Top Quotes: “Forbidden Nation: A History of Taiwan” — Jonathan Manthorpe
Introduction
“Taiwan’s aborigines are ethnic Malays from Southeast Asia whose ancestors migrated to the island over thousands of years before recorded history. Intermarriage with Chinese over the past five hundred years means that about 70 percent of modern Taiwanese have aboriginal blood. The Hakka are ethnically mainstream Han Chinese, but their distinct culture and language has made them outcasts within Chinese society. Hakka origins are in northern China, but over hundreds of years they were pushed down into the mountainous border country between Guangdong and Fujian provinces. Many Hakka became sea nomads and were among the first Chinese to establish outposts on Taiwan. Hoklo is the name given to natives of Fujian province. They make up the majority of modern Taiwanese. The mainlanders who came to Taiwan after 1945 are of mixed origins, but many came from the two last outposts of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang administration: Shanghai on China’s east coast and Guangdong province north and west of Hong Kong.”
“About half of Taiwan’s people applaud President Chen Shui-bian’s policy of asserting at every opportunity the island’s independence and cultural individuality. Most of the other half quietly support the aim, but not Chen’s means. They think Chen’s style unnecessarily goads China and is an abuse of American friendship. They think the Chen administration is putting at risk the extraordinary economic success and social development Taiwan has achieved in recent decades.”
“Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, his army, and about two million Kuomintang followers fled to the island in 1949 after their defeat in China by the Communists of Mao Zedong. Chiang and the Kuomintang regarded Taiwan merely as a brief haven where they would rebuild their strength in preparation for an eventual return to the mainland to oust the Communists. The rule Chiang and his followers established over Taiwan was colonial in all but name. It was not totalitarian in the strict sense but limited the opportunities available to native Taiwanese to low-and middle-level positions in the hierarchy. Within those boundaries Chiang’s government allowed some real reform. Land reform in the 1950s and early 1960s ended the power of the landlord class that had prospered during Qing and Japanese rule. Landlords were forced to sell much of their holdings to their tenants. Armed with the deeds to their land, many Taiwanese were able to go to the banks with collateral for loans. Their small plots became the sites of cottage industries which within a couple of decades evolved into Taiwan’s high technology miracle. But behind this enlightened despotism real power and influence was kept firmly in the hands of mainlanders. Many native Taiwanese quickly realized the key to survival under this regime was acquiescence. A few years after the arrival of Chiang and his followers, half the members of the Kuomintang were native Taiwanese.”
“Significant political reform and change at municipal and national levels only began in the 1980s, when the Kuomintang finally acknowledged that its dream of reconquering China was a fantasy. Washington’s formal diplomatic recognition of Beijing at the beginning of 1979 and the parallel downgrading of relations with Taiwan forced this attitude.”
“The Chen administration has vigorously promoted, and not always wisely, notions of “Taiwanese consciousness.” This includes the near eradication of Chinese history from the school syllabus and the almost exclusive use of the Taiwan dialect, Minnan — as different from the mainlanders’ Mandarin as Portuguese is from English — in daily life.”
“During the 300 years of Qing dynasty presence on the island, which ended in 1895 with Japanese annexation, China exercised a feeble and constantly challenged administration on only the western third of Taiwan. After Taiwan was handed to Chiang Kai-shek at the end of the Second World War in 1945 — an illegal bequest — the mainland Kuomintang government was already on the run from the Communists. Large areas of China were never under effective Kuomintang control and Chiang lost it all to Mao Zedong by the end of 1949. Thus there has never been a Chinese administration that exercised government over both the mainland and Taiwan at the same time.”
“The name Taiwan is both new and old. It has been used as the standard name for the island among Westerners only within the last four decades or so. Chinese speakers have used it for a long time. The derivation of name goes back at least four hundred years. Taoyuan was the name the Dutch used for their settlement, the area of modern Tainan on the island’s southwest coast, when they established their trading colony in 1624. Chinese adopted it as the name for the whole island around the end of the seventeenth century, when Tainan was the capital of the Qing dynasty’s administrative outpost on Taiwan’s western lowlands. Where this word, with several spellings, came from is disputed. Some authorities say it is a word the local aborigines used when they found Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch voyagers on their shores. Taoyuan, Taian, or Taiyan is said to mean “foreigners” or “aliens” in the local aboriginal language, and the Dutch picked it up because it was the most discernible part of the natives’ conversa-tion. Others say it is a corruption of Chinese words meaning “terraced bay.” Another opinion is that it may have been the name of the tribe living in the region where the Dutch established their forts and trading post. A further speculation is that Taiwan may be a corruption of the Chinese phrase tung hwan, meaning “eastern savages,” thus encapsulating much of what the mainlanders knew and thought about the island.”
“The name “Formosa” is an abbreviation of “Ilha Formosa,” meaning “beautiful island,” and was used for several hundred years among westerners until the recent domination of “Taiwan.””
“Between these folded mountain ranges is a series of high valleys running roughly north and south the length of the island. Lushly forested mountains and hill country now cover almost 70 percent of the island. These forces are still at work and the island continues to suffer irregular but persistent earthquakes.
