Just like Germany, Japan never underwent a thorough process of "denazification." After being defeated by anti-imperialist forces in China, Korea and other Asian countries, fascism went underground, hiding itself behind the cute Japanese anime, J-pop or J-drama. With the crisis of capitalism exacerbating and the hegemonic power of the imperialist West (including Japan) gradually weakening, the fascist and national-chauvinist sentiments in Japan are shedding their disguises and revealing their true faces.
Last year in November, Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi explicitly described a hypothetical scenario concerning Taiwan as a “survival-threatening situation", implying Japan’s potential armed intervention in the Taiwan Strait in the future. One month later in December, Japan's cabinet approved its largest defence budget ever at $58bn since the World War II, laying ground for Japan's military expansion ambitions. This year in May, a new legislation to establish Japan's first post-war centralised intelligence agency passed the upper house of Japan’s National Diet, marking a new stage of Japan's remilitarisation.
Meanwhile, Japan and the Philippines have launched bilateral negotiations on the delimitation of their exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and continental shelves in waters east of China's Taiwan island, violating international law and interests of Taiwanese people. In spite of the obvious violation of Taiwan's own maritime interests, the Taiwanese government led by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) remained silence on this matter, dedicately playing the role of a comprador class of the imperialist West and its rabid dogs.
As a pro-west and pro-independence party, the DPP has, during the past decade in office, spared no efforts to distort the history of Taiwan's colonial era under the brutal rule of the imperialist Japan and to spread anti-reunification propaganda. As a result, many young people in Taiwan Province have become increasingly unfamiliar with the history of Taiwan's anti-colonial struggles against the imperialist Japan, a history that is even less known outside Southeast Asia.
Thus, I translated an article about the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle of the brave Taiwanese people, the second article of " the fascist history of Japan" series.
"Taiwan Retrocession Day": The Patriotic Tradition of Taiwan Compatriots Viewed Through the Lens of Taiwan's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression
(台湾光复纪念日:从台湾抗日历程看台胞爱国传统)
By: Guo Hainan (郭海南)
In April 1895, Japanese imperialism used a war of aggression to coerce the corrupt Qing government into signing the humiliating Treaty of Shimonoseki. Japan forcibly seized Taiwan and the Penghu Islands, subjecting the people of Taiwan to a miserable half-century of colonial rule.
Throughout these five decades, the Japanese colonial authorities brutally suppressed and massacred the Taiwanese people through military force. They implemented policies of cultural assimilation and promoted the Kōminka (Japanization) movement in a bid to fundamentally eradicate the Taiwanese people's consciousness of their motherland.
Despite the cruel oppression of Japanese colonial rule, the people of Taiwan remained steadfast in their devotion to the motherland; they waged an unyielding struggle against the Japanese colonizers and tenaciously upheld their identity and consciousness as members of the Chinese nation.
[1] Armed Resistance Against Japanese Colonial Rule
On June 17, 1895, Kabayama Sukenori, the first Japanese Governor-General of Taiwan, presided over the inauguration ceremony in Taipei. This event marked the beginning of Japan's colonial rule over Taiwan, reducing the island to a Japanese colony for the next fifty years. From the very day of the Japanese occupation, the Taiwanese people—resolute in their vow never to submit to Japanese rule—launched a vigorous armed struggle against the invaders, never once wavering in their firm conviction to achieve national liberation and return to the embrace of the motherland.
From June to October 1895, undaunted by brute force, Taiwan’s volunteer forces and Qing troops fought heroically against the enemy under extremely arduous conditions. Wave after wave of fighters—shedding their blood and sacrificing their lives—engaged in over a hundred battles, large and small, over the course of more than five months.
Following the Japanese occupation of Taipei, the resistance movement among the Taiwanese people surged across the entire island with renewed intensity. Qiu Fengjia (丘逢甲) shouldered the heavy responsibility of leading the resistance to defend Taiwan against Japan; fighting alongside fellow volunteer commanders such as Wu Tangxing, Xu Xiang, and Jiang Shaozu, he confronted the invading forces. Leveraging the terrain, these volunteers—armed only with primitive muskets, long spears, and broadswords—engaged in fierce close-quarters combat against the well equipped modern Japanese army, suffering heavy casualties.
