When global observers talk about Taiwan, the conversation rarely strays from semiconductor supply chains, U.S.-China relations, or the looming threat of conflict. But treating the island as a mere piece on the geopolitical chessboard erases the complex, vibrant society that actually lives there. To truly understand modern Taiwanese identity, a “national myth” shaped by indigenous resistance, Japanese colonialism, and the post-1945 arrival of the Republic of China, you have to look at its “people’s history”.
In this interview, I sat down with historian Dr. Evan Dawley to discuss how Taiwan’s multi-ethnic past continues to shape its democratic present. We dive into the foundational legacy of the island’s Indigenous peoples, the cinematic narratives trying to make sense of a contested history, and why the best way for the world to understand Taiwan is simply to buy a ticket and go.
Evan Dawley is Associate Professor of History at Goucher College. He is the author of Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City, 1880s-1950s (Harvard Asia Center Press, 2019) and of Taiwan: A People’s History (Reaktion Books, 2026). His current research project, “China, Chinese Abroad, and the International Construction of the Modern Nation-State, 1920s-1970s,” examines the ongoing creation of Chinese identities in the context of relations between the ROC government and communities of Chinese and Taiwanese abroad. He is co-editor of Beyond Versailles: The 1919 Moment and a New Order in East Asia (Lexington Books, 2021) and The Decade of the Great War: Japan’s Interactions with the Wider World in the 1910s (Brill, 2014).
Elijah Shoaf: I’ll start with the first question. In the introduction of your newest book, Taiwan: A People’s History, you note that global observers view Taiwan primarily as a geopolitical flashpoint or great power battleground, whereas your current work centers around what’s called a “people’s history”. How does refocusing in this way fundamentally shift our understanding of Taiwanese identity away from being simply a byproduct of cross-strait or U.S.-China tensions?
Evan Dawley: If we put it in that framework of shifting things away from cross-strait or U.S.-China tensions, the initial point I would make is that it lets us see Taiwan not as a chip to be gambled with or a card to be played by some other power, but rather as a place that has its own identity and its own agency in creating itself. I think using this “people’s history” framework forces us to view the world as the Taiwanese view the world, or as the people who have over time become Taiwanese view the world and their place in it. It shows how they themselves were involved in the process of defining who they are and defining their position in the world.
That is a radical departure from how Taiwan has often been presented. In terms of the geopolitical framing, if it is framed as a piece that either China or the United States can use as leverage in their bilateral relations, then we forget that the Taiwanese have their own interests and their own stake in all of these matters that affect them. Certainly, the cross-strait situation and geopolitical tensions have mattered in Taiwan’s history and continue to matter today. But when you focus on the people of Taiwan as the main subject, you’re forced to acknowledge that their interests have to be taken into account.
ES: Moving to question number two, you examine how the narrative of a harmonious multi-ethnic and multi-racial Taiwanese polity functions as an inspiring national myth—an aspiration grounded in history, rather than an uncontested reality. How has the pursuit of this shared national consciousness helped modern Taiwan define its own democratic agency long before modern statehood and diplomatic recognition became primary concerns?
DE: In the opening introduction of the book, I frame things in terms of this national myth of Taiwan as a multi-racial, multi-ethnic polity in the world today, unified and generally all Taiwanese. That national myth is absolutely framed and presented in terms of historical events and historical figures in a lot of different ways. But I want to emphasize that it is definitely a contested myth. In fact, it’s taken a long time for that myth to take shape.
Actually, that version of Taiwanese identity only emerged relatively recently, really in the 1990s and the early 2000s. This was after Taiwan statehood was already a relevant concern, and after the process of democratization was very well underway. In fact, that particular national myth was a direct product of the phase of democratization emerging in the 1980s and 1990s. It became essential for the different identity groups in Taiwan to deal with each other as they were beginning to play a role in national politics and elections. They had to work out some of these long-standing divisions and differences among them. They have not worked them out perfectly by any stretch of the imagination, but one thing that did emerge out of that process was this national myth, this vision of Taiwan as a place that could become a harmonious, multi-ethnic, multi-racial polity and population bound by a common set of objectives, goals, and interests.
ES: When I was drafting this question, I became interested in Taiwan as a new nation-building project. What does it mean to be Taiwanese? In some ways, it almost feels like they’re trying to replicate Chinese concepts of “five races, one union”. Living there, it seems to me they want to be Western and multicultural as part of their national identity, but they also still have this Chinese aspect of a leading ethnic group. There are indigenous groups, but there is still a leading group. How do you feel about that?
