Taiwan is interesting for me as a budding Filipino archaeologist because of ANU Prof. Peter Bellwood’s “Out-of-Taiwan” theory for the peopling of my country, the Philippines, south of Taiwan. 2021 DNA findings show that the latter theory is only partly true.
Beginning 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, Austronesian-speaking, non-Han indigenous people of Southern China through Taiwan -and possibly also directly- traveled on rafts or boats for short-distance travel to the northern Philippine islands and became the ancestors of our Igorot indigenous peoples who live today in the Cordillera mountain range. (The maritime compass for long-distance sailing would only be invented and used by Han Chinese and Western Europeans after the 11th-12th c. AD, while the idea of Nanyang, 南洋 or South China Sea, would be born closer to our time when imperial horse-riding Manchu of the Qing dynasty built a navy in the late 19th c. AD.)
However, by that time, the Philippines had already been home to many other peoples who had been trekking over a period of 600,000 to 700,000 years following other routes on mainland Southeast Asia and over now-submerged land bridges.
Political and cultural identities
According to Wikipedia,
Austronesian-speaking ancestors of Taiwanese indigenous peoples settled the island around 6,000 years ago. In the 17th century, large-scale Han Chinese immigration to western Taiwan began under a Dutch colony and continued under the Kingdom of Tungning. The island was annexed in 1683 by the Qing dynasty of China, and ceded to the Empire of Japan in 1895.
In Dr. Angela Schottenhammer’s breathtaking 2012 journal article “The ‘China Seas’ in world history: A general outline of the role of Chinese and East Asian maritime space from its origins to c. 1800,” she describes the condescending (mis)representations of Austronesian-speaking Taiwanese and their island home in Han Chinese historical sources:
[U]ntil Qing times, the island was considered [by mainland Han Chinese government officials] as a frontier location, not really being part of the Qing Empire, although it was officially incorporated as a part of Fujian Province in 1684. Qing sources describe the island as “lonely hanging beyond the seas” (gu xuan haiwai 孤懸海外), as a “faraway place beyond the deep ocean” (yuan zai zhongyang zhi wai 遠在重洋之外). The local inhabitants are repeatedly referred to as cruel, ruthless and stubborn. They are described as “foreign people that came from several places outside [the Chinese realms]” (fanmin zachu er wailai zhi min 番民雜處而外來之民).
Prof. William Kirby of ChinaX narrates that, because of Manchu Qing rules in the 17th century on emigration to Taiwan, few Han Chinese settlers came to Taiwan from the southern coast of the mainland. Of the latter, most were men such that there were in Taiwan marriages (sometimes bigamous, according to Prof. Kirby, as in the cultures of southern China and, indeed, in Spanish colonial Philippines) between Han Chinese and local Austronesian speakers. The Manchu Qing adopted more open policies towards Han Chinese emigration in the 19th century and by 1885 imperially considered Taiwan its province (presumably without consulting islander locals most of whom spoke neither the reigning Qing family’s Manchu nor their subject Han Chinese bureaucrats’ Mandarin).
In 1895, Japan occupied Taiwan as its first colony during the Sino-Japanese War. Taiwan remained part of the Japanese Empire until 1945. During this period of half a century, the Taiwanese acculturated to Japanese culture, learned Nihongo, and considered themselves citizens of Japan, fighting alongside Japanese from the latter’s homeland during World War II (similar to how many Filipinos enlisted in or fought alongside U.S. expeditionary forces for World War I and especially World War II, before Philippine political independence and decolonization from colonial America began in 1946).
With Japan’s final World War II defeat in 1945, the Taiwanese came under the rule of the Han Chinese Nationalists (even though they had fought each other during the War).
According to Wikipedia, “As a result of the surrender of Japan at the end of World War II, the island of Taiwan was placed under the governance of the Republic of China (ROC), ruled by the Kuomintang (KMT), on 25 October 1945.”
To the Taiwanese, the Nationalists were an occupying or colonizing force (much like how many Filipinos, especially our revolutionary heroes, viewed the US after Spain ceded the Philippines to the latter in 1898). To the Han Chinese, the Taiwanese were of questionable loyalty because of the strong and recent Japanese influence on their lives (and likely also because many locals belonged to non-Han, Austronesian-speaking ethnic groups).
Former Japanese industries were nationalized, protests on the small island were crushed, and thousands of the Taiwanese elite were executed. Martial law stayed in effect for forty years, from May 1949 until July 1987.
Living under Han Chinese Nationalist occupation since 1947, the Taiwanese developed a fiercely distinct identity, neither Japanese nor Han Chinese. Moreover, after waves of colonialism, the Austronesian-speaking first nations or original Taiwanese people of Formosa (another of Taiwan’s many names in history) had been pushed to the margins of society.
Thus, it’s perhaps more appropriate to speak of fluid, hybrid and multiple identities, instead of just a fixed one, among Taiwanese just as among other Austronesian-speaking islanders in Southeast Asia and islands of the Indo-Pacific Oceans, including the ancient wayfinding peoples of Madagascar, New Zealand, Hawai’i, and Easter Island.
In 1949, the Communists defeated the Nationalists on the mainland, forcing Chiang Kai-shek along with two million Han Chinese Nationalists to flee into exile to Taiwan. There they established the Republic of China (ROC), with its capital in Taipei, run by the one-party Kuomintang government.
The rival landlubber Communists and Nationalists-in-exile — both predominantly Han Chinese, one may note — saw colonized Taiwan island and mainland China (with more stable and permanent borders by the 20th c.) as belonging to a single “nation,” differing only on which was the governing party. One may ask, did either side meaningfully consult Taiwan’s first or indigenous peoples on their thoughts on this debate?
