- Joined
- Feb 1, 2015
Formosa don't feel like China and here's why I think it is that way:
Pro-unification policymakers on both sides of the Taiwan Straits rationalize unification with the assertion that Chinese ethnic and cultural heritage is inextricably linked with the political concept of Chinese nationality. While this linkage is far from universally accepted, in the context of cross-straits relations, it suggests that a shared Chinese cultural heritage in Taiwan and Mainland China provides the basis for political unification under the aegis of a single Chinese nation-state. Thus the legitimacy of the pro-unification policy is fundamentally dependent upon the assumption that both Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese societies share a single cultural identity today. However, over the course of the 20th century, the Chinese cultural identity in Taiwan was challenged and ultimately displaced by a distinct Taiwanese cultural identity. While this Taiwanese identity partly originated in the era of Japanese colonial rule, its development was most significantly accelerated as a reaction to the cultural shock of the KMT’s arrival on the island in 1945 and the alienating effects of the KMT’s economic exploitation, political repression, and forced assimilation policies in the following decades.
Before and during the first two decades of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, porous border control, combined with regular cross-straits commercial traffic and personal travel, initially allowed for the continuation of cultural contacts between the Hakka and Han Chinese living in Taiwan and their counterparts living across the straits in Fujian province. However by the end of the First World War, the Japanese colonial authorities’ tightening of border controls and implementation of mandatory primary education in the form of Japanese language and patriotic values (Tsai 144) exerted a profound influence on the island’s cultural identity by reshaping the local culture in accordance with Japanese aims while simultaneously isolating the Taiwanese from contemporary developments on the mainland. Just as significantly, the temporary liberalization of Japanese colonial rule in the 1920s manifested in the island’s cultural sphere through a brief explosion in the publishing of poetry and literary journals written for the first time in vernacular Taiwanese Hokkien by the local literati, whose works were tolerated by Japanese authorities so long as they did not criticize colonial oppression and social injustices (Tsai 145).
However, by the late 1930s and early 1940s, strict military rule under the wartime Japanese colonial administration increased the intensity and extent of forced assimilation (Gold 60) by severely punishing the public display of traditional Chinese cultural practices and languages while systematically mandating and incentivizing the adoption of the Japanese language, state religion, national values, and patriotic sentiments. Thus, by 1943 over 80 percent of Taiwanese were fluent in the Japanese language while approximately two percent of Taiwanese had even taken on Japanese family names (Tsai 154). By the war’s end, the Taiwanese sense of cultural identity was left in a state of crisis due to the conflict between the widespread but irregular adoption of certain elements of Japanese culture and the retention of Chinese cultural heritage and values.
However, it was the arrival of the KMT on the island that provided the greatest impetus for the accelerated development of the Taiwanese cultural identity. Regardless of previous loyalties to the colonial administration, most Taiwanese at the time were eager for the end of strict and exploitative Japanese rule especially after the economic deprivation of the island during the later stages of the Pacific War. Thus, the landing of 60,000 KMT soldiers at Keelung in October 1945 to accept the surrender of Japanese forces and establish an ROC presence on Taiwan was greatly anticipated by the island’s residents (Bullard 41). However, the newly appointed KMT governor of Taiwan, General Chen Yi, made a critical error in employing units of poorly behaved but experienced combat veterans to occupy the island instead of using the neatly uniformed and well-disciplined cadets of the newly formed KMT Youth Armies also under his command (Bullard 42). The Taiwanese were understandably shocked and disappointed by the appearance and behavior of the war-weary KMT troops, whose ragged attire and lack of discipline made a poor first impression in contrast to the surrendering Japanese with their immaculate uniforms and professional military bearing.
Almost immediately, the KMT mainlanders and Taiwanese islanders regarded one another in a mutually xenophobic light, a phenomenon that was exacerbated by the huge socioeconomic disparity between the Taiwanese civilians and most KMT troops. The overwhelming majority of the KMT soldiers were poor, illiterate conscripts whose rural home provinces had been ravaged by decades of continuous warfare and civil strife. In contrast, Taiwan had been the wealthiest and most politically stable Japanese colony. Most Taiwanese had received some level of primary school education and enjoyed a literacy rate and prosperous standard of living much higher than that in much of Mainland China, while the island itself had survived the war relatively unscathed apart from some light American bombing and the economic shortages caused by war rationing and the American naval blockade.
