Identity Politics and Foreign Policy: Taiwan's Relations with China and Japan, 1895-2012.

[Aepsilons]

ON 7 SEPTEMBER 2010, A CHINESE FISHING BOAT collided with two Japanese Coast Guard vessels near the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands within Japan's claimed exclusive economic zone. The Japanese Coast Guard detained the crew and ship but thereafter let them go, only to hand over the Chinese captain to prosecutors for obstructing its execution of duties. The Chinese government immediately protested to Japan and demanded the release of the captain. The situation only calmed down in late September when the Japanese government set the captain free but refused to apologize or give compensation.

When diplomatic tensions escalated, nationalist activists across the Taiwan Strait quickly mobilized. Meeting in Taipei on 11 September, activists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau said that they planned to sail from a fishing port in northern Taiwan to Diaoyu/Senkaku to stage a protest there. At this baodiao [defending Diaoyu] forum, Taipei county councilor King Chieh-shou, from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and Hong Kong legislative council member Leung Kwok-hung called for the Chinese and Taiwanese governments to work together and take a stronger stance against Japan. Chinese activists were also scheduled to leave port Xiamen for the islands at roughly the same time.[1] These moves echoed the voices from mainland China and Hong Kong urging the two sides to jointly protect the maritime sovereignty of the motherland.[2] Further, cross-strait cooperation received implicit endorsement from Beijing. When asked to comment on the baodiao activities in Taiwan, the spokeswoman for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council stated twice that safeguarding sovereignty over the islands conformed to the common interests of people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.[3]

Pressed by calls for joint actions with Beijing, responses from Taipei were rather cool. During the incident, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reiterated the Republic of China's (ROC) sovereignty claim but denied that it was siding with China. Ships of the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) escorted a Taiwanese fishing boat to protest at the islands, but the CGA said it was to protect Taiwanese fishermen, not to support baodiao activists, and that the action had nothing to do with China.[4] Moreover, Taipei blocked Hong Kong and Macau activists from using Taiwanese fishing boats to stage protests by threatening to revoke the Taiwanese captains' licenses and deny entry visas to the activists in the future.[5] In the meantime, Taipei repeatedly called on all parties to exercise restraint. President Ma Ying-jeou made it clear on 28 September that the government would protect the interests and rights of Taiwan fishermen but also wanted to maintain the status quo of these islands because Taiwan is in a sensitive position.[6] Similarly, since the flare-up of the disputes in July 2012, Taipei has asserted sovereignty rights but called for restraint and peace, and rejected cooperation with China.

Taiwan's position seems perplexing. Not only had Taipei led the protests since 1970, shortly after the United States had included them as part of Okinawato bereturned to Japan's control, but alsoMa himself is known for being a baodiao activist and legal specialist.[7] Why did the Ma government try to stay out of Sino-Japanese territorial disputes despite its own stake in them? How to explain Taiwan's complex attitude toward China and Japan? Because Taiwan has always been a sensitive issue in Sino-Japanese relations, and cross-strait relations can potentially become one of the most dangerous flashpoints in the region, one needs to understand the Taiwan-China-Japan triangle.

The existing literature on Taiwan-Japan relations has covered extensively their historical and cultural links, economic and security interdependence, and shared democratic ideology -- often in comparison with Taiwan's respective ties with China.[8] Recognizing the relative importance of China and Japan to Taiwan is certainly useful to understanding their triangular relations. But Taiwan is not merely a prize for Sino-Japanese competition, whereby whichever power demonstrating more shared interest or cultural traits with Taiwan would draw Taiwan closer. Nor are Taiwan's external behaviors always a coherent strategic choice based on a rational cost-benefit calculation. Rather, the behaviors are often intertwined with the shifting self-images of Taiwan in relation to outside powers and the intense tug-of-war between domestic forces taking interest in these self-images. In other words, one cannot fully comprehend Taiwan's foreign relations if leaving out the psychological and political contestation over national identity.

