Taiwanese people

This article is about the people governed by the Republic of China. For the Chinese-language dialect known as Taiwanese, see Taiwanese (linguistics)

A girl from Taiwan

The Taiwanese people (simplified Chinese: 台湾人; traditional Chinese: 臺灣人 also 台灣人; pinyin: Táiwān rén) refers to people originating from or inhabiting Taiwan Province, Republic of China. They are all citizens of the Republic of China (ROC). In Taiwan, the inhabitants are categorized into four groups of people: the Hoklo (70%), the Hakka (15%), Mainlander (13%), and Taiwanese aborigines (2%).

The term Taiwanese people may refer to any of the following:

• A person who was born on Taiwan or Pescadores before 1949.
• A person who resides on the island of Taiwan.
• A person who identifies him/herself as a Taiwanese.
• A person who is identified by others as a Taiwanese.

Differing definitions of Taiwanese

The definition of Taiwanese is actually disputed in Taiwan due to the domination of the majority Hoklo from whom both the identity and language of Taiwan tends to be solely attributed. The Hoklo speak a variation of the Min-Nan dialect of Fujian (Hokkien) province with a heavy grammatical influence from indigenous Austronesian languages. This dialect is what has come to be known as the Taiwanese language. Another definition includes the Hakka and the highland aborigines but excludes the Mainlander group, which primarily speaks regional Chinese dialects and a form of Mandarin Chinese that was created by Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese Nationalist) scholars from a variety of northern Chinese dialects (Norman, 1988).

The concept of ethnic and national identities as defined above creates a greater conflict, as the standards used by both the ROC and the PRC are heavily influenced by nationalist discourse and may not reflect the actual complexity of the genetic and cultural histories of Taiwan's population, nor does it account for hybridity or self-identification as in the case of several plains tribes. As plains tribes continue to mobilize based on their collective identity, Taiwanese society is forced to re-think the current markers of identity and ethnicity (Hsieh, 2006).

The concept of a Taiwanese people relies on mythologized constructions of groups of humans that may or may not imagine themselves to belong to a single community. It should also be noted that identities are not fixed, but fluid and change with time and memory or in response to a changing environment rather than stemming from a primordial or authentic source (Brown,2004).

According to the theory proposed by social theorist Benedict Anderson in his highly influential work ''Imagined Communities'', the Taiwanese people are those people who imagine themselves a part of a national community that regards itself as Taiwanese. Any connection Taiwanese may have with one another is purely imaginary, based on the shared belief in a common destiny. The sense of common destiny stems from the very real parameters of daily life including: Government, Economy, Education, Popular Culture and Electronic/Print Media (Anderson, 1983).

Anderson's theory allows for the decolonization of ethnic identities and opens the identity to the real phenomenon of hybridity which occurs in any pluralistic community and has been traditionally ignored by orientalists, especially in studying China (Said, 1979; Bhabha, 1994; Harrell, 1995).

In the case of Taiwan, it is still uncertain who is identified as Taiwanese or non-Taiwanese as the definitions used by the ROC government are rooted in the "National Ethnicity/Racial" policies undertaken by Chinese Nationalists in the late 19th century to reflect a Chinese national outlook, yet had very little relation to actual claimed identities (Dikotter,1992). The fact that the people on Taiwan have intermarried for over 8,000 years, with few class-based, social, or cultural barriers further conflates the argument of a Taiwanese identity into a greater national and political discourse (Shepherd, 1993; Wachman, 1994; Brown, 2004; Teng, 2004). The idea of a common Chinese identity can also be seen as reliant on a political ideology as descendants of Han Chinese migrants on several Pacific islands have acculturated into local communities in the absence of the Overseas Chinese organizations established by the KMT in after 1949. In communities with an active, nationalized, Overseas Chinese organization, the communities have resisted assimilation (Wu, 2002). The PRC relies on a Stalinist construction for the ethnic groups in China.

