,

Taiwan"'s History
An Introduction
Andrew D. Morris

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION

Nothing happens that is not at least in part a result of what has gone be-
fore, and so we start this volume with a brief account of Taiwan by historian
Andrew D. Morris.
This chapter is not the whole story. That would take many volumes. It is
not the only perspective. There are many voices that deserve to be heard. It is
not final. Much is yet to be discovered about the past just as about the pres-
ent. But it can serve as an orientation to the subject and as a background to
the other chapters in this volume.
Briefly, Taiwan is located off the coast of southeastern China, between
the Philippines and Japan. Taiwan has the highest mountains east of Tibet,
with a water runoff that could power all of Asia if it were used to power gen-
erators on a rainy day. Most people live in the small areas that are compara-
tively flat-principally the western plain formed over the millennia by mud
washed down from the mountains.
The island's aboriginal Austronesian population is closely related to the
peoples of the Philippines. About four hundred years ago, increasing num-
bers of Chinese began moving across the Taiwan Strait from Fujian Province
and settling in Taiwan. Their origins varied slightly, and their squabbling over
land rights and other issues in Taiwan often led them to seek alliances with
people from the same places of origin to conduct petty local wars with other
settlers, as the earlier non-Chinese population took refuge in ever-higher
mountainous areas.

3
 The dawn of centralized Qing administration of the island came in 1683,
and in 1885 it was granted provincial status under the Qing dynasty. The two
centuries between those dates were characterized by increasing population,
settled farming, frequent plagues, occasional uprisings, and almost constant
feuding and petty wars among ethnic groups and local interests. The whole
island was a wild and woolly frontier, and no magistrate was enthusiastic
about representing the imperial government in this remote and unruly re-
gion. Today every part of the island can produce accounts-not always true
but always interesting-of the tragedy of its plagues or the nobility of its lo-
cal militia or the intervention of its local gods during the imperial period.
In 1895, less than ten years after it was made a province, Taiwan was
abruptly ceded by the Qing emperor to Meiji japan. For the japanese, this in-
troduced the sudden responsibility to administer a subject population. For
the Taiwanese, it was more than a change of government. It meant subjuga-
tion to a new and inexperienced colonial administration, speaking a foreign
language, the imposition of foreign ways, and japan's determination to con-
vert the whole populace from being Chinese to japanese.
The colonial record of japan in Taiwan is mixed. In retrospect, and with
our current distaste for colonialism, it is easy to be critical. It is also easy to
forget that the political situation in japan between 1895 and the end of
World War II was rapidly evolving, and so colonial policy toward Taiwan also
varied. Quite possibly, no two japanese ever agreed on what the empire's
"steady-state" relationship with Taiwan should be. But for better and for
worse, japanese possession of Taiwan-for an even fifty years-comprises
part of the island's history and part of its identity. Industrial and commercial
development during this period clearly provided the basis for the prosperity
that was to follow.
Events in the rest of China were not static during those fifty years.
Rebels threatened the imperial government at the end of the nineteenth
century in the famous and bloody Boxer Rebellion, suppressed only with the
help of European powers in 1900. Taiwan was untouched by this uprising be-
cause it was under japanese administration.
In 1911 the dynasty was overthrown and in 1912 a new Republic of China
was established, headed by the Nationalist Party, also known as the KMT
(Kuomintang) or GMD (Guomindang). But the KMT government was so
weak that some areas it claimed to control never in fact passed under its ef-
fective administration. The revolution was not without bloodshed, and local
warlords ravaged the countryside in some areas. Taiwan again escaped the
turmoil, for it was part of japan.
In 1937, japan-increasingly falling under the control of extremist mili-
taryfactions-invaded China, seizing much ofthe Eastern part ofthe country
and imposing a brutal administration that lasted until the end of World War
II in 1945. Taiwan, already long under japanese administration, was once
again sheltered from the suffering inflicted upon the mainland. In 1945, with

