Sojourn, Nostalgia, Return, and Identity Formation of Chinese Mainlanders in Taiwan, 1940S-2000S
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THE GREAT EXODUS: SOJOURN, NOSTALGIA, RETURN, AND IDENTITY FORMATION OF CHINESE MAINLANDERS IN TAIWAN, 1940S-2000S by MENG HSUAN YANG B.A., York University, 2003 M.A., The University of British Columbia, 2005 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (History) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2012 © Meng Hsuan Yang, 2012 Abstract In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the world witnessed a massive wave of political migrants out of mainland China in the wake of the Nationalist debacle and the Chinese Communist victory. Approximately 900,000 to 1 million people followed Chiang Kai-shek’s regime across the sea to Taiwan. Most were low-ranking Nationalist soldiers and civil servants. There were also refugees from different walks of life, ordinary people drawn into the vortex of the Chinese civil war and ended up in Taiwan by sheer historical chance. The legacy of the great exodus continues to have important implications for Sino-American relations, as well as Taiwan’s deepening democracy and quest for national identity nowadays. Nonetheless, the crux of the story remains poorly understood because of the ways in which the history of the Chinese civil war and the history of post-war Taiwan are framed in the existing literature. The civil war migrants and their descendants are referred to as “mainlanders” or waishengren in Taiwan. This dissertation examines the civil war migrants (or first generation waishengren) from the moment they left mainland China to their eventual return decades later. The research focuses on the transformation of the migrants’ mentalités—from “reluctant sojourners” in the 1950s to “cultural nostalgia” from the 1960s to the 1980s, and to “narrating the exodus” from the late 1980s and the early 1990s onwards. The study demonstrates the importance of the great exodus in shaping the lives and the worldviews of waishengren and the development of state-society relations and communal relations in post-war Taiwan. It also offers ways to rethink existing frameworks in the study of Chinese migration, and contributes to the project of theorizing diaspora. More importantly, using waishengren as an example, the dissertation argues that identity formation is a convoluted historical process engendered by people moving diachronically through time and physically through geographic localities. The mainlander identity is a product of a particular historical trajectory and actual lived experiences. The articulation of these experiences was mediated by the politics of remembrance and collective memory in response to changing sociopolitical contexts and shifting power relations. ii Preface This dissertation benefits from the testimonies of 20 civil war migrants. These individuals were interviewed by the author in Taiwan from June 2008 to August 2010. The interviews were conducted in accordance with the procedure and method approved by the UBC Behavioural Research Ethnics Board (BREB) prior to the start of the research. The BREB certificate number for this study is H07-02952. The procedure and research progress were reviewed annually under the study period. An end of study report was submitted in March 2011. The audio recordings of the interviews were turned into MP3 files. They were saved in a keyword-guarded computer not connected to the Internet. In accordance with the consent form signed by both the interviewees and the author, the audio files will be stored in this way and remain confidential for at least three decades. They will be handed over to the UBC Asian Library afterwards and made open to the public. To ensure total anonymity before this, pseudonyms are used when the testimonies are cited in this dissertation. The same goes for related publications. The text of this dissertation is free of all personal information as defined in the Privacy Act of Canada. iii Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................. ii Preface .............................................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ iv List of Tables ................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures ................................................................................................................. vii Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... viii A Note on the Romanization of Chinese Words ........................................................... xi Dedication ....................................................................................................................... xii Chapter 1 Introduction.................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Prologue ................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Scholarly Engagements: Historiographies, Theories, and Waishengren Studies ... 11 1.3 Methodology and Sources ...................................................................................... 30 1.4 Chapter Outline ...................................................................................................... 34 Chapter 2 The Exodus ................................................................................................... 39 2.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 39 2.2 Methodology and Sources ...................................................................................... 43 2.3 How Many? ............................................................................................................ 50 2.4 The Great Exodus and Social Problems: Class and Gender ................................... 61 2.5 War, Exile, and an “Atomized” Community ......................................................... 79 2.6 Concluding Remarks .............................................................................................. 88 Chapter 3 Reluctant Sojourners ................................................................................... 97 3.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................ 97 3.2 Methodology and Sources .................................................................................... 102 3.3 Reluctant Sojourners ........................................................................................... 109 3.4 Prolonged Exile and the “Unholy Alliance” ........................................................ 120 3.5 Neighbours and Strangers: Waishengren and the Local Population .................... 137 3.6 Concluding Remarks ............................................................................................ 148 Chapter 4 Cultural Nostalgia ...................................................................................... 150 4.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 150 iv 4.2 Methodology and Sources .................................................................................... 155 4.3 The Historiography of Tongxianghui ................................................................... 159 4.4 Waisheng Tongxianghui in Taiwan during the 1950s .......................................... 167 4.5 Wading into Nostalgia: Waisheng Tongxianghui’s Wenxian Project .................. 180 4.6 The Consequences of Cultural Nostalgia ............................................................. 200 4.7 Concluding Remarks ............................................................................................ 205 Chapter 5 Narrating the Exodus ................................................................................ 207 5.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 207 5.2 Methodology and Sources .................................................................................... 213 5.3 Anti-Communist Literature and the Making of the Five Hundred Martyrs ......... 215 5.4 Precursors: Alien Land and Miscellanies of a Foot Soldier ................................. 232 5.5 Narrating the Exodus: The Founding Myth of Waishengren ............................... 247 5.6 Concluding Remarks ............................................................................................ 257 Chapter 6 Epilogue ...................................................................................................... 260 Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 276 v List of Tables Table 1 The Number of Mainlanders Entering Taiwan, 1945-56 (Military Personnel Excluded .......................................................................................................... 91 Table 2 The Burial of Pedestrian Patients in Taipei City, Mainlanders versus the Native Taiwanese, 1948-1965 ......................................................................................... 96 vi List of Figures Figure 1 Percentages of