Taiwanese people

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Taiwanese people
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The term "Taiwanese people"

Fujian Province (see Taiwan Area). However, the inhabitants of Kinmen and the Matsu Islands themselves may not consider the "Taiwanese" label to be accurate as they are a part of Fujian and not Taiwan. They have a distinctive identity from that of the Taiwanese; viewing themselves as Kinmenese or Matsunese, respectively, or as simply Chinese.[11][12]

At least three competing (occasionally overlapping) paradigms are used to identify someone as a Taiwanese person: nationalist criteria, self-identification (including the concept of "New Taiwanese [zh]") criteria and socio-cultural criteria. These standards are fluid and result from evolving social and political issues. The complexity resulting from competing and evolving standards is compounded by a larger dispute regarding Taiwan's identity, the political status of Taiwan and its potential de jure Taiwan independence or Cross-Strait Unification.

According to government figures, over 95% of Taiwan's population of 23.4 million consists of Han Taiwanese, while 2.3% are Austronesian Taiwanese indigenous peoples. The Han are often divided into three subgroups: the Hoklo, the Hakka, and waishengren (or "mainlanders").[13][14] Although the concept of the "four great ethnic groups" was alleged to be the deliberate attempt by the Hoklo-dominated Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to defuse ethnic tensions, this concept has become a dominant frame of reference for dealing with Taiwanese ethnic and national issues.[15]

Despite the wide use of the "four great ethnic groups" in public discourse as essentialized identities, the relationships between the peoples of Taiwan have been in a constant state of convergence and negotiation for centuries. According to Harrel and Huang, the distinction between non-aboriginal Taiwanese groups are "no longer definitive in cultural terms".[16]

Definitions of Taiwanese

The word "Taiwanese people" has multiple meanings and can refer to one of the following:

The history of Taiwanese identity

The earliest notion of a Taiwanese group identity emerged in the form of a national identity following the Qing dynasty's ceding of Taiwan to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895 (Morris 2002:3–6). Prior to Japanese rule, residents of Taiwan developed relationships based on class solidarity and social connections rather than ethnic identity. Although Han often cheated Aborigines, they also married and supported one another against other residents of the same ethnic background.{source needed} Taiwan was the site of frequent feuding based on ethnicity, lineage and place of origin (Lamley 1981; Lamley 1990:79; Shepherd 1993:310–323).

Japanese era

Taiwanese in the Japanese colonial era

In the face of the Japanese colonial hierarchy, the people of Taiwan were faced with the unequal binary relationship between colonizer/colonized. This duality between "one" and "other" was evident in the seven years of violence between the Japanese and groups of united anti-Japanese Han and Aborigines (Katz 2005). Only later did the Japanese attempt to incorporate Taiwanese into the Japanese identity as "loyal subjects", but the difference between the experience of the colonized and the colonizer polarized the two groups (Fujii 2006:70–73). The concept of "

aborigines as either "raw" or "cooked" (Brown 2004:8), which to the Japanese embodied the social ramification of ethnic origin and perceived loyalty to the empire (Wolf & Huang 1980
:19).

Martial law era

Non-Kuomintang politician Wu San-lien (2L) celebrated his landslide victory (65.5%) in the first-time Taipei city mayoral election in January 1951 with his supporters. Taipei has been the capital of Taiwan since December 1949.

In 1945, the Taiwanese faced a new unequal binary relationship when Taiwan entered the political sphere of the

February 28 Incident)[citation needed]. The latter were preferred for jobs in the civil service as opposed to Taiwanese who were regarded as "untrustworthy"(Phillips 2003:8–9). Recurrent violent suppression of dissent also played an important role in enforcing a separate sense of "Taiwanese-ness" (Gates 1981
:253–275).

