Legitimacy, Meaning and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity

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Legitimacy, Meaning, and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity

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Legitimacy, Meaning, and Knowledge in the Making of Taiwanese Identity

Mark Harrison

LEGITIMACY, MEANING, AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE MAKING OF TAIWANESE IDENTITY

© Mark Harrison, 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7587–4 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7587–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harrison, Mark, 1968– Legitimacy, meaning, and knowledge in the making of Taiwanese identity / Mark Harrison. p. cm. ISBN 1–4039–7587–6 1. Taiwanese—Ethnic identity. I. Title. DS799.42.H37 2006 305.895105249—dc22

2006046049

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Guinevere, and for my father, Dennis Harrison (1936–2003)


Contents

Acknowledgments

viii

A Note on Romanization

ix

Chapter 1

Epistemologies

1

Chapter 2

Explaining National Identity

23

Chapter 3

Legitimizing Taiwan

51

Chapter 4

Elaborating Taiwan

79

Chapter 5

Writing Taiwan

107

Chapter 6

New Narratives

131

Chapter 7

New Epistemologies

155

Chapter 8

New Taiwanese

191

Notes

207

Bibliography

231

Index

247

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Dr. Gloria Davies and Professor Bruce Jacobs for their scholarly advice. The Center for Chinese Studies at the National Central Library in Taipei and the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University provided invaluable material and intellectual resources. The author would also like to express his warmest thanks to Lee Su-chuan at Academia Sinica for her knowledge, insight, and wisdom.

A Note on Romanization

This book applies the romanization conventions generally used for work on Taiwan. In instances when received romanizations of names and places are already established, or when individuals romanize their own names in specific ways, then these are observed. When no received romanized form has been established, then the hanyu pinyin system in used.


CHAPTER 1

Epistemologies

T

aiwan is an island in the South China Sea 220 km off the southern coast of mainland China. For several thousand years, its major populations were societies of Pacific islanders, joined much later by itinerant Chinese settlers from the mainland across the straits. In the early seventeenth century it came partially under Dutch rule, before being caught up in dynastic transition when the Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong (also known as Koxinga) landed with a force of several hundred thousand Chinese on the island from the mainland retreating from the Manchus during the establishment of the Qing dynasty. The Ming outpost fell after twenty years, and Taiwan entered a fractious period of imperial governance and periodic conflict among the sub-ethnicities of its Chinese settlers. At the end of the nineteenth century, with the European and Japanese empires circling, the Chinese imperial government invested heavily in Taiwan, testing the apparatuses of modernization on what was now a province. The experiment was short-lived, however. Following the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, when the Qing empire began to collapse, it ceded Taiwan to Japan as its first colony. Taiwan enjoyed the best of Japanese liberalism in the creation of modern heath and education systems, and then experienced the worst of Japanese militarism from the 1930s. On the mainland, empire had been replaced by nationhood with the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC), and it is to the Republic that Taiwan was passed upon “Retrocession” in 1945. Eighteen months later, in an island-wide uprising and the defining event of modern Taiwanese history, the Taiwanese unsuccessfully challenged Chinese Nationalist (KMT) rule at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Just eighteen months later, the Nationalists lost the civil war and relocated the national government of the ROC to Taipei.

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Making of Taiwanese Identity

Through Taiwan’s post–World War II history it has been one half of a divided China, a Little Dragon, a military dictatorship and most recently, a new democracy and for some, a new nation. Taiwan is, above all, a frontier— in the past of the empires of both China and Japan and more recently, of U.S. hegemony in the Pacific and an imagined frontier of the People’s Republic of China. It is also a conceptual frontier—of an East Asian postcoloniality, of modernization, and globalization, and perhaps even a frontier of the postmodern. Taiwan’s contested identity as Chinese, Japanese, or even as “Taiwanese,” expresses its literal and discursive location on the edge of the great political, economic, and cultural forces around it. Taiwan, therefore, is a tremendously complex and interesting subject of study, both for foreign scholars and nowadays for Taiwanese studying themselves. At the intersection of so many sociohistorical categories of knowledge, Taiwan generates endlessly rich possibilities for scholarship. At the centre of these is the issue of identity and the question of who are the Taiwanese. Toward a Taiwan Studies The identity of the island of Taiwan (Taiwan bendao) following Retrocession has been at one level a contest over names, both in Chinese and in English. The list of names and terms applied to the island is long: China, the Republic of China, Taiwan, Chinese Taipei, and Formosa; or Zhongguo, Zhonghua Minguo, or Taiwan; categories such as guojia (nation), sheng (province), and fu (prefecture); and evocative terms such as xiangtu or bentu (the native soil), and the Chinese translation of Ilha Formosa, Meilidao. There are also names now in disuse, such as Free China or Ziyou Zhongguo, and Nationalist China. All of these names indicate the multiple meanings that have been ascribed to the island of Taiwan. Under each term particular historical trajectories are privileged or suppressed and certain social distinctions are valorized or erased. The name “Free China” suggests the global struggle against Communism and cold war geopolitics, while it effaces the distinction between people who identify as natives of Taiwan, benshengren, and the post-1949 mainland refugees (waishengren). In doing so, the historical moments that created that distinction, Retrocession, the 2-28 Incident, and the Nationalist defeat in the Chinese civil war, are also erased. The Portuguese name “Formosa” that dates from the early sixteenth century locates the island’s identity in the West within the history of Western imperial expansion. Starting in the early seventeenth century with the reports by the Dutch colonial administrators of the island, the geographic and ethnographic studies of the island by many European naturalists, missionaries, and fortune seekers including oddities such as the fictitious account of George Psalmanazaar1 use the name Formosa.

Epistemologies

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3

Following Retrocession, the term Formosa retained a distinctiveness and a historical legitimacy as a political label. When early independence activists such as Ong Joktik elaborated a national history for the island in English, they did so under the name Formosa, and referred to the island’s people as Formosans.2 The names for the island have operated in different ways over time under specific categories of knowledge and within different institutional settings. As a political category under Qing administration, the Chinese name “Taiwan” had, until 1885, only a prefectural (fu) designation that covered the main island and the smaller island of Penghu. Within the prefecture were the county (xian) designations of Taiwan, Zhuluo, and Fengshan. Adopting the Chinese designation, European visitors referred to the town that was the administrative center of Taiwan Prefecture as “Taiwan-foo.”3 In 1885, the prefecture was elevated to provincial status, becoming Taiwan sheng. Ten years later, in the political confusion following the Sino-Japanese War and the cession of Taiwan to Japan with the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Taiwan briefly became the name of a nation-state as the Republic of Taiwan (Taiwan Minzhuguo), before being reduced to the level of Prefecture of the Governor of Taiwan (Taiwan Sôtokufu) under Japanese rule. Following Retrocession in 1945, Taiwan was once again referred to as a provincial-level political body under the Republican administrative structure. Then with the Nationalist defeat in 1949, the name Republic of China was reduced in real political terms to mean almost the same territory as Taiwan, with only the addition of Penghu, Matsu, and Kinmen. In the 1950s, Taiwan’s complex political circumstances meant the names, Republic of China or Zhonghua Minguo, Taiwan, and Formosa could all refer to the island, with different but overlapping meanings. In strictly political terms, the ROC was the correct name, but while Formosa rapidly fell into disuse, Taiwan became the privileged label when referring to the island in a geographical sense. In the 1950s one could speak meaningfully of the distinct geography or fauna and flora of Taiwan, but the geography of the Republic of China or Zhonghua Minguo dili would not have made sense except in the political context of the Nationalist’s territorial claim over the mainland.4 Politically, in the 1950s and 1960s, Taiwan as a province was a qualifier of the Republic of China, and often appeared as Taiwan, Republic of China. Because the two names referred to almost (but not exactly) the same geographic territory, very soon there began to be slippage between them. Since the 1950s, the scope of the name Taiwan has progressively broadened, occupying the primary position in the discourse of the island’s culture, social life, and economy and gradually pushing out references to China and Formosa. Formosa had largely disappeared from English usage by the late 1960s, while

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China and Taiwan were still interchangeable in literary studies, politics, and anthropology. By the late 1970s China generally meant the People’s Republic of China: in 1968, the anthropologist Margery Wolf published The House of Lim: A study of a Chinese Farm Family5 but in 1972, she followed it up with Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan.6 By the early 1980s, Taiwan in Chinese had generally replaced Zhonghua Minguo in studies of the island’s economy. The proceedings of a conference in 1976 on the Taiwanese economy held at the Institute of Economics at Academia Sinica, for example, used Taiwan, without any provincial qualification.7 After the lifting of martial law in 1987, Taiwan began to occupy the cultural realm, becoming the predominant name used to refer to the island’s literature and cinema. Finally, through the 1990s, the name Taiwan has come back into the politics, literally intruding into the existing designation when the state began using the Republic of China on Taiwan in the mid-1990s. Later in 2002 when the phrase “Issued in Taiwan” started to appear on ROC passports.8 The supplanting of the name Republic of China by the name Taiwan is demonstrated by the slight mismatch between the geographic meanings of the two names. In its limited geographical and strict political senses, Taiwan refers only to the main island, whereas the territory actually governed by the ROC also includes the islands of Penghu, Matsu, and Kinmen. By the 1990s, the name Taiwan had become sufficiently dominant to efface this difference and take on the political meanings of the Republic of China, so that it became possible to refer unproblematically to Taiwan and also implicitly mean all the territories actually governed by the ROC. For example, the contemporary term “China-Taiwan relations” does not include any distinction between the main island and those territories. The importance of this process is clearly understood by the mainland Chinese government that has resisted the use of the name Taiwan in association with the idea of statehood at every opportunity, including while referring to some of the most unlikely arenas, such as art exhibitions and international service organizations. The overall trajectory of the rise and fall in the use of names for Taiwan has been the ascendance of the name Taiwan from one of a number of possibilities to the most meaningful term for the island. Each name has represented particular histories and each has privileged ways of knowing about the island. Implicated in the ascendance of the name Taiwan, therefore, is the emergence of a specific and dominant meaning for the island. The issue of naming is one way to approach the question of a Taiwanese identity. As Taiwan has become the most meaningful word to distinguish the geography, history, culture, and polity of the island, it has become possible for someone to legitimately label himself or herself as Taiwanese to evoke an

Epistemologies

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5

identification with those things. To use other names is to invoke identification with different histories and cultures that do not necessarily correspond to the island’s geographical space. The most obvious example is Chinese, but there is also Formosan, Hakka, or even the anachronistic names of intra-island groups such as Quanzhou and Zhangzhou. Jacques Derrida has written an extensive critique of the act of naming in his work on Levi-Strauss, which links the act of naming to structures of power and, ultimately, violence. Derrida says, “the proper name was never possible except through its functioning within a classification: and therefore within a system of differences.”9 For Derrida, Saussure’s account of meaning, in structural linguistics terms, comes from the difference between signs; the act of writing, in Derrida’s very broad sense, is how difference is signified; and the inscription of difference by writing structures the world in terms of power: “To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute.”10 Producing meaning in the world is an act of violence for Derrida: there is no possibility of returning to a moment before the inscription of difference, so there has never been and can never be a moment when meaning is not being inscribed and power is not being exercised. Therefore, in Derrida’s terms, when one sets out to write about Taiwan, one is inscribing its difference and creating its meaning even at the level of choosing what name to call it. For Derrida, a kind of textual (and literal) violence is being committed over the island, for taking something and naming it is automatically to locate it within a system of classification that is the basis of the exercise of power over it. In Christopher Johnson’s reading of Derrida, “Writing, difference and violence are not something that happens to a previously pure and intact system, they are not something that supervenes from without. To use Derrida’s own formulation, writing, difference, violence are always already there, at the origin, from the origin, which means in effect that there is no (pure) origin.”11 Therefore, simply naming the island Taiwan in English, Chinese, or Japanese constitutes a Taiwanese identity. Each time the island is named Taiwan and not Formosa or China, Taiwan as a legitimate object of meaning is being differentiated from other meanings that can encompass the island under other names. When one writes phrases such as “Taiwanese popular culture” or “Taiwan’s democratic transformation,” rather than using, for example, Formosa or Free China, its meaning is being rehearsed, elaborated, and contested at the boundaries of what Taiwan can mean. However, this is not a neutral and homogeneous discursive process that simply unfolds the truth about Taiwan in ever-greater detail with each statement. Rather, it is structured in terms of power and replete with omissions, effacements, and priorities that

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privilege certain events, themes, and cultural practices such as the 2-28 Incident, a migrant history, a cuisine, language, and so forth. Its name locates it within a system of differences that are part of a structure of meaning organized around that name. For example, public debates in the 1990s have been about the form of a 2-28 Memorial or a 2-28 National Commemorative Holiday to memorialize events in Taiwanese history. In these debates, what can legitimately be called Taiwanese is separated from that which belongs under other names such as Formosa or the Republic of China. The 2-28 Incident is an event in Taiwanese history, not Chinese history (although it can come under Formosan history) and to write about it is to demarcate the boundaries of the meaning of the name Taiwan. The Taiwan traced in this process is elusive and indeterminate. Despite the claims of nationalists, politicians, and scholars to make definitive statements about Taiwan,12 Taiwan-as-meaning is never fixed. Rather, as it is being continually named by the production of statements about it, Taiwan is always at the moment of coming into being. In his critique of the rhetorical strategies of temporality that create an imagined national narrative, Homi K. Bhabha writes: “the suddenness of the signifier is incessant, instantaneous rather than simultaneous. It introduces a signifying space of repetition rather than a progressive or linear seriality.”13 Bhabha’s work captures the tenuousness and urgency by which the nation of Taiwan is formed as a narrative by the iterative moments of the recitation of its name. Taking into consideration this aspect of meaning is necessary for any serious attempt to write about Taiwanese identity. Developing at least a basic understanding of the nature of meaning and the part one’s own writing plays in inscribing it, enables one to develop a critical position that takes in more of the political and epistemological structure of Taiwanese identity. The alternative is for one’s scholarship to become simply part of the same process: writing becomes one more inscription of the difference of Taiwan and one more reach for a conclusive statement about what Taiwan means. As Davies has observed, “when one sees beyond the easy homogeneity of ‘words which mean exactly what they say’ to textual operations which produce the effect of ‘words that mean exactly what they say,’ then one stands a real chance of being challenged by the text, about its assumptions as well as one’s own.”14 In this case, the text is Taiwan and the idea of “words which mean exactly what they say” is the belief that the name Taiwan has a simple and direct correspondence to an island in the Northern Pacific and that one can speak authoritatively, transparently, and conclusively about what comes under that name on the basis of that belief. To understand the textual operations of words is to understand how meaning is socially produced in writing under the exercise of power—in other words, who gets to say what Taiwan

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means, and how the effect of authority, transparency, and conclusiveness over it is created. Even if one does not delve deeply into Derrida’s critique of language, his implication of naming and meaning within the structure and operation of power is an important way to grasp how meaning for Taiwan has been produced by the political forces that have operated over the island. After the Qing government had accepted the surrender of Zhen Keshuan, grandson of the Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong in 1683, it decided to incorporate the island into the empire as a prefecture of Fujian province to come under the imperial system of territorial classification for the first time.15 Although Chinese from Fujian had been traveling to the island for several centuries, Taiwan had not been part of the Ming imperial administrative system and, as Shepherd notes, is very infrequently mentioned in imperial writing until the Qing dynasty. At the most basic level, incorporating Taiwan into the Qing empire meant naming it and placing it within the hierarchical system of classification of territorial administration, in this case a prefecture (fu). To designate the region, the Qing administration used the Chinese transliteration of the Aboriginal name Tayouan that referred to a peninsula on the harbor at Anping near Tainan.16 Although the actual Qing control was initially limited to pockets in the northern and southern plains on the west coast, the territory named Taiwan prefecture included the entire island, and the act of naming marked it out as having a particular status within the imperial system. In accordance with imperial administrative practice, Qing administrators produced a prefectural gazetteer, Taiwanfu Zhi, the first in 1694, followed a decade later by a revised gazetteer for the prefecture and also gazetteers for the counties within the prefecture over the subsequent decades. From establishing its classification, knowledge about Taiwan was structured on the basis of the epistemological foundations of the empire, which meant privileging certain kinds of knowledge and certain categories. At one level, this knowledge was instrumental in its governance, and indeed the limited nature of imperial knowledge is indicative of the limitations of the exercise of Qing power over Taiwan. The early Qing gazetteers showed the registration of land for taxation, population, the functioning of markets, and prices of commodities such as rice and sugar. At the same time, the Qing administrators did not have detailed maps of the island and the inadequacies of the baojia system of land registration acted as a constant constraint on the effective collection of tax revenue.17 Qing officials also wrote accounts of the island’s indigenous population that differentiated the people of Taiwan (as in other frontier regions) according to their assimilation into Chinese social power structures with the terms

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“raw” and “cooked.”18 While the differentiation of the population with these terms was instrumental in controlling them, it was also part of the discursive production of social relations within the empire and of the relations across the empire’s borders. Imperial writing about Taiwan, therefore, was the inscription of knowledge about the island that incorporated it into the complete structure of Chinese imperial power. In this way, Taiwan Prefecture became an economy that could be taxed and an environment that could be exploited, and understood as such as a part of the functioning of the whole imperial economy. It also became a region whose people could be located at a point in the whole imperial social hierarchy. Qing officials understood how the differentiation of territory was the first step in its consolidation under imperial control, and also how knowledge about territory was structured on the basis of the imperial project of colonizing and civilizing. The Zhuluo gazetteer in 1717 includes the following: In the past, people have risked crossing the Ta-chia boundary even though it was forbidden; if a county is founded, then many farmers can be induced to open the land. Han can reclaim tribal land by paying the aborigine head tax on behalf of the tribes. In this way, revenues will increase, and the aborigines will also benefit. And increased tax revenues can pay for soldiers’ rations. With an additional county, government officials of both counties can police the area and educate the people; the relations between officials and the people, formerly distant, can grow close; officials can cultivate the people, promulgate imperial edicts, and teach the virtues of filiality and loyalty. Propriety, morality, modesty, and the sense of shame will flourish, and rebellions will cease. The purpose of adding troops and establishing a county is not only to display military might to overawe others but also to spread a refining influence.19 As the passage indicates, the naming of boundaries was not fixed but a process of continual inscription. Therefore, it was always open to renegotiation. By the late nineteenth century, the operation of power over Taiwan had begun to change, triggered by the increasing aggression of the European and Japanese empires as well as the highly successful export economy of the island. In the early 1860s, Taiwan acquired two treaty ports in Tainan and Tanshui20 and was exporting rice, sugar, tea, and camphor, and importing opium. At the same time, Japanese threats against the island after the murder of shipwrecked Japanese sailors by aborigines in 1871 and the failed invasion by a French expedition in 1884 aroused concern at the center about the compromise of the frontiers and the need to strengthen its authority.21 In 1885 Taiwan went a step up in its classification and became a province (sheng),

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from which it became part of the Self-strengthening (ziqiang) campaign in the last years of the Qing dynasty.22 As Taiwan’s Qing administrators were producing their kind of knowledge about the island, European explorers, missionaries, and traders were producing another kind. In this discourse, Taiwan was Formosa and a part of many narratives of exploration and trade in the Far East written from the eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. Early legitimate accounts include those of La Pérouse in 1787. He describes landing at the port of “Taywan” shortly after a revolt in what he refers to as a “Chinese colony.” Like the Qing administrators, La Pérouse had certain kinds of knowledge that structured his view of the world and located him in it. He described Taiwan’s geography and reported on the livelihood of the inhabitants he encountered, both Chinese settlers and aborigines. He described Taiwanese aborigines as “neither Chinese nor Japanese: situated between these two empires, they seem in some respects analogous to each.”23 After Taiwan acquired its treaty ports and a semipermanent population of foreign missionaries and trade representatives in the mid-nineteenth century, many more accounts were written. In Britain, knowledge about Formosa, along with many other parts of Asia, was taken up by the Royal Geographical Society where it became part of the discourse through which European imperial power was being exercised around the world. In Edward Said’s well-known formulation, this was “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling it, ruling it . . . a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”24 The Society published Proceedings and held colloquies at which accounts of journeys around the world were recounted. The description by Robert Swinhoe, who was a British consul in Taiwan in the 1860s, is a typical travelogue: We anchored in Lungkeaou Bay, and pulled to the central village, called Lungkeaou, which is somewhat removed from the beach. The village is walled, and I suppose contains about 1000 Chinese. It has a ditch round it, with plank-bridges crossing to the two gates. On the north side of the bay are two or three hamlets; these the Lungkeaou villagers warned us against, and said that beyond this bay southwards the Chinese squatters were beyond control, and not to be trusted.25 Twenty years later British visitors were writing in much more detail about the island’s topography, with particular attention to harbors and trade. Colquhoun and Stewart-Lockhart’s paper in the China Review of 1885 specifies

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quantities and prices of coal, camphor, rice, and tea exports and the importation of textiles and opium.26 The foreign accounts of Taiwan parallel the official Qing gazetteers in their scope, but as Said argues for the whole discourse of Orientalism, they demonstrate a “flexible, positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the relative upper hand.”27 Europeans and North Americans in Taiwan could be traders, missionaries, and adventures, and could slip between these subject positions, reinscribing Taiwan in different terms each time. Under the Japanese after 1895, Taiwan Sôtoku fu, the Prefecture of the Governor of Taiwan, was subject to the same process of differentiation and production of knowledge as had occurred under Qing rule, but with a far more elaborated language of reporting and research than had been undertaken by the Qing administration or the European visitors. This matched the level of authority the Japanese empire exercised over Taiwan and its investment in Taiwanese economic and social development. After the ineffective governance of the first three administrators of the island,28 Goto Shimpei and Kodama Gentaro undertook a similar method of defining the territory as under Qing administration in the seventeenth century. Goto used the existing baojia system of village organization left over from Qing rule to organize the allocation of the military and policing to stamp out resistance and to eventually bring the entire island under colonial control.29 In 1900, he conducted land surveys involving classification, registration, and valuation as part of a wide-ranging land reform program. Japanese scholars wrote detailed accounts of colonial administrative practices, such as Sugiyama Seikan’s Taiwan rekidai Sotoku chiseki (Administrative Achievements of Taiwan’s Governors-General) in 1921, and by the 1930s, the Japanese in Taiwan had undertaken studies of the island’s agricultural development, geography and wildlife, and local population, especially Taiwan’s indigenous peoples. These included Ino Kaku’s Taiwan bunka chi (History of Taiwan’s Civilization), Teikokushugika no Taiwan (Imperial Administration of Taiwan) by Yanaihara Tadao in 1929, Miyakawa Jiro’s Taiwan no genshi geijutsu (Primitive Art in Taiwan) in 1931, Taiwan hontojin no shukyo (Religion of the Minnan People of Taiwan) by Masuda Fukutaro in 1937, and industry studies such as Taiwan no Togyo (Sugar Industry of Taiwan) in 1939 and Taiwan beikoku keizai-ron (The Rice Industry of Taiwan) by Kawano Shigeto published in 1941. With the Japanese studies of the island being done under name of Taiwan, the dimensions of what the name could mean in Japanese were greatly expanded in their detail and sophistication. Like the Qing empire, the Japanese empire also produced Taiwan discursively, differentiating it as a category of

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knowledge and elaborating its meaning with scholarship and administrative reporting. Also like the Qing, Taiwan’s discursive production was implicated in the discourses of social relations both within Japan itself, and Japan’s relations with the rest of the world. For Lo Ming-cheng, medicine was a key, and moveable, marker of discursive differentiation of the Taiwanese within the Japanese empire, rather than the Qing notion of civilization, as signified by the terms “raw” and “cooked.” Lo argues that through immunization laws and the education and Japanification of Taiwanese doctors, “Taiwan was transformed from a ‘sick zone’ into a ‘healthy land,’ and eventually into the bastion for conquering the new sick zones of China and South Asia.”30 After the Nationalist retreat in 1949, Taiwan’s identity in English was divided among the names Formosa, Taiwan and variations on China, such as Free China and Nationalist China. This split reflected the multiple meanings and historical trajectories in which the island found itself within the Englishspeaking world. The English name Taiwan was not the predominant name for the island at that time. The use of the term Formosa had persisted in use in English through the Japanese colonial period and remained common even in official language. The text of the Cairo Declaration of 1943 giving control of the island over to the Nationalists used Formosa,31 as did Truman’s speech in which he ordered American intervention in the Taiwan Straits in June 1950 after the outbreak of the Korean War.32 The American publication Far Eastern Survey wrote about Taiwan in the late 1940s but attached to Formosa as a qualification, as Formosa (Taiwan).33 The World Today, published in 1948 by the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London referred to the island as “Formosa, also known as Taiwan.”34 Although Formosa was still widely used in the 1940s and 1950s, Truman’s decision to support the Nationalists, which brought the island under a different set of configurations of power and naming practices. The U.S. aid program coordinated under the Joint Chinese-American Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR) transferred its operation to Taiwan from the mainland and began extensive research on the Taiwanese economy, land use, and agriculture in association with Taiwan’s Nationalist administration. This brought together detailed Chinese and English language studies of Taiwan using empirical methodologies that were familiar to the American officials. Like the Japanese fifty years earlier, the aid and development program elaborated knowledge about the island necessary for the implementation of the land and economic reforms that so effectively restructured the Taiwanese economy in the subsequent two decades. Chen Cheng-hsiang’s Atlas of Land Utilization in Taiwan was published in 1950, and the JCRR began producing many studies of Taiwanese social and economic life. These studies used the

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name Taiwan and occasionally Free China instead of Formosa. In 1954, the JCRR published A Report on Taiwan’s Population and Land Reform in Free China; in 1955, Rice Marketing in Taiwan and New Spirit for a New China in Agriculture; This Land Is Ours: Land Reform in Taiwan in 1960, and many more papers and books. As a government organization, the JCRR used names for Taiwan making distinctions that accorded with the KMT and American government policy of the time. This meant distinguishing between the ROC as the national government of China and Taiwan as the English transliteration of name of a province of the ROC. Therefore, JCRR studies used the nomenclature Taiwan, Republic of China. Formosa fell outside of these official naming practices, and as a result, the names Taiwan and Formosa became markers of power in the production of knowledge of the island. Those closer to the U.S. and ROC governments, either as government officials or researchers attached to the JCRR or Taiwanese research organizations, used the name Taiwan for the island. The name moved into the language of top level postwar generation of American academics working in Chinese Studies. When the well-known sinologist, John K. Fairbank called for Taiwanese self-determination in the mid-1950s, he called the island Taiwan, but the stretch of water between Taiwan and the mainland the “Formosa Straits.”35 By the end of the decade, the use of Taiwan as a qualifier for Formosa had been reversed, so that in Nuttonson’s 1963 study of geography and agriculture, for example, the island had become Taiwan (Formosa)36 and by the end of the 1960s, the Far Eastern Economic Review and American publications such as the Atlantic Monthly had given up using the name Formosa altogether in favor of Taiwan. Formosa persisted at the margins, however. Some scholarly and semi-scholarly work continued under that name, such as Mancall’s edited volume Formosa Today in 1964, and Kerr’s Formosa Betrayed in 1966. Most notably, independence activists in Japan and the United States operated under the name Formosa, publishing the English language journals Independent Formosa and Formosa Quarterly into the 1970s. The highly fragmented independence movement formed a peak body in 1970 in New York as the World United Formosans for Independence (WUFI). For these groups, the name Formosa was a sign of opposition to official naming practices, taking the meaning of the island outside the legitimized production of knowledge. By the late 1960s, the marginalization of Formosa meant that very little mainstream scholarly work in English was being produced under that name, with China or Taiwan becoming the alternatives. In anthropology, Bernard Gallin published Hsin Hsing, Taiwan; A Chinese Village in Change in 1966 and as noted above, Margery Wolf produced The House of Lim: A Study of a Chinese Farm Family in 1968 and Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan in

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1972. In the same year, Burton Pasternak and David Jordan published Kinship and Community in Two Chinese Villages and Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors: The Folk Religion of a Taiwanese Village respectively. The slippage across the names China and Taiwan was indicative of changing political circumstances. The claim of the KMT to be the representative government of China, and therefore for Taiwan to be able to be called the Republic of China was being undermined by its deteriorating international situation: US–PRC (People’s Republic of China) détente, the Diaoyutai Islands dispute, and the loss of the ROC seat at the United Nations. Naming practices reflected these political changes as the boundaries of the meanings of China and Taiwan began to shift accordingly. The Taiwanese could be Chinese in an anthropological sense and were researched under that label by Wolf, Pasternak and many others, but in a political sense the name China was losing legitimacy over the island. The name Taiwan, on the other hand, was gaining in legitimacy and being further elaborated to encompass more and more aspects of the meanings of the island. In the case of Gallin and Wolf, their naming practices expressed a distinction between Taiwan as a geographical location and China as an ethnographic category: the place is Taiwan but the people are Chinese. However, the meanings are overlapping and ambivalent. Pasternak’s use of the adjective Chinese could mean that the subjects of his study were Chinese in an ethnographic sense, but also that they were living in China, therefore privileging the notion of Taiwan’s Chinese identity. Jordan’s study, in contrast, used the adjective Taiwanese, thus privileging the location as Taiwan and implying Taiwanese as an ethnographic category. Wolf ’s later work, on “rural Taiwan” gave a geographic location that also suggested an ethnography: the women and families of Taiwan being Taiwanese. At the beginning of the 1980s, Taiwanese had become legitimized as an ethnographic category with Gates and Ahern’s edited volume The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society.37 From the late 1960s, this continued into other disciplines. The island’s rapid economic growth attracted the attention of development economics and became part of the formation of neoliberal development theories. The name Taiwan became deeply implicated in the notion of the achievement of rapid economic development through the application of neoliberal economic policy. The classic study was by Fei, Kuo, and Ranis for the World Bank, Growth With Equity: The Taiwan Case.38 Some studies of the Taiwanese economy tried to have it both ways, for example, Galenson’s 1979 edited volume was entitled Economic Growth and Structural Change in Taiwan: The Postwar Experience of the Republic of China.39 Here the two names have become equivalent and interchangeable. Rather than Taiwan being a subset of China, as in the early JCRR work, the island is placed into a different array of categorization

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as an economy with a specific trajectory of development in the context of other economies on similar paths. The JCRR economic studies from the 1950s and 1960s had identified Taiwan as being a province of the Republic of China, a political label that inscribed the difference between the Communist and non-Communist worlds. Later, in economics, Taiwan became a name in the discourse of the “developing country” and was set against Brazil, South Korea, and other medium-sized economies, rather than against the People’s Republic of China. An early example, before this discourse fully emerged in the trope of the tiger economies or “Little Dragons,” was the 1968 study by the U.S. research organization the Committee for Economic Development, Economic development issues: Greece, Israel, Taiwan, and Thailand. By the 1980s, in the scholarship and journalism that promoted an East Asian model of development after the Latin American debt crisis of 1979, such as Vogel’s The Four Little Dragons and Chen’s Hyper-growth in Asian Economies, the name Republic of China was entirely marginalized over Taiwan. The Republic of China was never a Little Dragon. At the end of this naming, differentiation, and elaboration of meaning in Chinese, Japanese, and English, it is possible to talk about the name Taiwan as a category under which a structured body of knowledge is beginning to be organized, that is, the emergence of a Taiwan Studies. It has arisen at the intersection of the naming practices of the many social science disciplines under which studies of the island have been conducted. In anthropology, political science, economics, and so forth, it is the name Taiwan itself that has become the organizing principle. Taiwan Studies is nominally a form of area studies in that it takes as its primary scholarly category a geographical region, but given the multiplicity and contingency of names applied to the region, Taiwan Studies can be seen to be the ultimate elaboration of the name Taiwan. It is also a key moment in the articulation of a Taiwanese identity. If the academic practices that establish the legitimacy of a discipline include research centers, courses of study, and publications, then Taiwan Studies has been developing since the mid-1980s. In Taiwan, Zili Wanbao (Independence Evening Post) began publishing the Taiwan Jingyan 40 Nian (40 Years of the Taiwan Experience) series in 1987 after the lifting of martial law, and this has been followed by an enormous amount of academic and popular writing on Taiwanese history, culture, and politics. In 1993, the Preparatory Office of the Institute of Taiwan History was formed at Academia Sinica. In July 2004, this became the Taiwan History Institute,40 representing a significant step in the legitimization of the study of Taiwan as an academic discipline on the island itself. In mainland China, for specific political reasons, Taiwan Studies has also come together as an area of study through the 1980s and 1990s, following the establishment of the Taiwan Studies Institute

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at Xiamen University in 1982 and at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1985. These have been joined by other institutes such as those at Nankai and Tianjin Universities in the mid-1990s. In the West, the publisher M.E. Sharpe began the Taiwan in the Modern World series in 1992 with Beyond the Economic Miracle, and the first North American Taiwan Studies Association conference was held in 1995. Griffith University in Brisbane started a Taiwan Studies Unit in the same year. In 1999, the Research Unit on Taiwanese Culture and Literature was established at Ruhr-Universität Bochum University in Germany, building on many years of work by Helmut Martin. The School of Oriental and African Studies in the United Kingdom established a Taiwan Studies program at the same time, and in 2003 it began offering an MA in Taiwan Studies. In simple terms, it is possible to historicize the development of Taiwan Studies by linking it to specific political events in recent Taiwanese and Chinese history. The democratic reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s generated an enormous amount of new scholarship and political debate over the meaning of Taiwan. On the island itself, the lifting of martial law and removal of press restrictions in 1987 allowed the research and publication of previously forbidden subjects, most notably the 2-28 Incident. The official abandonment of the claim by the Nationalists to be the government of all of China in early 1991 and the implementation of a democratic electoral system at the national level has legitimized political and intellectual interest in the Taiwanese condition. In China, the post-Mao period has seen a revival of nationalist concerns such as territorial integrity, including the future of Taiwan, which was impelled in 1982 with the reversion agreement between Britain and the PRC over Hong Kong. Chinese interest has also been clearly heightened by the perception of the rise of Taiwan nationalism and support for independence. Similar forces have been operating internationally, with particular interest in Taiwan’s economic development and democratization, and from the 1990s growing interest in contemporary Taiwanese culture. The growth of cultural studies outside the West has found a receptive constituency within Taiwan, notably Chen Kuan-hsing at Tsing Hua University. The language and methodology of cultural studies have crossed easily over into Chinese and found a rich vein of experience in Taiwan’s multiplicity of postcolonial positionings. The June Fourth Incident in 1989 and the PRC’s increasingly belligerent attitude toward Taiwan through the 1990s have all helped promote an interest in Taiwan as a distinct entity and as under pressure from mainland China and therefore worthy of scholarly attention. In international relations, the Chinese missile tests and the intervention by the U.S. Seventh Fleet before the 1996 presidential election, which made the Taiwan Straits a global “hotspot,” were

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a powerful stimulus to scholarship on Taiwanese nationalism and cross-straits relations. As noted above, Taiwan’s economic development has made it central in debates over East Asian economic and social transformation in broadly empiricist fields such as development economics and politics. Beyond historicization, it is possible to examine the epistemological foundations of Taiwan Studies. As an academic discipline, it is constituted, in the first instance, by what Davies refers to as “truth statements.” These are the particular categories the investigation of which constitutes the work of that discipline. Applying Foucault, Davies says these are the “authoritative propositions, which dominate, indeed constitute, a discipline of study, enabling it to be determined and regulated as a particular form of discursive practice different to other forms.”41 Shapiro, developing similar ideas in a poststructuralist critique of political science, says that, discursive practices . . . delimit the range of objects that can be identified, define the perspectives that one can legitimately regard as knowledge, and constitute the certain kinds of persons as agents of knowledge, thereby establishing norms for developing conceptualizations that are used to understand the phenomena which emerge as a result of the discursive delimitation.42 In the Foucauldian terms that Davies and Shapiro are using, Taiwan Studies, like Chinese Studies or political science (which are the objects of Davies’ and Shapiro’s critiques) is understood as a discourse characterized by specific practices that produce the effect of authority and of legitimate knowledge in the discipline. In a discursive sense, the discipline is structured and constrained. In applying this view to Taiwan Studies, there are certain things one writes about and ways of writing that make a piece of work Taiwan Studies rather than, say, Chinese Studies. In addition, there are certain ways of writing, both epistemologically and stylistically, which make Taiwan Studies texts credible as expressing knowledge about Taiwan. The categories that have come to generate the questions one asks when one is doing Taiwan Studies include democratization, economic development, China–Taiwan relations, Taiwanese literature, especially nativist writing, and Taiwanese identity. Doing Taiwan Studies might mean asking “Does Taiwan have a national identity?” or “How successful has Taiwan’s democratic transition been?” This book, being about one such truth statement in Taiwan Studies, the problem of nationhood, is part of its discursive production. Debating answers to these questions and others is the process by which the limits of the discipline are established. For example, on the question of democratization, work done in the early 1990s—in the years immediately

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after the lifting of martial law, debated the stability of Taiwan’s democratic transition and possibilities of a relapse to authoritarianism.43 By the late 1990s, the issues had moved on to include the problem of corruption and negative campaigning in Taiwan’s democratic system.44 Democratization remains the key category in this example, and its elaboration by scholarly debate is how it is established and reproduced as one of the questions that delimit Taiwan Studies. Scholarly controversy often circulates around such truth statements. Criticisms of the “maturity” of Taiwan’s democracy have been presented as challenges to the notion of Taiwan’s democratic transition, but they nonetheless continue to work on, and reproduce, “democratization” as a category that is studied when one studies Taiwan. This is not merely to say that certain ideas about Taiwan are more important or prominent than others, or that democratization is not a feature of Taiwanese political life that is worthy of attention, but that when one writes about Taiwan, there are specific and limited questions that are asked, argued over and answered on the basis of particular discursive categories. All discourses involve an epistemological structure that legitimizes specific forms of knowledge, proscribing what counts as knowledge and what does not. In the case of Taiwan Studies, one can begin to sketch out the epistemological limits of the field by first comparing it with a larger related discipline. Writing in the 1960s, Twitchett wrote this description of sinology: “The traditional discipline of textual criticism and ‘philology’ applied to Chinese literature, a set of techniques designed to extract the most accurate possible information from a body of data, in this case the written word.”45 Words like “information” and “data” are acknowledgments of 1960s social science, but in his opening phrase, Twitchett flags sinology as a form of classics, and although Chinese Studies has long since moved on and incorporated more modern social science methodologies, the tradition of the close reading of difficult classical literary and philosophical texts is still able to exercise scholarly authority in the field. The discourse of sinology as described by Twitchett produces the idea of Chinese classical civilization (among other things) and does not differentiate China by regions with specific characteristics, but focuses instead on dynastic history, individuals, and schools of thought.46 As a discourse, it does not produce the idea of Taiwan. Taiwan Studies, on the other hand, has no philological tradition and does not involve the textual criticism of classical texts. The sinological discourse nominally encompasses Taiwan, yet effaces regional distinctions in China; the Taiwan Studies discourse could in theory produce Taiwan as the site of a form of classical Taiwanese philosophy and literature, but instead produces the notions of Taiwan as an economy, polity, and postcolonial society. The counter to this suggestion might be a definitive statement that Taiwan had no classical

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philosophical tradition. Such a statement, and its definitiveness, are part of the discursive operation of Taiwan Studies. It is marking the boundaries of what the discipline (and therefore Taiwan itself ) can be. The point is not whether Taiwan “really” had such a tradition or not. The discourse of Taiwan Studies in its current form effaces the possibility, because it does not go looking for and it does not develop the philological methods that would enable it to include such a tradition. This is also not to say that it could not, but were a scholar to produce work arguing for a classical Taiwanese philosophical tradition and produce knowledge about it with philological methods, it would represent a fundamental broadening of the scope of Taiwan Studies and add significantly to the possibilities of Taiwanese identity. Taiwan Studies in its present form, as noted above, exists at the intersection of a range of modern social sciences that have taken up the practice of naming the island as Taiwan. Therefore, though Taiwan Studies could claim to be “multidisciplinary,” its epistemological structure is based on those of its primary disciplines. Out of political science, anthropology, economics, international relations, and others has come a broadly positivist inclination. The positivism characterizing Taiwan Studies is understood here as a theory of knowledge that assumes an empirical basis for knowledge of Taiwan. This means that what is written and argued about is done so on the basis of the belief that the world comprises objects separate from language, but to which linguistic terms can be made to correspond. That is, while objects in the world and their interrelationships can only be expressed, described, and understood using language, they are understood to be, nevertheless, autonomous from it. Producing knowledge about Taiwan means inquiring into the properties of those objects and establishing relationships between them, or theories.47 For example, Taiwan scholars identify objects of study, such as “democratization” or “national identity” the properties of which are refined by scholarly processes (“unstable” or “not mature”) and which are then placed in relationships to make theories. So the linguistic object “democratization” might be linked by a causal relationship to another object like “the middle class” in a sentence like “the rise of the middle class led to democratization.” Chiou has put forward a version of this actual argument in the context of Taiwan and China: “a stable democracy requires high economic growth, while low economic development makes democratization more difficult and democracy less secure and stable.”48 In this instance, “democracy” and “growth” are linked in a logical relationship, and Chiou’s use of qualifiers “more” and “less” is a rhetorical device to avoid the statement being absolute. Instead of A equals B, it becomes A tends to equal B. Chiou

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however does not specify just how often A can fail to equal B and can still have the statement maintain its explanatory power. Shapiro explains this mode of knowledge in the following way: If one is to make correct inferences about the world, one must develop conceptual systems or theories as sets of statements that are semantically and syntactically coherent. Hypotheses about experience must be logically derived from initial premises and statements that are more abstract, and observations must be linked to theoretical terms in an orderly, rulegoverned way, for example, through the development of operational definitions that prescribe the method for identifying the data which are the referents of the theoretical terms.49 In the case of Taiwan and its democratization, T’ien, writing in 1992, presents a series of exactly the kind of positivist statements that Shapiro is describing: One sees that considerable changes occurred in Taiwan’s political system. How does one explain these changes that underlie the democratic transition in the KMT regime? There are at least three analytical perspectives that can shed light on Taiwan’s experience. First is the correlation theory, which links socioeconomic preconditions to democratic transition. Second is the genetic or causation theory, which emphasizes the ruling elite’s initiatives as principal imperatives for democratic reforms. Third is the interaction theory, which views democratic evolution as a process of calculated struggles and interactions between the ruling elite and the opposition forces. Each of these three theoretical perspectives explains certain aspects of Taiwan’s democratic evolution.50 Each of these theories is a syntactically correct sentence of the form “because of A then B.” T’ien then goes on to present evidence that refers to each of the terms in the theories. He offers detailed statistical evidence for the notion of economic development for the first statement and lists the actions of Chiang Ching-kuo and opposition groups in the 1970s and 1980s in the lead up to the lifting of martial law to support the second and third. T’ien brings all three together with the idea that “each is necessary but not sufficient” to explain democratization.51 In this way, he “explains . . . Taiwan’s democratic evolution” and produces knowledge about Taiwan. The point is not that these theories are wrong. They are legitimate on the terms under which they operate. However, they assume a relationship

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between language and experience, which is that language can be used to refer to an experience separate from it. For Shapiro and Davies, reading Foucault and Derrida, this is an untenable assumption. Shapiro writes, Language is not about objects and experience, it is constitutive of objects and experience. This is not the subjectivist position that there is nothing (no thing) in the world until we recognize it or speak of it. Rather, it is the position that the world of “things” has no meaningful structure except in connection with the standards we employ to ascribe qualities to it. We therefore cannot speak about the world of experience without beginning with some presuppositions about the boundaries that distinguish one object or event from another.52 Davies expands upon this point in Derridean terms: For Derrida, the designation of truth or of some other fundamental as lying outside language is always caught in a linguistic dilemma; it can only ever “reveal” itself in language in terms which always require further “revelation,” for there is no term which is entirely self-referential, whose meaning is not dependent on how it is situated in a complex of meanings in relations to other terms.53 This assumption allows T’ien to produce sentences that have the effect of objectivity. Because he believes that experience has a coherent structure independent of his own use of language to describe it, he believes that he is playing no role in the creation and structuring of experience, and that he can produce knowledge in which he is a disinterested observer. Scholarship in this sense is a language game, with meaning-objects in relationships structured on the basis of semantic rules. T’ien takes meaningobjects such as “democratization” and “economic growth” and places them in semantic relationships to produce knowledge about Taiwan, as if these words and their relationships simply and unproblematically correspond to a Taiwan that is “out there.” In doing so, he is effacing the role his own language has in creating meaning for Taiwan. He takes received categories, lines them up in a logical way, as if that is all that needs to be said. This is not to say that Taiwan itself and the people who live there and have struggled and suffered for their freedom are just a language game, that they are not “real.” But the Taiwanese experience and the language that is used to describe it cannot be separated. The language produced by T’ien is part of a discourse of Taiwan that structures the Taiwanese experience itself. As with all discourses, certain categories are privileged and others are effaced;

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certain ways of knowing, such as positivism, are legitimized and others are displaced. Both Davies and Shapiro ask why one should inquire into the discursive operations of scholarship. To the question, “What can be gained from such an exercise?”54 Shapiro offers the following answer: If we recognize that among the conventions which give statements meaning are those that determine who must make the statement for it to have a particular meaning, we are in a position to relate the meaning of statements to the distribution of power in a society. To ask about the meaning of the statements that comprise a discourse, for Foucault, is to ask, among other things, what is the status of the individuals who alone have the right, sanctioned by law or tradition, juridically defined or spontaneously accepted, to proffer such a discourse?55 In the case of democratization, a positivist analysis merely limits the possibilities of understanding Taiwan’s social and political transformation and blinds the observer to the operation of power in the production of the idea of democracy within the Taiwan discourse. For the question of national identity, that will be argued in the next chapter, a positivist analysis is entirely untenable.


CHAPTER 2


S

ince the late 1980s, national identity has been one of the key discursive categories that has constituted the study of Taiwan. This has been found in work on nationalism, the independence movement, postcolonial studies, and writing on the issue of Taiwan’s international status and crossstraits relations.1 As a category within Taiwan Studies, interest in national identity has been a reflection of the political and social liberalization of the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Taiwanese nationalism has been established in the mainstream of Taiwanese politics. National identity has also emerged as a key scholarly category in response to the belligerent attitude of China toward Taiwan, including its threat of military action in the event of a declaration of “independence,” thus creating the notion of the Taiwan Straits as a “flashpoint.” However, national identity as a scholarly category has also had its own academic trajectory, moving from political science and international relations into cultural studies. As argued in chapter 1, a clear distinction between scholarly description and the described object (Taiwanese identity) is impossible to draw. In this way, the theme of national identity in scholarship on Taiwan has inscribed a trajectory of development of national identity in Taiwan itself, from a particular problem in international relations to a complex body of writing about identity and Taiwan’s place in the world in the context of ideas such as postcoloniality and globalization. Work on Taiwanese national identity has been informed, at least implicitly, by the large body of literature on nationhood that has emerged over the past two decades. In the early 1980s, several classic texts on the subject, including Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism,2 and Anthony Smith’s Theories of Nationalism,3 have sought to define the scope of debate on nationhood. Anderson made the

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following observation in 1983: “Nation, nationality, nationalism—all have proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone analyze. In contrast to the immense influence that nationalism has exerted on the modern world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously meagre.”4 But in revising Imagined Communities a decade later, he noted the explosion of interest in the category of the nation and nationalism: “The study of nationalism too has been startlingly transformed—in method, scale and sheer quantity . . . by their historical reach and theoretical power [the key texts have] made largely obsolete the traditional literature on the subject.”5 Writing on Chinese nationhood and especially on nationalism has also flourished in the post-Mao period, with a wide range of theoretically sophisticated and historically detailed writing, such as John Fitzgerald’s Awakening China6 and Prasenjit Duara’s Rescuing History from the Nation,7 which is discussed below. Taiwan has a somewhat problematic relationship with this literature. In a stark expression of the positivist epistemological assumptions criticized in chapter 1, Shelley Rigger has observed that the issues of “measurement” and “classification” of Taiwanese national identity have not yet been resolved in Taiwan Studies.8 However, this suggests that Taiwan Studies has failed to engage with the full depth of theoretical work on the subject of nationalism generally, and national identity issues in particular, given that much of the current theory coming out of postcolonial and cultural studies sharply criticizes the viability of treating national identity as an objectively measurable phenomenon. The result is that while Taiwanese national identity has been identified as a key category in Taiwan Studies, it has tended to be studied in relation to other subjects, such as democratization or cross-straits relations, and without a fully detailed treatment of its theoretical and epistemological bases. This is a problem, given that Taiwanese national identity is in need of a detailed understanding of meaning and subjectivity, and there is already a rich literature on these issues in other fields. The following section reviews two important writers on nationhood with contrasting methodologies. Although both Benedict Anderson and Prasenjit Duara, both produce very sophisticated and detailed analyses of nationhood, they highlight in their different approaches the epistemological issues drawn out in chapter 1 and reveal some of the implicit assumptions in existing work on Taiwan. With a broad scope and a wealth of historical detail, Anderson’s study is positivist, explaining the nation as a set of categories in causal relationships; Duara sees the nation as fundamentally textual in the broadest sense, as the operation of meaning, and makes use of Derrida’s self-reflexive approach to language also outlined in chapter 1.


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Anderson and Modernity Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is perhaps the best-known book on nationhood, presenting a remarkably comprehensive theory for the development of nations over the past 400 years. Anderson’s thesis is that nations are cultural phenomena that have arisen through a shared consciousness created in print languages. On this basis, he outlines a series of explanatory models for the emergence of nations in various parts of the world. The overall framework of his analysis is of a development from a premodern politicocultural formation to the nation. The premodern state is characterized by the use of what he terms “sacred language,” written language as a privileged system of representation in which its signs are considered absolute representations of reality. In the “great, religiously imagined communities,”9 a small literate stratum of society mediated between “heaven,” the written sacred language, and “earth,” the oral vernacular. Then, the rise in the circulation of printed materials from the fifteenth century onwards created the conditions for a change in mentalities, one in which people were no longer bound by either direct personal contact or by elite imperial languages, but could imagine themselves collectively over the territory of the nation through printed language. Anderson argues that it was the commercial printing of vernacular languages, which broke down the division between the oral and the written and created the medium of the nation. The limits of the circulation of printed materials created a “unified field of exchange” in which the consumers of print could “imagine” the simultaneity of events across territorial space. National consciousness, that is, the identification with a national territorial space is enabled by the circulation of discourse within it.10 Anderson’s argument about printing explicitly links the nation to the notion of modernity in the West, and as a result his work can be included in the long history of scholarship on the transformative power of the technology of printing.11 Changes in the technologies of communications have the power to transform social relations, and thus, social life. In the context of Chinese societies, Anderson’s model suggests a description of imperial China with a village-level oral culture of localized kinship groups and a literate class of the scholar-gentry mediating between them and “the empire” that existed in the medium of written classical Chinese. Identity, in this schema, came at one level from the village in a shared spoken dialect, but over and above that, from the empire as consciousness of “Chineseness” in the engagement with written classical Chinese. Although Anderson does not discuss China in any detail, his work suggests that the Chinese nation became possible with the growth in newspapers and printed media at the end of the nineteenth century. Henrietta Harrison has effectively applied some of

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Anderson’s argument in her work on Chinese nationalism that, among other things, emphasizes the development of missionary newspapers and the writing of vernacular literature at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century as important for “imagining” the nascent Chinese nation.12 In the case of Taiwan, an Andersonian explanation of its national consciousness would locate the transition from the premodern, or “dynastic realm” to a modern national imagining during the Japanese colonial period, when mass education and the emergence of a reading public for Japanese newspapers and magazines stimulated a growing sense of a specifically Taiwanese identity from the 1920s onwards. However, it is not difficult to identify inherent problems in Anderson’s work in its application to Chinese societies. In imperial China, Anderson imagines two abstracted social worlds, “the village” and “the empire”, underplaying the enormous presence of both the written and printed text across different social strata.13 Anderson’s distinction between printing that had been active in China since the tenth century, and (Western) print capitalism, in which market forces demanded accessible, commercial texts, especially the novel, fails to take into account that commercial printing and a popular literature were certainly features of Qing imperial Chinese culture. Despite its limitations, Anderson’s work is a paradigmatic contribution to the understanding of nationhood, and its assumptions are also implicitly the basis for some of the studies of Taiwan. In the first instance, Anderson makes a strong argument for the ideological basis for the nation. That is, his work refutes the possibility of defining national identity in an essentialist way, as something that is immanent in the subjectivity of nationals, as, for example, a unique national character. The idea that the nation is actively created in the imagination means it is the contingent result of social and political processes. This is not a novel assertion. In his classic 1882 essay What is a Nation? Ernest Renan systematically refutes theories that locate the nation in any essential characteristic, such as race, kinship, language, or geography, and suggests instead that national identity is fundamentally an idea. Renan wrote, “It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation’s existence is . . . a daily plebiscite.”14 Anderson’s contribution to the problematics of notional “national identities” is to support this idea of “a daily plebiscite” with a comprehensive theory. By arguing for the contingent nature of nationalism, Anderson distinguishes between nationalist ideology and the nation as a social phenomenon amenable to scholarly analysis. This is a very complex point, but to begin with, it is sufficient to say that instead of describing national identity on the basis of how nationals may identify themselves as a unique people, for example


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as Chinese, Japanese, or Taiwanese, Anderson is theorizing an individual’s sense of his or her own “nation-ness” as a general category. Clearly, Renan is doing the same, but Anderson goes further and attempts to explain national consciousness through an objective theory, in an argument that links national identity to the development of printing. He is, therefore, aiming to describe national subjectivity with an objective theory. Like the work on democratization discussed in chapter 1, it offers the promise of a positivist causal model for “explaining” national consciousness: collective imaginations are sustained by languages; printing creates a new field of exchange; therefore, in this causal model, the oral villages and scribal empires are dissolved into modern nations of people reading newspapers and novels. It is the possibility of a causal explanation for the development of national identity that sounds so much like a scientific explanation that generates much of the appeal of Imagined Communities. Anderson himself notes in the introduction to the second edition of Imagined Communities in 1992 that this is the feature of the book that was most commented upon.15 He identifies this appeal as a form of universalizing Eurocentrism that tended to ignore his argument that print was mostly important in Latin America: “It had been part of my original plan to stress the New World origins of nationalism. . . . I was startled to discover, in many of the notices of Imagined Communities, that this Eurocentric provincialism remained quite undisturbed, and the crucial chapter on the originating Americas was largely ignored.”16 Anderson is being slightly disingenuous; although he is quite specific in arguing that the nation began in the colonial printed gazettes of Latin America, he does present a general model for the transition from empire to nation based on changes in language use. He is at pains to substantiate his theory with historical detail and certain caveats, but he is still trying to explain nations in a general sense as the outcome of particular historical processes. Like most theories of democratization, Anderson’s is implicitly working on the assumption that one can describe language operations, the “imagined communities,” as separate from one’s own use of language. As outlined in chapter 1, this is not necessarily a viable undertaking, or at least that the distinction between the subjective nation in the imagination and the objective nation in scholarship needs to be made entirely explicit for an effective understanding of national identity. An attempt to construct an objective theory of nationhood necessarily effaces some of its important assumptions. For example, it tends to mask the operation of power in the national idea: the argument that a national identity is an automatic effect of certain historical, and especially technological developments downplays specific political considerations such as in whose interests

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the nation is being imagined, and what other collective imaginings are being marginalized by it. Understanding one category of knowledge, “nation,” in terms of others such as “printing” flattens out historical specificity and does not attend to the actions of individuals in shaping nations. A positivist theory of nationhood also tends to link national identity to modernity. To operate within an epistemology in which it is meaningful to ask and then to answer the question “What caused nations?” assumes national identity as a historical effect, or as the result of certain historical processes that necessarily locate their development in a historical trajectory. Modernism is a very important dimension of Anderson’s theory, especially in the context of Taiwan. It understands the nation as quite explicitly a novel political and cultural formation, an epistemological break in which the subjectivities of the “dynastic realm” give way to a new mode of modern subjectivity. In this model, the premodern is conceived of as a historical, with individuals who are unable to participate equally in a shared identity (being either speakers or writers), while the idealized national citizen, in contrast, is rational and constituted by active, complete subjectivities, able to imagine his or her nation equally in the printed language. The modernist position on nationhood fits with the trajectory of modernization and modernity that has inscribed one version of Taiwanese postwar history and identity. The “Little Dragon,” the “Tiger economy,” democratization, and the idea of the emergence of Taiwanese nationhood are all located within this trajectory. In terms of Anderson’s model, Taiwanese identity is a new form of subjectivity for the Taiwanese and risks implying that prior to Taiwan’s modernization, the Taiwanese were not capable of imagining themselves nationally because of the way they used language. Duara and History The idea of “emergence” is not the only way to understand nations, especially if one is interested in identity. One of the best critiques of Anderson and the modernist position on nationhood has come from Prasenjit Duara in a number of articles and most fully in Rescuing History From the Nation that deals with the formation of national identity in China and India. Duara criticizes both Anderson and Gellner for “deny[ing] history altogether”17 in theorizing the nation as entailing a radically novel consciousness—an “epistemological break” with past forms of consciousness in the creation of a unified episteme of a coextensive polity and culture. Duara is critical of both Gellner and Anderson for allowing only the modern nation as the political and cultural form capable of generating political self-awareness and “imagining itself to be the cohesive subject of history.”18 For Duara, the modernist position is


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a neo-Hegelian notion along the lines of the teleology of Spirit through History. It implies that only moderns are truly active subjects, whereas premoderns, such as people who might have lived in imperial China, were not capable of coherently imagining and reflecting upon their own identity as Chinese. Duara supports his critique with a detailed history of events in Chinese history, such as the Jin invasion of China in the twelfth century to demonstrate that members of the scholar-gentry were indeed able to identify themselves as specifically Chinese in relation to the different peoples around them, such as the Jin and the Mongols.19 By countering the idea of the nation as representing a revolutionary transformation of the premodern, Duara elides the whole McLuhanesque understanding of media and subjectivity, summed up in McLuhan’s phrase “the medium is the message.” His project is to emphasize the continuity of the processes of identity formation, with “modern” identity formations representing realignments of “historical” ones, but still being formed by basically the same discursive processes. In discussing the operation of Chinese identity, both imperial and national, Duara presents a discursive understanding of nationhood, rather than a causal model. He argues that national consciousness is only another historical configuration in which the nation, whatever form it takes, provides an object of identification in opposition to an other. For Duara, national consciousness is a relational identity: the nation, even when it is manifestly not a recent invention, is hardly the realization of an original essence, but a historical configuration designed to include certain groups and exclude or marginalize others—often violently . . . and these potential others that are most deserving of our attention because they reveal the principle that creates nations—the willing into existence of a nation which will choose to privilege its difference and obscure all of the cultural bonds that had tied it to its sociological kin.20 Duara is using the same Derridean argument applied in chapter 1, but in a slightly different way. Although he does not concentrate on names as the foundation of collective identity—we are ultimately just what we call ourselves—he is suggesting that identity is a form of meaning that only becomes possible with the differentiation between two possible identities. Therefore, for Duara, identity is ultimately relational, and is created in the moment in which one group defines itself in opposition to another. Duara elaborates the operation of a specifically national identity through two themes he distinguishes as dissent and descent, for which he coins the

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neologism discent. Discent describes national identity as being constructed in opposition to an Other—dissent—and as representing, in terms of discourse, the appropriation of a historical identity—descent. In the notion of discent is a sense of the nation as an imagining built from extant representations of community and as one among competing possible sources of identification. The nation itself is formed when from among the weave of historical themes comes a particular one that through political action is able to achieve preeminence: An incipient nationality is formed when the perception of the boundaries of community are transformed, namely, when soft boundaries are transformed into hard ones. This happens when a group succeeds in imposing a historical narrative of descent and/or dissent on both heterogeneous and related cultural practices.21 National identity, then, works like any form of collective identity as the historical privileging of one narrative in relation to others, producing meaning through the difference between them. While the nation-state may be the only legitimate geopolitical entity in the contemporary world, in terms of identity it is merely one trace among a weave of traces that may provide a point of identity for a collective consciousness. For Duara, the premodern realm also contained multiple levels of community with which individuals were able to identify, and all of which were imagined. The nation is neither a realization of the historical “truth” of a people in the völkisch sense, at one extreme, nor, at the other, a politicocultural formation established in modernity, as Anderson would imply. Instead, national identity is a historical trace created out of “a deliberate mobilization within a network of cultural representations toward a particular object of identification.”22 Duara’s work is fundamentally descriptive. Unlike Anderson, he avoids the valorization of modernity and offers plenty of scope for tracking through the political contestation of narratives of national history as they have formed from soft into hard boundaries. Useful though Duara’s work is, it is also possible to critique it. In particular, just as he criticizes Anderson and Gellner for denying history, Duara tends to deny the reality of historical change. This is one of the most difficult aspects of Taiwanese history—to accommodate between Anderson and Duara. Taiwanese modernization has a historical reality that must be accounted for in understanding Taiwanese identity. Duara rejects discursive mechanisms such as media because he wants to counter the idea that only moderns are capable of subjectivity, but he is unable to acknowledge the changes that media technologies and other features of modernity such as


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urbanization and industrialization may have brought to the ways in which people communicate and think about themselves. Anderson’s theorization of print as the new discursive space of the nation may be too programmatic and determinist, but it offers a tantalizing possibility of connecting different aspects of modernity in explanatory models. Duara’s approach, in contrast, can ultimately just describe the discourses that constitute specific national identities. Taiwan on the Global Fissure of the Cold War Anderson and Duara offer two representative approaches to the study of national identity. Anderson is a positivist and has attempted a causal theory of nations that rests implicitly on a positivist theory of language. Duara is both reflective and discourse-oriented, assuming that identity is fundamentally textual in the most abstracted sense. Duara’s Derridean approach can be very fruitful when applied to Taiwan, by drawing upon the ideas of identity as relational with respect to China, and shifting from a soft to a hard boundary as a result of political changes. Anderson, on the other hand, allows us to map transformations of lived experience or subjectivity, which needs to be taken seriously in the context of Taiwan’s real economic and political changes. Neither Anderson nor Duara however, captures the elusive way that national identity intrudes upon scholarship about it. Both writers generalize the category of the nation and the individual’s sense of their own identity, thus presenting the specifics of an identity as merely examples of the national category. Even Duara, who writes about China and India, does so in order to elucidate a theoretical argument about the nation, rather than to specifically explain Chinese and Indian national identities. The problem is particularly acute when one is writing about an individual nation that is understood to be in the process of instituting its identity. Although one might be attempting, as a scholar, to describe the historical, political, and cultural processes by which this process of institutionalizing occurs, the very act of describing identity constantly threatens to become a statement of identity. An academic can write a sentence such as “to be Taiwanese is to be on the frontier of China and Japan” to offer elucidation, insight, or even explanation for Taiwanese national identity, but a Taiwanese nationalist can make the same statement as an ideological belief. The difference is the theater of scholarship, its institutional practices, rhetorical modes, and epistemological bases; the academic speaks from a particular subject position, with knowledge authorized by rhetorical strategies, whereas the nationalist speaks from a claim of authenticity, immediacy, and political urgency, in terms that might be emotive and declaratory. More fundamentally,

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the academic is speaking about a Taiwan that he or she imagines is “out there,” applying a belief in objectivity based on assumptions about a relationship between language and the objective world. The nationalist speaks on the assumption that his or her language is constitutive of Taiwan; he or she is not describing but creating this conceptual entity. Bhabha has said something along similar lines, though not quite the same, when he refers to “the tension between the pedagogical and the performative”23 in his discussion of the epistemological basis of the nation. He views the nation as a narrative in which the national is both speaking to it and speaking it: We then have a contested cultural territory where the people must be thought in a double-time; the people are the historical “objects” of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pregiven or constituted historical origin or event; the people are also the “subjects” of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principle of the people as that continual process by which the national life is redeemed and signified as a repeating and reproductive process.24 The argument above suggests that the nonnational also operates in this “contested cultural territory.” The foreigner is as much implicated in the inscription of a nation’s narrative as the national, even when writing nations as a general category, as in the example above of Anderson’s ostensibly objective description of national subjectivity. An effective understanding of Taiwanese national project can only become possible when this very subtle play between statement and description, between, as it were, “language as Taiwan” and “language and Taiwan,” or performance and pedagogy, is made explicit. Indeed, it is part of this argument that the shifts in this relationship, and what those mean for positionality, self-reflexivity, and subjectivity are a key element in the development of the national idea in Taiwan. In the specific academic work on Taiwanese nationhood discussed below, no such distinction is made between the academic practices of describing Taiwan’s national identity and how easily this can become implicated in statements of what is Taiwanese identity. Specific work about Taiwan has most often been done within larger disciplines such as political science and international relations that have aimed to see the identity question as an element of other problems, such as cross-straits relations or democratization, and do not encompass the problems of positionality or subjectivity. Prior to its constitutive role in the establishment of Taiwan Studies, the category of national identity was an implicit feature of early works that dealt


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with Taiwan’s complex international status after the decision in June 1950 by the U.S. government to support the Chiang regime with the outbreak of the Korean War, and then the 1954 defense treaty signed by the United States and Republic of China governments. The problem of international legitimacy and recognition between the contending geopolitical entities of ROC and the PRC, set in place over that time persists in a modified form right up to the present. In the 1950s and 1960s, this was referred to as the Formosa Problem,25 in which the U.S.-supported Nationalist government on Taiwan was recognized as the legitimate government of China, and held the China seat at the United Nations and the UN Security Council, while the Communist government of the mainland was excluded from international bodies and not recognized by many governments around the world. Many U.S. observers at the time recognized the absurdity of nonrecognition of the PRC and understood the hypocrisy of supporting a dictatorial regime on Taiwan called Free China in the name of democracy and freedom. Also clearly acknowledged was the degree to which the U.S. was increasingly internationally isolated by its China policy. In 1957 the eminent U.S. sinologist, John K. Fairbank wrote thus: Almost single-handedly we support Chiang Kai-shek’s claim to represent the Chinese one-quarter of mankind, though the chances of his regaining the mainland are so dim as to be invisible. We oppose Communist China’s admission to the UN, though a majority in the General Assembly may defeat us next year in the name of recognizing fact as fact.26 In the decade that followed, after France had switched recognition to China in 1964, the same arguments continued to be made: “This would leave the majority of the world community in one position—and the United States and Formosa in another.”27 The thinking about Taiwan in this period acknowledged the notion of “Formosa” as at least a potential nation and “Formosans” as a unified and coherent group identity. This was especially clear in international support for self-determination for the Taiwanese. In the British national election campaign of 1955, all the major parties made policy statements concerning Taiwan, with the Labour Party coming out most strongly against the Nationalist government and explicitly supporting self-determination: Labor has constantly urged that this crisis can only be overcome by the evacuation of the offshore islands, now held by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces; by the long overdue admission of Communist China to the United

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Nations; and by the neutralisation of Formosa under the United Nations to enable its inhabitants to make their own choice.28 In the same campaign, the Conservative Party was not so explicitly antiNationalist, but it too saw Taiwan’s international status as being at least an open question: “This could lead to the reconsideration at an appropriate moment both of Chinese representation in the United Nations and the future status of Formosa.”29 In the international debates over the status and future of Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s, the distinction between mainland China and Taiwan was overlaid by the categories of Communist and Nationalist, and that distinction was part of the broader division between the West at its third-world allies and the Communist Bloc which became the cold war. It was the contradictions in this arrangement of categories that allowed the Formosans to find a space in which to be regarded as a people with legitimate identity. The global political reorientation around the idea of the Communist bloc versus the “free world,” meant that center-left activists in the West were at least as opposed to a right-wing dictator like Chiang Kai-shek as to Mao Zedong. Taiwan was clearly understood not to be equivalent to Nationalist China by those who understood the legitimacy problem of the KMT government on Taiwan. C.P. Fitzgerald made this argument in the 1950s, differentiating the Nationalists from the Taiwanese on the basis of political legitimacy: “The island should be freed from the Nationalist regime which is locally detested, and left under a Government of its own inhabitants, guaranteed by the United Nations. After the space of ten or more years, the Formosan people would then choose whether they wished to be associated with China and to what degree.”30 In this geopolitical environment, the Taiwanese were understood in Western scholarship, commentary, and politics as unwitting participants in the larger conflict of the cold war, and the Nationalist government in Taiwan was characterized as having no legitimacy and as a failed and corrupt right-wing political and military force that was maintaining its position on Taiwan against all logic. It was on this basis that liberal scholars could support Taiwanese self-determination and understand the Formosans as being a viable national category. This argument did not preclude support for unification under the new Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government, however, but within the anti-Communist fears of the cold war, center-left politics expressing hostility to the Nationalists without explicit support for the Chinese communists, found the Formosans a natural constituency for their sympathies.


