In reality, the “Ministry of Winnie Affairs” located in a Taipei cafe is the work of EyeCTV, a Taiwanese comedy group that has made its name by satirizing China and the ruling Chinese Communist Party, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory and threatens to take the island of nearly 24 million by force if the democratically elected government in Taipei ever declares formal independence.
Driven in part by escalating Chinese military aggression, the sketch show’s rise to fame has ushered in a new genre of Taiwanese political satire. Tackling the tense relationship with China head on, it appeals to a sense of absurdity many in Taiwan feel toward their government’s status and its inability to escape the political quagmire caused by China’s territorial claims.
While Taiwan’s tradition of vibrant political debate dates back to the 1990s, when it democratized after 38 years of martial law, the focus on China as an object of ridicule has intensified in recent years as Taiwanese commentators sound the alarm about Xi’s campaigns to smother dissent and flex Chinese military power.
Their popularity reflects how young people in Taiwan increasingly consider themselves Taiwanese, not Chinese, with a sense of identity that is so distinct from contemporaries in the People’s Republic that the idea of being a single country seems laughable.
EyeCTV’s parodies of Chinese officials and state broadcaster CCTV have drawn more than 1 million subscribers to its YouTube channel, making the cast some of Taiwan’s most popular online performers.
Imitating the mannerisms of Chinese officials is one of the group’s regular bits, and host Chen Tzu-chien, has more than a passing resemblance to former Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang. The actors also produce news commentary, sometimes delivered while seated on a toilet, and their own satiric version of the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV’s annual Spring Festival Gala, a four-hour-long variety show of unabashed nationalism that makes a habit of featuring Chinese actors in blackface.
Chen and producer Sandra Ho launched EyeCTV a year after watching CCTV for the first time in 2014 while taking part in a contest for aspiring Taiwanese journalists hosted in Quanzhou, China. But the propaganda, meant to improve the Chinese Communist Party’s image in Taiwan, had the opposite effect on the pair, drawing attention to China’s tone-deaf messaging.
“At first we just wanted to make people laugh, but in the end, we grew into a whole production company,” Chen said. Now the group has only about 300,000 fewer followers than CCTV’s official YouTube account. “People [in Taiwan] need an emotional outlet after having been oppressed [by China] for so long,” he added.
Jokes at the expense of the Chinese government are only part of the show’s appeal. Much of EyeCTV’s humor is aimed closer to home, targeting the weirdness of the constitution of the Republic of China, Taiwan’s official name.
Written when the Nationalist Kuomintang ruled China before retreating to the island of Taiwan in 1949, it is an improbable document difficult to square with current geopolitical reality, but politicians fear replacing it entirely could spark a Chinese military assault.
“The current situation of our constitution and our country is not normal, but there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Ho. “So we want to at least highlight these conflicts to reveal the ridiculousness behind our status quo.”
So EyeCTV sketches present an alternate universe where the Republic of China (ROC) state media rails against “communist bandits” and has ambitions to rule all of China. During the Tokyo Olympics, EyeCTV awarded medals from China and even Mongolia, which the constitution technically still claims, to the ROC.
People in Taiwan “don’t want to be the real China,” explained Austin Wang of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, but “they are stuck,” because of the risk of Chinese attacks. “At least they can make fun of it.”
According to the latest survey from Taiwan’s National Chengchi University, 62 percent of citizens consider themselves only Taiwanese in 2021, up from around 18 percent in 1992.
Wang warns, however, that the growing influence of Taiwanese political comedy may reinforce nationalism in both Taiwan and China. Even though the Chinese government has so far ignored jokes at its expense from EyeCTV, angry Chinese Internet users have begun to cite these political comedy shows as “proof that Taiwanese people always make fun of China,” he said.
After finding success at home, some Taiwanese satirists are now branching out to produce English content with the goal of using humor to explain Taiwan’s complicated political status to foreigners.
In February, Bailingguo News, the ninth most popular podcast in Taiwan according to data provider Chartable, launched a sketch show named “Tough Bobas: Taiwan Uncensored” — after bubble tea tapioca pearls — broadcast from a “doomsday bunker” that warns about the dark side of China’s rise.
Inspired by “Saturday Night Live” and “Chappelle’s Show,” its short videos are a blend of infomercial and college humor. In one, China-U.S.-Taiwan relations are presented as a love triangle where Beijing keeps luring the United States away with wads of cash. Another likens Beijing’s strategy in the South China Sea to a greedy party guest who furtively steals salami, one slice at a time, from other countries’ plates.
“We want the world to wake up and see that China is a threat,” Ken Young, one of the show’s hosts, said in an interview from the show’s cluttered studio in a Taipei apartment complex. “And we [Taiwanese] are the ones on the front line bearing all the costs.”
Even before launching the sketch show, Young and his co-host Kylie Wang never shied away from topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese Communist Party. Their interview and current affairs show, “Bailingguo News,” is, they claim, “the freest international news podcast in the Chinese speaking world.”
Recent guests include figures like Chen Qiushi, a Chinese citizen journalist who was detained for most of 2020 after releasing videos from Wuhan hospitals and quarantine centers early in the year.
During a brief period of days in early 2021 when audio discussion app Clubhouse was accessible in China, they hosted a room for Uyghurs, the mostly Muslim minority from Xinjiang in northwest China, to share experiences about life during the sweeping internment and “reeducation” campaign in their homeland with Han Chinese.
Wang considers it important to show that in Taiwan you can make jokes about the Chinese Communist Party and still make a living. In her telling, a burgeoning Taiwanese political comedy scene in the 1990s faded under President and Kuomintang leader Ma Ying-jeou, who promoted economic ties with China from 2008 to 2016.
“People censored themselves because they have business in China,” Wang said. But repression in Xinjiang and Hong Kong made many in Taiwan reconsider. “They started to realize it’s important for us to say what we want to say,” she added.
Fear of losing access to the Chinese market remains a concern for many in the entertainment industry — and not just in Taiwan. “Initially we planned to shoot ‘Tough Bobas’ in the U.S., but we were turned down by many American actors who were afraid to touch this subject,” Young said.
But in Taiwan, at least, finding support is getting easier. Both Bailingguo News and EyeCTV have recently secured new financial backing from advertisers and investors. Wang and Young received sponsorship to shoot “Tough Bobas” Season 2, while Chen, as the face of EyeCTV, has secured brand endorsement deals with Ikea and Dyson.
According to Chen, businesses’ interest in supporting the show has increased markedly in recent years, and some companies that declined to work with EyeCTV previously recently contacted him about advertising opportunities. “People seem to have realized that there is a market here,” he said.
