One Year After the Recall: A Civil Defense Team Born From Failure
TC Lee | Chairman of CDAT, Founder of the Ganghu Civil Defense Team
At around four in the afternoon on July 26, 2025, everyone was anxiously glued to their computers and phones. I was at recall headquarters with a couple of 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, while the screen in front of me showed the vote tallies from every polling station in Ganghu.
The five stages of grief blew through my chest like a bullet train, car after car.
What now?
If the public, through political participation, couldn’t stop China’s hand reaching toward Taiwan, what else could we do?
In late April the year before, the third round of recalls hadn’t officially launched yet, and Ganghu was dealing with its own split into two teams. I was working hard just to keep things running. There were a lot of hot potatoes to handle, but also a lot of people who were enthusiastic, sharp, and worked hard together to defuse one crisis after another. This group didn’t run from it, didn’t give up. Facing a nightmare only we understood, they kept working to persuade every voter they could reach.
At the time, the recall was at its most intense, inside and out, and no one knew how it would end. But I felt a strange calm. Because I knew there was a group of people here who, for the same belief, for the same island, for our home, had stepped out of their own lives and jobs to stand together. People willing to staff petition booths after work, stand at intersections through wind and rain, drive sound trucks around Ganghu, brave the curse that it always rained the moment a motorcade went out, chase down garbage trucks, and find every mailbox they could reach.
Because we only have one Taiwan.
I knew that when a crisis came, this group would stand up together again. And knowing that made me feel steady.
But on 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 Chinese Communist Party’s aggression and threats.
And on that path within the system, we lost this battle.
I don’t believe we lost the war.
I finally realized that the war against China was never something that hadn’t started yet — it had simply never ended.
It’s just that the appearance of a thriving economy, or the small comforts of a stable life, let us forget this brutal reality.
I also finally realized that politics alone might not be enough.
Had we truly prepared for every possible scenario, put in every possible effort?
Maybe that’s what awakening means — deciding to keep fighting no matter what happens.
So I started trying to understand how, beyond politics, we could use civil defense — stockpiling supplies, building mental resilience, learning skills, training our bodies — to deter China and strengthen Taiwan.
To make any aggressor understand that this kind of aggression comes with an enormous price.
So around five o’clock, once the outcome of the vote was effectively settled, I turned to a few of the comrades who had thrown themselves hardest into the recall campaign and said:
The recall is over, but the resistance against the Chinese Communist Party is not. I’m going to build civil defense. Everyone’s welcome to join. Whether anyone comes or not, however many people come, I’m doing this.
I had no idea how many people would respond. I just wanted to tell everyone what I was going to do, and hope a few brave souls would walk the road with me.
I knew a lot of people were exhausted, hurt, and not everyone agreed with my thinking. So I didn’t expect this to be an easy road, and I braced myself for the possibility that almost no one would walk it with me.
What I didn’t expect was that at our first few online info sessions, it wasn’t just people from Ganghu who showed up. A lot of people who felt anxious about the recall result, but didn’t know what else they could do, were there too.
I’ll never forget that at one of our early in-person events, a friend who had moved up from Kaohsiung to work in Taipei broke down in tears, saying how devastated he’d been — but that he’d finally found people here he could keep walking with after the recall.
Some people stayed and decided to keep pushing forward together. Some decided to stop and rest, or to leave, along the way.
Of those who stayed on from the recall campaign, only about a third make up our active members today. The rest are people who joined us one by one along the way, each becoming a solid part of Ganghu.
Along the way, some people have looked at Ganghu with envy, as if we had some massive team running things behind the scenes. But the truth is, we didn’t start from zero — we had a group of comrades who had already fought side by side.
The people who stayed kept doing what they were already good at — community management, writing copy, event planning. The teamwork forged during the recall became the civil defense team’s head start.
And the people who lived through the recall have a terrifying kind of determination to get things done. Everyone had already learned how to do the work of three people alone — that’s probably the real reason Ganghu “looks like” it’s always pushing so many things forward at once.
Maybe it’s this momentum and this habit of moving that’s made more people notice us, and join us.
Some came from other recall teams whose districts weren’t in Ganghu, but who joined because they worked in the area. They gradually became the backbone of the team, and some later became officers.
Everyone brought different expertise or skills, constantly enriching our knowledge and capabilities, while also gradually converging on shared values.
This past year we’ve run a lot of courses, joined a lot of events, written a lot of lesson plans, and built a fair number of systems.
But a few things stand out, looking back, as especially worth writing down.
The first is that decentralization does not mean deorganization.
On August 1 of last year, we held our first online info session. One member suggested we should be a decentralized unit; another honestly worried that if they formally committed to a role, they might not be able to show up when mobilization was needed, and that would just cause problems.
