The TV anchor reads the news without blinking: China has imposed a blockade on Taiwan and appears poised to attack. When the broadcast shifts to the defence ministry, she turns incredulously to her producer and asks: “Is there really going to be war?”
This is fiction: a scene from the Taiwanese TV drama Zero Day, which is due to hit the screens this summer. But the controversial series — the first work of mass entertainment to realistically portray a Chinese invasion — aims to have a real world impact by forcing the country’s public to ask itself the same question.
“We Taiwanese have been living under this shadow together for so long, but we never dared to touch it,” said Zero Day producer Cheng Hsin-mei. “But Taiwan is so free now, so why can’t we talk about it?”
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Ever since China’s Kuomintang government fled to Taiwan in 1949 after defeat in the Chinese civil war, Beijing has threatened to take the island by force. For decades, it lacked the military power to follow through. Then the close ties built as Taiwanese invested in China’s developing economy made war seem impossible.
But Zero Day comes at a time when Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine and China’s increasing military manoeuvres around Taiwan have begun to make an invasion seem much more conceivable.
“For the longest time, especially since mainland China started its reform and opening, Taiwanese were not very aware of the possibility of war, they just didn’t have this concept,” said Ma Cheng-kun, a professor at Taiwan’s National Defense University. “Now the public is beginning to feel and realise it, especially due to the daily activities of PLA aircraft and ships around Taiwan.”
According to the Taiwan National Security Survey, a multiyear poll series, the proportion of Taiwanese who believe China would attack if Taipei formally declared independence has soared from 49 per cent in 2017 to 64 per cent last year.
But many Taiwanese struggle to even imagine being plunged into a war and feel their country is far from ready for one. “For society to collectively accept this reality and be willing to participate in national defence mobilisation, that requires a process of social persuasion,” Ma said.
After failing to find backers for a Taiwan war film in a first attempt six years ago, Cheng, a screenwriter and former journalist, decided to produce one herself. She lined up a team of directors who each direct one episode. The first hour-long episode will premiere at the Copenhagen Democracy Forum on May 13.
Shot in a visceral, highly realistic style, Zero Day plays through a week-long countdown kicking off with the blockade. Shops and homes are plunged into darkness by Chinese cyber attacks. Familiar, leafy Taipei streets descend into pandemonium as banks and public transport collapse. Fearful families line up in a dark fishing port to catch a boat out. Criminal gangs released by corrupt prison officials help Beijing force the population into submission. And finally, soldiers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army arrive.
Observers believe the drama has the potential to catch the public imagination in the way films about nuclear war did in the UK and the US in the 1980s.
“I grew up in the cold war in the US, and the fear of nuclear war was a big, big milestone in my childhood: I had nightmares about it,” said Nathan Batto, a professor at Academia Sinica. His memory of those dreams includes people wrapped in blankets wandering in the nuclear winter — a scene from the 1983 movie The Day After about a Soviet missile strike on Kansas City that he watched at age 13.
“It was a cultural marker everybody was familiar with,” he said.
Zero Day could have a similar impact, even as it lays bare the deep divisions that run through Taiwanese society.
Although both the descendants of those who came from China with the fleeing Kuomintang regime 76 years ago and the island’s original residents overwhelmingly reject unification with China, rifts are widening under the mounting pressure from Beijing.
Some KMT politicians denounce President Lai Ching-te as a warmonger because he has defined China as a “hostile foreign force” and seeks to urgently strengthen Taiwan’s defences. The government’s move to deport Chinese citizens who publicly supported an invasion triggered criticism of persecution from some Taiwanese with family ties in China.
Meanwhile, supporters of Lai’s Democratic Progressive party are increasingly concerned about Chinese-backed disinformation campaigns, espionage and other infiltration.
“Along with the growing external danger, people are also perceiving China’s threat from within,” said Wei-ting Yen, a political scientist at Academia Sinica, citing exchanges between KMT politicians and the Chinese Communist party and infiltration by China of Taiwanese criminal networks. “These threats are very real.”
KMT politicians argue that their contacts with China can help avoid war. But Zero Day addresses the issue of divided loyalties in Taiwan head-on. It features portraits of people whose first instinct is to surrender, while others flee and some collaborate with the invaders.
That has already triggered fierce controversy. After the release of a 17-minute trailer last July, opposition lawmakers demanded Cheng explain whether the production takes aim at specific political parties or politicians. Other critics have denounced the series as a propaganda project because it received a grant from a government-financed film fund — as do many Taiwanese productions.
Just days before shooting was due to start for a scene in which a prison director releases gangsters in exchange for a promise to help with a liver transplant for his daughter, the prison abruptly cancelled location access.
“We say that China might infiltrate the prison system to release prisoners to cause social unrest in preparation of an invasion — this is an assumption from our national security authorities which we based our plot on,” said Cheng.
“The justice ministry’s Agency of Corrections said this was slandering them and insisted that nothing could happen in their prisons,” she said. The agency declined to comment.
Despite the controversy around the series, Zero Day’s creators are hopeful it can unite society. Diana Chao, whose previous works were mostly unpolitical, directed an episode about a Taiwanese female online celebrity falling prey to cognitive warfare. A virtual relationship with a Chinese-created AI persona gradually transforms her into a pro-China influencer who, when Beijing attacks, urges her audience to surrender.
Chao hopes her audience will learn more about how their own minds work. Education and consumption of Chinese literature had given some Taiwanese a “romantic imagination of China”, said Chao, herself from a family where such sentiment was prevalent.
“Some in our parents’ generation may have feelings for that land that are understandable, and often that clashes with the kind of society China actually is and with its current nature,” she said.
There was extended debate even among the production team.
“We asked ourselves, if we don’t have consensus about our nation, when infiltrators turn us against each other, when war comes, when the PLA lands, what is it that we Taiwanese want to protect together?” said Cheng. “In the end, we found that it is freedom, it’s democracy, it is our way of life together on this island.”
