Taiwan Votes 2024: How the Taiwanese identity has evolved, and again morphed in this presidential election

TAIPEI: When Taiwanese Ivy Chen’s husband moved to mainland China for work in the late 1990s, she often visited him from Taipei, where she remained to take care of their daughter. 

On the mainland, strangers would ask where Ms Chen was from as soon as she opened her mouth and started speaking Mandarin.

To avoid rude comments and a feeling of being looked down upon, Ms Chen said she would lie that she was from Fujian province, where Mandarin is spoken in tones close to those of her island home.

On one such visit in the early 2000s, she was at Shanghai’s airport preparing to fly home when she accidentally took out her Taiwanese passport while looking for her “Taiwan Compatriot Permit” – used by Taiwanese to pass through immigration on the mainland.

A voice shouted from the queue behind her: “You cannot use that! Throw away your Taiwan passport. You are Chinese, you need to use a Chinese passport!”

Ms Chen, now 66 and a cooking instructor, told CNA in her home in Taipei that she did not confront the fellow traveller, who was Chinese, but the incident has weighed on her mind since.

Her experiences on the mainland led her to believe that “Chinese always want to control Taiwan, so they actually brainwash their people (that) Taiwan is one of their territories”, and made her feel more Taiwanese.

Although she identifies as Taiwanese, this was not how Ms Chen was educated in school. Growing up in Tainan in the 1960s, her textbooks were all oriented towards the history, geography and society of mainland China. 

She recalls memorising the names of rivers and railways on mainland China across the Taiwan Strait, while barely learning anything about the terrain of her own home.

“All the textbooks told you that you were Chinese and you spoke Chinese,” she said, but there was a disconnect with her reality.

"Because at home, we spoke Taiwanese, and the whole environment, my relatives, my family – our culture was just Taiwanese, very different from the textbook” then, she said. She has always thought of herself as Taiwanese since then and till today.

Similarly, most voters going into Saturday’s (Jan 13) presidential and legislative elections now identify as Taiwanese.

This shift has taken place over the last three decades, spurred by political and social flashpoints and more gradual changes like curriculum reform.

But Taiwanese identity still carries shades of difference in Taiwan's relationship with China, and each presidential candidate represents a different way forward, with repercussions for regional and global stability.

The ruling Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) William Lai, 64, has called himself a “practical worker for Taiwan independence” in the past. The incumbent vice-president is seen as a troublemaker and separatist by China.

The opposition Kuomintang's (KMT) Hou Yu-ih, 66, incumbent mayor of New Taipei City, is expected to continue the party's traditional preference for close ties with China.

The position that the Taiwan People's Party (TPP), led by former Taipei mayor Dr Ko Wen-je, 64, will take on cross-strait relations is less certain, according to observers.

Beyond the China question, identity has also cropped up elsewhere in this election, becoming fodder for misinformation and personal attack on candidates. CNA looks at how identity has changed and how it can be seen in this election.

TAIWANESE, CHINESE OR TAIWANESE-CHINESE?

More than 62 per cent of adults in Taiwan identify themselves as Taiwanese, compared to 2.5 per cent who identify as Chinese, according to an annual survey that the Election Study Center of Taiwan’s National Chengchi University has conducted since 1992.

Around 30 per cent identify as Taiwanese-Chinese. People with this dual identity see themselves as Taiwanese who are successors of Chinese culture, rather than a Chinese nation, according to Dr Chen Fang-yu, assistant professor of political science at Soochow University in Taiwan.

That refers to the traditional folk beliefs and customs and use of traditional Chinese script that continue in Taiwan, he said. 

“I do believe that in Taiwan, yes, we are a successor of Chinese culture. But with a mixture, or we create a unique Taiwanese culture.”

Dr Chen, whose research focuses on identity, said there is now largely consensus around Taiwanese identification, and that it strengthens in younger cohorts. 

A survey he conducted this semester among university students showed more than 80 per cent identified as Taiwanese – 20 percentage points above the national average.

Such numbers indicate that for the majority of Taiwan’s people, at a personal level, Taiwanese identification is no longer a struggle. In fact, it has been on the rise since 1994 when Taiwanese identification overtook Chinese identification in NCCU’s survey for the first time. 

Dr Chen linked this to the Qiandao Lake incident that year, in which 24 Taiwanese tourists were killed by robbers in Zhejiang province. 

