Vol 03: Pingpu Consciousness & Palestinian Self-Determination
Threading Taiwanese and Palestinian Liberation, Part 1 (plus, upcoming events for September!)
Note: As of August 2025, a revised and expanded draft of this piece can be read at Lausan Collective. Much gratitude to their editors for clarifying edits.
Hi there! This edition captures some of the talking points I delivered in-person to a gathering of Taiwanese Americans seeking community solidarity with Palestine. Most of the connective tissue here is nascent, as is my own experience writing/thinking critically about such issues. I hope you treat these earnest, developing thoughts with grace and I welcome continued discourse in the comments, via email, or in person. I call this “Part 1” because I believe there is so much more to say - and I hope to make the time and space to explore this further (i.e., the unproductive tension between the United Nations and Palestine/Taiwan; nationalist “birthright” projects in Israel and Taiwan, etc.). For now, the scope of this piece addresses the connections between Pingpu (Indigenous Plains Taiwanese) and Palestinian self-determination.
My cousins and I are the direct descendants of the Indigenous Ketagalan nation’s last standing chief (my mother’s grandfather). Because of the tribe’s tenuous reality, it took me a long time to figure out how to claim this identity without feeling absurd or unworthy. Is something still worth claiming if it has been labeled extinct? Am I being opportunistic or exploitative for holding onto it in name only?
When my debut poetry collection, Book of Cord, was published, I was twenty-one. I chose to include the Ketagalan connection in my “author bio” because it felt like a spiritual origin story. When prompted by novelist Shawna Yang Ryan in our Q&A for TaiwaneseAmerican.org, I shared that “my indigenous background is shaped by loss and silence, and so when I write of being Ketagalan, it is never to claim their histories or glories as my own. It is to mourn their exile, their shame, and the emptiness I have inherited as a result.” This continues to feel true for me; and I hope my ancestors would permit the way I try to find them: by synthesizing good-faith speculation, scholarly research (“me-search”), and family lore to render us more coherent to each other.
The Ketagalan mantle is well-known (Ketagalan Boulevard, Ketagalan Forum, Ketagalan Foundation and Institute, Ketagalan Culture Center, Ketagalan Media, etc.); its reasons for erasure less so. But the connection between Pingpu consciousness and Palestinian self-determination is, I think, richly generative.
Essayist-poet-activist June Jordan once called Palestinian self-determination a “moral litmus test for the world,” and I hope we as Taiwanese Americans can meet the moment by extending as much tender, critical consideration to their struggles as we do for ours. I am hesitant to draw comparisons, because they risk oversimplification. But when I participate in transnational movements, I am always moved by the ways we search fervently for common ground. In moments like this, our desire to share hope matters deeply.
In the Reflections chapter of her book, Collective Rights of Indigenous Peoples, esteemed scholar and Pingpu activist Jolan Hsieh / Bavaragh Dagalomai quotes a statement shared by the Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP): “When we join together, in solidarity, in relationships and partnerships based on understanding and mutual respect, when we all recognize that the right to self-determination is within all of us, and not granted by an artificial, external, and oppressive force, ‘anything is possible.’”
My brain has been rotting from Instagram overconsumption so I’ve been parroting “I’m just a girl” as a nervous way to diffuse the helplessness and confusion I feel wrestling with complicated politics. And I do mean it, kind of. I often feel lost in its intentional obfuscation, unable to tell where the rhetoric bleeds into genuine belief, unable to distinguish between the missionary and the mercenary, the views of the state and the desires of the people.
So I come back to this again and again: what happens when we consider all histories through the perspectives of mothers?
I think we would find some ground for acknowledging the humanity of even those who have caused great suffering. For my part, growing up in a staunchly pro-Taiwanese independence community, I had lacked curiosity about waishengren settlers whose lives were only legible to me through the suppression they inflicted upon Han and Indigenous Taiwanese. It wasn’t until recently that I began to counter such stubborn myopia with more curiosity and critical empathy for those whose histories are, only on paper, diametrically opposed to mine.
Similarly, I am trying to better recognize the origin story of Israel as one that centers the dignity of Jewish refugees who were fleeing generations of anti-Semitic persecution and violence, as one of sufferers who were coercively transformed into settlers through circumstances beyond their control. Though their pursuit of safety came at the expense of displacing indigenous Palestinian people, I hope fervently to embody politics that do not fault individuals for trying to survive. Absolved from context, most decisions throughout the course of humanity are ones we can fundamentally tolerate, and even empathize with.
