The Republic of China (ROC) has survived in a form its founders could scarcely have imagined. More than a century after its founding in 1912, and seventy-seven years after retreating to Taiwan in 1949, the ROC governs 23 million people and an economy worth roughly US$920 billion under sustained pressure from the People's Republic of China (PRC).
In 2025 alone, Taiwan recorded 5,446 PLA aircraft sorties, 3,763 of which crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait, alongside 2,613 PLA naval deployments, all annual records. Formal diplomatic recognition extends to just eleven states and the Holy See; while most other governments having made their own accommodation with Beijing rather than any single veto being exercised case by case.
And yet the ROC collects taxes, issues its own passports and currency, fields armed forces, adjudicates constitutional disputes, and transfers power through competitive elections, functions international law's Montevideo criteria treat as the substance of statehood.
What it lacks is broad international recognition under the older constitutive theory of statehood, which the jurist James Crawford traced in his work on recognition. The legal debate matters, but it no longer captures the central political problem.
The ROC has existed on Taiwan for seventy-seven years. Its institutions have been democratized, its electorate has changed, and its political life is now overwhelmingly centred on the island. The question is what this state has become.
Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu offered an answer in an October 2024 National Day address, four lines that have circulated for two full National Day cycles since:
ROC as our country (中華民國是我們的國)
Taiwan as our home (美麗台灣是我們的家)
Chinese culture as our root (中華文化是我們的根)
Democracy and freedom as our treasure (民主自由是我們的寶)
The four lines are more than a patriotic slogan. They try to hold together four parts of Taiwan's present identity that political debate often pulls apart: the ROC's constitutional inheritance, Taiwan as the place where people live and govern themselves, Chinese cultural inheritance, and democratic values.
A Taiwan-Centered State Under Permanent Pressure
The ROC of 2026 bears little resemblance to the emergency regime that relocated to Taipei in 1949. Democratization in the 1990s converted the 1947 constitution from an instrument of martial law into the operating charter of a pluralistic system: courts strike down legislation, parties alternate in power, and the military answers to civilians.
None of this required Beijing's blessing, and none of it has been undone by Beijing's objections.
Economics reinforces the picture. Taiwanese foundries account for roughly 70 percent of global chip foundry revenue and closer to 80 percent of production at the most advanced process nodes, a narrower claim than holding 80 percent of wafer capacity outright. Older, larger-node fabrication is spread more evenly across South Korea, China, and the United States. Taiwan's particular leverage lies in the advanced tier.
That concentration makes disruption to the island's semiconductor sector a problem for every economy that depends on modern electronics, which is to say nearly all of them.
Security pressure has also become part of ordinary political life. Drills, gray-zone patrols, and economic pressure from Beijing no longer arrive as isolated shocks. People notice them, but they do not necessarily organize every domestic political argument around them. Housing costs, wages, energy prices, pensions, and defense spending compete for the same political attention.
That may be one of the most important changes since 1949. The PRC remains central to Taiwan's security problem without being the sole source of Taiwanese political identity.
What Han Kuo-yu's Four Lines Try to Reconcile
Han's sentence rewards being read the way it was almost certainly built: as four separable claims stacked in a deliberate order, each doing work the others cannot.
"ROC as our country" is the starting point. It says more than that the ROC exists as an institution. It treats the ROC as the existing country rather than as a provisional government still waiting for a final settlement. That runs against Beijing's claim that Taiwan's status remains unresolved.
It also differs from President Lai Ching-te's formulation during the same National Day period that without Taiwan there would be no Republic of China.
The Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation asked about the two statements separately. 50.6 percent agreed with Han, while 48.3 percent agreed with Lai; 38.6 percent disagreed with Lai. The questions did not require respondents to choose between the two positions. Someone could reasonably agree with both.
That matters. Han starts with the constitutional state. Lai starts with the society that gives that state its present political content. Those propositions can coexist.
"Taiwan as our home" addresses a different reality. For most citizens, Taiwan is not a temporary base from which the ROC might one day return to the mainland. It is where people are born, marry, work, raise families, and vote. Long-running identity surveys have tracked Taiwanese self-identification as the dominant position for years.
