Racial chauvinism, demonstrated in Ma's personal honoring of the Yellow Emperor with its Yasukuni-like implications, is a powerful component of Ma's thinking, and his fostering of a retrograde Han chauvinism/superiority is an important affirmation of the remarks of people like Hsing Yun or GIO master blogger Kuo Kuan-ying. Indeed Ma criticized Kuo's comments by saying that everyone was a Son of the Yellow Emperor, affirming the Han Chauvinism that drove them even as he distanced himself from that chauvinism's more odious expressions. In terms of creating a civil society with a Taiwan identity at its heart, this is a step backwards.
Dang it, Taiwanese citizenship has nothing to do with race or ethnicity. I daresay what "a civil society with a Taiwan identity at its heart" evokes is being part of a free society with equal rights and protections for all members where "Taiwan" means a sovereign democracy, not a reductive blood tie. Not all Taiwanese are Han! And anyway, my dad is Hakka.
There are enough instances of bad history between Taiwan's many people groups -- history that is slowly being overcome -- without Ma now banging the drum of chauvinistic Han identity. I hate identity politics! They always -- always -- end up being divisive and reductive.
I won't even open the can of worms that is mainland Communist China's conception of Han-ness or the political/expansionist idea that "hey, everyone is Chinese, really, so it's OK if we absorb these groups even if they don't want to be absorbed because they're Chinese too and all Chinese should be under one big Han umbrella (i.e., the CCP)."
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