Blog Post on this week’s readings: Barclay and Corcuff

I found the concept of liminality to be very useful and accurate way to describe Taiwan and it’s relationship with China. I especially enjoyed the quote, “Ultimately, it is a way to better understand the complexity of China’s feelings towards Taiwan, where self-proclaimed love and hidden hate, feelings of proximity and jealousy, appropriation, interdependency, fascination and contempt all mix.” There is a very long and complex history here between the relations between China and Taiwan. The relations cannot be easily summarized, that would be a naïve thing to do. The China and Taiwan relationship is vastly complex and this must be recognized.

It is hard to know the future of the Taiwan and China relationship from the Corcuff article. Barclay however, gives more insight.

In the Barclay article it is written that there are two narratives of Taiwan in the 1980s. One narrative is that of the Han history in Taiwan which speaks to a Han identity and is used to advocate for Han independence. Han identity is tied to the island, to the point where people want to identify as partially indigenous to assert their right to their independent land. The other speaks of an indigenous history of the island and of how all non-indigenous peoples are really invaders and do not have a true claim to the island. I think these two interpretations have a very interesting contrast. The first story can be seen as an appropriation of indigenous identity used for political purposes. I would consider the second interpretation more politically and factually correct, but from what I have read in the past about Taiwanese Aboriginal Peoples and that time period I would assume that the story of the colonizers was more likely to be heard.   

The take-away message I guess would be to understand that we cannot think of nationality and identity in binary terms. To understand Taiwan you have to understand a complex history. You must know that Taiwan is not China and China is not Taiwan. Indigenous peoples have lived in Taiwan for a long time, colonialism threatened their culture and still today we cannot be foolish and view Taiwan as a nation separate from China, we must understand the indigenous history and the colonial context.