The Stalinist model uses a criteria to define ethnic groups in the PRC based on a common language, common territory, common economy and common psychological make up. Under the Stalinist criteria, the PRC recognizes 56 Chinese ethnicities, with Han being the largest, making up 91% of the population, while the other 55 minzu occupy only 9% of the population (Brown, 2004; pp. 6-8). The PRC does not differentiate between regional differences in Han, thereby adopting an earlier colonial model in which the Han viewed themselves as the embodiment of Confucian society and the cultural center (Ebrey, 1996, Crossley, 1999). The PRC insists that all Han are Chinese and most Taiwanese are Han, therefore Taiwanese people are Chinese. This national narrative attempts to link the present Chinese nation state to past Han civilizations and serves as justification to linking the modern China to prior narratives of Han dominance and culture.

Due to Taiwan's unique and differing social and political experiences from China's, the Taiwanese identity does not correspond with the PRC's definition as an "minzu" or "local Han" (Brown, 2004; 8).

In contemporary Taiwan the phenomenon of mixed marriages between couples comprising different ethnic groups has grown to include people from the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia, the Philippines, Europe, the Americas and the Pacific Islands. The increasing number of marriages between natives of Taiwan and other countries creates a problem for the rigid definitions of ethnic identity used by both the ROC and the PRC when discussing Taiwan (Harrell, 1995). In one-seventh of all marriages in Taiwan today, one partner will be from another country. Many immigrants to Taiwan seek to gain official ROC citizenship and assume a Taiwanese national identity. As Taiwan's birthrate is among the lowest in the world [1], this contingent is playing an increasingly important role in changing Taiwan's demographic makeup.

Self Identification

In a 2002 poll by the Democratic Progressive Party, over 50% of the respondents considered themselves "Taiwanese" only, up from less than 20% in 1991.

In a poll released 12/14/2006 by the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), 57% of people on Taiwan consider themselves to be Taiwanese. 23% Chinese and 20% both Chinese and Taiwanese (China Post, 2006). The growing sense of a Taiwanese identity has continued to increase despite fluctuations in support for pro-independence political parties, demonstrating the Taiwanese identity is not the product of local political manipulation, but an anctual phenomenon of ethnic and sociopolitical identities (Corcuff, 2002; pp. 137-149, 207; Hsiao, 2000; pp. 157-170).

In the view of the United States government, under the Taiwan Relations Act, the only law or regulation outside of Taiwan that recognizes Taiwanese autonomy, the Taiwanese people are defined as the "people on Taiwan" simply meaning that any resident of Taiwan is Taiwanese.

Main article: Taiwan independence

History of the four ethnic groups

Main article: History of Taiwan

According to the Republic of China government, the majority of Taiwan's 23 million population consist of 98% Han Chinese with a minority Austronesian population of less than 500,000. Migration to Taiwan from southern Asia began approximately 12,000 B.C.E. but large scale migration to Taiwan did not occur until the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century as a result of political and economic chaos in China (Shepherd, 1993; Bellwood,2000; Blust 1988) . The first large scale migration occurred as a result of the Manchu invasion and conquest of China, overthrowing the Ming dynasty and establishing the Qing the Qing dynasty, which was established in 1644 and remained until 1911. In 1624, the Dutch East India Company, with on the suggestion of the Ming Court, abandoned a small fort on Peng Hu Island and established an outpost in Tainan in southern Taiwan to trade Chinese silk for Japanese silver. However, the Dutch realized Taiwan's position as a potential colony of the Orange Crown, and developed a colony in cooperation with plaines tribes to trade deer hide, venison, rice, and sugar, but the main problem was labor. The aborigines were not interested in developing the land and it would be too costly to transport settlers from Europe, so the Dutch opted to hire Han farmers from across the Taiwan Strait, luring them to Taiwan by placing advertisements along the southeastern coastal Fujianese cities with promise of free land, four years tax exemption and guarantees of payment for rice and sugar . Migration of male laborors from Fujian steadily increased into the 18th and 19th century,and due to acculturation of plains aborigines, intermarriage and assimilation, Han became the ethnic majority. The descendants of Hoklo, Hakka and plains aborigines who have lived together on Taiwan for over four hundred years and have come to be known as native Taiwanese. Thouugh, it was not until the Japanese arrival in 1895 that Taiwanese first developed a collective Taiwanese identity in contrast to the colonizing Japanese Morris, 2002. When the Chinese Civil War broke out between Kuomintang nationlists and the Chinese communists in 1945, there was another mass migration of people from China to Taiwan fleeing the communists. These migrants are known as the Mainlanders.

