General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Island Nation (国际桥牌社)

Island Nation (國際橋牌社) is a Taiwanese political drama series, the first television drama in Taiwan to treat contemporary politics directly as its genre, produced by Mark Twain International Images (馬克吐溫國際影像) with producer-director Wang Yi-hsin (汪怡昕) and supervising producer Feng Hsien-hsien (馮賢賢).¹^•² Each season dramatizes a span of Taiwan's democratization using fictional characters whose situations parallel documented political events, a mixed approach the makers describe as "a fictional story built on real history."³ The project was announced with a plan for eight seasons tracing Taiwanese political history from the 1990s onward.⁴

Key fact	Detail
Genre and position	Taiwan's first political drama (政治職人劇), also nicknamed the "Taiwanese House of Cards"¹
Season 1 scope	1990–1994, from the lifting of martial law toward the first Taipei mayoral election; 10 episodes⁵^•⁶
Season 2 scope	1994–1996: the first direct presidential election and the Taiwan Strait missile crisis; 10 episodes⁷
Season 1 cost	NT$75 million total, including a NT$30 million Ministry of Culture subsidy and NT$30 million Wang raised by borrowing⁸
Overall plan	Eight planned seasons with a stated total budget of NT$800 million (about HK$200 million)⁴
Spin-off	Hoping (和平歸來), a spin-off about the 2003 SARS outbreak and the closure of Taipei's Hoping Hospital⁹

Spoilers

Premise and method

The series treats Taiwan's international position as a card game. Wang Yi-hsin, who earlier made a documentary on former president Lee Teng-hui, said that in more than 100 hours of interviews he found that events Taiwanese saw as domestic matters had all been shaped under constraints or compromises involving the United States, China, Japan, and South Korea; his summary was that "we play our own cards, but we are also a card in other people's hands."¹⁰

The drama uses invented characters rather than portraits of named politicians. Its purpose, Wang said, is to "construct real life stories under the atmosphere of the era" more freely, while expecting that audiences will still match characters to real figures.¹⁰ Season 1 follows six small figures across four storylines covering politics, the military, the media, and society through a family of White Terror (Taiwan's martial-law-era political persecution of dissidents) victims, showing people oscillating between authoritarian and democratic habits.¹¹ Fictional leads include the first native-born president after martial law, named Li Qingbo (黎清波) in the series, and characters such as the White Terror survivor Xu Zhiling (許芷伶).¹² Well-known public figures appear as themselves alongside the fiction, including former American Institute in Taiwan director William Stanton (司徒文) and former Lee Teng-hui office director Su Chi-cheng (蘇志誠).⁵

Season 1 threads real events through the plot: the Daemo Plan (大漠計畫), the severing of diplomatic ties between Taiwan and South Korea, the Koo-Wang talks, and the repeal of the Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion, set in the years when Taiwan's democratization accelerated after martial law.² The opening credits state that the background years are 1990 to 1994 and that the characters and plot are fictional.¹³

Seasons

Season 1 (2020) covers 1990 to 1994, from just after the end of martial law to the Taipei mayoral election, with ten episodes.⁵^•⁶ Its cast included Yang Lieh (楊烈), Ying Tsai-ling (應采靈), and Chou Hsiao-an (周孝安).¹⁴

Season 2 (2021) moves to 1994–1996 and is built around the president's visit to Cornell University, the first direct presidential election, and the Taiwan Strait missile crisis, showing the president working through diplomatic isolation, internal party struggles, and the risk of war with China.⁷ Wang said the season's script was being written as of March 2020, with filming planned for June of that year.¹⁶ Filming actually began later: the crew held its opening ceremony at the 228 Peace Memorial Park in Taipei on November 24, 2020.¹⁷ Season 2's cast included Yang Lieh, Lu Szu-ming (路斯明), Tsai Tsan-te (蔡燦得), Yang Hsiao-li (楊小黎), and others, and the season ran on PTS and LINE TV.⁷^•¹⁸

Wang's stated ambition extends the timeline season by season toward the 2020 presidential election, so that each season covers one era of Taiwan's political history.⁶

Spin-off. Hoping (和平歸來), listed on PTS materials as part of the Island Nation series, is a spin-off set in 2003, when SARS reached Taiwan and Taipei's Hoping Hospital was sealed off, dramatizing the political maneuvering behind the outbreak response.⁹ By December 2023, the released seasons of Island Nation and Hoping were streaming free on the PTS+ platform.¹⁹ The production also extended the franchise into other media: planned comic series about the Chen family of Tainan gentry, a book by a well-known writer about figures behind Hoping Hospital in 2003, and limited NFT auctions of the most politically sensitive cross-party scenes.²⁰

Production history

A long, troubled development. Preparation took nearly five years without major financing behind it. During that period the production replaced its screenwriter ten times, was turned down by more than fifty directors, and lost actors who signed and then withdrew and a cinematographer who quit with a single phone call; principal photography finally began on March 15, 2019.⁴ Wang said investors could not imagine a Taiwanese political drama and at one stage suggested remaking it as a Taiwanese Infernal Affairs-style crime series instead.⁴

The research effort was itself large: Wang spent nearly NT$4 million on preliminary research, including NT$1 million commissioning a team of professors to write a study of 1990s Taiwan and its international context, which the screenwriters were then taught from. The research team drew on materials from the US Department of Justice and CIA, the Japanese cabinet, Taiwanese intelligence, and Chinese Communist Party documents, and reconstructed the daily positions of every ship in the US carrier deployments during the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait missile crisis.⁴

Money and filming. Season 1 cost NT$75 million, of which NT$30 million came from the Ministry of Culture and NT$30 million from loans Wang took on personally; reporting noted that despite the production's scale he lived in T-shirts and drove a twenty-year-old car.⁸ Filming succeeded inside the Presidential Office Building, and the production built a 1:1 interior set; the series was described as one that "cannot be taken down no matter how you film it," and season 1 was released on Netflix.¹⁴ Finding a platform was nonetheless difficult: the producers reported that international platforms expressed interest but cited concern over the China market.¹⁵

Why Taiwan had no political drama

Industry commentary around the premiere framed the series as filling a gap. Taiwan's historical dramas before it had concentrated on periods before the Kuomintang authoritarian era, such as Japanese rule, Qing rule, or the Dutch period, and films confronting the authoritarian past had only recently appeared, with Detention (2019) becoming the year's top-grossing Taiwanese film.² Critics attributed the gap to fear left over from the martial-law period, unresolved archives from the party-state era, and, after democratization, the pull of the Chinese market.²^•⁴ Wang's own market research found that Taiwanese audiences brightened at the idea of a drama about the 1990s democratization, with no comparable existing product, which he read as the market opportunity for the series.¹⁰

Wang also described the storytelling problem specific to a first-of-its-kind genre: audiences abroad treat political dramas simply as drama, but because Taiwan had no precedents, many viewers judged the show against their own historical memories, some treating it as documentary, and the production had to answer to many different expectations of the same history.¹⁵ Reviewers made the same point from the other side, comparing it with House of Cards and noting that the two work in entirely different narrative registers.²¹ Feng Hsien-hsien characterized what Wang was building as "his own public television," an independent vehicle for telling Taiwan's political history.⁶ The production company behind the series, Mark Twain International Images, had earlier produced the historical reenactment series Just One Missing (少了一個之後), recreating the 1989 Patou Station killings and the death of lawyer Tang Te-chang, work in the same vein of staging suppressed episodes of Taiwan's past.²²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › Hong Kong and Taiwanese serial drama

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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