To an even greater extent, the language barrier drove a huge wedge between the Taiwanese and KMT occupiers. Very few of the newly arrived KMT mainlanders were fluent in the Hokkien dialect spoken by the majority of Taiwanese (Bullard 37), while Mandarin Chinese was practically unknown to most Taiwanese. Furthermore, the extensive incorporation of Japanese-origin loanwords into the vocabulary of Taiwanese Hokkien still led to frequent misunderstandings with the handful of Mainlanders from Southern Fujian who spoke a mutually intelligible Hokkien dialect.
But to make matters even worse, the newly arrived KMT soldiers, with the tacit approval of the KMT military occupation authorities, viewed the entire Taiwanese population as a defeated foreign enemy rather than liberated countrymen (Bullard 39). Indeed, many Taiwanese had engaged in varying degrees of coerced and voluntary collaboration with the Japanese during the colonial era, with some 56% of the island’s colonial administrative posts staffed by Taiwanese (Tsai 145). However, the KMT made no distinctions, regarding all Taiwanese as guilty of treason against China. This indiscriminate identification of all Taiwanese as traitors to the Chinese people not only damaged the islanders’ conception of their self-identification as Chinese, but it also legitimized and even encouraged the mistreatment of the Taiwanese by the occupation force. Thus, rampant looting and abuse of the local population by KMT troops followed in the wake of the initial military occupation of the island, severely alienating the Taiwanese, who had not suffered comparable mistreatment from the highly professional Japanese colonial police and military.
However, disorganized looting and petty theft by individual KMT soldiers soon gave way to a systematic economic exploitation of the island that exceeded even the worst excesses of the Japanese colonial era and was to ultimately result in open conflict between the KMT and the Taiwanese. As their military position on the mainland deteriorated, the KMT began viewing Taiwan as a rich source of wealth that could be ruthlessly exploited to continue funding the war, sustain the deteriorating mainland economy, and simply add to the personal wealth of the KMT leadership (Tsai 176). To this end, the KMT established far-reaching monopolies on all sectors of the Taiwanese economy, indiscriminately confiscated lucrative Taiwanese-owned businesses and properties, and appointed corrupt and incompetent KMT officials to manage them. In this fashion, the Taiwanese economy was run into the ground, impoverishing many of the island’s residents while enriching the KMT leadership and its associates. Combined with the aforementioned xenophobic cultural undercurrents, popular resentment against the KMT economic exploitation and corruption finally culminated in the 228 Incident, a general uprising of Taiwanese against the KMT in 1947, which was swiftly crushed with the massacre of some twenty thousand Taiwanese (Tsai 177).
Simultaneously, the total loss of Mainland China to the CCP resulted in the relocation of an additional 700,000 KMT soldiers and civilian refugees from the mainland to Taiwan by 1949 (Tsai 179). In 1953, these mainlanders were joined by over twenty thousand Chinese POWs who had refused repatriation to the PRC after the Korean War and subsequently resettled in Taiwan. In contrast to the relatively small KMT garrison force stationed in Taiwan in the years before 1949, this large number of newly arrived mainlanders constituted a highly visible minority across the island, and they received preferential treatment from the ruling KMT elite, which felt obligated to provide for the jobless and largely destitute arrivals from the mainland. Thus many of the demobilized KMT soldiers and civilian refugees were given key posts in the bureaucracy, education system, and government enterprises to the exclusion of equally qualified Taiwanese (Bullard 32). The mainlanders were largely resettled in urban properties confiscated from Japanese and Taiwanese owners, exacerbating the post-war housing shortage and placing the mainlanders in close proximity with the Taiwanese population, who resented them as colonial exploiters and carpetbaggers after the mistreatment of the early occupation (Bullard 32).
