Jesper Zeuthen
Department of East Asian Studies, Aarhus University
E-mail: zeuthen@gmx.at.

Nation and Identity in Taiwan: An analysis based on examinations of the public political discussion.

Abstract – In this paper I examine the development of the relationship between nation and state in Taiwan within the last decades and try to compare this development to general theories about the relationship between nation, state and identity. The examination of the relationship between nation and state in Taiwan is based on an analysis of numerous political texts from the last four decades. I am applying this qualitative and historic approach, because most of the research done in this area has been based on surveys. The most notable exception is Hughes (1997, 2000), whose analysis, however, focuses more on foreign politics than does mine. I have thus felt a lack of analysis of the arguments that are actually used in the public political discussion in Taiwan. Because I deal with a long-term development there are many cases in which I could have gone more into detail but choose not to, just as there are probably relevant areas that I do not examine because I am not aware of them. In spite of this I believe that I have managed to give a broad picture that may serve as inspiration for asking new questions. The study of Taiwan also adds interesting perspectives to theories of relationship between nation and state. It seems that although more and more people are starting to think of themselves as Taiwanese, at the same time they also want to think of themselves as belonging to ethnic groups that do not necessarily only consist of people from Taiwan.

Introduction: Taiwan - a Unique Case?

Taiwanese identity in itself is not a new phenomenon. There have probably for a very long time existed persons who identified themselves with Taiwan. The importance and the meaning of Taiwanese identity have, however, changed severely within the last few decades.
A Taiwanese web-add in February 2001 showed some cartoon-like Mainland soldiers in their green uniforms saluting the People's Republic's flag while they sang: "I love China, I love China." The second banner showed an ordinary Taiwanese man wearing glasses and dressed in a suit who said: "I love China, but I love Taiwan even more..." "because", continued the third banner, "Taiwan has Taiwan Telecommunication's ADSL."
The add is a good example of the complex relationship between the not very well defined Chinese identity and the likewise unclear Taiwanese identity.
The development of Taiwanese identity is interesting not only in an East Asian context, but also from a global point of view. Within the Chinese cultural sphere Taiwan is remarkable because it is the only democracy where the majority speak a Chinese language. The island is also interesting because it is the only political entity, besides the People's Republic, that has not either always been controlled by places very far away (i.e. Hong Kong and Macao) or consists of an extremely multiethnic population (i.e. Singapore).
From a global point of view Taiwan is interesting for a number of reasons. Taiwan has de facto been a politically, economically and military sovereign state since 1949, but until at least the mid-eighties it was the official policy of both Taipei and Peking that there ought to be only one China. In itself this is not very different from what has been the case in the relationship between the two parts of other divided countries like Germany and Korea. However, unlike what has been or is the case in these other divided countries, the economic situation in the weaker part is better than in the stronger, and the political system of the weaker part is globally more accepted than that of the stronger.
Taiwan is in many ways a unique case, and it seems fruitful to test Western theories of processes affecting the relationship between nation, state and identity on the Taiwanese experience.

Nation and Identity in a Global Perspective

In recent academic literature there seems to be an agreement that nations are to be viewed as almost exclusively modern phenomenon. The emergence of nations is closely linked to industrialisation where the social structure undergoes severe changes and the mass and elite cultures need to match each other better.
There are very different ways of defining what a nation is. One might get an impression of the different viewpoints one meets among scholars on changes in the relationship between nation, state and identity by examining the theories of two of the most well known scholars of the field: Benedict Anderson and Anthony D. Smith.
Benedict Anderson believes that the nation is a level of identification very close to a pre-modern religious identity. A nation is an imagined community i.e. a community that is so big that all members of the community are not likely to meet each other in their lives. The kind of imagined community formed by a nation is different from an imagined community formed by for instance a political party or a union, because one is thought of as being born into a nation. Belonging to a nation is not in general something you choose, it is rather thought of as one's faith, and it is the only community of faith modern people belong to.
Anderson's individually based view of a nation is different from the view stated by Anthony D. Smith. Smith considers the problem from a more historical point of view. He defines a nation:
"As a named human population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members" (Smith, 1991: p. 43)
This definition in itself does not necessarily contradict that of Anderson. The two scholars just look at the process from very different angles. The major difference is that Smith tends to see the identity in a nation as being ideological rather than religious. He thus defines nationalism as:
"...an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential nation." (Smith, 1991: p. 73)
Smith thinks that there is a core ethnic group in every nation that plays a more important role in forming the national identity than other ethnic groups within the nation. It is implicit in theories of nationalism that each individual only belongs to one nation.

