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Editor’s note: Ryan Ho Kilpatrick reflects on Reorienting Taiwan: Ocean, Selfhood, and the Pacific, a volume that interrogates Taiwan’s asserted maritime identity. The contributors expose tensions between political rhetoric, historical experience, and daily life, while indigenous perspectives challenge the myth of an inherently ocean-bound nation. Kilpatrick interweaves personal encounters with Taiwan’s guarded coasts and limited swimming culture, illustrating the distance between oceanic symbolism and practice. The book ultimately portrays Taiwan as a paradoxical island shaped by both continental inheritances and maritime aspirations.

[ESSAY] “Islands in Denial: Reorienting Taiwan Amid a Sea of Contradictions” by Ryan Ho Kilpatrick

Click HERE to read all entries in Cha
on Reorienting Taiwan.

Niki J. P. Alsford and Ti-Han Chang (editors), Reorienting Taiwan: Ocean, Selfhood, and the Pacific, Brill, 2025. 237 pgs.

四面環海—“Surrounded by the ocean on four sides”—is a phrase I have encountered so frequently in my readings on Taiwanese history and culture that it has almost reached the point of semantic satiation. It is, of course, objectively true: the island of Taiwan is bounded by the East Sea to the north, the Pacific Ocean to the east, the South China Sea to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the west. Yet these words are often employed not merely to describe a geographical reality but also to evoke an intrinsic, nationwide connection to the world ocean.

Reorienting Taiwan: Ocean, Selfhood, and the Pacific is a volume refreshingly unafraid to confront the contradictions that lie at the heart of this assumption underpinning Taiwan’s relatively new-found maritime identity. Edited by the University of Lancashire anthropologist Niki J. P. Alsford and Ti-Han Chang of SOAS, it brings together perspectives from a wide range of experts, from desk-bound translators of Taiwan’s oceanic literature to field researchers who have spent years mastering indigenous fishing methods on and beneath the water. Throughout, readers are invited both to explore and to question the notion of “oceanic Taiwan”.

This perspective is curiously absent from much of the existing literature on the island’s maritime history and culture. In Shih-Shan Henry Tsai’s Maritime Taiwan: Historical Encounters with the East and the West (2009) and Tai Pao-Tsun’s Oceanic Cultures and History of Taiwan (2011), the seafaring traditions of indigenous Taiwanese, who lived on the island for thousands of years before the arrival of Han Chinese settlers, are only briefly acknowledged. Instead, the focus rests on migrants who sailed across the Taiwan Strait from Fujian and Guangdong. This relatively short voyage is treated as a transformative experience that turned agrarian mainlanders into a distinctly maritime nation in the making, a community set apart from their land-bound cousins one hundred nautical miles to the west. In the words of Antonio Paoliello-Palermo and Mireia Vargas-Urpí, this narrative seeks to emphasise difference and to construct a new identity: “Taiwan as a land of the ocean in contrast with China as a continental entity”.

Pei-yin Lin observes in her chapter that “re-conceptualisations of Taiwan as ocean-centric have been viewed as akin to ‘qu zhongguo hua 去中國化 (de-Sinicisation)’ or as leaning towards independence”. The scholar, now based at the University of Hong Kong, acknowledges that “the oceanic discourse since the 1990s risks being overly politicised and tendentiously appropriated”. In independence-leaning works of maritime history, oceanic narratives are often constructed to distance pre-1949 arrivals from the Kuomintang’s Central Plains mentality, thereby becoming a metaphor for Hoklo cultural ethno-nationalism.

Indigenous voices are especially attuned to this hypocrisy. Multiple chapters in Reorienting Taiwan engage with these communities, including Futuru C. L. Tsai’s chapter on underwater spearfishing among the coastal Amis and Julien Laporte’s study of spearfishing among the Tao people of Orchid Island (Lanyu). “As for Taiwan, which defines itself as an ocean country, its coasts are bordered on all sides by maritime defence lines and guarded by coast guards,” remarks the Tao indigenous writer Syaman Rapongan, widely regarded as the foremost pioneer of “oceanic literature” in Taiwan. It is “as if the state apparatus were doing everything it could to dissuade citizens from approaching the sea,” he observes.

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“But there is almost nothing related to the ocean in Taiwan’s literature or everyday life.”

“Taiwan is indeed a very strange place,” the indigenous scholar Sun Dachuan is quoted as saying. “It is surrounded by the ocean. And now it is said that Taiwan is a country of the ocean. But there is almost nothing related to the ocean in Taiwan’s literature or everyday life.” As the writer Hao Yu-hsiang similarly remarks, “Taiwan seems to be an island that does not think of itself as an island; it looks more like a fragment of a continent to which the traditional way of thinking of the central Han plain has been transplanted.” While the volume is also replete with colourful odes to “Taiwan as Ocean” and to the island’s forming “an integral part” of the Pacific “Sea of Islands”, these observations pull the discussion firmly back to reality.

They also resonate strongly with my own experiences on the island. When I joined a local dragon-boat team, for instance, I was disappointed to discover that all training sessions and races were held in flat, inland bodies of water, including the misleadingly named Pacific Ocean Dragon Boat Festival near my home on the breathtaking East Coast. Like most Taiwanese, many of my teammates did not know how to swim or even tread water, and personal-flotation devices had to be worn at all times. The idea of participating in water sports without basic competence in the water struck me as baffling, yet I quickly realised that it was the norm in this self-styled “island nation”. At Fulong Beach in New Taipei, I once had to paddle out to rescue visitors who, unable to swim, had been swept away by the same rip current that surfers ride to the line-up beyond the breaking waves. Unable to read the water, they gravitated towards the current’s deceptively flat surface rather than towards the shallows where the waves roll safely ashore.

