What kind of Chinese?

Wang Gungwu (王赓武), a prolific historian and scholar, has written extensively on China and Chinese migration. He was recently in Taipei, where he gave a lecture at the Lung Ying-tai Cultural Foundation (龍應台文化基金會) called What Kind of Chinese? Southeast Variations. Before the lecture, he sat down with the Taipei Times to discuss Taiwan's recent history and identity, local politics and his impressions of China's leadership and their concerns over Taiwan.

Taipei Times: What influence does history have on ideas of local identity and independence?

Wang Gungwu: I think there is an understandable desire on the part of many people here to reexamine their history and rewrite it. And I think that is happening. And understandably because, for a long time, when the Nationalists [Chinese Nationalist Party, KMT] were in power under Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) … history was all about China with very little reference to Taiwan - maybe a footnote here and there - and I think that caused a lot of resentment. So, the idea of putting Taiwan into the history books is certainly understandable. But of course the politics of independence is a different issue altogether. That is not always about history, it's about the future; you want a certain future and then you reinterpret the past to help you get to the future. That has got very little to do with history writing per se. That's politics, ideology, face … But using the past for that is very common everywhere, but that's not history.

TT: How can a balance be struck in Taiwan between the writing of history and politics?

WGW: Some of the politicians involved are not interested in striking a balance. They want to make a case for their own needs and history can be useful: The history that helps their cause they will bring out, and that which doesn't help they will ignore. It's not really about history. It's really about creating in their minds a new nation, and that is a different cause altogether. I mean scholars, we historians, are interested in what happened in the past even though we might not get it right, but we want to know what happened in the past and know it for its own sake. We have no agenda - our agenda is to get as close to the reality as possible. So we don't always come up with the answers politicians want. If we don't, we know that they will ignore us. But if we do, our findings will be used.

TT: In your opinion, are the current ethnic tensions a reaction to KMT policies of the 1980s?

WGW: It does look like a reaction against what people say was a very repressive regime and indeed the record shows that it was a very tough authoritarian regime that ruled up until the 1980s. During the period from 1945 down to at least the death of Chang Kai-shek and beyond, until the 1980s, many native-born Taiwanese people felt oppressed and some of them actually were treated badly. Many people were killed and imprisoned and tortured. The record is mixed, but on the whole it was a pretty grim record and all kinds of opposition were banned or treated shabbily. So the reaction against that is very understandable and one can sympathize greatly with those people who aspired for a more democratic Taiwan from the 1960s and 1970s on. But they were not only native Taiwanese. There were people from the Mainland who were liberal and democratic and some were even quite radical, and they shared a lot together against the regime. Many were driven out of the country and not allowed to come back and they stayed away until the 1990s. They exiled themselves because they were opposed to the regime. Those people I don't think distinguished between the native born and those who were not. Theirs was a political and, one might say, understandable human reaction against an oppressive regime.