The Origins of Contesting Ethnic Identities in Taiwan.

The first inhabitants of Taiwan were the ancestors of those people who are today called "the aboriginal population" (yuanzhumin) or sometimes "the aboriginal peoples" (yuanzhu minzu). The origins of these groups is a question under dispute, but it is known that they belonged to different tribes, spoke different languages, and did not have any written languages.
The first written reports of Han-Chinese communication with Taiwan are from the 15th century, when people from Fujian on the opposite side of the Taiwan Strait traded with the aboriginal population. However, Han immigration on a larger scale did not start before the 17th century, when it was partly facilitated by Dutch colonisers.
Part of the aboriginal population became married to Han-Chinese and adopted their culture. Other groups became marginalized and had to move to increasingly unattractive parts of the island. Thus until the mid-nineteen nineties the aboriginal population was even in official contexts called mountain people (shandiren or shanbao), even though all Aborigines adopted parts of the Han-Chinese culture.
The Dutch colonisation of Taiwan only lasted for a short period of time. The Chinese-Japanese pirate and Ming-loyalist Koxinga took power in 1662. His clan was defeated by the Qing about 20 years later. Taiwan was part of the Fujian province until 1885, when the island became an independent province under the Qing. The Qing lost Taiwan to Japan after the Sino-Japanese war 1894 – 1895.
The first census in Taiwan was carried out in 1905 by the Japanese rulers. Of the three million inhabitants of the island almost all three million were categorised as Han-Chinese and only around 80,000 as Aborigines.
The Han-Chinese population was composed in a way similar to the one on the opposite side of the Strait. The largest group clearly was the Minnans, but there was also a large number of Hakkas. Both groups spoke Chinese dialects that like most South Eastern Chinese dialects are very different from Mandarin. However, the Minnan and the Hakka dialects are not mutually understandable. During the Japanese rule Japanese became the only language used in education. This meant that unlike the situation in other parts of South Eastern China not even the elite spoke any Mandarin by 1945.
The linguistic situation and the fact that many Taiwanese had fought for Japan from 1937 to 1945 implied that the KMT (Kuomintang), when it took power on the island after Japan's defeat in 1945, looked upon the Taiwanese (i.e. the people, who were in Taiwan before 1945) as traitors. The suspicion of the KMT was one of the factors that led to a tense relationship between the new rulers and the Taiwanese. It did not better the situation that the island was more industrialised than most parts of the mainland, and many of the island's resources were shipped to the Mainland.
The tense relationship between the Taiwanese and the KMT-leadership led to the so-called February 28th Incident (Er-er-ba-shijian) in 1947, where a large number of people were killed in a few months. Estimates vary but most sources seem to believe that between 5,000 and 20,000 people were killed, of whom by far the most were Taiwanese.
The Incident resulted in a heavier control of media etc. Deaths of many leading Taiwanese also resulted in a severe setback for the KMT-opposition in itself. However the incident eventually became one of the reasons for the KMT to give more power to Taiwanese in local politics. The Taiwanese were still clearly the majority despite the many refugees from the Mainland. The heavy economic growth, which, after the KMT's retreat to Taiwan in 1949, replaced the flow of resources away from the island, meant that Taiwan in many ways became a well functioning society, although it was a dictatorship. This happened in spite of the wounds in the relationship between Mainlanders and Taiwanese caused by the February 28th Incident.

Claims for Independence under Chiang Kai-shek's Dictatorship

During the first years of KMT-rule there had been some movements calling for Taiwanese independence, and there were even reports of people opposing the KMT in the Japanese uniforms they had used in the war against China a few years earlier. Among well educated Taiwanese, however, the most common way of resisting was by severely criticising the KMT for regarding the Taiwanese as second-rate Chinese. They thought that since the island's population was much more used to modernity than the average Chinese, the Taiwanese had a lot to offer the rest of China.
The first major call for independence in Taiwan since the early 1950's was in 1964, when the head of the political department at National Taiwan University, Professor Peng Ming-min, and some of his students –all born in Taiwan– wrote the pamphlet Self-help Declaration of the Taiwanese People (Taiwan Renmin Zijiu Xuanyan). They advocated for a revolution to overthrow Chiang Kai-shek and the few people with whom he exercised power. They believed that Chiang Kai-shek's real reasons for wanting to keep power were merely for personal gain, and that the only way he might have a chance of not loosing it was by maintaining his claims over the mainland. In that way he could play off the People's Republic and the US against each other. The cost of this game was a huge risk of extermination of the Taiwanese people in a war. He and the other few persons in power within the KMT had kept a back door open for escape to South America.
Instead, Peng and his students wanted a democratic Taiwanese republic for both Taiwanese and Mainlanders that did not gamble with the survival of the Taiwanese people (i.e. Taiwan's entire population) by claiming the Mainland. In his autobiography, A Taste of Freedom, which was first issued in 1972, Peng compared the situation to the relationship between England and Australia. He saw both Australia and Taiwan as examples of communities where almost everybody descended from the same areas, but still felt a need to form their own nations (Peng, 1992).

