Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Nationalism in Taiwan has in many ways been generated and refined through a series of protests of foreign imperialism. Taiwan has had a long history of imperialist conquest, which began with the Dutch in the seventeenth century and ended, according to many Taiwan nationalists, with the Guomindang (GMD) takeover of the island in 1945. Over this 300–year period, Taiwan was governed by Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese rulers, and although protests were infrequent, from the late nineteenth century on they took on an increasingly nationalistic character. In recent years, Taiwanese nationalists have drawn upon the island's colonial history to encourage its modern residents to resist efforts by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to take it over and turn it into a Chinese province. The residents of Taiwan at the time of the Dutch conquest in 1624 were composed of numerous Austronesian aboriginal tribes that can be broadly divided into two groups. Mountain aborigines had had little or no contact with Chinese traders and other groups that had periodically landed on Taiwan's shores, and were regarded by Taiwan's Dutch rulers, and later by Chinese and Japanese rulers alike, as impossible to assimilate and best left on their own, although the territory that they controlled diminished substantially over time and under Japanese rule many of their traditional practices were outlawed. Plains aborigines, ... log in or subscribe to read full text