The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan
Dominic Yang
Cambridge University Press: 2020
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Amid the global pandemic and the black clouds of international affairs, Taiwan is a silver lining whose success story is finally gaining some long-overdue recognition: transparent civic society; progressive democracy; thriving tech powerhouse. With such triumphs, it is easy to forget the island’s less glamorous past: a history of defeats and displacement. The Great Exodus from China reminds us how far Taiwan has come.

Taiwan is a country where several centuries of colonial settlement came at the expense of its indigenous Austronesian peoples. On top of that, Taiwan has suffered from serial colonisation by foreign rulers including the Dutch, the Manchus, the Japanese and Chinese Nationalists. Postwar Taiwanese society has been built, in the main, by three groups of deeply traumatised ‘losers’: the one million Chinese refugees (mainlanders or waishengren) who were forcibly displaced to Taiwan by China’s civil war; a ‘semi-Japanised’ Hoklo and Hakka settler majority (benshengren) who came under the political dominance of the Chinese Nationalist (KMT) regime; and the indigenous peoples who have been severely subjected to all forms of colonisation, including the ongoing state and mainstream settler-colonial structure, and yet endure.

• Tags: Dominic Yang, Issue 23, Joshua Yang, Taiwan