Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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History as Indistinguishable, Homogeneous Blob
IN THE WAKE of a letter by a Taiwanese academic that claimed Taiwan and China were part of the same polity…based on a land bridge that connected the two during the Ice Age, Vijay Prashad’s Tricontinental Institute has now followed up with a lengthy piece by Zang Ruxing. Zang is the director of the International Department of the Taiwan Labor Party. The piece, entitled “The Taiwan Question: From Civil War to External Intervention,” proves remarkable for many reasons, least of which is that the piece is dead on arrival from the first paragraph. Zang writes:
“Taiwan and the mainland are part of one and the same China. They have never been divided by any historical boundary. The people of Taiwan and the people of the Chinese mainland are one nation, with no division between them: they share the same language, the same history and culture, and the same folk-religious traditions.”
Indeed, if Taiwan and China have never been divided, one wonders why there is talk of the need to combat “independence” or achieve “unification” in the many paragraphs that follow. There are, of course, many historical divides between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, whether that be the Ice Age, the premodern Chinese dynasties that claimed parts of Taiwan but never fully administered–or cared much–about it, the Japanese colonial period that began in 1895, or the KMT retreat to Taiwan in the wake of the Chinese Civil War.
Consequently, it is plainly untrue that Taiwan and China share the “same language, the same history and culture, and the same folk-religious traditions.” For one, this presumes a view of both as unchanging, static, and homogeneous. Both “Taiwan” and “China,” as we refer to it today, are diverse. To confine our discussion to Taiwan, one notes that there are Indigenous languages, Taiwanese Hakka, Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiwanese Mandarin, and other languages. A variety of tongues have always been spoken in Taiwan, whether by the peoples who are of the many Indigenous groups who were Taiwan’s first residents and continue to reside in Taiwan today, or by the various Han settler groups that came to Taiwan in the past centuries.
Even just the post-Chinese Civil War migration to Taiwan in itself comprised many Han linguistic and cultural groups, not to mention the more recent waves of migration from Southeast Asia, driven by the demand for migrant labor to take up the so-called “3D”–dirty, dangerous, and demeaning–jobs that Taiwanese are not willing to take up, which has made Taiwan increasingly diverse. As for folk-religious traditions, one notes that even when the same gods are worshipped in Taiwan and China, they may be worshipped in different ways, and Taiwan has many gods that are specific to it and not found in China. And given the split in the wake of the Chinese Civil War, words for almost anything invented in the last eighty years are different.
Indeed, Zang’s claim that there are no linguistic, historical, or cultural differences between Taiwan and the rest of China–treated here as itself a homogeneous mass–is utterly bizarre. One can readily acknowledge linguistic, historical, and cultural differences between Taiwan and other parts of China while still viewing Taiwan as part of China. After all, few would claim that there are no linguistic, historical, or cultural differences whatsoever between, say, Sichuan and Hubei, Shandong or Zhejiang, and yet these are all Chinese provinces. Why, then, does he attempt to claim there are no differences whatsoever between Taiwan and (in his view, the rest of) China?
Splittism Bad, Nationalism Good?: A History of Splittism and Nationalism, Not Class Struggle
THE NEXT SEVERAL sections of Zang’s essay consist of a gloss on the last eighty years of Taiwanese history. The elisions from this history–as well as the contradictions it seeks to paper over–are notable. Zang writes:
“Before the war, Taiwan had been a territory seized by an Axis power. Its return to the motherland after that power’s defeat was wholly natural. Moreover, China was itself a victor in the war, and the handover therefore proceeded smoothly and without dispute – unlike in other places (such as the Ryūkyū Islands and Korea), which were placed under the trusteeship or military occupation of the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, or other powers.”
One finds oneself amazed to see Zang apparently leave the 228 Massacre wholesale out of his narrative, apparently because this is inconvenient to his narrative of a peaceable and smooth return to China after the Chinese Civil War–never mind 50 years of Japanese colonialism that cut off Taiwan from China that he is loath to discuss. This, too, proves bizarre; most Chinese nationalist irredentists do not go so far as to try to pretend the 228 Massacre did not happen altogether as part of some claim as to eternal Chinese ethnic unity.
Zang does go on to discuss the KMT’s purge of leftists and its political repression, as well as how the KMT was a typical right-wing dictatorship backed by the US in the interests of anti-Communism. In his Manichaean gloss of the last eighty years in Taiwan, Zang, however, then finds it inconvenient to explain the rise of the DPP, a force that historically supported Taiwanese independence, currently holds power in Taiwan through victory in democratic elections, and emerged from Taiwan’s democracy movement.
