• Patrick Winn
Anxiety over a potential invasion by China permeates Taiwan, but it’s especially potent among the island’s original inhabitants: Indigenous peoples who populate the remote highlands. Largely Christian, Indigenous church organizations fear Chinese occupiers would burn their Bibles. And as minorities, they’re keenly aware of Beijing’s ruthless treatment of Uyghurs and Tibetans. The World’s Patrick Winn reports from Taiwan on how they’re quietly planning to preserve their communities — and their faith — in case war comes to their homeland.
Taiwanese Christians forming anti-China resistance squads
The World
Nov. 14, 2023 · 12:00 PM EST
• Patrick Winn
Anxiety over a potential invasion by China permeates Taiwan, but it’s especially potent among the island’s original inhabitants: Indigenous peoples who populate the remote highlands. Largely Christian, Indigenous church organizations fear Chinese occupiers would burn their Bibles. And as minorities, they’re keenly aware of Beijing’s ruthless treatment of Uyghurs and Tibetans. The World’s Patrick Winn reports from Taiwan on how they’re quietly planning to preserve their communities — and their faith — in case war comes to their homeland.
Here’s a story from The World.
Tomorrow in San Francisco, President Joe Biden will meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping, an attempt to smooth out years of growing tension hanging over there and counter China’s increasingly aggressive military posture toward Taiwan.
Taiwanese people, however, are not waiting to see whether the Biden-Xi meeting produces a flurry of mutual understanding. Polls show half of Taiwan’s citizens are worried their army isn’t doing enough to defend them from China.
Yesterday, we reported on office workers prepping for a possible Chinese invasion. Today, the World’s Patrick Winn takes us to Taiwan’s mountains to meet people trying to protect their homeland or summoning their ties to Christianity.
It’s Saturday morning. Worshippers are filing into a Presbyterian church made of stone, gathering inside its cavernous chapel where a wooden cross towers above the pulpit. As the pews fill up, everyone begins to sing of love, a love bigger than the mountains and deeper than the sea.
But when the singing stops, talk quickly turns to war. A man in his early forties comes to the pulpit. He’s got slicked-back hair and determined eyes. He’s wearing a woven vest, colored scarlet with this black diamond pattern like the scales of a viper. And behind him, there’s a map of Taiwan. Boom. Boom. Boom. He’s pointing out where Chinese missiles might strike first if war comes to the island.
This is who I’ve come to meet in the green hills of Pingtung County, Southern Taiwan, a man who speaks like a mix between a military strategist and a prophet. My name is Ljavakaw Tjaljimaraw. You just call me “Ljavakaw.”
Unlike Ljavakaw, most people in Taiwan are ethnic Chinese. Many descended from mainland Chinese who fought against China’s communist takeover in the 1940s. They lost that war and fled to Taiwan, 100 miles off China’s coast. But Ljavakaw’s people were already here. They’re from the Paiwan ethnic group, one of the island’s original peoples with an ancient connection to the land.
That pattern on Ljavakaw’s vest evokes the scales of a pit viper. Many fear its poisonous fangs, but the Paiwan revere the snake. They say it can warn of approaching typhoons.
“That kind of snake, they will, hiss, then people will know danger is coming.”
Today, Ljavakaw is gathering dozens of church leaders from around the area to forecast a different type of danger. One that is familiar to indigenous Taiwanese who know all about invaders. Europeans showed up here nearly five hundred years ago, converting most of them to Christianity. Waves of Chinese and Japanese colonizers have come since.
But nothing, Ljavakaw says, compares to the modern threat posed by communist China, now encircling the island with fighter jets and warships on a near-daily basis.
“We risk Chinese invasion every day. We don’t have much time.”
When Ljavakaw speaks, people listen. He’s the son of a Paiwan chief, his mother, and he’s a political scientist with two PhDs studying civilian defense tactics. He recently started a network called Academia Formosana. Its mission is teaching indigenous Taiwanese, mainly Christians, how to prepare for war. He says the stakes are existential. Just look at how communists treat minorities in China, he says, from Uyghurs to Tibetans to Christians:
“Their churches are demolished, and their pastors are put in jail. The Bibles are burned. So these all very anti-Christ devil things.”