This article treats identity politics as an important domestic determinant of foreign policy preferences and uses the Self-Other theory to approach it. The first section introduces the conception and spells out the impact of national "Othering" on foreign policy. It becomes particularly complex when this approach is applied to a settler colony, like Taiwan, where the national Self is defined first and foremost in response to the perception of its master nations. There, creole nationalism vis-à-vis the ethnic/cultural mother countries often functions as a critical ideology shaping national identity discourse. The next two sections illustrate the argument through a historical analysis of the role played by China and Japan as the two primary Others in Taiwan's self identification, first in 1895-1980s, and later during the Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian administrations. The analysis focuses on an imaginary China-versus-Japan battle long prevalent in Taiwan's identity politics separate from if not entirely independent of Sino-Japanese relations in the real world. This identity discourse has been utilized not only by the Japanese and Chinese rulers who tried to win over the local population when they descended on Taiwan, but also by Taiwan's creole nationalists who draw upon Japanese colonial legacy in order to form a unique historical and cultural basis for a national identity detached from China. The subsequent section explores Ma Ying-jeou's attempt to redirect Taiwan's identity discourse so that it would no longer set the two Others against each another but instead portray them both as Taiwan's friends. The new identity construct has motivated the Ma government to draw close to China and Japan simultaneously. This policy is designed not only to gain economic and security benefits for Taiwan but also to maximize his domestic political support vis-à-vis the opposition. But implementing this policy is no easy job, given the competitive Sino-Japanese relationship that frequently pressures Taiwan to take sides. China's policy toward Taiwan is another uncertain factor constraining Taiwan's diplomacy. The paper concludes that as long as China and Japan get along well and Beijing maintains a moderate approach to cross-strait relations, Taiwan may befriend both powers. Should the Sino-Japanese rivalry intensify and Beijing turn more assertive toward Taiwan, however, Taiwan's ambivalent diplomacy would meet stern challenges both from China and Japan externally and from internal forces contesting national identity.

 

[Aepsilons]

Japanese colonization from 1895 to 1945 and postwar KMT rule of Taiwan have often been juxtaposed in terms of their "wrestling with the challenge of subordinating the native society to its authoritarian rule."[24] The success of both regimes in accomplishing the goal lies in an adaptive practice of governance that, over time, managed to co-opt, incorporate, and transform the local elite to support the regimes' nation-building and state-building vision. To facilitate the process, both made systematic attempts to construct a dominant Japanese or Chinese identity in Taiwanese society, often through a coercive cultural policy to suppress local consciousness. Specifically, after WWI, the Japanese colonial government tried to acculturate the Taiwanese under the "principle of homeland extensionism" [naichi encho shugi], proclaiming to treat them the same as Japanese citizens. Further, in the 1930s and '40s, to sustain an all-out war first with China and later with Western powers as well, a Japanization campaign was launched to immediately turn the Taiwanese people into "subjects of the emperor" [kominka]. Kominka facilitated the extraction of massive resources, manpower, and logistic assistance from Taiwan. The Taiwanese were urged to wear Japanese clothes, adopt Japanese customs, switch from local religions to Shintoism, and speak the Japanese language. The primary target of this assimilation policy was the China Other, which not only had deep cultural roots in Taiwan but also was a major enemy country in the war that Japan was waging. Taiwanese allegiance to Japan would be highly suspect if their spiritual ties with China remained thick. Therefore, from the very beginning, Japanization was carried out hand in hand with desinicization. Schools prohibited the use of the Chinese language, Chinese newspapers were banned altogether, and even people's Chinese names were replaced by Japanese ones. By the end of the war, it was estimated that two-thirds of the Taiwanese population had been Japanized.[25] The younger generation, who would experience the transition to KMT rule later, was more receptive to Japanization, and many of them were sent to battlefields in China, though not always voluntarily.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, its colonial subjugation campaign was halted. Even before controlling Taiwan, the KMT government was determined to reverse the influence of Japanization and foster a China-centered identity.[26] Similar to the Japanese imperialization of Taiwan, the siniciza-tion campaign of the KMT was aimed at both national integration and securing Taiwanese support to its conflict with the Communists on the mainland. After losing the civil war in 1949, the KMT regime headed by Chiang Kai-shek faced an even more critical task of nationalizing the Taiwanese people to justify its governance, both locally vis-à-vis the Taiwanese population and internationally under the legitimacy challenge from the Communist regime. In the officially promoted "One China" vision, Taiwan was claimed to be a part of the ROC along with the mainland, the Taiwanese were Chinese, and the KMT government was the sole legitimate government representing China.[27]