4 ANDREW D. MORRIS
the defeat of japan by the allied forces, Taiwan was turned over to the Re-
public of China, a government unknown to the people of Taiwan-and one
scornful and suspicious of them as "japanese collaborators."
From 1945 to 1949, the government of the republic was engaged in a vi-
cious civil war with forces of the Communist Party. The Communists pre-
vailed and established a new People's Republic of China. The government of
the Republic of China lost control of all of China-all, that is, except Taiwan,
the island it had so recently acquired and so scorned. The organs of govern-
ment were hastily moved to Taibei, in northern Taiwan, which was identified
as the "provisional capital" of the Republic of China during the "temporary
period" of Communist rebellion.
With the chaos and change of regime on the mainland, there arrived in
Taiwan about a million refugees: soldiers, teachers, merchants, bureaucrats,
policemen, the good, the bad, the vicious, and the innocent, thrown in con-
fusion upon the unwilling hospitality of a population that had not long be-
fore been briefly granted japanese citizenship.
In this chapter, Morris recounts all these events and the remarkable
challenges, contradictions, tribulations, heroism, and sometimes comic
ironies that were involved.
In the midst ofthe civil war on the mainland, on February 28, 1947, ten-
sions in Taiwan boiled over in a riot which, within days, led to a government-
sponsored massacre. The die was now cast for an enduring Taiwanese hostil-
ity to mainland immigrants and "their" KMT government. The date 2/28, or
"228," was destined to live forever in the Taiwanese imagination as the form-
ative moment in the emergence of a post-japanese identity of Taiwanese as
not really being Chinese after all. For if Chinese could do what the KMT did
on 228, Taiwan wanted no part of it.
A state of martial law prevailed on the island until 1987. It is easy to
imagine the period of martial law as darker than it was. Babies still giggled,
children still laughed, and the sun continued to shine. Economic progress
was so rapid that even severe critics conceded that it was almost a miracle.
But criticism of the KMT or of the goal of retaking the mainland for the Re-
public of China was not tolerated. When martial law was lifted, a new era of
openness and of open criticism of KMT abuses dawned. Taiwan, with a popu-
lation now over 22 million-more than three times what it was in 1945-had
at last became a democratic state.
Today the distinction between "Taiwanese" and "mainland immigrants"
has been much muted with the passing of half a century since the fall of the
KMT on the mainland. But many aspects of life are affected by the history of
mainlander-Taiwanese relations. Meanwhile, the Communist government on
the mainland has continued to insist that, as the successor to the RepUblic of
China on the mainland, it is the only legal and legitimate government of Tai-
wan. The mainland, with nearly sixty times the population of Taiwan, has eas-
ily persuaded nearly all the nations of the world to conform, at least nomi-

Taiwan's History 5
 nally, to this view. Recognition of the government of the Republic of China-
Taiwan's current democratic government-brings the withdrawal of diplo-
matic relations from China. Few countries support Taiwan's claims to its legit-
imate independence under that threat.
Thus Taiwan today faces two dominant and inescapable dilemmas that
are reflected through its cultural institutions. One is the question of how
united its population is. Are the people of Taiwan all really Taiwanese, or are
they all different, as history would seem to indicate? The other is the ques-
tion of whether in the future (perhaps next week) Taiwan will abruptly be-
come a province of the Communist state across the straits-once again a part
of China. Within these ambiguities and under this threat, the people of the
island go about their daily affairs, making themselves a remarkable font of
creativity and cultural innovation.
The essays in this volume all relate in one way or another to this anxious
situation, for it is the overwhelming reality of life in Taiwan today. In this in-
troductory chapter, Morris provides the critical background that is so ready
and real in all that Taiwanese do in daily life.•

Long, long ago

For generations on this piece of land
Where no wealth or prosperity grows
Where no miracles are ever produced
My ancestors wiped away their sweat
And brought forth their fated children.
Wu Sheng, preface to Vignettes arMy Village

Land of the Eastern Barbarians l (Yizhou), Little Ryukyu (Lequeo Pequeno, Xiao
Liuqiu), Little Eastern Island (Xiao dong dao), Beautiful Island (Ilha Formosa),
Land of the High Mountain People (Gaoshanguo), gateway to Chinese com-
merce, place of banishment, solitary island, stone pointing at the south, first
Asian republic, colonial laboratory, the Orphan of Asia, rebel province, Free
China, unsinkable aircraft carrier, "Chinese Taipei," Republic of China on Tai-
wan, Austronesian homeland, and green silicon island-these are just some of
the terms that have been used to describe Taiwan over the last several centuries. 2
Clearly, the nationalist slogan of the 1980s and 1990S that Taiwan is "just
Taiwan" is far too simplistic to be true. At the same time, its absolute converse-
that Taiwan "has always been an inseparable part of the Chinese mainland"-is
several dimensions farther removed from reality. Over the last several centuries,
Taiwan has been home to or served as the subject of expansionist desires of far
too many peoples and nations-native Austronesian, Chinese, Dutch, Spanish,
Manchu, British, German, French, American, Japanese, and Taiwanese-for its
history to be summed up in either of these naive fashions. This introductory es-
sayan the history of Taiwan is meant to prOVide perspective on the diverse and
eventful history that the people of this island state have inherited and made.

6 ANDREW D. MORRIS
THESETIING

Taiwan is a mountainous island 245 miles (394 km) long by 90 miles (144 km) at
its widest. It is shaped from north to south, depending on the taste of the be-
holder, like a tobacco leaf or a sweet potato-or even a whale. The island, the
southern third of which is below the Tropic of Cancer, is separated from the
coast of southeastern China by the deadly, rough, and shallow waters of the Tai-
wan Straits, some 81 to r37 miles (r30-22o km) wide. About 70 miles (II3 km)
east of Taiwan lies Yonaguni-jima, the southwesternmost of the Sakishima Is-
lands ofjapan, and some 50 miles (80 km) to the south across the Bashi Chan-
nellie the Batan Islands, the northernmost of the Philippine Islands. While Tai-
wan shares the continental shelf with China, it is part of the same island system
as japan.
With a total area of some 13,836 square miles (35,834 km 2), Taiwan is
slightly larger than Belgium or Maryland, half the size of Panama or West Vir-
ginia, or about one-twelfth the size of California. Its present population of 22.3
million makes Taiwan one of the most densely populated nations on earth.

