The Lingering Patriots: An Ethnography of Chinese Nationalists in Post-Authoritarian Taiwan

Abstract

This thesis examines the relationship between the Chinese Nationalist party Kuomintang (KMT), Taiwan’s former autocratic ruling party, and its supporters in post-authoritarian Taiwan in the form of an anthropological project. Based upon three months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, this study explores the imaginings of Chinese Nationalism supporters in Taiwan. Often identified by their upbringing and clientelist relation with the KMT regime and the Chinese framework of the nation, the Chinese Nationalists find themselves in a new context when Taiwanese nationalism seems to have gained the upper hand. Throughout the presidential election in 2020, this characteristic of the imagined community of Chinese Nationalists in modern Taiwan intensifies through their support of the populist politician and the KMT’s presidential nominee Han Kuo-yu. Following Han’s failed presidential bid, however, the emotional shift and changing perspectives documented through my research in the community after electoral defeat demonstrates a sense of postponed realization of an uncertain future as a now apparently marginalized minority. The continuing presence of Chinese Nationalists in Taiwan, along with their continual ties with the Nationalist Party, poses an intriguing case-study on the subject of citizen-shaping when analyzed as a feature of post-authoritarian societies. The objective of this thesis is to illustrate and understand how imagined communities, through the concept of 'political subjectivity' on the basis of a collective national as well as an ethnic identity, are sustained as well as transformed through proceeding trends of “democratic developments” in newly reformed societies, with Taiwan representing one of the many.