User:Ling.Nut/Taiwanese people/Maowang
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Taiwanese people may refer to individuals who either claim or are imputed nationality or possess citizenship in the Republic of China (ROC), or its largest administered territory, the island of Taiwan. While citizenship is an objectively determined legal status, at least [number..four? five?] competing (and sometimes overlapping) standards can be used to determine one's nationality as a Taiwanese person: [insert list of standards here]. The complexity resulting from competing standards is compounded by a larger dispute regarding the political identity of the ROC itself, and its potential dejure independence or political (re)unification with the People's Republic of China.
- The composite category of "Taiwanese people" includes a significant population of at least [number: three? four? five?] constituent ethnic groups: [insert list here].
[edit] Taiwanese people as a group identity
Although group identity is often claimed on the basis of ancestry and culture, it is, in actuality, held together by a common socio-political experience (Corcuff 2000). The concept of a Taiwanese people relies on mythologized constructions of groups of humans that may or may not imagine themselves to belong to a single community. It should also be noted that identities are not fixed, but fluid and change with time and memory or in response to a changing environment rather than stemming from a primordial or authentic source (Bhabha 1990:1);(Brown 2004:5).
According to the theory proposed by social theorist Benedict Anderson in his highly influential work Imagined Communities, the Taiwanese people are those people who imagine themselves a part of a national community that regards itself as Taiwanese. Any connection Taiwanese may have with one another is purely imaginary, based on the shared belief in a common destiny stemming from the very real parameters of daily life including: Government, Economy, Education, Popular Culture and Electronic/Print Media (Anderson 1983);(Hsiau 2000:10-14). Political leaders often attempt to manipulate and fix identities for political advantage and totalize the imagined community and assign an essentialist identity to the community for political gain. New identities are continually emerging based on individuals’ perceptions of commonalities and differences as the patterns of local communities, kinship and language pattern usage change with economic, cultural and demographic change. These changes can also result in the creation of shift in new ethnic identities based on the national experience (Harrell 1996:5). . The earliest notion of a Taiwanese group identity emerged in the form of a national identity following the Qing empire’s ceding of Taiwan to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki in1895 (Morris 2002:3-6). Prior to Japanese colonization, residents of Taiwan developed relationships based on class solidarity and social connections rather than ethnic identity. Although Han often cheated Aborigines, they also married and supported one another against other residents of the same ethnic background. Taiwan was the site of frequent feuding based on ethnicity, lineage and place of origin (Lamley et al. ; Shepherd:310-323).
In the face of the Japanese colonial hierarchy, the people of Taiwan were faced with the unequal binary relationship between colonizer and colonized, This duality between “one” and “other” was evident in the seven years of violence between the Japanese and groups of united anti-Japanese Han and Aborigines Template:Harvcol\Katz.
The Japanese employed a system of household registers based on the notion of “race” to distinguish groups of colonial subjects. From within the group of “non-Japanese” the colonial government divided Han citizens into “Han” and “Hakka” based on their perception of linguistic and cultural differences and the Japanese maintained the Qing era classification of Aborigines as either “raw” or “cooked” (Brown 2004:8). The Japanese era distinctions embodied the social ramification of ethnic origin and perceived loyalty to the empire [[Harvcol|Wolfe and Huang|1980|p=19}} Only later did the Japanese attempt to incorporate Taiwanese into the Japanese identity as “loyal subjects, but the cleavage between the experience of the colonized and the colonizer only emphasized the polarity between the two groups (Fujii 2006:70-73).
[edit] Genetic studies
The Hoklo and Hakka population, which makes up the majority of Taiwan's population, are descended from Minnan- and Hakka-speaking Han Chinese from mainland China, predominantly the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. Southern Han Chinese are, in turn, descended from inter-marriage between northern Han Chinese immigrants who moved southwards over successive centuries, and local aboriginal populations known as the Yue peoples. As a result, the Taiwanese population are, like the Han Chinese population of the southern Chinese coast, genetically disparate from the Han Chinese population further north. [1]. The majority of DNA from plains aboriginies could not be taken into account as most of the descendants are indistinguishable from the general population and hybridity can not be determined.
