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?”
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.
