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- [00:01]
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Evan D. About his book titled Taiwan A People's History, published by reaction in 2026. Now, the title tells us what we're doing with this book and what we're not doing. Right. Many books about Taiwan focus predominantly, if not solely on the sort of geopolitics of what's going on. And obviously that's important. But there's a whole bunch of people that live in Taiwan and have lived in Taiwan and those histories, which are not just sort of one size fits all, are a lot more nuanced than a kind of purely geopolitical focus will allow us to understand. So this book helpfully kind of goes into that to give us a somewhat different picture perhaps than is usually told about this place, which I think will make for a very interesting discussion. So, Evan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:30]
Dr. Evan Dawley
Thank you very much, Miranda. I'm delighted to be here and to get a chance to talk with you about this book that I'm very happy to have finished.
- [02:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I can imagine you're very pleased to have finished it. But if you could both introduce yourself and take us back to the beginning of the project to tell us why you even decided to do this in the first place.
- [02:49]
Dr. Evan Dawley
Yeah, sure. That's always a question that we should answer about the things that we undertake. So first to introduce myself. My name is Evan Dawley. I'm a professor of history or associate professor of history at Goucher College, which is in Baltimore, Maryland. And I've been teaching here for, I think this is my 13th year, and I teach all across East Asia. So in terms of why I decided to write this book, I guess I mean, the simplest answer is that I was asked to write this book. A few years ago, an editor at Reaction Books, Pascal Porteron, reached out to me. The press was looking for somebody to write a general history of Taiwan. And I have to admit that my initial answer, or my initial thought was, no, I don't have time to do this. I have other research projects that I really want to get going on after a couple years of the pandemic that delayed everything. And so initially I was not inclined to do it. But then I spoke with him, and then I thought a little bit more about it, and I realized that I did want to do it, that I wanted to be someone who got to write a new history of Taiwan, if you will, a new approach to Taiwan's history. Because I realized a couple of things. One, I had something to say, or I thought at least that I had something to say that hadn't really been written or hadn't really been the approach that earlier histories of Taiwan had used. There were already some survey histories of Taiwan out there, but I thought that I could add something. And a few years earlier, I had published an article with the International Journal of Taiwan Studies about the periodization of Taiwan's history, in which I argued for how we could write a Taiwanese center history, in other words, a history that centered the peoples of Taiwan as you just as you have just described it. And this article said that we needed or in this article I argued that we needed to divide up Taiwan's history not according to the different governments the. That had established themselves there, but following, I suppose, trends or processes of transformation that affected the peoples who lived there. And then we could divide up our periods of time roughly based upon when significantly large transformations had occurred. And so I divided things up in the 17th century, in the late 19th century, and the mid to late 20th century. Those were my dividing points. And so I thought that I could apply that sense of chronology or that sense of periodization to write a new history of Taiwan. So that was one reason, right. I said that I thought I had something to do or something new to add. And I also thought that I had taught a couple of classes on the history of Taiwan at Mashreef University in Czech and George Washington University in the United States. And I figured, oh, I'll just take my old lectures and transform those into chapters. That's not exactly how things worked out. In the end, I discovered it's actually not that easy to go from lecture to book. But that was a very productive process, I think that enabled me to write a more cohesive and detailed book. In the end, the last reason that I decided to do it was somewhere along the line, after I published my first book, somebody suggested to me that maybe I should write a more popular or accessible history for my second book. And I had originally said, no, no, no. I've got this other monograph I want to work on. But I think that that was probably a good suggestion, and I was glad to take it. If I could steal one more moment, though, to make one final introductory comment, which is that the nature of this book as a general survey history of Taiwan means that it's based not really on my own research, but on the work of dozens upon dozens of other scholars. And I'm not probably going to drop their names throughout this conversation, But I am very grateful for the foundation they provided so that I could write this book.
- [07:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for that very helpful introduction. It gives us a lot of things to pick up on in more detail. And I think the first two, really, that I'd like to draw on and sort of intertwine is the comment about periodization, which I agree is really crucial here, as well as, of course, the contributions of other scholars, which is important for this kind of history especially as well. So let's not start our discussion in the 1940s, right? Let's not even start our discussion in the 1800s. Can we go and talk about the current state of knowledge around the much older indigenous history of Taiwan?
