Claiming the Overseas Taiwanese: Nationality and Ethnicity in the Early Post-War Republic of China

Evan Dawley, Goucher College

Following its assumption of sovereignty over Taiwan in 1945, the government of the Republic of China faced a daunting task: re-Sinicizing a globally dispersed Taiwanese population that had followed its own trajectories of identity formation since 1895 and, for the vast majority of its members, did not share in the ROC’s nationalist ideology. Moreover, it undertook this task while fighting a war for its political survival and convincing a globally dispersed Chinese population, and an ambivalent international community, that the Kuomintang-run party-state was the legitimate, true government of a contested Chinese nation. Even before its exile to Taiwan in 1949, when the new province became almost co-terminus with the ROC, the KMT enhanced its outreach to communities of Overseas Chinese (Huaqiao) in an attempt to enlist their moral, political, and financial support. As part of this process, the KMT government created a new administrative category of Overseas Taiwanese (Taiqiao), which applied to people living outside of Taiwan who had until recently been Taiwanese subjects of the Japanese Empire (Taiwan sekimin). It launched a campaign to locate and register all of these people, in order to bring them into the national community. The term was short-lived, fading out of use in official documents by 1948, but for a few years it constituted and differentiated a small subset of China’s national population. This paper will explore the application of this term to better understand the boundaries between nationality and ethnicity in the official Chinese mind after World War II.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 219. Asians and the Construction of Ethnic Identities: Nationalism, Colonialism, and Power Relations