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Through a considered and remarkably prescient argument, drawing on Chinese history while denying its immutability, Fairbank came to argue for the need for self-determination for the Taiwanese, outlining a possible trajectory for resolving the issue, of which some has come to pass in the past two decades: Our support of an independent Taiwan must rest on principles we hold in common with neutralist Asia. The first of these is self-determination: that if the Chinese of Taiwan so desire, they may remain independent of the rest of China . . . How do we engineer an independent Republic of Taiwan, guaranteed as such by the United Nations, when the ruler of Taiwan, the Nationalist Government, will have none of it and claims to rule all China? . . . While insoluble in Western legal terms, the problem can perhaps be dealt with on a de facto basis. There is no question what government actually rules Taiwan. As its genuine electoral process continues to develop in scope and efficacy, it can be seen by all Asia to be a government by consent, with participation of the governed, and thus it can validly claim to be a channel of popular self-determination, without recourse to a plebiscite which it would never consent to hold. If with our aid the island’s standard of living and degree of political freedom can keep developing well ahead of conditions on the mainland, Taiwan’s de facto independence can gradually become more firmly established. Full recognition of it can follow a period during which Peking and Taipei, while renouncing no claims in formal, face-losing terms, can tacitly acquiesce in the compromise situation which already exists.31 Importantly, Fairbank identifies the Taiwanese as the “Chinese of Taiwan.” Clubb, in 1964, made a similar reference to the Taiwanese as “FormosanChinese”: “Granted that the non-Nationalist Formosan Chinese might wish to exercise the right of self-determination, and might in such case even opt for autonomy or full independence, they have no voice in their own destiny so long as the Nationalist regime remains in being.”32 Therefore, in the space dialectically projected out of the binary oppositions of Nationalist and Communist and Taiwanese and Chinese, “Chineseness” manifested its overlapping meanings as nation and ethnicity. The Formosans may have been a potential national identity, but the term Chinese was flexible enough to still include them as ethnically Chinese. This play between the possible meanings of Chinese continues to be a feature of identity politics on Taiwan today. For those further to either end of the political spectrum, who were explicitly either pro-Communist or pro-Nationalist, the space between the two

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sides in which the Formosans could find a voice closed up. Communist sympathizers such as the novelist Han Suyin looked forward to unification under communism, while Nationalist supporters such as the Australian Rotarian W.G. Goddard marveled at the achievements of Nationalist Taiwan as the high point of Chinese civilization: “In their long history, the Chinese have never risen to such a height of grandeur as in Free China today. T’ang was splendid, Sung was radiant, but democratic Free China is magnificent, when viewed against the dark background of the Communist mainland.”33 Writing Taiwan in English The writings in the 1950s and 1960s that identified the Taiwanese as at least a potential nation constituted a limited response to the cross-straits standoff as a foreign policy problem, and none of it elaborated a meaning for Taiwanese identity in any detail. Although the Formosans were understood as being a people deserving of self-determination and freedom from a dictatorial government, writers on Taiwan’s status did not dwell on what kind of society the Formosans would have established for themselves without the KMT. Right from the establishment of the PRC, most Western scholarly and political attention in Chinese Studies had been directed at the dramatic social and political changes occurring on the mainland. By the 1970s, the issue of Taiwan’s future political status that had created a small space for thinking about the Taiwanese as a potential national identity, was overshadowed by the repositioning of China with respect to the West that followed U.S.–China détente and the commencement of the Open Door policy in late 1978. Taiwan’s status as an analytical category became less bound up in cold war geopolitics and began to take on a legitimacy in its own right as something that was distinct from China. Taiwan had, by this time, acquired a new and distinctive narrative as a result of its dramatic economic growth, under labels like “miracle economy” and “Little Dragon,” that set it within a teleology within economics and social and political science of national, social, and economic transformation. The work that deals with Taiwanese identity in English in the 1970s and 1980s is indicative of Taiwan’s inchoate status as an analytical category at that time, and as the literature reviewed in the previous chapter indicates, it was constrained by prevailing methods and concepts within larger disciplines, such as anthropology and political science. Nevertheless, some distinctive themes had begun to emerge for elaborating the idea of Taiwan, filling out knowledge about what kind of society Taiwan was, and establishing a new trajectory and periodization for its history.


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The examples discussed below are drawn from Thomas Gold and Alan Wachman, two U.S.-based Taiwan Studies academics who each wrote a major book and a number of follow-up pieces that are indicative of the consolidation of the Taiwan idea. Thomas Gold began to publish widely on Taiwan in work that attempted to develop the “miracle economy” notion by linking it to Taiwan’s specific social and political characteristics. His key text, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle as well as later works examine notions of civil society and identity in the context of Taiwan. Wachman’s work, though problematic, is an important development of the question of Taiwanese national identity. Thomas Gold’s State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, published in 1986, does not deal explicitly with the nationhood issue, and this omission is in itself a marker of how the question of identity emerged more forcefully in the 1990s. What Gold does do, however, is to present a specific and comprehensive historiography for the study of Taiwan on the basis of his particular form of political economics. Although Gold was not the only scholar to produce a Taiwanese historiography in English around this time, his work is quite paradigmatic. He divides Taiwanese history into “periods distinguished by major transformations of economic structure.”34 Some of these correspond to political changes, and they establish a useful mode of periodization for the study of Taiwanese history: the imperial period, the Japanese colonial period, 1945–1947, 1950–1959, 1960–1973, and 1973–1984. Gold’s thesis is that Taiwan’s postwar economic and social development is a product of the complex relationship, in his terms, a “bargain,” between the Taiwanese public and the authoritarian state, whereby political freedom was exchanged for economic freedom.35 He presents a critique of both the simple economistic explanations of Taiwan’s development, as well as the Marxian dependency theories that were popular in the 1970s and early 1980s, both of which suffer from excessively deterministic methodologies. For Gold, economic explanations reduce Taiwanese development to merely the application of particular fiscal policies and diminish the significance of a repressive state. Indeed, Gold is rightly critical of the tacit justification for authoritarianism under terms like “political stability” that has been given as a precondition for economic growth by some economic theorizing, such as Ezra Vogel’s. Similarly, he is unconvinced by the arguments of dependency theory that explains economic development (or underdevelopment) in terms of a neocolonial relationship between the “First World” and the “Third World.” Dependency theory that prefigures much of the critiques of globalization two decades later, tends to efface the specificities of the Taiwanese experience and attenuate the local reasons for Taiwan’s social and economic development, assuming that agency lies primarily with governments and businesses in the First World.36

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Gold explains Taiwan’s economic development as being the result of an accord struck between its authoritarian state and the Taiwanese people. The KMT was determined to maintain its monopoly on power through political repression, but also understood its tenuous position and its ultimate dependency on the United States. Therefore, it accepted the need for opening avenues of social and economic power to the Taiwanese majority: Stability through authoritarianism and a developmentalist state laid the foundation for Taiwan’s growth, but also key was the mainlander partystate’s grudging willingness to create a system that granted wide scope to succeed economically to a pragmatic people with ambitions and talent in that direction. Cronyism and corruption existed, but so did genuine opportunity.37 While the identity issue was not paramount for Gold in 1986, his historiography emphasizes certain events that have subsequently become established as key categories in Taiwanese political history in English. First, he presents a detailed discussion of the 2-28 Incident, the massacre of as many as 20,000 Taiwanese by the Nationalist administration in 1947. In doing so, he makes an important contribution to the establishment of 2-28 as a defining idea in Taiwan Studies. In the post–martial law period, when a historiography for Taiwan Studies has become much more secure, the importance of 2-28 is unproblematic. However, researching and writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s meant that Gold would have had no access to public materials on 2-28 in Taiwan itself, and very little academic discussion in English to work from. His three sources are—the famous nationalist text by the Marxist historian Shi Ming, Taiwanren sibainian shi (Four Hundred Years of the History of the Taiwanese People),38 George Kerr’s 1965 account Formosa Betrayed,39 and Douglas Mendel’s Politics of Formosan Nationalism,40 from 1970. Gold’s discussion of 2-28 is, therefore, constructive of the Taiwan idea in the context of the contemporary development studies against which he was writing, as well as against much of the academic work on Taiwan in English and Chinese, which, with the few exceptions such as Mendel and Kerr, had not dealt in detail with the 2-28 Incident up to that point. As noted above, economic deterministic theories were conservative and inattentive to social and political history, and dependency theory focused on the global operation of power. Similarly, Gold’s English language sources, none of which was less than sixteen years old at the time of publication, demonstrate how 2-28 was largely erased from the mainstream study of Taiwan by the 1970s and early 1980s outside of Taiwan. Indeed, although Gold’s sources are entirely legitimate, their paucity compared with the enormous amount of writing on 2-28


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that has appeared subsequently says a great deal about the effectiveness with which the KMT had suppressed its record both within Taiwan and outside it in the international area. The 2-28 Incident is important to Gold’s argument because it explains the hostile relationship between the state and the society in Taiwan and establishes the premise for the KMT’s need to strike the “bargain” that defines the postwar Taiwan miracle. Therefore, he positions 2-28 as a defining moment, one from which the complete postwar Taiwanese experience can be understood. In a Taiwanese historiography, this is a significant elaboration of Mendel’s location of 2-28 within Formosan nationalist ideology and Kerr’s personal interest in the events, as one of the few foreign eyewitnesses. For Gold, the effects of 2-28 were to critically undermine the legitimacy of Taiwan’s KMT government, and, crucial to his subsequent analysis, forestall the Taiwanese from political participation under KMT rule: But more important, seeing their elite and its successors systematically hunted down and murdered by the mainlanders traumatized the Taiwanese to the point that the phrase “politics is dangerous” became a watchword etched into their collective unconsciousness. Political activity became associated with a violent end. As they had been after the brutal Japanese military takeover fifty years earlier, the reconquered Taiwanese again became leaderless, atomized, quiescent and apolitical. It was learned behavior, not a cultural trait.41 Gold’s writing about 2-28 accords with what has become the received interpretation of Taiwanese history in English. His conclusion to State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle goes on to establish the main events that began the transition from authoritarianism to democracy in the 1970s. He identifies the Chungli Incident in November 1977 as the formative moment in modern Taiwanese politics. This occurred around the election for Taoyuan County magistrate, which was contested by the flamboyant opposition or dangwai activist Hsu Hsin-liang. He won the election but the government refused to ratify the result. A riot ensued in which a police station was destroyed and Hsu was subsequently confirmed as the winner. For Gold, the Chungli Incident redefined modern Taiwanese politics for two reasons. First, it exposed the myth of Taiwan as an economically driven but politically apathetic society, a notion that was to form the core of the idea of “Asian Values,” and second it signaled the end of the political bargain between the KMT and the population that Gold argues drove Taiwanese economic success.42 The Chungli Incident is the first of a series of political and cultural moments of opposition in which Gold anticipates the end of the state-society

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bargain. The others he discusses are the nativist literature movement in the late 1970s, the Kaohsiung Incident in December 1979, the subsequent murders of members of Lin Yi-hsiung’s family in February 1980 and Henry Liu in 1984, and the probable murder of Chen Wen-cheng in 1981.43 Gold’s argument is prescient in that its logic predicts the political changes to come in Taiwan in the late 1980s and 1990s. The growing political activism of Taiwanese society, as marked by these events, signaled that economic freedom by itself was insufficient for the Taiwanese. Although Gold was writing while Taiwan was still under martial law, the events he highlights have subsequently been interpreted as those that marked the beginning of the process of democratization.44 Gold’s emphasis on the importance of the Chungli Incident shows that his economic periodization essentially remains grounded in a political one. Furthermore it is one in which violence, whether by the state or by the people, implicitly inscribes or periodizes Taiwanese history. From 2-28 to the Chungli and Kaohsiung Incidents, violence represents the most extreme form of political contestation, when symbols of state power, such as the police station in Chungli were destroyed, or (much more frequently) activists who had been resisting the state were imprisoned or killed. Nonviolent political events, such as the establishment of opposition journals and their attendant political groups in the 1970s are, for Gold, positioned within historical trajectories with violence as their ultimate conclusion: A Chungli type incident was inevitable as Taiwan’s dynamic social forces, desirous of political participation and a say in the nation’s destiny, continued to clash with an ossified political regime. Where and when it erupted was not important. It signalled, for the first time, that the people’s wishes would have to be actively considered in future political and economic policy making.45 Gold’s implicit privileging of violence as the author of Taiwanese history is a trace of the rich vein of the Marxist critique of modernity. Hannah Arendt writes, Only the modern age’s conviction that man can know only what he makes, that his allegedly higher capacities depend upon making and that he therefore is primarily homo faber and not an animal rationale, brought forth the much older implications of violence inherent in all interpretations of the realm of human affairs as a sphere of making.46 Although it is awkward to introduce as dense and powerful a writer as Arendt into a discourse on a limited area of scholarship such as Taiwanese history, the


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link with Marxism is not a frivolous one. Marking Taiwanese history with violence produces what is essentially a radical historiography, albeit one that disguises and dilutes itself with the language of scholarly objectivity and exhaustive lists of economic and social statistics. In the first instance, Gold’s history is radical because it recovers the importance of state violence, both literal in 2-28 and other acts of repression, and ideological, in the reinvention of Taiwan as Free China by the KMT. As Gold himself recognizes, prevailing accounts of the “miracle economy” of Taiwan had been conservative in their effacement of the repressive state and of social injustice. By accounting for the violent state, Gold is writing Taiwanese history against the state and its interests. In the example of 2-28, one could argue that he is writing a counter-hegemonic history, challenging the event’s erasure by the KMT both within Taiwan and outside of it. Gold was certainly not the first Western scholar to recognize or write about Taiwanese history in a way that at least acknowledged the importance of social conflict. And his text is hardly a Marxist critique of the capitalist oppression of the Taiwanese. Nevertheless, even in the 1990s, his historical emphasis could be contrasted with conservative histories of Taiwan, those which wrote in accordance with the interests of the state. Ezra Vogel’s wellknown but very problematic book, The Four Little Dragons, published in 1991 subsequent to Gold’s, makes only a passing reference to the 2-28 Incident, and presents apologia for KMT oppression: The Kuomintang did not initially win the hearts and minds of many local Taiwanese, but conversely, it was not under any obligation to local interest groups. Humanitarians at home and abroad criticize the way Taiwan achieved its unity, but it remains true that Taiwan’s unity, though achieved by objectionable methods, gave modernizing bureaucrats more room to manoeuvre in promoting industrialization and gave capitalists confidence in the security of their investments in Taiwan’s industry.47 Vogel is a true conservative. He imagines a concordance between the actions of state and the interests of the people. Indeed, for Vogel, not merely did the state act in the people’s interests, but even when it was demonstrably acting in its own interests by repressing opposition to it, he argues that this was to the ultimate benefit of Taiwan, as it benefited its capitalists. Vogel’s comment is based on the Weberian foundations of ideas of modernity and the rational state, but adds a questionable political dimension by implying that a rationalized, or disinterested state and a state without legitimacy are equivalent. This is a highly teleological justification of the oppression and lack of legitimacy

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of the KMT by locating them implicitly within a distorted version of Weber’s anti-Marxist view of modernity.48 Vogel suggests that a disinterested state was one of the reasons for Taiwan’s spectacular economic development, but by conflating the KMT’s lack of legitimacy with disinterest, he makes a political case for the justification of the KMT’s oppressive rule. Gold, in contrast, recovers 2-28 and other periods of repression and protest and brings a “history from below” into mainstream Western scholarship on Taiwan. In addition to a historiography, in giving violence a specific role in Taiwanese politics, Gold situates violence at one end of a continuum of political action in Taiwan’s postwar history. It represents the most extreme form of political action in Taiwan, and one that marks moments of transition: “Chungli represents the culmination of one historical stage in the interaction of these two strains and the beginning of a new one.”49 This view has Marxian overtones, and embeds Gold’s study with some powerful, though unstated, assumptions about the significance of violence in history. Drawing on Arendt, it suggests that violence is the expression of a particularly modern subjectivity in Taiwan, in which the Taiwanese are the homo faber to whom Arendt referred. For Gold, the political transition of the 1980s required “violence as the only means for ‘making’ it.”50 Thus, the Chungli Incident for Gold was not a failure of organized politics, or an eruption of violence of an unthinking mob that indicated a breakdown of social order. Rather it was the apex of political action. For Gold, societal violence against the state was ultimately progressive: it had signaled the failure of the state’s attempt to separate economic from political power, and expressed the will of the Taiwanese people to operate as fully developed national citizens, economically and politically, with “a say in the nation’s destiny.”51 Again Gold’s view can be contrasted with Vogel’s, for whom violence can only be a disruption in the operation of capitalism and the rationalized state, and therefore adverse to its interests. “Political stability,” that is, the absence of political activism and political violence, gave “modernizing bureaucrats more room to manoeuvre in promoting industrialization and gave capitalists confidence in the security of their investments.” It is easy to overplay these arguments, but the different dimensions of Gold’s work all point to a realignment of historiography in a way that begins to produce notions of a distinct Taiwanese nationhood. A “history from below,” a counter-hegemonic history, modernity, the progressiveness of political action, especially violence against the state, and the realization of fully developed national subjects draw towards the construction of Taiwan as a coherent and fully developed national idea. It is this aspect of State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle that gives it, its paradigmatic status in Taiwan Studies. Gold marks Taiwanese history with specific events and with a clear


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trajectory, and writes in opposition to a political force that worked to deny the realization of the Taiwanese idea. State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle is not a nationalist text in that Gold does not claim a political position or to speak from a privileged position of authenticity as a Taiwanese national; he writes in the language of objectivist, positivist political science and political economics that, in keeping with its methodological approach, does not connect his own writing process with the production of Taiwan as a discourse. However, as will be more fully elaborated in the following chapters, Gold is writing a specifically Taiwanese history that incorporates ideas about national subjectivity and marks out events that are formative of Taiwanese nationhood. Gold’s book, then, is an example of writing in that unstable area between description and statement that was identified in the earlier discussion of Bhabha. Gold assumes that his language and Taiwan are separable, and he uses a rhetorical mode that operates as if Taiwan is a social object amenable to analysis, but he nevertheless is writing a history that produces a coherent and bounded discourse of Taiwan as a nation. In Gold’s work, Taiwan has a clear history and an almost complete national experience: social, political, economic (but not cultural, yet). Although his writing mode is descriptive, he is making a statement that fully elaborates a unique meaning for Taiwan, different from China, Nationalist China, a Tiger Economy, or any of the other names that might encompass the island. Gold’s book underlines an important point. One might ask, how would it be possible to avoid being complicit in the Taiwanese national idea. If, as the above critique is implying, it is impossible to write about Taiwan without producing the discourse of Taiwanese nationhood, how can one remain objective in one’s scholarship? The answer is that one cannot. The best that one can do, as is being attempted here, is to understand and make explicit one’s complicity with imagined, albeit academically approved, narratives of nationhood, and through that understanding offer a greater depth and nuance in describing the processes, including one’s own, through which the Taiwanese national idea has come into being. After the publication of State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, Taiwan fulfilled the promise that Gold anticipated in the Chungli Incident, and began the institutional processes of democratization. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was legalized in 1986, martial law was lifted in 1987, and the following year, Chiang Ching-kuo died and the presidency passed to the native Taiwanese Lee Teng-hui. Gold’s Taiwanese national narrative was working off the story of the miracle economy, but in the early 1990s, political transformation was added to economic transformation, producing a rich new story in which to see the further realization of a Taiwanese nation. Since

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the early 1990s, democratization, along with its “causes,” and successes and failures has become perhaps the most vigorous area of research into Taiwan.52 “Taiwanese national identity,” another “truth statement,” is close behind democratization as a key topic of Taiwan Studies. Although it was possible to write about Taiwan in a way that understood the possibility of a national identity for the island, as in the work from the 1950s and 1960s, it was not until the early 1990s that the problematic of “Taiwanese national identity” as category of Taiwan Studies fully emerged. In addition to Wachman discussed below, there were works by Lo Mingcheng, Christopher Hughes, Allen Chun, Ah-chin Hsiao, and many others in the 1990s. Within Taiwan, with the lifting of restrictions on the press after the end of martial law, a veritable industry of writing has sprung up on the subject, which will be discussed in more detail in later chapters. In the period between the end of martial law in 1987 and the Taiwan Straits missile crisis in 1996, a key text on Taiwanese identity was Alan Wachman’s Taiwan: National Identity and Democratization. The timing of Wachman’s book is significant; he was writing at a time when the narrative of Taiwan Studies was still dominated by both the miracle economy discourse that underpinned Gold’s earlier work and the newly emergent theme of democratization. Therefore, Wachman was developing a theme in Taiwan Studies that applied those established ideas about what was interesting and important about Taiwan. It was not until after the 1996 missile crisis that the national identity issue became more focused on Taiwan’s relationship with China. Wachman’s book is an attempt to integrate the democratization discourse into that of national identity. The methodology in his discussion of democratization applies the standard positivist Huntingtonian argument also used by T’ien and discussed in chapter 1,53 but Wachman readily acknowledges the difficulties of applying that approach to national identity, and of explaining what constitutes the “world of sentiments” after one has “left behind the world of facts”:54 “As one begins to probe, it soon becomes evident that the convictions people have about their own identity are not necessarily consistent with reason.”55 Wachman recognizes the elusiveness of national identity: “Matters of identity rest largely on sentiment, and one cannot quantify such sentiments. They are dynamic, not static. Sentiments change.”56 Wachman offers an explanation for the emergence of a Taiwanese national identity along the lines of a causal model by linking it to the democratization process of the late 1980s. Democracy allowed identity to suddenly rise as a social issue under the new liberal political regime, giving the Taiwanese: “the liberty to address divisive questions concerning national identity that might have been considered taboo only a few years earlier.”57 Wachman is certainly correct to assert that identity was and continues to be a key site of political


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contestation in Taiwan. As he suggests, many of Taiwan’s public debates over a wide range of political governance issues such as education, environmental policies, and foreign policy are overlaid by identity politics. However, rather than going very far with elaborating a causal theory of identity, Wachman’s approach is to apply the methodologies described in chapter 1 to focus on producing Taiwanese identity as objective knowledge. His two methods are first to determine the historical basis of Chineseness and Taiwaneseness, and second, to conduct a large number of interviews with leading citizens to elucidate meanings that are legitimized by the political, social, or, economic status of his interview subjects. His goal is to find the historical “causes” of identities in Taiwan and to describe “them” by, in a sense, testing people through interviews to elucidate their identity.58 This approach rests on the epistemological assumption that “Taiwaneseness” or “Chineseness” are qualities that exist outside of his, and his interviewees’ use of language, as “sentiments,” “convictions,” or a “sense” of Chinese or Taiwanese identity. History is to identify events when these names-as-identity, or meaningobjects came into being, and the interviews are an attempt to fix or define their meanings. The logic of this approach is entirely consistent with a positivist theory of language: identities are already “out there,” as a set of fixed categories (“Taiwanese national identity,” “Chinese,” “Taiwanese”), they just need to be “found.” The work of the scholar is to pursue the meaning of identity to its singular point of origin both historically and by sharpening the precision by which he or she can define it. The positivist approach leads Wachman to classify, refine, and filter history and language to find the origin of Taiwanese identity. For example, Wachman writes: To locate the source of Taiwanese national identity, then, would be to identify reasons why Taiwanese think of themselves as a group distinct from other Chinese. There are many. Among those factors Taiwanese themselves commonly see as shaping their identity are 1. The separation from the rest of China and the collective memory of succeeding periods during which forces came from elsewhere to impose control on the island’s people. 2. The friction between the KMT and the Taiwanese stemming from persistent memories of initial misperceptions and early conflicts; 3. The sense that a distinct Taiwanese culture and consciousness differs from Han culture and Chinese consciousness; and 4. A legacy of frustration resulting from the authoritarian nature of KMT rule, which seemed to favor Mainlanders and their interests over the Taiwanese, and which, in an effort to resocialize Taiwanese as Chinese, inadvertently reinforced mutual perceptions of difference.59

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Wachman has described a series of abstracted moments in history and political and social relations from which “Taiwanese national identity” has come into being. He does not relate these events to the use of language: separation, friction, distinctiveness, frustration, all refer to the “sentiments” that, on the basis of this approach, characterize identity. It is at this moment that one can see a positivist methodology as being ultimately inadequate. It is difficult to systematically understand where identity exists. It seems to be somewhere between a thought and an emotion, a collectively felt “sense of oneself.” Identity is not understood as language-dependent, and language, in turn, is conceived of as merely a “tool” for apprehending it. By assuming that identity is objective, Wachman reads its history backwards, in a kind of “present-mindedness.” He reads back into history from the present in order to establish a linear path between certain historical events and present-day expressions of Taiwanese national identity. Therefore, in the sentence quoted above, “To locate the source of Taiwanese national identity . . . would be to identify reasons why Taiwanese think of themselves as a group distinct from other Chinese,” “Taiwanese national identity” is the object from which he starts; locating its source, or fixing it as a category, is to find its essential or “originary” meaning (impossibly) free from its relationship to other categories; and reading back from its essential meaning in the present is to “identify reasons” in history. This produces an overly teleological view of history: the complexities of the past, the way identities change, emerge, and disappear, and do not necessarily lead in a linear way to contemporary identity, all these are effaced by this approach. Wachman is therefore unable to explore the discursive production of identity, and the way in which it proceeds as a process of contestation, effacement, and legitimization. Instead, in Wachman’s teleological approach, the past, as the location of the “causes” of Taiwanese identity, leads inexorably to its formation in the present. Interviews, which form the core “data” of Taiwan: National Identity and Democratization, can be subjected to a similar critique. The interview approach reaches for the meaning of Taiwaneseness or Chineseness “behind” the words people say. Most of Wachman’s interviews locate identity in the way people speak about political and social issues facing contemporary Taiwan. Two key examples are education and unification with mainland China. Wachman relates the resentment that many Taiwanese felt at being socialized into an abstracted Chinese identity by the Nationalist government through the primary and secondary school system, in which they needed to memorize facts about mainland China, especially its history and geography. He quotes the well-known journalist Antonio Chiang: “My daughter now is in high school. She has to memorize all the cities, all the agricultural products,


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and industrial products of every province [of China], the weather, the rivers, and the natural resources. Everything.”60 Wachman reports a similar sentiment from the senior Democratic Progressive Party figure Chiu I-jen “when he was in junior high school . . . students were issued a history text and a geography text, but in those twelve volumes, there were only two chapters that mentioned anything about Taiwan’s history and only two that mentioned anything about Taiwan’s geography.”61 The question of whether Taiwan should become part of a single nation-state with mainland China or whether Taiwan should pursue self-determination and become an independent state as the Republic of Taiwan is the political dispute in which identity can be seen most clearly. The supporters of Taiwanese “independence” are motivated by their “sense” of Taiwanese identity, whereas the aspirants for a unified China are expressing their Chinese consciousness: “Challenging the view of a single Chinese culture, nation, and state has led some to assert that Taiwan has been autonomous and deserves an independent political status”62 and “C.V. Chen (Charng-ven), an exceptionally visible attorney who wears many hats in the public and private sector, . . . sees no contradiction between his identification with Taiwan as his home and his identity as a Chinese that impels him to push for reunification.”63 Identity, as Taiwanese or Chinese, is a social object that can “explain” personal positions on issues such as education or aspiration for independence or unification. Antonio Chiang “has” a Taiwanese identity and therefore makes certain statements about the education of his children. Or a Chinese nationalist like C.V. Chen supports unification with mainland China because he “has” a Chinese identity. For Wachman, this identity-object structures almost all social and political life in Taiwan: While Taiwan faced many problems that may have appeared from the outside to be more pressing, underlying tensions related to national identity affected nearly every sphere of political and social interaction at the central level and guided the attitudes, decisions, and behavior of the political elite.64 In this sentence Wachman privileges the category of national identity and positions it as the moment of origin for social and political life in Taiwan’, so in the same manner that certain historical events lead to contemporary identity, identity, in turn, is the starting point for individuals’ positions on social and political issues. Assuming that national identity is an objective category has the consequence that every utterance in language, however trivial, can theoretically serve as an “instance” of a pre-imagined notion of identity. The significance of other identity formations (e.g., Hakka or aboriginal, gender or class) is

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undermined by a theoretical framework that is itself producing Taiwanese identity. Because “Taiwanese national identity” is understood as an object or a “sense”, any statement may be interrogated to determine what it might say about Taiwanese national identity. With this methodology, it makes sense to ask whether “Taiwanese national identity” can be “found” in education, politics or literature, food, dress, or speech. The answer may be “yes” or “no,” but it is by asking and answering the question in this way that the scholar has already shaped the lived experience of his interviewees to fit into the discourse of the “Taiwanese national identity” that he himself is producing, rather than “discovering.” As a result, this empirical approach is inattentive to its own drive to pursue the theoretical meaning of “Taiwanese national identity” in every utterance and every social and political moment. Language is the way into “the world of sentiments” of national identity, but language is never sufficient to wholly and finally grasp its meaning. To recall Davies’ comment from the previous chapter, “the designation of truth or of some other fundamental as lying outside language is always caught in a linguistic dilemma; it can only ever ‘reveal’ itself in language in terms which always require further ‘revelation,’ for there is no term which is entirely self-referential, whose meaning is not dependent on how it is situated in a complex of meanings in relations to other terms.”65 Therefore, the effort to describe a coherent and unified Taiwanese national identity and to locate its moment of origin in history is bound to fail. The attempted totalization of an ever-increasing range of “instances” of such national identity risks either stretching the notion of national identity itself into something as metaphysical and as capacious as a “Spirit” or it curtails the notion to accord with certain historical and contemporary “facts,” thus rendering it wholly (and often unwittingly) ideological. Instead, Taiwanese national identity can be understood as a scholarly category with its own discursive effects, as much as a phrase referring to the “real” Taiwan. As such it can be understood as a concept that invites contestation by the very nature of its “inventedness”: one can always find alternative formulations for such an identity because it is ceaselessly produced by moments of enunciation, in which the island is named as Taiwan. Finally, Wachman, like Gold, is writing in the gap between description and statement, or pedagogy and performance. He makes statements such as, “Taiwan has not always been considered part of China, has often been governed by non-Chinese, and has never been ruled exclusively by people who consider Taiwan as home.”66 This is delivered as a statement of objective fact, and in one sense one could read it simply as an unremarkable summary account of Taiwan’s geopolitical status. Yet it could also function as a statement of Taiwanese nationalist ideology. In Wachman, the statement is


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legitimized by the institutional practices of academia, and also by its epistemological assumption of a “truth . . . lying outside language.” By a Taiwanese nationalist, such a statement would be written not from a distanciated position to the “truth” of Taiwanese identity but would be made as a declaration of such an identity. As argued earlier in relation to Gold, it is not possible to write about Taiwan without also producing the idea of a Taiwanese identity. Taiwanese identity is just that elusive self-referential moment: to write it is to create it, which itself is a form of writing. Therefore, Taiwanese identity becomes one’s own act of writing: not an observable social object but the impossibility of closure of one’s own text, intruding upon the discursive boundaries that one inscribes in order mark it off as a social object. This presents two methodological directions for the study of Taiwanese national identity. First, the material is not the “sentiment” behind people’s words, but the words themselves. Chiu I-jen and Antonio Chiang’s railing against the KMT education system is not an expression of their Taiwanese national identity, but an assertion of how they wish to construct their identity. Second, though it may not be possible to distinguish between writing about Taiwanese national identity and simply producing it, Taiwanese national identity is still written as if it were an objective fact. The academic may write in the space between description and statement, but Wachman, Gold, and many others are writing as if they are able to be objective and disinterested social scientists. This operates as a crucial rhetorical mode in the legitimization of the idea of Taiwanese nationhood, naturalizing it and embedding it with the status of fact. It is in this move to objectify the idea of the Taiwanese nation where Taiwanese national identity finds both academic and ideological legitimacy.


CHAPTER 3

Legitimizing Taiwan

A Sense of Taiwanese Identity The preceding chapters questioned the way Taiwanese national identity has been written about as an abstracted social object. The positivist mode of analysis that has characterized Taiwan Studies and other work on Taiwan in political science and international relations objectifies national identity, and this limits the way it can be understood. The assumption of objectivity, that is, positioning identity unproblematically as “out there,” takes a socially produced discourse, a community of imaginations, to use Anderson’s terms, and reports it as a fact. By taking that step, when collectively imagined identity becomes objectified, the scholar risks becoming part of the discursive process by which that identity is produced. By turning a sentence like, “I am Taiwanese” into a statement about “the Taiwanese” without being clear about the complex process by which that transfer occurs, the scholar can unwittingly reproduce the discourse of Taiwanese identity, with all its attendant ideology and politics, thus himself becoming part of its production rather than merely its analysis. This epistemological process slips easily into the rhetorical modes of scholarship on Taiwanese identity, however. An example in Western scholarship is the tendency to refer to the “sense” of identity in Taiwan. For instance, Hughes has written, “neither the Taiwanese, nor even many of the Mainlanders, had really consolidated any sense of national identity. Loyalties to Taiwan had been eroded by the Japanese occupation. A sense of being ‘Taiwanese’ was also compromised for the pre-1945 residents by lingering loyalties to old provincial identities.”1 Wachman writes, “The hundred miles or so that separate Taiwan from the mainland also separate its people from

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the people on the mainland. Those on Taiwan have developed a sense of belonging to a group defined by residency on the island.”2 Gold in the same vein says, “Ironically, visiting ‘the motherland’ for many people, Taiwanese and mainlanders, reconfirms their sense of Taiwan’s distinctiveness rather than its essential ‘Chineseness.’ ”3 The notion of a sense of Taiwanese identity is an example of the positivist tendency in Taiwan Studies. As a social fact or phenomenon, a sense of national identity or a “sense of Taiwan’s distinctiveness” is something other than language, perhaps behind it, or under it, an emotion, a feeling (a sense), impelling people to write and speak about their identity in a particularly Taiwanese way. On this basis, the sense of identity in Taiwan is treated as something like a measurable or testable phenomenon. It assumes that a multitude of individual moments in which identity is expressed, even just by the basic act of naming, can be added up and pronounced upon as demonstrating the presence or otherwise of a singular, coherent, collective identity for Taiwan. And again, this objectification of identity implicates the scholar in its production. By reporting a sense of identity as if it were an objective fact, a statement about a sense becomes an expression of it, disguised by the language and style of academic objectivity. This point is a highly self-reflexive one: it does not argue that there was no sense of Taiwanese identity in any of the situations the writers above describe. The sense described is legitimate within the terms of positivist social science. The argument is that the notion of a sense of identity is ultimately inadequate, and that there is a process in which any statement, whether by a Taiwanese or, in the instances above, an American or British scholar can become part of the weave of Taiwan’s identity. Taiwanese identity is better understood as a constant production of meanings, and as such it occurs at multiple levels, from secondary scholarly work by non-Taiwanese, to claims to be an “authentic” Taiwanese, and self-conscious reflections upon Taiwan’s identity by Taiwanese themselves. Indeed, the objectivist assumptions that inform knowledge production in Western scholarship about Taiwan are also a fully developed scholarly approach among Taiwanese sociologists and historians on their own identity problematic. One of the features of contemporary Taiwanese identity is its self-consciousness, which can be understood as the simultaneous operation of multiple sites of identity, in which Taiwanese people can not only claim an authentic, essential “Taiwaneseness,” but also can reflect upon their own identity as if it were the same objective social fact. This is what Bhabha calls “double writing.” The location of the nation’s narrative address is “between the performative and the pedagogical,” between the singular moments of enunciation of

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Taiwanese identity (“I am Taiwanese”) and the objective narrativization of Taiwanese identity (“to be Taiwanese is . . .”). These arguments can be developed by a closer reflection on the sense of Taiwan’s distinctiveness that Gold found among Taiwanese who visited the mainland in the 1990s. Gold was writing in response to the public debate in Taiwan in the late 1980s and early 1990s about aspects of Taiwan’s relationship with China after travel restrictions were lifted on Taiwanese visiting the mainland in November 1987.4 Many Taiwanese made the trip as tourists, while others were mainlander veterans returning to homes in China they had left in the late 1940s. Gold’s point is referenced to an article by Hu Chang from 1991,5 which drew upon opinion surveys conducted by the Chang Yungfa Foundation as well as a series of ad hoc interviews Hu conducted with some Taiwanese who had visited the mainland. The surveys Hu cites focused on the experiences of veterans, with questions on whether they had experienced problems on their trips, and whether their personal encounters had been positive or negative and so forth. Gold’s comment about their sense of Taiwan’s distinctiveness is rhetorical shorthand for these quantitative and qualitative opinion surveys, and they provide evidence for the sense that he describes. His statement is implicitly legitimized by the principles of sampling and statistical significance developed by sociology and behavioral psychology in the postwar period as a way of establishing scientific methodologies for those disciplines. The justification for describing the presence of a sense of Taiwanese identity is unstated, but rests ultimately on certain percentage numbers extracted from the collated results of the questionnaires. Pierre Bourdieu wrote in the early 1970s a succinct critique of opinion polling entitled Public Opinion Does Not Exist. He notes the a priori assumptions of polling, in which questions are asked that are already within constituted discourses, and are therefore part of the production of the discourses themselves. He criticizes the limitations of representing such socially and politically constructed discourses with a mere percentage point: It imposes the idea for instance that in any given assembly of people there can be found a public opinion, which would be something like the average of all the opinions or the average opinion. The “public opinion” which is stated . . . is a pure and simple artefact whose function is to conceal the fact that the state of opinion at any given moment is a system of forces, of tensions, and that there is nothing more inadequate than a percentage to represent the state of opinion.6

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Bourdieu’s point about the limitations of representing a public opinion with a percentage is particularly appropriate in the context of the study of Taiwanese identity. In Gold’s reference, as well as the others cited, even the pseudoscientific accuracy of percentage points delivered by Hu’s original survey work is lost to a simple binary presence or absence of a “sense.” A highly elaborated example of the kind of discursive moment that Gold is trying to objectify can be found in a series of three articles published in 1993 by the Lianhe bao (United Daily News). The newspaper sent three writers who identified themselves as Taiwanese to their ancestral villages in Fujian. The editor began each piece with a summary biography that included the number of generations that each writer’s family had lived in Taiwan. This example contrasts with the constituency who traveled to the mainland in the late 1980s who were predominantly mainland veterans. All three authors treat the trips to Fujian as journeys in search of their roots from which to understand their contemporary identity. They visit cemeteries and ancestral halls and make contact with people who share the same surname. In all the texts, Fujian is abstracted as an ancestral place. None of the writers discusses the broader political context of the relationship between Taiwan and China, and none covers the specific political events that have allowed them to make the trip. For Wang Haowei the connection between himself and his ancestral home Pinghe has been broken. He concludes with the comment that before visiting the mainland he could scarcely remember where his ancestral home had been, and after the experience he remained unsure where he belonged: Going to the graveyard, I looked for the old names: Pinghe, Nanxing, Yongding . . . the names of these counties cover 100 km around me, gathered together today on the graves through the same vicissitudes of life. It was difficult for me to remember what was my own hometown; just like the feelings of my identity, [my ancestors] moved on long ago in another direction. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that the characters of Pinghe on the grave are from the same Zhangzhou Pinghe as my ancestors. Can the grave and the name of my hometown really be referring to the same thing?7 Jian Zhen’s engagement with her mainland heritage is more positive, enabling her to conjure up the image of her ancestor who made the dangerous journey to settle in Taiwan. Her central motif is drawing the qian, the bamboo strips imprinted with characters that are drawn from a vessel as part of Daoist divination.

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I carried the nine characters as if they were nine literary masterpieces to Fujian; I had no expectations in my heart for what I might find in my ancestral home. I had read the tourist brochures before leaving, but I just wanted to understand the province with which Taiwan has the closest relationship.8 She imagines both herself and her ancestor performing the ritual with the same goal of seeking to find their places in the world. Jian is elaborating a highly personal meaning: to be Taiwanese on the basis of a return to an ancestral home means to be an emigrant, and her identity is filled out with narratives of journeys back to an imagined point of origin. She envisages her ancestor who first migrated across the straits: “What did he feel when he embraced his first child to be born after he came to Taiwan? When he closed his eyes, was Taiwan’s sky clear and bright or stormy?”9 Hou Jiliang’s piece is mainly descriptive, relating his trip and his experiences in the town of Nan’an in Quanzhou county from where his ancestors had emigrated five generations earlier. He does, however, position Taiwan and mainland China in a very specific relationship, along a teleological line of modern development, with Taiwan being positioned “ahead” of mainland China. China is implicitly disempowered by Taiwan’s relative material prosperity. The Taiwanese are able to look at, indeed objectify, mainland China through the notion of nostalgia: Of course I can imagine people from the mainland having the same kind of desire for the benefits of modern life. Of course, we do not want to use our position to ask that they leave some historical vestiges intact; let us keep this history because it is too important to be destroyed, not because Taiwanese do not care enough about history and want somewhere to come to satisfy our sense of nostalgia.10 This theme is also played out very strongly in Hu Chang’s interviews, with his subjects all describing the mainland as “behind” Taiwan, and poor: “The buildings in Shanghai are those of 40 years ago. . . . Still very backward, Shanghai people must mend their broken teapots and use the same basin for personal washing.”11 For Hou, like Jian, traveling to Fujian becomes the discovery of his roots, which is entirely consistent with the teleological relationship he sees between China and Taiwan. He inscribes a complex personal and intellectual relationship to the mainland, at once an unmediated emotion and an objectified position, with a teleology that allows him to imagine it as an original moment. He seems to be hoping for his emotions and his bodily sensations

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to overtake his rationality, or his modernity, and connect him with his true identity expressed as this imagined past that he finds for himself in contemporary Fujian province: Then, after finding my ancestral hall, Yu Haoxin asked me straight away, what do you feel? Perhaps there was just too much anticipation, because I didn’t feel anything. But on inviting us to have some tea, I discovered them making offerings at the ancestral tablet in the great hall. It was upon the solemn experience of seeing the lineage being preserved so purely that I had the feeling of returning home. Going to Quanzhou for the first time, I trembled at the sense of coming back to the places where I grew up. Mainland cities seemed to be like the cities in Taiwan back in time. In Quanzhou, because I could hear so many people speaking minanhua, and see people dressed like elderly people in Taiwan, with similar houses, old streets, and fragrant temples, etc., then I really had a feeling of returning to the past.12 The arguments presented so far make it possible to connect Gold’s comment about the sense of Taiwan’s distinctiveness with the highly personal accounts of Taiwanese tourists’ visits to the mainland. All these writers express a Taiwanese identity, at the most basic level by simply naming Taiwan in their texts. The word marks off Taiwan as an object of meaning, and, especially sharply when deployed in the context of returning to the mainland; it has the effect of expressing the differentiation of Taiwan from China. Hou Jiliang also refers to the Chinese as “the people from the mainland.” His choice is significant; he does not use Chinese, but instead conveys the ambivalence of the relationship between China and Taiwan with this more open term. He avoids the sharp inscription of difference that is made with the two words Taiwanese and Chinese. Therefore, at the simplest level, Gold is right to suggest that for people living in Taiwan, traveling to the mainland reinforced their sense of Taiwan’s own identity. Travel presented new opportunities to write “Taiwan” and elaborate the meaning of the name by writing about Taiwan in relation to China. That can be understood as a reconfirmation of Taiwan’s distinctiveness, but it is more systematic to say that it offered a new opportunity to inscribe a meaning for Taiwan. However, the complexity and ambivalence of even just these three pieces show the limitations of the notion of sense of identity. It reduces and abstracts this “system of forces, of tensions”—notions of ancestry, teleologies of histories, narratives of journeys, and origins—to a singular, homogeneous object. Hou’s piece demonstrates this complexity by responding to his trip with something like Bhabha’s notion of “double writing” mentioned earlier, in

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which nationals are both “the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy” and also “the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification.”13 Hou presents mainland China pedagogically, objectifying it and likening it to Taiwan’s past, and cautioning against the possibility that it might become a nostalgia theme park for the modern Taiwanese. But at the same time, he reaches for an unmediated, subjective response toward an imagined original moment. What he is trying to find is an identity that transcends language to reveal itself outside of it, as a sense, an emotion or feeling, something that no longer needs language to be meaningful, a “self-identical essence” in Eagleton’s terms.14 Hou demonstrates this idea neatly in his urgent, and ultimately unsatisfactory, demand for an emotion upon arriving at his point of origin, his ancestral hall. The search for the truth of one’s identity recalls Davies’s comment, quoted in chapter 1 about the “linguistic dilemma”: “the designation of truth or of some other fundamental as lying outside language . . . can only ever ‘reveal’ itself in language in terms which always require further ‘revelation.’ ” Hou’s piece in particular seems to capture this dilemma. His mere arrival at the ancestral hall is not enough, and is disappointing. He feels nothing, and needs further revelation, that only comes when he sees the worshippers at the altar. But even here, his discovery of his “truth” is fleeting and contingent. In this way, rightly or wrongly, Wang, Jian and Hou are engaged in a project to refuse the structural nature of language, and the contingencies of meanings ascribed to names theorized by Derrida and other poststructuralists, such as Bhabha and Chow.15 They are pursuing their “true” identity on the assumption of the determinate nature of meaning in language, that will, on this basis, allow them to name once and for all what they hope will be their foundational identity and place. The place where these writers hope to find essential identity is in Fujian. It becomes an imaginary that conflates both a personal and a Taiwanese past, in which they might find a sense of their identity as Taiwanese. This reading draws significantly on contemporary theorizing about the performative powers of language.16 It is a wholly textual reading of Taiwanese identity, locating it in the operation of language. Eagleton suggests that attempts to define identity often end up treating it as “ontologically empty,”17 and his caution seems valid in the context of these articles. Even as they recount personal journeys of self-discovery in a heightened emotional style, ultimately they say very little about identity, either personal or national. Hou Jiliang felt he had truly come home as he saw the worshippers at the ancestral altar, but as he himself says, that experience was a long way from his daily life in modern Taiwan. It was the act of tracing his contemporary experience back to an imagined past in which he sought to recover his essential or “true”

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identity, not in an account of the reality of modern Fujian or his experience in modern Taiwan. The positivist, and indeed a Taiwanese nationalist, might respond to the critique of these pieces by arguing that they are not a representative sample, and are therefore insufficient to make a legitimate knowledge-claim about the presence of a Taiwanese identity. There are some Taiwanese who would reject any association with the mainland, and others who would link Taiwan’s identity with China’s traditional or Confucian culture, rather than with local identities in Fujian. Lianhe bao is a conservative newspaper, so it is not surprising that in the post–martial law era, with its rhetoric of democracy and social inclusion, it would publish a series of pieces by ethnic Taiwanese authors which neatly revives the ideology of a mainland future for Taiwan by going off in search of a mainland past; they leave the China out of mainland China, and slip in Fujian as an unproblematic substitute. However, these criticisms replay the language assumptions made by Gold, Wachman, and Hughes that there is a singular, coherent, and measurable sense to Taiwanese identity. To criticize these pieces as unrepresentative is to assume that it is a viable epistemological undertaking to measure their language against some truth outside of language of “real” Taiwanese identity. As will be elaborated below, the notion of unrepresentativeness is ultimately a political contest over the legitimacy of certain statements about Taiwanese identity over others. Therefore, as Wang, Jian and Hou searched for a literal, physical sense of their identity (“what do you feel?”), they worked on the basis of the same linguistic assumptions that made it viable for Thomas Gold to refer to the “sense of Taiwan’s distinctiveness.” They assumed that Taiwan’s identity, and their own identity as Taiwanese, exist as an indisputable reality beyond the language they use to express it. For Gold, it is enough to make a passing reference to a sense of Taiwanese identity, but Wang, Jian, and Hou actually are Taiwanese, and following political changes in cross-straits relations by the mid-1990s found themselves able to literally seek out a place where they hoped they would find the truth of their identity. The argument being made here privileges the textual aspect of identity and suggests that the positivist methodology that finds a sense of Taiwan’s identity is itself part of its text. “Evidence” for identity in Taiwan exists as individual moments among the traces of identity that run through language, and is not something outside language that is fully realized in the political form of the nation. The challenge is to write about what the island has come to mean to the people who have lived there in a way that recognizes the continuity of the evolution of its meaning through history, while also understanding

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that Taiwan is only meaningful in a subjective, lived experience in a given singular moment. Taiwan as an idea may reach back into history to legitimize itself, but in its present moment that means creating a history as it goes from the vantage point of the present, with recourse to an ever-expanding and legitimized discourse on Taiwanese identity. The argument so far suggests that insight into the development of the idea of Taiwan means looking for the gaps between what Taiwan may have meant in the past and how present-day accounts re-read and revise this past. This argument, however, does not necessarily imply a radical rewriting of the development of the Taiwan idea, as ultimately, the gaps may be small. But it does mean understanding the limitations of the possibilities of understanding Taiwanese identity. The argument suggests that identity can sometimes be just the moment in which an individual names himself or herself saying, “I am Taiwanese,” as an enunciation of his or her Taiwanese identity; or the moment when he or she is named as one of “the Taiwanese,” as a description and an inscription of identity. There is no sense of Taiwanese identity behind these statements; the statement itself is where Taiwanese identity is to be found, and is meaningful such as as it is, without necessarily needing elaboration. But at the same time, the name Taiwanese can be surrounded by a tremendously complex and powerful set of institutions in education, politics, and culture: literature, films, school subjects, political parties, religious practices, scholarship, and even the books of foreign academics. The notion of a rise or emergence of Taiwanese really describes the social process by which its name has been elaborated, institutionalized and, in Bourdieu’s sense, has accumulated symbolic power—the process that makes the single moment of declaration (“I am Taiwanese”) meaningful, then legitimate, and then authoritative. Eagleton noted the emptiness of identity categories, but in the general point he makes, he says, “Categories, ontologically empty though they may be, continue to exert an implacable political force.”18 A cross-section of this process was covered in chapter 1, tracking through the ascendance of the name Taiwan in scholarship. Alan Wachman, too, provided a version of this argument, albeit implicitly in his choice of interview subjects. Unable to fund a large-scale survey in his research, he targets “important” people—politicians, business leaders, and scholars—whose opinions are legitimized by their power. When they speak, it expresses identity in Taiwan in a way that is made meaningful and legitimate. And, in turn, part of the legitimization of the idea of Taiwanese identity is its objectification in Taiwan Studies scholarship. The proceding arguments can be added to the discussion of naming and identity presented in chapter 1. In the first instance, they can be applied to

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Taiwan’s historical record, where academics and nationalists have gone looking for the roots of Taiwanese identity. Discourses of identity, names, and naming may be identifiable in history, but one must step carefully through how that history is mediated by contemporary scholarship. Work on Taiwanese history that looks for examples of Taiwanese identity from the past operates on two levels: as part of the contemporary discourse of identity and also, theoretically at least, drawing on texts that provide a possibly unmediated insight into identity formations in the past. In addition, the kind of knowledge of identity produced by the dominant disciplines of Taiwan Studies—political science, history, and anthropology— is fragmentary. It tends to consist of reports of certain events and statements and commentaries by leading figures—intellectuals, politicians, and writers, for example. Some scholarship works to aggregate these into quasi-surveys of identity, but a textual approach that looks at identity from viewpoint of meanings must acknowledge that these fragments are the material of identity. Having come to the problem of identity through a critique of the positivist literature in the previous chapter, the preceding arguments make it clear that Taiwanese identity has existed for as long as Taiwan has had a name. The quotes above about the sense of Taiwanese identity as emerging over time, as a result of Taiwan being an island, or Taiwanese returning to the mainland after the lifting of travel restrictions in 1987, or with Hughes, denying a sense of Taiwaneseness or Chineseness in the 1940s, all miss the fundamental point that Taiwan had an identity the moment there was a word for it. Although this may be true, the writers quoted above do understand that Taiwan has not always been the most meaningful term for people to describe the island, and this is the issue that they are trying to apprehend in the notion of a sense of identity. The descriptions of a rise in Taiwanese identity do express a historical reality in which discourses of Taiwaneseness have come to prominence, especially since the lifting of martial law. These observations need to be systematized within a theoretical framework that can map when and how Taiwanese identity ascended to the most significant position in the consciousness of the Taiwanese people. As discussed in chapter 1, Taiwan has become the dominant name for the island and its people in quite a specific historical and political process that has accelerated since the lifting of martial law. In terms of identity, however, there have been numerous other names that subdivided the people of Taiwan into smaller groups and yet others that have subsumed the Taiwanese within more broadly imagined identities. The establishment of Taiwanese identity understood sociopolitically has not only been a contest between different names for the whole island, and for the ascendance of the name Taiwan, but also the

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contest between different names for subgroups within Taiwan, such as waishengren, benshengren, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, and Hakka, and subsuming names for the Taiwanese, such as Fulao, Chinese, or Asian. In the first instance, it is possible to track through other names that have competed against Taiwanese as the dominant meaning for people living on the island. The historical record also shows that there were names, some of which are no longer used, which were meaningful for people who lived in Taiwan in the nineteenth century and earlier. Harry Lamley has written extensively on the often very violent conflicts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between “sub-ethnic” social groups who engaged in “exceptionally severe sub-ethnic strife from the 1780’s to the 1860’s.”19 This conflict was at its most destructive “when entire villages or market towns were plundered and burned, and the survivors killed or forced to flee.”20 Lamley identifies three communities, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, and Hakkas, who were migrant groups to arrive in Taiwan from the late eighteenth century, settle across the island and compete for resources in land and water with each other and Taiwan’s aborigines. The first two took their identity from the regions in southern Fujian from which they emigrated. Hakkas were, and still are, a de-localized ethnic group in southern China. Each of these sub-ethnicities brought with them associations of community from their home regions. These included religious practices, surname lineages, and commercial guilds, as well as certain dress and culinary habits. Hakka were distinguished primarily by language but also by habits of dress, food, and religion. For example, they worshipped the deity San Shan Guo Wang and Hakka women did not engage in foot-binding.21 The Hakkas were later settlers in less hospitable territory than the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou groups. According to Lamley, though there were some differences in the spoken dialect among the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou people, the main point of identification was religion, with the two groups worshipping different deities. In areas where Quanzhou people were predominant, they were further divided on the basis of religion into associations of counties such as the Tung An and the San Yi within Quanzhou itself. The three larger sub-ethnic categories therefore were fluid and capable of dissolving and reforming in relation to each other in a process that accords well with Duara’s explanation of identity. The Tung An and San Yi people feuded from the mid-eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century, before joining forces with a more broadly imagined Quanzhou community to begin a conflict with the Zhangzhou. Quanzhou and Zhangzhou communities also later coalesced allied into what might be called a Minyue identity22 in conflicts with Hakkas.