- [07:54]
Dr. Evan Dawley
Yes, yes, I'll do the best I can. This is, sadly, the area of my own least knowledge about Taiwan, perhaps. And it's an area that I had to really spend a bit of time reading a little bit about in order to write this book. So what I would say, based on what I've read, is that, um, the state of knowledge is. Is rapidly improving in recent decades, but there. There are still significant gaps. But I want to add a caveat to that initial statement right Already caveating my own, my own work about starting about a little over a hundred years ago, during the period of Japanese colonization, Japanese researchers actually produced quite a lot of knowledge about indigenous Taiwanese. They did quite a lot of research and published a lot of studies. And so 100 years ago the state of knowledge was reasonably good, if of course, you read Japanese. But that research kind of went dormant for a little while, I think, and it was picked up in Taiwan, primarily in Taiwan, maybe, I don't know, sometime in the 1960s or 1970s. And again in recent decades, there's really been a rapid expansion and improvement in the research that's been done on indigenous Taiwanese, much of it by indigenous Taiwanese themselves. They've really been providing some of the most useful scholarship. A lot of this is of course, written in Chinese and published in Chinese. But there's also been a rising tide, if you will, in English language scholarship over the last few decades. So to give maybe a more concrete example of what I mean by this long term development of the state of the field and how it has evolved, I want to talk about maybe the three theories of the origins of indigenous Taiwanese. And I go through this a little bit in the early stages of the book as well. So there have been three theories that have been proposed over time about where the indigenous Taiwanese came from and how they are connected to other parts of the world. The first theory to be proposed really is a scientific theory based upon research and analysis is the theory of Southern origins. The idea that the indigenous Taiwanese arrived in Taiwan oversea from parts of Southeast Asia, right? They had migrated northwards from Philippines, from what's now Indonesia, you know, further, further south, and arrived in Taiwan at some point in the very distant past. And that was based upon linguistic research and cultural research as well. So that's the southern origins theory. A second theory was the theory of a northern origin. So and this theory suggested that, you know, rather than coming north out of Southeast Asia, the indigenous Taiwanese had migrated over from the Asian mainland at some point in the past. And the at some point in the past had many different dates applied to it, depending upon who was proposing it. Some of those dates were in the rather distant past, before there were even Chinese dynasties. Some of those theories or some of the versions of the theory, much more recent, maybe in the last couple of thousand years, migrations to Taiwan. So you might be able to tell that these different theories might have connected. These first two theories might have connected to particular efforts by the Japanese scholars who propose the southern origins theory to link Taiwan to an expanding Japanese Empire in the first half of the 20th century, or in the case of the northern origins people who were trying to show deep historical links between Taiwan and China. So those were the first two theories that were proposed in, beginning in the 1960s and then really picking up steam in the 1980s. A third theory was the theory of Austronesian dispersal. So this theory drew upon a body of knowledge about the Austronesian language family, if you will, or that's really where it began, with linguistics and cultural anthropology that built a sense of who these Austronesian people were spread around different parts of the globe. And in, as I said, beginning in the 1960s and then picking up steam in the 1980s and after a number of scholars doing research on these languages proposed that, in fact what had happened was that the indigenous Taiwanese had arrived in Taiwan, again, probably from the mainland of asia, but between 6 or 8,000 years ago, or between 6 and 8,000 years ago. And so a very long time in the past, they had then settled in Taiwan for several millennia and gone through a process of linguistic and cultural diversification. And then beginning about three or four thousand years ago, had began to migrate outwards and had ultimately dispersed. Hence, Austronesian dispersal had spread across a huge chunk of the globe, extending from Madagascar on the west to Easter island or Rapa Nui on the east. So throughout this enormous maritime zone. And this Austronesian dispersal theory really became the dominant one in terms of support from scientific evidence, and that it's become again largely accepted. However, there has been recently, due to new research, archaeological and some genetic research that has added some qualifications to this so called out of Taiwan thesis. Some new research, recent research has suggested that the populations of Southeast Asia, the Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific where the Austronesian speakers live, have a rather complex DNA mixture, if you will. And the similarities between Taiwan's indigenous peoples and the people spread across the broader Austronesian world is not exact. There's a lot of variation again across Southeast Asia and the western Pacific. That does bring into question the idea that all of these Austronesians came out of Taiwan, if you will. So this is, I think, an example of how the knowledge has expanded and improved and changed over time.
- [15:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, this is really interesting to kind of have a sense of the different theories and kind of when and why they've developed in the ways that they have. So thank you for updating us on kind of what the thinking is and also why that's the thinking too. That's obviously a really key part of this. If we move then forward a bit, obviously in time, kind of regardless of which. Of the theories of how indigenous people got to Taiwan, we're going to go with. There are at a point.
- [15:28]
Prime Originals Promoter
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- [15:29]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Indigenous communities in Taiwan. What then are initial interactions like with people. People who are definitely outsiders. Right. Whether we're talking about the Chinese, the Japanese, the Europeans. What were those sorts of interactions like at first?