As the mountains rose from the Pacific floor they carried up with them vast amounts of seabed coral, which became the raw material of Taiwan’s exceptional agricultural fertility. Having established Taiwan’s basic form, nature now started sculpting its creation. Taiwan straddles the Tropic of Cancer and is in the direct path of monsoon rain storms and typhoons — Asian hurricanes— that sweep in from the Pacific every year. The island’s average annual rainfall is 98.5 inches, but it does not fall evenly. Most falls on the east coast and the mountains. The west coast receives only about 50 inches of rain a year.”
“During the period of oppressive military rule by the Kuomintang mainlanders, from 1945 until martial law was lifted in 1987, the island’s aboriginal peoples, who now number about 350,000 and two percent of the population, were largely ignored and their languages and culture suppressed. Chiang Kai-shek saw Taiwan’s natives as just one of the over 50 minority ethnic groups in China proper – groups to be tolerated but not encouraged. It was when Lee Teng-hui, a Taiwanese-born ethnic Chinese of the Hakka minority, was selected president in 1990 that a profound cultural and political transformation began on the island.”
“Ethnic Malays lived throughout Southeast Asia and many of the islands of what are now Indonesia and the Philippines. They resented the imposition of the alien Indian monarchies and religions over them and the accompanying demands for land. The military dominance of the Indians, however, made Malay resistance ineffective. People began moving to find new land away from the power and influence of the Indian princes. Some merely ousted their neighbors, who then did the same and set off an ever-widening ripple of pressure for land. Some Malays inevitably had to take to their canoes and rafts and seek land beyond the seas. It was on these pioneering voyages that the Malays discovered and settled southern Taiwan.”
“Although the new arrivals on Taiwan were all ethnic Malays, they came in family, tribal, and cultural groups from various parts of Southeast Asia with their own specific cultural traditions and languages. Once they arrived, the geography of Taiwan tended to promote the maintenance of these differences and the evolution of even greater distinctions. Those who colonized the west coast flatlands were separated by the island’s spinal mountain ranges from those who settled on the narrower plains and steep river valleys of the east coast. The ridge formation of the central mountains tended to form isolated pockets of habitation for those who worked their way up into the high country. These solitudes created over time groups that have become distinct in language and other aspects of their cultures. The Paiwan in the far south, Puyuma in the southeast, the central Bunun, the Ami of the eastern central region, and Yami on Lan Yu Islands, with the Tsou in central Taiwan are all of Malay heritage, but their languages, religious ideas, manners of livelihood, and communal structures vary widely.
Geography and ferocious warrior cultures sustained aboriginal independence on Taiwan for a remarkably long time. Neither the Dutch nor early Chinese administrations ever controlled much more than the western third of the island. It was not until the 1930s that the Japanese administration, with the help of machine guns, and poison gas, brought Taiwan as a whole under central control.”
Early History
“He was commissioned to assemble “several tons of starving people” and ship them to Taiwan, where the Dutch were beginning to establish agriculture and needed indentured labor with better skills than the Aborigines. Because of this initiative, Cheng is frequently held up as the father of the Chinese colonization of Taiwan.”
“His army of 25,000 was given an ecstatic welcome by thousands of the island’s Chinese settlers, who rushed down to the beaches with handcarts to aid the landing. For these early Taiwanese islanders the arrival of Koxinga was an intoxicating moment of liberation, and they mobbed the arriving army. The invasion held the prospect of an end to burdensome Dutch rule and the advent of a familiar Chinese administration with all the formulas of Chinese culture but without the regular chaos of life on the mainland.”
“The wives were given to Koxinga’s captains as concubines and the small children were sent to China. Koxinga himself took one of Hambroek’s teenage daughters – “a very sweet and pleasing maiden” according to Caeuw – as one of his concubines. In August there was also a killing of captive Dutch from the hinterland and Fort Provintia; Koxinga believed they had been inciting the aborigines against the Chinese. The Dutch reports say five hundred men were either beheaded or “killed in a more barbarous manner.” Many women and children were killed too, but others were “preserved for the use of the commanders, and then sold to the common soldiers. “Happy was she that fell to the lot of an unmarried man, being thereby freed from vexations by the Chinese women, who are very jealous of their husbands,” says the fort’s daily journal.
The results of these incidents are still evident in some parts of southern Taiwan. There are areas where the people have decidedly European features and even occasionally the red or auburn hair common among seventeenth century Dutch.”
“Cheng Ching’s seventeen-year reign was Taiwan’s first Golden Age. He proved a worthy guardian of his father’s dream for the island and kept the family pledge to attempt to restore the Ming dynasty. But he never gave up his taste for debauchery, which shortened his life. When Cheng Ching died on March 17, 1681, at age 39 like his father, he had overseen a great burst of agricultural, industrial, commercial, and administrative development on the island. Yet this was also the beginning of the end of the Cheng dynasty on Taiwan. Cheng’s designation of Cheng Ko-tsang, a son by a concubine, as his successor set off a family feud that ended with submission to the Oing dynasty in Beijing. Taiwan became for two hundred years an ignored and ill-used outer island of the Qing empire until its colonial occupation by Japan in 1895.”