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In the historical record, references to Taiwan itself abound both in imperial administrative documents and travellers and merchants tales. One such reference is William Pickering’s account, published in 1898, of his experiences of working in the late 1860s and 1870s for the Chinese customs service and later for the British trading firm McPhail & Co., entitled Pioneering in Formosa: Recollections of Adventures Among Mandarins, Wreckers and Headhunting Savages.23 Pickering was in his twenties when he went to Taiwan, learned Mandarin and Taiwanese and wrote a droll description of his exploits as a fortune seeker in the “Far East,” at the peak of the period in British history when such adventures were both possible and meaningful. That Pickering was able to write and publish on “Formosa” legitimizes Taiwanese identity, and throughout his text he provides meaning for the name Formosa through his anecdotes. He describes a meeting with a magistrate to discuss a dispute over the trade in camphor, to which he brought an official Chinese copy of the 1862 Treaty signed in Tianjin permitting the trade by foreigners. Paraphrasing the magistrate, Pickering writes: “He continued his argument by saying that the treaty was very good for China, but that Formosa was different. It was a peculiar place; the people were wild and turbulent, and that if I obstinately persisted in my course I might lose my life.”24 Pickering also recounts the arrival in a southern settlement of the news that Chinese soldiers were heading south to attack an Aboriginal tribe: This prospect created great consternation amongst the Chinese settlers. They called me in and entreated me to assist them. They argued, “We have no desire to be under the yoke of the mandarins, whilst as to Chinese soldiers, you know what they are! They are worse than locusts. If we should be good by them, they will take all we have; while if we do not find them supplies, they will seize our women and kill us.”25 A positivist mode of theorizing about Taiwanese identity would find in these comments historical evidence for the sense of Taiwanese identity. However, the arguments made so far provide a more solid ground for understanding exactly what this evidence is and what it shows. In the first example, Pickering and, if he is describing the encounter accurately, the magistrate are reproducing an idea of Taiwan simply by naming it. Reading back from the present, Pickering’s report of the magistrate’s comment “that Formosa was different,” sounds like evidence for a sense of Taiwanese identity simply because Taiwan is being differentiated (literally as well as semiotically) from

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the larger meaning of China, in accordance with the processes of identity as the production of meaning through naming detailed in chapter 1. In the second example, the villagers in the south, it is not Taiwan that is being named, but China. In the inverse of the naming of Taiwan, Taiwanese identity is being defined by a relationship, as something that China is not. Again, in a moment that recalls Duara’s argument, the differentiation of China from Taiwan by the simple act of naming the Chinese (“as to Chinese soldiers, you know what they are”) produces a meaning for Taiwan. Pickering’s text expresses a little of how the name Taiwan was elaborated at the end of the nineteenth century. According to the magistrate, it was “peculiar” with a “wild and turbulent” people. This accords with the nineteenth century phrase “san nian yi xiao fan, wu nian yi da luan” (Every three years a minor uprising, every five years a major rebellion), which supposedly characterized Taiwan at that time.26 At the same time, Pickering refers to these Taiwanese as “Chinese settlers,” most probably differentiating them from Taiwanese aborigines, and using the name Chinese to inscribe the Taiwanese and mainlanders as a single people. This produces a contradiction in his text between his reports of the Taiwanese differentiating the Chinese. Indeed, throughout his book Pickering makes liberal use of the sardonic term “Celestials” to name the Taiwanese he meets, in a jocular reference to China as the “Celestial Kingdom” and indicating that for him, the Taiwanese were Chinese. Therefore, Pickering is deploying an array of different meanings: Formosa as a peculiar place with wild people; but people who were Chinese, but could still be differentiated from mainland Chinese. The major distinction that Pickering draws is a quasi-class difference between Chinese who are identified as imperial as opposed to those who are settlers, or frontiersmen, avoiding the “yolk of the Mandarins.” Therefore, Pickering is describing an imperial structure to identity in Taiwan, differentiating between military and civic imperial power and a broadly imagined Chinese peasantry. Names and Power What is being implied in both Pickering’s contemporary account and Lamley’s history, as well as in the review of Taiwan Studies in chapters 1 and 2 is the way different identities have been legitimized by social and political institutions, the “implacable political force” of identity, that Eagleton describes. The native-place identities of the Taiwanese described by Lamley, which were privileged over Taiwan or China, were legitimized by complex and powerful religious, land management, and policing organizations. Within all the communities, group identification was maintained through

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institutional practices and organizations, such as jisi gongye (ancestral estates) and shenming hui (religious societies). Jisi gongye were formed by kinship groups and held corporate wealth such as landholdings. These kinds of organizations became active in the nineteenth century. They organized community projects and provided funding for feuds between subethnic groups, albeit less generously than their mainland counterparts. Earlier, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, shenming hui had built community temples that served as centers of local politics and sometimes as militia headquarters. Longshan Shi, built in 1740, was a command center for a San Yi Quanzhou militia in its feud with the Tung An Quanzhou. When this conflict ended in 1859, it became a command center for the united Quanzhou force against the Zhangzhou community.27 In addition to money and manpower, the shenming hui offered “supernatural” support for subethnic groups through rituals and maintenance of ancestral shrines. Subethnic conflicts declined in Taiwan after the 1860s, coincidings with the more complete incorporation of Taiwan into the empire, when nativeplace institutions were coopted by the imperial state, and Taiwan began to generate its own imperial scholar-gentry class, drawn from the subethnic groups.28 The change in the late nineteenth century is expressed by Pickering. The distinction between Taiwan and China functioned within the consolidated imperial administrative structures of the 1880s and 1890s. Pickering dealt with a trade dispute by appealing to a Qing government magistrate, not a local leader who might have secured his power from a Quanzhou or Zhangzhou jisi gongye. The magistrate and Pickering himself could name Taiwan within the context of the Chinese empire, and specifically within the implementation of the Tianjin treaty, while Taiwanese could identify Chinese as soldiers within the Qing military structures. Another archival artifact of the consolidation of imperial power of Taiwan in the late nineteenth century comes from Dennys’s detailed 1867 account of the administration of Taiwan. The same arguments applied to Pickering also apply here: Taiwan as a coherent object of identity becomes meaningful within its incorporation into imperial power structures: The Viceroy of Fukien and Chekiang, governing Formosa as a Fu or Prefecture of the first-named province, is bound by law to visit the island once every three years. These formal visits are lucrative to the high functionary . . . the exalted servant of the Emperor walks the paths of duty, and returns, unlike most other travellers, with a well-filled purse . . . The T’ai-wan Tao (or chief authority of Taiwan) resides at the Fu or capital city. He is the highest magistrate and has to make a circuit of

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the departments once annually. The next civil authority is the T’ai-wan Fu or Prefect; then the T’ai wan Hien or District Magistrate; and lastly the Hai-fang T’ing, or Marine Prefect.29 After World War II, the same discursive process can be identified in the shift in usage in English from Formosa to Taiwan. The name changes in scholarship were instigated by the institutional arrangements established by the Nationalist and the U.S. governments through the JCRR. The Kuomintang (KMT) designated Taiwan a province as Taiwan sheng, or (including the outlying islands) an “area” as Taiwan diqu. The JCRR, as an official organization of both governments, and one of the peak bodies through which the two governments cooperated, took up the KMT’s Chinese names into English as Taiwan, China, thus legitimizing the name Taiwan and beginning the social and political process by which it became the dominant Chinese and English name for the island. The relationship between power, as exercised through institutional arrangements of all kinds, and language, especially the language in which these institutional arrangements find implementation, is a well-established idea. For Derrida, language, power, and violence are fundamentally connected. Bourdieu has worked through this relationship with the notion of legitimacy, with which he produces a kind of sociology of language and power that takes in its institutional bases.30 Bourdieu dismisses the “illusion of linguistic communism” in which language is understood without the dimension of power, and describes a process by which the state legitimizes certain modes of speech and writing through education and public administration, in an “economy of linguistic exchange.” For Bourdieu, “All linguistic practices are measured against the legitimate practices,” and legitimate practices are defined as “the practices of those who are dominant.”31 Bourdieu tracks through this process from imperial through post–Revolutionary France in which styles of language became implicated in the functioning of the state: With the progressive constitution of an administrative organization linked to royal power (involving the appearance of a multitude of subordinate administrative agents, lieutenants, provosts, magistrates, etc.) . . . the Parisian dialect beg[an] to take over from the various langue d’oc dialects in legal documents . . . . Whereas the lower classes, particularly the peasantry, were limited to the local dialect, the aristocracy, the commercial and business bourgeoisie and particularly the literate petite bourgeoisie . . . had access much more frequently to the use of the official language, written or spoken, while at the same time possessing the dialect (which was

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still used in most private and even public situations), a situation in which they were destined to fulfil the function of intermediaries.32 Bourdieu is writing in response to a specific view of language from Saussure and Chomsky, that of the distinction between langue and parole, or an ideal, abstract language as vocabulary and grammar, and actual speech, or linguistic competence. For Bourdieu, in individuals the ideal language is as much socially produced as linguistic competence. For the purposes of this argument, Bourdieu’s model of language becomes very similar to Anderson’s. He links the establishment of Parisian French as a uniform official language to the consolidation of the post–Revolutionary French nation-state: “The imposition of the legitimate language in opposition to the dialects and patois was an integral part of the political strategies aimed at perpetuating the gains of the Revolution through the production and the reproduction of the ‘new man.’ ”33 Bourdieu, however, has a more sophisticated model of the dynamics of power in language than Anderson. He describes a social process of differentiation that dynamically inscribes the meaning of high and low modes of language through the constant negotiation of legitimacy. Language for Bourdieu is a site of social stratification and the exercise of hegemonic power. Sanctioned forms of speech are subject to a process of assimilation and dissimulation as language usage is continually appropriated and marginalized by different social strata as a dynamic negotiation of their power relationships. Members of the “lower classes” may take up certain modes of authorized language to accumulate cultural capital, and the “upper classes” may devote large resources to maintaining certain modes of language in order to secure the value of their cultural capital. But low forms of language can also be legitimized by aspirational groups as a counter to the hegemony of “correct” speech. In Taiwan, this distinction has been made especially sharp in the hegemony of Mandarin Chinese over Taiwanese, and this has been challenged by the incorporation of Taiwanese into socially legitimized institutional settings. The 1997 controversy over university teaching in Taiwanese is one such example.34 In the dynamism of language legitimacy, social stratification is continually produced: “The social mechanisms of cultural transmission tend to reproduce the structural disparity between the very unequal knowledge of the legitimate language and the much more uniform recognition of this language.”35 For Bourdieu, the framework in which these mechanisms operate is the state and its education systems. Official language is produced by schools and it marginalizes dialects and patois through social and political sanction. His economistic approach emphasizes the mechanisms of a symbolic economy, in

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which certain modes of language are valued in accordance with their symbolic value in terms of social, political, and economic power: Thus the effects of domination which accompany the unification of the market are always exerted through a whole set of specific institutions and mechanisms, of which the specifically linguistic policy of the state and even the overt interventions of pressure groups form only the most superficial aspect. . . . All symbolic domination presupposes, on the part of those who submit to it, a form of complicity which is neither passive submission to external constraint nor a free adherence to values. . . . It is inscribed, in a practical state, in dispositions which are impalpably inculcated, through a long and slow process of acquisition, by the sanctions of the linguistic market, and which are therefore adjusted, without any cynical calculation or consciously experienced constraint, to the chances of material and symbolic profit which the laws of price formation characteristic of a given market objectively offer to the holders of a given linguistic capital.36 Bourdieu has developed these points to deal with regionality, rather than nationality, as a specific instance of the economy of symbolic power, in which certain identity formations become authorized as the most legitimate: “Regionalist discourse is a performative discourse which aims to impose as legitimate a new definition of the frontiers and to get people to know and recognize the region that is thus delimited in opposition to the dominant definition, which is misrecognized as such and thus recognized and legitimate, and which does not acknowledge that new region.”37 Bourdieu is describing a process of negotiation of the legitimacy of identity formations. Different definitions of “frontiers”—the local, ethnic, provincial, imperial, or national, contest for social authority through social institutions. The points made above about subethnic identification and the reference from Pickering with respect to local and imperial institutions of power in the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as the example of the JCRR using the name Taiwan instead of Formosa from 1950 can be interpreted as specific instances of the symbolic authority of language. Lamley noted the way subethnic identities were legitimized by institutions such as jisi gongye; Pickering’s account indicates the way the distinction between the China and Taiwan was inscribed by imperial officials and legitimized by the structures of imperial power; and the JCRR was an institution that legitimized the designation Taiwan, China, under which its research and administrative activities were carried out. “Frontiers” in Bourdieu’s terms, or names in the terms of the present analysis, like language generally, acquire legitimacy in accordance with the kinds of institutional processes that Bourdieu has theorized. These

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can be aggressively enforced by state apparatuses, such as the KMT’s nationalist education policies that legitimized China and marginalized Taiwan after 1945, and about which Antonio Chiang and Chiu I-ren complained. Also, as Bourdieu says, these can be diffuse processes within the symbolic economy; the ascendance of the name and identity of Taiwan in the postwar period in scholarship is at least in part an accumulation of symbolic capital around the word. The connection between power and identity as a specific instance of the legitimization of particular linguistic formulations has been amply studied. Duara covers in great detail the Manchu appropriation of Chinese institutions that maintained local as well as imperial forms of social identity and that eventually coopted the Manchus themselves into the institutions they were controlling.38 Goodman has also written about the role of institutions in the articulation of native-place identities among sojourning communities in midnineteenth to the early twentieth century in Shanghai.39 For these communities identification with their respective native places was maintained in practice through often very powerful organizations, including huiguan that were maintained by the wealthy business elites, and whose activities covered all aspects of the welfare of the community from which they were drawn. Huiguan mediated in commercial disputes, offered a forum for memorials from workers, undertook philanthropy and organized and funded civil works. They also had quasi-religious functions, such as constructing temples and ancestral halls and organizing festivals that “incorporated religious ritual, performance and entertainment, demonstrations of wealth and prestige, charitable acts and free food, and the vigorous transaction of petty business.”40 Chapter 1 presented Derrida’s argument of the inscription of meaning through differentiation as fundamentally a form of power and, indeed, an act of violence. Bourdieu provides a sociology of power and language, offering a way of engaging with the operations of naming and the institutionalization of particular meanings associated with a given name. These interpretative strategies provide a way of mapping identity in Taiwan in terms of the dramatic moments of political change and crises, such as the cession to Japan, Retrocession and democratization, when social, cultural, and political power in Taiwan was radically restructured. It also offers a description of the economy of power and language, with the small moments of naming and elaboration of the meaning of names making up the fabric of Taiwanese identity. On this basis, it is possible to rethink some of the statements about the sense of Taiwanese identity mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. There has always been a Taiwanese identity for as long as people could name the island Taiwan. But that name has meant many things, and has not always been socially and politically sanctioned as the most legitimate name for the

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people of the island to call themselves. Other names—Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, China, Japan, and Formosa—have benefited from social, political, and economic resources directed at the production of positive meanings around these names in public culture. And names have been contested as part of broader struggles over political power. Reading back from the past, the subethnic conflict in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be interpreted as a lack of an island-wide Taiwanese identities. Pickering’s account, on the other hand, may support a sense of Taiwanese and Chinese identites. Bourdieu’s argument suggests, however, that what looks like an absence or presence of identity is more systematically understood as the operations of institutions and social sanction legitimizing different names for the heterogeneous people occupying the island. Therefore, when Hughes asserted that the Taiwanese had not “really consolidated any sense of national identity” in the 1940s, he was describing, rightly or wrongly, the absence of a legitimate discourse for a national idea for the Taiwanese, as China or Taiwan. There was no education system or other state apparatus for legitimizing a Taiwanese nation, and very little elaborated symbolic language for a specifically Taiwanese national identity. Similarly, when Gold identified the strengthening of Taiwanese identity after Taiwanese people began traveling to the mainland in the late 1980s, he was implicitly recognizing the weakening of the symbolic power of China for the Taiwanese who made the trip. They experienced the PRC state, that had no legitimacy for them as Taiwanese, or even as citizens of the ROC. They also encountered the specific version of the symbolism of Chinese national identity that was legitimized by the PRC. No doubt the elements shared with the ROC state, such as the narratives of opposition to Japan and China’s imperial history, would have been familiar to them, but the PRC’s specific historiography that interwove Chinese communism into the history of the Chinese nation, would have had little, if any, positive meaning. Instead, what clearly was legitimate were the narratives of ancestry and family history, and the symbolic power of native-place identity in Fujian, legitimized by religious practices and ancestor worship. This theoretical elaboration of Hughes’ comment, as well as Gold’s reference to the sense of Taiwaneseness by Taiwanese visitors to the mainland, opens up the question of identity; the PRC may have had no political legitimacy, but China retained a social and cultural legitimacy, especially for some of those who visited their ancestral homes in Fujian. The “reconfirm[ation of ] their sense of Taiwan’s distinctiveness” can be better and more systematically understood as a layered and contradictory experience that produced many different feelings and thoughts, among which the name Taiwan had achieved powerful legitimacy on the basis of the economic and political

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successes that could be claimed under that name, while China or Fujian retained a legitimacy on the basis of personal or family narratives of home, belonging, and place. Identity in this argument is a function of naming that is shaped by power, and this is continually contested. Bourdieu’s model of a diffuse process, operating in habitus as a kind of economy, is neatly reflected by scholarship in the West on Taiwanese identity. Western scholars have not been subject to the direct exercise of political power of the ROC state, and nor are Western scholars propelled by a sense of Taiwanese identity, yet they have willingly participated, as this book attests, in the legitimization of the Taiwan idea within the global academic system. They are part of the “economy of linguistic exchange”41 in which the idea of Taiwanese identity has accumulated symbolic capital; books are being published, theses supervised, and careers built. A book on the development of Taiwanese national consciousness attracts resources, but a hypothetical book that looked at, for example, the American consciousness of the Taiwanese, would be an unlikely project. Even if one could contrive an argument to support the idea (American university degrees, fast food and popular culture, perhaps), in the economy of legitimacy, the idea of Taiwanese identity for the island of Taiwan has the most value, indicated by its basic credibility, whereas an American identity simply seems somewhat absurd. Mapping Identity in Taiwan If in the post–martial law period Taiwan has been characterized by the “emergence” of a sense of Taiwanese identity, in Bourdieu’s terms, this is the accumulation of symbolic capital under the name Taiwan and the marginalization of other names. The name Taiwan, officially marginalized by the KMT party-state as a mere province under the larger national category of China has become legitimized by social groups through politics, literature, and history as part of the symbolic struggle over Taiwan’s identity. On this basis, names have also been sites of resistance, such as the use of the name Formosa by Taiwanese nationalists until the 1980s. The moments of crisis, violence, oppression, or resistance are when names are inscribed most deeply. These are the times when power is expressed most overtly, when the act of naming (“You are Taiwanese” or “You are Chinese”) becomes aligned with state power, such as the repression of dissent in the 1950s and 1960s, and the violent opposition to it, such as the 2-28 Incident and even global power, such as the cold war. On this basis, identity can be mapped through the operation of power. Political crises involve the deployment of names, and so do the references to symbols and discourses of power in history. In contemporary thought and

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practice, it is those small moments of naming that make up the fabric of Taiwanese identity. These moments, or references, may be fleeting and elusive, or they may become discursive monuments in meaning. The task is not to prove that there was or was not a Taiwanese identity, but to capture the process by that the names for the island have become legitimate and dominant. Political acts are not moments that express identity, but rather they are the moments that constitute identity formations. Mapping Taiwanese history in this way is a highly self-reflexive undertaking. As argued in the previous chapter, the process of history writing, and its incorporation into scholarly forms with particular epistemologies is itself part of the establishment of legitimacy for Taiwanese identity. Therefore, even as scholars attempt a distanciated interpretation of Taiwanese history, they must acknowledge their inevitable participation in its discursive production. An example of the symbolic economy of Taiwan’s identity can be seen in the Taiwan Republic of 1895 that was declared on May 25 by the governor of Taiwan province, Tang Jingsong. The Republic effectively collapsed when Tang fled the island less than two weeks later on June 5, although antiJapanese resistance persisted in its name for up to two years.42 The history of the Republic has been detailed by Lamley and others and is generally understood as an attempt by Taiwan’s imperial administration to forestall Japanese annexation of Taiwan under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, that ended the Sino-Japanese War. At the end of 1894 and in early 1895, when it became clear that the Qing government had abandoned Taiwan, its provincial administration pursued strategies that would protect the island from Japan. The key idea that emerged was seeking assistance from the Western powers that were present in the region, especially the French. Chen Jitong and Qiu Fengjia, who held official posts under Tang, were probably the advocates of the republican model on this basis. Chen had lived in Europe for sixteen years and had studied law in Paris, and Qiu was well versed in European political philosophy.43 The French had expressed concern about Taiwan’s cession to Japan, and had gone as far as threatening intervention. A French warship docked at Tanshui in May of 1895. Chen made contact with French authorities in the region and in Paris, and met with the commander of the ship, who also met with Tang. Meanwhile, Qiu sent memorials to the Qing court and circulated strategic ideas among his colleagues in Taiwan. During this period, the notion of self-rule for the island was canvassed by Qiu. He claimed that under international law, any change in government needed to be legitimized by a plebiscite. Qiu and Tang suggested different words in Chinese to advocate self-rule, including zi zhu and min zhu that could also be translated as “popular rule.”44

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Tang Jingsong and the other advocates of the Republic were anxious to maintain the language of loyalty to the empire, and while they wrote of selfrule, they did not use the term duli, or independence. After the founding of the Republic, when Tang became president and Qiu, vice-president, the presidency proclaimed its title as Yong Qing, or the Eternal Qing. Significantly in terms of the symbolic economy of the office of president of the Republic, Tang used two official seals, one presidential and the other imperial. He functioned as a “governor-president,” and referred to his office as “acting governor” in correspondence with the Qing court.45 Lamley has noted that the founders of the Taiwan Republic had only the most superficial understanding of the concept of a republic. This belief is supported by contemporary commentary such as Davidson’s and even that of Liang Qichao, who called it a “joke.”46 Nevertheless, the strange history of the Republic has provided a rich source of ideology for Taiwanese nationalists and scholars in pursuit of the origins of the Taiwanese nation. Huang Zhaotang, writing in Taiwan Shibao has argued that the Republic represented the birth of Taiwanese national consciousness, and the beginning of Taiwan’s struggle for self-determination: During the period of resistance to Japan of the Taiwan Republic, the minnan (for example Hou Xigeng, Lin Kunkang), the Hakka (for example Qiu Fengjia, Xu Xiang), people from the mainland (for example Liu Yongfu), and the aborigines (the names of whose leaders is not recorded) have all had heroic moments. Although this period of resistance to Japan brought the chaos of war to Taiwan, it actually forms the beginning moment of “Taiwan consciousness.” In the modern Taiwanese national independence movement, cannot these four ethnic groups unite to resist China?47 On the basis of the arguments presented earlier, the crises of 1894 and 1895 were events that inscribed a Taiwanese identity. The attempt to exercise political power by founders of the Republic served, at least to a limited degree, to legitimize a Taiwanese identity. But even the cession by the Qing empire and the occupation by Japan were moments that enunciated Taiwan as a coherent, single term for the island and its people. However, the Republic also shows a tenuous legitimacy. The abandonment of the province by the central government withdrew imperial political legitimacy for the island’s identity, and the provincial gentry responded by seeking a language of legitimacy outside of the empire. It is a measure of the power of the European empires at the time that Tang, Chen, and Qiu turned to the language of republicanism, rather than that of monarchism. The 1895

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Republic did begin to establish a functioning nation-state, with stamps, currency, and a flag, but it was far too short-lived to begin legitimizing its identity through schools, literature, and its own process of national history writing, in the way that occurred in the 1990s. Furthermore, the double imperial-presidential seals of Tang Jingsong and the notion of the “Yong Qing” presidency indicate that imperial legitimacy was by no means exhausted. In its brief life, the 1895 Republic referenced both the modern nation-state and the Qing empire, indicating that both ideas had a measure of legitimacy for the Republic’s founders. But in that divided referencing, the Taiwan idea could only be weak and probably subordinate to the remaining legitimacy of the Qing in Taiwan, especially in cultural terms. Japanese Colonial Period Similar arguments about language, power, and legitimacy can be made about the Japanese colonial period. The arrival of Japanese rule reconfigured power relationships on the island under a new source of political and social legitimacy. The reconfigurations of power that came through the consolidation of Japanese rule was expressed by a number of political and cultural movements that literally and symbolically negotiated with Japanese power. Viewed from the present, these movements, with their associations, publications, and campaigns, look like an expression of Taiwanese identity because of the way they worked against the Japanese ideological construction of Taiwan as a colony. The Japanese exercised colonial power in the name of Taiwan, inscribing the whole island with a coherent political meaning entirely in terms of its colonial relationship to Japan. This included the state but also commercial organizations in the sugar, rice, and paper industries that produced meanings for Taiwan as a colony, colonial economy, and primary producer. The colonial period proto-nationalist movements challenged the power of the Japanese to define the island by engaging with the administrative practices of the colony, and regardless of how effectively they were able to do this, they participated in a contestatory elaboration of Taiwan’s meaning. This meaning was played out in both specific issues and early attempts to construct an ideology for a Taiwanese identity. One example was the campaign for a high school for Taiwanese children. The colonial administration had promoted education for the Taiwanese, establishing academies in Taipei almost immediately after taking control of Taiwan. The first college established in 1896 taught Japanese language, teacher training, and engineering, and had enrolled 116 students in 1898; a medical school was setup in 1897. But although the colonial government placed importance on learning the

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Japanese language, it had restricted the provision of childhood schooling to the elementary level. The schools taught the same basic curriculum as was available to the Japanese in Taiwan with the addition of some classical Chinese, demonstrating the enduring legacy of the cultural legitimacy of imperial China.48 One of Taiwan’s most important early civic leaders, Lin Xiantang, campaigned along with a number of others for higher levels of public education for the Taiwanese. In 1915, after a two-year campaign of lobbying and fund raising, the Taichung Public High School opened with 204 students.49 Tsurumi argues that Lin’s movement for Taiwanese participation in the colonial education system was a part of a broader pragmatic political strategy, but she is not necessarily convinced that it formed an identifiable nationalist movement, because of the political restrictions imposed by the Japanese colonial rule.50 Lo Ming-cheng, however, does make a case for the colonial period social movements representing a Taiwan consciousness: a Taiwanese consciousness among Han immigrants first developed in response to the recognition of the Japanese as obvious outsiders; it grew in the course of guerrilla wars waged against the Japanese; and it finally matured through constant social interaction, which was facilitated by the island-wide roads and communication networks built by the Japanese. . . . Taiwanese consciousness signalled the beginning of an imagined community among the Taiwanese people.51 The arguments made earlier suggest that rather than a clear protonationalism, the early colonial education campaigns were an example of the ambivalent nature of a Taiwanese identity at that time. Lin Xiantang and his campaigners saw value in participating in the educational system being put in place by the Japanese, but at the same time the Chinese imperial education system held significant symbolic capital well into the colonial period, with many thousands of students studying in Chinese-style schools well into the 1920s, and some going to both the Japanese and Chinese schools.52 When identity is understood as a function of language and power, it suggests that though Japanese colonial rule consolidated the idea of Taiwan as the legitimate term for the island and its people within the structure of the Japanese empire, Taiwanese identity remained nascent. Lin did not campaign for an independent education system for the Taiwanese, with a uniquely Taiwanese curriculum, but one that would allow them to navigate through certain, proscribed paths of power (especially medicine) that led to Tokyo. But he did imagine the Taiwanese people as singular enough to campaign on their behalf.

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Of course, Lin Xiantang was not free to promote political and cultural causes, but was subject to an oppressive colonial regime. As Tsurumi points out, he followed a “narrow path between collaboration and revolution.”53 In terms of collective identity, this recalls Bourdieu’s notion of an economy of linguistic exchange, a habitus in which the relationship between the active subject and the social and political forces to which he or she submits is dynamic, with a process of co-option and resistance and negotiation of symbolic power. This ambivalence between nascent Japanese and Taiwanese identities is reflected in the political and cultural movements that flourished from the 1910s to the 1920s. In 1914, Lin Xiantang founded the Taiwan tonghua hui (Taiwan Assimilation Society), with the support of the esteemed liberal politician, Itakagi Taisuke. In November 1914, Itakagi described Taiwan’s place as a bridge between China and Japan, and alluded to Japan’s imperial ambitions: Since the Empire began governing the island of Taiwan, it is as if the way to the south has been unlocked. The two peoples of Japan and China have come together in the task of governing the island, and this not only expresses to the world the achievement of our colonial policy, at the same time it determines the way forward through the tension between the two peoples of Japan and China.54 Jiang Weishui, who was one of the founders of the Taiwan wenhua xiehui (Taiwan Cultural Association), said the same thing in 1927: “The Taiwanese people are charged with a mission. They are to serve as an intermediary for Chinese and Japanese friendship. Sino-Japanese friendship is a prerequisite for confederation of the peoples of Asia.”55 There is no question that Taiwan has a Chinese identity in these statements, and this is hardly surprising given that Taiwan had been ceded from the Qing empire only twenty years earlier. What Itakagi is indicating in his reference to “governing the island,” and Jiang in his statement of a “mission” is the process by which the negotiation of real power across the island is expressed in terms of an identity formation for Taiwan. The symbolic power of Japan and China was contested on the island, and the formulation both Itakagi and Jiang developed for understanding Taiwan’s identity in the middle of these competing legitimizing symbolic regimes was of an “intermediary” or bridge. For Itakagi and Jiang, Taiwan itself is not legitimized in its own right as an autonomous national identity for the island, but as something neither Japanese nor Chinese. Political activism continued through the 1920s, and like the education campaign, often dealt with specific issues rather than a broadly imagined

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nationalism. Again, the engagement with Japanese colonial policies inscribed and elaborated a meaning for Taiwan. A major grievance for the Taiwanese was the baojia system of land management that remained as a legacy of the Qing dynasty. The Japanese had reworked the system for their administration and policing, and reorganized agriculture through new organizations, such as Irrigation Cooperatives (Suiri Kumiai) and Development Cooperatives (Sangyo Kumiai), and at higher levels, Agricultural Associations (Nokai Kumiai). In the 1920s, there were efforts by activists to have the baojia system abolished, with a petition submitted to the Diet in Tokyo in 1921.56 When those efforts failed, the Taiwanese attempted to coopt the system, in a process echoed forty years later under KMT rule. In 1927, starting in Miaoli, Taiwanese political activists began running for the baojia posts of baocheng to wrest some control of the system from the Japanese.57 The New People’s Society, founded in 1920 in Tokyo by Lin Xiantang campaigned against Law No. 63 that gave the governor of Taiwan sweeping powers to control the Taiwanese population on the basis of the baojia system. This included the Bandit Punishment Ordinance that made an entire community of a baojia district responsible for a crime committed by one of its members. Repealing Law No. 63 would have removed the special powers of the governor and effectively extended Japanese law over Taiwan, giving the Taiwanese equal status under law with the Japanese.58 More so than the previous decade, the 1920s saw some attempts to articulate an ideological basis for Taiwan in the context of the Chinese imperial legacy and Japanese colonial rule. Perhaps the best-known example is Cai Peihuo, a teacher who had pursued further education in Japan, and had been baptized in 1921. In 1924, Cai wrote a short treatise entitled Shi xiang guan jian (In My Humble Opinion) that presented a project for Taiwanese society arguing for modernization and the galvanizing of the Taiwanese people in accordance with the needs of the new century. Cai’s argument was strongly derivative of prevailing ideas, for example, from Sun Yat-sen and Liang Qichao. He wrote in the urgent and emphatic style of reformers and revolutionaries of the time. He mixed some specific and unusual reforming ideas, for example, using the Presbyterian romanized Taiwanese written language, with a wide-ranging, improvised social theory. Like Itakagi, Cai argued that the Taiwan’s multiethnic society was a model for Asia and the world, though he omitted Itakagi’s imperialism. He also called for an awakening of the Taiwanese through rationality and technology, and the practicing of healthy living and moral righteousness. At the same time, Cai was not unequivocally a Taiwanese nationalist; he maintained that the Taiwanese were ethnically Chinese (i.e., hanren).59 The reform movements of the Japanese period, of which there were many more than those touched upon here, including communist-inspired peasant

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and anticapitalist and anti-imperialist movements, inscribed an ambiguous status for Taiwan and the Taiwanese. Some pursued legitimacy for Taiwan as part of Japan, others held on to the Chinese imperial tradition, while yet others absorbed the reformist and revolutionary ideologies of the May Fourth intellectuals on mainland China, and argued for an “awakening” of the Taiwanese on those terms. It is not possible to say that there existed a singular sense of Taiwanese identity, or indeed a Japanese or Chinese consciousness throughout this time. All three contended for legitimacy, just as symbolic power in Taiwan was reworked by the transition to and consolidation of Japanese colonial authority. It was the operation of colonial power that provided new circumstances in that to name Taiwan, and thus it became the most meaningful term with which to identify the people of the island. In naming and filling out what that name might mean, Taiwan took on a degree of legitimacy. As always, identity was something like Bourdieu’s “system of forces and tensions.” The native-place identities that Hughes suggests “lingered,” no doubt persisted even with the diminishing power of native-place association, but by the end of the colonial period, Taiwan, Japan, and China had become the dominant ideas. The ambiguity of Taiwanese identity in this period is reflected in Peng Ming-min’s famous description of the handover from Japanese to Chinese rule on October 25, 1945. Following the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945, Taiwan was returned to the Nationalist regime under the terms of the Cairo Declaration of December 1, 1943, that stated that “all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese such as Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores shall be restored to the Republic of China.”60 By late October the Japanese population was being repatriated and the Nationalist army began arriving, and on October 25, 1945, General Chen Yi assumed the office of governor.61 Peng describes the events from his personal viewpoint: In late October word came at last that Chinese military units were expected to land at Takao . . . Local Japanese military authorities, awaiting repatriation with their men, turned out a smartly disciplined honor guard to line the wharf, ready to salute the victorious Chinese army. A great crowd of curious and excited citizens had come to support my father’s welcoming committee and to see the show. The ship docked, the gangways were lowered, and off came the troops of China, the victors. The first man to appear was a bedraggled fellow who looked and behaved more like a coolie than a soldier, walking off with a carrying pole across his shoulder, from which was suspended his umbrella, sleeping mat, cooking pot, and cup. Others like him followed, some with

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shoes, some without. Few had guns. With no attempt to maintain order or discipline, they pushed off the ship, glad to be on firm land, but hesitant to face the Japanese lined up and saluting smartly on both sides. My father wondered what the Japanese could possibly think. He had never felt so ashamed in his life.62 In that moment was a legitimacy crisis for Taiwan’s Chinese identity. Peng’s father had welcomed an imagined China, a classical culture, and a “victor,” but was instead confronted by the reality of Republican China. Peng’s contrast with the end of imperial Japan, a “smartly disciplined honour guard” meeting a “bedraggled fellow . . . more like a coolie” is a contrast in legitimacy, and one that captures the dynamic quality of the politics of identity. As power is constantly being configured, so too is identity being reimagined. That dynamism is most powerfully expressed in what is perhaps the defining event of postwar Taiwanese history, the 2-28 Incident.

CHAPTER 4

Elaborating Taiwan

T

he argument presented here is an attempt to produce knowledge about Taiwanese identity by using the kind of knowledge of Taiwan typically produced by the academic disciplines of political history and political science. This is a challenging undertaking, because, as argued in the previous chapter, the knowledge of Taiwan that is available for secondary scholarship such as this text tends to be formulated in highly empirical terms. The accounts of Taiwan used in the previous chapters do not question the interpretability of “facts,” and tend to conceptualize cultural/national “identity” in relatively homogeneous terms, as if it were a social object that could be read directly from narratives of Taiwan’s social and political history. In this way, the empiricist scholarship on Taiwan imposes a representative “Taiwaneseness” on a heterogeneous population. Political movements or statements of ideology by individual actors in Taiwan’s history are aggregated into something that functions like an implicit survey, taken as evidence to pronounce upon the presence or otherwise of Taiwan’s nationhood, in terms such as “absence” or “emergence.” As has been argued, this approach is based on a positivist epistemology that may not be the best way to deal with the identity problematic. At best, the kind of knowledge available from the political history of Taiwan is fragmentary: the comments by Jiang Weishui, for example, of Taiwan as a “bridge” between China and Japan, or of Peng Ming-min’s father’s shame at seeing the Chinese troops dock in Kaohsiung bears upon the discursive construction of Taiwanese national identity, but in a much more complex way that can be apprehended with an authoritative statement about a sense of identity at any given historical moment. The alternative approach being offered here is semiological, insofar as it explores textual patterns in public discourse relevant to the formation of

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Taiwanese identity—the ways in which certain signs and statements have acquired significance in the constitution of Taiwanese nationhood. The empirical work on Taiwan reviewed in the previous chapters is being brought together with theories of discourse, such as Bourdieu’s, and interpretations of meaning, such as Derrida’s, for example, in the arguments about naming and power, so that the kind of knowledge that dominates research on Taiwan can be used to say something meaningful about Taiwan’s identity over time. Identity is just the name Taiwan, and a Taiwanese identity is evidenced at the most basic level by the presence of the name. It is symbolic power, in the kind of economy of linguistic exchange that Bourdieu theorized, that gives the name of Taiwan its significance. Social and political institutions, including scholarship in the development of Taiwan Studies itself, legitimize Taiwan. What Taiwan Studies has interpreted as the “rise” of a Taiwanese identity1 is more systematically understood as accumulation of symbolic power around the name Taiwan when it is used to describe the people of the island. In the post-Retrocession period, the event that inscribed Taiwanese identity most forcefully was the 2-28 Incident. The events of 2-28 are now well known: after eighteen months of building tension, the crisis of legitimacy that began at the hand-over of authority at the end of 1945 exploded into violence. On the evening of February 27, 1947, an elderly woman cigarette seller was assaulted by mainland Chinese customs guards. A crowd gathered, a shot was fired that killed one of the onlookers, and a demonstration ensued. In the following days, unrest spread across the island until the KMT administration effectively lost control. The U.S. naval attaché George Kerr wrote an eyewitness account that was published later that year in Far Eastern Survey: The next morning a crowd of perhaps 2,000, unarmed and carrying banners displaying the demands, marched through the main streets to the Monopoly Offices, but were turned away without a hearing. Approaching the Governor General’s office, petitioners and bystanders alike were struck down by machine-gun fire. Elsewhere in town, angry citizens had discovered two Monopoly agents molesting children hawking tobacco. Two of the agents were clubbed to death and a nearby branch office and warehouse of the Monopoly Bureau were destroyed and mainland employees beaten.2 Kerr suggests that even after events had quietened down in the first few days of March, the administration was planning the systematic massacres that followed: The situation in Taipei had improved. Primary schools reopened on March 5 and shops resumed trade. There was, however, a mystifying and

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intensive movement out of the city of the household goods and families of high officials to a well-defended concentration point and pillboxes and barricades being thrown up around the Governor General’s offices.3 The massive scale of the violence is now well documented. Innocent people were machine-gunned in the streets; community leaders, organizers of the Committee to Settle the February 28 Incident and students systematically identified, rounded up and killed, ending in the deaths of at least twenty thousand people.4 The 2-28 Incident was a terrible human tragedy and its political and social legacy that emerged after the lifting of martial law will be explored in detail later. In terms of identity at the time, the 2-28 Incident produced a crisis. For Wachman, it was a “cause” of Taiwanese identity,5 but a more systematic argument would be that in its violence, Taiwan was inscribed as something distinct from China in the most extreme form possible. In Derrida’s terms, it was the “originary violence of language” expressed as real physical violence, what Derrida labels as a “third violence” in his argument that links violence to power and the inscription of meaning. Derrida’s first violence is naming itself: “To name, to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference”.6 The second is the institutional processes and acts that legitimize and proscribe names: “a second violence that is reparatory, protective, instituting the ‘moral,’ prescribing the concealment of writing and the effacement and obliteration of the so-called proper name”; the third violence is injury, suffering and death, “within what is commonly called evil, war, indiscretion, rape; which consists of revealing by refraction the so-called proper name, the originary violence which has severed the proper from its property and its self-sameness.”7 In a Derridean interpretation of meaning (not the tragedy of the events or causes that might be analyzed economically or politically) the “empirical violence”8 of 2-28 can be read as an extension of the same principles of differentiation between signs that is more conventionally understood to operates in language. It was the logical endpoint of the basic act of naming Taiwan, as a dimension of the nexus of writing, violence, and difference that Derrida theorizes. Therefore, Derrida’s argument about naming, violence, and différance as effectively being inextricably linked9 describes a model of identity that at one moment was simply when someone named himself or herself (“I am Taiwanese”) or was named (“You are Taiwanese”); at another moment, it was the national political structures and institutions of the Republic of China, in which Taiwan was a reclaimed territory, an administrative region, then a province, the “institution of the system of proper names”;10 at yet another it

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was the moment of naming expressed in its most powerful form, as a physical assault in the name of Taiwan or China by or against those who named themselves Taiwanese or Chinese. Therefore, the terrible violence of 2-28 represents the strongest statement of a Taiwanese identity as an inscription of the name Taiwan. The differentiation between Taiwan and China that occurred on the quayside in October 1945, expressed as embarrassment by the attending Taiwanese, had become hostility and anger and then violence by 1947. Taiwan could already be named, personally by people who called themselves Taiwanese or Taiwanren, and administratively by the structures of the Republic of China of which Taiwan became a province, but with 2-28 it was inscribed more brutally—and indelibly—than ever before. This is a different argument from Wachman’s, for example, who argues that 2-28 caused Taiwanese identity (by the “persistent memories of initial misperceptions and early conflicts”). What looks like a cause is better understood as the strongest meaning—violence—strong enough to assume, with hindsight, the proportions of a point of origin. Although the 2-28 Incident inscribed the name Taiwan with violence, in a sense it also left a void of meaning or signification. Taiwan became a name that signified the human cost of tens of thousands of lives, but even in 1947 the name was not elaborated into a nationalist ideology. The 2-28 Incident was not an organized revolution, fought for a cause with a canon of writing that defined the true meaning of being Taiwanese. In 1947, there was no developed symbolic economy that legitimized the name Taiwan. Instead, from the late 1940s into the 1980s, the symbolic economy controlled by the KMT worked toward the legitimization of China over Taiwan. Some of Kerr’s comments, even in the aftermath of the initial crisis of the first few days of March, indicate the legacy of China’s legitimacy. He observes: “Formosans discovered that certain classes of mainlanders were honourable, attempting to work as best they could under difficult conditions . . . it was discovered that bona fide scientists and technical men had the interests of Formosa—and China—at heart.”11 Kerr is suggesting that the Taiwanese were committed at some level to the postimperial Chinese national project. He reinforces this possibility when he says. “In some instances military police and troops handed over their arms, agreeing with the Formosans that it was foolish for Chinese to fight Chinese.”12 He clearly makes a distinction between the mainlanders and the Formosans, but also uses the terms ambiguously, and his comment about Chinese fighting Chinese suggests that the name China retained a significant legitimacy for the Taiwanese. In early March the Committee to Settle the February 28 Incident (Ererba chuli weiyuan hui) attempted to negotiate with the Chen Yi administration.

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On March 6 it issued a set of demands including full provincial status for Taiwan, an autonomous constitution, popular election of mayors and magistrates, and general freedoms of speech and assembly.13 The conveners of the assembly spoke as the legitimate representatives of the Taiwanese: “Pending approval by the Central Government, the administrative bureau of the Committee to Settle the February 28 Incident will undertake reorganization of the present administration.”14 But they also legitimized their role in the Republic with references to some of the ideological tenets of Chinese nationalism. In their list of demands issued on March 6, they included “We are all sons of the Yellow Emperor and all of the han race. The quality of national government depends on all citizens of the republic.”15 Therefore, while the violence of 2-28 differentiated as never before the Taiwanese from the Chinese, exactly what it meant to be Taiwanese remained unelaborated. In Bourdieu’s terms, 2-28 produced a legitimacy crisis in language. Taiwan was not China, but it had no Taiwanese state education system, no national literature, or nationalist ideology to legitimize the name and differentiate it from China in the dynamic, nuanced way that Bourdieu describes. China, on the other hand, had been imposed on Taiwan by the KMT with a powerful and complex set of meanings: state, nation, culture, history, and Nationalist (as distinct from Communist). The KMT had established the institutional and state apparatuses with which to propagate those meanings. But from the moment the KMT soldiers docked in 1945, that legitimacy began to crumble. The power of China over Taiwan, as the most powerful or the most legitimate moment of identity for the Taiwanese, had collapsed under the KMT’s corrupt and inefficient governance even before 2-28. Therefore, China, a rich and complex idea of nationhood, instituted by an authoritarian state that had lost its possible popular legitimacy, was squared off against Taiwan, a limited idea without a canon of nationalist ideology, a national culture, or the trappings of statehood to legitimize it. And yet, it was a name that had been inscribed in the most brutal terms imaginable. The KMT quickly understood the potential problems 2-28 had created for them in terms of the dissolution of their legitimacy over Taiwan and moved in administrative terms to repair the damage. In May 1947, Chen Yi was removed as governor and replaced by Wei Tao-ming. By mid-1947, Wei was making some efforts to give the appearance of softer Nationalist rule in Taiwan, acceding to some of the original demands of the Committee to Settle the February 28 Incident, such as the abolition of the Monopoly Bureau, the privatization of some Nationalist enterprises, and the incorporation of seven Taiwaneseborn members16 into the fourteen-member Taiwan Provincial Commission.

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After the 2-28 Incident, some Taiwanese began immediately to fill the void in the meaning of Taiwan in opposition to the imposition of the ideology of Chinese nationalism. The violent differentiation of Taiwan from China created a complex and contradictory array of discursive strategic possibilities. On the island, China and Chinese could be mean a state, culture, history, nationalist ideology, and a race. A Taiwanese national idea could refuse them all, constructing Taiwan as a nation having a distinct history and culture. The Taiwanese could even be imagined as a distinct race of people. Alternatively, China could be a nation-state that Taiwanese nationalists opposed, while Chinese could be an ethnicity or a culture that they accepted. A year and a half after 2-28, when the Nationalists relocated the government of the Republic of China to Taipei, China could also be Communist and Taiwan became Nationalist, which put in place a new set of relational possibilities for Taiwan. Formosan Nationalism A year after the 2-28 Incident the Far Eastern Economic Review reported Taiwan the following way: At the moment feelings run high in Taiwan, the tension is growing and the relations between the native people and the Chinese from the mainland are increasingly hostile. What information leaks out of Taiwan makes most unpleasant reading: it is a story of exploitation and oppression suffered by the natives at the hands of the Chinese masters.17 Out of the crisis of identity caused by 2-28, some Taiwanese such as Xie Xuehong and Lin Moushun were inspired by Chinese communism and fled to China. Others went to Hong Kong and Japan and set out to oppose both the KMT’s and CCP’s versions of Chinese nationalism with a Taiwanese nationalist movement that campaigned for the establishment of a Republic of Formosa. The Formosan nationalists wrote a Taiwanese history and argued for a unique Taiwanese identity, and elaborated an explicitly Taiwanese national idea in greater detail than had been done before. In Bourdieu’s terms, they were attempting to achieve legitimacy for the Taiwanese idea by creating an authorized discourse of Taiwanese history and notion of identity, to “legitimate a new definition of the frontiers and to get people to know and recognize the region that is thus delimited in opposition to the dominant definition.”18 They drew explicitly and implicitly on American and Chinese nationalisms, for example, the narratives of founding of a nation in the notion of Pilgrim Fathers19 and Sunist ideas of a national struggle for survival.20 These themes were applied to generate a certain ideological legitimacy, as part

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of the campaign for real political legitimacy undertaken internationally by petitioning the newly formed United Nations, and establishing the rituals of statehood with a government-in-exile in Japan. The rhetoric of Formosan nationalism worked, in the way Bhabha describes, between “pedagogy and performance.” It was not the tenuous references to the imperial and the nation-state that characterized the attempts to politically legitimize the 1895 Republic by Tang Jingsong, or the ambiguous notion of Taiwanese identity espoused by Jiang Weishui and the Taiwan Cultural Association in the 1920s. Nor was it objective writing on the nature of Taiwanese identity by theoretically informed scholars with American PhDs in the 1990s. Rather it was an elaborated nationalist ideology that spoke from a position of authenticity and appealed to emotions and a sense of crisis. In terms of a political program, Formosan nationalist organizations called for a plebiscite to effect self-determination for Taiwan and a period of UN trusteeship until such a plebiscite could be held. As the League for the Reliberation of Formosa, Formosan Nationalists in Hong Kong submitted a petition in September 1948 to the United Nations21 signed by the leaders of a dozen Formosan nationalist organizations, that demanded that “all properties and assets taken over or away by the Chinese rulers be conserved in the hands of the provisional Formosan administration until the wishes of the people, after the plebiscite, have become known” and that “all Chinese nationals who arrived after August 15, 1945, be concentrated and repatriated.”22 As noted in chapter 2, the plan for UN trusteeship and a plebiscite had support among foreign politicians and academics. The British-based Royal Institute of International Affairs claimed that Chinese rule was not in the best interest of the Taiwanese and it identified support within Taiwan for the idea of UN trusteeship. It did, however, offer a more sanguine interpretation of Taiwanese feelings toward mainlanders: If the Formosans were in a position to decide their own future what would they do? Many . . . are convinced they would seek a trusteeship under the United Nations. . . . After the termination of the trusteeship . . . the Formosans would welcome an affiliation with China provided the Chinese had meanwhile put their own house in order. In the event that a stable China did not emerge they would prefer to be independent.23 Writing Taiwanese History By the time the Nationalists had relocated the Republic of China government to Taiwan in late 1949, American-influenced activists like Thomas and Joshua Liao had moved to Tokyo where Thomas Liao became the leader of

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a fractious and ineffective nationalist movement. Thomas (Wenyi) Liao was elected as president of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Formosa in Tokyo in December 1955 by a Provisional National Congress comprising twenty-four representatives of regions of Taiwan living in exile in Japan. The ideologies produced by these Formosan nationalists in the 1950s were the first to inscribe a particular and fully elaborated meaning for Taiwan as a nation. This inchoate nation struggled for legitimacy with its petitions and government-in-exile, which Mendel describes as a rather hapless organization.24 Once the cold war became entrenched, the Formosan nationalists were always marginal compared with the power of KMT ideology and the bigger forces of global geopolitics of the period. In the reimagining of the Japanese colonial period that occurred in the intervening decades, Japan has acquired a certain cultural legitimacy for the Taiwanese, in contrast with mainland China. However, in the months after 2-28, both China, and Japan after its surrender in 1945 were damaged in their viability as terms for the Taiwanese to describe themselves, and Formosan nationalism worked to fill the void with a fully and self-consciously elaborated Taiwanese idea. The claims of a Formosan history that Thomas Liao elaborated through the 1950s were heavily based on the writings of his older brother, Joshua (Wenkuai) Liao.25 Joshua Liao had published a number of articles in Hong Kong in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Orient that articulated a Formosan nationalism, and had drawn these ideas together in a memorandum submitted to the United Nations in September 1950 on behalf of the Formosan League for Re-emancipation, published under the title Formosa Speaks. The national histories and ideologies from Japan, China, and the United States with which Formosan nationalists were engaged and reacting against served to set the ideological boundaries for their own understanding of Taiwanese nationhood. Therefore, the Taiwanese histories articulated by Formosan nationalists stood in counterpoint to the modern national histories in which Taiwan figured. On one side was the Chinese appropriation of European imperial and racial nationalism from the nineteenth century. After 1947, by arguing against the nationalist claim of both the CCP and the KMT for Taiwan, the engagement of Formosan nationalists with the ideas of race, culture, and history that informed Chinese nationalist ideology led them to seek an equivalent basis for understanding Taiwanese nationhood. Therefore, they tended to pursue an understanding of Taiwan framed with the same group of concepts. On the other side were the narratives that underpinned the national identity of the United States, and the liberal post–World War I ideas of self-determination and state rights promoted by Woodrow Wilson.

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Thomas and Joshua Liao both studied in the United States and both for a time were married to Americans. From there they brought back the New World ideas of the foundation of the American nation by religious refugees, as well as the post–World War I liberal democratic notions that informed Wilson’s League of Nations and the idea of national self-determination. This complex genealogy of ideas for Formosan nationalism made for a sometimes-incoherent ideology, with incompatible notions of racialism, culturalism, and liberalism undermining the viability of a clear articulation of Taiwanese national identity. Formosan Nationalist Historiography: Modernity and Resistance In asserting a Taiwanese national history, Joshua Liao used a periodization based on political regimes to assert a national history of resistance to different colonizing forces. He began with the prehistorical Aboriginal period, then went on to Dutch rule, the Koxinga Interregnum, Manchu imperial rule, the 1895 Republic, Japanese colonial rule, and ended with Retrocession and Taiwan under the KMT. However, Liao wrestled with the problem of finding a consistent ideology to encompass this periodization. The two general themes expressed are Taiwan’s modernity relative to mainland China, and the characterization of Taiwanese history as one of unceasing resistance to the various colonial and quasi-colonial regimes that had ruled Taiwan. Although both themes overlap and contradict each other and generate a number of anomalies, they are nonetheless ideological positions that resonate powerfully with some of the themes of Chinese nationalism in the context of KMT rule in Taiwan at the time. Under the first theme, Joshua Liao writing in 1948 traces Taiwan’s economic development back to the Dutch colonial period: “The Dutch colonizers greatly improved the Island. They paid great attention to promoting production and started the exploitation of natural resources; therefore during their rule of only thirty eight years there was marked progress in the economic history of Formosa.”26 Later, he noted the introduction by the Dutch of oxen, new seeds, and farm implements as well as the construction of irrigation systems.27 Liao credits Zheng Chenggong, or Koxinga, with the establishment of a sustainable structure for economic development. The distribution of land to the soldier-emigrants who made up Koxinga’s loyalist army and who formed the first large-scale wave of Chinese settlers in Taiwan laid the foundation for what he calls the Land System of private land ownership that was maintained through the Qing and into the Japanese periods.28 The Qing period was also one of economic growth, and Liao links that development with the emergence of an identity for Taiwan that distinguished

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it from the mainland: “thus, within two centuries the Island became as well developed as and possessed of greater resources than any province of China.”29 Liao goes further and argues for the emergence of a distinctive national character for the Taiwanese people. The Taiwanese were able to develop ahead of mainland Chinese because of the particular quality of life in the “wild country.” Liao’s comment resonates with Pickering’s report of the Tainan magistrate, who warned him of Taiwan’s “wild and turbulent” people. Settlers were pioneers under threat of Aboriginal attacks, and this demanded a prudence and perseverance not required by the mainlanders: By crossing the Formosa Strait and settling in a wild country, Chinese immigrants led a very different life from their cousins left behind. In Formosa they worked as pioneers in constant contact and conflict with aboriginal tribesmen and therefore had to be very alert and ever-ready for action. In no time they became far more alert, frugal and industrious than the people of China.30 Japanese colonization was grudgingly acknowledged by Liao to be one of economic and material development, but in the immediate postcolonial period he placed greater emphasis than is now fashionable on the oppressiveness of the Japanese regime. Liao presents an image of small and weak Taiwan overwhelmed by the power of the Japanese empire, and though experiencing industrial development, doing so for the benefit of the Japanese rather than the Taiwanese: “The Japanese way of exploiting Formosa’s natural resources can be compared with keeping a hen for eggs and in this way the industries and all kinds of establishments had remarkable progress.”31 Taiwan under the Japanese developed in accordance with the changing needs of the Japanese empire. He describes Taiwan’s progress as leading from a “mediaeval colony into a silo, then into a workshop, and finally into a warmachine.”32 In 1955, Thomas Liao covered the same theme and rephrased his older brother’s argument as follows: “the Japanese converted the hitherto medieval colony by turning it into a rice basket, then into a workshop and finally into a warmachine.”33 But while Taiwan was advancing by stages into industrialization, for Liao mainland China was mired in a preindustrial past. In one of his most powerful statements, Liao argues the achievement of modernity, born of both industrial development and opposition to the Japanese, distinguished Taiwan from the mainland: By resisting Japanese oppression on one hand Formosans experienced progress and developed well during this period of fifty years. It has been a

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great achievement of Oriental society. Formosans breathed the air of modern civilization and progressed, but those on the opposite coast did not get farther than the mediaeval age.34 Therefore Liao clearly assumed a teleology of development from the Dutch period through the emergence of a distinctive Taiwanese national character under the Manchus, that of a hardworking and prudent people, to the achievement of modernity. Liao’s teleology is neatly matched by Thomas Gold’s in State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, who followed the same historical periods, up to the immediate postwar period, with the same progressive realization of the Taiwanese national idea. At the same time, Liao’s explicit comparison between Taiwan and mainland China to suggest that the Taiwanese possessed a more modern civilization and were more “alert, frugal and industrious” dovetails with certain characterizations of the Chinese that can be found in Sunist Chinese nationalist ideology. Fitzgerald has argued that Sun Yat-sen’s assessment of the Chinese as “very much lacking in personal culture” was motivated by a reaction by Chinese nationalists to nineteenth century European imperialist perceptions of the Chinese as indolent and slovenly.35 He describes the way Chinese nationalists took on those perceptions and incorporated them in ideological programs like the New Life movement as an act of contestation with European stereotypes. The ideology of Formosan nationalism can be interpreted as expressing an oppositional nationhood in reaction to Chinese nationalism. In this way, Formosan nationalists were drawing upon the ideologies that had been brought to Taiwan from China as sources for the development of their own ideology. If, in Fitzgerald’s terms, Chinese nationalism was a political program that sought to “awaken” the people of China, then Formosan nationalism can be understood as expressing an already “awakened” nationhood. The other theme that Formosan nationalists used to draw out a consistent Taiwanese historical narrative was the resistance to foreign rule over a four hundred year history. Thomas Liao states this idea most plainly in 1956: “Its history has been nothing other than a continuous struggle of a pioneering and freedom loving people against unwanted intruders and unjust rulers.”36 Liao’s statement also manages to incorporate elements of the notion of the Taiwanese as industrious modernizers, and this produces a number of curious ideological aberrations and contradictions between the benefits brought by Taiwan’s various governments and the Taiwanese people’s opposition to them. In 1948, Joshua Liao described the early agricultural development during the Dutch colonial period as part of the modernity narrative. Two years later in 1950, however, he emphasized opposition to Dutch rule in Taiwan as part

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of the resistance narrative. By his account, the first “armed struggle for liberation against unjust rulers”37 occurred in 1652 led by Kuo Huai-yi. Liao has no difficulty in identifying the inhabitants of Taiwan of this time as being Chinese, with the motivation for rebellion being the heavy taxes imposed on Chinese settlers by the Dutch and land disputes caused by the increasing numbers of Chinese settlers who arrived in the 1640s. Liao claims that it was an employee of the Dutch colonial administration who entreated Koxinga to invade Taiwan and expel the Dutch, thus adding to the national hero-status of Koxinga. The resistance theme is at its most vitriolic when Formosan nationalists of this era directed their historical condemnation against the Manchus. In Liao’s historiography, the Koxinga regime was defeated by the Manchus with help from the Dutch, in a double betrayal, but the Taiwanese continued to resist them throughout their rule in Taiwan: Thence Formosa had become the object of the Manchu exploitation and feudalistic oppression for over two hundred years until 1895 when Formosa was ceded to Japan. To illustrate the cruelty of the Manchu government the following proverb is quoted, “a small riot in three years and a big revolt in five years.”38 Liao is using the phrase san nian yi xiao fan, wu nian yi da luan, which, as noted in chapter 3, was used to characterize Taiwanese society in the nineteenth century. For Liao writing in 1948, it was the corruption of Manchu officials, which led to such strong opposition to their rule, treating Taiwan as a “conquered colony” under a ruling regime that he characterizes as “exploitation without production and taxation without representation.”39 He brings up the historical anecdote of the Qing government’s apparent abrogation of responsibility for the eastern part of Taiwan following the shipwreck and murder of Japanese sailors in 1871 by Aborigines, which led to the Japanese expedition to Taiwan in 1874. Thomas Liao broadly makes the same claim when he characterized the Manchu period as one of resistance and uncommitted rule: “the Manchu authority never succeeded in completely pacifying the island; nor was there any indication that the central government in Peking considered Formosa as an integral part of China.”40 He again uses the phrase san nian yi xiao fan, wu nian yi da luan to support this assertion as well as to give a historical explanation for the Qing government’s response to the incident of the shipwrecked Japanese sailors. In 1950, Joshua Liao added Ming loyalism as a motivation for Taiwanese resistance to the Manchus, in a curious parallel to Chinese nationalism at the

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turn of the century. Although the proto-Chinese nationalist movement started by Sun Yat-sen at the end of the nineteenth century contained a strong anti-Manchu component, by the 1920s, after the empire had collapsed, it ceased to be a major feature of Chinese nationalist rhetoric. The phrase san nian yi xiao fan, wu nian yi da luan is prefaced with a reference to the Manchus to add this new ideological twist: “Against the Manchu invaders and usurpers, the Formosans carried on their struggle for liberation much longer and more often than the Chinese in China by ‘launching one disturbance every three years and one rebellion every five years.’ ”41 Liao even suggests the Ming loyalist secret societies, established in Taiwan during the Koxinga Interregnum, became a political force opposing the Manchus during the three major rebellions of 1721, 1786, and 1861: The last but not least important factor of constant Formosan insurgency against the Manchus was the seeds of Ming patriotism sown by Koxinga and his compatriots—organized into the Ming Loyalist Society—among the social substrata, which when under no ideological leader and political organizer often took the form of uprisings for secessionism. None the less, the three biggest revolutions that spread over the whole Island hoisted the Ming flag, revived the lost cause, and swore Ming Renaissance.42 In his analysis of the 1786 rebellion, Spence argues that the rebellion was organized by the Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandaihui) and was primarily an interethnic feud and discounts the claim of Ming loyalism. Instead, the rebels declared a new dynasty under the title of Shuntian or “Obedient to Heaven.”43 Lamley, however, points out that Ming revivalism existed in southern Taiwan in 1895 after Taiwan was ceded to Japan. The Taiwan scholar, Xu Nanying wrote a poem that included the lines: “Parliament widely extends the Republic; The land reverts to the Sacred Ming Dynasty!”44 Like the Manchu period, the resistance theme can also be found in the representation of the Japanese colonial period. However, the theme is presented in moral terms that endeavor to undermine the value of the material improvements that the Taiwanese enjoyed under rule by Japan. For Joshua Liao while Taiwan under the Japanese was an “economic success” it was also a “moral failure,”45 phrases repeated by Thomas Liao in 1956: “An economic success though it was, it amounted to a moral failure.”46 Joshua Liao emphasizes the oppression of the colonial system that despite improvements in the standard of living, undermined the attempt to “Japanify” the Taiwanese by the colonial administration: “To the Formosans, whose hearts they never succeeded in winning, gain of material prosperity could hardly compensate for loss of spiritual liberty.” Liao goes on to suggest that despite industrial

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development under the Japanese, being merely a component in the Japanese empire left Taiwan an unfulfilled society: “For instance, throughout the entire Japanese reign police-stations and policemen always outnumbered schools and teachers; prostitutes outnumbered nurses.”47 Therefore, the Japanese are understood to have inhibited the development of all aspects of a modern society, represented by health and education, while vice flourished in a police state. The Koxinga Interregnum and the 1895 Republic The two odd periods that stand out in Formosan Nationalist historiography are the Koxinga Interregnum from 1662 to 1683 and the Taiwan Republic of 1895. In Formosan nationalism Koxinga takes on the role of Taiwanese national hero. In 1948, Joshua Liao describes the soldier-emigrant force of Ming loyalists as Taiwan’s “Pilgrim Fathers” who “began to love this country of freedom, deciding not to go back to the continent, and they determined to settle in Formosa for good.”48 Thomas Liao, writing as President of the provisional government in Tokyo in 1956 also used the term Pilgrim Fathers. In 1950, Joshua Liao placed great emphasis on the Ming loyalism of the Koxinga regime, and went as far as aligning Taiwanese nationhood with Chinese opposition to the Manchus: “Just as the Sardinian soldiers and sailors won victory after victory for the House of Savoy, so did the Formosan Army and Navy fight for the already fallen Ming Dynasty against foreign invaders—for Chinese nationalism against Manchu imperialism.”49 Mendel reporting his attendance at a small 2-28 commemoration held in Tokyo by Thomas Liao’s Provisional Formosa Government in 1963 says that a large picture of Koxinga was part of the decorations of the bar in the Ginza district where the commemoration was held.50 As would be expected, the 1895 Republic is given a prominent status by Formosan nationalism. In 1948, Joshua Liao wrote: “Thus Formosa revealed to the world its heroic ambition and militarily resisted the Japanese invasion for more that two years.”51 Liao implies that the 1895 Republic remained a viable political force for much longer that it in fact did, an implication he repeats in his 1950 article, although in less exaggerated terms: “Opposing the territorial change against their wishes, they declared independence and organized the Formosan Democratic Republic . . . They fought a war of independence openly for half a year.”52 Writing in 1956, however, Thomas Liao gives the 1895 Republic a life of “about two years.”53 In contrast with the argument about the ambivalent legitimacy of the Republic described in chapter 3, this is an ideologically skewed representation. Nevertheless, the emphasis given by Liao highlights the point made earlier about the necessity

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for nationalist histories to work hardest when the legitimacy of a national identity is as inchoate as Taiwan’s was at that time. The historiography of Formosan nationalists was premised on their determination to challenge the legitimacy of Chinese rule over Taiwan. Formosan nationalists were motivated by a sense of moral outrage at the corruption and oppression of the government of the ROC in Taiwan, so they sought to bring to light details of that misrule, but they were also conscious of the need to present a substantive case for Taiwan to the international community. Therefore, in the way that they drew upon the Chinese and American nationalist ideologies that affected Taiwan to develop their own ideology, they also drew upon precedence in international law and foreign relations to make a case for Taiwanese self-determination. Both Thomas and Joshua Liao wrote extensively on the injustices that occurred under KMT rule in Taiwan. They maintained that misrule by the KMT disqualified it for claiming sovereignty over Taiwan. Joshua Liao detailed the corruption of the senior KMT officials Chen Yi, Wei Tao-ming, and Chen Cheng in his 1950 submission to the UN, and Thomas Liao had continued that account in his writings up until the mid-1950s. Joshua Liao wrote: “Suddenly, the Formosans, who had expected the Confucian Way of Right to replace the Bushido Way of Might, found themselves driven into the KMT ‘Way of Bite.’ ”54 In his UN submission, Liao details the expropriation of Taiwanese industry by the Nationalists and its exploitation by unqualified and corrupt officials. He describes currency speculation and the use of government monopolies to extract “squeeze” at multiple points through the transaction of commerce.55 In terms of international law, Formosan nationalists argued against the validity of the Cairo Declaration using the principle of self-determination set down in the Atlantic Charter in August 1941. The Charter said thus: “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”56 Formosan nationalists argued that without the consent of the people of Taiwan the transfer of sovereignty over Taiwan from Japan to the Republic of China made in the Declaration was in violation of the Charter. Joshua Liao also reworked his historiography to dispute the claim of an integral historical link between China and Taiwan, using the same arguments of modernity and resistance to deny the validity of the historical claim.57 More significant is his attempt to argue against the Chinese nationalist assertion that the peoples of China and Taiwan belonged to a common race. In 1948, Liao made a tentative argument, later included in his UN submission for the racial distinctiveness of the Taiwanese: “Formosans blood changed