Jiang Shaozu (姜绍祖), the youngest leader among the resistance forces, was only nineteen at the time. Upon hearing that Taipei had fallen, he generously distributed his family fortune to recruit volunteers, rapidly assembling a force of over 500 men known as the "Dare" (Gan) Volunteer Corps; he led from the front in battle but ultimately took his own life after being overwhelmed by superior numbers.
Before his death, he penned a final poem expressing his patriotic resolve to defend the nation and the island:
"A lone force stands at the frontier; my heart is torn with grief at the unfolding tragedy. A man must act for the sake of his country; how could I dare to cling to life by surrendering to the foreign invaders?边戍孤军自一枝，九回肠断事可知。男儿应为国家计，岂敢偷生降敌夷)."
While defending the final line in Tainan, Xu Xiang (徐骧) was critically wounded during a fierce clash but leapt up to shout, "A true man dies for his country with no regrets," before making the ultimate sacrifice. Through their heroic struggle and the shedding of their blood, the people of Taiwan wrote a magnificent chapter in the history of the Chinese people's century-long fight against imperialism.
By mid-November 1895, Kabayama Sukenori declared that the entire island had been fully pacified. Yet, the struggle of the Taiwanese people against Japanese colonial rule never ceased. On December 30, Lin Dabei (林大北) a former member of the Black Flag Army, raised the banner of revolt in Yilan. Rallying under the slogan "expel the Japanese invaders and restore China," he fired the first shot of armed resistance against Japanese colonial rule following the island's occupation.
From the early days of the Japanese occupation until 1915, the people of Taiwan waged a vigorous, twenty-year armed struggle against the Japanese, with peasants forming the core of the resistance. A shared desire to return to the motherland drove these armed struggles.
In the north, Hu Jiayou (胡嘉猷) and others publicly declared in a manifesto: "This campaign against the Japanese invaders serves the nation and saves the people." They utilized titles such as "Blue Feather Awardee" (granted by the Qing court) and the reign title of Emperor Guangxu, while asserting that "all nations are friendly states to our Qing Dynasty," thereby making the restoration of Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan their primary objective.
In central Taiwan, Ke Tiehu (柯铁虎) and his associates raised a banner of righteousness on the top of the hill Dapingding inscribed with the characters "Under Qing Orders to Subdue the Japanese," calling for a return to the motherland.
All these actions vividly demonstrated the Taiwanese people's profound sense of belongings to their motherland.
The victory of the Xinhai Revolution greatly inspired the revolutionary spirit of the Taiwanese people, sparking wave after wave of armed resistance against Japanese colonial rule. The Miaoli Incident (苗栗事件) occurred under the influence of the Xinhai Revolution. At that time, Luo Fuxing (罗福星), a member of the Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance), returned to Taiwan and secretly established revolutionary organizations in areas such as Miaoli and Taipei.
On March 15, 1913, Luo convened a meeting of anti-Japanese activists from across the island in Miaoli and issued the "Great Revolution Manifesto," calling on the people of Taiwan to unite, coordinate with the revolution in the motherland, and wage a struggle against the Japanese. They organized military units and prepared to launch an uprising. However, the plot was discovered by the Japanese police, and the participants were arrested one after another. In court, Luo Fuxing openly admitted that the goal of the movement was "to restore the island [Taiwan] to Chinese sovereignty." Luo Fuxing was heroically executed in March 1914; a total of 261 people were tried in the same case, with six sentenced to death.
In 1915, the Tapani Incident (噍吧哖起义) —also known as the Xilai'an Incident (西来庵事件)—broke out, led by figures such as Yu Qingfang (余清芳), Luo Jun (罗俊), and Jiang Ding (江定). At the time, under the influence of the Xinhai Revolution, patriotic sentiment among the people of Taiwan was running high; Yu Qingfang and others leveraged religious beliefs to incite resistance against Japanese rule.
Using Xilai'an Temple in Tainan as their base, they recruited followers and raised funds for their cause. They launched attacks on several police substations in the Jiaxianpu Branch District and killed dozens of people, including Japanese officials, but were ultimately defeated by Japanese police and military forces, suffering heavy casualties. From that point on, the anti-Japanese movement among the Taiwanese people shifted primarily from armed struggle to non-violent resistance.
