Written by Cao Kefei
Image credit: Provided by author. Standing inside an abandoned air-raid tunnel on Nangan Island in the Matsu archipelago, looking across the narrow strait toward Huangqi town, the shore from which I departed in Fujian.
As someone born and raised in mainland China, I first came to Taipei in the summer of 1999. I wandered through the streets, tasted food at night markets, and chatted with local residents. What struck me was how deeply familiar everything felt, despite differences of accent and vocabulary. This familiarity resisted easy explanation; it emerged from shared rituals of daily life and an intuitive emotional resonance.
In the summer of 2025, I took the “Mini Three Links” (小三通) route for the first time, departing from Huangqi Pier in Fuzhou and crossing the Taiwan Strait to Nangan Island in the Matsu archipelago. The journey lasted only half an hour. In that brief crossing, I encountered what many describe as a lived reality: people on both sides of the Strait inhabiting a shared sphere of life, the water between them serving as their main passage.
I then travelled to Kinmen Island. On a clear day, standing on the shore, I could see the layered high-rise buildings of Xiamen across the water. A fishing boat drifted slowly by in the distance, creating a scene of apparent calm. Yet before me stretched rows of spiked anti-landing obstacles, their rusted metal a stark reminder of military preparation. These remnants, once meant to repel invasion, revealed how this peaceful shoreline still bears the designation of Taiwan’s “frontline.”
Image credit: Provided by author. Rows of spiked anti-landing obstacles on the shore of Kinmen are reminders of past military defences.
This scene of stark contrast brings me back to the education I received as a child. As I grew up, the neighbours just across the water were crudely divided into “us” and “them,” shaped by ideologies on both sides into imagined enemies. As Taiwanese democracy pioneer Peng Ming-min (彭明敏) once noted, Taiwan’s two major population groups—commonly referred to as “Native Taiwanese” (本省人) and “Mainlanders” (外省人)—are categories rooted in a “Great China-centred mindset”… In this sense, each side mirrors the other more than either is willing to admit.
Today, having lived across different cultural eras and political systems, my experiences compel me to question any homogenous historical narrative—to reject the demonised “them” we are taught to fear and to interrogate the unified “us” we are taught to defend. To me, Taiwan is a kindred neighbour carrying the memories and traumas of war while having grown into a vibrant and autonomous society.
During my current residency at the Käte Hamburger Centre of Heidelberg University (2025-2026), I am developing an international collaborative theatre project. Set against the historical backdrop of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, it excavates marginalised and forgotten individual stories from different communities, with particular focus on how ordinary people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait experienced this watershed moment.
Historian Gao Hua observed that “history and the present flow toward each other,” a reminder that revisiting 1949 is not nostalgia but a necessity—a way to (re)ask urgent questions: How does the civil war that divided the Strait more than seventy-five years ago continue to shape our fears and our thinking? What stories remain buried? What vision might interrupt this cycle? And how do we begin to imagine differently, together?
There are several reasons why I chose the Chinese Civil War as the point of departure for this theatre project. First, it is closely tied to my own upbringing. In mainland Chinese textbooks and film productions, the war is invariably commemorated as a narrative of “victory” and “liberation.” Yet I have long sought to understand what truly happened.
A profound turning point came when I read Big River, Big Sea: Untold Stories of 1949, a work of documentary literature published in 2009 by the writer Lung Ying-tai. Moving beyond a singular political stance, the book presents the complexity and multiplicity of the civil war through archival materials, interviews, the author’s own family history, and personal accounts from different communities. It restores the violence of war to the concrete bodies, memories, and destinies of individuals, wresting it from grand historical narratives.
This realisation crystallised my understanding: once the machinery of war is set in motion, there are no victors but only survivors. And survival often means living with trauma, silence, and rupture. Whether those forced into exile, those who lost loved ones, or those swept along or crushed by historical currents, war leaves behind long-term, invisible forms of harm. Such violence permeates intergenerational memory, shapes identity, and alters how we understand “home,” “belonging,” and “the Other.”
Image credit: Provided by author. Teenage refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan participating in a theatre workshop in Berlin.
A second motivation emerges from my direct encounters with the people displaced by war. In 2016, large numbers of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq arrived in Germany. In Berlin, a former East German secret police building was converted into a temporary refugee shelter housing over 1,800 people. I facilitated weekly theatre workshops with a cohort of teenagers, establishing trust and a provisional sense of stability through collaborative games and performance work. I encouraged them to draw, write, and act, documenting their memories. Over four months, their drawings, texts, and bodily expressions revealed the magnitude of trauma these young lives had already endured. Their articulated aspirations centred on two fundamental needs: access to education and family reunification.
Image credit: Provided by author. In a Berlin exhibition, Kader Attia transforms photographs of severely wounded World War I soldiers into haunting sculptures.
In 2022, at a civilian donation centre in West Berlin, I encountered older people, women, and children who had fled the war in Ukraine. The men—sons, husbands, fathers—remained absent, conscripted to resist the invasion at the risk of their lives. Nearly four years later, the grief and exhaustion in their gazes remain with me. The war continues.