The KMT lost the

sinicize" the Taiwanese people.[19][20][21][22] KMT's Taiwan Garrison Commander Chen Yi stated that after 50 years of Japanese rule, "Taiwanese customs, thought, and language would have to gradually return to that of the Chinese people".[23] The KMT believed that a centrally controlled curriculum would forge a unified national sentiment in Taiwan. They also believed education would help build a martial spirit and stimulate enough military, economic, political, and cultural strength not only to survive, but also to recover the mainland.[24]

Under the KMT structure, "Taiwanese" became a strong "regional" identity. The term has often been used synonymously with benshengren, a term which covered both Hokkien and Hakka whose ancestors arrived in Taiwan before the Japanese restrictions on immigration in 1895. "Taiwanese" was used in contrast with waishengren (mainlanders), who included the people who followed the KMT to Taiwan between 1945 and 1949 and their descendants. The government tended to stress provincial identities, with identification cards and passports issued until the late 1990s displaying one's ancestral province and county. During this period the terms "cooked" and "raw" Indigenous disappeared. The former "raw" Indigenous were termed Shandi Tongbao, Gaoshanzu (Mountain Race) or Gaoshan Tongbao (Mountain Compatriots).[citation needed]

Democratic era

Lee Teng-hui became the first president of the Republic of China to be born in Taiwan. He was democratically elected in 1996.

With Taiwan's political liberalization in the 1970s and 1980s, encouraged by Taiwan's changing international status, the concept of a "Taiwanese people" became politicized by opponents of the KMT. The tangwai movement deployed concepts of "Taiwanese identity" against the authoritarian KMT government, often using extreme tactics to build a short-term ethno-centric opposition to the KMT.[25]

The campaign saw resonance with the people of Taiwan and the term "Taiwanese" has been used by politicians of all parties to refer to the electorate in an effort to secure votes. The concept of a separate Taiwanese identity has become such an integral factor to the election culture in Taiwan, that identifying as a Taiwanese has become essential to being elected in Taiwan (Corcuff 2002:243–249). These political reforms have since been credited with the renewal of interest in Taiwanese history, culture, and identity.[26]

After the lifting of martial law in 1987, the

Beijing Opera as representative of culture. This was opposed by other ethnic groups such as the Hakka people and Taiwanese indigenous peoples who fought against using Hokkien as the national language and narratives of Han colonization of Taiwan. As a result, the Hoklo became more supportive of a multicultural policy that focused on equality of languages and ethnicty. However others were skeptical and said that the Hoklo do not have a strong ethnic identity since they define themselves and their language as primarily Taiwanese.[27] The Hakka and indigenous peoples of Taiwan have also been redefined as "Taiwanese" in the following period. There have been criticisms of this movement as politically motivated. Authors such as Shih Chih-yu and Yih-jye Hwang described Taiwan's multiculturalism as a discursive construction of identity and that Taiwan identity only existed in discourse without a fixed, essential, or permanent state. There were strong political inclinations underlying both Taiwanese identity as well as pan-Chinese (Han) identity. They criticized the indigenous wing of the KMT for arguing that the Taiwanese were not Chinese and that pro-independence leaders were trying to generate a Taiwanese national consciousness through deliberately redrawing ethnic boundaries and rewriting histories.[28] The division of Hoklo, Hakka and Mainlanders, originally introduced by the Hoklo, has gained popular support within Taiwanese society.[29]

New Taiwanese

The term "New Taiwanese" (新臺灣人) was coined by former

February 28 Incident of 1947 and characterized the frigid relations between waishengren and benshengren during forty years of martial law. Although originally aimed at the successive generations of Taiwanese with mainlander ancestry, it has been further articulated by Lee and other political and social leaders to refer to any person who loves Taiwan and is committed to calling Taiwan home. Although critics have called the "New Taiwanese Concept" a political ploy to win votes from benshengren who regarded the KMT as an alien regime, it has remained an important factor in the dialectic between ethnic identities in Taiwan. Despite being adopted early on by former Provincial Governor James Soong (1997) and later by, then Taipei mayoral candidate Ma Ying-jeou (1999), the term has since been dropped from contemporary political rhetoric (Corcuff 2002
:186–188).