[2] Resisting and Opposing Japan’s Assimilation Policy and the Kōminka (Japanization) Movement
After occupying Taiwan, Japan gradually established a policy of assimilation as the fundamental principle of its rule over the island. Den Kenjirō, Taiwan’s first civilian Governor-General, articulated the spirit of this assimilation policy as "extension of the mainland" (naichi enchō shugi)—viewing Taiwan as an extension of the Japanese mainland itself. The objective was to transform the Taiwanese people into "full-fledged Japanese subjects" loyal to the Japanese Imperial Court, and to instill in them a sense of obligation toward the Japanese state through education and guidance.
A key measure of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan was to cut cultural ties between the Taiwanese people and the Chinese mainland. The authorities implemented a system of "enslavement education" and forcibly imposed ethnic assimilation policies, with the Japanese language serving as the core of this assimilationist curriculum.
After 1904, Japanese-language instruction came to dominate the educational landscape; the Taiwanese school system was further Japanized, classical Chinese was relegated to an elective subject, and entrance examinations were conducted exclusively in Japanese.
The rapid decline in the number of Taiwanese youths proficient in classical Chinese led to deeply concerns amomg Taiwanese people. In an article celebrating the launch of Taiwan Minpō (Taiwan People's News), the patriotic poet Cai Huiru (蔡惠如) wrote:
"Chinese characters are inherently the most profound script in the world and are not easily mastered; furthermore, having received no education in classical Chinese during their school years, how could Taiwanese students possibly grasp the nuances and meaning of the language? Given its difficulty and the lack of incentives to learn it, our Taiwanese brethren have—over the past twenty years—fallen out of the habit of using it. Alas! The mere thought of this brings tears streaming down my face!"
To resist the assimilation policies of the Japanese colonial authorities, the Taiwanese people waged an unyielding struggle. As early as the initial period of Japanese colonial rule, Taiwanese people utilized traditional private academies (shufang) to pass on Chinese culture. By March 1898, there were 1,707 such academies across Taiwan, with a total of 29,941 students—an average of about 17 students per academy. Among the teachers, as many as 814 held the rank of Xiucai (秀才, a degree from the imperial civil service examinations) or higher.
Originally, they had operated these private schools to earn a living; under Japanese colonial rule, however, their work took on greater significance. By teaching classical Chinese to the Taiwanese children, they preserved traditional culture and provided a spiritual anchor for the national identity. Their efforts played a vital role in safeguarding Chinese culture and fostering a deep sense of belongings to the motherland among the Taiwanese people.
To enlighten the public, promote national culture, and foster an awakening of national consciousness among Taiwan compatriots, the Taiwan Cultural Association was established on October 17, 1921, at the Jingxiu Girls' School in Taipei (台北静修女子学校).
Chiang Wei-shui (蒋渭水), a principal founder of the association, wrote in Taiwan Minpo (Taiwan People's News):
"The Taiwanese people are currently ailing, yet there is a lack of talent to treat them; thus, our association must first set about curing the root cause of this illness. My diagnosis is that the Taiwanese suffer from 'intellectual malnutrition'—a condition that absolutely cannot be cured without administering intellectual nourishment. The cultural movement is the only remedy for this ailment, and the Cultural Association is the institution dedicated to devising and implementing this treatment."
Following its establishment, the Taiwan Cultural Association launched a series of cultural enlightenment initiatives, including the creation of newspaper-reading clubs, the organization of various workshops, island-wide lecture tours, and modern drama and film screenings.
The initiative that had the greatest impact on the Taiwanese people was the hosting of cultural lecture series. Led by Lin Hsien-tang (林献堂)—a prominent figure in the national movement—key members of the Cultural Association mobilized en masse to serve as lecturers.
These speakers were not solely assigned by the Association's headquarters; instead, the Taipei, Taichung, and Tainan branches operated independently, with Chiang Wei-shui, Lin Hsien-tang, and Tsai Pei-huo (蔡培火) coordinating efforts in the north, central, and south regions, respectively. They would schedule dates, and the speakers would pay for their own travel, while local residents provided food and lodging.
This approach fostered a close bond between the Cultural Association and the general public, making the events highly successful and dynamic. Given the generally low level of formal education among the public at the time, the lecture format—featuring speakers who shared ideas directly—was the most accessible and popular way to disseminate new knowledge and concepts.
