Place, Identity, and National Imagination in Post-war Taiwan

Bi-yu Chang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317658115
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the struggles for political and cultural hegemony that Taiwan has witnessed since the 1980s, the focal point in contesting narratives and the key battlefield in the political debates are primarily spatial and place-based. The major fault line appears to be a split between an imposed identity emphasizing cultural origin (China) and an emphasis on the recovery of place identity of 'the local' (Taiwan).

Place, Identity and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan explores the ever-present issue of identity in Taiwan from a spatial perspective, and focuses on the importance of, and the relationship between, state spatiality and identity formation. Taking postwar Taiwan as a case study, the book examines the ways in which the Kuomintang regime naturalized its political control, territorialized the island and created a nationalist geography. In so doing, it examines how, why and to what extent power is exercised through the place-making process and considers the relationship between official versions of 'ROC geography' and the islanders' shifting perceptions of the 'nation'. In turn, by addressing the relationship between the state and the imagined community, Bi-yu Chang establishes a dialogue between place and cultural identity to analyse the constant changing and shaping of Chinese and Taiwanese identity.

With a diverse selection of case studies including cartographical development, geography education, territorial declaration and urban planning, this interdisciplinary book will have a broad appeal across Taiwan studies, geography, cultural studies, history and politics.

1 Introduction

Nationalism, identity and geographical imagination in postwar Taiwan

In 2004, two Kuomintang (KMT, Zhongguo guomindang)¹ candidates running for the Presidency of Taiwan each made the public gesture of kneeling down to kiss the ground during their election campaigns. This symbolic act by the politicians was an unambiguous demonstration of their love for, and undying allegiance to, Taiwan. The last two decades of Taiwan’s history have been marked by a dramatic transformation in Taiwanese identity, expressed both in the rise of Taiwanese consciousness and a steady growth in Taiwan-centrism. Representing a party that has often stood accused of being ‘a foreign regime’ (wailai zhengquan) (Shiba 1994), the KMT candidates’ attempt to win favour by declaring their love for and loyalty to Taiwan – by kissing the ground and kowtowing to the land – may simply have been a political necessity. However, behind the media hype and the opposition’s mockery, this political act can also be understood as a meaningful spatial practice, a strategy that signifies both membership and ownership of the land, producing spatial markers that identify its performers as insiders.

In the last few decades, issues of Taiwan identity, the dramatic changes it has undergone, the reasons for these changes, and the ways in which they have taken place, have been of great interest for many scholars working across various disciplines in both Taiwan Studies and China Studies. The narrative of nationhood promoted by the KMT regime during its 50-year rule of Taiwan had always been China-centric, regarding Taiwan merely as a small part of the great country. As time passed, this approach has become increasingly irrelevant and outdated, alienating the islanders from the land they inhabit.

In the struggles for political and cultural hegemony that Taiwan has witnessed since the 1980s, the focal point in contesting narratives and the key battlefield in the political debates are primarily spatial and place-based. The major fault line appears to be a split between an imposed identity emphasizing cultural origin (China) and an emphasis on the recovery of place identity of ‘the local’ (Taiwan). In the wake of the democratization process in the 1990s, a new discourse rapidly emerged that asserted Taiwanese subjectivity and advocated its independence and that brought about a dramatic identity change in the mid-1990s. In the struggle for political hegemony, great emphasis has been placed on Taiwan’s unique historical and cultural ‘positioning’ (B. Chang 2004, 2006, 2009). In contrast to the previous China-centric focus, a more grounded discourse has been constructed to promote Taiwanese consciousness and create a longing for an ‘authentic’ Taiwan (and Taiwanese roots). The indigenization issue has thus been at the centre of Taiwanese politics. In 2000, the opposition party – the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP, minzhu jingbudang)² – won the Presidential election and ended half a century of KMT rule. Since then, although the KMT regained power in 2008 and has adopted a more China-friendly policy, the indigenization trend has continued. In other words, the dramatic identity conflicts have resulted in a more locally focused identity.

Since no individual is outside or beyond geography, we are all bound up in the struggle over geography, which is, as Said (1993: 6) states, not only about ‘soldiers and cannons’ that take possession of or defend a piece of land, but also ‘about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings’ that conceptualize our sense of place, enhance our understanding of the world and equip us to navigate in our lives. However, these extremely influential spatial factors are often overlooked in the consideration of identity politics.