Fearing the potential for a repeat of the 228 Incident due to the strain caused by the mainland refugee influx, the KMT established repressive political measures and assimilatory cultural policies in order to crush the last vestiges of Taiwanese dissent and reshape the population into loyal subjects of the ROC. Fearing populist nationalism, the KMT outlawed the various Taiwanese independence movements and executed critics of KMT rule, including much of the Taiwanese intelligentsia and local educated gentry-class (Tsai 17
. The civil rights of all Taiwanese were severely restricted through abrogation of the ROC constitution, and the Taiwanese were reduced to second-class citizens ruled over by the mainlander elites (Tsai 179).
In the realm of cultural policy, the KMT regarded the existing Taiwanese culture as hopelessly contaminated by Japanese colonial influences, marking it as a target for forced assimilation that sought to extinguish any basis for an independent cultural tradition. Mandarin Chinese was established as the sole language of government, commerce, and popular media while Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and Aboriginal languages were harshly suppressed. With total control of all media outlets and education on the island, the KMT used its monopoly on cultural capital to promote and disseminate an ideologically-charged version of Chinese culture that was alien to the Taiwanese (Gold 60). The Chinese cultural identity propagated by the KMT in Taiwan completely excluded the Taiwanese cultural and historical experience, focusing instead on idealized elements of Chinese high culture and recent military history that glorified the achievements of the KMT mainlanders. In this manner, Taiwanese culture was effectively denied a role in the KMT’s conception of Chinese identity and civilization (Rigger 316). The resulting one-sided Chinese cultural narrative, which the KMT repeatedly insisted was the only legitimate representation of Chinese culture, failed to resonate with the Taiwanese and caused many to believe that Taiwanese culture and Chinese culture were fundamentally different and ultimately incompatible (Rigger 316).
Alienated by the KMT’s forced assimilation but forced to comply for fear of persecution and political repercussions, the Taiwanese reacted in a fashion that echoed their forefathers’ response to Japanese colonial assimilation. Most Taiwanese adopted Mandarin for use in the workplace and professional settings and publicly professed KMT-mandated patriotic values, but they simultaneously preserved their ancestral languages and traditional cultural practices at home. Thus the Taiwanese cultural identity survived and was ultimately strengthened as the Taiwanese first rejected the KMT mainlanders’ notion of a Chinese cultural identity and then grew protective of their distinct Taiwanese cultural identity once it was threatened by Mainland Chinese assimilation. With the gradual democratization of KMT military rule and the loosening of restrictive media control by the 1970s and 1980s, the Taiwanese cultural identity was freed from decades of indiscriminate government suppression and provided an outlet for public expression. What followed was a blossoming of Taiwanese film, music, and literature rooted in themes drawn from uniquely Taiwanese experiences, culture, and language (Gold 62). This renaissance of Taiwanese cultural expression in the public sphere codified and established the independent Taiwanese cultural identity in its modern form.
With the resumption of cross-straits travel and commercial links over recent decades, it is perhaps instructive to consider whether the accelerated tempo of cultural exchanges between Mainland China and Taiwan will prompt a societal response among the Taiwanese analogous to that provoked by the arrival of the KMT on the island in the post-war period. Vastly increased exposure to the modern Chinese cultural identity via reciprocal exchanges in visitors and mass media offers the Taiwanese a definition of Chinese identity that differs enough from their internalized sense of Taiwanese identity to perhaps drive further cultural divergence rather than bridging the gap between mainland and island, as pro-unification logic predicts. The post-war Taiwanese experience certainly suggests the likelihood of the former scenario over the latter and analysis of the early KMT occupation of Taiwan should perhaps factor into future development of pro-unification theory.