DE: Let me say first that the process of defining Taiwanese identity has a long history, going back at least a hundred years. This was several decades before martial law ended and democratization took place in the open, allowing Taiwanese identity to be debated publicly. The process of defining what it meant to be Taiwanese began under the Japanese colonial administration, and maybe even as early as the late Qing period. That’s when people began to get a sense of rootedness in Taiwan. Then, under Japanese rule, people began to define a new consciousness and identity for themselves as Taiwanese.
But, and this is a really key point that goes to your question, the first formulators of Taiwanese identity, the first people to imagine a Taiwanese community, were descendants of people who had settled in Taiwan from the Southeast China coast during the Qing period. They were beginning to think of themselves as Taiwanese and defining themselves as not Japanese, in contrast to the Japanese settlers. They were also defining themselves in contrast to the indigenous Taiwanese. So as a Taiwanese consciousness began to emerge, it was among this population that had its ancestral roots in China.
That may be why you’re seeing some resonance with how Chinese national identity was formed in the early decades of the 20th century, which was happening at roughly the same time this new Taiwanese consciousness was being created. But I would still say that Taiwanese consciousness is distinct. It’s not just a variation. The Taiwanese consciousness that has emerged in this multi-ethnic, multi-racial vein is its own thing, in part because it emerged in contrast to the Chinese identity imported into Taiwan after World War II.
There may be some similarities to the multicultural, multi-ethnic form Chinese national identity took in the early 20th century, as well as similarities to multicultural national identities seen in the United States and other countries. But it’s also a real contrast to the mono-ethnic or ethno-nationalism that emerged in parts of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and other parts of the world during decolonization in the 1960s and 70s, and the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the 1980s and 90s. There is something very distinctive about this Taiwanese identity; it’s not just a different version of other forms of national identity.
ES: One of the biggest personal tragedies for me regarding Taiwan is that I love the political system of the Republic of China: how it exists, the history behind it, all of those things. But I also understand that it was a very ethnocentric, Chinese type of government system. On the reverse, I love Taiwan’s unique culture and identity, which is distinct from that system of government I find so fascinating. To me, that’s a great tragedy, because the two don’t really get along anymore.
DE: Right. When the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party, arrived in Taiwan and began to impose its vision of Chinese national identity on everybody: the majority population of Han Chinese settlers from southeastern China, the Hoklo and Hakka peoples, as well as the Indigenous Taiwanese, that national identity didn’t really recognize ethnic difference as a valuable thing. It wanted everyone to become Chinese in the same way: nationalistic, patriotic, embracing the Three Principles of the People and other parts of nationalist ideology.
But Taiwanese identity is not that, even though it exists within the state of the Republic of China. The identity is very different. It actually embraces internal variations and different communities. At least in its ideal form, as a national myth, there’s an effort to embrace all the different groups within. I do want to re-emphasize, though, that it is an ideal. It is a myth to be achieved one day, not a condition that currently exists, because there are very real tensions between different ethnic and racial groups in Taiwan.
ES: Question number three: You begin the book by dissecting Wei Te-sheng’s cinematic trilogy. How do these cultural works attempt to reconcile the conflicting legacies of indigenous resistance, Japanese imperial rule, and post-1945 Chinese migration into a single narrative? And where does that cinematic aspiration meet resistance within contemporary Taiwanese politics, building on what you mentioned about the difference between ideal and practice?
DE: It is a little curious, perhaps, that I chose these three movies by Wei Te-sheng to lead off my book, because they aren’t up-to-the-minute Taiwanese films. Kano, the third in the trilogy, was released in 2014, so they’re older movies by now. But as I was working on the book, I had seen them all relatively recently and watched them repeatedly, so they really stuck in my mind because of the way they drew upon Taiwan’s 20th-century history to present this image of Taiwan as a multi-ethnic, multi-racial, unified society.
I think the way Wei Te-sheng tries to reconcile some of the tensions in that history is best exemplified in Seediq Bale and Kano. In Seediq Bale, the movie revolves around the 1930 Wushe incident, in which an indigenous group, the Seediq, attacked a Japanese town on the frontier border between Indigenous Taiwanese territories and settler society. The Japanese colonial regime had adopted a Qing practice of drawing something called the “indigenous guard line”, which demarcated a boundary between settler society and indigenous society. In 1930, the Seediq rose up against Japanese colonial rule as symbolized by this village. The movie tells the story of the uprising and the brutal suppression of it, in which almost all of the Seediq people lost their lives, either killed by Japanese forces, which included Taiwanese and other indigenous troops, or ending their own lives.
