30-Second Overview:
"Mainlanders" (外省人, waishengren, literally "people from outside provinces") is the most distinctive postwar ethnic label in Taiwan, originating with the more than one million migrants who arrived between 1945 and 1950 amid the Chinese Civil War. They were once seen as the privileged group under the Mandarin-language policy, but the other side of the historical record shows that they suffered the highest proportional casualties during the White Terror, fell into "vagrant soldier" poverty in the 1950s, and many of them were torn from home as conscripts at gunpoint. This article walks through their half-century soul-migration — from "pure Chinese" to "Taiwanese."
Kidnapped Youth: Who Were the "War Refugees"?
In December 1949, the streets in front of Taipei Station were packed with crowds carrying simple bundles. This wave of migration was different from the early Han migrants who came in search of farmland; the core motivator was escape from war 1.
A counterintuitive fact: many in this group did not come willingly. Before the Kuomintang's evacuation in 1949, to replenish military strength, the army carried out forced "press-ganging" of able-bodied men in places like Hainan and Zhoushan, sometimes putting them on ships at gunpoint 10. For these people, the "national restoration" narrative could not contain the experience of being forcibly torn from home. Beyond the soldiers, the "Dachen Compatriots" (大陳義胞) — civilians evacuated from the Dachen Islands as part of a 1955 strategic withdrawal — were another distinctive collective migration. They settled in the 35 Dachen New Villages built around Taiwan and became one of the most identity-rooted groups within the Mainlander community 111220.
📝 Curator's Note: "Mainlander" is an umbrella term covering many provincial origins, classes, and migration experiences — a "composite identity" left behind by the great postwar exodus.
Four Soul-Migrations: Reconstructing Identity
Research by historians Yang Meng-hsuan and Shen Hsiu-hua argues that Mainlanders' identity transformation in Taiwan is not a smooth linear story. It moves through four major psychological traumas and turning points 1013:
- Survival fear in and around 1949: The hastily evacuated migrants faced extreme poverty and homelessness. More cruelly, they became the group the authoritarian regime suspected most. According to the "Taiwan Transitional Justice Database," Mainlanders made up 45–46% of White Terror victims — given their share of the total population, their persecution rate was far higher than that of native Taiwanese 1421.
- The 1958 settler awakening: After the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, Chiang Kai-shek was forced to announce a shift to "political means" of restoring the mainland. This made Mainlanders confront the reality that they "couldn't go home," and their psychological frame began to shift from "wartime sojourner" to "settler" 10.
- Disillusionment and belonging in the 1980s: After family-visit policies opened, veterans returned to their hometowns to find homes destroyed by the Cultural Revolution and a values gap with their relatives. The return trips made them realize Taiwan was their true home 10.
- Reconstruction after martial law: The localization movement made some Mainlanders feel excluded. They began to reconstruct identity through writing. In 1992, Chu Tien-hsin (朱天心) published Thinking of My Brothers in the Military Village (想我眷村的兄弟們), turning the military village (juancun) into a cultural reference point and a symbol of the lost home 1516.
Cross-Ethnic Bonds: Intimacy Inside the Bamboo Fences
Because the gender ratio of early Mainlander migration was extremely imbalanced, large numbers of working-class Mainlander men formed families with native Taiwanese (Hoklo and Hakka) and Indigenous women 1322. This "cross-ethnic intermarriage" became the deepest layer of integration in Taiwanese society. From the 1960s through the 1970s, many Indigenous women — pulled by economic factors — married Mainlander veterans and moved into distant military villages, where they sustained their households in the cracks between languages and cultures with extraordinary resilience 2324.
📝 Curator's Note: Identity often grows out of daily care, marriage, language, and shared suffering — bloodline is only one thread among many.
A Vanished Privilege and the Early Shadow
For a long time, the prevailing view was that Mainlanders enjoyed structural privilege. But research by Su Kuo-hsien (蘇國賢), professor at National Taiwan University, shows that gaps in education and occupation between provincial-origin groups have shrunk dramatically 3.
Yet there was a less-discussed shadow over Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s: large numbers of unattached, working-age Mainlander men, unable to find work, fell into the category of "vagrant soldiers." At the time, the crime rate among Mainlanders was nearly twice that of native Taiwanese 10 — and the resulting public-order disorder created deep early ethnic estrangement and unease. Even in the 228 Incident, many ordinary Mainlander civilians became victims, a doubled trauma long buried under polarized political discourse 1825.
The Soul-Migration in Numbers
The migration of identity left a stunning trace in the data:
- 1992: 74% of Mainlanders identified as "purely Chinese."
- 2005: That figure plunged to 9.7% 10.
In just over a decade, the Mainlander community completed an enormous migration of soul. For the third generation of Mainlander descendants, "waishengren" feels more like a distant family symbol.
For third-generation descendants, "Mainlander" is often only a marker from their grandparents' generation; everyday life, education, work, and political participation have long since placed them inside the shared destiny of Taiwanese society.
Further Reading
- Ethnic Groups (Hoklo, Hakka, Indigenous, Mainlanders, New Immigrants) — understand Mainlanders' interactions with other groups in the larger ethnic-classification framework.
- Taiwan Military Dependents Villages History — fills in the housing space, community networks, and cultural memory of Mainlander migrants after settlement.
- Taiwan White Terror — connects Mainlanders' suffering experience under authoritarian rule and political cases.
References
Footnotes
- Population Out- and In-Migration in Taiwan from the Early Postwar Period to the 1950s — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- From "Chinese Provincial Origin" — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- A Re-examination of Ethnic Inequality in Taiwan: Explaining the Narrowing of Native/Mainlander Differences — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Review of Stéphane Corcuff's Light Wind, Warm Sun: Taiwan's Mainlanders and the Transformation of National Identity — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Language and Ethnic Identity: Mother Tongue and Taiwan Mandarin Among Taiwan's Mainlanders — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Household Registration Law Revision History — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Yaba Village: "High-Class Mainlanders" — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Audio/Video Source on Mainlander Identity Transformation — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- From "Dachen Compatriots" — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Ho Cheng-che: Dachen to Taiwan — A Case Study of 1950s New Immigrants — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Postwar Ethnic Barriers, Social Injustice, and Intimate Relationships in Taiwan: Two "Belated" Books — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Taiwan Transitional Justice Database — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Taiwan Literature Virtual Museum: Thinking of My Vanished Home — Military Village Literature — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Thinking of My Vanished Home: Military Village Literature — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- CNA: Scholars on Mainlander Victims in the 228 Incident — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- The Dachen New Village in Cijin: Historical Change and Identity — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Yahoo News: Transitional Justice Commission Releases Database — Native and Mainlander Victims at 55% and 44% — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Yu Chien-ming: When Mainlanders Met Taiwanese Women — Discourses on Women in the Postwar Taiwan Press (1945–1949) — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- China Review News: Indigenous Women Married to Mainlander Veterans — Endless Stories of Hardship — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- The Yonghe Dachen Compatriot Urban Renewal Case Study — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩
- Chen Wei-hua and Chang Mau-kuei: From Dachen Compatriots to Dachen People — provides background, data, or event context for this article. ↩