Taiwanese Identity Research Articles

Historical consciousness matters: national identity, historical thinking and the struggle for a democratic education in Taiwan

ABSTRACT While Western and established democracies are wary of teaching students about national identities and aspire to broaden the framework of history education, the Republic of China (Taiwan) is still struggling to construct a Taiwanese identity to safeguard its freedom from the Chinese historical narrative. As the divide between Taiwan and China grew, what would be Taiwan’s preservice teachers’ historical consciousness and purpose of teaching history? Thirty-three preservice history teachers from Teacher Education institutions in different areas of Taiwan were interviewed in order to determine the historical consciousness of their national identity and teaching orientation. The results showed that most preservice teachers have a Taiwanese-oriented historical consciousness, while fewer of them have a mixed or Chinese orientation. Their preferred goals, thinking skills, and contents varied according to their specific historical consciousness. However, pedagogically, most of them believed that they should remain neutral on the issue of national identity. This paper argues that preservice teachers’ historical consciousness matters and teacher educators must help to clarify and develop their ‘narrative competence’ and be aware of how it orients their teaching of history; history education should be based on developing a sound democratic society, in which memories, thinking skills, and future visions come together.

출구, 1980년대 이후 대만의 신추상미술

Placing focus on post-1980s abstract art, this study aims to investigate how abstract art has been translated and transplanted into Taiwan through China, Japan and the U.S. in different stages. In discussing the drift from group to independent abstract from the 1980s to the present, and how abstract painting has been conformed in the Chinese- speaking world, this paper argues that what came with this very art form were experimental modes under specific socio-political conditions that artists aiming to transform and to exit from their existing boundaries and realities, and utmost, questing for democracy and their Taiwanese identity.

Do Social Contacts Alter the National Identity? Evidence from a Panel Study among Taiwanese Students that Visited Mainland China

With the rise of the China Model, China’s sharp power has infringed upon the exercise of liberal democracy in other nations. A concern for governments of the Taiwan Strait and other democratic countries is whether visits to Mainland China alter the national identity of Taiwanese youth. This research conducted a panel study of 331 Taiwanese youths who had visited Mainland China. Social contact, rational choice, and political socialization theories were introduced to establish hypotheses; a questionnaire was employed to collect panel data, and statistical regression models were utilized to test the hypotheses. Following visits to Mainland China, the number of participants perceiving themselves as only Taiwanese decreased by 4.59%; those perceiving themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese increased by 3.98%, and those perceiving themselves as Chinese increased by 0.61%. According to the mean survey results, the average change to national identity was 0.05, indicating that visiting Mainland China slightly negatively influenced participants’ Taiwanese identity. Following visits to Mainland China, participants’ impression of China improved, their preference for an independent Taiwan reduced, they seemed less satisfied with Taiwan’s democratic government, and their personal sense of being Taiwanese was reduced.

International sports events and national identity: the opening ceremony of the Taipei Universiade

This article analyses the relationship between Taiwanese national identity and the opening ceremony of the 29th Summer Universiade in Taipei City under the shadow of China. This event was an opportunity for Taiwan to host an international sports event and project its national identity on the global stage. Based on Critical Discourse Analysis, this article explores how national identity was a fundamental narrative in the opening ceremony, one which showcased Taiwan as a single territory enriched by a process of historic transformation and modernization, and one with significant aboriginal roots. This article analyses how the discourse of the opening ceremony sought to establish ideas of national cohesion based on a narrow vision of identity. The article concluded that the opening ceremony, significantly influenced by the international context, was designed to showcase a unique and distinct Taiwanese identity.