“The pioneer work done by the military to clear land and bring it into production trespassed on the hunting grounds of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples. The pushing forward of the boundaries of Chinese occupation created a great deal of resentment among aborigines and led to several serious uprisings. To try to ease the tension the Cheng administration eventually separated the settlers and aborigines with a boundary line running roughly down the western side of Taiwan’s central mountains. This division, called the “red line” for the color of the markers, kept aboriginal eastern Taiwan outside any effective government administration until after the arrival of the Japanese in 1895. Until 1887, when Taiwan was designated as a province of China, officials disavowed any responsibility for or control of what happened east of the red line. Even today there are regulations on what mountain land may be used for and who may own it, with aborigines given preference.”
“China was seen as a complete nation and empire in itself. If other states and territories were wise enough to emulate Chinese culture and social order, well and good. But conquest and empire building in the European style were not the Chinese way. There were even tentative overtures made to the Dutch to see if they were interested in buying Taiwan back. They were not. The emperor asked for opinions from his advisers about what to do with the island and the dominant view was to abandon the place.
“Taiwan is nothing but an isolated island on the sea far away from China, it has long since been a hideout of pirates, escaped convicts, deserters and ruffians, therefore, there is nothing to gain from retaining it,” said one report to the emperor. “On the other hand, the Penghu islands, being an important military strongpoint, need to be retained and used as a front base in the eastern China Sea. As for the Han immigrants currently living on Taiwan, they should all be shipped back to their homes in China.”
Shih Lang fought a lone battle arguing for incorporation of the island into the empire. “Taiwan is a natural shield for the four southeastern provinces of China, namely Guangxi, Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong,” he wrote. “It is not only abundant in fertile soil, but also in farm products and natural resources. Even if Taiwan is to be abandoned, the policy of shipping immigrants back home is impracticable, for immigrants would flee to the mountains [of Taiwan] grouping with aborigines and escaped convicts from the Mainland, and attack the coastal regions of China. This will cause trouble in the future. Furthermore, the Dutch may try to occupy Taiwan again and the safety of Penghu Islands will be jeopardized.””
“In 1839 Chinese imperial officials in Guangzhou lost patience with the British and had several thousand tons of the Indian opium seized and thrown into the harbor. These were the days before the telegraph, and it took about a year to send a message to London and receive an answer. The task of protecting British interests was left by force of circumstance to the officers and diplomats on the spot. The British Empire was acquired not in “a fit of absence of mind,” as historian J. R. Seeley wrote in 1883, but in an absence of communication when freebooter adventurers on the colonial frontiers were beyond the control of policymakers in London. Naval officers of the Asian fleet in cahoots with outraged British merchants fought and won the so-called First Opium War against China before London knew much about it. To give the merchants a secure base for their trading, Britain took as its prize the island of Hong Kong under the August 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, much to the disgust of the British government, which felt it had acquired a “barren rock.””
“The number of European and American merchant ships badgering to get into the China trade by fair means or foul in this period grew dramatically in response to the evident weakness of imperial rule in Beijing. More shipping meant more wrecks, especially during typhoons and on the forbidding east coast of Taiwan, which bordered the sailing lanes to America and Japan. Accounts from the period speak of shipwrecked crews meeting more cruel and brutal fates at the hands of the indigenous tribes or even the Chinese on the island than would have been inflicted on them by the sea. A particular affront to the certainty of European ethnic superiority – which included Americans at the time – were reports of shipwrecked sailors and officers being kept and bought and sold as slaves by both the Chinese and indigenous Taiwanese.”
The 19th Century
“Shen Pao-chen had, after the Japanese invasion, recommended that greater attention be paid to Taiwan. He continued making his arguments for a decade, and in the aftermath of the French incursion his words began to gather a sympathetic response in Beijing. In 1887 Taiwan was separated from Fujian and made a province in its own right, with Liu Ming-chuan as its first governor.
The appointment gave Liu, for most practical purposes, his own principality. The sea was wide. The mountains were high. The emperor and the numbing hand of the Beijing court were far away. Liu was now free to try to put into effect the ideas of a modernized Confucian state he had marshaled during his years of scholarly exile on his Anhui estate. He began by making an imperial progression through his domain to see for himself the state of affairs on Taiwan, to meet and measure the leaders of the island’s clans and families, and to show himself to his subjects. Then, like many reformers before and since, he let everyone know that a new era had dawned with a whirlwind of name changes.
Liu had decided during his months of campaigning against the French that the island’s capital was in the wrong place. Since the days of the Dutch the island’s administrative capital had been in the far south at Fort Zeelandia, renamed Tung-tu by Koxinga and, in Liu’s day, known as Taiwanfu. This made sense in the centuries when the main route to the island for trade or invasion was across the stepping-stones of the Penghu Islands from Xiamen in Fujian or up the Taiwan Strait from Southeast Asia. The emergence of Japan as a regional power together with increasing trans-Pacific trade and the development of the treaty ports such as Shanghai on China’s east coast required a change in the center of defensive and administrative gravity on Taiwan.