Multicultural present

In contemporary Taiwan the phenomenon of mixed marriages between couples comprising different ethnic groups has grown to include people from the Indian subcontinent[

Pacific Islands. The increasing number of marriages between Taiwanese and other countries creates a problem for the rigid definitions of ethnic identity used by both the ROC and the PRC when discussing Taiwan (Harrell 1995). In one-fourth of all marriages in Taiwan today, one partner will be from another country[30] and one out of every twelve children is born to a family of mixed parentage. As Taiwan's birthrate is among the lowest in the world, this contingent is playing an increasingly important role in changing Taiwan's demographic makeup. By 2010, this social-cultural group of people is typically known as "Taiwan's new resident (臺灣新住民 lit. "New Residents in Taiwan" pinyin: Xīnzhùmín; Wade–Giles: Taiwan Hsin Chu-min; [ɕin ʈ͡ʂu min]).[citation needed
]

The current state of Taiwanese identity

Han characters
.

Taiwanese national identity is often posed as either an exclusive Taiwanese identity separate from Chinese national identity, or a Taiwanese identity within a pan-Chinese national identity. Since democratization, there has been an increase in those identifying exclusively as Taiwanese, with those identifying as Taiwanese and Chinese nationals have fallen and those exclusively identifying as Chinese nationals have almost vanished.

National Chengchi University has conducted annual polls on national identity since 1991. In 1991, 17.6% of respondents identified as Taiwanese (臺灣人) only, 25.5% as Chinese (中國人) only, 46.4% as both, and 10.5% declining to state. In 2000, the numbers were 36.9% Taiwanese, 12.5% Chinese, 44.1% both and 6.5% declining. In 2008, 48.4% identified as Taiwanese, 4.0% as Chinese, 43.1% as both, and 4.5% declining. By 2016, 58.2% identified as Taiwanese, 3.4% as Chinese, 34.3% as both, and 4.1% declining. In 2020, 64.3% identified as Taiwanese, 2.6% as Chinese, 29.9% as both, and 3.2% declining.[31]

Likewise, in a 2002 poll by the Democratic Progressive Party, over 50% of the respondents considered themselves "Taiwanese" only, up from less than 20% in 1991 (Dreyer 2003). Polls conducted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) in 2001 found that 70% of Taiwanese would support a name change of the country to Taiwan if the island could no longer be referred to as the Republic of China.[32]

The discrepancy in identity becomes larger when polls only give the two options of "Taiwanese" versus "Chinese". In June 2008, a TVBS poll found that 68% of the respondents identify themselves as "Taiwanese" while 18% would call themselves "Chinese".[33] In 2015, a poll conducted by the Taiwan Braintrust showed that about 90 percent of the population would identify themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.[34]

In 2006, Wu Nai-teh of Academia Sinica said that "many Taiwanese are still confused about identity, and are easily affected by political, social, and economic circumstances."[35] However, since then the sense of a collective Taiwanese identity has continued to increase despite fluctuations in support for pro-independence political parties. This has been cited as evidence that the concept of Taiwanese identity is not the product of local political manipulation, but an actual phenomenon of ethnic and sociopolitical identities (Corcuff 2002:137–149, 207; Hsiau 2005:157–170).

The 2023 documentary "Nous sommes Taïwan" (French for "We are Taiwan") by Pierre Haski explored the current state of Taiwanese identity.[36]

In 2023 the LA Times wrote "Taiwan's odyssey to establish its distinct identity is manifold and complex. It won't be worldwide recognition of any single component of the culture, history, politics or food that accomplishes this but a combination of them all."[37]

Major socio-cultural subgroups

"Beauty of Taiwan" per caption, circa 1900

According to governmental statistics, over 95% of Taiwan's 23.4 million people are

retreat to Taiwan following the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. The non-Han Austronesian population of Taiwanese Indigenous peoples comprises about 2.3% of the population and have inhabited the island for millennia.[41]

Migration to Taiwan from southern Asia began approximately 12,000 BC, but large-scale migration to Taiwan did not occur until the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century as a result of political and economic chaos in mainland China.

