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At a central Taipei branch of a popular bank on Tuesday, a few clients came to Joseph Chiu, a teller, with an odd request: to withdraw millions of kuai from their accounts. “They worry the bank will close its doors tomorrow,” he said during an afternoon streetside smoke break.
Chiu said he wasn’t worried about such an event, and there is no indication that it is even a possibility, but it was a small sign that among Taiwan’s stoic, often fatalistic population, something had shifted this week.
A few hours later Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, landed at Taipei’s Songshan airport with a delegation from Congress. The visit – plans for which were leaked some weeks ago – comes at a time of extraordinary sensitivity and has threatened to spark a fourth Taiwan strait crisis.
Generally, Taiwan’s population had not been overly interested in the talk of a visit. As international media pumped out headlines and op-eds, domestic news prioritised local elections, a long-running heatwave and celebrity news. In one bulletin, Pelosi didn’t even make the top half. Having fun with it, some commentators bet bags of rice that she wouldn’t visit.
Foreign reporters quoted Taiwanese people telling the world once again: we have been under the threat of Chinese invasion every day for decades, so what’s the use in worrying about it?
“It’s useless to worry too much,” said Chiu. “You’ve seen the Russian war, and what war looks like. If it happens, it happens.”
People’s reasons not to worry are diverse, ranging from seeing invasion as an unstoppable inevitability, to a futile mission bound to be resisted by Taiwan or thwarted with US help, to something that simply won’t happen because no one wants it.
But then Pelosi’s visit was confirmed and the mood shifted. News sites ran polls, with almost two-thirds of UDN’s respondents saying the visit was destabilising. Talk radio discussed preparation and escape plans, and walked listeners through their growing anxieties. At one point more than 300,000 people around the world were tracking her flight on FlightRadar24, before the site crashed under load.
Hundreds of civilians gathered across multiple city sites to welcome or protest against her arrival.
