RE-EXAMINING CRITICAL LINKS BETWEEN energ securit rogra TAIWAN AND SOUTHEAST ASIA: THE NEW SOUTHBOUND POLICY IN THE TSAI ERA POLITICAL AND SECURITY AFFAIRS n September 5, 2016, Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen launched BRIEFS IN THIS SERIES the New Southbound Policy to aid in promoting regional Oexchange and collaboration. The initiative Rediscovering an Old Relationship: focuses on expanding existing relationships Taiwan and Southeast Asia’s Long, Shared History By Ja Ian Chong with the ten members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, countries in South Repositioning Taiwan in Southeast Asia: Strategies to Enhance People-to-People Connectivity Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. By Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao and Alan H. Yang This briefing series explores the long-standing The Migration of Labor between Taiwan and relationships between Taiwan and Southeast Southeast Asia: Changing Policies Asia, despite the lack of formal diplomatic By Ji-Ping Lin ties, in light of the New Southbound Policy. Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy: The briefs collectively provide policymakers One-Year Economic Review By Chen-Dong Tso and Gratiana Jung and academics alike with a comprehensive assessment of how Taiwan’s relations with the Religious Ties between Taiwan and Southeast Asia By C. Julia Huang region have evolved across the spectrum—from Taiwan’s Maritime Linkages with Southeast Asia people-to-people ties and common cultural and By Ting-Hui Lin religious bonds to economic integration. The objective of the series is to contextualize critical Taiwan’s Regional Strategy in Southeast Asia: Kicking the New Southbound Policy into High Gear linkages between Taiwan and Southeast Asia By Jing Bo-jiun as the Tsai administration embarks on future phases of its New Southbound Policy. the national bureauthe national of asian bureau research of asian • energy research security | www.nbr.org program • september 2015 REDISCOVERING AN OLD RELATIONSHIP: energ securit rogra TAIWAN AND SOUTHEAST ASIA’S LONG, SHARED HISTORY POLITICAL AND SECURITY AFFAIRS By Ja Ian Chong ontemporary impressions of Taiwan’s relations with Southeast Asia tend to focus on flows of labor, capital, tourism, and marriage. Countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand carry the impression that they are the origins of cheap, sometimes easily exploitable, migrant labor for employers in Taiwan. Many people in Taiwan also see the former two countries Cas sources of brides for lower-income men.1 These same countries, along with Cambodia and, to a lesser degree, Malaysia, are locations where Taiwanese capital is invested in factories for low-cost labor, proximity to Taiwan and China, and the relative absence of political contentiousness for being Taiwanese. With the advent of cheap air travel, Taiwan and Southeast Asia also offer the middle class in these areas options for quick holiday getaways. These interactions and the condescension toward Southeast Asia that sometimes accompany them belie the rich history of interactions that Taiwan and Southeast Asia share. Taiwan’s own history is deeply intertwined and often runs in parallel with that of Southeast Asia. The island’s location off the Asian mainland and astride sea lanes between Northeast and Southeast Asia means that it has long been part of the networks of migration, commerce, cultural interaction, and conflict traversing the area. In many respects, these types of sub-state, social exchanges continue to characterize linkages between Southeast Asia and Taiwan today. Scratch the surface, and these connections are evident in business, popular culture, religious practices, family ties, and even the languages spoken in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Outreach efforts between Taiwan and Southeast Asia, such as Taipei’s New Southbound Policy, are natural extensions of these long-standing relationships and can serve to further consolidate existing societal and other bonds that reach across the South 1 Isabelle Cheng, “Making Foreign Women the Mother of Our Nation: The Exclusion and Assimilation of Immigrant Women in Taiwan,” Asian Ethnicity 14, no. 2 (2013): 157–79. the national bureauthe national of asian bureau research of asian • energy research security | www.nbr.org program • september 2015 China Sea. Even if official ties are subject to the usual originally home to emigrants from Luzon, Penang, political constraints, due to either direct pressure Malacca, Batavia, and Singapore.3 Such migration from Beijing or preemptive efforts to avoid provoking patterns meant that family networks spread across China, substantive possibilities for fostering Taiwan’s these areas. The movement of people brought with relations with Southeast Asia remain. it shared linguistic, religious, and cultural practices, with temple networks linking