Taiwan's "Mainlanders," New Taiwanese?

In recent years, the validity of the traditional distinction between Waishengren and Benshengren was so challenged that it is finally becoming more and more common to divide the Taiwanese population into four main groups: the Austronesians, the island's original inhabitants, forced to cohabit with the Hakka and Holo peoples arriving from Fujian and Guangdong provinces of China, particularly since the seventeenth century; and fourth, the Mainlanders coming to Taiwan during a final wave of Chinese migration from the Mainland during the watershed years 1945-1949. The Austronesians, labeled as Shanbao (compatriots from the mountains) as late as 1994, were then renamed more appropriately "Aborigines" and represented 1.7 percent of the total population in 1989. ¹ The Holo (73.3 percent) and Hakka (12 percent) peoples, who have been on Taiwan for between one hundred and four hundred years, are the "native Taiwanese" who call themselves "Taiwanese" (Taiwanren), or "people of this land" (Bendiren). The last to arrive have, since 1945, been called Waishengren (people from outer provinces), and they numbered around 13 percent of the island's population in 1989 (Huang 1993). ²