Some interesting comments over on Reddit over one of the last paragraphs to be written in my book Rebel Island, itself a response to the publisher’s sensitivity reader about whether or not I should refer to the place on the opposite side of the Taiwan Strait as “China.”

This is the passage in question:

Over the years, particularly after my time in Xi’an in the 2010s, my own Taiwanese accent faded away almost completely. Every now and then, something still sneaks in, such as my habit of referring to dalu (‘the mainland’ or ‘the continent’), which continues to give me away as someone who learned his Mandarin in Taipei. The term is so common on Taiwan because referring to the land across the Strait as ‘China’ would rather imply that Taiwan was not-China.

And this is the comment from Lonely-Variation6940 that accurately carbon-dates my time in Taiwan — I was sent there to learn Mandarin in 1991, shortly after martial law was lifted, but when a lot of its cultural policies were still in force.

The 1980s was the era of Chiang Ching-kuo. I grew up in that era. The book you mentioned is generally correct. In school we were taught to use “mainland” or “mainland area.” When I was in high school, if I used words like CCP, Mainland, and China randomly in the essay questions on the Three Principles of the People, I would not only fail the test but also be called in for questioning by the instructor. That was a term used in the era of the Kuomintang’s ideological control before Taiwan’s democratisation. It remains in our current constitutional system. For example, the government department in the Executive Yuan that handles Chinese affairs is called the “Mainland Affairs Council.”

You can hear me talking in greater depth about some of the linguistic politics at work here in my recent interview on Late Night Live.