In the KMT's identity discourse, though not so much in its foreign policy, Japan became a negative national Other. New cultural policy in direct denial of the colonial legacy was introduced from 1946 onward, beginning with promoting Mandarin Chinese and forbidding the use of Japanese in schools. Japanese newspapers and magazines in Taiwan were also eliminated.[28] History textbooks from the 1950s through the 1980s described Chinese suffering since the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War, including Taiwan's colonization at the hands of the Japanese, and stressed the mutual inspiration and assistance of the Taiwanese and Chinese in resisting Japanese invasion.[29] The government also encouraged and sometimes directly sponsored the production of anti-Japanese war movies, such as through the state-run Zhongying [Central Film Company]. The 1970s in particular saw a wave of war movies because of the urgent need to boost national confidence after the ROC lost its seat at the United Nations. While most of these movies focused on the heroic struggles of the Nationalist forces on the mainland, a few depicted Taiwan's resistance movement. One prominent example was the 1976 film Meihua [Plum Blossom], named after the national flower of the ROC, which used a family tale to spell out the connections between the resistance campaigns in Taiwan and the mainland. It was a big hit once released, and the theme song, Meihua, became one of the most popular songs in Taiwan.

Thus, the Other images of China and Japan were pitted against one another in top-down identity projects to nationalize Taiwan both by the Japanese and by the KMT. Meanwhile, such a China-Japan image clash was played out in social resistance against official culture in both periods. Wakabayashi argues that the very birth of modern Taiwanese nationalism was a response to Japanese colonization. The Taiwanese people did not realize a distinct Self until they became discriminated members of the Japanese empire.[30] Striving for equality and dignity, colonial nationalist elites emphasized Taiwan's uniqueness, and from the 1920s, petitioned for self-rule by establishing Taiwan's own parliament. The political campaign was accompanied by the activities of the Taiwan Culture Association to bring cultural enlightenment to Taiwan. But it is hard to see these developments as creole nationalism yet since colonial resistance in Taiwan, even at the highest point, never developed into a full-fledged independence movement.[31] Moreover, an important, though not the entire, theme of the cultural movement was to urge Taiwanese people to appreciate their Han Chinese traditions. It is in this sense that "the colonial nationalist projects of 'Taiwanese consciousness' were in many cases endeavors including a pursuit of 'Chineseness."[32] To be sure, Taiwan was physically isolated from China for the large part before 1945. But native elites were seized with a sentimental draw to the ancestral homeland in either an open or an inner opposition to Japanese colonization.[33]

After WWII, the Taiwanese people initially welcomed Chinese rule, but they soon resented the wholesale repudiation of the Japanese legacy by the new regime. Forbidden to speak Mandarin Chinese or local dialects, colonial Taiwan had been using Japanese as the only intellectual language and Japanese education as the bridge to the outside world. Native elites felt a loss of self-identity when the Japanese language was abruptly banned in social life.[34] Cultural frustration was compounded by socio-economic grievances as Taiwanese resources were siphoned off to support the KMT's war against the Communists, official corruption went rampant, and main-landers enjoyed political and economic privileges while native elites were largely kept out of the new government. The KMT's justification for denying the Taiwanese political participation was that, having been "enslaved" in the Japanese empire and "infected" by the colonial education for half century, Taiwan not only lagged behind Chinese cultural progress but also was disloyal to the motherland; so before being reintegrated into China through lengthy reeducation programs, the Taiwanese were unfit to govern themselves.

