Taiwanese American Storytelling and the "China Threat"

In the last century, the people of Taiwan have faced threat and oppression from two entities claiming to be “China”: first Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang dictatorship, which imposed almost 40 years of martial law on Taiwan, and now the People’s Republic of China, which has declared increasingly expansionist territorial ambitions for “reclaiming” Taiwan. Throughout this period, Taiwanese migrants who settled in the United States have passed on intergenerational stories, shaped by both their past in Taiwan and their new life in the United States, about the “China threat”. This thesis seeks to answer one major question: how do Taiwanese Americans maintain, through intergenerational storytelling, and react to perceptions of China as a threat as a vehicle for identity formation? This paper proposes a theoretical model in which intergenerational storytelling about China increases threat perception of China, which subsequently increases both attachment to the Taiwanese identity and expression of anti-China behaviors (boundary work). I conducted an original survey (N=452), which provided empirical evidence for each claim in the theoretical model. Additionally, 15 in-depth interviews with selected survey respondents provided supplementary narrative detail about how both intergenerational stories from Taiwan’s Martial Law Period and living in an American cultural and political landscape shape the way Taiwanese Americans perceive China as a threat.