Despite the wide use of the "four great ethnic groups" in public discourse as essentialized identities, the relationships between the peoples of Taiwan have been in a constant state of convergence and negotiation for centuries.

Prior to Japanese rule, residents of Taiwan developed relationships based on class solidarity and social connections rather than ethnic identity.

[15] Shortly following the Kuomintang (KMT) arrival, however, social conflict erupted in the midst of rampant government corruption, soaring inflation and an increasing flow of immigrants from China (see February 28 Incident)[citation needed].

[16][17][18][19] KMT's Taiwan Garrison Commander Chen Yi stated that after 50 years of Japanese rule, "Taiwanese customs, thought, and language would have to gradually return to that of the Chinese people".

They also believed education would help build a martial spirit and stimulate enough military, economic, political, and cultural strength not only to survive, but also to recover the mainland.

The government tended to stress provincial identities, with identification cards and passports issued until the late 1990s displaying one's ancestral province and county.

[22] The campaign saw resonance with the people of Taiwan and the term "Taiwanese" has been used by politicians of all parties to refer to the electorate in an effort to secure votes.

[26] The term "New Taiwanese" (新臺灣人) was coined by former President of the Republic of China, Lee Teng-hui in 1995 to bridge the ethnic cleavage that followed the February 28 Incident of 1947 and characterized the frigid relations between waishengren and benshengren during forty years of martial law.

Although critics have called the "New Taiwanese Concept" a political ploy to win votes from benshengren who regarded the KMT as an alien regime, it has remained an important factor in the dialectic between ethnic identities in Taiwan.

Despite being adopted early on by former Provincial Governor James Soong (1997) and later by, then Taipei mayoral candidate Ma Ying-jeou (1999), the term has since been dropped from contemporary political rhetoric (Corcuff 2002:186–188).

The increasing number of marriages between Taiwanese and other countries creates a problem for the rigid definitions of ethnic identity used by both the ROC and the PRC when discussing Taiwan (Harrell 1995).

In one-fourth of all marriages in Taiwan today, one partner will be from another country[27] and one out of every twelve children is born to a family of mixed parentage.

Polls conducted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) in 2001 found that 70% of Taiwanese would support a name change of the country to Taiwan if the island could no longer be referred to as the Republic of China.

[33] In 2006, Wu Nai-teh of Academia Sinica said that "many Taiwanese are still confused about identity, and are easily affected by political, social, and economic circumstances.

The 2023 documentary "Nous sommes Taïwan" (French for "We are Taiwan") by Pierre Haski explored the current state of Taiwanese identity.

"[36] According to governmental statistics, over 95% of Taiwan's 23.4 million people are Han Chinese,[37] of which the majority includes descendants of early Hoklo immigrants who arrived from Fujian in large numbers starting in the 17th century.

Due to the resulting labor shortage, the Dutch hired Han farmers from across the Taiwan Strait who fled the Manchu invasion of Ming dynasty China.

Their ancestors are believed to have been living on the islands for approximately 8,000 years before major Han Chinese immigration began in the 17th century (Blust 1999).

Taiwan's Austronesian speakers were traditionally distributed over much of the island's rugged central mountain range and concentrated in villages along the alluvial plains.

The Hoklo people of Taiwan and Penghu speak Taiwanese Hokkien and mostly originated from Fujian (specifically Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Xiamen and Kinmen).

[50] The ethnic identity of assimilated Plains Aboriginals in the immediate vicinity of Tainan was still known since a pure Hoklo Taiwanese girl was warned by her mother to stay away from them.

[58] The Taiwanese Hakka communities, although arriving to Taiwan from mountains of eastern Guangdong and western Fujian, have also likely mixed through intermarriage with lowland Indigenous as well.

Following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Taiwan was the most prominent humanitarian contributor, donating US$252 million in combined aid under then-ROC-president Ma Ying-jeou's administration.

The original migrations from China were male-dominated as they came as laborers under contract to the Dutch, so there is a belief in Taiwan that there was considerable intermarriage with women from Plains indigenous peoples.

Subsequent full genome studies using large sample sizes and comparing thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms have come to the conclusion that Taiwanese Han people are primarily of mainland Chinese descent and have only very limited genetic mixture with the indigenous population.

Due to mass migration, within a few decades, the Han population vastly outnumbered the indigenous people so that even if intermarriage did happen it would have been impossible to meet demand.

The T group individuals were genetically distinct from neighbouring Southeast Asians and Taiwanese Austronesian tribes but were similar to other southern Han Chinese.

The researchers suggested that this ancient Austronesian-related ancestry arose from admixture events between Han Chinese and pre-Austronesian populations (Baiyue) that occurred in mainland China.

The study's conclusion was that the admixture event resulting in Island Southeast Asian (ISEA) ancestry likely occurred before the Han migration to Taiwan.

According to Akatuang, Taiwan's independence shouldn't be established on the idea of blood relations and these people "ignore scientific evidence because they want to believe they are different from China.