Taiwan's Provincial Tensions

30-second overview: In 1949, about 1.2 million soldiers and civilians retreated to Taiwan with the Nationalist government from mainland China, forming the demographic structure of mainlanders (waishengren) and ethnic Taiwanese (benshengren). Institutional inequality during martial law, layered with the collective trauma left by the February 28 Incident, made provincial origin the most sensitive underlying logic in Taiwanese politics. After democratization, provincial tensions were repeatedly mobilized by politicians, until they were gradually diluted by "Taiwanese identity" after the millennium — but researchers say the tensions never disappeared, only changed form.

A Taipei Local Who Has Never Lived in Shanxi Province

In 1992, Rita was born in Taipei. Her father, in the "provincial origin" column on her birth certificate, wrote down Shanxi Province — a place she had never been to, a place her father had only known as a child.

Rita is what's called a "third-generation mainlander." She can barely speak Taiwanese, was in and out of KMT or New Party campaign offices from a young age, and the elders at home told her: "The DPP will never help us, you absolutely must not support them." It was not until the 2014 Sunflower Movement that she began to rethink what kind of person she was.

"My Taiwanese identity was not innate; it was awakened through a series of political events," she later told BBC Chinese. "It's like the experience of European immigrant families — their identification with the country they have moved to only develops through experience after experience."

Rita's confusion is, in fact, a microcosm of seventy years of history compressed into a single person.

1949: A Migration Not Meant to Last

In October 1949, the Chinese Civil War was decided. Chiang Kai-shek led the Republic of China government in retreat to Taiwan, bringing the largest population influx in Taiwanese history. Historian Lin Tung-fa estimates that between 1945 and 1952, the total number of soldiers and civilians arriving in Taiwan was about 1.2 million — of whom soldiers were roughly half, mostly single, dependentless men in chaotic retreat.

These people came from every Chinese province: Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hunan, Shandong, Guangdong… they didn't even know each other. Before this, on the mainland, a Jiangsu native had also seen a Zhejiang native as a "person from another province." But once in Taiwan, they all became "mainlanders" (waishengren), set against the "ethnic Taiwanese" (benshengren) who had settled in Taiwan before the war.

💡 Did you know?
The label "mainlander" was actually first drawn by mainlanders themselves. Scholar Yang Kai-yun argues: "The distinction between bensheng and waisheng was not made by the bensheng — the waisheng made it themselves first; because of a sense of superiority when they first arrived, the gap was carved out from their side." But other scholars consider this oversimplified, arguing the polarization was an interactive result on both sides.

Their mindset was that of temporary residents. The government's slogans were "one year of preparation, two years of counterattack, three years of mopping up, five years of victory," and most believed they would soon be going home. Many did not buy property in Taiwan, nor did they seriously learn Hokkien, because "this is just a transit stop."

The transit stop turned into a lifetime.

The Wound of February 28: The Original Sin of Provincial Tensions

The February 28 Incident occurred in 1947, two years before that great migration. But it is the underlying color of everything that came after.

On February 27, 1947, near the Tianma Tea House in Taipei, contraband-cigarette enforcement officers beat a female street vendor, Lin Chiang-mai, and shot dead the bystander Chen Wen-hsi (then 20 years old) on the spot. The next day, all of Taipei went on a citywide strike, and protests spread across the island. In early March, the Nationalist government brought in troops to suppress the uprising. Across Taiwan, ethnic Taiwanese elites, intellectuals, doctors, and lawyers were arrested and killed; the death toll is estimated to be over 10,000.

That massacre burned provincial differences into collective trauma. What the bensheng remembered was that the army brought by the waisheng killed their fathers and brothers; what the waisheng were told was that the bensheng had rebelled. From then on, the two sides' historical memories split apart.

More importantly: the government did not allow public discussion of it for forty years afterward. Under martial law, "228" was a forbidden term. The wound was covered with a sealing bandage, but the wound did not heal — it festered in silence.

⚠️ Contested viewpoint
The death toll of the February 28 Incident remains contested. The Executive Yuan's 1992 Report on the February 28 Incident estimated 18,000 to 28,000; some scholars consider this number too high; others argue that, due to deaths extending into the White Terror's "village cleansing," it is even harder to estimate. Whatever the number, the nature and scale of the violence is a confirmed wound in Taiwan's history.

Institutional Inequality: It's Not Just a Feeling

Provincial tensions are not only psychological — they have a concrete institutional structure.

In 1946, the proportion of Taiwan's civil servants who were mainlanders was 12.3%. Three years later in 1949, the proportion rose to 33.3%; by 1951, it had climbed to 39.1%. In other words, in a Taiwan where mainlanders made up only about 12% of the population, they held nearly 40% of civil service positions.

