Specificities and Limits of Taiwanese Nationalism

2010

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2014

Modern Taiwanese nationalism is a complicated case of peripheral nationalism that emerged, submerged, and re-emerged as a result of successive yet unfinished state-making and nation-building projects on the island by various imperial centers. Three historical empires present in Northeast Asia deeply shaped the formation and developmental trajectory of Taiwanese nationalism: the Qing Empire from 1683-1895, the Japanese Empire from 1895 to 1945, and the American Empire of the post-WWII era.

Comparison is a useful tool in social sciences where experiments under a strictly controlled condition are impossible/impracticable (or unethical even if it is possible). While each event/case is unique and therefore ultimately incomparable, comparison creates space for a degree of generalisation which, in turn, allows us to form a more abstract, and shared, understanding of the world. In the study of nationalism, too, each case is unique and ultimately incomparable but comparison, an admittedly limited tool, has helped to shed light on the nebulous phenomenon of nationalism identifying patterns and commonalities among cases across time and space. In this spirit, the paper explores the ways in which comparison can be used to understand the case of nationalism in Taiwan. In regards to the emergence and development of nationalism in Taiwan, we can discern roughly three phases. The first phase which ended in the nineteenth century, Taiwan (or Formosa) constituted periphery to the Chinese mainland with influence of Dutch and Spanish colonialism as well as Han Chinese migration and loosely incorporated in Qing Empire. This phase could be seen as a pre-nationalism era in which subjectivity of people of Taiwan was not expressed in national terms. The second phase starts with the cession of Taiwan by the Qing to the Japanese Empire in 1895. In this phase, Taiwan was subjected to forceful incorporation to a newly emerging empire. There is some evidence that under the Japanese rule, people in Taiwan started to articulate their identity though the differentiation between Taiwanese and Chinese did not appear to have attracted much interest of the people of Taiwan. The third phase starts with the defeat of Japan at World War II which returned Taiwan to Chinese sovereignty. However, due to the resumption of civil war on mainland China, Taiwan became the bases of the Republic of China which competed for hegemony with the People’ Republic of China. It is in this phase where clear articulation of Taiwanese identity took off and it is now legitimate to discuss Taiwanese nationalism. So which case would be a useful reference point in trying to understand the Taiwanese case? While it is not too difficult to find some cases that could be compared meaningfully in terms of the first and second phases, the conditions presented in the third phase are difficult to match with those in other cases. As a way of identifying equivalence that could help us compare the third phase of the development of Taiwanese nationalism, the paper examines the second phase with reference to the Scottish and Okinawan cases. The comparison with the Scottish case would shed light on the impact of incorporation into an empire on the development of nationalism in general. The comparison with Okinawa which occupies a similar position to Taiwan vis-à-vis the Japanese polity would shed light on the role of the understanding of race, nation and ethnicity and self-perception in shaping the ways in which nationalism develops. As such this constitutes a first step in the search for equivalence to investigate the third phase of the development of nationalism in Taiwan.

in Jonathan Sullivan and Chun-yi Lee eds., A New Era in Democratic Taiwan, London, Routledge, 2018