Decentralization is a popular word in Taiwan’s civil defense circles. But what I’ve observed is that in many groups, decentralization in practice becomes deorganization. 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 the civil defense scene is wary of hero-worship. But being wary 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 freely, but the structure has to be clear; when the chain of command breaks, someone can step up immediately, without relying on one single person to make every decision. The group holds together because members share the same values and goals, not because of any one person. And all of this rests on clear rules for how the organization operates.
Looseness without rules isn’t decentralization.
It’s just deorganization.
It makes the team less efficient, without direction.
Who’s responsible for making the hard-but-right call?
Who’s accountable when things go wrong?
What’s allowed, why is it allowed, and what isn’t?
A team without organization looks flat and decentralized, but it can’t answer any of these questions.
At the end of September last year, when the barrier lake on the Matai’an River near Guangfu, Hualien, overflowed, some of our members went out to survey the damage in early October on their own initiative, and later joined two more waves of disaster relief work. That experience made me even more certain: in an emergency, an organized team can do far more than a crowd of loosely connected individual volunteers.
There is no mission without a chain of command.
And the chain of command is the organization.
A civil defense group, as a disaster-response unit, cannot dodge the fact that it needs to be organized.
The second thing is that willingness matters more than ability.
On the path of civil defense, everyone learns and grows together. Some people bring expertise in a specific area; some just came to a topic a little later than others.
We’ve gradually realized that willingness matters more than ability.
People who care matter more than people who are skilled.
People who care can learn and grow together, slowly.
People who are skilled but don’t care are just chasing a stage.
Civil defense deals with the things that, on the worst days, actually happen right outside your door.
A skilled person isn’t guaranteed to stay and face that with you.
But someone who cares will.
The third thing is that Taiwanese people are afraid of making mistakes, so they hold back.
We have a few members on the team who are more than capable. But every time we ask them to teach a class, they keep making excuses. The reasons all sound the same: afraid they won’t explain it well enough, afraid of getting something wrong, afraid of misleading people.
I gradually realized this is part of our shared culture.
A year ago, on July 26, when I told the group I was going to build civil defense, I was a complete novice. I had only a vague idea, and compared to the veterans in this space, my civil defense knowledge and skills amounted to about what you’d learn in an elementary school scout troop. If I had waited until I felt qualified to speak up, the Ganghu Civil Defense Team might never have existed.
We’ve seen the same thing in our students. At Ganghu’s first Home Fortress course, someone didn’t dare sign up because they hadn’t put together their own Bug-Out Bag (BOB) yet.
Being afraid to show up because you’re not qualified, and being afraid to teach because you might get something wrong — those are actually the same thing.
Someone might say: teaching civil defense wrong can cost lives, so can we really let just anyone teach?
No. But the answer isn’t to silence everyone who isn’t perfect yet — it’s to let a system carry the responsibility for quality. So we’re building a teaching-assistant system, so people can stand beside an instructor first, then step in front of the class. We’re also pushing forward instructor certification and training, so the team can help willing people get ready together. That’s why lesson plans need to be built collectively, and revised regularly.
Quality should be guaranteed by a system, not by people being too afraid to speak up.
Otherwise, we can’t even guarantee that the people who do speak up are getting it right.
Like everything else, you don’t start once you’re ready. You get ready by starting.
Since last August, we’ve known that having legal status matters for working with the government.
And this week, right as our 726 anniversary arrives, our official registration documents and certificate came through.
It marks the footprint of this year’s effort.
But it also means we now owe society accountability — we have to keep delivering on what we’ve promised.
And in the coming year, we want to bring civil defense in front of more people.
The most painful lesson I learned during the recall 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. Even sitting face to face with people who have an emotional bond with you, who are willing to hear you out, we still couldn’t always get through.
So once we started pushing civil defense, it quickly became clear that figuring out how to get people who are politically apathetic, or even on the other side, to start preparing is a challenge every group in this space faces.
We want to find things that feel genuinely small and easy for people to step into.
More people keep pets today 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 have to learn human CPR first. Drone soccer is a great fit for kids from about third grade up, and in some of our community outreach events we’ve noticed that flight-simulator drone piloting is popular with adults and kids alike.
We need more entry points like these, to build closer ties with our community and with different groups within it.
It’s exactly by building goodwill and public trust this way that we earn the chance to walk into a community and talk about disaster prep, about civil defense, in the first place.
This is also the direction we’re currently discussing with city councilors and borough chiefs for future cooperation.
A year ago that afternoon, sitting in 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 working on it together, and we’ll keep working on it together.
The Ganghu Civil Defense Team will keep going, until Taiwan belongs to the people of Taiwan.