From Taiwan Subjects to Overseas Taiwanese to Taiwan Provincials:

Being Taiwanese in Early Post-war Japan

Evan Dawley

April 28, 2025 / 17:30-19:00 (JST)

Hybrid (In person and on Zoom)

・Venue: Room 301, 3F, building 10, Sophia University

・Join Zoom Meeting: https://sophia-ac-jp.zoom.us/j/97766723579

・Meeting ID: 977 6672 3579

・Passcode: 927760

Following its assumption of sovereignty over Taiwan in 1945, the government of the Republic of China faced a daunting task: re-Sinicizing a globally dispersed Taiwanese population that had followed its own trajectories of identity formation since 1895 and who mostly did not share in the ROC’s nationalist ideology. Moreover, it undertook this task while fighting a war for its political survival and convincing a globally dispersed Chinese population, and an ambivalent international community, that the Kuomintang-run party-state was the legitimate, true government of a contested Chinese nation. As part of this process, the KMT government created a new administrative category of Overseas Taiwanese (Taiqiao), which applied to people living outside of Taiwan who had until recently been Taiwanese subjects of the Japanese Empire (Taiwan sekimin). The term was short-lived, fading out of use in official documents by 1948 and getting replaced by “Taiwan provincials” (Taiwan shengji), but for a few years it constituted and differentiated a small subset of China’s national population. This talk will examine the application of this term to better understand the boundaries between nationality and ethnicity in the official Chinese mind after World War II.

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 A People’s History of Taiwan (Reaktion Books, forthcoming). His current research project is titled “China, Chinese Abroad, and the International Construction of the Modern Nation-State, 1920s-1970s,” which 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).

This talk is organized by Christian Hess (Professor of History, Sophia University).