China Power | Society | East Asia

Friendly Strangers: How Two Peoples Across the Taiwan Strait Are Drifting Apart

The populations of China and Taiwan are drifting apart in ways that will be structurally hard to reverse.

Over the past three decades, public attitudes on both sides of the Taiwan Strait have shifted in ways that are strikingly consistent and difficult to reverse. In Taiwan, identification with a distinct Taiwanese – rather than Chinese – identity has risen steadily since the early 1990s, accelerating at key political inflection points and most pronounced among younger generations. The gap between those favoring eventual independence and those favoring unification has widened significantly, while the largest single position now favors maintaining the status quo indefinitely. This trajectory has been reinforced by Beijing’s actions, particularly its military pressure on Taiwan and its treatment of Hong Kong.

On the Chinese side, the picture is more nuanced than official rhetoric suggests. Mainland Chinese publics tend to have relatively warm views of the Taiwanese people, even as they remain skeptical of Taiwan’s government, and support for a military resolution of the cross-strait dispute is weaker and more contingent than state messaging implies. Taken together, survey evidence from both sides of the strait points less to two populations on a collision course driven by popular passion than to a quieter pattern of structural divergence. This widening gap in political identity has long-term implications for the feasibility of any negotiated settlement between Taipei and Beijing.

Since 1992, the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University (NCCU) has asked respondents in Taiwan: Do you think of yourself as Taiwanese, Chinese, or both? The answers, tracked annually ever since, have produced one of the most consequential longitudinal datasets in modern political science. 

At the outset, fewer than one in five respondents – 17.6 percent – identified as “Taiwanese only.” About a quarter said “Chinese only,” while a plurality, nearly half the island, chose a dual identity. 

Three decades later, the pattern has effectively reversed. By 2023, roughly 63 percent of respondents identified as “Taiwanese only”; the “Chinese only” category had fallen to around 2-3 percent; and dual identifiers accounted for about 30 percent. This amounts to a 45-percentage-point increase in exclusive Taiwanese identification, driven not by revolution or war, but by the gradual accumulation of democratic experience, generational replacement, and exposure to Beijing’s conduct.

The demographic contours of this shift are sharp. Pew Research Center’s 2023 Global Attitudes survey found that 83 percent of those under 35 identified as solely Taiwanese, compared to lower, though still majority, rates among older cohorts. The same Pew survey found that emotional attachment to mainland China tracks strongly with age: 46 percent of those 35 and older reported feeling connected to China, versus just 26 percent of those under 35. Women are also slightly more likely than men to identify as solely Taiwanese (72 versus 63 percent). And political affiliation matters enormously: DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) supporters align strongly with a solely Taiwanese identity, while supporters of the KMT (Kuomintang), which has historically been closer to Beijing, are more likely to identify as both Chinese and Taiwanese, or as Chinese only.

Views of China as a government have followed a parallel trajectory. The Pew 2020 Global Attitudes survey found that just 35 percent of Taiwanese gave positive marks to mainland China as a whole, with roughly 60 percent holding unfavorable views. By 2023, Pew found that 66 percent of Taiwanese described China’s growing power and influence as a “major threat” to Taiwan – more than those naming the United States (45 percent) or Russia (25 percent). Strikingly, this threat perception cuts across the political spectrum: 58 percent of those who identified themselves as primarily Chinese broadly considered China’s influence a threat.

The turning points in the NCCU trend line are instructive. The data does not simply slope upward in a smooth curve; it lurches at specific moments. The 1995-96 Taiwan Strait Missile Crisis, triggered by President Lee Teng-hui’s visit to the United States and Beijing’s subsequent missile tests near Taiwan in an attempt to intimidate voters ahead of the island’s first direct presidential election, produced a measurable backlash. The 2014 Sunflower Movement, which blocked a cross-strait trade pact, marked the moment economic integration with China shifted from aspiration to anxiety. But the most dramatic inflection point in the entire 30-year dataset comes in 2019-2020. The NCCU data recorded an 8.5-percentage-point jump in “Taiwanese only” identification between June 2019 and June 2020 alone. The reason is not hard to identify: Hong Kong.

Beijing’s crackdown on the 2019 Hong Kong protests, and the subsequent imposition of the National Security Law in 2020, transformed an abstract fear into a concrete example. The slogan “Today’s Hong Kong, Tomorrow’s Taiwan” had existed since the 2014 Sunflower era; suddenly, it felt prescient. Academia Sinica’s China Impact Studies survey in March 2019, conducted before the protests had fully unfolded, already found that 79 percent of Taiwanese rejected Beijing’s proposed “one country, two systems” framework, with 84 percent opposing the use of force against Taiwan.

After 2019, those numbers hardened further. The NCCU data shows the gap between those favoring eventual independence and those favoring unification widening from less than 3 percentage points in 2018 to more than 20 points by 2020. At the same time, the preference for maintaining indefinitely the status quo – neither independence nor unification – has itself become the largest position, held by around 33 percent of respondents as of 2024, up from 25.5 percent in 2020. Xi Jinping’s January 2019 speech marking the 40th anniversary of the “Message to Compatriots in Taiwan,” which proposed Hong Kong’s model for Taiwan, appears to have backfired.

What makes this story more than a Taiwanese one is what surveys reveal on the other side of the strait, a more challenging research environment. A 2024 survey of Chinese citizens commissioned by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Carter Center found that 91 percent of respondents described the Taiwanese people – using the official framing of “Taiwanese compatriots” – as friends to China. That is by far the highest rating any people or country received in the survey. By comparison, only about 17 percent of Chinese respondents described the United States as a friend.

Yet that warmth does not extend to........

© The Diplomat