Taiwanese Identity in the 21st Century

Domestic, Regional and Global Perspectives

Gunter Schubert, Jens Damm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136701269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

As we look to enter the second decade of the 21st century, Taiwan's quest for identity remains the most contentious issue in the domestic arena of Taiwanese politics. From here, it spills over into the cross-Strait relationship and impacts on regional and global security. Whether Taiwan is a nation state or whether Taiwan has any claim to be a nation-state and how Taiwan should relate to "China" are issues which have long been hotly debated on the island, although it seems that much of this debate is now more focused on finding an adequate strategy to deal with the Beijing government than on the legitimacy of Taiwan's claim to sovereignty as the Republic of China.

The collection of chapters in this book shed light on very different aspects of Taiwan's current state of identity formation from historical, political, social and economic perspectives, both domestically, and globally. As such it will be invaluable reading for students and scholars of Taiwan studies, politics, history and society, as well as those interested in cross-Strait relations, Chinese politics, and Chinese international relations.

Part I

Domestic Perspectives

1 Legacies of Memory and Belonging in Taiwan History

Ann Heylen

Writings about memory tend to emphasize the many ways shared memories are tied to places (lieux de mémoire) (Nora 1989). In the article “Forgetful Remembering,” Johannes Fabian nuances the positive value ascribed to memory and remembering, and remarks that there are more studies in which “remembering clearly was critical, contestatory and at times subversive” (Fabian 2003: 490). History writing, by its very nature, makes use of contrasting representations of memories to suppress and memories to celebrate. As Gallerano puts it,

the political function of historiography is to regulate memory and oblivion in order to shape the characteristics and the collective identity of a community and to distinguish it from others; and to construct, thanks to the past, a project and a prophesy for the future.

(Gallerano 1995: 90)

In Taiwan, the project of recovering historical memory cannot be separated from the broader context of politics. Democratization since the late 1980s has gone hand in hand with the active promotion of the creation of a Taiwanese identity by stressing cultural heritage and historical tradition. In seeking to forge a national cultural identity, the Chen administration (2000–2008) emphasized a discourse of Taiwanese pluralism in which citizens of Han Chinese and indigenous descent are colorfully marked, and which is no longer defined in terms of a nationalist Chinese uniformity. The change in political leadership after the March 2008 elections is not likely to be able to turn back the clock, in spite of the new administration’s pro-China rhetoric. Rather, the Ma administration will probably be compelled to appropriate precisely those issues in the Taiwanese collective memory which lend themselves to being interpreted as part of the Greater China inclusive discourse.

The purpose of this article is to elucidate some of the dynamics involved in the definition of ROC citizenship in Taiwan’s so-called post-national constellation. The key question asked is somewhat psychological in nature. I intend to engage with notions of citizenship that extend beyond a “simple totting up of rights and duties,” to include the idea that “to be a citizen, one not only has to formally belong somewhere; one has also to feel that this belonging is real” (Frosh 2001: 62). This feeling of belonging often goes with a certain kind of imagery, which is crucial to finding and molding one’s relationship with culture and community. Generally speaking, in their cultural planning, state agencies create the social environment that generates this feeling of belonging. This also makes it a driving force in identity politics and memory construction and accounts for the distinctions between perceptions of cultural and national citizenship (Rosaldo 2003). I intend to disclose some dynamics that seek explanations for situations where remembering is sometimes invoked and forgetting is sometimes imposed. Special reference will be made to modes of nostalgic interpretation and forms of remembrance that underlie historiography and the encounter with one’s “other” in society. Svetlana Boym’s (2001) work on restorative and reflective nostalgia will be addressed in the first part, and serves as the interpretation in the transition from a sino-centric to a Taiwan-centric approach to history writing. As will be demonstrated, the bifurcation of the Japanese memory and the arrival of the Mainlander community created conditions both favorable and unfavorable to Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of mémoire exemplaire (“exemplary memory”) (Todorov 2004).

Realities of Rootlessness, Dislocation and Disorientation

One of the major shifts of the twentieth century which was central to bringing out contrasting notions of memory and forgetting was the end of World War II, the end of imperialism and the beginning of the Cold War. Independence, liberation and the ensuing processes of decolonization turned old friends into new enemies and vice versa. The regime changes in themselves had profound impacts on their populations. Pursuing a national project came to be seen as a way of resolving problems of identity and community in the postcolonial situation of globalizing social relations.