2019

In attempting to account for a weaker Taiwan's maintenance of its de facto independence in the face of a more powerful China's irredentist claim, much of the literature is predicated on counter-factuals, misconceptions and wishful thinking. That is, it sees Taiwan facing an inhibited binary choice between independence from (taidu) and unification with (tongyi) Beijing. In doing so, the literature ignores the fact that Taiwan has been an independent, sovereign state under the name of the Republic of China since 1949 and that this status quo constitutes that reality through an intermediate state identity and discourse of "ROC Independence", or huadu. Huadu, therefore, is worth analysing in its own right as the phemomenon that accounts for Taipei's maintenance of its de facto independence. Huadu developed from rational responses by the authoritarian ROC state to three crises of legitimacy on Taiwan; first, in 1947 when it responded with violence and entrenchment, second, after 1971 when it responded with liberalisation and, third, after 1987 when a democratising ROC pivoted to the PRC. The fortuitous result of that encounter for Taipei was that huadu became encoded as the 1992 Consensus of One-China-Respective-Interpretations (OCRI)-a tacit agreement with Beijing that permitted de facto peaceful international relations while shelving Taiwan's de jure status as long as neither side violated the status quo. This study argues that huadu nucleated in post-1987 democratisation and crystalised in post-2008 Rapprochement with Beijing, legitimating and securing the ROC ontologically as a sovereign Taiwan. In so doing, huadu delegitimates taidu and tongyi and effectively stalemates Beijing's power by compelling its sanction. A realist-constructivist account that uses a linguisticsinformed discourse analysis is an innovative approach that best elucidates huadu. It is realist and constructivist because, first, it provides firm textual warrant for huadu's viii intersubjective co-constitution in power politics and, second, it treats cross-Strait relations as they are, not as interested parties would like them to be. became a US Cold War proxy from 1950. Second, the 1972 US-PRC Shanghai Communique created an ambivalent US One-China policy that "acknowledged" China's (ROC and PRC) One-China Principle. Third, the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act provided Taipei with a US security umbrella, even as the US de-recognised the ROC and formally recognised the PRC. Both permitted Beijing and Taipei to agree the 1992 Consensus, which consolidated the status quo in One-China Respective Interpretations (OCRI). However, while such an approach explains the permissive environment, it effaces Taiwan's development of a state identity, separate to that of China, between 1950 and 1992. This study argues that "respective interpretations" in OCRI legitimated Taipei's separate state identity and permitted its political divergence from China. Hence, this study abstracts out US material power to focus on how and why Taipei's state identity accounts for its sovereignty. Taiwan is worthy of attention because it provides an outstanding example of how a contested state can achieve provisional endorsement, even from its veto state. Taiwan is not a secessionist entity; rather, its contested statehood in the ROC derives from the 1949 Communist Revolution in mainland China, which reduced the ROC to an ancien regime holdout. Its legitimacy ameliorates its legal isolation and cross-Strait relations have, in fact, developed Taipei's statehood through state identity change. 9 This study argues that the 1992 Consensus provides Taipei with legitimacy in huadu. That legitimacy bestows on Taipei a form of discursive power that stalemates Beijing's material power, resists Beijing's daguo identity and delegitimates both tongyi, which Beijing supports, and taidu, which Beijing resolutely opposes.

Historical Journal, 2024

This essay argues that contemporary Taiwan, as a democratic, functionally independent polity, constitutes the crucial exception to disavowals by the Republic of China (ROC) and People's Republic of China (PRC) of imperialist claims and ambitions. As such, it explores how the ideal of a single China spanning the Taiwan Strait ('one China') depends on the erasure of a (proto-) national Taiwanese identity, and possibly the suppression of the people who claim it. 1 'One China' narratives seek to naturalize Taiwan's absorption into the ROC in the 1940s and its potential future annexation by the PRC, hiding the pressures placed on Taiwanese people today to give up their hard-fought democracy, as well as the bloodshed that would be involved in any military conquest. In its separation, Taiwan has been powerfully constitutive of how many Han Chinese nationals of the PRC and ethnic Chinese abroad understand what China is and ought to be. 2 From the perspective of the PRC party-state, as articulated in speeches by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping and Chinese ambassadors stationed around the world, Taiwan is a wound whose only proper healing is a political union with the PRC. 3 The PRC claims sovereignty over Taiwan on the implicit grounds that it is the inheritor of the fullest extent of Qing territory and the explicit contention that it has superseded the ROC as the true 'one China'. There is, to date, no organized protest within China or even in the PRC diaspora against a possible

Taiwanese identity is a controversial topic in the modern era and defining it is not a simple tasks. Its origin and formation deserves attention and should be inspected. The origin of the word identity is from its Latin predecessor, idem, which has the definition of "the same".

Journal of Contemporary China, 2007

This paper argues against the popular impression that the rise of Taiwan's national consciousness is a result of democratization. Instead, it looks to the world timing of Taiwan becoming an independent reference point internationally for explanation of the changing identity in contemporary politics.

National Identities, 2009