Michael Rudolph

From Forced Assimilation to Cultural Revitalization: Taiwan’s Aborigines and Their Role in Taiwan Nativism

Since the beginning of the nineties, Taiwan’s society faced a situation of rapid political and cultural change. After four centuries of domination by foreign powers—the Spanish, the Dutch, the Chinese, the Japanese, and the “mainlanders” who had come from the mainland as refugees with Chiang Kai-shek after 1945—the first Taiwan-born president in Taiwan’s history Li Denghui was officially confirmed in his office in 1990. Though Li belonged to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that had ruled Taiwan for over forty years, the change was enthusiastically welcomed by Taiwan’s Han, since Li had his cultural and religious roots in Taiwan and was believed to work much more on behalf of Taiwan’s population than the mainland-born presidents of the Jiang family before who had never relinquished the hope to return to China someday. Only in this moment the issue of identity search of “the Taiwanese” could become a theme of growing significance in the political arena, tolerated now as it did not collide with Li’s endeavor to consolidate his power vis-a-vis the mainlanders who were still represented in the government and in the military. At the same time, there also occurred a re-evaluation of Taiwan’s relationship to the communist mainland, that tried to hinder this development by more and more aggressive contests of its sovereignty and that once again emphasized its conviction of cultural and genetic homogeneity of Taiwan’s and China’s population.