Mainlanders in Taiwan: From Kidnapped Youths to Taiwanese Identified with the Land Beneath Their Feet

30-second overview:
“Mainlanders” are one of postwar Taiwan’s most distinctive ethnic labels, originating with the more than one million migrants who arrived between 1945 and 1950 because of the Chinese Civil War. They were once seen as an advantaged group under the Mandarin-language policy, but the reverse side of history is this: they suffered the highest proportion of victims during the White Terror, many fell into poverty in the 1950s and were labeled “straggler vagrants,” and many had their youth effectively kidnapped through forced military conscription. This article takes you into a half-century spiritual migration from being “pure Chinese” to becoming “Taiwanese.”

Kidnapped Youths: Who Were the “War Refugees”?

In December 1949, the streets in front of Taipei Main Station were crowded with people carrying little more than simple luggage. Unlike earlier Han migrants who came in search of farmland, the driving force behind this migration was escape from war ¹.

The counterintuitive fact is that many in this group did not come voluntarily. Before the Kuomintang retreat in 1949, the military, in order to replenish its ranks, forcibly “grabbed able-bodied men” in places such as Hainan and Zhoushan, even driving young men onto ships at gunpoint ². For these people, the narrative of “retrocession” could not contain the experience of being forced to leave home. Beyond soldiers, the “Dachen compatriots” who arrived in 1955 because of a strategic retreat formed another special group of collective migrants. They put down roots in 35 Dachen new villages built across Taiwan and became one of the groups within the mainlander community with the firmest sense of identity ³⁴⁵.

📝 Curator’s note: The term “mainlander” covers multiple provincial origins, classes, and migration experiences. It is an “identity assemblage” left behind by the great postwar migration.

Four Migrations of the Soul: Reconstructing Identity

Research by historians Yang Meng-hsuan and Shen Hsiu-hua shows that the mainlander community’s transformation of identity in Taiwan did not unfold in a simple linear manner. It passed through four major psychological traumas and turning points ²[^13]:

1. Fear for survival around 1949: Migrants who arrived in haste faced extreme poverty and homelessness. Still more cruelly, they became the people most distrusted by the authoritarian government. According to statistics from the Taiwan Transitional Justice Database, mainlander victims accounted for 45% to 46% of White Terror victims. Relative to their share of the population at the time, their probability of persecution was far higher than that of benshengren, or earlier-settled Taiwanese ⁶⁷.
2. The awakening of settlement in 1958: After the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, Chiang Kai-shek was forced to announce that “political means” would instead be used to recover the mainland. This made mainlanders realize the reality that they “could not go home,” and their mentality began shifting from “wartime sojourners” to “settlers” ².
3. Disillusionment and belonging in the 1980s: After visits to relatives in China were permitted, veterans returned to their hometowns and found that their homes had been damaged by the Cultural Revolution, while a gulf in values had opened between them and their relatives. This homecoming made them realize that Taiwan was their true home ².
4. Reconstruction after the lifting of martial law: The localization movement made some mainlanders feel excluded. They began reconstructing identity through writing. In 1992, Chu Tien-hsin published Thinking of My Brothers in the Military Dependents’ Village, transforming military dependents’ villages into a cultural allusion and a symbol of a lost homeland ⁸⁹.

Cross-Ethnic Unions: Intimacy Inside the Bamboo Fences

Because the early mainlander migrant population had an extreme gender imbalance, large numbers of lower- and middle-class mainlander men formed families with benshengren and Indigenous women ¹⁰¹¹. This “cross-ethnic intermarriage” became the most basic driving force behind social integration in Taiwan. In the 1960s and 1970s, many Indigenous women married mainlander veterans for economic reasons and moved far away into military dependents’ villages, managing households in the gaps between languages and cultures and showing remarkable resilience ¹²¹³.

📝 Curator’s note: Identity often grows out of everyday care, marriage, language, and shared suffering. Bloodline is only one thread.

Vanishing Advantages and Early Shadows

For a long time, society generally believed that the mainlander community enjoyed privilege. Yet according to research by National Taiwan University professor Su Kuo-hsien, educational and occupational differences between provincial-origin groups have rapidly narrowed ¹⁴.

But in the 1950s and 1960s, Taiwanese society also had a less-discussed shadow: large numbers of young and middle-aged mainlander men who had poured in without support and could not find work became “straggler vagrants.” At one point, the crime rate among mainlanders approached twice that of benshengren ², and this disorder in public security created deep early estrangement and unease between ethnic groups. Even during the February 28 Incident, many innocent lower-level mainlander civilians became victims. This double trauma was long obscured by polarized political narratives ¹⁵¹⁶.

A Spiritual Migration in Data

This migration of identity left striking traces in the data:

• 1992: 74% of mainlanders considered themselves “pure Chinese.”
• 2005: That proportion had plunged to 9.7% ².

This confirms that in just over a decade, the mainlander community completed a profound spiritual migration. For third-generation mainlanders, “mainlander” is more like a distant family symbol.

For third-generation mainlanders, “mainlander” is often only an identity marker belonging to their grandparents’ generation; everyday life, education, work, and political participation have long since placed them within the shared fate of Taiwanese society.

Further Reading

• Ethnic Groups (Hoklo, Hakka, Indigenous Peoples, Mainlanders, New Immigrants) — Understand mainlanders’ interactions with other groups within a broader context of ethnic classification.
• History of Taiwan’s Military Dependents’ Villages — Complements this article with the residential spaces, community networks, and cultural memories that formed after mainlander migrants settled in Taiwan.
• Taiwan’s White Terror — Connects the mainlander community’s experiences of suffering under authoritarian rule and political cases.

References