Yeh Jung-chung (叶荣钟), a key member of the Association, recalled: "In some remote areas with poor transportation, speakers were even welcomed and escorted in mountain sedan chairs, preceded by traditional ceremonial bands—much like the processions held to invite the goddess Mazu."
According to records kept by the Japanese colonial authorities, these cultural lectures often morphed into de facto anti-Japanese demonstrations. Because the lectures reached both rural villages and urban centers across Taiwan, they played a pivotal role in the cultural enlightenment of the populace and the awakening of national consciousness.
Following the outbreak of the July 7 Incident in 1937, Taiwan entered a wartime footing. Japan’s colonial policy shifted from a gradual approach of assimilation to the radical "Kominka" (Imperialization) movement. In essence, the Kominka movement was an unprecedented campaign of forced assimilation targeting the colonial population.
Centered on severing ties with Chinese culture and instilling the spirit of the Japanese Imperial state, the movement sought to forcibly assimilate Taiwan’s Han Chinese and indigenous peoples—who were part of the Chinese nation—into loyal subjects of the Japanese Emperor. The goal was to mold a class of "distorted Japanese" who would be utterly submissive to Japanese rule, while simultaneously exploiting Taiwan’s people and resources for the war effort. Key measures included the mandatory use of the Japanese language and the banning of written Chinese; campaigns requiring people to adopt Japanese names; the forced Japanization of daily life; and the construction of Shinto shrines across the island.
The Kominka movement met with resistance and opposition from the Taiwanese people. Although the use of the Chinese language was banned at the time, the public continued to study it in secret; even toward the end of the Japanese occupation, many people hired teachers to instruct them in Chinese. Traditional Chinese study halls, which had survived despite immense obstacles, were finally forced to close in 1943 due to a strict prohibition imposed by the Governor-General's Office.
While Taiwanese people were compelled to speak Japanese in certain public settings, they mostly conversed in Taiwanese dialects (primarily Southern Min) within their homes. Lin Hsien-tang refused to learn Japanese throughout his life, maintaining the attire and customs of the Han people and using an interpreter whenever he spoke with the Japanese.
At Japanese language training centers, people studied the language outwardly but switched to Chinese the moment the Japanese instructors left. The campaign to adopt Japanese names also met with a lukewarm reception; between February 1940 and November 1943, the households that adopted Japanese names accounted for only 1.69% of the total, and the individuals involved represented 2.06% of the population.
Even when Taiwanese people did adopt Japanese names, the choices often retained strong ethnic connotations—such as changing the Chinese surname "Chen" to "Yingchuan," "Huang" to "Jiangxia," or "Liu" to "Zhongshan"—to signify their longing for their ancestral homeland. Shrine worship, promoted by Japanese colonial authorities through various incentives and encouragement measures, was rejected by the Taiwanese people.
In rural areas, ordinary people were particularly baffled by Japanese-style religious practices; regarding the sun goddess Amaterasu, they would say, "The authorities told us to worship her, so we did," or "They told us to worship her morning and night, so we did, though we didn't understand the meaning behind it."
Resisting the assimilation policies and the Kominka (Japanization) movement of the Japanese colonialists—while preserving the national spirit of the Chinese people—was a conscious, widespread endeavor among the vast majority of Taiwanese during the Japanese occupation.
Li Ying-chang (李应章), a pioneer of the Taiwanese farmers' movement, broke with the convention of taking graduation "study tours" to Japan and instead organized a tour group to visit Guangzhou, a revolutionary base back then. Through this trip, he came to appreciate the magnitude of the revolution in the motherland and clarified his own revolutionary path.
In 1923, while attending an alumni association meeting at Taiping Public School in Taiwan, a young man named Weng Ze-sheng (翁泽生)—frustrated that the proceedings were conducted entirely in Japanese—leapt onto the podium and delivered a speech in Southern Min. He cried out passionately:
"Chinese people cannot speak their own language on their own soil—is there anything in the world more painful or humiliating than such a lack of freedom?"
When the Japanese principal stepped forward to stop him, the audience rallied in support of him continuing his speech, plunging the venue into chaos; this became the sensational "Taiping Public School Incident (太平公学校事件)."
