Taiwan Is Not Israel: The Morning Star & the CPB’s Weaponisation of Anti-Colonial Language

Postscript: Five Responses to Campists

The argument arrived, as these arguments do, in a WhatsApp group at half past eleven on a Friday night. Taiwan, we were informed, is a settler colonial state. Han Chinese colonised the island just as Europeans colonised North America. Therefore Taiwanese self-determination is illegitimate. Therefore Chinese annexation is acceptable, perhaps even progressive.

The logic has a certain neatness. It also collapses under the slightest examination.

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This article has a new postscript with responses to five campist criticisms.

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This framing has proliferated across the campist left in recent months, deployed by the same currents that spent a decade dismissing the Syrian revolution as a CIA plot, that frame Ukrainian resistance as NATO provocation, that treat the sovereignty of authoritarian states as a supreme value overriding the democratic rights of populations. The settler colonial label is the latest weapon in an arsenal designed to delegitimise any self-determination claim that conflicts with the geopolitical preferences of Beijing or Moscow.

But Taiwan is not Israel. The comparison fails on every dimension that matters: structural, historical, and political. Understanding why it fails illuminates both the bankruptcy of campist politics and the path toward a genuinely internationalist position.

The Structural Difference: Ongoing Violence vs. Settled Society

Israel requires ongoing violence to maintain itself. This is not polemic but description. The settlement enterprise in the West Bank expands daily. The siege of Gaza, now entering its seventeenth year, constitutes collective punishment of two million people. The legal apparatus of apartheid distinguishes between Jewish citizens and Palestinian subjects. Remove the IDF, the checkpoints, the settlement infrastructure, and the Zionist project in the occupied territories collapses. The violence is not incidental to Israel’s existence; it is constitutive of it.

Taiwan requires no equivalent ongoing dispossession. The island functions as a representative democracy through civic participation, not military displacement. Indigenous peoples in Taiwan face real injustices: inadequate land rights, legal setbacks like the 2021 Constitutional Court ruling on hunting, the slow pace of transitional justice. These struggles deserve solidarity. But they occur within a democratic framework that permits indigenous political organisation, reserved legislative seats, and public contestation. The Taiwanese state does not require daily violence against indigenous peoples to reproduce itself.

Taiwan’s conflict is external: defence against PRC invasion. Israel’s conflict is internal: structural requirement for the settler project’s survival. This distinction is not subtle. It is the difference between a society with unresolved historical injustices and a society whose present existence depends on perpetuating injustice.

The Watchdog Myth: Fifty Years of Western Abandonment

A second parallel fails equally. Israel was constructed as Western imperialism’s gendarme in the Middle East: suppressing Arab nationalism, protecting oil routes, providing a reliable ally against Soviet-aligned states. Even as Israel now operates with greater independence, that foundational role shaped its integration into imperialist structures.

The campist argument assumes Taiwan functions identically: America’s “unsinkable aircraft carrier” to contain China. But this erases fifty years of actual Western policy.

Nixon’s 1972 opening to Beijing. Carter’s 1979 recognition of the PRC and severing of formal ties with Taipei. Decades of “engagement” premised on integrating China into global capitalism. WTO membership, Most Favoured Nation status, massive capital flows eastward. The entire neoliberal globalisation project built on Chinese labour.

Taiwan was not the West’s watchdog. Taiwan was abandoned by the West in favour of Beijing. For fifty years, Washington’s strategic priority was cultivating the PRC, not defending Taiwan.

And the deeper irony: the PRC has become far more central to global imperialism than Taiwan ever was. China is the workshop of the world, the holder of US debt, a major investor across Africa and Latin America, the indispensable node in global supply chains. If we are asking which polity is more structurally integrated into imperialist circuits, the answer is Beijing, not Taipei. The campist framing inverts reality.

We should harbour no illusions about Washington’s motives today. American interest in Taiwan is inseparable from its contest with Beijing over regional dominance: free navigation in the South China Sea, containing Chinese maritime expansion, and above all, access to TSMC’s semiconductors. The Trump administration has pressured Taiwan to dramatically expand chip production in Arizona, explicitly to reduce US vulnerability to future Chinese action against Taiwan. This diversification might benefit TSMC’s shareholders in the long term. But it gives Washington one less reason to defend Taiwanese independence. The US is simultaneously claiming to protect Taiwan while actively eroding its own incentive to do so.