Terror under Divide & Rule
In 1979, James Baldwin wrote, “the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years.”
Richard Morrock defines “divide and rule” as the “conscious effort of an imperialist power to create and/or turn to its own advantage the ethnic, linguistic, cultural, tribal, ore religious differences within the population of a subjugated colony.”1 Further, though all colonial empires have implemented the “divide-and-rule” praxis in some way, “only the Axis powers - the Nazis in Eastern Europe and the Japanese in East Asia,” Morrock observes, “used the ‘divide-and-rule’ strategy with comparable dexterity.” (Interestingly, though, the paper I cite does not remark upon these effects in Palestine or Taiwan 👀).
But what does this look like, exactly?
The divide-and-rule playbook outlines four tactics: 1) the creation of differences within the conquered population; 2) the compounding of existing differences, 3) the exploitation of these differences for the benefit of the colonial power; and 4) the politicization of these differences so that they carry into the post-colonial period.
Taiwan: The creation and compounding of existing differences began administratively. From the arrival of the Dutch, who imposed a hybrid colonization (Chinese agricultural settlers; Dutch administrators and military) to Japan’s consolidated colonial authority, Indigenous communities were repeatedly displaced and categorized in ways that unnaturally governed their own identity formation.
In Taiwan Lives2, Niki J. P. Alsford offers more succinctly: “Japanese colonial policies of categorization “locked Indigenous communities into imagined boundaries that not only prevented some forms of Indigenous cultural unity but also imposed cultural compartmentalization on those who had not previously identified with such labels.” The choices Indigenous peoples made under coercion - be they assimilation, allegiance, or resistance - would have lasting impact on the kinds of territories and recognition they could access. For example, the Dutch employed Chinese agents to sell hunting licenses and grant lucrative contracts on the basis of acculturation; those who could “cut it” were allowed to stay in the fertile, game-rich territories. Those who refused were forcibly expelled into an “unassimilated” space that would become a defining characteristic, thereby distinguishing between the “raw” peoples of the mountain and the assimilated “cooked” peoples of the plains.
Further, to garner support from all ethnic groups in Taiwan, the Japanese crafted a divide-and-rule policy by pitting Indigenous against Chinese. In one categorization, Japanese ethnographers distinguished Indigenous peoples as “invested with a cultural authenticity that marked them as avatars of prelapsarian Taiwan antedating Chinese immigration, based in part on high Japanese appraisals of Austronesian cultural production.” Yet among the Indigenous, the Japanese administrators further partitioned their homelands, enforcing lasting demarcations that exist today, visibly in contemporary issues like tribal recognition and affirmative action programs.
The Ketagalan nation - my ancestors - became one of the ten sub-tribes administratively classified by the Japanese, characterized by their early contact with the Han Chinese and their highly Sinicized societies. If the Japanese neutered the Pingpu nations; then it was the Chinese Nationalists who codified their de facto extinctions.
The Chinese Nationalist government, while operating under Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s principles for a multi-ethnic China, “only recognized the indigenous peoples living within its territory as minorities - a traditional Han chauvinistic perspective which [ultimately] denies the concept of indigenousness.” What’s more, their official policy revoked the Japanese system for minority categorization in Taiwan, and declared the extinction of the Pingpu due to their deep Sinicization.
See, what had characterized the Pingpu under the Japanese therefore extinguished them under the Chinese Nationalists. In 1650 the Ketagalan were the second-largest Austronesian ethno-linguistic groups living in the northernmost part of Taiwan.3 Today, we are concurrently unrecognized, invisible, and yet widely named; at once everywhere and nowhere.
An aside: as a supplementary method for identifying whether one is of Pingpu lineage, Pingpu activists have proposed qualifications beyond census documentation that may imply kinship, including the absence of “additional nails on one’s baby toes.” However, please do not ask for my feet pics!!
But what, then, is next for me and my toenail-challenged cousins? Since 2000, Yuhani Iskakafuter, former Chairman of the Council of Indigenous People has consistently articulated that it is not the fact of our Sinicization, but the conditions of it that must be centrally considered in understanding the Pingpu people; and that we/they are not flatly extinct but worthy of curiosity, identification, even revival.
Palestine: In 1917 the Balfour Declaration was authored by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. While the declaration stipulates that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” the national or political rights of the Palestinians themselves are conspicuously unaddressed. In fact, in the document Palestinians are not even referred to as Palestinians but as “non-Jews,” defining them relative to not being Jewish rather than as an inherently sovereign population.