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from that of the Chinese. The history of the Formosan race is less than four hundred years old, and the present race has not yet reached its stability.”58 In 1950, Liao used race again to make two important points that prefigure both the radical Taiwanese nationalists active up to the present and the liberal Taiwanese nationalists who emerged in Taiwan in the sixties. Liao begins by asserting that the Taiwanese are racially distinct from the Chinese by virtue of intermarriage with the aboriginal population, which he puts at 10 percent, and the various foreign presences in Taiwan over the course of its history, from the Dutch and Portuguese to the Japanese. He says, “Thus, in both race-psychology and physical appearance the native Formosans have become as different from the Chinese as—if not more than—the Americans are from the English and the Brazilians are from the Portuguese.”59 His choice of comparison, especially that between England and the United States, is surprisingly weak given the strong ethnic links between them. However, it suggests Liao’s awareness of the problematic relationship between ethnicity and nation that stood at the heart of Sunist ideology. This is borne out in his next sentence: “Even the same race can segregate into different nations just as several races often combine into one nation. To uphold any lofty idealism the Chinese might as well advocate the establishment of a world-federation since all nations and all peoples are traceable to the same ancestry.”60 Liao straddles both an essentialist, racialist imperative for Taiwanese nationhood and a conceptualization of a liberal nationhood that separated race from nation, by challenging that imperative in Chinese nationalism. However, he is unable to follow through on the powerful implications of his critique to develop a fully elaborated liberal alternative to the racialist basis of the KMT’s Chinese nationalism that was being imposed on Taiwan. Thomas Liao presents the same arguments in greater detail and is even clearer in his problematizing of the connection between race and nation. In countering the Chinese claim for the imperative of territorial integrity for a common race, he says that the Taiwanese “may partially belong to the same race, but, if they do not have the same will, the mere blood relationship is not necessarily the legal foundation for unification.”61 He continues by making a claim for Taiwanese nationhood that reworks a theme from Joshua Liao’s Formosan nationalist historiography: “The Formosans today are descendants of Koxinga and his followers who gave up the war-torn continent, and migrated to Formosa to look for peace and security; therefore they are different from Chinese today. We hope that the world’s people will compare our ancestors with the Pilgrim Fathers of America.”62 As in Joshua Liao’s use of the phrase Pilgrim Fathers, Thomas Liao was also referencing United States nationalism to add ideological and affective legitimacy to his claim for Taiwanese nationhood. However, even as the early

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Formosan nationalists were able to draw upon many sources to construct their ideology, the disparate themes also constrained them in their efforts to articulate a coherent narrative. Drawing on emotive themes from American national identity problematized the ideological boundaries set by Chinese nationalism. Therefore, trying to claim a sharp distinction in national identity based on race and history was inevitably compromised by the historical reality of Taiwan’s links to China and the intellectual heritage of Chinese nationalism. Nevertheless, the postwar ideas of the Formosan nationalists were crucial in the later developments of themes of Taiwanese national consciousness. The ideology of Formosan independence activists such as Thomas and Joshua Liao is the strongest and most unequivocal statement of Taiwanese identity during the 1950s. Within the broad argument being presented here, the self-conscious articulation of a Taiwanese identity was above all an attempt to legitimize the Taiwanese idea. They did so ideologically, for example, by making references to U.S. nationhood and the Pilgrim Fathers, which was a notable intervention in the discourse of the US-ROC alliance and the exercise of hegemony over Taiwan by the United States in the 1950s. The ideology of Formosan nationalism challenged the claim on U.S.-sponsored notions of freedom and democracy of the KMT by appealing directly to narratives of American nationhood. Politically, the Formosan nationalists legitimized a Taiwanese national idea by operating within the emerging postwar international structures, such as the United Nations and its Wilsonian foundations as inscribed in the Atlantic Charter. They also established the institutional trappings of legitimacy, through a government-in-exile with a president and ministers, flag, anthem, and a commemorative day for the 2-28 Incident. The framework of Formosan nationalist ideology was the contest for political power over Taiwan. Each of the historical periods that Joshua Liao identified as a structure for Taiwanese historiography was a change in domination—the Dutch, the Qing empire, the Japanese, and finally the Nationalists. What has produced Taiwan’s unique identity for him is both the exercise of power by Taiwan’s ruling regimes and the resistance to that power by the Taiwanese people. On this basis, a major component of Formosan nationalist ideology was arguing for the lack of legitimacy of China and Japan over Taiwan. Liao’s rhetorical flourish, “the Formosans, who had expected the Confucian Way of Right to replace the Bushida Way of Might, found themselves driven into the KMT ‘Way of Bite,’” neatly captures the complexity and equivocal nature of this negotiation. The cultural and historical legitimacy that China held over Taiwan in 1945 compared with the militaristic authority of Japan was shattered

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by the disastrous events after Retrocession. For Formosan nationalists, the expression of a Taiwanese national identity was the effort to undermine alternative identities for Taiwan. Much of the urgency of the rhetoric of the early nationalists stemmed from an understanding of the difficulties they faced against the well-resourced KMT, especially once U.S. support was secured in the second half of 1950, and Free China became part of the broader struggle against Communism. “Build Taiwan and Prepare for a Counteroffensive” As noted in chapter 2, Formosan nationalism had some initial support internationally, especially among groups who were unsympathetic to Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, but while it went some way to articulating a nationalist ideology for Taiwan, it never became a serious and effective political movement. The consolidation of the cold war through the 1950s served to legitimize the KMT in Taiwan in terms of the global struggle against Communism; the Formosan nationalist movement could never compete politically. Nevertheless, early on in the reconfiguration of global power around the Communist and non-Communist worlds, at the end of 1949 and in the early months of 1950, the Nationalist regime found itself in desperate circumstances. In January 1950, U.S. president Truman stated the U.S. intention not to intercede in the event of attack from the mainland. Truman’s statement said: “The United States has no desire to obtain special rights or privileges or to establish military bases on Formosa at this time. Nor does it have any intention of utilizing its armed forces to interfere in the present situation.”63 Chiang Kai-shek reassumed the presidency on March 31 and the remaining Nationalist forces withdrew to Taiwan from Hainan and Chusan between April and May, where they prepared to make their last stand. Premier Chen Cheng said to the National Assembly in March, “We must concentrate all our efforts to defend Taiwan and prepare for a counteroffensive on the mainland.”64 Although the Nationalist government remained publicly belligerent about the viability of another attack against the Communists, Chen nevertheless outlined policies aimed at securing Nationalist rule in Taiwan in preparation for the expected Communist invasion. Government plans called for streamlining of the armed forces, stabilizing the Taiwanese economy, and implementing a degree of self-rule within Taiwan. Allowing a higher level of Taiwanese representation in local assemblies can be understood in the context of the regime’s awareness of its extremely tenuous position in Taiwan. Defeated on the mainland and without support among the Taiwanese population, the Nationalists had little choice but to

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make some attempt to cultivate a measure of political legitimacy among the Taiwanese. However, while the ability of the remnants of the Nationalist forces to withstand Communist attack can only be the subject of speculation, the June 25, 1950 invasion of South Korea reversed U.S. policy toward Taiwan and saved the Nationalist regime. On June 27, Truman issued a statement saying, “Accordingly, I have ordered the Seventh Fleet to prevent any attack on Formosa. . . . The determination of the future status of Formosa must await the restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations.”65 With Taiwan protected from mainland invasion, the Nationalist government set about consolidating its power and implementing its ideological program. The United States, anxious not to “lose China” a second time, immediately began massive military and economic aid and land reform through the Joint Chinese American Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR). Although Truman’s original statement acknowledged the unresolved status of Taiwan, geopolitical expediency in the postwar era secured the Nationalist’s place in Taiwan through the 1950s and ended the dream of a Republic of Taiwan. After June 1950, the Nationalist government shifted its policy from “defend Taiwan and recover the mainland” to “develop Taiwan and recover the mainland.” Indeed, Zhongyang Ribao (Central Daily News) optimistically proclaimed these as the “two central tasks for next year.”66 This represented a reconfiguration of the place of Taiwan in Nationalist rhetoric. Rather than being merely a last defense in anticipation of the Communist invasion, Taiwan became a place from which a model Chinese province could be built. Taiwanese development would not merely provide the material basis for retaking China, but legitimize the regime as an example of both Nationalist achievement and also the hoped-for Communist failure. In October 1950, Premier Chen Cheng, in a speech to the Legislative Assembly, outlined a three-point plan of development for Taiwan, covering culture, politics, and the economy that would “prepare every province with a future development yardstick.”67 In this way, in the early 1950s Taiwan as a concept initially had a larger place in the Chinese Nationalist ideological firmament than later in the decade when the fiction of Taiwan as the Republic of China became more secure. The Zhongyang Ribao editorial that accompanied the text of the speech by Chen Cheng said: “In this perilous situation, members of . . . the assemblies must look out for each other and help each other’s spirit of mutual trust and work hard to guarantee the collective mission of Taiwan to oppose the mainland Communists.”68 The policies of development were all framed in the rhetoric of antiCommunism and Taiwan as the island haven from which to oppose it. The

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KMT extolled the development of culture, politics, and economics. On culture, the government said: The aim of cultural development is to protect the freedom of the people (minzu) and national (guojia) independence. The measures of the Communists bandits toward culture are premised upon class interests. This poisonous scheme and rebellion shatters social cohesion. Its brutal consciousness and conflict confounds ethics and annuls morality. . . . To target this cultural aggression, we must strengthen education in the cultural movements of the Three Principles of the People, propagate the Three Principles of the People and ensure the fostering of national consciousness.69 The same style of rhetoric applied to other aspects of Taiwanese life. By the mid-50s KMT rule in Taiwan was largely secured, and as the cold war deepened the “Formosa Problem” had largely disappeared from the international agenda. The 1954 report of Chen Cheng to the Legislative Yuan identified the stability achieved by land reform and the local self-government program. He also emphasized the importance that the KMT had placed on legitimizing the government on Taiwan as a basis for the planned counteroffensive: “What was more important still was to establish the government’s prestige and to win the support of the people. . . . In order to heighten the prestige of the government and to win greater political support from the people, it was necessary to improve their welfare.”70 By 1956, apologists for Nationalist rule on Taiwan such as Henry Luce were able to make strident claims for the legitimacy of KMT rule on the basis of the rising mood of anti-Communism in the West: “Nowhere in the world today is there a community which is living for so great a purpose, the liberation of China from the Communist tyranny and the restoration of the Chinese people to their ancient tradition of decency and humanity, expressed in terms of freedom and democracy.”71 The Australian Rotarian, W.G. Goddard was even more extravagant. He expounded on the Taiwan issue in a way that even the Nationalists had not yet begun to do: “Free China is . . . determined to redeem the mainland from the Red curse. . . . Free China is mobilised physically, economically, and spiritually for the one great purpose of effecting that redemption.” Goddard’s religious terminology is explicit, interpreting as he does the standoff between the Communists and Nationalists as of “two opposing spiritual forces.”72 KMT Ideology in Taiwan Following the Nationalists’ defeat in the civil war and their retreat, Taiwan became part of a bizarre myth; it was the “island fortress” of a

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government-in-exile, a model China in miniature and also just a province of the Republic of China. More fundamentally, the KMT brought to Taiwan a state nationalist ideology. Over the previous fifty years, the codification of this ideology by the KMT served to naturalize notions like a singular coherence to Chinese identity and 5,000 years of continuous history that formed the basis of both state political action and cultural policy on Taiwan. Sun Yat-sen was the founder of the KMT and, as the first president of the Republic, is known as the “father of the nation” (guofu). He was steeped in the intellectual currents of late nineteenth and early twentieth century China, but his political thought was never as sophisticated as that of his classicallyeducated contemporaries, such as Liang Qichao. Typical of activists and intellectuals of the period, his ideological and rhetorical mode was one of crisis and of the urgency of “saving China,” and this was carried on into the rhetorical style of the KMT in Taiwan. National unity was a key issue for Sun, which informed KMT ideology up until the 1990s (and Chinese Communist ideology up to the present). While Sun acknowledged regional differences, he made a claim for the common race of its people: Despite the vastness of China’s territory and the immensity of its population, nevertheless, except for the provinces of Fukien and Kwangtung, where the spoken language differs from that of China proper, the spoken languages of the other regions are the same, with slight local, dialectical differences, and the entire nation shares a common written language and common customs. In the past, before the advent of relations with outsiders, people in one province would harbour prejudice against the people of other provinces, but today this is diminishing, and concern, compassion, and fraternal feeling for one another are increasing among Chinese compatriots.73 Sun’s ideology was elaborated through the concepts of the three so-called principles of nationalism, democracy and livelihood, which were codified in a collection of essays entitled San min zhu yi (The Three Principles of the People) taken from a series of public lectures given in Canton in 1924. This became the foundational text of the KMT and was taught in every school in Taiwan right into the 1990s. In developing the Three Principles after the 1911 revolution, Sun shifted the emphasis in his ideology to a more comprehensive program of nation building. Sun recognized that a Chinese national consciousness suffered from a lack of legitimacy among the Chinese people. The dominance of provincial and subethnic identities was described in the Three Principles of the People in the

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famous phrase “we are but a sheet of loose sand.”74 After the founding of the Republic in 1912, Sun argued that it was this lack of a national consciousness that had reduced China to “the lowest position in international affairs.”75 Although he acknowledged the absence of national consciousness, he nevertheless maintained that China was a single nation comprising a single people. The unified nation had been developing, he argued, since the earliest unification of China under the Qin and Han dynasties, and he set China apart from other nations formed from many races such as Great Britain and the United States.76 Sun’s nationalist ideology was fascist in a similar style to that of Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy in the 1930s.77 At its foundation, it appealed to an essentialist basis for identity on the basis of objective criteria, in particular race. Denying the possibility of a purely subjective basis for identity, Sun stated, that the Chinese nation was immanent in individuals as a birthright by virtue of being racially Chinese78 and, therefore, was ultimately not a matter of choice. He wrote: “It is not necessary to do research in order to know what nationalism is. A person always recognizes his parents and never confuses them with strangers. Nationalism is analogous to this.”79 However, Sun understood China as occupying approximately the same territorial boundaries as the Qing state, and therefore he required a flexible definition of the essential Chineseness of the Chinese people. He defined the Chinese as a race on the basis of five “forces”: common heredity, language, mode of living or “livelihood,” religion, and customs,80 and from this he described the people of China as “for the most part . . . of the Han or Chinese race.”81 Sun denounced the alternative liberal, multiethnic nationalist ideologies of the period as “cosmopolitanism.” For Sun, under the logic of cosmopolitanism, the Chinese could become, for example, British or American, which he equated with the destruction of the nation: “Suppose that should happen, then that England should subjugate China and our people become English— would that be good for us? . . . If nationalism decays, then when cosmopolitanism flourishes, we will be unable to survive and will be eliminated by other races.”82 Incorporating the concepts of social Darwinism, Sun believed, somewhat implausibly given China’s enormous population, that the Chinese as a race were in danger of actual extinction: “Then China will not only lose her sovereignty, but she will perish, the Chinese people will be assimilated, and the race will disappear.”83 John Fitzgerald has noted that Sun’s “candid identification of nationalism as a state doctrine rested . . . on an assertion of the racial unity of the Chinese people which seemed to defy the evidence of the senses.”84 However, the circular logic of Sun’s ideology tended to make such an assertion necessary. From his starting point position of the weakness and humiliation of the nascent Chinese nation, Sun defined the nation’s boundaries on the basis of the

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territories lost to or occupied by foreign empires. He says: “our territorial losses were Korea, Taiwan (Formosa), the Pescadores and such places, which as a result of the Sino-Japanese War were ceded to Japan. Still further back in the century, we lost Burma and Annam.”85 Sun had no other objective criterion for the boundaries of China than the historically contingent boundaries of the preceding Qing state, which he defined by the failure of the Qing to maintain them against the pressure of foreign imperialism. But in believing that Chinese identity had an essential and racial basis, Sun’s understanding of the constitution of the Chinese race was necessarily contrived to be congruent with that historically contingent territory, as also was the new Chinese nation-state that was tasked with awakening the China in the Chinese people. Similar to the logic of Sun’s identification of the unity of race, nation, and state, his essentialism meant that rather than a conscious act by the individual subject, being Chinese could only be evinced as behavior that demonstrated the stereotyped virtue of his idealized China. Therefore, in the Three Principles of the People Sun criticized bad manners and laziness as signs of the lack of Chinese consciousness. The individual needed to express his “true” Chineseness by refined behavior, while bad behavior was a betrayal of that essential identity. As Fitzgerald suggests, Sun was also responding self-consciously to colonial Western stereotypes of the “Chinaman,” unable to govern himself in his uncultured, unselfconscious state.86 For Sun, Chinese identity remained an absolute quality against which individual behavior could be measured. In 1925, Chiang Kai-shek became leader of the KMT on Sun Yat-sen’s death. In 1934, he with his wife Soong Mei-ling launched the New Life Movement as an attempt to generate the kind of consciousness raising that Sun had envisioned in the previous decade. New Life demonstrated the political possibilities of Sun Yat-sen’s attitudes to behavior. If an individual’s behavior could be measured against his or her true Chinese identity, then this presented possibilities for the control of behavior as part of a political program carried out in the name of the nation. New Life was propagated through the party political organs throughout the Nationalist-controlled parts of China, utilizing the developing modern infrastructure of media and communications as a means of mass mobilization.87 The movement’s goals were in line with Sun’s pronouncements on national restoration. It emphasized personal deportment and the cultivation of ethical behavior in accordance with the Confucian principles that Sun had identified in San min Zhu yi. Soong Meli-ling at that time wrote: The Chinese of today seem to have forgotten the old source of China’s greatness in their urge to acquire material gain, but, obviously, if the national spirit is to be revived, there must be recourse to stable foundations.

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In the four principles of ancient times, we have those foundations—“Li” means courtesy; “I ” service toward our fellow men and toward ourselves; “Lien” honesty and respect for the rights of others; and “Chih” highmindedness and honor.88 In the context of Chiang’s militarism, Chinese nationalism took on a fascistic tenor through New Life. Chiang said it was to “thoroughly militarize the life of the people of the entire nation. It is to make them nourish courage and alertness, a capacity to endure hardship, and especially a habit and instinct for unified behavior. It is to make them willing to sacrifice for the nation at all times.”89 It was a small step from appealing for proper Chinese behavior in order for an individual to demonstrate his or her Chineseness to enforcing the demonstration of that behavior through the violence and coercion of the state. The legacy of early republican Chinese nationalism and the nation-building ideologies of the KMT were transferred to Taiwan and imposed on the Taiwanese in many different ways. The oppressive tenets of Chinese nationalism were cultivated in schools and universities and in the armed forces through compulsory military service for Taiwanese youth. The KMT transplanted a number of national institutions to Taiwan to demonstrate the credibility of its claim that Taiwan was an idealized China. These included the National Central Library, and most significantly, the National Palace Museum, containing the Chinese imperial art collection. The pilgrimage to the museum that foreign visitors to Taiwan still make has become part of the practices of Chinese nationalism in Taiwan.90 In his speeches and interviews through the 1950s and 1960s, Chiang Kaishek invoked the name of Sun Yat-sen as the father of the nation and exhorted the Chinese people to resist Communism and strive to build a new China. Chiang spoke to the China that Sun had imagined in his ideological pronouncements and in a similar rhetorical style. In his national day speech of 1951, Chiang said: As a result of the revolution of 1911 under the leadership of Dr Sun Yatsen, the two thousand year-old imperial system was uprooted and the two hundred and sixty year-old Manchu dictatorship was overthrown. A democratic and free Republic of China has now been established for forty years. . . . Every page of its forty years of history presents the glorious record of our revolutionary martyrs who struggled with blood and tears for saving and reconstructing the nation. . . . In spite of the failure of our anti-Communist war on the mainland, we continue to vigorously struggle for national independence, for the stability of Asia and for the peace of the

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world. Now Taiwan, the base area of Free China, is the foundation of national recovery and reconstruction. . . . Everyone should reflect on whether he has lived up to the expectations of the father of the nation, Dr. Sun Yat-sen and the revolutionary martyrs.91 The KMT applied this rhetoric to its policy pronouncements, if not its actual policies, which were generally more measured than those of the Communists, especially in economic management. It applied the Leninist strategies of establishing a party-state for ideological mobilization and political control that it had developed on the mainland. Schooling in particular took on the militaristic and moralizing quality of the New Life movement and became a system to cultivate true Chinese identity among the Taiwanese, as Antonio Chiang complained about in the early 1990s. The KMT also set up a brutal dictatorship, that had its most vicious phase in the 1950s and 1960s, known as the White Terror (Baise Kongbu), that is also the name given to the KMT suppression of the Communists in Shanghai in 1927.92 But although the ideology of the KMT on Taiwan stands out for its brutality and, in its call to “recover the mainland,” its absurdity, the process of sinicization in the Nationalist’s image of China was a complex one. The KMT engaged with and appropriated Taiwanese history in a way that drew on a more broadly imagined version of China that was still relevant to the Taiwanese. Cultural practices derived from the classical or “high” Confucian traditions, as well as popular or local traditions, beliefs, and values provided a source of political practices from which the KMT could also draw upon to establish a measure of legitimacy for its rule of Taiwan. Nationalizing Taiwanese Folk Heroes An illustration of the co-optive potential of the KMT’s Chinese nationalist ideology is the Koxinga Shrine in Tainan. It was reconstructed for the ideological purpose of appropriating a Taiwanese historical figure in a way that drew on Chinese traditions for legitimacy. The shrine commemorates the life of Zheng Chenggong, or Koxinga as he is known in English.93 Zheng Chenggong was the son of a Japanese woman and a southern Chinese naval warlord. As a Ming loyalist, he raised an army and a navy to resist the invading Manchus at the end of the 1650s: In 1661 he was forced to flee to Taiwan, from where he expelled the Dutch, before his premature death in 1662. Eventually twenty years later Taiwan was incorporated into the new Qing Dynasty. His son Zheng Jing and grandson, Zheng Keshuan established the first major Chinese settlement of Taiwan along the lines of the Ming sociopolitical structure, before their acquiescence to the Manchus.94

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The life of Zheng Chenggong is poorly recorded and has become rather mythologized in Taiwan, dominating, for example, the legacy of his son and grandson. Despite, or because of this, Koxinga became a Taiwanese folk hero almost immediately after his death. The stories about him that circulate in Taiwan mention certain magical features about his life—being born auspiciously during a typhoon, controlling the waters of the Taiwan Straits, a dramatic and fated death; in some places on the island he is still worshipped as a deity capable of influencing the oceans.95 For the KMT, the story of Koxinga proved as adaptable to the ideology of Chinese nationalism as it had been to that of Confucianism and Japanese imperialism under Taiwan’s previous ruling regimes. As a proto-nationalist Koxinga could be anti-Manchu, anti-Imperialist—by defeating the Dutch— and a guardian of Chinese culture.96 In the need of nationalisms to look backward to moments of origin and to a glorious past, as well as forward to an ascendant future, he became representative of both an idealized historical China and a model for the action required to overcome China’s apparent national weakness in the first half of the twentieth century.97 And once the Nationalists lost the civil war and fled to Taiwan in 1948–1949, he took on a special significance because of the parallels with his own escape and plans to retake the mainland, three hundred years earlier.98 The Koxinga Shrine in Tainan was first opened officially in 1875 and was renovated by the Nationalists in the years immediately after their arrival in Taiwan in 1945. Under the Japanese, it had become a quasi-Shinto space, but the Nationalists turned it into a nationalized Chinese temple or lineage hall, drawing on traditional Chinese architectural forms to make it into a minor instrument of Nationalist ideology.99 In front of the memorial, the KMT appropriation of the myth of Zheng Chenggong was explicit. At the entrance, a traditional Chinese gate was built bearing the calligraphy of Pai Chung-hsi, the leading Nationalist army general and minister of defence after 1946. Pai had been sent to Taiwan in the immediate aftermath of the 2-28 Incident and had made the initial official efforts to account for the events and restore a measure of stability to Taiwan and credibility for the Nationalists. Pai’s calligraphy celebrates the Taiwanese folk hero as a nationalist: “The spirit of a great man who is upright and devoted to the promotion of righteousness is immortal; the sole-surviving, lonely minister giving his best and life’s loyalty should be judged a national hero, though he failed in the restoration of his fallen country.”100 Within the memorial structure itself, the primary symbolic form in the Koxinga Shrine under the Nationalists became Chinese calligraphy. The display of calligraphy occurs in certain traditional forms of Chinese public architecture

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such as temples, lineage halls, and memorial arches. The practices of writing and displaying calligraphy is, like Bourdieu’s state language in France,101 embedded in a set of institutional practices in education, art, and philosophy which reproduced the cultural capital of those in power. The formalization of language expressed in the training required to write calligraphy, its formal display in a public space, and the classical language of the texts themselves are, as Michael Shoenhals has argued, part of the management of power by the state.102 In the Koxinga Shrine, one enters and passes through its various gates and outer courtyards, on the walls of which are displayed the calligraphy of luminaries expressing laudatory sentiments in sophisticated language about Koxinga in the context of China’s imperial and national historical struggle. In a self-conscious teleology, the earliest display dates from 1875 in the outer courtyard, the year the Shrine was built, and follows through the inner courtyards in chronological order, until over the central altar are the characters of Chiang Kai-shek himself written in August 1950, reading simply “Zhenxing Zhonghua (Revitalize China).” The institutions that legitimized calligraphy as a public symbol of power have a centuries-long history, and for Nationalists like Pai and Chiang, writing and displaying it in the shrine referenced the power of imperial China by invoking its symbols and practices. The displays of classical calligraphy in the shrine represented the Nationalist’s ideal China, “the splendid culture and civilization under ancient China’s sages and kings” of which Sun Yat-sen had spoken thirty years earlier.103 Those traditions legitimized the KMT’s authority on Taiwan and were also being deployed as instruments of legitimization, what Bourdieu describes as “acts of authority, or, what amounts to the same thing,—authorized acts.”104 That is, the Nationalists both appropriated and deployed the symbolic power of the shrine to transform the story of a local legend into a national one. Individual Nationalists, such as Chiang Kai-shek himself, enacted the KMT’s power on Taiwan by writing and displaying his calligraphy, which gave text its authority as well as expressed authority through it. As has been argued in the critique of the objective basis of identity, it is difficult to say how effectively the symbolism in the Koxinga Shrine worked to legitimize the Nationalists for the Taiwanese who visited it in the early years of their rule. The Nationalists reached for the strategies of power that they had inherited from Chinese history, including imperial strategies, and these codes of empirical power maintained a certain symbolic authority for the Taiwanese at that time. Instrumentally, the Nationalists obviously believed that traditional symbolic forms of the shrine were still meaningful in Taiwan in the early 1950s. However, as much as the Formosan nationalists

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such as Thomas and Joshua Liao might have wanted to conjure up a new Taiwan as a blank slate, the cultural legacy of imperial China on Taiwan was significant. This legacy would be wielded right into the 1970s, as will be shown in the next chapter. But the seeds of a different basis for Taiwan’s identity, with a different set of symbolic forms, would also be sown in that same period.

CHAPTER 5

Writing Taiwan

T

he 1950s and 1960s were a period of consolidation and strengthening of Taiwan’s Chinese identity as the KMT fortified its rule. This consolidation was, most directly, a function of a nationalist ideology that was enforced by the apparatuses of state authoritarianism. Taiwanese nationalism and direct opposition to the KMT’s national ideology remained effectively suppressed. However, the KMT also operated co-optively, using education and the media to legitimize its governance and promote Chinese nationalism in Taiwan by implementing successful policies of economic and social development. In 1961, Liu Songzhou, a Lianhe bao columnist summarized Taiwan’s condition a decade after the Nationalist defeat: In the last ten years of the fifty years of the founding of our country, the successful development of Taiwan has been both the most difficult and most glorious page of our republic’s history. For more than ten years, the people of China have suffered bitterly, and here we have continued to resist the Communist bandits in the struggle for political rights. Still, the greatest task of construction is to fight communism and recover the mainland.1

Liu goes on to describe the scope of Taiwan’s development under the KMT, but switches to a pragmatic mode of rhetoric contrasting with the hyperbolic style that characterized KMT rule in its revolutionary, Sunist mode. In political reform, he noted the establishment of secret ballot elections and the electoral reform of “one man one vote,” although he did not mention the banning of opposition parties and arrest of dissidents. Liu also

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emphasized economic development, prefiguring the “Taiwan miracle” trope that emerged toward the end of the 1970s: “In the area of industry, last year industrial production reached NT$10,755,000,000, including manufacturing, services, public investment, and construction, increasing on average by 9.9 percent over the last ten years.”2 The exhaustive use of statistics functions as a kind of objective, pseudoscientific or “evidential” authority in this assessment of the regime’s performance, and it constitutes a kind of statistical fetishism that has continued to dominate debate on the Tiger economies. Indeed, the reduction of a government’s value to economic statistical measures has parallels elsewhere. It was an element of the rhetoric of the Chinese Communist Party in, for example, the Great Leap Forward, and as the success of some of the East Asian economies became apparent to the West in the 1970s and 1980s, it has come to dominate Western political rhetoric also. Economic performance became a key source of legitimacy for the KMT right into the 1990s and long after the notion of Free China had been discredited. The KMT was also helped by the sharp contrast of its economic success with the chaos and disasters of Communist rule of mainland China after the mid-1950s. In addition to the political practices of the KMT, ideas of Chinese nationhood were cultivated in the cultural and social institutions of education and the arts. Sometimes the more liberal forms of Chinese nationalism, articulated in journals like Ziyou Zhongguo (Free China), stood at odds with those of the KMT, but together they formed a powerful set of practices for legitimizing Taiwan’s Chineseness. During this period, Taiwan’s identity politics both on the island and in exile communities became a complex web of overlapping and competing oppositions:—Nationalist and Communist, China and Taiwan, authoritarianism and liberal democracy. These ideas formed shifting and sometimes contingent alliances: the Nationalists positioned themselves in opposition to mainland China because it was Communist; Taiwanese nationalists also positioned themselves in opposition to the mainland, not because it was Communist, but because China represented an imperialism from which they sought to be decolonized. Democracy activists opposed the Nationalists because they were authoritarian; independence activists opposed the Nationalists because they were Chinese. In these shifting relationships, distinct political positions could end up sometimes facing in the same direction, and this is particularly the case with the anti-Nationalist democracy and Taiwanese independence activists, who sometimes conflated those positions into one. Over all of these internal divisions in Taiwan right until the early 1970s was the cold war, that gave the KMT an unassailable legitimacy as an ally of the United States in Taiwan’s guise as Free China. Initially the incorporation

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of Taiwan into global cold war geopolitics did create a space for international support for Taiwanese self-determination by those who saw the Taiwanese, or Formosans, as its unwilling participants, but by the end of the 1950s, with notable exceptions such as John K. Fairbank, international support for Taiwanese self-determination was hard to find. Inside Taiwan, dissent was very difficult and dangerous. From the mid1950s, the publisher of the magazine Ziyou Zhongguo (Free China), Lei Chen, used the journal to test the limits of KMT authoritarianism, and in 1960 briefly established a political party, the China Democratic Party, as part of a campaign for democratic reform. The KMT’s reaction was severe. Lei was arrested and tried for treason at the end of 1960 and sentenced to ten years in prison.3 The title page of Ziyou Zhongguo included a list of objectives for Lei’s selfproclaimed “Free China movement” as a form of political manifesto. Drawing on the practice established during the May Fourth era of featuring a manifesto as the title page of a journal to indicate the overall tenor of the journal’s contents, Lei wrote: 1. We must declare to all the people of the world that freedom and democracy are absolutely fundamental, and then that we must urge the government (at all levels) that in addition to reform of the economic governance, we must develop the freedom and democracy of society. 2. We must support the government using all possible efforts to fight for freedom under the iron curtain of communism. 3. We must use all our strength to assist the compatriots in occupied territories, and help them to recover their freedoms. 4. Our first goal must be to establish all of the Republic of China as a free China.4 Typical of this kind of political writing in magazines such as Ziyou Zhongguo and Daxue (The Intellectual), the criticisms of the KMT were couched in a strong anti-communist rhetoric. Lei, like other liberal intellectuals of the period such as Li Ao and Hu Fo, criticized the KMT for failing to live up to the ideals of democracy and freedom which it had proclaimed in the struggle against Communism. In early 1957, Ziyou Zhongguo published a piece by Zhu Banyun entitled “Fandui dang! Fandui dang! Fandui dang! (Opposition! Opposition! Opposition!)”: “Assuming the existence of a strong opposition to the party is one of the fundamental conditions of democratic government.”5 Lei went further later that year with a series of articles entitled “Jintian de wenti (The

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Problems Today)” that openly questioned the KMT’s rhetoric and policies. In the second part of the series, “Opposing the mainland,” Lei wrote, “Our opposition to communism is not for political rights, rather it is a way of life, covering everything from ideology to lifestyle, and in substance it is no different from communism itself.”6 Lei’s subsequent arrest and jail sentence were severe, but documents recovered from the Garrison Command at the end of the 1990s indicate he was lucky to escape with his life.7 Lei’s activism expresses the overlapping politics noted above. Lei was part of a liberal intellectual tradition within Chinese nationalism that included famous intellectuals such as Hu Shih, Kang Lishi, and Wang Shimi.8 In many ways his manifesto reflects a liberal Chinese opinion that fell within an acceptable range for the Nationalist regime. But his rhetoric also slipped beyond some of the standard slogans. He does not say “Fan Gong, Fu Guo,” “oppose communism and recover the mainland,” in the ritualistic way that Liu Songzhou did in his Lianhe Bao column that expressed an almost routine submission to the KMT. Instead Lei suggests instead merely helping the mainland Chinese to overthrow communism themselves rather than launching a campaign to retake the mainland. While Lei played a part in establishing Taiwan’s postwar civil society and was an early participant in Taiwan’s democracy movement, his strong liberal, urban mainland tradition contrasted with the local political movements established in Taiwan in the 1920s. He was a Chinese, not a Taiwanese, nationalist. The Taiwanese nationalists, who had been led by Thomas Liao in the early 1950s, had become a fractious, exiled movement by the end of the decade. Liao had been arrested in Tokyo under the U.S. occupation, but released in 1952, after which he led the Taiwan Democratic Independence Party and the Taiwan Republic Provisional Government based in Tokyo. A breakaway group, the Taiwan Youth Association, was established in 1959, led by Ong Joktik. They published Formosa Quarterly and later Independent Formosa that reported on human rights abuses in Taiwan, attempted to undermine the KMT’s rhetoric of Free China, and continued to elaborate a Taiwanese nationalist ideology. The writing in these independence movement publications is a clear example of the elevated rhetorical style of a nationalist ideology, not dissimilar to that of the Chinese Nationalists. The Taiwanese nationalists, however, never formulated a codified ideology, in the manner of San Min Zhu Yi. As the KMT’s rule over Taiwan became entrenched, Taiwanese nationalists focussed their rhetoric against it, developing the counternarrative of the Taiwanese as an oppressed people who were denied the full subjecthood of their national identity. In 1963, Lim Kianjit expressed this idea in a poignant

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reference to the imposition of Chinese nationalism on Taiwan: “The ten million Formosans living in Formosa are groaning under the heartless mechanism of oppression. The world has never known such coercion, which deprives the people not only of the freedom of speech, but of the freedom to be silent.”9 In 1965, Ko Kiansing went further in an attempt to define the essence of Taiwanese identity: What is this nation called Formosa? The Formosan and the Chinese themselves correctly distinguish one another by instinct. Be that as it may, the Formosan should be provided with a clear definition of its own, the movement itself being rooted essentially in nationalism. . . . Now, to come to the point, the Formosan may be defined as those, their descendants inclusive, who (1) had maintained continuous living in the island until the time of its cession to Japan on 2nd June, 1895, in consequence of the Sino-Japanese War terminated earlier that year, (2) chose to remain Formosan by staying in the island after 8th May, 1897, the day the people of Formosa were given a chance to decide their future path—whether or not to leave the island of Formosa. . . . Their decision was, in fact, an indication of the will of the Formosan to share the same fate with the land and, furthermore, of the birth or awakening of the “Formosan Consciousness” omnipresent in the minds of the people of Formosa.10 Part of Ko’s definition is another example of the space between ideology and description, or between an authentic subjective expression of identity and an objective description of it. Ko speaks as an authentic Taiwanese subject using an emotionally inflected language aimed at conveying a sense of urgency and immediacy, and he appeals to “instinct” as a basis for Taiwanese identity. But he also attempts an objective definition of the Taiwanese national in terms of history, using language that is very similar to, for example, Wachman’s “causes” of Taiwanese consciousness. Ko’s true Taiwanese having “maintained continuous living on the island” expresses the same idea as Wachman’s comment that “those on Taiwan have developed a sense of belonging to a group defined by residency on the island.” The difference is the subject position from which the authors speak; Ko speaks as an authentic subject, whereas Wachman speaks as a foreign scholar objectifying Taiwanese identity. Both Ko and Wachman produce something that is, to paraphrase Bhabha again, between the performative and the pedagogical. On one hand, the assumption of objectivity produces legitimacy for the Taiwan idea by its appeal to knowledge outside of the subjective and emotional. On the other

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hand legitimacy is maintained by the authenticity of the voice of a “real” Taiwanese. Both their “explanations” reproduce that objective experience: we/they are Taiwanese because we/they live here/there. However, an important innovation in Ko’s statement is the possibility of an ultimately subjective basis for Taiwanese identity, as expressed by Ko’s second point that a Taiwanese was someone who “chose to remain Formosan.” Taiwanese identity becomes a conscious decision, made by an actively constituted subjectivity. Ko’s suggestion that one is Taiwanese because one has chosen to be so is an important contribution to the constitution of Taiwanese identity, and one that is fully realized in the “New Taiwanese” idea popularized in the 1998 Taipei mayoral election by the then-president Lee Teng-hui. It is also a key break with the essentialist basis of identity argued by the ideology of Sun Yat-sen and the KMT. Later in 1965, the Formosan Youth Association re-formed under a new name, the United Young Formosans for Independence, and continued in its activism. In a political program published in December, the association set down its goals as being the overthrow of the KMT on Taiwan and the establishment of an independent republic. The program also attempted again to define Taiwanese identity. Even more explicitly than Ko Kiansing, the United Young Formosans for Independence argued for a subjective basis for Taiwanese identity, as a conscious choice or commitment to Taiwan: The United Young Formosans for Independence is a revolutionary organization representing all the Formosan people, based on the national hopes of the Formosan people and dedicated to the attainment of such a nation. . . . “Formosan” refers to all people who love Formosa as their homeland, who seek independence and happiness for Formosa, and who pray for her progress and prosperity.11 Taiwanese identity here is again something active and self-ascribed, losing even the notion of “instinct” that Ko Kiansing had suggested. The exiled nationalists suffered a blow when, disillusioned by the failures of the movement, Thomas Liao renounced Taiwanese nationalism and returned to Taiwan in 1965. The reaction of his colleagues in Tokyo was vitriolic: As is well known, The Formosan Association has nothing at all to do with the person Thomas Liao but rather is an offspring of criticism towards the so-called “Provisional Government” led by him, and has since been walking on its own path. . . . An “instant” government, boneless and principleless,

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his “provisional government” vividly reflects the very crooked character of his and proved to be a mere group of opportunists. . . . It was we realise now, our big mistake not to have subjected the poisonous creature to an unsparing criticism. We should not have ever allowed him to exist. We should have wiped off that misleading image of Liao’s “Provisional Government” once and for all. We should not have allowed his name to be connected with the genuine independence in which the whole of the Formosan people rested their hope and future.12 Back in Taiwan, even after the arrest and imprisonment of Lei Chen, opposition to the KMT continued, both in the form of democracy activism and Taiwanese nationalism. The political controversy with the highest profile was the campaign and subsequent arrest of the well-known law professor Peng Ming-min, the editor of Free China Monthly Hsieh Tsung-min, and the law student Wei Ting-chao. In 1964, the three wrote a manifesto entitled A Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation and tried to circulate 10,000 copies around the island. The declaration covered similar territory to the writings of Joshua Liao and the later Taiwanese independence activists. It also drew inspiration from classical statements of political rights such as the American Declaration of Independence and Paine’s Rights of Man.13 They wrote Taiwanese history as one of oppression and exploitation by imperialist powers, and focused most of their text on the dictatorial government of the KMT. Their goal was a Republic of Taiwan, included among three principal objectives that summarized their nationalism: 1. To affirm that return to the mainland is absolutely impossible, and by unifying the island population, regardless of place of origin, to bring about the overthrow of the Chiang regime, establishing a new country and a new government; 2. to rewrite the constitution, guaranteeing basic human rights and obtaining true democracy by establishing an efficient administration responsible to the people; and 3. to participate in the United Nations as a new member, establishing diplomatic relations with other countries striving together for world peace.14 Many of the ideas expressed in the declaration are key themes of Taiwanese politics up to the present, such as UN membership, constitutional reform and, good government practice. An notable difference between the declaration and earlier Taiwanese nationalist views is its position on the post1945 mainland refugees. Unlike some of the very early statements of Taiwanese

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nationalism after 2-28, which advocated repatriation of the mainlanders,15 Peng, Hsieh, and Wei argued for unity among all the people living on Taiwan. This again elaborates a notion of Taiwanese identity as one of subjective choice more clearly than the somewhat ambiguous statement by Ko Kiansing quoted earlier, and it is an idea that would be fully realized in the late 1990s. Much of what the three activists wrote was directly aimed at the KMT’s intransigent rhetoric of representing all of China and recovering the mainland. It had been fifteen years since the Nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan, yet in public language under the authoritarian system, the recitation of KMT ideology in state-sanctioned phrases such as “Fan Gong Fu Guo” had become both necessary for personal survival and part of a complex process of ideological indoctrination. The Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation was a genuine attempt to challenge the distortion of public language, or the gap between words and their meaning that had opened in Taiwan. In this way, it bears similarities to samizdat literature in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, which challenged the control of public language by Communist states. Under Czech and Soviet communism, the well-known dissident and later Czech president, Václav Havel criticized the same submission to the meaningless language of a rigid power structure. In Living in Truth, Havel wrote, “As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual.”16 Havel’s description of Czechoslovakia applies equally to Taiwan in this period. For Havel and the Taiwanese activists, Peng, Hsieh, and Wei when their state language became so ritualized, and its distance from reality so great, the operation of power through it became denaturalized. Like the proverbial emperor with no clothes, the structures of power produced through such language became apparent and de-legitimized, and as such, a site of political contestation. For Havel, as for Peng, Hsieh, and Wei, the fight was against a mode of language that, in its collective recitation, co-opted the subjectivity of individuals: “if ideology originally facilitated (by acting outwardly) the constitution of power by serving as a psychological excuse, then from the moment that excuse is accepted, it constitutes power inwardly, becoming an active component of that power. It begins to function as the principal instrument of ritual communication within the system of power.”17 Another important feature of the Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation was its conflation of democracy with nationalism. This is a feature of Taiwanese politics up to the present. In the program written by Peng, Hsieh, and Wei, overthrowing the Chiang regime was the equivalent of Taiwanese

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independence, because opposition to the KMT meant replacing its Chinese nationalist ideology with Taiwanese nationalism as well as the KMT authoritarianism with democracy. As noted earlier, this nexus was not necessarily a feature of oppositional political activity in Taiwan, as argued by Lei Chen and other liberal nationalists such as Li Ao. In 1972 Peng Ming-min wrote an account of his political struggle against the KMT. Like Havel’s writings on life under the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Peng’s book A Taste of Freedom is a compelling description of the practice of political dissent under authoritarianism. In it, he describes the efforts to print the Declaration, when he, Hsieh, and Wei sought out shady, backalley printers, invented cover stories, and held clandestine meetings in grubby hotel rooms in Taipei. It was in such a room that the three were arrested, after they had succeeded in making 10,000 copies. Peng wrote, “We were on the edges of the Manka underworld here and were ourselves too innocent to realize that every alley had its spies, every hotel its paid informants.”18 “Every petty informer knew he would be rewarded, all printers had been warned to report any unusual job orders, and every hotel-keeper had orders to call police attention to unusual events and behaviour”19 Peng and Wei were sentenced to eight years in prison and Hsieh for ten years. The trials and sentences were major news within Taiwan and internationally, and with Peng’s profile as a professor of law bringing pressure to bear on the government, he was released after fourteen months. He remained under intense surveillance, however, and in 1970 he made a dramatic escape to Sweden aided by Amnesty International and foreign and Taiwanese supporters on the island. Diaoyutai Islands Dispute Peng Ming-min’s views on the KMT’s untenable position on Taiwan were widely reiterated internationally, as indicated, for instance, by the comments of John Fairbank in 1957 quoted in chapter 2. Similarly, the Far Eastern Economic Review continued to be highly critical of the Chiang government right through the 1950s and into the 1970s.20 The support of the United States remained as the pillar of the KMT’s international legitimacy. Yet even this had begun to weaken in the face of the shift in geopolitical circumstances almost immediately after the Communist victory. From the 1950s, successive American governments sought ways to circumvent ideology and effect some kind of dialogue between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Semiofficial diplomatic exchanges had taken place in Geneva and Warsaw from 1954;21 the Sino-Soviet split became apparent to the United States in the very early 1960s and among senior U.S. government officials and

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representatives, shifts in policy were canvassed, for example, in the 1966 Congressional foreign relations committees chaired by Clement Zablocki and J. William Fullbright.22 These early signs led to a significant change in U.S. policy at the end of the 1960s. The Nixon administration began a process of U.S.–China détente that positioned both the United States and China against the Soviet Union. In January 1970, the United States and China conducted ambassadorial-level meetings in Warsaw during which the former signaled a shift in its policy to the Chinese representative.23 Although the negotiations were sometimes hostile, by the end of 1970, Nixon was able to make a press statement: “The United States is attempting to open channels of communication with Communist China, having in mind the fact that looking toward the future, we must have some communication and eventually relations with Communist China.” The idea of a Nationalist China or a Free China as distinct from and in opposition to a Communist China became irrelevant once the United States and China officially adopted a more pragmatic policy toward each other. The reconfiguration of cold war geopolitics broke down the bipolar division between communists and non-communists into a rather more clearly defined U.S.–Soviet rivalry that allowed for different possibilities of affiliation. Nationalist China, on one side of the global fight against Communism, had no place within the new U.S.–China relationship once the communist world was split in two. It became a distraction in the process of normalizing U.S.–China relations against their common hostility to the Soviet Union. Therefore, as mainstream politics under the Nixon administration became sufficiently accommodating of Communism to accept rapprochement with the PRC, the ROC became increasingly marginalized. The Republic of China experienced a series of diplomatic reversals as it was less and less able to exercise leverage without U.S. support in its international relations. These included the Diaoyutai Islands dispute in 1970–1971, the loss of the Republic’s UN seat in 1972, and a rush by many nations to switch recognition to the People’s Republic. Canada switched in October 1970, Japan followed suit in September 1972 and Australia in December of that year. The political marginalization of the Republic of China by U.S.–China détente that was occurring internationally was a key moment in the public undermining of the legitimacy of Nationalist China in Taiwan itself. As its external, international reference was withdrawn by a nation upon whom the ROC was dependent, the social meaning of the KMT-controlled practices in education, the military, the press, and public spectacle became more and more difficult to sustain. Local legitimizing strategies such as the appropriation of the story of Zheng Chenggong, discussed in the previous chapter, were inevitably insufficient once Nationalist China lost its place in

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the cold war. U.S.–China détente rendered the language of Nationalist China disconnected from reality in the way that Havel observed in Czechoslovakia, and this disconnect could not be countered by Taiwan’s authoritarian government. Free China certainly did not disappear. The rhetoric of crisis and struggle against adversity that had characterized the language of the KMT since the inception of Chinese nationalist ideology became apposite in these circumstances. Even after a year of reversals, in a speech to the National Assembly on February 21, 1972, at the beginning of Nixon’s visit, Chiang Kai-shek was still able to exhort the Taiwanese to resist Communism and struggle against setbacks for the revival of China: “The key to leading the defeat of chaos and the recovery of the mainland is for all the people of the nation to have hope and confidence.”24 However, for those in Taiwan, U.S.–China détente and the international irrelevance of the idea of a Free China deepened the ritualization of those statements in the way that Havel described in Czechoslovakia around the same time. Without the external reference of cold war geopolitics, the language of struggle and aspiration became isolated and more and more self-referential. Without any possibility of it ever coming true, slogans like “fight communism and recover the mainland” were emptied of meaning and revealed themselves more and more as merely ritual practices that did nothing other than reproduce the raison d’etre of the KMT government. Though the state had sufficient strength to maintain the language of Free China into the mid-1980s, with each of the early international failures through the 1970s, the rhetoric of anti-Communism, struggle, and hope for revival became more and more hollow. The clearest marker the ritualization of the language of the KMT at the beginning of the 1970s was the way alternative expressions of Chinese nationalism filled the void left by its increasing hollowness. A new generation was emerging in Taiwan at the same time as these broad geopolitical changes were occurring. Its members were the product of twenty years of economic development and of a broadening of the demographic base of education. By, 1970, this generation of younger Taiwanese found themselves in schools, universities, and the armed forces reciting KMT ideology. But precisely as the meaning of KMT rhetoric evaporated, those in a position to perceive its emptiness immediately sought to fill the social vacuum with a different language, one that was legitimized in ways alternative to those of the KMT, and through which they could sustain the meaning of the nation and of their place in it. Taiwanese nationalism remained suppressed by the apparatuses of the state, and the alternative language that expressed the KMT’s failing legitimacy in the early 1970s was initially an alternative Chinese nationalism. Therefore, the failures of the KMT government internationally and domestically through

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the 1970s did not in themselves mean a negation of Taiwan’s Chinese identity. Rather, they undermined the KMT’s authority to exercise control over the language of Chinese nationalism. These alternatives arose from segments of Taiwanese society able to apprehend the language and practices of Chinese nationalism and reproduce them for political purposes. On one hand was a co-option of the nationalist rhetoric of the KMT by groups outside of the party-state structure such as radicalized students; on the other was a resurgence of liberal nationalism among the intelligentsia and writers in the style of early republican intellectuals like Hu Shih and of the May Fourth Movement. The first event that undermined the meaning of Nationalist China was the dispute over the sovereignty over the Diaoyutai Islands, a small group of uninhabited islands 110 nautical miles northeast of Taiwan. After the 1894 Sino-Japanese War, the islands had been incorporated into Okinawa Prefecture, but the terms of the peace treaties between Japan, the United States, and the ROC signed in 1951 and 1952 that revoked Japan’s claim over Taiwan and annulled the Treaty of Shimonoseki, allowed for an interpretation that they had restored the islands to Nationalist Chinese control.25 In 1969 the possibility of oil reserves around the islands was suggested in a report by the United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) as Japan and the United States began sensitive negotiations over the reversion of Okinawa. In July 1970, Japan formally notified the ROC of its claim for the islands under the terms of the reversion agreement with the United States and in early September of that year, the ROC foreign minister Wei Tao-ming, at a meeting of the Control Yuan Foreign Affairs Committee, made a counterclaim for ROC sovereignty.26 Wei demanded that Japan acknowledged the ROC claim and that the United States took into account the ROC position, and that the ROC be allowed the free movement of boats and people to the island. Soon after a feature article appeared in Zhongyang Ribao attacking the legitimacy of Japan’s move to take the islands. The piece argued against the idea that the Diaoyutai were geologically connected to Okinawa and noted that they failed to appear on Japanese maps covering Okinawa and Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period. The article contrasted this with Okinawa itself, claiming that the island had appeared on Chinese imperial maps since the Ming dynasty but not on Japanese ones. As well as covering history and geography, the piece also used the argument that the Diaoyutai were Chinese on the basis of international law.27 The following day, Gu Zhenggang, the chairman of the World Anti-Communist League, made a statement in Japan saying that although the issue was not within his area of responsibility, he wished to “declare to Japanese friends that China’s sovereignty would not easily be encroached upon.”28 Later that

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month, Japanese police from Okinawa removed an ROC flag on the largest island, and there followed operations in the surrounding waters by the Japanese and ROC navies. Overall, in keeping with the seriousness of the dispute for the KMT, the Taiwanese press and particularly Zhongyang Ribao were giving the issue significant but generally measured and sober coverage from September 1970 until the end of that year. In Hong Kong and the United States, however, the Diaoyutai Islands issue had grown into a public nationalist movement among Chinese university students. Overseas Chinese student groups had begun mobilizing in December 1970 and in January 1971 they staged simultaneous demonstrations across the United States involving several thousand students.29 The issue escalated in Taiwan through 1971 after the April 9 decision by the United States to formally support Japanese accession of the islands together with Okinawa, to take place in 1972.30 Zhongyang Ribao reported the official response on April 11 from the foreign minister Wei Tao-ming of the ROC’s intention to oppose the U.S. position. Again, the paper re-stated the historical claim over the island and insisted that the possibility of oil reserves in the surrounding waters did not influence the government’s reaction.31 Foreign Ministry spokesman Wei Yusun “strongly emphasized: that although the US State Department had already advised that American oil companies had temporarily stopped deep drilling in the surrounding waters, this did not influence the government’s position . . . The government’s position has been made clear to the US State Department which is that the issue is one of national sovereignty, not oil exploration.”32 In contrast to the measured tone of Zhongyang Ribao, other newspapers reported the issue in far more vitriolic terms than had been used the previous September. In a dramatic April 15 editorial piece in Zili Wanbao titled “Women de you! Women de xue! (Our Oil! Our Blood!),” the paper presented an inflammatory and tendentious argument that China’s claim to the Diaoyutai oil reserves was morally righteous, whereas Japan’s was purely opportunistic. The piece firmly located the issue in the context of the bitter legacy of the War of Resistance Against Japan from 1937: Let us be reminded of the history of the War of Resistance Against Japan and let me propose a saying for the annals of history: “One drop of oil! One drop of blood!” We must recognize that the oil under the territorial waters of Taiwan is a lifeline for our nation’s people. This is our oil and this is our blood! If we must use our blood to protect our oil, then we must draw on the spirit and determination of thirty-four years ago, and follow a new path to war!33

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Within a week of the U.S. decision, however, the issue was overtaken in the press by the visit of the president of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, beginning on April 16.34 But continuing through April and into June was a wide-ranging protest movement operating at the margins of the sanctioned expressions of opposition to the Japanese claim and the U.S. support for it that had been presented in the press up to that point. The different themes of the issue—oil, history, and sovereignty—worked around a common moral axis. They positioned China and Japan on either side of a moral divide on the basis of Japanese opportunism in contrast with Chinese national suffering. In this moral relationship, the Japanese were only interested in the possibility of oil reserves and were inflicting yet another rapacious assault on Chinese national dignity along a lineage with the historical struggle against Japan by China in the 1930s. Simultaneously, as suggested in the Zili Wanbao editorial, while the issue was one of national sovereignty and dignity and not oil rights, China had a right to the Diaoyutai oil anyway. The China whose sovereignty was being violated was neither Nationalist nor Communist, but a far broader understanding of the meaning of the Chinese nation. In the context of the dispute, the key point of identification was the China that had fought and suffered in the War of Resistance Against Japan. This conceptualization of China was more closely linked to the nationalist ideology of Sun Yat-sen, and the period of Chinese history from the end of the Qing until the Japanese invasion in 1937. The transnational forms of the protest movement used a common language of outrage over the violation of Chinese sovereignty and lamented over China’s humiliation by foreign powers, rather than the post-1949 Nationalist language of restoration or the Communist language of revolution. Therefore, the issue was only partially within the orbits of the languages of both Nationalist China and the People’s Republic. This aspect of the dispute was reflected in both Nationalist and Communist China expressing strong opposition to the Japanese claim for the Diaoyutai independently of each other. No mention was made of the PRC position in the sanctioned Taiwanese press, but unofficially the protest movement was divided into pro-Communist and pro-Nationalist camps, particularly in the United States and Hong Kong. The possibility of the PRC using the protest movement in Taiwan as an opportunity to infiltrate the island was of great concern to both ROC and American government officials.35 The Protect Diaoyutai Islands Movement (Bao Diao Yundong) escalated toward the end of the week following the U.S. decision to support Japan. Most of the protests occurred on Taipei university campuses, where students organized committees, engaged in rallies and protest marches, and wrote

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petitions. The leaders of the activities were mainly students from Hong Kong and Macao, and it was newspapers from the two territories that provided the most detailed information on the issue.36 The U.S. decision to support Japan was made on a Friday and between the following Monday, April 12 to Saturday April 17, banners and posters were erected by students on campuses attacking the United States and Japan, and various demonstrations were held both at the universities and at the U.S. and Japanese embassies. On Wednesday, April 14, a rallies was held at several universities that ended with a march on the Japanese and American embassies. A delegation of students also met with the American ambassador to present a petition.37 The following day, Zhongyang Ribao reported the student protests outside the Japanese embassy, in a small descriptive article that again took a moderate tone: “Students from National Taiwan University (NTU) arranged themselves in orderly lines behind the national flag and marched to the Japanese embassy. Then they arrived in an orderly way at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where outside the gates they broke into song: ‘Long live our leader’ and declared ‘The Diaoyutai Islands are our territory.’ ”38 At the Taiwan Normal University on that Wednesday, student groups and societies from across the university produced posters denouncing Japan and the United States. Slogans included “Our territory will not be invaded by those people; our rights will not be easily violated by those people” and “Japan has no right to violate our sovereignty, America has no right to write our history.” And as reported in Zhongyang Ribao on Thursday, students from National Taiwan University marched up Zhongshan South Road behind a banner that read “Support the government” to the Japanese embassy and on to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.39 Over the following days, numerous groups on the campus of National Taiwan University held meetings until the morning of the Saturday the 17th, when a mass rally was held in the sports ground. Over 4,000 students assembled and after the president of the university had made a speech stating his “attitude” to the rally, students gave a series of emotional speeches expressing their opposition to the islands’ accession to Japan.40 After the rally, the chairman of a combined organizing committee, Tan Jiahua, organized the signing of a petition in blood, or a “blood letter” (xue shu) to present to the American and Japanese embassies. Students lined up at the campus health center where four nurses drew blood from each student, who then took a calligraphy brush to write his or her name. Some students wrote with their fingertips pricked with a disinfected needle. The blood letter day began at eight in the morning and continued until after six in the evening at which time there were four, ten-meter-long petitions with a total of over 2000 names.41

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The coverage of these events, despite their scale, was notably played down in the press. Zhongyang Ribao described “dozens” (jishi) of students at the April 15 protest rally at NTU, yet the photograph that appeared in the leading journal Daxue of the event in May clearly shows some thousands of people. Students were frustrated at the reporting by the government-controlled media, and a group of journalists met with a student delegation from Taiwan Normal University on April 17 to hear their grievances. The students were unconvinced by the journalists’ explanations.42 The student protests flared again after June 17 when the United States and Japan signed the Okinawa reversion agreement. They followed a pattern similar to the earlier protests, with large numbers of banners and posters on the university campuses and rallies. A tutor in Philosophy at National Taiwan University, Wang Xiaobo, wrote an open letter to the people of the ROC and letters of protest to the Japanese and American embassies. He accused the Americans of appeasement along the lines of Chamberlain at Munich in September 1938 and warned against the possibility of war with Japan.43 The student protests in the first half of 1971 were only one part of a broader movement that also took in older intellectuals and professionals in Taiwan. In the April edition of Daxue, there appeared a declaration signed by ninety-three academics, professionals, and business people condemning Japanese encroachment on Chinese sovereignty and supporting any action the government might choose to take on the issue: Recently, the Japanese claim over the Diaoyutai Islands has caused great concern among Chinese people (huaren) all over the world. For we Chinese concerned about the important issue of national sovereignty, it is impossible to remain silent. Therefore, we wish to make known the following point of view: on the basis of history, geography and law, the Diaoyutai Islands are an inseparable part of the territory of China’s Taiwan province. We emphatically oppose the attempt by certain foreign countries to violate our country’s sovereignty and strongly support any action our country’s government takes to uphold its sovereignty.44 The following month, in May, most of the journal, Daxue, was devoted to the Islands dispute. A large part gave a detailed coverage of the student protests in April, with eyewitness accounts and reports by representatives of the students. There were also extended pieces on the historical and legal issues surrounding the dispute, generally presenting measured analyses. The editors of Daxue immediately picked up on the broader implications for the future of Nationalist China on Taiwan of the U.S. position on Japan’s claim over the

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Islands. Quoting a U.S. State Department statement that the status of Taiwan and Penghu had not yet been resolved, the journal wrote: America’s ridiculous position is even more serious than its ridiculous position on the Diaoyutai Islands, because now, with surprising arrogance, it wants to punish the 36000 square kilometres of China’s territory of Taiwan, and to decide the fate of fourteen million Chinese. This is an insult towards those Chinese people. We Chinese can only feel extreme resentment towards this kind of arrogant and unreasonable misconception.45 Some scholars working on Taiwanese politics have located the Diaoyutai Island movement within the narrative of democratization, as a proto-opposition movement.46 However, this interpretation is valid only in a limited sense. The movement was implicitly critical of the government in that it highlighted its inability to maintain the sovereign integrity of the Republic and it took the form of unsanctioned organized political activities. Yet at the same time it included pro-government sentiments, such as seen in the march from NTU on April 14 and in the April 1971 declaration in Daxue. Accordingly, the official government response was ambivalent: although the protests were played down by the press, Zhongyang Ribao still described the students as “expressing their patriotic spirit”47 during the NTU march. Rather than an antigovernment protest, the Diaoyutai Islands movement is better understood as a complex and structured response to the failure of the government to act effectively to defend the Republic’s sovereignty. It was, therefore, a response to a failure of the KMT’s legitimacy to govern. This carried with it implications for the political contestation over Taiwan’s national identity. When Japan claimed the Islands and the ROC was sidelined in the negotiation process by the United States, the KMT’s rhetoric of consolidation, reconstruction, and moral righteousness were undermined and themes of humiliation and suffering at the hands of foreign powers were revived. While the student protests and the coverage in Daxue and the press were negotiating with an authoritarian state, and were circumspect in their provocation of the government by avoiding direct attacks on its inability to act effectively, ultimately the government was being marginalized as much domestically by the Diaoyutai dispute as it was internationally. For the students, intellectuals and professionals who were critically engaged with the problematic discourse that the issue of a Nationalist China had become by the early 1970s, their recourse was to an alternative discourse with a different set of legitimizing practices outside of those carefully cultivated by the KMT. Two thousand students signing a petition in blood and leading

