Since Taiwan’s 228 Incident, the self-identification of Taiwanese people has remained a sensitive and controversial topic. Despite China’s threats of war over any formal declaration of independence from Taiwan, most Taiwanese people now see themselves as primarily Taiwanese instead of Chinese. However, a sense of distinct identity is not only a phenomenon extant on Taiwan proper (台灣本島), but on Taiwan’s outlying islands as well. The residents of these islands, namely Kinmen and Matsu, often see themselves as a group not only distinct from China, but also from Taiwan.

Both Kinmen and Matsu are situated off the coast of China’s Fujian province and, as such, find themselves literally in the middle of cross-strait relations. In the book Waters Divided (斷裂的海) by Yian Lee (李易安) and Hsin-chieh Ho (何欣潔), the authors interviewed several residents of these outlying islands. One Kinmen resident noted, “if Taiwan doesn’t want us, and we also don’t want to be Chinese, what are we to do?” Implicit in this question is the belief they are neither Taiwanese nor Chinese, but a third identity grouping. Likewise, many residents of Matsu, the second set of Taiwan’s outlying islands bordering the Chinese mainland, also have their own distinct sense of identity. The case here, however, is even more extreme than in Kinmen, as Matsu was established as a unified administrative region out of a grouping of previously disconnected islands in 1949. Dongyin, an island that is a two-and-a-half-hour boat ride from the main islands of Matsu (Beigan and Nangan) also holds a sense of identity, distinct, even, from that of Matsu. A resident of Dongyin admitted, “I am from Dongyin, I am not from Matsu.” These beliefs, according to the authors of Waters Divided, are steadily changing among young people, who, like their counterparts in Taiwan proper, also adopt a more Taiwanese identity. However, the question arises: why would a distinct identity form on these islands in the first place? And how is it that the residents of Taiwan’s outlying islands could come to possess such a strong sense of identity separate from Taiwan?

The frameworks of two well-known Chinese scholars within mainland China help decipher such a case. The scholars are Fei Xiaotong (费孝通), who was a famous sociologist and anthropologist who taught at Peking University up until his death in 2005, and Liang Shuming (梁漱溟), a writer and political theorist who advocated for a modern interpretation of Confucianism during the late Qing and Republican period, before falling into relative obscurity until his death in Beijing in 1988. They put forth two complementary frameworks, Liang Shuming’s “anti-group” (反团体) theory and Fei Xiaotong’s “Differential Ordering” (差序格局).

In discussing whether democracy is suited to Chinese culture in his essay “Chinese People’s Social Life and Cultural Characteristics” (中国人的社会人生及文化特征) Liang Shuming pointed out, “Chinese people are clearly not opposed to democracy, but rather are opposed to the formation of groups.” Liang Shuming’s explanation for why can be summed in two points: he holds that Chinese people historically had “too much freedom” and that China is a country which centers familial ties as the center of society (as opposed to the individual).

The first point is common to many pre-modern empires: rulers did not strive to control all the details of their subjects’ lives. Their culture and folk practices primarily passed through local grassroots efforts and thus formed independently, and not as a result of top-down regulation. So long as tribute came, usually not much else was needed. The old saying “Heaven is high above, and the emperor is far away” reflects this point: even if a person nominally belongs under the suzerainty of the dynastic system, the emperor also has little real ability to ensure his authority penetrates all domains and reaches every region. This is especially true of remote areas like Kinmen and Matsu. Liang Shuming similarly notes, “there is a saying amongst the rural parts of Hebei province that goes like this: ‘as long as you pay your tribute to the government, you’re free as a king.’ As long as one pays taxes and brings to the government its cut of the harvest, no more constraints would be put on the individual. Thus, if one takes Liang Shuming’s view on the matter, even though the emperor controlled All Under Heaven (天下) in Ancient Chinese society, common people had no strong sentiments about the operation of the country. Just as Liang Shuming summarized, “as long as Chinese people can live together in harmony, they lack any sense of national obligation or ideology.” Because of this, few peasants identified with a larger polity that went beyond their local scopes.

In the second point, Liang Shuming went a step further to point out that traditional Chinese family customs intensified this type of “anti-group” characteristic. Liang brings up two examples to prove this point. Firstly, “[Chinese] people eat primarily in gatherings with their families, whereas Westerners often eat in groups.” Secondly, Chinese people’s traditional homes featured “central halls where the ancestral shrine would be placed, as well as serving as a place to sit guests. In addition, this was a space where the whole family would eat. This space served as the center of the home.” These two examples show traditional Chinese society as a structure that centers the family as its operational unit, as opposed to more “Western” culture, where one might associate and organize groups more regularly with others outside of one’s family. This in turn means that, while “Western” culture is often understood as being individualistic, that individualism allows more readily for people to associate with groups beyond their own family, thus enabling for the construction of a collective consciousness that can extend beyond the local environment, something much more difficult to realize in historical Chinese society where blood ties and locality play a cardinal role.

