The barrel of an M48A3 tank is pointed at the newcomer. Its intimidating tonnage is tamed by the hosts’ gracious welcome, followed by an invitation to pass through the entrance to the Taoyuan Veterans Residence. The metallic mass rests peacefully, the days of blood and fire now distant, under the placid Taiwanese climate. Also the residents, who start the day exercising in unison in the central square; arthritic movements to the rhythm of a playful, almost childish melody, blasted from the speakers at deafening volume. The song finally ends, returning to the delicate morning trill of the birds. Then Sun Guo-xi appears proudly dragging his wheelchair, a milestone at 104 years old, a demonstration of a strength that sustains his entire biography: the person who greets is one of the last survivors of the Chinese civil war, an unresolved conflict that lasted almost a century. then today it divides China and Taiwan, whose outcome will mark the future of the world more than any other. The island, independent ‘de facto’, represents for the communist regime a rebellious province that it has never given up on subduing by force. That same force that Sun and his missing comrades in arms confronted, a future future. The old man’s withered fingers count the years according to the traditional format, and the dunes of time become even more confusing. With his eyes fixed on them, he claims to have been born in the ninth of the Republican era, that is, 1920. One adjective is enough to describe his childhood in a town in the province of Hubei. “Hard, very hard.” «There were no schools back then, we learned to write characters in the sand because there was no paper. We ate wild vegetables and that kind of thing, unlike young people now in Taiwan, who have everything. civilians for a hypothetical war because Beijing will redouble its pressure on the new president, William Lai, who takes office this Monday. He had just turned seventeen when army emissaries appeared in his village to recruit soldiers. It was September 1937; Just two months earlier, Japan had launched a full invasion of China following the Marco Polo Bridge incident. “We were young, we didn’t understand anything,” Sun recalls. “We needed money, so we enlisted.” “They took us on trains to Changsha and, after three months of weapons training, they sent us to fight the Japanese.” Sun was assigned to Nanking (Nanjing), the then capital, not to defend it but to abandon it. Meanwhile, Japanese troops committed all kinds of atrocities against the local population, an infamous episode known as the rape of Nanjing, which left some 300,000 civilians murdered. Past struggles The occupation marked a parenthesis in the internal conflict that was shaking the country: the civil war. between the communists of Mao Zedong and the nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek. «The army had more than six million men in total. After the victory against the Japanese, they were all demobilized and sent back home, but the local governments could not pay them salaries or even feed them, so Mao took advantage of that opportunity,” he says. He then intones a popular proclamation from memory: “If Chiang doesn’t want them, Mao wants them.” “Their tactics were good, the Communist Party had no troops, only a few thousand in Yan’an.” And he says: “The communists did not defeat the Kuomintang, the KMT defeated itself.” War on the surface Above, Sun Guo-xi, 104 years old. Below left, Daning, a young recruit who has finished his mandatory military service. On the right, Taoyuan Residence Veteran displays anti-communist tattoos. JSSun evokes his experience on the defeated side as a long retreat. «With the Japanese, if we lost we were captured and beheaded. In the civil war it was different, all retreat after retreat. Once again he found himself immersed in a historic situation: the fall of Beijing, then Beiping, at the beginning of 1949. “The communists had more than a million men in the northeast led by Lin Biao,” and from his roars he seemed to be seeing them in a different light. new. «They attacked from Harbin. We protected Peking with a large force, but we had no food. We had to surrender and retreat to Xuzhou, where the last battle took place. Afterwards there were no more, only withdrawals. His particular setback ended a year later on Donghai Island. There, along with two divisions of his regiment, he boarded a landing craft that after eight days of sailing landed in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. “We had to spend two more days on board, being interrogated to verify that there were no communist spies among us, before we could get off.” Sun Guo-xi, who at thirty years old had known nothing but misery and war, began the rest of his life in this way. But that didn’t make him immune to nostalgia. Taking refuge on the island where the KMT entrenched itself, he lost