Taiwan’s democracy is instrumentalised, not cherished. This is precisely why self-determination must be centred: neither Beijing nor Washington will protect it. Only the Taiwanese people, organised independently from its comprador bourgeoisie, can guarantee their own future.

Indigenous Voices Against the Campist Appropriation

If the settler colonial framing were genuinely about indigenous rights, we would expect indigenous activists in Taiwan to welcome Beijing’s territorial claims. They do not.

In 2019, thirty-one indigenous representatives from Taiwan’s sixteen recognised tribes addressed an open letter to Xi Jinping: “Taiwan is the sacred land where generations of our ancestors lived and protected with their lives. It doesn’t belong to China.” They rejected the “mono-culturalism, unification, and hegemony” promoted by Beijing.

Kolas Yotaka, an Amis legislator, argues that indigenous identity is “the thing that China is most afraid of” because it demonstrates that “Taiwan was never connected to China from our blood.” Activists like Savungaz Valincinan of the Bunun people link their struggle to global movements like Black Lives Matter while prioritising “self-regulation” and “land back” over any form of “reunification” with the PRC, which they view as a threat to the democratic space within which they operate.

Indigenous activists in Taiwan are not naive about the settler history of their island. They contest Han dominance, demand land rights, critique the inadequacy of transitional justice. But they understand that annexation by an authoritarian state engaged in active genocide against Uyghurs and cultural destruction in Tibet would eliminate the democratic space within which their struggles are possible. Campists who invoke indigenous claims to justify PRC annexation are not amplifying indigenous voices. They are instrumentalising them.

The Morning Star Line: Beijing’s Talking Points in British Left Clothing

The Communist Party of Britain and the Morning Star newspaper, which reflects its views, have consistently framed Taiwan as a “breakaway province” with “wannabe-separatist” leadership. Kenny Coyle, writing in the Morning Star, argues that “the Taiwan conflict is not based on national differences... There are Chinese people on both sides of the Strait. The fundamental divide is a political, not ethnic one.”

This formulation erases both indigenous peoples (who are not “Chinese people”) and the distinct Taiwanese identity that has developed over 130 years of separate political development. It echoes Beijing’s “One China” talking points with remarkable fidelity. Coyle warns of a “generously funded Taiwan lobby” working to “legitimise Taiwan as an entity distinct from China”: the suggestion being that Taiwanese identity itself is a foreign imposition rather than a product of historical experience.

Similarly, the Party for Socialism and Liberation frames Taiwanese independence movements as “counter-revolutionary” forces that “undermine the struggle for socialism.” Workers World Party refers to “China’s own island of Taiwan” while comparing the situation to the US occupation of Hawai’i. The consistency is striking: these organisations in the USA treat Beijing’s territorial claims as axiomatically legitimate while dismissing the democratic aspirations of 23 million people as imperialist manipulation.

From Damascus to Taipei: The Campist Method

The method is now familiar. Gilbert Achcar identified it a decade ago as “the dismal logic” where the “enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It produces the same pattern across every case:

• Dismissal of popular movements. The Syrian revolution was a “CIA plot.” The Ukrainian resistance is “NATO provocation.” Taiwanese self-determination is “US-backed separatism.” In each case, the agency of the people actually living under threat disappears into geopolitical abstraction.

• Selective anti-colonialism. These currents deploy “settler colonial” language against Taiwan while remaining silent on the PRC’s active settler colonialism in Tibet and Xinjiang. The framework is applied where it delegitimises enemies of Beijing; it vanishes where it would indict Beijing itself.

• Silence on authoritarianism. The barrel bombs in Aleppo, the filtration camps in occupied Ukraine, the concentration camps in Xinjiang: these vanish from the campist field of vision. “Anti-imperialism” becomes a synonym for apologetics.

• Paramountcy of state sovereignty. The sovereignty of Assad’s Syria, Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China becomes a supreme value overriding the democratic rights of populations. Self-determination is reframed as “separatism”; resistance as “provocation”; solidarity as “intervention.”

The PRC’s claim is not sovereignty but imperial ambition

To be clear: we do not call for violating the sovereignty of states over their actual territories. We refuse to recognise expansionist claims over territories never ruled as "sovereignty" in the first place.

