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Ignore the super-slow video (if you can! — I watched it a dozen times).  Look at what is written on the man's t-shirt.

It clearly says:

jiěfàng Táiwān

解放台湾

"Liberate Taiwan"

At first I thought it was from the point of view of the Taiwanese who wish to liberate their country from the threatened tyranny of the communist People's Republic of China.  With all the current tension over Taiwan Independence, surely it must be from the Taiwanese standpoint.  But then it occurred to me that the same two words could even more likely be from the point of view of the PRC expressing the desire to liberate Taiwan from Uncle Sam's umbrella of protection or the KMT / GMD (see below) so as to bring about a unification with the mainland.  (Notice that, for historical reasons, I did not use the word "reunification".)

If we adopt this slogan, "Liberate Taiwan", from the POV of the Taiwan independence movement, it is compatible with this related slogan:

Chhut-thâu-thiⁿ

出頭天

The literal translation is roughly "lift up [your] heads towards the sky" or "[we shall] emerge with only the sky above [our] heads", which means something like "we shall have our day".  This may be compared with a similar slogan in Irish republicanism, "Tiocfaidh ár lá" ("Our day will come"),

An early use of the phrase "Chhut-thâu-thiⁿ"

appeared in the second chapter ‘Sin Tâi-ôan kap Lô-má-jī ê Koan-hē’ (‘A new Taiwan and its relationship with Latinized orthography’) of Chhoà Pôe-hóe [nan]'s 1925 book Cha̍p-hāng Koán-kiàn (‘Ten Humble Opinions’).

The phrase is also associated with Taiwanese nativist Christian theological currents of the 1970s, most notably Chhut-thâu-thiⁿ Theology.

On the other hand, the completely opposite meaning can be extracted from the same slogan, "Liberate Taiwan", as expressed in these early PRC posters:

Uncles from the People’s Liberation Army! Quickly go
and liberate our little distressed friends in Taiwan, 1955

We must liberate Taiwan, 1958

Some of the posters incorporate unparsed, monosyllabic pinyin and even English, French, and German.

CHINESE POSTERS.NET Taiwan — Liberation has many similar posters, plus explanatory text, of which this is a part:

Already before the mainland was ‘liberated’ officially in 1949, plans existed to invade Taiwan in the process as well. Although the population at the time was already prepared for military action thanks to forceful propaganda, the plans came to naught.

Intervention of the U.S. Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait in 1950 and the subsequent conflict in Korea caused the immediate liberation plans to be shelved. The American support for the GMD-regime played an important role in the anti-imperialist propaganda that at the time made heavy use of the ‘paper tiger’ imagery.

Notice that the characters on the t-shirt are simplified versions, both the larger ones (see above) and the smaller ones:

Wǒmen yīdìng yào shōufù Táiwān

我们一定要收复台湾

We must retake Taiwan

Once again, we see that the same language can mean quite different things depending upon the historical, political, or other context.

Selected readings

• "Taiwan independence posters in polysyllabic characters" (2/21/18)
• "Hong Kong protests: 'recover' or 'liberate'" (11/3/19)
• "Vicious smears" (9/10/20)
• "Xinhua English and Zhonglish" (2/4/09)

[Thanks to Gene Hill and Jing Hu]

May 2, 2025 @ 5:36 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Context, Language and politics, Slogans

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