Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan

Naming China

Hui-Ching Chang, Richard Holt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135046347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Following the move by Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Party Kuomingtang (KMT) to Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1940s, and Chiang's subsequent lifelong vow to reclaim the mainland, "China " has occupied—if not monopolized—the gaze of Taiwan, where its projected images are reflected. Whether mirror image, shadow, or ideal contrast, China has been, and will continue to be, a key reference point in Taiwan's convoluted effort to find its identity.

Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan traces the intertwined paths of five sets of names Taiwan has used to name China since the KMT came to Taiwan in 1949: the derogatory "Communist bandits"; the ideologically focused "Chinese Communists"; the seemingly neutral geographical designators "mainland" and "opposite shore/both shores"; and the ethnic and national label "China, " with the official designation, "People's Republic of China." In doing so, it explores how Taiwanese identities are constituted and reconstituted in the shifting and switching of names for China; in the application of these names to alternative domains of Taiwanese life; in the waning or waxing of names following tides of history and polity; and in the increasingly contested meaning of names. Through textual analyses of historical archives and other mediated texts and artifacts, the chapters chart Taiwan's identity negotiation over the past half century and critically evaluate key interconnections between language and politics.

This unique book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Taiwan studies, Chinese politics, communication studies and linguistics.

1 Naming China—political art as challenges

In 2001, a Taiwan reporter covering a meeting of the organization Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Shanghai called the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “Chinese Communists” (zhonggong, 中共). Agitated, foreign minister Tang Jiaxuan¹ remonstrated:

We are in the big Shanghai of the People’s Republic of China, and yet you keep calling us “zhonggong, zhonggong.” Such a term of address I have heard before, but now it has become a historical term and yet it still comes from the mouths of you Taiwanese reporters.²

This eruption reflects contentious relations between Taiwan and China, sparked by Taiwan’s exclusion from that meeting for the first time since 1993. The next day at a press conference, president Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) purposefully and repeatedly called China “PRC” (zhonghuarenmingongheguo, 中華人民共和國), a taboo term never previously uttered by presidents of Taiwan to designate China.

“Chinese Communists” and “PRC,” along with “Communist bandits” (gongfei, 共匪), “the mainland” (dalu, 大陸), “opposite shore/both shores” (duian, 對岸/liangan, 兩岸³), and “China” (zhongguo, 中國), comprise the five sets of names for China that Taiwan has used interchangeably, each traversing a unique trajectory and set of meanings. Following the move by Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Party Kuomintang (KMT) to Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1940s, and his subsequent lifelong vow to reclaim the mainland, “China”⁴ has occupied—if not monopolized—the gaze of Taiwan, where its projected images are reflected. Whether mirror image, shadow, or ideal contrast, China has been, and will continue to be, a key reference point in Taiwan’s convoluted effort to find its identity.

At times the relations between the two appear a tangled mess; at times a cordial partnership; and at times open enmity (amid other configurations) stitched irregularly on cultural, economic, political and other fronts. Like many states, Taiwan relies on language in the public sphere, using symbolic means to secure, establish and demarcate political reality. With its power disadvantage, Taiwan has had to conscientiously marshal into service linguistic resources, with names for China serving as powerful tools.

To repudiate the CCP’s legitimacy and bolster the image of the Republic of China (ROC) as true heir to the grandeur of Chinese cultures, in 1947 Taiwan was mobilized into joining the anti-Communist crusade by formal designating the CCP “Communist bandits” (gongfei), a name that persisted until officially banned in 1987. Two other names, zhonggong and dalu, were made official—along with extended adjectival phrases—only after Temporary Provisions during the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion (hereafter, Temporary Provisions—also known as “Temporary Decree”) ended in 1991, four years after cessation of martial law concluded the “bandit rebellion” era. After the Nationalists abandoned the idea of using Taiwan as a “recovering base,” yet still portraying conflicts with China as “domestic” struggles, the ideologically focused “Chinese Communists” (zhonggong), often used as surrogate and supplement, in 1991 was made the official name (replacing gongfei) by the new Mainland Affairs Council (MAC).⁵

The seemingly neutral geographic name, “mainland” (dalu), a flexible name that can refer to people, land, or both, has transmuted, from a blood-connected, nostalgically imagined land eclipsing Taiwan, to a more geographically defined marketplace that for some time remained largely unexperienced. Following policies opening doors between China and Taiwan in the late 1980s, other geographic names such as “opposite shore/both shores” (duian/liangan) emerged and competed for predominance. While suggesting partnership, these names imply opposition toward China, breaking out of the “one China” policy and suggesting “two.”