In September 2025, I participated in the “Taipei International Peace Forum” organised by the Lung Ying-tai Cultural Foundation. There, I met a peace education scholar from Israel and a writer from Palestine. This encounter profoundly affected me. Neither sought to persuade the other; instead, they spoke honestly from personal experience about fear, loss, and seemingly irreconcilable conflict. Even in the face of rupture and difference, they chose to listen and to imagine coexistence.
This attitude prompted me to reflect on cross-Strait relations. I do not suggest that these conflicts are the same. Yet their commitment to continue listening, even amid highly unequal and antagonistic narratives, led me to reconsider: how might we sustain forms of coexistence that transcend the logic of victory and defeat?
Image credit: Provided by author. The Golan Heights, along the Syrian border, the site of the 1973 war, was visited during the ceasefire.
Subsequently, following the recent ceasefire in the Israel-Palestine conflict, I was invited by the Israeli Ministry of Culture to participate in a theatre showcase in Tel Aviv. During this visit, I witnessed the material consequences of protracted conflict: I visited the site of the October 7 attack, travelled through the Golan Heights and Jerusalem, and made a deliberate visit to a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic school where the peace educator works. Witnessing a reality in which war and death are no longer abstract news or statistics but manifest as lived trauma, dehumanising rhetoric, separation walls, and militarised daily life has profoundly shaped my thinking.
In a cross-Strait reality marked by deep entanglement and asymmetry—shared history, economic interdependence, and yet competing sovereignties, incompatible social systems, and mutual suspicion—grassroots dialogue and cultural exchange become urgently necessary. Theatre, as a practice of embodied encounter and imaginative rehearsal, is uniquely positioned to engage this complexity. The question is not how theatre might avoid such trauma and contradictions, but how it can engage them without reproducing the logic of domination, demonisation, and zero-sum thinking that perpetuate conflict.
It is against this backdrop that I return to A Thousand Plateaus by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, seeking conceptual tools to explore the relationship between artistic creation and peace practice. The book introduces several key ideas: the rhizome, plateau, line of flight, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, and becoming. The “rhizome” proposes a non-hierarchical, decentralised mode of thought, rejecting singular origins and linear development in favour of multiplicity, lateral connection, and continual growth. Rather than charting a path toward definitive solutions, rhizomatic thinking produces an ever-shifting cartography of thought and action. The “plateau” reframes creation as a sustained intensity—a practice that resists closure but remains productively open, allowing diverse voices, experiences, and contradictions to coexist within a shared horizon.
The “line of flight” does not imply escape from reality. It names the deliberate forging of alternative pathways and new possibilities without being captured by reactive emotion, repetitive antagonistic narratives, or the denial of the Other’s existence. “Deterritorialisation” and “reterritorialisation” further illuminate how identity, home, and belonging may be reconfigured: how inherited structures can be loosened, attachments transformed, and heterogeneous communities and networks of relation formed. At the heart of these movements lies “becoming”—the emergence of new possibilities through encounter. Becoming is not imitation but resonance.
These concepts offer a lens through which to consider the historically, politically and culturally entangled condition of the Taiwan Strait. They invite us to ask whether individuals might step beyond inherited national narratives—and the zero-sum logics they encode. Instead of reproducing oppositional structures, such an approach suggests another practice: placing different languages, bodies, memories, and positionalities alongside one another within a common temporal and spatial field, cultivating a relational sense of futurity. In this light, theatre and peacebuilding converge as sites where empathy and critical reflection are activated through negotiation and processes of becoming amid irreducible difference.
From this perspective, I return to Lung Ying-tai’s words on the opening page of Big River, Big Sea: Untold Stories of 1949:
“If some are said to be ‘the losers’ of war, then all who were trampled, humiliated, and harmed by their time are. It is through their so-called ‘failure’ that they revealed to us what values are truly worth striving for.”
In this genealogy, I understand my theatre practice as a calling for a “theatre of the defeated.” Here, “defeat” does not signify shame or failure, but rather a relational condition of human vulnerability. In witnessing others’ wounds, we come to recognise our own vulnerability. Within the theatre as a space of encounter, I seek to restore visibility and embodied presence to narratives marginalised or distorted by dominant discourse.
This theatre cannot offer solutions. Rather, it opens a threshold space where pain and alterity coexist alongside the acknowledgement of mutual susceptibility. The theatre invites people from divergent, even antagonistic positions into the same physical and temporal space. Here, amid uncertainty and discomfort, a form of dialogue emerges that does not seek agreement but rather mutual recognition. In such a theatre, peace becomes tangible through fragile, ongoing practice. It means naming harm without seeking revenge, recognising difference without demanding assimilation, and choosing, moment by moment, connection — and the possibility of beginning again.
Cao Kefei has worked primarily as a theatre director and writer in China and the German-speaking world since the late 1990s. She is the co-founder of the performance collective LadyBird in Beijing and Nomadic Minutes in Berlin. Since 2007, she has created a series of documentary performances, short films, and cross-media works exploring Chinese history and society, the condition of women, and transcultural experience. She is currently a Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre at Heidelberg University.