Taiwanese Identity — Who Am I?

"Are you Taiwanese, Chinese, or both?" This deceptively plain survey question, first posed systematically by National Chengchi University's Election Study Center in 1992, has become one of the most telling barometers of a society in quiet revolution. At the outset, fewer than twenty percent of respondents answered "Taiwanese only." Three decades later, that figure exceeds sixty percent, while exclusively Chinese identification has collapsed to near single digits. No amount of policy, propaganda, or protest could have produced the shift alone; it is the cumulative work of democratic elections, a free press, generational turnover, cross-strait estrangement, and an expanding civic imagination.

The transformation has been carried not only in opinion polls but in language, curriculum, and public memory. The 1990s and 2000s saw sweeping reforms to history and civics textbooks, relocating Taiwan — rather than a mythologized greater China — to the center of the national story. The Council of Indigenous Peoples was elevated to cabinet rank, sixteen indigenous nations were formally recognized, and the Hakka Affairs Council was established to revive a language once suppressed under Mandarin monolingualism. The rise of the Hokkien-language revival, native-land literature, New Wave cinema, and a vibrant independent music scene in Taiyu and Hakka gave the Taiwan-centered identity not just a political form but an everyday cultural texture.

This reorientation was never uncontested. Older generations raised on Nationalist narratives felt displaced; some argued that the new identity risked flattening the island's own internal diversity — among waishengren, benshengren, Hakka, indigenous peoples, and the growing community of new immigrants from Southeast Asia. The legalization of same-sex marriage in 2019, the first in Asia, crystallized the emergent self-image: Taiwan as a plural, rights-based, democratic society defined less by ancestry than by shared commitments. Yet debates over Mandarin's status, the legacy of Japanese colonization, and the place of Chinese culture in Taiwanese life continue to animate dinner tables, classrooms, and legislative chambers alike.

This volume maps the long arc of Taiwanese identity formation — from colonial memory and postwar suppression to democratic self-assertion and global cultural confidence. Through survey data, textbook revisions, language policies, film and literature, it shows how an island that was for centuries named by others has come, at last, to name itself.