A group of young Maori from New Zealand has visited Taiwan to seek their roots, while a Japanese anthropologist has speculated that a branch of Japanese ancestry might have traveled to Kyushu Island from Taiwan.
As people from other places seek their roots in Taiwan, it is ironic that the high-school curriculum guidelines claim that the nation is a “Han Chinese immigrant society” and that Taiwanese’s ancestors came from China.
Recorded history in Taiwan started during the Dutch colonial rule. Documents show that, there were more than 200 plains Aboriginal communities at that time, the largest being the community in what is today Tainan’s Madou District (麻豆) with a population of more than 3,000.
It was surrounded by smaller communities, whose populations were not recorded.
Among highland Aborigines, the Dutch had most contact with the Paiwan people.
The plains Aborigines and the Paiwan people were the main forebears of Taiwanese. This can be seen from more than 30 lines of evidence, including Aboriginal household and tax records, and farming data.
Why then the distortion that Taiwan is a “Han Chinese immigrant society”? The causes are Sinicization, bestowing surnames and using genealogies to connect Taiwan to China.
In a report on Taiwan affairs to Emperor Yongzheng of the Qing Dynasty, then-prefectural magistrate Shen Qiyuan (沈起元) recorded the policy of “turning naturalized Aborigines into Han Chinese and unnaturalized Aborigines into naturalized ones.”
The book A Brief History of Taiwan writes that in Aboriginal communities near today’s Tainan and Kaohsiung, people mostly spoke Mandarin or the dialects of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou from China’s Fujian Province — just as Han Chinese did.
During the reign of Emperor Qianlong (乾隆), the Taiwan Prefecture Gazetteer recorded that people in naturalized Aboriginal communities mostly dressed like Han Chinese and could speak a little Chinese.
The book Annals of Taiwan Province, published by the Taiwan Province Archives — what is today Taiwan Historica — said that Qianlong in 1785 implemented a compulsory measure to bestow surnames, the most concrete proof of Sinicization.
How did Qianlong bestow surnames? The residents of an Aboriginal community were simply forced to adopt the surname of the Chinese official who was sent to them. No wonder it was common to find villages where people had the same surname, despite not being related.
In 1885, Chinese official Liu Mingchuan (劉銘傳) wrote in a report to the emperor that it was inappropriate for the Qing Empire to turn Taiwan into a Chinese province.
Aborigines and Taiwanese in the eight coastal counties of the time accounted for 60 and 40 percent of the population respectively, Liu wrote.
Taiwan was still an Aboriginal society in 1885. It in 1895 entered half a century of Japanese colonial rule, but the attempt at Japanization eventually failed. In 1951, Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) began to bestow surnames and genealogies, and, absurdly, some siblings were given different surnames.
Chiang even “amended” 791 Taiwanese genealogies, or about 65 percent of them.
Even after all these distortions, census data in 1956 showed that the 940,000 Chinese in Taiwan at the time only accounted for 10 percent of the population, showing that Taiwan is not a “Han Chinese immigrant society.”
How will Taiwanese face history if the curriculum guidelines remain unchanged?
Sim Kiantek is a former associate professor of business administration at National Chung Hsing University.
Translated by Eddy Chang
KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) recent visit to Beijing and her upcoming visit to Washington will serve as a high-level test of her diplomatic mettle. In Beijing, Cheng was received with symbolic gestures, a warm reception, and high-level access. In Washington, she will receive far less pomp and far sharper questions about the KMT’s vision for the future of Taiwan. Her challenge will be to persuade Washington that the KMT’s engagement with China can coexist with strong deterrence. Cheng’s April 7-12 visit to mainland China coincided with an intense period of conflict in Iran. Despite the strategic significance of Cheng’s trip,
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent the vast Asian chemicals industry into a tailspin. Deprived of the likes of Qatari natural gas and Saudi Arabian oil, the region’s fertilizer and plastics plants are slowing production or even shutting down. Everywhere except China, that is. In petrochemicals, China is unique. As well as a traditional industry that uses oil and gas as feedstock, it has parallel output that relies on its abundant domestic coal. Unsurprisingly, India and other regional powers want to copy and paste the Chinese method. This would not be easy — or climate friendly. The
History might remember 2026, not 2022, as the year artificial intelligence (AI) truly changed everything. ChatGPT’s launch was a product moment. What is happening now is an anthropological moment: AI is no longer merely answering questions. It is now taking initiative and learning from others to get things done, behaving less like software and more like a colleague. The economic consequence is the rise of the one-person company — a structure anticipated in the 2024 book The Choices Amid Great Changes, which I coauthored. The real target of AI is not labor. It is hierarchy. When AI sharply reduces the cost
US President Donald Trump recently repeated his claim that “Taiwan stole America’s chip industry,” reigniting public debate on the issue. As a former Taiwanese minister of economic affairs and an entrepreneur deeply involved in semiconductor supply chain development, I feel a responsibility to clarify this misunderstanding. From the perspective of global industrial evolution and the economic principle of comparative advantage, such a statement appears overly simplistic and risks obscuring the essence of the issue. The rise of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry was not built on “replacing America,” but rather emerged as a result of countries pursuing different development paths within the
RSS