Taiwan's Ethnic Groups

30-second overview: In 2016, Taiwan's president formally apologized to indigenous peoples at the Presidential Office, acknowledging four hundred years of harm — yet outside the gates, some tribal members were blocked by police shields, refusing to accept the apology on their behalf. Taiwan has five major ethnic groups (Minnan, Hakka, Indigenous, Mainlanders, and New Immigrants), but this classification was only invented in 1993 — and from the beginning, it left certain people out.

On the morning of August 1, 2016, in Taipei, a stalk of millet was lit in front of the main entrance of the Presidential Office.

Smoke rose upward. This is an indigenous ritual — smoke guides ancestral spirits to come witness. A Bunun elder, Hu Jin-niang, poured wine in the Jing-guo Hall to allow the spirits to "meet" newly inaugurated President Tsai Ing-wen. Then Tsai Ing-wen delivered a document unprecedented in Taiwan's history:

✦ "I want to represent the government in offering our most sincere apologies to all indigenous peoples. For the pain and unfair treatment that you have suffered over the past four hundred years, I, on behalf of the government, apologize to you."¹

But outside the Presidential Office gates, another group of indigenous people was being held back by police shields. They condemned the tribal members who went inside as "collaborators," and condemned Tsai Ing-wen for calling the elders indoors and conducting the apology behind closed doors.

This image — the burning millet stalk, the apology text, the shields outside the gates — is nearly a perfect miniature of Taiwan's ethnic relations: historical wounds, governmental postures, and the divisions among tribal members over whether "this is enough."

How the "Four Major Ethnic Groups" Were Invented

The "four major ethnic groups" framework so familiar to Taiwanese today was invented in 1993.

Democratic Progressive Party legislators Lin Cho-shui and Yeh Chu-lan formally proposed the classification of "Indigenous, Minnan (Hoklo), Hakka, and Mainlanders," giving Taiwan's ethnic groups a shared narrative framework for the first time. This classification did not emerge naturally from history — it was a construction of political language. Packaging Taiwan's people into "four groups" was a tool of the localization movement (本土化運動) of that era.

Scholar Wang Fu-chang, in Contemporary Taiwan Society's Ethnic Imagination (《當代台灣社會的族群想像》), points out: this classification places distinctions of fundamentally different natures on the same plane. The distinction between "Indigenous vs. Han Chinese" and the distinction between "Minnan vs. Hakka" are, at root, not the same kind of thing at all.

And from the start, the framework left certain people out.

Curator's Note
The "four major ethnic groups" gave Taiwanese people a shared vocabulary of self-description for the first time. But it also solidified a strange logic: indigenous peoples are one "ethnic group," while Minnan people are an aggregate of three major dialect subgroups. "Mainlanders" can simultaneously include people from Guangdong, Shandong, Mongolians, Tibetans... This framework works — but it was never precise.

Where Are the Plains Peoples (Pingpu)?

In 1956, the Nationalist government conducted the first household registration census in Taiwan. The category of "Pingpu peoples" (平埔族) was simply deleted from the form.

The Pingpu peoples were the indigenous groups of Taiwan who first encountered outsiders — the Ketagalan, Siraya, Makatao, and others. During the Qing period, they were the first to undergo Sinicization, and as a result they disappeared from later classifications. When the "four major ethnic groups" framework was established, "indigenous peoples" referred to the 16 officially recognized nations — but the question of identity recognition for Pingpu descendants has never been resolved.

In 2001, 400 Pingpu representatives entered the Legislative Yuan for a public hearing, demanding restoration of indigenous status. In 2010, representatives submitted a complaint to the United Nations, accusing the Council of Indigenous Peoples of refusing to recognize them. In 2016, Tsai Ing-wen's apology text also promised to resolve the matter — but legislation remains stalled to this day.

When people talk about "four major ethnic groups" in Taiwan, some people are already excluded from that number.

The Island's Owners, Waiting Ten Years for Their Name

Before the "four major ethnic groups" framework appeared, the name "indigenous peoples" (原住民族) itself was the product of a struggle.

Before 1994, the Taiwanese government had another name for the island's indigenous inhabitants: mountain compatriots (山胞). Even earlier: "番" (savages), "Takasago peoples" (高砂族), "mountain-area mountain compatriots" (山地山胞). In 1984, the Association for Taiwan Indigenous People's Rights was established, launching the name rectification movement. Ten years of struggle — taking to the streets, entering the constitutional amendment process — finally resulted in August 1, 1994: "mountain compatriots" was removed from the text of the Republic of China Constitution and replaced with "indigenous peoples" (原住民).

