The television anchor reads the news without blinking: China imposed a blockade on Taiwan and seems ready to attack. When the broadcast moves to the Ministry of Defense, it turns incredulous towards its producer and asks: “Will there be a really war?”
It's fiction: a scene from Taiwanese television drama Zero day, which should hit the screens this summer. But the controversial series – the first mass entertainment work realistically portrayed a Chinese invasion – aims to have a real impact by forcing the country to ask the same question.
“We, Taiwanese, have lived together in this shadow for so long, but we have never dared to touch it,” said Zero day Producer Cheng Hsin-Mei. “But Taiwan is so free now, so why can't we talk about it?”
Since the Chinese government of Kuomintang has fled Taiwan In 1949, after his defeat in the Chinese civil war, Beijing threatened to take the island by force. For decades, he did not have the military power to follow. Then, the close ties built while the Taiwanese invested in the developing economy of China made war impossible.
But Zero day comes at a time when the large -scale assault of Russia against Ukraine and the growing military maneuvers of China around Taiwan began to make a The invasion seems much more conceivable.
“During the longest, especially since continental China began its reform and openness, the Taiwanese were not very aware of the possibility of war, they simply did not have this concept,” said my Cheng-Kun, professor at the Taiwan's National Defense University. “Now the public is starting to feel it and carry out it, especially due to the daily activities of planes and ships placed around Taiwan.”
According to the Taiwan National Security Survey, a series of multi -year surveys, the proportion of Taiwanese who believe China Attack if Taipei officially declared that independence went from 49% in 2017 to 64% last year.
But many Taiwanese even find it difficult to imagine being plunged into a war and feeling that their country is far from ready for one. “So that society collectively accepts this reality and is willing to participate in the mobilization of national defense, which requires a process of social persuasion,” said MA.
After failing to find donors for a Taiwan war film in a first attempt six years ago, Cheng, screenwriter and former journalist, decided to produce one herself. She aligned a team of directors who each run an episode. The first episode of one hour will be presented at first at the Copenhagen Democracy Forum on May 13.
Turned in a visceral and very realistic style, Zero day The one week's countdown account with the blockade. Stores and houses are plunged into darkness by Chinese cyber attacks. The familiar and leafy streets of Taipei descend into pandemonium while banks and public transport collapse. Frying families align themselves in a dark fishing port to catch a boat. The criminal gangs released by corrupt prison officials help Beijing to force the population to submit. And finally, soldiers from the Chinese people's liberation army arrive.
Observers believe that the drama has the potential to catch the public's imagination in the way nuclear war films have made in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1980s.
“I grew up in the Cold War in the United States, and the fear of nuclear war was an important step in my childhood: I made nightmares on this subject,” said Nathan Batto, professor at Academia Sinica. His memory of these dreams includes people wrapped in wandering covers in the nuclear winter – a scene from the 1983 film The day after About a Soviet missile strike on Kansas City whom he watched at the age of 13.
“It was a cultural marker that everyone knew,” he said.
Zero day could have a similar impact, even if it exposes the deep divisions that cross the Taiwanese society.
Although the two descendants of those who came from China with the Kuomintang flight regime 76 years ago and residents of the island massively reject unification with China, The rifles widen Under the Beijing mounting pressure.
Some KMT politicians denounce President Lai Ching-Te as a bellicist because he defined China as a “hostile foreign force” and seeks to strengthen Taiwan's defenses. The government's decision to expel Chinese citizens who have publicly supported an invasion Awarded a criticism of the persecution of some Taiwanese with family ties in China.
Meanwhile, supporters of the Lai Democratic Progressive Party are increasingly concerned about Chinese -supported disinformation campaignsEspionage and other infiltration.
“In addition to the growing external danger, people also perceive the threat of interior China,” said Wei-Ting Yen, a political scientist at the Sinica Academy, citing discussions between Kmt politicians and the Chinese Communist Party and China infiltration of Taiwanese criminal networks. “These threats are very real.”
KMT politicians argue that their contacts with China can help avoid war. But Zero day Takens the question of divided loyalty to Taiwan from the front. He presents portraits of people whose first instinct is to surrender, while others flee and some collaborate with the invaders.
This has already triggered fierce controversy. After the release of a trailer of 17 minutes last July, opposition legislators demanded that Cheng explain whether production was aimed at political parties or specific politicians. Other criticisms have denounced the series as a propaganda project because it received a subsidy from a cinematographic fund funded by the government – just like many Taiwanese productions.
A few days before the shooting should start for a scene in which a prison director releases gangsters in exchange for a promise to help a liver transplant for her daughter, the prison suddenly canceled access to the location.
“We say that China could infiltrate the penitentiary system to release prisoners to cause social troubles in preparation for an invasion – this is a hypothesis of our national security authorities on which we have based our conspiracy,” said Cheng.
“The Correctional Services Agency of the Ministry of Justice said it was in calculation and insisted that nothing could happen in their prisons,” she said. The agency refused to comment.
Despite the controversy around the series, Zero dayThe creators hope that he will be able to unite the company. Diana Chao, whose previous works were mostly non -political, produced an episode on an online online Taiwanese celebrity of the prey of cognitive war. A virtual relationship with a character of AI created by Chinese gradually transforms it into a pro-China influencer who, when Beijing attacks, urges his audience to surrender.
Chao hopes that his audience will learn more about the functioning of their own mind. The education and consumption of Chinese literature gave some Taiwanese a “romantic imagination of China,” said Chao, herself of a family where such a feeling was widespread.
“Some in the generation of our parents can have feelings for this understandable land, and often that come up against the type of society that China is really and with its current nature,” she said.
There was a prolonged debate even among the production team.
“We wondered, if we have no consensus on our nation, when infiltrators turn us against each other, when war arrives, when the PLA landed, what is Taiwanese, want to protect together?” said Cheng. “In the end, we found that it is freedom, it is democracy, it is our way of life together on this island.”
