Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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PERHAPS THE MOST noteworthy thing about the Qiao Collective’s “Taiwan: An Anti-Imperialist Perspective”, published in the Monthly Review, is to what extent it focuses on premodern history–and to what extent the Taiwanese people are absent from a history purportedly about them. This should not surprise for Qiao, but one still finds one’s self somewhat surprised that the Monthly Review allowed for the publication of a perspective on history that is clearly more cultural nationalist than Marxist.
Indeed, for a purportedly anti-imperialist history, in Qiao, one finds mostly the use of the history of pre-modern empires to justify geopolitical claims by a contemporary empire. So it is, then, that Qiao’s history of 1895 begins with the claim that “Taiwan’s separation from the Chinese mainland began in 1895, when the Qing government was forced to cede Taiwan to Japan after its defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War.”
All this proves blatantly ridiculous for the Monthly Review, whose pages once hosted the Brenner debates. Was not the lesson of the Brenner debates precisely to show the mistake of ahistorically projecting the “nation” as a category backward in time?
Yet this is exactly what Qiao’s take on Taiwanese history does, in justifying contemporary historical claims about the PRC’s sovereignty over Taiwan on the basis of the Qing empire claims over Taiwan in the 19th century. Qiao nowhere discusses the tenuousness of such claims, in that Taiwan was only incorporated as a province for seven years under the Qing, and it was viewed as an obscure and unimportant hinterland by premodern Chinese dynasties.
That being the case, this also raises the question as to why Qiao thinks that the PRC, as having emerged from the political forces that overthrew dynastic China, should inherit the premodern claims of the Qing empire. This all belies Qiao’s cultural nationalism, however, in that Chinese cultural nationalist claims rooted in the history of the PRC have increasingly come to valuate the history of dynastic China in spite of the role that the CCP played in overthrowing Qing imperial China. This is not a phenomenon specific to China, as seen in Soviet apologists who have increasingly come to praise the history of the Russian empire.
Still, so it is that after this spurious claim that the political history of Taiwan and China only differs in 1895, one finds Qiao going back to far-flung 230 CE to claim that the history of Indigenous migration links Taiwan and China going back to antiquity. Though it is not surprising that Qiao finds this to be of greater significance than what contemporary Indigenous themselves have to say on their views about what they believe to be their relationship with China, it proves strange to see Indigenous deployed here as a historical prop to claim that Taiwan and China have always been linked–imperial China did not always view Indigenous as humans, but as human-like animals, inclusive of the use of their body parts in traditional Chinese medicine. To further Chinese imperial claims over pre-Han settlement Taiwan, Qiao claims that the Qing empire interfered minimally in the affairs of Indigenous almost as though this were enlightened political policy, rather than that they simply did not care very much for Taiwan’s affairs, and probably aims to avoid discussing Qing policy toward Indigenous because this casts China’s treatment of Indigenous in a negative light.
The article in question
Thus, Qiao finds itself at odds to explain how exactly the Han settlement of Taiwan–a form of settler colonialism that Indigenous faced–took place. Even as Qiao’s history of Taiwan to frame Taiwan as having always been quintessentially Chinese, Qiao seems loathe to discuss how Han Chinese ended up in Taiwan. This was partly because Han immigrants served as laborers for the Dutch, but Qiao would likely not want to acknowledge how Taiwan’s history of western colonization was one of its drivers for Han settler colonization, one of the ways in which many forms of colonialism have overlapped and interfaced in the course of Taiwanese history. Consequently, it is not surprising that Qiao raises a historical figure such as Ming loyalist and pirate warlord Zheng Chenggong, also known as Koxinga, to frame him as a historical personage linking Taiwan and China during this period, while conveniently overlooking that Zheng was half-Japanese–and that Zheng was also much beloved by the Japanese empire during Taiwan’s Japanese colonial period, because he could also be used as a means of linking Taiwan and Japan for the same reasons–as well as that many Indigenous remember Zheng as a genocidal Columbus figure.
Qiao turns next to the Japanese colonial period, followed by the period of KMT authoritarianism. These two periods constitute the next one-third of the essay after the one-third about dynastic China and Taiwan. Still, one again notes that Qiao’s historiography here is primarily the history that they would like to see, rather than what actually took place. While any discussion of the Taiwanese left during this period should, of course, touch on the history of the Taiwanese Communist Party, Qiao seems notably loathe to discuss the overall dynamics of the period, in that there were, in fact, many Taiwanese accepted Japanese colonialism, or willingly welcomed the KMT government. To this extent, while the roots of much of contemporary Taiwanese nationalism–including many of the strains of Taiwanese left nationalism–can be rooted in anger against KMT governance that favored the mainlanders who had come with them to Taiwan and came to constitute a political and economic elite during the authoritarian period, Qiao is hesitant to discuss this. After all, this would point to the origins of perceived differences between Taiwan and China that gave rise to or contributed to independent national identity.
