The Emergence of the Concept of "Ethnic Group" in Taiwan and the Role of Taiwan's Austronesians in the Construction of Taiwanese Identity

Abstract

On March 12, 1996, newly elected Taipei city mayor Chen Shuibian announced that street front of president's palace Taipei – Long live Chiang Kai-shek Road – had been renamed to Avenue. The Ketagalan were one of Aboriginal Taiwan that had assimilated to Han society long before.In his reflections on structures of collective memory, Jan Assmann contends that after a period of 40 years memory of a generation of people with shared experiences comes to a critical stage. After this period those who were witnesses of significant events as adults, gradually step out of professional life. When they die, their memory – or better, social frame which their memory was organized – vanishes, and certain aspects that have not been transformed into memory yet may fall into – or may be left to – oblivion.If we look at Taiwan, Han elites have showed tremendous efforts to reconstruct collective memory since end of 1980s – exactly those years when Mainlander elites' memory had begun to wither away and other memories had chance to take over. The notion of fate – a concept that was established by Taiwan's opposition party 1989 – as well as notion of life put forward by central figure of Nationalist Party (KMT) elites, Li Denghui, shortly afterwards – converged into a long-term community renaissance policy after 1992, which in a time of national identity crisis Taiwan had main purpose to refocus people's identity on Taiwan and let people's original collective memory reorganize and reappear. In this project, all communities Taiwan – ethnic, rural and urban communities, most of which were either Hoklo, Hakka or Aboriginal – were asked to participate actively local life, to organize rites and festivals, and to engage preservation of local culture and collection of oral history.My article explores role of Taiwan's Aborigines this process of memory reconstruction Taiwan since lifting of martial law. The emergence of notion of group Taiwan and construction of the four great ethnic groups were important steps this endeavour. By shifting focus away from Chinese nation to distinct cultural and groups, framework which people had forcibly organized their memory for forty years was broken up and newly arranged; though framework was not clearly articulated yet, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as well as KMT politicians conjured up ethnic integration of people Taiwan, which would finally crystallize into either a new arising nation or into a new Taiwanese nation. In this process, Taiwan's Austronesians fulfilled an important role political and historical as well as terms: not only could Taiwan's history now be backdated to a history of eight to ten thousand years, even longer than that of mainland, but Taiwan's Austronesian heritage also served as a proof that Taiwan – and genetic terms – had its own particularity and was much more connected to Pacific region than to any region to west of Taiwan.