The removal of the term “Han Chinese” from the Executive Yuan’s Web site, which has sparked an online backlash, was intended to improve ethnic equality in Taiwan based on advice from the Control Yuan and was not politically motivated, Cabinet spokeswoman Michelle Lee (李慧芝) said on Sunday.

A user on the Professional Technology Temple (PTT) online bulletin board on Saturday wrote that on March 24 a section on the Executive Yuan’s Web site about ethnic groups in Taiwan removed the term “Han Chinese.”

The current version of the site states that indigenous people make up 2.6 percent of registered households in Taiwan, while 1.2 percent were foreign nationals and 96.2 percent were “the rest of the population.”

A screenshot of the site archived on March 17 on the Wayback Machine shows that it previously said that Han Chinese accounted for the largest portion of the population at 96.4 percent.

Soon after the PTT comments gained widespread media attention, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) criticized the change as “cognitive warfare” against China by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.

KMT Legislator Chen Ching-hui (陳菁徽) on Saturday called the change “absurd,” saying it recognized the ethnicity of minority groups comprising only 3.8 percent of the population, but referred to the 96 percent majority as simply “the rest.”

Such blurring of the nation’s ethnic composition is unhelpful and raises suspicions about the motive behind the change, she said.

Lee said the Department of Household Registration made the revision in response to a suggestion from Control Yuan member Antonio Hong (鴻義章) in December 2022, who said the previous description counterposed Han Chinese against indigenous people and new immigrants.

In the previous language on the site, the term “Han Chinese” encompassed Hoklo and Hakka people, as well as immigrants, Lee cited Hong as saying.

Such polarizing phrasing might hinder efforts to facilitate ethnic equality and eliminate racial discrimination, she cited Hong as saying, adding that he again proposed the revision in 2023.

The Executive Yuan updates the country profile on the Web site annually and uses terms related to ethnicity based on statutes such as the Household Registration Act (戶籍法), the Indigenous Peoples Status Act (原住民身分法) and the Immigration Act (入出國移民法), as well as demographic data, Lee said.

The term “more than 23 million people of Taiwan” refers to citizens of the Republic of China with a registered household, including foreign nationals, she said.

Indigenous people must register their ethnicity in accordance with the Indigenous Peoples Status Act and foreign nationals would be documented as a group based on their first-time household registration, she added.

However, the ethnic status of Hoklo or Hakka people, or minority groups such as Manchus, Mongolians or Tibetans, is not recorded and their numbers could not be calculated by category, Lee said.

As using “Han Chinese” as an umbrella term to encapsulate all these ethnic groups does not accurately reflect their ethnicity, it was replaced with “the rest of the population” to more objectively describe the demographic structure in Taiwan, she said.

The change was not politically motivated and should not be misinterpreted, Lee said.

Additional reporting by CNA