Ironically, perhaps the most provocative name is the ethnic and national label “China” (zhongguo), which changed from referring to both Taiwan and China (presumably held by the ROC) to, following rising Taiwanese consciousness, exclusively China. As Taiwan hovers between Taiwanization and Sinicization, “China” continues to bedevil people in Taiwan in terms of the semantic distance between “Taiwan” and “China.” No matter which name denotes China, its official title, People’s Republic of China, was never uttered on official sites, as the ROC denied its statehood until after 2000, when the locally-based DPP won the presidency and made naming China “China” or the “PRC” official policy, underscoring Taiwan’s status as independent.

Nevertheless, “PRC” again disappeared from official discourse when the KMT returned to power in 2008. On February 7, 2011, president Ma Ying-jeou said at a government social function that, based on the principle “one China, each side having its own interpretation,” Taiwan should not name China, “China,” but call it “mainland” or “opposite side” (“Ma Wants a Return,” 2011).

Taiwan’s use of other-focused, yet self-referential, names is both unique and emblematic of similar situations in other nations. Nonetheless, Taiwan’s task is in some ways, and as something of a hybrid endeavor, more complex: it must name a distant locale its constitution claims, but does not own; it must name an opponent who is not entirely an opponent, since it shares connections of culture, ethnicity and economic interests; and it must disentangle distinctions between land and people, while managing the push-and-pull in response to international politics. Other and self are bound in competitive/cooperative engagement, as they become each other’s reference point in realizing Taiwan’s identity.

Having evolved through idiosyncratic contexts and multiple layers, these names—or identity categories—prove especially powerful in realizing Taiwan’s “identity project” through the infusion of symbols into shared collective memory (Laitin, 1998, p. 264). Taiwanese identities are constituted and reconstituted in the shifting and switching of names for China; in the application of these names to alternative domains of Taiwanese life; in the waning or waxing of names following tides of history and polity; and in the increasingly contested meaning of names. Examining how names fashioning China’s image are enacted and transformed throughout Taiwan’s history, we explore recursively its reflected self-appraisals.

All about names

Names as political metaphor

Scholars have explored naming practices from multiple perspectives, such as history; linguistics; discourse and culture; rhetoric; and geography. They have examined naming locations to proclaim ownership and promote ideology (Azaryahu, 1997; Horsman, 2006; Lefebvre, 1991) and naming states (Coakley, 2009; Galasinski and Skowronek, 2001), ethnic groups (Alcoff, 2005), and opponents (Bhatia, 2005).

To appreciate how names and politics are intertwined one can take a metaphorical perspective, seeing names as symbolic devices that provide conceptual casing summarizing complex sociohistorical circumstances (Edelman, 1971; Miller, 1979). An assigned name aggregates “a series of normative associations, motives and characteristics … attached to the named subject” (Bhatia, 2005, p. 8). Each name carries a story, or stories, suggesting metaphorical links with behaviors and unfolding events, giving full expression to metaphors (Nevins, 2008). As names change with history, so do perceptions and the construction of political reality (Edelman, 1971; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Miller, 1979).

Conflicts about names confront nation-states, existing in, and shaping, history. Names compel patterns and construct political reality (Edelman, 1988; Miller, 1979), since “the very selection of a term … puts invisible boundaries for human perception and suggests attitudes for its evaluation” (Kiewe, 1998, p. 81). Name changes reshuffle power, altering ideological and political configurations, as names are assigned and appropriated in political agendas, mobilizing action while being resisted, disputed and contested (Bakhtin, 1986; Bhatia, 2005). Given the potency of names, Bhatia claims, “a site, a territory or people are first colonised by words and names before being physically occupied by soldiers, trading companies, and statesmen” (2005, pp. 13–14).

