During the portion of his Double Ten National Day address that focused on cross-strait relations, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) turned to ethnicity to play down the differences between the two countries.
“The people on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait are ethnic Chinese — descendants of the legendary emperors Yan and Huang,” Ma said.
While many would dispute this contention, emphasizing ethnicity and ancestry as a means to encourage reconciliation or, conversely, foster alienation misses the point completely. The reason is simple: The longstanding conflict across the Taiwan Strait has nothing to do with ethnicity and lies instead in the political, ideological and imaginary spheres.
History is replete with examples of leaders who used ethnicity to stoke nationalistic fervor, often with devastating consequences. When it comes to Taiwan, this device has two fundamental flaws that make it unsuited as an element of political discourse.
The first is the exclusionary nature of nations built on race or ethnicity. In an increasingly mobile world, genetics have lost relevance in terms of buttressing one’s nationality. Consequently, nationality is no longer predicated on ethnicity, but rather on one’s association to a land or people. That is why the concept of “foreign,” a term often used in Taiwan, has an entirely different, and in many cases irrelevant, connotation in multi-ethnic countries such as the US, Canada or the UK. That is why immigrant societies — and Taiwan is such a society — embrace peoples of all backgrounds as participants in the national experiment. That is why a person of Haitian background, for example, could serve as the representative of Queen Elizabeth in Canada, or why a man with Kenyan ancestry can sit in the White House.
This leads us to the second flaw in the argument of ethnicity as a determinant of nationality: Nations, in contrast to countries, exist in the head and transcend geography. As such, genetic variance or similarity has absolutely no bearing on the state of relations between two groups of people. Far more relevant are social mores developed over time, the systems of governance chosen through social experimentation, as well as the shared ideational components that tie a people together.
Ma, like his Beijing counterparts, can rely all he wants on the idea of shared ethnicity to glue his amorphous empire together, but this will never change the fact that at the end of the day, groups of people that are victims of repression — such as Tibetans, Uighurs, Aborigines and, yes, Taiwanese — are in that situation because of concepts that have no relation to ethnicity. In other words, whether they are “Han Chinese” or not, or agree that they are “descendants of the legendary emperors Yan and Huang,” is inconsequential, as either way they will be repressed and prevented from living their lives in a manner that fully reflects their identity.
There is no denying that Taiwan and China have much in common, including overlapping periods of history, cultural elements, language, writing systems and so on, all of which are the result of geographical proximity. That said, the formative experiences of the two peoples, the “social genes,” have been wildly divergent for decades, if not centuries. That, in part, stems from the fact that Taiwan is an island nation, which, though less than 200km from the continent, not only creates a physical barrier to external influence, but also imposes its own idiosyncratic identity.
Terms like freedom and democracy are often bandied about without their conjurers fully understanding what those concepts mean, but however ill-defined, they nevertheless are part of the fabric of Taiwanese national identity, as are the shedding of authoritarianism and the influence that the countless thousands of Taiwanese who studied abroad brought back with them over the decades.
Genetic similarity or not, Taiwan is unique, and nothing Ma (or Beijing) says will ever change that.
World leaders are preparing themselves for a second Donald Trump presidency. Some leaders know more or less where he stands: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy knows that a difficult negotiation process is about to be forced on his country, and the leaders of NATO countries would be well aware of being complacent about US military support with Trump in power. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would likely be feeling relief as the constraints placed on him by the US President Joe Biden administration would finally be released. However, for President William Lai (賴清德) the calculation is not simple. Trump has surrounded himself
US president-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday named US Representative Mike Waltz, a vocal supporter of arms sales to Taiwan who has called China an “existential threat,” as his national security advisor, and on Thursday named US Senator Marco Rubio, founding member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China — a global, cross-party alliance to address the challenges that China poses to the rules-based order — as his secretary of state. Trump’s appointments, including US Representative Elise Stefanik as US ambassador to the UN, who has been a strong supporter of Taiwan in the US Congress, and Robert Lighthizer as US trade
Following the BRICS summit held in Kazan, Russia, last month, media outlets circulated familiar narratives about Russia and China’s plans to dethrone the US dollar and build a BRICS-led global order. Each summit brings renewed buzz about a BRICS cross-border payment system designed to replace the SWIFT payment system, allowing members to trade without using US dollars. Articles often highlight the appeal of this concept to BRICS members — bypassing sanctions, reducing US dollar dependence and escaping US influence. They say that, if widely adopted, the US dollar could lose its global currency status. However, none of these articles provide
On Friday last week, tens of thousands of young Chinese took part in a bike ride overnight from Henan Province’s Zhengzhou (鄭州) to the historical city of Kaifeng in search of breakfast. The night ride became a viral craze after four female university students in June chronicled their ride on social media from Zhengzhou in search of soup dumplings in Kaifeng. Propelled by the slogan “youth is priceless,” the number of nocturnal riders surged to about 100,000 on Friday last week. The main road connecting the two cities was crammed with cyclists as police tried to maintain order. That sparked
RSS