Redesigning Taiwan as a Pacific Island Nation – The Diplomat
Taiwan has long been automatically located in the “Greater Chinese World,” an imperialist ideology that takes the effects of thousands of years of Chinese colonization as the essence of this island. While the Republic of China (ROC), the state that has governed Taiwan and its surrounding islands since 1945, may be recognized as a sovereign state by any definition you might find in a political science textbook, one is even more likely to see Taiwan as a culturally and socially Chinese state. It is not only because the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never stopped claiming Taiwan as part of its territory and denies the very existence of the Republic of China, but also because before its democratization in the late 1980s, Taiwan was ruled by a single party. government and martial law by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). After its exile from the mainland, the KMT never stopped claiming all of China’s territory and considered itself the legitimate government of China.
During the longest period of martial law in world history, the KMT violently suppressed, imprisoned and killed protesters in Taiwan and effectively acted as the sole spokesperson for the Taiwanese people. During the third wave of democratization of the 1980s, the first opposition party – the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) – was founded in 1986. The following year, Chiang Ching-Kuo, then chairman of the ROC, finally ended martial law. Instead of founding a new country under a new constitution, the ROC remains, and its constitution remains, with some amendments added in the spirit of democratization. While the DPP recognizes the ROC as a sovereign country named Taiwan, the KMT has insisted on unification with China.
This is a sketch of contemporary Taiwanese history from a state perspective. Although the PRC claims Taiwan as part of its territory, it has never established sovereignty over or governed Taiwan. Since 1945, the ROC has been a de facto sovereign country whose governing territory covers Taiwan and its surrounding islands. While the PRC’s claim to Taiwan is illusory, the ROC’s governance of Taiwan has also long been contested. The ROC “took over” Taiwan after the Japanese surrendered in 1945, ending 50 years of Japanese rule in Taiwan. Prior to Japanese colonization, although the ancient Qing Empire in China incorporated Taiwan into its territory and established the old rule in Taiwan, Taiwan remained largely self-governing and indigenous. In other words, as many historians have pointed out (see for example the work of Chou Wan-Yao A New Illustrated History of Taiwan), the Qing sovereign claim to Taiwan was more nominal than actual.
This means that the assertion “Taiwan has always been Chinese” is simply false and anachronistic.
From a less state-centric perspective, around 1,200,000 people exiled to Taiwan, many of whom were linked to the KMT between 1945 and 1950, changed the demographic composition of Taiwan to some extent. Prior to this, the majority of Taiwan’s population consisted of settlers from southern Hokkien and Canton to a lesser extent. These people, who were of Han ethnicity, had been in Taiwan for hundreds of years and had built a collective consciousness as Taiwanese over time. They constituted more than 90% of Taiwan’s population. The new settlers/refugees, however, are widely identified as Chinese.
Before Han settlers came to settle and cultivate land in Taiwan, Taiwan, an island in the Pacific, was home to various indigenous groups. As the early Han settlers dispossessed the indigenous peoples and assimilated them, they also forged various affective, erotic, social and political alliances and relationships with the indigenous peoples. Especially since early Han settlers were predominantly male, many established sexual relationships with native women and married them. As many scholars of settler colonialism (such as Richard White, Ann Stoler, and Michael Witgen) have pointed out, sexual relationships have a much broader social and political impact beyond sexual partners. This was also the case in Taiwan.
It is often claimed that indigenous peoples have become largely sinicized, as they have often lost their traditional territory, cultural practices and writing systems. Yet it is also true that these Han were indigenized. Together, they forged an “imagined community,” to use the words of Benedict Anderson, through these tight, tender bonds. This is not to deny the atrocities inflicted by settlers on the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, but to assert that amid the violence, war, sexual assault, etc., there was a collective imagination of a common Taiwanese identity.
Long before the arrival of the ROC and its subjects in Taiwan, over the centuries, Taiwanese of many backgrounds and ethnicities had already lived as Taiwanese, an identity that was anything but Chinese. And this collective identity, despite 40 years of one-party KMT authoritarian rule, has resisted and persisted. Today, Indigenous peoples and groups still have vibrant and vibrant cultures and social and political organizations. Aboriginal ancestry is widely recognized. Indigenous peoples continue to claim traditional territories, hunting rights and state recognition. In recent years, broader alliances between radical independence activists and indigenous activists have formed. This new “chain of equivalence”, to quote Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, rejects the Sino-centric ideology and conceives Taiwan as its subject, and above all as an indigenous island.
Within this framework, the DRC is a Chinese colonial state that imposed itself on Taiwan and exercised political control over Taiwan and its surrounding islands. Thus, it is wrong to treat Taiwan simply as an extension of China (the PRC) or to regard it as an imperial periphery of China. We must recognize Taiwan as a Pacific Island country and revive its vibrant indigenous cultures as Taiwan’s common root.
Resisting China’s imperial claims does not require us to rekindle the binary rhetoric of the Cold War era or force us to align ourselves with conservative forces hostile to China on trade issues. Both realists and pessimists give the impression that China’s growing power and grip on other world powers will continually circumscribe Taiwan’s international space and eventually render Taiwan invisible. However, I believe that such aggression and conservative resurgence are signs of a fear of global insurgent politics and transnational decolonization movements. In other words, they are simple reactions against left-wing movements that have challenged and addressed racial, gender, sexual injustice and capitalist exploitation on a global scale. Therefore, we should instead align Taiwan’s struggles with progressive decolonial and independence movements around the world.
Although still working with the ROC’s constitutional framework, the current President of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen (whose paternal grandmother is Payuan, an indigenous people), is the first ROC government official to present official apologies to Indigenous peoples for government oppression and injustice, as part of its program to promote transitional justice. Along with its other diplomatic efforts, such as building stronger relations with other South Pacific island countries, such as Palau, the Solomon Islands and the Marshall Islands, this can be seen as Taiwan’s attempt to challenge the old China-centric ideology as well as a realistic discourse that focuses only on the consequences of “the rise of China” and rediscovering itself as a Pacific island nation.
Janice Feng holds a Ph.D. political science student at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on settler colonialism, feminist and queer theory, and contemporary democratic theory.
