In many nations educators are fighting to build a curriculum that reflects the knowledge and beliefs of all peoples rather than a dominant political power group. This perspective is particularly significant when examining school discourse in Taiwan, a country with a long-standing multicultural population and a diverse history of alien occupations. After ending 38 years of martial law in 1987, Taiwanese intellectuals began to challenge the Sinocentric education of national standardized Chinese language/culture textbooks which had neglected unrepresented ethnic groups, hindering the development of students' Taiwanese identity. In 2001, the Ministry of Education relinquished the editorship of high school standardized textbooks to private publishers. This paper examines how political ideology and cultural representation in grade-seven Chinese textbooks have influenced the formation of Taiwanese students' identities since the 1970s. The data samples are from junior high school Chinese textbooks between 1970 and 2004. The results indicate in the early 2000s private publishers' textbooks enhanced not only Taiwanese discourse but also a hybrid of Chinese, Taiwanese and Western discourses promoting local and mixed identities, as well as a global identity.