- [15:42]
Dr. Evan Dawley
Yeah, sure. Well, if I may go back even a little bit further, if we're going to talk about the. At first. Sorry. Relations. I think we do have to go make at least a brief mention of the fact that several thousand years ago, before the Common Era, Some of the indigenous Taiwanese were actually well connected to trading circuits that extended down into what are now the Philippines islands and across to what is now Vietnam. There was a substantial trade in jade ornaments and other products that we can find archeological evidence of. So that was really the first contacts with outsiders, if you will. But those trade networks, or at least the indigenous Taiwanese participation. Participation in those trade Networks, disappeared about 1700 years ago. For reasons that I'm still not entirely clear about. So those were the really first ones. But to get to really what you were asking about, which was how did Taiwan, I suppose, get reconnected to trade networks in something closer to the early modern and modern period? And that really took off in what, from the Chinese perspective would be the Ming Dynasty era. From the Japanese perspective would be the Warring States period in the 16th and 17th centuries. So what seems to have happened in the 16th and 17th Centuries is that a growing number of both Chinese and Japanese merchants. Were going out into Southeast Asia and also were trading back and forth with each other. And also trading with the Ryukyu Kingdom, which is nearby to Taiwan, now part of Okinawa Prefecture in Japan. So these merchants from different places Began to sail into Taiwan's harbors on the north coast and on the southwest coast. And they wanted to trade with each other. One of the reasons they wanted to trade with each other on Taiwan Is that there were prohibitions placed by the Ming Dynasty on trade. That really limited the possibility of trading in Chinese harbors along the. The east coast of China there. And. And Japan was in such a state of disarray during the Warring States period that. That there were not many places that were really safe for foreign merchants to land. And so it was much easier for these merchants to meet each other on Taiwan. But the other reason that they wanted to go to Taiwan Had a lot to do with what the island itself could provide. And what indigenous Taiwanese could bring to this. Or what emerged as really a triangular trade. So one of the Key resources, if you will. Or one of the key products in this triangular trade. Was the Taiwan chica deer. There were massive herds of deer. Used to roam the island of Taiwan. And both Japanese and Chinese merchants. Were really interested in the deer. And the things that it could provide. As I understand these things. Japanese were particularly interested in the leather, which was important for making armor. Very important to the samurai wars of the 16th century. Armor, sorry, leather and sinews and things like that. That could be used to. To improve samurai warfare. And Chinese merchants were interested in deer meat and deer horns and hoes. For medicinal purposes. And maybe some other uses as well. And so these merchants began to meet each other on Taiwan. They traded with each other. They traded with indigenous groups. To facilitate their own trade purposes. There was another factor that really maybe enhanced this trade. Or facilitated this trade. That was going on in Taiwan in the 16th century. Which was that the Ming dynasty was very concerned. With pirates. Along its coastal region. And some of these pirates do seem to have taken up refuge. In Taiwan's harbors, Right. To seek sort of a safe place to hide from the Ming navies. And there are records of some punitive missions. That the Ming dynasty launched. Against these pirates. That were taking up again, using Taiwan's harbors, like Jilong in the north. As a pirate base, Essentially. As the Ming dynasty suppressed some of these pirates, it also began to issue licenses to Chinese merchants. That allowed them to legally trade. At a couple of Taiwan's harbors at various points in time. Now, there were not a lot of these licenses. But the licenses that did exist. Again allowed the trade to expand a little bit. And so that really took shape in the 16th and early 17th century. What then happened was the arrival of European. Over the course of the 16th and early 17th century, three main European empires Established themselves in East Asia. The Portuguese were really the first. The Spanish roughly contemporaneous. And the Spanish really established themselves in Manila. The Portuguese in Macau, and then further south. And also the Portuguese began to go into Nagasaki in Japan. The third group was the Dutch. And the Dutch were arriving in what is now Jakarta in Indonesia. They established their colony in Batavia. The Dutch were also trying to get involved. In the trade with Japan. And Taiwan is somewhat strategically located. On the sailing routes. Between both Manila and southeast China. And, of course, Southeast Asia and Japan. So the Dutch and the Spanish, in particular. Became interested. In establishing footholds on Taiwan. And they did so in the 1620s. The Spanish actually arrived second. Established themselves in Geelong, up in the north. Geelong, or Keelung and Danshui up in the north, the Dutch down in the south, in what is now Tainan. And they competed with each other a little bit over the course of a couple of decades. And by the mid-1640s, the Dutch had sort of driven out the Spanish and established a small colonial outpost, or set of colonial outposts, if you will, along the western coast of Taiwan, extending again roughly from the area around Tainan to the area around Geelong up in the north. Another factor in facilitating sort of the Dutch success, if you will, to the extent that, you know, colonization can be a success, is that the Japanese essentially abandoned their overseas interactions in there in the 1630s. The shogunate became decided that Japan could be best protected if it was not sending its merchants out into the world where they might get involved in different conflicts. And there had been some groups in Japan that were really interested in perhaps establishing a permanent foothold on Taiwan, but they were withdrawn in the 1630s, and that again facilitated the establishment of the Dutch colony there.
- [24:03]
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- [25:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so that's really helpful to map out in some cases literally right, the entangled networks and interconnections of kind of who's going where. But what I'm hearing is A lot of footholds of ports, of sort of resupply. None of that is inevitably the same thing as settler colonialism of the whole island. So how do we get to that?
