英文摘要 |
The two purposes of this article are to a) identify the historical, social, and political processes behind the formation and transformation of ethnic categorization in Taiwan’s population census procedures, and b) to locate the position of ethnic categorization in the political and social systems of postwar Taiwan. The author describes how ethnic characteristics in the general population were categorized by the Republic of China (ROC) government across seven censuses conducted between 1956 and 2000, then uses the data to propose a four-stage transformation. An explanatory framework of political institution re-construction byMainland Chinese in Taiwan during the postwar era is offered to position the role and function of ethnic categorization. The author argues that categorizing people in terms of their geographic origins in China or Taiwan was institutionalized by the ROC government under the banner of “Chinese national imagination” to meet the political goals of unifying people and claiming legitimacy for its efforts to retake the mainland. Categorization played an important role in the temporary political institutions that were established by the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) regime to claim that it was still the legitimate ruler of China. However, categorization also revealed the regime’s lack of trust in the Taiwanese people to show loyalty to the Chinese nation, which the government suggested was the result of five decades of Japanese colonial rule. The end result was an institution in which Taiwanese were under-represented both politically and culturally. After 1971 (when international support for the KMT regime declined), Chinese national ideology came under intense internal challenge, with the emerging opposition advocating an alternative Taiwanese national imagination. According to demands for ethnic equality, temporary political arrangements were interpreted by opposition groups as institutions of ethnic discrimination against Taiwanese. The transformation of categorization from Chinese “original domicile” to Taiwanese “ethnicity” entailed not only a change in imagined societal boundaries, but also in ideal patterns of inter-group relations within the society. The original domicile categorization system was eventually abolished after major institutional changes occurred in the early 1990s. The author addresses the circumstances under which the ethnicity concept became salient in Taiwan, and how it was used to counteract a nationalist discourse rather than an explicit racist ideology. Thus, ethnic relations in Taiwan developed concurrently with a dispute over national identity, rather than within a less controversial national boundary. |