My concern here is to see how our sense of place in the world can be influenced, shaped or even constructed and (re)invented through spatiality. To address the question of why the concept of ‘place’ which one can call one’s own is so important in the construction of identity, geographical imagination and nation-building, the book adopts a spatial approach. In particular, my focus is on the importance of and the relationship between state spatiality and identity formation. Taking Taiwan as a case study, Place, Identity, and National Imagination in Postwar Taiwan explores the ever-present issue of identity from a spatial perspective, and aims to explore the relationship between the operation of state power and the construction of social space. Thus the book looks at the long neglected spatial dimension of identity formation, examining the symbolism, construction, visualization and contested meanings of Taiwan’s geography and political landscape.

Colonial context

Located 100 miles off the southeast coast of China, Taiwan lies between Japan and the Philippines and had long been populated by Austronesian-speaking peoples before the arrival of the Chinese and Europeans. This tropical island came to the world’s attention at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when its European name – Formosa – first appeared.³ From the early seventeenth century, the Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and Spanish had all sought control of the island, resulting in a colonial history that was both bloody and complex. Since that time, there was a succession of colonial occupations, first by the Europeans (1624–62),⁴ then by the Qing (1662–1895)⁵ and finally by the Japanese (1895–1945).⁶ One prominent result of the constant changes in political control is that there was never a single and stable identity for the islanders or a clear-cut ethnic mixture.

After the Second World War Taiwan and the nearby islands were retroceded to the Chinese government – the Republic of China (ROC, Zhonghua Minguo). Only four years later, the KMT-led ROC government was defeated in the Chinese Civil War and fled to Taiwan in 1949 under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. Approximately 1.5 million refugees and retreating army personnel fled from the mainland to Taiwan, accounting for roughly one-sixth of the island’s total population.⁷ Since the KMT retreat, the region under ROC direct control has an area of approximately 36,000 km² in total, roughly equivalent in size to the Netherlands. The land that under ROC control is generally referred to as the ‘Taiwan region’ (Taiwan diqu)⁸ consists of the island of Taiwan and nearby islands, including the Penghu island group (i.e. the Pescadores), several frontier islands near China (such as Kinmen⁹ and Matsu) and a few small islets in the South China Sea.

Both upholding a ‘one China’ policy, the two Chinese polities across the Taiwan Strait insisted on their own political legitimacy, leading to military confrontation at first and later to fierce struggles for international recognition and the right to represent the ‘real’ China. During the Cold War, with American support and protection, the exiled KMT government in Taiwan managed to hold on to the Chinese seat on the United Nations (UN) Security Council as the legitimate Chinese representative for two decades until 1971, rather than the People’s Republic of China (PRC), established by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949. When the PRC was finally accepted as the Chinese representative at the UN in 1972, the international status of the ROC – and thus Taiwan – was formally cast into doubt. Immediately after the ROC’s withdrawal from the UN academics suggested some possible solutions to the problems raised by the issue of the ROC’s sovereignty (Chen and Reismant 1972), though its ambiguous status has never been resolved. Because of its problematic legal status, the ROC has often been barred or excluded from participation in international organizations as a sovereign member state, or at best has been forced into a position in which it was treated as part of China (and implying merely a breakaway province of the PRC).

The impact of international isolation was not confined to the diplomatic arena. Domestically, the effects of isolation were equally detrimental. As a result of diplomatic defeats and international de-recognition, many difficult issues were brought to the fore and discussed fervently by the island’s population. If the world considered the PRC to be the legitimate Chinese government, what would be the ROC’s place in the world? Moreover, who then were the Taiwanese whose Chinese identity was rejected by international society? In the process of soul-searching and as a result of the self-doubt that arose from the island’s isolation, grievances over political, economic and cultural inequality between the local Taiwanese (benshengren) and the newly arrived mainlanders (waishengren) began to surface. What was seen as the unfair distribution of power, resources and capital became the key issue for Taiwan’s opposition movement and was deemed to reflect colonial suppression and cultural imperialism by the foreign (Chinese) regime.