As in British and Spanish America, where discontent toward the imperial metropole led to the colonies' assertion of the cultural and political Self, the oppressive rule of a mainlanders' regime sparked the creolization of Taiwanese nationalism vis-à-vis the Chinese motherland. By 1946, Taiwanese elites commonly believed that the KMT was treating Taiwan as a colony, and likened it to the Japanese colonizers, except that the KMT colonization was even worse. They began to draw upon past experiences of striving for self-government during the Japanese period to demand greater political influence.[35] But their attempt collapsed in the February 28 (2-28) Incident in 1947 in which an island-wide uprising of native Taiwanese was violently put down by Nationalist forces. Thereafter, the KMT regime blamed the "poisonous" effect of Japanization for causing the incident, and made it clear that calling for self-government was tantamount to seeking independence.[3] Although temporarily suspending political activism in the island, after the incident, Taiwanese nationalists actually abandoned the moderate goal of self-government and gravitated to an explicit movement to create an independent Taiwanese state. Pro-independence Taiwanese, largely operating in exile, rejected the "One China" thesis with a Taiwan-centered creole identity. They played down the historical and cultural bonds between the Taiwanese and mainlanders while stressing the latter's contempt for and discrimination against the former in past centuries. Further, they claimed that culturally and materially, Taiwan was far ahead of the mainland, citing the half century of modernization and westernization introduced during Japanese colonization.[37] By this logic, Taiwanese civilization would be both different from and superior to that of China, and China had lost Taiwan by moral forfeit. Ironically, the cultural influence of the Japan Other, which had been the target of Taiwanese nationalist struggles before 1945, was now held up as a powerful symbol to resist the China Other personified by the KMT regime.

For nearly a century since Taiwan was ceded to Japan, the Taiwanese people have constantly wrestled with the question of how to define their national Self. In the course of this political battle, a paradigmatic debate pitting the Chinese and Japanese Others against one another took shape between different groups of nationalist elites. For those who wished to mobilize support for a non-Chinese political entity (that is, a Japanese colonial regime and Taiwanese creole nationalists), Japan was presented as a benign and intimate Other in order to suppress or dilute feelings of Chineseness on the island. Conversely, for those who opposed a non-Chinese political entity (that is, anti-colonial elites and the post-war KMT regime), China assumed the role of a father figure in contrast to a vicious Japan.

This discursive confrontation is not simply a product of the Sino-Japanese conflict in the real world. Aside from their two wars in modern history, China and Japan were not each other's archenemies and even had some degree of cooperation, such as during the nationalist revolution in the late Qing dynasty and after their diplomatic normalization in 1972. Nor is the China-versus-Japan dichotomy a reflection of spontaneous emotions or purely historical perception. Taiwan's pro-independence elites, for instance, claim a longstanding, widespread sense of separation in Taiwanese society vis-à-vis the mainland -- the so-called fantangshan tradition -- ever since the Qing takeover and well before the February 28 incident, which contradicts the fact that most native Taiwanese initially embraced China after Japan surrendered.

While identity politics is first and foremost about domestic power competition, it significantly shapes and constrains foreign policy. An identity discourse portraying two national Others as mutual adversaries naturally disposes the Self to choose between them in foreign policy. While international structural factors trumped Taiwan's diplomatic preferences in the early Cold War era, leading Chiang to side with America's ally, Japan, against Communist China, democratic Taiwan under Lee and Chen did the same, largely due to identity politics. Favoring Japan over China might not have been the optimal foreign policy maximizing Taiwan's overall interest, inasmuch as it resulted in considerable external tension and worsened Taiwan's security environment, but it served the political agenda of the ruling bloc seeking to legitimize a Taiwan-centric identity as opposed to a China-centric one. Since coming to power, Ma Ying-jeou has recalibrated Taiwan's foreign policy to carve out a more neutral position between China and Japan. The reason is more than the simple fact that Taiwan is the weakest peripheral pole in this asymmetric triangle.[99] To a large extent, Ma is oriented by a new identity conception that, instead of presenting China and Japan as the "either-or" choices, links them with Taiwan in two mutually independent self-other nexuses, each containing a bifurcated interpretation of the Other in question. That is to say, Japanese colonization oppressed the Taiwanese people but contributed to local development, and Japan can still help Taiwan today; China is the ultimate fatherland, but the mainlanders should take responsibility for their misrule of Taiwan in the early postwar decades comparable to Japanese colonization. Also, acknowledging the clear trend of creole nationalism in Taiwan, the new discourse concurs with the Taiwan-centric discourse from the Lee and Chen eras that the Taiwanese people have formed a unique cultural tradition in addition to Chinese elements and deserve the right to determine their own lives. Overall, Ma wishes to convince people in Taiwan that they can be both Taiwanese and Chinese, and that befriending China and Japan simultaneously should not be an ideologically prohibited option.[100]