Zang consequently tries to claim that the DPP, in fact, does not originate in the democracy movement but in the collaborators of kominka movement introduced in the late Japanese colonial period to assimilate Taiwan to Japan. To avoid discussing the fact that proto-DPP independence advocates, along with leftists of both pro-independence and pro-unification stances, and democracy activists of all political stripes were persecuted by the KMT–presumably to claim that only pro-unification leftists were the only victims of the White Terror–Zang claims that members of the kominka movement were not targeted by the KMT. Zang never explains why.
Zang’s explanation of the DPP that follows is laughably contradictory. He writes:
“Almost all separatist movements around the world are grounded in a distinct nation, religion, language, or historical and cultural identity, or in the memory of a past state. Taiwanese separatism alone has nothing to do with any of these. Taiwan and the Chinese mainland have historically belonged to the same country; Taiwan has never been an independent kingdom; the two sides share the same language, the same folk-religious traditions, the same history, and the same culture.
Taiwanese separatism draws its impetus from two sources. First, anti-communism – on the basis of their class position, the leading separatists are deeply afraid of reunification with socialist China. Second, anti-nationalism –since anti-communism had already been the principal governing ideology of the KMT, it alone was insufficient for seizing power. Therefore, the main impetus of the separatist movement had to be anti-national.”
From a Marxist standpoint, it does not seem hard to understand the rise of the DPP as a Taiwanese nationalist party, backed by the domestic national bourgeoisie of Taiwan, and which advocated for bourgeois democracy against the KMT’s dictatorship and its Chinese nationalist ideology. But Zang–apparently a fan of the “nation”–wants to deny Taiwanese separatism even the status of “nationalism”, as part of his claim that there can be no nationalism apart from Chinese nationalism, only the aberrant ideology of “splittism.” As such, he terms the DPP “anti-nationalist” but then goes on to write a few paragraphs later:
“To fabricate a national contradiction, it was necessary to fabricate a nation. If Taiwanese are not Chinese, then revulsion and hatred towards the Chinese had to be manufactured. Anti-communism and the hatred of a particular ethnic group came to define the separatists’ steady march toward fascism.”
So is the DPP nationalist or anti-nationalist? One wonders. It seems rather easy to claim that the DPP is a Taiwanese nationalist party and then condemn it on these grounds from the standpoint of Chinese nationalism, but apparently Zang likes the “nation” as a concept too much to even deign to grant the DPP the status of being “nationalists.”
To this end, though Zang acknowledges the rise of a bourgeois democratization movement during the KMT’s rule, to see the DPP as emergent from this movement would apparently depict it in too positive a light. As such, he writes, “A common misunderstanding holds that the separatist forces represented by the DPP led the democratisation movement against the KMT dictatorship, and that the DPP is therefore Taiwan’s progressive force. In fact, the democratisation movement that began to germinate in the 1970s, and which by the late 1980s had increasingly come under separatist leadership, ceased at that point to advance democratisation against dictatorship and turned instead to inflaming native-place sentiment and promoting an anti-national separatist movement.”
So, we are to understand the DPP as having “splittism” as an ideology, something that is linked, in Zang’s view, with “fascism” or “hatred of a particular ethnic group.” It is never explained as to how the DPP are “fascist”; after all, a specific socio-historical phenomenon and not simply a bad word for an ideology one does not like–one can be “authoritarian” but not necessarily “fascist.” “Splittism” is also never adequately defined, except that Zang hates it, and that it is necessarily and inherently bad. Why is that the case, from a leftist standpoint? Would Zang have also claimed that the Haitian Revolution was “splittism” from the Napoleonic French Empire and therefore bad? We never find out.
Nor is it explained which ethnic group the DPP apparently hate, as rather than explain this, Zang instead moves to bringing up when Taiwanese benshengren–those from waves of Han migration before the Chinese Civil War–falsely claim Indigenous or Western ancestry to position themselves as not being Chinese to suggest that the DPP aim to not be Chinese. Presumably, Zang thinks the DPP hate those who came with the KMT after the Chinese Civil War and Chinese people writ large, but Zang also wishes to avoid any discussion of any historical, cultural, or linguistic difference between any separate wave of Han migration to claim that Taiwan has always been part of China–hence it is strange to see him use the term “ethnic group” here, as to suddenly suggest there is actually an ethnic difference after all those paragraphs beforehand in which he insists there are no differences.
Lastly, then, Zang’s summation of Taiwanese history ends on the point of the present. Zang depicts the DPP as having enacted an autocratic regime that has targeted political dissidents and brainwashed young people, not unlike the KMT. If so, one wonders–why is Zang not in jail? Likewise, why have there, in fact, been elections in which the KMT has done well in the past decade, if apparently the DPP runs a dictatorship? One notes that the KMT, in fact, currently has a narrow majority in the legislature.
