waishengren

See also: Waishengren

English

Alternative forms

• Waishengren

Etymology

From Mandarin 外省人 (wàishěngrén), literally "outside province people" (from the point of view that Taiwan was a province of the Republic of China and they were migrants from other provinces).

Noun

waishengren (plural waishengren)

1. a category of people and their descendants who fled mainland China for Taiwan after 1945 in response to the Nationalists losing the Chinese Civil War; sometimes regarded as an ethnic group.

   Hypernym: mainlander

   Coordinate term: benshengren

   • 2000 August 18, Takefumi Hayada, “The complexity of the Taiwanese”, in Taipei Times‎^[1]:

     What surprised me was that it was not a "waishengren" who had such a deep consciousness of Chinese history, but a "bensheng-ren"[...]Many Japanese people residing in Taiwan, including myself, receive a lot of help from benshengren, who are fluent in Japanese. We often hear them complain about waishengren and China, while they appear to cherish Japan.

   • 2011, Joshua Fan, China's Homeless Generation: Voices from the Veterans of the Chinese Civil War, 1940s-1990s, Routledge, →ISBN, page 151:

     Recent studies and surveys have shown that most of the Waishengren have already taken this opportunity and are gravitating toward a “New Taiwanese” identity.

   • 2021 August 4, Sarah A. Topol, “Is Taiwan Next?”, in The New York Times Magazine‎^[2]:

     The tsunami of around 1.5 million exiles who accompanied Chiang to Taiwan produced two castes: benshengren — people from this province — and waishengren — people from outside this province[...]Nancy’s father identified as Chinese, waishengren from Jiangxi Province, like his father before him.