Essentially intended to reconcile the polarized political views in Taiwan, Ma's new identity discourse appeals to those Taiwanese who are ambiguous and undetermined about where Taiwan belongs. His policy of cooperation with both China and Japan also initially seemed useful in controlling the diplomatic damage done by the previous Chen government. After Ma entered his second term and expectations for permanently resolving the cross-strait impasse were ratcheted up, however, this way of handling foreign relations has been under challenge. The sheer power of China and its unswerving ambition about national greatness constitute an omnipresent pressure for Taiwan to operate in China's orbit. At the same time, Ma must be mindful of the growing apprehension of Japan and other Asian countries toward an ever-stronger and assertive China in the region. Neutrality between China and Japan is particularly difficult in light of a Sino-Japanese rivalry currently unfolding in the real world. While a Sino-Japanese conflict of interest can be moderated by their shared interests, which are quite substantial, their contrasting values, represented by autocracy and democracy, cannot. When the two major powers lock horns, the implications for Taiwan are profound. In the 2012 Sino-Japanese island disputes, both countries watched Taiwan's moves closely and hoped to draw it to their own side of the fence. Domestically, the Ma government is jostled by those eager to approach China and others who resolutely reject China, in addition to the moderate majority who nevertheless identify themselves increasingly with Taiwan. How it reacts to a Sino-Japanese crisis is subject to internal scrutiny, and any missteps can easily be turned into political campaign issues. All these forces stand to push Ma's delicate foreign policy off balance.

Predictably, the deeply entrenched China-versus-Japan dichotomy will continue to enjoy currency in Taiwan's identity politics no matter how hard the Ma government tries to play it down. Even Ma himself has consciously played the Japan card to mitigate his pro-China image and has used the anti-Japanese history to consolidate his support base within the KMT. Because it is inextricably tied to the ambivalent and ever-changing self-identity of the Taiwanese people, striking a balance between the Chinese and Japanese Others is a creative but also daunting task. When managing Sino-Japanese and cross-strait relations, one should be sensitive to the complex identity politics in Taiwan and its impact on Taiwan-China-Japan triangular relations.[*]




Reference:

HE, Y. (2014). Identity Politics and Foreign Policy: Taiwan's Relations with China and Japan, 1895-2012. Political Science Quarterly (Wiley-Blackwell), 129(3), 469-500.

 

[CCP]

There is how China and US identify taiwan and japan.

None care about how taiwan and japan identify themselves.

 

[Nan Yang]

Japanese colonization from 1895 to 1945 and postwar KMT rule of Taiwan have often been juxtaposed in terms of their "wrestling with the challenge of subordinating the native society to its authoritarian rule."[24] The success of both regimes in accomplishing the goal lies in an adaptive practice of governance that, over time, managed to co-opt, incorporate, and transform the local elite to support the regimes' nation-building and state-building vision. To facilitate the process, both made systematic attempts to construct a dominant Japanese or Chinese identity in Taiwanese society, often through a coercive cultural policy to suppress local consciousness. Specifically, after WWI, the Japanese colonial government tried to acculturate the Taiwanese under the "principle of homeland extensionism" [naichi encho shugi], proclaiming to treat them the same as Japanese citizens. Further, in the 1930s and '40s, to sustain an all-out war first with China and later with Western powers as well, a Japanization campaign was launched to immediately turn the Taiwanese people into "subjects of the emperor" [kominka]. Kominka facilitated the extraction of massive resources, manpower, and logistic assistance from Taiwan. The Taiwanese were urged to wear Japanese clothes, adopt Japanese customs, switch from local religions to Shintoism, and speak the Japanese language. The primary target of this assimilation policy was the China Other, which not only had deep cultural roots in Taiwan but also was a major enemy country in the war that Japan was waging. Taiwanese allegiance to Japan would be highly suspect if their spiritual ties with China remained thick. Therefore, from the very beginning, Japanization was carried out hand in hand with desinicization. Schools prohibited the use of the Chinese language, Chinese newspapers were banned altogether, and even people's Chinese names were replaced by Japanese ones. By the end of the war, it was estimated that two-thirds of the Taiwanese population had been Japanized.[25] The younger generation, who would experience the transition to KMT rule later, was more receptive to Japanization, and many of them were sent to battlefields in China, though not always voluntarily.

