When the leader of a pro-unification political party denounced students protesting a trade pact with Beijing in April last year, saying “you are all [expletive] offspring of Chinese,” he was unambiguously employing race as the primary mode of persuasion.
The angry ululation was unusual in that an appeal to race in Taiwan, unlike, say, the pulpit variety found in the US, typically takes the form of white noise: It contains many frequencies and is only mildly obtrusive and easily ignored — except around election time.