- [25:58]
Dr. Evan Dawley
Through a lot of contestation, if you will, and also in a few stages. So I want to go through maybe a little bit of the background here of some of the events that were a part of this unfolding of Chinese settler colonialism on Taiwan, and then maybe give a couple of examples of. Of how that unfolding sort of developed into a much more permanent settlement. So the background did begin with the. The Dutch colonial outposts, because the Dutch. It was really the Dutch East India Company, right, as a commercial venture. They were interested in trying to maximize profits and to get as much resources out of Taiwan as they could. They were also interested in deer products. They were interested in sugar and rice that could be sold as valuable commodities. And in order to acquire these things, the Dutch actually encouraged the settlement by Chinese agricultural workers, farmers, and merchants to come across the Taiwan Straits and establish themselves in Taiwan and serve as intermediaries with the indigenous populations to again acquire many of these products. This is a process, it's called co colonization, if you will, between both, sort of an alliance between the Dutch East India Company and some Chinese. So one of the individuals who was involved in facilitating this co colonization was a merchant by the name of Zhang Zhilong. Zhang Zhilong was from southeastern China, from Fujian Province, and he had developed a bit of a maritime empire extending from the southwestern coast of Japan. Nagasaki, Hirado, were the two ports around there where he was active, extending all the way down to the China coast and even into parts of Southeast Asia. And he allied himself with the Dutch and facilitated the migration of Chinese to Taiwan. Now his son, Zheng Chonggong, or Koksinga, as he's often known, became a really essential figure in shifting the balance of power in and around Taiwan in the middle of the 17th century. There was, of course, in China a conflict Brewing in the 1630s and 1640s between the Ming Dynasty and Manchus from the northeastern frontier of the Ming Dynasty, who eventually established the Qing Dynasty. As the Manchus swept down through the Great wall in the 1640s, they displaced the Ming Dynasty, you know, fully established themselves as the rulers of China in the 1640s, 1650s. But not everybody immediately surrendered. There was a lot of, as I said, contestation. And so Zheng Chong, or Koksinga, was one of the last to really hold out against the imposition of Manchu rule by the Qing Dynasty. And during the early 1660s, Zheng Chengguang's position on the southeast coast of China became really untenable, and he decided that to continue his operations, he needed to relocate, and he set his sights on Taiwan, with which he had had a lot of interactions over the preceding decades. In 1661, he sent his armada across the strait to lay siege to the Dutch colony Dutch colonial outpost. And by 1662, he had driven the Dutch out and established his own regime, a brigand to establish his own regime on Taiwan, ostensibly out of loyalism to the Ming, but largely to preserve his own maritime empire and to continue to struggle against the Qing. Now, he died soon after he had established this new regime, but his descendants continued it until the early 1680s, when the Qing dynasty finally defeated them and decided to Annex Taiwan in 1684. So that's a lot of the events that really set the stage for much larger numbers of Chinese settlers to move across the coast from southeastern China to Taiwan and gradually spread across roughly half the island. Now, let me say quickly, who were these Chinese settlers? So they came from primarily two groups and two geographic regions along the southeastern coast. One group were from a region known as Minnan, or southern Fujian Province, and particularly in that region, two counties, Quanzhou and Zhangzhou counties. These people are known as the Hoklo, which is the local language pronunciation essentially of how they refer to themselves in Chinese. It's the Minan people. The other group were Haka. And the Hakka came not so much from these coastal regions of Jiangzhou and Quanzhou, but the Hakka came from more upland regions right on the border between Fujian Province and Guangdong Province. And they moved out of those upland regions down to the coast and also began to migrate across to Taiwan in the 18th century. The largest numbers were the Quanzhou and the Zhangzhou people. The Hakka were much smaller numbers. It is worth noting, and this is probably to set up some terms I'm going to be using as we go through this, it's worth noting that at a very broad level, both the Hoklo and the Hakka could be considered part of the Han Chinese family, if you will. So at the broadest level, we can lump them together, even though there are serious differences between them, and we should keep those in mind. So over the course of the 18th century, settlement gradually increased from, you know, in the middle of the 17th century, there were maybe a few tens of thousands of Han Chinese living in Taiwan under the Dutch and then under the Zhang regime, 50, 60, 70,000. By the 1770s, there were maybe 800,000 and then by 1895, there were about two and a half million. So you can see the population really expanded dramatically. Now, this was not by any means a calm and stable process of settlement. There was frequent conflict among these settlers, both with each other and especially with the Qing state and with indigenous Taiwanese as they were moving into those territories. And I want to use maybe a few examples to exemplify both this transition from a really unstable settler society to. To a more stable settler society and some of the points of conflict that emerged. So the first event that I want to begin with is the Zhuigui Rebellion that emerged or that took place in 1721. So Jui Gui was a farmer in the area around what is now Tainan, and he and a number of other farmers launched what was essentially a tax revolt against the Qing state. And when the Qing state launched a rather brutal reprisal against them, that actually just provoked more resistance. And Zhuigui linked up with a local bandit named Du Junying, and the two of them sort of raised a force that attacked the seat of the Qing government on Taiwan in what is again now Tainan, and actually drove the Qing administration and Qing forces off of the island. So completely detached Taiwan from the Qing Empire. Now, this didn't last very long. One of the features of the people who participated in the Juiwei Uprising, a rebellion, was that, according to later research, about 60% of them had no living family members, and another 15% had living family members but were unmarried. In other words, they were viewed as unstable or unsettled, shiftless people who didn't really have deep roots anywhere. So this is an example of the unsettled nature. Another feature of that rebellion is that Zhuigui himself was. Was, I believe, from Zhangzhou and his bandit ally, Du Junying, was a Haka. And the disputes between them emerged pretty quickly, so that by the time the Qing forces returned to Taiwan a couple months later, the rebellion was already falling apart, and it ended pretty quickly. So it wasn't a very long lasting rebellion, but it sort of exemplifies again, some of the unsettled nature of, or the unstable nature of early settled society. If we move then about 65 years later, we get to a second uprising known as the Lin Shuangwen Rebellion. This one was much larger. It lasted from 1786 to 1788. It spread over a much larger territory. And by one estimate, this rebellion actually displaced as much as 75% of the settler population as refugees over the course of its duration. Now, the Lin Chuangwen Uprising did not remove the Qing forces or the Qing administration from Taiwan, but it did consistently