contact with his relatives on the mainland. “Every night, when I passed by the seashore in front of the bay, I would burst into tears,” he admits. “Many people committed suicide at that time.” “For most it is a waste of time,” says the young Daning about his “boring” experience doing military service. Seven decades later, Sun clings to that longing. “My goal is to see China reunified, that’s what older people like me want,” he says. «Things are no longer like in the times of Mao and his purges, now there is peace. As long as you don’t break the law, you can do whatever you want. Mainland China is very stable, it will soon catch up with the United States, but Taiwan is in decline. “His generation, the last that fought, is also the last for which China and Taiwan make up the same nation, an idea that demographic evolution has been undoing . Today, only 1% of those under 35 years of age consider themselves “primarily Chinese”, compared to 83% who consider themselves “primarily Taiwanese”, according to a survey carried out in 2023 by the Pew Research Center. The growing military hostility of recent years has accelerated this trend. “Many young people don’t know where they are from,” criticizes Sun. «They think they are Taiwanese, but Taiwan is not a country. They are confused.”Future strugglesDaning takes a seat in a modern cafe in the center of Taipei. At 24 years old, he has just finished his military training, four months that still make up a recent memory. «The first month was a general instruction. “They taught us how to use a weapon, but I think the most important thing was learning to obey orders,” he says. «You couldn’t dress in any way, you couldn’t snack between meals, you couldn’t smoke, you couldn’t use your mobile phone…». Contemporary discipline poses its own demands, those that correspond to a society of abundance. «At first I took it as a game. We were throwing grenades and I did it as if they were balls. But my supervisor told me that on the battlefield I would have already died, and my perspective changed,” he acknowledges. Daning spent the next three months guarding, rifle in hand, the entrance to a military complex north of Taipei. A “boring” experience, but one for which he can consider himself lucky: in the face of Chinese aggressiveness, at the end of 2022, the then president Tsai Ing-wen extended mandatory military service to twelve months. “I feel that my life was interrupted, although at the same time I think it is something we have to do,” he comments. “For most it is simply a waste of time.” There are many young Taiwanese – this medium has spoken to several – who resort to stratagems to avoid service, such as spending time outside the territory and returning with a foreign passport. «My goal is to see China reunified. “Things are not like they were in Mao’s time,” says Sun Guo-xi, a 104-year-old veteran. Now that Daning tries to get back on track by looking for a first job after college, he discovers that having fulfilled his duty does not represent a merit. «No one cares. In fact, it’s good to have escaped, it makes you look like a person with resources,” he laments resignedly. Meanwhile, the shadow of a military conflict looms over his future. Daning confesses to feeling helpless, numb. «People here are used to it, they pretend they don’t see. I didn’t understand it before, but now I do,” he explains, and his voice takes on a sad tone. «I think this kind of intense emotion cannot be sustained for long. If I had it in mind, I would think that I am under threat of death at all times. “It is very difficult to live like this.” Many of his friends, he adds, are looking for a way to emigrate to the United States. War and Freedom Sun, on the other hand, longs for that day. «The last battle is inevitable. Mao was wrong, he should have attacked Taiwan first, so the Government would have had nowhere to retreat. Future and past merge, both unattainable, perhaps that is why it concludes without enthusiasm. «Actually, the only thing I think about is dying. My legs don’t fully work, but I can walk better than many in their eighties and nineties. They need help, but I don’t depend on anyone: I bathe and eat by myself, but the sooner I die, the better. I just hope that my children and grandchildren live well. Daning’s grandfather could have said something similar. His mother’s father arrived on the island like so many other defeated KMT soldiers, a poor young man from Shandong province with no choice but to fight. “I didn’t talk to him much, but sometimes I heard him tell stories, he liked to talk about his life in China, I missed it,” Daning remembers. «I think being in the military has helped me better understand lives like yours. I would love to know more stories, more details, to better understand that time; to better understand war and freedom.
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