This day later became "Indigenous Peoples' Day" — and the reason Tsai Ing-wen chose the same date to deliver her apology was that it was the morning that marked exactly 22 years since the name rectification.

The currently officially recognized indigenous nations number 16, including the Amis, Atayal, Paiwan, Bunun, Tao (Yami), and others. The population is approximately 614,000 (February 2025 Council of Indigenous Peoples statistics), accounting for 2.6% of Taiwan's total population.² But traditional territory land rights remain unresolved: Article 21 of the Indigenous Peoples Basic Act stipulates that the government must obtain the informed consent of tribes before conducting development within traditional territories.³ Whether "traditional territories" include privately owned land, however, is still subject to differing interpretations between the Executive Yuan and the Supreme Administrative Court — and anti-development protests by Amis peoples on Taiwan's east coast recur every year.⁴

Contested perspectives
After the 2016 apology text was delivered, multiple indigenous organizations criticized the promises as unfulfilled. Nuclear waste is still stored on Orchid Island (Lanyu), home of the Tao people; the demarcation process for traditional territories has been criticized for carving out private land; former tribal figure Mayaw Biho has pointed out that the demarcation regulations effectively strip indigenous peoples of their right to informed consent over large-scale development projects on privately owned land within traditional territories. An apology text is words; implementing it is another matter entirely.

1988: A Portrait of Sun Yat-sen Wearing a Face Mask

Back to December 28, 1988, on the streets of Taipei.

At the front of the marching crowd, there was a framed memorial portrait of Sun Yat-sen — wearing a face mask. Provincial assembly member Fu Wen-cheng served as general commander, reciting the ceremonial text in Hakka: "We, the descendants of the Hakka, stand before your spirit, and beseech your spirit in heaven to protect Hakka people's unity and harmony, so that the Hakka language may be transmitted forever, and the Hakka people may be resilient and prosperous."

The leaflets read: "If the Founding Father Sun Yat-sen were alive today, he would not be allowed to speak his own Hakka on television."

This "Return Our Mother Tongue" (還我母語) movement was the first time the Hakka community took to the streets en masse. Over ten thousand people protested the Broadcasting and Television Act's prohibition against television stations broadcasting in dialects. In those years, speaking Hakka on television was forbidden — the same as speaking Hokkien (Taiwanese).

Did that march of ten thousand change anything? It did — but very slowly. Dialect broadcasts were gradually permitted starting in 1991; Hakka Television (客家電視台) launched in 2003; in 2019, the National Language Development Act designated Hokkien, Hakka, and indigenous languages as "national languages," granting them legal protection.

But the pace of language policy could not catch up with the rate of loss.

A 2016 survey by the Council for Hakka Affairs showed that approximately 4.53 million people in Taiwan identify as Hakka, constituting 19.3% of the total population — but of these, only 46.8% could still speak Hakka, approximately 2.12 million people.⁵ And the number is still declining. A follow-up survey in 2021 confirmed that Hakka speaking and listening ability among younger generations is especially low.

Within a single generation, half of all Hakka people have lost their ancestors' language.

570,000 New Families

Taiwan's ethnic composition is not yet fully accounted for.

Starting in the 1990s, Taiwanese men began marrying spouses from Southeast Asia and mainland China in large numbers. In that era, these women were called "foreign brides" (外籍新娘), and news coverage was saturated with discriminatory framings: "low quality," "can't communicate," "can't raise children properly."

By 2024, Taiwan's new immigrant population had reached 570,000 (including mainland Chinese spouses). The largest group by origin is mainland China (65.25%), followed by Vietnam (19.54%) and Indonesia (5.45%).⁶ This figure does not include the children these women have given birth to in Taiwan — the population of "second-generation new immigrants" has now surpassed one million.

Research by National Taipei University sociologist Lan Pei-chia found that second-generation new immigrants manage their identities through several typical strategies. The most common is the distancing stance of "emphasizing that my mom is Vietnamese and I am Taiwanese" — not identification, but self-protection. This distancing typically occurs among children who experienced bullying during their upbringing because of their immigrant background.

A Vietnamese mother, in an interview with United Daily News, said: "You are Taiwan's children, but remember that Vietnam is your second homeland." (United Daily News, 2024) She does not let her children sink into the "second-generation new immigrant" label, but she does not pretend the label does not exist either.

