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Letter from Taiwan

Redefining the Meaning of ‘Chinese’

TAINAN — Taiwan and its 23 million people will eventually be absorbed by China, which claims it as a breakaway province, by a process of economic osmosis. So runs the conventional wisdom among many businessmen, and some diplomats.

Or will it? Instead of China changing Taiwan, might Taiwan change China?

Taiwan has a powerful weapon at its disposal: an inclusive national identity that absorbs and celebrates difference, said Mark Harrison, a Taiwan specialist at the University of Tasmania.

“Taiwan is actually very significant in terms of China’s future,” Dr. Harrison said. “It points the way to a politics of identity-making.”

Because what China cannot seem to do — and probably not for a long time yet — is this: build a broadly attractive definition of what it means to be “Chinese” for all its various ethnic groups, including the increasingly restive Tibetans and Uighurs, and thereby genuinely bring together the different voices within its borders, Dr. Harrison said.

Tied to that: It cannot, for now, show the world that a Chinese society can be open, tolerant and democratic. But Taiwan can.

That inclusiveness is clearly on display in Taiwan’s open news media, culture and academia, but also here, in the southern city of Tainan, where the decade-old National Museum of Taiwan Literature celebrates a rich range of narratives from the cultures that make up the island’s highly diverse history.

In a handsome, brick-and-column building dating from 1916, designed by the Japanese architect Moriyama Matsunosuke and beautifully updated since, dozens of voices are documented in exhibitions: the indigenous Austronesians; native speakers of Taiyu, a local language; Dutch colonial rulers of the 17th century; the Chinese of the late Ming and the Qing dynasties who sailed over from the mainland; the Japanese colonists; and the Chinese Nationalists who retreated to Taiwan in 1949 after their defeat to the Communists in the civil war.

For a longtime resident of Beijing, the capital of a state that stresses a rigid vision of national identity and tries to restrict the spread of even its major regional languages, like Cantonese, a visit to this museum was electrifying.

Here is the story of a “Chinese” state — Taiwanese, in reality — that celebrates the existence of different, critical voices, and freely admits the mistakes of the past, when it tried to smother them. It even offers some exhibits in digraphia, a mixture of Chinese characters and the Latin alphabet that some scholars, both Chinese and non-Chinese, say is important for modernizing Chinese, but is rejected by a Beijing government intent on preserving linguistic “purity.”

All this offers a lesson for China, said Dr. Harrison, as it faces dissatisfaction from peoples in the vast border regions of Tibet and Xinjiang.

“Somehow the Chinese need to let the Tibetans and Uighurs feel they are Chinese, they need to rethink their identity in a way that makes that possible, and I think the Taiwanese show how it can be done,” he said. “But the Chinese government doesn’t even begin to think in those terms. They take a colonial view, ‘We’re doing so much for these people, why aren’t they satisfied?”’

“For the Chinese, being Chinese is an objective fact. You can’t become Chinese. You are born it. But for the Taiwanese there’s the possibility of choosing to be Taiwanese,” a process that allows meaningful cultural differences while being a part of the nation, he said.

“Their attitude is, ‘We’re all here now on this island, we have to learn to live together, we must all be Taiwanese,”’ he said. “It’s a postcolonial identity. Inclusive. Open.” He calls it the Formosan voice, after the Portuguese name for the island of Taiwan.

Things weren’t always like that here. For decades after 1949, the Nationalists, who harked back to their mainland China roots, ruled with an iron fist. Yet the process of identity-building was fermenting below the surface. It gathered speed after the lifting of martial law in 1987 and for the past 20 years has been in high gear.

For sure, Dr. Harrison added, “There are a lot of other voices that are yet to be really heard, including migrant workers and expatriates. But it’s being shaped.”

No one is expecting China to start listening to Taiwan anytime soon. After trying military threats to intimidate the island into reunification, for the past decade under President Hu Jintao, China has offered financial incentives and increased trade to encouraged re-unification, dubbed by some “hongbao” diplomacy, a reference to the Chinese custom of giving red packets with money on special occasions like weddings.

Yet it’s not impossible that one day, China will be faced with such severe problems trying to hold together a state that is based on the borders of the last imperial dynasty and negotiating the disparate interests therein, that it may start looking to Taiwan for some answers.

“What Taiwan says is that there is nothing immutable about being Chinese, and there are a lot of other ways of thinking about being Chinese that are beyond the nationalism of the People’s Republic of China,” Dr. Harrison said. That model could eventually convince ethnic minorities that they are truly equal members of the Chinese state.

If that state were listening.

A version of this article appears in print on   in The International Herald Tribune. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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