The Formosan Black Bear and Taiwanese Nationalism

Building on scholarship that situates nations and nationalism within colonial relations, this article examines nationalism in settler‐colonial Taiwan amid China's colonial claim to sovereignty. Drawing on interviews, conservation documents and popular representations, we show how the Formosan black bear became a national symbol of resistance to Chinese irredentism across three cumulative stages: early‐2000s symbolic competition with China's giant pandas; mid‐2010s diffusion through branding, commodification and political advocacy; and post‐2017 politicisation amid intensifying cross‐strait tensions. However, Han Taiwanese often attribute bear deaths to Indigenous communities and prioritise bear conservation, whose public popularity is partly associated with the bear's national symbolism, over Indigenous communities' everyday experiences of living with bears. We show that Taiwanese nationalism has anticolonial origins and continues as antihegemonic resistance, while suggesting that this bear symbolism may subordinate Indigenous perspectives in public discussions of human–bear conflicts. The paper offers a relational account of nationalism's resistant and oppressive possibilities.