Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has once again demonstrated his preference for style over substance with the launch of his own Facebook page yesterday.

There’s not much on the site yet, just two videos, some personal information like his birth date, the address of the Presidential Office Building, a brief biography and a short statement about how he hopes to use the site to share views with the public. Oh, and he listed jogging and swimming under “interests.” These details are hardly earth shattering or informative, yet by yesterday afternoon, 62,551 netizens had clicked on the “like” button on Ma’s page.

In these troubled times, Taiwanese know they are different but they may not always be able to verbalize how different they are. From the Japanese era on, Taiwanese had begun to gain a unified sense of their difference. At that time, unlike under Qing rule, the Hoklo, Hakka and indigenous people realized that they should not let outside rulers play one group against the other. They became united in forging an identity. Thus, as Taiwan now distances itself from the martial law, propaganda and attempted indoctrination of the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) one-party state, its citizens feel more free to claim their true identity;Taiwanese. In this process they should examine three terms, creolism, syncretism and hybridization.