ETA Episode 34 Transcript
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Ear to Asia podcast Title: Grappling with identity in Taiwan Description: How do the people of Taiwan identify themselves and their society? Most have ancestry that can be traced to the Chinese mainland and now speak Mandarin, but does a uniquely layered history set them apart? Asia-Pacific historian Dr Lewis Mayo and political scientist Dr Sow Keat Tok, both of Asia Institute, examine the notions of ethnic and national identity on the island and discuss the implications for relations with mainland China Listen: https://player.whooshkaa.com/episode/?id=296983 Peter Clarke: Hello. I'm Peter Clarke. This is "Ear to Asia." Lewis Mayo: Taiwan (台湾) is like other societies which are now economically dependent on the Chinese mainland, coping with the fact that China is so economically powerful. And you have many of the sort of anxieties about what do we do about the fact that we used to be on top and now these people that we used to be ahead of are, sort of, ahead of us. Sow Keat Tok: What I observed is that, increasingly, younger Taiwanese people, they have grown up to be a lot more comfortable with their identity as Taiwanese, and yet accepting the fact that they are not a separate state themselves, and living with the fact that there is this big China out there; that's where the opportunities are. Peter Clarke: In this episode, "Evolving Political Identity in Taiwan." Ear to Asia is the podcast from Asia Institute, the Asia Research Specialists at the University of Melbourne. In Ear to Asia, we talk with Asia researchers about the issues behind the news headlines in a region that's rapidly changing the world. Taiwan is a small mostly-mountainous island, under 200 kilometers from the eastern coast of mainland China, now home to 24 million people. China has always maintained that Taiwan is, and will remain forever, an inalienable part of China and that political unification with the mainland is a foregone conclusion. In Taiwan, itself, questions about whether it is, or should be, part of a single China remain, to say the least, politically controversial. But while the great majority of people in Taiwan today have ancestry that can be traced to the Chinese mainland, and speak one or more of its languages, how do they actually identify themselves in their society? To what extent do they actually feel Chinese? In the multi-layered history hand social makeup of Taiwan, have they, in fact, forged a uniquely Taiwanese identity as Singaporeans of Chinese descent have forged a uniquely Singaporean identity? To examine notions of both national and ethnic identity on the island, and what they imply for relations with mainland China, with us on the Ear to Asia this time, Asia Pacific Historian, Dr. Lewis Mayo, and Political Scientist, Dr. Sow Keat Tok, both of Asia Institute. Peter Clarke: Lewis, Sow Keat, welcome. Lewis Mayo: Hello, Peter. Page 1 of 15 Sow Keat Tok: Hi, Peter. Peter Clarke: Now, it's obvious, Lewis, that we're going to be drilling down at this idea of identity, but it's pretty hard to talk about identity today without going back a fair bit, I think. So can we go back, perhaps, to the time before any colonizers even arrived on the island of Taiwan? There was an indigenous population. Lewis Mayo: Indigenous people of Taiwan are speakers of Austronesian languages. Those languages actually originate from Taiwan, and the Austronesian family is a very widely-spread family. It includes Maori, Indonesian, Hawaiian, the Malagasy language of Madagascar, and that population was ... as far as we can tell, the almost exclusive possessors of the island of Taiwan prior to the 17th century. Even though Taiwan is very close to mainland China, evidence of any kind of permanent settlement from China prior to the 1600s is quite limited. In the 1620s, the Dutch, who were trying to trade with the then Ming Dynasty government in China, established an outpost there. That precipitated, along with some Spanish colonization in the north of Taiwan the transformation of that Austronesian indigenous space into, basically, a Chinese settler environment with the majority of the settlers, between the 17th and the 19th centuries, coming from Fujian province, the province where Sow Keat's ancestors come from, and many Southeast- Sow Keat Tok: Yes, I do. Lewis Mayo: ... Asians do, with the majority dialect groups being the language that, in English, we refer to as Hokkien ... That's what it's called in Singapore ... with a significant minority currently around 10% of the Taiwan population speaking Hakka, which is a Chinese language that can't be understood by speakers of Hokkien unless they have some proper training. Sow Keat Tok: Nor Mandarin. Lewis Mayo: Nor Mandarin. Yeah. Peter Clarke: They're quite a