In 1936, the Taiwanese writer Wu Yongfu (巫永福) used powerful imagery and repetitive rhetorical devices in his poem Motherland to express the longing and yearning for the motherland felt by Taiwanese compatriots during the period of Japanese colonial rule. In the poem, he wrote:
"A motherland I have never seen—separated by the sea, seeming both near and far; a motherland glimpsed in books and dreams—its shadow, which has coursed through my blood for millennia and dwells within my breast, now echoes in my heart."
In his seminal work The Man from the Ancestral Homeland, Zhong Lihe (钟理和) observed:
"The blood of the man from the ancestral homeland must flow back to that homeland before it can cease its seething."
During the fifty years of Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan, despite the imposition of Japanese education and forced "Japanization" (assimilation), the fact that the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait shared the same bloodline and culture remained unchanged.
Yang Zhaojia (杨肇嘉), a prominent Taiwanese figure, noted in his memoirs:
"The people of Taiwan will never forget their motherland, nor will they ever abandon their national culture! After enduring fifty years of harsh and oppressive Japanese rule, we, the people of Taiwan, returned to the motherland with our Chinese bloodline untainted and our patriotism pure. As a member of Taiwan Province, I cannot help but feel a deep, heartfelt joy!"
Lin Hsien-tang held a similarly clear sense of attachment to the motherland, stating:
"One must understand the purpose behind the Taiwanese people's ceaseless struggle against Japanese imperialism over the past fifty years—a struggle marked by heroic sacrifices and wave upon wave of patriots stepping forward to take the place of the fallen. In short, it was for the sake of national liberation; once this is understood, everything else becomes self-evident."
Even the Japanese were forced to admit that the Japanization policy had failed. Rikichi Ando, the final Governor-General of Taiwan, remarked: "If our rule had truly won the hearts of the people, then even if the enemy were to land and the entire island became a battlefield, the Taiwanese people would assist our Imperial Army and step forward to crush the invading forces. That is what true Japanization must look like. However, the opposite scenario is very likely: the Taiwanese people might collude with the invading enemy and launch a surprise attack on our Imperial Army from the rear. The situation could be dire. Moreover, as I see it, we lack the courage and confidence to place absolute trust in Taiwanese people."
[3] Heading to the Mainland to Join the War of Resistance
Following the July 7 Incident, China’s nationwide War of Resistance established the world’s first large-scale anti-fascist battlefront, shattered Japan’s strategy of a "quick war, quick decision," and brought new hope to the Taiwanese people's own anti-Japanese struggle.
Embracing the conviction that "to save Taiwan, one must first save the motherland," countless Taiwanese people consciously linked their own destinies with the liberation of the motherland. They threw themselves into the torrent of the nationwide resistance, proving with their blood and lives that they were Chinese—inseparable members of the great Chinese national family—and wrote a glorious chapter in the history of Chinese people uniting to overcome national crisis and repel foreign aggression.
Along the southeastern coast of the motherland, the Taiwan Volunteer Corps and the Taiwan Youth Corps—led by Li Youbang (李友邦)—actively engaged in political work targeting the enemy, medical services, production to support the nation, and morale-boosting activities for both troops and civilians; their efforts earned high praise from the military and the public alike.
On February 22, 1939, with the direct support and guidance of the Communist Party of China, the Taiwan Volunteer Corps and the Taiwan Youth Corps were formally established at No. 18 Jiufang Lane, Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, with Li Youbang serving as the commander of both groups. Composed of compatriots from Taiwan, the Taiwan Volunteer Corps was the largest, most influential, longest-lasting and the only formal anti-Japanese force formed by Taiwanese people to directly participate in the motherland's War of Resistance.
Members of the corps wore armbands bearing the characters "Fu Jiang (复疆)" (Recovering the Territory), symbolizing their determination to reclaim Taiwan for China and the Chinese nation. At the inaugural ceremony, Li Youbang declared:
"The Taiwan Volunteer Corps and the Taiwan Youth Corps are now officially established. Patriotic Taiwanese compatriots must raise high the banner of patriotism and resistance against Japan, actively throw themselves into the War of Resistance, and fight to the very end to 'defend the motherland and recover Taiwan'!"