wage or levy attacks on coastal cities, from Danshui all the way up in the north to Lugang, More in the center of the island and even further south. Right. It was a really widespread and devastating uprising that again took the Qing dynasty a year and a half or so to fully suppress. And this, I think, exemplifies that. By the late 18th century, people in Taiwan had sunk much deeper roots into the island. They had established themselves as farmers, they had developed forms, they had developed sources of wealth, they had built much stronger ties to each other. The details of the Linchuang Wen rebellion indicate really strong social and secret society networks that had built up across Taiwan over the decades that facilitated the survival of this rebellion for as long as it did and allowed it to become as destructive as it was. The third form, I apologies for the very long answer here, but there's a lot, as I said, that went on in this period of time. The third form of contestation and struggle that emerged in Taiwan is known as sub ethnic violence, violence between different groups of settlers from Taiwan, and also violence that involved different groups of indigenous Taiwanese. So some of these forms of conflict happened between Huklo and Hakka. Some of them were between Quanzhou and Jeonzhou settlers. Right. So sub ethnic groups of Hoklock. The alliances were shifting in such a way that, you know, in one example, in northeastern China from the 18th century. Sorry, northeastern Taiwan from the 18th century, the Yilan region, or what's today the Yilan region, you know, there was an alliance of Hakka, Quinzhou and indigenous Taiwanese against Zhengzhou settlers. But in other places, you would have, you know, alliances of Zhangzhou and Hakka against Quanzhou. Right. These things shifted quite, quite dramatically. But the main point, again, about this sub ethnic violence is that the settlers were defending the interests that they had developed over the course of perhaps generations by the early and mid 18th century. And that's one of the reasons why these outbreaks became so intense in the course of the 19th century. This was not unique really to Taiwan itself. Rebellion became essentially endemic to much of Qing territory by the early 19th century, but it did have sort of these particularities along ethnic lines in Taiwan.
- [40:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, no, that's helpful to understand, to kind of situate it within the broader context, but without losing the nuance of the particular place. Were these conflicts then, when you're talking about kind of embedded over generations, are we seeing sort of embedded over generations, but within still settler colonial sort of groups are we seeing sort of mixing between different settlers and indigenous groups.
- [40:24]
Dr. Evan Dawley
So, yeah, that's a really hard question to answer in some ways. It's a really hard question to answer. Because over the course of this process of settlement. There was definitely also a process of assimilation that took place as the settlers, particularly the Hoklo settlers, established themselves in the plains and foothills of western Taiwan. They moved into areas that had been inhabited by what we've come to call the Plains indigenous populations. And segments of those populations really became absorbed into settler society. And disappeared, I suppose, from the historical record in some ways. So that's one of the reasons why it's a little hard to say exactly whether or not these ethnic lines were preserved in these forms of sub ethnic violence. But let me step back for a moment and sort of talk about assimilation more broadly. Because it was in some ways bi directional in the sense that particularly in the early decades of settlement. When the only people who were coming across, legally at least, were single males, There was a not infrequent occurrence of intermarriage between those single Han males and indigenous females. And in many cases, those Han males actually moved into their wives villages and became absorbed into indigenous societies. So assimilation did move in that direction. Perhaps more common, though not even perhaps definitely more common though, was the absorption over time. And it wasn't a peaceful absorption by any stretch of the imagination. In many cases, forced absorption in many cases of indigenous populations by these Han settlers. But this assimilation, I think, was not always a primary objective. The primary objective, I think, for these Hokulo settlers and Haka settlers. Was economic survival. They had left conditions in southeastern China that were difficult and unsettled. Seeking more opportunities in Taiwan. And so again, their primary objective was economic. But they were willing to use a wide range of means to achieve that goal of economic advancement. Assimilation, displacement, defeat through armed conflict. There was also among the Chinese who settled in Taiwan. And other educated Chinese who observed Taiwan. There was a debate among them over whether or not indigenous Taiwans even could be assimilated. The general sense was yes, but maybe not all of them. Or at least not all of them rapidly. And this debate sort of resulted perhaps in the emergence of a division in Chinese mines among the indigenous between two categories. One category they referred to as xiang fan. So sheng means in this case, raw or uncooked. Fan is the term that was applied to the indigenous. It has connotations of barbarian or savage that go along with that term. So they're the xiang fan. And then on the other hand, they're the shu fan. And the term shu means cooked in some way. So the Xiang Fan were unassimilated and perhaps unassimilable, and the Shufan were assimilated. But it's really hard to know how many went through this process of assimilation or became assimilated. Again, the population numbers are really hard to find, and I did the best I could with the numbers that were available to me. But the research that I had suggests that there were maybe between 70,000 and 100,000 indigenous Taiwanese in the mid 17th century. Much better data, I think, emerged in around 1900, and that also said there were about 100,000 indigenous Taiwanese, which looks like remarkable stability over a very long period of time and suggests that there was probably quite a lot of natural increase as well as assimilation going on. But I guess what I want to emphasize finally here is that this distinction between Shangfan and Shu Fan, the most significant characteristic of that distinction was that the, the Shang Fan, the so called raw indigenous, had never submitted to Qing rule, they never submitted to the administration of the Qing Dynasty, and they were largely unassimilated. That doesn't mean that their culture did not change over the course of 200 years, or their cultures did not change over the course of 200 years, but they were not assimilated into settler society.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's helpful to understand, especially because I think these questions of assimilation are not, when it comes to Taiwan, are often thought of in terms of kind of Taiwan as one clump, I suppose, being assimilated into something even larger than that, rather than looking inside Taiwan. So that's really interesting to talk about kind of what's happening inside Taiwan over, as you said, kind of not just years or even, even decades, but really generations. If we combine that, then with the idea of Taiwan sort of as an entity in and of itself being assimilated, how might we compare processes, for example, of the Chinese and the Japanese sort of trying to make Taiwan part of what they're doing? Obviously, that also covers quite a large span of time. But if we think about the similarities in terms of kind of assimilation or not, what sorts of comparisons might we find?
