President Tsai Ing-wen and this emerging Taiwanese national identity, part one. Taiwan Republic 台灣国, national identity, and world history classrooms. It will take many decades to fully assess President Tsai Ing-wen’s legacy. Oral history, historical archives, primary documents and not yet available – and this phase of Taiwanese history is particularly significant and dynamic – Western imperialist academics would probably say “fraught” or “nuanced.” So, these reflections are super preliminary. My main thesis: even though by temperament and reputation President Tsai is moderate, almost boring, Taiwanese national identity under her eight years made revolutionary leaps.
Historians tend to credit significant changes to the leaders of that time period – reasonable as a kind of academic shorthand. Of all elements of public life, national identity is the most complex – surely democratically elected president Tsai had an impact on this evolving Taiwanese national identity – but as it is often the case, great leaders also see and hear dynamic changes from the bottom up – and rather than to create those evolutions, they act instead as a channels, creating a path to coherently give words and meaning to these evolving national identities.
To me, the most significant change to this emerging Taiwanese national identity during Tsai’s eight years is that President Tsai, a former China KMT technocrat, miraculously convinced pro-Taiwan DPP supporters to tolerate formal institutions and symbols of the foreign/Chinese-imposed RoC – even up to the bloody reign of the younger Chiang dictator CCK. President Tsai advanced and modified her mentor, Taiwan’s first democratically elected president Lee Teng-hui’s formulation “RoC in Taiwan” into “RoC Taiwan” – starting the periodization at the end of the latest Chinese civil war in 1949, which the China KMT lost before they fled to Taiwan. This is an imperfect, everyone has something to not like compromise – but one which generates a stable, peaceful governing majority among Taiwan’s citizens, and significantly, has the support from the US, Japan, and the Free World. Even though the headlines out of Taipei now are the inevitable counterrevolutions from reactionary, anti-democracy, and anti-Taiwan political parties – if we broaden the historical lens out to centuries of Taiwanese history, the evolution of Taiwanese national identity has always been a two-step forward one or two steps back process.
An important data point to ponder regarding whether the Tsai formulation is transitory or historically significant is to assess the relative positions of new President Lai with former President Chen. Both Chen and Lai had to deal with anti-Taiwan, anti-democracy, and reactionary majorities in the parliament – noise and all notwithstanding, the pro-Taiwan and pro-democracy forces are in far better shape in 2024 than they were in 2000. It was a miracle that President Chen survived the reactionary coup attempts – President Lai has a firmer hold on to the executive branch, pro-democracy majority, and foreign support. And President Tsai’s policies played a significant role in this change – all the boring, non-crowd-pleasing policies she pushed through – pension reforms, improving the standings of the military and civil servants, infrastructure, transforming Taiwan from an international beggar, as the China KMT had formulated, into a positive global contributor, and so on.
The second significant development – and I am still thinking about this – is Tsai’s push for the Taiwanese to ponder, to enact, this emerging Taiwanese national identity apart from the “China-or-Not-China” construct – real independence comes only when the Taiwanese stop habitually comparing themselves first to China, or to China alone. To me, President Tsai’s calls for citizens of Taiwan to think of Taiwan as a part of the world is a significant revolution – to change decades of Chinese colonial, imperialist brainwashing that Taiwan is “only” a cultural periphery of a superior Chinese imperial core. And through an understanding of world history and global studies, to see Taiwan’s historic, and contemporary roles – not as the China KMT had constructed – Taiwan as a beggar, a muddied hinterland without culture or history – but as a democratic, sovereign, dynamic Taiwan nation that is positively contributing to the Free World. In this realm, I think the main dynamism and energy come not from formal, institutional, political quarters – or even formal educational institutions. When President Tsai took President Lee’s comment – “The agony of being Taiwanese” and updated it to become “The pride of being a Taiwanese,” I think she is more reflecting and channeling emerging Taiwanese national consciousness from the ground up than she is creating and leading.
Again, a historical comparison is useful. I think up to the late 1990s Taiwan-as-a-part-of-China was framed in Taiwan by the Chinese colonialist occupational elites as a conscious and subconscious “default” – in different realms of public life, to deviate from that default required strenuous efforts. Whereas in 2024 Taiwan is a nation with democratic sovereignty separate from China and any other nation is the new default. This rapid evolution in modern Taiwanese national identity may well explain why reactionary, anti-Taiwan, and anti-democracy leaders like Ma and other members of the China KMT have sharpened their rhetoric and attacks against Taiwanese democracy. As we have seen with political evolutions in North America and Europe, “white privilege” and “Chinese ‘mainlander’ privilege” share historical similarities. Foreign colonial settlers who have enjoyed decades of unearned, illegitimate power losing that privilege to a democratic, dynamic present will often turn to foreign autocratic allies to destroy the democracy from within. 14.6.2024
[illustration: “For Taiwan it is not about independence versus unification; in reality the only problem is a Chinese invasion to annex democratic Taiwan” Source: https://www.threads.net/@chenweiliaodesign?xmt=AQGzkbK9vj9u6STHE5MPKhr9Gx7BQRHQGrdJl4iOf3yynQ ]
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