Overview and research questions
China has long portrayed the image that there is a singular Chinese culture, but in reality, it is a large country with a varied population. While many consider the Taiwanese to be a traditionally “Chinese” people, there is a lot of conflict in the region between the Taiwanese government and the Chinese government. Even more interestingly, there are some specific cultural minorities in Taiwan, like the Hakka people, with their own cultural traditions, beliefs, foods, and even languages.
The purpose of this discussion will be to investigate the current sociocultural status of the Hakka population in Taipei today. The investigation will center around racial and class separations in this city in the Global North, and it will investigate why certain groups like the Hakka population become segregated from mainstream society—and why these groups tend to struggle in terms of economic and social success.
Although the Hakka people are traditionally considered to be “Han” Chinese—that is, they are part of the majority group in China—they also have a very distinct cultural tradition that deviates significantly from the mainstream (Brown, 2004). While the Hakka people are found in great numbers in Taipei, they are from any of the provinces bordering the Yellow River that speak Hakka (Brown, 2004). In most Chinese cultural subgroups, the reason for the subgroup’s existence is a shared geopolitical and linguistic history; however, Hakka people are from many different parts of China. Many left the country during the Cultural Revolution and settled in Taipei (Chang, 2004; Brown, 2004). Today, there are 80 million Hakka people around the world, and approximately 15-20% of the Taiwanese population is considered to be Hakka (Brown, 2004).
The Hakka present an interesting question, because they are considered Han Chinese by most, and thus, they do not face the same level of discrimination that some outside groups face in Taiwan (Lin et al., 2001). Instead, these individuals face a completely different kind of discrimination: erasure (Constable, 2005). The Hakka people, despite having their own cultural traditions and language, have been effectively assimilated into Han culture and largely erased from public view in many ways.
The purpose of this discussion is to investigate the ways that culture in Taipei leads to erasure or invisibility for certain Chinese ethnic groups, particularly groups like the Hakka. Because this group has no ancestral homeland, so to speak, there is no central power locale for the group; it is disparate and linked only by cultural traditions (Wang, 2004). While Taipei has been effective in developing a number of relatively liberal protections for different racial minorities, the Hakka are still a group that experiences social and cultural invisibility in the current geopolitical paradigm in Taiwan as a whole (Wang, 2004).
This discussion will investigate how these groups maintain cultural integrity in the face of erasure and policies of homogeneity, and how policies that encourage homogeneity affect cultural structures in Taipei. The discussion will also investigate how this group’s linguistic and social structures have affected the Taiwanese popular culture as a whole, and the perception of what it means to be Han Chinese in Taipei. Han Chinese culture is complex and much less uniform than is commonly thought; the Hakka people are interesting because of their simultaneous exclusion and inclusion into this ethnic group in Taipei.
References
Brown, M. J. (2004). Is Taiwan Chinese?: the impact of culture, power, and migration on changing identities (Vol. 2). Univ of California Press.
Chang, B. Y. (2004). From Taiwanisation to De-sinification. Culture Construction in Taiwan since the 1990s. China Perspectives, (56).
Constable, N. (2005). Guest people: Hakka identity in China and abroad. University of Washington Press.
Lin, M., Chu, C. C., Chang, S. L., Lee, H. L., Loo, J. H., Akaza, T., & Tokunaga, K. (2001). The origin of Minnan and Hakka, the so‐called “Taiwanese”, inferred by HLA study. Tissue antigens, 57(3), 192-199.
Wang, L. J. (2004). Multiculturalism in Taiwan: Contradictions and challenges in cultural policy. International journal of cultural policy, 10(3), 301-318.