• The PRC has never governed Taiwan; its claim is not sovereignty but imperial ambition.

• Russia has no sovereign claim to Ukraine; its invasion is conquest, not recovery.

• Assad's Syria had no legitimate sovereignty over a Kurdish population demanding autonomy after decades of national oppression.

The campist sleight of hand is to treat territorial ambitions as equivalent to actual sovereignty, then accuse anyone who supports the targeted peoples of advocating "intervention." We advocate the opposite: non-intervention by the expansionist power.

It is Beijing that proposes to intervene in Taiwan, Moscow that intervened in Ukraine, Damascus that intervened in Rojava. Supporting the resistance of peoples to annexation is not the same as calling for external powers to invade their oppressors. The neocon position was: we have the right to impose regimes by force. Our position is: peoples have the right to resist imposition. These are opposite claims.

The Danzig Test: When Demographic Transformation Becomes Settled History

A consistency test exposes the political function of the settler colonial framing.

Following the Potsdam Agreement, approximately twelve to fourteen million Germans were expelled from territories that became part of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union. This was violent ethnic cleansing that, as historians note, “severed the tracks” of regional history. Gdańsk was Danzig. Wrocław was Breslau. Kaliningrad was Königsberg.

No serious political current today argues these territories should “return” to Germany based on pre-1945 demographics. The transformation, though violent and recent (eighty years ago), is treated as settled history. The people living there now have the right to determine their political future.

Taiwan’s Han settlement began four hundred years ago. It was less violent than the 1945 expulsions. Yet campists frame it as “ongoing” colonialism requiring rectification through PRC annexation.

The inconsistency reveals that the “settler colonial” label is applied not because of the character of the demographic transformation but because it serves to delegitimise a polity that conflicts with Beijing’s territorial ambitions. It is a geopolitical weapon dressed in anti-colonial clothing.

Against the Restricted Definition of Self-Determination

The theoretical move underpinning campist positions deserves direct engagement. The argument runs: self-determination is “the absolute inalienable right of nations that have been colonised or occupied by foreign states, NOT a blanket green light for separatism.”

This restricted definition does significant work. It excludes Taiwan (not currently “colonised” by China, therefore no right to resist Chinese annexation) while protecting the “territorial integrity” of established states. It frames any popular democratic movement that might fragment a state aligned with campist preferences as illegitimate “separatism.”

But the definition is historically and theoretically incoherent. Lenin’s position on self-determination was not restricted to colonised nations. It applied to all nations, including those within multinational states: Poland within the Russian Empire, Ukraine, Finland, the Baltic states. The Bolsheviks defended the right of nations to separate even when separation might benefit hostile powers, even when the separating nation had not been “colonised” in the classical sense. The whole point was that the decision belonged to the people in question, not to socialists making calculations about which separatisms were legitimate.

The Fourth International maintained this position through the twentieth century. It supported Baltic independence from the USSR despite significant Russian populations. It supports Ukrainian self-determination against Russian invasion. It supports Hong Kong’s democracy movement. Au Loong-yu, writing for International Viewpoint, identifies the CCP’s claim to Taiwan as an “imperial successor doctrine” where Beijing views itself as the “natural successor” to the territories of the Qing dynasty and the KMT. This is, as he argues, a “doctrine of empire building” that violates basic socialist principles.

Pierre Rousset puts it directly: “Opposing US militarisation in the Asia-Pacific should not mean remaining silent on China’s emerging imperialism.” The Fourth International’s analysis rejects the idea that a population must submit to an authoritarian regime simply because that regime is a rival to Washington.

Worker Democracy, the Chinese revolutionary socialist journal, states the matter plainly in its “Preliminary Theses”: “Taiwan’s separation from China is a historical fact” and “the PRC has never actually ruled Taiwan.” This historical reality empowers the twenty-three million people of the island with the democratic right to “decide their own destiny,” including the right to choose their own country’s name.

The DPP Problem: Defending Self-Determination Without Cheerleading

Defending Taiwanese self-determination does not mean endorsing the Democratic Progressive Party or Taiwan’s bourgeois government. The Fourth International maintains a sharp critique of the DPP’s trajectory.

The DPP has undergone four critical transformations since its founding.

1. First, the shift from mass mobilisation to parliamentary electoralism, sidelining popular movements.

2. Second, reliance on corporate conglomerates, recruiting technocrats from the old KMT regime and diluting its reformist agenda.

