ABSTRACT
We should remember that the Japanese applied the same expressions as the Imperial Manchu Ch’ing court, i.e. ‘cooked’ and ‘raw’ barbarians, even though the official term adopted by the government to designate them was ‘peoples of Takasago’. Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese government, which was set up in the island in 1949, used the term ‘Hanism’,1 and the aborigines’ official name became shanti t’ungpao, abridged to shanpao, ‘compatriots from the mountains’, but they were more often known as shanti jen, ‘mountain people’, or kao shan tsu, ‘high mountain tribes’, and more commonly huan, ‘savages’. To show their difference, the Chinese called themselves p’ingti t’ungpao, ‘compatriots from the plains’. The present government’s policy was, until the beginning of the 1990s, ‘great Hanism’, meaning the complete Sinisation of all the minority groups in the country. The government, the Taiwanese and the Chinese all thought that Sinisation was ‘good for the aborigines’.