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intellectuals writing authoritative commentaries, appeals, and condemnations constituted the limits of a spectrum of both unsanctioned and sanctioned political activities. This was a set of practices that marked out a range of radical and liberal responses to the issue. Each moment can be understood as making references to earlier as well as contemporaneous practices, such as the May Fourth movement and American student radicalism, but which were nonetheless as implicated in China’s national project as those codified by the KMT. The Protect Diaoyutai Islands Movement was a different way of acting out a Chinese national identity, sustained by meanings of the nation that remained viable even under Taiwan’s changing circumstances. At one end of this spectrum were the authoritative statements of Daxue, beginning with April 1971 declaration signed by ninety-three signatories including intellectuals and professionals. With the government’s position weakened by America’s lack of support, this statement operated as a clear definition of the scope of the movement. It set down its position as not antigovernment, but cast the issue in the broader historical context of China’s national struggle, with its reference to “certain foreign countries violat[ing] our country’s sovereignty.”48 It was a statement that the KMT had been unable to make since it had located itself so firmly within the global fight against Communism that it was difficult for it to be openly critical of the United States and Japan. The signatories of the declaration were not acting as representatives of the government or of the Republic of China, but as representatives of this broader understanding of China, as Chinese people or “hua ren.” They were by virtue of their status as well-known figures in their respective fields self-appointed representatives who were nonetheless convincing spokespeople for the Chinese position on the Islands dispute. The other articles in the journal were detailed analyses by expert opinion of the legal, geographic and historical issues around the possession of the islands that legitimized the ideological claim in the journal’s opening declaration. In this way, the April issue of Daxue was engaged in a highly polished attempt to claim independent intellectual authority. Its arguments for ROC sovereignty over the Diaoyutai Islands were given legitimacy by their clarity and objectivity and an apparent absence of ideology. There is none of the emotive language and immediacy that characterized Chinese (and Taiwanese) nationalism, nor any specific examples of writing on the Diaoyutai issue, such as the April 15 Zili Wanbao editorial. At the other end of this set of discursive practices was the “blood petition” produced by the students at National Taiwan University. The petition was a kind of improvised ritual of protest or remonstrance that referenced imperial and republican forms of political action. Like the theater of scholarship that legitimized the nationalist ideology in Daxue, the students participated in a

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theater of protest that took the practices of Chinese nationalist protests from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Esherick and Wasserstrom have written insightfully into Chinese student politics in the 1980s using exactly this notion of “theater”: protesters worked from familiar “scripts” which gave a common sense of how to behave during a given action, where and when to march, how to express their demands, and so forth. Some of these scripts originated in the distant past, emerging out of traditions of remonstrance and petition stretching back for millennia. More were derived (consciously and unconsciously) from the steady stream of student-led mass movements that have taken place since 1919.49 They note the creative way student protests draw on these scripts to produce political action. It becomes “street theater: untitled, improvisational, with constantly changing casts,”50 as one would expect unsanctioned political activity in an authoritarian state to be. A key example given in Esherick and Wasserstrom’s interpretation of the 1989 Tiananmen protests was the elaborate performance of the presentation of the petition on the steps of the Great Hall of the People by three kneeling students. In the symbolism of that moment the students referenced acts of submission to a Chinese emperor and the elaborate formalities of imperial power. They were offering a critique of the Communist leadership of China as imperial, by which they meant aloof, despotic, and corrupt. Esherick and Wasserstrom also comment on the high degree of organization of some of the 1989 protest movement, with march monitors and a “security force,”51 and this also accords with the systematic way the NTU students went about their protest, with concerns for health and hygiene and an almost military level of order. As with the Tiananmen Square protests, the students’ protest petition at National Taiwan University spoke from the same “script” of late Qing and May Fourth and Republican political action, all of which offered a rich array of political action from which to draw legitimacy. But in the creative and improvisational performance of protest that Esherick and Wasserstrom describe, the NTU students used different references that modulated the meanings of their actions. For example, they did not kneel before the Japanese and U.S. embassies, thus obviating any reference to those powers as imperial in the same way as the 1989 protesters criticized China’s “new emperors.” Nor did they draw on the rich vein of Communist political theater that produced such seemingly incongruous actions as the Tiananmen protesters singing The Internationale or carrying pictures of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.52

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Indeed, references to Communism and Mao and Zhou in the political theater of Tiananmen protests highlights the key difference between the two movements, apart from their relative importance, which was their ultimate target. The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were explicitly aimed at the authoritarianism and corruption of the Chinese Communist Party’s governance of China, and some protesters imagined an idealized leftism as embodied in Mao and Zhou that the contemporary leadership was seen as having betrayed. In contrast, the Diaoyutai Islands protesters were mainly anti-Japanese and anti-U.S., articulating a Chinese nationalist message that the KMT government itself was unable to directly articulate. Instead of being the target of the protests, the KMT government was ultimately marginalized by them. Even leaving out the explicitly left-wing and Communist movements, students could draw on a very rich history of anti-foreign protest movements in China. One such example is the 1905 Anti-American boycott in Shanghai. This movement, in response to the imposition of punitive immigration regulations directed specifically against the Chinese in San Francisco, took the form of numerous meetings, petitions, and eventually a coordinated boycott of American products on sale in Shanghai. Like the Diaoyutai Island dispute, it placed the Qing government in an ambivalent position: the American government policy confronted a broadly imagined (and emerging) Chinese identity that was very distinct from the Qing state, but that the Qing needed to be able to manage to maintain a degree of political legitimacy. Therefore, while the movement was nominally directed at the United States, like the subtext of the Diaoyutai issue, it was also an implicit challenge to the government. The 1905 boycott was unusual in that it emerged from the mercantile class in Shanghai, that it was not a violent uprising, and that it was one of the earlier public modern political campaigns in China. In Wang Guanhua’s study of the boycott, he notes the historical importance of the petitioning of officials, but also suggests that these remained relatively exclusive acts of remonstrance and criticisms of governance, circulating as letters and books among the scholar-gentry. But with new forms of technology and media such as telegraphs and popular newspapers, the organization of largescale public meetings and petitions became a common form of political action, especially as the Qing empire began to collapse.53 The NTU students were also drawing on the narratives of the May Fourth movement and other, more specific campaigns, such as those from the 1910s to the 1930s. Protests against the Twenty One Demands in Beijing in 1915 attracted a crowd of 300,000 to the new Central Park in Beijing and demonstrated the way imperial spaces had been literally converted into public ones following the collapse of the Qing dynasty.54 Similarly, the NTU petition

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protest as well as the Chengchi University protest earlier in that week culminated in a march down Zhongshan South Road in central Taipei. The students were literally breaking out of the confines of the university and broadening the political scope of their movement by taking over a public space controlled by the state. The most dramatic element of the NTU protest in 1971 was the blood petition that produced some of the most potent symbolism of Chinese identity of the whole movement. Like the other elements of the theater of protest, writing in blood was an established “script,” though one that has not received the profile it perhaps deserves in the history of Chinese protest actions. Lamley refers to a “petition written in blood,” using the term “xue shu cheng,” by Taiwanese gentry to the Qing court before Taiwan’s cession to Japan in 1895.55 In Red Star Over China, Edgar Snow relates comments by Mao Zedong on the overthrow of the Manchu government in Hunan: “The original had been written in blood by Hsu T’eh-li . . . Hsu had cut off the end of his finger, as a demonstration of sincerity and determination, and his petition began, ‘Begging that parliament be opened, I bid farewell [to the provincial delegates going to Peking] by cutting my finger.’ ”56 And significantly, in an act that connects the politics of protest in Taiwan and contemporary mainland China, one of the best-known leaders of the 1989 movement, Chai Ling, bit the end of her finger and wrote out a slogan in her own blood during the campaign leading up to the June 4 massacres.57 The use of their blood was clearly intended by the students as a symbolic representation of their loyalty to the Chinese nation. This accorded with much of the rhetoric of Chinese nationalism from both the KMT and also the CCP. Sun Yat-sen and later Chiang Kai-shek routinely spoke in terms of life and death, with the Chinese people as engaged in a struggle for their very survival, and sacrificing blood, that is, dying, as part of the Chinese national struggle. As discussed earlier, an explicit connection was made in the press between the Diaoyutai oil reserves and the blood of the Chinese people, implying the willingness of the Chinese to go to war with Japan and die for the Islands. Blood, however, was more than a rhetorical flourish. Sun Yat-sen’s ideology of Chinese identity made explicit reference to blood as a biological connection between all Chinese people. In San Min Zhu Yi he wrote: “The greatest force is common blood. The Chinese belong to the yellow race because they come from the blood stock of the yellow race. The blood of ancestors is transmitted by heredity down through the race, making blood kinship a powerful force.”58 The NTU students, like Chai Ling two decades later, were acting out this ideology literally. Blood in this sense becomes an expression of the essentialist epistemology of Sunist Chinese nationalism, as

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something beyond culture and language and as essential in the physical bodies of Chinese people. In the context of mainland China, Ana Anagnost has suggested, drawing on the work of Bourdieu and Foucault, that the state had made the body a site of politics in new ways in the Mao era. The body became a location for the state to exercise power through the control of behavior: “They . . . cajoled, publicly shamed and generally pestered into conformity with model behavior. . . . They are . . . rituals of subjection, of subject making; they produce docile bodies and transform those bodies into signifiers.”59 A similar argument could be made about the operation of power in Republican China, with the New Life movement and its concern for behavior an attempt to reconstruct a field of control over the body in the context of the new Republic. The KMT published an optimistic report on New Life’s achievements in 1936, which emphasized this aspect of bodily control: There is no wandering or shuffling about the streets, no stopping in the middle of the road, no gaping about and no blocking, the traffic. . . . Spitting in public places calls for a reprimand, not from the police but from the followers of the New Life Movement. Rudeness and vulgar manners have been, or are being eliminated.60 The principles of New Life were maintained in Taiwan, especially in the school system. Students in schools well into the 1980s were supervised by party and army officials, and boys undertook military training while girls learned nursing, all of which was designed to exercise the kind of bodily discipline that the New Life movement had tried to achieve in the 1930s. Although the body may have been a site of the inscription of power under the KMT through the education system, such an extreme act as a petition in blood could be interpreted as an ambiguous response to the politicization of the body. On one hand, it could be argued that it was an act of submission to Chinese nationalist ideology, taking the embodiment of the nation to its logical end point. In consciously trying to evoke their commitment to Chinese identity through their own blood, the students sought to evoke a politically powerful sense of racial kinship as the basis of Chinese identity. This essentialist appeal to authenticity excluded the possibility of any critical distance in their engagement with the idea of China. As blood being Chinese could not be a matter of choice or debate. But there is also an element of the blood petition that could be described as beyond the limits of the KMT’s nationalist practices. The New Life movement and the militaristic ideology of the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek both express an aversion to the corporeal nature of the body, as indicated by the derisive comment about spitting. As the students

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lined up and had nurses draw their blood to write, they subjected their own bodies to a quasi-military form of discipline that embraced their corporeal nature as a physical expression of nationhood, but this went beyond the limits of the KMT’s institutions of bodily control. While students in schools and universities in Taiwan may have participated in military drilling and rituals of ideological indoctrination, they were not subjected to any routine institutional control over their blood. All of this points to the instability of politics in Taiwan in this period. The Diaoyutai protests were indicative of the weight of Chinese culture and history in Taiwan, and the degree of effectiveness with which the KMT maintained a viable symbolic economy of Chinese nationalist ideology. These presented the Taiwanese students with a rich array of political practices with which to make protests, with a kind of legitimacy that energized their actions. But the protests also exposed the failing international legitimacy of the KMT and went beyond the kind of received political behavior that the KMT condoned domestically. Therefore, the students were challenging the legitimacy of the KMT to control the language of Chinese nationalism. This can be further contrasted with the practices of Taiwanese nationalism described earlier. Like the language that the students could draw upon, Taiwanese nationalists also had a language of struggle and suffering, but their acts of protests were inflected differently. In Japan, part of the Taiwanese nationalist movement formed a government-in-exile, taking on the trappings of statehood as a legitimizing language. Similarly in Taiwan itself, though the possibilities of Taiwanese nationalist action were extremely limited into the 1970s, Peng Ming-min, Hsieh Tsung-min, and Wei Ting-chao enacted their politics with something closer to the political acts in Eastern Europe, through a samizdat-style self-published manifesto. The Declaration of Formosan SelfSalvation was not written in blood and was not meant to symbolize an essential Taiwanese identity or the body as a site of politics. Rather it emphasized the text as the key political location of their antigovernment activism and Taiwanese nationalism, and it resonates with Vaclav Havel’s pursuit of truth in language in Czechoslovakia. The contrast between the Taiwanese and Chinese nationalist practices in Taiwan over this period, and up to the present, says a great deal about the complicated, contested and often inconsistent ways in which identity politics, and identity itself, have been played out. Chinese imperial culture and nationalism retained a rich and viable language that was reinforced and reworked by the KMT and appropriated by students and intellectuals as part of the contestation of Taiwanese politics. At the same time, Taiwanese nationalism was creating its own discourses and sources of legitimacy, borrowing some from Chinese nationalism, and some from political practices

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around the world, such as samizdat literature and the Wilsonian ideals of self-determination and democracy. Taiwan’s rich and complex identity is the weave of these threads of contesting discourses, with Chinese nationalism being contested almost immediately upon Retrocession and Taiwanese national identity appropriating, creating, and legitimizing new ideologies of identity in new ways right up to the present.

CHAPTER 6

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he protests over the Diaoyutai Islands issue show the complex way identity was contested by students and the KMT government, with both claiming the legitimacy to speak as Chinese. It also shows a degree of effectiveness with which the KMT had substantiated Chinese identity in Taiwan through state institutions. At the same time, as the blood petition indicates, symbols of Chinese identity, for example, from imperial history and the May Fourth movement, also had longer history than KMT rule over the island. Against this were developing “scripts” of Taiwanese identity, such as the government-in-exile and samizdat publishing that applied different symbolisms to legitimize Taiwanese identity. For Taiwan’s international situation, the Diaoyutai Islands issue was only the first major failure experienced in the 1970s. Only a few months after the Diaoyutai crisis, on October 25, 1971, the United Nations passed Resolution 2758 that said: “The General Assembly . . . Recognizing that the representatives of the Government of the People’s Republic of China are the only lawful representatives of China to the United Nations . . . Decides to restore all its rights to the People’s Republic of China . . . and to expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the place which they unlawfully occupy at the United Nations and in all the organizations related to it.”1 The expulsion came at the end of a long and complex diplomatic process by which the ROC had endeavored to forestall the recognition of the PRC. After a moratorium on dealing with the issue in the UN until 1960, the recognition issue became classified as an “important question” under the rules of the UN and therefore requiring a two-thirds majority in the General Assembly to pass any change in the ROCs and the PRCs status. In the 1960s, as support

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for the ROC continued to decline, the possibility of dual representation within the UN was raised by the Italian government, in which both Taipei and Beijing would maintain seats in the General Assembly and the PRC would take over in the Security Council. Various resolutions and proposals worked through the United Nations before the ROC withdrew shortly before the ultimate vote to expel Taiwan.2 The news of the expulsion was treated soberly by the press, without any of the vitriol of the editorial comment on the Diaoyutai Islands. In the major newspapers, the details of the resolutions and how the rules of the UN worked against the ROC were laid out in detail. Zili Wanbao also gave extensive coverage of the response by the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, George Bush, later to become U.S. President, who referred to the expulsion of the ROC as a “moment of infamy.”3 Outside of the press reaction, the UN issue did not generate the kind of nationalist protest that the Diaoyutai Islands issue did. As Mab Huang noted, in the United States and Hong Kong, the Diaoyutai Islands issue positioned the respective supporters of the ROC and the PRC against Japan, and though the two sides struggled over who had the right to speak for China, their common ground was a broadly imagined Chinese identity.4 The loss of the seat at the UN was an unequivocal rebuff to the ROC and a validation of the PRC’s claim to be the true representatives of the Chinese people. There was a small protest on a university campus, when students at Tunghai University held a protest against the United Nations, which included placards supporting Chiang Kai-shek, and one of them, again, was written in blood, but overall, the response to the loss of the ROC’s seat at the UN was muted.5 The international situation had been worsening through 1972, with countries such as Japan and Australia switching recognition. Another setback for the KMT followed in 1972, when Nixon made his historic visit to China, signaling the unraveling of public U.S. support for the ROC over the PRC. Again, there were no inflammatory editorials like the blood and oil commentary in Zili Wanbao, but a generally restrained reporting of the visit setting a tone that reflected the gravity of the event for Taiwan’s diplomatic relations. An editorial in Zhongyang Ribao said: The joint communiqué released by President Nixon and Zhou Enlai affirmed that Taiwan is a part of China. This is certainly true. At the same time, [Nixon] also knows that Taiwan is under the sovereignty of the Republic of China, because seven hundred million freedom and peaceloving Chinese people have faith in this connection, and resist the violence of Communist oppression.6

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The process of diplomatic reversals reached a conclusion of sorts at the end of the decade, when on January 1, 1979, the United States finally recognized the PRC and withdrew recognition of the Republic of China. With Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek dead, and the PRC having embarked on the Open Door Policy, “Free China” or “Nationalist China” had become a footnote to US-China relations. In its place were normal relations with the People’s Republic of China and the Taiwan Relations Act, which mandated ongoing military support for “Taiwan.”7 Taiwan’s president, Chiang Kai-shek’s son Chiang Ching-kuo, made a New Year’s speech at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei in 1979, at which, despite the decade of setbacks to the Nationalist position, he continued to use the language that had characterized the KMT rule of Taiwan for the previous thirty years: The spirit of the Republic of China is based on the Three Principles of the People, peaceful endeavour, building the nation, and advancing unity (da tong). As well as this spirit, as we build the nation we promote the majestic qualities of the Chinese people. . . . The history of the Republic of China has been especially bitter and difficult, but this history is also a shining light. The Republic of China has never bowed its head in the face of adversity or given in to fear, and never surrendered to the enemy.8 Although these events were irrecoverable setbacks for the viability of Taiwan in its guise as Free China, they were not unexpected and did not by themselves overturn KMT authority on Taiwan. The implausibility of the continuing claim to be the representative government of all of China made for good copy in journals with a dry editorial style like the Far Eastern Economic Review, but the complexity of Taiwan’s identity politics gave the KMT other narratives from which to draw and maintain strategies of legitimacy. As the blood petition and the Koxinga Shrine indicate, there were other forms of Chinese identity in Taiwan and, other ways of naming and legitimizing Taiwan as Chinese that were interwoven with and contested with those promoted explicitly by the KMT government. At the same time, a specifically Taiwanese identity was well established by the 1970s as a coherent narrative in a lineage that traced back at least to the 1920s. From the early activists under the Japanese such as Cai Peihuo and Lin Xiantang, through the Formosan nationalists in the 1950s and the democracy activists in the 1960s, the basis of a Taiwanese nationalist ideology had been elaborated in a wide range of writings. The “Taiwan Relations Act” was a significant moment in the practices of naming and legitimizing Taiwan as well as the marginalization of the Republic of China in the discourses of international relations.

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These other narratives smoothed the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule in the late 1980s, giving the KMT and opposition political forces a wide array of “Taiwan ideas” to draw upon and co-opt for their specific political ends. Therefore, the NTU students not only contested for the legitimacy to speak as Chinese, on the basis of some of the same rhetoric as that of the KMT, of struggle and crisis, but also went beyond the KMT’s practices of naming, literally with their own blood. Taiwanese nationalists imagined a Republic of Taiwan that “lived in truth,” and some went as far as constructing an imaginary state to legitimize their identity. Even the United States government could create a new nonnational, but coherent and singular identity for Taiwan in the Taiwan Relations Act. The Taiwan as understood in the Taiwan Relations Act—not an internationally recognized nation-state nor a province of China—is an example of the way Taiwanese identity slips beyond the boundaries of a specifically national imagining to become a name given legitimacy by, in this instance, the political processes and foreign relations of the United States. As Anderson9 makes clear, when an identity seeks expression and legitimization as a political movement, it most commonly takes the form of nationalism, but in a broader view of identity than that of Anderson’s, Taiwan as a name, an identity, but not explicitly a nation, also acquired symbolic power in other forms. The discussion earlier of Taiwan as an object of scholarly inquiry is an example, and so was the act of Congress which mandated military support for something called Taiwan—not the Republic of China, and not strictly speaking a nation, or a province, but a legitimized entity nevertheless. Of these broader notions of Taiwanese identity, one of the most important that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s was that of a developing economy. Again, this was a not a necessarily national or nationalist idea for Taiwanese or Chinese nationalists. It did not make any claims for the essential identity of the Taiwanese people as Chinese, or for their identity to be a matter of subjective choice and commitment as Taiwanese. But the development idea has become one of the most powerful narratives for understanding Taiwan’s social life and history for the Taiwanese people themselves as well as for the international community. As noted previously, “Build Taiwan” replaced “Defend Taiwan” after the start of the Korean War as an important aspect of the KMT ideological program. It encompassed the Sunist Chinese nationalist project of nation building, taking in many aspects of socioeconomic development and drawing on the rhetoric of the New Life movement.10 By the late 1970s and 1980s the notion of development narrowed to acquire a sharper focus on economic performance, and as the Taiwanese economy became so successful, the development idea

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took on a legitimacy, that other aspects of KMT ideology could not match. It also stood outside much of the anti-KMT and anti-Chinese ideology of Taiwanese nationalism, and was at odds with some of the ideology of the Taiwanese as victims of history, which some Taiwanese nationalists promoted. In its original form as a KMT slogan, the narrative of “Build Taiwan” was an improvised ideology to deal with the retreat of the Nationalist forces to the island. The KMT may have genuinely wanted Taiwan to become a model for all of China, but under the circumstances it was also the only viable positive message for their role on Taiwan that they could promote. The way the narrative encompassed Taiwan, however necessary under the circumstances, was also a significant example of the naming of Taiwan with a coherent and legitimate meaning, thus consolidating Taiwan as a meaningful identity in its own right from the earliest days of the KMT refugee rule of the island.11 The previous chapter presented an example of the development idea in the Lianhe Bao article by Liu Songzhou in 1961. It proclaimed the “building of Taiwan” (Taiwan jianshe) on the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the republic. Liu’s article analyzed Taiwanese socioeconomic development under different categories. For example, on education, he wrote: In the sphere of the development of education, the figures over the last ten years show great advancement and success. In national education, in the 1959 academic year, the whole province together has 1720 schools, 33,314 classes and 1,769,445 students, which equaled 95.44 percent of children of school age.12 As noted in the previous chapter, even in 1961, the use of statistics to make political and even quasi-moral points about the value of the government, was well established. Writing about industrial production, Liu said, “Compared to fifteen years ago, this is an increase of 9.91 times; just taking manufacturing, it is 13.25 times greater; in mining 3.63, public infrastructure has grown by 6.35 times.”13 The narrative of development as invoked in government statistics is instrumental and nominally nonideological. It does not express the notion of a Chinese or Taiwanese essence, as blood or instinct, or as a function of subjectivity, but constructs an implied postwar historical narrative for Taiwan on an objective basis, using economic and social statistics. Like the complex weave of references that made the blood petition a meaningful nationalist act among Taiwanese students, national development as a narrative operated meaningfully within the changing political circumstances in Taiwan. A successful developing market economy legitimized this particular aspect of KMT governance domestically and also made sense in the broader geopolitical struggle

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between Capitalism and Communism. Taiwan’s success was a model for capitalist “third world” development. In the 1970s another version of the economic development theme linked it to Taiwan’s deteriorating international situation. In the weeks after UN Resolution 2758, Zili Wanbao published an editorial commentary about maintaining economic growth by drawing upon relationships with overseas Chinese communities, thus circumventing the possible repercussions of Taiwan’s international isolation: “Our island economy possesses a great potential, and it is the 15,000,000 Chinese living overseas with whom we can do business. They can take us ahead by opening up markets for the products of the free motherland.”14 The use of the phrase “our island economy” (women de haidao jingji) suggests an exclusive Taiwanese identity subverting the abstract notion of the Republic of China, and this can be related back to the argument presented in chapter 1: simply referring to, or naming, Taiwan in this way differentiates the meaning of Taiwan. When the United States switched recognition to the PRC in 1979, a key government response was to reiterate the rhetoric of Build Taiwan. Zhongyang Ribao wrote: “We must strengthen national defence, develop the economy and strengthen every aspect of national development. Most important today is the strengthening of our hearts, and the strengthening of the spirit of the people.”15 By the 1980s, the development idea appeared in versions that focused specifically on the kind of economic entity Taiwan had become by that time. Just after the official lifting of martial law, this variation appeared in a piece in Taiwan Shibao entitled “Cong haiwai kan Taiwan (Looking at Taiwan from overseas),” that warned of the risks of Taiwan’s booming export economy. Liu Ruilin wrote: But pick up the box of an electric fan, and surprisingly printed underneath will be “Made in Taiwan.” Look at the base of the fan, and there again are the words “Made in Taiwan.” I do not know if fans made in Taiwan will ever be sold in America with the French brand Pierre Cardin, but I believe spending nearly NT$900 for an electric fan made in Taiwan is too expensive, because you can get a very nice fan in Taipei for between one and two hundred dollars.16 With the phrase Made in Taiwan, Taiwan had become located within the discourse of postwar East Asian development, a “Little Dragon,” one of the “flying geese” following Japan into an export-driven economy of low-wage light industrial production, making cheap toys and clothes for American consumers.

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Twenty years later, Chen Po-chih, Chairman, Council for Economic Planning and Development, could write in a language that fully embraced the development narrative, erasing the subjective references to “spirit” and “hearts” that characterized Chinese nationalist rhetoric from Sun Yat-sen, through the New Life movement and the KMT rule over the island: Over the past half-century, Taiwan has created an economic miracle, which has been especially notable for the achievement of rapid economic growth with price stability and equitable income distribution. Now Taiwan must respond to the new era of fast-changing information technologies and trade liberalization by moving toward a knowledge-based economy.17 The KMT’s language of “Communist bandit cliques” and “recover the mainland” had become ritualized as political slogans by the 1960s, and certainly by 1970s and 1980s, their use signified a nominal acquiescence to KMT authority, albeit one that kept open numerous strategies of passive and active resistance. The rhetoric of Taiwanese development, however, acquired legitimacy in the context of Taiwan’s rapid economic growth in the postwar period, and in this last example, absorbed the legitimizing global language and slogans of policy, business, and economics. The Little Dragon The importance of the development narrative is that it has become part of one of the most powerful narrative structures for understanding Taiwan, and as has been argued in different ways, becomes a form of knowing about Taiwan that produces its identity. Development was a part of a number of other discourses of identity into which Taiwan was incorporated in the 1980s. It can be summarized by the term “the Little Dragon,” though there was a range of related terms: the miracle economy, as Chen says above, the Tiger economy, the Asian Tigers or the NICs (the Newly Industrialized Countries). The discourse of the Little Dragon and its variants redrew the boundaries of identity in East Asia. It grouped Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore together as “hypergrowth” economies, sharing a common experience of modernization, rather than being distinguished by their different cultures, languages, politics, or histories. In this way, The Little Dragon was not a national concept, or indeed necessarily specific to a single nation’s history. In terms of Taiwan’s identity formations, the Little Dragon narrative set Taiwan apart from China very clearly. Economics and liberal free-market

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economic regimes became the primary categories and concepts for defining the Little Dragons, and they grouped Taiwan with the other Dragons on the basis of economic growth, thus establishing a different basis for imagining its identity from that of China’s. Thomas Gold’s book, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, placed the development narrative, the “miracle,” at the heart of his version of Taiwan’s social, political, and economic identity. Even earlier, the Canadian economist Roy Matthews wrote a study of the importance of East Asia development for Canada in 1983 which used the term Little Dragon to refer to Taiwan.18 In perhaps one of the best-known elaborations of the term, Ezra Vogel’s The Four Little Dragons presented a clear example of Taiwanese identity as one of the little dragons. As will be discussed in the following chapter, in Taiwan itself, it was in the period leading up to and after the lifting of martial law that the Little Dragon theme was fully embraced as a narrative of Taiwanese identity and as a part of the flood of new writings on postwar Taiwanese history. Liu’s piece appeared in 1987, and in 1989, the Taiwanese economist Wang Zuorong published Women ruhe chuangzao le jingji qiji (How We Created the Economic Miracle)19 that detailed the successful application of strategic industry assistance and a neoliberal economic regime of low taxes and low government spending. Gao Xijun’s 1990 book Taiwan Jingyan Sishinian (Forty Years of the Taiwan Experience) referred explicitly to Taiwan as one of the Four Little Dragons or Si Xiao Long.20 Although the Little Dragon discourse can be connected to the Build Taiwan slogan of the KMT, it has a specific genealogy. It is an umbrella term for a complex group of ideas about East Asian development that arose in the 1980s in the discourses of business, economics, and government policy, both in the West and in parallel in some of the Asian nations involved, and was deployed across the boundaries of scholarship, government policy, analysis, and journalism. The significance of the term for Taiwan is the way it structures Taiwanese historiography. The historical condition it expresses is one of emergence or ascendancy. It puts in place a group of related oppositional concepts at either end of a historical process of transformation: traditional/modern, agricultural/industrial, village/urban, family or group/individual and as the term is applied, becomes a relatively uncritical valorization of progress from the premodern to the modern. It also implicitly separates the smaller East Asian nations, including Taiwan, from the two “Big Dragons,” China and Japan, establishing a hierarchy of development with Japan at the top and China at the bottom. China, the “sleeping dragon,” would, when woken, be the biggest dragon of all. Therefore, the Little Dragon idea provides a conceptual basis

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for defining Taiwanese identity as something distinct from China, with a fundamentally different kind of history. It does so outside of nationalism using an objective basis for knowledge about the Taiwanese historical experience. The idea of Taiwan as a miracle can be located within a general theme of the transformation to modernity in non-Western countries. In the context of Asia, Japan presented the prototype in its modernization after the Meiji Restoration, and in particular after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. The American essayist, Randolph S. Bourne, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1916 about the challenge to American nationhood of the World War I made reference to “The spectacle of Japan’s sudden jump from medievalism to post-modernism.”21 The contemporary version of the idea of miraculous transformation for Japan reemerged at the end of the 1960s after a sustained period of very rapid economic growth. The British newspaper the Financial Times readmitted Japan to the club of Western nations in 1970 in a patronizing paragraph, showing a “flexible, positional superiority”22 that seemed to forget the scale and technological sophistication of Japan’s military machine only three decades earlier: “her latest massive stride has brought her abreast of the least affluent of the advanced countries of western Europe— Italy and Ireland, for example and it will not be long before she catches up with countries like Britain and Belgium.”23 When the Financial Times wrote this about Japan in 1970, the four countries that became the Little Dragons, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore were still included in the category of “developing countries” in scholarship, policy analysis, and international relations. These four countries were just part of a group that included countries in Latin America, South East Asia, southern Europe, and sometimes Africa. They were not exemplars of an Asian Way24 of development but were part of the Third World, separated from the West and the Communist bloc. The category of developing countries was a function of the cold war, with the West and Communism offering alternative and competing paths to development. A key site for the elaboration of the discourse of the developing country was the academic discipline of development economics. In the late 1960s, a so-called new orthodoxy emerged in the field to explain the industrialization of countries like Taiwan, the Philippines, Brazil, and Mexico25 in terms of the application of a liberal economic regime. This work is especially associated with the work of Bela Balassa and Simon Kutzets, and the group known as the “Chicago Boys,” the University of Chicago-trained economists who directed the neoliberal economic reforms in Chile from 1973 to 1989.26 Neoliberal development economics focused on the growth of export-driven trade that was a result of policies of import substitution, strategic industry assistance, and large-scale public infrastructure programs, as well as increasing

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human capital through education and a flexible labor market, high domestic savings rates, and so forth.27 In a way fairly typical of development economics, Samuel Ho summarized Taiwan’s development policies in the following way: Starting in 1958, it began to search for a new approach to industrialization, and in the early 1960s the new strategy took shape. It is probably best described by the government’s new slogan “Developing agriculture by virtue of industry, and fostering industry by virtue of foreign trade.” Basically the aim was to liberalize controls and to turn the economy increasingly towards external trade. To implement this, the government initiated reforms to eliminate some of the wastes and discriminatory aspects of its import-substitution program, and at the same time introduced new programs which actively encouraged exports.28 As Clark argued in the late 1980s, Taiwan was not a classical example of a neo-liberal model, but showed a combination of free market and central planning in its economic and policy characteristics.29 But although development economists may have argued about the specific characteristics of Taiwan’s economy,30 in the terms being argued here, it was the spectacular rates of economic growth that became the “truth statement” of Taiwan’s development in the postwar era. Taiwan has become an exemplar of a nonCommunist state achieving economic development while maintaining social stability. Indeed, in the terms of development economics, Taiwan really was the model state that the KMT had envisioned in 1950. The concept of an East Asian model of socioeconomic development, distinct from other developing economies in Latin America and elsewhere, was crystallized in the early 1980s when the collapse of world commodity prices and rising interest rates in the Western lender nations sent many of the Latin American economies into crises of spiraling debt and hyperinflation.31 The failure of those economies served to separate Taiwan and the other Dragons from the developing economies of Latin America as exemplars of the success of neoliberal development economics. In the literature 1980 onwards, development economics ceases to include the East Asian developing economies with the Latin American or southern European, and instead imagines them together as a coherent group with common characteristics. The economic success of Taiwan and the other Asian tigers also coincided with the various crises for left-wing governments in the West. Since the early 1970s, populist conservative writers such as Peter Drucker had been promoting East Asian economic growth as not merely a model for other developing countries but also for Western nations.32 At the beginning of the 1980s, the

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shifting of the political mood in the West away from the social democracy and welfarism toward policy regimes promoting free-market economic policies, exemplified by the 1979 Conservative government in Great Britain and the Reagan administration in the United States, gave the region and its model for economic success an audience outside of its original economic subdiscipline. As the hypergrowth economies entered their fourth decade, East Asian development acquired the quality of a powerful global historical trend that took hold in popular imagination beyond academia and governments. The Western writing on East Asia in the 1980s is redolent of the tensions of threat and triumph that Japan and the Little Dragons were seen to represent, especially in the context of painful economic restructuring in the West and then the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Vogel states this idea very baldly with respect to Taiwan: The industrial transformation that had taken western nations and Japan a century, or even longer, was completed in Taiwan in essentially four decades. . . . The society had been largely rural in 1949, but at the end of the next four decades nearly half the population was living in the metropolitan areas of Taipei, Kaohsiung and Taichung, and most of the rural population had been linked to nearby urban areas and transformed by urban culture.33 The pop futurologist, John Naisbitt, in his Megatrends Asia: Eight Asian Megatrends That Are Reshaping Our World makes a similar point with even greater hyperbole: “South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong have revolutionized the theory of economic development by showing the world how to skip over much of the industrialization phase and plunge into the information economy.”34 Apart from popular and academic writing, the ideas that circulated around the Little Dragons exerted an influence on government policymaking at the highest levels. In Australia perhaps more sharply than in any Western country, the Little Dragons discourse was a component of a reimagining of Australian identity as part of Asia. The peak of that movement came when the government report by Ross Garnaut, Australia and the North East Asian Ascendancy, was published in 1989. Garnaut’s report treated East Asian development as both offering a neoliberal policy model that could reasonably be applied to Australia as well as creating economies that would become the target markets for Australia’s own export-oriented trade in manufactured products and services. By following East Asia, sustained economic growth could be achieved by liberal economic regimes focused on exports, and the export market was East Asia itself.35

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Garnaut also echoed the earlier Financial Times commentary about Japan, with a similar reference to relative levels of socioeconomic advancement: “Australia cannot and need not aspire to emulate the rapid growth of Northeast Asia in recent decades [because] much of the superlative growth performance has reflected ‘catching up’ technologically, in a way that Australia is too far advanced to emulate.”36 This opinion was countered vigorously by the Singaporean government with a conservative moralistic variation on the miracle economy idea in which development could be achieved without the social problems of the West. In 1997, the-then Permanent Secretary of the Singaporean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kishore Mahbubani, gave a speech provocatively titled “Can Asians Think?” He argued “yes” because of the spectacular postwar economic achievements of the Little Dragons, and looked “beyond” the Western model of modernity: Today Asians can still see the plateau of contentment that most Western societies rest on but they can also see, beyond the plateau, alternative peaks that they can take their societies to. Instead of seeing the plateau as the natural end destination, there is now a desire to bypass the plateau (for they do not wish to be afflicted by some of the social and cultural ills that afflict Western societies) and to search for alternative peaks beyond.37 Garnaut’s comment is a useful summary of the teleology of modernity within the Little Dragon discourse. In their claims to a sweeping historical trend, academics such as Garnaut and Vogel and writers such as Naisbitt took a fairly narrowly defined and argued body of work in development economics and used it to make a much larger point about modernity and global history. The term Little Dragon came to cover a very wide range of ideas about the trajectory of Asian societies in the postwar period starting with economics and spreading to the social and even civilizational realm. The discourse of the Little Dragon remained underpinned and limited by the notion of the hypergrowth economy but in the examples cited above, referring to “ ‘catching up,’ ” “industrial transformation,” “skip[ing] over . . . the industrialization phase,” and “see[ing], beyond the plateau,” it conflated the notion of economic growth with that of a social transformation from a premodern society to a modern, or even postmodern one. When development economics was stretched to form the basis of a broader socioeconomic discourse of Taiwan’s experience of modernity as a Little Dragon, its limitations became problematic. The complexity and richness of modernity, as covered in the work of Berman38 or Calinescu,39 for example, is expressed in the language of economic statistics and policies. The

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loss of tradition and the growth of the city as a social experience, with its fluid social relations and dynamism are ascribed to the growth of manufacturing, labor market flexibility, and spending on “human capital,” that can only ever be a limited basis for imagining and describing a Taiwanese social experience. In addition to losing the richness of social life in Taiwan by subsuming broad understanding of modernity in hypergrowth, the Little Dragon discourse distorts Taiwanese historiography. It compresses the experience of modernity for the Taiwanese into the postwar period. Vogel’s description quoted above is an example of this. In the logic of the Little Dragon, the period before hypergrowth, a “largely rural society,” which really means before modernity, becomes a period without history, and imagines a people without a sense of a national or modern identity, in the way theorized by Anderson. Similarly, in Fei, Ranis, and Kuo’s Growth With Equity: The Taiwan Case, they acknowledge a colonial legacy, but begin Taiwan’s modern history in 1953, as “the initial year of its transition”40 when it entered the “first subphase of transition growth, common to virtually all developing countries, [of ] primary, or first stage, import substitution.”41 Yet this attenuates the possibility of understanding the late-imperial, Japanese colonial, and Republican periods as a continuous narrative of social and economic change. In Vogel’s assertion, for example, that the “industrial transformation that had taken western nations and Japan a century, or even longer, was completed in Taiwan in essentially four decades,”42 there is little room for an understanding of Taiwan’s social development occurring as a continuous process over the entire twentieth century and earlier. The Little Dragon discourse overdraws the transformation in Taiwanese society. The postwar era becomes the beginning of history, the point from which the changes in Taiwanese society narrate the experience of modernity. The postwar period becomes characterized by modern forms of social relationships and a modern subjectivity for the Taiwanese people. The Taiwanese have become modern, like “us,” and as Vogel tries to argue, this transformation is compressed into an extremely short history, becoming like “us” in only forty years. The forgetting of the past in the discourse of the Little Dragon exposes the way knowledge of Taiwan has been politically structured by the institutions of scholarship. Development economics relies on statistics of economic development, which in the context of Taiwan have been dominated by those from the KMT government and the economic reforms sponsored by the U.S. government through the JCRR.43 Therefore, the political break of Retrocession and the Nationalists’ loss in the civil war is unreflectively replicated by scholarship on its economy. New policies, a new field of development economics, the West, and the Communist bloc struggling for hegemony over the developing

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world in the cold war, all come together to start the Taiwan miracle in 1949 rather than the modernization programs at the end of Qing or those in the 1920s under Japan. When this narrow basis of knowledge is expanded into the historical trend of the Little Dragon, it becomes hegemonic, constructing a narrative that attenuates Japanese colonialism and the imperial period and produces a trajectory of social development that validates both Western liberal beliefs of historical progress and in the case of Taiwan, the KMT’s version of a Taiwanese history that begins in 1949. Despite its methodological limitations, the Little Dragon discourse nevertheless remains a durable one. In Kishore Mahbubani’s attempt to critique the idea, quoted above, he did not attack its epistemological foundations or historiogrpahy, but stayed within its conservative and Western-centric orbit: Mahbubani could only conceive of “overtaking” the West along the same trajectory, not dealing with the problematic assumptions of the whole Asian miracle discourse. Through the 1990s, the Little Dragon narrative added other nations in South East Asia, notably Malaysia that had embarked on a development program that explicitly sought to emulate the achievements of the tigers in North East Asia. The notion of hypergrowth, with all its attendant assumptions about modernity, came to an abrupt end in 1998 with the Asian economic crisis. The seeds of decline had been recognized earlier: Emmott’s The Sun Also Sets: The Limits to Japan’s Economic Power44 appeared in 1989, followed up by his Japanophobia: The Myth of the Invincible Japanese45 in 1993, and both anticipated structural economic problems limiting hypergrowth in the Japanese context. In 1992, Bello and Rosenfeld’s Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis made similar arguments about poor financial regulation, rising wages, and U.S. protectionism undermining the East Asian economies, some of which was proven valid at the end of the decade. By then, the Dragon narrative was less relevant to Taiwan. Other, Taiwan-specific themes, such as democratization, had overtaken the notion of the Little Dragon to offer new narratives for Taiwanese history. The “Real” Taiwan: Localism and Nativism Development and the Little Dragon discourse offered an alternative, transnational and rather contingent basis for Taiwanese identity in the 1970s and 1980s. It was a narrative legitimized by social science and economics, defining Taiwan objectively through economic statistics in terms that were quite different from the emotional and subjective dimensions of a nationalist ideology. Of course, a fully elaborated nationalist movement was impossible in Taiwan itself until the lifting of martial law in 1987. However, direct attempts

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to articulate a Taiwanese identity found alternative forms of expression in Taiwan even after the arrest of Peng, Hsieh, and Wei despite the continuing presence of an oppressive state. The negotiation of identity between the state and Taiwanese nationalists in this period recalls Bourdieu’s symbolic economy of legitimacy, with the divisions of social power continually inscribed in a dynamic process, requiring vigilance by the state and being challenged by activists. Bourdieu’s argument in Language and Symbolic Power does, however, tend to downplay the active role of a coercive state.46 A politicized reading of the notion of hegemony, such as John Fiske’s that draws on Gramsci’s account of Marxism interprets the contestation of ideology in sharper terms: “Consent must be constantly won and rewon, for people’s material social experience constantly reminds them of the disadvantages of subordination and thus poses a threat to the dominant class . . . Hegemony . . . posits a constant contradiction between ideology and the social experience of the subordinate that makes this interface into an inevitable site of ideological struggle.”47 Here hegemony is not being applied to class, but loosely to national identity. If the Diaoyutai Islands protest represented the high point of the effectiveness of Chinese nationalist hegemony, the counter-hegemonic movement that emerged in response shortly after in the mid-1970s was localism. Localism can be covered by a number of different words in Chinese with different but overlapping meanings. The term xiangtu that can be translated as “nativist” or literally “native soil” has been most fully elaborated in the debates associated with the nativist literature movement in the 1970s as xiangtu wenxue. Localism or nativism is most strongly associated with this literary movement that flourished in the mid-1970s in journals such as Xia Chao (China Tide) and Taiwan Wenyi (Taiwan Literature), and itself had antecedents in literature from the 1920s in Taiwan. Another term, bentu wenhua, or “local culture,” is part of broader debates on Taiwanese identity and nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s around the transition to democracy, the end of KMT rule, and the continuing threat of mainland China. Other less common terms include shequ wenhua that translates as “community culture,” and difang gan, a “sense of place” that comes out of the cultural studies of late 1990s and the appropriation of the jargon of “postisms” (postcolonial, poststructuralist, postmodernist) to the understanding of Taiwanese identity in the context of globalization. Each of these terms is a way of thinking about Taiwanese identity, defining the limits of what constituted Taiwan in the context of specific debates in literature and politics from the period of the decline of the KMT’s international legitimacy into the 1990s. Localism is coherent enough to be labeled as a cultural movement from the 1970s onwards. In its various cultural forms, it was an attempt to proscribe Taiwanese culture and to define what constituted a Taiwanese experience. It

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valorized a particular version of Taiwan tradition, the rural or the village, located in an imagined past. It can be contrasted with the ideologies of Formosan nationalism that attempted to write a Taiwanese national history and define the meaning of the Taiwanese nation and the national in an objective way. Localism is not explicitly Taiwanese nationalism, in that it did not imagine the “local” in Taiwan in national terms, but, like the notion of the Little Dragon, is a bounded and structured discourse producing a narrative of the meaning of Taiwan. Xiangtu is also one of the key terms in the establishment of the discourse of Taiwan Studies in its association with literature. As noted earlier, nativist literature has been the foundation of scholarship constituting Taiwan Studies since the 1970s. In English, scholarship on Taiwanese literature began to appear in the 1980s. Faurot’s Chinese Fiction from Taiwan48 was published in 1980, and Lau’s The Unbroken Chain: An Anthology of Taiwan Fiction Since 1926 49 was published in 1983. These were published very soon after the nativist literature movement peaked in 1977–78, which had generated a number of anthologies and critical works in Chinese. Lau’s book is an example of scholarship that was motivated by a desire to mark out a separate Taiwanese identity. The periodization of his collection directly challenges the political periodization of Taiwanese history around Retrocession and the Nationalist retreat, establishing an alternative narrative for a specifically Taiwanese experience in opposition to prevailing political power. In xiangtu wenxue, the local evoked nostalgia for an imagined Taiwanese past or for a rural idyll. In his criticisms of xiangtu wenxue in the late 1970s, the critic Yan Yuanshu suggested xiangtu meant “local colour,” but also identified a political dimension by suggesting it was a literature written by Taiwanese that excluded mainlanders.50 Chang suggests that its characteristics were the “use of the Taiwanese dialect, depiction of the plight of country folks or small-town dwellers in economic difficulty, and resistance to the imperialist presence in Taiwan.”51 Jing Wang says, “Local landscape, folk customs, even local stupidities and superstitions were examined and coated anew with a nostalgic beauty.”52 Although localism in nativist literature produced some lyrical descriptions of Taiwan’s rural experiences, Wang identifies nativism as a political literature: “They created variegated figures of the lower social strata, who suffered, loved, and struggled in a half-insulated territory, insensitive to the overshadowing social evils which intertwined so intimately with their tragic downfalls.”53 Therefore, part of what defines the local in nativist literature is a critical acknowledgment of and concern for the disempowered in Taiwanese society. The local in the xiangtu wenxue debates could be understood as the subaltern, the people who cannot represent themselves but need a literature to document their experience.

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The disempowerment that is depicted in nativist literature is typically a function of modernization, and the social changes brought by “miracle economy” of urbanization, alienation, and the disappearance of rural life in Taiwan. Wang suggests “a hidden interplay between city and village.”54 One of the best-known examples, Hwang Chun-ming’s “The Drowning of an Old Cat,”55 tells the story of urban development encroaching on a village. Despite the villagers’ opposition, a natural spring that has sustained the village is turned into baths for urban tourists, and the protagonist eventually drowns himself in them. This is an ideological presentation of village life in Taiwan: the eternal spring, clear and pure, being sullied by modernity as the village is destroyed. In the story, the spring is literally contaminated by modernity with the body of the villager. The political basis of nativist literature comes out of a specific genealogy of ideas. In the case of nativist literature in the 1970s, its impetus came from challenging the abstruse modernist fashion that prevailed in Taiwanese literature until that time. In a vitriolic debate that flourished in the 1970s, the nativists argued against “art for art’s sake,” that had been a dominant ideology for Taiwanese writers and artists. This ideology had produced an ostensibly apolitical, highly aestheticized, and introspective mode of literature, especially poetry, drawing on surrealism, psychoanalysis, and other high modernistic styles.56 Therefore, nativist literature was located within a long-standing argument both in Western literature and in China, on the social role of art. Jing Wang argues that “xiangtu” became a mere slogan in the late 1970s, and the theoretical debate within the xiangtu wenxue movement quickly overwhelmed the substantive content of the literature written in its name: “The creative writing of xiangtu literature often failed to match the scope of its theoretical writing. Artistically, it lacked the means to reveal the dialectical nature inherent in its postulates.”57 There were other, less well-known literary terms in the 1970s that expressed similar political concerns, indicating the wider context of literary politics at that time and of which nativism was just a part. These variations highlight the boundaries of the kind of imagining of Taiwan that nativist literature produced. China Tide used the pejorative term “Worker-PeasantSoldier Literature,” invoking a socialist quality that was very problematic in Taiwan at that time under KMT rule. Gongnongbing wenxue was another slogan in the politics of Taiwan’s literary scene, but it invoked the same broadly leftist political position as xiangtu wenxue.58 Giles Delueze, referencing Maoism, said: “Reality is what actually happens in a factory, in a school, in barracks, in a prison, in a police station”59 and in the same way, gongnongbing wenxue implicitly flagged the privileging of the places where social reality was most meaningful as those places where power is exercised most intensely,

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especially institutional power. Therefore, gongnongbing wenxue expressed with xiangtu wenxue a general leftist interest in the condition of marginality, but without identifying this condition as specifically Taiwanese. In this way, xiangtu wenxue could be criticized for conflating the notion of marginalization with that of a claim of authentic Taiwaneseness in the quasicolonial KMT-controlled society. This notion that localism expressed a structure of power and marginality can be highlighted by comments made by Hwang Chun-ming at a lecture delivered at National Chengchi University in 1978. He made a wry comment about his dress: “Today I have come here in jeans and a basketball shirt. Standing here in western style clothing, no one can say that I am a native.”60 Hwang neatly deflected his status as the leading writer of xiangtu wenxue of the time by positioning himself as a modern. He implicitly defines localism as a relational “other” to the urban, the modern, or other expressions of social power. And he neatly pre-empted his audience’s positioning him as an authentic representative of the “real” Taiwan. Therefore, although nativism in Taiwanese literature has been described as an attempt to evoke an authentic Taiwanese experience in nostalgia or the rural, by, for example, Chang, Wang, and Yan, it also defines the local in political terms, as the experience of those who have been marginalized by the processes of economic and social development in Taiwan. As a literary movement, nativism came to an end in 1979, when according to Chang, it was overtaken by political events such as the Kaohsiung Incident. Since then, the term bentu wenhua covered a Taiwanese cultural experience in broader terms than nativist literature did. It linked the notion of a local culture to a range of pro-Taiwan political positions given free rein after the lifting of martial law in 1988. If not a slogan, bentu wenhua has been described by Jin Ruiping as a movement in Taiwan and part of Taiwanhua or bentuhua, Taiwanization or localization: The nativist movement in Taiwanese literature and the localism movement mark the struggles in the long history of Taiwan’s national development, and so are themselves part of that history. Therefore, the circuitous paths of “nativization” and “localization” are, in reality, the many moments of sadness in [Taiwanese] history.61 One of the leading campaigners for localization in Taiwan, the commentator and professor of journalism, Li Hsiao-feng made the link between bentu wenhua and politics explicit when he described it as a cultural affiliation that sustained the Taiwanese people through centuries of foreign control. Li’s work is another example of the blurred boundary between scholarship and ideology, or between the claim of objective knowledge of Taiwan and the

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claim of an authentic and subjective Taiwanese identity, and his work on bentu wenhua is very close to nationalist ideology: In the period of foreign control of Taiwan, local culture was the grain which sustained the dignity and life of the nation. Its unique quality is the basis of the search for our history, and of the sadness of many of our songs. In the period after foreign political power had finally ended, local culture has become a national culture (benguo wenhua) and has built our national confidence, fundamentally strengthening our national development and the international position of Taiwan. Now we can attend to the contemporary life in Taiwan. Already the songs being sung are happy and positive.62

Imaging the past References to bentu wenhua are not difficult to find in Taiwan from the 1980s to the present. Newspaper columns, books, restaurants, and music are all sites that can fall under the label of bentu wenhua and that self-consciously evoke an authentic or “real Taiwan.” One category, less well studied but no less evocative, is photography. Laozhaopian, or historic photographs, are a particular genre of bentu wenhua that commercially packaged nostalgic images for consumption by contemporary Taiwanese in well-designed coffee-table books. The photographs of the town of Lugang by Hsu Chang-tse are a typical example. A book of his black and white photographs from the early 1950s was published in 1989, with several reprints through the 1990s.63 Lugang has a particular place in the iconography of the local in Taiwan, notably for its long history of settlement and its preservation of traditional architecture. As DeGlopper notes, long before bentu wenhua became the subject of fashionable newspaper supplements, Lugang had a strong sense of its distinct identity and of a prehistory, before Japanese colonization and Nationalist rule, that had evinced a kind of timeless past: “The old days before the Japanese, while frequently invoked, seem to be thought of as a static moment, a sort of degreeless noon. The Lugang of 1750 and the Lugang of 1890 are put together in the category of ‘the old days,’ which is contrasted to the present.”64 Hsu’s photographs are an example of Taiwan’s practices of cultural memory. They are grouped into categories of traditional architecture, children, the elderly, agriculture, food, fishing, and religious worship. Architecture features traditional rough brick walls, the very narrow stone-paved lanes that are a characteristic of Lugang, and images of Taiwanese roofs taken from an elevated height with a long focal-length lens, capturing a terraced landscape of

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their distinctive tiles and curving gables. Children are represented playing games such as hacky-sack and marbles; adults are engaged in traditional activities as laboring, ploughing with oxen, repairing fishing nets, cooking, threshing rice, and so on, and wearing traditional Taiwanese clothing. Some of the images are iconic, such as a child in a conical straw hat riding an ox, a nativist symbol of nostalgia for an imagined rural past. Hsu’s photographs actively produce the local as a cultural discourse, defining a particular kind of knowledge about the meaning of Taiwan. Like the way nativist literature invoked an authentic Taiwan through the relationship between power and marginality, Hsu’s photographs are embedded in a textual strategy that produces local as a cultural effect. The discursive operation of bentu wenhua in Hsu’s photographs can be highlighted by contrasting their function as localism and their function as historical documents. As noted above, the distinction between history and the local is not necessarily clear. The meanings of the words that evoke bentu wenhua and, in this example, Taiwanese history (Taiwanshi) are not neatly separable, and much of the writing of Taiwanese history has either explicitly or by default become part of the localization movement in the post–martial law period. Hsu’s photographs, however, do contain a particular distinction that can be the starting point for elaborating how the local is produced in Taiwan. Only one of his collection, of electricity workers installing power lines, alludes to the modernization of Taiwan under the KMT through the 1950s. Office workers are conspicuously absent and only one image contains Nationalist troops. There are no images of cars, trucks, radios, shops and shopkeepers, postal workers, teachers, high school or university students, all of which were features of Taiwanese life in the 1950s. Therefore, while Hsu’s images are historical, they are not dated. They are not placed into a temporal moment along a trajectory of events leading to modernity. The exceptions to this are striking: an image of a scowling elderly woman with soldiers in the background in Nationalist uniforms is a sudden reminder of precisely where in Taiwanese history the image is. Similarly, an image of electricity workers shows the modernization project of 1950s Taiwan with the workers themselves in Rayban sunglasses and 1950s-style Converse sports shoes. Hsu’s bentu wenhua can also be contrasted with Nationalist propaganda of the period. In Taipei Pictorial magazines of the 1950s, almost all the images are located in a trajectory of modernization: new buildings, mechanized agriculture with fertilizers and pesticides, new industries, large city intersections with heavy traffic, and gloved policemen on point duty. The connection between historical images taken out of history and the notion of the local can be explicated with the arguments of Derrida and his

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concept of différance that were presented earlier. For Derrida, meaning has a temporal dimension in its invocation in the constant movement between signs. He argues against the possibility of fixed meaning in language, and tries to apprehend the moment of differentiation in which meaning is deferred from a point of fixedness: “the sign, which defers presence, is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and moving toward the deferred presence that it aims to re-appropriate.”65 The work of Rey Chow, for example, has explored the impossibility of an essential or fixed meaning to nationhood or ethnic identity using Derrida’s notion of différance. Chow has presented a critique of the possibility of an original cultural moment in the context of Chinese film. She has used the notion of translation to suggest that Chinese criticisms of some Fifth Generation cinema rest on nationalist ideological assumptions of Chinese identity: “ ‘China’ as the sum total of the history and culture of a people; ‘China’ as a content, a core meaning that exists ‘prior to’ film.”66 Chow says: “What is useful from deconstruction, as is always the case, is the lesson about the ‘original’. . .[that] we take absolutely seriously the deconstructionist insistence that the ‘first’ and ‘original’ as such is always already différance—always already translated.”67 Chow’s work suggests that if Hsu is endeavoring to capture the ideality of Taiwan in his photographic collection, then that would be an epistemologically impossible task. While this may be so, the corollary to Chow’s work is the discursive strategies through which the essential Taiwan continues to be invoked in bentu wenhua. In the example of Hsu’s laozhaopian, Taiwan is dehistoricized by a strategy by which images are selected to take historically specific moments and de-contextualize them in time. They are marked off from their location in a narrative of modernity and modernization, so that they become singular moments from a past without history. The local in Taiwan constructs an essential Taiwanese identity because its fundamental moment is that of taking a moment out of history. In Derridean terms, the strategy of de-historizing is a textual or rhetorical attempt to break the chain of deference of meaning to invoke a transcendental signified. Once the chain is broken, the meaning of Taiwan, at least ideologically, is frozen as something essentially or “truthfully” Taiwanese. This point can be emphasized by hypothetical counterexamples to Hsu’s photographs of Lugang. His iconic nativist image is the boy riding the ox. If that image was counterpointed to the same child grown up as a man driving a car, the rhetorical strategy by which the image was made into bentu wenhua would be dispelled, and the images together would become a narrative of social modernization, of the transformation from the rural to the urban that the Little Dragon narrative constructed in economic terms.

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Homi K. Bhabha uses a similar Derridean argument to understand in broader terms the discursive strategies by which nations narrate their history. For Bhabha, Hsu’s photographs would represent an enunciation or performative instance of nationhood, a singular expression of a coherent national subjectivity in which the nation no longer has a history and ceases to be a contingent product of historical circumstance. However, Bhabha argues that this is only one side of the narrative address of the nation. The other is a political and ideological process by which singular, ahistorical instances are woven into an objectively imagined history, so that the nation operates as both a teleology of national realization and as instances of ahistorical, “self-identical essence.”68 “In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuous, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation.”69 Bhabha’s argument offers a way to reconcile the difference between a rhetorical strategy like bentu wenhua in which the past in Taiwan is taken out of time so as to fix its meaning as an essential Taiwan, and the powerful narratives of modernization such as the Little Dragon which have flourished as a feature of discourses of Taiwan at the same time. For Bhabha, both are necessary moments in the way Taiwan is narrated as a nation. The de-historicized past of bentu wenhua creates an imagined point of origin, of which Chow was so critical but which nevertheless provides the legitimacy for imagining a people with a coherent, singular identity. From this point, the Little Dragon can imagine the social transformation to a fully realized nation. Bhabha says, “The pedagogical founds its narrative authority in a tradition of the people” so that the Little Dragon, as an objectively constructed narrative of modernization, can be a plausible version of Taiwan’s history, with the authoritative appeal of the local to establish its discursive boundaries as uniquely Taiwanese. Bhabha suggests, however, that necessary to a temporalized narrative of modernization a de-historicized past may be, the two signify an inherent tension in the discursive bases of nations. In Bhabha’s Gordian terms: “The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from its eternal self-generation, becomes a liminal form of social representation, a space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations.”70 By this he means that a teleological narrative of modernization such as the Little Dragon functions in tension with an appeal to the essential Taiwaneseness of Hsu’s photographs. The narrative of modernization opens a limitless array of subjectivities and historical possibilities in its imagining of a transformed, modern

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Taiwan, and in the gap between this present moving through time and the atemporal past of Hsu’s photographs of Lugang is a discursive space in which Taiwanese people live their lives. Contemporary Taiwanese might see their essential Taiwanese identity in the boy riding the ox, but this is a long way from the multiplicity of possibilities of life in modern Taiwan today. In Bhabha’s interpretation of this apparent contradiction, this creates a liminal space in the narrative address of the nation. People are marginalized from their own essential national identity by the narration of its contemporary transformations. For Taiwan today this generates a crisis of national identity that is the defining feature of Taiwan’s post–martial law identity.


CHAPTER 7

New Epistemologies

The Kaohsiung Incident In the late 1980s, Taiwan made the transition to democracy. On December 7 and 8, 1986, the newly formed, and technically still illegal, Democratic Progressive Party fielded candidates in the election for the Legislative Yuan; on July 14, 1987, martial law was lifted; and on January 13, 1988, Chiang Ching-kuo died and the presidency passed to Lee Teng-hui. Through the 1990s, Lee consolidated Taiwan’s democratic transition and worked to create a centrist position in the Taiwanese political landscape that would accommodate the lingering animosity between Taiwanese and mainlanders in the post–martial Law period. Subsequently in the 2000s, he has become one of the most vociferous proponents of Taiwanese nationalism and of an independent Republic of Taiwan. In the period leading up to the lifting of martial law, there were a number of challenges to the KMT’s authority. Gold discusses the Chungli Incident as a major event of 1977. The Kaohsiung Incident in December 1979 was a larger protest, and the subsequent murders of the members of the family of imprisoned opposition activist Lin Yi-hsiung on February 28, 1980 marked the Incident and its aftermath as shocking events in the history of Taiwan’s democracy struggle. The Kaohsiung Incident is an example of the conflation between nationalism and issues like democracy and human rights in Taiwan’s opposition politics. As a campaign against political oppression by the KMT, the Incident had started as a large protest for Human Rights Day that commemorates the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948. It had been organized by Meilidao, the opposition journal founded by

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Huang Hsin-chieh that had been functioning as a quasi-political party, organizing events and publishing articles that argued for human rights, democratic reforms, and especially the lifting of martial law.1 But as with the opposition activism of the 1950s and 1960s, the KMT was a target for both its Chinese nationalism and its authoritarianism, and this created a variety of positions for those who opposed it. An editorial meeting of Meilidao held in the week before the Kaohsiung Incident under a banner “Minzhu, Tuanjie, Ai Taiwan” (“Democracy, Unity, Love Taiwan”) summarized the different concerns of activists at the time.2 In the standoff between the soldiers and protesters in Kaohsiung on December 10, 1979, the activist Shih Ming-teh appealed to the soldiers on the basis of a Taiwanese nationalism: All armed troops: You are the sons and brothers of Taiwanese. You are the troops of the Taiwanese. Please do not misunderstand[sic]. Taiwanese must not fight Taiwanese. Withdraw! Everybody calm down. The Taiwanese are to be pitied; do not fight them. Taiwan soldiers withdraw! Taiwan soldiers go! Organizers plea for non-violence[sic]. Taiwanese soldiers, move back! Taiwanese soldiers go! They have their own problems. Let them get away. Don’t fight the Taiwanese soldiers. Don’t fight the Taiwanese soldiers! Don’t fight the Taiwanese people! Don’t fight the Taiwanese people. Taiwanese people, move back a bit. Move to the side. Taiwanese people don’t fight each other. Sweet potato must not fight against sweet potatoes.3 Shih’s statements might be interpreted as an example of his sense of Taiwanese identity, and furthermore, Shih’s own sense might be regarded as representative of an emerging sense of Taiwanese identity in Taiwan’s society at that time. However, this approach to identity treats statements such as Shih’s as social facts in themselves rather than as statements intended to convey a specific notion of identity. This book has instead developed a series of arguments for engaging with events such as Shih’s appeal as formulations that invoke identity through rhetoric and symbolism. To begin with, Shih expressed his Taiwanese identity through enunciating Taiwan. As he explicitly named the participants, both soldiers and protesters, as Taiwanese, his urgent and iterative rhetoric marked off an identity, Taiwanese, from the identity that the KMT had worked to legitimize in Taiwan for the previous thirty years, Chinese. This is a moment in language politics, marking the “people” and “soldiers” as sharing a communal bond that he names Taiwanese, thus inscribing a Taiwanese identity in the act of naming Taiwan. It was a political refusal of their naming by the KMT

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as Chinese and a challenge to the state’s hegemony and legitimization of a Chinese identity for the Taiwanese. Indeed, to name the soldiers Taiwanese neatly encapsulates the linkage between names, power, and identity. It was an explicitly political act, urging them, as representatives of the state and practitioners of KMT hegemony, to reject the legitimacy of the KMT to name them Chinese. At the same time, however, one of Shih’s phrases, “Taiwanese must not fight Taiwanese” was a formulation modeled on a powerful and well-known slogan used in the Chinese nationalist struggle in the 1930s and 1940s. Truman’s advisor, Arthur N. Young reports that the Chinese communists used the slogan “Chinese should not fight Chinese but should fight Japanese” during the Sino-Japanese War.4 More recently, Jiang Zemin, in his 1995 speech “Continue to Promote the Reunification of the Motherland” which outlined the Eight Point Plan for the incorporation of Taiwan into the People’s Republic of China, used the same in the statement, phrase, “We should strive for the peaceful reunification of the motherland since Chinese should not fight fellow Chinese.”5 Therefore, Shih’s phrase was an enunciation that inscribed a Taiwanese identity, but one that also drew on a historical reference to Chinese nationalism and historicized that enunciation in complex and ambivalent ways. One could read his statement as a deliberate appropriation of the language of Chinese nationalism, turning it over to the purpose of his Taiwanese nationalism. Alternatively, one could read it as suggesting the limits of Taiwanese nationalist rhetoric being constrained by the rhetorical forms of Chinese nationalism as a result of its hegemonic practices in Taiwan. To make the public statement that “Taiwanese must not fight Taiwanese” also indicates the complexity of a Taiwanese national subjectivity that was being inscribed in the political protests. Rather than an expression of an underlying or immanent sense, Shih’s address was a political act that itself created or invoked an identity, as the meaning of Taiwan in that moment. Bhabha describes the contestability of the singular moments in which nations are invoked in the following way: “that place of the ‘meanwhile,’ where cultural homogeneity and democratic anonymity make their claims on the national community, there emerges a more instantaneous and subaltern voice of the people, a minority discourse that speaks betwixt and between times and places.”6 Bhabha is writing about liberal democratic nations, whereas in Taiwan in 1979, anonymity was not democratic but a function of an authoritarian state. However, his point remains relevant: that a national identity is made up of those moments when appeals to unmediated, immediate subjectivity meet institutionalized and authorized discourses of national identity.

