Creating and re-creating the nation of Taiwan: representations of the history of the Japanese colonial era in history textbooks and teachers’ discourses

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study argues the state power and social efforts shaped and reshaped the contour of the ‘imagined community’ of post-war Taiwan from mainland China to the island with a focus on how the history of Japanese rule has been represented. By conducting a content analysis of officially published junior high school history textbooks (1949–2015) and interviewing history teachers, this study discusses how they present national past. The transformative presentation of the ‘Japanese era in Taiwan’ suggested the self-reinventing of the statehood of the Republic of China; the bottom-up forces even went beyond the demands of the state and facilitated nation-building.