Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.Taiwan, a Chinese breakaway territory calling itself the Republic of China, is a faux nation-state formally recognized by only 12 countries: 11 United Nations member states and the Holy See (Vatican City). This has given it very limited status at the United Nations. Despite Taiwan’s renegade status, according to one of its career civil servants, Li-hsin (Angel) Liu, Director General of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Vancouver, Taiwan and Canada share a commitment to reconciliation with their indigenous peoples. This commitment, she claims, means that “Reconciliation has become one of the warmest, least politically contentious threads in the Taiwan-Canada relationship.”High-sounding words, in an obsequious opinion piece titled Reconciliation Without Borders: What Taiwan and Canada Share, but empty ones when it comes to substance, despite the many general features Canada’s indigenous peoples share with their Taiwanese counterparts.For starters, Canada doesn’t even accept Taiwan’s borders because it is not among the few countries that recognize its sovereignty. Instead, the list includes insignificant freeloading Third World nations in Latin America and the Caribbean that have garnered substantial aid from Taiwan over the years in exchange for their purely symbolic recognition of that country’s very existence.With friends like these, surely Taiwan’s only enemy is mainland China.As for the Taiwanese indigenous peoples, formally called Taiwanese aborigines, they are nationally recognized subgroups totalling some 600,000 people or 3% of the country's population. .Archaeological research suggests that humans have been living on Taiwan for at least 30,000 years. Mainland Han Chinese first settled on the island only in the seventeenth century, at the behest of the Dutch colonial administration in China, a process that was accelerated by successive governments during the twentieth century. Like the aboriginal peoples of the New World, for centuries Taiwan's indigenous inhabitants experienced economic competition and military conflict with a series of colonizing newcomers. Centralized government policies designed to foster language shift and cultural assimilation, as well as continued contact with the colonizers through trade, intermarriage, and other intercultural processes, have resulted in varying degrees of language death and loss of original cultural identity. For example, of the approximately 26 known languages of the Taiwanese indigenous peoples, at least ten are now extinct, while five are moribund.Many indigenous communities did not evenly share in the benefits of the economic boom Taiwan experienced during the last quarter of the twentieth century. They often lacked adequate educational resources on their reservations, undermining their efforts to develop marketable skills. The economic disparity between village and urban schools resulted in many social barriers for indigenous people, which prevent many from moving beyond vocational training. Students transplanted into urban schools also face adversity, including isolation, culture shock, and even discrimination from their peers. The cultural impact of poverty and economic marginalization has led to an increase in alcoholism and prostitution among these indigenous peoples.Despite these facts, many of which are broadly shared with Canada’s Aboriginals, they do little to bolster Liu’s vacuous arguments.In fact, Taiwan’s indigenous people, whether they live on reserves or not, are never called or even proclaim they are “First Nations” with special rights separate from those of other Taiwan residents, the first clue that Liu’s indigenous pronouncements are exaggerated.Second, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) officially recognizes the indigenous Taiwanese as one of its ethnic groups known as Gāoshān. The 2000 Chinese census identified 600,000 Gāoshān living on Taiwan, descendants of the island’s indigenous peoples who lived there before the 1949 evacuation of the PRC..Third, the only hard constitutional recognition given to its indigenous people is the six of 113 seats in the legislature reserved for Aboriginal representatives, hardly enough to grant them direct, protected power to shape national policy.As for the rest of the constitution, the only other mention of Aboriginals is the vague declarations that “The State affirms cultural pluralism and shall actively preserve and foster the development of Aboriginal languages and cultures … The State shall, in accordance with the will of the ethnic groups, safeguard the status and political participation of the aborigines. The State shall also guarantee and provide assistance and encouragement for aboriginal education, culture, transportation, water conservation, health and medical care, economic activity, land, and social welfare, measures for which shall be established by law.”All these rights pertain to Taiwan citizens generally.As for basic human rights, the constitution also declares that “There shall be equality among the various racial groups in the Republic of China” and that “All citizens of the Republic of China, irrespective of sex, religion, race, class, or party affiliation, shall be equal before the law.”There could be no clearer divergence from Sections 25 and 35 in Canada’s 1982 Constitution granting unique rights to our indigenous peoples. In short, there is no mention in Taiwan’s constitution of the application of the contents of other documents remotely resembling Canada’s Royal Proclamation of 1763, the many codified treaties with indigenous peoples, the Indian Act, or, most recently, extra-constitutional recognition by the courts of the provisions of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).Because Taiwan is not a full member state of the United Nations, it could not sign UNDRIP (although the People’s Republic of China’s signature on this document suggests its quasi-de jure application to Taiwan). Instead, in 2018 it adopted a much weaker version of the Declaration called The Indigenous Peoples Basic Law.Overall, then, Canada’s laws and practices regarding the country’s indigenous people, whether based on reconciliation or not, have little in common with those of Taiwan, regardless of Liu’s contrary assertions.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