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Shih’s appeal to a meaning for Taiwan in that moment was not an elaborated ideology or definition of what it meant to be Taiwanese. When he addressed the soldiers and the protesters as Taiwanese, he invoked “that place of the meanwhile,” speaking as if a coherent and bounded Taiwanese subjectivity was viable, apparent, and self-evident. He assumed an identity, in both senses of the word. Shih and the people he addressed were taking on an identity and at the same time invoking it by appealing to the conviction that it was “always-already-there.”7 In the context of KMT authoritarianism, and the specific context of facing down a row of soldiers, Shih’s enunciation of a Taiwanese identity embracing his fellow protesters and perhaps the soldiers themselves was sharply politically defined. It invoked Taiwanese national identity as a form of resistance. The words Taiwan and Taiwanese took on an anti-authoritarian political energy by bringing into being an imagined coherent people who existed in the shadow of the practices of the state in politics, education, and culture. Like the earlier examples of Formosan nationalism from the 1950s and 1960s, Shih’s nationalist enunciation operated in the space between the subjective and objective. In Shih’s instance, while it may be possible to locate his Taiwanese identity at the level of his own utterance of the name Taiwan, when he spoke to the soldiers and the protesters he also appealed to a sense of their identity as Taiwanese. That is, Shih invoked his own subjective Taiwanese identity by enunciating Taiwan but he also addressed the soldiers and protesters as if they held an innate, objectively understood sense of Taiwanese identity. The sense to which Shih appealed was not the objective definition of Taiwanese identity like that which Ko Kiansing elaborated in 1965. It was spoken tacitly, but like Ko, Shih appealed to an objective knowledge of the Taiwanese nation outside of the subjective and emotional, and simultaneously maintaining his legitimacy to speak as a Taiwanese national by the authenticity he could invoke among Taiwanese nationalists as the voice of a “real” Taiwanese. Although it is possible to identify epistemological continuity with earlier national imaginings, the key significance of the Kaohsiung Incident along with its constitutive moments, such as Shih’s address, is that it occurred in public on the island of Taiwan itself. Taiwanese identity was deployed for political purposes and Taiwan was enunciated as an element of the rhetoric of opposition protests. Therefore, the Kaohsiung Incident offered the chance to stitch a singular moment of political action into a rapidly developing narrative of Taiwanese nationhood. Like the 2-28 Incident and the less prominent events in the 1950s and 1960s, each enunciatory moment became part of the contested narrative of Taiwanese national identity. Indeed, both the protest

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itself, and its subsequent discursive elaboration in the writing of Taiwanese history has become part of the national discourse. Its inclusion into a Taiwanese history and public debate is “the very act of the narrative performance interpellat[ing] a growing circle of national subjects.”8 That is, in moments when Taiwanese identity became public as a subject for political rhetoric and a theme of politics, as it did during the Kaohsiung Incident, it opened up discursive, narrativized space for Taiwanese identity for all Taiwanese. Despite the violence of the Kaohsiung Incident and its aftermath, Taiwan’s democratization has been labeled a “quiet revolution.” In an editorial in 1992, the Asian Wall Street Journal wrote: “Not all revolutions are waged with mortars and violence . . . From Taiwan comes the example of the ‘quiet revolution,’ based on economic know-how and the gradual introduction or reworking of democratic institutions.”9 However, as described above, the end of martial law came after a dramatic period of protest and opposition activity that went on from the 1970s through the mid-1980s, which eventually involved both a formal process of negotiation with the KMT by liberal academic luminaries such as Hu Fo, Yang Kuo-shu, and Li Hung-hsi, and also large-scale public protest marches led by seasoned stump campaigners such as Kang Ning-hsiang.10 In the 1970s and 1980s, political opposition took up the distortion of language that characterized the KMT’s governance with its slogans like “fangong fuguo.” Activists played with irony, layering meaning to create moments of resistance in public discourse. For example, in 1979, the activist and Taoyuan County Magistrate Hsu Hsin-liang held a mass “birthday party” for between 10,000 and 30,000 supporters the day before his removal from office by the Control Yuan for his political activities.11 In 1986, the organized opposition, as the dangwai movement, had been negotiating with the KMT over the establishment of a legal opposition party, involving many of those who had become leading figures in the Democratic Progressive Party. On September 28, opposition activists convened a meeting at the Grand Hotel in Taipei and, in what C.L. Chiou reports as a rather spontaneous gesture, Chu Kao-sheng proposed the formation of a political party.12 The opposition activists hoped, correctly as it turned out, that the KMT would not risk international and domestic opprobrium by too heavy a crackdown, and would let the organization stand. Bruce Jacobs’s subsequent comment that “on the basis of precedents . . . the DPP leaders would have been arrested, yet they continued their activities”13 indicates the uncertain outcome for opposition activism in the mid-1980s. Lianhe Bao journalist Yang Hsien-hung reported on the founding of the DPP, but his story was initially withdrawn under pressure from the KMT’s Department of Cultural Affairs.

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The determination of Zhongguo Shibao to run the story forced Lianhe Bao’s hand, and news of the event was made public.14 On October 5, in a KMT Central Standing Committee meeting, President Chiang Ching-kuo said, “Time is changing, circumstances are changing, and the tide is changing. To meet these changes, the ruling party must push reforms according to new ideas, new methods, and based on constitutional democracy. Only so will our party be able to move with the tide and to be with the people all the time.”15 Two days later, Chiang announced his intention to lift martial law during an interview with the Washington Post.16 The story of Taiwan’s democratization has been detailed by political scientists such as T’ien, Chiou, Hsiao, Rigger, and many others. As noted in chapter 1, “democratization” has become one of the foundational categories of Taiwan Studies. In political science, the notion of a democratic “transformation” or “transition” has been located within the same trajectory of modernity that was discussed in the previous chapter. The argument by Lipsett, Huntington, and others that democracy could be located within an explanatory model linked to development, or modernity, has structured the study of Taiwan’s political transition.17 It has been incorporated into the discourse of the Taiwan miracle with a narrative that validates Western liberalism. It is presented as evidence that not only has capitalism worked in Taiwan to create economic prosperity, but it has led to freedom and democracy as well. As Chiou writes, “The whole of Taiwanese society had substantially changed. Its economy had become “a miracle” with consistent 10–15 percent annual growth rates during the previous decade. With successful capitalism, the culture and the society had become very much Westernized, and thus more pluralistic, utilitarian and pragmatic.”18 The lifting of martial law had real effects on government policy and marked a stage in Taiwan’s political reform that eventually led to the change of government from the KMT to the DPP in 2000. As a singular date, it also represented a shift of symbolic power.19 The KMT loosened the policies with which is had exercised hegemony over the narratives of history and identity, allowing new histories and the legitimization of different identity formations. The purpose of critical scholarship in cultural studies is to expose the masked operation of power as its constructs subjectivities and shapes cultural formations, but power can also be perfectly obvious, and when the ROC state ended martial law in 1987, a whole set of punitive restrictions on the press and public debate was removed. It became possible to write about Taiwanese nationalism, the independence movement, the 2-28 Incident, and much else without the same fear of imprisonment as had existed until that point. The deregulation of newspapers, for example, opened the way for more

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papers competing for readership with a range of political positions and with much larger editions. Discursively, the lifting of martial law has come to signify the singular moment at which “democratization” occurred. Although the reality of political change has been a complex unfolding process over many years before and after 1987, the narrative of transformation tends to emphasize the specific moment around which change can be measured. Although other dates might be candidates for the transformative moment, such as the formation of the DPP in 1986, the lifting of martial law has become paradigmatic. The year 1987 becomes the moment that marks “before” and “after” that is implicit in a temporal notion like “democratization.” When writing about identity, the same narrative of transformation also tends to overdetermine change around that specific date, and this structures knowledge about Taiwanese identity. This issue was reviewed in chapter 6 in the context of the Little Dragon narrative. In the specific instance of the lifting of martial law, the impetus is to look either for the continuity of identity formations through 1987 or their radical transformation after the moment of “democratization.” Part of the drama in the theater of scholarship comes from writing against received histories and discourses, and both positions have a certain scholarly appeal. One might take the historicizing route and suggest that despite the transformation of Taiwanese politics in the 1980s, the new identity formations were simply the expression of those established decades earlier. Alternatively, and more commonly, identity could be located within the larger narrative of political and economic transformation and one can argue that the emergence or radical transformation of Taiwanese identity occurred after 1987. Positivist theories that link categories in causal relationships tend to emphasize temporal notions like a “rise” or “emergence,” and this has helped consolidate the lifting of martial law as the transformative moment in many analyses of Taiwan. On this basis, identity becomes a social object, a “dependent variable” whose change is determined by an underlying social or political change from which a new identity can be explained. These models rely on changes in their “variables” for their explanatory potential, and thus the emergence of the identity issue after democratization in 1987 fits into them neatly. Causal models of the emergence of Taiwanese identity can also have an authority within the conventions of the empirical political and social sciences, which comes from the possibility of an “explanation” of identity, and the totality of a coherent model of social change that they offer is engaging and satisfying to read. The basically descriptive approach being adopted here instead does not offer a formula for social change to explain an emergence of

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Taiwanese identity. However, this discursive approach suggests that the causal, positivist models of social change can themselves be understood as the operation of a set of textual strategies. An “explanation” of identity that uses, for example, “the rise of the middle class,” with categories linked in causal relationships to objectively “explain” identity, can itself be seen as the operation of a textual strategy that produces the notion of Taiwanese identity. The challenge of scholarship on Taiwan is to avoid structuring knowledge of Taiwanese identity on the basis of a single transformative moment while still recognizing the fundamental changes in the way the Taiwanese have imagined themselves before and after 1987. From that time, with political controls progressively relaxing, the issue of Taiwanese identity has become the defining issue of Taiwan’s social and political life. It has produced a veritable industry of books and articles on the Taiwanese condition and infused almost every public issue in Taiwan. In the post–martial law period, language, party politics, art, education, architecture, food, media, and commerce have become sites of contestation over Taiwanese identity. The well-known French Taiwanist Stéphane Corcuff has asked the question “Where is the nation?,” and answered, “The nation is everywhere.”20 The way so many aspects of Taiwanese social life can be understood through the lens of the identity issue makes producing legitimate knowledge in scholarship particularly difficult. In Corcuff ’s English and French language work, he follows the positivist pattern set by Gold and Wachman in the early 1990s and uses opinion surveys. These rely on the principles of statistical sampling to generate knowledge that can be claimed to be legitimate on the basis of its representativeness.21 This text has gone some way to attempting to deal with the identify issue in a different way, by treating it as meaning. Locating identity at the level of the practices of naming, and drawing on Derrida’s interpretation of the operation of meaning to understand it, is different way to deal with a Taiwan that is “everywhere,” as a way of acknowledging the identity implications of the flood of newspaper articles, political speeches, advertising, music and, much else that simply name Taiwan. It suggests a way of understanding the feeling that one is experiencing Taiwanese identity (the sense of Taiwaneseness) when one simply sees and hears the utterance of Taiwan in text or speech in Taiwan’s public life. Similarly, Bhabha’s work evokes the narrative mode of Taiwan’s discourse of identity. In its contestable condition, Taiwanese identity requires a constant reiteration, with an “enunciatory ‘present’ marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign.”22 It operates as appeals made over and over again in order to establish its structure and to determine its discursive boundaries. Even in the new century, Taiwanese identity is not naturalized or commonsensical.

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Its urgency and unease, the way it continues to be invested with emotion even in the every day by many Taiwanese people, reflects its contestation and its disturbed boundaries, both within Taiwanese society and in Taiwan’s relations with its “others”: China, the rest of Asia, or the West. The preceding analyses have drawn carefully from detailed descriptions of particular political events and ideologies to fill out that approach, but also to provide support for the theoretical elaborations. Meaning, différance, symbolic power, and other specialist terms may be sufficient in the arch style of postcolonial theorizing, but scholarship in Chinese Studies and Taiwan Studies relies on empirical data and field research, along with labor in libraries and archives, as the dominant set of criteria for legitimate scholarly knowledge. Detailed description of events and ideologies is part of that labor. Balancing theory and political and social history is a challenging task. This is especially so in reviewing the post–martial law era, when the sheer volume of issues, controversies, and cultural and political events threatens to overwhelm scholarly methodologies. A complete social history of Taiwanese identity is an impossible undertaking; opinion surveys are unsatisfactory, but excessive emphasis on theorizing can produce work disconnected from the lived experience of Taiwanese people unless it is moderated by the kinds of descriptions of political and social events that this study has attempted. A way through this dilemma is to focus on specific subjects. In a process of scholarly selection from and stratification of the 1990s, some issues, such as 2-28, can be marked as more important than others. Yet others, such as the Taiwanese language movement or, notably, the circumstances of Taiwan’s aborigines might be placed on the periphery of Taiwan’s identity politics. However, the selection must be made explicit. As has been argued throughout this text, the processes of scholarship, such as selecting the most “important” aspects of Taiwanese identity, are themselves part of Taiwan’s identity formation. Emphasizing, for example, the movements for memorialization of the 2-28 Incident valorizes 2-28 and is not an unmediated response to objective identity formations. Rather, the academic effort to map the territory of Taiwanese identity, to define what counts as identity and what does not, and then to structure that territory on the basis of what “really” is Taiwanese identity, is necessarily a political act. In its exclusion and inclusion and its structuring, it produces the ambiguous space between subjective ideology and objectivity that has been the basis throughout this book of the attempt to apprehend the category of Taiwanese identity. Responding to this problem requires an analysis that foregrounds epistemology and methodology. In the first instance, this avoids assuming that identity is an objective social fact. This would make the Taiwanese people objects of history, and their identity formations a “natural” phenomenon. An

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objectivist ontology of the Taiwanese cannot account for their own discursive production of their identity, and their own capacity to reflect upon it from a self-conscious distance. Scholarship on this basis stands in for that critical distance, presuming to systematize the identity of Taiwanese people into theories and generalizations in a way that assumes, however implicitly, that the Taiwanese cannot do that themselves. This kind of scholarship cannot adequately account for the fact that they do. In the simplest terms, scholarship on post–martial law Taiwan must recognize that Taiwanese people themselves read works of scholarship, analysis, and commentary on their own identity, and their reading informs and produces their understanding of themselves. Following through on the implications of this simple observation means an awareness both of the ambiguity of scholarship’s own subject position and the negotiated relationship between Taiwanese people, as authentic subjects, and those (including themselves) who would speak about, explain, and understand Taiwanese identity. The year 1987 marked a change in Taiwan’s national narrative most dramatically by the arrival of a new set of discourses of history and identity. If it is viable to privilege one over others, the recovery of the 2-28 Incident is perhaps the defining historical event signifying the rewriting of Taiwanese history after the lifting of martial law. The KMT government had suppressed the 2-28 Incident from public debate from 1947 to 1987, and then acquiesced to its recovery. In that period there was no commentary, analysis, research, or public memorials to stitch the event into a coherent and legitimate narrative of Taiwanese history. The 2-28 Incident was described earlier as a “void” in the meaning of Taiwan,23 as an act of violence that inscribed the difference between mainlanders and Taiwanese, yet did so without an elaborated ideology and without a historical narrative to give the violence meaning. But after 1987, there has been an enormous amount of scholarship, commentary, and memorialization of 2-28, placing it within a narrative of Taiwanese history, which peaked in 1997 on the fiftieth anniversary of the event. Over that period, 2-28 became the focus of a broader post–martial law project of rewriting Taiwanese history, and consolidating a new legitimized national narrative for Taiwan. Public discussion of 2-28 through this period demonstrates the difficult political process by which the Incident was legitimized as part of Taiwan’s history. Writing in the late 1980s and early 1990s shows a tense debate, with a received mainlander-dominated position gradually giving way to an acceptance of its importance. One of the early moments in that political process was the day before the fortieth anniversary of the 2-28 Incident. Li Hsiao-feng published an article on February 27, 1987 about 2-28 in Zili Wanbao that broached the subject in

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public. He also wrote explicitly about the process of writing 2-28 into public memory: On February 28, 1947, the “2-28 Incident” occurred in Taiwan. Up until now, there has been no public discussion of how we can abide its memory. The tragedy of 2-28 has been obscured by a political fog in Taiwan. Last year, Professor Hsü Cho-yun wrote an article, “To speak of the legacy of 2-28” in which he called for the transformation of the symbolism of the tragedy of 2-28, but today it still seems an impossible task. However, perhaps in ten years, the meaning of this tragedy of history will be fully realized, and these black clouds will be lifted.24 On the anniversary day itself, the conservative paper Lianhe Bao responded in a defensive and somewhat dismissive tone: In the forty years since the event, it has become a memory of old people, and there are very few people who can remember it. But it is not a taboo, and also not forgotten. But as everyone understands, it was only a conflict among a limited number of people, and although it affected all members of society, it was really just an unfortunate incident.25 A few months after these articles appeared the KMT’s paper Zhongyang Ribao commented on 2-28. Its editorial revealed the tension that still existed around the issue, and also dealt explicitly with the problem of remembrance. Like Li, the editorial wrote of the “discovery” or “uncovering,” faxian, of the 2-28 Incident: As we uncover the “2-28 Incident” from forty years in the past, how can we now talk about dealing with this “contemporary issue facing the nation”? There are many people who have this question in their hearts. At the same time, there are certainly many people with another feeling: today it seems impossible to avoid discussing the “2-28 Incident”. . . The government from the outset had a policy of silence, and domestically and overseas it created the impression that it was covering up the event . . . In fact, the “2-28 Incident” has never been a taboo topic that could not be discussed. In recent years, the silence maintained by the government has not been “avoid and do not discuss,” but rather “hope to not discuss again”26 The following year, in 1988, Zhongguo Shibao published a detailed account of the actual events of the 2-28 Incident. The piece used personal

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stories that told the story from both the mainlander and Taiwanese perspective, and the article concluded with quotes from the March 17, 1947 report by Pai Ch’ung-hsi into the causes of the Incident and making proposals for reform.27 In 1989, Minzhong Ribao returned to a belligerent and dismissive tone, describing 2-28 sarcastically as a jiri, a forbidden or taboo day: “Today is the ‘taboo day’ of the ‘2-28’ Incident. Before the lifting of ‘martial law’ the Taiwan region has had many such ‘taboos,’ that very few people would discuss.”28 But a year after that, the same paper devoted a large part of its edition to 2-28, and was more conciliatory. It also indicated the way the debate had quickly moved on to how to memorialize 2-28: 2-28 is a tragedy of history, and some people say it is a tragedy that we should not look at. This is wrong. It is tragedy in the pages of human history that teaches us the most important lessons. More than forty years ago, the government exercised arbitrary will, massacring Taiwanese people and creating suspicion among them, without reflection, apology, or punishment. . . . Every year, February 28 marks the changes over time, and we should now re-examine and give the day the significance it needs. In the commemorations of the last two years, the most important consequence is breaking through the government’s sanction, so that the people whose memories are the most bitter can grieve and have some consolation.29 The commentaries about 2-28 on all sides of the political debate in the late 1980s, use terms such as silence, memory, remembrance and commemoration, and taboo. Commentators called for the discovery, or recovery, of the history of 2-28 and Taiwanese history in general to establish a stable basis for Taiwan’s social and political development. The period between the event and the lifting of martial law is imagined in commentaries as an empty space in the center of Taiwan’s postwar political and social history, an untold and suppressed story, and the silence on 2-28 of the martial law period symbolized the denial of justice for its victims and for an unwritten history for Taiwan. Li Hsiao-feng writes about 2-28 as something silenced, rather than a mere silence, and Edmondson follows through on this distinction in his work on 2-28. Silence was created in Taiwan by an oppressive state apparatus not to erase the memory of 2-28 but, in preventing its being spoken of, to control public discourse. Silencing 2-28 up until 1987 was a part of the practices of the KMT’s political power through its capacity to control the discourses of Taiwanese history.30 Therefore, 2-28’s public exposure was a marker of the change in Taiwan’s discursive landscape, as the silence began to be lifted and the silenced began

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to speak and write. In the period of transition, the first issue was the legitimacy of recovering the event to incorporate it into Taiwanese history. Li poses it as a problem: the establishment of a legitimate political system is not possible without the absent presence of 2-28 being filled, and this is a common argument with respect to many of Taiwan’s historical issues. The Lianhe Bao editorial’s haughty tone indicates a contest over the legitimacy of the memory of 2-28. The newspaper attempts to marginalize the memory of 2-28 by the suggestion that it is merely the memory of the elderly; Minzhong Ribao’s sarcastic tone, and use of quotation marks, also signifies an attempt to delegitimize the event. Zhongyang Ribao is defensive. But Minzhong Ribao’s acknowledgment of February 28 as an annual commemorative day by 1990 signifies how quickly 2-28 became a legitimate part of Taiwanese history. Edmondson has written about the remembrance of the 2-28 Incident as part of the process by which Taiwanese identity has been reimagined in the post–martial law period. In particular, he notes the way what is described as a single date has become part of a narrative of Taiwanese identity that writes the significance of 2-28 into Taiwan’s future: As an event, a memory, a silence, a protest, and a history, this seemingly singular moment in time is, through representation, interpretation, and performance, repeatedly drawn into the contingent present and projected onto the unwritten pages of the future. . . . The narration of the February 28 Incident . . . has indeed been harnessed as just this kind of historical agency, and may serve as a window into the contemporary multivalent negotiations of Taiwanese national identity.31 Writing history and memory are key aspects of any national project, and recovering the history of 2-28 was part of the process of writing a national narrative for Taiwan. The discursive effect of the legitimization of the memory of 2-28 was to make Taiwan’s identity unique and irreducible to potentially subsuming identities, such as Chinese. However, the recovery of memory was also a discursive process in Taiwan’s cultural politics. It was not merely recovery of the “truth” of 2-28, but the establishment of an authoritative reading of it. In this sense, it was also the re-creation of a memory and history. Although journalists and scholars may have been genuine in their desire to report the truth of the 2-28 Incident, remembrance was a political act in which the limits of its history were defined. Indeed, just as the suppression of the memory of 2-28 by the KMT was a political act through which the KMT exercised power, so too was its remembrance a political process that tracked the changing structure of political power through the 1990s.

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Following the early, cautious, and tendentious commentaries, a huge amount of scholarship on 2-28 has been produced. Every year, on the Incident’s anniversary, debate over Taiwanese identity and Taiwan’s relationship to China and Chinese identity is renewed. By the mid- to late 1990s and well into the 2000s, 2-28 was the subject of the opinion pages in the daily newspapers, running contending views by academics and commentators in much the same way as opinion pages everywhere. In Taiwan’s intensely competitive print media, the major papers, Lianhe Bao, Zhongguo Shibao, and Ziyou Shibao, are differentiated across the political spectrum in accordance with their target demographics, and each looks for drama in contention and controversy around current social and political issues, and the debate over 2-28 has proved an ideal subject. Despite the vitriolic nature of this debate at times, the establishment of 2-28 as a regular subject of commentary and scholarship represents a rationalization and formalization of the discourse of 2-28 into particular received positions. In 1995, Zhongguo Shibao published a special series of articles about 2-28 reflecting the change in the debates. It was no longer a question of the legitimacy of recovery, but an iterative, received elaboration of the significance of 2-28 and its meaning. One piece, by Chen Wenxi, located the recovery of the history of 2-28 in the previous decade within a broader political consciousness of Taiwanese people of their place in the world: The tide of history of 2-28 strikes us, year after year, but for many people, awareness of 2-28 has let them see not only Taiwan, but at the same time China, the Hungary of 1966 [sic], and East Germany at the Berlin Wall. Consciousness of 2-28 sees 18th century Europe, sees the Hui under Chinese rule in the 19th century, and contemporary Tibet and Beijing’s Tiananmen.32 Yin Zhangyi wrote a piece contextualizing 2-28 in Taiwan’s postwar history, and discussing its place in cross-straits relations. He notes 2-28’s taboo status in Taiwan until 1987 while it continued to be commemorated by the PRC government. He also clearly recognizes the establishment of a received version of 2-28, going as far as to suggest that the event is becoming commercialized: We should grieve and worry when we are faced with the politicization and commercialization of 2-28. But we should also feel consolation and a degree of happiness when we see the government and the people dealing with the work of memorialization, entering into legal process and administrative

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matters, as well as the history of 2-28. . . . Solving these domestic problems gradually forms a sense of “common destiny” as the basis of a public consensus. From that common consciousness, it unites the homeland, the people and classes as “new Taiwanese.”33 Yin was rehearsing a familiar theme with respect to 2-28: the need to account for it so as to normalize and stabilize Taiwan’s social life. These later pieces in Zhongguo Shibao are no longer questioning the importance of the memory of 2-28, or questioning its right to be included in a history of Taiwan, but are discussing its symbolism and its role in Taiwan’s politics and culture. The 2-28 Incident is no longer simply an event, but a series of movements. It has become the “2-28 Peace Movement” or the “2-28 Memorial Movement,” or as Yin Zhangyi suggests, “the 2-28 Movement is the most successful opposition movement.” It has become an aspect of a broader narrative of Taiwan’s “tragedy” or, later, by “dealing” with its memory, the way to a resolution of its dilemmas and crises, and therefore the crisis of Taiwanese identity. Less than a decade after its dismissive references to the taboo of 2-28, Minzhong Ribao published “Wode er er ba (My 2-28).”34 In academic discourses, the remembrance of 2-28 took the form of detailed histories, and the scholarly efforts to explain the causes of the event. Li Hsiao-feng has written a number of books on the 2-28 Incident. In 1987, he contributed to the Zili Wanbao series Taiwan Sishinian Jingyan (The Forty Years of the Taiwanese Experience) with a volume called Taiwan sishinian minzhu yundong (Forty Years of Taiwan’s Democracy Movement)35 that presented a detailed account of 2-28. In 1998, he published Jieshi Er Er Ba (Explaining 2-28) that tracked through the Incident’s social, economic and cultural causes, and its effects. He opens with the question, “How did the feelings of the Taiwanese people turn around in such a short time? This is one of the most serious questions in history.”36 These articles and scholarly works on 2-28 over nearly two decades reflect the development of a subject position with respect to being Taiwanese. Personal accounts and the exposition of the facts of the event have given way to a self-conscious reflection upon it, incorporating 2-28 into explanatory frameworks about the Taiwanese condition and a broader narrative of Taiwanese identity. The 2-28 Incident has become a foundational theme that the Taiwanese deploy when they explain to themselves what it means to be Taiwanese. Therefore, the processes of history writing about 2-28 after the lifting of martial law signaled the beginning of a period of intense reflection by the Taiwanese on their own identity, which continues to the present. The Taiwanese write

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about identity and their own identity with a remarkable energy. The notion of the discovery or recovery of 2-28 Continued into a general project to “discover” any and all aspects of Taiwanese history and social life. Indeed, the magazine Tianxia produced a two-part history entitled Faxian Taiwan (Discover Taiwan) in 1992 as part of its Renshi Taiwan (Understanding Taiwan) series.37 When applying Bhabha’s arguments about the narrative address of the nation to Taiwan, it would suggest continuity between the pre– and post–martial law periods. For Bhabha, nations address themselves with a subjective, unmediated expression of an essential identity (“I am Taiwanese”) and simultaneously with an objectification of national identity (“to be Taiwanese is”), “their double inscription as pedagogical objects and performative subjects.”38 These arguments can be applied equally to Ko Kian-sing’s nationalist writing in the 1960s, Shih Ming-teh’s appeal to the soldiers and protesters during the Kaohsiung Incident, as well as the national narratives of the 1990s and 2000s. The differences are the legitimizing structures of symbolic power and the rhetorical styles with which those are applied. Bhabha’s work is a critique, a deconstruction, of the totality of the discourse of the nation. His main concern is the nature of time in the context of the nation; how individual, ahistorical39 moments of enunciation of national identity are narrativized by the processes of writing history. He uses the term “double-time” as well as “double writing,” in which individual enunciations of identity are moments that inscribe an essential and a historical national identity, but which through the process of history writing become stitched together into a historicized and bounded discourse. Shih’s appeal to Taiwanese identity on the barricades in 1979 could be interpreted on the basis of this argument. Shih’s declarations were singular moments of enunciation, and they have been incorporated into a historical narrative of Taiwanese nationhood by histories and nationalist ideologies.40 Together, according to Bhabha, they form narratives of nationhood. Bhabha’s attention to subjectivity and his description of the discursive address of the nation is relevant to Taiwan because it allows a nuanced interpretation of the complexity of changes in national identity across events like the lifting of martial law. In particular, it allows more than simply linking political changes to the “emergence” of identity; it helps develop an understanding of both the continuities and complex changes that occurred in the late 1980s. As noted above, when Bhabha’s work is applied to the example of Taiwan, it suggests that a self-reflexive discursive space into which a Taiwanese nation could be imagined had been opened well before the lifting of martial law. A small example of this complexity of subjectivity is the use of quotation marks in some of the Chinese-language reportage and commentaries given

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above. For both sides of the political spectrum, it has offered a rhetorical device for explicitly presenting two levels of meaning and creating a contestable as well as a hegemonic discursive space. Taiwanese independence is de-legitimized as a political position as “Taiwanese Independence” (taidu) in reportage in the 1970s and 1980s. When the independence activist Qiu Yonghan returned to Taiwan from Japan in 1972, Lianhe Bao wrote, “Qiu Yonghan, who had been agitating for ‘Taiwanese Independence’ in Japan, responded to the government’s appeal and returned after twenty-four years to his hometown to fight the communists.”41 Similarly, the conservative Minzhong Ribao could use “jiri” or “taboo day” in 1989 to indicate the operation of a layer of political and ideological meaning over the apparent meaning of public language. The Minzhong Ribao editorialists were implying that there was a public opinion that held that 2-28 was a forbidden subject, and then implying that there was another layer of political truth that suggested that the “taboo” of 2-28 was merely ideology among Taiwanese nationalists. They were addressing readers as if they would read “taboo” with the same sense of derision as the Minzhong Ribao editorialists. In this way they had the effect of marginalizing the independence movement. Similarly, but less commonly, Hsu Hsin-liang’s “birthday party” used irony to contest the KMT’s hegemony, producing a second layer of meaning in which “party” meant “opposition rally.” The use of quotes is a dimension of what Bhabha refers to as a “doubled” address, creating a subject position by rhetorically invoking an imagined oppositional position against which one can be positioned. The newspapers wrote as if there was an interlocutor who knew what “Taiwanese independence” or a “birthday party” really meant. Both examples created an imaginary or assumed subject position in rhetoric between the reader and the writer in opposition to a received political position. For Bhabha, this assumed subject position is the location of the nation. The nation is created as an address to that interlocutor, the people who newspaper editorialists and political activists invoked with their sarcastic or ironic use of quotation marks. However, this was an unruly and poorly regulated discursive space. The same assumed subjects who were called into being by reading about “taboo” might have understood that the paper meant to be derisory toward the notion of a taboo, but they may just as well have agreed with the marginalized independence activists that it really was taboo. Similarly, in all probability they would have read about the “birthday party” and understood perfectly clearly that it was an act of political dissent. The points about subjectivity and the narrative address of the nation can be brought back to the issue of silence and being silenced during the martial law period. The same imagined interlocutor, while silenced by authoritarianism, was nevertheless imagined, and even deployed, in the rhetorical practices

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of the KMT. In the example of the use of quotes around “Taiwanese independence,” while the KMT-controlled press was delegitimizing the idea, it was at the same time addressing a silenced subject position, that is, the people of Taiwan under martial law. For any one of those people, to speak about Taiwanese independence without quotes would have meant emerging from “the people” as an independence activist and risking arrest and imprisonment. Therefore, though the use of quotes represented a small act of repression by the KMT, it also invoked the possibility of a “Taiwanese people.” In this way, this mode of rhetoric was paradoxical. The political practices of silencing invoked the silenced national voice, but in enforcing its silence it also created a potentially counter-hegemonic discursive space. The silenced were addressed by sarcastic references to a taboo day, but may have responded with whatever degrees of agreement, amusement, anger, or derision they wished. The people could not speak publicly, but their subjectivity had been opened by being addressed by Taiwan’s hegemonic KMT government. The complex of rhetoric and subjectivity that this analysis is attempting to unravel here is explicitly dealt with by the Taiwanese themselves in their own references to taboos, silence, and remembering. As Li Hsiao-feng suggests, the silencing of 2-28 was the silencing of the Taiwanese people themselves. But more than this, the practice of silencing of the Taiwanese people also produced the notion that there existed a people who could be silenced, and therefore imagined as a singular and coherent identity. City of Sadness This silenced subject opened an unstable discursive space in which resistance was possible, and in the late 1980s, as political changes began to occur, its counter-hegemonic possibilities began to be realized. One of the clearest instances of a transition in the discursive address that highlighted this feature of Taiwanese national subjectivity was Hou Hsiao-hsien’s celebrated film of 1989, City of Sadness. Like commentators and academics at the end of the 1980s and through the 1990s, Hou recognized that his artistic project was a self-conscious practice of remembrance. In an interview in 1995, Hou said: I have lived in Taiwan for over forty years but it was only when I made A City of Sadness that I began to learn about Taiwan’s history. In preparation for the film, I read a lot of books on Taiwan’s history. It was only then that I consciously wanted to delve further into this area. Making a movie is a process of learning about history, people and life itself.42

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Yip has read City of Sadness as a form of social memory, which fits the film neatly into the same arguments that Edmondson has made about 2-28 more generally. She notes the film’s contribution to the “reclamation of a Taiwanese position as subject—rather than mere object—of history”43 and Hou’s comments indicate that the film was intentionally so. She also describes the film as a “ ‘history from below,’ deliberately rejecting the vantage point of the rulers in favor of the perspective of the common people,”44 an observation that locates City of Sadness in the nativist tradition that flourished in the 1970s. For Yip, City of Sadness presents an open-ended and pluralistic interpretation of Taiwan’s history.45 The nature of film with its narrative conventions, stylistic devices, and emotive nature makes for a “text” that allows for a presentation of historical events that emphasize a personal and dramatic perspective. This is in contrast with the conventions of historical scholarship and journalism that achieves legitimacy through making authoritative objective truth claims and generalizations. Indeed, one of the features of City of Sadness is its deliberately oblique evocation of the actual events of the 2-28 Incident. Rather than anything as direct as a re-creation of the assault on the elderly woman that sparked off the uprising, the Incident is evoked by a static scene of chaos in a hospital.46 As a cultural representation of 2-28 from the late 1980s and early 1990s, City of Sadness expresses the same process of recovery and contestation of history that occurred in newspapers of that time. Like the newspaper commentaries, the interpretation of 2-28 in the film remained equivocal and emotional, and it expressed how a received reading of the Incident had not been securely established at that time. The style of City of Sadness suits this moment, when the possibility of reading 2-28 in an authoritative way remained difficult not only in terms of the uncertainty of Taiwan’s political changes but also because its interpretation remained highly contested. The central character in City of Sadness played by Hong Kong actor Tony Leung is a deaf-mute, and his inability to speak symbolizes the Taiwanese as silenced by the oppression of the government. Ping-hui Liao reads the central character’s inability to speak as expressing Hou Hsiao-hsien’s own ambivalence toward Taiwanese history. For Liao, Hou is unwilling to fully embrace a specifically Taiwanese history, with the necessary claims on authenticity and authority over it, but instead uses a silenced subject to convey a distanced perspective: by using a deaf and mute character, the filmmaker can maintain an ambivalence that allows him to at once say nothing or anything about the character (and the Incident) who can neither hear nor speak for himself.

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Instead of facing human violence and cruelty, Hou consistently—and redundantly—turns his gaze away and focuses on the landscape that, in its permanent silence, seems to witness the loss of human lives and nevertheless survives.47 Liao is harshly critical of Hou’s characterization. A less critical interpretation might be that the mute character of Wen-ching invokes, and makes real, the same imagined Taiwanese interlocutor who, at the level of the everyday, is assumed by the journalists, editors, and censors who used quotes in their sarcastic references to Taiwanese political issues. Hou may be ambivalent toward the legitimacy of the history he is re-creating, but Tony Leung’s character explicitly represents the silenced Taiwanese. That is, he may represent the silencing of the Taiwanese, but the character is still present at the center of the narrative of the film. Commentary The possibilities of multiplicities of meanings and overlapping subjectivities operating in the public sphere which were developing through the 1970s and early 1980s have been realized and systematized after 1987. The “people,” silenced by the KMT, represented as silenced in City of Sadness, found a voice, and have been speaking to themselves at great length about the problem of their identity as Taiwanese ever since. It is the self-consciousness of the project of the discovery of the Taiwanese condition in historical events such as 2-28 in the press, scholarship, literature, cinema and any and all modes of cultural production that characterizes the discourses of Taiwanese identity in the 1990s and 2000s. The central theme in the discourse of Taiwanese identity after 1987 has been the problematic of Taiwanese identity itself. Recovering Taiwanese history became only the first step in a discursive formation in which a key subject of Taiwanese identity became Taiwanese identity. This way of speaking about Taiwanese identity may be found in many different topics: Taiwan consciousness (Taiwan yishi), Taiwanese independence (Taidu), the Taiwan complex (Taiwan jie) and the China complex (Zhongguo jie), national identity (guojia rentong), as well as the many political and cultural controversies around democratic politics. bentu wenhua, and others. Debates over identity have featured in Taiwan’s public discourse in print, especially newspapers and magazines, but they can also be found in radio, cinema, music, and television, and in the late 1990s, in DVDs and VCDs and the Internet, with the explosion of new digital media technologies.

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At a basic level of analysis, the possibility of debating Taiwan’s identity in Taiwan itself is the most visible marker of the change in symbolic power after 1987. After the lifting of martial law, topics such as Taiwanese independence that would have been suppressed, could be openly discussed. But even less contentious topics were markers of change. When Taiwanese academics, commentators, and politicians simply wrote or spoke about a relationship between Taiwan and China, naming both as if they were distinct discourses, and suggesting that the two could actually be in a political, cultural and, social relationship, it was part of the easing of the KMT’s hegemonic discourse that Taiwan was equivalent to China.48 One of the earlier themes in Taiwan’s identity debate was the notion of the Taiwan Complex and the China Complex that referred to the apparently national neurosis of Taiwan’s identity problem. In October 1987, the journal Zhongguo Luntan (China Tribune) published a long article by Yin Zhangyi called “Taiwan yishi shifen (Analysing Taiwan Consciousness),”49 that described in considerable detail a structure for Taiwanese identity in relation to China and in the context of Taiwanese history. Yin’s piece begins by referring to Erikson’s notion of an “identity crisis” and the idea that Taiwan’s identity could be understood as a developmental issue in accordance with Erikson’s psychoanalytic theories.50 The substance of Yin’s piece, however, is to track the development of identity though Taiwanese history, detailing settlement, colonization, the development of the Taiwanese economy, and society. He develops an early and sophisticated, version of the “immigrant island” argument, proposing that Taiwanese identity is a result of the history of migration experiences that have created a complex of relational identities with mainland China, Japan, and the rest of the world.51 In similar terms to Hughes’s assessment of Taiwanese identity in the immediate postwar period, Yin writes: Following the period as a Japanese colony, the identity produced by the opposition to the colonial government disappeared once the colonial oppression ended. But apart from the “nativist identity” which continued to mature, and a strong China consciousness, residual forms of Japan consciousness, global consciousness, “orphaned” consciousness and an individualizing kind of Taiwan consciousness all still existed.52 Yin’s piece reflects the period in which he was writing, and much like the early commentary, journalism, and scholarship on 2-28, he began by writing a history of Taiwan. Yin used the same periodization as Thomas Gold’s in State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, and like Gold, Yin wrote a history that produced a coherent and bounded narrative of Taiwan as a nation.

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Similarly, Yin links identity formations to political circumstances in a fairly direct way, using an empiricist methodology that describes political events and argues for their identity effects. He describes, for example, how the international reversals of the 1970s led to an “identity crisis” for Taiwan, and then in the 1980s, “Society and government have progressively pluralized, and in the process of positively resolving popular conflicts, have gradually learned to accept the positive benefits of social progress of a pluralistic society.”53 Therefore, Yin was writing Taiwan, creating a narrative of Taiwanese history and a set of problematics for the Taiwanese condition. As with Gold, he was producing a discourse of Taiwan, by elaborating its meaning, and thus establishing the discursive boundaries of a Taiwanese identity. Similar also to the work of Wachman, Yin’s key Taiwan problematic was Taiwanese identity itself, as if it were an object of social analysis. Unlike Wachman, however, Yin was also producing his own subjective identity as an object of social analysis. In addition to serious journal article, the “Taiwan Complex” trope was broadly deployed in newspaper commentary at the end of the 1980s, as the identity issue explicitly entered Taiwanese social and political life. In 1987 in Zili Zaobao, in an article entitled “Jiekai ‘Taiwanjie’ ‘Zhongguojie’ de genben tujing” (The way to solve the “Taiwan complex” and “China complex”) Huang Guangguo wrote: “The mutual antagonism of ‘Taiwan consciousness’ and ‘China consciousness’ creates the fundamental causes of most of Taiwan’s political problems today. The ruling party’s policies must make a considerably greater adjustment to untie the ‘complex’ of these two kinds of antagonistic conditions of consciousness.”54 Later that year, still using the shrill language of Nationalist China, Zhongyang Ribao wrote, “Taiwan is a part of the territory of the Republic of China. The purpose of the existence and development of the Republic of China is to build Taiwan and recover the mainland. There is absolutely no such ‘Taiwan complex.’ The way through the problem of the reunification of China is the Three Principles of the People.”55 The same argument about the debate on the Taiwan complex can be made about the many Taiwan-related topics debated through the 1990s in the opinion pages of Taiwanese newspapers. In 1992, the well-known scholar, Chang Mao-kuei was interviewed in an article for Zili Zaobao on the issue of Taiwanese independence. He argued that the independence movement was not a result of the division between mainlanders and Taiwanese, but a function of Taiwan’s relationship to mainland China. Chang suggests that a Republic of Taiwan would be a way to normalize Taiwanese society, making it stable, peaceful, and prosperous: “A Republic of Taiwan is one form with which the people can establish a collective dignity, by strengthening relations between individuals and community groups. In addition, working towards the ‘rectification of names’ strengthens the moral basis of the society.”56

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The Ziyou Shibao columnist Sun Qingyu wrote a piece in 1996 about “Taiwan consciousness” that reviewed the issue in terms of Taiwanese politics and the consolidation of a competitive party democracy: In his last years, Chiang Ching-kuo observed a “national identity crisis” in the KMT, and as a result said, “if you have lived in Taiwan for thirty nine years, you are already a Taiwanese.” James Soong on the 29th said, “We are all Taiwanese together.” He said, “Taiwan consciousness is not necessarily Taiwan independence consciousness.” This is definitely not just currying favor with the electorate. If the ruling party and the government do not identify with Taiwan and promote “Taiwan consciousness,” then it is equally negative for their own national identification, and they will lose the rationale to demand of others that they identify with the “Republic of China.”57 Sun indicates the way populist politics took up identity as a campaign issue. As he implies, this was partly for electoral success: like every democratic nation, appeals to identity, especially national identity, are a key aspect of the rhetoric of political campaigns. Even for the KMT, which could not make credible appeals to Taiwanese nationalism in the early to mid-1990s in the way that the DPP could, Sun Qingyu suggests that identity was sufficiently problematized to make its rhetorical deployment in one form or another a campaign necessity. Later that year, the same newspaper published an editorial on education and Taiwan consciousness that made an argument similar to that of Chang Mao-kuei, that the cultivation of Taiwanese identity would allow a normalization of Taiwan’s post-authoritarian social circumstances, and deliver peace and prosperity to Taiwan: The ethnic groups (zuqun) who are growing up on the island of Taiwan should have both feet in the soil. The freedom which now flows in history and time produces this depth of feeling and this, at last, is the self-belief of the Taiwanese people. It is from these “real feelings” of identity towards the land that education must develop inseparably. This is “organic” (youji). Furthermore, from a healthy and independent “Taiwan consciousness” can come cultural education, which can remould the thinking of Taiwanese people and build self-respect in Taiwanese society.58 This explosion of self-conscious commentary on identity by Taiwanese people provided the means for establishing a discourse of Taiwanese identity through the 1990s. That is, rather than signifying a rise in an underlying

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identity formation (a sense), the commentary on their own identity by Taiwanese was itself Taiwanese identity. This self-reflexive point has been developed throughout this book in different ways, with the argument about the blurred boundary between scholarship and identity, through the work of Bhabha, and with the notion of the self-consciousness or self-reflexivity of Taiwan’s identity discourse. In the 1990s, it is evidenced in the large amount of writing that is explicitly about Taiwanese identity. In 1994, on the national day of October 10, Zili Zaobao published an editorial entitled “Xincun Taiwan, rentong Taiwan, jianshe Taiwan (Feeling for Taiwan, identifying with Taiwan, building Taiwan)”: “Calling our country the Republic of China is good, calling it Taiwan is also okay. She is the place of destiny and prosperity for all of her 20 million people. The nation exists for the existence of the people.”59 In 1995, Li Hsiao-feng wrote the book Taiwan, wo de xuanze! (Taiwan, my choice!) that contained a series of essays on Taiwanese identity mainly from a historical perspective. Li tracked through political and cultural events mainly in the postwar period which, for him, map the development of Taiwanese identity. He concentrates on political events, such as the 2-28 Incident, Chungli Incident, Kaohsiung Incident and so forth, as well as exhaustively listing other events, including the Taiwan Professors Association meeting in 1991 and the formation of the “ ‘Mainlander’ Taiwanese Independence Promotion Association” in August of 1992.60 In 1996, less than ten years after it had urged readers to apply the Three Principles of the People to the problem of identity, Zhongyang Ribao published an editorial entitled “Rentong Taiwan de ren yingdang bei Taiwan rentong (People who identify with Taiwan should be identified by Taiwan)” that made a critical argument concerning the need by the Taiwanese to decide who they thought was “really” Taiwanese. The piece was prompted by the build-up to the Atlanta Olympic Games. The Chinese-born table tennis player, and Seoul gold medalist, Chen Jing had moved to Taiwan in 1991 and joined the Taiwan Olympic team for Atlanta: In society, everyone needs to have an “identity” and to be “identified” . . . for example, after Chen Jing came to Taiwan, in order for her to not be regarded as a foreigner by Taiwanese, she had to change her standard Beijing accent to Taiwan Mandarin. . . . Since Chen Jing and the great majority of Taiwanese love the kind of life in Taiwan, and all identify with the place, can one only hope that people can be enthusiastically identified and supported as Taiwanese, and not made into “foreigners”?61 Zhongyang Ribao’s appeal is a marker of the rapidly changing political and cultural landscape through the 1990s. Its once hegemonic voice now argued

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against an imagined hegemonic discourse of the Taiwanese. Like right-wing voices all around the world in the 1990s which railed against “political correctness,” it is suggesting, with a certain indignation, that the once marginalized Taiwanese voice is now dominant and is still occupying the high moral ground of the marginalized. Zhongyang Ribao is implying that benshengren are hypocritical by continuing to claim marginal status even though they are no longer oppressed by the KMT. The critical tone of the Zhongyang Ribao editorial reflects a dominant theme in Taiwan’s identity debate, that of a problem or crisis to be solved. From the early pieces on the Taiwan complex to calls in the 2000s to solve the identity problem, identity is objectified as a social and political goal that will realize social harmony.62 Indeed, shortly before his inauguration in 2000, President Chen Shui-bian described an “identity confusion problem” (rentong cuoluan wenti)63 in Taiwanese society, and later in 2004 called for the cultivation of an inclusive and positive basis for Taiwanese identity as part of his reelection campaign.64 By 2002, the identity “problem” had taken on an international dimension. Ziyou Shibao published an editorial that suggested that the identity problem prevented Taiwan from establishing its place among the community of nations: Taiwan is a sovereign independent country, and it is regrettable that a minority of people do not recognize that fact. Those who say they are Taiwanese . . . but are unwilling to cry out “I am Taiwanese,” create a contradiction in ethnic and national identity. To foreigners, Taiwan still goes by name of the Republic of China in the international community, and suffers under China’s arbitrary pressure. Therefore Taiwan is unable to participate in international affairs, marginalizing its place in the world, and violating the rights and interests of 23 million people.65 The notion of Taiwanese identity as a problem or crisis is a key dimension of its discursive production in the 1990s. The subject matter of Taiwanese identity becomes the identity crisis, rather than the positive elaboration of a nationalist ideology. In the first instance, this highlights a feature of commentaries, which is that Taiwanese consciousness is not elaborated as a meaning for Taiwan, but instead becomes a term that is appealed to, called for, criticized, or argued for what it may bring to Taiwanese social life. Zhongyang Ribao believed that Chen Jing was not identified as Taiwanese by an imagined Taiwanese people, and wrote with indignation against those people who were, in its view, hypocritically calling for greater identification with Taiwan. The article indicated the limits of Taiwan’s identity politics: for Zhongyang

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Ribao, Chen’s identification with Taiwan should be enough, and yet it claimed that her Beijing accent marked her out as inauthentically Taiwanese among some of those Taiwanese people. But despite the vitriol, the editorialist did not elaborate on the meaning of the Taiwanese identity with which Chen could identify. For Zhongyang Ribao, merely uttering one’s commitment to Taiwan, declaring “I am Taiwanese,” is a sufficient sign of Taiwanese identity. The lack of elaboration reflects the impossibility of defining precisely what a Taiwanese identity or consciousness might actually be. It also reflects an awareness of the political implications of a definition of identity. Identity demands inclusions and exclusions, and as Eagleton sharply describes it, “a violent stabilizing of the sheer precariousness and ambiguity of . . . identity to some spuriously self-identical essence.”66 Zhongyang Ribao’s indignant piece tested the boundaries of Taiwanese identity in the example of Chen Jing, implicitly recognizing that an attempt to define who is Taiwanese and who is not is fraught with precisely the problems and possibilities of crisis that the commentaries on identity so often deplored. While lamenting an identity crisis may be an “ontologically empty”67 feature of Taiwan’s identity discourse in the 1990s and 2000s, at the same time it does construct a narrative trajectory for Taiwanese nationhood. Notions of a crisis or problem, and the call for their resolution assume the teleology of a historical endpoint and the realization of a national subjectivity when a resolution is reached. Yin in 1987 implied a teleology of national realization or completion when he argued that Taiwanese people were still passing through stages of psychosocial development. In the subsequent articles quoted above, in the 1990s and 2000s, Taiwan’s identity crisis was a political and social problem that was a source of social conflict. As Chang Mao-kuei suggested in 1992, resolution would achieve “collective dignity,” and strengthen “the moral basis of the society,” implying the fulfillment of Taiwan’s national project in the complete subjectivity of the Taiwanese people. In Ping-hui Liao’s terms, commentary of this form “decodes” the social, cultural, and political life of the nation. Readers read the narrative of their own national identity in the daily press, and are entreated to envision a future as complete Taiwanese people by the criticisms made by social commentary on their present lack of Taiwanese identity or consciousness.68 For Liao, commentary on Taiwanese identity is as much about the process of narrativization as elaborating a coherent substance to the content of a Taiwanese national consciousness, as to what should be going on in people’s heads: “as these columns treat public issues, they also help manufacture publicity and generate the desire to decode public culture in an industrialized and commodified cultural knowledge: a desire for the simple formulation of social circumstances, in order to experience and perceive the everyday as mediated.”69

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The narrativization of Taiwanese identity in 1990s introduces the possibility of a coherent national subject without the explicit political implications of defining who that subject would be. For Bhabha, narrativization is a fundamental aspect of nationhood: the performative, the individual utterances of national identity (“I am Taiwanese”) compresses the nation’s history into a singular moment, in which the nation no longer has a history and ceases to be the contingent result of a historical process, while pedagogy, exhorting the need for a national consciousness, for example, traces a line through history as a teleology of the realization of the national subject, marginalizing alternative histories (e.g., Chinese, Hakka) and inscribing a coherent identity to the people. “In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuous, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation.”70 The nation is imagined out of an elusive vision of its future in the singular moments in which it is invoked. And yet, as Eagleton has said in the quote in chapter 3, the categories of identity continue to exert an implacable political force.”71 Imagining identity as a crisis or problem to be resolved is a way of structuring the terrain of Taiwanese identity in political terms as the beginning of a hegemonic ideology for Taiwan nationhood. The appeal by activists, politicians, and commentators to the narrative of an imagined Taiwanese national future, when the identity problem is “solved,” provides a discursive terrain in which Taiwanese can be judged as “good” or “bad” Taiwanese national citizens on the basis of their commitment to that future. Ziyou Shibao criticized Taiwanese who “are unwilling to cry out ‘I am Taiwanese’ ” and in so doing offered a hegemonic discourse of Taiwanese identity, structured by the vigor of the rhetoric of commitment as a way of measuring who is “really” Taiwanese and who is not. The conclusion to chapter 6 presented this argument from a slightly different perspective. The essentializing imperative of, for example, bentu wenhua, positions the contemporary discourses of the identity crisis discussed here as liminal within the nation’s narrative address. In Bhabha’s terms, the Taiwanese are “alienated from [their] eternal self-generation.”72 The objectified narratives of Taiwan’s identity crisis express the inevitable marginalization of Taiwanese national subjects from the imagined sense of an essential Taiwaneseness that the nativist cultural movements sometimes constructed in the narrativizing of their national history and national future. If the boy riding the ox expresses the essence of Taiwanese identity, then the urgent calls for a Taiwanese future, for the Taiwanese “to cry out ‘I am Taiwanese’ ”, to invoke, as it were, that boy, express the way Taiwanese nationals are marginalized from essentialized invocations of their own identity. Contemporary

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Taiwanese generally do not ride about on oxen, and contemporary national identification operates with a necessary gap between the daily reality of modern lives and the invocation of the essences of national identities. It is into this gap that appeals to a fully realized and coherent Taiwan national subject are made. However, in a way that Bhabha does not anticipate, in contemporary Taiwan this “internal contradiction in the modern . . . nation”73 is made explicit in Taiwan’s identity discourses. The explicit subject of Taiwanese national identity is exactly the impossibility of a coherent national subjectivity that Bhabha describes. Taiwanese commentators, academics, and politicians have, using a different style of rhetoric, specifically criticized the Taiwanese for the crisis of self-identification that Bhabha finds as the “internal contradiction” at the centre of the national imagining. The appeals to solve Taiwan’s identity problem are the impossible hope that the contradictions of the narrative address of the modern nation, to which the Taiwanese feel so close, may be resolvable. Commentary in Taiwan constructs elaborate temporal narratives for Taiwan’s future, but as Ping-hui Liao has theorized, it also produces a critical discursive space. With references to Habermas and the notion of a public sphere, as well as Wang Hui and Nancy Fraser’s specific critique of the Chinese public sphere, Liao has observed and criticized the distinctive selfconscious voice in Taiwan of social commentary inflected with a globalized academic language and featuring certain critical styles and subject matters. He has identified newspaper columns as a key site for this discourse: These columns that we have broadly defined as belonging to the field of cultural criticism are mostly written by bilingual intellectuals to promote changes in public policy or to advocate notions of new social movements, cultural nationalism, regional coalition, or various strategies of localization. Among the topics discussed are the unstable mixtures of new ideas . . . with local politics in Taiwan or China; the resurgence of indigenous and traditional cultures in relation to modernization; oppositional projects of ethnic identity and cultural location . . . emergence of new cityscapes and urban social relations; forms of cultural production and consumption.74 Liao suggests that they are examples of the textualization of public discourse in Taiwan, creating a “metatopical” discourse in which commentary adopts a distanciated subject position from which to critique Taiwanese society. For Liao, this is a discursive process in which social life becomes self-reflexive: Cultural criticism columns in Taiwan’s newspaper literary supplements have functionally converted the public sphere in the world of letters, a sphere held together by the medium of the press with its serial literature

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and institution of the reading public, into a public domain of professional criticism within which “the subjectivity originating in the interiority of the conjugal family, by communicating with itself, attained clarity about itself.”75 Liao is identifying a mode of address for social discourse in Taiwan. Contained in his notion of “communicating with itself,” and “attain[ing] clarity about itself ” is an apprehension of the complex of subjectivity that Bhabha phrases as the “barred Nation It/Self, alienated from its eternal selfgeneration, becom[ing] a liminal form of social representation.”76 The processes of communicating and achieving “clarity” is one way of describing how Taiwanese identity is constructed as a discourse. Certain tropes are valorized and others marginalized to establish a structure for what Taiwanese identity “really” is—2-28, Taiwanese independence, Taiwan consciousness, and so forth. These tropes are reproduced in a mediated, textualized public field of commentaries that Liao suggests, have become highly self-referential. The discourses within this textualized field have a history too. The Taiwan complex has faded from debate, replaced by more up-to-date topics, such as the dangers to Taiwan’s nascent national integrity from excessive dependence on the mainland Chinese economy. For Liao, this is a function of the commodification of Taiwan’s identity discourse in a competitive media market, “decod[ing] public culture in an industrialized and commodified cultural knowledge.”77 An illustration of the emergence of the self-reflexive, textualized discursive space that Liao is describing is the 2-28 Memorial in Taipei. The memorial was built in 1995 in the rededicated Taipei Peace Park in central Taipei, and has become the central site for memorializing practices, both official and unofficial, of the 2-28 Incident. The monument is a self-consciously modernist architectural structure with complex symbolism and its establishment, design, and opening were all marked by controversy. Edmondson has discussed the 2-28 Memorial in the 1990s in terms of the public performance of the collective memory of 2-28, and of Taiwanese nationhood that created acts of remembrance to legitimize certain versions of Taiwanese history. He has written about the opening of the memorial on February 28, 1995, which was surrounded by a range of protests, street theater and official, government-sanctioned events and, debate in the media. For Edmondson, the memorialization of 2-28 highlights the contestability of Taiwan’s identity landscape, with various groups using a range of strategies to oppose the KMT’s attempts to appropriate the memory of the Incident in the new era of competitive electoral politics. “The new histories or counter-narratives being generated moved the past

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into the realm of politics, and established the ideological groundwork for making new claims and demands, as well as promoting the consolidation of Taiwanese identity within the process of resistance.”78 For Edmondson, the practices of remembrance of 2-28 have structured the physical public space in Taipei, through parades, demonstrations, and the Memorial itself. The contestation of the political landscape was expressed in the literal contestation of the Taipei cityscape by the many events organized over 2-28.79 In the “political theater” of the 2-28 Memorial was a controversy over the text of the plaque in front of the memorial. When it was opened in 1995, no agreement could be reached as to the text’s content, and so it stood reading simply “2-28 Memorial.” Two years later, on its fiftieth anniversary, a new plaque with text detailing the events was dedicated and replaced the original. However, in the hours after the plaque was unveiled, in an act of literal textual violence, it was vandalized by demonstrators. As a result it was returned to the simple memorial name until the KMT mayor Ma Ying-jeou was elected Taipei City Mayor in 1998 and reinstated the longer text in 1999. Therefore, for the early life of the key memorial in Taiwan to 2-28, there was nothing apart from the name “2-28 Memorial” to indicate precisely what it was memorializing. Even with the text reinstated, it is a small component of a highly symbolic structure in which its surfaces, shapes, and symbols cannot be immediately decoded by an observer. The 2-28 Memorial can be contrasted with the Koxinga Shrine in Tainan that was discussed in chapter 4 in relation to Bourdieu, as an example of the strategies used by the Nationalists to legitimize their rule over Taiwan. The shrine drew on imperial textual and architectural practices to valorize the Nationalists’ version of Taiwanese history. They invoked the symbolic power of classical Chinese culture, notably calligraphy, in the context of the shrine, to legitimize their interpretation of the narrative of Koxinga. The Koxinga Shrine indicates that classical Chinese symbolic forms were an authoritative and legitimate embodiment of Chinese culture on Taiwan in the 1950s. By the 1990s, however, the symbolic power of calligraphy had become diluted. After the opportunity came to rewrite Taiwanese history to include the 2-28 Incident, its representation in the memorial in Taipei is striking for the absence of Chinese characters or reference to classical Chinese culture in its symbolic forms. In fact, there is no writing on the memorial structure at all, and this signifies a break with the legitimizing practices of Taiwan’s Chinese identity that the Nationalists had been able to deploy in the 1950s. This points to a change in the legitimizing regime of the discourses of Taiwan between the 1950s and 1990s. Taiwanese identity breaks with the hegemonic Chinese national identity imposed by the KMT not simply because

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it is a different set of ideas about the meaning of Taiwan, but also because it is constituted by different legitimizing practices. As Liao’s analyses indicate, the textualized discursive space in the media is one place where the legitimization of Taiwanese identity now occurs. The obscurantist symbolism of the 2-28 Memorial as an architectural structure is decodable by Taiwanese visitors because the history it represents is being legitimized in the authorized language of Taiwanese history in journals and newspaper columns. Instead of a legitimizing the regime using classical architecture and calligraphy, it is a modernist space that supplements, and indeed relies on, the books and commentaries that have drawn the events of 2-28 into Taiwan’s national consciousness. In this way, the discourse of news and cultural media decodes or narrates Taiwanese social life for the Taiwanese, imagining a teleology assembling a discourse of the meaning of Taiwan. Readers can position themselves in relation to the discourse of this assumed identity by their responses to these commentaries about the Taiwanese condition, marking their commitment or otherwise to the new Taiwanese nation. Ping-hui Liao highlights the kind of language being used, produced by a group of scholars and writers who are steeped in the globalized language of criticism, inflected by the various postisms that have come to shape sociocultural analysis: “These bilingual intellectuals, coming from varied backgrounds and having multiple layers of experience, draw on their expert and common knowledge to talk about Western concepts such as civil society, cultural politics, consumerism, gender, media, neocolonialism, and national identity.”80 Liao perhaps overplays the importance of bilingual, Western-educated Taiwanese public intellectuals as the sole arbiters of Taiwan’s public discourses. However, he correctly identifies the arrival of social and cultural theory into Taiwan’s identity debates through the 1990s. An example is the work of political scientist Tsai Ing-wen, later chairwoman of the Mainland Affairs Council, and then vice-premier in 2006. Tsai published a theoretically informed paper in the journal Zhengzhi kexue luncong (Political Science Review)81 on Taiwanese identity, making extensive use of postcolonial theorizing, in particular Juia Kriseva and Homi K. Bhabha, to argue against any kind of essentialist basis for identity and formulate arguments on the basis of concepts such as legitimization and relational identity. She wrote, “individual and collectivities pursue association on the basis of legitimized distinctions, but at the same time, those attempts to establish political and cultural identities in the basis of difference rely on flexible and negotiated boundaries.” On contemporary Taiwan, Tsai writes, Looking at this phenomenon in a positive way, we can say that Taiwan’s sociopolitical situation in the post–martial law period has moved toward

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“pluralization”. . . Furthermore, although this kind of pluralism produces conflicts and divisions, the reason why a pluralistic society constitutes the conditions of a free society lies in the fact that it can contain the kind of conflicts initiated by those differences.82 Tsai’s writing represents the sharp end of the argument about the selfreflexivity of Taiwanese identity in the 1990s. A Western academic can apply the dense writing of Homi K. Bhabha to the problematic of Taiwanese identity as a scholarly problem, objectifying Taiwan and producing Taiwan as a discursive formation. Yet if a Taiwanese academic and politician such as Tsai Ing-wen can also apply it to the objective analysis of her own subjectively experienced identity, then this points to the operation of an episteme in which the important aspect of Taiwanese identity is the folding together of subjectivity and objectivity in Taiwan’s identity discourse, and the creation of a discursive location in which the political contestation of identity continues to be vitriolically played out. Indeed, in 2000, Tsai Ing-wen participated in a television debate on Taiwanese identity that illustrated the popular, public side of this discursive formation, not academic theory, but a theoretically informed discussion on television for a mass audience called “Dahejie: Women shi shenme ren? (A Great Reconciliation: Who are we?)” In the debate, Taiwanese addressed themselves on how they could understand and express their own sense of their identity.83 The debate itself was an expression of Taiwanese identity and it elaborated objective meanings for their own subjective identity by Taiwanese people themselves. Tsai’s work also highlights one of the ways in which the elaboration of identity is legitimized by the language of political and social theory. If the ultimate expression of Chinese identity in Taiwan was the blood of NTU students in 1971, twenty-five years later, the institutional practices of analysis and scholarship have become a key legitimizing strategy for Taiwanese identity. That is, when the students at NTU wished to signify their Chinese identity most dramatically, they used their own blood. The ideology of Chinese nationalism applied notions of race and essentialism, so that a petition in blood was a meaningful Chinese nationalist act under the KMT. Similarly, the Koxinga Shrine legitimized Nationalist Chinese history through references to classical Chinese culture. For the Taiwanese nation, however, race and blood, though elements of the extremes of Taiwanese nationalism, are not at its center. Nor is nationalism legitimized by notions of a great cultural history of thousands of years. Instead, the Taiwanese nation has developed different emphases in its legitimizing structure. The numerous conferences, papers, articles, and newspaper commentaries that are written with a critical language inflected by

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postcolonial studies or political science writing indicate a different set of legitimizing rhetorical forms. Taiwanese identity objectifies itself with an authorized language of contemporary, cultural and social analysis. For those practicing their Taiwanese identity, signing a petition in one’s own blood might seem an excessive and rather distasteful act, and it is that sense of its absurdity that is a marker of the delegitimizing of Chinese nationalist practices on Taiwan. Reading and writing about one’s identity problematic in an authoritative scholarly language might seem a far more meaningful undertaking. The seriousness with which the Taiwanese take such writing and the authority it holds is a marker of the legitimizing structure of Taiwanese identity. Languages of Legitimization In follow-up work to his earlier piece on newspaper supplements, Ping-hui Liao has been sharply critical of the popularization of the global language of cultural studies in Taiwan as the dominant language for dealing with issues of identity. In particular, he takes exception to the valorization of this language by Taiwanese academics. He argues that global cultural studies is antithetical to the possibilities of Taiwanese identity, even as it is that language that is most vigorously applied to Taiwan’s identity problematic by Taiwanese themselves: The critical genealogy of postmodernism and postcolonialism as these terms are appropriated in a Taiwanese context should be of interest to scholars in comparative culture. For in Taiwan it is often the writers who are against localization processes . . . that advocate the idea of postmodern heterogeneity or of postcolonial multivocality . . . they condemn nativist movements in the name of cultural constructionism [because] everyone on the island is but a “fake” Taiwanese.84 Liao is possibly right to question the motives of the practitioners of theory on Taiwan. Anecdotally, I have observed that within the academy in Taiwan cultural theorists are predominantly waishengren (mainlanders),85 who are at risk of marginalization by legitimizing claims to authenticity by Taiwanese (benshengren). Therefore anti-essentialist claims to “hybrid” identities using a global academic discourse might be interpreted as a rhetorical strategy to counter such claims on Taiwanese identity. Important though cultural studies has been in Taiwan for constructing a legitimate discourse of Taiwanese identity, there are other legitimizing languages that can be identified in the 1990s. A key rhetorical form that comes out of another globalized authoritative academic language is political science.