What the movie does compellingly, at least to a viewer caught up in the drama, is that it embraces that opposition to Japanese colonial rule by this small indigenous group as emblematic of all Taiwanese people, representing the resistance of all Taiwanese to colonization. It tries to reconcile the tensions within Taiwanese society by adopting the Seediq uprising and the figure of its leader, Mona Rudao, as standing in for all Taiwanese people.
The movie Kano does this in an even more obvious way. It takes the real historical example of a high school baseball team out of Chiayi that consisted of Japanese players, Han Taiwanese players, and Indigenous Taiwanese players, all under a Japanese coach. Historically, this team went to the biggest high school baseball tournament in the entire Japanese empire, which still happens every year at Koshien Stadium in Kobe, Japan, and made it to the finals. They didn’t win, as the movie shows, but they made it to the finals.
The movie attempts to reconcile the tensions in this colonial history, as well as the tensions in post-colonial Taiwanese society between Han Taiwanese and Indigenous Taiwanese, by making it a story about all Taiwanese. It frames it as: “This is our identity; we are this unified group that can overcome our differences and make it to the finals”. Okay, so they didn’t win, but they still triumphed.
ES: That brings me to question four. Rather than starting with European contact or the Qing imperial administration, you trace Taiwan’s history—rightly so, I think—back to the Austronesian dispersal and pre-conquest indigenous societies. Why was it essential to emphasize that Indigenous peoples set the terms of human encounters on the island for millennia? And how does this challenge external narratives that frame Taiwan as historically or culturally monolithic, or perhaps part of a greater narrative somewhere else in the world?
DE: By centering the people of Taiwan and moving away from political histories that use the change from one colonial regime to another to periodize Taiwan’s history, I pretty much had to begin with the Indigenous Taiwanese. Because the peoples of Taiwan were at the center, I had to examine the history of all those different peoples as much as I possibly could, and the Indigenous Taiwanese were there first. I wanted to present them as the common thread that runs across almost all of human history in Taiwan. There are some paleolithic societies I didn’t address because of archaeological evidence I’m not really qualified to discuss, but for me, the Indigenous Taiwanese are the thread that runs through all of Taiwan’s human history from the earliest days right up until the present.
It is also important to center them because they are so often decentered and seen as marginal to Taiwan’s history. It has become very common to see Taiwan as a place subjected to one form of colonial rule after another, but within that framework, there’s not always a lot of attention given to the Indigenous Taiwanese. They are the ones who have been colonized, it’s not just the island that has been colonized, it’s the peoples themselves. They have been subjected to one form of cultural assimilation or external rule after another, and I wanted to make sure they were not pushed out of the center of the story.
Having said that, as I move through the chapters of the book, the Indigenous Taiwanese do become displaced from the central narrative. I had to be faithful to that history. As Chinese settlement becomes a dramatic presence and far and away the dominant population, that had to be taken into account as they became the predominant actors in Taiwan.
Still, centering the Indigenous Taiwanese and making sure they emerge in most chapters challenges the idea that Taiwan is just a product of the Chinese cultural sphere. I’m not always successful in showing how indigenous culture has influenced broader Taiwanese culture, but there are a few examples I include about indigenous deities finding their way into Taiwanese religious practice, and the remarkable persistence of indigenous festivals, which have become much more pronounced in the last twenty or thirty years.
To go back to your first question about what we gain from using this people-centered history, it reminds us that the Indigenous Taiwanese have always been drawn into cross-strait and geopolitical tensions against their will. It’s not their fight. It’s important to remember that there is this long-established population in Taiwan with completely separate interests that should be taken into account.
Part of that early phase of the production of Taiwanese identity involved a process of self-indigenization, deciding that “we are Taiwanese, we are from here, we are indigenous because we’ve never been from somewhere else”. The people who defined that identity had been born there, perhaps for multiple generations. That was reinforced by Japanese colonization and post-war recolonization because the Japanese saw the people they called islanders as natives. That made things even more complicated for how that population addressed the earlier history of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. I don’t criticize this any more than I do my own American history and my own place in that history.
ES: I think it’s so fascinating because if they can make that claim, you could argue the people on the Mayflower have been here so long they could do the same. I actually see a parallel with a French Canadian friend of mine. There is a sense of indigenous national identity among French Canadians because they are so far removed from the Kingdom of France they came from, their culture literally doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world anymore. They also self-indigenize, feeling like Canada is colonizing them or trying to take them over. I find that so interesting.
DE: Absolutely.
ES: Let’s go to question five. For American policymakers, and this is where we tie it into our greater mission of fostering mutual understanding and peace between the U.S., China, and Taiwan, who default to treating Taiwan primarily as a strategic chess piece or a semiconductor hub, what specific educational or analytical shifts would help incorporate Taiwan’s domestic social, or dare I say, “people’s history”, into a more nuanced, long-term U.S. foreign policy toward the island?
