The TV Show That Divided Taiwan

TAIPEI, Taiwan—You could be forgiven for believing that Taiwan is an island preparing for war. Chinese warplanes skirt Taiwan’s airspace almost every day. A Taiwanese billionaire has pledged funds to arm and train 3 million civilian sharpshooters to fight China. Last month, Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te announced plans to build an air defense system similar to Israel’s Iron Dome.

But the reality on the ground is something closer to this: Taiwan is an island where some people are trying desperately to convince everyone else to start preparing for war; where many are generally more preoccupied by low wages and expensive housing than by the prospect of a war they believe is far off; and where some oppose war preparedness entirely, believing it to be a provocation that will spark the very conflict it aims to deter.

That friction—between people desperate to prepare for war, and those resistant to it—is key to understanding the increasingly febrile discourse of Taiwanese politics which pits “warmongers” against “traitors,” and makes even the act of imagining a future war controversial.

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It’s a good idea for a show—timely, certainly, and no one would deny that the stakes are high. Many analysts believe that conflict over Taiwan is the most dangerous potential flashpoint between the United States and China, two nuclear-armed superpowers.

But rather than raising awareness about China as a threat, the show seems to have highlighted Taiwan’s internal divisions—in part because the very premise of it appeared too closely aligned with a single political party. Driving the push for Taiwan’s military preparedness is the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which currently holds the presidency but not the legislature. The Kuomintang or Nationalist Party (KMT), which currently dominates the legislature in coalition with a smaller party, believes Taiwan’s security lies in maintaining the status quo and not provoking Beijing.

It doesn’t help that the show’s origins and plot choices encourage a political read. Zero Day Attack received funding from Robert Tsao, the pro-DPP activist and billionaire trying to create an army of civilian snipers, and from the Ministry of Culture, leading to accusations from prominent KMT lawmaker Wang Hung-wei in July that the DPP was “[using] the state apparatus to achieve its political goals.” The KMT held a press conference in August to suggest that government money had been improperly used to support the series. While never naming the parties, the show makes thinly veiled jabs at KMT leaders and KMT-leaning media, and portrays as more trustworthy people who can speak Taiwanese—a dialect of Chinese spoken by Taiwanese families but not by the KMT leaders and members of the army who fled China in 1949, set up shop in Taipei, and whose children and grandchildren still form part of the KMT’s backbone today.

DPP leaders, by contrast, supported Zero Day Attack and its cast. “The real threat Taiwan faces is China, not a TV show,” DPP lawmaker Wang Ting-yu said in August 2024, when the trailer was released. And former Taiwanese president and DPP leader Tsai Ing-wen cheered at the show’s global premiere at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit in May 2025.

In this charged political climate, however, it’s unlikely that any drama about Taiwan defending itself against Chinese plots could have had broad, multi-party appeal. That’s because in Taiwan today, it’s not just politics that is polarized—it’s imagination itself. What will happen if Chinese leader Xi Jinping follows through on his threats to take Taiwan by force? The DPP’s answer and that of its supporters, known as the pan-Green coalition, has crisp outlines and the sharp edge of moral clarity: Taiwan will fight back. As the fictional president-elect in Zero Day Attack says in her national address in the final episode, “We choose the way we want to live, and we guard it.”

The KMT and its pan-Blue supporters seem to have no answer to that question, and its leaders reject any attempt to prepare for or even contemplate a future that involves war. KMT advisor and former spokesperson Eric Huang told Foreign Policy in an interview, “What would be a Blue version of Zero Day Attack? It would be: There’s no attack.”

With the upper hand in the legislature, the KMT has frozen a chunk of the defense budget, decried what it calls the DPP’s dictatorial policies targeting alleged Chinese influence on the island, and sought to reassure Beijing that Taiwan won’t declare independence.

Trying to keep on friendly terms with Beijing isn’t necessarily naive. It’s a KMT strategy that worked for many years. As Huang explained, if Chinese leaders are “convinced that Taiwan is separating from mainland China, of course they are going to invade.” The KMT position, and indeed its promise to the Taiwanese people, is “the Chinese won’t invade if we are in power.”

From this standpoint, a TV drama like Zero Day Attack risks convincing Beijing that Taiwan has separatist intent.