The transition from "foreign bride" to "new immigrant" (新住民) took twenty years. And these two terms represent two completely different ways of seeing people.

Mainlanders: Forty-Five Provinces in the Military Dependents' Villages

In the years following 1949, approximately one to two million people retreated to Taiwan with the Nationalist government — soldiers, officials, teachers, workers, and their families. They came from forty-five provinces and directly governed municipalities across mainland China, speaking Cantonese, Shandong dialect, Jiangzhe dialect, Hunan dialect.

They moved into military dependents' villages (眷村) across the island — temporary dwellings, planned to be occupied only until "retaking the mainland." As it turned out, they stayed for seventy years.

Today, the concept of "mainlander" (外省人) has almost dissolved in the third generation — intermarriage with Minnan and Hakka communities, attending the same schools, working in the same workplaces, living the same lives. But eyuan village culture (眷村文化) persisted: eyuan village cuisine (ginger beef noodle soup, northern-style wheat foods like dumplings), old veterans at temple entrances speaking Mandarin tinged with their home accents, and an emotional memory of "Taiwan as a temporary residence" — all of these are slowly thinning.

Mainlanders constitute approximately 7.5% of the population, but their influence on shaping Taiwan's education system has far exceeded that proportion.

Curator's Note
There is a paradox in the political science of the "four major ethnic groups." The classification was deployed in 1993 by the localization movement as a tool to challenge the cultural hegemony of the mainlander group. Thirty years later, the classification itself has begun to become the problem. Ethnic categories can calcify boundaries, but Taiwan's social reality has long been one of intermarriage, mixed identities, and multiple affiliations. Wang Fu-chang says ethnicity is "an ideology for distinguishing groups of people" — not a fixed scientific taxonomy. So who gets to decide where the boundaries are — and why should there be boundaries at all?

Language: The Last Line of Defense

Taiwan's linguistic diversity and mother tongue culture crisis cuts across all ethnic groups as a shared problem.

The 1988 Return Our Mother Tongue movement took to the streets partly because, before that, speaking a mother tongue in public could result in a fine. After the lifting of martial law, prohibitions were gradually removed; the 2019 National Language Development Act made Hokkien, Hakka, and all indigenous languages "national languages" and incorporated them into school curricula.

But the law moves slower than reality. The younger generation fluent in Hokkien continues to shrink; of the 16 indigenous nations' languages, most are used daily only by a handful of elders; Hakka loses a generation of transmission every decade.

Language death does not happen suddenly on a single day — it is the sum of individual family decisions: "Let's just speak Mandarin with the kids; it'll be more convenient for them in the future." Each of those decisions is rational in isolation. Their aggregate is irreversible.

Historically, ethnic classifications were enforced with swords and laws. Today's language loss is accomplished through convenience and choice. Compared with the violent suppression of the martial law era following the 228 Incident, this kind of loss is quieter — and harder to see.

What Can an Apology Do?

Whether the smoke from that burning millet stalk on August 1, 2016 was seen by the ancestral spirits, we cannot know.

What is certain: the land problems of the indigenous people held behind police shields outside the gates were not resolved by the apology text; the Hakka language's decline was not halted by Hakka Television; the way new immigrant mothers are treated at clinics, schools, and markets cannot be changed by a single National Language Development Act.

In Taiwan, ethnicity is not a problem that has been solved — nor one that has not yet begun to be discussed. It is a problem that every generation must renegotiate: who counts as "us," who is left out, who bears the historical accounting, and whether — in the next generation — anyone will still remember the language.

Of those 614,000 indigenous people, how many can still speak their mother tongue? Will the children of those 570,000 new immigrant families remember their mothers' language when they grow up? Those dwindling Hakka speakers — whose children are they, and whose choices brought them here?

These numbers are still in motion.

Further reading:

• Linguistic Diversity and Mother Tongue Culture — The rate of decline and revitalization movements for Hokkien, Hakka, and indigenous languages
• Taiwan Indigenous Peoples' History and Name Rectification Movement (zh only: 台灣原住民族歷史與正名運動) — The ten-year name rectification struggle from "mountain compatriots" to "indigenous peoples"
• Cultural Map of Taiwan's 16 Indigenous Nations (zh only: 台灣原住民族16族文化地圖) — Distribution, languages, and cultural characteristics of the 16 nations
• Hakka Culture and Language (zh only: 客家文化與語言) — The historical migrations and cultural preservation of the Hakka community
• 228 Incident — The historical origin point of postwar ethnic conflict

References