The local and the newcomers

For immigrant communities such as Taiwan, the bonds with the land that they have long inhabited and the constructed ‘homing desire’¹⁰ to return to the ancestral home sometimes seem contradictory. The crucial factor influencing postwar identity in Taiwan has been shengji – that is the province of one’s birthplace or origin and also known as benji (original home) or zuji (ancestral home). During most of the postwar period, people in Taiwan generally categorized themselves as either benshengren or waishengren: the former term meaning ‘people from the local province’ and usually referring to the Taiwanese, the latter term meaning ‘people from other provinces’ and commonly referring to the mainlanders who came to Taiwan after the end of the Second World War. The category of benshengren is seen to consist of three groups of people: indigenous peoples (yuanzhumin),¹¹ Minnan¹² and Hakka,¹³ and generally signifies people who lived in Taiwan and whose ancestors migrated to the island before the Chinese takeover. The category of waishengren mainly refers to those who came to Taiwan after 1945, no matter from which part of China. Thus, the division is carved arbitrarily and homogenously, ignoring the many differences. The term waishengren carried negative connotations for the local Taiwanese, in part because of the rampant corruption experienced under Chinese rule following the departure of the Japanese and the arrival of ill-disciplined Chinese soldiers and officials working under Governor Chen I. The tension between benshengren and waishengren occurred soon after the Chinese takeover and eventually erupted in the 28 February Incident of 1947.¹⁴ This incident, in which the armed police killed unarmed protestors and which led to a bloody suppression island-wide, was an old wound that remained unhealed and became a taboo subject for many decades. The deep-rooted mistrust and resentment between the two groups could not be easily overcome or forgotten.

Except for Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, who account for 2.29 per cent of the island’s total population,¹⁵ most people in Taiwan are ethnic Han Chinese.¹⁶ Apart from the indigenous peoples, the division of Taiwanese identity rests not simply on ancestral origins but also depends on the point in time when one’s ancestors migrated from the mainland. In other words, Taiwan’s identity conflicts are not exacerbated by issues of ethnicity; rather, they are further complicated by a politically generated agenda. The simplistic and somewhat arbitrary categorization proposes a fixed definition of each group’s identity regardless of variables such as intermarriage, actual place of birth and personal circumstances, affiliation and choice. Not everyone fits neatly into one of these categories.

Even so the dichotomy between the two identities – the benshengren (the local) and the waishengren (the newcomers) – had always been obvious and the gap started to surface and widen in the first half of the 1990s. Although the KMT’s China-centric governance, compounded by its authoritarian rule and ideological construction, was extremely effective in the early postwar decades, the ways in which the Taiwanese people identified themselves changed dramatically in the mid-1990s. For example, before the DPP took power in 2000, 62 large-scale surveys were carried out between 1989 and 2000 on the issue of ‘how the Taiwanese identified themselves’.¹⁷ Although the surveys were conducted by various institutions and their results did not always correspond entirely, the overall trend was congruent and consistent. Before 1994, the majority of the islanders identified themselves as ‘Chinese only’ or as ‘both Chinese and Taiwanese’, while less than one-fifth of the interviewees identified themselves as ‘Taiwanese only’.¹⁸ After the rising hostility across the Strait and the growing negativity associated with China in the mid-1990s, the result of the surveys on self-identification was reversed, the turning point being reached in 1994. While the majority of respondents classed themselves as ‘both Chinese and Taiwanese’, the number of those who identified themselves as ‘Chinese only’ steadily decreased and those identifying themselves as ‘Taiwanese only’ continued to grow.¹⁹

The reversal of Taiwanese identity happened within only a few years in the mid-1990s. Both the process of making Taiwan ‘home’ and the demarcation of borders between inside and outside contribute to the creation of an effective place-identity. After all, the politics of assuming an ‘insider’ identity is also ‘the politics of claiming power’ (Rose 1995: 116). A strong sense of ‘inside-ness’ can easily be employed to arouse nationalist fervour and also to stir up hostility towards ‘the Other’ – both of which are strategies regularly used in the construction and articulation of state spatiality. Thus, identity politics have driven Taiwan’s push for democratization and social justice during the last two decades. But they have also created social divisions, conflicts and political upheaval. Consequently, identity tension came to a head at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The fish in the water

As Taiwan’s identity crisis deepened, the main issue appeared to be a rift between how people identified themselves politically and spatially. In other words, the major fault line appears to be a gap between the imposed Chinese identity emphasizing cultural origin and political daotong (i.e. Confucian orthodoxy) and the emerging Taiwanese consciousness demanding a recovery of ‘the local’ and an emphasis ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on romanization
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction Nationalism, identity and geographical imagination in postwar Taiwan
• 2 Building castles in the sand The construction of national imagination and territorial ownership in the ROC yearbooks (1951–2010)
• 3 Maps, modernity and the state Taiwan’s postwar cartographic development and changing national rhetoric
• 4 The rise and fall of Sanminzhuyi Utopia The spatiality of power in the construction and dismantling of Chunghsing New Village1
• 5 Home is a foreign country The ‘national geography’ in postwar elementary education (1945–2000)
• 6 Postscript Home and beyond
• Appendix I Glossary
• Appendix II Analyzed textbooks
• Bibliography
• Index