Political observers must be a little puzzled by such terms as localization, which in fact means taiwanization, and de-sinicization, which has to be defined as the act of getting rid of Chinese influence from Taiwan.

Localization certainly is not the right word to describe a recent movement by chiefly Amoy-speaking politicians to rid Taiwan of practically everything on the island that has been modified by Chinese influence or, in a word, sinicized.

Taiwanization - a word yet to be entered in an English dictionary - is a little more accurate definition, but it has an ambiguous connotation. The movement pays only a little more than lip service to Hakka interests and scant attention to those of the aborigines.

In reality, taiwanization and de-sinicization are the two sides of a coin.

All these gibberishes, however, cannot varnish the social realities on Taiwan.

Taiwan, where the aborigines had lived hundreds of years before the first Chinese immigrants arrived, was sinicized during the 21 years of rule by Koxinga and his son and grandson in the 17^{th century. The ethnic Chinese outnumbered the aborigines by 1683 when Ch’ing China annexed Taiwan as a prefecture of Fukien or Fujian province. The Japanese tried unsuccessfully to de-sinicize Taiwan while they held the island as their colony from 1895 to 1945.}

The Hakka were the first Chinese emigrants to Taiwan. They speak a Chinese dialect unintelligibly different from Amoy or Hok-lo, the mother tongue of a large majority of the residents of Taiwan today.

They were often united in fighting the aborigines, who were of Malay origin. While they were not fighting against the aborigines, the Hok-lo would battle with the Hakka. And during sporadic truces, the Hok-lo used to fight among themselves, with those who spoke one variation of the dialect, Chuanchou, trying to kill their counterparts speaking a different variation, Changchou, or even among clans who spoke the same Chuanchou.

Japan put an end to the bloody communal feud.

What the politically oriented movement now wants to achieve is an independent sovereign state of Taiwan against the wishes of a minority of mainlanders or waishenjen (people from Chinese provinces other than Taiwan) for an eventual unification with China.

The movement has thus pitted mainlanders against islanders or penshenjen (native born residents of Taiwan province). Both terms are misnomers because many if not most of the mainlanders were born and brought up on the island, while a large number of Amoy-speaking islanders have mainlander parents.

It would be correct to make that distinction shortly after the February 28 incident of 1947, less than two years after the Chinese army reoccupied Taiwan at the end of the Second World War, or even after the exodus from the China mainland in 1950 following Chiang Kai-shek’s debacle in the Chinese civil war. The distinction has since been blurred by intermarriages as well as the coming into age of a second or even a third generation of mainlanders, to whom Taiwan is, for all intents and purposes, their only home.

Over half a century of Chinese rule has transformed Taiwan into an almost fully homogeneous modern society. The bitter islander-mainlander feud, the pernicious result of the February 28 Incident, was disarmed in 1998 with President Lee Teng-hui proclaiming a national holiday, Peace Memorial Day, in commemoration of the victims massacred by troops brought from the mainland of China.

Universal education has helped eliminate the language barrier, not only between the islanders and the mainlanders but also among the aborigines, Hakka and Hok-lo. Mandarin is not just an official or a national language. It is a lingua franca in Taiwan as well. Intermarriages, more than anything else, have made Taiwan a melting pot. Taiwan’s independence movement - the island province of Ch’ing China declared independence in 1895 and many Formosans worked to gain independence from Japan in the 50 years that followed -- was resuscitated by the February 28 Incident but tapered off in the late 1980s, with hard-core supporters coming to accept their homeland ruled by a democratically elected native-born president as the next best choice to a sovereign state they have tried to create.

There was a brief surge of new nationalism: loyalty and devotion to the “New Formosans,” a people without distinction between islanders and mainlanders. Riding on the crest of that new wave, James Soong and Ma Ying-jeou, both mainlanders, were elected governor of Taiwan in 1994 and mayor of Taipei in 1998 respectively.

Things began to change after President Chen Shui-bian came to power almost two years ago. The taiwanization or de-sinicization movement, albeit not officially blessed, has been gaining so much momentum that the People’s Republic of China calls it Chen’s policy of “creeping” independence for Taiwan. On his inauguration, Chen vowed he would not declare Taiwan’s independence while he was in office.

In January, Chen announced he had approved adding the words “issued in Taiwan” to passports. A month later the Ministry of Foreign Affairs disclosed that it was studying the feasibility of changing the name of Taiwan’s representative offices overseas. Currently they are known as Taipei representative offices, and the Waichiaopu wants them called Taiwan representative offices. Shortly afterwards, Taipei announced that it no longer considered Mongolia a part of China. Outer Mongolia was recognized by Beijing in 1949, but the Kuomintang government in Taipei continued to claim it as part of the territory of the Republic of China, along with all of the mainland across the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwan Solidarity Union, a legislative ally of Chen’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, is proposing to make Hok-lo another official language of the island.

It is only natural for the People’s Republic of China to conclude, by viewing all these developments together, that Chen has set Taiwan creeping towards independence. Beijing threatens to invade Taiwan if Chen declares independence or delays indefinitely talks about China’s reunification.

While that threat is largely vain, the damages the taiwanization or de-sinicization may do the island’s communal harmony are real. There is no need whatsoever to attempt to destroy that hard-earned harmony, the harmony Taiwan so briefly enjoyed after hundreds of years of bloody strife among aborigines, Hakka, Hok-lo and the mainlanders. Why try to rake the fire of communal hatred which has been all but quenched?

　

（本評論代表作者個人之意見）