ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the rise in Taiwanese anti-Chinese sentiment, drawing particular connections to language use on the locally-grounded PTT bulletin board system (BBS), specifically its largest board, Gossiping. BBSs are among the earliest social media - their public availability, beginning in the late 1970s, predates that of the internet by a decade. Taiwanese fear of China is not an easily-condemned xenophobia - it inevitably ties into Taiwan's continued existence as a separate community. While in the past much fretting concerned standard dangerous others, the new fears are based on the potential negation of Taiwanese democracy. While, as is common on message boards, Gossiping users attack many broad categories of people - women and gays, for instance, as well as more idiosyncratic targets such as academically inferior 'humanities people' - attacks on mainland Chinese and their language use are particularly interesting.
