« Le réveil de la conscience hakka de Taïwan »

Abstract

In 1992, the region of Meinong, a Hakka farming village in the south of Taiwan, was strongly shaken by a large-scale state project to construct a water reservoir. After more than seven years, local Hakka people managed to suspend the project, which they saw as a threat to their environment and culture. The intervention of a whole generation of university graduates who returned to their native region (fanxiang housheng, “the juniors who returned home”) was decisive in this resistance. These young activists succeeded in developing a large regional and international network of relationships through different associations, and mobilising many official cultural resources to the point of entirely creating a worship dedicated to yellow butterflies, borrowing and reinventing the very ancient Confucian liturgy of the so-called “Three Offerings” (sanxianli). Their unprecedented return also led to competition between local figures accepted as authorities on the interpretation of Meinong’s culture. This became a true power issue among the native elites, while the Taiwan democratisation context beginning in the late 1990s generated changes that were more favourable to the ethnic status of the Hakka. In this article, based on a Taiwanese ethnologist’s point of view on fieldwork conducted for twenty years, we will see how these Hakka people ended up becoming the model of a successful social movement.

Keywords

• Hakka
• elites
• power
• cultural heritage
• Meinong
• Taiwan