Abstract
Zhong Renshou was born in the early days of Japanese rule in the Liudui Hakka area in southern Taiwan, which was defined by the Japanese as a “Cantonese race” living area. He received colonial education as a child, and, like other colonial elites, he was not only involved in the fields of education, administration, and commerce, but also traveled all over China, Japan, and Korea, through which he also strengthened his identity as a subject of the Japanese Empire. After the outbreak of the SinoJapanese War, he had to abandon his family to go to central China to avoid being recruited by the Taiwanese Colonial Government. With his fluency in both Chinese and Japanese, he entered the pro-Japanese regime in Nanjing, the Reformation and Wang Jingwei government, as an official, wandering between the governments of China and Japan. This article traces how he found a living space in the struggle of various political forces in mainland China from 1938 to 1945, and how his Hakka identity emerged in the interaction of multiple ties of countries, capitals, homelands, and relatives. After the war, he also became a leading advocate in promoting the consciousness of Hakka identity in Taiwan. In the early 1950s, he participated in Taiwan’s first association named “Hakka,” and in the 1970s he compiled Taiwan’s first local chronicle titled “Hakka.” In the author's view, Zhong Renshou's experiences and his emotional world are a rare micro-case that gives us an opportunity to observe closely how Taiwan society produced a group of people whose Hakka identity was triggered through their overseas experience long before the Nationalist Government took over Taiwan, and why they became key figures in the “Hakka discourse as a national cause” that emerged in Mainland China in the first half of the twentieth century, and the “Hakka discourse as a colonial race” in Taiwanese society since Japanese rule.