I used ChatGPT to translate a great German article about the original KMT refugees from China posted here: 📰 Nachrichten aus Deutschland - #194 by qwert_zuiop
They followed KMT their whole life and try to explain their (delusional) point of view.
The Last Chinese
Seventy-five years ago, China’s civil war ended. The defeated government fled to Taiwan with hundreds of thousands of soldiers. In a veterans’ home in Taipei, one encounters old men with outdated views and longings for a Greater China.
Wu Yun-long felt extremely nauseous. The ship had departed from Guangdong. Like many of the roughly thousand people who boarded the ship on China’s southeastern coast, he didn’t know where they were headed. As they sailed away, they took one last look at their homeland—a war-torn China, shrinking on the horizon.
It was 1949, and they were soldiers in retreat.
“Near Hong Kong, we encountered a typhoon and became so seasick that we couldn’t keep a single bite down for three days,” recalls Wu, now 99. The Nationalist Chinese government army, to which he belonged, was on the brink of defeat in the civil war against the Communists. Where else could they flee?
The name of the island that spread among those on the rocking landing ship was one Wu had heard before, but he knew nothing else about it. “I thought Taiwan was a foreign country,” he says. It was only after they landed in the port city of Kaohsiung that he was pleasantly surprised to find that he could read the banners at the house entrances and that even the gods in the temples were the same as at home. “That’s when I understood: Oh, Taiwan is also China! I had no idea.”
The Chinese civil war took place 75 years ago. Almost forgotten in the West, it was one of the bloodiest and most consequential conflicts of the modern era. The fighting from 1927 to 1949 cost between seven and ten million lives, with some estimates going even higher. On October 1, 1949, the victorious Communists proclaimed the People’s Republic of China in Beijing. The defeated Kuomintang (KMT) government, the Nationalist Party, fled with 1.5 to 2 million followers to the last piece of land they could still hold: Taiwan.
From there, they believed, they would someday reconquer the mainland.
Since then, Taiwan has been caught in a frozen conflict. Xi Jinping’s communist regime in Beijing views the incorporation of the island republic as the final unresolved chapter of the civil war. For most Taiwanese, however, nostalgia for the mainland has become foreign, and dreams of reconquest have faded.
Three-quarters of a century after the exodus of the war’s losers, Wu Yun-long lives in the state-run veterans’ home in Banqiao, a district of New Taipei City. His comrades and he are among the last mainland soldiers in Taiwan. They leave behind an unloved legacy. Nearly two-thirds of the island’s population now identify as exclusively Taiwanese, with only 2% considering themselves purely Chinese. The rest lie somewhere in between.
Not Wu. He is a Chinese through and through, he says, by birth, politically, and in terms of identity. It is a fading identity. Its disappearance explains why Taiwan will likely never voluntarily become part of a Greater Chinese empire again.
Wu, a finely dressed gentleman with a silver wristwatch and leather belt, sits under the trees in the courtyard of the veterans’ home. Benches shaped like boats commemorate the retreat 75 years ago, and a stone arch bears the name “The Crossing.” It is an architecture of homesickness.
The old man recounts his life over the last century. Born in 1925 in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu, he grew up as one of six siblings. His mother died in childbirth when he was eight. His father ran a simple breakfast restaurant.
Politics touched Wu’s life only in the form of military violence. In 1912, China’s last emperor was overthrown. The country then became a republic for the first time, ruled by the pro-Western nationalist Chiang Kai-shek. But the new leader engaged in a brutal power struggle with his communist rival Mao Zedong.
When the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists broke out in 1927, Wu was a toddler; by the time it ended, he was an adult man. A war as long as a short life, with phases of varying intensity and strategic pauses.
In 1937, Japan invaded China, thus beginning World War II in Asia. To repel the invaders, Chiang and Mao temporarily formed a united front. They succeeded. The Japanese were defeated in 1945, just like their Nazi allies in Berlin.
But once the external threat was gone, Chiang and Mao quickly turned their weapons against each other again. The civil war entered its decisive phase, driving the young Wu Yun-long through vast regions of China.
When Wu describes his path, it sounds like rapid-fire city and province names: Suqian, Kaifeng, Zhengzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan, Guangdong… He sketches troop positions in the air like a conductor: the Communists over there, we Nationalists over here.
At 15, he joined a loyalist unit. He says it had nothing to do with ideology. The KMT troops were simply where he happened to be. “I still don’t know what we fought for. I knew nothing about politics—I hadn’t even attended elementary school. I joined to survive.”
He attributes his survival to cigarettes. Without them, he says, he wouldn’t be here.
It was the summer of 1948. In the penultimate year of the war, he was serving as an adjutant beside a commander in the besieged city of Kaifeng. When the Communists encircled the city, he had an idea. “There was a tobacco shop on the ground floor of our building. I told the commander to put on civilian clothes and hide in the back room. When the Communists came in, I stood at the counter and pretended to be a shopkeeper. ‘Boy,’ they said, ‘get out of here!’”
Whenever they encountered Communists on their subsequent escape, they would bribe them with generous donations of cigarettes to be allowed to pass. “The cigarettes saved our skins.”
Thus, the war for Wu did not end with captivity or death on the mainland, but on a swaying ship to Taiwan—an island where the people worshiped the same gods and used the same characters as he did, and therefore must have been his countrymen.
At the entrance of the Banqiao Veterans’ Home stands a statue of Chiang Kai-shek, the commander who led the soldiers across the sea. Sometimes, when the old men want to relax, they sit in the shadow of the long-deceased “Generalissimo.”
