by Chris Fry

Material for this chapter was taken from the article “Taiwan’s residents reject being Washington’s proxy in its war against Socialist China” published in Fighting-Words.net on August 13, 2025.

As of summer 2025, the Pentagon’s plans for war against the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have hit a snag. On July 27, Taiwan’s residents voted to reject the ruling secessionist Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) bid to recall twenty-four opposition Kuomintang (KMT) legislators. The KMT, though just as pro-capitalist as the DPP, nevertheless favors continuing dialogue and improved relations with the PRC, and agrees with the “One China policy” accepted by the vast majority of nations around the world. KMT leaders have traveled to mainland China to hold trade and cultural talks with the PRC leadership, defying the U.S-supported DPP leadership.

Another recall election in August of seven more KMT legislators was also unsuccessful, and all legislators targeted retained their seats. However, these developments will not halt the U.S. empire from arming Taiwan with the latest missiles and other military technology in preparation to launch a full-scale war against the PRC without the consent of Taiwan’s residents.

The DPP’s Wave of Repression Meets Mass Resistance

The recall attempts are only one part of the DPP’s campaign to serve their U.S. masters by coercing Taiwan’s residents to accept becoming proxies in Washington’s war against the PRC, which is now on the Pentagon’s drawing board.

Ever since elections were permitted in Taiwan, parties with the name “reunification” have been under attack by the government and by both major parties. The Focus Taiwan News Service reported in August that the Taiwan High Court “upheld prison sentences of four years and six months for two officials of the minor Reunification Alliance Party who recruited people to travel to China for political purposes.”¹

A June 8 Wall Street Journal article titled “Taiwan Tries to Purge Its Ranks of China Sympathizers”² reported: 

“Taiwan has embarked on a mission to purge any allies of Beijing from its civil service in an escalating battle against China’s influence… 

…In the past few weeks, Taiwan expanded the ID-vetting process to local governments, schools and universities, telling administrators to punish employees who hold or have applied for Chinese identity cards but failed to report doing so…

…A spokeswoman for Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office said… that Taipei was attempting to ‘undermine efforts to bring people on both sides of the strait closer together.’”

Even mainland-born spouses of Taiwan residents are being threatened, as a July 8 Taiwan News article reported: “1,668 spouses in Taiwan miss deadline to renounce Chinese household registration.”³

Many of these are being told they will lose their permanent residency status. The news agency AFP reported in a July article titled: “Taiwan pursues homegrown Chinese spies as Beijing’s influence grows,” that even top officials in the DPP executive branch are being targeted: “Prosecutors last week charged four recently expelled members of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party—including a former staffer in President Lai Ching-te’s office—for sharing state secrets with Beijing.”⁴ 

All of this is bitterly ironic, since the DPP gained its popularity by being an alternative to the KMT, which imposed the “White Terror”: 40 years of martial law on Taiwan’s residents, jailing tens of thousands and murdering between three and four thousand residents. This occurred after Chiang Kai Shek’s KMT forces were defeated in the wake of World War II by the Red Army, but escaped to Taiwan, ruling there with an iron fist for decades with lavish U.S. support. Taiwan has been part of China for centuries. Imperial Japan seized control of it in 1895, but China regained control of it following the surrender of Japan in World War II, in 1945. 

The KMT always maintained it was the legitimate ruler of the Republic of China (ROC)—the official name of the government in Taiwan—which claimed all of China as its territory, so it never called for Taiwanese independence or separation from the mainland. Now the DPP itself is sparking this wave of repression to force the people of Taiwan to fight a war that only serves the interests of U.S. imperialism.

The DPP’s repressive campaign has sparked mass resistance, as the Hong Kong news website Dimsum Daily reported on April 27: 

“In a rainy Taipei on Saturday, more than 250,000 people gathered to protest what they described as the ‘dictatorship’ of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities… 

The demonstration occurred amidst growing discontent over the DPP’s ‘mass recall’ campaign, launched earlier this year, which targeted legislative representatives affiliated with the KMT. Protesters also denounced recent searches conducted against KMT offices across Taiwan, viewing these actions as part of a broader effort to suppress opposition voices.”⁵

Trump is Not Happy with the DPP

President Trump is a fickle master, unhappy with the DPP’s failure to mobilize the residents behind the U.S. warmongering against China. He is now threatening a massive 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese imports. These tariffs are vital for Silicon Valley’s accumulation of capital for its Artificial Intelligence and cryptocurrency schemes.

