The creation of national language communities has played an integral role in the emergence and institutionalization of the nation-state system centuries ago (Gellner 1983). Language has remained a defining feature of politics well after the consolidation of the Westphalian order, and it still features as a fundamental component of many nation and state-building processes. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, language movements strove not only to revive dead or dying languages, but also to create new language communities or to empower old ones by officializing and promoting otherwise vibrant yet institutionally marginalized regional languages. Linguistic revitalization and recognition movements have often emerged in the context of recognition politics and self-determination projects (Taylor 1994). As Liu (2015) points out, language regimes institutionalize power relations between different ethnolinguistic groups, so that the formal recognition or marginalization of specific languages by governments also implies the recognition or marginalization of these groups. From this perspective, it is not surprising that disputes over the content of language regimes are often at the centre of ethnonationalist conflicts, sometimes violent ones. At the same time, language is also imbued with a flexibility unseen in many other types of ethnocultural conflict. In the words of Laitin (1999: 2, 4), “Language conflict […] has its own particular dynamic”, as “[…] language grievances (as opposed to say, religious grievances) tend to redirect conflict from the military to the political/bureaucratic realm”. A mother tongue can feature as a defining component of ethnic belonging, but unlike many other aspects of ethnicity, language can also be acquired. Far from being exclusive, a language can coexist with many components of ethnicity, such as race, religion or even other languages. Language, as a component of both ethnic and national identities, constitutes a powerful yet highly malleable substance for identity building.
If language has been a powerful force in nationalist movements, there is little evidence that such movements have been triggered by language itself. Quite on the contrary, language conflicts, like other types of ethnic conflicts, are perhaps most fundamentally by-products of competition over institutional access, control and change. For instance, the rise of language politics in places like Québec, Flanders and Catalonia has occurred concomitantly with regionalist and secessionist politics, and has often served as a platform to (re)negotiate the parameters of contested national identities. According to David Laitin’s theory of language and identity change (e.g. 1998a, 2007), language and identity shifts are in some circumstances mutually reinforcing phenomena, and nationalist, regionalist and postcolonial political elites have a rational incentive to promote indigenous or titular languages as a way to enhance regional distinctiveness and promote political autonomy. In most European states, progressive assimilation has enabled the languages of dominant groups to stand as legitimate symbols of the nation’s cultural fabric. For many of the more recent language movements, however, promoting the language and culture of historical majorities or politically dominant groups has often been more controversial, and efforts were made either at making linguistic concessions to speakers of minority languages, or at “detaching language from ethnicity” so as to make the dominant language acceptable to all ethnic groups (Dupré 2015: 154). In many postcolonial or highly heterogeneous societies, language regime change has further involved complex bargaining processes, resulting in language regimes that often have little to do with ethno-demographics. This is particularly obvious in postcolonial polities where a colonial language or a non-indigenous lingua franca have maintained their prominence. In these cases, Laitin (e.g. 1992, 1993) sees language outcomes as the result of a conflict of interest between different societal actors, and the creation of language regimes often ends up reflecting linguistic utility rather than ethno-demographics.
Due to these ramifications between language and the concepts and practices of ethnicity, culture and national identity, this book opts for a broader concept of culture politics, rather than language or ethnic politics alone. By culture politics, I refer to political debates and agendas concerning the place of culture in state institutions and public life more generally. Culture politics is an exercise that attempts to define the cultural boundaries of the nation and, by extension, of the state that governs it. When civil society actors and political parties engage in culture politics, they attempt to (re)define the culture(s) that can or should stand as legitimate national symbol(s). Since most aspects of culture, such as language, are inherently linked to ethnicity, it follows that cultural recognition usually implies the recognition of ethnic groups. In places like Taiwan, where the political scene is itself divided on national identity, cultural recognition is further interlinked with and intensified by national identity politics; as the nation’s political status is debated, it is inevitable that its cultural parameters will also be. By framing the subject matter in terms of culture politics, I want to make full use of the malleability of language as a component of different types and layers of identity: sometimes ethnic, sometimes national, sometimes both at the same time. For the purpose of this book, culture politics is the realm where ethnic politics, language politics and national identity politics intersect.
