Producer-director Vanessa Hope has worked on a number of films about China and its neighbouring nations, and this new one focuses on Taiwan, which is increasingly in the news as anxieties mount over a possible invasion by the People’s Republic across the Taiwan Strait. As a work of journalistic explication for interested but underinformed western viewers, it’s a bit all over the shop, although admittedly the history of the island is fiendishly complex and confusing.
We get some handy-dandy animated map-based graphics that explain how it passed through the hands of various colonialist invaders, from both Europe and Asia. Then it starts to get very confusing for neophytes when we get to the time when, having thrown off the shackles of imperial Japan (which ruled from 1895-1945), it became independent, known by the parenthetic handle the Republic of China (Taiwan). Yet it is still considered as a not yet entirely incorporated satellite by the People’s Republic of China, perpetually under threat of forced assimilation like Hong Kong.