Aborigines

Main article: Taiwanese aborigines

Hoklo

The Hoklo communities in Taiwan originated from male laborers from Fujian (hired by the Dutch), some of whom married into Lowland Taiwanese aborigine communities. Official statistics show that aborigines make-up less than 2% of Taiwan's population, they are often referring to those citizens who the government identifies as aborigines and may not reflect actual identification or hybridity. There are fragmented populations of lowland aborigines who still acknowledge their identity and heritage throughout Taiwan. Others have assimilated to a degree where their descendants speak Taiwanese and identify with the Hoklo majority, and it is possible to find families where the older members still identify themselves as lowland aborigine, while the rest of the family may identify as Hoklo.

Hakka

The Taiwanese Hakka communities, although arriving to Taiwan from Eastern Guangdong and the mountains of Fujian, have also likely mixed through intermarriage with lowland aborigines as well. Hakka family trees are known for identifying the male ancestors by their ethnic Hakka heritage while leaving out information on the identity of the female ancestors. Also, during the process of intermarriage and assimilation, many of the lowland aborigines and their families took on the sinicized Hoklo and Hakka family names. Much of this happened in Taiwan prior to the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, so that by the time of the Japanese colonization, most of the population that the Japanese classified as "Chinese" Hoklo and "Chinese" Hakka were in truth already of mixed ancestry. Physical features of both Taiwanese aborigine and Chinese can be found amongst the Taiwanese mainstream today.It is also believed by many scholars that the Hakka of Taiwan are mainly the descendents of Hakka assimilated ethnic Shi people from the mountainous area between Fujian and Guangdong, with linguistic relations to Min nan speakers (Norman, 1988).

Mainlander

The descendants of mainlanders (sometimes called the "New Taiwanese") had originally live within the heart of large urban centers in Taiwan such as Taipei, Taichung, or Kaohsiung, due to the high numbers of government officials and civil servants who followed the KMT to Taiwan and occupied the positions of the colonial governemnt vacated by the Japanese following the allies armisitce with Japan in 1945. The followers of the KMT sojourn government on Taiwan moved into the official dormitories and residences built by the Japanese for civil servants. The ghettoization of mainlander communities exasperated the divisions imagined by non-mainlander groups and stymied cultural integration and assimilation into mainstream Taiwanese culture Gates, 1981. Under the nationalization campaigns undertaken by the KMT, the ROC government established an official "culture", which reflected the KMT government's own preference for what it considered authentic Chinese culture and excluded many of the local Taiwanese practices and local cultures, including the diverse cultures brought to Taiwan by the mainlanders from all parts of China Wachman, 1994. Unlike, the Hoklo and Hakka of Taiwan, who felt excluded by the new government, the mainlanders and their families supported the nationalists and embraced the official "culture" as their own, with "national culture" being taught in school Wilson, 1970. The mainlanders used their embrace of Nationalist culture to identify themselves as the authentic Chinese people of Taiwan. People identifying themselves as "mainlanders" can now be found in all parts of Taiwan, and through government agriculture and construction campaigns of the 1960's, "mainlander" communities or mixed marriage mommunities have been established in the high mountains and along the east coast. Taiwanese of Hakka heritage traditionally lived in communities such as Hsinchu, Chungli, Miaoli, Meinung, Pingtung, and Taitung in Taiwan. Taiwanese of Taiwanese aborigine heritage are primarily highland aborigines who live in the Central Mountain and Pacific Coastal regions of Eastern Taiwan. The Cities of Yilan, Hualien, and Taitung are known for their aboriginal communities. Taiwanese of Hoklo heritage are the most widespread of the peoples and are spread out all over Taiwan.

