Authoritarian governments have long wielded education as political tools by which to transmit their conceptions of nationalistic identity, but does the same hold true of democratic governments? Transitioning from martial law to full democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, Taiwan serves as an ideal case study. As authoritarian rulers, Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (KMT) imposed education curriculum that legitimized their claims to be the rulers of all China. After martial law was lifted in 1987, dissenters could freely vocalize a Taiwanese identity that advocated for a sovereign Taiwan separate from the Chinese nation. Contemporaneously, Lee Teng-hui rose to power as a loyal KMT member, but as president he shifted away from Chinese identity to promote a sense of Taiwanese identity. Preceded by nationalistically Chinese KMT stalwarts and succeeded by one who pushed Taiwan even closer to independence, Lee was a transitional leader whose own ideological evolution reflected Taiwan's shift from a staunchly Chinese political entity to a possibly independent state separate from the mainland. During Lee's presidency, controversy erupted over the content of textbooks for a junior high course entitled Understanding Taiwan [renshi taiwan] that focused for the first time on Taiwan in its own right instead of as only one small part of China. The textbooks instigated a debate on identity, for how one regarded the accuracy or appropriateness of the textbooks reflected one's views of Taiwan in relation to China. The debates and the textbooks' contents revealed clearly that despite the considerable democratization occurring in Taiwan over the decade, curriculum content continued to mirror the convictions espoused by the central government -- led by the democratically elected president Lee Teng-hui (1988-2000) -- in much the same way that it had done so under the authoritarian rule of Chiang Kai-shek (1949-1975).

Harrison offers a new, critical approach to understanding the formation of Taiwan's identity. It applies contemporary social theory and historiography to a wealth of detail on Taiwanese politics, culture and society.

The consolidation of Taiwanese identity in recent years has been accompanied by two interrelated paradoxes: a continued language shift from local Taiwanese languages to Mandarin Chinese, and the increasing subordination of the Hoklo majority culture in ethnic policy and public identity discourses. A number of initiatives have been undertaken toward the revitalization and recognition of minority cultures. At the same time, however, the Hoklo majority culture has become akin to a political taboo. This book examines how the interplay of ethnicity, national identity and party politics has shaped current debates on national culture and linguistic recognition in Taiwan. It suggests that the ethnolinguistic distribution of the electorate has led parties to adopt distinctive strategies in an attempt to broaden their ethnic support bases. On the one hand, the DPP and the KMT have strived to play down their respective de-Sinicization and Sinicization ideologies, as well as their Hoklo and Chinese ethnocultural cores. At the same time, the parties have competed to portray themselves as the legitimate protectors of minority interests by promoting Hakka and Aboriginal cultures. These concomitant logics have discouraged parties from appealing to ethnonationalist rhetoric, prompting them to express their antagonistic ideologies of Taiwanese and Chinese nationalism through more liberal conceptions of language rights. Therefore, the book argues that constraints to cultural and linguistic recognition in Taiwan are shaped by political rather than cultural and sociolinguistic factors. Investigating Taiwan’s counterintuitive ethnolinguistic situation, this book makes an important theoretical contribution to the literature to many fields of study and will appeal to scholars of Taiwanese politics, sociolinguistics, culture and history.

