At around four in the afternoon on July 26, 2025, everyone was anxiously glued to their computers or phones. I was at recall campaign headquarters with one or two other volunteers, watching the numbers and updates pour in on Line from every polling station.
One computer was hooked up to a TV showing the news broadcast, and in front of my own computer was the running tally from every polling and vote-counting station in Gang-Hu.
The five stages of grief hit me one after another, like cars of a bullet train.
What now?
If mass political participation couldn’t stop China’s hand reaching toward Taiwan, what else could we do?
In late April of last year, before phase three had officially begun, Gang-Hu was dealing with its own split into two teams, and I was working hard just to keep the team running. There were plenty of thorny problems to deal with, but also plenty of enthusiastic, sharp people working together to defuse one crisis after another. This group of people didn’t run away, didn’t give up, and facing nightmares that only we knew about, kept working to persuade every voter they could reach.
At that point the recall campaign was at its most intense, inside and out, and no one knew how it would turn out. But I felt a certain calm inside. Because I knew there was a group of people who, for the same belief, for the same island, for our home, had stepped out of their own lives and jobs and come together. Willing to staff petition booths after work, to stand at intersections rain or shine, to drive sound trucks around Gang-Hu, to push through the curse of rain hitting every time we did a motorcade, to chase down garbage trucks, to find a way to reach every mailbox we could.
Because we only have one Taiwan.
I knew that when a crisis hit, this group of people would stand up together again. And knowing that made me feel steady.
But by the day the votes were counted, I wasn’t sure anymore. My calm was gone.
I realized we hadn’t just lost a recall election.
We had tried to use democratic means to hold back the CCP’s encroachment and threats.
But on this path within the system, we lost this particular battle.
I don’t think we lost the war.
I only finally realized that the war against China was never something that hadn’t started yet — it had simply never ended.
It’s just that what looked like a thriving economy, or the small comforts of a stable life, had let us forget this brutal reality.
I also finally realized that politics alone might not be enough.
Had we truly prepared and worked hard enough for every possible scenario?
Maybe that’s what awakening means — resolving to keep working no matter what happens.
So I started trying to understand how, beyond politics, we could deter China and strengthen Taiwan through civil defense — through stockpiling supplies, building up mental resilience, learning skills, and physical training.
To let any aggressor know that this kind of aggression would come at an enormous cost.
So at around five o’clock, once the outcome of the vote count was all but certain, I said to a few of the comrades who had been most deeply involved in the recall campaign:
The recall is over, but the resistance against the CCP isn’t. I’m going to start building civil defense. Everyone’s welcome to join. Whether anyone comes or not, however many people come, I’m going to do this.
I had no idea how many people would respond. I just wanted to tell everyone what I was going to do, and hope some brave souls would walk the path with me.
I knew a lot of people were tired, hurt, and not everyone agreed with my thinking. So I didn’t expect this to be an easy road, and I was prepared for it to be a road few people walked with me.
What I didn’t expect was that at our first few online info sessions, the people who showed up weren’t only from Gang-Hu. Many people who felt anxious about the recall result but didn’t know what else they could do were there too.
I also won’t forget that at one of our early in-person events, a friend who had moved to Taipei from Kaohsiung to work cried and said how sad he’d been — but that he had finally found people here he could keep walking with after the recall.
Some teammates stayed and decided to keep working together. Some decided to stop and rest, or to leave.
Of those who stayed on from the recall campaign, only about a third of our active members trace back to it. The rest are people who joined us one after another along the way, each becoming a solid teammate in Gang-Hu.
Along the way, some people have looked at Gang-Hu with envy, as if we had some enormous team behind us. But the truth is, we didn’t start from zero — we had a group of comrades who had already fought alongside each other.
The teammates who stayed kept doing what they were already good at — community management, copywriting, event planning. The teamwork forged during the recall campaign turned directly into a head start for the civil defense corps.
And people who’ve been through a recall campaign have a frightening amount of determination to get things done well. Everyone had already learned to do the work of three people alone — that’s probably the real reason Gang-Hu “looks like” it’s constantly pushing so many things forward.
Maybe it’s this momentum and habit that let more people notice us, and join.
Some came from other recall teams outside our district but joined because they work in Gang-Hu. They gradually became the backbone of the team, and some later became officers.
Everyone brought different expertise or skills, continually enriching our knowledge and technical ability, and gradually converging on similar values.
This past year we ran a lot of courses, took part in a lot of events, wrote quite a few lesson plans, and built a fair number of systems.
But looking back on the year, a few things in particular stand out as worth recording.
First: decentralization does not mean the absence of organization.
On August 1st last year, we held our first online info session. One teammate suggested we should be a decentralized unit; another honestly worried that if she formally joined and then couldn’t show up when mobilization was needed, that would just cause trouble.
Decentralization is a popular idea in Taiwan’s civil defense circles. But what I’ve observed is that in many groups, decentralization in practice becomes an absence of organization. And the reality is, a center still exists — the center just doesn’t like being called a center.