When Japan surrendered in 1945, its colonial subjugation campaign was halted. Even before controlling Taiwan, the KMT government was determined to reverse the influence of Japanization and foster a China-centered identity.[26] Similar to the Japanese imperialization of Taiwan, the siniciza-tion campaign of the KMT was aimed at both national integration and securing Taiwanese support to its conflict with the Communists on the mainland. After losing the civil war in 1949, the KMT regime headed by Chiang Kai-shek faced an even more critical task of nationalizing the Taiwanese people to justify its governance, both locally vis-à-vis the Taiwanese population and internationally under the legitimacy challenge from the Communist regime. In the officially promoted "One China" vision, Taiwan was claimed to be a part of the ROC along with the mainland, the Taiwanese were Chinese, and the KMT government was the sole legitimate government representing China.[27]

In the KMT's identity discourse, though not so much in its foreign policy, Japan became a negative national Other. New cultural policy in direct denial of the colonial legacy was introduced from 1946 onward, beginning with promoting Mandarin Chinese and forbidding the use of Japanese in schools. Japanese newspapers and magazines in Taiwan were also eliminated.[28] History textbooks from the 1950s through the 1980s described Chinese suffering since the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War, including Taiwan's colonization at the hands of the Japanese, and stressed the mutual inspiration and assistance of the Taiwanese and Chinese in resisting Japanese invasion.[29] The government also encouraged and sometimes directly sponsored the production of anti-Japanese war movies, such as through the state-run Zhongying [Central Film Company]. The 1970s in particular saw a wave of war movies because of the urgent need to boost national confidence after the ROC lost its seat at the United Nations. While most of these movies focused on the heroic struggles of the Nationalist forces on the mainland, a few depicted Taiwan's resistance movement. One prominent example was the 1976 film Meihua [Plum Blossom], named after the national flower of the ROC, which used a family tale to spell out the connections between the resistance campaigns in Taiwan and the mainland. It was a big hit once released, and the theme song, Meihua, became one of the most popular songs in Taiwan.

Thus, the Other images of China and Japan were pitted against one another in top-down identity projects to nationalize Taiwan both by the Japanese and by the KMT. Meanwhile, such a China-Japan image clash was played out in social resistance against official culture in both periods. Wakabayashi argues that the very birth of modern Taiwanese nationalism was a response to Japanese colonization. The Taiwanese people did not realize a distinct Self until they became discriminated members of the Japanese empire.[30] Striving for equality and dignity, colonial nationalist elites emphasized Taiwan's uniqueness, and from the 1920s, petitioned for self-rule by establishing Taiwan's own parliament. The political campaign was accompanied by the activities of the Taiwan Culture Association to bring cultural enlightenment to Taiwan. But it is hard to see these developments as creole nationalism yet since colonial resistance in Taiwan, even at the highest point, never developed into a full-fledged independence movement.[31] Moreover, an important, though not the entire, theme of the cultural movement was to urge Taiwanese people to appreciate their Han Chinese traditions. It is in this sense that "the colonial nationalist projects of 'Taiwanese consciousness' were in many cases endeavors including a pursuit of 'Chineseness."[32] To be sure, Taiwan was physically isolated from China for the large part before 1945. But native elites were seized with a sentimental draw to the ancestral homeland in either an open or an inner opposition to Japanese colonization.[33]

After WWII, the Taiwanese people initially welcomed Chinese rule, but they soon resented the wholesale repudiation of the Japanese legacy by the new regime. Forbidden to speak Mandarin Chinese or local dialects, colonial Taiwan had been using Japanese as the only intellectual language and Japanese education as the bridge to the outside world. Native elites felt a loss of self-identity when the Japanese language was abruptly banned in social life.[34] Cultural frustration was compounded by socio-economic grievances as Taiwanese resources were siphoned off to support the KMT's war against the Communists, official corruption went rampant, and main-landers enjoyed political and economic privileges while native elites were largely kept out of the new government. The KMT's justification for denying the Taiwanese political participation was that, having been "enslaved" in the Japanese empire and "infected" by the colonial education for half century, Taiwan not only lagged behind Chinese cultural progress but also was disloyal to the motherland; so before being reintegrated into China through lengthy reeducation programs, the Taiwanese were unfit to govern themselves.