Youth and Political Music in Taiwan: Resignifying the Nation at Inland Rock and Tshingsan Fest

This article uses musical events in Taiwan to examine the changing contestation of Taiwanese politics. It shows how youth activists remake political practices by connecting people to constructions of local culture through musical performances. Whereas civil society and youth participation in Taiwan's elections have attracted increased scholarly attention, this article focuses on politically charged activities outside election campaigns. The article sources politics in musical practices, highlighting localized reproductions of global genres of popular music and its significance for Taiwanese youth activism. Drawing on historical analyses of the development of Taiwanese music throughout the twentieth century as localizing global influences in the production of indigenized music, the author argues that music has been more than just a communicative medium for contesting establishment politics, because activists use it to resignify sociocultural symbols and practices in productions of Taiwanese identity. The author examines two 2016 music festivals, Inland Rock and Tshingsan Fest, to analyze active constructions of identity and political action through a framework of music as politics. It demonstrates how, by appropriating space and symbols of Nantou County and Monga district for new cultural festivities, activists reterritorialized physical and conceptual terrain to reconnect people to indigenized constructions of Taiwanese identities.

Language ideologies of the transcription systemZhuyin fuhao: a symbol of Taiwanese identity

This study argues that the transcription system Zhuyin fuhao, which has been widely used in Taiwan for the last seventy years, has been reinvented as a symbol of Taiwanese identity by the Taiwanese...

Public service broadcasting in Taiwan: cultural issues and national identity conveyed in documentaries

This article explores how the Public Television Service (PTS) of the Republic of China-Taiwan, born in 1998, has contributed to promoting the Taiwanese identity through documentaries, by conveying cultural issues in a way that could be shared by the majority of the population, independently of political opinion. Among the main cultural aspects, PTS gave particular attention to respect for other ethnic groups, ecology, traditions, and religion. The first part of the study begins with a summary of the social and political background surrounding the birth of PTS—after the first free elections of 1996—including the development of the two main political parties, their proposals about the relationship with mainland China, and how that feeling has shifted towards a more cultural dimension. The second part includes a thematic analysis (content-discourse analysis with qualitative methodology) of a selection of six awarded documentaries aired around October 2011 (and later), in the year that marked the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Republic of China, and constituted a crucial moment to relaunch the Taiwanese identity.

Home and away – Implications of short-term sojourning of young Australian bilinguals

This study investigates the transnational experiences of young Taiwanese-background children living in Australia, who sojourn to their parents’ homeland during the school holidays to improve their linguistic and cultural skills, as reported by their mothers. Although this appears to be a frequent practice in the Taiwanese diaspora, showcasing the agency of this community, little research has systematically investigated this practice, and in particular its impact on the children and their families. Data for this study were obtained through online questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with mothers who engage in this practice, to gather information on family histories and participants’ backgrounds, family language policies, and parents’ perceptions of children's experiences and challenges. The data show that parents aim to enhance their children's proficiency levels in the home language as well as their Taiwanese identity. Children, however, take an agentive role with regard to identity choices, so parents’ aims are not always fulfilled. Sojourning is presented as a clear example not only of enacted family language policy, but also as an explicit management practice, positioning the Taiwanese diaspora within both their new as well as their old homeland.

