In this year of consequential elections, first off the blocks was Taiwan. Shortly before the January 13 vote, Chinese president Xi Jinping and his Taiwanese counterpart Tsai Ing-wen reminded the world, in their New Year addresses, what was at stake. Xi expressed his determination to see “all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait… bound by a common sense of purpose”; Tsai insisted that Taiwan was an independent country whose future should be decided democratically, rather than by a widely-expected invasion by People’s Liberation Army forces. Allegations swirled of Chinese meddling in the election in favour of the Kuomintang (KMT), seen as friendlier than Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). It was all to no avail: the DPP candidate, Tsai’s successor Lai Ching-te, was elected, and cross-Strait relations will remain tense.
In his new history of Taiwan, Rebel Island, Jonathan Clements reminds us just how recent is Taiwan as a single democratic polity. If we were to imagine the island’s history as a calendar year, he says, beginning with the arrival of the first humans 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, then it wouldn’t be until late December of that year that most of what we consider “Taiwanese history” plays out. “Prolonged and enduring ties with the Chinese on the mainland,” Clements writes, “are initiated around Christmas.” Democratic Taiwan doesn’t arrive until New Year’s Eve.
Taiwan’s long prehistory is the all-but-unknown story of disparate groups, speaking different languages, making their lives on an island roughly the size of Switzerland. That island has been far enough away from mainland China and the Japanese archipelago to have escaped lasting absorption into either, yet near enough to be a convenient hideout for people dodging the jurisdictions of both. Hence Taiwan’s indigenous peoples have entered the historical record largely in Chinese, Japanese and (latterly) European writings, as barbarous irritants to be negotiated, bribed or violently compelled into vacating areas coveted by smugglers, pirates and colonialists.
Clements laments this partial understanding of the island’s indigenous groups, while sharing – with justified relish – accounts of cultural interactions gone awry. One Chinese traveller of the early 1600s, Chen Di, was disgusted to find that a group on Taiwan prized, as a delicacy, not just the intestines of deer, but the contents of those intestines: recently swallowed grass. “When Chinese see it, they retch,” Chen noted, before adding that when those people “see Chinese eating chicken and pheasant, they retch… who can say what is right or wrong when it comes to taste?”
