In 1661, as Manchu Qing forces tightened their grip on China, Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong—known to the West as Koxinga—led his fleet to Taiwan’s shores and seized Tainan from the Dutch East India Company, seeking a new stronghold for resistance. Though he died just a year later, and his regime ended in 1683 when the Qing annexed Taiwan as part of Fujian Province, the Han Chinese migration and material foundation established under Koxinga and his descendants—including military-agricultural settlement, land tax systems, and Confucian education—has been memorialized as the beginning of Taiwan’s modern era.

The descendants of Han migrants honored his loyalty and valor through various titles like “the Sage King Who Opened Up the Mountains” and “Yanping Prince to the Ming,” enshrining him in more than 100 temples across Taiwan. Since 1962, the annual commemoration of Koxinga’s arrival (Zhengchenggong zhongshu jidian) has been institutionalized as a national state ceremony, with the minister of Executive Yuan serving as Chief Ritual Officer.^[1] At the 2023 ceremony, the minister remarked: “No matter what title Koxinga has been given, we honor both our predecessors’ legacy and the pioneering spirit that shaped modern Taiwan—a spirit that brought together Indigenous peoples, Han immigrants, and subsequent immigrants in our diverse society.” Implicitly, this statement addressed recent critiques of Koxinga’s role in initiating Indigenous land dispossession and genocidal violence in Southern Taiwan, particularly against the Siraya people, comparing him to Christopher Columbus in Taiwan’s context.

However, Koxinga’s stories proliferated beyond his role as a settler master in Southern Taiwan: The Japanese colonial regime honored him for resisting the Qing (partly due to his half-Japanese heritage), while Chinese Communist revolutionaries celebrated him as a patriotic anti-invasion symbol. After their defeat, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) recast him as an anti-Communist icon, and even Communist China valorizes the Taiwanese people’s inheritance of Koxinga’s political legacy and ethnic genealogy (Vicker 2021). With democratization and the Taiwanese nativization movement in the 1980s, local Taiwanese—descendants of later Han migrants—sought to distance themselves from the Chinese ancestry that Koxinga’s legacy had implied. This tension manifested in the evolving titles of the annual state ritual: from 1961’s “300-year Anniversary of Koxinga Reclaiming Taiwan” to 2011’s “350-year Anniversary of Koxinga Opening Up Taiwan,” and finally 2023’s “362-year Anniversary of Koxinga Arriving In Taiwan.”

Koxinga’s complexity—born of his cross-cultural background, position amid shifting regimes, and military ambitions—has made him a malleable figure for various political agendas. The proliferation of Koxinga’s historical representations, however, raises a more fundamental question beyond their political motivations. What demands closer examination is how readily Koxinga’s multifacetedness is taken for granted and how this celebration of multiplicity itself works to obscure the foundational role of Indigenous dispossession in Taiwan’s formation as a Han-dominated society. What lies beneath is a multiculturalist tendency embedded in such an uncritical celebration of multiplicity, where settler colonization becomes just one of many explanations for human mobility or even human suffering, with no specific stakes attached.

Koxinga was not the first to build a Chinese settlement in Taiwan; before his arrival, the Dutch had already imported Chinese laborers from China’s coastal provinces for their tropical plantations in Southern Taiwan. Chinese immigrants were so crucial to the success of the Dutch colonial enterprise that the historical condition of “Sino-Dutch co-colonization” laid the groundwork for Chinese settlement that fully developed in later centuries (Andrade 2008). Han settlement rapidly expanded under Qing China’s rule in Taiwan, bringing institutional racialization, resource extraction, and subjugation of Indigenous peoples across the island (Dawley 2018; Hirano et al. 2018). These historical specifics beg the question: If Koxinga was not the initial architect of settler colonialism in Taiwan, to what extent should Koxinga and his legacy be held accountable?

Koxinga’s enshrinement in Taiwan’s official and everyday settings—both acknowledging and despite his complex legacy—serves, in a process as I theorize as innocentizing, Chinese settler colonization by recasting arrivals before imperial modernity as merely a prologue to Taiwan’s multicultural narrative, a framing that aligns with scholarship highlighting its crucial geographic role in the maritime West Pacific. For Taiwan, an island society that experienced serial colonizations—Dutch, Manchu Qing, Imperial Japan, and post-WWII KMT—the invocation of colonial experience produces both shared and divergent historical narratives for Indigenous peoples and Han Taiwanese. While postcolonial contexts often focus on the binary of colonized and colonizer, the emergence of colonized subjectivity—where the colonized envision a future free from colonial rule—typically intertwines with processes of nationhood and decolonization. In Taiwan’s case, this dynamic takes on additional complexity: for Han Taiwanese who endured Japanese colonization and KMT authoritarianism, the emergence of “Taiwanese consciousness” represented both emancipation from recent colonial powers and an unconscious dismissal of their role in earlier colonial processes. This paradox allowed the structural dispossession and racial hierarchy established since the Han settlement to remain unexamined within Taiwan’s postcolonial narrative.

In other words, when the Han settlement and its colonial accountability for Indigenous dispossession becomes just one of many historical parallaxes, multiplicity itself—now embodying the multiculturalist democracy—fails to generate critical readings of power relations. Instead, it functions as a form of liberal multicultural tolerance where selective inscriptions of Indigenous presence remain constantly subordinate to a larger settler-centric narrative. This tension creates an awkward condition for Taiwanese people to reckon with, as multiculturalist democracy serves as Taiwan’s lifeline for strong sovereign assertions amid ongoing military threats of Chinese annexation. Sovereignty, democracy, and independence thus emerge as sacrosanct principles, aligning with the global order of the new Cold War between China and the US while perpetuating the ongoing practices of Indigenous dispossession (Liu 2021). In this context, as Taiwan strives for international recognition, narratives of its national founding inevitably center on Han Taiwanese’s trajectory of subject formation. This means that even as other colonial and authoritarian legacies draw critical scrutiny,^[2] Indigenous dispossession remains peripheral to discussions of Koxinga’s or Han settler colonization’s historical significance.

In my conversation with a Han Taiwanese local history practitioner who has devoted decades to Koxinga’s cultural work, his response to the critique of Koxinga being a foreign settler was “Koxinga has been nativized (zheng chenggong yijing bentuhua)! It’s laughable to call him a foreign person or settler whatsoever!” When settler colonial temporality renders history as mere chronological progression: settlers come to stay, become native, and eventually decolonize themselves.

Notes

[1] In recent years, the official annual commemoration has been transformed and promoted into an international event to showcase the multifaceted positions of Koxinga and the historical period he represented. Participants now include delegates from Hirado, Japan (Koxinga’s birthplace), overseas Chinese organizations in Malaysia and Singapore, and—for the 2024’s event marking 400 years since Dutch colonization—a descendant of Taiwan’s last Dutch governor, Frederick Coyett.

[2] For instance, Chiang Kai-Shek ruled Taiwan as an authoritarian dictator from 1949–1975, where his KMT regime imprisoned, tortured, and executed thousands of dissidents and suspected communists. His political legacy remains central to Taiwan’s ongoing work of transitional justice and historical reckoning.