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Dr. Evan Dawley
Sure, so we find quite a lot of similarities, I think, spread across a long period of time that goes from the Qing period. So Taiwan was within qing territory from 1684 to 1895. Then it became a Japanese colony in 1895 until the end of World War II. And then in 1945, the Republic of China took over administration of Taiwan and launched what I think we have to describe as a new phase of Settler colonialism in the early post war period and across those periods of time, I think we see a lot of similarities in approach, in mindset and in treatment. Let me give one example of a similarity, which is that really at no
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Dr. Evan Dawley
was there a full incorporation of all of the indigenous populations and all of the lands that they used. And what I mean by this is I'm drawing here on a book by Paul Barclay, scholar largely of Japanese empire, but particularly focused on indigenous relations with indigenous Taiwanese. And he talks about a condition of bifurcated sovereignty in Taiwan. And what this means is that even though the Qing Dynasty by the late 19th century was claiming to have sovereignty over all of Taiwan, and even though the Japanese Empire claimed to have sovereignty over all of or asserted sovereignty over all of Taiwan, and the Republic of China did the same, they carved out special categories for categories and policies and even spaces for groups of indigenous Taiwanese, groups of indigenous Taiwanese that for that came to be known as the. The mountain indigenous, if you will, suggesting that, you know, their homelands were the more mountainous regions of central eastern Taiwan. Their complications to that these indigenous groups had for a long time moved very widely across Taiwan, but they became associated with the mountains, hence mountain indigenous. And so again, there were always legal carve outs for these people that created this condition of so called bifurcated sovereignty within Taiwan. So that's sort of one similarity across the different ruling regimes. And it's one reason why I think that, you know, the ruling regimes can't always be at the center of our story. We have to think about, you know, things that continued over longer periods of time and how those factors affected and were responded to by the people living in these territories. To get to another similarity, all of these groups of settlers and all of these states viewed Taiwan and its populations as backwards. Taiwan was a backwards place that was filled with people who needed to be transformed and civilized. They needed to be changed in order to fit the state's vision of what good subjects or citizens would be and also to fit with prevailing social ideas about what civilized people did and how civilized people behaved. One of the things that happened with the beginning of Japanese rule was that the Han Chinese settlers then themselves became the subjects of a new colonial settler regime. And so they were placed under, to some extent anyway, this similar vision that viewed the peoples of Taiwan as backwards and not as civilized as the Japanese. Now the Japanese colonial settlers certainly distinguished between the descendants of the Han Chinese settlers and the indigenous Taiwanese in many significant ways, but viewed all of them as in need of civilization, modernization and Transformation into Japanese subjects. That outlook sort of replicated or reappeared in the post war period when once again the regime that arrived and the settlers that came with it looked upon all of the people of Taiwan as not as advanced and not as civilized as themselves. Again with distinctions drawn between the indigenous Taiwanese and other people in Taiwan. But there were similar efforts to assimilate these people, to transform them through education, perhaps through religious means, into, you know, Japanese people or Chinese people.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really interesting to see quite a number there of similarities in approach, despite, as you said, the very different regimes. And also means quite a lot of sort of impositions of, like, this is what it is to be Taiwanese. No, this is what it is to be Taiwanese. Like there's a lot of different ideas, kind of very much overlapping. So by the time we get to sort of the mid 20th century, what does it mean to be Taiwanese?