In 1945, Taiwan changed from being a Japanese colony to a Chinese province. The Japanese surrender restored Taiwan as a province of the Republic of China (ROC), under the leadership of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (1887– 1975), head of the Kuomintang (KMT). Taiwan makes an interesting case study because the regime change coincided with another migrant minority group taking power over the large majority of native inhabitants, and imposing their culture, language and customs (Huang and Lai 2001: 8). How can we describe the representation of the “other” in this new identity trajectory? The rootlessness, dislocation and disorientation that befell both Han ethnicities colored their experience of the Taiwanese/Chinese “otherness.” Coming to Taiwan, the Mainlander émigrés stepped into the history of a place without its people whilst the ethnic Taiwanese felt themselves to be once more a people without a history in the new socio-political setting. Both these Chinese communities were metonymically “out-of-place,” so to speak. Where the ideal was to achieve fusion between citizenship and nationality, in reality, identity and ethnicity were not synonymous with equality. Expectations that the new Chinese rulers would create a more equitable society, in which ethnic identity would not be a barrier to social advancement as it had been under Japanese colonial rule, were short-lived. The KMT one-party government viewed Taiwan as an asset in the Chinese Civil War. Local frustrations exploded in an island-wide uprising on 28 February 1947 (known as the 228-Incident). The ensuing White Terror campaigns during the 1950s and 1960s gave voice to Taiwan’s Cold War experience. Modernization in the name of fighting communism implied wrongdoings legitimized in the name of “national interests” and “national security.”

By and large, the ethnic Taiwanese collectivity resorted to its (pre)colonial social networks and embedded kinship ties from which the Mainlander refugee collectivity was excluded. At the same time, a division of labor was created in which Mainlanders were disproportionately represented in government service and in managerial positions in the island’s large industries, most of which were owned by the government (Rigger 2002: 367). But not all Mainlanders enjoyed the privileges of the happy few in the KMT government. The majority were impoverished soldiers, people who had fled their country, especially after 1949, with no hope of return (Huang 2003). Rather than working towards a sense of shared victimhood, rule under martial law (1947–87) silenced and closed down the ability of ethnic Taiwanese and Mainlanders to imagine themselves into the position of the other. Not surprisingly, this created a culture of psychosis, instilling fear and producing an “us versus them” mentality, an “imagined community based on exclusion more than affection, a union of those who are not with us, but against us” (Boym 2001: 43).

In brief, the politics of ethnification and practices of cultural stigmatization curtailed attempts to create an ethos of rapprochement between both “wounded” ethnicities. They also undercut the nationalist expectation that all citizens enthusiastically involve themselves in the task of nation-building, irrespective of their socio-economic background. This nationalist expectation is of immediate relevance: in itself, it invoked a Chinese master identity, of which the national imagery equaled the disavowal of a legitimate contradiction and alternative ways of being, especially those that were reminiscent of the imperial Japan and Chinese communist imaginaries.

Selecting the Past in Roc State-Building

The strategic call to tradition and culture in post-war Taiwan has been interpreted as a specific response to the threat of communism posed by China (Chun 1994: 53). The Republic presented itself as the inheritor of a vast, continental Chinese tradition with its origins in the “birthplace of four thousand years of recorded Chinese history,” that is, the zhongyuan, or central plains – an area that could, in fact, only ever be imagined by much of the KMT leadership, and indeed by virtually all of Taiwan’s populace (Taylor 2003: 18). “Tradition as hegemony,” the phrase used by Allen Chun (1994: 55), could be no better illustrated than by the fact that the KMT government was in possession of all the Chinese relics and antiquities which they were able to have shipped to Taiwan in the years immediately following retrocession.¹

Within a relatively short time, a visible and colorful national cultural identity was to emerge that was meant to unify all members of society. The notion of “belonging” was presented as an imagined belonging to the ancestral homeland (zuguo), that is, China. The adoption of Mandarin Chinese as the “national language” (guoyu) was intended to create homogeneity. The state insisted that all public education was to be conducted in this new official language medium and did not offer public services in other languages. Other distinctive markers of Chinese cultural identity that encouraged identification with the nation were an essentialized set of values, emphasizing Confucian civilization. The government invested in the promotion of “national” arts and crafts, encouraged the publication of Chinese literary magazines, set up competitions and literary awards and worked hard on museums and cultural exhibitions, making every effort to create national cohesion.