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Its primary methodology for apprehending Taiwan’s identity problematic is opinion surveys. Almost immediately after the lifting of martial law, scholars, the media, and government organizations have been using large-scale surveys to systematize and understand Taiwanese identity. Typical surveys have tracked whether people identify themselves as Taiwanese or Chinese or both, and whether people support unification, independence, or the status quo in cross-straits relations. Some have drawn distinctions within groups such as benshengren, waishengren, and Hakka. The results are consistent: they show a “rise” in “Taiwanese identity,” a “fall” in “Chinese identity,” and a fairly constant measure for centrist positions, such as “both Chinese and Taiwanese” or the status quo. The collations of survey results by the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) show those identifying themselves as Chinese dropping from over 40 percent in the early 1990s to less than 15 percent by the end of the decade, while Taiwanese has risen approximately by the same percentage.86 Conducting opinion surveys relies on objective knowledge about identity, of which this analysis has offered a critique. The epistemology of objective social knowledge, of a sense of identity separate from language is expressed in unqualified terms by the idea that identity can be measured and given a percentage point. As noted earlier, Shelley Rigger has said, “Taiwanese scholars and political activists have constructed extremely sophisticated analyses of national identity. But operationalizing this concept as a measurable variable has proven difficult.”87 The notion that identity as a “measurable variable” is a clear statement of the objectivist assumptions of political science. That Rigger does reflect on the problem of “operationalizing” identity indicates an awareness of problems of positivism in understanding identity, but she does not follow this all the way down to the basis of her methodological assumptions. The production and analysis of survey data on identity by scholars such as Wu Naide88 and Lin Tsong-jyi,89 government organizations such as the Mainland Affairs Council and surveys undertaken by the major newspapers, indicate the level of legitimacy that positivist knowledge holds in contemporary Taiwan. Surveys are a response to the problem of how to measure Taiwanese identity, and they treat it as a measurable phenomenon or fact. They produce empirical information and the misrecognized pursuit of this data as the “truth” about Taiwanese identity reveals a structure in which a positivist epistemology—an objective social world outside of language—is valorized as identity’s most legitimate basis. “Real” knowledge of Taiwanese identity is objective and scientifically produced using statistical methods delivering percentage figures, and from those, policy decisions can be made. In the case of the MAC data, Taiwanese identity is structured on the basis of only two

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categories, Taiwanese and Chinese. This is because the MAC is concerned with cross-straits relations, and their data align the identity problematic on that basis. The data produce graphs showing the “rise” and “fall” of identity formations, and this functions as a narrative of cross-straits relations. Identity becomes a variable operationalized in the geopolitical equation that the MAC uses to formulate policy on the relationship between national identity and tension across the Taiwan Straits. A methodology that anticipates objective, disinterested truth as its outcome attenuates the operation of social power and the processes of contestation by obscuring the discursive function of surveys themselves. At the same time, the epistemological strategies of surveys, with their bases in statistics and sampling, marginalize as ephemera personalistic and unsystematic knowledge such as discourses, meaning, and singular moments of enunciation. More importantly, the subjective experience of Taiwanese identity, the “I-am-Taiwanese” moment, is modulated by surveys themselves, in ways that the methodology of surveys cannot apprehend. A person can enunciate his or her Taiwanese identity by reading about it in a survey, and he or she can observe the objective rise of their own sense of themselves as a Taiwanese person. Yet, surveys operate on the basis of a claim on objective knowledge, and do not take into account how surveys themselves can become part of the rhetoric of identity, informing the responses of the interviewees. The complex relationship between the subjective enunciation and objective knowledge of identity that Bhabha theorized are collapsed together in the identity survey methodology. Surveys are therefore at one end of the continuum of the discursive production of identity that includes scholarship, commentary, and nationalist ideology. Just like those other modes of narrative address of Taiwanese identity, surveys address the Taiwanese people as if their own, subjective identity is a coherent and bounded social object. Furthermore, in the same way as the commentaries cited above, such as those of Chang Mao-kuei and Sun Qingyu, surveys present a narrative trajectory for the realization or fulfillment of the Taiwanese nation. Just like appeals to Taiwan consciousness by editorialists and politicians, the graphs of identity produced by survey results showing its rise produce a reference point that structures a discourse of Taiwanese identity. Taiwanese nationalists can celebrate the rise, Chinese nationalists can condemn it. For Taiwanese nationalists, the direction of the line of the graphs, like the call for a “resolution” of the identity problem, invokes an imagined future, with the rise in Taiwanese identity described by survey graphs holding out the hope of the fulfillment of the Taiwanese national subject. Yet, despite the many criticisms that can be made of surveys from the point of view of their methodology and of the limits of the kind of positivist

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knowledge they produce, they represent an important legitimizing moment for Taiwanese identity. The rising and falling graphs of identity imagine the possibility of an objective explanation of Taiwanese identity, and their numbers can be lined up with other objects of analysis like “democracy” or “crossstraits relations” to form explanatory or predictive theories. In this way, surveys are located within a dominant epistemology in political and social sciences that authorize the kind of knowledge they produce. As argued earlier, the boundaries between scholarship and ideology are blurred in such a way that the authorization of objective knowledge becomes a legitimizing rhetoric for Taiwanese identity itself.

CHAPTER 8

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ositivist political and social sciences privilege survey responses as providing legitimate data on “real” Taiwanese identity, and many of the preceding arguments can be brought to bear to critique the knowledge that they themselves produce. The survey strategy of simply asking people whether they think of themselves, or name themselves, as Taiwanese or Chinese is covered in the review of Derrida’s arguments on naming and the production of meaning. Lin Tsong-jyi has used that kind of survey data from the Election Study Centre at National Chengchi University to discuss “the distribution of national identities,” noting “increasing Taiwanese identity and decreasing Chinese identity” as “two significant and general trends.”1 He is really talking about the naming practices of the Taiwanese people. These surveys assume that naming is indicative of a social object called identity, so that the word Taiwanese corresponds to a measurable social phenomenon called Taiwanese identity. However, on the basis of Derrida’s reflections on the act of naming, even in the institutional setting of an opinion survey, the sign Taiwanese can be understood as a site of political contestation that has become invested with the meaning of nationhood. The arguments presented in chapters 1, 2, and 3 from Derrida, as well as Bourdieu and Bhabha, can be brought to bear a quite literal level over the use of the name Taiwan in a number of debates in Taiwan’s identity politics in the post–martial law era. In July 2002, for example, the Lions Club International made the decision to change the name of the Taiwan Chapter from “ROC Lions Club” to “China Taiwan Lions Club,” triggering a strong reaction in Taiwan. The former chairman of Taiwan’s Lions Club, Hsu Ming-te said, “By addressing the Taiwan Chapter as ‘China Taiwan,’ the LCI is not placing us on equal and fair footing with China but relegating us as a part of China.”2

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Similarly, in 2002 the Taiwanese government proposed adding “Issued in Taiwan” in English to ROC passports. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed it was merely an administrative change to facilitate international travel by ROC passport holders, but the KMT responded by suggesting that the decision exposed the Taiwanese independence intentions of the Democratic Progressive Party. The-then Chairman of the KMT Lien Chan responded by saying, “Our country is the Republic of China, and the national title is also the Republic of China. Adding ‘Taiwan’ to the passports is obviously an attempt to change the national title.”3 The New Party (Xin Dang) called for the impeachment of President Chen and claimed that the decision left Taiwan with a “ticking timebomb.”4 In these instances, the name of Taiwan itself has become the basis for Taiwanese identity, inscribing the meaning of the island, while its legitimacy remains vigorously contested. Since 2000, the official name of the country itself and the need for its “rectification” has emerged as a key political issue. Ziyou Shibao published an editorial in 2002: Taiwan has achieved a great deal through more than ten years of democratization and Taiwanization, and the next step of this important work will be the movement for the “rectification of names.” On the one hand, Taiwan’s collective consciousness will absorb the thinking of New Taiwanese and will extinguish the crisis of ethnic conflict. On the other, it will return Taiwan to its rightful international status, throwing off the fiction propagated by China, and clarifying the misunderstanding of the international community.5 The editorial and Lien’s and Hsu’s remarks illustrate an intuitive understanding of the connection between names, identity, and power to which surveys are not attentive. The changes in the naming practices of both the Lions Club and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs can be read as attempts to redraw the discursive boundaries of Taiwan and reinscribing the structures of power under which Taiwan operates. The heated reactions from politicians and commentators expresses the significance of the political implications of naming practices for Taiwanese identity. Temporally, the graphs of identity over time could be understood as graphs of the changing naming practices that these controversies express. The surveys track the contestation in the structures of legitimacy of the names that Taiwanese people deploy. In chapters 1 and 3, the argument was made that the use of names—Taiwan, China, and Formosa—rose and fell through the legitimizing forces of institutions of power within Taiwan as well as internationally. The rise and fall of Taiwanese and Chinese tracks the

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decline of Chinese nationalist hegemony and the rise of a different set of naming practices that privilege Taiwan, and therefore legitimize Taiwanese identity. The emergence of the political issue of whether to call Taiwan Taiwan or the Republic of China indicates how far the legitimization of Taiwan over China has come since Retrocession. Furthermore, these practices are not necessarily confined to the island of Taiwan. One can speculate that a survey of non-Taiwanese individuals with an interest in Taiwan (asking, for example, whether the interviewee saw the island as Taiwanese or Chinese) would probably show a similar rise in Taiwanese identity. In chapter 1, the connection between power, identity, and names were outlined in the context of the exercise of state power over the island. Each ruling regime, from imperial, colonial to republican, represented the island under a category that reflected the specific interests of the state at that time. Each regime exercised power on the basis of different categories through the state institutions they could deploy. Under the hegemony of the Qing empire, the Japanese, the Nationalists, and internationally, Taiwan was formally represented as a county, province, colony or country and its identity formation was legitimized accordingly. In the 1990s, those naming practices shifted again when Lee Teng-hui implemented constitutional reform and ended the “Period of National Mobilization for the Suppression of the Communist Rebellion” which withdrew the claim by the Republic of China to represent all of China.6 In terms of the arguments in chapter 3 on language and legitimacy, this can be understood as both a further consolidation of the name Taiwan as the only legitimate name for the island and its people. It also represents the abandonment of the legitimacy to name mainland China as the Republic of China. The reform drew a discursive line between Taiwan and China as two separate entities, in political meaning, if not, in law. On the other side of the straits, however, the People’s Republic of China has vociferously renewed its claim over Taiwan. In 1995 and later most dramatically in 1996, in the lead-up to the first presidential election, the Chinese government test-fired live missiles into the Taiwan Straits, as a demonstration of its power and as an attempt to influence the outcome of the vote. In opinion surveys the effect was a sudden jump in the percentage of people claiming Taiwanese identity,7 and this outcome makes sense in terms of a Derridean interpretation of the operation of meaning. The PRC does not exercise any direct political power over Taiwan; it has no institutional structures operating on the island itself that could enunciate and legitimize its name as China, and once the Taiwanese state itself stopped doing so in the early 1990s the legitimizing potential of Taiwan’s Chinese identity was significantly undermined. However, the Chinese state can direct its rhetoric and its violence at Taiwan. Like the violence of 2-28, China’s actions are the endpoint of the differentiation

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of China from Taiwan in language. As the Chinese government has come to understand, any enunciation of Taiwan by Beijing, whether through the language of missiles or public statements by its leadership is a moment of differentiation, but without the capacity to exercise direct governmental authority on the island, the effect is to sharpen the meaning of Taiwan. Missiles become another enunciation, and, to borrow Bhabha’s phrase, another “repetition and pulsation of the national sign,”8 that simply inscribes Taiwan and Taiwanese identity all the more acutely. For the same reasons, the missile tests were also one of the key moments in the growth of Taiwan Studies, placing the identity problematic and crossstraits relations at the heart of the field in the notion of the Taiwan Straits as a global “flashpoint.” Identity has received its most decidedly positivist treatment in studies of cross-straits relations, in accordance with the dominant methodological approach of international relations. It has become operationalized as a measurable variable in a geopolitical equation in which its rise becomes the cause of a cross-straits conflict. Bernstein and Munro’s The Coming Conflict With China that came out less than a year after the missile crisis is the baldest statement of this discourse.9 Chapter 7 presented a contrasting argument to objectivist surveys. It suggested that one way to understand the discourse of identity in contemporary Taiwan is as a textualized discursive space in which Taiwanese identity is constituted out of appeals to the possibility of such an identity. This produces an ideological field that allows a narrative and teleology of Taiwanese nationhood to be imagined in notions like a “crisis” of identity. By the end of the 1990s, notions of Taiwanese identity were being elaborated and legitimized by politicians, media personalities, and commentators as well as the institutions of the state. In Taiwan, as elsewhere, a key site for identity politics was education, which provided an institutional field for the legitimization of a narrative of Taiwanese history and social life. The major controversy in the 1990s was the series of high school textbooks called Renshi Taiwan (Understanding Taiwan). In 1993, at a Ministry of Education curriculum conference, reform of the national school curriculum was proposed to promote “localization,” “internationalization,” and “normalization,”10 and in 1997, three textbooks were produced covering Taiwanese history, geography, and social studies. In 1993, the proposals at the curriculum conference were broadly supported for introducing more balance into Taiwan’s school curriculum. Taiwanese nationalists of all shades had long objected to schoolchildren being required to learn Chinese national history as part of the KMT’s legitimization of a Chinese identity for Taiwan. Curiously, amidst the discussions these proposals generated, was Du Wenjing’s suggestion that the

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reforms could counter U.S. hegemony rather than Chinese: “More than concern for the local, who does not hope that their own children not only know the Hudson River, but also the Tamshui River and the Zhuoshui River. Who does not want their children to not only know Washington and Lincoln, but also Jiang Weishui and Lin Xiantang.”11 Lin Xiantang, along with the doctor Jiang Weishui, were founders of the Taiwan Cultural Association in 1920. While the early proposals attracted little attention, when the first textbooks were published in 1997, they became the subject of a fierce debate. The New Party legislator Li Qinghua accused them of “taking us down the road of Taiwanese independence”12 and also “beautifying the Japanese people,” thus subverting the basis of Taiwan’s Chinese identity. Much of the public debate around the textbooks was focused on Li’s comments. Qu Minxin used Li’s comments to make an argument for Taiwanese independence, and argued in a strongly worded response that, “Apart from the view of the Chinese communists, Taiwan already has its own central government, and this could be called an ‘independent Taiwan.’ ”13 Like the debate about Taiwan’s identity crisis, the textbooks presented a subject with which the key problematic of Taiwanese identity could become identity itself. The public debate over the textbooks was another issue with which to structure a relationship to an identification with Taiwan: for or against the textbooks was for or against the idea of Taiwan, thus producing a field of debate that contested the legitimacy to enunciate Taiwan. Therefore, the Understanding Taiwan controversy could be read as another thread in the narration of Taiwanese identity. The controversy over Understanding Taiwan has itself become a received component of Taiwan’s identity discourse, and stitched into the narrative fabric of Taiwanese identity. The textbooks themselves offered a received Taiwanese historiography, periodizing on the familiar basis of governance: Aboriginal, Dutch, Zheng Chenggong, Qing, Japanese, and Republican. They discuss the 2–28 Incident, the establishment of democracy, and the development of the economy. In the history text, this centrist position is made explicit at the outset: Immigrant society: In the 16th century, Portuguese sailors travelling the Pacific saw a forestcovered island and called it “Ilha Formosa,” the “beautiful island.” From then on in the minds of Westerners, “beautiful” became the name for Taiwan. Taiwan is an immigrant society, from the stone age to the present, coming here across many different times and places. Before the largest number of Han arrived on Taiwan, Aborigines were already here.14

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In terms of the work of Bourdieu presented in chapter 3 on the sociopolitical processes of the legitimization of language, the Understanding Taiwan textbooks are an expression of the legitimization of the name Taiwan by the institutions of the state, in this instance, education. For Bourdieu, education produces value in the economy of symbolic power, serving to standardize and legitimize modes of speech and thinking.15 Similarly, the Understanding Taiwan textbooks standardized and legitimized Taiwan as the object that is studied when a Taiwanese school student studies his or her nation. Their political significance is the extent to which they valorize Taiwan over China, and the three books neatly divide the different dimensions with which this is open to them: historically, geographically, and socially. This is explicitly noted in chapter 10 of the social science volume: “In this historical experience and into the 21st century, ‘Taiwanese’ has already become the shared name for us in the international community, and a brand new Taiwanese society is gradually coming into existence.”16 Nevertheless, although the Understanding Taiwan textbooks are a key example of the legitimization of Taiwanese national identity by the state, in terms of their specific discursive formation, they also legitimize precisely the same appeal to a Taiwanese nationhood made by many commentators, academics, and politicians in the 1990s. The identity debates through the 1990s narrated a teleology of national realization through the notion of an identity crisis, invoking an assumed nation by writing as if a Taiwanese nation were waiting for its realization and fulfillment. Therefore, the basis of Taiwanese national identity in the postmartial law period is its very contestability. This notion is explicitly part of the text of the Understanding Taiwan curriculum. Under “The Need for Harmony,” the text reads: Our society already has too many conflicts between people. The early conflicts between Han and foreigners, Minnan and Hakkas, and Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, as well as the hostility between the different aboriginal peoples, have all written chapters in drops of blood in history. In the second half of the century, Taiwanren and waishengren have been divided. . . . Therefore, we must make more emotional efforts to achieve reconciliation between people and between spirits. Furthermore, our relationship with the natural environment must also be re-established.17 Therefore, the textbooks are placing the notion of crisis or problem at the center of their version of Taiwan’s legitimized social discourse. They read like a critical newspaper commentary and yet do so from within the institutions of state education.

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New Taiwanese The Understanding Taiwan textbooks presented an inclusive and forwardlooking narrative for Taiwanese identity that was part of a broader political rhetoric about Taiwanese identity in the late 1990s. In 1994, Chen Shui-bian was elected Taipei City Mayor in a vigorously contested election marked by street protests and a degree of “ethnic” animosity between waishengren and benshengren. In 1998, Chen ran again, but was defeated by the KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou. In Ma’s campaign, the KMT president Lee Teng-hui proposed the phrase “New Taiwanese” (Xin Taiwanren) as part of the KMT’s political rhetoric. New Taiwanese was designed to articulate an inclusive Taiwanese identity in which all the people of Taiwan, regardless of their identity as mainlanders, Taiwanese, Hakkas, or Aborigines, could legitimately claim to be people of Taiwan: Today, all of us who have grown up and lived together on this land, are Taiwanese. No matter whether we are aboriginal, or came hundreds of years ago or in the last few decades, we are all masters of Taiwan. We have all contributed to the development of Taiwan to now, and we all have a responsibility for Taiwan’s future. The bigger problem is how to transform our love of Taiwan and our feelings towards our compatriots into specific action. This is the mission of every “New Taiwanese.”18 Illustrative of the potency of this trope, the media widely reported the famous campaign statement of Ma Ying-jeou, who said in 1998, “I am a New Taiwanese, who has grown up on the rice of Taiwan and loves Taiwan,” and was elected Taipei mayor.”19 As a campaign slogan, the term was designed to undermine the DPP’s leftleaning electoral claim to be the party of the majority benshengren. As a concept, however, the idea behind the notion of New Taiwanese was not new. As discussed in chapters 4 and 5, it has an established history as, for example, a dimension of the more moderate ideologies of exiled Formosan nationalists in the 1960s and democracy and nationalist advocates such as Peng Mingmin. This also includes the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan that was a strong advocate of human rights, nationhood, and democracy under martial law. In the Church’s manifesto published in 1971, entitled Statement On Our National Fate, one can find aspects of an ideology of Taiwanese identity as inclusive and subjective which are fully realized in the New Taiwanese slogan: We the people on Taiwan love this island which, either by birth or chance, is our home. Some of us have roots here going back a thousand years; the

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majority count a residence of two or three centuries while some have come since the Second World War. We are all well aware of our different backgrounds and even conflicts, but at present we are more aware of a common certainty and shared conviction.20 As a term, New Taiwanese had precedents in Taiwanese democratic politics also. In 1991, the leading DPP figure Lin Yi-hsiung had published a book entitled Xiwang you yi tian (I Hope There Comes a Day) that included the chapter “Taiwanren de xin jinjie: Xinren, xinxin, xin Taiwanren (The New Boundaries of the Taiwanese: new people, new hearts, new Taiwanese).” Much of Lin’s writing is emotional, even ecstatic, connected perhaps to the form of Christianity that he practices. He evinces the trope of renewal and realization, echoing the elevated rhetoric around the phrase “New Taiwanese”: An ideal Taiwanese person is someone who understands his history very clearly, his humanity, and his place in the universe. He knows the records of history are long, but the life of an individual is only a small part of history’s progress. He knows that in the world today there are several billion people, both past lives and the ones who may come in the future, and he cannot know how many more of those there are, so each person is only one of billions and billions.21 Later in his essay, Lin proposes an ideology for Taiwanese identity that again resonates with the New Taiwanese idea: A Taiwanese must understand this: Taiwanese are not aborigines, not Hakkas, Hoklo, and not benshengren or waishengren. Taiwanese are people who are prepared to make their homes on Taiwan, and indeed are people who will help their sons develop the prosperity of the land of Taiwan, regardless of where they came from, and regardless of when they arrived on Taiwan.22 The arguments about a common destiny for those who call Taiwan their home has been described as a civic nationalism,23 and it is counter to the ethnicist or racialist notions of Chinese and some forms of Taiwanese nationalism. All of these variations on the New Taiwanese idea place national identity within subjectivity and agency, rather than the essentialism of race, blood, or “inalienability.” New Taiwanese self-consciously creates the possibility of a coherent national subjectivity through a teleology that imagines the fulfillment of Taiwanese nationhood as the active choice by the Taiwanese to live together as Taiwanese people.

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In this way, the ideological basis for New Taiwanese is ontologically distinct from Chinese nationalism. The essential basis of Chinese national identity with its emphasis on ethnicity and race and which found its logical endpoint in Taiwan in the blood of the NTU students in 1971, rejects the possibility of subjective choice to become Chinese. New Taiwanese, in contrast is grounded in an act of choosing to be Taiwanese. It also marginalizes the link with the “hometown” as an original moment that the “return to the mainland” theme explored in the early 1990s. Instead of the pursuit of a truth of identity beyond language as an indivisible “self-identical essence” found in the ancestral hall of a village in Fujian, New Taiwanese is potentially an open-ended discourse in which multiple, layered identities—gender, race, sexual orientation—can find a place under one’s subjective choice to name oneself Taiwanese. New Taiwanese is based ultimately on the act of enunciating “I am Taiwanese,” as a moment of differentiation from a Chinese identity. In this way, the meaning of Taiwan is differentiated from the other possible words that can and have been used to inscribe the island. A critical scholarly approach might celebrate this anti-essentialist basis for a nation’s identity. By placing agency at the centre of Taiwan identity politics, New Taiwanese promotes in the field of nationalism a similar notion to Judith Butler’s arguments on performativity of identity. Butler’s comment that “gender is not a noun”24 can be used as an effective analogy for the critique of Taiwanese national identity as a measurable social object. In her suggestion that “gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed,”25 gender might be replaced by New Taiwanese to condense the whole ideology of the New Taiwanese form of Taiwanese nationalism. Certainly, by subverting essentialism, the notion of New Taiwanese rejects the possibility of an objective definition of Taiwanese identity, challenging the viability of positivism in ways that bear out the possibilities of a textualized approach to Taiwanese identity. It becomes impossible to say who really is Taiwanese if the Taiwanese themselves call for an identity formation on the basis of rhetoric such as a “shared commitment to Taiwan.” A positivist or essentialist approach reaches for an objective definition of Taiwanese identity, but in the case of New Taiwanese, that means objectively defining as Taiwanese someone who is “prepared to make their homes on Taiwan” or, as declared by Ma Ying-jeou, “grown up on the rice of Taiwan and loves Taiwan.” This is, therefore, to simply reiterate the ideology of New Taiwanese: “he/I is/am Taiwanese because he/I is/am committed to Taiwan.” An objectivist analysis of New Taiwanese would be nothing other than Taiwanese nationalism rewritten in the authorized rhetorical styles of political science.

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However, this leaves open the possibility of identity as an entirely politicized field. If the elaboration of Taiwanese identity by activists, politicians, educators, and artists is, as in the example of Ma Ying-jeou’s statement, based on a subjective enunciation or declaration of “Taiwaneseness,” then Taiwanese identity can become a political contest over the authority to speak as a real or true Taiwanese. Beyond the feel-good rhetoric of inclusion and the promise of a “solution” to the problems of ethnic and social division,26 New Taiwanese, can be reduced to a wholly politicized discursive territory in which the legitimacy to name oneself and others as a “real” or “true” Taiwanese continues to be fought out. This is evidenced in the similarity between the New Taiwanese idea and the rhetoric used in the commentary on Taiwanese identity that has proliferated throughout the Post-martial law period. The appeal by commentators such as Chang Mao-kuei to an imagined Taiwan in which history is reconciled and social harmony and prosperity are achieved through unity is also made by the rhetoric of New Taiwanese. The notion of New Taiwanese systematizes and naturalizes the narration of the national narrative in which the Taiwanese national emerges as a coherent and bounded subject who “struggles,” alongside other Taiwanese nationals, to realize a community and nation that can be defined as New Taiwanese. In this way, it is the counterpoint in political rhetoric to the notions of an identity crisis and the calls to solve the identity problem. New Taiwanese is predicated on the same basis of crisis, but emphasizes the possible Taiwanese nation that it imagines will emerge at the endpoint of its resolution. The key distinction between commentary and the rhetoric of New Taiwanese is that commentary is a criticially inflected “metatopical” discourse that speaks from a distanciated subject position, whereas New Taiwanese occupies a more ambivalent space between argumentation and an unmediated political rhetoric in its direct appeal to Taiwanese subjectivity. Therefore, the emergence of New Taiwanese as a centrist political position can be understood as a consolidation and legitimization of the hegemonic potential of Taiwan’s identity discourse. The imagined resolution of the identity problem to which commentary appeals is valorized in a campaign slogan that attenuates its critical dimension and promotes the nation at its narrative conclusion. In this way, New Taiwanese produces a hegemonic nationalist ideological structure that enables people to be ideologically constructed as Taiwanese people. Identity becomes an issue of commitment, measured by the emotional energy with which people enunciate themselves as Taiwanese, while political opportunities are opened up to marginalize critical voices. They become “un-New Taiwanese.” As the Ziyou Shibao editorial put it in 2002, “Those who say they are Taiwanese, and also Chinese, and are unwilling to cry

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out ‘I am Taiwanese,’ create a contradiction in ethnic and national identity.”27 A more critical illustration is the comments by Chang Chao-hsiung from the People First Party. He responded directly to the hegemonic possibilities inherent in the multiplying deployments of New Taiwanese and challenged not the New Taiwanese idea, but the way it operates as a measure of one’s commitment to Taiwan: “There is no question of native or non-native— those who live here are all New Taiwanese. Ethnic harmony is important to us. There are people who spend all day shouting about how much they love Taiwan. But I recall back when we were offering guidance counseling to university students, we used to warn girls to be especially careful of the boys who spent all day declaring their love.”28 Conclusion This book has argued for a textual approach to the problem of Taiwanese identity, an approach that foregrounds the ways in which authoritative formulations and counterformulations circulate in Taiwan’s public discourse and globally in the discourse of Taiwan Studies. My aim has been to suggest that writings on Taiwanese identity have become increasingly self-reflexive and Taiwanese identity itself is understood in such writings as sites of contestation over which individuals seek to claim authority for their preferred definitions. In describing Taiwan’s identity formations over several decades, the analysis also grapples with the problem of the open-endedness of discourses. No matter how authoritatively a certain definition or description of identity might be viewed at any one time, it will invariably be contested by the emergence of other definitions. The notion of identity constantly threatens to spill out into all areas of social life and even outside of Taiwan itself, everywhere and every time someone says Taiwan. This book has dealt with this problem by writing specifically about the boundary of Taiwan’s identity discourse, because it is at this imagined boundary where the lived experience of identity is located. The boundary is a constant negotiation and contestation over the authority to speak for and about Taiwan, to declare what is the real Taiwan. However, as has been argued here in many different ways, there is no real Taiwan, if the real is understood as some essential Taiwan, neatly and safely confined within its discursive boundaries. Instead, any reference to the real Taiwan is also a certain claim to knowledge of Taiwan, in the contestation over where the boundaries of the meaning of Taiwan lie. It is constituted in the negotiation of the power and legitimacy to enunciate Taiwan, to speak as a Taiwanese and to speak for Taiwan. This approach highlights a key problematic of the study of Taiwan, which is the legitimacy of the Western scholar to write about Taiwan in English. The

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institutions of scholarship have bestowed legitimacy to produce authoritative knowledge through particular authorial registers and epistemologies, allowing the academician to define Taiwanese history and social life with liberal political science narratives of modernity like the “Little Dragon” or the dense critical languages of the postcolonial or poststructural. This basis for knowledge in Western scholarship is a discourse in the Foucauldian sense. It is a structure that has organized the relationship between Taiwan and the West in terms of asymmetrical relations of power. This is itself part of the broader geopolitical processes of shifting power relations between Asia and the West, with old imperial relationships still extant, relegtimized in different forms and rhetorical styles. Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said problematized the narration by scholarship of the imperial relations of power between the West and the “Orient” in his classic work Orientalism,29 yet Asian Studies, Chinese Studies, and Taiwan Studies continue to struggle to embrace the implications of Said’s critique. Even efforts to rework Asian Studies post-Orientalism have sometimes produced just another language of global hegemony, for a new generation of twenty-first century “creoles” to appropriate and wield in their own cultural and social practices. As Ping-hui Liao has suggested, much of the work in Asian Studies in Taiwan, which is inflected with cultural studies and postcolonial theorizing is simply taking on a new language of obscurantist theory to re-inscribe the process of “doing” Asia in Asian Studies in Asia itself.30 For a number of scholars in Chinese Studies, such as Rey Chow and Gloria Davies, the key problematic is no longer undivided categories such as China or Taiwan, but the way scholarship narrates power relations in and between the discourses of China and non-China. They fully understand, as Said wrote in 1978, that as academics they are political actors whether they like it or not, and their own scholarship, legitimized by the globalized institution of the university, becomes a site for the renegotiation of these power relations at their discursive boundaries. They reject the rhetoric of positivism and objectivity because they recognize that those methodologies are political choices, and are ones which they are not prepared to make. In producing critically inflected Chinese Studies, Davies and Chow have explicitly problematized their status as Chinese women in the English-speaking academy speaking about China. They deploy the dense language of cultural studies, but also make explicit their complex subject positions. The use of autobiography is an aspect of Rey Chow’s work that tries to break down the objectification and naturalization of knowledge in scholarship and recognizes that in producing legitimate knowledge about China, the biography and ethnicity of the academic is part of negotiation of China’s discursive boundaries.

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In Writing Diaspora, Chow relates her humiliation in abstentia at a conference by a mainland Chinese academics: In the original essay I had made a mistake in my translation from the Chinese. On the basis of this mistake, my discussant trashed the entire essay, commenting to the audience that, after all, “she’s from Hong Kong.” The question behind this statement of the fact of my geographical origin, I suppose, was: How can this Westernized Chinese woman from colonial Hong Kong, this cultural bastard, speak for China and Chinese intellectuals?”31 Chow’s autobiographical moments are a conscious effort to make her relationship to academic discourse explicit. As a Hong Kong Chinese woman, scholarship in Chinese Studies is at one level about herself, constructing her as the object of its analysis. Chow discloses her positioning as an “authentic” Chinese, laying open the discursive processes by which she herself is constructed as an object of scholarly work. She also contests the processes by which her double claim on both authenticity and the language of the academy is marginalized by Chinese Studies. Her Chinese language skills are belittled to deny her the potential power she has to speak as a Chinese. In a way, Taiwan Studies has, especially since the 1970s, improvised solutions to these same issues. A generation of sinologists and political scientists who lived in Taiwan from that time were actual participants in the political changes that were occurring. Linda Gail Arrigo briefly married Shih Ming-teh following the Kaohsiung Incident in 1979, and went on to participate in Democratic Progressive Party politics before becoming a member of the Taiwanese Green Party in the late 1990s. The political scientist Bruce Jacobs who wrote a Ph.D. thesis on Taiwan in the early 1970s includes the following in his acknowledgments: “This book is dedicated to Melanie Pei Jacobs, who was born in Mazu Township during the initial field study in our dirt floor room in the house of former tenant farmers. Her birth has consolidated my links with Mazu Township.”32 As well as his use of the scientific methodologies of political science to analyze Taiwanese local politics, Jacobs is staking a claim from the outset for legitimacy to speak about Taiwan on the basis of authenticity. He participated in “real” Taiwanese life, as invoked in his experience of the local, and established in a direct family connection to Taiwan. Jacobs is unconvinced by the obscurantist language of cultural studies,33 but his own scholarship reflects an awareness of precisely the same problems that the cultural studies approach to the Chinese-speaking world addresses. In a sense, Jacobs’ work can be aligned with Rey Chow’s, with their related autobiographical strategies, but they tackle the issue from opposite directions.

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The difference between Jacobs and Chow or Davies is the legitimizing languages of their scholarship. Jacob’s claim on authenticity is marked off in the acknowledgments of his thesis, separated from the “real” scholarship of positivist political science. He draws a literal as well as epistemological boundary in his work between Taiwan as the object of his study and Western scholarship, but also literally acknowledges (in his “acknowledgments”) that there are different bases of knowledge of Taiwan. In his work he operates in both the personal and objective. For Chow or Davies, it is those boundaries themselves that are the location of identity and are the target of their theorized work. For Jacobs, his scholarly aims are not to challenge the discursive structures that produce knowledge about Taiwan, but instead, to delineate them more clearly, with a view to providing an “objective” knowledge of Taiwan. Yet, in the context of scholarship on identity, such objectivity can only ever be an effect produced by particular institutionally approved modes of interpretation. When done well, critically inflected cultural studies and social theory can focus on the discursive boundaries of the meaning of Taiwan, including the production of meaning in scholarship itself. In this way, this approach enters into a dialogue with the positivist political science on one side of that boundary that has dominated Taiwan Studies. At the same time, it is motivated by the belief that it is no longer possible for English-language scholars to speak unproblematically about Taiwan, and to misrecognize the way they slip so easily into speaking for it. Even if it can be argued that positivist political science scholarship on Taiwan legitimizes Taiwanese identity and Taiwan itself, this is an inadequate response to Taiwan’s identity problematic. Objectifying the Taiwanese nation, reducing it to statistics and graphs or meaning objects in causal relationships, or (worse still) to the jargon of “discursive spaces” or “liminal subjectivities” as an object of “doing” cultural studies, is to enter into a political relationship with Taiwan that needs to be made explicit. At a basic level, there are too many Taiwanese who are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves in their divergent ways of knowing, “what it means to be Taiwanese,” for Taiwan Studies scholars to be able to perform the role of adjudicating between “authentic” and “inauthentic” claims. Indeed, such scholarly adjudication would not only be unproductive, but also undermine the plural ways in which people who live in Taiwan are defining an identity for themselves, whether in individual, communal, or national terms. Furthermore, Taiwanese academics have mastered languages of power of political science and international relations in the 1970s and 1980s, and now cultural studies and postcolonial theory in the 1990s and 2000s. They can deploy the authoritative discourses of the academy, utilizing the rhetoric of

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avant-garde theory just as eloquently as Anglophone scholars based in the United States, Australia, Canada, or the United Kingdom. They are fully capable of engaging in an active dialogue with Western scholarship to analyze their own subjective identity. Therefore, for Western scholar to suggest “we are ‘here’” and we can study a Taiwan which is simply “there” is to efface the political implications of scholarship and to replicate and participate in the unequal distribution of power between Taiwan and the rest of the world. It also fails to recognize it is the contestation of the boundary of Taiwan as a discourse that makes possible being “endlessly accessible to new discourses and open to the task of transforming them.” As Bhabha writes, “Cultural difference marks the establishment of new forms of meaning, and strategies of identification, through processes of negotiation where no discursive authority can be established without revealing the difference of itself.”34 Taiwan’s marginal position in global geopolitics makes the problematic of the subject position of scholarship all the more acute. Therefore, to acknowledge the political implications of scholarship is to recognize that we cannot simply be distant observers of Taiwan but are participants in its identity formation. The rise of Taiwan Studies is part of the rise of Taiwanese identity, and it plays an important role in the legitimization of the existence of Taiwan as an autonomous polity. Therefore, to write on the discursive boundaries of Taiwanese identity is to embrace the responsibility that scholars have toward the object of their study. As Taiwan’s geopolitical circumstances change in the years to follow it is a responsibility that will need to be taken more and more seriously.


Notes

1. Epistemologies 1. See George Psalmanazaar, Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa: An Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan (London: R. Holden, 1926). 2. Ong Joktik, “In the Beginning,” Formosan Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1 ( July 1962): 3. 3. See T.F. Hughes, “Visit to Tok-e-tok of the Eighteen Tribes, Southern Formosa,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, Vol. 16, No. 3 (1872): 265–271. 4. See, for example, Zhang Qiyun, ed., Zhonghua min guo di tu ji (Maps of the Republic of China) (Yangmingshan: National War College, 1959). 5. Margery Wolf, The House of Lim: A Study of a Chinese Farm Family (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968). 6. Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972). 7. Taiwan jingji fazhan fangxiang ji ce lue yan tao hui (Proceedings of the Conference on the Direction of Taiwan’s Economic Development) (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jingji yanjiusuo, 1976). 8. “Huzhao jiazhu ‘TAIWAN,’ feigenggai guohao”( “The Passport Gets the Name ‘TAIWAN,’ Not the Country”), Ziyou Shibao (The Liberty Times), January 14, 2001, 1. 9. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 109. 10. Ibid., 111. 11. Christopher Johnson, Derrida: The Scene of Writing (London: Phoenix, 1997), 41. 12. Ko Kiansing, “On the Definition of the Formosan,” Independent Formosa, Vol. 4, No. 4 (August 1965): 10–14. 13. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 310. 14. Gloria Davies, “Chinese Literary Studies and Post-Structuralist Positions: What Next?” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 28 (July 1992): 78. 15. John Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 107. 16. Ibid., 458, n7.

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17. Chen Ching-chih, “The Japanese Adaptation of the Pao-Chia System in Taiwan, 1895–1945,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2 (February 1975): 392. 18. Stephan Feuchtwang, “The Chinese Race-Nation,” Anthropology Today, Vol. 9, No. 1 (February 1993): 14. 19. Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy, 184. 20. William M. Speidel, “The Administrative and Fiscal Reforms of Liu Mingch’uan in Taiwan 1884–1891: Foundation for Self-Strengthening,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2 (May, 1976): 445, n15. 21. Ibid., 441. 22. Ibid., 447. 23. Jean-Francois de Galaup La Pérouse, The Voyage of La Pérouse Round the World, in the Years 1785, 1786, 1787 and 1788, with Nautical Tables (London: John Stockdate, 1798), Chapter 16. 24. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Peregrine, 1985), 3. Said’s critique of imperialism draws on Foucault rather than Derrida, and some of his argumentation could be subject to an effective Derridean deconstruction. Nevertheless, Said’s account of administrative control under imperialism provides a useful corollary to Derrida’s observations of the power structures that operate on the basis of names. 25. Robert Swinhoe, “Additional Notes on Formosa,” Proceeding of the Royal Geographical Society of London, Vol. 10, No. 3 (1866): 124. 26. A.R. Colquhoun, and J.H. Stewart-Lockhart, “A Sketch of Formosa,” The China Review, No. 13 (1885): 161–207. 27. Said, Orientalism, 7. 28. Chen Ching-chih, 394. 29. Ibid. 30. Lo Ming-cheng, Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 43. 31. “Conference of President Roosevelt, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, and Prime Minister Churchill in North Africa,” American Journal of International Law, Vol. 38, No. 1, Supplement: Official Documents (January 1944): 8–9. 32. Glenn D. Paige, The Korean Decision (New York: Free Press, 1968), 62. 33. Elizabeth Converse, “Formosa: Private Citadel?” Far Eastern Survey, Vol. 18, No. 21 (October 19, 1949): 249. 34. “Formosa in Transition,” The World Today: Chatham House Review, Vol. 4, No. 5 (May 1948): 209. 35. John K. Fairbank, “China: Time for a Policy,” Atlantic Monthly (April 1957): 35–39. 36. M.Y. Nuttonson, The Physical Environment and Agriculture of Central and South China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (Formosa): A Study Based on Field Survey Data and on Pertinent Records, Material, and Reports (Washington: American Institute of Crop Ecology, 1963). 37. Emily Martin Ahern and Hill Gates, eds., The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981). 38. John C.H. Fei, Gustav Ranis, and Shirley W.Y. Kuo, Growth with Equity: The Taiwan Case (Oxford: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 1979).

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39. Walter Galenson, Economic Growth and Structural Change in Taiwan: The Postwar Experience of the Republic of China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). 40. “New Institute Inaugurated,” Taipei Times, July 14, 2004, 4. 41. Gloria Davies, “Chinese Literary Studies and Post-Structuralist Positions: What Next?” 78. 42. Michael J. Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding: The Politics of Discursive Practice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 130. 43. See Cheng Tun-jen, “Democratizing the Quasi-Leninist Regime in Taiwan,” World Politics, Vol. 41, No. 4 (July 1989): 471–499, and T’ien Hung-mao, “Taiwan’s Evolution Toward Democracy—A Historical Perspective,” in Taiwan: Beyond the Economic Miracle, ed. Denis Simon and Michael Kau (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), 18–19. 44. See Gary Rawnsley, “Political Communication, Globalization and TechnoPopulism,” Contemporary Political Studies, Vol. 2 (1997): 481–493, and Chu Yun-han, Larry Diamond, and Doh Chul Shin, “Halting Progress in Korea and Taiwan,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2001): 122–136. 45. Denis Twitchett, “A Lone Cheer for Sinology,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1 (November 1964): 111. 46. See, for example, The Wisdom of China, ed. Lin Yu Tang (New York: Random House, 1942) or C.P. Fitzgerald, China (London: Crescent, 1950). 47. Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding, 11. 48. C.L. Chiou, Democratizing Oriental Despotism (New York: St. Martin Press, 1992), 7. See also Samuel P. Huntington, “How Countries Democratize,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 106, No. 4 (Winter 1991–1992): 579–616. 49. Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding, 11. 50. T’ien Hung-mao, “Taiwan’s Evolution Toward Democracy—A Historical Perspective,” 15. 51. Ibid., 16. 52. Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding, 20. 53. Gloria Davies, “Chinese Literary Studies and Post-Structuralist Positions: What Next?” 80. 54. Ibid., 78. 55. Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding, 149.

2. Explaining National Identity 1. See, for example, Melissa J. Brown, Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), Robert P. Weller, “Living at the Edge: Religion, Capitalism, and the End of the Nation-State in Taiwan,” Public Culture Vol. 12, No. 2 (2000): 477–498, Chen Jie, Foreign Policy of the New Taiwan: Pragmatic Diplomacy in Southeast Asia (London: Edward Elgar, 2002). 2. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). 3. Anthony Smith, Theories of Nationalism (London: Duckworth, 1983).

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4. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 3. 5. Ibid., xii. 6. John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 1996. 7. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1995. 8. Shelley Rigger, The Evolution of the DPP and KMT’s Policies of the National Identity Issue, paper prepared for the Conference on War and Peace in the Taiwan Strait (Duke University, February 26–27, 1999), 2. 9. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 16. 10. Ibid., 44. 11. See, for example, Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951), Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book (London: Verso, 1976), Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 12. Henrietta Harrison, Inventing the Nation: China (New York: Oxford, 2001), 9–32. 13. See for example, David Johnson, “Communication, Class, and Consciousness in Late Imperial China,” in Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. David Johnson et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 35–72. 14. Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 19. 15. Anderson, Imagined Communities, xiii. 16. Ibid. 17. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 82. 18. Ibid., 54. 19. Ibid., 57–58. 20. Ibid., 15. 21. Ibid., 66. 22. Ibid. 23. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 297. 24. Ibid. 25. Li Thian-hok, “The China Impasse,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 3, No. 36 (April 1958): 437–448. 26. John Fairbank, “China: Time for a Policy,” Atlantic Monthly (April 1957): 36. 27. O. Edmund Clubb, “Sino-American Relations and the Future of Formosa,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 1 (March 1965): 2. 28. Political Science Resources, “British Labour Party Election Manifesto, 1955,” Keele University, available at http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/uk/man/lab55.htm (accessed October 29, 2002).

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29. Political Science Resources, “British Conservative Party Election Manifesto, 1955,” Keele University, available at http://www.psr.keele.ac.uk/area/uk/man/ con55.htm (accessed October 29, 2002). 30. C.P. Fitzgerald cited in W.G. Goddard, Formosa (Taiwan) (Taipei: Publisher unknown, 1958), 57. 31. Fairbank, “China: Time for a Policy,” 38. 32. Clubb, “Sino-American Relations and the Future of Formosa.” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 1 (March 1965): 11. 33. W.G. Goddard, Formosa (Taiwan), 47. 34. Thomas B. Gold, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1986), 17. 35. Ibid., 90. 36. See Gold, Chapter 1, “Explaining the Taiwan Miracle,” in State and Society, 3–19. 37. Ibid., 125. 38. Shi Ming, Taiwanren sibainian shi (Four Hundred Years of the History of the Taiwanese People) (San Jose, CA: Paradise Culture Associates, 1980). 39. George Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (Boston, MS: Houghton-Mifflin, 1965). 40. Douglas Mendel, Politics of Formosan Nationalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970). 41. Gold, State and Society, 52. 42. Ibid., 129–131. 43. Ibid., 117–120. 44. T’ien Hung-mao, “Taiwan’s Evolution Towards Democracy: An historical Perspective,” in Taiwan: Beyond the Economic Miracle, ed. Denis Fred Simon and Michael Y. M. Kao (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), 3–24. 45. Gold, State and Society, 129–130. 46. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 228. One might also note with respect to the previous quotation that Gold’s phrase “dynamic social forces” echoes a vulgar Hegelian/Marxist notion of social change through the dialectical movement of the contradictions of capitalism. 47. Ezra F. Vogel, The Four Little Dragons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 18. 48. See Derek Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber (London: Routledge, 1991), 109. 49. Gold, State and Society, 3. 50. Arendt, The Human Condition, 228. 51. Gold, State and Society, 130. 52. For example, the 2004 European Association of Taiwan Studies conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, United Kingdom, spent all of the first of the two days on the issue of democratization. 53. See T’ien Hung-mao. “Taiwan’s Evolution Towards Democracy: An Historical Perspective,” in Taiwan: Beyond the Economic Miracle, ed. Denis Fred Simon and Michael Y.M. Kao (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992).

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54. Alan M. Wachman, Taiwan: National Identity and Democratization (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), 56. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 27. 57. Ibid., 8. 58. Ibid., 12. 59. Ibid., 91–92. 60. Wachman, “Competing Identities in Taiwan,” in The Other Taiwan: 1945 to the Present, ed. Murray A. Rubinstein (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), 40. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 26. 63. Ibid., 34. 64. Wachman, Taiwan: National Identity and Democratization (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999), 9. 65. Davies, “Chinese Literary Studies and Post-Structuralist Positions: What Next?” 80. 66. Wachman, “Competing Identities,” 6.

3. Legitimizing Taiwan 1. Christopher Hughes, “Post-Nationalist Taiwan,” in Asian Nationalism, ed. Michael Leifer (London: Routledge, 2000), 66. 2. Alan Wachman, “Competing Identities in Taiwan,” in The Other Taiwan: 1945 to the Present, ed. Murray A. Rubinstein (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994), 40. 3. Thomas Gold, “Taiwan’s Quest for Identity in the Shadow of China,” in In the Shadow of China-Political Developments in Taiwan Since 1949, ed. Steve Tsang (London: Hurst and Company, 1993), 191. 4. Republic of China Yearbook 1998 (Taipei: Government Information Office, 1998), 121. 5. Hu Chang, “Impressions of Mainland China Carried Back by Taiwan Visitors,” in Two Societies in Opposition-The Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China After Forty Years, ed. Ramon Myers (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institutions Press, 1991), 141–155. 6. Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question (London: Sage, 1994), 149. 7. Wang Haowei, “Mosheng de fangxiang” (An Unfamiliar Direction), United Daily News, December 9, 1993, 4. 8. Jian Zhen, “Xianzu de xuelu” (The Bloodlines of My Ancestors), United Daily News December 10, 1993, 4. 9. Ibid. 10. Hou Jiliang, “Jifeng qiao yu xun hou an” (A Delightfully Unexpected Encounter), United Daily News, December 8, 1993, 4. 11. Hu, “Impressions of Mainland China Carried Back by Taiwan Visitors,” 148. 12. Hou Jiliang, “Jifeng qiao yu xun hou an,” 4. 13. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 297.

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14. Terry Eagleton, “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,” in Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 23. 15. See, for example, Homi K. Bhabha, “ ‘Race,’ Time and the Revision of Modernity,” in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 236–256, and Rey Chow, “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” in Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 27–54. 16. See, for example, Zygmunt Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist—Or a Short History of Identity,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 18–36. 17. Terry Eagleton, “Nationalism,” 3. 18. Ibid., 24. 19. Harry Lamley, “Subethnic Rivalry in the Ch’ing Period,” in The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, ed. Emily Martin Ahern and Hill Gates (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981), 284. 20. Ibid., 307. 21. Ibid., 292. 22. Wang Xiaobo, Taiwan Yishi de Lishi Kaocha (Investigation of the History of Taiwan Consciousness) (Taipei: Haiyue Scholarly Publishing, 2001), iii. 23. William Pickering, Pioneering in Formosa: Recollections of Adventures Among Mandarins, Wreckers, and Head-Hunting Savages (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1898). 24. Ibid., 222. 25. Ibid., 194. 26. Jian Jiongren, Taiwan kaifa yu zuqun (Development and Ethnicity in Taiwan) (Taipei: Qianwei (Vanguard) Publishing, 1995), 83. 27. Lamley, “Subethnic Rivalry in the Ch’ing Period,” in The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, ed. Emily Martin Ahern and Hill Gates (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981), 295. 28. Ibid., 312. 29. N.B. Dennys, “Formosa,” in The Treaty Ports of China and Japan, ed. N.B. Dennys (London: Trübner, 1867), 297. 30. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 43. 31. Ibid., 53. 32. Ibid., 47. 33. Ibid. 34. Xu Gongren, “Bie rang muyu cheng wei xiaoshi de jiyi (Don’t Let Our Mother Tongue Disappear Into Memory),” Zhongguo Shibao (China Times), November 8, 1997, 11. 35. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 62. 36. Ibid., 50–51. 37. Ibid., 223. 38. Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 50.

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39. Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995). 40. Ibid., 95. 41. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 43. 42. Harry Lamley, “The 1895 Taiwan Republic: A Significant Episode in Modern Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies 27, No. 4 (August 1968): 745. 43. Ibid., 748. 44. Ibid., 746–747. 45. Chen Peizhou, “Yazhou di yi ge minzhu gonghegguo” (The First Democratic Republic in Asia), Lianhe bao (United Daily News), April 8, 1996, 17. 46. Lamley, “The 1895 Taiwan Republic,” 4 and 740. 47. Huang Zhaotang, “Taiwan Minzhuguo yu Taiwan se duli” (The Taiwan Republic and Taiwanese Independence), Taiwan Shibao (Taiwan Times), April 15, 1995, 3. 48. E. Patricia Tsurumi, “Education and Assimilation in Taiwan Under Japanese Rule, 1895–1945,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4 (1979): 619. 49. Ibid., 622. 50. E. Patricia Tsurumi, Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 197. 51. Ming-cheng M. Lo, Doctors Within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 44. 52. Tsurumi, Education and Assimilation in Taiwan Under Japanese Rule, 1895–1945, 620. 53. Tsurumi, Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895–1945, 193–194. 54. Quoted in Cai Peihuo, Chen Fengyuan, Lin Boshou, Wu Sanlian, and Ye Rongzhong, Taiwan minzu yundong shi (The History of Taiwan’s Nationalist Movement) (Taipei: Zili Wanbao, 1971), 17. 55. Quoted in Tsurumi, Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895–1945, 197. 56. Chen Ching-chih, “The Japanese Adaptation of the Pao-Chia System in Taiwan, 1895–1945,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2 (February 1975): 407. 57. Ibid., 408. 58. Cai Peihuo et al., 54–55. 59. See Ann M.F. Heylen, “Cai Peihuo’s Vision on the Cultural Enlightenment of the Taiwanese People,” The Ricci Bulletin 2002, No. 5 (February 2002), 68–81. 60. Quoted by William Bullitt in “Report to the American People on China,” in The China Reader, Vol. 2, Republican China: Nationalism, War and the Rise of the Communists 1911–1949, ed. Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (New York: Random House, 1967): 342. 61. Lai Tse-han Myers, Ramon H. and Wou, and Wei, A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 63. 62. Peng Minming, A Taste of Freedom: Memoirs of a Taiwanese Independence Leader (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 51.

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4. Elaborating Taiwan 1. Robert Marsh, “National Identity and Ethnicity in Taiwan: Some Trends in the 1990s,” in Memories of the Future: National Identity and the Search for a New Taiwan, ed. Stéphane Corcuff (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 144–162. 2. George Kerr, “Formosa: The March Massacres,” Far Eastern Survey, Vol. 16, No. 19 (November 5, 1947): 224. 3. Ibid., 225. 4. See, for example, Li Hsiao-feng, Jieshi Er Er ba (Interpreting 2-28) (Taipei: Yushan, 1998). 5. Alan M. Wachman, “Competing Identities,” 91–92. 6. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 112. 7. Ibid., 111–112. 8. Ibid., 112. 9. Cf. Chapter 1. 10. Christopher Johnson, Derrida: The Scene of Writing (London: Phoenix, 1997), 37. 11. Kerr, “Formosa: The March Massacres,” 225. 12. Ibid. 13. Li Hsiao-feng, Jieshi Er Er ba (Interpreting 2-28), 132–133. 14. Quoted in Henry R. Lieberman, “Formosan Rebels Set Up Assembly,” New York Times, March 11, 1947. 15. Quoted in Li Hsiao-feng, Jieshi Er Er ba (Interpreting 2-28), 133. 16. “Formosa in Transition,” The World Today: Chatham House Review, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Vol. 4 (January–December, 1948): 215. 17. Joshua Liao, “The Question of Taiwan’s Independence,” Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 5, No. 24 ( December 15, 1948): 621. 18. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 223. 19. Duncan S.A. Bell, “Mythscapes: Memory, Mythology, and National Identity,” British Journal of Sociology Vol. 54, No. 1 (March 2003): 75–76. 20. Sun Yat-sen, “The Three Principles of the People and the Future of the Chinese People,” in Prescriptions for Saving China: Selected Writings of Sun Yat-sen, ed. Julie Lee Wei, Ramon Myers and Donald G. Gillin (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1994), 44. 21. Ong Joktik, “A Formosan’s View of the Formosan Independence Movement,” in Formosa Today, ed. Mark Mancall (New York: Praeger, 1968), 166. 22. Liao, “The Question of Taiwan’s Independence,” 621. 23. “Formosa in Transition,” The World Today, 215. 24. Douglas Mendel, “Perspective on Liao’s Return to Taiwan,” Independent Formosa Vol. 4, No. 41 (August 1965): 17. 25. This comment is based on a comparison of two of their texts, Joshua Liao, Formosa Speaks (Hong Kong: Graphic Press, 1950), and Thomas Liao, Inside Formosa: Formosans vs. Chinese Since 1945 (Tokyo: Publisher unknown, 1956).

