Hmmmmmm. I just read this news story over at the Expatica site and thought about how it relates to Taiwan. The Japanese were in Taiwan ALOT longer than the Germans in Holland. So now maybe the question should “Taiwanese: Chinese or Japanese?”
German soldiers ‘fathered 50,000 Dutch children’
AMSTERDAM
I hate to get on my soap box, but…
The Japanese were on orders not to touch the local women. It was seen as stooping down. It’s not that it didn’t happen…and later in the late 1930’s and 40’s it was not frowned upon so much. The most Japanese mixing occured in the mountain areas where japanese policemen/school teachers/care takers married with girls from the highland tribes or atleast…got down with some of them. To talk ethnicity in Taiwan is a very slippery subject mixing cultural myths with historical fact and the weight of prejudice.
Dutch records record numerous accounts of Dutchmen marrying plains aborigines including Robertus Junius. The Dutch actually encouraged mixing to better spread religeon and loyalty through out the plain. When the Dutch withdrew, men who had married into the tribes were allowed to stay. The Dutch also recorded the common practice of Han deer hunters staying with aboriginal girls and “causing discontent” in the tribes. The plains aborigines had differing sexual customs and many tribes were matrilineal/matrilocal where women could freely have sex with a variety of men until she found one she liked.Couples usually didn’t marry until their thirties. One Dutch document describes a Siraya man making love with his wife and emerging from the back of the hut covered in sweat and exhausted. He then asked the Reverend Junius to please have a go for the Sirayan was worn out.
Available women were so scarce in Koxinga’s time he had girls brought from indonesia. By the time the Koxinga armies had been dispersed by the Qing, there were only 7000 Han farmers left and allowed to stay for they, like the Dutch, had taken wives in the tribal villages.
The men who arrived during the Qing were mostly young men who were unmarried or their families were held as ransom in China for his return. Despite the restriction to male crossings, the Taiwanese population continued to rise. Many of the large land holding families acquired land through marriage to aboriginal women. The Zhangs of Taichung, Lins of Ban Qiao, Lins of WuFeng…the Ku family etc…all married into tribes to gain land as the Qing allowed aborigines and the government to own land, everyone else had to rent…unless they were given the land by the owner…hehehe. Some of these men took several wives and loaned it to rentors to hide land from the government.
Through the 19th century the plains people acculturated into Han society to reap the riches of Handom. The Qing actually had an Affirmative Action program for hakkas and aborigines in the Civil Service exam. British reports of southern Taiwan often speak of entire villages of mixed people…especially Heng Chun and Che Cheng in Pintung. Family geneologies are faked to create a link to China and hide the mixed character of taiwanese families. The grave stones in Taiwan usually have Chinese homes listed in the custom, more out of tradition than of reality.
After the Chinese arrived in 1945, they tended to stick together to avoid mixing with a “lower class”, but the poorer soldiers, out of necessity, bought local wives. Many of the wives purchased by the KMT soldiers were poor women and aborigines. The childern of such marriages mostly claimed a Chinese ethnic identity to avoid the negative stereotype of being a lower caste. The legislator Gao Jin Su Mei is one such example as she was Chinese until she wanted to become a legislator and then exploited her mother’s ethnic classification as an Atayal, an unusual choice as until recently the children of any marriage belonged to the man and to be an aborigine both parents, then later just the father had to be aborigine.
Today people are mixing more than ever with southeast Asians, Chinese, Europeans, African Americans, Euromericans etc… all becoming parents to Taiwanese children.
The question of Taiwan’s national identity as Chinese or independent does not hinge on ethnicity. Ethnicity is a poor and convoluted way of determining a national identity and is meaningless if compared to contradictory self and group identities.
Where ethnicity does play a part is in realizing Taiwan as a multi-ethnic/multi-cultural society. Schools need to drop the propaganda that “we are all Chinese” and make way for the other people who are becoming Taiwanese and clearing the way for a new Taiwanese identity. The reality IS, that Taiwan and Taiwanese need to make room for a new discourse on Taiwanese ethnic identity to give equal space in Taiwan for all the people who call Taiwan home. As more foreigners marry Taiwanese, the “all Chinese” discourse is going to discriminate against the children of such marriages and the old discourse leaves little room for other Taiwanese cultures, such as aborigines. By leaving China to China, Taiwan becomes the common ground for all people born or living in Taiwan regardless of ethnicity.
Do you think you could develop a Taiwanese identity?
Just a quick note: ethnicity need not be interpreted in terms of blood quantum or patrilineal descent, those are Western and Chinese assumptions (respectively). A lot depends on who you think you are, which can easily change from one political regime to another.
exactly! and also group identity.