Works Cited
Bullard, Monte. The Soldier and the Citizen: The Role of the Military in Taiwan’s Development
Gold, Thomas B. “Civil Society and Taiwan’s Quest for Identity”. Cultural Change in Postwar Taiwan
Rigger, Shelley. “Competing conceptions of Taiwan's identity: The irresolvable conflict in cross‐strait relations”
Tsai, Shih-Shan Henry. Maritime Taiwan: Historical Encounters with the East and the West
Pro-unification policymakers on both sides of the Taiwan Straits rationalize unification with the assertion that Chinese ethnic and cultural heritage is inextricably linked with the political concept of Chinese nationality. While this linkage is far from universally accepted, in the context of cross-straits relations, it suggests that a shared Chinese cultural heritage in Taiwan and Mainland China provides the basis for political unification under the aegis of a single Chinese nation-state. Thus the legitimacy of the pro-unification policy is fundamentally dependent upon the assumption that both Mainland Chinese and Taiwanese societies share a single cultural identity today. However, over the course of the 20th century, the Chinese cultural identity in Taiwan was challenged and ultimately displaced by a distinct Taiwanese cultural identity. While this Taiwanese identity partly originated in the era of Japanese colonial rule, its development was most significantly accelerated as a reaction to the cultural shock of the KMT’s arrival on the island in 1945 and the alienating effects of the KMT’s economic exploitation, political repression, and forced assimilation policies in the following decades.
Before and during the first two decades of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan, porous border control, combined with regular cross-straits commercial traffic and personal travel, initially allowed for the continuation of cultural contacts between the Hakka and Han Chinese living in Taiwan and their counterparts living across the straits in Fujian province. However by the end of the First World War, the Japanese colonial authorities’ tightening of border controls and implementation of mandatory primary education in the form of Japanese language and patriotic values (Tsai 144) exerted a profound influence on the island’s cultural identity by reshaping the local culture in accordance with Japanese aims while simultaneously isolating the Taiwanese from contemporary developments on the mainland. Just as significantly, the temporary liberalization of Japanese colonial rule in the 1920s manifested in the island’s cultural sphere through a brief explosion in the publishing of poetry and literary journals written for the first time in vernacular Taiwanese Hokkien by the local literati, whose works were tolerated by Japanese authorities so long as they did not criticize colonial oppression and social injustices (Tsai 145).
However, by the late 1930s and early 1940s, strict military rule under the wartime Japanese colonial administration increased the intensity and extent of forced assimilation (Gold 60) by severely punishing the public display of traditional Chinese cultural practices and languages while systematically mandating and incentivizing the adoption of the Japanese language, state religion, national values, and patriotic sentiments. Thus, by 1943 over 80 percent of Taiwanese were fluent in the Japanese language while approximately two percent of Taiwanese had even taken on Japanese family names (Tsai 154). By the war’s end, the Taiwanese sense of cultural identity was left in a state of crisis due to the conflict between the widespread but irregular adoption of certain elements of Japanese culture and the retention of Chinese cultural heritage and values.
However, it was the arrival of the KMT on the island that provided the greatest impetus for the accelerated development of the Taiwanese cultural identity. Regardless of previous loyalties to the colonial administration, most Taiwanese at the time were eager for the end of strict and exploitative Japanese rule especially after the economic deprivation of the island during the later stages of the Pacific War. Thus, the landing of 60,000 KMT soldiers at Keelung in October 1945 to accept the surrender of Japanese forces and establish an ROC presence on Taiwan was greatly anticipated by the island’s residents (Bullard 41). However, the newly appointed KMT governor of Taiwan, General Chen Yi, made a critical error in employing units of poorly behaved but experienced combat veterans to occupy the island instead of using the neatly uniformed and well-disciplined cadets of the newly formed KMT Youth Armies also under his command (Bullard 42). The Taiwanese were understandably shocked and disappointed by the appearance and behavior of the war-weary KMT troops, whose ragged attire and lack of discipline made a poor first impression in contrast to the surrendering Japanese with their immaculate uniforms and professional military bearing.
Almost immediately, the KMT mainlanders and Taiwanese islanders regarded one another in a mutually xenophobic light, a phenomenon that was exacerbated by the huge socioeconomic disparity between the Taiwanese civilians and most KMT troops. The overwhelming majority of the KMT soldiers were poor, illiterate conscripts whose rural home provinces had been ravaged by decades of continuous warfare and civil strife. In contrast, Taiwan had been the wealthiest and most politically stable Japanese colony. Most Taiwanese had received some level of primary school education and enjoyed a literacy rate and prosperous standard of living much higher than that in much of Mainland China, while the island itself had survived the war relatively unscathed apart from some light American bombing and the economic shortages caused by war rationing and the American naval blockade.
