June Yip is an independent scholar living in Los Angeles. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an M.A. in Cinema Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she has taught Chinese film.

Envisioning Taiwan

Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural ImaginaryBy June Chun Yip

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2004 June Chun Yip
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822333579

Chapter One

Confronting the Other, Defining a Self: Hsiang-t’u Literature and the Emergence of a Taiwanese Nationalism

Encountering the Other: Taiwan’s Colonial History

Since the concept of nation is intimately tied to the processes of imperialism and colonialism, it is important to begin with an understanding of Taiwan’s uniquely complex colonial experience, a history whose structural legacies and psychic effects are integral factors in the evolution of the island’s self-image. While Taiwan has not generally been discussed in terms of colonialism, its history in fact presents a fascinating example of the forms of structural domination that characterize the colonial relationship. Despite the “one China” rhetoric subscribed to by the governments of both the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, the island has not always been considered part of China and has often been governed by non-Chinese. Indeed, with its long history of being ruled by “outsiders”-the Dutch (1624-62); a warlord of mixed ancestry (1662-83); the Manchu dynasty (1683-1850); the Japanese (1895-1947); and, since the Communist victory on the mainland in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek’s exiled Kuomintang regime-the small island one hundred miles off the southeastern coast of China has suffered centuries of marginalization and subjugation by a succession of foreign rulers. Those who hold that Taiwan’s 1945 return to Chinese rule under the KMT marked the end of its colonial experience ignore not only the historical marginalization of Taiwan by China but also the complexities and peculiarities of its historical development in the more than five decades since the end of World War II. While the vast majority of the island’s residents today acknowledge their primarily Chinese heritage, certain linguistic, cultural, and experiential differences between the Taiwanese and the mainland Chinese have led many Taiwanese to think of their island as a unique entity that is in many ways distinct from the mainland. Mainland China and Taiwan may share a common linguistic and cultural heritage, but, like the two halves of the formerly divided Germany, their modern identities have been shaped by very different historical experiences. Although it might be problematic to call Taiwan a modern nation-state in the legal-political sense of the term, one can certainly speak of a Taiwanese nation in the sense proposed by Anderson and others-a sense of collective identity, of belonging to some sort of “imagined community.” Over the years, many Taiwanese have sought to differentiate themselves and their island from the constructions of political authority imposed by a Chinese government that has sought to subsume regional differences under a unified national “Chinese” culture.

Indeed, Taiwan has a historical separatist tradition that dates back hundreds of years. Its earliest inhabitants were not Chinese at all but of Malayo-Polynesian origin. Beginning in the centuries before Christ, these peoples-now referred to as the island’s aborigines-drifted north from the South Seas through Southeast Asia to the island that Portuguese merchants, arriving in the sixteenth century, dubbed Ilha Formosa, the Beautiful Isle. Although Chinese governments had known of the island’s existence centuries before the arrival of European explorers, they made no attempt to chart its coasts, establish trade with its inhabitants, or do anything to make it part of China. It was the Dutch who opened the island to settlement, instituting basic government, establishing schools, introducing new forms of agriculture, recruiting Chinese laborers from the coastal villages in Fukien Province across the strait, and building maritime trade with Japan and Europe. It was also during the period of Dutch control that the island came to be known by its current name, T’ai-wan. The Dutch were forced to abandon their flourishing island colony in 1662 when a Japanese-born sea baron of mixed ancestry, Cheng Ch’eng-kung ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]; better known as Koxinga the Pirate), invaded Taiwan, which he ruled as an independent principality until 1683, when his annoying buccaneering raids on the Fukien coast finally prompted Peking to assert some control over the island. Even then, the island was simply declared a dependency of Fukien Province. The first significant wave of Chinese immigrants did not arrive until the late seventeenth century, and these were mostly bandits, pirates, itinerant seamen, and others fleeing discrimination and persecution on the mainland. At that time, crossing the strait to Taiwan was in clear defiance of Peking’s ban on cross-channel migration. 8 These people had no aspirations to ever return to the continent, and they distrusted mainlanders and disdained mainland rule. Between 1714 and 1833, the island’s people launched three “great rebellions” and innumerable smaller revolts against the Ch’ing ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) imperial government, all of which were brutally crushed-further reinforcing the islanders’ resentment and disrespect for continental authority. The central Chinese government, for its part, showed little interest in Taiwan or its inhabitants, dismissing the island as a hopelessly remote and uncivilized outpost, a barbaric land of criminals, pirates, and savages who could not be considered true Chinese. China’s noncommittal attitude toward Taiwan was evidenced by its refusal, until 1875, to take any official responsibility for the island and its inhabitants. Even then, the Ch’ing government was merely bowing reluctantly to international pressure: in 1871, Japan complained to Peking about the murder of Japanese sailors by Formosans, and China responded by claiming that its sovereignty over Taiwan extended only to the “civilized” western lowlands-in effect denying responsibility for over two-thirds of the island. When China finally declared Taiwan a full-fledged province in 1887, it was only because Japanese, English, and French forces were threatening to occupy the island. Since the Ch’ing government clearly viewed Taiwan and its inhabitants as more of a troublesome liability than an asset, it is not surprising that, in accepting the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, it quite willingly ceded Taiwan to Japan in exchange for Japanese withdrawal from Manchuria. Many of the island’s inhabitants felt deeply betrayed by China’s decision and considered any remaining obligations of loyalty to China to be dissolved. In the early part of the twentieth century, Chinese authorities on the mainland also had little interest in reclaiming the island for China. Mao Zedong, in a lengthy interview about China’s war with Japan, even expressed his support for an independent Taiwanese nation: “It is the immediate task of China to regain all our lost territories…. We do not, however, include Korea, formerly a Chinese colony, but when we have reestablished the independence of the lost territories of China, if the Koreans want to break away from the chains of Japanese imperialism, we will extend them our enthusiastic help in their struggle for independence. The same thing applies for Formosa.”

