KMT's 'Imperialist' Rhetoric Shifts Taiwan's Democratic Fault Line

The word“imperialist” crystallizes this shift. In Marxist-Leninist vocabulary - the CCP's native idiom - imperialism names a specific enemy: the United States and its allies, whose interference supposedly prevents the natural reunification of the Chinese nation.

When Cheng uses it, she does more than flatter her hosts. She reframes Taiwan's relationship with the US as a form of colonial subjugation rather than a democratic alliance.

She reframes the 1949 separation not as the consequence of a civil war between two Chinese political forces, but as an injury inflicted by outsiders. In doing so, she erases the agency of the Taiwanese people themselves - the millions who built a democracy on this island without anyone's permission.

This matters far beyond rhetoric. The KMT is currently blocking a NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.3 billion) special defense budget in the Legislative Yuan. Cheng frames the spending as turning Taiwan into America's“ATM.”

Eric Chu and Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen, both KMT members, have publicly supported higher defense spending than Cheng proposes. The party is splitting, but the chair holds the institutional levers.

What Taiwan is experiencing is not a standard political disagreement between a party that leans toward engagement and one that prioritizes sovereignty. Democracies live with that kind of tension - it is healthy. What is happening now is qualitatively different.

The main opposition party's leader has adopted the authoritarian neighbor's framing of history, its vocabulary, and its strategic priorities - while simultaneously working to weaken the island's defense posture.

This is no longer about smiling at Beijing versus keeping Beijing at arm's length. It is about whether alternation of power in Taiwan would mean alternation of the democratic system itself.

Europeans recognize this pattern. In Hungary, Viktor Orban did not campaign on dismantling democratic institutions. He campaigned on pragmatism, economic realism, and the need to maintain good relations with Russia.

The erosion came through vocabulary first, through institutional capture second, and through the hollowing out of democratic norms third. Several European parties - from Alternative for Germany to Rassemblement National in France - have maintained financial and rhetorical links to Moscow that their voters did not fully understand until the invasion of Ukraine made the alignment impossible to ignore.

Taiwan's situation is more dangerous. China is not merely an ideological rival - it claims sovereignty over the island and rehearses invasion scenarios. A KMT that returns to power under Cheng's ideological framework would not just shift Taiwan's diplomatic orientation.

It would potentially dismantle the conditions under which Taiwanese democracy survives: defense capability, alliance credibility, and the basic principle that Taiwan's future is decided by its people.

President Lai Ching-te embodies the opposite pole - a frank advocate for Taiwan's freedom who has consistently maintained that the island is already an independent, sovereign country and therefore needs no declaration of independence.