The Zionist preference for self-segregation became further exploited by British imperialists, who propped up their partnership but sabotaged their state-building, the success of which would have empowered them to shrug off Britain’s continued presence. Though patronage of a Zionist state would transfer from Britain to the United States, it’s worth noting what was of importance for the British — not the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people,” but a pro-British Jewish colony that would cement their claims to the area.
Israel continues the playbook by seeking to divide Palestinians, disrupting threads of solidarity among those in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria “as if they are different people with different problems.” But, writes Palestinian journalist and peace activist Ahmed Abu Artema4, “their problem is one: Israel’s occupation and colonization of their land, which has led to their expulsion, dispossession and oppression.”
Zionism and Han Chauvinism
For Indigenous peoples from Palestine to Taiwan, “modernization” and “civilization” are primarily ideologies that rationalize their destruction.
In short, the geographic displacement and Han Chauvinistic categorization of Indigenous peoples synchronously reinforced and created their identity. Their Sinicization has simultaneously allowed them to stay on their native lands and forced them into close proximity with Han settlers, leaving them vulnerable to Sinicization in a cycle of dispossession.
In a fascinating essay titled “Who Gets To Be Chinese?"5 for Noema, published earlier this year, Jacob Dreyer, who is Shanghai-based, writes: “Han seems to be a malleable term that means ‘civilized’ more than it denotes an ethnic phenotype,” and, further, that its possibilities transcend geographic, national, administrative boundaries. “Han people have recorded the concept that race is a fiction for millennia. It is encapsulated in a phrase attributed to Confucius: “夷狄入华夏，则华夏之。华夏入夷狄则夷狄之” (“When barbarians come to China, they become Chinese. When Chinese go to the land of barbarians, they become barbaric). Within the worldview of this saying, Han is above all a culture, not an ethnic phenotype. As such, it is endlessly capacious, able to accommodate various barbarians — the Mongolians, the Manchurians, me.”
In regard to Palestine, early Zionist leaders described Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Of course, we know that’s not true, and that the Jewish settlers came not as immigrants ready to be absorbed into an existing society, but as hegemonic settlers who established racially segregated colonies, expelling Palestinians as a part of that project. But as I said earlier - they were simultaneously a population of persecuted refugees whose vulnerability was ultimately weaponized against Palestinians. How do we make sense of these contradictions? How do we stay close to the humanity of those who have been on both sides of catastrophic violence?
Historically, the Chinese have attempted to civilize (Sinicize) “barbarians,” imbuing Indigenousness with a stigma that has, among the Pingpu peoples especially, accelerated its destruction. Only those who were civilized could be regarded as men and upgraded among the hegemonic population; my ancestors, like many Pingpu people, would pay the price of assimilation with the forfeiture of their original ethnic traits.
For their part, Zionists believed that colonization was inherently neutral, to be deployed as part of a tactical, practical program, involving organization, colonization, and negotiation. I can understand how it is a mechanism for a compelling vision: that ancestry cannot be compromised by religion or language; that what has subjected them to suffering can be the thing that now connects them to a nationhood forged for redemption, salvation, and fulfillment.
I guess what I’m trying to wrestle with is this: I am trying to honor the humanity of every side of history by seeking the posture of their hearts. Knowing their intentions, without holding them in equal weight to their impact, keep us invested in seeing each other beyond binaries of victims and perpetrators. Taiwanese American theologian SueAnn Shiah put it best here for TaiwaneseAmerican.org: “The world cannot be simply divided into the binary of oppressors and oppressed, victims and perpetrators— it is not to say that oppression does not exist in the world, but if we only deign to acknowledge the humanity of those whose suffering is most intelligible to us, we will never stop playing the cruel game that erases one people’s suffering for the benefit of our own simplistic narratives of others.”
In the first edition of my newsletter, I try to understand the allure of Zionism in the Taiwanese American imagination, though I’d like to revisit this in more depth soon.
But what makes Zionism different than Han Chauvinism? While the latter pursue assimilation as completion, elevating those who comply and assigning “useful,” inferior roles for those who do not, “race-supremacist Zionist settlers in Palestine have a zeal for physical expulsion.” The Zionist concept of the “final solution” to the “Arab problem” in Palestine was, heartbreakingly, congruent with the “final solution” to the Jewish problem in Germany: “the elimination of the unwanted human element in question.”