There’s an obvious problem with this strategy, however. What if the KMT is wrong and China attacks even if Taiwan hasn’t declared independence? Xi, who ushered in an era of aggressive Chinese nationalism when he came to power in 2012, is China’s strongest leader in decades, and he seems to view the goal of annexing Taiwan as an important part of his personal legacy as a leader. In the face of such an adversary, a security strategy based on refusing to plan for contingencies seems unwise.

Wei-Ting Yen, an assistant research fellow at the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s national research institution, said that the KMT’s inability to create and broadcast a vision for Taiwan’s biggest “what if” scenario stems from internal struggles within the party to define national identity in a way that accords with how most Taiwanese people now feel.

“Political parties in Taiwan, when they compete with each other, they aren’t just functioning like political parties in normal democracies,” Yen told Foreign Policy. “In Taiwan’s context, when you capture the executive branch, what you are also capturing is the power to interpret the nationalist vision.”

That nationalist vision revolves around Taiwan’s relationship to China. Is Taiwan a part of China that is now autonomous? Or is it a separate and different entity entirely? The DPP and the KMT seem to have different answers to this question, as reflected in the names they prefer to use to refer to their country. The DPP prefers “Republic of China (Taiwan),” or even simply “Taiwan,” while the KMT often emphasizes just “Republic of China.”

“The KMT’s nationalist vision includes China,” said Yen. “And the DPP’s nationalist vision does not.”

This divergence between the parties reflects Taiwan’s recent history, which is rather complicated. From 1895 to 1945, Taiwan was a Japanese colony. When Japan lost World War II, it was forced to return its colonial holdings, and Taiwan became a part of the Republic of China (ROC). Four years later, the KMT-led ROC government in Nanjing lost the civil war and fled to Taiwan, bringing roughly 1 million Chinese mainlanders and setting up a regime of martial law from its capital in Taipei.

Taiwanese local identity was suppressed under the KMT dictatorship, and speaking Taiwanese in public was prohibited. According to the KMT, Taiwan was the seat of the rightful government of all of China.

After democratization in the 1990s and the DPP’s rise to power as a political party, Taiwanese identity began to assert itself, and how people identified themselves in surveys of national identity began to change. In 1992, the first year Taiwan’s National Chengchi University conducted its now-famous survey of Taiwanese national identity, just over 17 percent of respondents identified as Taiwanese only, as opposed to Chinese or both Taiwanese and Chinese.

In 2025, 63 percent of respondents identified as Taiwanese only.

But the KMT has struggled to update its nationalist vision and its cross-strait policy to fit Taiwan’s swiftly evolving identity. The modern KMT strongly values the ROC’s democratic constitution, as well as the array of living institutions—the ROC government—that have continuously existed since 1912, when they were established by Chinese people in the Chinese city of Nanjing. Some in the KMT’s ROC faction, distinct from its pro-Beijing arm, dream of the day in the future when that constitution might serve as a model for a unified, democratic China. Their division, Yen said, is why the KMT doesn’t “have a concrete coherent China policy right now, let alone a vision for what the future might hold.”

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“When we start doing the work in Doublethink, we thought what we are dealing with is a media technology and social media problem,” including fake news, disinformation, and malign actors, he told Foreign Policy in an interview. But the organization’s research into Chinese military journals show that the People’s Liberation Army views disinformation as part of the “information front” deployed to win strategic advantage.

In 2023, Ttcat traveled to Ukraine to learn more about how Ukrainian organizations are fighting Russian disinformation. He saw how Russian bombs could devastate a neighborhood or even a whole village—but also how quickly residents mobilized to rebuild. As long as Ukrainians kept rebuilding, Ttcat realized, Russia couldn’t win. The goal of Russian disinformation was to convince Ukrainians they couldn’t prevail.

Ttcat now sees China’s well-documented disinformation targeting Taiwan in this light.

“Our adversary is using this as a gray-zone tactic, as part of their war strategy,” Ttcat said. “The war is already starting and we just don’t know—the majority of Taiwanese don’t know, and they don’t feel it.”

To those in the pan-Green camp who increasingly view Taiwan’s existential struggle as already unfolding, the KMT’s opposition to strengthening Taiwan’s national defense seems not merely foolish, but potentially traitorous.

Which brings us back to Zero Day Attack. Political polarization may be the great danger the show both ignores and inflames. There are no major Chinese characters. Viewers are never a fly on the wall inside the war room in Beijing. Instead, the most visible villains are those within Taiwan itself.