As a unique force in the resistance against Japan, the Taiwan Volunteer Corps and the Taiwan Youth Corps made the cause of national salvation their mission; each member contributed to the best of their ability, actively engaging in production, intelligence gathering, subversion operations, propaganda, and medical work.
In April 1940, the Taiwan Volunteer Corps launched Taiwan Vanguard (Taiwan Xianfeng), a progressive publication dedicated to the anti-Japanese cause. The journal strove to spread the fact that Taiwan was Chinese territory, recount the history of Taiwan's revolutionary struggles, advocate for fighting the War of Resistance to the very end, and highlight the revolutionary activities of the Volunteer Corps and the Youth Corps.
Li Youbang also frequently published articles, demonstrating his unwavering devotion to the motherland. In his article "Taiwanese Compatriots Have Not Forgotten the Motherland," he noted:
"More than forty years have passed since Taiwan was ceded. Although the Japanese invaders have exhausted every effort to enforce 'Japanization'—seeking to make the Taiwanese people forget their motherland and remain forever enslaved—the deep affection the Taiwanese people hold for their motherland has actually grown with each passing day; the longer the time passes by, the more fervent the sentiment—never for a moment have they forgotten."
Li Chunqing (李纯青), former Vice Chairman of the Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League headquarters, once remarked:
"The journey of every Taiwanese person in search of their motherland is a narrative poem spanning millions of lines."
During the nationwide War of Resistance, tens of thousands of Taiwanese compatriots traveled to the mainland to join the front lines of the struggle for national salvation. In 1938, Weng Zesheng’s younger sister, Feng Zhijian (冯志坚), traveled from Singapore to the motherland to join the war effort, becoming the first Taiwanese woman to participate in the resistance from Yan'an. She vowed to transform her blood and tears into a sharp bayonet to strike at every enemy.
In 1940, five passionate Taiwanese youths—Zhong Haodong, Xiao Daoying, Jiang Biyu, Huang Suzhen, and Li Nanfeng (钟浩东、萧道应、蒋碧玉、黄素贞、李南锋)—disillusioned with Japanese colonial rule, embarked on an arduous journey back to the motherland to join the resistance. They traveled by ship from Shanghai to Hong Kong and then into Guangdong. Initially unable to find a unit to accept them, they were later suspected of being Japanese spies and narrowly escaped execution; they were saved through the intervention of Qiu Niantai (丘念台). Subsequently, they joined the "Eastern Service Corps" led by Qiu Niantai, engaging in behind-enemy-lines resistance work until the war ended in victory.
In the winter of 1943, Li Zixiu (李子秀), a Taiwanese compatriot, was forcibly conscripted by the Japanese military and sent to Japan for artillery training. Though stranded in a foreign land, his heart remained with the motherland; risking his life to break through numerous checkpoints, he eventually reached the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Military Region to serve as an artillery instructor.
In 1944, Wu Sihan (吴思汉), a Taiwanese youth, resolved to return to the motherland to join the resistance against Japan, fearing that the Japanese colonial authorities would conscript him for the front lines—forcing him to turn his gun against his own people—before he could graduate from university. His journey to the destination took over a year and spanned more than ten thousand miles. Standing by the Yalu River, he once cried out with deep emotion: "Motherland, look at me—your son from Taiwan has returned!"
During the War of Resistance, Yang Meihua (杨美华), then studying in Japan, was deeply influenced by the spirit of national salvation; in February 1945, she abandoned her unfinished studies and returned home alone to join the war effort. Despite her classmates' attempts to dissuade her, she remained steadfast, declaring:
"I am Chinese, yet I cannot speak the language nor have I ever seen the motherland. If I can simply set foot on that soil and contribute even a modest effort to Mother China, I would gladly die for the cause."
Throughout the War of Resistance, Taiwanese compatriots were active on various fronts, leaving a glorious mark across the land of the motherland. Following the outbreak of the war, Lin Zhengheng (林正亨)—an eighth-generation scion of the prominent Wufeng Lin family—abandoned his beloved art studies to enroll in the Central Military Academy in Nanjing. Upon graduation, he bade farewell to his wife and children and headed to the front lines, fighting all the way from the Battle of Kunlun Pass to the Burma campaign.