Manchu invasion and conquest of China, overthrowing the Ming dynasty and establishing the Qing dynasty
, which was established in 1644 and remained until 1911.

In 1624, the

Anping, Tainan in southern Taiwan after expelling the Spanish. The Dutch soon realized Taiwan's potential as a colony for trading deer hide, venison, rice, and sugar. However, Indigenous were not interested in developing the land and transporting settlers from Europe would be too costly. Due to the resulting labor shortage, the Dutch hired Han farmers from across the Taiwan Strait who fled the Manchu invasion of Ming dynasty China.[45]

plains Indigenous with the Han) resulted in the widespread adoption of Han patterns of behavior making Taiwanese Han the ethnic majority.[citation needed
]

It was not until the Japanese arrival in 1895 that Taiwanese first developed a collective Taiwanese identity in contrast to that of the colonizing Japanese.

Chinese communists in 1945, there was another mass migration of people from mainland China to Taiwan fleeing the communists. These migrants are known as the mainland Chinese.[citation needed
]

Indigenous peoples

A group of Taiwanese indigenous children

Taiwanese indigenous peoples are the

linguistically closely related to the ethnic groups of Maritime Southeast Asia and Oceania. Their ancestors are believed to have been living on the islands for approximately 8,000 years before major Han Chinese immigration began in the 17th century (Blust 1999). Taiwan's Austronesian speakers were traditionally distributed over much of the island's rugged central mountain range and concentrated in villages along the alluvial plains. Today, the bulk of the contemporary Taiwanese indigenous population reside in the mountains and the major cities. The total population of recognized indigenous peoples on Taiwan is approximately 533,600, or approximately 2.28% of Taiwan's population.[41] The cities of Yilan, Hualien, and Taitung are known for their communities. In the 1990s, Taiwanese indigenous peoples, which had traditionally viewed themselves as separate groups, united under the singular ethnonym '原住民' or 'Indigenous peoples' (Stainton 1999
).

Hoklo

The

plains aboriginals also adopted Chinese customs and language so as to be indistinguishable from the Han.[47] Thus, many who categorize themselves as Hoklo have some degree of indigenous ancestry.[citation needed
]

It is possible to find families where the older members still identify themselves as lowland aborigine, while the rest of the family may identify as Hoklo. Among the Hoklo, the common idiom, "has Tangshan father, no Tangshan mother" (Chinese: 唐山公、無唐山媽; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Ū Tn̂g-soaⁿ kong, bô Tn̂g-soaⁿ má)[48][49] refers how the Han people crossing the Taiwan Strait were mostly male, whereas their offspring would be through marriage with female Taiwanese aborigines.[citation needed]

Within the Taiwanese Han Hoklo community itself, differences in culture indicate the degree to which mixture with aboriginals took place, with most pure Hoklo Han in Northern Taiwan having almost no Aboriginal admixture, which is limited to Hoklo Han in Southern Taiwan.[50] Plains aboriginals who were mixed and assimilated into the Hoklo Han population at different stages were differentiated by the historian Melissa J. Brown between "short-route" and "long-route".[51] The ethnic identity of assimilated Plains Aboriginals in the immediate vicinity of Tainan was still known since a pure Hoklo Taiwanese girl was warned by her mother to stay away from them.[52] The insulting name "fan" was used against Plains Aborigines by the Taiwanese, and the Hoklo Taiwanese speech was forced upon Aborigines like the Pazeh.[53] Hoklo Taiwanese has replaced Pazeh and driven it to near extinction.[54] Aboriginal status has been requested by Plains Aboriginals.[55]

The term "Chinese Formosans" has been used to imply Hoklo descendants,[56] though this term has also been used to denote the Taiwanese people (whether of pure or mixed origin) in contrast to the Japanese and mountain aborigines.[57]

