Taiwanese vs Chinese Identity

I think it’s much more serious in South Korea. There was quite a bit of controversy when boy bands were exempted there last December.
In Taiwan, when Jay Chou was exempted for back pains, then went on to perform martial arts moves in Green Hornet, it was generally laughed off. “Well, who wouldn’t?” seemed to be the prevailing attitude.

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Eek. I hope we can set our sights on a situation that worked out slightly better and a lot more peaceful. My bunker just got 10m deeper…

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I think this is natural after a few generations of people separated from the country that is now China. Even the people who fled here with the KMT have been a few generations removed from the idea of Chinese ethnic unity, their kids and grandkids didn’t grow up in communist China, they grew up in free Taiwan. Many are like me, born after democratic elections. It’s all I’ve ever known, I was born a free man. The idea of being under a country like China is not appealing.

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For sure. But military service is looked down, for long-standing cultural reasons, even if it were fun and exciting. This isn’t controversial.

Idk. People used to take it seriously and were proud their sons were going. That’s what my father and uncles say. It was respected as your duty to your country. Now it’s a joke and everyone thinks so too.

The Israeli do it very seriously and requires men and women to serve. I think Taiwan should learn from them. Women could play an important role in war as well, maybe not front line stuff but they can do a lot.

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Taiwan is sending soldiers to Israel to learn from their reserve system.

(Just don’t duplicate their human rights record).

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This is from Lee Kuan Yew’s memoirs. He faced an identical problem with Chinese aversion to military service, where virtually all the army enlistees were Malays.

History is important, and as a nation of immigrants, ethnicity isn’t a requirement for being Taiwanese.

The USA isn’t an ethnostate either. But being American means more than territorial sovereignty. It means belief that the government’s role is to give you the freedom to pursue your goals and not take care of you, a lack of a state-run religious monopoly allows religion to flourish, and the American dream of home ownership in the suburbs with a white picket fence.

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Wtf, sure, US politics is more driven by religion than most places in the OECD. Taiwan doesn’t need a Taiwan dream.

The Taiwan identity is coming along quite nicely and there are constant discussions on podcasts and everywhere. Taiwan does not need to copy the US or any top down social engineering

Maybe you should try spending sometime in Taiwan

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This bank commercial does a better job of imagining the nation than anything you are suggesting

I’m not suggesting Taiwan should copy the US, just that the US has something.

You can make a strong case for Taiwan being the purest form of Chinese identity. Mainland destroyed much of it’s cultural identity during the cultural revolution while Nationalists exported as much as they could carry when they left in 1949. Taiwan preserves much of it’s historical identity while mainland has even moved away from traditional Chinese script for writing and reading.

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:clap: :clap: :clap:

As a foreigner who spent an election cycle here and had the opportunity to talk to a good number of Taiwanese about their country as it went through the process of choosing its leader, I find it both curious and amusing that someone who lives 8,000 miles away thinks the country needs a new identity.

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I think you overstate the case for what the US has.

The attempt to force a delta between Taiwanese and Chinese identity is forced and artificial - Taiwanese identity is largely Chinese identity, due to a large proportion of the population being ethnically Chinese, and a large proportion of that having had their families be relatively recent arrivals. Take that, sprinkle in with a little indigenous, japanese, and other colonial aspects, some post wwii history, and some democracy, and bam, Taiwanese identity.

Scroll up, I said exactly what you are saying.

What even Is Chinese identity?

Taiwan has largely a southern min rural Chinese culture (I.e Redneck) with all its superstition.

Mixed with the grandiose KMT rejuvenation of Chinese elite culture.

And then Southern Hakka.

There isn’t one Chinese culture and all of these things are fluid and interchanging. Taiwan is Taiwan

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Of course there’s no one thing - that’s the case with practically everything, but we don’t go around saying things like “but what even is bread?.. there isn’t one bread…” But talking generally, we can make general statements, and when talking identity and culture, we generally talk ethnic groups, religion, values, food, etc. There’s certainly some general statements to be made there.

Specifically with China though, there was never one identity. As Ezra Pound said, “China is a civilization pretending to be a nation State”. China was an empire and then early 20th century , in order to complete with modern Western nations, a national identity and narrative was engineered, mostly by the KMT.

Chinese culture is as nebulous as “European Culture”, to the point where it’s a pretty pointless term.

What’s continuous from Guangdong to Heilongjiang?

Chinese script, Confucianism, using chopsticks…

@Poundsand I’m agreeing with you though, there is no need to engineer any of this

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