Many Taiwanese today view Chiang differently: as a tyrant who imposed his outmoded dream of reclaiming the mainland upon them. It’s not that no one here wants anything to do with China. Four out of ten adults say they at least feel some emotional connection to the country. But that’s mostly a cultural statement, not a political one. To many, Chiang is primarily a deposed ruler who imported the Chinese civil war from the mainland to Taiwan aboard those landing ships that brought Wu Yun-long in 1949.
One of the peculiarities of Taiwanese history is that the civil war had virtually nothing to do with the island, whose fate it has determined ever since. The fighting took place on the mainland; Taiwan only suffered the aftermath.
That Wu initially thought the foreign coast was abroad has a simple reason: for a long time, it was.
Until 1945, Taiwan had been under Japanese colonial rule. Only with the Allies’ victory over Tokyo in World War II did the Republic of China gain control over the island. During the imperial era, Taiwan had belonged to the Chinese empire, but was considered a remote and inhospitable periphery that received little attention. That changed abruptly when Chiang Kai-shek ordered his soldiers to retreat there in 1949.
Although the number of Taiwan’s natives was more than three times that of the newcomers, the mainlanders took over virtually all important positions and treated the islanders as second-class citizens. Although they were also mostly ethnic Chinese, the new mainland regime regarded them as contaminated by Japanese colonial indoctrination or aspirations for an independent Taiwanese state.
The exiled mainlanders imposed their loss of homeland on the islanders, regardless of the fact that the latter could hardly feel “homesick” for a place they had never set foot on. There was no room for nuance in the ideology of the “Republic of China on Taiwan.” The island’s people were expected to miss the mainland and long for its reclamation. Those who saw it differently were silenced, imprisoned, or executed.
West of the sea, the Republic of China no longer ruled a single inch of land but pretended as if it still governed its lost empire. Until the 1980s, elderly legislators in wheelchairs were pushed through parliament in Taipei to represent mainland provinces that had been under communist control for decades.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that this increasingly absurd dictatorship of exiles was replaced. An island-wide democracy movement fought through a peaceful revolution to end the mainland nostalgia regime. For many, it felt as if they, the inhabitants of a pseudo-China of the displaced, were shedding their costumes after all those years. What emerged were Taiwanese. Since then, the share of those who identify as Chinese has been rapidly declining.
Wu Yun-long finds that terrible. He pulls out a few delicate sheets of paper from his back pocket and unfolds them. The large-format sheets become longer and longer, until they measure several meters, densely written in delicate handwriting. Calligraphy, the art of beautiful writing, is his hobby, he explains. This is an essay he wrote himself. The title reads: “Taiwanese Are Chinese.” What follows is a tirade against proponents of Taiwanese independence, who he claims “deny their origin by any means.”
He launches into a long historical argument, backdating the first significant mainland settlement of the island by more than 1,300 years. He sounds a bit like Xi Jinping’s propagandists when they attribute Taiwan to China “since ancient times.”
After a career as a policeman, Wu even moved to the People’s Republic for a time in his retirement, where he met the descendants of his relatives, whom he had not seen for half a century. He stayed there for 16 years. Today, he no longer views his old enemies, the Communists, so negatively. They have made China powerful and strong. “The leaders of today are the real leaders.”
It is a worldview in which being Chinese is more important than anything else, where ethnicity trumps the form of government. This leads to a situation where even formerly hostile mainlanders often understand each other better today than they do with Taiwanese who insist on their distinctiveness.
When asked whether it isn’t good that there is democracy here, unlike on the mainland, Wu shakes his head. It’s far too chaotic, he says. “In my opinion, what is needed is a dictatorship. People in Taiwan are worse off than those on the mainland.” It is a defiant statement not rooted in reality. Taiwan scores significantly better than the People’s Republic in analyses of quality of life and economic performance.
Why did he return to Taiwan? Wu says that as an old man, he receives excellent healthcare here. The irony is lost on him.
The old wounds of the civil war have healed. Another veteran, 96-year-old Chang Gui-fen, pulls up his pant leg and shows a hole in his thigh, so deeply scarred that it looks as if the bone had sucked the skin in from the inside. That wound, he says, was inflicted on him by the Communists back then. Later, as a retiree, he also often visited the mainland. He takes out photos of his family there. In one, his grandson is wearing the uniform of China’s People’s Liberation Army—the same military that shot up his thigh.
Does that feel strange? No, says Chang, that’s just how history plays out. And besides, the leg doesn’t hurt anymore.
Walking sticks clatter along the corridors that surround the courtyard like a cloister. In the dining hall, lunch is served—each veteran receives a chicken drumstick. From the loudspeakers, the Mandopop diva Teresa Teng croons old ballads. They are songs the Chiang regime once used in its propaganda to lure Communists to defect to Taiwan. Now they’re nostalgic background music.
Who should miss the mainland when there are hardly any mainlanders left in Taiwan? Even the KMT fielded a Taiwan-born candidate in the most recent presidential election in January. They lost anyway, for the third time in a row.
Seventy-five years after Wu Yun-long’s arrival on this island, it has long since become foreign to him again. Seventy-five years after the civil war, there is only one thing he can probably agree on with most Taiwanese: the old conflict must not flare up again. “When you die,” he says, “you die with empty hands anyway.”
But for Wu, that means unification with the mainland. It is a lonely position that will likely soon no longer exist in Taiwan.
After lunch, the 99-year-old goes outside and reaches into his breast pocket. Then he lights a cigarette with a smile.
Something online communities might benefit from taking as the status quo unless explicitly stated X,Y or Z 
