Changing authentic identities: evidence from Taiwan and China

Despite ideological rhetoric to the contrary, identity changes and authenticity depend on social experience - the lived interactions of individuals as well as the broad range of political-economic, historical, and personal factors that shape those interactions. Because governments influence social experience, they can shape identities of their populations. Plains Aborigines in colonial Taiwan became Han Taiwanese after Japanese authorities banned footbinding. Local Han became Tujia, and Prmi became both Pumi and Tibetan in China's nation-wide ethnic identification project. However, deliberate attempts at manipulation do not always succeed. The social experience of daily discrimination countered colonial authorities' efforts to make Han Taiwanese into Japanese, contrary to the claims of more recent nostalgic narratives. Narratives of unfolding - partisan stories about the development of a people over time - push the notion, useful to contemporary political authorities, that ethnic identities are fixed because they are based on culture and ancestry and that their authenticity is an ontological absolute derived from origins in antiquity. Analytic distinction of ideological rhetoric from the social experience of individuals allows a better understanding of the socially constructed processes of identity formation and authentication.