3. Third, leveraging independence rhetoric for political consolidation while taking no substantive steps toward formal independence.

4. Fourth, under Tsai Ing-wen and Lai Ching-te, completion of its transformation into what International Viewpoint authors call a “US Client”: a “vanguard of right-wing nationalism” defending the “Republic of China under DPP rule” rather than genuine self-determination.

The danger is compounded by the emergence of a cross-strait plutocracy: an intermingling of KMT wealth with CCP interests that creates networks of business and political links bypassing democratic oversight. The 2014 Sunflower Movement, when students and workers occupied the Legislative Yuan to protest a service trade agreement, represented resistance to this trend. The movement demonstrated that Taiwanese autonomy is inextricably linked to social justice and economic security: the protesters rejected sacrificing “labour rights and common people’s livelihoods at the altar of unlimited cross-strait expansion.”

None of this invalidates Taiwanese self-determination. It clarifies what that self-determination must become: not a vehicle for neoliberal integration into US strategic frameworks, but a democratic process through which the Taiwanese working class can chart its own course.

The Saarland Precedent: Class Politics Against “Reunification”

Historical precedent illuminates the principled position. In 1935, the Saarland held a plebiscite on whether to rejoin Germany, from which it had been separated after World War One. The population was ethnically German. Nazi Germany claimed the territory as naturally belonging to the German nation.

Trotsky and other revolutionary socialists argued against reunification on class grounds. Rejoining Germany would mean subjecting the Saarland’s working class to fascist repression: the destruction of trade unions, the banning of workers’ parties, the apparatus of totalitarian control. Whatever the ethnic composition of the population, socialists had to oppose a “reunification” that would eliminate the organisational capacity of the working class.

The logic applies directly to Taiwan. Even if one accepts (which one should not) that Taiwan is “historically” part of China, a socialist must oppose its “reunification” with a regime that would destroy independent trade unions, ban opposition parties, eliminate press freedom, and impose the apparatus of authoritarian control. The question is not abstract national belonging but concrete class consequences. What happens to the Taiwanese working class’s capacity for independent organisation if the PRC annexes Taiwan? The answer is obvious: it is eliminated.

Toward a Principled Position

Settler colonial theory is a serious analytical framework that illuminates real injustices. The dispossession of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples under successive Dutch, Qing, Japanese, and KMT regimes is historical fact. Indigenous struggles for land rights, cultural recognition, and political autonomy deserve unconditional solidarity.

But the instrumentalisation of this framework by campist currents to delegitimise Taiwanese self-determination serves Beijing’s territorial ambitions, not indigenous liberation. It erases indigenous voices who reject PRC claims. It ignores the PRC’s active settler colonialism in Tibet and Xinjiang. It subordinates democratic principles to geopolitical alignment.

A principled Fourth Internationalist position is clear:

• Indigenous sovereignty is fundamental. Genuine reconciliation requires recognition of indigenous nations as sovereign entities with rights to land and autonomy that precede the settler state.

• Democratic self-determination is inalienable. The people of Taiwan have the right to democratically choose their destiny, including independence, regardless of what Washington or Beijing prefer.

• Anti-imperialism must be global. Opposition to US militarism cannot mean silence on the PRC’s emerging imperialism and its expansionist territorial claims.

The future of Taiwan should be decided by its twenty-three million inhabitants: indigenous and Han alike, Hoklo and Hakka and post-1949 mainlanders. It should be decided through democratic processes free from both the bullying of totalitarianism and the manoeuvres of inter-imperialist rivalry. It should not be decided by Western leftists deploying anti-colonial language in service of an authoritarian empire.

Coda: The Class Question

One final clarification. The Taiwanese independence movement is not a monolithic class bloc. It possesses an intersectional character: working class participation, youth and student activism, the “Yellow Ribbon masses” who often lead through uncompromising spontaneity. But it remains a democratic movement limited by the dominant ideas in our society, which are bourgeois and petit-bourgeois.

The DPP was never a mass party of the working class. It began as a liberal party serving small and medium entrepreneurs and the native political elite. On the other hand, the large capital at the top of Taiwanese society is, as Mao would say, a comprador bourgeoisie with interests aligned to Taiwan’s biggest trading partner: mainland China. It benefits from cross-strait expansion and collusion with the CCP bureaucracy. These tycoons are frequently ready to abandon Taiwanese autonomy in favour of profit.

