Who are the Taiwanese? This question lies at the heart of recent shifts in the study of Taiwanese identity, which is here defined as a collective sense of self specific to the island of Taiwan that transcends other group identities – such as native place, tribal or professional – adopted by the island's residents. Over the last decade, scholars around the world have dramatically transformed the field of Taiwan studies. They have both internationalized the field and placed the historical experiences of Taiwan and its residents at the centre, rather than simply using them as a medium for examining aspects of Chinese or Japanese history. Scholars studying Taiwan's history have also incorporated literary, anthropological, sociological and other theoretical approaches into their work. In so doing, they have either directly or indirectly addressed the problems of Taiwanese identity: what is it, where did it come from and how has it operated? Through an examination of emblematic works written in both English and Chinese published since 2000,Footnote ¹ I will explore the strengths and limitations of recent arguments about the origins and nature of Taiwanese identity and offer a few suggestions about lines of inquiry that could productively shape the future of the field.

The selection of 2000 as a starting point is not entirely arbitrary because it reflects the rough beginning of a second wave of studies of Taiwanese identity that followed and built upon the first wave of the 1990s. The delineation of two waves does not represent a generational shift, since some scholars were active in both, but rather changes in perspective, available sources and prevailing political climates. The first wave began when scholars such as Wang Fu-ch'ang, Zhang Maogui and Wu Naide took advantage of the end of martial law to examine the political and social movements since the late 1970s for evidence of a distinctively Taiwanese identity.Footnote ² Wang stressed that political suppression by the Nationalist government had pushed the growth of Taiwanese nationalism and the drive for independence.Footnote ³ Zhang and Wu explored the relationship between political suppression, ethnic consciousness and national identity after 1945 and especially during the 1980s.Footnote ⁴ Scholars of the second wave remained engaged with existing political debates, but they built upon and departed from the first wave in two main ways. First, authors adopted a longer historical perspective as they addressed the island's pre-1945 history and derived more varied and nuanced pictures of Taiwanese identity. Second, they drew upon a rich collection of newly available sources that enabled deeper inquiries into the influence of both Japanese and Nationalist rule.

The works surveyed here present a range of interpretations and cover the years beginning with the first establishment of an outpost of empire on the island in 1624. I divide this time into two main eras: the imperial period (1624–1945),Footnote ⁵ with a sub-category for the crucial decades of Japanese rule (1895–1945), and the Nationalist period (1945–90s). This division reflects the dominance of Sino-centric narratives of Taiwan's history, but it remains valid because migrants from the Chinese Mainland were the first to develop an island-wide consciousness that transcended and incorporated local identities. Their settlement during the years of Dutch rule (1624–62) set in motion the long historical process that ultimately created several distinctive Taiwanese identities. Taiwan's aborigines played key roles in the construction of a multi-ethnic Taiwanese consciousness and I have included several works that address their historic contribution.

The answers to the question asked at the outset – who are the Taiwanese – are dependent upon a number of factors, including when it is asked, the point in time about which it is being asked, who is doing the questioning, and who or what is providing the answer. The meaning of “Taiwanese” is very different for 1700 from its meaning for 2000 and it carries different connotations for residents of Mainland China, Taiwan and Japan. The following discussion explores current understandings of the formation and meanings of Taiwanese identity, and will suggest alternative methods of exploring these issues.

The Imperial Period, Part 1: 1624–1895

For almost 300 years prior to the establishment of Japanese rule, three different empires colonized Taiwan: the Dutch, Spanish and Qing. The fact of Dutch and Spanish colonization, although limited in space and time, has never been in doubt, but it is only in recent scholarship that Qing rule and Han settlement of Taiwan has been placed within the broader framework of global imperial history. From the establishment of the European colonial outposts through the brief regime of Zheng Chenggong and his descendents to the rule of Taiwan by a Mainland-based regime, conditions developed that would ultimately provide the basis for Taiwanese identity formation.

The most important factor was the process by which Taiwan entered the Chinese cultural and political spheres. Tonio Andrade shows that Dutch policies encouraged Han Chinese to cross over from the Mainland to produce the commodities the Dutch needed to make their colony profitable, thus creating a hybrid Sino-European colony similar to those in South-East Asia. The Chinese population expanded during the two decades of Zheng rule, slowly making Chinese culture predominant in parts of the island.Footnote ⁶ While Andrade argues that the pre-Qing years were the most important phase of sinification, Emma Teng places more emphasis on developments after the Qing defeated the Zhengs and established rule over Taiwan.Footnote ⁷ Teng's interpretation seems to be the correct one because it was during Qing rule that the Chinese influence became firmly inscribed upon the island.