(2018) Changing Taiwanese Identities, edited by J. Bruce Jacobs and Peter Kang

(2018) Changing Taiwanese Identities, edited by J. Bruce Jacobs and Peter Kang

A Passage to China: Literature, Loyalism, and Colonial Taiwan by Chien-hsin Tsai

Reviewed by: A Passage to China: Literature, Loyalism, and Colonial Taiwan by Chien-hsin Tsai Emma J. Teng A Passage to China: Literature, Loyalism, and Colonial Taiwan by Chien-hsin Tsai. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2017. Pp. xiv + 342. $49.95 cloth. Chien-hsin Tsai's A Passage to China: Literature, Loyalism, and Colonial Taiwan plays on the dual meanings of "passage" to offer a highly original examination of the theme of loyalism and the figure of the loyalist in colonial Taiwan's literature. Focusing on authors who traveled to China, sometimes via Japan, Tsai demonstrates how they creatively deployed and adapted loyalist ideals and tropes from the Chinese literary tradition in order to work through Taiwan's abandonment by the Qing (1636–1912), the vicissitudes of Japanese colonialism, and the search for a Taiwanese identity in the modern world. Tsai argues that the tradition of loyalism cannot be interpreted as an unquestioned and [End Page 400] unchanging essential tie between Taiwan and China, but rather reveals the complications and contradictions of this historical link. Like other works in Taiwan studies, the book makes a case for "why Taiwan matters."1 It also contributes more broadly to the field of sinophone literary studies as well as to the theoretical discussion of postloyal criticism in comparative terms. The texts examined by Tsai showcase the linguistic diversity of literary production in colonial Taiwan, including works written in classical Chinese, vernacular Mandarin, Japanese, and experimental attempts to transcribe the Taiwanese (Southern Min 閩) regional speech using Chinese scripts. They furthermore span the genres of poetry, travelogue, short story, novella, novel, essay, drama, and more. The introductory chapter lays out the trajectory of the author's critical concerns "from loyalism to postloyalism" (p. 1) and establishes the importance of the figure of the loyalist (yimin 遺民) in the Chinese literary and cultural tradition. First demonstrating how the tradition of loyalism "went through another existential and cultural reconfiguration after the end of the Qing [dynasty]" (p. 34), Tsai further makes his case for why Taiwan matters, arguing that Taiwanese writers' creative reinventions of loyalist culture and identity in colonial Taiwan provide fresh insights into questions of loyalism and postloyalism. He shows how the history of Taiwan's conquest and settlement by Han Chinese, dating back to the 1661 occupation of the island by Ming (1368–1644) loyalist Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功; 1624–1662), produced a particular entanglement between yimin as loyalist and the homophonous term yimin 移民, meaning "immigrant settler." The notion of loyalism in colonial Taiwan was complicated by the legacy of Ming loyalism, as the island's Han Chinese settlers faced first the demise of Koxinga and the Qing conquest of the Chinese empire, then the Japanese colonization of Taiwan, and finally the 1911 Revolution in China, celebrated by some Taiwanese as a belated victory of the old Ming loyalists over the Manchu Qing. Linking literary history to contemporary issues, Tsai further considers the legacy of loyalism for post-1949 Taiwan, which became a bastion of anti-Communist Republican loyalism under Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 (1887–1975). [End Page 401] Chapter 1, "Qiu Fengjia and Lyric Poetry after Trauma," examines the Chinese classical-style poetry-history (shishi 詩史) of Qiu Fengjia 丘逢甲 (1864–1912), the most outstanding Taiwanese poet of his era. Qiu's life spanned the cession of Taiwan to Japan in 1895, the brief establishment of the independent Republic of Formosa (1895–1896), and the Republican Revolution of 1911 that overthrew the Qing. A descendent of Hakka 客家 immigrants from Guangdong, Qiu received a classical Chinese education in Taiwan. In 1889, he traveled to Beijing, where he sat for and passed the highest level of the civil examination. After a brief spell as an official in Beijing, Qiu became disillusioned with bureaucratic life and returned home to Taiwan. His quiet life as a teacher and poet was soon disrupted, however, by Taiwan's cession to Japan, a traumatic event captured in this brilliantly sketched scene of collective crying that opens Tsai's chapter: It was the mad year of 1895. The whole island of Taiwan, all of a sudden, displayed a key symptom of hysteria—collective crying. People burst into tears when the news report reached their ears...

News narratives as identity performance: A narrative analysis of Taiwanese and international news coverage of interracial intimacy

ABSTRACTThis study examines news coverage of an assault upon an interracial couple that happened in Taiwan in 2015. Using narrative analysis from a social identity perspective, the study notes that Taiwanese news media suppressed gender salience in their coverage of this incident to construct a favorable Taiwanese identity; nevertheless, this strategy was performed at the price of reducing the urgency to combat sexism at a societal level. International news media framed the same event as a case of both racism and sexism; however, racism was given different symbolic meanings by different media, with each international news press conceptualizing racism in a way that met its local audience’s identity needs. In addition, both Taiwanese and international news organizations employed several social identity strategies in their news coverage to negotiate desirable international relations. These findings reveal that news media function as agents of international communication in today’s age of globalization.