DE: This is a hard question to answer, partly because U.S. policymakers, government advisors, and people working in think tanks are always going to prioritize U.S. interests. From the lens of U.S. interests, we get the sense that Taiwan is a bargaining chip or something we can use to our advantage in other settings. There is also a strong dedication to Taiwan as a democratic society, especially since Taiwan has become a very vibrant one. So there is genuine interest there. But it’s hard to say exactly how U.S. policymakers should take the interests of the Taiwanese into account, because they are advocates for U.S. interests first and foremost.
That caveat aside, I would say that really learning more about Taiwan would be a good starting point. This is true across U.S. society: for policymakers, analysts, educators, and the general population. There’s definitely been a shift I’ve seen over the last twenty years. I hear many fewer people confusing Taiwan with Thailand, which used to be quite common. People are much more aware that Taiwan is on the map, and they’re aware that Taiwan is Taiwan. It’s not as common to hear people say, “Taiwan is just democratic China”. Nobody says “free China” anymore.
Some of these shifts have already occurred, but it’s important for people in positions of influence, whether in policy or academic circles, to know more about Taiwan and see what makes it distinctive. When they can see what makes Taiwan distinctive, they can understand why there is value in preserving that distinctiveness, or really helping Taiwan preserve itself.
ES: You have to ask, what is Taiwan to these people? If they’re really senior folks, it might still be viewed as an ideological bastion against communist China. Of course, that view has eroded significantly over the past twenty to thirty years. But if you ask some contemporary folks, “What is Taiwan?”, they might still say, “Oh yeah, I love Thailand!”.
DE: Right.
ES: Okay, so given that Taiwan’s political direction is driven by the interests and collective memories of its civil society rather than just outside diplomacy alone, how can journalists, think tanks, and civic organizations better engage with local Taiwanese community perspectives instead of filtering everything through this larger geopolitical lens?
DE: When I think about that question, I think about a moment maybe two years ago when I was in Taiwan on a Fulbright fellowship. At the very beginning of the fellowship year, there was an orientation session for all the new Fulbright grantees in Taipei. The head of Fulbright Taiwan, Dr. Randall Nadeau, talked in his opening speech about his own journey to Taiwan. The way he put it was that he had “discovered Taiwan in Taiwan”. In other words, he had gone to Taiwan to do research many years ago, and that’s where he began to learn about Taiwan and gain an appreciation for its distinctiveness.
That resonated with me because it had been my own experience. I had gone to Taiwan to study Chinese in the mid-1990s, and I hadn’t been focused on Taiwan at all. I had spent a year teaching English in China, and my goal was to study China, work in China, and maybe eventually get a PhD in Chinese history. But because I had that experience in Taiwan, studying in the mid-90s and then looking for a dissertation topic there, that’s really where I discovered that I wanted to study Taiwan and learn more about it.
With all of that background, I think the main answer to your question is that it’s really important for people to actually go to Taiwan. I think that really does affect their outlook and perspective. I can think of a concrete example of this in action: at the height of COVID in 2020, a lot of journalists from the New York Times, NPR, and other outlets had to leave China and relocate to Taipei. Suddenly, there were a lot more stories and really good articles being written about Taiwan’s politics, society, food culture, and Indigenous peoples. There were articles written about the environmental movement and the nuclear waste that was dumped on Lanyu, or Orchid Island.
As journalists settled their operations in Taiwan, they began to write so much more about it because it was right there at hand. I think that was a big contributor to the greater awareness in the English-speaking world of what is going on in Taiwan and what makes it distinct. It raised interest in Taiwan’s politics and elections. So, I would say to people who work in think tanks, journalism, and business: go to Taiwan. Spend a couple of weeks there. Get to know the place a little bit better, and that will change your outlook a bit.
ES: I absolutely agree. And even beyond that, you see so many China scholars—or maybe scholars are decently good at it, but certainly policy folks—who have never stepped foot in China, or maybe they went to Hong Kong twenty years ago. These places need to be visited.
DE: Sure. And actually, academics too. I’ve noticed in recent years that a lot of historians who do China, like me, did their language study in Taiwan but did their main work on Chinese history. But they’ve been going to Taiwan a bit more recently. Larger numbers of people who I associate with studying Chinese history, whether it’s the 20th century or before, have been appearing more frequently in Taiwan. I think that also affects how they teach. There’s been an increase in interest in teaching classes on Taiwan history at a lot of schools in the U.S.—and not just history, but politics and literature as well.