For a while Liu contemplated moving the capital to present-day Taichung, close to the center of Taiwan’s western plains. A town site was laid out with streets on a grid system, walls and gates were built, and the imperial office buildings, the yamen, were constructed. The new capital was even garrisoned for a while. The cost overruns were huge, however. Liu felt forced to abandon the project after it had cost a quarter of a million taels of silver and there was no end in sight. He decided it would be more economic to adopt and expand the existing small city and commercial center of Taipei, midway between the two ports of Tamsui and Keelung. Taiwan became the name of the whole island and, to avoid confusion, the southern city was renamed Tainan. The prefecture around the city was called Anping.”
“Liu, the modern Confucian, was determined to jerk the island into the nineteenth century by building the most modern means of transportation, railways, an innovation as yet unknown on the mainland, let alone on Taiwan.
Liu’s plans for railways on Taiwan first had to overcome skepticism in Beijing. He did this by pointing out that the moving of the capital to the interior at Taipei necessitated a swift and reliable means of transportation. Beijing’s agreement was grudging, but Liu got the approval he wanted. More difficult to surmount was the strong devotion among islanders to feng shui, the belief that the will of Heaven and its implications for humankind can be divined from the Earth’s physical features and phenomena. Under these concepts, any disruption of the Earth by humans, from the siting of a house to the placing of a grave, has an effect on the good fortune of the people involved. These notions of harmony extend to the positioning of furniture within the home and sometimes to convictions that can astonish non-Chinese. At Repulse Bay on the south coast of Hong Kong’s Victoria Island is a large, upmarket block of apartments some 30 stories high and built in the early 1990s. But in the middle of the block, which looks out over the South China Sea, is a large hole in the building some four stories high and three apartments wide. This is so that the dragon that lives in the hill behind the building can fly out unimpeded on his regular sorties over the sea.”
“In Shintoism all dead ancestors become gods.”
“The soldier’s officers were open to bribes from landholders unhappy at finding themselves in the railways path. For the right payoff the officers would change the route of the track with never a thought to the demands of engineering. The officers took the moneymaking opportunities of this concept one step further and found they could do excellent business by diverting the intended line of the railway toward the land or family graves of a rich landlord. The landlord could then be induced to pay for the line to turn away in another direction. This led to some alarming twists and turns on the intended path of the railway. As the soldiers had no concept of what it was they were building – that the sweep of curves and slope of gradients are critically important in railway construction – but thought of the enterprise as simply a better kind of footpath, there was much frustration among the foreign engineers.”
“Liu showed unusual tolerance for the criticism that was leveled at him. He was the constant target of satirical poems on wall posters, but he took no notice. Some dissenters were not content to just paste up acid rhymes. On one occasion, when Liu threw a party to mark his mother’s birthday, protestors gathered at the gate of his house and gave guests handbills on which was written a poem decrying the extravagance. But more than any other governor of Taiwan before and most of them since, Liu understood the benefit of allowing Taiwanese to vent their strongly held views.
Liu’s tolerance of dissent and his vigorous pursuit of modernization on Taiwan caught the attention of many devotees of the self-strengthening movement among the literati-gentry on the mainland. There was a steady trickle of such intellectuals to the hospitable atmosphere of Taiwan and away from the stultifying and often dangerous attitudes toward free thinkers on the mainland. This intellectual accumulation was to become significant a few years later when it provided the impetus for the short-lived Taiwan Republic.
During the six years of Liu Ming-chuan’s tenure there were no serious outbreaks of violent unrest among the island’s Chinese colonists, one of the few periods in Taiwanese history of which that can be said.”
“Lin Chaosung led a contingent of his family militia on this campaign. The tribal warriors became adept at silently and invisibly surrounding Chinese detachments in the mountain forests and then rushing out to fight at close quarters where the advantage of the Chinese firearms was minimized. In one such maneuver Lin and his men were besieged on a mountaintop for ten days. They managed to get word of their predicament out to the family enclave at Wu-feng, where Ch’ao-tung’s feisty wife levied fresh troops. She led the mission herself, broke the siege, and rescued her husband. The dashing young woman, wearing a white dress and galloping through the hills on a white stallion to save her threatened lover, has, understandably, become an indelible image in the island’s story.”
“One of the notions behind declaring self-rule for Taiwan was that one or more of the European powers would come to the beleaguered little island’s aid against Japan if it was seen as a small and vulnerable independent state. In a foretaste of frustrations to come in the twentieth century, not one of the major powers ever recognized the Taiwan Republic.”
Japanese Occupation
“The Taiwan Republic was formally declared in Taipei. The declaration said:
The Japanese have insulted China by annexing our territory of Taiwan. The People of Taiwan, in vain, have appealed to the Throne. Now the Japanese are about to arrive.
If we, the People of Taiwan, permit them to land, Taiwan will become a land of savages and barbarians. If, on the other hand, we resist, our state of weakness will not be for long, as foreign powers have assured us that Taiwan must establish its independence before they will assist us.
