My Latest for American Citizens for Taiwan: Being Taiwanese, Being Chinese

Yes, there is a balloon museum near this spot. Its reputation is inflated, however.

My latest for American Citizens for Taiwan: Being Taiwanese, Being Chinese.

This analytical stance looks useful only because so many accept it, but it is an ideological construct. Its implicit and highly ideological assumption is that being Chinese means you are more sympathetic to political links to China, and further, that the two identities are zero-sum: to have more of one means to have less of the other. The authors of the piece, and many readers trained to think in this way, follow this chain of logic very well: those Taiwanese who have some Chineseness will have greater support for political links to China.

As you can imagine, this piece on Taiwan identity was inspired by that awful presentation of the survey in WaPo. I've been steamed about it for a week, and the more I think about it, the angrier I get. Note what one wrote in the response to my comments which I posted with his permission:

""That said, we think people were probably thinking more about ‘cultural’ Chinese, than about political Chinese. We also asked later in the survey about ethnicity (族群身分). People were asked to allocate 10 points across five ethnic identity choices: 閩南人, 客家人, 原住民, 中華民族, 其他人. It turns out that all three of the original identity groups (Taiwanese, Chinese, both) allocated the most points to 閩南人 and then to 中華民族, and there was no significant difference across these three groups in the average number of points allocated to these two ethnicities. In other words, even those who say they are “Chinese only” give more points to 閩南人 than to 中華民族.

They knew when they composed that write up in WaPo that the Taiwan identity they were examining had no political connection to China, but was entirely cultural and very complex. So given space in a a major paper of record to write about the Taiwan identity in a way that would reflect its complexities and lack of political connection to China, they instead chose to replicate utterly wrong and conventional misunderstandings about the cultural links between China and Taiwan and reinforce existing attitudes and falsehoods.

If someone gave me 1000 words in WaPo, I wouldn't spend it serving Beijing. Nor should anyone from a democracy ever do such a thing.

*incoherent, frustrated screams*
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