But Qiao seems much more at home discussing what took place in the Chinese mainland during these two periods. Hence one sees their apparent history of Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period quickly turning back to discuss Republican-era China, and Deng-era China during what should be a discussion of the martial law period in Taiwan. Nor does one see any discussion of the developmentalist state that arose under Chiang Ching-kuo by way of massive undertakings such as the Ten Major Infrastructure Projects, instead one primarily sees a triumphalist celebration of Deng–presumably, Qiao is much more at home discussing Chinese history. Even as Qiao begins the essay by referencing Taiwan’s contemporary dominance in the field of semiconductors, it is to this period that one can trace the dawn of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, yet this is not discussed in the slightest. This evidences how Qiao’s grasp of Taiwanese history is, in fact, quite tenuous.
It is in the last third of the essay that Qiao turns toward discussing contemporary Taiwanese politics. But here, one sees how Qiao retreats into history in order to avoid confronting the present–presumably because they do not like the present, in which poll after poll shows that Taiwanese young people do not identify with China, or just out of lack of knowledge. Qiao spends most of this last one-third of the essay discussing the Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian presidencies, more or less framing them as race traitors, then awkwardly shoehorning in the Tsai Ing-wen presidency and newly inaugurated Lai presidency. Strangely, one finds very little discussion of the Ma Ying-jeou presidency, which saw the highest level of cross-strait engagement in the last two decades, presumably because Qiao finds it inconvenient to discuss the 2014 Sunflower Movement that broke out against him, and because he was a president of the KMT. Tsai and Lai are also not discussed except as continuing the policies of Lee and Chen, as though there were no real political differences across the span of twenty-five years.
Yet Qiao effectively misses the last quarter century of Taiwanese history because of its hesitancy to address the present. This proves a strange matter if Qiao wishes to discuss Taiwan’s contemporary history as caught between the US and China, as this is primarily due to antagonisms that arose in the last decade. And Qiao is hesitant to confront the realities of how Taiwan’s contemporary democracy votes in the present, stating “[Tsai’s] 2020 re-election campaign, flagging in the polls, opportunistically seized on Hong Kong’s anti-extradition bill protests to discredit the “one country, two systems” framework.” Indeed, one wonders why then the DPP has won consecutive landslides and an unprecedented third term if it is as unpopular as Qiao claims.
Most importantly, however, the Taiwanese people prove wholly absent from Qiao’s narrative of the last twenty years of Taiwanese politics, Qiao preferring to discuss Taiwan in terms of political leaders. Effectively, the only social force that Qiao discusses outside of Great Men of History in the course of Taiwanese history is the pro-unification left.
Qiao’s syllabus on Taiwan
But whether Qiao likes it or not, the currents of contemporary Taiwanese identity trends are against them, and pro-localization trends were the factors that led to the election victories of Chen Shui-bian, Tsai Ing-wen, or Lai Ching-te–such individuals are only significant from the standpoint of left history insofar as they prove expressive of such trends. Even if Qiao does not like this history, a history of Taiwan is incomplete without addressing such forces. This is much as a history of Taiwan from a pro-independence standpoint would also be a falsification if there were no accounting for the history of pro-unification views in Taiwan and the attempt were made to depict Taiwanese as always having wanted and longed for independence, never mind how identity trends or views on the what Taiwan and China’s relationship should be have changed over time, or refusing to acknowledge that many Taiwanese did accept Japanese colonial rule or KMT rule in the course of the 20th century. History is, after all, not one’s fanfiction about an idealized past.
All this proves typical, then. Qiao is ultimately a cultural nationalist project if anything else and its syllabus on Taiwanese history, from which it draws on for the sake of this article, is primarily for the sake of reinforcing Chinese nationalist claims over Taiwan–irrespective of what the view of Taiwanese themselves are. It proves telling that Qiao draws its sources from Chinese, rather than Taiwanese voices, while it is itself comprised mostly of diasporic Chinese. But Qiao’s clear fixation on Taiwan may be because Taiwan troubles many of the political binaries that they are more accustomed to dealing with. And the Monthly Review simply platforms cultural nationalist views in the name of leftism, with basic logic apparently out the window when it comes to non-western contexts in which such claims might be scrutinized more critically. To the dustbin of history then, for their time of relevance has long since passed.