Determination of Taiwanese National Identity

[[abstract]]This thesis argues that Taiwanese are not Chinese and the reason for Taiwanese looking on themselves as Chinese is the influences of the totalitarian dictatorship of the Kuomintang government especially during the presidencies of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Jin-kuo. The totalitarian measures of the Chiang’s government, by virtue of armed forces, ethnicization policies, cultural education and colonial cultivation, compelled Taiwanese to make themselves Chinese, Chinese Communist Party the devil, and President Chiang Kai-shek the savior of Chinese Nation. Because of that ideology swayed from the government, nowadays native-province Taiwanese, even those who have never had ‘Chinese experiences,’ share a dream with the outside-province Taiwanese that they have to ‘return to’ China, their mother country. Those who establish their identity as Chinese always speak very highly of Chinese culture but scorn Taiwanese culture of their own and the Taiwanese identity of their parents. Even though some of them are higher in Taiwanese identity, they are anxious for being Taiwanese only. This is the kind of postcolonial situation. As a result, this research, based on personal interviews with Mingnan R?n, Hakka R?n, W?ish?n R?n, and Taiwan natives, particularly focuses on issues concerning the postcoloniality of Chinese identity and ‘double identity’ and addresses the complexities of that postcolonial situation. Implications for the narrations by the colonizing culture distorting the experience, realities, and the inferiority of the colonized people who attempt to articulate their identity and reclaim their past in the face of that past inevitable otherness are discussed.