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.

National identity has been an ongoing political issue in Taiwan since the late-1890s. The Construction of National Identity in Taiwan’s Media, 1896-2012 breaks new ground with the most comprehensive analysis of the development of Taiwan’s media and the construction of national identity in Taiwan’s media. Using a variety of media contents including newspapers, opposition magazines, broadcasting radio, news TV stations and the Internet as well as numerous interviews with journalists, senior media staffs and academics, Dr Hsu provides many original insights into the formation of national identity in Taiwan's media. Taiwan's media began to demonstrate a variety of new identities under democratization. Part of this change responded to market conditions as a majority of Taiwan's population stressed their Taiwan identity.

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.

Since the early 1990s, more and more people in Taiwan have come to view Taiwan itself as a country independent of China. They consider themselves Taiwanese rather than Chinese. Drawing on a social constructionist perspective to nationalism and Laclau and Mouffe's theory of discourse, this dissertation attempts to analyze the discursive mechanisms that have constructed this new collective imagination by many people in Taiwan that now regard themselves as members of an independent Taiwanese nation. The research questions of this dissertation are: how has the post-1949 national identity of Taiwan been discursively transformed since the early 1990s? What are the discursive and institutional mechanisms that have reproduced the Taiwanese national identity? What challenges is the Taiwanese national identity facing? To answer these questions, this dissertation outlines three nationalist discourses and five representations that have been derived from them regarding Taiwan's status, its relationship with mainland China, and the national identity of people in Taiwan. It examines the changes in Taiwan's discursive regime and symbolic economy since the early 1990s, showing how the rise of Taiwanese national identity has been closely related to political leaders' identification with Taiwanese nationalism. I argue that the rise of Taiwanese national identity in Taiwan has been an effect of a discursive contestation among the three major nationalist discourses and the polarization of the discursive field. This dissertation also explores the provincial origin issue---which has been closely related to ethnic tension in Taiwan---and the relations between the nationalist discourses and democratization. In addition, to explore the possibility for a deconstruction of the Taiwanese national identity, I examine the challenges that the Taiwanese national identity faces, focusing on democracy, the Democratic Progressive Party's performance as the ruling party, and the cross-Strait economic integration and political interactions.

"What does it mean to be Taiwanese? This question sits at the heart of Taiwan’s modern history and its place in the world. In contrast to the prevailing scholarly focus on Taiwan after 1987, Becoming Taiwanese examines the important first era in the history of Taiwanese identity construction during the early twentieth century, in the place that served as the crucible for the formation of new identities: the northern port city of Jilong (Keelung).Part colonial urban social history, part exploration of the relationship between modern ethnicity and nationalism, Becoming Taiwanese offers new insights into ethnic identity formation. Evan Dawley examines how people from China’s southeastern coast became rooted in Taiwan; how the transfer to Japanese colonial rule established new contexts and relationships that promoted the formation of distinct urban, ethnic, and national identities; and how the so-called retrocession to China replicated earlier patterns and reinforced those same identities. Based on original research in Taiwan and Japan, and focused on the settings and practices of social organizations, religion, and social welfare, as well as the local elites who served as community gatekeepers, Becoming Taiwanese fundamentally challenges our understanding of what it means to be Taiwanese."

Taiwan: Manipulation of Ideology and Struggle for Identity chronicles the turbulent relationship between Taiwan and China. This collection of essays aims to provide a critical analysis of the discourses surrounding the identity of Taiwan, its relationship with China, and global debates about Taiwan’s situation. Each chapter explores a unique aspect of Taiwan’s situation, fundamentally exploring how identity is framed in not only Taiwanese ideology, but in relation to the rest of the world. Focusing on how language is a means to maintaining a discourse of control, Taiwan: Manipulation of Ideology and Struggle for Identity delves into how Taiwan is determining its own sense of identity and language in the 21st century. This book targets researchers and students in discourse analysis, Taiwan studies, Chinese studies, and other subjects in social sciences and political science, as well as intellectuals in the public sphere all over the globe who are interested in the Taiwan issue.