So close, yet so far away: imaging Chinese ‘homeland’ in Taiwan’s geography education (1945—68)

Abstract

After their defeat in the Chinese civil war, in 1949 the exiled Kuomintang (KMT) government fled to Taiwan and endeavoured to educate the baby-boomer generation on the island to become ‘true Chinese’. Geography education was one of the fundamental vehicles used by the KMT to construct a Chinese identity and to create a longing for a Chinese motherland. This paper explores the ways in which a KMT-versioned ‘sense of place’ was constructed in elementary education during the period between 1945 and 1968, and investigates how the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ were introduced and presented in school textbooks. By examining the geographic knowledge taught in Taiwan’s elementary schools (both through the content of textbooks and the design of the curriculum), this paper investigates how the foundations of a China-centric identity were laid, and also the ways in which a Chinese homeland was constructed through geography education. However, in the process of reinforcing a sense of Chinese-ness, the relationship between the island and its inhabitants was sacrificed. The island became distant, insignificant and absent in school education and was turned into a meaningless flatscape. This paper argues that the rise of Taiwanese awareness in the 1990s has proven that an arbitrary construction of an inauthentic Chinese identity is both problematic and unsustainable.