216 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

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Liao, “The Question of Taiwan’s Independence,” 621. Liao, Formosa Speaks, 3. Liao, “The Question of Taiwan’s Independence,” 621. Liao, Formosa Speaks, 10. Ibid., 9. Liao, “The Question of Taiwan’s Independence,” 622. Joshua Liao, Formosa Speaks, 11. Thomas Liao, Inside Formosa: Formosans vs. Chinese Since 1945 (Tokyo, 1956). Liao, “The Question of Taiwan’s Independence,” 622. John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 105. Liao, Inside Formosa, 3. Liao, Formosa Speaks, 4. Liao, “The Question of Taiwan’s Independence,” 622. Ibid. Liao, Inside Formosa, 2. Liao, Formosa Speaks, 9. Ibid., 10. Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990), 113–14. Lamley, “The 1895 Taiwan Republic: A Significant Episode in Modern Chinese History,” 758. Liao, Formosa Speaks, 12. Liao, Inside Formosa, 4. Liao, Formosa Speaks, 12–13. Liao, “The Question of Taiwan’s Independence,” 622. Liao, Formosa Speaks, 8. Mendel, “Perspective on Liao’s Return to Taiwan,” 18. Liao, “The Question of Taiwan’s Independence,” 622. Liao, Formosa Speaks, 11. Liao, Inside Formosa, 3. Liao, Formosa Speaks, 15. Ibid. International Information Programs, “The Atlantic Charter (1941),” U.S. Department of State, available at http://usinfo.state.gov/usa/infousa/facts/democrac/ 53.htm (accessed July 8, 2003). Liao, “Formosa’s Demand for Independence,” Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 9, No. 16 (October 19, 1950): 465. Liao, “The Question of Taiwan’s Independence,” 622. Liao, “Formosa’s Demand for Independence,” 465. Ibid., 465, and Formosa Speaks, 51. Liao, Inside Formosa, 68. Ibid., 68. Truman Presidential Museum and Library, The Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1945–1953, “The President’s News Conference, January 5,

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1950,” available at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid 574&stformosa&st1(accessed April 13, 2003). 64. Chen Cheng, “Report to the Legislative Yuan in Taipei, October 3, 1950,” in Formosa Under Chinese Nationalist Rule, ed. Fred Riggs (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 157. Chen is quoting his own statement to the National Assembly in his report to the Legislative Yuan. 65. Truman Presidential Museum and Library, The Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1945–1953, “173: Statement by the President on the Situation in Korea,” available at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index. php?pid 574&stformosa&st1(accessed April 13, 2003) 66. “Mingnian liang dazhongxin renwu jianshe Taiwan fangong dalu” (The Two Central Tasks for Next Year, Develop Taiwan and Recover the Mainland), Zhongyang Ribao, October 7, 1950, 2. 67. “Jianshe Taiwan jihua” (Plan for the Development of Taiwan), Zhongyang Ribao, October 7, 1950, 2. 68. “Xingzheng lifa liang yuan bixu miqie hezuo” (The Government and the Legislative Yuan Must Closely Cooperate), Zhongyang Ribao, October 7, 1950, 2. 69. “Jianshe Taiwan jihua” (Plan for the Development of Taiwan), ibid., 2. 70. Chen Cheng, Report on Free China as Submitted to the Second Session of the First National assembly on March 4, 1954, (Taipei: Government Information Bureau, 1954), 30. 71. Quoted in W.G. Goddard, Formosa (Taiwan) (Taipei: Publisher unknown, 1958), 47. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 28. 74. Sun Yat-sen, San min chu i—The Three Principles of the People, Frank W. Price (trans.) (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975), 5. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 2. 77. Maria Hsia Chang, The Chinese Blue Shirt Society: Fascism and Developmental Nationalism, (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California-Berkeley, 1985), 33. 78. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 84. 79. Sun Yat-sen, “The Three People’s Principles and the Future of the Chinese People,” in Prescriptions for Saving China, 42. 80. Sun Yat-sen, San min chu i—The Three Principles of the People, 4. 81. Ibid., 5. 82. Ibid., 17. 83. Ibid., 6. 84. John Fitzgerald, “The Nationless State: The Search for a Nation in Modern Chinese Nationalism” in Chinese Nationalism, ed. Jonathan Unger (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 69. 85. Sun Yat-sen, San min chu i—The Three Principles of the People, 9. 86. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 105. 87. Spence, 414.

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88. Soong Mei-ling, “A New Life for Kanghsi,” The China Reader, Vol. 2, Republican China: Nationalism, War and the Rise of the Communism 1911–1949, 152. 89. Spence, 415. 90. See, for example, Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 184. 91. Chiang Kai-shek, “Zhonghua minguo sishinian guoqing jinian (Commemorating the Fortieth Anniversary of the Republic of China),” Zhongyang Ribao, October 10, 1951, 1. 92. The oppression of CCP members continued in Nanjing after the national government was established there in 1928. 93. This is an English transliteration of the Ming imperial title “Guo Xing Ye.” 94. Ralph C. Croizier, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center, Harvard University, Harvard University Press, 1977), 16. 95. Lou Zikuang, “Zheng Chenggong chuan shuo zhi zhengli (Organizing the Legends of Zheng Chenggong),” in Taipei Wenxian (Taipei Literature) Vol. 1, June 1962–December 1966 (Taipei: Chengwen Publishing Co., 1966): 116. 96. Croizier, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism, 57. 97. Zheng Hengcai, “Fayang Zheng Chenggong jingshen” (Emulating the Spirit of Zheng Chenggong), Zhonghua Ribao (Chinese Daily), October 25, 1985, 11. 98. “Zheng Chenggong shi ‘kaitai’ er bu shi ‘futai’ ” (Zheng Chenggong Opened Taiwan, Not Recovered Taiwan), Minzhong Ribao (Commons Daily), March 31, 1994, 11. 99. Croizier, 68. 100. Copied during field trip to Tainan, May 1998. 101. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 110–112. 102. Michael Shoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1992), 2–3. 103. Sun Yat-sen, “My Autobiography,” 20. 104. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 111.

5. Writing Taiwan 1. Liu Songzhou, “Jin shinian lai de Taiwan jianshe (The Last Ten Years of Development on Taiwan),” Lianhe bao (United Daily News), (January 1, 1961), 12. 2. Ibid. 3. Li Hsiao-feng, Taiwan minzhu yundong 40 nian (Forty Years of Taiwan’s Democracy Movement) (Taipei: Zili Wanbao, 1987), 78. 4. “ ‘Ziyou Zhongguo’ de zongzhi” (The Goal of “Free China”), Ziyou Zhongguo (Free China) Vol. 17, No. 5 (September 1, 1958): 2. 5. Zhu Banyun, “Fandui dang! Fandui dang! Fandui dang! (Opposition! Opposition! Opposition!),” Ziyou Zhongguo (Free China) Vol. 18, No. 1 (April 1, 1957): 7. 6. Lei Chen, “Fangong dalu wenti (The Problem of Retaking the Mainland),” Ziyou Zhongguo (Free China) Vol. 17, No. 8 (August 1, 1957): 5.

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7. “A Crusader of Dissent to Have His Day in the Sun,” Taipei Times, November 15, 2001, 2. 8. Li Hsiao-feng, 56. 9. Lim Kianjit, “An Appeal to All Freedom-Loving Peoples,” Formosa Quarterly Vol. 2, No. 1 (July 1963): 17. 10. Ko Kiansing, “On the Definition of the Formosan,” Independent Formosa, Vol. 4, No. 4 (August 1965): 10. 11. “Program of the Young United Formosans for Independence,” Independent Formosa, Vol. 4, No. 6 (December 1965): 2. 12. “Thomas Liao Turns His Coat,” Independent Formosa, Vol. 4, No. 3 ( June 1965): 1–2. 13. Peng Ming-min, A Taste of Freedom: Memoirs of a Taiwanese Independence Leader, 127. 14. Ibid., 129. 15. For example, Joshua Liao, Formosa Speaks, 4. 16. Václav Havel, ed. Jan Vladislav, Living In Truth: Twenty-Two Essays Published on the Occasion of the Award of the Eras (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 47. 17. Ibid., 46. 18. Peng Ming-min, A Taste of Freedom: Memoirs of a Taiwanese Independence Leader, 133. 19. Ibid., 136. 20. See, for example, William Glenn, “What Now Generalissimo?” Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 74, No. 46 (November 13, 1971): 13–19. 21. Rosemary Foot, “The Eisenhower Administration’s Fear of Empowering the Chinese,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 111, No. 3 (Autumn 1996): 506–10. 22. James C. Thomson, “On the Making of U.S. China Policy, 1961–9: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics,” The China Quarterly, no. 50 (April–June 1972): 239. 23. See Gerald Segal, “China and the Great Power Triangle,” The China Quarterly, No. 83 (September 1980): 490–509. 24. “Zongtong li lin guo da zhi ci yu zhu zhong kai guojia xin yun” (The President Addresses the National Assembly and Reiterates His Call for a New Direction for the Country), Zhongyang Ribao (Central Daily News), Februrary 21, 1972, 1. 25. “Treaty of Peace between the Republic of China and Japan, April 1952,” in China and the Taiwan Issue, ed. Hungdah Chiu (New York: Praeger, 1979), 224–226. 26. “Diaoyudao yingwei wo lingtu” (The Diaoyutai Islands Are Our Territory), Zili Wanbao (Independent Evening Post), September 9, 1970, 1. 27. “Diaoyutai qun queshu yu wo” (The Diaoyutai Islands Categorically Belong to Us), Zili Wanbao (Independent Evening Post), September 11, 1970, 5. 28. “Zhuquan jueburong qinfan” (Sovereignty Cannot be Easily Violated), Zili Wanbao (Independent Evening Post), September 12, 1970, 1. 29. Mab Huang, Intellectual Ferment for Political Reform in Taiwan, 1971–1973, (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1976), 8. 30. Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 72, No. 16 (April 17, 1971): 4. 31. “Mei ni jiang Diaoyutai lie yu jiao ri, woguo zhengfu jianjue fandui yi xiang mei zuo yanzhong jiaoshe” (Our Government Firmly Opposes American Plans to Give the Diaoyutai Islands to Japan, Has already Made Serious Representations to the United States), Zhongyang Ribao (Central Daily News), April 11, 1971, 1. 32. Ibid.

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33. “Women de you! Women de xue!” (Our Oil! Our Blood!), Zili Wanbao (Independent Evening Post), April 15, 1971, 1. 34. Zaire had maintained diplomatic relations with the ROC since 1960, but in parallel with the Diaoyutai Islands dispute, Mobutu’s visit signaled the diplomatic marginalization of Taiwan. On November 24, 1972, Zaire switched recognition to the PRC. 35. Huang, 9. 36. Ibid., 14. 37. Li Chongmin, Wu Qiongen, and Ma Haobin, “Woguo dazhuan xuesheng baowei Diaoyutai yungdong jishi” (Eyewitness Account of the Protect Diaoyutai Movement from Our Nation’s Tertiary Students), Daxue (The Intellectual) No. 41 (May 1971): 11–16. 38. “Weihu Diaoyutai dao zhuquan xuesheng xiang rishiguan kang yi” (Students Protest at the Japanese Embassy to Protect Sovereignty), Zhongyang Ribao (Central Daily News), April 15, 1971, 4. 39. Li Chongmin et al., 13. 40. Ibid., 14. 41. Ibid., 14. 42. Huang, 10. 43. Ibid., 11. 44. “Women dui Diaoyutai lieyu wenti de kanfa” (Our position on the Diaoyutai Islands Problem), Daxue (The Intellectual), No. 40 (April 1971), 17. 45. “Bochi suowei Taiwan falu diwei weiding de miulun” (Refuting the Misconception of the so-called Unresolved Legal Status of Taiwan), Daxue (The Intellectual), No. 41 (May 1971), 2. 46. See, for example, Shelley Rigger, Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy (London: Routledge, 1999), 109–110 and Daniel K. Berman, Words Like Colored Glass: The Role of the Press in Taiwan’s Democratization Process (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 181–182. 47. Zhongyang Ribao, April 15, 1971, 4. 48. Daxue (The Intellectual), No. 40 (April 1971), 17. 49. Joseph W. Esherick and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “Acting Out Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 49, No. 4 (November 1990): 839. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 836. 52. Ibid. 53. Wang Guanhua, “The 1905 Anti-American Boycott: A Social and Cultural Reassessment” (PhD dissertation, Michigan State University, 1994). 54. Shi Mingzheng, “From Imperial Gardens to Public Parks: The Transformation of Public Space in Early Twentieth Century Beijing,” Modern China, Vol. 24, No. 3 (July 1998): 242. 55. Lamley, “The 1895 Taiwan Republic: A Significant Episode in Modern Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4 (August 1968): 750. Lamley does not indicate whether this the 1895 petition was literally in blood as was the

Notes

56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

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Taiwanese students’ in 1971, but the term in Chinese, xue shu, is the same for both. Edgar Snow, Red Star over China (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1963), 138. Esherick and Wasserstrom, 857. Sun Yat-sen, San min chu i—The Three Principles of the People, 4–5. Ana Anagnost, “The Politicized Body,” in Body, Subject and Power in China, ed. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 138–139. Arif Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A study in Counterrevolution,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 4 (August 1975): 950.

6. New Narratives 1. Resolutions adopted by the General Assembly during its twenty-sixth session, United Nations, available at http://ods-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/ GEN/NR0/327/74/IMG/NR032774.pdf?OpenElement (accessed February 15, 2003). 2. Monique Chu, “Taiwan and the United Nations—Withdrawal in 1971 Was an Historic Turning Point,” Taipei Times, September 12, 2001, 3. 3. “Buxi lian da da bian (UN Ambassador Bush’s reply),” Zili Wanbao (Independence Evening Post), October 25, 1971, 1, and “U.N. Seats Peking and Expels Taipei,” New York Times, October 26, 1971. 4. Mab Huang, Intellectual Ferment for Political Reform in Taiwan, 1971–1973 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1976), 7. 5. William Glenn, “What Now, Generalissimo?” Far Eastern Economic Review, Vol. 74, No. 46 (November 13, 1971): 18. 6. “Renlei lishi bu hui daotui” (Human History Cannot Go Backwards), Zhongyang Ribao, February 28, 1972, 2. 7. King-yuh Chang, “Partnership in Transition: A Review of Recent TaipeiWashington Relations,” Asian Survey, Vol. 21, No. 6 ( June, 1981): 608. 8. “Bu dao fei wei chedi bengkui, fangong douzheng jue bu zhongzhi (Do Not Wait Until the Lies of the Bandits Fall Apart, the Struggle Against the Communists Cannot Stop),” Zhongyang Ribao (Central Daily News), January 2, 1979, 1. 9. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 135. 10. “Jianshe Taiwan jihua”(Plan for the Development of Taiwan), Zhongyang Ribao, October 7, 1950, 2. 11. Ibid. 12. Liu Songzhou, 12. 13. Ibid. 14. “Ruhe fazhan women de jingji huodong” (How to Develop Our Economic Activity), Zili Wanbao (Independent Evening Post), November 4, 1972, 1. 15. “Jianquan jingshen jianshe tong xia gexin gongfu” (The Resolute Work of a Building a Robust Spirit Under Suffering), Zhongyang Ribao, January 2, 1979, 1.

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16. Liu Ruilin, “Cong haiwai kan Taiwan” (Looking at Taiwan from Overseas), Taiwan Shibao (Taiwan Times), December 13, 1987, 2. 17. Chen Po-chih, “Taiwan and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation,” Government Information Office, available at http://www.gio.gov.tw/taiwan-website/4-oa/apec_ 20001110.htm (accessed March 7, 2004). 18. Roy Matthews, Canada and the “Little Dragons”: An Analysis of Economic Developments in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea and the Challenge/Opportunity They Present for Canadian Interests (Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy, 1983). 19. Wang Zuorong, Women ruhe chuangzao le jingji qiji (How We Created an Economic Miracle) (Taipei: Shibao wenhua chubanshe, 1989). 20. Gai Xijun and Li Cheng, Taiwan Jingyan Sishinian (Forty Years of the Taiwanese Experience) (Taipei: Tianxia Wenhua Chuban Gufen yu Xiangongsi, 1991), 7. 21. Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans-National America,” The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 118, No. 1 (July 1916): 88. 22. Said, Orientalism, 7. 23. “Japan Miracle ’70: Business Guide to the World’s Third Economic Power,” prepared by the Financial Times, (Harlow: Longman, 1970), viii. 24. Alan Dupont, “Is there an ‘Asian Way?’ ” Survival, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Summer 1996): 13–33. 25. Ian Malcolm, David Little, Tibor Scitovsky, and Maurice FitzGerald Scott, Industry and Trade in Some Developing Countries: A Comparative Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). 26. Eduardo Silva, “Capitalist Coalitions, the State, and Neoliberal Economic Restructuring: Chile, 1973–88,” World Politics Vol. 45, No. 4 (July 1993): 541–542. 27. The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy, A World Bank Policy Research Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 17–19. 28. Samuel P.S. Ho, “Industrialization in Taiwan: Recent Trends and Problems,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring 1975): 228. 29. Cal Clark, “The Taiwan Exception: Implications for Contending Political Economy Paradigms,” International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 3 (September 1987): 328. 30. See, for example, John Brohman, “Postwar Development in the Asian NICs: Does the Neoliberal Model Fit Reality?” Economic Geography Vol. 72, No. 2. (April 1996): 107–130. 31. Carlos F. Diaz-Alejandro, Paul R. Krugman, and Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Latin American Debt: I Don’t Think We are in Kansas Anymore,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Vol. 1984, No. 2 (1984): 335. 32. Peter Drucker, “What We Can Learn from Japanese Management,” Harvard Business Review Vol. 49, No. 2 (March–April 1971): 110–122. 33. Vogel, The Four Little Dragons, 38–39. 34. John Naisbitt, Megatrends Asia: Eight Asian Megatrends That Are Reshaping Our World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 12.

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35. Ross Garnaut, Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy: Report to the Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade (Canberra: Australian Government Public Service, 1989), 21–22. 36. Ibid., 47. 37. Kishore Mahbubani, Can Asians Think?: Understanding the Divide Between East and West (Singapore: Times Books International, 1998), 24–25. 38. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983). 39. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987). 40. John C.H. Fei, Gustav Ranis, and Shirley W.Y. Kuo, Growth with Equity: The Taiwan Case (Oxford: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 1979), 26. 41. Ibid. 42. Vogel, The Four Little Dragons, 38. 43. See, for example, Ezra Vogel, The Four Little Dragons, 116, nn.1 and 2. 44. Bill Emmott, The Sun Also Sets: The Limits to Japan’s Economic Power (New York: Times Books, 1989). 45. Bill Emmott, Japanophobia: The Myth of the Invincible Japanese (New York: Times Books, 1993). 46. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 45–46. 47. John Fiske, “British Cultural Studies and Television,” in Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, ed. Robert Allen (London: Routledge, 1992), 291. 48. Jeannette L. Faurot, ed., Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives (Bloomington, In: Indiana University Press, 1980). 49. Joseph S.M. Lau, ed., The Unbroken Chain: An Anthology of Taiwan Fiction Since 1926 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983). 50. Yan Yuanshu, “Dangqian Zhongguo wenxue wenti” (The Problems of Contemporary Chinese Literature), in Xiangtu wenxue taolun ji (Discussing Nativist Literature), ed. Wei Tiancong (Taipei: Wei Tiancong, 1978), 766. 51. Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist: Resistance Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press , 1993), 149. 52. Jing Wang, “Taiwan Hsiang t’u Literature: Perspectives in the Evolution of a Literary Movement,” in Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives, ed. Jeannette L. Faurot (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980), 49. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 51. 55. Hwang Chun-ming, The Drowning of an Old Cat and Other Stories, trans. Howard Goldblatt (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980), 12–36. 56. Xiaobing Tang, “On the Concept of Taiwan Literature,” Modern China, Vol. 25, No. 4 (October 1999 ): 387. 57. Wang, “Taiwan Hsiang t’u Literature,” 43. 58. Yan Yuanshu, 764–765 and Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, 149.

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59. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Education, 1988), 212. 60. Hwang Chun-ming, “Yige zuozhe de beibi xinling”(A Mean-Spirited Author), in Xiangtu wenxue taolun chi (Discussing Nativist Literature), ed. Wei Tiancong (Taipei: Wei Tiancong, 1978), 629. 61. Jin Ruiping, “Xiangtu, bentu, renshi Taiwan” (Nativism, Localism, Understanding Taiwan), Taiwan Shibao (Taiwan Times), August 19, 1993, 11. 62. Li Hsiao-feng, Taiwan, wo de xuanze! (Taiwan, My Choice!) (Taipei: Yushanshe chuban, 1995), 1. 63. Hsu Chang-tse, Jie fang shi jing (Neigborhood Market) (Changhua: Youyang chubanshe, 1989). 64. Donald R. DeGlopper, Lukang: Commerce and Community in a Chinese City (Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press, 1995), 188. 65. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 137. 66. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 184. 67. Ibid., 193. 68. Terry Eagleton, “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,” in Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (London: University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis, 1990), 2. 69. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 297. 70. Ibid., 299.

7. New Epistemologies 1. John Kaplan, The Court-Martial of the Kaohsiung Defendants (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1981), 16. 2. The Kaohsiung Tapes, available at www.taiwandc.org/kao-tapes.pdf, New Taiwan, Ilha Formosa: The Website for Taiwan’s History, Present, and Future (accessed January 2, 2004), 5. 3. Ibid., 29. 4. “Oral History Interview with Arthur N. Young,” available at http://www. trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/young.htm. Truman Presidential Museum and Library (accessed January 2, 2004). 5. “President Urges Cross-Strait Summit,” Beijing Review, February 16, 1995, 5. 6. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 309. 7. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 66. 8. Ibid., 397. 9. “Taiwan’s Quiet Revolution,” Asian Wall Street Journal, November 11, 1992. 10. C. L. Chiou, Democratizing Oriental Despotism (New York: St. Martin Press, 1992), 95–96.

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11. Bruce Jacobs, “Taiwan 1979: ‘Normalcy’ After ‘Normalization,’ ” Asian Survey, Vol. 20, No. 1 (January 1980): 91–92. 12. Chiou, Democratizing, 101. 13. Cited in Chiou, Democratizing, 103. 14. “Hard-Pressed Taiwan’s Newspapers Battle for Readers,” Sinorama, Vol. 22, No. 7 ( July 1997): 7. 15. Quoted in Chiou, Democratizing, 103. 16. Ibid. 17. See, for example, T’ien Hung-mao, “Taiwan’s Evolution Toward Democracy— A Historical Perspective,” in Taiwan: Beyond the Economic Miracle, ed. Denis Simon and Michael Kau (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), 18–19, and Samuel P. Huntington, “How Countries Democratize,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 106, No. 4 (Winter 1991–1992): 579–616. 18. Chiou, Democratizing, 95–96. 19. Ping-hui Liao, Hui yuan gu dai: cong xiandai yu zhiminlun wenji (Modernity in Revision: Postmodern and Postcolonial Theories) (Taipei: Rye Field Publishing, 1994), 310. 20. Seminar presentation at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, January 23, 2004. 21. Stéphane Corcuff, “Taiwan’s Mainlanders, ‘New Taiwanese?’ ” in Memories of the Future, ed. Stéphane Corcuff (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 163–195. 22. Bhabha, “Dissemination,” 299. 23. See Chapter 4 and the discussion of 2-28 and the production of meaning. 24. Li Hsiao-feng, “Wo ben jiang xin tuo mingyue” (I Hold the Bright Moonlight in My Heart), Zili Wanbao(Independent Evening Post), February 17, 1987, 10. 25. “Ruhe kan zhe lishi de bahen ‘er er ba shijian?’ ” (How Do We Look at the Scars of the History of the “2-28 Incident”) Lianhe bao (United Daily News), February 28, 1987, 1. 26. “Women dui ‘er er ba shijian’ de taidu yu kanfa” (Our Attitude and Perspective on the 2-28 Incident), Zhongyang Ribao (Central Daily News), May 10, 1987, 2. 27. “Er er ba shijian rizhi” (Record of the 2-28 Incident), Zhongguo Shibao (China Times), February 28, 1988, 10. 28. “Wei ‘er er ba shijian’ de ‘jiri’ shuo jijuhua” (A Few Words on the “Taboo” of the 2-28 Incident), Minzhong Ribao (Commons Daily), February 27, 1989, 2. 29. “Heping, aixin yu jingti” (Peace, Love, and Vigilance), Minzhong ribao (Commons Daily), February 27, 1990, 6. 30. Robert Edmondson, “Placing Collective Memory: Geography, Body, and Politics in the 56th Anniversary of Taiwan’s 2-28 Incident,” unpublished paper, 1998. 31. Robert Edmondson, “The February 28 Incident and National Identity,” in Memories of the Future, ed. Stéphane Corcuff (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 26. 32. Chen Wenxi, “Jinian bei neng fuping duo shao shanghen?” (How Many Wounds Can a Memorial Soothe?) Zhongguo Shibao (China Times), February 28, 1995, 11. 33. Yin Zhangyi, “ ‘Xin Taiwanren’ de dansheng” (The Emergence of “New Taiwanese”), Zhongguo Shibao (China Times), February 28, 1995, 11.

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34. Chen Zhizhen, “Wode er er ba” (My 2-28) Minzhong Ribao (Commons Daily), February 27, 1997, 27. 35. Li Hsiao-feng, Taiwan minzhu yundong 40 nian (Forty Years of Taiwan’s Democracy Movement) (Taipei:Zili Wanbao, 1987), 25–53. 36. Li Hsiao-feng, Jieshi er er ba (Explaining 2-28) (Taipei: Yushanshe, 1998), 8. 37. Faxian Taiwan (Discover Taiwan) (Taipei: Tianxia Zazhi Faxing, 1992). 38. Bhabha, “Dissemination,” 309. 39. “Ahistorical” here refers to singular moments or events that invoke a national identity without necessarily elaborating a historicized ideology of Taiwanese nationhood. 40. See, for example, Lian Genteng, Ni You Suo Bu Zhi De Taiwan Duli Shijian Biao (The Timetable of Taiwanese Independence You Did Not Know You Had) (Taipei: Qian Wei, 1995), 70. 41. “ ‘Taidu’ zai Riben gaojifenzi Qiu Yonghan zuo fanzheng gui guo” (The leading “Taiwanese independence” activist in Japan Qiu Yonghan repudiates his cause and returns to the nation), Lianhe Bao (United Daily News), April 3, 1972, 1. 42. Peggy Chiao, “Great Changes in a Vast Ocean: Neither Tragedy Nor Joy (Interview with Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien),” Performing Arts Journal, No. 50–51 (May–September 1995), 43. 43. June Yip, “Constructing a Nation: Taiwanese History and the Films of Hou Hsiao-hsien,” in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon Hsiao-ping Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), 142. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 146. 46. The evocation of 2-28 in City of Sadness starts with the hospital staff listening to radio broadcasts from the governor Chen Yi. It alternates static shots of the hills, street, and interiors where the family lives, and uses the sounds of shouts and cries to indicate the start of the rioting, as well as silence to indicate the passing of the hours and days of the events. The key scene is the hospital in which injured people are brought in for treatment. 47. Ping-hui Liao, “Rewriting Taiwanese National History: The February 28 Incident As Spectacle,” Public Culture, Vol. 5 (1993): 294. 48. This phenomenon reached its apotheosis when Lee T’eng-hui referred to China and Taiwan as having a “special state-to-state” relationship. See Jean-Pierre Cabestan, “Taiwan in 1999: A Difficult Year for the Island and the Kuomintang,” Asian Survey Vol. 40, No. 1 (January–February, 2000): 172–173. 49. Yin Zhangyi, “Taiwan yishi shifen” (Analysing Taiwan Consciousness), Zhongguo Luntan (China Tribune), Vol. 25, No. 1 (October 10, 1987): 95–114. 50. Erikson proposed that humans passed through eight stages of psychological development and that each stage was marked by an “identity crisis.” 51. Yin Zhangyi, “Taiwan yishi shifen,” 107. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 109. 54. Huang Guangguo, “Jiekai ‘Taiwanjie’ ‘Zhongguojie’ de genben tujing” (The Way to Solve the “Taiwan Complex” and “China Complex”), Zili Zaobao (Independent Morning Post), April 6, 1987, 2.

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55. “Bingwu suowei ‘Taiwanjie’ ” (There is Not Such Thing as the “Taiwan Complex”), Zhongyang Ribao (Central Daily News), September 30, 1987, 2. 56. Chang Mao-kuei, “Taidu shi wei toushen guoji de ‘zhengming’ yundong” (Taiwanese Independence Means Joining in the International Movement for the Rectification of Names), Zil Wanbao (Independent Evening Post), April 1, 1992, 3. Zhengming, the rectification of names is a Confucian term which calls for vigilance over the meanings of words. It argues that maintaining the correspondence between the meaning of words and the social world to which they refer is necessary for social, political, and moral order. 57. Sun Qingyu, “Guojia rentong yu Taiwan yishi” (National Identity and Taiwan Consciousness), Ziyou Shibao (Liberty Times), November 1, 1996, 2. 58. “Chongjian zizhuxing de ‘Taiwannyishi’ jiaoyu” (Rebuild the Independent Education of “Taiwan Consciousness”), Ziyou Shibao (Liberty Times), December 22, 1996, 7. 59. “Xincun Taiwan, rentong Taiwan, jianshe Taiwan” (Feeling for Taiwan, Identifying with Taiwan, Building Taiwan), Zili Wanbao (Independent Evening Post), October 10, 1994, 3. 60. Li Hsiao-feng, Taiwan, wo de xuanze! (Taiwan, My Choice!), 115. 61. “Rentong Taiwan de ren yingdang bei Taiwan rentong” (People Who Identify with Taiwan Should be Identified by Taiwan), Zhongyang Ribao (Central Daily News), April 8, 1996, 2. 62. Hsin-yi Lu, The Politics of Locality: Making a Nation of Communities in Taiwan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 36. 63. Alice Chu, “You can’t Say ‘Chinese!’ : Negotiating Taiwan’s National Identity Crisis Discourses on Political TV Call-In Shows,” paper presented at the Eleventh Annual Symposium about Language and Society, University of Texas, Austin, April 11–13, 2003. 64. Lin Chieh-yu, “Chen Tells Voters to Bury Nation’s Dictatorship,” Taipei Times, March 10, 2004, 1. 65. “Tuidong Taiwan zhengming zhuiqiu Taiwanren de ziwo rentong” (Promoting the Rectification of Taiwan’s Name to Achieve the Self-Identification of the Taiwanese People), Ziyou Shibao (Liberty Times), May 12, 2002, 11. 66. Terry Eagleton, “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,” 2. 67. Ibid. Eagleton’s description of identity as “ontologically empty” applies a poststructuralist critique of language to argue that identity can never be a fixed category of meaning because of its fundamental indeterminacy. The claim for an indivisible identity, a self-identical essence, will be based on a category that is constantly undermined by its supplementarity. 68. Ping-hui Liao, “The Case of the Emergent Cultural Criticism Columns in Taiwan’s Newspaper Literary Su,” in Global/Loca: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 344. 69. Ibid. 70. Bhabha, 297. 71. Eagleton, 24.

228 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

89.

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Notes

Bhabha, 299. Ibid. Ping-hui Liao, 340. Ibid., 341–342. Bhabha, 299. Ping-hui Liao, 344. Robert Edmondson, Placing Collective Memory: Geography, Body, and Politics in the 56th Anniversary of Taiwan’s 2-28 Incident, unpublished paper, 15. ibid., 21–23. Ping-hui Liao, 340. Tsai Ing-wen, “Rentong yu zhengzi: zhong lilunxing zhi fansheng” (Identity and Politics: A Theoretical Reflection), Zhengzhi kexue luncong (Political Science Review), Vol. 8 (June 1997): 51–84. Tsai, 53. Alice Chu, 33. Ping-hui Liao, “Theorizing the 90s: How Not to Talk about Taiwan in Terms of the World System, Global Cultural Economy, etc.,” paper presented at Re-Mapping Taiwan: The Fifth Annual Conference on the History and Culture of Taiwan Culture of Taiwan, University of California, Los Angeles, October 12–15, 2000. The author attended the July 13–16, 1998 “Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference: Problematising ‘Asia’ ” in Taipei and noted that none of the participants with whom he spoke was a ‘Taiwanese’ (benshenren). “Public Opinion on Cross-Strait Relations in the Republic of China,” available at http://www.mac.gov.tw/english/english/pos/9307/po9307e.htm, Mainland Affairs Council, Taipei, Taiwan (accessed June 6, 2004) and “Unification or Independence,” available at http://www.mac.gov.tw/english/english/pos/9305/9305e_1.gif, Mainland Affairs Council, Taipei, Taiwan (accessed June 6, 2004). Shelley Rigger, “The Evolution of the DPP and KMT’s Policies of the National Identity Issue,” paper prepared for the Conference on War and Peace in the Taiwan Strait, Duke University, February 26–27, 1999. Wu Naide, “Shengji yishi, zhengzhi zhichi he guojia rentong (Provincial Consciousness, Political Support and National Identity),” in Zuqun guanxi yu Guojia Rentong (Ethnic Relations and National Identity), ed. Zhang Maogui (Taipei: Chang Yung-fa Foundation Institute for National Policy Research, 1993), 47–48. Lin Tsong-jyi, “The Evolution 0f National Identity Issues in Democratizing Taiwan: An Investigation of the Elite-Mass Linkage,” in Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and the Search for a New Taiwan, ed. Stéphane Corcuff (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 123–143.

8. New Taiwanese 1. Lin Tsong-jyi. “The Evolution of National Identity Issues in Democratizing Taiwan: An Investigation of the Elite-Mass Linkage,” in Memories of the Future: National

Notes

2. 3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

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Identity Issues and the Search for New Taiwan, ed. Stéphane Corcuff (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 134–135. “Lions Roar over Name, Flag Dispute,” Taipei Times, July 4, 2002, 3. “Chen Stands by Passport Decision,” available at http://www.taiwanheadlines. gov.tw/20020115/20020115p1.html, Taiwan headlines, January 15, 2002 (accessed 1 July, 2002). Huang Weifeng, “Huzhao jia zhu ‘Taiwan’: baituo xian xiang qingchu zai fandui” (Adding “Taiwan” to the Passport: Please Think Again and Oppose It), Ziyou Shibao (Liberty Times), January 15, 2002, 22. “Dajia dou shi Taiwanren” (Everybody is Taiwanese), Ziyou Shibao (Liberty Times), May 12, 2002, 11. Lin Fu-shun, “ ‘One China’ Policy a Cold War Relic,” Taipei Times, July 9, 2000, 8. See Mainland Affairs Council, “Unification or Independence,” available at http:// www.mac.gov.tw/english/english/pos/9305/9305e_1.gif) Taipei, Taiwan (accessed June 6, 2004). Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 299. Richard Bernstein and Ross H. Munro, The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Random House, 1997). Du Wenjing, “Renshi Taiwan rengbuzu shuangyu jiaoyu ying peihe” (Understanding Taiwan is Still Not Enough, Bilingual Education is Also Required), Zili Wanbao (Independence Evening News), July 1, 1993, 5. Ibid. “Xinpian ‘Renshi Taiwan’ jiaokeshu yinqi de zhengyi” (The Controversy Over the New ‘Understanding Taiwan’ Textbooks), Lianhe Bao (United Daily News), June 13, 1997, 2. Qu Minxin, “You ren bu rang Taiwanren renshi Taiwan” (Some people Won’t Let Taiwanese People Understand Taiwan), Zili Wanbao (Independent Evening News), June 10, 1997. Wu Wenxing and Zhang Shengchan, Renshi Taiwan (Lishipian) (Understanding Taiwan (History)) (Taipei: Guoli Pianzeguan, 1997), 1. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 49. Lin Fushi and Peng Minghui, Renshi Taiwan (Society) (Understanding Taiwan (Society)) (Taipei: Guoli Pianzehuan, 1997), 88. Ibid., 91–92. Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan de zhuzhang (Taiwan’s Position) (Taipei: Yuanliu, 1999), 264. Ibid., 262. Cited in Christine Louise Lin, The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the Advocacy of Local Autonomy, Sino-Platonic Papers, No. 92 (Philadelphia: Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 1999), 95. Lin Yi-hsiung, Xiwang you yi tian (I Hope There Comes a Day) (Taipei: Yuwangshe, 1995), 33. Ibid., 39.

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23. Kuo Cheng-liang, “New Taiwanese: Reconstructing Taiwanese identity,” Jiaoliu (Exchange) No. 43 (February, 1999): 11. 24. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1999), 24. 25. Ibid., 25. 26. “What is a ‘New Taiwanese?’ ” Taipei Times, March 1, 2004, 11. 27. Ziyou Shibao (Liberty Times), May 12, 2002, 11. 28. Laura Li, “Interview: Chang Chau-hsiung of the People First Party,” Sinorama, Vol. 26, No. 12 (December 2001): 32. 29. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Peregrine, 1985). 30. Ping-hui Liao, “Theorizing the 90s: How Not to Talk about Taiwan in Terms of the World System, Global Cultural Economy, etc.,” paper presented at ReMapping Taiwan: The Fifth Annual Conference on the History and Culture of Taiwan Culture of Taiwan, University of California, Los Angeles, October 12–15, 2000. 31. Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 26. 32. J. Bruce Jacobs, Local Politics in a Rural Chinese Cultural Setting: A Field Study of Mazu Township (Canberra: Contemporary China Centre, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1980), i. 33. Based on discussions with Professor Jacobs. 34. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” 313.

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Index

2-28 Incident 2, 15, 38–40, 70, 78, 158, 160, 163–9, 173 2-28 Memorial 6, 169, 183–4 2-28 National Commemorative Holiday 6 Aboriginal 7–9, 47, 61–3, 72, 87–90, 94, 163, 195–8 Academia Sinica 4, 14 acknowledgments 203–4 America 10–12, 70, 84–5, 87, 93–5, 97, 100, 115, 119–26, 136, 139 American Declaration of Independence 113 Anagnost, Ana 128 Anderson, Benedict 23–32, 66, 134, 143 Anping 7 anthropology 4, 12–14, 18, 60 Anti-American boycott 126 Arendt, Hannah 40, 42 Arrigo, Linda Gail 203 Asian Values 39 Way 139 Asian Wall Street Journal 159 Atlantic Charter 93, 95 Atlantic Monthly 12, 139 Australia 36, 98, 116, 132, 141–2, 205 Australia and the North East Asian Ascendancy 141 authoritarianism 17, 37–9, 45, 83, 107–9, 114–5, 117, 125, 134, 156–8, 171 autobiography 202 Bandit Punishment Ordinance 76

baojia 7, 10, 76 behavior 101–2, 128–9 Beijing 126, 132, 168, 178, 180, 194 Bela Balassa 139 benshengren 2, 61, 179, 187–8, 197–8 bentu wenhua 145, 148–52, 174, 181 bentuhua 148 Bhabha, Homi K. 6, 32, 43, 52, 56–7, 85, 111, 152–3, 157, 162, 170–1, 178, 181–3, 185, 189, 191, 194, 205 blood 93–4, 102, 119, 121–4, 127–35, 186–7, 196, 198 body 128–9 Bourdieu, Pierre 53–4, 59, 65–70, 75, 77, 80, 83–4, 105, 128, 145, 184, 191, 196 Bourne, Randolph S. 139 British Conservative Party 34 British Labour Party 33 Cai Peihuo 76, 133 Cairo Declaration 11, 77, 93 calligraphy 104–5, 121, 184–5 Canada 116, 138, 205 capitalism 26, 42, 136, 160 causal model 18, 24, 27, 29, 31, 44–5, 82, 84, 161–2, 194 Chai Ling 127 Chang Chao-hsiung 201 Chang Mao-kuei 176–7, 180, 189, 200 Chang, Yvonne 223 Chen Charng-ven 47 Chen Cheng 93, 97–8 Chen Cheng-hsiang 11

248

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Index

Chen Jing 178–9 Chen Jitong 71 Chen Kuan-hsing 15 Chen Po-chih 137 Chen Shui-bian 179, 197 Chen Wenxi 168 Chen Yi 77, 82–3, 93 Chengchi University 121, 127, 148, 191 Chiang Ching-kuo 19, 43, 133, 160, 177 Chiang Kai-shek 33–4, 96, 101, 105, 117, 127–8, 131–3 Chiang, Antonio 46–7, 49, 68, 103 Chicago Boys 139 China Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 15 civil war 1–2, 143, Communist 33, 116, 120 complex (Zhongguo jie) 174–5 mainland 1–4, 11–15, 33–4, 46–7, 51–60, 63–4, 69, 72, 77, 80, 86–8, 96–8, 108–10, 113, 117, 128, 137, 145, 164–6, 175–6, 183, 188, 193, 203 People’s Republic of 2, 4, 13, 115, 131, 131, 157, 193 Republic of (ROC) 3–4, 13–4, 69–70, 82, 85, 93–7, 102, 109, 116–24, 131–3, 160, 176–9, 191–3 Taiwan relations (see also cross-straits relations) 4 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 34, 84, 86, 126–7 Chinese nationalism (see nationalism) Chinese Studies 12, 16–17, 36, 163, 202–3 Chiou, C.L. 18, 159–60 Chiu I-jen 47, 49, 68 Chomsky, Noam 66 Chow, Rey 57, 151–2, 202–4 Chu Kao-sheng 159 Chun, Allen 44 Chungli Incident 39–40, 42–3, 155, 178 Chusan 96 cinema 151, 172–4 City of Sadness (Beiching chengshi) 172–4 class 18, 25, 63, 98, 126 classical culture 17–18, 25, 74, 78, 103, 105, 184–5

cold war 2, 31, 36, 86, 98, 109, 116–17 Colquhoun, A.R. 9 Coming Conflict With China, The (Richard Bernstein, Ross H. Munro) 194 commentaries 60, 124, 166–70, 180, 183–6, 189 Committee for Economic Development 14 Committee to Settle the February 28 Incident (Ererba chuli weiyuan hui) 81–3 Communism 2, 36, 69, 96–8, 102, 107, 109–10, 114, 116–17, 124, 136, 139 Confucianism 104 Control Yuan 118 Corcuff, Stéphane 162 Council for Economic Planning and Development 137 cross-straits relations 16, 24, 32, 36, 58, 168, 188–9, 194 cultural studies 15, 23, 145, 160, 187, 202–4 Czechoslovakia 114, 117, 129 Daoism 54 Davies, Gloria 6, 16, 20–1, 48, 57, 202–4 Daxue (The Intellectual) 109, 122–4 Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation 113–14 DeGlopper, Don 149 Delueze, Giles 147 democracy 2, 17–18, 33, 39, 44, 58, 95, 98–9, 108–10, 115, 130, 133, 141, 145, 155–6, 160, 177, 190, 195, 197 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) 47, 159–1, 177, 192, 197–8, 203, 210 democratization 15–21, 27–8, 32, 40–4, 46, 68, 123, 144, 159, 160–1 Dennys, N.B. 64 Department of Cultural Affairs 159 dependency theory 37–8 Derrida, Jacques 5, 7, 20, 24, 57, 65, 68, 80–1, 150–1, 162, 191, 207–8 dialect 25, 35, 61, 65–6, 99, 146–7 Diaoyutai Islands 13, 115–32, 145 différance 81, 151, 163 discourse 10, 17–21, 67–70, 80, 129, 170, 177–9, 185–9, 194–6, 201–5 doctors 11, 74 double-time 32, 170

Index double-writing 52, 56, 170 Drucker, Peter 140 Du Wenjing 194 Duara, Prasenjit 24–31, 61, 68 Dutch colonial period 1–2, 87–90, 94–5, 103–4, 105 Eagleton, Terry 57, 59, 63, 180–1 East Asia 2, 14, 16, 108, 136–44 Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) 118 economy (see also miracle economy, Tiger economy) 3–4, 8, 11, 13, 17, 73, 134–7, 140–3, 160, 175, 183, 195–6 Edmondson, Robert 166–7, 173, 183–4 education 1, 11, 26, 45–9, 59, 65–9, 73–6, 83, 92, 98, 105, 107–8, 116–17, 128, 135, 140, 158, 162, 177, 194–6 Eight Point Plan 157 Election Study Centre 191 empire 1–2, 7–11, 25–7, 64, 72–5, 88, 91–2, 95, 101, 126, 193 enunciation 52, 59, 72, 152, 157–8, 162, 170, 189, 194–5, 199–201 epistemology 6, 7, 16–18, 24, 28, 31–2, 45, 51, 58, 79, 127, 164, 188, 190 Esherick, Joseph W. 125 ethnicity 35, 58, 61–4, 67, 72, 76, 84, 91, 94, 100, 151, 177, 179, 182, 192, 197, 199, 200–1, Europe 1–3, 8–10, 71–2, 86, 89, 114, 129, 139–40, 168 Fairbank, John K. 12, 33, 35, 115 Far Eastern Economic Review 12, 84, 86, 115, 133 Far Eastern Survey 11, 80 fascism 100, 102 Financial Times 139, 142 Fiske, John 145 Fitzgerald, C.P. 34 Fitzgerald, John 24, 89, 100–1 Formosa 2, 3, 5–12, 33–6, 39, 62–6, 69–70, 77, 82, 97–8, 101, 109, 129, 192, 195, 197 Formosa Quarterly 12, 110 Formosa Speaks 86 Formosan League for Re-emancipation 86 Formosan nationalism (see nationalism)

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249

Foucault, Michel 16, 20–1, 128, 202 Four Little Dragons, The 14, 138 France 33, 65, 105 Free China 2, 4, 11–12, 36, 51, 96, 98, 103, 108–10, 116–17, 133 Free China Monthly 113 Fujian 7, 54–8, 61, 69–70 Fullbright, J. William 116 Gallin, Bernard 12–13 Gao Xijun 138 Garnaut, Ross 141–2 Garrison Command 110 gazetteers 7–8 Gellner, Ernest 28, 30 gender 47, 185, 199 geography 3, 4, 10, 12, 26, 46–7, 118, 122, 194 George Bush Sr. 132 Goddard, W.G. 36, 98 Gold, Thomas 37–44, 48–9, 52–8, 69, 89, 138, 155, 162, 175–6 Goto Shimpei 10 Gramsci, Antonio 145 Grand Hotel 159 Great Hall of the People 125 Great Leap Forward 108 Green Party 203 Gu Zhenggang 118 Habermas, Jürgen 182 habitus 70, 75 Hainan 96 Hakka 5, 47, 61, 72, 181, 188, 196, 197–8 Han 8, 45, 74, 100, 195–6 Han Suyin 36 Harrison, Henrietta 25 Havel, Václav 114, 117 Heaven and Earth Society 91 hegemony 66, 95, 143, 157, 160, 193, 195 historiography 37–8, 42, 69, 92–3, 95 Ho, Samuel 140 Hong Kong 15, 84–5, 119–21, 132, 137, 139, 141, 173, 203 Hou Hsiao-hsien 173 Hou Jiliang 55–7 Hsiao Hsin-huang, Michael 160 Hsiao, Ah-chin 44

250

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Index

Hsieh Tsung-min 113–15, 129, 145 Hsu Chang-tse 149 Hsu Hsin-liang 39, 159, 171 Hsu Ming-te 191 Hu Chang 53 Hu Fo 109, 159 Hu Shih 110, 118 Huang Hsin-chieh 156 Huang Zhaotang 72 Huang, Mab 132 Hughes, Christopher 44, 51, 58, 60, 69, 77, 175 huiguan (native-place associations) 68 Human Rights Day 155 Hwang Chun-ming 147–8 Hypergrowth 14, 137, 141–4 ideology 26, 39, 48, 51, 72–3, 79, 82–9, 93–104, 110, 135, 145, 189–90, 197–9 Imagined Communities 23–7 Immigrant society 74, 88, 175, 195 immigration 126 imperial government 1, 2, 7–10, 25–6, 62–74, 104–8, 184, 193 independence 3, 12, 23, 35, 47, 72, 95, 192, 108, 110–13, 160, 171–2, 175–8, 183, 192, 195 Independent Formosa (journal) 12, 110 industrialization 31, 41, 42, 88, 139, 141–2 international relations 15, 18, 23, 51, 116, 133, 139, 194, 204 island fortress 98 Itakagi Taisuke 75 Jacobs, Bruce 159, 203 Japan colonization 11, 38, 73–7, 86–91, 118, 143, 149, 175, 193 sailors 8, 90 scholarship 10 education 75 Jian Zhen 54–8 Jiang Weishui 75, 79, 85, 195 Jiang Zemin 157 Jin Ruiping 148 jisi gongye (ancestral estates) 64, 67

Johnson, Christopher 5 Joint Chinese-American Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR) 11, 97, 103, 123 Jordan, David 13 June Fourth Incident (see also Tiananmen) 15 Kang Lishi 110 Kaohsiung Incident 40, 141, 148, 155–9, 170, 178, 204 Kerr, George 80, 82 kinship 13, 25, 64, 127–8 knowledge 3, 7, 12–20, 60, 66, 79–80, 111, 139, 144, 148, 162, 185, 188–91, 202–4 Ko Kiansing 111–12 Kodama Gentaro 10 Korea 11, 97, 101, 137–9, 141 Korean War 11, 33, 134 Kuo Huai-yi 90 Kuomintang (KMT) 1, 11–15, 19, 34, 38–9, 41–5, 49, 65, 68, 70, 76, 80–7, 93–119, 123–39, 140, 150, 155–60, 164–7, 171–5, 177, 178, 183–6, 192, 194, 197 Kutzets, Simon 139 La Pérouse, Jean François Galaup 9 Lamley, Harry 61, 63, 67, 71–2, 91, 127 Language 5, 18–20, 24–32, 48–9, 57–8, 66–9, 114, 185–8, 202 Laozhaopian (historic photograph) 149–51 Latin America 14, 27, 42, 55, 96, 126, 139–40, 148, 179 Law No. 63, 76 League of Nations 87 Lee Teng-hui 43, 112, 155, 193, 197 Legislative Yuan 98, 155 legitimacy 3, 13, 34, 65–77, 134–7, 173–4, 188, 192–5, 200–3 Lei Chen 113, 115 Leung, Tony 173–4 Levi-Strauss, Claude 5 Li Ao 109, 115 Li Hsiao-feng 148, 165–6, 169, 172, 178 Li Qinghua 195

Index Liang Qichao 72, 76, 99 Lianhe bao (United Daily News) 54, 58, 107, 10, 135, 159–60, 165–8, 171 Liao, Joshua (Liao Wenkuai) 85–95, 106, 113 Liao, Ping-hui 173, 180, 182, 187, 202 Liao, Thomas (Liao Wenyi) 85–95, 105, 110, 112 liberalism 1, 23, 34, 44, 75, 86–7, 94, 100, 108–10, 118, 124, 157, 160, 202 Lien Chan 192 Lim Kianjit 110 Lin Moushun 84 Lin Tsong-jyi 188, 191 Lin Xiantang 74–6, 131, 195 Lin Yi-hsiung 40, 155, 198 Lions Club International 191–2 literature 15–7, 26, 40, 48, 59–60, 70, 73, 114, 130, 145–50, 174 Little Dragon 2, 14, 28, 36, 41, 136–46, 152, 161, 202 Liu Songzhou 107, 110, 135 Lo Ming-cheng 11, 74 Localism 144–50 Longshan Shi (Longshan Temple) 64 Lugang 149–53 Ma Ying-jeou 184, 197–200 Macao 121 Mahbubani, Kishore 142, 144 Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) 185, 188 Mancall, Mark 12 Manchu 1, 68, 77, 87–92, 102–4, 127 Manchuria 77 Mandarin Chinese 66, 178 Mao Zedong 34, 125, 127, 133 martial law 4, 14–19, 38, 40, 43–4, 58–60, 70, 81, 136, 138, 144, 148, 150–6, 160–7, 170–2, 175, 185, 188, 191, 196–7, 200 Martin, Helmut 15 Marxism 38–42, 145 May Fourth Movement 77, 109, 118, 124–6, 131 Mazu 203 McLuhan, Marshall 29

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251

meaning 4–7, 20–1, 43–8, 56–7, 61–3, 66–8, 73, 81–6, 114–20, 136, 146, 150–2, 158–9, 164–5, 171, 180, 191, 201, 204 media 25, 29–30, 101, 107, 126, 174, 183–5, 197 Megatrends Asia 141 Meilidao 2 Meilidao (Formosa Magazine) 101, 155–6 Mendel, Douglas 38–9, 86, 92 militarism 1, 92, 95, 102–3, 128 Ming Dynasty 1, 7, 90–2, 103, 118 Ministry of Education 194 Ministry of Foreign Affairs 121, 192 Minnan 10, 196 Minzhong Ribao (Commons Daily) 166–71 miracle economy 36–7, 43–4, 108, 127–9, 132, 144, 147, 160, 175 missile crisis 15, 44, 193–4 Mobutu Sese Seko 120 modernism 147, 183, 185 modernity 25, 28, 30–1, 40–2, 56, 87–9, 93, 139, 142–4, 147, 150–1, 160, 202 Monopoly Bureau 38, 80, 83 naming 4–8, 11–14, 18, 56, 59–63, 68, 70–1, 77, 80–2, 133–6, 156, 162, 175, 191–3 narratives 9, 30, 43, 56, 69–70, 79, 84–6, 95, 126, 131–4, 160, 170, 181–3, 202 nation-state 3, 30, 47, 66, 73, 84–5, 101, 143 National Assembly 96, 117 National Taiwan University (NTU) 121–7, 134, 186, 199 nationalism Chinese 26, 84, 87, 89–92, 94, 102–4, 110–11, 117–18, 127–30, 156–7, 199 Formosan 84–96, 110–14, 133, 146, 158 Taiwanese 16, 23, 48, 58, 70–2, 76, 84, 94, 109, 110, 112–5, 129, 133–5, 145–6, 156–8, 171, 177, 186, 189 Nationalists (see KMT) nationhood 1, 16, 23–9, 32, 37, 42–4, 49, 79–80, 83, 86, 89, 92–5, 108, 129, 139, 151–2, 158, 170, 180–3, 191, 196–8

252

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Index

Nativist literature 40, 145–8, 150 Neoliberal development economics 13, 138–41 New Life Movement 89, 101–3, 128, 134, 137 New Party (Xin Dang) 192 New People’s Society 76 New Taiwanese (Xin Taiwanren) 112, 169, 197–203, 205 Nixon, Richard 116–17, 132 Nokai Kumiai (Agricultural Associations) 76 North American Taiwan Studies Association 15 nostalgia 55–7, 146, 148, 150

postcolonial 2, 15, 17, 23–4, 88, 145, 163, 185–7, 202, 204 prefecture (fu) 2–3, 7–8, 10, 64, 118 Presbyterians 76, 197 print 26–9, 31, 54, 115, 136, 174 Protect Diaoyutai Islands Movement protests 120–9, 131, 157–9, 167, 183, 197 province (sheng) 1–3, 7–8, 12, 14, 47, 55–6, 64, 65, 70–2, 81–2, 88, 97, 99, 122, 134–5, 193 Provisional Government of the Republic of Formosa 86, 92, 110–13 Psalmanazaar, George 2 public intellectuals 180–4

objectivity 20, 24, 27, 32, 41–3, 45–53, 100–1, 105, 108, 111–13, 124, 135, 139, 144, 148, 152, 158, 163–4, 173, 186–90, 194, 199, 202, 204 Okinawa 118–19, 122 Ong Joktik 3, 110 ontology 57, 59, 164, 180, 199 Open Door policy 36, 133 Orient, The 86 Orientalism 10, 15, 202 overseas Chinese 119, 136

Qin Dynasty 100 Qing Dynasty 1, 3, 7–11, 26, 64, 71–6, 87, 90, 95, 100–3, 120, 125–7, 144, 193 Qiu Fengjia 71–2 Quanzhou 5, 44–6, 61, 64, 196 quiet revolution 159

Pai Chung-hsi 104–5, 166 Paine, Thomas 113 passports 4, 192 Pasternak, Burton 13 pedagogy 32, 48, 52, 57, 85, 111, 152, 170, 181 Peng Ming-min 77, 79, 113, 115, 129 People First Party (Qinmindang) 201 People’s Republic of China (PRC) (see China) performativity 32, 52, 67, 111, 152, 170, 181, 199 Period of National Mobilization 193 photography 149 Pickering, William 62–4, 67, 69, 88 Pilgrim Fathers 84, 92, 94–5, 102 political science 14, 16, 18, 23, 32, 36, 43, 51, 50, 160, 185, 187–8, 202–4 popular culture 5, 26, 70, 103, 131, 186 Portuguese 2, 94, 195 positivism 18–21, 24, 27–8, 31, 43–6, 51–2, 58, 62, 79, 82, 161–2, 188–9, 194, 199, 202, 204

race 84, 94–5, 99–101, 127, 186, 199 Reagan administration 141 rectification 176, 192 Renan, Ernest 26 Renshi Taiwan (Understanding Taiwan) 170, 194–7 Republic of China (ROC) 3–4, 13–14, 82, 85, 93, 97, 102, 109, 116–24, 131–3, 176–9, 193 Republic of Taiwan 3, 47, 113, 134, 176 Rescuing History From the Nation 24–8 Retrocession 1–3, 68, 80, 80, 87, 96, 130, 143, 146, 193 reunification 47, 157, 176 rhetoric 31, 58, 85, 91, 95–9, 102–3, 108–10, 117, 127, 143, 137, 151–2, 170–2, 187–90, 197–200 Rigger, Shelley 24, 160, 188 Royal Geographical Society 9 Royal Institute for International Affairs 11, 85 Russo-Japanese War 139 Said, Edward 9, 202 samizdat 114, 129–31 San Min Zhu Yi (Three Principles of the People) 98–101, 113, 127, 133, 176

Index san nian yi xiao fan, wu nian yi da luan (Every three years a minor uprising, every five years a major rebellion) 63, 90–1 Sangyo Kumiai (Development Cooperatives) 76 Saussure, Ferdinand 5, 66 scholarship 2, 6, 11, 20–1, 23, 27, 42–3, 51, 59–60, 70, 79–80, 124, 138–9, 143, 146, 161–4, 178, 189–90, 202–4 School of Oriental and African Studies 5 self-consciousness 52, 86, 95, 101, 105, 149, 164, 169, 172, 174, 177–8, 183, 198 self-reflexivity 24, 32, 52, 71, 170, 178, 182–3, 201 Seventh Fleet 15, 97 Shapiro, Michael 16, 19–21 shenming hui (religious societies) 64 Shephard, John 7 Shi Ming 38 Shih Ming-teh 156–8, 170, 203 Shoenhals,Michael 105 Si Xiao Long (Four little dragons) 138 silence 165–7, 171–4 Singapore 137, 139, 141–2 Sino-Japanese War 1, 3, 71, 75, 101, 111, 118, 157 Sino-Soviet split 115 sinology 17 Smith, Anthony 23 Snow, Edgar 127 social Darwinism 100 social science 14–15, 17–18, 52, 144, 191 Soong, James 177 Soong Mei-ling 101 South China Sea 1 Soviet Union 114–16, 141 State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle 37–43, 89, 138, 175 Stewart-Lockhart, J.H. 9 sub-ethnic conflict 1, 61–4, 67, 69, 76 subjectivity 24, 26–32, 42–3, 112, 114, 143, 152, 157–8, 170–2, 180–3, 198, 200 Suiri Kumiai (Irrigation Cooperatives) 76 Sun Qingyu 177, 189 Sun Yat-sen 76, 89, 91, 99, 101–5, 112, 120, 127, 133, 137 surveys 53, 59, 60, 79, 162–3, 188–94 Swinhoe, Robert 9

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253

symbolic power 66–75, 77, 80–2, 105–6, 127–9, 134, 145, 160, 163, 170, 175, 184, 196 taboo 44, 165–72 Taichung Public High School 74 Tainan 7, 8, 88, 103–4, 184 Taipei 35, 73, 80, 84, 112, 115, 120, 127, 132–3, 141, 159 Mayor 184, 197 Pictorial 150 Taiwan Assimilation Society (Taiwan tonghua hui) 75 complex (Taiwan jie) 174–9 consciousness (Taiwan yishi) 72, 74, 174–7, 183, 189 Cultural Association (Taiwan wenhua xiehui) 75–6, 85 diqu (Taiwan area) 65 History Institute (Academia Sinica) 14 Normal University 121–2 Olympic team 178 Provincial Commission 83 Relations Act 133–4 Republic (1895) 71–2, 92 sheng (Taiwan province) 2–3, 8, 61, 65 Straits 1, 11–12, 23, 44, 88, 104, 189, 193–4 Studies 2, 14–18, 24, 32, 37–8, 44, 51–2, 59, 60, 63, 80, 146, 163–4, 194, 201–5 Youth Association 110 Taiwan Shibao (Taiwan Times) 72, 136 Taiwan Sôtoku fu (Prefecture of the Governor of Taiwan) 3, 10 Taiwan Wenyi (Taiwan Literature) 145 Taiwanfu Zhi 7 taiyu (Taiwanese language) 66, 162 Tan Jiahua 121 Tang Jingsong 71–3, 85 Tanshui 8, 71 Taoyuan 39, 159 taxation 7, 90 Tayouan 7 teleology 29, 3, 41, 46, 55–6, 89, 105, 142, 152, 180–1, 185, 194–8 Tiananmen Square 125–6, 168 Tiger economy 14, 28, 43, 108, 137, 140, 144

254

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Index

Tokyo 74, 76, 85–6, 92, 110, 112 Treaty of Shimonoseki 3, 71, 118 Truman, Harry 11, 96–7, 157 Tsai Ing-wen 185–6 Tsing Hua University 15 Tsurumi, Patricia 74–5 Twenty One Demands 126 Twitchett, Dennis 17 T’ien Hung-mao 19–20, 44, 160 United Nations General Assembly 33, 131–2 Recognition 33, 116, 131–3, 136 Resolution 27, 58, 131, 136 United States China relations 36, 115–17 Okinawa Reversion Agreement 118–22 Seventh Fleet 15, 97 State Department 119, 123 Taiwan relations 2, 11–14, 33, 96, 108, 119–23, 132, 144, 195 United Young Formosans for Independence 112 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 155 veterans 53–4 violence 5, 40–2, 65, 68, 70, 80–3, 102, 132, 156, 159, 164, 174, 184, 193 Vogel, Ezra 14, 37, 41–2, 138, 141–3 Wachman, Alan 37, 44–9, 51, 58–9, 81–2, 111, 162, 176 waishengren 2, 61, 187–8, 196–8 Wang Guanhua 126 Wang Haowei 54 Wang Hui 182 Wang Shimi 110 Wang Xiaobo 122 Wang Zuorong 138 Wang, Jing 146–7 War of Resistance Against Japan 119–20 Washington Post 160, 195 Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. 125 Weber, Max 41–2 Wei Tao-ming 83, 93, 118 Wei Ting-chao 113, 129 Wei Yusun 119 West 2, 7, 9–10, 15, 25–6, 34, 36, 41–2, 51–2, 70–1, 98, 101, 108, 139–44, 160, 163, 185, 195, 201–5

White Terror (Baise Kongbu) 103 Wilson, Woodrow 86–7, 95, 130 Wolf, Margery 4, 12–3 Worker-Peasant-Soldier Literature (Gongnongbing wenxue) 147 World Anti-Communist League 118 World Bank 13, 208 World United Formosans for Independence (WUFI) 12 World War I 86–7 World War II 2, 65, 198 Wu Naide 188 Xia Chao (China Tide) 145 Xiamen University 15 xiangtu 2, 145–7 xiangtu wenxue 145–7 Xie Xuehong 84 Yan Yuanshu 146 Yang Hsien-hung 159 Yin Zhangyi 168–9, 175 Yip, June 173 Yong Qing (Eternal Qing) 54, 72 Young, Arthur N. 157 Zablocki, Clement 116 Zhangzhou 5, 54, 61, 64, 69, 196 Zhen Keshuan 7, 103 Zheng Chenggong Zheng Chenggong Shrine Zhongguo Luntan (China Tribune) 175 Zhongguo Shibao (China Times) 160, 166, 168–9 Zhonghua Minguo 2–4, 105 Zhongshan South Road 121, 127 Zhongyang Ribao (Central Daily News) 97, 118–19, 121–3, 132, 136, 165–7, 176–80 Zhou Enlai 125, 132 Zhu Banyun 109 Zili Wanbao (Independence Evening Post) 14, 119–20, 124, 132, 136, 165, 169 Zili Zaobao (Independence Morning Post) 176–8 Ziyou Shibao (Liberty Times) 168, 177–9, 181, 192, 200 Ziyou Zhongguo (Free China) 108–9

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The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Cultures of Consumption)

The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Cultures of Consumption)

Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth

Contextualism in Philosophy - Knowledge, Meaning and Truth

Exploration and Meaning Making in the Learning of Science

Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema

Exploration and Meaning Making in the Learning of Science

Religion and the Formation of Taiwanese Identities

The Meaning Of Meaning

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Justice and Legitimacy in Upbringing

Children's Mathematics: Making Marks, Making Meaning

Media and Male Identity: The Making and Remaking of Men

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Imagining Niagara: the meaning and making of Niagara Falls

Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan

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Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning

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Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X

Sources of the self: the making of the modern identity

Knowledge Annotation: Making Implicit Knowledge Explicit

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

Meaning and Identity in a Greek Landscape: An Archaeological Ethnography

God's Gateway: Identity and Meaning in a Hindu Pilgrimage Place

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