Liberalisation and a Stronger Opposition

The Peng Ming-min group was arrested and the participants were given severe punishments. Following the worsening situation of Taipei's diplomatic relations in the early 1970's, where Taipei both lost China's seat in the United Nations and Japan's recognition, Chiang Kai-shek made a few moves towards liberalisation of the political system. For instance, direct elections were held to a few of the national seats in the legislative assemblies.
However, it was not until after the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975 and the following shift of power to his son Chiang Ching-kuo that new claims for Taiwanese independence were made on a larger scale. The number of activities opposing the KMT-leadership began to increase in 1976. The level of activity reached new heights in December 1978 when it became publicly known that the US were to withdraw their diplomatic recognition from Taipei the following January and the planned elections for an increased number of national seats were cancelled. The climax came around one year later, in December 1979, when the Formosa Incident (Meilidao Shijian) took place in Kaohsiung.
The Formosa Incident was a result of clashes with the police at a demonstration arranged by some of the editors of The Formosa Magazine (Meilidao Zazhi). This monthly opposition magazine had been published since August 1979 and had reached a circulation of around 100,000. The planners had hoped that the demonstration would be peaceful, but violence was used on both sides. Though the casualties were limited the incident stands as an important benchmark for the Taiwanese opposition.
The group behind the Formosa Magazine largely consisted of Taiwanese, but also included some Mainlanders. The leader of the Formosa group, Huang Hsin-chieh, was also leader of the "non-party" Dang-wai ("outside the party") –an organisation of individuals running for elections outside the KMT. It was not possible to form an ordinary opposition party. In the first article of the first issue of the Formosa Magazine Huang captured the uniting ideas of the magazine very well:
"This beautiful island [Meili zhi dao, like in the title of the magazine] is the homeland where we have grown up"
Later on in the article he continued:
"Democracy in Taiwan is the biggest favour the 18 million people in Taiwan could do for the Chinese people" (Formosa Vol. 1, 1979: p. 2)
The focus of the magazine was democracy and most of the contributors seemed to find this easy to combine with a Chinese identity. It was also a common claim that by combining democracy with Chinese culture it might be possible to create a society that was much closer to a perfect society than for instance the US (for examples see Formosa Vol. 1, 1979: p. 9).
However, among those writing for Formosa there was also a small group that saw Taiwanese identity as an identity that was probably better fit for democracy than the Chinese. They regarded the fact that all people in Taiwan had at one point immigrated to the island as an evidence of a common striving towards freedom and happiness. This was especially so for the Minnans, Hakkas and Aborigines. The Mainlanders had, much like earlier the Japanese and the Dutchmen before them, only seen Taiwan as a means for achieving another goal. The Mainlanders could become good Taiwanese citizens, but they might have to work hard to become good Taiwanese citizens (see Formosa, Vol. 1, 1979: p. 48 and p. 76 and Vol. 3, 1979: pp. 69 - 76).

