Wit & Attitude Quote by Alex Chiu

Alex Chiu’s line isn’t trying to persuade; it’s trying to police the boundaries of belonging. The bluntness, the casual “idiots,” the jump from “some reason” to implied illegitimacy all work as a shortcut around the actual argument Taiwanese identity raises: that nationality, citizenship, and self-definition aren’t inherited like eye color. By reducing a complex political identity to a family tree, he swaps a contested present for a supposedly settled past.

The intent is unmistakably corrective. He frames Taiwanese people who reject “Chinese” as suddenly wayward, as if identity were a default setting that only malfunctioning individuals would alter. That “all of a sudden” is doing rhetorical heavy lifting: it implies a fad, an overreaction, a youthful tantrum. It erases decades of democratization in Taiwan, the rise of local political parties, and the steady hardening of cross-strait realities. Calling it inexplicable (“for some reason”) isn’t ignorance so much as strategy; if the reasons are granted legitimacy, the claim becomes debatable.

The subtext is also about power. “Chinese” here isn’t merely ethnic heritage; it’s a geopolitical demand for alignment with a larger national story, one in which Taiwan’s separateness is framed as deviance. Chiu’s businessman persona matters: commercial elites often speak in the language of stability and continuity, and this quote weaponizes both. It’s an attempt to turn self-identification into ingratitude - as if choosing “Taiwanese” is a betrayal of ancestors rather than a description of lived reality under a different government, passport, and public memory.