To an even greater extent, the language barrier drove a huge wedge between the Taiwanese and KMT occupiers. Very few of the newly arrived KMT mainlanders were fluent in the Hokkien dialect spoken by the majority of Taiwanese (Bullard 37), while Mandarin Chinese was practically unknown to most Taiwanese. Furthermore, the extensive incorporation of Japanese-origin loanwords into the vocabulary of Taiwanese Hokkien still led to frequent misunderstandings with the handful of Mainlanders from Southern Fujian who spoke a mutually intelligible Hokkien dialect.
But to make matters even worse, the newly arrived KMT soldiers, with the tacit approval of the KMT military occupation authorities, viewed the entire Taiwanese population as a defeated foreign enemy rather than liberated countrymen (Bullard 39). Indeed, many Taiwanese had engaged in varying degrees of coerced and voluntary collaboration with the Japanese during the colonial era, with some 56% of the island’s colonial administrative posts staffed by Taiwanese (Tsai 145). However, the KMT made no distinctions, regarding all Taiwanese as guilty of treason against China. This indiscriminate identification of all Taiwanese as traitors to the Chinese people not only damaged the islanders’ conception of their self-identification as Chinese, but it also legitimized and even encouraged the mistreatment of the Taiwanese by the occupation force. Thus, rampant looting and abuse of the local population by KMT troops followed in the wake of the initial military occupation of the island, severely alienating the Taiwanese, who had not suffered comparable mistreatment from the highly professional Japanese colonial police and military.
However, disorganized looting and petty theft by individual KMT soldiers soon gave way to a systematic economic exploitation of the island that exceeded even the worst excesses of the Japanese colonial era and was to ultimately result in open conflict between the KMT and the Taiwanese. As their military position on the mainland deteriorated, the KMT began viewing Taiwan as a rich source of wealth that could be ruthlessly exploited to continue funding the war, sustain the deteriorating mainland economy, and simply add to the personal wealth of the KMT leadership (Tsai 176). To this end, the KMT established far-reaching monopolies on all sectors of the Taiwanese economy, indiscriminately confiscated lucrative Taiwanese-owned businesses and properties, and appointed corrupt and incompetent KMT officials to manage them. In this fashion, the Taiwanese economy was run into the ground, impoverishing many of the island’s residents while enriching the KMT leadership and its associates. Combined with the aforementioned xenophobic cultural undercurrents, popular resentment against the KMT economic exploitation and corruption finally culminated in the 228 Incident, a general uprising of Taiwanese against the KMT in 1947, which was swiftly crushed with the massacre of some twenty thousand Taiwanese (Tsai 177).
Simultaneously, the total loss of Mainland China to the CCP resulted in the relocation of an additional 700,000 KMT soldiers and civilian refugees from the mainland to Taiwan by 1949 (Tsai 179). In 1953, these mainlanders were joined by over twenty thousand Chinese POWs who had refused repatriation to the PRC after the Korean War and subsequently resettled in Taiwan. In contrast to the relatively small KMT garrison force stationed in Taiwan in the years before 1949, this large number of newly arrived mainlanders constituted a highly visible minority across the island, and they received preferential treatment from the ruling KMT elite, which felt obligated to provide for the jobless and largely destitute arrivals from the mainland. Thus many of the demobilized KMT soldiers and civilian refugees were given key posts in the bureaucracy, education system, and government enterprises to the exclusion of equally qualified Taiwanese (Bullard 32). The mainlanders were largely resettled in urban properties confiscated from Japanese and Taiwanese owners, exacerbating the post-war housing shortage and placing the mainlanders in close proximity with the Taiwanese population, who resented them as colonial exploiters and carpetbaggers after the mistreatment of the early occupation (Bullard 32).