close-knit group, aren't they? The Hakka- Lewis Mayo: Yes, indeed, indeed. And the settlement process was an interesting one in that, between the Dutch, who were expelled by forces linked to the declining Ming Dynasty in the middle of the 17th century, and that regime, which is an important one for the ideas associated with unification in the Taiwan straits, because it's seen as emblemizing a kind of Chinese patriotism, and that the long-term destiny of Taiwan is to join with the Mainland. That regime was defeated and replaced by the government of the Qing Dynasty in the 1680s. Then, a complex process of colonization occurred, often without actual government support. Different groups of migrants from different parts of Fujian and Guangdong provinces, Hakka and Hokkien, settled in different areas. Page 2 of 15 Peter Clarke: And did they just drift across to the island drawn by opportunity? Was that the main reason? Lewis Mayo: Well, I would argue that a lot of it was a combination of entrepreneurial ambition and desperation. We're looking at a stage in which the Chinese economy was expanding in the 18th century, in particular. And the nature of rice was in the market, particularly in Fuji, and was very significant. People ambitious for the expansion of their commercial interests were important colonizers. That said, there were also a lot of people who were essentially poor and desperate who went. So it's a complex analog to other settlement processes that you can see in New Zealand or in the United States or Canada, in terms of being commercially-driven and also promoted by people who did not necessarily want to leave their homeland, but on the other hand, were also interested in opportunity ... So very similar to the processes that unfolded with Chinese communities in Southeast Asia in the same period. Peter Clarke: Just briefly, Lewis, a snapshot of it geographically ... the topography of this island ... so many of these islands, it has a spine of mountains and a fairly flat western plain. Isn't it? Lewis Mayo: Yes. Yes. Well, as a New Zealander, I feel a lot of home in Taiwan because it's mountainous and shaky. The eastern part of the island, where the indigenous people are now concentrated, is extremely mountainous and inaccessible and was not really opened to external settlements until the late 19th or, even, 20th centuries. Lewis Mayo: But on the western side, you have extremely fertile plains. Taiwan is blessed in terms of its environmental circumstances and people live well there in terms of what they can eat, and that's a result of transformation of the environment by the settlement process. Peter Clarke: So, Taiwan has a clear, indigenous population with an important linguistic aspect to that as well. We have the colonizers, the Dutch, Spanish. Bring us up to date, then, well the Japanese, of course. Lewis Mayo: Okay. So, in terms of Taiwan's place in the modern history of Chinese nationalism, a critical event is the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and 1895, which was seen by Chinese patriots as a sign that the Qing Dynasty could no longer be trusted with the mission of defending China's culture from external aggression. The success of Japan, there, caused a great crisis of self-esteem amongst people who had been previously, relatively loyal to the Qing Dynasty. And it's to be remembered that the Qing Dynasty was, of course, ruled by a minority group of non-Han people, but majority population were people that were classified as Hong Chinese and that the defeat of the Qing Dynasty by Japan led to Taiwan being ceded to the Japanese. Lewis Mayo: The experience from 1895 to 1945, under Japanese rule, is something that is quite distinctive and quite intriguing from an external point of view, in that, of course, Japan was the first industrial colonial power not to have a Page 3 of 15 European or Euro-American background. And Taiwan was their laboratory, if you like, and they experimented with many different strategies for how they were going to treat this population. Most significantly, this colonization isolated Taiwan from the revolutionary process in China that happened in 1911 which led to the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty, the establishment of the two rival parties that were competing for power – the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Chinese Communist Party. As events unfolded when, in a sense, Taiwan was a modernizing colony living under a Japanese police state. Lewis Mayo: Significantly, when Japan attacked China in 1937, Japanese policy changed towards a radical encouragement of the Taiwan population to become more Japanese. So between 1937 and 1945, intense Japanification of the Taiwan population occurred. This created a very different kind of population temperament, if you like.