Xi repeated his mantra that nefarious foreign forces and a small handful of bad apples in Taiwan stand in the way of unification, which he called a “natural requirement for realising the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” He also restated that the Communist Party leadership will not renounce the use of force to make its dream of controlling Taiwan – something it has never done – a reality.

For Taiwan, which democratised in the 1990s after four decades of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, whom the Communists overthrew in China in 1949, a return to authoritarianism at the hands of a foreign regime is a nonstarter.

The Kuomintang, now Taiwan’s largest opposition party, has long advocated closer ties with China. Yet its chairman, Eric Chu, when asked about a telegram the party sent to Beijing to congratulate the Chinese Communist Party on holding its congress this week, told Taiwan media the message was sent in deference to custom, and that he opposed a Hong Kong-style “one country, two systems” arrangement for Taiwan with China.

As Taiwan prepares to hold local elections next month, Chu’s statements suggest that he does not want the party too closely associated with China. The response from Taiwan’s government has been more direct.

“Democratic Taiwan has never been a part of the totalitarian People’s Republic of China,” said Joanne Ou, spokesman for Taiwan’s foreign ministry.

“Only the 23 million people of Taiwan have the authority to decide Taiwan’s future.”

For Yu-Jie Chen, an assistant research professor of law at Taiwan’s top research institution, Academia Sinica, Xi’s offer of “peaceful unification” comes across as a threat rather than the olive branch that Beijing presents it as to domestic audiences in China.

“I don’t hear any goodwill in the speech,” Chen said. “To today’s China, which probably realises the hopelessness of attempting to peacefully absorb Taiwan, I think ‘peaceful unification’ has become window dressing, especially when it’s backed by the use of force.”

Legislator Fan Yun of President Tsai Ing-wen’s ruling Democratic Party, which won both the presidency and large parliamentary majorities in 2016 and 2020, also interpreted Xi’s speech as a threat.

“What Xi Jinping’s speech emphasised was not ‘peaceful unification,’ but rather ‘absolutely not renouncing the use of military force,'” Fan told Nikkei Asia.

“What matters is that it is impossible that the Taiwanese people, under any circumstances, would accept Chinese rule, whether it arrives peacefully or by war.”

Fan, herself a prominent student leader in the 1990 Wild Lily protests that served as a tipping point in Taiwan’s democratic struggle, said Taiwanese democracy and sovereignty were not up for negotiation. Under the Kuomintang, tens of thousands of Taiwanese were executed and hundreds of thousands imprisoned, tortured, or “disappeared.”

“In the process of our democratisation, many Taiwanese people paid a massive price for what we now have,” she said. “It is only because we have democracy that we can have free and diverse discussions in society.”

Although there is lively debate in Taiwan over what relations with China should look like, one major point of agreement is the rejection of a ‘one country, two systems’ framework similar to that under which Beijing governs the former British colony of Hong Kong.

As part of the agreement between the UK and China that facilitated the peaceful unification of Hong Kong and China in 1997, Beijing promised a high degree of autonomy for the territory for 50 years. However, since Xi’s ascent in 2012, Hong Kong’s civic freedoms have been systematically dismantled, creating a generation of political prisoners and exiles.

An August survey by Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council found that 84.7% of respondents opposed one country, two systems, with only 6.1% in favor of the idea.

As for opinions of the Communist Party, which enjoys a monopoly on political power in China, views are similarly dim. An October poll by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation found that 68.3% of respondents held a negative opinion of China’s ruling party, with only 5.5% saying they had a positive opinion.

For most Taiwanese, China’s appeal is irrelevant.

They seek to maintain Taiwan’s functional sovereignty, even if it means continuing to live under the Republic of China government that the Kuomintang first brought to the island after Japan’s surrender in 1945. Taiwan had previously been a colony known as Japanese Formosa since 1895. During that period, its struggle for self-determination gained momentum.

The Kuomintang, which relocated its government from Nanking, on the mainland, to Taipei in 1949 after escaping annihilation by communist forces, imposed a Chinese identity on the Taiwanese people that was strictly enforced until democratisation. With greater civic freedoms, people began to feel increasingly comfortable thinking of themselves as Taiwanese.

Survey data from Taiwan’s National Chengchi University shows that the percentage of respondents identifying exclusively as Chinese dropped from 25.5% to 2.4% between 1992 and June of this year. During the same period, the number of people identifying exclusively as Taiwanese rose from 17.6% to 63.7%.

Even the Kuomintang, which views Taiwan as culturally Chinese, rejects the offer of one country, two systems, knowing that endorsing it would be political suicide.

Ma Ying-jeou, Tsai’s pro-China predecessor, who still holds considerable sway over the party, said in 2021 that one country, two systems had “officially passed into history,” which he described as “very regrettable.”

One person who knows firsthand what is at stake is Lee Ming-che, a democracy activist who in 2017 was grabbed by Chinese security forces upon entering the country. Months later, he was sentenced to five years in prison for threatening China’s national security by sharing democracy-related content online — while he was living in Taiwan.

Lee was released earlier this year and lives in Taipei. He warned that just as “peaceful unification” was an empty promise for Hong Kong, and Tibet before it, so it is for Taiwan. Adding to his concerns are public statements this summer by China’s ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, who said that Taiwanese society would require “re-education” after unification, a term that echoes claims by Beijing that detention camps in Xinjiang were re-education centres.

“Taiwan has no way of accepting this,” Lee said. “If you look what China does rather than what it says, ‘peaceful reunification’ means the destruction of human rights.”