As in British and Spanish America, where discontent toward the imperial metropole led to the colonies' assertion of the cultural and political Self, the oppressive rule of a mainlanders' regime sparked the creolization of Taiwanese nationalism vis-à-vis the Chinese motherland. By 1946, Taiwanese elites commonly believed that the KMT was treating Taiwan as a colony, and likened it to the Japanese colonizers, except that the KMT colonization was even worse. They began to draw upon past experiences of striving for self-government during the Japanese period to demand greater political influence.[35] But their attempt collapsed in the February 28 (2-28) Incident in 1947 in which an island-wide uprising of native Taiwanese was violently put down by Nationalist forces. Thereafter, the KMT regime blamed the "poisonous" effect of Japanization for causing the incident, and made it clear that calling for self-government was tantamount to seeking independence.[3] Although temporarily suspending political activism in the island, after the incident, Taiwanese nationalists actually abandoned the moderate goal of self-government and gravitated to an explicit movement to create an independent Taiwanese state. Pro-independence Taiwanese, largely operating in exile, rejected the "One China" thesis with a Taiwan-centered creole identity. They played down the historical and cultural bonds between the Taiwanese and mainlanders while stressing the latter's contempt for and discrimination against the former in past centuries. Further, they claimed that culturally and materially, Taiwan was far ahead of the mainland, citing the half century of modernization and westernization introduced during Japanese colonization.[37] By this logic, Taiwanese civilization would be both different from and superior to that of China, and China had lost Taiwan by moral forfeit. Ironically, the cultural influence of the Japan Other, which had been the target of Taiwanese nationalist struggles before 1945, was now held up as a powerful symbol to resist the China Other personified by the KMT regime.

For nearly a century since Taiwan was ceded to Japan, the Taiwanese people have constantly wrestled with the question of how to define their national Self. In the course of this political battle, a paradigmatic debate pitting the Chinese and Japanese Others against one another took shape between different groups of nationalist elites. For those who wished to mobilize support for a non-Chinese political entity (that is, a Japanese colonial regime and Taiwanese creole nationalists), Japan was presented as a benign and intimate Other in order to suppress or dilute feelings of Chineseness on the island. Conversely, for those who opposed a non-Chinese political entity (that is, anti-colonial elites and the post-war KMT regime), China assumed the role of a father figure in contrast to a vicious Japan.

This discursive confrontation is not simply a product of the Sino-Japanese conflict in the real world. Aside from their two wars in modern history, China and Japan were not each other's archenemies and even had some degree of cooperation, such as during the nationalist revolution in the late Qing dynasty and after their diplomatic normalization in 1972. Nor is the China-versus-Japan dichotomy a reflection of spontaneous emotions or purely historical perception. Taiwan's pro-independence elites, for instance, claim a longstanding, widespread sense of separation in Taiwanese society vis-à-vis the mainland -- the so-called fantangshan tradition -- ever since the Qing takeover and well before the February 28 incident, which contradicts the fact that most native Taiwanese initially embraced China after Japan surrendered.

