native taiwanese vs mainlander taiwanese...another kind of prejudice

Official sacked for 'hillbillies' comment
Incident exposes divide between Mainlanders and native Taiwanese

TAIPEI: A Taiwan civil servant has been sacked after he owned up to writing articles which denigrated the island, in an episode which has laid bare the faultline between Taiwanese communal groups.
Mr Kuo Kuan-ying, director of the information division at Taiwan's trade office in Toronto, Canada, told CTiTV News that he was responsible for online essays which had caused offence by referring to native Taiwanese as tai ba-zi or 'hillbillies'.

Writing under the pen name 'Fan Lan-ching', he also called Taiwan 'a ghost island', pro-independence activists 'Japanese pirates' as well as suggested that China should take Taiwan back by force.

The case has highlighted resentments between the Taiwanese who had settled on the island from the 17th century and the so-called Mainlanders - later arrivals who had fled to the island along with the Kuomintang (KMT) Army after the 1949 civil war in China.

The KMT and its followers effectively became the ruling class after they moved to Taiwan, squeezing out the native Taiwanese.

Incidents like the Feb 28 Massacre of 1947, which saw the KMT forces killing thousands of Taiwanese to quell an uprising, only deepened the hatred between the native Taiwanese and Mainlanders.

That Mr Kuo called himself 'a superior Mainlander' in his essays only fed suspicions that his views reflected the snobbish attitudes the Mainlanders hold towards native Taiwanese.