Therefore, we, the People of Taiwan, are determined to die rather than be subdued by the Japanese. This decision is irrevocable.”
“Taiwan was never fully pacified from the day the Japanese arrived in 1895 until well into the twentieth century. Japanese records from its period of colonial rule of Taiwan show a persistent insurrection for which the authorities frequently used the euphemism “banditry.” Between 1895 and 1920 at least 8,200 Taiwanese were arrested each year for alleged attempts to overthrow Japanese rule. The numbers began to decline as many Taiwanese benefited from the administrative, social, agricultural, and industrial advances promoted by the Japanese. Even so, between 1921 and 1930 never fewer than 6,500 people were detained for insurrection in any year. From 1931 to 1940 the number declined further but was still never less than 3,450. There were 19 major uprisings during the period of Japanese rule, including 2 attempts to take the capital, Taipei. In the first seven years of Japanese administration there were 94 guerrilla attacks by Taiwanese. The Japanese lost many more soldiers to partisan attacks in the first few months after their mission to occupy Taiwan was accomplished than they did during the invasion and the quelling of the Taiwan Republic. The Taiwanese guerrillas suffered similarly. At least 12,000 died in the guerrilla war, about double the number thought to have been killed during the five months of resistance to the arrival of the Japanese.
The quiet subversion that developed throughout the period of Japanese occupation was ultimately more significant for the political development of Taiwan than the violent uprisings were. The subversion began as pressure for Taiwanese representation on various colonial institutions but grew into demands for island “home rule” within the Japanese empire. From there it was a short step to the evolution of the Taiwanese independence movement, which is a bequest from the island’s Japanese colonial period to modern times.”
“Taiwan’s individuality was at the heart of the concept for the society. There was never any idea of the organization urging a reunification with China. That was an extremely unattractive proposition at the time, with China in the throes of a contest between regional warlords. And the quarter century under Japanese rule had left the parents of many of the students with the view that as unpleasant as some of Tokyo’s actions on Taiwan were, life in general had improved and the rapacity of the Qing had been much worse.
The founding of the Taiwan Cultural Society and its influential publication, Taiwan Youth Magazine, thus marks the beginning of the island’s independence movement, now nearly a century old. In later years, when Taiwanese students and political refugees from Kuomintang persecution started going to North America and Europe in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, new branches and spinoff organizations of the Taiwan Cultural Society were formed. But the formative link with Japan remained and remains. Very many of the surviving elders of Taiwan’s independence movement today spring from the island’s student movements in Tokyo in the prewar years.”
“Ota approached the situation by using a tactic that has been deployed many times before and just as many since. He commissioned a survey of the feuds and rivalries among the tribes. Then he classified some as “allied tribes” and others as “protected tribes.” The villages and homes of the “protected tribes” were invaded and searched for any kind of weapons. Then military arms were issued to the “allied tribes” and Ota and his police looked the other way while thousands of the “protected” tribes’ men, women, and children were slaughtered.”
“The Japanese legacy on laiwan is as ambiguous and subject to partial interpretations as all other aspects of the island’s history. It remains pertinent today because so many Taiwanese of the older generation are inclined to view that period as, on balance, beneficial to the island. This judgment is in marked contrast to the abiding hatred of Japan in other colonial territories such as Korea and Manchuria. This is in part because Japanese, rule was a good deal more brutal in those territories than on Taiwan. But Beijing remains outraged that Taiwanese retain a mild affection toward Japan. It is seen as ethnic and spiritual corruption. This reaction certainly prompts some Taiwanese to espouse a gentler view of the Japanese colonial experience than they truly feel or is justified. Many island nationalists are willing to see merit in any stance that enrages Beijing.”
Chinese Occupation
“China has been beset with civil unrest since economic reforms began to bite in the mid-1980s. The end of collectivized agriculture, the smashing of the “iron rice bowl” of Communist centrally planned social support, and the asset stripping of privatized state-owned industries by corrupt party officials left some 250 million people out of work by the early twenty-first century. In 1989 the Tiananmen Square student demonstrators became the focus for nationwide dissent, and there were violent uprisings all over China. It took the institution of martial law to restore order. In the late 1990s, with hopes of quick political reform removed from the national agenda by the army, Falun Gong began attracting millions of disenchanted Chinese. The sect’s advocacy of seeking bodily and spiritual well-being through meditation and traditional stylized exercises was particularly attractive to middle-aged Chinese whose lives had centered on faith in the Communist Party. In April 1999 Falun Gong showed it was a national organization with a communications network beyond official control. Falun Gong mounted a demonstration of some 12,000 people outside the walled Zhongnanhai leaders compound in Beijing containing the main Communist Party offices and the homes of several leaders, without the security services getting any forewarning. It was especially troubling for the party that so many people were able to gather at the Zhongnanhai, originally the gardens of the imperial palace next door, when security was meant to be at its tightest because of the upcoming tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. The organization was banned and a sustained campaign of persecution begun. Communist leaders’ suspicion that Falun Gong was a direct threat to the party’s hold on power was compounded by the fact that the sect’s leader, Li Hong-zhi, lives in exile in New York.”