Finding Meaning in Time and Space: Periodisation and Taiwanese-centric History

This essay explores the practice of a Taiwanese-centric historiography that prioritises the study of peoples rather than states. It reconceptualises the manner in which Taiwan’s history has been periodised by moving away from political history to divide time according to major transformations for the main long-term populations of the island—indigenous groups and multiple waves of Chinese settlers—and their interactions with each other, the governing entities, and the island itself. It traces the differential processes through which people created and adopted Taiwanese identities. Though not a traditional state-of-the-field essay, it builds upon a body of existing scholarship and demarcates Taiwan’s history into four eras at three watershed zones: the 1650s–1670s, the 1870s–1880s, and the 1970s–1990s. It draws connections to the study of Chinese history and uses scholarship on United States history for insights into the incorporation of indigenous and minority groups into a single narrative of the past.

Cleavage structure and the demise of a dominant party: The role of national identity in the fall of the KMT in Taiwan

The KMT’s electoral defeat in 2016 was not a case of a dominant party crashing to defeat due to mismanaging its factions or ineptly allocating state resources. This article illustrates a third path by which dominant parties can lose power. The KMT lost because the underlying cleavage structure slowly shifted and eroded the KMT’s political foundations over a quarter century. Indeed, the KMT had ceased to be a dominant party long before 2016; that election was merely a particularly dramatic step in what was actually a long decline. Taiwan has a single dominant political cleavage defined by national identity. Since the early 1990s, exclusive Taiwanese identity has gradually increased and eventually replaced both Taiwanese and Chinese identity as the majority disposition. As the cleavage line gradually shifted, the KMT tried to develop other appeals, but these were only successful as long as they did not directly clash with the dominant national identity cleavage.

National identity under economic integration

This study empirically investigates how economic integration influences individuals’ national identity. Due to historical reasons and unique cross-strait politics, some people in Taiwan identify themselves as Chinese while others identify themselves as Taiwanese. Using individual survey data with the outward investment data at the industry level from 1992 to 2009, we find that the rising investment in China has strengthened Taiwanese identity and has reduced the probability of voting for the Pan-Blue parties. The effects are much stronger for unskilled workers than for skilled workers, suggesting that outward investment in China may not only have economic impact on the economy but may also deepen the political polarization in Taiwan.

J. Bruce Jacobs and Peter Kang, eds., Changing Taiwanese Identities

J. Bruce Jacobs and Peter Kang, eds., Changing Taiwanese Identities

Bifurcated homeland and diaspora politics in China and Taiwan towards the Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACTThe conventional literature on diaspora politics tends to focus on one ‘homeland’ state and its relations with ‘sojourning’ diaspora around the world. This paper examines an instance of ‘bifurcated homeland:’ the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan) since 1949. The paper investigates the changing dynamics of China's and Taiwan's diaspora policies towards Overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia throughout the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. They were affected by their ideological competition, the rise of Chinese nationalism, and the ‘indigenisation’ of Taiwanese identity. Illustrating such changes through the case of the KMT Yunnanese communities in Northern Thailand, this paper makes two interrelated arguments. First, we should understand relations through the lens of interactive dynamics between international system-level changes and domestic political transformations. Depending on different normative underpinnings of the international system, the foundations of regime legitimacy have changed. Subsequently, the nature of relations between the diaspora and the homeland(s) transformed from one that emphasises ideological differences during the Cold War, to one infused with nationalist authenticity in the post-Cold War period. Second, the bifurcated nature of the two homelands also created mutual influences on their diaspora policies during periods of intense competition.

Building Taiwanese history and memory from below: The role of social movements

Social movements use memories not only to inspire and mobilize movements but also to struggle for justice. Using memory tools, Taiwanese social movements have challenged official interpretations of history, pluralized subjects worth having their own history and democratized the process of demanding that certain memories should be preserved. They have used memory to fight for social justice and for Taiwanese traditions against modernization and globalization. Social movements have used various memory tool kits, depending on their causes, understandings of Taiwanese identity, current social struggles and access to the political process. Different memory tool kits have led social movements to interpret differently which injustices matter and which gaps in hegemonic narratives deserve their attention.