Trump even told President Lai Ching-te not to bother stopping in New York City to drum up support for Taiwan’s “independence” during Lai’s recent international diplomatic tour, in which the DPP politician also visited the few remaining small countries left in the world that still recognize the ROC rather than the PRC. The White House announced that this snub of Lai was “to enable trade talks with the PRC.” China’s suspension of the sale of rare earth minerals needed for computer hardware, cars and weapons has created enormous difficulties for U.S. imperialism. Trump’s snub can be seen as part of his clumsy efforts to “split” China from its Russian ally, and to pressure India to distance itself from BRICS. All these efforts are backfiring.

Washington Escalates War Preparations on Taiwan’s Soil

Despite his continuing failure to force China into submission to imperialism, Trump has only been emboldened to escalate military war preparation in Taiwan, with the full assent of the DPP government, but without support of Taiwan’s residents.

On May 12, CNN reported:

“Taiwan on Monday test-fired for the first time a new US-supplied rocket system that has been widely used by Ukraine against Russia and could be deployed to hit targets in China if there is a war with Taiwan… 

…Taiwan has bought 29 of Lockheed Martin’s precision weapon High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS, with the first batch of 11 received last year and the rest set to arrive by next year.

With a range of about 300 kilometers (186 miles), they could hit coastal targets in China’s southern province of Fujian, on the other side of the Taiwan Strait, in the event of conflict.”⁶

The U.S. is doing more than just training. With the bulk of U.S. missile shipments going to its proxy war in Ukraine, it has fallen behind with such shipments to Taiwan. Therefore the U.S. has “persuaded” Taiwan to build its own long-range offensive missiles. As Taiwan News reported on June 7: 

“Taiwan has reportedly produced 100 Hsiung Sheng surface-to-surface missiles with a range of up to 1,200 kilometers. 

An unnamed senior military official told Liberty Times on Saturday that the Hsiung Sheng missile system has already completed its initial mass production phase. 

The official was quoted as saying the production model of the Hsiung Sheng missile has a range of 1,200 km, and National Chung-Shan Institute of Science & Technology researchers are working to push this further. ‘Naturally, the goal is the range of the latest US and Japanese missiles.’”⁷

The military website SOFREP reported in June that there are now more than 500 U.S. military personnel in Taiwan. Since the Pentagon lists only forty-one soldiers there, it can be assumed that most are expert contractors, who are there to ensure that all the missiles and other high-tech weapons will be fired if Trump, not Taiwan, gives the order. 

It should be noted that Taiwan’s government is using bribery to convince the populace to go along with this arms buildup. The news outlet Taiwan Plus reported on August 2: “Taiwan’s government is set to make cash payments of over US $300 per person by the end of October, after President Lai Ching-te enacted an economic relief bill passed by the legislature in July.” 

Of course, the 800,000 heavily exploited migrant workers in Taiwan from Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines won’t see a penny of that money. 

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¹James Thompson and Hung Hsueh-kuang, “High court upholds sentences for Reunification Alliance Party figures,” Focus Taiwan: CNA English News, August 20, 2025, https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202508200013.

²Joyu Wang, “Taiwan Tries to Purge Its Ranks of China Sympathizers,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/taiwan-tries-to-purge-its-ranks-of-china-sympathizers-5caf62fa.

³Keoni Everington, “1,668 spouses in Taiwan miss deadline to renounce Chinese household registration,” Taiwan News, July 8, 2025, https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/6150855.

⁴AFP, “Taiwan pursues homegrown Chinese spies as Beijing’s influence grows,” MSN, June 18, 2025, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/taiwan-pursues-homegrown-chinese-spies-as-beijing-s-influence-grows/ar-AA1GZHzj.

⁵Dimsum Daily Newsroom, “Over 250,000 rally in Taiwan against DPP’s ‘authoritarian rule’,” Dimsum Daily, April 27, 2025, https://www.dimsumdaily.hk/over-250000-rally-in-taiwan-against-dpps-authoritarian-rule/.

⁶Reuters, “Taiwan test-fires new US-supplied HIMARS rocket system,” CNN, May 12, 2025, https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/12/world/taiwan-test-fires-himars-rocket-system-intl-hnk.

⁷Keoni Everington, “Taiwan produces over 100 Hsiung Sheng missiles,” Taiwan News, June 7, 2025, https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/6129229.

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Chris Fry is a long-time activist in the revolutionary socialist movement, first as a member of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then with the Workers World Party, which he joined in 1970. In 1972 he was elected a UAW union steward and bargaining committee member at the steel warehouse where he worked in Detroit. In 1973, he helped lead a successful 6-week strike. He then worked for 6 years at the Chrysler Lynch Road Assembly plant where he was active in anti-racist and working class struggles both inside and outside the plant, such as the All Peoples Congress and the People’s Takeover of Big Oil. Fry became a writer for Workers World and then for the Fighting Words newsletter of the Communist Workers League. He is retired and living in the Albany, New York area.