Attitudes Towards Taiwanese Diaspora Communities

By William Budd, Second Year History

海外台灣人 (haiwai taiwan ren) is the term used by all Chinese speaking populations to refer to Taiwanese people not living on or who were not born on the island of Taiwan. In September of 2024, I came across a fascinating post in an online forum in which a particular writer listed out the various ‘types of Chinese’ living abroad. Their reference to non-Chinese speaking ethnically Chinese people as caring little for the Chinese mainland and ‘can be safely treated as another foreigner like Japanese or German’, as well as the care that must be taken when conversing with young Taiwanese made me wonder how this attitude is felt by Taiwanese communities abroad. Whilst it’s impossible to understand such a complex issue in just a thousand words, I hope to introduce the most important currents in the evolution of Taiwanese identity abroad. How have overseas Taiwanese developed their identity in diaspora communities across the world, and how does the PRC have a huge impact on how these identities develop?

An estimated 2 million people of Taiwanese descent are currently living outside of Taiwan. For a nation with a population of 23 million people, this is not an insignificant proportion. The largest proportion of these (definitely 25%, possibly as high as over 50%) live in the United States. The significant Taiwanese diaspora of largely first- and second-generation immigrants experience an external view of Taiwan, and therefore have a ‘socialised identity’ through which the nature of being Taiwanese is heightened. This is exacerbated with media portrayals of Taiwan presenting the nation as in peril or under the boot of the PRC.

Flushing, Queens. One of the largest Taiwanese diaspora communities in the world, and one of the first established.

Both ‘negative experiences with Chinese immigrants’ as well as witnessing ‘Taiwan’s marginality’ contribute to this phenomenon, according to sociologists Ming-Sho Ho and Yao-Tai Li. This phenomenon, whilst on the surface an issue of sociology, is deeply rooted in the historical context of PRC-Taiwan interaction. As seen with the example given in the introduction, it’s an issue which permeates interpersonal interaction. In this I’m not looking to repeat the work of Ho and Li but simply reinforce the historical context in which these socialisations are taking place. 

The idea of being ‘confronted by identity’ is one which speaks to many Taiwanese who migrate to the United States. Xi Jinping’s increasingly authoritarian Chinese state draws an implicit association between the People’s Republic of China he rules and the island nation of Taiwan, separated by only a few miles of water in some places and with huge cultural overlap. The pressure of this association has in the past fallen on Taiwanese people to dissociate from the identity linked to the current regime in China. 

However, the burden of a historically linked identity doesn’t only fall on those who have left Taiwan. When in conversation with a professor at National Sun Yat Sen University (中山大學) in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, I was informed that if he were to have the same conversation around Taiwanese identity with a Mainland Chinese student as he’d had with myself, they would put on headphones, speak loudly to drown him out, or even just walk out of the room. As a result, academic conversation around identity in Taiwan, especially in the form of lectures, have to be carefully planned, so as not to cause conflict between Taiwanese and Chinese students. 

These potential points of conflict also emerge in the case of Taiwanese and Chinese migrants interacting in the United States. As further detailed by Ho and Li, so called ‘microaggressions’ from Chinese students full of national pride are becoming increasingly more common. Using the wrong terminology in conversation with friends, or maybe on a social media post, can be enough to earn disparaging remarks from fellow students. Even in a country significantly geographically removed from the conflict, overspill from the negative association of Taiwanese students by certain Chinese students extends the question of identity even for those not living in Taiwan or China.

A subsidence of this social tension constitutes a significant challenge. Reckoning with the simultaneous desire to promote Taiwanese identity on the world stage and preserve harmony between the two diaspora groups seems an impossible task to achieve. With only increasing hostility from Xi’s China towards the newly elected pro-sovereignty DPP (Democratic Progressive Party) presidency in Taiwan, it seems as if the political context of Taiwan-PRC relations is set to overshadow cultural interaction, even in diaspora communities. We can only hope for a preservation of peacetime relations between the nations, and a progressive cooling of societal friction.

Useful links:

 https://www.quora.com/What-do-Mainland-Chinese-think-about-overseas-Chinese

 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/1070289X.2022.2109859?needAccess=true

Edited by Ben Bryant and Scarlett Bantin

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