How generational differences within Taiwan influence evolving concepts of identity

In 1992, when National Chengchi University’s Election Study Center began tracking how people in Taiwan identified themselves, 25.5 percent said they were Chinese, 17.6 percent said they were Taiwanese, and nearly half identified as both

By 2023, those numbers had inverted and accelerated beyond what the original researchers had anticipated. About 61.7 percent identified only as Taiwanese, while only 2.4 percent identified only as Chinese. It was the lowest figure recorded since the survey began. That transformation did not happen uniformly across generations. It happened in stages, shaped by different historical conditions, different educational experiences, and different relationships to the cross-strait situation that each cohort inherited.

The NCCU Election Study Center data is the most longitudinal and widely cited public record of this shift. Taiwanese identification has exceeded 60 percent in all of the past four years, after hitting a high of 64.3 percent in 2020. The data tracks not only identity but political preference. 33.2 percent of people preferred to maintain the status quo indefinitely, a number that has steadily increased from 25.5 percent in 2020.

Those numbers are not uniform across age groups. Research consistently shows that younger Taiwanese hold higher levels of Taiwanese identity and lower levels of Chinese identity than older generations. That gap has widened rather than narrowed as younger cohorts have entered the survey’s sample.

The oldest generation carries a relationship to Taiwanese identity that no survey question fully captures. Taiwanese citizens who received their education in Japanese during the colonial period, who lived through the 1945 transition from a Japanese to Nationalist administration, and who experienced the early decades of Nationalist governance with its suppression of both Taiwanese Hokkien and Japanese cultural expression, carry an identity shaped by a sequence of political impositions that subsequent generations did not experience directly.

Their understanding of what it means to be Taiwanese was formed under conditions of coercion from multiple directions — colonial, postcolonial, and authoritarian — that produced an identity defined partly by what it was not permitted to be.

The generation that came of age during Taiwan’s democratic transition occupies a different position. For Taiwanese citizens whose formative years fell in the late 1980s and 1990s, the political events that define Taiwan’s democratic identity were not history. They were the lived environment. The lifting of martial law in 1987, after 38 years, was a real event. The first direct presidential election in 1996, conducted under the pressure of PRC missile tests in nearby waters, was a civic experience.

The first peaceful transfer of presidential power in 2000, from the KMT to the DPP after more than five decades of KMT governance, was a demonstration that democratic institutions could function in ways that authoritarian governance had not permitted. For this generation, Taiwanese identity and democratic identity are not separable concepts. They developed together, in the same political moment, and the connection between them is not abstract.

For Taiwanese citizens under 40, the baseline is different from both preceding generations in a specific way. Research on Taiwanese political identity consistently shows that the younger generation holds higher levels of Taiwanese identity and lower levels of Chinese identification than older cohorts. External pressure from China, in the form of military threat and economic incentives alike, has been less effective in shifting the identity orientation of younger Taiwanese than older ones.

The Taiwan-centered curriculum reform of 1999 also reshaped how subsequent generations learned Taiwan’s history, shifting the educational narrative away from a mainland-centered focus and toward one that centered Taiwan’s own historical experience. For citizens educated under that reformed curriculum, the cross-strait situation is not a deterioration from a more stable past. It is the condition they were born into, and their identity was formed within it rather than in response to it.

The political consequences of that generational shift are visible in modern electoral outcomes. The January 2024 presidential election produced a result that the traditional unification-independence understanding does not fully explain. William Lai of the DPP won the presidency with 40 percent of the vote, a plurality in a three-way race rather than a majority, while the legislative elections produced a divided legislature in which no single party commanded a majority for the first time since 2004.

The Taiwan People’s Party, a newer formation that does not align cleanly with either the pro-independence DPP or the more China-accommodating KMT, secured eight legislative seats and a decisive swing position. The electorate that produced that outcome is not one organized primarily around the unification-independence binary that defined Taiwanese politics in earlier decades. It is one in which a strong and growing Taiwanese identity coexists with a preference for maintaining the status quo, where the question of formal independence is less salient than the question of democratic governance and institutional performance.

The TPP’s performance in 2024 reflects something the survey data has been showing for years. Younger Taiwanese are not organizing their political choices around the question of unification or independence. They are organizing around governance, accountability, and institutional performance. They are the concerns of a generation that takes Taiwanese identity as settled and democracy as the baseline rather than the achievement. The cross-strait question has not disappeared from Taiwanese politics. It has been subordinated by a generation for whom it was never the defining question to begin with.