I understand where this fear comes from. After the Sunflower Movement, we saw too many political stars collapse, so civil defense circles are afraid of hero-worship. But being afraid of hero-worship shouldn’t lead to being afraid of organization, afraid of teams. That’s just falling into a different trap.
Real decentralization means: members can move in and out, but the structure has to be clear; when the chain of command breaks, someone can step in at any time, without depending on a single person to make every decision. A group’s members come together because they share the same values and goals, not because of a particular person. And all of this rests on clear rules for how the organization runs.
Looseness without rules isn’t decentralization.
It’s just the absence of organization.
And that actually makes a team less efficient, without direction.
Who’s responsible for making the hard but correct call?
Who’s accountable when things go wrong?
What’s allowed, why is it allowed, and what isn’t?
A team without organization may look flat and decentralized, but it can’t handle any of these questions.
When the Matai’an Creek landslide dam overflowed near Hualien at the end of September last year, some of our teammates went to Guangfu on their own in early October to survey the damage, and later took part in two rounds of disaster recovery work. That experience made me even more certain of this: in an emergency, an organized team can accomplish far more than a loose group of individual volunteers.
There is no task without a chain of command.
And a chain of command is organization.
A civil defense group, as a disaster-response unit, cannot avoid the fundamental nature of organization.
Second: willingness matters more than ability.
On the civil defense path, everyone is learning and growing together. Some people have specific expertise; others just came to a subject a bit later.
We gradually discovered that willingness matters more than ability.
People with willingness matter more than people with ability.
People with willingness can grow together, slowly.
People with ability but no willingness to invest are only chasing a stage.
Civil defense deals with the things that, on the worst days, actually happen right outside your door.
A capable person isn’t necessarily one who’ll stay to face that with you.
But a willing person will.
Third: Taiwanese people are afraid of making mistakes, so they don’t dare to step up.
There are a few teammates in the corps who are more than capable. But every time we invite them to teach a course, they keep making excuses. The reasons are all similar: afraid they won’t explain it well enough, afraid of getting something wrong, afraid of misleading people.
I’ve gradually come to realize this is part of our shared culture.
A year ago, on July 26th, when I told the group chat I was going to start building civil defense, I was a complete novice at it. I only had a vague idea, and compared to others more senior than me, my civil defense knowledge and skills amounted to about what you’d learn in elementary school scouts. If I had waited until I felt qualified enough to speak up, Gang-Hu Civil Defense Corps might never have existed.
We’ve seen the same thing in our students. At Gang-Hu’s very first Home Fortress course, someone didn’t dare sign up because they hadn’t yet prepared their own emergency bag.
Being afraid to show up because you’re not qualified enough, and being afraid to teach because you might say something wrong — these are actually the same thing.
Someone might say: teaching civil defense wrong can cost lives, so surely you can’t just let anyone teach?
No, you can’t. But the answer isn’t to silence everyone who isn’t yet perfect — it’s to hand quality control over to the system. That’s why we’ve tried to build a teaching-assistant system, so people can stand beside the instructor first, then step up front; we’ve also tried to push instructor certification and training, so the team helps prepare anyone who’s willing. That’s why lesson plans need to be developed together, and revised often.
Quality should be guaranteed by the system, not by individuals being too afraid to speak.
Otherwise we can’t guarantee that whoever does speak up is actually right either.
Like everything else — you don’t start once you’re ready. You get ready by starting.
Since last August, we’ve realized that having legal status matters for working with the government.
This week, right as the 726 anniversary approaches, the official registration documents and certificate finally came through.
It marks the footprint of this past year’s effort.
But it also means we now have a responsibility to society going forward, to keep pursuing the goals we’ve committed to.
And in the year ahead, we want to bring civil defense in front of more people.
The most painful lesson I learned during the recall campaign was actually a failure of communication. It wasn’t that we couldn’t persuade strangers — it was that we couldn’t even persuade our own family and friends. Sitting face to face with someone who has an emotional bond with you and is willing to hear you out, and still not being able to get through to them.
So once we started pushing civil defense, we quickly found that getting people who are indifferent to politics — or who even hold different political positions — to start preparing is a challenge every group in this space is facing.
We want to find things that feel really small and easy for everyone to get into.
These days more people keep pets than raise children, and pet CPR is something pet parents genuinely care about and want to learn — and of course, to learn pet CPR you first have to learn human CPR. Drone soccer is a great fit for kids in upper elementary grades and up, and in some of our community outreach events we’ve found that simulated drone flying is popular with adults and kids alike.
We need more entry points like these, to build closer ties with communities and different groups of people.
It’s by building this kind of reputation first, building the public’s trust, that we get the chance to walk into a community and talk about disaster preparedness, about civil defense.
This is also the direction we’re currently discussing with city councilors and neighborhood chiefs.
A year ago that afternoon, at recall headquarters, I asked myself, “what now?” A year later, I still often ask myself the same question.
What’s different is that now I know there are many people still working hard together, and we’ll keep working hard together.
Gang-Hu Civil Defense Corps will keep at it, until Taiwan belongs to the people of Taiwan.