“Chen established a military administration staffed exclusively by mainlanders and his relatives. Then the systematic acquisition of all Japanese-owned assets and the looting of anything of value began. The looting proceeded at several levels. Ordinary Kuomintang soldiers were notoriously badly paid, if at all, and were expected to live by plunder. This they did with the thoroughness of locusts. But even as the Taiwanese were being robbed to the walls they couldn’t help but be amused at the antics of the ignorant mainland country boys. There are many stories from those days of soldiers stealing bicycles and then carrying them off on their backs because they didn’t know what a bicycle was or how to ride it. At the officer level the plunder was more grandiose. All Japanese military establishments were taken over by the Kuomintang army and navy, which then shipped all the stores to the mainland to be sold for great profits. Chen’s own coterie of administrators took control of all the industries, businesses, enterprises, and even the housing districts that had been Japanese. This amounted, according to some estimates, to 90 percent of the island’s economy. They all disappeared into monopolies and what Chen described as “necessary state socialism.” The industries and businesses quickly atrophied because the mainlanders put in charge were incompetent. But the Chen administration made large profits by sending stored goods to be sold in China and even dismantling and shipping out entire industrial production plants. The administration also ended up with a vast real estate empire of land that had been held by Japanese.”
“Not surprisingly the economy collapsed. Between November 1945 and January 1947 the consumer price index spiraled out of control. The price of food rose by over 21,000 points in that period and clothing by nearly 25,000 points. There were even greater increases in the prices of seed and fertilizer as well as scarcity of supply. As a result the rice crop in the early postwar years was only half what it had been in the 1930s and the general agricultural production fell to the level of 1910. The public health programs and regulations so assiduously followed by the Japanese were abandoned. The bubonic plague and cholera became endemic again. Malaria reappeared as a serious problem when stores of quinine medicines left by the Japanese were sold to the mainland and replacements sent by foreign donors were diverted to the same destination.”
“Any incident could have toppled the cauldron. In the event it was what happened to a widow, Lin Chiang-mai, who was selling cigarettes in a Taipei park on February 27, 1947, that transformed resentment into open rebellion. Lin was accosted by six agents from the Monopoly Commission who accused her of selling contraband cigarettes. They grabbed the woman and her money. She resisted, was hit on the head with a pistol butt, and called out to passersby for help. An angry crowd gathered quickly. One of the commission agents fired his pistol into the crowd to force an escape route and killed one man. The agents escaped, but the crowd went on a rampage and burned the commission truck.
The next morning several thousand people gathered at the park and marched to the Monopoly Commission offices with a petition demanding the prosecution of the agents. They found the bureau locked and guarded so the crowd turned to Chen Yi’s office. They arrived at about noon and were fired on by soldiers with a machine gun. Two people died and several others were wounded. News spread quickly and by late afternoon the streets were full of angry crowds. Two Monopoly Commission agents were caught and beaten to death. Within two days the uprising had spread to cities throughout the island.
Martial law was declared on the evening of February 28, and military patrols began roaring through Taipei firing from their vehicles at anyone they saw. This indiscriminate use of force revealed a real problem faced by Governor Chen. The demands of the civil war on the mainland had shrunk the forces available to Chen from 48,000 at their height to only 11,000 in March 1947. Chen played for time.
On March 1 a group of civic leaders led by the speaker of the Taiwan Provincial People’s Political Council, Huang Ch’ao-ch’in, went to see Chen and demanded that martial law be lifted. The governor agreed to do so, but even as the meeting was being held more and more troops were spreading through Taipei, gunning down anyone they saw. The next day Chen made a radio broadcast saying a generous restitution payment was being made to widow Lin to settle the February 27 incident and that he had agreed to form a joint settlement committee with civic leaders. While he was speaking there was one of the most serious clashes thus far, at the Taiwan Railway Administration building, in which over 120 people were killed by army machine gun fire.
On March 7 the settlement committee presented Chen with a list of 32 demands. It was a broad-based prescription for reform starting with an end to military rule and the establishment of Taiwan as an autonomous province of China. There were items dealing with the lack of Taiwanese people in the administration and requirements for free and fair elections. Some demands dealt with the independent and notoriously corrupt police forces attached to some government departments. Others urged the release of political prisoners. Still more addressed economic issues such as abuses of the tax system. An irate Chen rejected the demands and the committee retreated to soften its proposals.
The insurrection was continuing throughout the island, and many towns and cities were under the effective control of the local people. In Taipei the civic leaders of the settlement committee believed that despite Chen’s initial rejection, a reworking of the 32 demands could create a compromise that would restore order. What they didn’t know was that on March 5 Chen had sent a message to China asking for reinforcements. On March 8, 10,000 troops landed at Keelung in the north and another 3,000 at Kaohsiung in the south. The following morning the new forces began a campaign of indiscriminate shooting, raping, and bayoneting as they moved to reestablish Chen’s control over the island. By March 13 most of the insurgents in the towns and cities had been suppressed, but fighting continued in the mountain regions for at least another week.
