Word.ws English Dictionary

benshengren

benshengren noun: han Chinese who came to Taiwan from mainland China before 1945, often having experienced Japanese rule, as compared to Han Chinese who came to Taiwan from mainland China after 1945, following the Chinese Civil War (waishengren).

Noun

benshengren (plural benshengren)

  1. Han Chinese who came to Taiwan from mainland China before 1945, often having experienced Japanese rule, as compared to Han Chinese who came to Taiwan from mainland China after 1945, following the Chinese Civil War (waishengren).
    • What surprised me was that it was not a "waishengren" who had such a deep consciousness of Chinese history, but a "bensheng-ren"[...]Many Japanese people residing in Taiwan, including myself, receive a lot of help from benshengren, who are fluent in Japanese. We often hear them complain about...2000 August 18, Takefumi Hayada, “The complexity of the Taiwanese”, in Taipei Times
    • Gu Xionghua remembered when he first got to Taiwan there was no Benshengren in the army.2011, Joshua Fan, China's Homeless Generation: Voices from the Veterans of the Chinese Civil War, 1940s-1990s, Routledge, →ISBN, page 60

Proper noun capitalized: Benshengren

Benshengren

  1. Alternative letter-case form of benshengren (“Han Chinese in Taiwan before 1945 and their descendants”).

Forms of benshengren

pluralbenshengren
alternative formBenshengren

Origin of benshengren

From Mandarin 本省人 (běnshěngrén), literally "original province people" (from the point of view that Taiwan is a province of the Republic of China).

Questions about benshengren

What does benshengren mean?
Benshengren means han Chinese who came to Taiwan from mainland China before 1945, often having experienced Japanese rule, as compared to Han Chinese who came to Taiwan from mainland China after 1945, following the Chinese Civil War (waishengren).
What part of speech is benshengren?
Benshengren can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of benshengren?
The plural of benshengren is benshengren.

Words near benshengren in the dictionary

  1. Bensenville
  2. benserazide
  3. Bensham
  4. benshee
  5. benshees
  6. benshengren
  7. benshi
  8. benship
  9. benshiply
  10. benshis
  11. Benshoof

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: benshengren (page history and authors); Benshengren (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “benshengren.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/benshengren. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.