The task of the revolutionary left is therefore not simply to defend self-determination in the abstract but to build independent political power for the Taiwanese working class: a force that can champion self-determination without succumbing to either the neoliberalism of Taipei or the imperialist pressures of ‘ChiMerica’, and profit-driven shared interests between Washington and Beijing. Political independence is the unfinished work. Without it, self-determination remains a bourgeois project vulnerable to betrayal from above.

Taiwan is not Israel. The comparison is not analysis but weaponisation. Recognising this is the beginning of a genuinely internationalist politics. Taiwan should have the right to self-determination from the PRC, which has never ruled it.

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Postscript: Five Responses to Campists

Following publication, several objections emerged that warrant response.

1. Some framed Taiwan as merely “the losing, pro-American side of a frozen civil war” whose self-determination claim is therefore illegitimate. This framing erases thirty years of democratic transformation. Contemporary Taiwan was not built by the KMT but by movements that opposed the KMT dictatorship: the Tangwai movement, the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979, the long struggle that ended martial law in 1987 and culminated in free presidential elections in 1996. The Democratic Progressive Party emerged from that opposition. Most Taiwanese alive today have never lived under any government claiming to represent “all of China” and do not identify as Chinese. Polling consistently shows that the proportion identifying as “Taiwanese only” has grown from under 20% in the early 1990s to over 60% today. To reduce these 23 million people to relics of Chiang Kai-shek’s 1949 retreat is to deny the agency of everyone who built Taiwanese democracy since.

2. Others argued that Taiwan was “part of China for several centuries” under the Qing, as though historical incorporation settles the matter. But Mongolia was also a Qing territory. The PRC recognised Mongolian independence in 1949. Finland was part of the Russian Empire; the USSR eventually accepted Finnish independence. Ireland was ruled from London for centuries; that history does not delegitimise Irish self-determination today. If historical Qing sovereignty does not require Mongolian annexation in 2026, why should it require Taiwanese annexation? The answer cannot be principle; it can only be geopolitics. Taiwan is strategically valuable; Mongolia had Soviet protection. The “historical China” argument is applied selectively, where it serves Beijing’s interests.

3. One reader offered an alternative definition of “campism”: a term used by Western socialists to “delegitimise anti-imperialist positions” and evade responsibility for British colonialism. This reverses the actual critique. The Fourth International has opposed this tendency since the 1930s, when Stalinists argued that defence of the Soviet Union required subordinating all other struggles. The term describes a specific and recurring error: treating opposition to Western imperialism as requiring silence about non-Western authoritarianism and the struggles of workers and oppressed peoples within those states. It is not a recent invention to delegitimise anyone; it names a political current with a long history and identifiable positions.

4. The criticism that we should “look inward” and dismantle Western imperialism rather than “meddling” in other regions presents a false choice. Internationalism means precisely that solidarity crosses borders. British socialists in the nineteenth century supported Polish independence; this did not prevent them from fighting British capitalism. The First International was founded on the principle that workers’ struggles in one country strengthen workers everywhere. To say “fix your own imperialism first” before expressing solidarity with Taiwanese, Ukrainian, or Kurdish self-determination is to abandon internationalism entirely. It also implicitly accepts that peoples facing annexation must wait for Western workers to complete their revolution before their struggles become legitimate. This is not anti-imperialism; it is indifference dressed in radical language.

5. Finally, some suggested that supporting Taiwanese self-determination means “always trusting America.” The article explicitly argues the opposite. American interest in Taiwan is instrumentalised: semiconductors, supply chains, great-power competition. The Trump administration is actively extracting Taiwan’s strategic assets in ways that reduce Washington’s incentive for future defence. We harbour no illusions about US motives. But recognising American cynicism does not require us to support Chinese annexation. Both imperialisms can be opposed simultaneously. This was the Fourth International’s position on the Cold War, for working-class revolution against the ruling elites on both sides, and it remains our position today. The Taiwanese people’s right to determine their future does not depend on the benevolence of any great power. It depends on their own organisation, their own struggles, their political independence from their comprador capitalist class, and the international solidarity of workers and oppressed peoples everywhere.