Ljavakaw says those anti-Christ devil things are just one of many coming threats. What do you think the Taiwanese city folks are going to do when their cities get bombed?
“Many of them already say we will run into the mountains because we can hide in the mountains.”
The mountains where many indigenous people live. Ljavakaw imagines mobs of starving people coming to steal food from indigenous communities or fellow Christians showing up wounded because their church just got blown up. Someone would have to treat their wounds.
Ljavakaw has come here to tell indigenous church leaders: start planning now. Ljavakaw is asking them to fuse together more than a thousand churches and more than half a million indigenous and ethnic Chinese Protestants into a rescue and defense operation, with indigenous believers running the show.
He says we know how to live off the land, we know how to endure occupation, but we need first aid training, secure communication equipment, and hidden stockpiles of supplies.
“We are trying to save our own lives. Who can oppose you when you want to save your own life?”
Perhaps Taiwan’s army could oppose him. Most armies do not like civilians starting military-style operations that run parallel to their own. I spoke to a former high-ranking Taiwanese officer, Shen Ming-shih. He’s at the Institute of National Defense and Security Research, a government-funded think tank, and he advises Taiwan’s military. I asked him to sum up what the top brass in Taiwan thinks about civilian-led defense squads.
“Senior officers think you are not a general or military man. You don’t know anything.”
But Shen says actually army leaders have the wrong attitude.
Ljavakaw is part of a growing trend in Taiwan. Civilian defense teams are starting up left and right. On the weekends regular people will train for combat with BB guns because real guns are restricted. Shen Ming-shih says that when groups like Ljavakaw’s pop up, the army should help them because they can relieve the burden on the state in a time of war. Bring them onto army bases, he says. Teach them how to shoot real rifles.
“If we can give them some training and equipment, they also can join the war and protect their city or protect their homeland.”
When it comes to using guns, indigenous people in Taiwan already have an edge. They make up only two to three percent of the island’s 23 million population, but only they have the right to own guns, but only primitive homemade muzzleloaders like the kind used in the 1800s. They use them to hunt wild animals.
Here’s a man named Ming Jie from the Pinuyumayan indigenous group. “Mountain boar, flying squirrel, monkeys, civets, that’s what we hunt,” he says.
Ming Jie grew up here in Taiwan’s southern hills, but later joined the military’s most elite unit, Airborne Special Ops. And since Ming Jie is both an indigenous and a military man. I wanted his take on Ljavakaw’s plan to build a Christian self-defense network.
Ming Jie says look, our indigenous people do have that Sparta mindset. Sparta? I asked.
Ah, Sparta, like “THIS IS SPARTA!”, the Spartan Warrior Society in ancient Greece.
My co-reporter, Michael Garber, translates for Ming Jie.
“In our tribal tradition, every man is a warrior and has a responsibility to be able to fight like a soldier for the tribe if necessary.”
Going back to the 1500s, every colonizer who’s ever come to Taiwan has remarked on the fighting prowess of its Aboriginal people. It’s an established trope. So I wasn’t sure if Ljavakaw would want to lean into that warrior imagery, but he said, we are proud of that reputation.
“The Taiwanese aborigines are actually the last Samurais on this island, the last warriors on this island. They indeed can fight. They are good fighters.”
Inside the stone church hidden away in the hills, the Presbyterians are taking a singing break after all that talk of war. But soon they’re back at it, diving into the details of forming an organized resistance. One pastor fears the city-dwellers will abandon them if war comes. Another invokes Saint Michael, the warrior angel who battles satanic forces in the Bible. All decide that yes, they will sign up to Ljavakaw’s plan, the Ark Plan they call it, like Noah’s Ark, a defense against a coming storm.
From the pulpit, Ljavakaw leads them in prayer. It’s Corinthians 12:12, a verse about the Christian flock: If one of us suffers, it says, all of us will suffer together.
For The World, this is Patrick Winn in Taiwan. Michael Garber contributed to that report.
