BILL BIRTLES, Reporter: On the streets of Hong Kong, free speech in action. This former British colony was promised limited autonomy after the handover to China in 1997.

But this is what Hong-Kongers think of Beijing’s ‘One Country – Two Systems’ style of government.

BILL BIRTLES: Two million people took to the streets here to push back against Beijing’s efforts to exert greater control.

But these Hong Kong protests could just be a prelude to an even bigger confrontation over the island of Taiwan. China’s Communist Party regards it as a province that must be brought under Beijing’s control, even if that means using military force.

GENERAL WEI FENGHE (June 2019): If anyone dares to split Taiwan from China, our military has no choice but to fight at all costs.

JOSEPH WU, Taiwan Foreign Minister: And the Taiwanese people are seeing all this, phenomenon that the Chinese are getting a tighter control of Hong Kong.

And if China is willing to use a military means to go against Taiwan, I think the people understand that fighting against China is the ultimate way to go.

BILL BIRTLES: A new generation of Taiwanese nationalists don’t want to sing along to a tune written by Communist China. Leading the charge - Freddy Lim, front man of band Chthonic. Independence activist. Banned from playing in Hong Kong. He also happens to be a member of Taiwan’s Parliament.

FREDDY ONSTAGE YELLS TO AUDIENCE (Wake Up music festival): “Only if Taiwanese unite can we overcome all obstacles!

BILL BIRTLES: They’re dancing ever closer to the so-called Red Line. To cross it -- by Taiwan declaring independence -- is to invite military invasion. Now, the communist leaders in Beijing are confronted by death-metal diplomacy.

FREDDY LIM, Independent MP: I try to let China and the world understand what the young people in Taiwan are thinking. Maybe it will piss China off.

BILL BIRTLES: Freddy Lim has harnessed the political power of youth – a generation that increasingly identifies themselves as Taiwanese – not Chinese.

He sailed into parliament off the back of a 2014 mass protest called the Sunflower Movement. Students fearing Beijing’s influence successfully derailed government plans to forge closer trade ties with China.

FREDDY LIM: After 2014, after the Sunflower Movement, it shows Taiwan's young people will never want to be a part of China in the future.

BILL BIRTLES: What does it feel like to you to be on that stage in front of all those people?

FREDDY LIM: I feel like…I feel like I can change the world! (clenches fists) (smiles)

because I think all the audience are with me!

BILL BIRTLES: On a Taiwanese beach, final preparations for a very different kind of performance. This annual drill by Taiwan’s military is a full-dress rehearsal for catastrophe. Fighting off an invasion by China’s People’s Liberation Army.

GENERAL CHEN ZHONGJI: We are confident and capable of making the Chinese Communist Party invasion of Taiwan a failure.

BILL BIRTLES: Taiwan’s been self-ruled for 70 years since Chiang Kai-Shek and his national army fled here, after losing China’s civil war to the communists. For Beijing, the island is unfinished business. Conscription is being replaced by a professional, volunteer force. Behind the scenes, some of the Next-Gen troops don’t appear too battle-ready. Much of this hardware is now outdated, the troops outnumbered.

The US is promising billions of dollars’ worth of new tanks, fighters and missiles – but they’ll still be no match for China. China is building warships at unprecedented rates for peacetime, and its navy is now challenging US dominance of these waters.

This is all about showing Beijing that if they ever did really try to invade this island, it would be brutal, it would be bloody and there would be a massive economic and political price to pay – but this is just one aspect – there is also the hearts and minds – and the reason I’ve come here is to answer the question – do the people of this island have the will to keep withstanding China’s pressure.

These days, rock star Freddy Lim moves to a very different beat. It’s campaign season. He’s up for re-election in 2020 – and needs to bridge the generation gap.

FREDDY [on stage]: "Thank you to the very beautiful host. Hello everyone."

“Most of the young people, they recognise me because I'm a singer in a rock band and older citizens, they recognise me because I'm a politician. And also, I'm a judge in a talent show in Taiwan, too. So most of the old people, they like that show.”

BILL BIRTLES: As an independent, Freddy is part of a coalition that supports the ruling Democratic Progressive Party – a government cautiously balancing support for independence with the dire consequences of pushing China too far.

Joseph Wu is Taiwan’s Foreign Minister.

