During the talk show”L’Aria che tira” on La7, Italian mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi compared Taiwan to Mussolini’s late Republic of Salò, stating that the island “has no right to exist” because it would be a fascist enclave.
A statement that, besides being offensive to twenty-three million people, is historically wrong. Point by point.

What Odifreddi said about Taiwan

The passage was aired on La7, within the programme ‘L’Aria che tira’, and went viral within a few hours. In particular, it discussed Taiwan, Chinese pressure on the Strait, and the position the West should take.

And there, in front of the cameras and a studio that reacted with a mixture of embarrassment and restrained irony, the mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi pronounced a dry sentence: “Taiwan is the analogue of what the Republic of Salò would be today. It was the fascists, basically, who fled after a civil war and made an enclave to resist. But that is no reason to allow them to exist’.

David Parenzo, on the show, tried as usual to dilute it with a joke – “Do you know, professor, that your sentence will go viral?” – and Odifreddi confirmed without flinching: ‘Of course, literally: Chiang Kai-shek’s government was the analogue of Mussolini’.

One could therefore dismiss it as yet another provocation by an intellectual who has for years sought scandal as a rhetorical technique.
Yet words carry weight. Especially when they are uttered in prime time, in a country where knowledge of Asian history is scarce by definition, especially towards the history of Taiwan, and by a person whom at least a certain audience identifies with the rigour of mathematics.

It is worth, then, taking the time to dismantle what has been said. Not out of fury, but because Taiwan deserves more than an over-the-top joke, and because a nation deserves respect, not mere viral phrases twisting its history.

First mistake: the Chinese Civil War was not a struggle between fascists and anti-fascists

The equation between the Kuomintang of 1949 and the Italian Social Republic is grotesque even before being historically questionable.
Chiang Kai-shek was an authoritarian, conservative, anti-communist nationalist, supported by the United States and – during the Second World War – an ally of the anti-fascist powers against Japanese imperialism. Japan was the aggressor in that chessboard, not Chiang’s China.

The Republic of China participated in the war on the side of the Allies, sat among the victors at the table in 1945, and was one of the founding members of the United Nations, with a permanent seat on the Security Council, retained until 1971.

Salò, on the contrary, was a puppet state of the Third Reich, militarily supported by Hitler, established on territory occupied by the Nazis.
Chiang had none of these characteristics.
He was a dictator – this yes, and no one denies it – of Chinese nationalist persuasion, in continuity with Sun Yat-sen’s 1911 revolution, not with the fascisms of the times.

To confuse the two is to have understood neither the former nor the latter.

Second mistake: Taiwan did not ‘remain’ the island of Chiang Kai-shek

This is the most important point, and it is the one that makes Odifreddi’s statement not only simply inaccurate, but downright false in its deeper meaning.

Taiwan today is not the regime of 1949.
It has not been for almost forty years.
And to claim that it is is tantamount to claiming that today’s Spain is still Francoism, or that today’s Germany is still the Reich. A nonsense that no one would dare to say on television without being immediately challenged.

The authoritarian regime of the Kuomintang, established in 1949 with martial law and continued through the so-called ‘White Terror’ – during which some 140,000 people were imprisoned or killed for alleged links with communism or political dissent – ended on 15 July 1987, when Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek, abolished martial law and initiated the democratic transition.

A choice made, it is worth remembering, from within the very party that had ruled the dictatorship: a rather rare case in the history of authoritarian transitions.

From there on, Taiwan took a completely different path.
In 1986, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the first legalised opposition formation, was born.
In 1991, the ‘temporary provisions against communist rebellion’, the legal apparatus that kept the island in a permanent state of exception, were repealed.
In 1996, the first presidential elections with direct universal suffrage were held, won by Lee Teng-hui, nicknamed ‘Mister Democracy’ and remembered as the architect of the transition.

In 2000, with the victory of Chen Shui-bian of the DPP, there was the first handover of power between different parties: the decisive proof, according to Samuel Huntington, that a democracy really is a democracy.

Since then, there have been regular changes of government, alternations between Kuomintang and DPP, and constant recourse to popular vote.
The current president, Lai Ching-te, was elected in January 2024 with 40% of the vote in an election deemed free, competitive and plural. Three parties represented in parliament, opposition present and alive, independent judiciary, press freedom among the strongest in Asia. This is the real Taiwan, not the one imagined by Odifreddi.

Third mistake: the right to exist is not granted, it is recognised

Then there is the sentence that weighs heaviest in the TV passage, and which would deserve a separate editorial on its own. “This is not a reason to allow him to exist”.
Said like that, in a democratic nation, in another democratic country, in prime time, it is something that should give one pause for thought.
Not about relations between Taipei and Beijing, but about the current state of Italian public debate.

Twenty-three million Taiwanese live, work, vote, strike, protest and change governments through the ballot box.
They produce the most advanced microchips on the planet – TSMC alone is worth about 90 per cent of the island’s GDP, and is the world’s largest semiconductor company, ahead of giants like Intel and Samsung.
Without Taiwan, the entire global digital economy would grind to a halt in a matter of months.
To decide that all this ‘has no right to exist’ because seventy-seven years ago a civil war had a certain outcome is a position that echoes, word for word, the rhetoric of the Chinese Communist Party.

On this Odifreddi is in good company, moreover: even Vladimir Putin, before invading Ukraine, had explained at length that Kyiv was an ‘artificial creation’ and that Zelensky’s government was ‘Nazi’. The logic is identical. One delegitimises the opponent by labelling him with the most infamous word there can be and paves the way for the idea that his disappearance would be not only acceptable, but almost desirable.

It is an old rhetorical mechanism, and it is exactly what Beijing’s propaganda uses on a daily basis on Taipei, or rather, what is unfortunately referred to as ‘Chinese Taipei’.

A question of seriousness, even before geopolitics

What is certain is that Formosa(Ilha Formosa – the historical name by which Taiwan has been known in the West for centuries) does not need to be defended by Odifreddi’s words.
Taiwan is a grown-up democracy, capable of withstanding far more serious pressures than an Italian television broadcast – think of the daily incursions of the Chinese air force into its defence identification space, or the disinformation campaigns documented before the last elections.

What remains to be defended, if anything, is the principle that in a serious country nonsense should be called by its name. Not to silence those who say them, but out of respect for those who listen.

Dear Odifreddi, Taiwan is not Salò.
It is a full democracy, ranked twelfth in the world, inhabited by twenty-three million citizens who do not need anyone’s permission to exist.
Next time you happen to talk about it on TV, it might be worth taking a trip to Taipei first. You would discover, perhaps to your surprise, that it is one of the freest and liveliest cities on the Asian continent.