Politics of alienation and polarization: Taiwan's Tangwai in the 1980s

Abstract

After a quarter-century power struggle on the Chinese mainland, in 1949 the Chinese Communists (CCP) defeated the Nationalists (the Kuomintang or KMT) and forced Chiang Kai-shek and his totally demoralized army and government to retreat to Taiwan, an island that had been returned to China in 1945 after fifty years of colonial rule by the Japanese. By 1949, the original residents of the island, the Taiwanese, most of whose ancestors had come from the mainland two or three centuries earlier, had already gone through the initial welcoming of the Nationalists and enthusiasm for going back to China in 1945, and the subsequent great shock, anger, and disappointment of the February 28, 1947 Uprising, and the suppression and massacre that followed it. The February 28 Uprising resulted from harsh and oppressive Nationalist policies that forced the generally passive Taiwanese people, particularly the intellectuals, to resort to a series of protest demonstrations, some of them violent. In response, the Nationalist army led by General Chen Yi carried out a bloody purge, a massacre of the Taiwanese sociopolitical elite. The Uprising has since been regarded by many Taiwanese as the most important historic event in contemporary Taiwanese history, a revolutionary fight against injustice and tyranny. The supporters of the Taiwan independence movement have looked upon it as the beginning, the source of inspiration and legitimacy for their movement. In 1949 the six million Taiwanese were no longer happy, and they were suspicious and resentful of the sudden influx of the one-million-strong Chinese mainlanders who had just been decimated and forced by the Communists to flee to Taiwan and were to rule over the Taiwanese as another colonial power.