FOREIGN MINISTER JOSEPH WU: “If you believe in democracy, I think the people here are already saying, "We are not interested in unification with China. But, of course we understand our responsibilities in preventing war from taking place, on our part. And the current government, ever since 2016 when we took over, we are taking a very prudent approach towards China. We try to prevent China from having an excuse to go after Taiwan, militarily.

BILL BIRTLES: On the streets of the capital Taipei, a reminder of Taiwan’s insecurity.

[Air raid siren]

Seventy years since the war, and the island still prepares for a Chinese attack. The annual air raid drills now have an added urgency. China’s growing arsenal of missiles could obliterate this city with just a few minutes warning.

“Well this is really eerie, I've got to say. This bustling metropolis has just turned into a ghost town when these air raid sirens began. Admittedly, the tropical storm played a big part in driving everyone inside. But we’re now being told by police that we need to go inside as well.”

A plainclothes policewoman spells out the rules.

POLICEWOMAN: "Any violation will be fined between $30,000 and $150,000 [Taiwan dollars]."

BILL BIRTLES: "I see, everyone's got to take it pretty seriously?"

POLICEWOMAN: "Yes, we have to take it seriously. Yes. We can live in a really liberal country, but even the government cannot guarantee that everything will be fine, that the peace will last forever. So we have to make preparation for this."

BILL BIRTLES: After half an hour the all clear sounds and life, for most, goes on.

Freddy: "Hi come in."

Bill: “Freddy, good to see you again.”

Freddy: “And you."

Bill: "This is quite an office. It wasn't quite what I expected. You've got David Bowie on the wall."

Freddy: "I try to remain as a musician."

BILL BIRTLES: Freddy Lim has taken an unconventional path to politics. Aside from his Death Metal gig, he also led Amnesty International in Taiwan. For inspiration, he turns to one of Beijing’s targets, Tibet’s spiritual leader-in-exile.

Freddy: “Look at my, the image behind me is Dalai Lama because I always know, when I get nervous or I cannot find the right decision, I always think about Dalai Lama.”

Bill: "So you’ve got a rock star background, the Dalai Lama on your wall. What on earth do you think in Beijing they make of you?"

Freddy: "I don’t think they like me." (laughs)

FREDDY LIM: The Chinese Government just tried to push the Red Lines every time when we hold back. They just, again and again. Then, now there's no lines. There's just about, "If you do anything, then I'll kick your ass.”

BILL BIRTLES: Freddy Lim says the immediate threat comes not from Beijing’s soldiers storming up these beaches – but from Taiwan’s open, free-wheeling media.

As a member of parliament’s defence and security committee, he warns some news outlets with links to China relentlessly push a defeatist message – that reunification is inevitable.

FREDDY LIM: I worry about it very much, especially in the last two or three years that I can see those medias who got billions of dollars from China. They try to brainwash Taiwanese people and try to make good images on China, they try to avoid to people to know what happened in Tibet and Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

BILL BIRTLES: Freddy and the national security committee are even looking to Australia for help.

FREDDY LIM: The Australian government, now you have the anti-interference law, and we try to know all the other countries, how they do and try to start the conversation between Taiwan, Japan, Australia and the US – if we want to have an international mechanism together.

FOREIGN MINISTER JOSEPH WU: In the course of last year, we have seen the Chinese are also engaged in a disinformation campaign against various government institutions. To create a distrust in the government, and to create a distrust in the democratic institutions.

BILL BIRTLES: Is it working? Are you worried it's working?

FOREIGN MINISTER JOSEPH WU: We worry, because it's being deeply entrenched.

BILL BIRTLES: There’s no doubt that Beijing is waging an intense hearts and minds campaign here, where, according to the Taiwanese, the weapons are fake news and lots of mainland cash.

J. Michael Cole is a former Canadian intelligence officer who’s stepped out of the shadows, and is now a Taipei-based security analyst.

J MICHAEL COLE, Strategic analyst: It’s a huge intellectual challenge to try to connect the dots and make sense of what’s going on. Disinformation is certainly an area where the Chinese have been very active, content firms or content mills that employ individuals who generate disinformation and then that disinformation gets recycled by traditional media in Taiwan that are seen to be pro-Beijing, and then that enters the bloodstream in Taiwanese media environment and can favour certain politicians in elections, for example. Or create confusion about the current leadership in Taiwan, the state of the economy, the workability of democracy, notions of inevitability when it comes to unification, the futility of resisting Beijing.

BILL BIRTLES: And they're mass media, are they? They're popular media in Taiwan.

