Cape No.7 and China-Taiwan relations

An editorial piece published this week in a newspaper in Australia.

Since August, the island of Taiwan has been in the grip of the movie phenomenon “Cape No.7”. It is a rare thing in any country, a locally-made film that has smashed box-office records, becoming not just the most successful local film of all time, but the second most successful film in Taiwan ever, after Titanic.

Taiwan was a colony of Japan from 1895 to 1945, when it was passed to the Chinese Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek, and Cape No.7 tells parallel love stories between the last days of colonial rule and the present day. In 1945, a young man is repatriated to Japan and writes love letters on the ship to the Taiwanese girl he is leaving behind. They are addressed in the old Japanese way to a place called Cape No.7 and are never delivered. Sixty years later, a young failed rock singer working as a postman is given the letters, and a chance at success and love with a Japanese woman who is promoting a rock music festival in his hometown.

Cape No.7 is a feel-good story of personal redemption, complete with rock concert finale and a public declaration of love by the hero, and perhaps Strictly Ballroom is the nearest Australian equivalent. However, rather than through family relationships, redemption is achieved by the narrative link to Taiwan’s Japanese past. Evoked with an intense nostalgia, the colonial love story offers the truth and virtue that allows the young man to find his way through his contemporary discontents.

The success of Cape No.7 and its representation of Taiwan’s colonial history comes during an improvement in Taiwan’s political relationship with China. In the legislative and presidential elections earlier this year, the Democratic Progressive Party suffered heavy election defeats to the KMT. The electorate was tired of the divisive identity politics of the former president Chen Shui-bian and the DPP had lost much of its moral authority through a series of corruption scandals. The KMT came back to power on a campaign to boost economic growth and repair China relations.

Many of the domestic economic promises of the KMT have proven to be very unrealistic, greatly exacerbated by the global economic crisis, and the popularity polls of the new president Ma Ying-jeou have fallen towards 25%.

On relations with China, however, the KMT government has pressed ahead with the support and encouragement of the Chinese side. Under a policy of “no independence, no unification and no military action”, as well as ingenious conceits such as the “1992 Consensus”, discussions between the Taiwanese and mainland China have reopened on fundamental issues such as trade and transport. After years of stalled negotiations, direct travel and freight links have been agreed and mainland Chinese tourists have been coming to Taiwan, albeit in small numbers.

The improvement in cross-straits relations has been very enthusiastically received by the international community, long frustrated with the brinkmanship of the previous DPP government and its willingness to confront China while relying on an assumption of US support.

Now, the symbolic gestures towards Taiwanese independence of the DPP have been replaced with symbolic, and some policy, actions far more accommodating towards China.

During the visit by the Chinese representative Chen Yunlin to Taipei in November for the new negotiations, events were carefully staged and words carefully framed to avoid any suggestion of Taiwan’s sovereign status. The visit overlapped with the very public arrests and detention of former president Chen Shui-bian and other senior DPP officials on corruption allegations, and last week President Ma reportedly ruled out a visit to Taiwan by the Dalai Lama in 2009.

Demonstrations were held in Taipei against the Chinese visit, with the largest attracting half a million people, and the police countered very hostile crowds with violence of a level not seen since the dark days of martial law in the late 1970s. A student movement has sprung up, the Wild Strawberries, who have been camped in the old Chiang Kai-shek Memorial square for several weeks.

However, the phenomenon of Cape No.7 is a reminder that some of the most important political changes are not seen on the streets. Since the lifting of martial law in Taiwan in 1987, a rich and profound process of history writing has been undertaken in politics, the media, academia and popular culture. Starting with the 2-28 Incident – the anti-Chinese Nationalist uprising of 1947 – and moving onto the Japanese colonial period and recently to the 1950s and 1960s, the Taiwanese have been recovering histories suppressed and erased during the period of authoritarian rule.

Cape No.7 is an upbeat marker of how those distinctive histories have become a received part of an affirming popular Taiwanese national history. The symbolic politics invoked by the new KMT government will no doubt have satisfied the Chinese government, and that is an important development in cross-straits relations, but Cape No.7 suggests that Taiwanese value both the history writing that is possible in a democracy and also enjoy the uniqueness of the histories that they have recovered.

Unfortunately, Cape No.7 has been banned in mainland China, and the representative Chen Yunlin has been reported as describing the film as expressing the legacy of “colonial brainwashing” of the Taiwanese by Japan. The Chinese blogsphere, while always overheated, has offered ferocious vitriol and condemnation of the film and of Taiwanese attitudes to Japan generally.

The international community might be happy about the direction of the new Taiwanese government, but it might also remain mindful that long-term and peaceful rapprochement between China and Taiwan will ultimately require an acknowledgement of the plurality of history and needs a way to acknowledge of the legitimacy of Taiwan’s unique historical experience. The success of Cape No.7 is a sign of just how far China and Taiwan yet have to go.