The significance of Taiwan
The case of post-democratization Taiwan (or the Republic of China [ROC])1 expresses the conflicting relationship between ethnolinguistic and national identities in the context of party politics in a particularly forceful manner. Taiwan’s population is predominantly Han Chinese, with a small Austronesian Aboriginal (原住民) minority of about 2 to 3 per cent. Taiwan’s so-called Han population is however far from homogenous. It is divided into three ethnolinguistic groups: about 70 per cent of the population is Hoklo (福佬), 15 per cent Hakka (客家) and 13 per cent Mainlanders (外省人) of various ethnolinguistic backgrounds.2 The ancestral language of the Hoklo is often rendered as Southern Min (Minnanhua 閩南話) or Hokkien (福建話), but is more commonly referred to as Taiwanese (台語) due to its demographic and historical prominence in Taiwanese society. The Hakka’s ancestral language is simply known in English as Hakka (客家話). Aboriginals, themselves divided into 16 officially recognized tribal groups, have traditionally spoken a variety of Austronesian languages and dialects, the number of which is up to debate (the Taiwanese government offers teaching materials in 43 of them), though many of these are now practically extinct or severely endangered (Legislative Gazette 2007: 496). Originally from southern China, the Hoklo and Hakka only began to settle in Taiwan in large numbers when the territory came under Chinese control in the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, these two ethnic groups are considered native or indigenous (本土人/本省人) alongside Aboriginals. The first generation of Mainlanders, on the other hand, came to Taiwan from the Chinese Mainland after 1945. Originally from various parts of China, and therefore speaking a wide variety of languages, their offspring have assimilated into or at least identified with Mandarin (known as Guoyu 國語 or national language) at an early stage of their settlement in Taiwan (Her 2009).3
From 1895 to 1945, Taiwan went through a period of Japanese colonization during which Japanese was enforced as both state language and education medium in elite schools. In 1945, Taiwan was handed to the Republic of China, itself controlled by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuo Min Tang or KMT, 國民黨). In accordance with the Chinese policy, Mandarin was promoted as de facto national and official language. A Mandarin-only policy was enforced with particular strength from 1956, as local languages were gradually banned from public spaces. The period of Martial Law (1949–1987), during which KMT-affiliated Mainlanders occupied the bulk of administrative positions in the authoritarian ROC state, has been decried as a new form of colonialism by many native Taiwanese nationalists and international scholars. In 1987, due to internal and external pressures, the KMT government lifted Martial Law, propelling progressive yet rapid liberalization and democratization. Taiwan’s democratization was accompanied by a Taiwanization (台灣化 or 本土化)4 movement led by pro-Taiwan independence political elites and intellectuals trying to reclaim the place of Taiwanese culture in Taiwanese society and state institutions. In the context of Cross-Strait politics, the movement also aimed to emphasize the cultural distinctiveness of Taiwanese society vis-à-vis its Chinese counterpart. Increased use of Hoklo in formal domains, together with discourses on the public use and promotion of local languages, has become more prevalent in the past decades. The aim of many language revivalists has been for Taiwanese languages – in particular Hoklo – to be recognized as national languages and become fully-fledged societal languages on a par with (or even above) Mandarin. In other words, Taiwan has been home to an important language revitalization and recognition movement.5
While many Taiwanization policies were initiated by the reformed KMT under the presidency of Lee Teng-hui (1988–2000), many initiatives on language revitalization in the 1990s – notably in the field of language education – were proposed and promoted by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP, 民進黨). As Taiwan’s largest pro-independence party and leader of the pro-Taiwan Green coalition,6 the party capitalized heavily on Taiwanization. Its rise to power as minority government in the 2000 presidential election, under the leadership of Chen Shui-bian, provided an opportunity to formally change Taiwan’s cultural landscape and linguistic regime. However, the DPP did little to enhance the status of Taiwanese languages vis-à-vis Mandarin during Chen Shui-bian’s two-term presidency (2000–2008). In 2002, proposals by the more radical Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU, 台灣團結聯盟) to make Hoklo a co-official language were rejected with little consideration. Instead, the DPP administration submitted proposals for a Language Equality Law (語言平等法), calling for the recognition of all of Taiwan’s languages (Hoklo, Hakka, Mandarin and Aboriginal languages) as equal national languages. A shorter and largely token version of the proposal re-emerged in 2007 as the National Languages Development Law (國家語言發展法), which was debated in the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan’s legislature), but not adopted. By the time the KMT came back to power in 2008, little change had taken place in Taiwan’s linguistic regime. Interestingly, while some significant initiatives in Hakka and Aboriginal policy were implemented, the revitalization and recognition of the Hoklo majority’s culture had become akin to a political taboo.
The case of Taiwan raises interesting questions on the relationship between language and identity, and on culture politics more generally. What explains recent trends in culture politics and language recognition in Taiwan? More specifically, what explains the limited success of Taiwanese language revitalization despite the consolidation of Taiwanese identity in recent decades, and the relative marginalization of the Hoklo majority’s culture in recent identity discourses and ethnic policy? Since many of the most successful language movements appear to gravitate around the culture of regional majorities, Taiwan’s paradoxical linguistic dynamics deserve further investigation.
Some may argue that a shift towards Mandarin is inevitable in all sinophone societies, and that differences between Taiwanese groups and between their languages are too trivial to warrant the adoption of ethnic or language politics frameworks. Unlike Mandarin, which has enjoyed more than a century of government-led standardization efforts in China, other languages spoken by Sinitic groups remain largely unstandardized, and have long been portrayed as mere dialects (方言) rather than languages. While Mandarin was only introduced in Taiwan in the late 1940s, its hegemony today is such that it is now seen as a Taiwanese language in its own right; indeed, Mandarin can increasingly be considered the language of Taiwan (Dupré 2013; Scott and Tiun 2007; see also Chapter 5). The hegemonic status of Mandarin may partly explain why support for local language revitalization and recognition has been lukewarm at best. In fact, it is only in the past 30 years that the Taiwanese began to conceptualize and treat Sinitic (i.e. Han) subgroups as distinct ethnic groups in their own rights. While these factors indubitably had adverse effects on language revitalization and recognition efforts, they do not in themselves constitute a fulfilling explanation for the low success of cultural revitalization in Taiwan. If Taiwan’s population has been rather indifferent to cultural recognition, the fact that the DPP did propose changes to Taiwan’s language regime through linguistic laws indicates that there has been some significant demand for revitalization and recognition, at least from its cultural revivalist lobby. More importantly, the factors above fall short of explaining the most interesting puzzle, that is, the question as to why Hoklo recognition has been particularly controversial, while the recognition and revitalization of minority cultures has become an imperative of party and electoral politics.