For Teng, sinification went hand-in-hand with Han settlement across the island. She finds many similarities between Qing policies and evolving Chinese views of the island and the processes of European and Japanese imperial expansion. Common to all of these cases were mapping and discursive practices that made the unknown known, and a civilizing ethos whereby local populations were transformed from savages into civilized, or at least civilizable, subjects. Between 1684 and 1895, the Qing dynasty gradually asserted its sovereignty over the entire island while literati and settlers domesticated the terrain and attempted to turn the aborigines into Chinese. It was only very late in the period of Qing rule that Chinese identity, divided though it was by sub-ethnic ties to separate native places and clans, encompassed the entire island.

A distinctive Taiwanese identity simply did not exist before 1895. Andrade, Teng and Melissa Brown all emphasize the Chinese identity of settlers and the process of becoming Chinese among some aborigines, a shift that would have important results. Brown in particular stresses that some aborigines were able to take the long route to Han identity during the 17th century by claiming Han status in order to take advantage of new tax codes.Footnote ⁸ It is questionable whether or not this was genuine identity transformation or simply adopting membership in a state-defined category, but nevertheless Brown agrees that there was no Taiwanese identity. The strongest argument in favour of a sense of Taiwaneseness in the identities of Han settlers comes from a book by Hsueh Hua-yuan, Tai Pao-tsun and Chow Mei-li that surveys much of the scholarship published in Taiwan.Footnote ⁹ They cite the transfer of ancestral remains from the Mainland to Taiwan and the formation of clans based solely on surname rather than bloodline to argue that settlers developed a local identity that distinguished them from other Han Chinese. However, even they agree that there was no sense of a broad, island-wide Taiwanese identity prior to 1895.

The Imperial Period, Part 2: 1895–1945

There is a similar concordance over the view that fundamental shifts in the identities of Taiwan's residents occurred during the 50 years of Japanese rule. The sinification of the first phase became the foundation for fundamental changes thereafter. However, scholars disagree over how to characterize the new Taiwanese identity that emerged in this period. Some argue for nationalism or nascent nationalism, others for ethnic formation, and still others for cosmopolitanism or modernism. While it is certain that a multiplicity of identities took shape, recent scholarship has stressed the emergence of Taiwanese nationalism, or at least its roots, during the 1920s and 1930s.

The search for the origins of Taiwanese nationalism is apparent in two of the most influential English-language books on Taiwanese identity, those by A-Chin Hsiau and Leo Ching. Hsiau concentrates on the 1980s, but he also examines literature written by the descendents of Han settlers during the 1920s and 1930s and finds that these authors established a sense of local identity that stressed their cultural uniqueness but fell short of full-scale nationalism.Footnote ¹⁰ Ching's argument, also based primarily on literary sources, stresses the “contradictory irreducible triple consciousness” of Taiwanese identity, with residents caught between Chinese culturalism, Japanese colonialism and an emancipatory Taiwanese ethno-nationalism.Footnote ¹¹ His examination of a multiplicity of factors marked an advance in the field, and he is correct to locate Taiwanese nationalism, rather than just its roots, in the Japanese period. Nevertheless, his conflation of ethnicity and nationalism erases a historically significant distinction, and his reliance on the experience of aborigines to explore the influence of Japanese colonialism on Taiwanese identity formation is somewhat puzzling because the group that defined itself as Taiwanese during this era intentionally excluded aborigines.Footnote ¹²

Fong Shiaw-chien's study of narrative identities also shaped the second wave of Taiwanese identity scholarship.Footnote ¹³ Fong, drawing upon Benedict Anderson's work on nationalism and the idea of colonial modernity advanced by Michael Robinson and Gi-wook Shin, finds a gradual transition in the identity of Han in Taiwan. In 1895 they saw themselves as overseas Chinese (Tangshanren 唐山人), but they gradually developed a sense of themselves as separate from this larger diaspora. However, this distinctiveness contained considerable variation: a cultural identity based upon religious cults, a native place identity tied to ancestral homelands, a national identity as “Chinese who became Taiwanese citizens of Japan,”Footnote ¹⁴ and a Japanese identity when they internalized Japanese nationalism. The “weak hegemony” of Japanese identity was a crucial occurrence during the years of Japanese rule, but the birth of Taiwanese nationalism was the most historically significant development.

