Narrating Taiwan out of the Chinese Empire: Rewriting Taiwan’s History from a Taiwanese Perspective in the 1970s

By A-chin Hsiau

Volume 18, Issue 2, pages 93-126

Abstract

The political control, cultural ideology, and exilic mentality that prevailed in postwar Taiwan under the authoritarian Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was informed by a historical narrative based on a ‘Great China’ outlook embodied in the official historiography of Chinese imperial dynasties. In the 1970s, anti‐KMT young intellectuals of local Taiwanese background began to challenge this narrative by revisiting the history of Taiwanese anti‐colonialism of the 1920s and creating an alternative understanding of Taiwan’s past that was supposedly a ‘return to reality’ and a ‘return to native soil’. This article examines the alternative historical accounts narrated by dissidents of the younger generation in the period of political change, when the dissident cultural politics began to shift, moving from antagonism towards the KMT and its exilic politics to an increasingly anti‐Sinocentric ‘de‐colonial’ view which motivated the challenge of Taiwanese nationalism to KMT dominance and stimulated the evolution of democratization in the 1980s and beyond.

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