While identity politics is first and foremost about domestic power competition, it significantly shapes and constrains foreign policy. An identity discourse portraying two national Others as mutual adversaries naturally disposes the Self to choose between them in foreign policy. While international structural factors trumped Taiwan's diplomatic preferences in the early Cold War era, leading Chiang to side with America's ally, Japan, against Communist China, democratic Taiwan under Lee and Chen did the same, largely due to identity politics. Favoring Japan over China might not have been the optimal foreign policy maximizing Taiwan's overall interest, inasmuch as it resulted in considerable external tension and worsened Taiwan's security environment, but it served the political agenda of the ruling bloc seeking to legitimize a Taiwan-centric identity as opposed to a China-centric one. Since coming to power, Ma Ying-jeou has recalibrated Taiwan's foreign policy to carve out a more neutral position between China and Japan. The reason is more than the simple fact that Taiwan is the weakest peripheral pole in this asymmetric triangle.[99] To a large extent, Ma is oriented by a new identity conception that, instead of presenting China and Japan as the "either-or" choices, links them with Taiwan in two mutually independent self-other nexuses, each containing a bifurcated interpretation of the Other in question. That is to say, Japanese colonization oppressed the Taiwanese people but contributed to local development, and Japan can still help Taiwan today; China is the ultimate fatherland, but the mainlanders should take responsibility for their misrule of Taiwan in the early postwar decades comparable to Japanese colonization. Also, acknowledging the clear trend of creole nationalism in Taiwan, the new discourse concurs with the Taiwan-centric discourse from the Lee and Chen eras that the Taiwanese people have formed a unique cultural tradition in addition to Chinese elements and deserve the right to determine their own lives. Overall, Ma wishes to convince people in Taiwan that they can be both Taiwanese and Chinese, and that befriending China and Japan simultaneously should not be an ideologically prohibited option.[100]

Essentially intended to reconcile the polarized political views in Taiwan, Ma's new identity discourse appeals to those Taiwanese who are ambiguous and undetermined about where Taiwan belongs. His policy of cooperation with both China and Japan also initially seemed useful in controlling the diplomatic damage done by the previous Chen government. After Ma entered his second term and expectations for permanently resolving the cross-strait impasse were ratcheted up, however, this way of handling foreign relations has been under challenge. The sheer power of China and its unswerving ambition about national greatness constitute an omnipresent pressure for Taiwan to operate in China's orbit. At the same time, Ma must be mindful of the growing apprehension of Japan and other Asian countries toward an ever-stronger and assertive China in the region. Neutrality between China and Japan is particularly difficult in light of a Sino-Japanese rivalry currently unfolding in the real world. While a Sino-Japanese conflict of interest can be moderated by their shared interests, which are quite substantial, their contrasting values, represented by autocracy and democracy, cannot. When the two major powers lock horns, the implications for Taiwan are profound. In the 2012 Sino-Japanese island disputes, both countries watched Taiwan's moves closely and hoped to draw it to their own side of the fence. Domestically, the Ma government is jostled by those eager to approach China and others who resolutely reject China, in addition to the moderate majority who nevertheless identify themselves increasingly with Taiwan. How it reacts to a Sino-Japanese crisis is subject to internal scrutiny, and any missteps can easily be turned into political campaign issues. All these forces stand to push Ma's delicate foreign policy off balance.

Predictably, the deeply entrenched China-versus-Japan dichotomy will continue to enjoy currency in Taiwan's identity politics no matter how hard the Ma government tries to play it down. Even Ma himself has consciously played the Japan card to mitigate his pro-China image and has used the anti-Japanese history to consolidate his support base within the KMT. Because it is inextricably tied to the ambivalent and ever-changing self-identity of the Taiwanese people, striking a balance between the Chinese and Japanese Others is a creative but also daunting task. When managing Sino-Japanese and cross-strait relations, one should be sensitive to the complex identity politics in Taiwan and its impact on Taiwan-China-Japan triangular relations.[*]




Reference:

HE, Y. (2014). Identity Politics and Foreign Policy: Taiwan's Relations with China and Japan, 1895-2012. Political Science Quarterly (Wiley-Blackwell), 129(3), 469-500.

Very obsess with Taiwan you are. Even gave me a negative rating because of that?

 

[XiaoYaoZi]

There is how China and US identify taiwan and japan.

None care about how taiwan and japan identify themselves.

Very obsess with Taiwan you are. Even gave me a negative rating because of that?

He always likes to abuse his "PDF think tank: analyst" status by giving negative ratings to revenge other Chinese members.

 

[Aepsilons]

Very obsess with Taiwan you are. Even gave me a negative rating because of that?

Taiwan is what we in the field of academia refer to as being of national personal autonomy. Thus, the State of Taiwan is critical to various geopolitical paradigm interests. As an academician who has interest in China-Taiwan as it relegates to Japan and the Japanese Order in conjunction with the United States' Global Policy --- its a forte of mine. A special interest.

You were given an infarction because you used an inappropriate slur term. Please evade in using slur terms in the future.