Before departing for Kunlun Pass, Lin Zhengheng had a photograph taken in his military uniform to send to his younger sister; in the picture, he appears heroic and resolute. Burning with patriotic fervor, he inscribed the following words on the photo:
"Military garb cannot mask the scholar's face; iron and stone pale beside a warrior's heart. Henceforth, I shall gallop north and south beneath the sun and moon, braving frost and snow. I shall laugh as I hack off the heads of Japanese invaders to use as balls, and feast upon their flesh and blood when hunger strikes. Until our territory is reclaimed, I shall fight on, body and soul, without rest! (戎装难掩书生面，铁石岂如壮士心，从此北骋南驰戴日月，衣霜雪。笑斫倭奴头当球，饥餐倭奴肉与血，国土未复时，困杀身心不歇！)"
In 1934, at the age of fifteen, Cai Xiao (蔡啸) traveled to the Chinese mainland in search of forces dedicated to resisting the Japanese invasion. In 1939, amidst the smoke and fire of the battlefield in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Cai Xiao joined the Communist Party of China. He served in various capacities, including commander of the Training Battalion of the 16th Brigade, 6th Division of the New Fourth Army, and chief of the Operations and Training Section at the brigade headquarters; he led his troops in tenacious combat against the enemy and distinguished himself repeatedly throughout the war.
He Feiguang (何非光) wielded cinema as a weapon, using film and television works to promote the cause of resistance. Working under arduous conditions in Chongqing, he produced several wartime films, such as Defending the Homeland, Light of East Asia, Awe-Inspiring Spirit, and Blood Spattered on Cherry Blossoms. Among them, Light of East Asia achieved tremendous success thanks to its unique subject matter and presentation, earning acclaim as "a sword of justice on the silver screen."
During the war, many Taiwanese compatriots organized anti-Japanese groups, but their scattered efforts hindered the effectiveness of resistance activities. In 1941, seeking to unite Taiwanese revolutionary patriots nationwide into a powerful force for resistance, various Taiwanese anti-Japanese groups on the mainland joined forces in Chongqing to establish the Taiwan Revolutionary League, vowing to fight on the battlefield and reclaim Taiwan.
The participation of Taiwanese compatriots in the motherland's War of Resistance vividly demonstrated the heroic spirit of the Taiwanese people—as members of the Chinese nation—standing in solidarity with their compatriots on the mainland through life and death during a critical moment of national peril; their struggle made a significant contribution to the victory of the war and the retrocession of Taiwan.
Throughout the fifty years of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, a consciousness of belonging to the motherland remained the prevailing sentiment among Taiwanese compatriots. This was reflected not only in their unyielding resistance against Japanese rule but even more powerfully in the jubilant celebrations that erupted when Japan was defeated and Taiwan returned to the embrace of the motherland.
On October 25, 1945, the Chinese government held the ceremony for the acceptance of the Japanese surrender in Taiwan Province at the Taipei City Public Hall (now Zhongshan Hall). On that day, more than 400,000 Taiwanese compatriots in Taipei—newly returned to the fold of the motherland—donned fresh attire, hung festive lanterns in every home, and exchanged congratulations as if celebrating the Lunar New Year; the sounds of firecrackers, gongs, and drums rang out to the skies, while lion and dragon dances filled the streets, causing traffic to come to a standstill. History reveals that a sense of attachment to the motherland was an undercurrent surging deep within the hearts of Taiwan compatriots as they struggled against Japanese colonial oppression.
Although the two sides of the Taiwan Strait have not yet fully reunified, compatriots on both sides share a common history and a common homeland; they share the same roots and origins, and are bound heart and hand.
No matter what theories regarding the "motherland" are put forward by "Taiwan independence" elements, nothing can alter the objective fact that both sides belong to one China, nor can it extinguish the Taiwan compatriots' sense of belongings to the motherland. Achieving the complete reunification of the motherland is the shared aspiration of all Chinese people at home and abroad; it is an inevitable historical trend, a righteous cause, and the will of the people—a process that no one can halt.
Compatriots on both sides should join hands to steadfastly safeguard the shared homeland of the Chinese nation, work together to create enduring well-being for the nation, firmly forge a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation, and steadfastly realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
Grazie mille per questa esaustiva Lezione di storia e per la citazione di eventi e persone che hanno lottato per la LIBERTÀ .