J MICHAEL COLE: Absolutely, yes. There's one major group that controls television, print, magazines, whose owner has been making a fortune in China. And it has been revealed that the Chinese Government has been funding one of the related companies, to the order of hundreds of millions of American dollars over the past decade or so. I don't want to name them, because they have threatened to sue people who said that they're Beijing mouthpieces.

BILL BIRTLES: But a recent UK Financial Times investigation has named them: ‘The Want Want Group’ - owners of the influential China Times and the CTi TV channel. Journalists working at the pro-Beijing outlets reportedly told the Financial Times that their editors take orders directly from the Chinese government. The Want Want group denies the allegations.

Not everyone is so worried about China’s influence. These local communists actively welcome it. It’s a big day out for what has long been a fringe element of Taiwanese politics. During the decades of martial law such overt displays of support for the People's Republic would have ended in jail or worse. Now they’re emboldened by Beijing’s increasingly muscular nationalism.

WEI MING-REN: Taiwan is an inseparable part of China. Taiwan is part of China since ancient times. Taiwanese are Chinese.

BILL BIRTLES: Today, Taiwan is a boisterous democracy, and communist leader Wei Ming-Ren sees no contradiction in exercising his freedom of speech to support a regime where such freedoms are not tolerated.

WEI MING-REN: These days the whole world often smears and slanders our Chinese Communist Party. So, fighting for freedom of speech is our party’s and our Chinese people's right”.

BILL BIRTLES: Wei Ming-Ren declares he’d be the first to support any communist troops that land here.

WEI MING-REN: Whether unify the country via peacefully or through force, we absolutely support it, and we support the Communist Party to come to unify Taiwan. Soon!

BILL BIRTLES: Political symbolism is everywhere in Taipei. The nation still pays homage to its founding father Chiang Kai-Shek, who fought the communists for decades. But the days of his hard-line rule in Taiwan are long gone. Now Beijing has to contend with the unpredictability of Taiwanese democracy – and the freedom to protest. Like this tribute to the unknown tank man from 1989s bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing. Airbrushed from China’s official history, it’s a lot for mainland tourists to take in.

Bill: "You know what that is?"

Man: "That? I just asked myself that. It’s a Chinese PLA tank, right?"

Bill: "Yes, it’s got the PLA logo."

Man: "It’s political?"

Bill: "Yes, the ’89 Tiananmen Square anniversary, but I don’t know if mainland tourists understand it."

Man: "They don’t understand it. It’s a really big question. Why put a PLA tank here? This is extremely reactionary! ‘89 was about anti-terrorism. Anti-terrorism."

BILL BIRTLES: Military tensions are escalating – but there’s a bigger campaign being waged on the economic front.

Last year, China-Taiwan trade was a staggering $150 billion US dollars. One Taiwanese company employs more than a million workers in mainland factories making mobile phones. Put simply; it would cost both sides a lot if Beijing ever went down the conflict route.

Military drills and air raid sirens can bring cities here to a halt, but for most people the threat of war with China – just doesn’t seem like a priority. It’s the hip pocket issues people talk about – the economy – but there is another part of Taiwan where people can literally see the power of China rising in front of them. And for them, the consequences of any conflict would be very real and immediate.

BILL BIRTLES: This is the view from the Taiwanese islands of Kinmen. Rising up on the mainland -- the Chinese city of Xiamen. It’s here that the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-Shek halted the march of Mao’s communists, repelling an invasion in 1949. But the communist threat loomed large for decades. The people and soldiers here, quite literally, dug in.

Drifting out from old propaganda speakers, pointed at the mainland, the soundtrack of Kinmen’s past. The soothing melodies of Taiwan’s most beloved pop star intended to both seduce and annoy the mainlanders. These days the volume’s dialled down. Nostalgia has replaced hostility. And these obsolete fortifications have been surrendered to tourism from the mainland.

It’s a little bit hazy today, but that’s China, just five kilometres away – the city of Xiamen. Millions of people. China’s influence here is growing really fast. They’ve just built a pipeline to pump fresh water from the mainland to Kinmen. Now the government in Beijing is offering to build a bridge linking the two. Taiwan’s Government – not surprisingly – has said, 'No thanks'.

As relations thawed in 2001, a local special status deal was struck, allowing citizens from both sides to cross easily here. Today, mainland day-trippers come over to stock up on duty free booze and cosmetics – although China’s now moving to curtail tourism, to put an economic squeeze on Taiwan’s government. For mainlanders there is the chance, when they are here, to wander the streets of an older, traditional China that’s fast-disappearing back home.