Subsequent authors have remained within the lines of interpretation laid out by Hsiau, Ching and Fong. Japanese scholar Fujii Shōzō shares Hsiau's view that it is possible to locate only the roots of Taiwanese nationalism in this period. Fujii looks at changes in the education system and the spread of literary journals and societies and finds that, under pressure from strong Japanization policies starting in the late 1930s, Taiwanese were on the verge of creating nationalism by the end of the war.Footnote ¹⁵ In contrast, both Ming-cheng Lo and Lan Bozhou agree with Ching and Fong on the rise of full-scale Taiwanese nationalism. Lo, in her study of Taiwanese doctors, argues that this professional group led the development of Taiwanese national identity, serving as “national physicians” as they cared for their ethnic community during the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁶ Lan traces the growth of Taiwanese nationalism from the outbreaks of anti-Japanese resistance up until 1915 through to the student movements of the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote ¹⁷ He finds that as Taiwanese nationalism developed it remained closely tied to a sense of Chinese identity and, in functional terms, to revolutionary movements on the Mainland. However, Lan makes a questionable leap when he argues that these early Taiwanese nationalists aimed at reunification and not independence.

Nationalism has been the subject of most recent books, but some scholars have reinforced the range of Taiwanese identities described by Fong. Paul Katz, in his social history of the 1915 Ta-pa-ni uprising, argues that the shift from being colonizers under the Qing to being colonized under the Japanese was catalytic for creating a distinctive sense of group identification among Taiwan's Han residents.Footnote ¹⁸ Wu Micha also emphasizes Taiwanese distinctiveness and roots it in cultural practices that persisted even during the Second World War.Footnote ¹⁹ Ming-cheng Lo, Komagome Takeshi and Peng Hsiao-yen all stress that modernism itself became an identity for Taiwanese elites.Footnote ²⁰ Lo finds that modernism was a way to transcend both nationality and ethnicity, while for Komagome it was a product of colonial modernity that brought a sense of global cosmopolitanism without the risks of political emancipation. Peng sees modernism as an elite identity in Taiwan, in contrast to the proletarian identity of the masses. Lo also adds another layer to her conception of Taiwanese identity when she discusses the creation of a self-consciously Taiwanese ethnic group by the 1920s. However, she does so without exploring where this ethnic identity came from or defining its main characteristics.

Recent studies of the Japanese colonial period differ in their views of Taiwanese identity, but there is little doubt that this was an era in which multiple identities took shape. Although some scholars have found only the roots of Taiwanese nationalism, the evidence favours those who argue that this identity reached full form during the 1920s and 1930s. The sense of separation from both Chinese and Japanese identities and the pro-independence proclamations of some intellectuals serve as proof of a national identity, although not a nation-state. However, it is not clear that this was the most important or widely held identity of the period. Those subscribing to proletarian or cosmopolitan identities probably outnumbered the nationalists, a group that comprised a relatively small number of intellectuals, and as Lo suggests, there was a large Taiwanese ethnic community throughout the island. However, these non-national identities remain understudied and as a result it is difficult to say definitively who the Taiwanese were in this period. The Taiwanese now existed as a distinct group, in contrast to the pre-1895 period, but in part because of differences of opinion within recent scholarship the exact contours of their collective sense of self remain unclear.

The Nationalist Period: 1945–2000

Recent scholarship on the years of Nationalist Party rule in Taiwan has stressed nationalism, both Taiwanese and Chinese, as the dominant form of identity, but there has also been significant attention to growing ethnic group consciousness. The presence of a strong Taiwanese national identity has become an undeniable fact; therefore, much of the work on the post-1945 period has attempted to explain where it came from, with the emphasis placed on the 28 February 1947 uprising and subsequent crackdown, the post-colonial or neo-colonial conditions under martial law, and the political movements of the 1980s and 1990s. Ethnic identity has been seen as a crucial factor in the spread of nationalism, but scholars disagree over the precise manner and timing of the formation of particular ethnic groups and their contributions to the construction of Taiwanese national identity. In fact, it is the attention both to the years of martial law and to ethnicity that has distinguished the second wave from the first wave of scholarship.Footnote ²¹