By the 1990s, the ROC had lifted martial law and conducted democratic elections. It held a seat in the U.N. until 1971 and was officially allied with the U.S. until 1979 (though the U.S.’s position on Taiwan was actually “strategically ambiguous”). From the late seventies, Taiwan gradually abandoned its claim to mainland China.
However, politically self-identifying Communist leaders of People’s Republic of China (PRC) have stubbornly maintained a claim of sovereignty over Taiwan. They’ve never abandoned the option of using military force to possess Taiwan, even if PRC has never exercised political control nor sovereign powers in Taiwan “for a single instant” (in Prof. Kirby’s words). They’ve offered to politically absorb Taiwan under a yiguo-liangzhi policy or “one country — two systems,” as was offered to Hong Kong in 1997 and Macau in 1999 (and we now know in 2021 where yiguo-liangzhi has led Hong Kong).
Economic identities
In the 1950s, Prof. Kirby recounts, the Han Chinese ROC in Taiwan instituted land reform with land to the tiller and compensation to the landlord. This succeeded in pacifying local Taiwanese. Economically, this was in stark contrast to the violent confiscation of farmland that was taking place in PRC during the Great Leap Forward. Agriculture on Taiwan thrived and helped finance Taiwanese industry, even as the Great Famine killed tens of millions in China.
Taiwan began a period of export-led growth that began with small- to medium-sized enterprises that attracted foreign investment. It was not purely capitalist, but instead an economic bureaucracy that planned, guided, protected and subsidized state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Private Taiwanese-owned businesses grew alongside these SOEs and eventually overtook them.
In 1978, Taiwan created the Industrial Technology Research Institute to help enterprises break into high-tech, encouraging educated and successful “overseas (ethnic Han) Chinese,” like Morris Chang of Texas Instruments, to return or migrate to Taiwan. Between 1952 and 1999, Taiwan’s economy grew at 9.2% per year. It became one of Asia’s four economic tigers (with Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea), even as its political position weakened to the point of exclusion from nearly all international political organizations (but not in international economic organizations like WTO and APEC).
Meanwhile, those who petitioned for free elections were intimidated and imprisoned. Letters written by university students, as recounted by Prof. Kirby’s friend from Berkeley, were opened and censored. It was not until 1987 (after the 1986 People Power Revolution of the Philippines) that pressure from a growing middle class forced the ROC and the son of Chiang Kai-shek, Pres. Jiang Jingguo, to finally end martial law.
This created a new source of tension with PRC across the Strait: the Taiwanese could now speak freely about their desire for a formally independent Taiwan. In 1996, China fired missiles over the cities of Keelung and Kaohsiung in an attempt to influence Taiwan’s elections. Taiwan’s “hedging” ally, the U.S., responded by sending two carrier battle groups (or naval fleets headed by their respective aircraft carriers), the Nimitz and the Independence, with the Nimitz traversing the length of the Strait in a tremendous projection of military power, according to Dave Pomerantz’s ChinaX Notes.
Since its foundation in 1986, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) emerged as the only viable opposition party, with a tradition of advocating for human rights and independence from mainland China. In 1997, it received more votes than the Kuomintang.
With the election of the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian to the presidency in 2000, the movement toward independence was officially encouraged. High school students were taught the separate and distinct histories of Taiwan and China. China meant only the mainland and those who struggled against Chiang Kai-shek were officially revered. In place of the One-China policy, President Chen advocated One-China, One-Taiwan.
Across the Strait, Chinese nationalism grew. Since 1950, Mao deemed Taiwan Chinese territory and PRC citizens were taught that Taiwan had always been Chinese.
Following the “return” of Hong Kong and Macao to China (though legally speaking they were ceded to PRC as a modern nation-state that’s different from Qing and previous imperial dynastic states with their shifting territorial borders, except along the mainland coast which has been fixed, according to internationally respected Sinologists and historians of ancient China including NUS Prof. Wang Gungwu and Prof. Kirby’s fellow ChinaX instructor Prof. Peter Bol), Taiwan was perceived by PRC as the one territory remaining for getting all the claimed lands of the ethnically and linguistically distinct Manchu Qing imperial family (17th to early 20th c.). In March 2005, PRC President Hu Jintao responded to Chen’s policy of independence with the Anti-Secession Law, reasserting the right to use “non-peaceful means” (read: military force) if Taiwan declared independence.
During the period of martial law (May 1949 to July 1987), the ROC forbid communication and transit with the mainland, though some trade, totaling about USD 1 billion, took place through third parties.
Once martial law was lifted, indirect links, usually via Hong Kong, led to investment and trade, which today exceeds USD 200 billion, making China the largest trade partner of Taiwan. Projects initiated by Taiwanese businesses were focused in Guangdong, Fujian, and the Yangtze River Delta, and over a million Taiwanese now live on the mainland. Over 300,000 have also intermarried.
Nonetheless, political tensions between the PRC and ROC governments could still become social tensions impacting people-to-people relationships, as shown in National Democratic Institute’s film above on Taiwanese coders and civil society’s collaborative response to PRC’s disinformation and foreign influence operations in the run up to ROC’s 2020 elections.
Unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan has its own military and remains politically independent with parties committed to resisting the mainland’s desire for annexing Taiwan. Since Taiwan’s de facto, if not de jure, independence doesn’t restrict the lucrative people-to-people commerce straddling the Strait, there’s no compelling economic reason to give up its political freedom and sovereignty.
As Pres. Kirby concludes, “Whether there is unity will be decided, not by businessmen, but by statesmen.”
And more importantly by the courageous and resilient Taiwanese people under our modern system of international law accepted by the community of nations for ensuring peace and security in the world today.
The author wrote an earlier version of this essay in response to ChinaX’s discussion question, “How would you describe Taiwan’s identity in political terms? How would you describe Taiwan’s identity in cultural terms? How in economic terms?”
