National Identity Ethnic Identity And Party Identity In Taiwan

Taiwan has become a democracy despite the inability of its political elite to agree on the national identity of the state. This is a study of the history of democratisation in the light of the national identity problem, based on interviews with leading figures in the KMT and opposition parties.

The consolidation of Taiwanese identity in recent years has been accompanied by two interrelated paradoxes: a continued language shift from local Taiwanese languages to Mandarin Chinese, and the increasing subordination of the Hoklo majority culture in ethnic policy and public identity discourses. A number of initiatives have been undertaken toward the revitalization and recognition of minority cultures. At the same time, however, the Hoklo majority culture has become akin to a political taboo. This book examines how the interplay of ethnicity, national identity and party politics has shaped current debates on national culture and linguistic recognition in Taiwan. It suggests that the ethnolinguistic distribution of the electorate has led parties to adopt distinctive strategies in an attempt to broaden their ethnic support bases. On the one hand, the DPP and the KMT have strived to play down their respective de-Sinicization and Sinicization ideologies, as well as their Hoklo and Chinese ethnocultural cores. At the same time, the parties have competed to portray themselves as the legitimate protectors of minority interests by promoting Hakka and Aboriginal cultures. These concomitant logics have discouraged parties from appealing to ethnonationalist rhetoric, prompting them to express their antagonistic ideologies of Taiwanese and Chinese nationalism through more liberal conceptions of language rights. Therefore, the book argues that constraints to cultural and linguistic recognition in Taiwan are shaped by political rather than cultural and sociolinguistic factors. Investigating Taiwan’s counterintuitive ethnolinguistic situation, this book makes an important theoretical contribution to the literature to many fields of study and will appeal to scholars of Taiwanese politics, sociolinguistics, culture and history.

The product of five years of North American Taiwan Studies Conferences, this book carefully analyzes the emergence of national feelings in Taiwan, its historical roots and its contemporary manifestations. It addresses questions central to the looming international issue of Taiwan/China. Part one considers the historical events that help to explain the emergence and development of a separatist, dissident discourse. The second part deals with the current issue of national identity transition in Taiwan. The final part places the national identity debate in a broader perspective by focusing on the larger issues of the maturation of the national identity question.

For China, Taiwan is next in line to be unified with the People's Republic after Hong Kong in 1997. China's claim on Taiwan is of great importance to the politics of Chinese Nationalism, and is central to the dynamics of power in this most volatile of regions. The democratic challenge from Taiwan is very potent and its status and identity within the international community is crucial to its survival. Taiwan and Chinese Nationalism explores how Taiwan's status has come to be a symbol for the legitimacy of the Chinese regime in the evolution of Chinese nationalism. It also demonstrates how this view has been challenged by demands for democratization in Taiwan. The KMT regime is shown to have allowed sovereignty to be practised by the population of the island while maintaining the claim that it is a part of China. The result is a "post-nationalist" identity for the island in an intermediate state between independence and unification with the PRC.

This volume analyzes what is arguably the single most important aspect of cultural and political change in Taiwan over the past quarter-century: the trend toward 'indigenization' (bentuhua). Focusing on the indigenization of politics and culture and its close connection with the identity politics of ethnicity and nationalism, this volume is an attempt to map prominent contours of the indigenization paradigm as it has unfolded in Taiwan. The opening chapters concern the origin and nature of the trend toward indigenization with its roots in the unique historical trajectory of politics and culture in Taiwan. Subsequent chapters deal with responses and reactions to indigenization in a variety of social, cultural and intellectual domains.

The "one China" policy officially supported by the People's Republic of China, the United States, and other countries asserts that there is only one China and Taiwan is a part of it. The debate over whether the people of Taiwan are Chinese or independently Taiwanese is, Melissa J. Brown argues, a matter of identity: Han ethnic identity, Chinese national identity, and the relationship of both of these to the new Taiwanese identity forged in the 1990s. In a unique comparison of ethnographic and historical case studies drawn from both Taiwan and China, Brown's book shows how identity is shaped by social experience—not culture and ancestry, as is commonly claimed in political rhetoric.