The Great Exodus, the difficult and chaotic movement of at least one million civilians and soldiers across the Taiwan Strait between 1948 and 1955, is asked to carry a lot of weight in Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang's vivid and important new book. It distinguishes the mainlanders (waishengren) from the other residents of Taiwan (benshengren and indigenous); it separates these exiles from their families in China; it binds those who experienced the exodus to the second- and third-generation waishengren; and it ultimately allows them all to build an identity as Taiwanese. It manages to support this considerable burden of memories and identities because, as Yang demonstrates through his thorough research in documentary and oral history sources, it was the root of multiple traumatic events that unfolded long after the last exiles reached Taiwan's shores.
Yang's principal contribution, both to Taiwan's history and to memory studies, is to trace that evolution through a series of displacements, or social traumas, each of which shaped a different mnemonic regime among the mainlanders and highlighted shifts in the relationship between the mainlanders and the Kuomintang (KMT)/Republic of China (ROC) state. Yang engages psychoanalytic and sociological models of trauma and memory but eschews the single-event theories of both for an approach that, following other historians of memory, connects the permutations of memory construction to specific historical contexts.
The exodus consisted of two displacements: one for the mainlanders as they fled their homelands or were forced to leave by the KMT military, and one for the “semi-Japanized native Taiwanese who were compelled to receive them” (p. 7). This term places those Taiwanese in an excessively passive position, but it works as a reflection of the attitudes of the waishengren toward their purported co-nationals. These traumas produced the first mnemonic regime, which was characterized by a retreat into recollections of experiences as refugees during the war against Japan and comforting memories of eventual triumph over adversity that sustained their hopes for a swift return home. Most significantly, these memories bound the mainlanders to the KMT regime—Yang effectively argues that this “unholy alliance” (p. 102) had to be forged—in a shared condition of sojourning that separated them from the mass of Taiwan's population. When these reluctant exiles realized that their displacement would not soon end, they set about rebuilding or creating communities by devoting considerable energy and resources to the second mnemonic regime: remembering native places by supporting tongxianghui and memory-based local history projects. Yang details this process from the late 1950s into the 1980s, explaining that it both further distanced waishengren from benshengren and sustained the divide between mainlanders and the KMT state, which did not fully trust these associations even as it deployed them to strengthen Chinese national identity.
The next major displacement, which Yang terms “the social trauma of the homecoming in China,” occurred during the 1980s, when gradual democratization in Taiwan coincided with reform and opening in the People's Republic of China to allow waishengren to revisit their long-separated relatives and hometowns. The returnees found places and people they no longer recognized or felt linked to and finally decided, after almost four decades, that Taiwan was their home. Now they experienced “the social trauma of homecoming in Taiwan,” because a parallel process of identity construction and memory formation produced a Taiwanese nationalism that cast all mainlanders in the same light, as colonizers who had equally oppressed the benshengren and indigenous Taiwanese.
These successive traumas initiated the third mnemonic regime, under which mainlanders finally remembered the exodus and defined themselves as both victims of the ROC state and members of the Taiwanese nation. Beginning in the 1990s, second- and third-generation mainlanders led the way in creating a unified waishengren ethnic identity.
This summary of the book's five chapters regretfully omits the evocative details that Yang has assembled, but it highlights both the analytical richness and some of the gaps within it. For example, in light of his argument that the Taiwan-born generations did not inherit memories of the native place, it is not clear how the return to China either was traumatic or led them to the exodus as a foundation of identity. Similarly, Yang situates the mainlanders within broader histories of Chinese migration, particularly by linking Shelly Chan's concept of diasporic temporalities to earlier scholarship on diasporic spatialities, arguing that the waishengren claimed diaspora only in the third mnemonic regime, paradoxically as a part of their localization. However, he did not incorporate this potentially illuminating spatiotemporal perspective into the core chapters. More attention to the tensions between a sojourning mentality and localization, or to the roles of tongxianghui and huiguan, or to the support of relatives and communities in China, among Chinese overseas across time and space might have altered his sense of the mainlanders as a diaspora.
However, the book's key achievements do not depend upon the diasporic framework. It provides a more deeply historicized understanding of mainlander ethnic identity, and of its divergence from Chinese nationalism, than exists in earlier scholarship. Most significantly, it asks us to consider the complicated historical realities, rather than the simplified received narrative, of perhaps one-seventh of Taiwan's population, a group that largely suffered under the ROC state that had forced its relocation and that itself traumatized, rather than found common cause with, others who were oppressed by the same regime. Therefore, it is a Taiwan-centered work that reminds us that Taiwan's independent history intersects with parts of Chinese history. Addressing these intersections within the context of contemporary politics is a crucial part of pursuing transitional justice in Taiwan, as Yang indicates in the epilogue, and this book should become a part of that process.
