Deepening a Sense of Being Taiwanese

This paper examines how the Amis, the largest indigenous community in Taiwan, draw on their Catholic faith to understand what it means to be Taiwanese. For over a century, the Amis were treated as marginalised citizens by the Japanese colonial government and the Han-Chinese Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo. Their predicament changed when political priorities shifted from cultural assimilation to multiculturalism after 1987. Successive Taiwanese governments since then have actively sought to incorporate indigenous culture as a core part of Taiwanese identity. Focusing on how the Amis intertwined their adopted Catholic notions and practices with pre-Christian ideas, social structure, and rituals, this paper demonstrates the ways in which the Amis carve out a place for themselves in wider Taiwanese society. It adds to ongoing discussions about the relationship between conversion and cultural transformation in Oceania by arguing that Catholicism empowered the Amis to deepen their sense of belonging to the island republic and, for the first time, assert themselves fully as Taiwanese.

Dividing without Conquering: Generation, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism in Taiwan’s 2016 Presidential Election

Based on the literature about the role of rising nationalism in recent world politics, this paper proposes a nationalism-oriented causal model to explain the voting choices of different social groups. With an interest-identity framework, this generic model is applied to Taiwan’s 2016 presidential election to examine whether and to what extent 11 causal mechanisms influence the voting choices of four groups defined by generation, class, and ethnicity. The findings not only reveal generational, class-based, and ethnic differences in Taiwanese voting behavior; they also show that the election was largely one of identity politics centered around the issues of national identity and democratic identification, making the “interest card” played by Beijing less effective in swaying voter choices. This explains why Beijing’s divide-and-conquer economic policy successfully divided Taiwanese voters but failed in the end to prevent the pro-independence candidate from winning the election. The findings also indicate that the economic concerns of voters promoted both their Taiwanese identity and support for Taiwan independence, while identification with Taiwan’s democracy contributed directly to the former and only indirectly to the latter. Overall, the model presents a more fine-grained analysis of nationalist politics and may be applied to the studies of other political behaviors involving nationalism.

Aboriginal Museums and the Construction of a Taiwanese Identity

This chapter analyses exhibitionary spaces dedicated to the aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. The first part of the chapter looks at two museums—the Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines (順益台灣原住民博物館‎) and the Ketagalan Culture Center (凱達格蘭文化館‎)—that reflect two different agendas. The first is a private museum opened in 1994 around the personal collection of the Shung Ye Foundation, a philanthropic arm of the Shung Ye Group, a distributor of Mitsubishi products in Taiwan. The second is state-funded and was a pet project of former president Chen Shui-bian. Although the motivations for their founding may be different, both museums project the view that aboriginal cultures are important features of a united multiethnic nation. The second part of the chapter focuses on two theme parks centered on aboriginal cultures, one of which is highly commercialized and the other more academic in orientation. These parks represent simultaneously the commodification and politicization of ethnic cultures.