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Dr. Evan Dawley
Yeah, that's a very complex question. Sounds like a simple question, but the answer's quite complex, I think. So on the one hand, if we were to define Taiwanese negatively, that is, in terms of what it is, what it was not, it was definitely defined as not Japanese and not Chinese in regards to the, the, the state or the national identities that the peoples of Taiwan were forced to address. Right. So as the Japanese and, and then the post war Chinese regimes in particular sought to Japanize or sinicize the population of Taiwan, Taiwanese identity was defined against that. Now, I do want to be clear that the assimilation efforts were not completely ineffective. There were certainly examples of people who began to think of themselves, I think as more Japanese began to think of themselves as more Chinese in the 50s and 60s. But nonetheless, Taiwanese identities were defined against those programs, against those assimilation projects. Also defined negatively, to be Taiwanese meant that you were not indigenous. As Taiwanese identities really took shape in the first half of the 20th century under Japanese colonial rule, the people who created that identity were these set, these descendants of the. Particularly the Hoklo settlers. And they defined themselves very much as not indigenous as well. Or they sort of excluded indigenous Taiwanese from this Taiwanese identity that they were created. So those are all sort of the negative ways in which we can think about it. Right. What it was defined against, if we define Taiwanese more positively, that is, in terms of what it was. It meant in some ways belonging to a community that had really been forged through two centuries of settlement, 50 years of Japanese colonization, and then at least the first decade or so of Chinese recolonization. And you know, I've talked a little bit about what that process looked like in the Qing period, briefly, what that process looked like in the Japanese period. In the Japanese period, there was a really strenuous effort to. To educate the population in Japanese language and Japanese history and culture, to pressure the peoples of Taiwan to attend Shinto shrines, to maybe adopt branches of Japanese Buddhism and other ways to come to identify themselves as Japanese. And then in really the first decade after the end of World War II, this first decade of Chinese recolonization, I think a number of features promoted the coalescence, if you will, or the solidification of this sense of being Taiwanese. Right, again, as a community that was forged by this long term process. So in the first decade after 1945, there was first a very rapid process of economic decline. Obviously, Taiwan had been greatly damaged by the late stages of the war, but the economy kind of went into free fall in late 1946 and early 1947, a time when the new government was extracting as many resources as it could out of Taiwan in order to use them to engage in the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists in China. So there was an economic collapse. There were also processes or practices of treating the people of Taiwan as if they, as I had said, were backwards and as if they'd been really corrupted by 50 years of Japanese influence and colonial rule. And those processes really provoked a series of tensions that exploded in February of 1947 in something well known, I think, as the February 28th incident, or 228, an event that of course, just passed its anniversary. This event was then quickly and brutally suppressed. And then a couple of years later, it was replaced by the installation of martial law and a regime that is referred to as the White Terror, during which thousands, really uncounted, thousands of people were disappeared, were sent to prison for periods of time. Sometimes they would vanish for a number of weeks, sometimes they would vanish for a number of years, Sometimes they would never return. Right. So the, the statistics are unclear. These white terror policies, in fact, targeted all segments, all demographic segments of Taiwanese society. But nonetheless, the result for this population that had come to define itself as Taiwanese during the Japanese period was again, to really strengthen that, I think, sense of community, common identity. But it leads to another question, or this leads us to another question, which was, what was the objective of being Taiwanese at this point? And I think that was part of what you were asking, right? Not just who were they, but what was their goal? What was their agenda at the middle of the 20th century? And it was, I think, largely the preservation of this community. But there was Also the beginnings of a movement for national independence. For Taiwanese independence. There had been some hints of this as early as the 1920s and early 1930s. It really began to expand in the 1950s. Particularly overseas. Particularly among Taiwanese who moved out to Japan and in the United States as well in the 50s and 60s.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really interesting to see. Kind of how the different threads sort of come together in opposition to. As well as. As you said, in positive ways as well. How does this all help make sense of Taiwan today. In terms of these sorts of questions of identity and population?
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Dr. Evan Dawley
Oh, yeah, okay. So it contributes, I think, in a lot of ways. So what we really need to think about over the course of the post war period in particular. But also the longer 20th century. Is, I guess, the intersection of two processes, really. Processes of Taiwanization and processes of democratization. So for Taiwanization, we should think about this in a couple of ways. The first way is, of course, the creation of a Taiwanese identity. But also the transformation and the expansion of that Taiwanese identity. In my first book, I really emphasize the formation of Taiwanese identity as an ethnic consciousness. But over time, that Taiwanese consciousness really took on more and more dimensions of a national identity. And, as I suggested, intersected with a growing Taiwane independence movement. So in addition to that, this Taiwanese identity did expand to become, in some ways, more inclusive. Over the course of the latter half of the 20th century. That expansion moved along a couple of different dimensions. One was a process of identity change. Among the settlers who came over after 1945. People known as the Weishangren or the. You know, the Weishangren or the mainlanders. People who were from outside of Taiwan. And over the course of several decades, many of these Weishangren who were, you know, soldiers and other people who had no. Who had very low economic status when they arrived in Taiwan. By the 1970s, many of these people had begun to think of Taiwan as their home. And when they were able to sort of reconnect with families in China in the 80s. They realized the distance that had grown up between themselves and their family members. Their imagined homeland. And so that really solidified their. Their identity as. As being of Taiwan. So, right. Taiwanization also involved the growth of a Taiwanese identity. Among many of these mainlanders. The third aspect, I suppose, of this expansion of Taiwanese Taiwanese identity. Was the incorporation of indigenous Taiwanese as a part of a broader Taiwanese family. Now, this piece didn't always happen with the participation, shall we say, of indigenous Taiwanese. It was something. The presence of indigenous Taiwanese was used by Taiwanese nationalists To distinguish Taiwan from China. Right? One feature that could distinguish Taiwan from China. So that's part of the Taiwanization story. The democratization story is something that again extended