In 2024, China’s united front system tried to love-bomb Taiwanese youth through cross-strait exchanges and outreach programs designed to cultivate goodwill and influence. In 2025, Beijing returned to a more traditional playbook: shaping how Taiwan’s identity and history are defined.
New data from ASPI’s State of the Strait project, which tracked every publicly known united front event related to Taiwan in 2025, shows a clear shift away from youth outreach back toward efforts to appropriate ‘Chinese’ culture and identity.
The largest category of united front activity in 2025 centred on co-opting Chinese identity and culture. These events frame China and Taiwan as having a shared civilisational heritage, advancing a narrative that portrays Taiwan’s distinct identity as secondary or illegitimate. By contrast, cultivating Taiwanese youth and online influencers – the leading category in 2024 at 67 events – fell by more than half to 33. That reversal is the defining trend of 2025.
In 2024, China’s united front work system leaned heavily into youth exchanges, influencer trips and entrepreneurship programs. In 2025, the number of these types of events dropped dramatically.
The likely explanation for this shift is that courting Taiwan’s youth simply didn’t work. Taiwanese identity is strongest among younger cohorts, shaped entirely under democracy and hardened by events in Hong Kong since 2019. Rather than doubling down, Beijing pivoted back towards using what it means to be ‘Chinese’ to define what it means to be ‘Taiwanese’.
Across 2025, united-front-linked bodies organised forums on shared ancestry, cross-strait clan networks and temple exchanges; conferences on Chinese civilisation and national rejuvenation; heritage initiatives linking Fujian and Taiwan; and cultural festivals framed around common bloodlines and historical destiny. The consistent theme was the claim that Taiwan is not merely politically linked to China, but civilisationally inseparable from it.
This form of identity appropriation and reframing seeks to re-anchor Taiwan’s story within a broader narrative of Chinese history: from imperial governance to anti-Japanese resistance, from post-war reconstruction to contemporary rejuvenation. Taiwan is cast not as a place and people with its own history but as a chapter in a continuous national Chinese saga.
That matters because sovereignty arguments do not rest on law alone. They rest on legitimacy. If Taiwan can be framed as historically and culturally embedded within a single Chinese family, then claims of separate identity appear derivative. United front work in 2025 reflected a deliberate effort to move back to this as a first principle of China’s political warfare against Taiwan.
Why shift back to identity?
First, identity is more durable than opinion. Governments change with elections, and economic incentives rise and fall, but historical narratives – once normalised – tend to endure. Younger Taiwanese increasingly identify primarily as Taiwanese only, which makes them more resistant to appeals framed around shared Chinese history or identity. But those narratives may still resonate more strongly with older generations, many of whom still hold political, social and economic influence in Taiwan.
Second, identity politics operates at a lower and less visible level. Temple exchanges, cultural forums and genealogy conferences attract far less scrutiny than overt political dialogue or influencer junkets. They appear apolitical, even while reinforcing the same core message: that Taiwanese distinctiveness is only superficial, layered over a deeper Chinese essence.
Third, narratives about identity can travel. Taiwan’s domestic debate over history and sovereignty is sophisticated and contested, but international understanding is often shallow. Concepts such as ‘one China’, post-war sovereignty and cross-strait relations are frequently misrepresented in foreign commentary. By repeatedly embedding Taiwan within a narrative of civilisational unity and historical continuity, Beijing can gradually shape global discourse purely through repetition.
There are strong reasons to remain sceptical about how far this strategy can reshape identity inside Taiwan. A civic Taiwanese identity is grounded in lived political experience. Scholars, journalists and civil-society actors vigorously contest attempts to subsume that identity within a narrative centred on the People’s Republic of China.
But united front work does not need to succeed inside Taiwan to matter. If identity-focused efforts lead policymakers and commentators abroad to view Taiwan’s status as historically settled rather than politically challenged by Beijing, they can still shape the strategic environment for deterrence and diplomacy.
The Taiwan Affairs Office and the United Front Work Department remain central coordinators of this effort. Their 2025 activity suggests greater thematic discipline. The centre of gravity is no longer trying to persuade young Taiwanese through opportunity; it is reinforcing the deeper claim that Taiwanese and mainland Chinese share an indivisible historical and cultural identity.
Whether that strategy can meaningfully reshape identity inside Taiwan remains doubtful. But as Beijing invests in rewriting Taiwan’s history and embedding it within a civilisational narrative of unity, the contest over Taiwan increasingly becomes a contest over story. And stories, once normalised internationally, can influence how sovereignty, legitimacy and even risk are perceived.
State of the Strait is available here. Governments and organisations can contact [email protected] to discuss co-funding this project and gaining access to the entire State of the Strait database.