New Taiwanese

The term New Taiwanese was coined by former President of the Republic of China, Lee Tung Hui in 1995 to bridge the ethnic cleavage which formed following the February 28 Incident in 1947 and characterized the frigid relations between waishengren and native Taiwanese during forty years of martial law. Although the "xin Taiwan guan" (New Taiwanese Concept) or "xin Taiwan lun" (The debate on the new Taiwanese identity) was originally aimed at the successive generations of Taiwanese with mainlander ancestry, it has been further articulated by Lee and other political and social leaders to refer to any person who loves Taiwan and is commited to calling Taiwan home. Although critics have called the "New Taiwanese Concept" a political ploy to win votes from native Taiwanese who regarded the KMT as an alien regime, it has remained an important factor in the dialectic between ethnic identities in Taiwan. Despite being adopted early on by former Provincial Governor James Soong (1997) and later by Taipei mayor and KMT Chairman Ma Ying Jiu (1999), the term has since been dropped from contemporary political rhetoric (Corcuff, 2002; pp. 186-188).

Genetic studies

The Hoklo and Hakka linguistic groups, which statistically make up the majority of Taiwan's population, can trace some of their historical cultural roots Minnan- and Hakka-speaking peoples come from what is now China, predominantly the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. Much of the original migrations from China were largely male so there was considerable intermarriage with local plains aboriginal groups and in many cases the offspring of mixed unions were designated Han, following the patrilieal preference, making the genetic make up of Taiwanese people difficult to determine.. The lack of a definite genetic record of plains aborigines, or conclusive understanding of their proto-Austronesian roots, further complicates the use of genetic data (Blust,1988) A study of the 9bp depletion of Asian and Pacific Islanders demonstrates a noticable difference between Han in China and on Taiwan (Stone, 2000; pp. 351-357). A Mahalanobis' generalized distance survey of 29 male groups categorized Taiwanese as a seperate subgroup of Northern Asian different from Shanghai,Nanjing and Hangzhou, associating Taiwanese closer to groups from Hainan, Korea, Ainu and Atayal (Pietrusewsky,2000; pp. 400-409)

In addition, 14% of Taiwan's population are immigrants or descendents of immigrants who arrived near the end of the Chinese Civil War with the Kuomintang government. They are also referred to as "Mainlanders" (外省人; Waisheng ren; literally "external-province person"), and originate from all parts of China, both north and south, unlike the Hoklo and Hakka.

Dalu ren (大陸人) refers to residents of the People's Republic of China. This group excludes almost all native Taiwanese. It also excludes foreign born spouses from Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines or spouses from non-Asian countries. The people supporting the independence of Taiwan would simply call these people Chinese (中國人).

The human leukocyte antigen typing study and mitochondrion DNA analysis performed in recent years show that more than 88% of the native Taiwanese population have some degree of aboriginal origin (Sim, 2003) http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2006/11/27/2003338134. Research conducted by Li Hui of the Life Sciences Institute at Shanghai Fudan University found that men from four Taiwanese aboriginal tribes (Amei, Atayal, Bunun, Paiwan) share common parts of the same Y-chromosome (No. 9, 10, 11, 12) with the Li people of Hainan and link them to a common ancestor, the Baiyue people (百越) who lived in Hemudu in eastern Zhejiang 7,000 years ago . It is believed that a pre-Austronesian people immigrated to Taiwan some 12,000-8000 years ago and share a similiarity with those that immigrated to Hainan, though it was not until a lengthy settlement on Taiwan that the people became Proto-Austronesians and the ancestors of the current ethnic groups of Austronesian speakers on Taiwan and other Pacific islands.

Both Chinese and Taiwanese nationalists have often tried to validate their political claims based on biology and implied ancestry. Despite the advancement of genetic research and diaspora studies of human populations around the globe, there is no evidence to suggest any corrolation between genetic or biological similarities or differences, and political or national identities. Genetic studies have only concluded the greater similarity between all people.

