Comments made by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Weng Hsiao-ling (翁曉玲) and Wang Wei-chien (王偉建), father of Taiwan men’s doubles badminton gold medalist Wang Chi-lin (王齊麟), have reinvigorated the debate over what it means to be a nation.
On this page, Hung Yu-jui (洪昱睿) questions the inclusion of the phrase “Yanhuang shizhou” (炎黃世胄, “descendants of the Yan Emperor (炎帝) and the Yellow Emperor (黃帝)” in the National Flag Anthem.
Hung believes that reference to this phrase in the anthem is problematic.
Weng invoked the idea that all Chinese are descended from the Yan and Huang emperors, saying that Wang’s Olympic victory was the “pride of the Chinese people,” and that by extension Taiwanese are part of a Chinese nation with the Yan and Huang emperors as common ancestors.
Wang said that his son’s Olympic victory allowed the world to see the glory of the “descendants of the Yan and Huang emperors.”
Behind this lies a preoccupation with the concept of a common ancestry and of belonging to one “nation.”
Hung refers to research by Taiwanese hematologist Marie Lin (林媽利) indicating that most Taiwanese carry the genes of indigenous people, saying that this disproves a common ancestry with Han Chinese living in China.
It is easy to refute whatever position anyone seeks to take on this issue, due to its complexity and a failure to properly define what is meant by “nation” or the word “Chinese” in both English and Mandarin.
People might make comparisons with other countries, saying that the population of the US shares ancestry with peoples from all over the world, and yet US nationalism involves no other country.
English nationalism is not the same as identification with the UK, and the West owes its cultural foundations to ancient Greece, but does not share nationalist affiliation to Greece today.
These comparisons are wide of the mark, in any case, because Asian cultures tend to ascribe more importance to ancestry than Western ones do.
The Cambridge dictionary defines a nation as “a country, especially when thought of as a large group of people living in one area with their own government, language, traditions,” but also as “ a large group of people of the same race who share the same language, traditions, and history, but who might not all live in one area.”
Merriam-Webster defines nation as “a community of people composed of one or more nationalities and possessing a more or less defined territory and government.”
Which of these definitions apply to Taiwan?
When Weng says: “We are Chinese... No matter who wins, Team Taiwan or the team from ‘mainland China,’ it is still the pride of all Chinese people,” what does she mean by “Chinese”? Is she talking about ethnicity? Can this ethnicity trace its way back to Neolithic China in any meaningful way? Is she talking about the population of China? Or a group of ethnicities with a shared culture?
While the blood and ancestral bond is strong in Asia, one could use the same logic to argue that modern Taiwanese are as related to indigenous Austronesian ethnic groups as they are to Han Chinese. That is using the ethnic definition of nation.
Taiwan is also distinct from China when using
Merriam-Webster’s definition of the nation as a defined territory containing different ethnic groups.
Weng would like to define “nation” as one with a shared ancestry, irrespective of territory or government. In the final analysis, it is up to Taiwanese how they define themselves as a nation.
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