Ethnic Orientation of the Opposition

Most of the leading persons in the Formosa group were imprisoned after the Formosa Incident. This entailed a setback for those who directly opposed the KMT. Approaches on both sides changed following the incident. The number of activities arranged by various interest groups to oppose concrete policies increased.
Since around 1970 more and more Taiwanese had been accepted into powerful parts of the KMT. This tendency continued, and in 1984 Taiwanese-born Lee Teng-hui became vice-president. At the same time more and more of the national seats in the legislative assemblies were opened for elections.
Not until the mid-eighties was the Dang-wai again able to organise an opposition with a somewhat common policy. In the years 1984 and 1985 there was a very high number of opposition magazines. One of these magazines had the English title The Movement (Chinese: Xin Chaoliu). The magazine did not have a circulation of a size close to that of the Formosa Magazine, but the board of editors included many important opposition politicians. When the Dang-wai in 1986 organised the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party, Minzhu Jinbu Dang) one of the two factions within the party was named after The Movement while the other was named after Formosa.
The Movement introduced a new view on the status of Taiwanese identity. Taiwan was now to a much higher degree seen as part of the world than as part of the Chinese cultural sphere. Democracy was still a very important issue, but Taiwanese independence and the role of the Taiwanese as victims of the arbitrariness of the Mainlanders had become far more prominent.
Peng and the Formosa Magazine had also been dealing with the February 28th Incident, but in The Movement Taiwan's history was referred to much more than in the other magazines. One of the volumes of the magazine thus had a Japanese flag and the KMT sun on a blue background in front of a map of Taiwan on its front page. The headline said: "From One Sun to Another." (The Movement Vol. 9, 1984).
The main point of the article series "From One Sun to Another" was to explain how the leading clans that had been co-operating with the Japanese were the same clans that the KMT preferred working with, while those clans which liked Taiwan and often thought highly of China were neglected. Clan-leaders who had first co-operated with one political power from far away and then with another, were called traitors of Taiwan (taijian), because they normally co-operated with the strangers for their own benefit and not for the benefit of the broader Taiwanese public.
In The Movement many authors saw Taiwanese as opposed to the Chinese. When Peng and the contributors to the Formosa Magazine wrote about the Taiwanese people they referred to it as Taiwan Renmin meaning the entire population of Taiwan. When they used the word Taiwanese (Taiwanren) it normally referred to the Minnans and Hakkas, and also often to the aboriginal population. Despite the fact that Peng called the solution of the Taiwan-problem a "one China – one Taiwan"- solution he still thought of the cleavage between the two countries as an exclusively political one. The wording of his claim for a Taiwanese republic for the island's entire population was thus:
"...that the force of twelve million people [the population of Taiwan in 1964] should irrespective of provincial descent co-operate to create a new state and establish a new government." (Peng et al, 1964)
Not until The Movement had it, in the post-1949 public political discussion, been seriously disputed that the Taiwanese were somewhat Chinese. Now the word used to refer to the Taiwanese People was sometimes even Taiwan Minzu. This expression clearly referred to the ethnic sense of the word "people", and the conflict between Mainlanders and Taiwanese was now sometimes, especially in the historical articles, referred to as a conflict between Chinese and Taiwanese.
The ideas in the Movement gave a hint of what was going to happen the following years. The Dang-wai quickly got itself better organised in the mid-eighties and set up the DPP before the national elections in 1986. President Chiang Ching-kuo did not try to stop the new party and was even very quick to make the party legal. The DPP continued along the same line as that The Movement had followed. Minnanese (or, as the dialect is normally called in Taiwan, Taiwanese (Taiyu)) was widely used at election campaigns, and it was clear that the party wanted Taiwanese independence even though there were limits for what could legally be said in public.