The impact of tourism across the Taiwan Strait on the Taiwanese identity

Nowadays, the search for identity in Taiwan has been more significant today compared to the past because political parties have been attempting to use Taiwanese identity to impact the political loyalty, the democratization as well as language. Based on current situation of tourism cross-Straits, this paper respectively analyzes its economic value, political value as well as cultural value on Taiwanese identity. This paper finds that due to a series of strategies adopted by Tsai’ government, tourism does not make a big difference in Taiwan’s economy, hence, the interdependence of tourism does not remarkably diminish Taiwanese identity from the perspective of economic value. Furthermore, according to the current perceptions of Taiwanese to Mainland tourists, tourism across Taiwan Strait makes slight influence on Taiwanese identity. Consequently, the current effect of using tourism as an economic lever to encourage political unification is extremely rough and tenuous. Besides, to some extent, currently tourism is likely to produce greater social and cultural alienation among Taiwanese, which makes a contribution to boost Taiwanese identity. However, the result can be reverse with the current improvement of education and the quality of Chinese and admiration of China’s remarkable development.

All under heaven KANO: The politics of nostalgia and the making of a new Taiwanese identity in Wei Te-sheng’s Taiwan-Japan trilogy

Abstract This article explores the highly contested topic of nostalgia for the Japanese colonial period in contemporary Taiwanese popular culture and the ways in which colonial nostalgia participates in contemporary identity politics in Taiwan. By analysing three of Wei Desheng’s recent movies that engage in different ways with aspects of the colonial past, this article illustrates how the creative use of nostalgia helps to challenge certain cultural and political narratives that have hitherto dominated discourses of identity in Taiwan. Focusing in particular on Wei’s baseball period-drama KANO, this study shows that nostalgia in Taiwanese cinema is not a singular trope whereby the bygone colonial era is uncritically eulogized, but a complex cultural practice through which issues such as Taiwan’s position in a globalizing economy, a new emphasis on diversity and multi-culturalism, and finally contemporary politics vis-à-vis mainland China are negotiated. The colonial past, far from being a stable, monolithic historical memory, thus constitutes a constantly shifting discursive space in which questions of national identity can be addressed from a number of angles.

Linking parental socialization about discrimination to intergroup attitudes: The role of social dominance orientation and cultural identification.

This study investigated the interaction of parental socialization about discrimination and social dominance orientation (SDO) in predicting the cultural identity and intergroup attitudes of the Minnanese, an ethnic group in Taiwan that faced systematic discrimination during the early decades of Chinese Nationalist rule. Because high SDO individuals tend to support group-based dominance, we hypothesized that under high preparation for bias, which may reinforce narratives that place the historically disadvantaged Taiwanese in a subordinate position, Minnanese high in SDO would identify less with Taiwanese and more with Chinese (the historically high-status outgroup) compared with their low SDO counterparts. We examined our hypotheses using a sample of Minnanese (N = 365; 183 women, 182 men; average age = 44.35) who participated in a nationally representative survey of Taiwanese adults. As predicted, among Minnanese exposed to high levels of preparation for bias, those with high SDO expressed greater levels of Chinese identification and more favorable attitudes toward Chinese than their low SDO counterparts (no difference was found in attitudes toward Taiwanese). Among Minnanese exposed to low levels of preparation for bias, SDO predicted neither Chinese nor Taiwanese identity. Moreover, the interaction effect of preparation for bias and SDO on attitudes toward Chinese was mediated by Chinese identity. Using a unique, non-Western sample, this study demonstrated the role that parental socialization about past discrimination, in combination with belief in group-based dominance, plays in the construction of group identity and intergroup attitudes among members of historically disadvantaged ethnic groups. (PsycINFO Database Record