There was a public outcry in Taiwan over the murders and the way mainland authorities handled the investigation.

Another sharp decline in Chinese identification happened after Taiwan's first direct presidential election in 1996 – a four-way contest in which the Kuomintang’s (KMT) Lee Teng-hui emerged victorious and went on to accelerate Taiwan’s democratic transition.

Mr Lee was Taiwan’s first islander (benshengren) president. While Taiwan’s mainlanders (waishengren) descend from migrants who fled mainland China after the KMT was defeated at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, islanders trace their roots further back in history.

The islander-mainlander divide has been a faultline in Taiwanese identity and history, most notably in the Feb 28 incident in 1947, when the KMT government led by mainlanders violently suppressed an uprising by islanders.

Ms Chen, the cooking instructor, said she is “not a political person”. She has not always exercised her vote. But for her, the 1996 election was a “crucial time” for Taiwan in which she felt strongly about making her vote count. 

She recalled the impression the eventual president Mr Lee made – she was struck by his familiar Taiwanese accent as much as by his intelligence and leadership.

"Before that, our imagined community, imagined boundary, is the whole mainland,” said Dr Chen, referring to founding president Chiang Kai-shek’s desire to reconquer the territory his forces lost in the Chinese Civil War.

“But from this time, we know that we can elect our own leader in Taiwan, and only in Taiwan, not for the mainland,” the professor said of the 1996 vote. 

In the years since, Taiwanese identification has twice peaked around disparate events set in motion by former Taiwanese president Ma and Chinese President Xi Jinping, leading observers to joke that both men are “godfathers” of Taiwanese identity, said Dr Chen.

In 2014, Mr Ma’s KMT-led administration tried to push the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement through parliament without a clause-by-clause review. Sunflower Movement protestors occupied the Legislative Yuan to oppose the move, and Taiwanese identification crossed the 60 per cent mark for the first time that year.

Five years later, Taiwanese identification hit an all-time high of more than 64 per cent during the 2019 anti-extradition law protests in Hong Kong, which prompted a police crackdown and Mr Xi’s imposition of a national security law.

Underlying the impact of short-term political developments is the long-term influence of curriculum reform, according to research published last year in the Journal of Development Economics.

In 1997, junior high school students in Taiwan began studying humanities subjects from a new set of textbooks named Getting to Know Taiwan. 

These provided abundant Taiwan-related content not found in previous textbooks, study co-authors Dr Chen Wei-lin of the University of California San Diego, Dr Lin Ming-jen of National Taiwan University and Dr Yang Tzu-ying of Academia Sinica noted.

The researchers found that students who learnt from the new textbooks were 18 percentage points more likely to identify as Taiwanese than those who studied the old textbooks. 

The impact was greater on students living in neighbourhoods or families where fewer people identified as Taiwanese.

Soochow University’s Dr Chen was himself among the first few batches of students to study from the new textbooks. 

“It’s quite natural that because we learn about Taiwan, we know that we live in Taiwan, we are not going back to the mainland,” he said.

IDENTITY IN THIS ELECTION

Yet the identity issue continues to be central to Taiwanese politics, a point made by Dr Nathan F Batto, associate research fellow in political science at Academia Sinica, in the Asian Journal of Comparative Politics in 2018.

“If a society is marked by a single deep and salient political cleavage, voters generally continue to vote along cleavage lines,” he wrote.

“National identity stands alone as the primary factor shaping politics over the past quarter century. Essentially, Taiwanese politics boil down to the question, ‘Who are we?’ More specifically, ‘Are we Chinese? Or are we Taiwanese?’”

It’s no different in this election, though the identity issue has played out in slightly different ways.

Despite the majority identifying as Taiwanese in 2024, the distinction between islander and mainlander Taiwanese remains salient.

The KMT’s presidential candidate Mr Hou is an islander who was born in Chiayi county, and has been noted to sound more fluent in Taiwanese than Mandarin.

Dr Chen said Mr Hou is considered a “weak” candidate to mobilise the mainlander vote. While mainlanders only made up 13 per cent of Taiwan’s population in the 1990 census – the last census to specifically track this group – they tend to occupy influential positions in the media and public service, he said.

A majority of KMT members tend to be mainlanders, and the party’s structure gives them the power to vote for party leaders, allowing them to dominate its decision-making process, he added.

