Introduction
National identity is a debatable issue in most modern countries since there is no single ethnic country but more than four fifth countries all over the world consist of multi-ethnic groups, as Jiang (1997) argued. Therefore it is rather difficult to define a common point of a modern country. The multi-ethnic communities also cause conflicts within a society. However sports events often provide a channel to solidify citizens in a country, like the World Cup fever. At times sports affiliation also becomes a symbol of the country, such as football in the UK. Yet sometimes it leads debate on race and ethnicity. For example, the Tebbitt speaking, “A large proportion of Britain's Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? It's an interesting test. Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?” Taiwan is experiencing the ethnic conflict and sports affiliations and fandom provide a platform for consolidation and sometimes these become problems as well. This essay will start from the meaning of personal identity in order to establish a base for the discussion of national identity, and then introduce functions of sporting affiliations and fandom and how these functions contribute to the identity. Lastly it will draw attention to Taiwan for the purpose of evaluating the importance of sporting affiliation and fandom in Taiwan.
1. Identity
It is worth to take a deep view of the meaning of identity in order to discover the relation between national identity and sporting affiliation. Identity in general terms means the collective aspect of the set of traits by which a thing is definitively recognizable or known. As Perry (2002) argued, “there are two methods to identify the identity of one thing ...