National historiography returned to unmistakably Chinese forms for its representations of the past. The KMT state-sanctioned narratives of Taiwan’s political history and post-war modernization were to be written according to the rhetoric of Chinese nationalist thought, fitting Taiwan into the “one China,” as an inalienable part of Chinese culture, geography, history and its Confucian canon. There is a special meaning accruing to the accumulation of antiquities and the strong rhetoric of Chinese history as civilization. Without any doubt, the emphasis on traditional values and the preservation of antiquity played a role in legitimizing the KMT’s competition for China’s national territory which was being claimed by the two different states (ROC and PRC) as of 1949. The KMT government invoked itself as the gatekeeper of Chinese civilization, the original past image of which had to be kept eternally young through relics and artifacts. At a social level, the preference for antiquity and the emphasis on traditional values was not only about having to “re-educate” the ethnic Taiwanese and deliver them from their “Japanese enslavement,” but also had the aim of re-establishing social cohesion and a sense of security among the Mainlander communities to guarantee their obedient relationship to KMT authority. The mythification of Chinese civilization extended instant gratification to the Taiwanese population by offering a respectable national past and a promising future.

Yet, paradoxically, the imperial aspirations of KMT rule and its centralist and eschatological approach to history writing generated the cultural resources needed to challenge the repertoire and tell the story of Taiwan otherwise. Here I would like to refer to Itamar Even-Zohar’s discussion of cultural resistance in cases where cultural planning appears to have coincided with the interests of the targeted group, and/or a seemingly common cause has been served. In such cases, “the self-image of the concerned entity, and the ensuing official history written by the advocators of endeavour, do not recognize any such prospective unwillingness” (Even-Zohar 2002: 49). Hence, little attention was paid to the fact that the nationalist Chinese imagery might create a sense of distance and de-familiarization for the Taiwanese localities, and Taiwanese cultural resistance persisted. This resulted in the overturning of the China-centered repertoire and in an effort being made to rewrite history in a way that emphasized the centrality of the home-repertoire in a national identification with Taiwan, and not China. This is often referred to as the transition from a sino-centric to a Taiwan-centric interpretation of Taiwan’s history, featuring the story of an island people with its autonomous history, in which there appears little room for the grandeur of China’s antiquity. Significantly, the Japanese colonial experience proved to be a powerful driving force.

The Presence of the Japanese Memory

How can we describe the processes predisposed towards a Taiwan-centric historiography? Chang Lung-chih explains very clearly the different steps that enabled “the rise of a nativistic Taiwan study” against the background of the political democratization and social movements in the 1980s (Chang 2008). Chang refers to the historical source collections and digitalization projects as part of the infrastructure-building of the Taiwan-centered history: the translation of Dutch East India Company records; the digitalization of Qing palace memorials and local gazetteers; the opening of Japanese Taiwan Government-General archives; and the official reports and oral histories of the 228-Incident (Chang 2008: 143). Concurrent with all these actions was an island-wide effort at institution-building, an example of which was the setting up of the Institute of Taiwan History (ITH) in 1993 that became a full-fledged institute in July 2004 (Chang 2008: 144). Finally, probing new research horizons furthered the necessary field-building. For example, the research topics of the Institute of Taiwan History range from Plains Aborigines in the Qing dynasty to nineteenth-century Western travelers, from Spaniards in seventeenth-century northern Taiwan to Taiwanese in war-time Southeast Asia, from colonial medicine to environmental policy, from women’s education to peasant movements, and from land ownership reforms to the introduction of modern political rights in Taiwan (Chang 2008: 144). The freedom of the press, after martial law was lifted in 1987, helped to foster a boom in amateur historians publicizing their visions. Bringing the recent past to life, absorbing its experience, and canonizing its memory, turned into a nationalist agenda for power in its own right (Heylen 2001). One of the reasons for this enhanced focus on the Japanese experience was that this memory was unique to the Taiwanese population and widespread amongst the people; hence it was still recent enough to be documented and preserved fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Domestic Perspectives
• Part II Regional and Global Perspectives
• Index