Xiao Feitong’s concept of a “differential order” also makes a distinction between the “Western” concept of family and that of China. Historically, in China this concept would extend beyond the nuclear family to a clan-like extended family. Writing in his work Local Character 乡土本色, Fei Xiaotong elaborates the differential order’s core characteristics include: “each social network has a ‘self’ that acts as the center, and every network’s center is thus different.” In addition, he further states, “ripples coming from the center cause connections to form;” these “are individualized;” and “not only are familial relations are like this, but regional relations are also like this.” This result of this type of mode is that “in China’s traditional society, an individual will sacrifice their family for themselves, will sacrifice their political party for their family, will sacrifice the country for their party, and sacrifice all under heaven for their country.” Put succinctly, local relations and identity are more important than anything. Because of this, traditional Chinese society makes local groupings the primary unit, which leads to the formation of a regional identity.

The mode of familial and local supremacy which Liang Shuming and Fei Xiaotong describe is not only well preserved in Kinmen and Matsu, but it has also deeply influenced these regions’ electoral politics. Kinmen has a “strong traditional clan-based culture…the villages are divided one by one into units in which a given village’s residents all share the same surname.” During elections, “the results for Country Magistrate seem to revolve around those put forward by the Chen clan and the Li Clan.” For example, Kinmen’s current Legislative Yuan representative is Chen Yu-Jen, and the County Magistrate is Chen Fuhai (i.e., they share the same surname, indicating they are both members of the Chen clan). In Matsu, where the population is even smaller, the local sense of identity is even more extreme. For one to be elected, one must satisfy the “five similarities” requirement: “same class [classmates], same surname, same clan, same hobby (such as if two people both play badminton), and same village. This phenomenon is the “differential order” theory’s ultimate expression, clearly revealing the privileging of regional identities.

It can be thus said that most Chinese regions once possessed a sense of strong local identity that has been diminished by the changes modernization has wrought, fostering instead a stronger national identity. In mainland China, owing to political unification and the rise of nationalism, regions began to be homogenized, leading to a sense of common identity. Likewise, because Taiwan was ceded to Japan following the First Sino-Japanese War, the people on the island began to have a separate set of historical experiences than that of mainland China. This led to an exacerbation of differences between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan, and the process of identity homogenization was localized to Taiwan. Owing to the marginal position these islands occupied, however, the residents of these outlying islands were largely left out of the greater construction of community that created respective nationalisms in Taiwan and China, and so they retained a particularly strong regional sense of identity. Thus, according to Waters Divided, the outlying islands’ marginality vis a vis Taiwan caused them to begin to feel a sense of being “not of the mainland, but also not of Taiwan.” Of course, Kinmen and Matsu, as symbols of the KMT’s desire to retake the mainland, also was integral in shaping modern Taiwanese identity in ways not often acknowledged, but the controls on movement put in place still ensured that they were not as thoroughly assimilated into a greater  identity as they might otherwise have been, resulting in them retaining a premodern Chinese conception that regional identity is privileged over national identity.

In sum, although Taiwanese identity can be explained through the nationalism that emerged from their particular historical experience (as opposed to the nationalism that formed in China), these factors do not completely explain why Taiwan’s outlying islands have such a strong sense of regional identity. According to Liang Shuming and Fei Xiaotong’s theoretical frameworks, the relative laxity in traditional Chinese society’s governance and the family-centered social structure naturally led to the construction of a regional-centered identity. The special situation of these outlying islands thus enabled them to preserve traditional concepts that both Taiwan and China have already abandoned. 

This is not all there is to the story, however. The Nationalist Party itself stressed a policy of difference between these islands and Taiwan, referring to them as belonging to Fujian Province rather than Taiwan as a way of legitimizing their claim to the mainland, and they were often depicted as the frontline in the defense of the Republic of China, a name which many on these islands still feel a particular attachment to. This said, it only explains the sense of belonging some residents have to the KMT’s brand of Chinese nationalism, and not why many choose to so strongly identify with their local environs. To arrive at that answer, we still need the frameworks Liang Shuming and Fei Xiaotong put forth. 

All national identities are constructed by undergoing a shared set of experiences that make people, as Benedict Anderson would say, imagine themselves as part of a larger community. This, combined with the homogenization of culture inherent in modernization, ensures the construction of the nation state from what might otherwise have been disparate regional identities. The periphery thus, as it usually does, challenges our assumptions that the world is static and exposes anachronistic understandings of identity. It is therefore necessary to lift the mask off the historicity of any specific claims to nationhood and see these phenomena for what they really are: modern political issues.