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On China’s National Day, commemorating the founding of the modern Chinese state on October 1, 1949, the Chinese military released an animated short film that showed two pieces of a torn historical scroll painting – with one part currently kept in China and the other in Taiwan – joining together.
The films expressed “the shared cultural heritage and hope for reunification between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits,” according to the state-run media outlet Global Times. China claims the largely self-governing island as its territory, maintaining a greater military presence around the island in recent years.
China’s President Xi Jinping had also said at the Communist Party’s National Conference last year that Beijing was ready to take the island of Taiwan “by force if necessary”. What are China’s claims on Taiwan and how has this painting become a symbol of possible reunification now? We explain.
What is this painting and what does the video show?
The 14th-century painting ‘Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains’ was created by the artist Huang Gongwang. It is an ink painting that shows mountains and settlements in eastern China and is considered a great classical work.
It was passed down to art collectors over time. According to Taiwan’s National Palace Museum, where one of its two parts is kept, “In 1596, it was bought by Dong Qichang and later pawned to Wu Zhengzhi… Wu’s grandson loved the scroll so much that he wanted to take it with him to the grave. Consigning it to the flames on his deathbed, the painting was secretly saved by his son. However, part of the front of the scroll was destroyed.”
Attempts were made to restore it but it became separated into two. The shorter section titled “Leftover Mountain” is now in the collection of the Zhejiang Provincial Museum in China. The longer part, known as the “Master Wuyong Scroll”, is in the city of Taipei, Taiwan.
On October 1, the People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theatre Command released an animated film called “Dreams Come True on Fuchun River”. It featured two elves, representing the two pieces of the painting. At the end of the movie, the two characters come together, magically making the painting whole again.
According to a Reuters report, during the journey of the two elves in the film, the Eastern Theatre Command inserted shots of aircraft carrier formations and J-20 fighter jets, “reminding viewers of its battlefield capabilities”.
China has claimed that Taiwan was a part of it until Japan occupied the island after a war in 1895. Japan then lost in the Second World War (1939-45) and had to give up its territories. After a civil war between the two major political groups of mainland China – the Communists and the Nationalists (or the Kuomintang party) – in the 1940s, the Communists emerged victorious in 1949 while the nationalist party largely retreated to Taiwan.
Both Communists and Nationalists then laid claims to being the “official” China, under the names the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Republic of China (ROC), respectively. But as the PRC grew in terms of its economic size and its economy opened up to the rest of the world by the 1980s, more and more countries began to recognise it as China officially, keeping only informal relations with Taiwan. Today, only 13 countries have diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
Presently, Taiwan and China have economic ties and there is significant immigration between the two. With the 2004 election win of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) after decades of Kuomintang rule, it brought a change. The DPP won again in 2016 and 2020 and has been vary of PRC’s control on the island. Also, with President Xi Jinping assuming increasing power since he took over the post in 2013, the PRC has also dialled up its rhetoric on Taiwan.
In a 2022 speech opening the ruling Communist Party’s 20th party congress in Beijing, Xi said: “We insist on striving for the prospect of peaceful reunification with the greatest sincerity and best efforts, but we will never promise to give up the use of force and reserve the option to take all necessary measures.”
China’s military has conducted military exercises and its planes have flown around Taiwan. On April 10, it flew 91 planes. According to a New York Times report, Taiwan said it tracked 103 People’s Liberation Army aircraft entering its air defence identification zone in a single day, in September this year. None entered Taiwan’s airspace. The number of such flights has been increasing since 2019, the report added.
That the Chinese military has released a film showing the two pieces becoming re-joined is being seen as part of its larger aims related to Taiwan. Global Times, in its article about the painting, also pointed to “the separation of cultural relics that accompanied the relocation of the Palace Museum to the island of Taiwan over half a century ago.”
It refers to another episode of historical commonality between China and Taiwan – how cultural artefacts were sent away from Beijing to other parts of China and Taiwan, to safeguard them amid a Japanese invasion in the 1930s. The civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists led to another such transfer.
According to a 2010 article in the state-run newspaper China Daily, then-Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, in relation to the painting, “expressed his hope to put together the two halves as the painting, just like people, can’t bear such separation.” In a joint exhibition in Taipei in 2011, both paintings were brought together and displayed for some time, when ties were warmer.
For the ongoing 2023 Asian Games being held in China’s Hangzhou, the painting was recreated using more than 34,000 aluminium alloy grilles on the curtain wall of the Fuyang Yinhu Sports Center in Hangzhou.