Even more serious was the political core. Most members of the central legislature (the Legislative Yuan and the National Assembly) were representatives elected in mainland China in 1948, who continued to exercise authority by law as the "Eternal Parliament" after coming to Taiwan, until they were finally fully re-elected in 1991. During those forty years, ethnic Taiwanese had almost no voice in the parliament that nominally represented "all of China."

Language policy was another invisible wall. Beginning in 1945, the Nationalist government promoted the "Mandarin Movement," compelling the use of Mandarin in schools, broadcasting, and government offices. In 1976, the Broadcasting and Television Act stipulated that "dialect" programs on radio and television could not exceed a specified ratio — Taiwanese (Hokkien) and Hakka, languages passed down through generations in Taiwan, were called "dialects" and limited to less than one hour per day.

Being fined or shamed with a placard for speaking Taiwanese at school is a childhood memory for many ethnic Taiwanese. To not be allowed a language is to not have an identity recognized.

📝 Curator's Note
The consequences of language oppression are still visible today. Many Taiwanese born in the 1950s through the 1970s, even those from bensheng households, have seen a great decline in their Taiwanese-language ability. And their children's generation are even more likely to speak no Taiwanese at all. This is not natural language evolution — it is a language fault line created by policy.

Military Dependents' Villages: Another Taiwan

In 1984, the Ministry of National Defense's registered military dependents' villages (juancun) totaled 888 villages and 109,786 households, scattered across all of Taiwan. Taipei City had the most, with 175; Taoyuan County was second.

The formation of the juancun had its logic: a great many soldiers had nowhere to go, so the government settled them in temporary housing — bamboo fences enclosed mainlanders inside, while the world of bensheng was outside.

This arrangement solved the housing problem and also produced segregation. Inside the juancun, people spoke the dialects of various provinces, ate northern wheat-flour foods, Sichuan and Hunan cuisine, and celebrated holidays differently from Taiwanese on the outside. The children of juancun, when they grew up, sometimes barely walked the surrounding streets.

Chu Tien-hsin, a second-generation mainlander writer, captures this rootlessness in her book The Old Capital: "Like a tourist wandering through her own city, observing places that no longer belong to her memory." Walking the streets of Taipei she felt an unfamiliarity — not of being unfamiliar with the city, but of the city being unfamiliar with her memory — the Taipei of the juancun and the Taipei of today are no longer the same Taipei.

In the late 1990s, the Statute for the Reconstruction of Old and Decrepit Military Dependents' Villages was passed, and large-scale demolition began. By the 2000s, most of the juancun had been redeveloped into public housing or commercial sites. The bamboo fences that had once kept two worlds apart vanished, but the cultural circle that had lived inside them scattered to the four winds.

Taiwan now has only 13 designated juancun cultural preservation areas; Sisinan Village is the most complete one remaining in Taipei City. For many people, the juancun has become nostalgia material, no longer a lived reality.

✦ "The disappearance of juancun culture, in some sense, was not integration — it was extinction. The question is — at the moment of extinction, did anyone remember to ask: did you want this?"

Political Mobilization: The Birth of the Provincial Card

There is a paradox in Taiwan's democratic transition: democratization let suppressed voices come to the surface, but the same process turned provincial tensions from private resentment into a public electoral weapon.

Research by Academia Sinica's Wang Fu-chang shows that in the 1970s, Chiang Ching-kuo began recruiting young ethnic Taiwanese politicians. This move was meant as opening, but unexpectedly triggered a "sense of crisis" among the mainlander political elite: mainlanders made up only 12% of Taiwan's population, and once democratization came, losing political dominance would be inevitable.

This sense of crisis, in turn, sharpened the ethnic consciousness of bensheng. "An important reason Taiwan's democratization was able to advance was that ethnic politics, which had been very subtle, came to the surface as a confrontation," Wang told BBC Chinese.

Lee Teng-hui is the most complex figure of this period. He was bensheng, yet rose step by step within the KMT system, eventually becoming Taiwan's first bensheng president (1988). His emergence was both a symbol of bensheng political ascendancy and what extended provincial tensions from internal party conflict to the streets. Mainlander politicians formed the New Party (1993), centered on Taipei City, and stirred up a whirlwind by appealing to the "mainlander sense of crisis" to mobilize voters.

At the same time, the DPP was no slouch either. The slogan "Taiwanese vote for Taiwanese" turned provincial identity directly into electoral logic. Bensheng made up about 70% of Taiwan's population, and in the math of democratic elections, that chip was too tempting.

According to a TVBS poll after the 2012 presidential election, about 80% of mainlander voters voted for KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou, and only about 10% voted for DPP candidate Tsai Ing-wen. The overlap of ethnicity and party was almost perfect at that moment.

Provincial Tensions, or Political Manipulation?

This is the hardest question to answer.

Research by Taiwanese political scientists shows that provincial tensions have a real social basis — the institutional history of inequality, language differences, residential segregation, the collective memory of February 28 — these are objectively real.