The deep-rooted hostility between Taiwanese Indigenous peoples and (Taiwanese) Hoklo, and the Aboriginal communities' effective KMT networks contribute to Aboriginal skepticism against the DPP and the Indigenous tendency to vote for the KMT. Some aboriginal representatives such as May Chin, also known as Kao Chin Su-mei, ridiculed the "Han-native" Taiwanese independence supporters, and advocated for unification. She criticized the Japanese colonial period, probably because of her blue-camp affiliation, but ignored the period of KMT rule under which the aboriginals also suffered.[58]

Hakka

Taiwan's Hakka people descend largely from Hakka who migrated from southern and northern Guangdong to Taiwan around the end of the Ming dynasty and the beginning of the Qing dynasty (ca. 1644).[59]

The Taiwanese Hakka communities, although arriving to Taiwan from mountains of eastern Guangdong and western Fujian, have also likely mixed through intermarriage with lowland Indigenous as well. Hakka family trees are known for identifying the male ancestors by their ethnic Hakka heritage while leaving out information on the identity of the female ancestors. Also, during the process of intermarriage and assimilation, many of the lowland Indigenous and their families adopted Hoklo and Hakka family names. Much of this happened in Taiwan prior to the Japanese colonization of Taiwan, so that by the time of the Japanese colonization, most of the population that the Japanese classified as "Chinese" Hoklo and "Chinese" Hakka were in truth already of mixed ancestry. Physical features of both Taiwanese aborigine and Chinese can be found amongst the Taiwanese mainstream today.[citation needed]

Mainlander

"Mainlanders" or waishengren refer to the

mainlanders settled first within the heart of large urban centers in Taiwan such as Taipei, Taichung, or Kaohsiung.[60] High numbers of government officials and civil servants who followed the KMT to Taiwan and occupied the positions of the colonial government moved into the official dormitories and residences built by the Japanese for civil servants. The ghettoization of mainlander communities exacerbated the divisions imagined by non-mainlander groups, and stymied cultural integration and assimilation into mainstream Taiwanese culture (Gates 1981). Nationalization campaigns undertaken by the KMT established an official "culture", which reflected the KMT government's own preference for what it considered authentic Chinese culture. This excluded many of the local Taiwanese practices and local cultures, including the diverse cultures brought to Taiwan by the mainlanders from all parts of China (Wachman 1994). Unlike the Hoklo and Hakka of Taiwan, who felt excluded by the new government, the mainlanders and their families supported the nationalists and embraced the official "culture" as their own, with "national culture" being taught in school (Wilson 1970
). The mainlanders used their embrace of Nationalist culture to identify themselves as the authentic Chinese people of Taiwan.

In addition to the Han people, there were also small numbers of

ethnic minorities
among the Waishengren.

Burmese Chinese

Burmese Chinese have settled mostly in

Taipei County. The job boom in the factories there has attracted an estimated 40,000 Burmese Chinese immigrants (c. 2008) which are 10% of the city's population. This is "believed to be the largest Burmese Chinese community outside of Burma."[61]

New residents or immigrants

Taiwan Hsin Chu-min (臺灣新住民 lit. "New Residents in Taiwan" pinyin: Xīnzhùmín; [ɕin ʈʂu min]) is a group that consists of mainly new residents, originally from other nations, who have either migrated to Taiwan or inter-married with a local Taiwanese. The majority of new residents originated from Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and Philippines.[62][63][64] As of 2018, there are more than 710,000 foreign labors employed in Taiwan in both blue and white collar industries.[65][66] Taiwanese society has a surprisingly high degree of diversity. According to Ethnologue, published by US-based SIL international, over 20 living languages are found on the island as of 2016. These languages are spoken by the many Austronesian and Han ethnolinguistic groups that comprise the people of Taiwan.

Enmity between ethnic groups on Taiwan

The deep-rooted hostility between Indigenous and (Taiwanese) Hoklo, and the Indigenous communities effective KMT networks, contribute to Indigenous skepticism against the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Indigenous tendency to vote for the KMT.[58]

Overseas Taiwanese