back to the Japanese colonial period. When there was the emergence of some form of civil society. When there were political movements, there were labor movements, There were efforts to define Taiwanese culture and to express Taiwanese culture in sort of public places. There were even some forms of open elections at the municipal level. And there were longer efforts to establish. Unsuccessful efforts, but longer efforts to establish a national, sorry, a provincial or a colonial assembly in Taiwan. And so those low level democratization processes continued in the post war period. They continued again with municipal elections. Beginning in 1950. The emergence of what has become known as the Dong Wai movement. There was only one legal party in Taiwan, the Guomindang or the Nationalist Party in this era of martial law. But in many elections, non party candidates could run. And so this Dongwui movement emerged particularly in the 1970s and the early 1980s. And alongside this growth of Dongwu politics. And then eventually the emergence of the DPP as the first formal opposition party. It actually was formed even before it was legalized, if that makes sense, in 1986. Alongside that was also an explosion of social movements and political movements in the 1980s and 1990s, before and after the end of martial law in 1987. So the significance of all of these events and movements is really that the growing cacophony, if you will, of these political and social and movements, I think the most important of which perhaps was the indigenous rights movement that took shape in the 1980s, was that with all of these voices claiming to be Taiwanese and all of these groups claimed to be Taiwanese, it was no longer possible for Taiwanese identity to be just a narrow ethno consciousness. It had to become a more civic, a more inclusive civic nationalism. That was rooted in these very long standing practices of mass and electoral politics. So how does this explain or help us to better understand Taiwan today? I had to give all that background to get to your actual question. Well, let me use some well known longitudinal surveys of public opinion that have been carried out in Taiwan since the early 1990s by a group of researchers at National Zhengzhi University. So they've been asking two questions over a long period of time. One question is about identity. What is your identity? Are you Chinese? Taiwanese? Both. Neither along those lines. And then a second question about independence versus unification. Do you want to see independence or unification or status quo? So the first of these questions, the first time the survey was given or released in 1992, people claiming some form of Taiwanese identity, either exclusively Taiwanese identity, or both Chinese and Taiwanese identity was already at 63% of the population, or at least the survey population. That percentage was above 90% by 1999, and it's never gone below 90% ever since then. So when I look at those numbers, I cannot believe that that 63% emerged out of nowhere in 1992. And nor can I believe that 30% of the population was converted to a Taiwanese identity across the 1990s. I think that that Taiwanese identity has been around for a very, very long time. Right? It has really been shaped by, through these centuries of history that I've talked about. It was not the creation of DPP organization in the 80s and 90s and then DPP governance beginning in the early 2000s. It was not simply the product of KMT era martial law. It really has this deep history that suggests it's a very strongly held identity. Looking at the question, however, about unification versus independence, so rapid unification and rapid independence have in almost every year been the lowest vote getters, if you will, the lowest percentage of the population. Neither one of them has ever been above, I think above 8% in any given year. And most of them have been. Most of the years they've both been below 5%. Some version of the status quo has been around 80% in almost every year. And this suggests that even though this Taiwanese consciousness or versions of Taiwanese consciousness have been in formation for a very long period of time, it has always been in formation in the face of. Of various pressures to erase it by various different colonial regimes, and most recently the insistence that Taiwan will be unified. That has been coming out of Beijing for decades now. So this process of formation has made, I think, Taiwanese identity very pragmatic about what is possible as well as a very strongly held identity. Maybe leave things there.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, we cannot predict the future, at least on this sort of scale. So we, I think we'll have to leave it there. But at least that gives us a much better sense of kind of how we've gotten to where we're at. I will ask you to do a little bit of predicting the future, though, as a final question, but on a much smaller scale than, you know, Pacific East Asian politics. Now that we. You have done the things you said you wanted to do at the beginning of the project, right? Write a broader history of Taiwan. Write something that's more for general readership. What might you be doing next?
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Dr. Evan Dawley
Well, in the very short term, I think mostly just trying to survive in an environment in which the US Government seems to be trying to dismantle higher education, or at least higher education as we know it. Surviving as an academic in that environment involves new challenges. But in addition to that, maybe somewhat more positively, if that's the more negative thing I'm trying to do more positively, I'm going to give an answer that is actually similar to an answer that I gave when I was interviewed for the New Books Network about my first book several years ago. Because I'm working on a similar project, or essentially the same project. I had to put that aside in order to work on this particular book, and I certainly don't regret that. But I'm now, I think, able to focus a little bit more. This project is, perhaps oddly, in terms of this conversation that we've been having over the last hour, is much more focused on the construction of Chinese national identity and particularly the construction of Chinese nationalism by the government of the Republic of China through its relations with and around populations, diasporic populations. So I'm looking at relations between the RSC government and other governments about populations of overseas Chinese living in French colonial Vietnam and British colonial malaya during the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s. And I'm also looking, or will eventually be looking, about relations between the RSC government and people involved in the Taiwanese independence movement in Japan and the United states in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and hoping to better understand again how Chinese nationalism was constructed and really how nation states in general are constructed.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds interesting. Best of luck with those investigations.
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Dr. Evan Dawley
Oh, thank you very much. Still a long way off in the future, I think, from maybe another book, but hopefully a couple of articles in the years to come.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that makes sense. And of course, while you're working on all of that, listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled Taiwan A People's History, published by reaction in 2026. Evan, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. Evan Dawley
Thank you, Miranda. I've really, really enjoyed getting to chat with you and answer all of your questions.
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