That Zionists would not “settle” for discrimination was evident in the 1948 Nakba, the mass displacement and destruction of Palestinian peoples, culture, and society. What compelled and permitted such an extreme agenda? One, Zionism stakes its survival on the idea of a demographic majority - essentially, if they can outnumber the “others,” they can ensure their own safety and security. The partitioning of Palestinian land and the subsequent ethnic cleansing were a means to achieving this. Further, we might consider how the rest of the world was complicit. Shahd Abusalama’s essay, Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Permanent Temporality6, has been a lucid primer for me in relating the rhetoric undermining “savage” Indigenous Taiwanese to the Orientalist representations of Palestinians as “primitive,” rootless wanderers. Both portrayals have effectively undermined Indigenous claims to their ancestral lands and either, in the case of Pingpu Indigenous peoples, tethered their survival to their assimilation or, in the case of Palestinians, facilitated their replacement with a new population. Even humanitarian efforts delegated specifically for Palestinian relief at the time “implied an imperialist attitude that favored the ‘advanced’ Zionist colonizer over the ‘backward’ Palestinian peasants, whose survival came second to that of newborn Israel.” Consequently, Palestinians have been excluded from human rights discourse, and their predicament remains “increasingly and disturbingly normalized,” though we see a global ethic increasingly refuting this.
My research for this has filled me with grief in other ways, too —
Sayegh’s monograph also notes that at the outset, when small numbers of Zionists arrived in Palestine they were greeted by people who sincerely saw them as “immigrant ‘pilgrims’ animated by religious longing for the Holy Land, or else ‘refugees’ fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe and seeking safety. Palestinian Arabs therefore accorded the immigrants a hospitable welcome.” Here, I think immediately of Han Taiwanese who greeted the Chinese Nationalists with such trust and optimism after Japan renounced its sovereignty over Taiwan. None of us are innocent, but all of us deserve the gift of hope.
I also see a shared spirit between Pingpu and Palestinian activists, who look to their elders and ancestors with such grace. “For forfeiture of its patrimony,” Sayegh writes, “the Palestinian generation of the inter-war era will never be indicted by the Palestinian generations to come. It lost indeed - but not without fighting. It was dislodged indeed - but not for want of the will to defend its heritage.”
Despite all that has been destroyed, taken away, or given up, I see the same appetite for self-determination in the Pingpu people, and I feel grateful to learn from the profound faith of both in the ultimate triumph of dignity and justice among all people, everywhere.
Announcements & Events
Saturday, September 14, 2024 - TAFNC Annual Dr. Chen Wen-Chen Memorial Tennis Tournament (plus Picnic Lunch & Discussion) I am not a tennis player, but I care deeply about helping Taiwanese Americans understand Dr. Chen Wen-Chen’s life and legacy. We’ll be at the Fremont tennis courts from 11AM, with time for lunch/hanging out before the casual discussion begins at 1PM. There is *no pre-reading or prior knowledge required* - we will be sharing passages from Chapter 5 of Wendy Cheng’s ISLAND X, titled “Liberalism, US Innocence, and the Life and Death of Chen Wen-Chen.” Cheng’s article on Dr. Chen in New Bloom offers a fertile introduction for how our discussion can take shape. Please email or DM us at @tafnc1 on Instagram by 9/10 if interested for more information.
Saturday, September 21, 2024 - The Southeast Bay Taiwanese Association will host their annual Mid-Autumn Festival BBQ in San Leandro from 11AM - 2PM. Please email or DM us at @tafnc1 on Instagram by 9/15 if interested for more information. I will be there if anybody wants to yap!
Morrock, Richard. “Heritage of Strife: The Effects of Colonialist ‘Divide and Rule’ Strategy upon the Colonized Peoples.” Science & Society, vol. 37, no. 2, 1973, pp. 129–51. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40401707. Accessed 31 Aug. 2024.
Alsford, Niki J. P. “Taiwan Lives: A Social and Political History.”
SUNG, MING-HSI. “The Hidden Reason for the Deadlock in the Achievement of Ethnic Recognition for the Ping-Pu in Taiwan.” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights, vol. 11, no. 1/2, 2004, pp. 75–113. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24675257. Accessed 31 Aug. 2024.
Artema, Ahmed Abu. “Israel’s divide, rule and erase strategy is failing.” Aljazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/26/israels-divide-rule-and-erase-strategy-is-failing. Accessed 31 Aug. 2024.
Dreyer Jacob. “Who Gets to be Chinese?” Noema. https://www.noemamag.com/who-gets-to-be-chinese/. Accessed 31 Aug. 2024.
Abusalama, Shahd. “Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Permanent Temporality.” Light in Gaza.