Names as discursive sites of struggle

Yet names are more than conceptual frames or political tools; their use is based in specific times and places and merged with disputing voices into vibrant language. They are symbolic devices helping construct meanings of named objects through interplay among basic and alternative definitions. Each name drives and is sustained by narratives through “collective remembering” (Wertsch, 2002) and actions propelled in this way deal with complex, varied political/cultural entities famously named “imagined communities” (Anderson, 1983).

Bakhtin (1986) said that language enters life through utterances, and life enters language the same way (p. 63). “[N]ames always invoke specific genealogical or legitimizing narratives, but they are limited by the need to connect with at least some aspects of lived experience” (Alcoff, 2005, p. 400). Cast into discourse, names automatically enter the lists, struggling for supremacy and survival; naming practices register ideological conflict, legitimize relations, and sustain power differentials (Fairclough, 1989).

Names, in charged arenas of conflicting interpretation, become targets for countless participants, each with unique perspectives, interests, and power (Bakhtin, 1986; Holt, 2004). Laitin’s (1998) “identity project” and “identity category” provide frameworks to analyze how naming opponents fashions identity. Examining names as identity categories, managed by stakeholders to maintain a consequential identity project, implies a host of important considerations: who proposed the name/category; which supporters advocate it; who capitalizes on or benefits from it; how do stakeholders promote names differently and for what diverse purposes; how do names/categories define relationships between states and people; what resources make them effective; how do different players use these names to suit their political agendas; when other identity categories become available, whether one category attempts, competitively, to replace another, or serves as an addition to multiply the range of interpretations; what resources enable switches in identity categories and under what circumstances; and what makes an identity category a good candidate and bestows its potential.

To understand identity projects is to know that they signify active processes involving power struggles among assorted players. A given identity label—or name—is always “in process.” Even if supported by governmental authority, propagation of specific identity categories cannot be pinned down to individuals, but is shared and endorsed—through multiple channels, means and the application of resources—by all involved with and participating in their construction. Any name said to be a potential identity label is continuously being shaped. Recursively reflected self-appraisals of states are pertinent not only to political authorities but also to their people, as is the seemingly inconsequential act of using names in various domains, allowing identity categories to spread and take hold, and even result in them becoming dominant metaphors.

Regardless of who the major stakeholders are, maintaining these categories takes hard work. If they are not to be empty labels, categories must be realized through rich interpretations with associations and stories to augment their meanings. Stories about identity categories must, in Laitin’s (1998) words, cascade into various discursive sites, whether political, cultural, educational, or others, to ensure the label functions effectively. This process occurs in different venues—official speeches, campaigns, written documents, and others—arising from sociopolitical circumstances. This facilitates the power of labels, sustained in use and re-use, and narratives that vivify them. Moreover, imbued with specific interpretations, identity categories can extend beyond their original meanings and connect to other elements of discursive domains.

While governments use identity categories as backdrops against which to interpret states’ views of themselves, the chorus of alternative voices never sings in harmony. At times there are eruptions disputing identity labels and the support of, or dispute over, specific labels changes with variations in sociohistorical circumstance. Even if contestants are too weak to reject categories, they may fashion paradoxical commentaries or contradictory statements to weaken their power while appearing to support them. Similarly, identity categories can become hidden, dormant, out of style, or even vanish. Just as they gain power through implementation and use, they lose power through the actions of numerous stakeholders—identity brokers, and even contestants—who work hand in hand to reduce their effectiveness.

Taiwan’s problem of how to name China is not merely a rhetorical exigency (Bitzer, 1968) engendered by events and situations, but a series of episodes recounting the struggle over the definition of other and self. Imagined communities (Anderson, 1983) enacted through names are realized recursively, as people in Taiwan negotiate their identities through how they view China. Moreover,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Naming China—political art as challenges
• 2 Communist bandits (gongfei, 共匪)—the evil enemy
• 3 Chinese Communists (zhonggong, 中共)—the ideological identifier
• 4 The mainland (dalu, 大陸)—the nostalgic never-land
• 5 The opposite shore (duian, 對岸) and both shores (liangan, 兩岸)—the separated partner
• 6 China (zhongguo, 中國) and the PRC (zhonghuarenmingongheguo, 中華人民共和國)—“us” or “them”?
• 7 Further thoughts
• Appendix A: Key events in naming China
• Appendix B: Transliteration of key Chinese terms
• Bibliography
• Index