The root of the dispute over Taiwan — which The Economist once called the most dangerous place on Earth — is a confusion of ideas: Beijing thinks the island’s inhabitants are Chinese, and most of the people of Taiwan think they aren’t.

In fact, a new book by a Taipei-based Canadian academic and former intelligence officer J. Michael Cole suggests that many people in Taiwan see China in the same way as Canadians regard the United States.

Cole notes that in 1992, just 17.6 per cent of Taiwan’s residents saw themselves as “Taiwanese only”; yet by 2023, those who self-identified as in that way had risen to 61.7 per cent (32 per cent considered themselves of mixed Taiwainese and Chinese heritage and only 2.4 per cent of thought of themselves “Chinese only”).

By embracing democracy an

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