Fearing the potential for a repeat of the 228 Incident due to the strain caused by the mainland refugee influx, the KMT established repressive political measures and assimilatory cultural policies in order to crush the last vestiges of Taiwanese dissent and reshape the population into loyal subjects of the ROC. Fearing populist nationalism, the KMT outlawed the various Taiwanese independence movements and executed critics of KMT rule, including much of the Taiwanese intelligentsia and local educated gentry-class (Tsai 17
. The civil rights of all Taiwanese were severely restricted through abrogation of the ROC constitution, and the Taiwanese were reduced to second-class citizens ruled over by the mainlander elites (Tsai 179).In the realm of cultural policy, the KMT regarded the existing Taiwanese culture as hopelessly contaminated by Japanese colonial influences, marking it as a target for forced assimilation that sought to extinguish any basis for an independent cultural tradition. Mandarin Chinese was established as the sole language of government, commerce, and popular media while Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and Aboriginal languages were harshly suppressed. With total control of all media outlets and education on the island, the KMT used its monopoly on cultural capital to promote and disseminate an ideologically-charged version of Chinese culture that was alien to the Taiwanese (Gold 60). The Chinese cultural identity propagated by the KMT in Taiwan completely excluded the Taiwanese cultural and historical experience, focusing instead on idealized elements of Chinese high culture and recent military history that glorified the achievements of the KMT mainlanders. In this manner, Taiwanese culture was effectively denied a role in the KMT’s conception of Chinese identity and civilization (Rigger 316). The resulting one-sided Chinese cultural narrative, which the KMT repeatedly insisted was the only legitimate representation of Chinese culture, failed to resonate with the Taiwanese and caused many to believe that Taiwanese culture and Chinese culture were fundamentally different and ultimately incompatible (Rigger 316).
Alienated by the KMT’s forced assimilation but forced to comply for fear of persecution and political repercussions, the Taiwanese reacted in a fashion that echoed their forefathers’ response to Japanese colonial assimilation. Most Taiwanese adopted Mandarin for use in the workplace and professional settings and publicly professed KMT-mandated patriotic values, but they simultaneously preserved their ancestral languages and traditional cultural practices at home. Thus the Taiwanese cultural identity survived and was ultimately strengthened as the Taiwanese first rejected the KMT mainlanders’ notion of a Chinese cultural identity and then grew protective of their distinct Taiwanese cultural identity once it was threatened by Mainland Chinese assimilation. With the gradual democratization of KMT military rule and the loosening of restrictive media control by the 1970s and 1980s, the Taiwanese cultural identity was freed from decades of indiscriminate government suppression and provided an outlet for public expression. What followed was a blossoming of Taiwanese film, music, and literature rooted in themes drawn from uniquely Taiwanese experiences, culture, and language (Gold 62). This renaissance of Taiwanese cultural expression in the public sphere codified and established the independent Taiwanese cultural identity in its modern form.
With the resumption of cross-straits travel and commercial links over recent decades, it is perhaps instructive to consider whether the accelerated tempo of cultural exchanges between Mainland China and Taiwan will prompt a societal response among the Taiwanese analogous to that provoked by the arrival of the KMT on the island in the post-war period. Vastly increased exposure to the modern Chinese cultural identity via reciprocal exchanges in visitors and mass media offers the Taiwanese a definition of Chinese identity that differs enough from their internalized sense of Taiwanese identity to perhaps drive further cultural divergence rather than bridging the gap between mainland and island, as pro-unification logic predicts. The post-war Taiwanese experience certainly suggests the likelihood of the former scenario over the latter and analysis of the early KMT occupation of Taiwan should perhaps factor into future development of pro-unification theory.
Works Cited
Bullard, Monte. The Soldier and the Citizen: The Role of the Military in Taiwan’s Development
Gold, Thomas B. “Civil Society and Taiwan’s Quest for Identity”. Cultural Change in Postwar Taiwan
Rigger, Shelley. “Competing conceptions of Taiwan's identity: The irresolvable conflict in cross‐strait relations”
Tsai, Shih-Shan Henry. Maritime Taiwan: Historical Encounters with the East and the West
