The goal of this paper is to reflect on Taiwan's旧ethnic phenomenon and to compare two theoretical perspectives on the study of ethnic politics. The first perspective sees ethnic group as cultural group, which is often described as “discrete, bounded, culturally distinctive and enduring”. Accordingly, one major task for analyzing ethnic politics is to provide a comparative study of group/cultural differences. The tools of percentage, mean and mode are often favored to conduct a comparative study on the topics of language use, income, education, voting behavior, political position etc., and it leads to a reification of ethnic group. Ethnic relations are then reduced to a question of tolerance and respect. Ethnic conflict is equated with ethnic groups in conflict, i.e., cultural groups in conflict. The second perspective sees ethnic group as a political community, and argues that an ethnic group is more than a cultural group, but a cultural group with a political mission. We do not mean to downplay the significance of culture, but to emphasize a need to analyze the production and representation of cultural differences in terms of political context. In addition, we choose to see ethnic group as a variable, in the conception of group as groupness. This political-community perspective observes the existence of ethnic group as an on-going event and directs our attention to the role of organizations and ethno-political entrepreneurs, the dynamics and consequences of events and activities, the competition for interpretative framing and rhetoric keywords, and the process of social construction and cognitive development.