Diving off the offshore island of Xiaoliuqiu, my wonder at watching sea turtles underwater was quickly shattered by a sense of horror as I witnessed local dive-masters dragging tourists around by the valves of their air tanks, colliding with the coral. “It does not matter if you cannot swim!” (不會游泳沒有關係!) was a favoured tagline among local tour operators. On a recent trip to Taiwan’s largest port city, Kaohsiung, I discovered that even at the plush Sunset Beach Resort a large sign reading “No Swimming Allowed” loomed over the sand. Two Coast Guard officials in bright orange coveralls patrolled the shoreline, keeping people away from the gently lapping waves. While Taiwanese are right to treat the ocean with seriousness, the usual response is neither education nor the cultivation of confidence and respect in the water. Instead, people are taught to fear and avoid it.

In coastal Taitung, I have become involved in the nascent outrigger-canoeing community, which seeks both to reinvigorate indigenous people’s connection to the ocean and to strengthen links with other Austronesian communities across the Pacific. At the club’s training ground in Taitung’s Flowing Lake, however, we are permitted to paddle only at dawn or dusk. At first, I assumed this restriction existed to avoid the heat of the midday sun, but in reality it is intended to avoid the suffocating oversight of government authorities. During the daytime, on-duty lifeguards prohibit any water activity that has not been explicitly approved by the government. Dip your toes in the crystalline, invitingly cool water and a whistle will pierce the silence. In order to circumvent the authorities’ overbearing safety regime and gain access to the water for training, we are therefore compelled to choose the less-safe option. When paddling to Green Island, we were also required to register with the Coast Guard both on launching and on landing the boat, despite never leaving Taiwanese waters. The procedure felt like a strangely overwrought ritual for an activity that is a daily habit for many in Hong Kong.

Some of this web of bureaucracy and securitisation is, as several contributors to Reorienting Taiwan: Ocean, Selfhood, and the Pacific remind us, a legacy of the island’s decades of martial law and authoritarian rule. From 1949 to 1987, access to the sea was tightly controlled. Ordinary citizens were effectively barred from the island’s coasts, which were reserved for the military, for polluting factories, and for small fishing harbours. Members of the public could not approach the sea without official authorisation. “Apart from registered fishermen, seafarers, academic researchers, or navy crew,” the writer and marine-education pioneer Hung-Chi Liao recalls, “people in Taiwan hardly had any direct contact with the sea, let alone the opportunity to partake in maritime activities.”

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The rise of discourse on maritime Taiwan coincided with the lifting of martial law and the beginning of the democratisation process.

The rise of discourse on maritime Taiwan coincided with the lifting of martial law and the beginning of the democratisation process. “Those who embraced Taiwan-centric cultural nationalism appreciated the image of the ocean as a means of articulating their efforts to ‘de-colonise’ the Kuomintang’s authoritarianism and to promote an independence-leaning agenda,” as Pei-yin Lin observes. “This is well illustrated in Peng Ming-min’s call for an ‘oceanic Taiwan’ as part of his political slogan during the 1996 presidential election.” While some of the sudden emphasis on maritime identity can be dismissed as cynical politicisation, much of it is both sincere and long overdue. It represents the process of an island rediscovering its own insular nature after centuries of colonial rule. For Taiwanese seeking to articulate a new identity distinct from the authoritarian Kuomintang’s Central Plains culture, a renewed focus on the blue ocean carried clear symbolic force.

This political allegory has, perhaps ironically, resonated powerfully in China as well. In 1988, CCTV’s River Elegy (河殤) provoked intense debate in intellectual circles. The six-part documentary series was structured around the contrast between the backward, inward-looking “Yellow River culture” of China’s past and the more open, forward-looking “blue ocean culture” associated with the West. In order to progress, it argued, China would have to move beyond its silt-laden inland waters and join the family of nations on the open sea. The series was criticised for promoting “bourgeois-liberal ideologies” and for stirring student unrest, and it was banned in the aftermath of the June 4th crackdown. Today, Xi Jinping once again speaks evocatively of his “Yellow River sentiment”, presenting the Communist Party’s effective control of its turbulent waters as a metaphor for its governance of the nation.

Viewed in this light, contemporary Taiwan is clearly no longer merely a “fragment of a continent” chipped off the Chinese mainland. Yet it remains far from being the salt-water nation that some proponents of “oceanic Taiwan” portray it to be. In reality, it is both, and neither. Niki Alsford captures this paradox eloquently when he writes:

Taiwan assumes a pivotal role, its geographical setting lending it strategic significance while simultaneously embodying the dual nature of both oceanic and continental characteristics. This duality suggests that any comprehensive study of Taiwan must consider these aspects, recognising the island not merely through physical or geopolitical lenses but as a dynamic entity shaped by its social, cultural, and historical contexts.

Reorienting Taiwan: Ocean, Selfhood, and the Pacific makes an important contribution towards realising this more comprehensive perspective. The volume acknowledges Taiwan’s continental and oceanic dimensions alike, and it treats the tensions and synthesis between the two not as an inconvenient truth but as the very quality that makes maritime Taiwan so compelling, so distinct from its neighbours, and so deserving of sustained scholarly attention.

^{How to cite: Kilpatrick, Ryan Ho. “Islands in Denial: Reorienting Taiwan Amid a Sea of Contradictions.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 16 Mar. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/03/16/islands.}

Ryan Ho Kilpatrick is an award-winning journalist and writer from Hong Kong. He has previously served as Managing Editor of the China Media Project and worked as a reporter for TaiwanPlus, The Washington Post, Hong Kong Free Press, TIME, and dpa. A divemaster as well as a seasoned paddler and sailor, he has a particular interest in the maritime history and culture of Hong Kong and the surrounding region. You can find his website and portfolio here. [All contributions by Ryan Ho Kilpatrick.]