Han's wording does not challenge that attachment. It places it inside the ROC.
"Chinese culture as our root" is more difficult. The wording refers to cultural inheritance, not necessarily to political allegiance. Language, ancestry, literature, food, customs, and historical memory can survive political separation. That does not settle the question of sovereignty.
Critics of Han's formulation can still reasonably worry about the political use of the word "root." PRC state media can quote that phrase without the rest of the sentence, presenting cultural affinity as evidence of political belonging.
The final line, "Democracy and freedom as our treasure," gives the formulation its clearest political value. These are not inherited characteristics. They are institutions and principles that Taiwan's population has developed and defended through democratization. Placing them at the end of the sequence can also be read as giving them the greatest normative weight.
Whether voters read the four lines that way is another matter. Some will hear "ROC." Others will hear "Taiwan." Others will focus on "Chinese culture" or "democracy and freedom." The fact that the same sentence can sustain these different readings is probably why it has remained politically useful.
Han and Lai Start From Different Places
The disagreement between Han and Lai is easy to exaggerate if it is reduced to ROC versus Taiwan. The more revealing difference concerns which one grounds the other.
Han's formulation begins with the ROC and places Taiwan within it. Lai's statement, delivered the night before at the National Day eve address, begins with Taiwan and explains the ROC through it.
That distinction helps explain why the two statements can receive overlapping public support. A person can regard the ROC as the country's constitutional identity while also believing that Taiwan, rather than the mainland, is the political community that gives the ROC meaning today.
This is one reason the old labels of "Chinese" and "Taiwanese" are increasingly inadequate for describing the entire debate. The contemporary argument is less about choosing one historical identity than about deciding how several inherited and acquired identities fit together.
The ROC supplies constitutional continuity. Taiwan supplies the territory and lived political community. Chinese culture supplies part of the historical inheritance. Democracy supplies the governing principles that distinguish Taiwan from the PRC.
Han's four lines put all four in the same frame. That is also where the difficulty begins.
The KMT's Internal Problem
The sharpest challenge to Han's formulation comes from within the KMT itself.
In an August 2026 interview, KMT chairwoman Cheng Li-wun said Taiwan's peace rests on the ROC constitution, not Taiwan independence. She argued that pursuing independence would threaten that peace. Asked about Taiwan's status, she was direct: "the status quo is not Taiwan independence. Taiwan has never been independent, and Taiwan has never been a country."
Cheng is using the ROC constitution differently from Han. Han uses ROC continuity to bring together the ROC, Taiwan, and democracy. Cheng puts the emphasis on what the ROC constitution means for cross-Strait relations. In her view, Taiwan is not an independent country and maintaining the ROC framework leaves room for closer ties with Beijing.
Han's formulation tries to hold different parts of Taiwan's identity together. Cheng draws a clearer line: Taiwanese identity cannot be used to argue that Taiwan is already an independent state.
Her meeting with Xi Jinping earlier in the year fits this approach. She said it was meant to show that, under the 1992 Consensus and opposition to Taiwan independence, cross-Strait relations could go beyond the achievements of the Ma Ying-jeou era before 2028.
The disagreement, then, is not about whether the ROC still exists. It is about what the ROC means and what its constitutional continuity should lead Taiwan to do. For Han, it helps accommodate Taiwan's existing democratic identity. For Cheng, it provides a basis for rejecting independence and pursuing closer relations with Beijing.
When Identity Meets Defense Policy
The defense-budget dispute in the first half of 2026 provides a useful, if limited, test.
The Lai administration proposed a special defense budget of NT$1.25 trillion, roughly US$40 billion over eight years, in late 2025. The proposal stalled for months in the Legislative Yuan, blocked by opposition parties ten separate times, in the body Han presides over as Speaker.
On May 8, the KMT and Taiwan People's Party passed a reduced NT$780 billion version, cutting the request by nearly 40 percent and tying most of the remaining spending to two batches of Foreign Military Sales letters of offer and acceptance already certified by Washington.
Domestic drone procurement, along with commercial-purchase and domestically-produced items analysts had identified as important to Taiwan's asymmetric strategy, was cut entirely from the final bill.
