Taiwan's identity has been constructed and described in a variety of ways by politicians seeking to demonstrate that Taiwan either is or is not Chinese. Those who wish to prove Taiwan's Chineseness emphasize the dominance of Han culture and the lengthy relationship between China and Taiwan. Those who argue that Taiwan's identity is distinctly un-Chinese tend to focus on the influence of Aborigine culture and ancestry on the Han population, the influence of Japanese culture, and the fact that Taiwan has been politically separate from China for most of the 20th century. Melissa Brown's Is Taiwan Chinese? investigates the merits of these claims through ethnographic study. She offers an excellent analysis of the shifting identity of Taiwan's plains Aborigines, which she supplements with a comparative analysis of Tujia identity in China's Hubei province that demonstrates that Taiwan's identity shifts are not unique.

Through ethnographic case studies and analysis of historical data, Brown concludes that Taiwan's plains Aborigines have undergone three identity shifts, from plains Aborigine to Han, in the first two cases, and from Han back to Aborigine in the last instance. Brown studies three foothills villages that by the early 1990s identified themselves as Han, but that had previously been Aborigine. She finds that because Qing economic and social policies had eroded boundaries between Han and plains Aborigines, these two groups already shared numerous cultural practices in the early 20th century. However, it was not until the Japanese banned footbinding, thus opening a range of new marriage options, that plains Aborigines began to take on Han identity, and to claim it on the basis of cultural similarity, rather than ancestry. Brown further finds that the impact of Aborigine culture on Han culture during this period was minimal, and that Han cultural practices supplanted Aborigine practices among those people who underwent the identity shift. In the late 20th century these same people underwent a second identity shift from Han back to Aborigine, one that was again spurred by changes in the political environment and one that, Brown argues, has been counter-productive to Taiwan's claims to uniqueness.