Then the troops and Chen’s security operatives began a hunt for dissidents. About one thousand middle school students in their early teens were detained and close to one hundred arbitrarily executed. Lawyers, leading businessmen, and newspaper editors were rounded up. So were members of the settlement committee. Several of them were killed. The reaction to the popular uprising became an orgy of killing by government forces of anyone considered a leader of Taiwanese society. Many were tortured and mutilated before being killed and their bodies left in the streets as a warning to others. The Kuomintang’s own records say that at least 28,000 people were killed.”
“American officials began soon after the Two-Two-Eight Incident discussing ideas for resolving the island’s status. They picked up on the notion of a United Nations trusteeship and explored the idea of a referendum, with no one doubting it would lead to the islanders choosing independence. In January 1949 the National Security Council produced a draft report on Taiwan and its future. The report noted the implications of the Cairo Declaration and said America’s national interest was that the island be denied to the Communists. While that tended to argue that Taiwan should be left in Kuomintang hands, the report noted that U.S. policy “cannot leave out of account the Formosan people and their strong resentment of Chinese rule arising from Chinese maladministration and repression.”
By the autumn of 1949 various branches of the U.S. government had agreed on a plan to take the future of Taiwan to the United Nations. That scheme came to a halt with the Communist victory on the mainland in October 1949 and the flight of the Kuomintang to Taiwan. Washington was overcome by fatalism. It looked as though it would only be a matter of time before the Communists took Taiwan. With that likelihood Washington wanted to be able to deal with the winner. On January 5, 1950, President Truman announced America would have no further involvement in the Chinese civil war and would provide no more weapons or advice to the Kuomintang.
It was not only Chen Yi who made early arrangements to try to survive a Communist victory on the mainland. Chiang Kai-shek had thought about it too. Late in October 1948 an order was issued stopping the export of food and goods from Taiwan. Efforts began to be made to rebuild the island’s economy so it could serve as a haven for Chiang, his supporters, and remaining military when – no longer if – the Communists triumphed. Mainlanders and their assets – among them almost the entire contents of the National Palace Museum – began moving to Taiwan in large numbers. By the time Chiang formally moved the capital of the Republic of China to Taipei in December 1949 there were about two million mainlanders on the island, among them 600,000 surviving members of the Kuomintang army.”
“Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan in December 1949, insisting this was only a temporary setback. They would restore their strength while on the island and when they returned to the mainland the Chinese people, having suffered the “slavery” of communism, would rise up as one in joyous welcome.”
“An essential element in Taiwan’s economic reconstruction and its later emergence as one of the industrial “miracle” states of Asia was land reform. Taiwan in 1949 still had a largely feudal landholding system under which large tracts were owned by wealthy families, and most farmers were tenants paying rents worth from 50 percent of their crops to as high as 70 percent in the more fertile areas. These rents were often fixed to what a piece of land should theoretically produce and not the actual value of the crop in a bad year. Tackling land ownership was a task relatively free of political risk for the Kuomintang, much more so than earlier attempts on the mainland had been. Kuomintang party members did not own agricultural land and the native Taiwanese landowning class was without influence. The program started in 1949 with a required reduction of rents to a maximum of 37.5 percent of the crop value. In 1951 the government sold off all the farmland, but not the urban or industrial plots that had been seized from the Japanese. This amounted to about one-fifth of the island’s arable land. To forestall grabs by the rich, the land was sold off in lots of a suitable size to support a family of six. The cost was two and a half times the value of the land’s expected annual yield, and buyers, of which there were over 150,000, were allowed to pay the debt off over ten years from their crops. The final step in land reform was the 1953 law requiring landlords to sell to the government their holdings beyond what they could farm themselves. They were paid in land bonds and in shares in the major government-owned industries. The government then resold the land to family farmers under the same terms as the 1951 program.
The program was astonishingly successful. At least two million Taiwanese became landowners, farmers’ incomes doubled, and productivity had increased by 50 percent by 1963. It was the acquisition of equity through land ownership that prepared Taiwan for its light industrial revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Enterprising farmers who wanted to start factories had the land and collateral with which to go to the bank for backing.”
“The Kuomintang justification for the deplorably low representation of native Taiwanese in major institutions on the island was simple. These institutions represented the government of the Republic of China, of which Taiwan was only one province. It would have been wrong to have people from only one province overrepresented in national institutions.”
“While it remained a one-party military dictatorship, the United States and other allies would always have reason to abandon the island. A functioning democracy would attract more loyalty. Chiang took this path even though he knew it meant abandoning his father’s dreams of a victorious return to the mainland. Chiang Ching-kuo knew also that reform meant putting Taiwan’s future in the hands of the islanders, most of whom did not see the island as a province of China and who had no interest in any kind of unification with the mainland.”
“In October 1971, after many years of staving off the inevitable, Taiwan left the United Nations on the eve of being expelled when Beijing gained enough votes in the General Assembly to take over the China seat.”
“Unger was to tell the Taiwanese president that the United States would establish diplomatic relations with Beijing on January 1, 1979, and that recognition would be withdrawn from Taipei. More than that, the Carter administration would in 1979 abrogate the mutual defense treaty with Taiwan.”
