My Cold Mars · Taiwan
How Taiwanese Became Taiwanese.
Every year since 1992, researchers in Taipei have asked the same question: do you think of yourself as Taiwanese, Chinese, or both? The answers tell a quiet story of national becoming.
Taiwanese / Chinese Identity, 1992 – 2025
Share of respondents in Taiwan, by self-reported identity. Bi-annual surveys, n ≈ 1,000–1,200 each wave.
In 1992, when the Election Study Center at Taiwan's National Chengchi University began running its identity survey, only 17.6 percent of people on the island called themselves Taiwanese. A quarter said they were Chinese. Almost half said they were both — a polite answer, perhaps, for a generation that had been told for forty years that the two were the same thing.
Then martial law receded into memory. Direct presidential elections began. A generation grew up that had never lived under Chiang Kai-shek and had never been told that Taipei was a temporary capital. The lines on the chart began to bend.
By 2008, more people called themselves Taiwanese than called themselves both. By 2014, it was nearly two-to-one. The "Chinese" line — once a quarter of the population — fell to a rounding error.
"Taiwanese" went from a minority answer to the modal answer in a single generation.
+44.4 points · 1992 → 2025
62.0%
Taiwanese only
(2025)
31.7%
Both Taiwanese
and Chinese
2.5%
Chinese only
(was 25.5% in 1992)
Polls don't make a country. But they record what people who already live in one have started telling each other. The slope of the green line — patient, persistent, climbing for thirty-three years — is the answer Beijing keeps refusing to read.
A note on the word "Chinese."
The Mandarin word NCCU uses for "Chinese" in this survey is 中國人 (Zhōngguó rén) — literally "person of the state of China." It's a political-citizen word. It is not the same as:
- 華人 (Huá rén) — ethnic / cultural Chinese, including the global diaspora. A Singaporean or Malaysian Chinese is 華人 but not 中國人.
- 漢人 (Hàn rén) — Han ethnicity. About 95 percent of Taiwan is Han by ancestry, so if NCCU asked this version, almost everyone would say yes.
That choice matters. The collapse of the blue line isn't a claim that Taiwanese have stopped being Chinese in any cultural sense — most still speak Mandarin or Hokkien, eat the same food, observe the same holidays. It is a claim about which state they belong to. The survey is asking a question about citizenship and political imagination, and the answer has shifted decisively away from the mainland.