Taiwanese People - History of The Major Socio-cultural Groups

History of The Major Socio-cultural Groups

According to the government, the majority of Taiwan's 23.3 million population consist of 98% Han Chinese (GIO 2004) with a minority Austronesian population of about 523,000. Migration to Taiwan from southern Asia began approximately 12,000 BC, but large-scale migration to Taiwan did not occur until the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century as a result of political and economic chaos in Mainland China (Shepherd 1993; Bellwood 2000; Blust 1988). The first large scale migration occurred as a result of the Manchu invasion and conquest of China, overthrowing the Ming dynasty and establishing the Qing dynasty, which was established in 1644 and remained until 1911.

In 1624, the Dutch East India Company established an outpost in Tainan in southern Taiwan after expelling the Spanish. The Dutch soon realized Taiwan's potential as a colony for trading deer hide, venison, rice, and sugar. However, Aborigines were not interested in developing the land and transporting settlers from Europe would be too costly. Due to the resulting labor shortage, the Dutch hired Han farmers from across the Taiwan Strait who fled the Manchu invasion of Ming dynasty China (Andrade 2006). During the Guo Huaiyi Rebellion, the Dutch massacred these Hoklo settlers on Taiwan. Koxinga brought along many more Chinese settlers during the Siege of Fort Zeelandia in which he expelled the Dutch. Migration of male laborers from Fujian, steadily increased into the 18th and 19th century. In time, this migration and the gradual removal of ethnic markers (coupled with the acculturation, intermarriage and assimilation of plains Aborigines with the Han) resulted in the wide spread adoption of Han patterns of behavior making Taiwanese Han the ethnic majority.

It was not until the Japanese arrival in 1895 that Taiwanese first developed a collective Taiwanese identity in contrast to that of the colonizing Japanese (Morris 2002). When the Chinese Civil War broke out between Kuomintang nationalists and the Chinese communists in 1945, there was another mass migration of people from Mainland China to Taiwan fleeing the communists. These migrants are known as the Mainlanders. The descendants of Hoklo, Hakka and plains Aborigines who have lived together on Taiwan for over four hundred years and have come to be known as benshengren, or native Taiwanese.