Words matter in cross-strait politics. Every phrase is weighed, every omission noticed. So when Kuomintang (KMT) chairwoman Cheng Li-wun described “imperialist forces” as the cause of Taiwan’s separation from the mainland during her visit to China this week, something cracked in Taiwan’s political architecture.

Not because the sentiment is new in Beijing’s playbook — it isn’t. But because a sitting KMT leader chose to adopt it as her own.

This is not the language Eric Chu used when he met Xi Jinping in 2015. Chu, a moderate who explicitly rejected reunification as a goal, kept the KMT’s traditional ambiguity intact: the “1992 Consensus” with “different interpretations” — a formula that left space for the Republic of China to exist as a concept alongside the People’s Republic.

Hung Hsiu-chu pushed harder toward Beijing in 2016, but she was swiftly replaced as presidential candidate precisely because her rhetoric alarmed mainstream voters. The party corrected itself.

Under Cheng, there has been no correction. When Xi congratulated her on winning the chairmanship last November, her reply dropped the “different interpretations” clause that both Wu Den-yih and Chu had included in theirs.

That omission was not careless. It was a signal — one that Beijing codified immediately, with Wang Huning framing future KMT-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ties around “the spirit of Xi’s congratulatory message to Cheng.” The rhetorical guardrails that previous KMT chairs maintained, however imperfect, have been dismantled.

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.

Pragmatic, not provocative. But the gap between Lai’s worldview and Cheng’s has widened into something that no longer resembles a policy debate. It looks more like a civilizational choice.

Taiwanese voters have rejected the KMT in three consecutive presidential elections. Public identification as “Taiwanese” rather than “Chinese” has surged over the past decade.

Yet the KMT controls a legislative majority through its alliance with the TPP, and Cheng’s institutional power over the party apparatus is real. The risk is not that Taiwanese society has shifted toward Beijing. It is that the party system no longer accurately maps onto what society actually wants.

The word “imperialist” should ring alarm bells — not because it is offensive, but because it is borrowed. When a democratic opposition begins speaking in the language of the authoritarian power that threatens its own country’s existence, the democratic fault line has moved. Taiwan should pay attention to where it now runs.

Romain Blachier is a professional in green energy and a lecturer in energy geopolitics and Asian affairs at HEIP, Université Lyon 1 and ILERI, and president of the France-Formosa Association. He conducted research missions to Taiwan in 2019 and 2025.