Taiwanese Nationalism in the Age of Cross-Strait Integration under Ma's Administration - Predominance and Pragmatism

Event Date: 

Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 4:00pm

Event Location: 

  • The Lane Room (Ellison 3824)

This study examines the phenomenon of rising Taiwanese nationalism within the trend of cross-strait economic and trade integration during the eight years in which Ying jiu Ma has been in power. It takes primordialism and political constructivism as its theoretical underpinnings. We perform cross-tabulation analysis on two indices: whether or not respondents believe Mainland Chinese are compatriots; and whether Taiwan is independent in their estimation, to create our four typologies for Taiwanese nationalism (TN): Typology I, with the lowest TN (are compatriots/ not independent), Typology II, with slightly higher TN (are compatriots/ independent), Typology III with the third highest TN (not compatriots/ independent), and Typology IV with the highest TN (not compatriots/ not independent). The order of these four typologies from lowest to highest TN is confirmed through the “Chinese/Taiwanese/both” choice and “unification/independence” choice spectrum.

We then utilize the complete empirical data provided by the April, 2015 survey in undertaking analysis. Our study presents the background composition of the four TN typologies, and also verifies the two hypotheses derived from theoretical literature and actual developments: that 1) Predominance -- we assume that levels of Taiwanese consciousness for respondents who fall into the lowest TN Typology I, are not vastly different from those of respondents classified into other typologies within the overall rising trend of Taiwanese nationalism; and 2) Pragmatism – we suppose that there is little difference between the group with the highest level of TN, Typology IV, and the others concerning pragmatic issues such as the continuance of economic and trade ties with Mainland China and the unwillingness to go to war. Overall, the results verify our hypotheses, and this study further provides 4 implications in its conclusion.

Dr. Da-chi Liao is a senior professor of Graduate Institute of Political Science at National Sun Yat-sen University (NSYSU), Kaohsiung, and a Party Review Committee member of Ministry of Interior, Executive Yuan, Taiwan (2010~). From 2004 to 2006, she served as the president of Taiwanese Political Science Association. She edited two books before 2006: American Policy in Asia Pacific Region After 9-11 (2002), and Democratization, Globalization, and the Role of Parliaments (2006, in Chinese); and published more than 60 refereed journal articles. She was in charge of Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities (SSH), National Contact Point of European Union 7th Framework Program that was sponsored by ROC Taiwan’s National Science Council from 2010 to 2013. In recent 10 years, she has been devoting significant time to study how to utilize ICTs (Information and Communication technologies) as a tool to analyze politics as well as to improve the quality of democracy in Taiwan. She has been working with information technologists to employ text-mining techniques doing content analyses either on legislative documents or on social media, such as Facebook or Taiwan’s BBS. She has also cooperated with European University Institute (Florence, Italy) to set up the iVoter website (http://ivoternet.org/) as a communication platform between Taiwanese voters and legislative candidates for the 2012 and 2016 elections. This effort was then published into two books. One is entitled as “iVoter: A Record of Taiwan’s Internet Democracy,” (2013, in Chinese) and the other is: Political Behavior and Technology—Voting Advice Applications in East Asia (2016 in English by Palgrave&Macmillan). She received her Ph.D in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 1990.

Paper related to the talk can be found on the IHC website.

PS 595 Credit