Poll shows 48.9% support independence
Taipei Times
Sep 2, 2023 — A poll released by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation yesterday showed 48.9 percent of Taiwanese support obtaining formal national independence.

Over 80% of Taiwanese favor maintaining status quo …
Focus Taiwan
Feb 23, 2024 — More than 80 percent of Taiwanese people want to maintain the status quo with China, with those preferring to keep Taiwan’s current status indefinitely rising sharply, while those who want independence have been dropping since 2020, according to the results of a survey released on Friday.

These polls were less than six months apart. Prior to the Republic of China (Taiwan) election in January 2024, there was a big push by the US State Department to promote Taiwanese independence. These numbers of close to 50 percent favoring independence may not have been reality, however, but a propaganda “push poll” by the West. That’s just my opinion. Both polls cannot be right and the second is more in sync with the trend of history.

For most of my life, I always viewed the Mao Zedong-led PRC as the godless communist enemy and the Chiang Kai-shek-led ROC as the freedom-loving Christian democracy. Chiang was baptized a Methodist and later became a professing Christian. So this certainly may have been true in the mid-20th century.

When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, estimates of the total number of Christian believers in China were around 700,000. By the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 some thought the church had completely disappeared due to decades of persecution.

However, the U.S. government estimated in 2021 that 5.1 percent of mainland China is Christian. That is out of a population of 1.4 billion or about 71.4 million Christians. Some mission groups claim it is around 100 million. This is up from less than one percent at the time of the death of Mao in 1976. Some journalists, scholars and Christian advocacy groups have suggested that Christianity in China continues to grow rapidly in the 21st century and that Christians are on track to make up a majority of the population there by 2050. This is partially due to the higher birth rates among Christians contrasted with the declining birth rates among Chinese in general.

At the beginning of the 1950s, there were reportedly 125,000 Christians in Taiwan, which was approximately 1.7% of the total population. By the mid-1960s, this number increased to 605,000, that is, about 4.5% of the population. According to the Taiwanese government, less than 3.9 percent of Taiwan’s population today is Christian. This is out of a population of 23.42 million or about 913,000 Christians — a growth in numbers since the 1960s, but a decline in per capita ratio.

My concern is for the growth of the Christian population.

Does Taiwanese independence and a push toward a Western Liberal alliance help missions to China or hurt it?

I never understood until recently that the one-China policy is held by both Taiwan and mainland China. Taiwan says there is only one China and the government is in Taipei. Mainland China says there is one China and the government is in Beijing. Although the civil war lasted from 1927 to 1950, it was never resolved with a treaty. Both sides consider the other government illegitimate. To pretend it can be resolved with Taiwan independence is ignorant of the reality.

We have to ask ourselves as American Christians, “Who is China?”

The solution to the problem with American Chrisitians’ thinking that Taiwan is independent or ought to be independent is to understand that China as a whole has never understood itself as a Westphalian nation-state. It is an ancient civilization. All Han Chinese are China (together with many other non-Han Chinese people groups). They are united by a common culture, a 3000-year-old history (some say 4000 years), and a religious philosophy.

So who is China?

It is the ethnos — the people, the nation of China, built on the cultural heritage of the Han people. Taiwan itself has actually more Han Chinese percentage-wise than mainland China.

This is China.

Regions with significant populations of Han Chinese 汉族; 漢族

Total population	1.4 billion
China	1.29 billion
Taiwan	22 million
Thailand	7.05 million
Malaysia	6.91 million
United States	3.80–5.79 million
Indonesia	2.83 million
Singapore	2.67 million
Myanmar	1.64 million
Canada	1.47 million
Philippines	1.35 million
Australia	1.21 million
Vietnam	992,600
Japan	922,000

As a Christian, I want China to have true freedom in the Holy Spirit. However, it is necessary to understand that it must be Christianity with Chinese characteristics. Is it anti-Chinese, according to their worldview, to be Christian? Not at all. China was not always Confucian. Yes, Confucianism has been around for 2500 years, but the Han civilization is older. It is much like the older Christian civilizations that ranged from Persia to modern day Morocco in the early centuries. They have been Muslim for 1500 years, but there are still Christians in these civilizations and they may be predominantly Christian again. Likewise, there are 100 million Chinese Christians among the Han people. This is how missionaries should consider evangelization of the Chinese. Not through the defeat of the PRC or through changing the policy of the government of Beijing, but by the unification of the Han people in their own unique civilization in the love of Christ.