Culture can be considered the accumulation of peoples’ experiences. To explore the cultural aspects of a place, a look from this angle would be a nice start. The most common way to study the people of Taiwan according to ethnic groups is to classify them into Minnanren, Hakka, Waishengren, and Indigenous.

What we call the indigenous peoples today are those whose ancestors came to Taiwan some 6,500 years ago. They comprise 2% - 3% of Taiwan’s total population. The 14 tribes or more all belong to the Austronesian group, whose people are found on more than 20,000 islands around the world and speak at least 1,200 languages.

This island then saw waves of immigrants from China around 450 years ago, during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), when the ban on immigration was gradually lifted. Most of them came from various cities in Fujian and Guangdong Provinces of China. Together with their descendants, they now compose around 85% of Taiwan’s population, and include the Minnanren and Hakka people, together called "Benshengren”, meaning the native/local people. The Hakkas take around 20% of the population.

Benshengren was more popularly used after the 1970s to distinguish them from "Waishengren”, or people from outside provinces, referring to those who came from China to Taiwan around 1949 when the Kuomintang regime moved its headquarters here. The waishengren comprise 13% of the total population.

Now, those called New Immigrants are a fifth ethnic group that has emerged due to inter-marriage over the last two decades with those who belong to the earlier four groups. They are Taiwan residents who hold foreign nationalities. They are mostly foreign spouses from China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Southeast Asian countries. Along with other nationalities, they make up around 1.4% of the total population.

A social construct

For sociologists, these ethnic classifications are a social construct, the contestation and compromise between political forces.

"Minnanren, Hakka, Waishengren and indigenous peoples are social categories that have developed over the last fifty years,” writes Wang Fu-chang in his book Ethnic Imagination in Contemporary Taiwan. He is a research fellow in the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica.

But Lin Cho-shui and Yeh Chu-lan, two Democratic Progress Party legislators, were the first to coin the term “four major ethnic groups”, in 1993. In less than 10 years, that term was well accepted by the general public and the government, Wang said.

Wang stresses in his book that there are divergences within each ethnic group. For example, there are ten different tribes within the indigenous peoples and they don’t speak the same language, live in the same area, nor share the same culture.

A pan-indigenous identity was constructed in the 1980s to gather aboriginal peoples in different tribes to work against the injustice they encountered in a Han-Chinese dominant society.

Wang believes that behind every comparative distinction, lies a social context. In his book, he explores the comparative differentiations of Benshengren vs. Waishengren since the 1970s, indigenous peoples vs. Han since the early 1980s, Hakka vs. Minnanren since the mid 1980s, and Waishengren vs. Minnanren since the 1990s.

Different historical incidents have contributed to make these distinctions, such as the 228 Incident in 1947; armed conflicts between people from Fujian and Guangdong provinces in the 18th and 19th centuries; social movements initiated by the indigenous peoples in the 1980s, and the DDP’s political campaigns in the 1990s.

Most of the wars and conflicts throughout history are of people vying for territory, water, rights or benefits, and the incidents mentioned above are no exception. In its Taiwan ethnic group series, culture.tw tells the life stories of people in different ethnic groups. There is a China-born retired veteran reminiscing his old days in the army; a Hakka-Hoklo couple speaking of their life together in the hairdressing business; foreign residents of different nationalities talking about their experiences living in Taipei, and a Puyuma musician sharing his passion for preserving traditional tribal music.

These stories are about ordinary people. They are not celebrities, government officials, tycoons, nor academics. They are random pieces of an entire culture. They are your neighbors, your colleagues, uncles and aunties who run convenience stores or hair salons. But their hidden lives are wonderful stories that can console those who read them with their hearts.

Ethnic integration

Any categorization has its limits. Here’s a simple example. People from places of Hakka origin (e.g. Guangdong Province or Western Fujian Province in China) came to Taiwan around the year of 1949 and are more likely to be considered Waishengrens, not Hakka, by the Hoklo or Hakka people in Taiwan. This is based on their time of arrival. The ancestors of Minnanrens and Hakkas came to Taiwan 300-400 years ago, while the ancestors of Waishengrens may have arrived 50-60 years ago.

Inter-marriage has caused the integration of ethnic groups, especially for Minnanrens, who is the most blended group for being the demographic majority. Many Waishengrens got married with Minnanrens while they settled down in Taiwan. Their offspring, the first Taiwan-born generation, have given birth to the second or the third generations.

These Taiwan-born generations have grown up in a different time from their predecessors and they perceive their ethnic identity differently. They generally feel attached to Taiwan, their birthplace and where they grew up, more than their forefathers’ birthplaces.

The lines between ethnic groups inevitably fade away with time. The stories in the Taiwan ethnic group series also show more integration than segregation among the predominant ethnic groups. Taiwan culture is after all, not simply the sum of five ethnic cultures, but the totality of each person who decides to make a life on this Ilha Formosa.