The vote does not prove that the KMT rejects the ROC as a sovereign state. That would be too large a conclusion from a budget dispute. It does show something narrower: agreement on constitutional identity does not produce agreement over the cost of defending that identity.
Han's formulation says the ROC is already the country. The legislative fight asks what follows from that claim when sovereignty has to be defended with money, weapons, training, and industrial capacity.
That is where identity rhetoric reaches its limit. A state can agree on its name while remaining divided over how much risk it should accept and what it is willing to spend to preserve its existing political order.
The Limits of Political Ambiguity
The public consensus behind Han's formulation has remained fairly stable. Mainland Affairs Council polling in May 2026 found about 83 percent opposed to Beijing's "one country, two systems" proposal, while 72.6 percent viewed the ROC and PRC as separate political entities.
The bigger uncertainty is within the KMT.
During the defense-budget negotiations, KMT Vice Chairman Chi Lin-lien said he did not believe Han would "sell out the party for personal glory," but warned that if he did, the party's veterans' faction would seek his expulsion. The remarks drew criticism from other KMT figures. Han's allies accused Chi of turning against his own party, Taichung Mayor Lu Hsiu-yen defended Han, and Cheng Li-wun quickly said Chi was expressing his personal view, not the party's position.
The episode showed how difficult it is for the KMT to maintain a common position when its members attach different meanings to ROC identity and cross-Strait policy.
Cheng's position points in a different direction. After visiting Beijing in April 2026, she said cross-Strait exchanges could return to normal once the KMT returned to power, telling Taiwanese businesspeople in China that they would not have to wait much longer. In a later interview with The Economist, she argued that future elections would be shaped less by the question of national identity than by cross-Strait relations, and said she hoped to meet Xi Jinping to advance that agenda.
There is no agreement with Beijing today, and any future settlement would face major political obstacles. But Cheng has made the KMT's preferred direction clearer.
Han's formulation leaves the relationship between ROC identity and cross-Strait policy open. Cheng's approach is more specific: she treats the ROC constitution as a reason to reject Taiwan independence and as a basis for closer engagement with Beijing.
A State Still Defining Itself
Han Kuo-yu's four lines will probably continue to be quoted because they offer a simple way to describe Taiwan's complicated political identity. They recognize the ROC without treating Taiwan as it was in 1949. They acknowledge Chinese cultural roots without making them a political allegiance to Beijing. And they place democracy and freedom at the heart of the country's identity.
The formula is useful, but it does not settle the debate.
The ROC today combines several identities. Its name reflects its history. Its institutions operate in Taiwan. Most of its citizens identify with Taiwan. Its political system is democratic, while its cultural heritage remains partly Chinese. These elements can coexist, but they do not always point in the same direction.
The disagreement becomes clearer when political leaders give different weight to them. Han tries to keep them together. Lai places more emphasis on Taiwan as the basis of the contemporary ROC, telling the same National Day gathering that "without Taiwan, there is no Republic of China." Cheng places more emphasis on constitutional continuity and its role in opposing independence and maintaining cross-Strait ties.
This debate is more revealing than asking whether the ROC is "really" Taiwan or "really" China.
The ROC that exists today is not the same state that arrived in Taiwan in 1949. Yet Taiwan has also retained the ROC constitutional framework under which its democratic system operates. The result is a Taiwan-centered democratic state that still carries the name and constitutional inheritance of the Republic of China.
This does not resolve Taiwan's international status or determine the future of cross-Strait relations. It does, however, describe the tension at the heart of Taiwan's identity: its society has changed profoundly since 1949, while its constitutional state has remained.
Han's four lines try to hold these two realities together.
The growing disagreement within the KMT shows how difficult that may be. The four lines can accommodate different views of Taiwan's identity, but they cannot decide which view should guide policy when those views begin to diverge.
Meng Kit Tang
Meng Kit Tang is a Singaporean freelance analyst and commentator who works as an aerospace engineer. He graduated from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), NTU, Singapore in 2025. His research interests include cross-Strait relations, Taiwan politics and policy issues, and aerospace technology.