“Carter’s statement that the deal with Beijing “will not jeopardize the wellbeing of the people of Taiwan” appeared to ring hollow. Attention focused on Carter’s abandonment of the mutual defense treaty with Taiwan and early in 1979 work began in Congress to fashion a replacement. The Taiwan Relations Act was approved by both houses of Congress on April 10. Support was bipartisan and over-whelming. The act passed by 339 votes to 50 in the House of Representatives and by 85 to 4 in the Senate.
The Taiwan Relations Act did two things. It attempted to assure that American support for the island’s defense would continue and that diplomatic links would be retained with Taiwan at a high though superficially informal level. Congress required the United States to make available to Taiwan defensive weapons in quality and quantities “necessary to enable Taiwan to maintain sufficient self-defense capabilities.” What was necessary and appropriate was to be decided jointly by the administration and Congress. This is significant. What aid should or should not be given to Taiwan is not to be decided at the whim of the president, who, like Jimmy Carter, might have scant regard for the island and its people. The president was required to inform Congress promptly of any threat from China to Taiwan. Should that happen, the United States would take “appropriate action” to protect Taiwan’s independence. To maintain diplomatic relations with Taipei, the act mandated the establishment of the American Institute in Taiwan, which functions as an embassy in all but name.”
“When the Kuomintang ruled Taiwan as a colonial elite managing a one-party military dictatorship, there was a degree of confidence in Beijing that unification would be ultimately achieved. The Communists and the Kuomintang hated each other, but it was the hatred of rival brothers. The two parties knew each other well and shared the same objectives. They were the opposite sides of the same Stalinist coin. Deng Xiaoping and Chiang Ching-kuo had, after all, been classmates in Moscow. They had learned the trade of governing from the same masters. And while the unreconstructed, mainlander-dominated Kuomintang remained in power on Taiwan, it was just as dedicated to the island’s unification with China as were the Communists in Beijing. The only question was the terms, not the intent. Indeed, the Kuomintang as one-party dictators reacted even more violently and repressively against Taiwanese independentists than they did against Communist infiltrators or fellow travelers.
Fundamental political change on Taiwan began in the late 1970s. Chiang Ching-kuo was forced, very reluctantly, to concede that the Kuomintang’s dream of regaining power on the mainland had become a fantasy. The events that forced home this message started with Taiwan’s withdrawal from the United Nations in 1971 – a few hours in advance of being expelled – and became fixed when the United States shifted diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing at the beginning of 1979. From that flowed the acceptance, as unappetizing as it was, that Taiwan was now the home of the exiled mainlanders. Colonial rule could not therefore be sustained, and the younger Chiang, egged on by Washington, began a slow process of reform. It started with native Taiwanese being appointed in increasing numbers to senior positions in the governing network, though for many years ultimate power remained with mainlanders. Pro-democracy demonstrations by native Taiwanese in the late 1970s, and especially the Kaohsiung Incident in 1979, gave impetus to the reform imperative. Before his death Chiang Ching-kuo lifted the ban on opposition parties in 1986, and martial law was ended in 1987. Just as important, in 1988 he chose as his successor Lee Teng-hui, the island’s first political leader to be native Taiwanese.”
“Lee Teng-hui’s accession to the presidency in 1988 was the moment when the chances of a negotiated union between Taiwan and Communist China shrank to near nothingness. It was the end of mainlander colonialism on the island and the beginning of a process, called “Taiwanization,” that affected all aspects of life. It was a slow process at first as native Taiwanese found their voice. But the realization that Taiwanese had finally achieved ascendancy in their own home soon infected the arts, the media, schools and universities, and even everyday discourse, where the local dialect, Minnan, began to supplant the Kuomintang-imposed Mandarin.
Lee’s revolution was most evident in politics. He accelerated the reform process and established a timetable for full democracy. In 1991 he reconstructed the Legislative Yuan, which had become an extraordinary and laughable anachronism. The Chiangs, father and son, had insisted that this body was the true parliament for the whole of China. So it was made up of members elected on the mainland in 1947. When elections and other aspects of democracy were suspended on Taiwan under martial law, the original parliamentarians stayed office until, after several decades, death inevitably took its toll. When this happened, other people from among the mainland exiles and from the same regions of China were appointed to fill their places. If suitable people from the right districts of China could not be found, legislators were appointed from among the Chinese diaspora in North America, Europe, or Southeast Asia. In December 1991 Lee forced the remaining mainland members of the Legislative Yuan to resign, including the then prime minister. New elections were held for Taiwan constituencies only.”
“Lee Teng-hui won the election with 54 percent of the vote in a close contest with the DPP’s Peng Ming-min, and became the first freely elected leader of a predominantly Chinese community in China’s entire four thousand-year history.”
“Polls indicate that Chen’s identity project was a success. When he won the presidency in 2000 only 30 percent of the island’s population identified themselves primarily as Taiwanese. After his eight years in power 70 percent said they were Taiwanese, with most of the rest saying they were both Taiwanese and Chinese, and a small minority – the living remnants of Chiang’s followers – giving their identity as only Chinese.”