Compromising on the Ethnic Question

When Chiang Ching-kuo died in January 1988 and vice president Lee Teng-hui took over his presidency a trump was taken away from the DPP. Lee Teng-hui very often chose to speak Minnanese in public, and he tried to explain to the public how the Taiwanese had benefited from co-operation with the Mainlanders since 1949 and vice-versa. Under his rule the process of democratisation accelerated so much that Taiwan today probably is one of the best working democracies of East Asia. He did not claim that he wanted an independent Taiwan, but neither would he under any conditions let Taiwan unify with the People's Republic from one day to another.
The DPP was having trouble getting the two factions co-ordinated after most of those imprisoned after the Formosa Incident had been released. The Formosa faction wanted a less aggressive policy on the question of Taiwanese independence. The result was a policy that changed many times during the first half of the 1990s. However, it was becoming a still less important issue exactly when Taiwan ought to declare itself an independent republic, and whether the name was really formally changed from the Republic of China to the Republic of Taiwan or not. The threat from the Mainland in the case of a Taiwanese independence declaration meant that those DPP-leaders belonging to the Formosa faction thought that a declaration could wait as long as Taiwan was de facto independent. The Formosa faction dominated for most of the 1990s, but at the first direct and free presidential elections in Taiwan in 1996 the extremely open system, which the DPP used for nominating their presidential candidate, meant that Peng Ming-min, who had returned from his exile in the US a few years earlier, became the DPP presidential candidate. Just as it had been in 1964 his line was very uncompromising on the question of unification and towards the KMT.
At the same time, president Lee Teng-hui showed much more willingness to co-operate than he had ever shown before. Lee Teng-hui had already been compromising so much with the one-China policy that a new party named the (Chinese) New Party ((Zhonghua) Xin Dang) had been created a few years earlier. Now a conservative leading member of the KMT, who had not yet left the KMT, ran for president against Lee Teng-hui.
One of Lee Teng-hui's first acts in his electoral campaign was to excuse the way the KMT had been acting during the February 28th Incident. This occurred during an opening ceremony for a monument of the Incident in early 1995. When Lee Teng-hui was nominated as KMT presidential candidate later that same year he gave a speech thanking the party for his nomination. In this speech he introduced the concept ‘New Taiwanese', (Xin Taiwanren) which was supposed to include the entire population of the island.
The myth of immigration that had also been used in some of the Formosa Magazine articles played a central role in his speech:
"Everybody knows that Taiwan is an immigrant society. Apart from the aboriginal county-men who came here first almost everybody has arrived from the Chinese Mainland during the last dynasties. And even if the time at which they have arrived differs, they are all born and raised here. This piece of land has been watered by the sweat and lifeblood of generations, before the present wealth and prosperity was achieved in a brotherly community for survival. Using the time of immigration to determine who is Taiwanese and who is not is neither necessary nor meaningful. If one recognises Taiwan and loves Taiwan one is Taiwanese. We must strengthen this "New Taiwanese"-identity. If we at the same time try to protect our sense of being a people [Minzu Qinggan], maintain Chinese culture, and do not forget the ideal of unifying China we are at the same time Chinese." (Lee, 1999a: p. 77)
Later on in his speech Lee seems to concur with Huang Hsin-chieh from the Formosa Magazine when he writes that Taiwan, being as advanced as it is both materially and politically, may serve as "The New Central Plains" (Xin Zhongyuan; The Central Plains (Zhongyuan) is the place where Chinese culture supposedly started). One of the most important reasons for Taiwan's success in becoming so advanced was the many different types of input to which the island had been exposed. They had created a "pluralistic culture" (duoyuan wenhua) (Lee, 1999a: p. 78).
The result of the presidential elections was a landslide victory for Lee Teng-hui. The DPP almost immediately returned to its more compromise-seeking line, while Peng Ming-min and a few other people with radical views on the question of Taiwanese independence created the Taiwanese Independence Party (Jianguodang).

Pluralism as an Ideal

The moderate DPP-line continued after Chen Shui-bian (Formosa faction) won the party's candidacy for the presidential elections in 2000. He made it even more clear than the DPP-leadership had earlier (after Peng's defeat in 1996) that the party did not wish a formally independent Taiwan if it would endanger the people on the island. He became unpopular in part of his hinterland by comparing the situation of Taiwan with that of Germany and Korea, because in doing so he implied that the population of Taiwan and of the Mainland were essentially one people. However, according to Chen, this did not mean that there ought to be only one state.
The independence movements have begun to use the same sort of discourse as Lee Teng-hui and Formosa.. They too see the advantages of presenting Taiwan as a pluralistic society of immigrants, but they generally seize any chance they get to look upon the population of Taiwan as non-Chinese. The aboriginal population plays an important role in that connection.
An article on the question of why Taiwanese should not be thought of as part of China's Minnanese dialect shows this tendency very clearly. The relationship between Minnanese and Taiwanese is compared to the relationship between German and Dutch, which is based on Noam Chomsky's claim that Dutch has so many linguistic characteristics similar to German that the only reason for both Germans and Dutchmen to consider the languages as two different languages is political. In the same way Taiwanese has developed separately. Taiwanese and Hakka in Taiwan have incorporated aspects of aboriginal languages and Japanese that the Mainland's Minnanese and Hakka dialects do not have. It may still be possible to understand Mainland speakers of the two dialects, but there are differences. Even the Taiwanese version of Mandarin is different from that of the Mainland. It is written with full-form characters and certain words, often Japanese, have been adopted in Taiwanese Mandarin.. All the languages of Taiwan are in a sense Taiwanese because to varying extents they have experienced the same influences (Zhang, 2000).
Even in the New Party pluralism seems to be a keyword, though maybe in a larger, Chinese context. The party tries to make it clear that its wish to unify China does not mean that it wants in any way to harm the local culture (bentu wenhua)(‘Xu Lichen: Zhuyi mei dui Tai Jun Shou Lichang', 1998).
Spokesmen for various aboriginal organisations have regarded the concept of pluralism as a means of getting a higher status for the group that is in many ways marginal. In some instances this has happened in co-operation with the independence movements, but also with other groups, and often on their own, since the main-interest of the aboriginal population is different from that of the independence movements. It is still clear that most of the aboriginal organisations see the major cleavage as being the one between the Han and the rest.
The Aborigines do not, as a few radicals might want them to, regard the cleavage between the Mainlanders and the rest as being the most important.. There does not seem to be a better connection to the Hakkas, which is historically the Han-group with the lowest status. The aboriginal organisations also seem to be the easiest places to find unfriendly opinions towards the around 300,000 low-paid immigrant workers from different countries all over East Asia. The aboriginal organisations feel threatened by the prospect of the immigrant population outnumbering the almost 400,000 Aborigines. This would mean that the aboriginal population would only be fifth-largest after the Minnans, the Mainalnders, the Hakkas and the immigrants. The immigrants make it even harder getting a job as an Aborigine.
But even if there is aboriginal dissatisfaction it seems that most aboriginal spokesmen adhere to the principles of a pluralist society, and, just like most others in the present public political debate, they see pluralism as an ideal. However, in some of the spokesmen's point of views this pluralist society should only include those different groups that have a relatively long history in Taiwan. Taiwan should be thought of as a multiethnic society, but only for a few selected ethnic groups.