This perceived disadvantage of Mr Hou is being balanced out by the rest of the KMT’s slate, said Dr Chen.

Mr Hou’s running mate is television personality Jaw Shaw-kong, 73, while the party’s top pick for legislator-at-large – who could become speaker if the KMT wins a legislative majority – is former Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu.

Both Mr Jaw and Mr Han are popular with mainlander voters as they are considered “deep blue”, pro-China figures.

This election cycle also saw the identity issue intertwined with nationality, following speculation about the nationalities, and hence loyalties, of two vice-presidential candidates – Ms Hsiao Bi-khim of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Ms Cynthia Wu of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).

Ms Hsiao, 52, was born in Japan to a Taiwanese father and American mother. She grew up in Tainan, went to college in the United States, and served as Taiwan’s representative to the US until she stepped down to contest the election.

Ms Wu, 45, was born in the United States to Taiwanese parents, and has studied in Taiwan, the US and the United Kingdom. She worked as an investment analyst in London before returning to Taipei to work for her family business, the Shin Kong Group, and became a legislator in 2022.

Dual nationals are barred from running for president or vice-president under Taiwanese law. In early December, Ms Hsiao and Ms Wu’s nationalities became fodder for online speculation, with rumours that both candidates still held US citizenship.

Both Ms Hsiao and Ms Wu had their nationalities verified by the Central Election Commission, which deemed them eligible to run in early December. The non-profit Taiwan FactCheck Center also came out to debunk the rumours.

Dr Chen said the nationality controversy has been an exception in this election, compared to the past where the question of national identity is not openly discussed in such terms.

GOING FORWARD WITH TAIWANESE IDENTITY

Voters who spoke to CNA were cynical about whether the speculation on nationality and identity was a genuine issue, or just an opportunity for rumour-mongering.

What started out as necessary vetting of the candidates became weaponised as a tool for political attack, said Mr Juan Hsu, 22, a fourth-year student at NCCU and president of the college’s student association.

For voters like Mr Hsu, each presidential candidate represents a different way forward for Taiwanese identity, understood through the prism of Taiwan’s relationship with China.

If the DPP’s William Lai wins, Mr Hsu said he expects cross-strait relations to remain as they have been under incumbent president Tsai Ing-wen, with a possibility of more tension.

If the KMT wrests power, Mr Hsu believes Mr Hou will continue the path of former president Ma, whose time in office was marked by friendly ties with China. 

But he speculated that Mr Hou might be less proactive about opening up to China, given public sentiment in Taiwan about Mr Xi’s more “totalitarian” leadership, and the KMT’s ouster over its cross-strait policy in the 2016 elections.

Less is known about the cross-strait policy that the TPP’s Dr Ko, will pursue, said Mr Hsu. 

But there is another aspect of identity that Mr Hsu hopes the next president, regardless of party, will pay attention to. Mr Hsu is a second-generation immigrant – his Thai mother migrated with his Taiwanese father just two months before he was born.

After the DPP introduced its New Southbound Policy in 2016, new immigrants and their children, previously treated as a “problematic” group, came to be seen as a valuable source of talent, with the advantages of multilingualism and cultural diversity, said Mr Hsu.

Yet still, “Taiwanese society labels and holds certain prejudices towards new immigrants and second-generation immigrants like me”, he said.

Having grown up in a multicultural family, identity is “fluid, adaptable and pluralistic” to Mr Hsu. He identifies as both Thai and Taiwanese, but only holds Taiwanese citizenship. 

“I was born in Taiwan and grew up here, and might die here in the future. Of course I’m Taiwanese,” he said.

As for Ms Chen the cooking instructor, promoting Taiwanese culture is a mission she will continue on regardless of the election outcome, after becoming more conscious of her Taiwanese identity in recent years while working on an English-language cookbook about Taiwanese food.

Ms Chen worked with her Taiwanese-American co-author to develop the recipes in the book published last year.

She soon found that beyond replicating the island’s well-loved dishes, her task was to help readers unfamiliar with this part of the world understand the difference between Taiwanese and Chinese cuisine and culture.

In stark contrast to her old textbooks on all things Chinese, a hand-drawn map of Taiwan now hangs on the wall of her cooking studio, showcasing different types of seafood and produce grown around the island.

“I feel this has become my mission or my obligation, to tell people who I am and where I’m from,” she said.