Seeing Past Taiwan’s Identity Politics
The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory and Identity in Modern Taiwan
The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory and Identity in Modern Taiwan
CHINA watchers see it as only a matter of time before Xi Jinping makes his move against taiwan. the Hong Kong crackdown, the coming Biden presidency and the distraction of the Covid-19 pandemic, not to mention Xi’s own statements on the matter: it all signals curtains for taiwan’s democracy.
this doom-and-gloom prognosis ignores several periods in contemporary cross-strait history that were equally — if not more — ominous. Accompanied by an ostentatious military threat, the third taiwan strait Crisis of 1995 to 1996 was the most obvious of these; but the 2004 presidential election was imbued with perhaps an even greater sense of menace. tensions had been simmering for months as democratic progressive party (dpp) incumbent Chen shui-bian sought re-election. Led by Lien Chan, the opposition Chinese nationalist party (Kuomintang, or KMT) had accused the president of exacerbating ethnic divisions through identity-based rabble-rousing. in speeches by KMT politicians and party campaign materials, Chen was frequently compared to Hitler (and also, incongruously, to saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.)
to anyone with a basic understanding of taiwan’s history, the comparisons appeared absurd. After all, it was the KMT that had established a 50-year totalitarian rule in taiwan after its loss to the Communists in the Chinese Civil War and retreat to the island. in this period, taiwan’s populace had been subjected to ruthless repression, including the initial massacres that followed the “228 incident” of 1947, and the arbitrary arrests and executions in the decades that followed.
for the majority taiwan-born “ethnic” group (benshengren), from which most of the victims came, listening to KMT leaders (some of whom had played a direct role in the abuses) invoking the nazis and the holocaust was an affront. that they were using these terms against a democratically elected benshengren president who had been jailed as a dissident was a bitter irony. And it was not just the politicians resorting to such imagery: as Olwen Bedford and Kwang-kuo Hwang have noted, some China-born taiwanese (waishengren)
complained that they were being “oppressed” in a manner similar to Jews in pre-war germany.
this was the volatile atmosphere that greeted dominic Meng-hsuan Yang when he returned to taiwan to conduct research for his MA thesis. Although “captivated” and “exhilarated” by the vibrancy of taiwan’s young democracy, he was also “deeply disturbed by the persistently escalating political and ethnic tensions.”
Yang’s thesis focused on the 228 incident, and his own personal tragedies that were unearthed during the research — relatives imprisoned and executed on trumped-up charges — made him deeply resentful of waishengren. His thesis became “a mission to uncover all of the terrible things the mainlanders had done to the native taiwanese population upon their arrival.” Yet the more he dug, the more he realized that, far from being a homogenous class of kleptocrats and colonizers, the waishengren were a disparate group. Many were themselves victims of the Kmt’s collapse in China and the subsequent tragedy that unfolded in taiwan.
this realization spurred the research that culminated in The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory and Identity in Modern Taiwan.
to call this a landmark in scholarship on taiwan and, more broadly, the field of psychology known as trauma studies, is no overstatement. from the outset, Yang rejects facile analysis: received wisdom is smashed by hard data, partisan generalizations avoided by a balanced subject-position; indolent daubing eschewed for deft brushstrokes that yield a sensitive expressionist portrait. rare is the page bereft of subtle insight. to take one of the more startling examples: the fact that, certainly in the early years of the Kmt’s rule in taimany
wan, and probably even for the duration, waishengren were disproportionately affected by the anticommunist witch hunt (in terms of arrest rates) will be a revelation to many.
Close to a million people arrived in taiwan in the post-world War ii years. this is not the first book to document their experience. But Yang early distinguishes his work from Mahlon Meyer’s Remembering China from Taiwan and Joshua fan’s China’s Homeless Generation. “My book is different,” writes Yang in his introduction. “it treats oral history both as history and as the social production of memory or ‘social memory’ — what a group of people, a society, or a nation concentrates on recalling or commemorating at a certain point in time in order to satisfy a particular need or serve a specific purpose.”
in examining the concatenation of “mnemonic regimes” that waishengren have undergone as diasporic subjects in taiwan, Yang elucidates why “it took nearly half a century before people started to take these stories out of their private homes/conversations, and began to articulate, exchange, and promote them in public.” this, Yang contends, is a shared, multiple-stage cultural trauma — beginning with an initial formative event but not susceptible to eurocentric/holocaust “single-event” interpretation, be it sociological or psychoanalytical. instead, waishengren memory production is a “ruptured and anachronistic history of displacement.”
that such ruptures help mold the very fabric of diasporic citizenship is not a new concept. Although not directly referenced, Lok C. d. siu’s study of the panamanian-chinese diaspora Memories of a Future Home points to the fragmentary nature of diasporic belonging. (interestingly, Yang does draw on the work of ien Ang who, Yang notes, repudiates the notion of a Chinese diaspora — because of its insistence on “Chineseness.”)
As for the stages in memory production that Yang posits, the initial “exodus” is given less prominence than one might expect — another departure from previous studies of Chinese Civil War refugeeism. instead, weight is shifted to the four subsequent phases of trauma. “Wartime sojourning” was a period when waishengren realized taiwan was no longer a short-term stopover and drew closer to the KMT regime as their last hope for a return. this interdependence drove a thicker wedge between the immigrants and benshengren. next comes “Cultural nostalgia,” which focuses on the emergence of native-place associations, and associated cultural initiatives designed to maintain ties to the “mainland” provinces — a fascinating phenomenon that has received scant attention (at least in english-language works).
in the final two chapters of the book, “the twin social traumas of homecoming on both sides of the taiwan strait” are discussed. the devastating disillusionment experienced by waishengren on their return to China following then president Chiang Ching-kuo’s decision to allow travel between the two countries (a policy reversal that, Yang points out, was forced upon Chiang by the growing resentment expressed through groups such as the Veterans Homebound Movement) led to waishengren beginning to associate taiwan with their sense of home. Yet the social changes and democratization that taiwan was undergoing were to create a further disjuncture, with waishengren increasingly feeling like outsiders.
the 2004 election represented the nadir of this alienation; hence the genuine concern and, in some cases anguish, that many waishengren felt with Chen’s populism. the fallout from this may be connected to a dwindling percentage of taiwan-born waishengren who self-identify as such. indeed, drawing on fan’s work, Yang speculates that this could eventually lead to such an identity disappearing altogether as “taiwanization” of younger waishengren continues. following Chen’s re-election in 2004, tensions came close to spilling over into civil unrest. With the instability that such fault lines engendered came the risk that China would take advantage. that this did not occur at a time when taiwan was riven by identity conflict should be cause for optimism now that pro-china sentiment is at a historic low.
Of course, other important factors are at play here, not least of which is Beijing’s renewed belligerence under a leader who has directly alluded to invading taiwan. But at a time when president tsai ing-wen’s government has deservedly earned the plaudits for its performance against a pandemic that emanated from across the strait, Yang’s book is a reminder of how taiwan has managed to navigate the perennially choppy waters of its own form of identity politics and developed a degree of unity in response to adversity.