It’s the slower pace that’s kept tea shop owner Wang Ling in Kinmen. She’s a local, but her husband Xu Ran, is not just from China, but from its capital Beijing.

WANG LING: When I was a child, Kinmen and the Chinese mainland are so close, while I knew there were two different governments, I did not think we were different. Now I don't call myself Chinese, because I started to understand the meaning of being Chinese. I see myself as Taiwanese.

BILL BIRTLES: On the mainland, the idea that Taiwan is an inseparable part of China is taught and reinforced from a young age. But Wang Ling says politics hasn’t got in the way of their marriage.

WANG LING: Indeed, this is a very strange situation, but I think we can be together because of our personalities.

BILL BIRTLES: Xu Ran can live here, but he’s forbidden from taking Taiwanese citizenship if he ever wants to return home again.

XU RAN: My parents didn’t want me to move to Kinmen, but they respect my decision. We talk about politics but not much. I'm not interested in politics. You asked whether we have any arguments. There are none.

BILL BIRTLES: Kinmen still has a very traditional feel to it. The Lion Dance brings fortune and good luck, and people here want that to continue. But many – particularly the older generations – believe proximity to China may mean future compromise.

[to Wang Ling]: How do you feel, being in a part of Taiwan with the Chinese flag everywhere?

WANG LING: Actually, I don’t like that. I know it's some elders, he do that. And he think it symbolise peace. But I don’t think peace is that easy. The elder people think it's okay, it's not necessary, because they really don’t want a battle again.

BILL BIRTLES: So there's a generational split?

WANG LING: Yes.

PATHE NEWSREEL NARRATOR: “A cargo of newsmen is flown into the hottest spot on earth! Quemoy Island off the Chinese mainland. No sooner landed, the reporters take to the hills and relative safety."

BILL BIRTLES: In 1958, China attempted to level this place – also known as Quemoy – firing nearly half a million artillery shells in one month.

NEWSREEL NARRATOR: “This way to the bomb shelter! A much-frequented chamber for the residents of Quemoy!”

BILL BIRTLES: Failing to dislodge the Taiwanese, the Communists then shelled Kinmen – every second day – for 20 years. With Taiwan returning fire on alternate days.

[to Wang Ling]: "Look at this. Are these original shells from the sixties and seventies?”

Wang Ling: "Yes. Yes."

BILL BIRTLES: Bizarrely, many of the communist shells weren’t armed with explosives – but propaganda messages – creating a new cottage industry – making knives.

Bill: "That is so heavy!" (laughs)

Wang Ling: "Yes, it's so heavy!"

Bill: "So these are all from these have been dug up from the island?"

Wang Ling: "Yes."

BILL BIRTLES: Locals say the shelling only stopped in 1978, after the US severed diplomatic links with Taiwan and recognised the Communists as China’s legitimate government.

Wang Ling: "Cut the shell into the small piece."

Bill: "Like this."

Wang Ling: "Yeah, like this. This big. And then they will hit it…"

Bill: "Beat it into shape."

Wang Ling: "Yes, and it will become like this."

Bill: "Is it good quality?... Of course!"

BILL BIRTLES: No one seriously believes Kinmen could hold out against the might of the People’s Republic. But without firing a shot, China’s economic might – and the islands proximity to the mainland – means that Beijing has in one sense already prevailed here.

Wang Ling and many other young locals now fear the hard logic of realpolitik. That their island home is ultimately expendable – a political bargaining chip that Taiwan might one day trade in return for peace with China.

WANG LING: (Kinmen) might be given away as a bargaining chip – to compromise. I’m actually very worried about this. I have been thinking if that day came, would I stay in Kinmen? It is hard as I was born and grew up here.

BILL BIRTLES: They’ve watched Hong Kong and seen broken promises for democracy.

WANG LING: If China actually invaded Kinmen, I probably would move away. Yes, I’d move.

BILL BIRTLES: But Freddy Lim and his fans aren’t going anywhere. And each year, Chinese pressure grows, bringing the dilemma ever closer. To compromise with Beijing or risk conflict by asserting Taiwan’s independence?

FREDDY LIM: The people like me, we have no choice, we can't give up, because Taiwan is our home, we have nowhere to escape. We just have to try to protect our way of life.”