Indeed, the role of the KMT itself proves another oddity in Zang’s narration of the present, suddenly appearing in the last section of his article as now on the right side of history and allowing for peaceable cross-strait exchanges. The DPP is instead depicted as having committed Taiwan to an unwinnable war against China as part of a “strategy – which treats the population as a hostage – [that is] drawn up under the direction of the US”. Why the DPP would do so is never really explained in Zang’s historical overview; there is no historical or material explanation as to why the DPP would align with the US–which, after all, previously backed the KMT for decades during the authoritarian period. Neither is there any explanation as to why, apparently, the KMT is now one of the protagonists of history, having apparently come to the right side of history.
Conclusion: Muddled, Ahistorical Chinese Nationalism, Rather Than Leftism
HOW THE KANGXI EMPEROR of the Qing Dynasty described Taiwan in 1683–”a ball of mud beyond the pale of civilization”–is perhaps an appropriate description of about how logical Zang’s historical overview of the last eighty years of Taiwanese history is. Indeed, most Chinese nationalists are willing to acknowledge that there are historical differences between Taiwan and China, while still asserting that Taiwan is still part of China–-and that while split by history from the Chinese mainland, it should therefore be returned to China. Zang’s history, on the other hand, is very much a history driven by the a priori logic that Taiwan is and has always been part of China and then sets out to prove this point, while never entertaining other views even for the sake of argument. This probably explains its convoluted and confusing nature.
And yet, one observes how bizarre the historical categories used by Zang are. The Taiwan Labor Party claims to be a Marxist, socialist party. But instead of analyzing history using categories such as, say, the working class or proletariat–in Marx and Engels’ view, a historic category and social class that arose in the course of the Industrial Revolution–the Taiwan Labor Party trades in ahistorical and amorphous nation-states.
In Zang’s essay, no real distinction is made between premodern Chinese imperial dynasties and the contemporary People’s Republic of China. Taiwan is part of China simply because it is…part of China…insists Zang. As for which China this is–one notes the emergence of the KMT and CCP from the historical forces that overthrew dynastic China, hence the odd claim that China is simply China in no altered manner through time immemorial–for Zang, China is simply China by a matter of tautology. For a party that claims to represent the interests of labor, it is not exactly as though dynastic China was a good place for the working class of the time–though certainly, that was prior to the emergence of any industrial proletariat–and so one wonders why Zang wants to justify contemporary politics based on the politics of a time in which the emperor and his court ruled over society without restraint.
Tellingly, for Zang, the prime evil of history is apparently “splittism”–never exactly defined, but apparently bad in all its forms. One wonders what Zang’s judgment on the other revolts against empires, premodern and modern, that have occurred throughout history as self-determination or anti-colonial struggles would have been–again, there is not even the attempt to claim that Taiwanese independence does not belong in the same category as such struggles in Zang’s argumentation, founded as it is on claims about premodern empires, just the insistence that “splittism” and “separatism” in all its forms is bad, though apparently they cannot be “nationalists.”
All this points to, however, what has long been known about the Taiwan Labor Party in Taiwan–that it is a Chinese nationalist party whose claim to leftism is simply on the basis of the fact that it views leftism as a cipher for Chinese nationalism. The Taiwan Labor Party, in this respect, does not stand for the interests of the working class of Taiwan–there is no argument as to why unification would benefit Taiwan’s working class in Zang’s essay in the slightest, except that it must occur because China is China is China. Nor does the Taiwan Labor Party seem concerned with the interests of Chinese workers either, if it views Taiwanese as Chinese.
After all, the argument for unification is simply made on the basis of the nation-state–as projected backwards eternally and amorphously through history–and in this, the Taiwan Labor Party sides implicitly with that oppressor of Chinese workers, the Chinese Communist Party. Karl Marx, of course, wrote in the Communist Manifesto:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
Class struggle–and the solidarity of the working classes of the world against their shared oppressors, beyond the borders imposed by nation–states–has evidently dropped out in favor of ahistorical nationalism for the Taiwan Labor Party. One notes that Zang’s arguments are not even the substitution of class struggle for alignment with some geopolitical historical protagonist that is understood as guiding the world to socialism, as in the campist view of “Socialism in One Country”, whether that be China or the Soviet Union. Instead, what one sees is simply an abstracted blood-and-soil nationalism in which one sees unbroken continuity from premodern Chinese empires to today’s PRC. Once again, it is hard not to wring one’s hands at the intellectually pitiable nature of putative leftists for whom leftism has long since become an elaborate masquerade for what is simply blood-and-soil Chinese nationalism, even if one is often amused by their feeble attempts at intellectually justifying themselves.