But equally real is that this rift was repeatedly amplified by political mobilization. A 2004 New Left Review analysis of Taiwan noted: "Ethnic tensions are not in themselves an especially serious social problem, and could be gradually resolved within Taiwan's existing democratic framework. Their incitement today is purely a product of the struggle for political power." (Tensions in Taiwan, NLR 28, 2004)

In other words: provincial tensions are a real wound, but the speed at which the wound heals lags far behind the speed at which politicians need that wound. Every election digs the tensions out again into the sun.

Taiwanese writer Ping Lu put it bluntly: "Although we all hope Taiwan has no provincial complex, to say the provincial complex no longer exists is also a myth. There are always many people saying provincial sentiment is a fake issue, but it is not."

Generational Integration: Intermarriage, Migration, Reconciliation

There's a number that is rarely cited: according to the research of Academia Sinica's Wang Fu-chang, in so-called "mainlander households," about half of the female spouses come from bensheng families.

This means the boundary between mainlanders and bensheng was already blurred in the marriage market long ago. Many "mainlander" children have a mainlander father and a bensheng mother. They lived in juancun, and lived outside juancun. Their ethnic identity cannot be packed easily under a single label.

Another sign is the difficulty of "going home." In 1987, Taiwan opened cross-strait family-visit travel, and in the first year there were hundreds of thousands of applications. But most veterans, when they got back, found they could neither return nor had a home to return to. The accent was still there, but that home was gone. Sociologist Tseng Yen-fen, in research on Taiwanese skilled migrants in Shanghai, found that second-generation mainlanders had even more difficulty integrating into Chinese society in Shanghai than their parents — because in essence, they had already become Taiwanese.

This is the most ironic integration: it's not that provincial tensions were actively resolved, but that mainlanders, without realizing it, lived themselves into being Taiwanese.

The Present: Have the Tensions Disappeared?

CommonWealth Magazine's 2020 national survey: more than 80% of Taiwanese aged 20–29 self-identify as "Taiwanese"; the proportion who consider themselves Chinese has dropped to just 1%.

Long-term trend data from National Chengchi University's Election Study Center show that the proportion self-identifying as "Taiwanese" rose from 17.6% in 1992 to over 60% in the 2020s. This trend cuts across provincial origin. Among the younger generation of mainlanders, many — like the bensheng — identify with Taiwan, not with the Chinese mainland.

Since 2012, no public opinion poll in Taiwan has further broken down voting tendencies by provincial origin. Some say this represents the fading of provincial politics; others say it merely means people are no longer willing to publicly admit that it exists.

Rita's younger brother, the third-generation mainlander who graduated from a vocational school and joined the military, said, dissatisfied with the KMT moving too close to Beijing, that he would vote for the DPP — he identifies with the Republic of China, opposes the Chinese Communist Party, and so votes DPP. In this choice, the logic of provincial origin has already been replaced by other logics.

But Ping Lu's words still stand there: "To say the provincial complex no longer exists is also a myth."

Perhaps a more accurate way to put it is this: provincial tensions have not disappeared; they have only changed clothes. Taiwanese identity vs. ROC identity, position on the unification-independence spectrum, stance toward Beijing — these new divisions, to a large extent, inherit the genes of provincial tensions.

Old wounds, presenting as new symptoms.

On the day martial law was lifted in 1987, many of the old soldiers in the juancun cried — not because of freedom, but because they realized that, this lifetime, they probably really could not go back. With a lifetime of waiting, they ended up with Taiwan. And their grandchildren long forgot they had ever had another home.

References

• Yam Roots and Sweet Potatoes Tangled Together: After 1949, What Did Mainlanders Do to Taiwan? (Story StoryStudio, 2021) (secondary)
• Taiwan Election 2020: Has 'Mainlanders Voting KMT' Become History? (BBC Chinese, 2019) (secondary)
• Taiwan Provincial Complex (Wikipedia) (index)
• Taiwan Mainlanders (Wikipedia) (index)
• China Is a Dream You Can Never Return To: The Contradictions and Sorrow of Taiwan's Mainlander 'Returnees' (UDN Opinion, 2023) (secondary)
• Multiple Memories of Taiwan's 'Mainlander' Life Histories (Digital Archives Observatory) (secondary)
• Military Dependents' Villages (Wikipedia; source for the 1984 figure of 888 villages) (index)
• Taiwanese Identity and the Memories of 2-28: A Case for Political Reconciliation (Project MUSE, 2019) (academic)
• Tensions in Taiwan (New Left Review, NLR 28, 2004) (academic)
• CommonWealth 2020 Exclusive National Survey (CommonWealth Magazine, 2020) (primary polling)
• Taiwan Language Policy Chronology (National Museum of Taiwan Literature) (primary)