Famous Taiwanese people

Main article: List of Taiwanese people

• Shui-Bian Chen - Current President of the Republic of China (Taiwan)
• Takeshi Kaneshiro - Half-Taiwanese actor
• Ang Lee - Academy Award-winning Hollywood director
• Cho-Liang Lin - Taiwanese violinist
• Chien-Ming Wang - Major League Baseball player, current pitcher for the New York Yankees
• Jerry Yang - Founder of Yahoo!

References

Anderson, Benedict.1983. Imagined Communities, Verso Press, NY.

Bellwood, Peter.2000.Formosan Pre-History and Austronesian Dispersal in ed. Blundell, David. Austronesian Taiwan: Linguistics, History, Ethnology and Prehistory.University of California Press, CA.

Blust, Robert.1988. Austronesian Root Theory. John Benjamin's Press, Amsterd.

Brown, Melissa J.2004. Is Taiwan Chinese:The Impact of Culture, Power and Migration of Changing Identities. University of California Press, Berkley, CA.

Bhabha, Homi K.1994.The Location of Culture.Routledge, London, UK.

Marsh, Robert.2002.National Identity and Ethnicity in Taiwan, in. ed. Stephane Corcuff,Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and A New Taiwan. M.E. Sharpe, London.

Corcuff, Stephane.2002. Taiwan's "Mainlanders", New Taiwanese?, in ed. Stephane Corcuff, Memories of the Future:National Identity Issues and A New Taiwan. M.E. Sharpe, London.

Crossley, Pamela Kyle.1999. A Translucent Mirror: History and Identity in Qing Imperial Ideology. University of California Press, CA.

Dikotter, Frank.1992.The Discourse of Race in Modern China. Stanford University Press, CA.

Ebrey, Patricia.1996. Surnames and Han Chinese Identity, in ed. Melissa J. Brown, Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan. University of California, Berkeley, CA.

Gates, Hill.1981. Ethnicity and Social Class, in eds. Ahern, Emily Martin and Gates, Hill. The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, Stanford University Press, CA.

Harrell, Stevan ed.1995.Cultural Encounters on China's Ethnic Frontiers.University of Washington Press, Seattle.

Hsiao, A-Chin.2000.Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism. Routledge Press, London.

Hsieh, Jolan.2006.Collective Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Identity Based Movement of Plains Indinenous in Taiwan. Routledge Press, New York.

Morris, Andrew.2002. Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and The Search for a New Taiwan. ed. Stephane Corcuff, M.E. Sharpe, New York.

Norman, Jerry.1988.Chinese:Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge University Press, UK.

Pietrusewsky, Michael.2000.Metric Analysis of Skeletal Remains: Methods and Applications in ed. Anne Katzenberg and Shelly Saunders, Biological Anthropology of the Human Skeleton.Wiley-Liss, Inc. New York.

Said, Edward.1979. Orientalism. Vintage Books, UK.

Sim, Kiantek.2003.Taiwan Xue Tong (Taiwan Blood Types).Qian Wei Press, Taipei.

Shepherd, John R.1993.Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier 1600-1800. Stanford University Press, Ca.

Stone, Anne C.2002. Ancient DNA from Skeletal Remains in ed. Anne Katzenberg and Shelly Saunders, Biological Anthropology of the Human Skeleton.Wiley-Liss, Inc. New York.

Teng, Emma JinHua.2004.Taiwan's Imagined Geography:Chinese Travel Writing and Pictures 1683-1895.The Harvard University Asia Center, MA.

Wachman, Alan A.1994. Taiwan: National Identity and Democratization. M.E. Sharpe, New York.

Wilson, Richard W.1970. The Political Socialization of Children in Taiwan. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, MA.

Wu, David Y.H.2002.The Construction of Chinese and Non-Chinese Identities, in eds. Susan D. Blum and Lionel M. Jenson, China Off Center: Mapping the Margins of the Middle Kingdom.University of Hawaii Press, HA.

See also

• Demographics of Taiwan
• History of Taiwan
• Republic of China
• Taiwan

External links

• The Hakka People
• Taiwanese Hakka
• Taiwan, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, U.S. Department of State