The Construction of A Hakka Community---Liudui in Taiwan

In today's Taiwan society, the promotion and construction of the Hakka as a recognized ethnic group is in the ascendant. The Liudui area in the south, together with Taoyuan, Xinzhu and Miaoli counties in the north, are generally acknowledged as the two main congregation areas of the Hakka in Taiwan. "Liudui," derived from the name of a local trans-village military organization in the Qing dynasty, was established by Hakka -dialect speakers in this region. Their religious center was the Pavilion of Loyalty and Righteousness (zhongyi ting) founded to worship the martyrs sacrificed for fighting the rebels. The concept of Liudui has transited from an alliance of Hakka-speaking villages to the symbol representing Taiwan Hakka to the present day. This thesis explores how the complex interaction between the local society and the three different states (the Qing empire, the Japanese colonial government and the Republic of China) in the past four centuries eventually led to the construction of the Hakka identity in the Liudui society.;In the early decades of the eighteenth century, the Hakka-speaking groups in south Taiwan were initially addressed "ke" (guest) in the writings by the Hoklo-speaking groups in a discriminatory manner. Nevertheless, they established their social status via the assistance to official troops in times of disturbances and via the expression of a collective consciousness through their advocacy of the Pavilion of Loyalty and Righteousness. Their identities were expressed in connection with their native places in the household registrations that were meant for baojia organization, taxation and in particular for imperial examinations. Clearly, the concept of Hakka as an ethnic group was not existent until some officials in the Japanese colonial government, who were influenced by the western idea of race, regarded Hakka-speaking groups as the Hakka race. Even so, more frequently the colonial officials categorized the Hakka-speaking groups "the Guangdong race," which directly applied the native places as their ethnic label. On one hand, this race category was fixed through official household registration, and on the other hand, colonial intellectuals endeavored to accentuate many cultural traits of the Hakka-speaking groups. This process gained legitimacy of the Hakka-speaking groups to be eventually ethnical within the colonial empire. It also perplexed the definitions of the Hakka in the process of the Liudui society's integration into the political and economic structure of the Japanese empire.;The Japanese colonial government performed assimilation policy and evolved to violent "Kominka" movement in the last decade of her rule in Taiwan. Nevertheless, it was exactly during this wartime period that the construction of the Hakka as a nationality which exported from southern China and Southeast Asia became highly feasible. In particular, the launch of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" brought opportunities for the integration of different nationalities within the Japanese ruling areas to come into reality. The vision of an enormous empire eventually collapsed because of the defeat of Japan, yet, this process paved the way for the postwar nation-state building in the same line. After the war, some people from the Chinese Mainland and some of them even originated from the Liudui area bore the Hakka identity and settled in Taiwan. They held important military and political positions in the republican government while in China, and they continued to play a crucial role in integrating the Hakka into the post-war nation-building process. It was under such political setting that the integration of Taiwan into the Chinese nation-state and the process of Taiwan's decolonization purported to utilize the historical sources of the Liudui society to be converged toward the ongoing construction of Hakka nationality in the Chinese Mainland.;The construction of the Taiwan Hakka ethnicity was influenced by different classifications in different periods of time. The transition in the wartime colonial period, in particular, was crucial for us to reconsider the relationship between the ethnicity and state as well as the historical process of ethnic construction.