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…
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.
His grandfather came from Shandong in 1949 and lived forty years in a military dependants' village at Fengshan, in a house of bamboo fence and cane board, six people in twenty ping. His father grew up in that village speaking Mandarin with a Shandong edge and Taiwanese that was never quite right. By his own generation the village had been rebuilt as public housing and the Shandong dialect had come down to a few words — the term for a clove of garlic, and the way the pleats are counted on the dumplings made at new year. The election study centre at Chengchi University has asked the same question since 1992. That year fewer than two in ten described themselves as Taiwanese only; thirty years later more than six in ten do, while those calling themselves Chinese only fell from a quarter to under three per cent. He ticks Taiwanese. It needs no explanation at home, because his father ticks it too. His grandfather's grave is in Kaohsiung, the stone carrying his ancestral county and his dates. He has never been to the place named on that line.
Longitudinal chart of Taiwanese/Chinese identity published by the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University, tracking responses from 1992 to the present and documenting the decisive shift toward an exclusively Taiwanese self-identification.
Election Study Center, National Chengchi University
A primary school mother-tongue class offering instruction in Taiwanese Hokkien (Taiyu), part of the post-2001 native-language curriculum that reversed decades of Mandarin-only schooling and reopened space for the island's local languages.
Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan)
A formal recognition ceremony for one of Taiwan's sixteen officially acknowledged indigenous nations, a milestone of the post-democratization reclassification that replaced the single "mountain compatriots" category with pluralistic ethnic standing.
Council of Indigenous Peoples, Republic of China (Taiwan)
Isle of Time