MCLC: redefining the meaning of Chinese in Taiwan

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Martin Winter <dujuan99 at gmail.com>
Subject: redefining the meaning of Chinese in Taiwan
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I was in Tainan one year ago, and in the 1980s. Great place. Taiwan has
hope, compared to China. But how could Taiwan be a model? And for being
Chinese, out of all things? For being open, yes. But why would anyone in
charge in China voluntarily give up one-party rule? They had to fight for
democratization in Taiwan, just like everywhere else. It's still called
Republic of China, for historical reasons. But people don't say they're
Chinese. There are many local nationalities, and there is the Taiwan
nationality. And there are historical cultures, much of it connected to
China. Taiwan has redifined Taiwan. That's great. I don't see a justified
hope of anything like this coming to the mainland soon. But I understand
the longing.

Martin

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Source: NY Times (2/23/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/24/world/asia/24iht-letter24.html

Letter from Taiwan
Redefining the Meaning of ‘Chinese’
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

TAINAN — Taiwan and its 23 million people will eventually be absorbed by
China, which claims it as a breakaway province, by a process of economic
osmosis. So runs the conventional wisdom among many businessmen, and some
diplomats.

Or will it? Instead of China changing Taiwan, might Taiwan change China?

Taiwan has a powerful weapon at its disposal: an inclusive national
identity that absorbs and celebrates difference, said Mark Harrison, a
Taiwan specialist at the University of Tasmania.

“Taiwan is actually very significant in terms of China’s future,” Dr.
Harrison said. “It points the way to a politics of identity-making.”

Because what China cannot seem to do — and probably not for a long time
yet — is this: build a broadly attractive definition of what it means to
be “Chinese” for all its various ethnic groups, including the increasingly
restive Tibetans and Uighurs, and thereby genuinely bring together the
different voices within its borders, Dr. Harrison said.

Tied to that: It cannot, for now, show the world that a Chinese society
can be open, tolerant and democratic. But Taiwan can.

That inclusiveness is clearly on display in Taiwan’s open news media,
culture and academia, but also here, in the southern city of Tainan, where
the decade-old National Museum of Taiwan Literature celebrates a rich
range of narratives from the cultures that make up the island’s highly
diverse history.

In a handsome, brick-and-column building dating from 1916, designed by the
Japanese architect Moriyama Matsunosuke and beautifully updated since,
dozens of voices are documented in exhibitions: the indigenous
Austronesians; native speakers of Taiyu, a local language; Dutch colonial
rulers of the 17th century; the Chinese of the late Ming and the Qing
dynasties who sailed over from the mainland; the Japanese colonists; and
the Chinese Nationalists who retreated to Taiwan in 1949 after their
defeat to the Communists in the civil war.

For a longtime resident of Beijing, the capital of a state that stresses a
rigid vision of national identity and tries to restrict the spread of even
its major regional languages, like Cantonese, a visit to this museum was
electrifying.

Here is the story of a “Chinese” state — Taiwanese, in reality — that
celebrates the existence of different, critical voices, and freely admits
the mistakes of the past, when it tried to smother them. It even offers
some exhibits in digraphia, a mixture of Chinese characters and the Latin
alphabet that some scholars, both Chinese and non-Chinese, say is
important for modernizing Chinese, but is rejected by a Beijing government
intent on preserving linguistic “purity.”

All this offers a lesson for China, said Dr. Harrison, as it faces
dissatisfaction from peoples in the vast border regions of Tibet and
Xinjiang.

“Somehow the Chinese need to let the Tibetans and Uighurs feel they are
Chinese, they need to rethink their identity in a way that makes that
possible, and I think the Taiwanese show how it can be done,” he said.
“But the Chinese government doesn’t even begin to think in those terms.
They take a colonial view, ‘We’re doing so much for these people, why
aren’t they satisfied?”’

“For the Chinese, being Chinese is an objective fact. You can’t become
Chinese. You are born it. But for the Taiwanese there’s the possibility of
choosing to be Taiwanese,” a process that allows meaningful cultural
differences while being a part of the nation, he said.

“Their attitude is, ‘We’re all here now on this island, we have to learn
to live together, we must all be Taiwanese,”’ he said. “It’s a
postcolonial identity. Inclusive. Open.” He calls it the Formosan voice,
after the Portuguese name for the island of Taiwan.

Things weren’t always like that here. For decades after 1949, the
Nationalists, who harked back to their mainland China roots, ruled with an
iron fist. Yet the process of identity-building was fermenting below the
surface. It gathered speed after the lifting of martial law in 1987 and
for the past 20 years has been in high gear.
For sure, Dr. Harrison added, “There are a lot of other voices that are
yet to be really heard, including migrant workers and expatriates. But
it’s being shaped.”

No one is expecting China to start listening to Taiwan anytime soon. After
trying military threats to intimidate the island into reunification, for
the past decade under President Hu Jintao, China has offered financial
incentives and increased trade to encouraged re-unification, dubbed by
some “hongbao” diplomacy, a reference to the Chinese custom of giving red
packets with money on special occasions like weddings.

Yet it’s not impossible that one day, China will be faced with such severe
problems trying to hold together a state that is based on the borders of
the last imperial dynasty and negotiating the disparate interests therein,
that it may start looking to Taiwan for some answers.

“What Taiwan says is that there is nothing immutable about being Chinese,
and there are a lot of other ways of thinking about being Chinese that are
beyond the nationalism of the People’s Republic of China,” Dr. Harrison
said. That model could eventually convince ethnic minorities that they are
truly equal members of the Chinese state.

If that state were listening.