State institutions in north Taiwan versus south Taiwan

Abstract

While the previous chapter emphasized how state exclusion resulted in separation, in this chapter, we see how political representation yielded an outcome that is less extreme. During the authoritarian period, the Kuomintang (KMT) imposed a repressive Mandarin-only policy. Yet as the country democratized in the early 1990s, the homogeneity of South Taiwan pulled the KMT to make linguistic concessions to its own Hokkien-speaking locals (benshengren). But this is only half the story. In North Taiwan, where the population has always been more heterogeneous, demographic shifts over several decades pushed the KMT away from repressive monolingualism.