The national identity of the Taiwanese, who have experienced the colonial rule by both the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists, is a complicated topic. Both alien ruling powers indoctrinated Taiwanese with either a Japanese identity or a Chinese identity. The Japanese employed Dōka (assimilation) to integrate the Taiwanese into the Japanese Empire, and the Chinese claimed the Taiwanese as the descendants of both the "Yan Emperors and Yellow Emperor" of the Chinese nation. Since democratization and Taiwanization under Lee Teng-hui's presidency, the Taiwanese can express dissent as well as their Taiwan identity; since democratization, Taiwan identity grows steadily in contemporary Taiwan.Since the late 1890s, the media, serving as an ideological apparatus, has been one of the major battle fields for constructing or debating national identities in Taiwan. Both the Japanese and the Chinese colonial rulers utilized the media in efforts to shape Japanese and Chinese identities for the Taiwanese. Taiwanese elites used the media during Japanese rule to push alternative identities in opposition to Japanese identity. Some opposition to Chinese Nationalist's martial law also utilized the media during that period to reveal a Taiwanese consciousness. After democratization, Taiwan identity media, including underground radio stations and the Internet, rose to occupy a remarkable market share competing with China identity media. Meanwhile, media ownership became the main factor that determined the media's national identity-whether it be China identity or Taiwan identity. However, the rise of China's economy, the close Cross-Strait economic relationship and the media owners' close relationships with China have grown to influence the national identity favored by some media outlets.For over a century of Taiwan's history, the media have exerted influence on the shape of the people's national identity through the representation of some societal elements such as language, kinship, religion, culture, myth, and democracy. Both the Japanese and the Chinese pushed a "national language" policy in the media to make the Taiwanese people a part of the Japanese Empire or the Chinese nation. The Japanese official media pushed Dōka onto the Taiwanese people while many Taiwanese elites expressed alternative national identity against Dōka in some newspapers. The Chinese Nationalist party-owned, state-owned, and military-owned media as well as its patron-client media propagated Chinese nationalism by using kinship, religion, culture and myth to represent a fundamental association of the Taiwanese people with the Chinese nation. By contrast, some opposition in their concern for Taiwan tried to connect "democracy" to a Taiwanese consciousness. After democratization, the media demonstrated diverse formulations of national identity. The China identity media repeated the same arguments used during the martial law period to construct a China identity. The Taiwan identity framed a Taiwan identity through such things as kinship (Austronesian descent) and language. The Taiwan identity media further employed the notion of "democracy" to make Taiwan identity distinct from China identity. The thesis concludes that the media have served as an agent for the construction of three broad conceptions of national identity-Japanese, Chinese and Taiwanese identity-over the last century of Taiwan's history.

As we look to enter the second decade of the 21st century, Taiwan’s quest for identity remains the most contentious issue in the domestic arena of Taiwanese politics. From here, it spills over into the cross-Strait relationship and impacts on regional and global security. Whether Taiwan is a nation state or whether Taiwan has any claim to be a nation-state and how Taiwan should relate to "China" are issues which have long been hotly debated on the island, although it seems that much of this debate is now more focused on finding an adequate strategy to deal with the Beijing government than on the legitimacy of Taiwan’s claim to sovereignty as the Republic of China. The collection of chapters in this book shed light on very different aspects of Taiwan’s current state of identity formation from historical, political, social and economic perspectives, both domestically, and globally. As such it will be invaluable reading for students and scholars of Taiwan studies, politics, history and society, as well as those interested in cross-Strait relations, Chinese politics, and Chinese international relations.

For China, Taiwan is next in line to be unified with the People's Republic after Hong Kong in 1997. China's claim on Taiwan is of great importance to the politics of Chinese Nationalism, and is central to the dynamics of power in this most volatile of regions. The democratic challenge from Taiwan is very potent and its status and identity within the international community is crucial to its survival. Taiwan and Chinese Nationalism explores how Taiwan's status has come to be a symbol for the legitimacy of the Chinese regime in the evolution of Chinese nationalism. It also demonstrates how this view has been challenged by demands for democratization in Taiwan. The KMT regime is shown to have allowed sovereignty to be practised by the population of the island while maintaining the claim that it is a part of China. The result is a "post-nationalist" identity for the island in an intermediate state between independence and unification with the PRC.

Jennifer M. Wei argues that construction and perceptions of language and identity parallel sociopolitical transformations, and language and identity crises arise during power transitions. Under these premises, language and identity are never well-defined or well-bounded. Instead, they are best viewed as political symbols subject to manipulation and exploitation during socio-historical upheavals. A choice of language—from phonological shibboleth, Mandarin, or Taiwanese, to choice of official language—cuts to the heart of contested cultural notions of self and other, with profound implications for nationalism, national unity and ethno-linguistic purism. Wei further argues that because of the Chinese Diaspora and Taiwan's connections to China and the United States, arguments and sentiments over language choice and identity have consequences for Taiwan's international and transnational status. They are symbolic acts of imagining Taiwan's past as she looks forward to the future.