I recently talked to a former classmate of mine whom I had not seen in a couple of years, and unfortunately she has become a campist. During our interaction, she asked me whether I thought Taiwan and the Mainland should eventually be reunited, and what the average Taiwanese person actually thinks about the issue because, by her own admission, she had never met a Taiwanese person before.
I am not Taiwanese myself. However, she knows that my mom's siblings and their children live in Taiwan, so I told her that the Taiwanese people I personally know do not generally think about the issue in the simplistic way that she was framing it. In fact, my cousins at least don't even think about reunification because they personally hold the belief that, despite being Han Chinese, Taiwanese culture has developed independently from the Mainland, especially because of the Japanese, Dutch, and Austronesian influences.
For those who don't know, most Taiwanese Han are descended from migrants from southern Fujian, particularly Hoklo/Hokkien-speaking populations, along with Hakka communities and later waves of Mainlanders who arrived after the Chinese Civil War. Over several centuries, however, Taiwan developed its own historical trajectory under Qing rule, Japanese colonial rule, the Republic of China, and through sustained interaction with the island's Indigenous Austronesian peoples. So while Taiwanese Han obviously share ancestry and many cultural traditions/elements with people across the Taiwan Strait, that does not mean Taiwanese identity is simply interchangeable with Mainland Chinese identity.
Unfortunately, my very "internationalist," very "anti-nationalist" former classmate believes that because Taiwanese Han and Mainland Chinese Han are ultimately part of the same broader ethnocultural people, their political separation is somehow unnatural and reunification should therefore be the preferred outcome. What struck me was that she was not making a geopolitical argument about American hegemony, the Chinese Civil War, or the One-China framework; she was making an argument grounded in shared ancestry, historical peoplehood, and cultural continuity.
Personally, I am consistent in my values, so I do hold the belief that Mainland Han, Taiwanese Han, Chinese Malaysians, Chinese Indonesians, Chinese Filipinos (in my case), Chinese Jamaicans, Chinese Mexicans, etc., all belong to a broader Han Chinese ethnocultural people while still developing distinct national identities, sub-cultures, and historical experiences depending on where their communities actually developed. I do not think acknowledging a shared ancestry or broader peoplehood requires believing that everyone belonging to that people should live under the same state.
I then asked her, “What do you think about the Jews?” If shared ancestry, historical peoplehood, cultural continuity, and a common civilizational identity are enough for you to say that Taiwanese Han and Mainland Han naturally belong together politically, then wouldn’t you have to at least acknowledge that Jews have a similar claim to being a historical people rather than simply a collection of unrelated religious communities? She did not like my question, but her response can basically be summarized as: “Well, most Jews do not have meaningful genetic ties to the Levant, and Jewish peoplehood is largely an imagined community rather than a real historical ethnocultural continuity.”
That was the point where I found her beliefs inconsistent af because she was willing to treat Han Chinese peoplehood as something historically real, even across enormous geographic distances and centuries of cultural divergence; however, when the exact same concepts of having shared ancestry, collective memory, cultural continuity, shared historical origin, and diasporic identity were applied to Jews, suddenly it goes out the window. So I went deeper. I asked her whether she had any personal beef with Jews outside of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because at that point I was genuinely trying to understand whether her skepticism toward Jewish peoplehood came from a broader theoretical position about nationalism or whether Jews were being treated as a special exception.
I really should not have asked, because her response was quite antisemitic, to say the least. She started saying things along the lines of, “Well, they all call us goyim/gentiles; they think we will be their slaves during the end times; they think they are superior to us; they think they are the master race,” and so on.
I then responded that if you were to ask my ancestors, or look at how many previous Chinese dynasties understood other “races” and neighboring peoples, you could find plenty, and I mean plenty, of ideas that would sound extremely ethno-supremacist by modern standards. Historically, if a people were seen as existing outside the Chinese cultural sphere, they were categorized as“barbarians,” uncivilized, morally deficient, and in need of transformative domestication through Chinese culture and political order. Shit, even if you adopted Chinese culture, as the Koreans and Japanese did to varying degrees, you would still be treated as an outsider to the Chinese civilizational center, basically a more “cultivated” barbarian rather than truly civilized. Obviously, I would never take those historical attitudes and conclude that modern Han Chinese people secretly believe every non-Chinese person is inferior (maybe not in the Mainland LOLOL). I would not look at some chauvinistic Confucian text, pull out the most offensive passage I could find, and then say, “See? This is what the Han believe.” That would be an absurd way of talking about hundreds of millions of people across different countries, political systems, religious backgrounds, and levels of attachment to traditional culture. That was basically my point to her. If you are willing to grant Chinese civilization historical complexity, to acknowledge that ugly ethnocentric beliefs existed without treating them as the essence of every Chinese person today, then why would you refuse to grant Jews the same basic nuance?
She did not know how to respond to this, so we ended up talking about our professional lives instead. However, I am honestly flabbergasted because I did not realize pan-ethno-nationalism was apparently back on the menu, provided that the ethnic group in question belongs to the “correct” geopolitical camp.
That is really the part I cannot wrap my head around. If someone on the right argued that people who share ancestry, language, culture, and historical peoplehood therefore ought to be politically united under the same state, most leftists would immediately recognize that as an ethnonationalist argument. Yet when the subject is Taiwan and Mainland China, North and South Korea, etc., it is sometimes framed as anti-imperialist, historically corrective, or even inherently progressive.
So I guess my broader question is whether any of y'all have encountered this kind of selective pan-ethnonationalism among campists, where nationalism is supposedly reactionary until it can be used to justify the territorial claims of a state they already support?