Conclusion: The Many Identities of the Taiwanese

The Taiwanese process of creating an imagined community consisting of all people living in the existing state has happened in an entirely different way than it did in Western Europe during the peak of nationalism from around 1880 to 1945. While standardisation was very much the ideal in the individual European nation states, in the last decades it has increasingly become the ideal in Taiwan that there should be differences. In many ways this has served the same means as the standardisation of populations of various states did in Western Europe, namely to create an imagined community, where ideally no citizen should feel inferior, though he belongs to the "wrong" ethnic group.
Smith would claim that in Western Europe this happened through the creation of national identities based on the ones that the core-ethnic groups in the new nation states possessed. Similar attempts have been made in Taiwan since 1945. The first time was when the KMT wanted to give the Taiwanese a sense of being Chinese. The second time is less clear cut, but in the mid-eighties some of the more radical members of the Movement faction attempted to create a Taiwanese nation based on the majority's Minnan identity. I have not been trying to determine whether or not the first attempt was successful, but the second clearly was not – at least not in the public political discussion. Instead different groups are increasingly being thought of as different ethnic groups that should all have equal opportunities.
This development has probably been influenced by the way myths of the American nation are told, but there are clear differences between the Taiwanese and the American situation. The most important difference is that while the struggle for independence is a key aspect of the myths of the American nation, the majority of the Taiwanese population probably would not want Taiwan to remain an independent state if the political situation in the People's Republic were to change to a system similar to the present system on Taiwan.
The orientation towards smaller ethnic groups has happened at a time when the linguistic, and possibly even economic, homogeneity of the island is greater than it has ever been. The proportion of people who understand Mandarin has probably never been higher than it is today, and Mandarin is the language of the public sphere, though most know some Minnanese even if they are not Minnanese themselves. The vast majority of TV-programmes, the educational system etc. use Mandarin. However, in an attempt to recognise the idea of a multiethnic Taiwan, so-called "mother tongue"-classes in Minnanese, Hakka or aboriginal languages have become mandatory in school, and in the new subways in Taipei the names of the stations are being announced in Mandarin, Minnanese, Hakka and sometimes also English.
It almost appears to be a requirement of Taiwanese public culture that one also belongs to another imagined community that not all other Taiwanese belong to. This other imagined community may include people who are not Taiwanese and may be more important than one's Taiwanese identity. It has become less and less a question for discussion if one should feel Taiwanese or not. It seems to be commonly accepted that people living in Taiwan (with the possible exception of immigrant workers from East Asia and expats) belong to the imagined community Taiwan. Though all thoughts of how to form a Taiwanese nation have clearly been part of an ideological movement it is not so clear whether feeling Taiwanese today is an ideology one chooses or almost a faith. It is, however, clear that it is easy to argue that being Minnanese, Mainlander, Hakka or Aboriginal is just as much a faith as being Taiwanese.
The Taiwanese identity is not a national identity in a traditional sense, but it seems to be an identity of a nature that can easily survive in a world where more and more problems become global. Taiwan is well adapted to a world where the globalisation is increasing and where nation states become less powerful. Taiwan may, in fact, show the way for the rest of the world.

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