Last Wednesday as the streets of Taipei emptied and sirens wailed across town for Taiwan’s annual air raid drills, a crowd of journalists, actors and film crew, watched similar scenes play out on screen. The press event, inside a city theatre, was launching a new Taiwanese series, Zero Day, which depicts a Chinese invasion. Timing the launch with the air raid drill was a clever piece of theatrics, but it also emphasised the real-world implications of what both events were demonstrating – the worsening threat of China’s ruling Communist party making good on its promise to annex Taiwan.
The 17-minute Zero Day trailer released that day sparked debate and anxiety across Taiwan. Despite the threat of invasion looming for decades, there are few if any modern Taiwanese cultural examples that depict this aspect of its existence.
“The feeling that war is imminent is something that most people in peaceful countries find hard to relate to. In Taiwan, everyone thinks about it, but hardly ever talks about it,” the director, Lo Ging-zim, tells the Guardian in his Taipei studio. “But if we don’t make that fear tangible, if we don’t turn it into drama, we’re going to have a hard time getting people to start a dialogue quickly.”
The plot begins with a Chinese warplane disappearing in the Taiwan Strait, and China using the search as a pretext for enacting a military blockade. Over the course of seven days it chips away further. The financial system crashes, communications are cut, foreigners and dual nationals flee. Fake news and fifth column sabotage spreads, and Beijing hacks public screens with a smiling, pink-jacketed Chinese news anchor urging Taiwanese to accept the “peaceful reunification of the motherland”.
It is tense and eerily quiet – a realistic look at how a gradual choking of Taiwan before an assault could play out.
Zero Day has a purpose – to light a fire under the Taiwanese about the need to, as the trailer says, “guard our homes, protect our country”.
The trailer, viewed more than a million times now, quickly sparked an emotional reaction from Taiwanese. “We are finally beginning to face problems that many Taiwanese people dare not face head-on,” said one commenter on the trailer’s YouTube page.
“It’s heavy because it’s possible,” said another. “Encourage Taiwanese people to have the courage to face war! Too many people are unwilling to face it. Thank you for firing a loud shot.”
On TV talkshows pundits discussed the already real threat of disinformation, espionage and infiltration from China and its government’s sympathisers, how sabotage efforts may filter through the island’s networks of temples, or its media.
Taking a risk to boost the ‘war effort’
References to Zero Day have already been censored on Chinese social media, and state commentary has accused Taiwan’s government of “spreading fear”.
Lo hopes that people will see Zero Day because it’s good, but also because it will help reverse some of the desensitisation in society after years of Chinese pressure. “When it is shown visually, when it is happening in the streets and temples that people are familiar with, people have more real feelings and are willing to get up and do more … This way, there will be less chance of war.”
The series features 10 award-winning directors and a cast including Japanese actor Issei Takahashi, Hong Kong-Taiwanese actor Chapman To, Kaiser Chuang and Ko I-chen, and Lien Yu-han.
All took something of a risk to sign on. Many global companies and entertainers fear losing the Chinese market, and across the industry contracts ban entertainers from speaking on political subjects or being critical of Beijing. Some are pressured to support its “one China principle”, which claims sovereignty over Taiwan.
“If they want to continue their careers, they must sign a contract which restricts them,” says Lo. One prominent actor was so desperate to join the cast of Zero Day, he asked if production could be delayed until their contract – which contained such restrictions – ran out, Lo says.
The creators consulted with experts here and overseas about the most likely scenarios and tactics of a Chinese attack, and were assisted by the military in Taiwan to film on board ships and in restricted areas (Lo says the military had no say on the script). Zero Day centres on the months-long period between a presidential election and inauguration. It has received government funding through creative support channels, and from individual backers including Robert Tsao, a 77-year-old Taiwanese tech billionaire who has pivoted to boosting Taiwan’s non-government defences.
In 2022, Tsao pledged a billion Taiwan dollars of his own money to train civilian militias and sharpshooters. The latter half of that plan has fallen by the wayside, he tells the Guardian, hampered by Taiwan’s strict gun laws. The training is primarily in first aid, disaster response, open-source intelligence analysis, and self-defence, run by the civil defence group Kuma Academy.
Zero Day is his latest foray into the war effort. Tsao says such a film should have been made much earlier. For him, it’s part of the cognitive warfare battle with China. “We have to fight back,” he says.
Taiwan’s government, particularly the previous Tsai administration, strove to balance the fostering of enough alarm that people supported government defence efforts, with not scaring them so much they gave up or fled.
Tsao concedes there is a risk that Zero Day’s bleak and violent scenes could backfire, and help encourage people to leave instead of staying to defend Taiwan, as is anecdotally already happening.
“Taiwanese know that if we are taken by the CCP [Chinese Communist party], no one will have a future.”