With this in mind, this book argues that constraints to cultural and linguistic recognition in Taiwan owe to political rather than cultural and sociolinguistic factors. The most obvious political constraint to enacting significant changes to Taiwan’s ethnolinguistic landscape was purely institutional: until 2016, the DPP – the main advocate of Taiwanization – never controlled the legislature, which means that Chen Shui-bian’s government (2000–2008) was in practice a minority government. However, the KMT had enacted a number of Taiwanization policies in the 1990s as a way to overturn its legacy of quasi-colonial, Chinese-nationalistic authoritarianism, and to enhance its credibility as representative of Taiwanese interests. Had the KMT remained loyal to Lee Teng-hui’s Taiwanization agenda, language regime change under the DPP government may well have been felt as a natural and logical development in the Taiwanization movement. But the KMT opposition the DPP government was facing in the early twenty-first century was a reinvented, re-Sinicized party distrustful of Hoklo nationalism and fixated on stalling the momentum towards Taiwanese identity and Taiwanese independence. For Chinese nationalists, indigenizing Taiwan’s culture and language regimes was too far a step in recognizing the distinct character of Taiwanese society. To them, the very recognition of local ethnic languages as Taiwan’s national languages was almost tantamount to recognizing Taiwan as a fully independent country. At the same time, however, the KMT showed a particular openness to grant minor concessions to the Hakka and Aboriginal minorities, especially if these were to be carried out at the local as opposed to the national level.
Clearly – and this is this book’s main argument – parties’ positioning on issues of cultural revitalization and recognition owes at least as much to electoral strategies as it does to nationalist ideology. This is partly due to the fact that Taiwanese parties, despite having different ethnic support bases, are not ethnic parties per se.7 The DPP has had to choose between either appealing to its Hoklo powerbase or widening its appeal to other groups by de-radicalizing its Hoklo-centred ethnonationalist ideology. Since the Hoklo are themselves deeply divided on the national identity issue, promoting multiculturalism has been the most rational option for the DPP. Therefore, this book contends that parties’ positioning on language revitalization and recognition in Taiwan was attributable to two types of ethnic strategies: outbidding and underbidding (Coakley 2008; Zuber 2013). Ethnic underbidding refers to the de-radicalization and depolarization of party agendas as they move towards the political centre or median voter. In the case of Taiwan, ethnonationalist underbidding involved attempts on the part of the DPP and the KMT to downplay their respective de-Sinicization and Sinicization ideologies, as well as their Hoklo and Mainland Chinese ethnocultural cores. Ethnic outbidding, on the other hand, refers to inter-party competition on a given ethnic group. Outbidding can have two effects: convergence or polarization. While ethnic outbidding is generally assumed to increase ethnic polarization or even lead to ethnic violence, in Taiwan, outbidding has had a convergence effect on minorities, as parties have competed to portray themselves as the legitimate defenders of Hakka and Aboriginal cultures and interests. In this sense, underbidding and outbidding strategies have been complementary: as parties have diluted their ethnocultural cores and adopted ambiguous stances on Taiwan’s political status, they have also widened their ethnocultural profile by absorbing elements of minority cultures. As I hope to demonstrate in this book, this logic is in part attributable to the ethnic voting structure of the party system, that is, its ethnic segmentation. In other words, parties adopted these particular strategies not only because multiculturalism occupies the moral high ground, but also because the segmentation of ethnic groups across the party cleavage made it electorally advantageous (if not necessary) to do so.
This party logic had a number of implications for culture politics and language recognition in Taiwan. First, these dynamics ended up removing recognition initiatives from the more conspicuous executive and legislative realms, and relegating them to the bureaucracy. This was especially the case under Chen’s minority DPP government, during which most initiatives on language revitalization and recognition were carried out within the auspices of Councils and Ministries, in particular the Ministry of Education. On the one hand, this enabled the government to bypass the largely antagonistic legislature and make some limited progress in areas such as language education and standardization. At the same time, it also enabled the government to show commitment to loyal activists by inviting them to serve as advisors, without having to promote their controversial policies and ideologies in high-profile settings. Second, although culture politics is inherently linked to issues of ethnic and national identities, underbidding strategies forced politicians to avoid ethnonationalist rhetoric when debating or promoting revitalization and recognition measures. As a result, debates over language recognition in Taiwan have put into play two antagonistic ideological forces – Taiwanese versus Chinese nationalism – that have been articulated throug...