Authors such as Steven Phillips, Wang Fu-ch'ang and Mark Harrison represent a large group of scholars who take the events surrounding the 228 protests against the excesses and failures of Nationalist rule as central to Taiwanese identity formation. However, they disagree on the precise nature and timing of the influence of 228. Phillips stresses that it was an outcry in favour of greater autonomy and self-government (zizhi 自治) for the island province within the Chinese nation-state. The pre-1945 residents of Taiwan saw themselves as a distinctive group after the war, but they did not have a national identity, not even in formation.Footnote ²² Wang sees 228 as the moment when locals (benshengren 本省人) drew a stark division between themselves and the Mainlanders (waishengren 外省人). This separation became the basis for subsequent ethnic group formation, although it took decades for ethnic identities to emerge fully.Footnote ²³ Harrison, in contrast, sees 228 as the first in a series of events that contributed to the construction of a Taiwanese national identity during the five decades of Nationalist supremacy.Footnote ²⁴ In light of the works discussed above on the Japanese colonial period, Phillips underestimates the existence of Taiwanese nationalism, though he is correct to emphasize that many Taiwanese sought only autonomy and not independence. Wang and Harrison, because they view 228 through the lens of later developments, are more representative of the two main lines of interpretation of the Nationalist period.

One line traces the full-scale emergence of a widespread Taiwanese national identity. Recent works stress that this identity has become defined to include all residents of the island within the Taiwanese national group, regardless of their cultural background or date of migration. Melissa Brown presents one important perspective on the construction of an island-wide Taiwanese national identity during the 1990s. At this time, groups dedicated to the cause of Taiwanese independence wrote a “new narrative of Taiwanese unfolding” that incorporated the cultural contributions of both Han Chinese and aborigines. In fact, it was the inclusion of aborigine influences that made Taiwan Taiwanese and not Chinese.Footnote ²⁵ Mark Harrison takes a different approach, beginning from the post-structuralist point that the simple act of studying Taiwan has itself created a Taiwanese identity, thus making the academic community implicit in the construction of the nation in Taiwan. Harrison focuses on the discourses surrounding discrete events, from 228 to the political movements following the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979, and argues that these discourses collectively created the strong Taiwanese nationalism that exists today.Footnote ²⁶ Both Brown and Harrison are in agreement with the earlier work of A-chin Hsiau, who stressed that the political movements of the 1980s and 1990s were fundamentally catalytic in creating Taiwanese nationalism.Footnote ²⁷

The other line, exemplified by the work of Wang Fu-ch'ang, examines the development of ethnic identities.Footnote ²⁸ Wang studies the processes by which Taiwan's four great ethnicities (sida zuqun 四大族群) – Minnanese, Hakka, Mainlander and aborigine – became salient identity groups during the 1980s and 1990s. He traces the historical development of these four groups through several stages: the establishment of a political identity as Han or “islanders” (bendaoren 本島人) during the Japanese colonial era; the formation of a linguistically-based Minnanese consciousness during the 1960s; divisions between locals and Mainlanders in the 1970s; the rise of aborigine consciousness in opposition to Han, and Hakka in opposition to Minnanese, during the 1980s; and finally the opposition of Minnanese to Mainlanders during the 1990s. The key factors that gave rise to these different ethnic groups were place of origin, timing of migration, and the sense of being a weak and oppressed minority. Wang's signal contribution to the study of Taiwanese identity is that he puts aside questions of Taiwanese nationalism, although he seems to accept a dominant national identity, and explores the deep internal complexities of what it meant to be Taiwanese.

The main thrust of recent scholarship is that an independence-oriented national identity became hegemonic, in the sense of being subscribed to by a majority, largely through literary and political movements in the last decades of the 20th century. Ethnicities arose that divided the island's population into different, often opposed, identity groups, but these appear to have been subservient to the larger Taiwanese national group. However, the precise relationship between ethnicity and nationality has not been fully explored. It is thus not clear if ethnicities were simply the building blocks for nationalism, if they were constructed and survived in their own right, or if nationalism developed along separate lines entirely. Also, we are left wondering how the Taiwanese ethnic consciousness of the Japanese period disappeared so quickly with the advent of Nationalist rule. Finally, the emphasis on Taiwanese nationalism and its manifestation in the drive for independence has lent a somewhat teleological quality to much of the existing scholarship: events and discourses matter not in their own right but because of their contribution to the construction of a Taiwanese nation-state. One must ask what has been omitted as a result.