this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Historically (pre 1949) mainland China was their own homeland. The Republican government fled to Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War. But I guess the people of Taiwan have moved past laying claim to their homeland for various reasons.
There’s a lot of layers there, Han people have been settling in Taiwan since the 17th century and this originally Taiwanese-speaking group makes up about 70% of people in Taiwan. They don’t consider China their homeland anymore than Americans do the UK.
Han people who came with the fleeing KMT government are more directly tied to China, but even they have been largely Taiwan-ized politically since the democracy and identity movements of the 1980’s. Which is to say, very very few people in Taiwan see China as a homeland these days.
The KMT conducted a 40-year fascist reign of terror where they wiped out most of the native Taiwanese and killed tens of thousands of Han who agreed that the KMT had lost and that integration needed to happen.
Yup, the White Terror. I didn’t disagree with that.
My point was that the KMT coming to Taiwan was a wave of migration of people who while very anti-PRC saw themselves as fundamentally Chinese and Mandarin-speaking as opposed to pre-1945 Han settlers who were Taiwanese-speaking and in many cases had been living in Taiwan for hundreds of years already.
Today, those distinctions have softened, and polling shows that even the people who are descended from that wave of KMT migration mostly see themselves as Taiwanese first and foremost.
Of course they do, if they saw themselves as mainlanders they were murdered and chucked in mass graves. The entire society is shaped by the white terror