When the victorious Allies decreed in 1945 that Taiwan be taken from the defeated Japanese and “restored” to Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China, they failed to take into account this unhappy historical relationship between the Taiwanese and the continental Chinese. Moreover, to think of the Kuomintang’s assumption of power over Taiwan in 1945 as a simple reunion of one people elides the dynamics of the colonizer/colonized relationship that characterized the historical interaction between the Nationalist Chinese government and the Taiwanese people. It is true that during the Japanese Occupation, when the Taiwanese were forced to use the Japanese language and were discriminated against based on their identity as “Chinese,” resentment of the Japanese colonizers led some among the indigenous population to identify with the Chinese homeland. Intellectuals and leaders of resistance groups, in particular, looked to the anti-imperialist arguments of the May Fourth Movement for inspiration, and many of the songs and poems composed during this period expressed a wistful longing for China. When the Occupation ended in 1945, therefore, the Taiwanese populace initially welcomed the KMT government and celebrated the island’s return to the motherland. However, as the disorderly Nationalist soldiers arrived and KMT advance men began preparations for governing the island, the Taiwanese people’s hopes for the restoration of peace and self-determination faded within weeks. Chiang Kai-shek’s government had long had a reputation for brutality, greed, and corruption, and the man appointed to be the new administrator general of Taiwan-an old Chiang crony named Ch’en Yi ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])-epitomized the KMT’s worst faults. As governor of Fukien Province during the 1930s, Ch’en had been notorious for his harsh treatment of locals and for the tight economic grip he held through a system of monopolies. People in Taiwan were also well aware of his history of brutality and quiet collaboration with the Japanese. Hence, even before the arrival of Chiang’s government the Taiwanese viewed the KMT with suspicion and distrust.

Despite the fact that they were a tiny minority (between 10 percent and 15 percent of the island’s population), the KMT quickly established an iron- fisted authority over the indigenous people. Just as the Japanese occupiers had discriminated against the Taiwanese and excluded native islanders from high-ranking jobs in the government, military, state-run industries, and schools, the Nationalist Chinese immediately seized monopolistic control of the island’s natural and agricultural resources, its transportation and shipping networks, the banks, the courts, the schools, the media, and other institutional structures abandoned by the Japanese colonial government. Thousands upon thousands of native Taiwanese were forced out of their jobs to make way for the incoming continental Chinese. The island’s war-damaged economic infrastructure was dealt a crippling blow as rapacious and unscrupulous carpetbaggers streamed in from the mainland to loot the island-even dismantling entire factories and shipping them to China. In short, rather than welcoming its Taiwanese brethren back into the “warm embrace of the Chinese motherland” the Nationalist regime treated the island as vanquished territory and offered its people little respect. Many Taiwanese understandably ceased to view the Chinese mainlanders as brothers and began to resent their presence as imperialist invaders. A failed rebellion on February 28, 1947, resulted in a retaliatory massacre by the KMT that left some ten thousand Taiwanese dead-including an entire generation of the island’s social and intellectual elite, whom the regime viewed as potential leaders of Taiwanese nationalism. In the aftermath of the failed revolt and slaughter, martial law was declared and one-party rule quickly established-a KMT dictatorship that stripped the Taiwanese of sociopolitical power for nearly five decades. The February 28, 1947 incident was a critical turning point in Taiwanese history, a bloody beginning to KMT rule that split its residents into hostile camps and poisoned islander-mainlander relationships for generations. An indigenous Taiwanese consciousness received a giant boost from the incident, however, resulting in the birth of a separate sense of national identity, which, until the reforms that followed the end of martial law continued to be fed by the KMT discriminatory political and cultural practices.

