| Looking back at its 100-year history, Taiwan has gone through two colonial periods, Japanese colonization (1895–1945) and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang ruled (1945–1980s). In 1945, after 50-year Japanese occupation ended in Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek took over Taiwan in accordance with the agreements of the Yalta Conference. Chiang Kai-shek's government took over Taiwan and aggressively began to instill a Great China mentality in the Taiwanese so that people who had lived separately from the mainland for 50 years could rebuild an identity and solidarity with the motherland. In order to subdue Taiwanese resistance and retain KMT its legitimacy, the KMT promoted nationalist thought to create a national identity for the Taiwanese. The task was accomplished through the education system, language policy, and rewriting of history.; In this study, in order to understand how the political power used a well planned systematic practice of its own values and belief system to reach its goals, the characteristics of KMT's official nationalism was investigated. In addition to studying how official nationalism was manipulated to cultivate the ideal citizens, I focused on how Chiang exercised political power in transforming nationalist ideologies into the images of what the nation is or should be. In describing the process, I focused specifically on the policy levers of KMT's official nationalism, such as compulsory state-controlled elementary school education.; The analysis would not address the lineal changes and outcomes of the KMT regime in Taiwan. Instead it illustrated the dynamic and interactive relationships between the exercise of political power and nationalist narratives, between the process of curriculum selection (or cultural forms) and dominant control, and between the nation-state' destiny and creation of personal national identity. Two objectives were pursued in this study. The first was to investigate how a political power manipulated its cultural forms to educate it citizen-to-be to learn to be Chinese, and to realize the nation-state's destiny. The other was to examine the ways in which national identity evolved in the public. |