Taiwan, various parts COMMON PASTS of Southeast Asia, and Fujian that are still active today. Minnan—which is the immediate linguistic Southeast Asia–Taiwan ties predate the now family to which Taiwanese belongs—remains a main familiar notion of sovereign nation states and their lingua franca for ethnic Chinese settler communities territorial boundaries, going back to the history in Southeast Asia.4 Given the long history of of Taiwan’s aboriginal peoples. The Formosan contact with the Malay world, Minnan, including languages that Taiwan’s aborigines speak are part Taiwanese, contains many Malay loanwords while of the Austronesian language family, which also Malay and Indonesian similarly borrow vocabulary includes languages spoken from the modern-day from Minnan.5 Philippines through Malaysia and Indonesia, such as Tagalog and Malay.2 Linguistic historians and COMMERCE AND CONQUEST historians generally attribute this spread of languages and cultures to migration across maritime Southeast Straddling communication links between Asia, parts of coastal mainland Southeast Asia, and Southeast and Northeast Asia enabled Taiwan Taiwan. This movement of peoples was possible to become a fulcrum of maritime might in the through the maritime routes linking Taiwan to seventeenth century. Using Taiwan and the various parts of Southeast Asia, starting with Luzon Pescadores (Penghu) as bases, privateer-pirates like in the contemporary Philippines, just across the Iquan (Zheng Zhilong) and his son Koxinga (Zheng Bashi Channel from southern Taiwan. Such networks Chenggong) became highly influential in seaborne of exchange manifest themselves in different forms trade from Sumatra and Java through Luzon, Macau, historically, but nonetheless embed Taiwan in a network of interactions with Southeast Asia that 3 casual observers overlook. Stainton, “The Politics of Taiwan Aboriginal Origins.” 4 Minnan, or Southern Min, is a Sinitic language spoken in Taiwan, parts Migrations to Taiwan from Fujian and Guangdong of Fujian, Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Hainan in China. It is commonly spoken in ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, such as in extended the island’s ties not just across the Taiwan the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. Linguists find little mutual intelligibility between Southern Min and other major Strait but to Southeast Asia as well. Many settlers on Sinitic language families, such as Mandarin, Cantonese (Yue), and Wu. See Victor H. Mair, “The Classification of Sinitic Languages: What Is Taiwan from the seventeenth century on came from ‘Chinese?’” in Breaking Down the Barriers: Interdisciplinary Studies in Chinese Linguistics and Beyond, vol. 2, ed. Guangshun Cao, Hilary Minnan-speaking areas like Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Chappell, Redouane Diamouri, and Thekla Wiebush (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 2013), 735–54. Amoy, and Quemoy, just as these regions were 5 Victor Mair, “Malaysian Multilingualism,” Language Log, September 11, 2009, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1734; and Henning Klöter, “Writing Taiwanese: The People Behind the Scripts,” in Transformation! Innovation? Perspectives on Taiwan Culture, 2 Michael Stainton, “The Politics of Taiwan Aboriginal Origins,” in Taiwan: ed. Christina Neder and Ines Susanne Schilling (Wiesbaden: Otto A New History, ed. Murray A. Rubinstein (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), Harrasowitz KG, 2003), 45–64. 27–44. 3 brief • the national bureau of asian research • january 2018 Fujian, Guangdong, and Kyushu.6 Wealth that COLONIALISM AND CONFLICT accrued from such activities allowed the Zhengs to Taiwan and Southeast Asia too are bound by the build a navy and encourage immigration to Taiwan webs of conflict and conquest that characterized from Fujian and Guangdong, steps that established much of the twentieth century in Asia. Japan, of the foundations for their political authority on course, colonized Taiwan between 1895 and 1945, and the island and its surrounding areas. Iquan first brought most of Southeast Asia into its Greater East challenged Ming authority along the Fujian and Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as it invaded the region in Guangdong coasts in the early seventeenth century, 1942. Some argue that Taiwan’s colonization persisted while Koxinga expelled Dutch and Spanish garrisons as the Kuomintang (KMT) took control of the island from Taiwan by the mid-seventeenth century and from Japan under the terms of the Cairo Declaration later took on the mantle of resistance to the invading as the then Chinese government and continued at Manchu Qing empire. The regime that Koxinga least until the political liberalization of the 1980s. established on Taiwan held out against vastly superior In this respect, Taiwan and its population share the Qing forces until