Political nationalism, as Benedict Anderson has noted, relies on the imagination to create a nation, and spreads its vision to the populace by means of intense socialization. Upon assuming control of Taiwan from the Japanese, the KMT regime immediately launched policies aimed at “resinicizing” the Taiwanese. One of the first steps it took was to articulate a common goal, a “sacred mission”: the defeat of communism and “the recovery of the mainland” ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])-“the consensus of aspiration burning in the hearts of 600 million compatriots.” Since the “myth of nation” is constructed through a sense of continuity with an “immemorial past,” Chiang Kai-shek insisted that “the promotion of civic education must pay special attention to the teaching of ‘Chinese History’ and ‘Chinese Geography.'” Through what Anderson has called the “political museumization” of the mainland Chinese heritage, the Nationalist government attempted to construct spatial and temporal continuity between the island and the continent, consecrating Taiwan as the rightful heir to China’s imperial tradition-a “national culture” based on Confucian teachings that emphasized knowledge of China’s geography, and monuments, historical heroes, and achievements and valued the literature and arts of the educated elite. While seeking to establish unbroken continuity with “five thousand years of Chinese history ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]),” the KMT conveniently omitted the “interruptions” of the civil war with the Communists, the retreat of the KMT to Taiwan, and its violent imposition of control on the island. Hence, the institutionalized remembrance and careful preservation of a “Chinese” tradition by the Nationalist Chinese government was coupled with “organized forgetting,” which included the systematic suppression of not only the violent conflicts between the KMT and the island’s natives but also of Taiwan’s aboriginal past and its development under the Dutch and Japanese-that is, any historical experience that would mark the island’s difference from China. While these sorts of efforts to strengthen a Chinese identity and assimilate the Taiwanese may have been effective at some level, they also created deep resentments, which ironically contributed to the growth of an indigenous consciousness.

Chiang’s government also proved to be skillful at manipulating such icons of nationhood as the national flag (brought over from the mainland and displayed ubiquitously), the national anthem (sung at schools and at the start of all cultural events), and the personification of the nation in the figure of Chiang Kai-shek. The KMT’s efforts to integrate the Taiwanese into the Chinese fold also included a strict language policy. Like the Japanese before them, the Nationalists instituted their own official language, Mandarin Chinese (kuo-yu [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]], literally “national language”), as the official medium of government, business, education, literature, and all public discourse. The frustration that the Taiwanese felt at having to learn yet another foreign tongue was further compounded by the government’s active discouragement of the use of Taiwanese, the island’s indigenous dialect. Not only were laws passed to restrict the use of Taiwanese to the home and the marketplace and children punished for speaking even a word of Taiwanese in school, but government campaigns often lauded the mellifluous grace of Mandarin while dismissing Taiwanese as vulgar and impure. As the government sought to consolidate its authority, the native language as well as indigenous literature, arts, and music were devalued as inferior to the cultural products of the mainland.

In short, from the first days of its arrival on the island in 1945, the Nationalist dictatorship on Taiwan behaved like a colonizer, dominating all political, educational, and cultural institutions on the island and rendering the local population politically impotent while burdening them with a sense of sociocultural inferiority. The emergence of a Taiwanese identity distinct and separate from China is inextricably tied to this history of discrimination, persecution, and repression. While it certainly can be argued that Taiwanese culture and society are simply regional variants of Chinese culture rather than separate national traditions, it is also impossible to ignore the legacy of victimization, frustration, and resentment that has allowed provincial distinctions and historical divergences to become potent symbols of difference around which a Taiwanese consciousness has been built. Over the course of its fifty-year rule on Taiwan, the KMT’s brutalities and militaristic repression, its political and social discrimination, as well as its policies of forced assimilation and cultural condescension, all contributed to the sense of us versus them that pervaded Taiwanese society for decades, dividing the island’s inhabitants into mainlanders and Taiwanese, and cementing deeply ingrained prejudices and animosity between them. While not everyone on the island fits into these two neat groups and their relevance has diminished in the wake of liberalization, for many years political debate and ideological struggle in Taiwan were framed in terms of these categories. It is a binary pairing that has exerted enormous influence on the Taiwanese cultural imagination and hence represents a crucial tool for any analysis of the island’s sense of self.

Continues…
Excerpted from Envisioning Taiwanby June Chun Yip Copyright © 2004 by June Chun Yip. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.