The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “united front” tactics continue to distort history to form a narrative conducive to CCP control over territories it lays claim to.
On Friday, the Council of Indigenous Peoples criticized former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Yosi Takun (孔文吉) for remarks he made during an event hosted by China’s Yunnan Minzu University. The remarks suggested that Taiwan’s indigenous people — who are of Austronesian descent, speak Austronesian languages, and have an independent identity and culture — are part of China’s minority cultures.
The council is right to push back against the obvious distortion targeting Austronesian people in Taiwan who have lived here for approximately 15,000 years.
The idea is so easily refutable that perhaps it is better to look behind the distortions and understand why the CCP is resorting to such unfounded claims.
The root of the problem is that the CCP is attempting to forge a nation state out of territory the Republic of China (ROC) inherited from the Manchu Qing Dynasty, which was subsequently transferred to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) when the CCP defeated the KMT in 1949, Chinese-Australian historian and Sinologist Wang Gungwu (王賡武) said.
The concept of the nation state developed in the late 18th century was formulated within the context of the majority of the countries in Europe already encompassing people who spoke the same language, had the same historical narrative and probably shared the same religion, and turning the people within the borders of each country into a nation state was relatively straightforward, Wang said.
Many Asian countries did not have this luxury, as their borders did not evolve along national lines, but were drawn according to the requirements of colonial masters, he said. Japan was one exception. China had a different quandary: The ROC in 1912 inherited the borders of the Manchu Qing empire, which was not a Han empire, but a Manchu-Mongol one, and covered territory beyond countries with majority Han Chinese populations.
Taiwan was not part of this territory: The Manchu-Qing empire had ceded it to Japan in 1895, and Japan did not relinquish control over Taiwan until 1945.
ROC founder Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) looked for a way to organize his inherited borders as a republic modeled on the two successful republics of the day, the US and France, to govern diverse groups of people who had been controlled by an imperial state. Wang called this a “mammoth task.”
The CCP is still struggling to work out how to control diverse groups who have never belonged to a nation in an ethnic — as opposed to political — sense, and to claim legitimacy for that project, Wang said.
If it fails to do so, it runs the risk of losing control over the territories it now controls through fragmentation along defined national, historical and ethnic lines, as happened in the late 20th century with the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said.
Putting all of these groups under the umbrella of the “Chinese nation” (中華民族), a term invented by Sun and co-opted by the CCP, is a solution, but ethnic groups and nations such as the Tibetans, Uighurs, Taiwanese and Austronesian indigenous groups in Taiwan are not buying it.
That is, the roots of the “united front” attempts to absorb Taiwan’s indigenous people into its orbit extend beyond the CCP’s fabricated claims over Taiwan; they strike at the heart of the CCP’s legitimacy and the party’s definition of the PRC as a nation state.
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