EARLIEST INHABITANTS

Taiwan's original inhabitants-thought by some to have migrated from the In-

donesian and Philippine archipelagos and by others to have come from south-
eastern China-have been divided into fourteen groups of lowland peoples and
nine groups of mountain peoples (Stainton 1999b, 29-41; Wang 1980, 32). The
first settlements of these groups, speakers of the earliest known Austronesian
languages, date back at least fifteen thousand years. Their descendants today
number some four hundred thousand, about 2 percent of Taiwan's population.
They are known as aborigines (yuanzhumin), and they have suffered repeated
discrimination by various coloniZing powers in Taiwan.
The date of the earliest Chinese travel and migration to Taiwan is also the
subject of great political debate. For decades, Chinese Nationalists have used
vague references to the Land of Eastern Barbarians or the Ryukyu Islands in the
History ofthe Later Han dynasty (25-220 C.E.) or the History ofthe Three Kingdoms
(mid-third century C.E.) in an effort to prove that Taiwan has always been part of
a timeless Chinese "motherland" (Fang 1994,13-20). To assume, however, some
intimate China-Taiwan relationship through the millennia would be wrong.
jack Wills has more accurately shown that even in 1600, Taiwan still "was on
the outer edge of Chinese consciousness and activity" (Wills 1999, 85). Four
centuries ago there was no permanent Chinese settlement on (or name for) Tai-
wan, although by that time there were Chinese and japanese traders, fisher-
men, and pirates willing to brave the malarial fever that claimed the lives of so
many visitors there. In r603, the scholar Chen Di spent twenty-two days in Tai-
wan before publishing his Record ofthe Eastern Savages (Dongfan ji), marveling at
their backward ways: "To this day they have no calendrical system, nor any

Taiwan's History 7
 writing system and they do not feel the lack. Is that not strange?"3 (Teng 1999,
445-45 0 )
As would become a pattern in the island's history, Chinese interest and set-
tlement in Taiwan picked up onLy with the presence of other foreign powers in
the Taiwan Straits-in this case, the Dutch. Hoping to obtain a foothold in the
lucrative China trade, the Dutch failed to gain trading posts in southeastern
China. Ming dynasty officials pushed these pesky and dangerous traders farther
east to an island not considered imperial territory but known to early seven-
teenth-century Chinese officials as Taiyuan, Dayuan, Taiwan, or Dawan (Naka-
mura 1954, II4).4 The Dutch knew this island as IIha Formosa, as it had been
named by passing Portuguese sailors in the 1540S, and they set up their China
trading operations there.
When they arrived in southern Taiwan in 1622, Dutch East India Company
agents estimated populations of a thousand Chinese sojourners and traders and
some seventy thousand plains aborigines on the western Taiwan coast (Wills
1999, 87-88; Hauptman and Knapp 1977, 175). After several tough years fighting
Chinese and Japanese pirates and competitors, native and Chinese revolts on
Taiwan, and Spanish forces from Manila colonizing the northern tip of Taiwan,
in 1636 the Dutch colonial administration began farming land out to Chinese
sojourners in order to acqUire a more consistent food supply and regular tax rev-
enue. By 1650, some twenty-five thousand Chinese had come to the Dutch
colony to grow and sell rice, vegetables, sugarcane, and indigo, as well as to fish
and hunt, during the three years that Chinese law allowed them to reside
abroad. While some fled to Taiwan to escape the destruction of the Ming-Qing
dynastic transition, others set sail on Dutch ships to Taiwan, attracted by Dutch
promises of oxen, tools, and seeds for Chinese pioneer farm labor (van Veen
1996,65-67).
At its largest, the Dutch population in Taiwan was a mere twenty-eight
hundred, of whom some twenty-two hundred were soldiers. These vulnerable
numbers reqUired colonial forces to spend most of their income on fortifica-
tions, and their worst fears were realized in 1652. ]n an event later immortalized
as the first Chinese "anti-Western uprising" in history, some fifteen thousand
Chinese settlers armed with sharpened bamboo set out to "kill the Dutch dogs"
at Fort Zeelandia. The Dutch recruited some two thousand Austronesian na-
tives to aid in suppressing the revolt (Hsu I980a, IS; van Veen 1996, 65-67, 71).
But the Dutch days on the Beautiful Island were numbered. Their presence
on Taiwan forced the outgoing Ming dynasty and the new Manchu Qing to pay
more attention to the island. Only under the Qing in the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury was the name "Taiwan" officially adopted to refer to the whole island
(Nakamura 1954, II4). ]t was in the context of this new Chinese consciousness
of Taiwan that Zheng Chenggong (Koxmga) sought to make the island the base
of his movement to overthrow the newly founded Qing dynasty in the name of
restoring the vanqUished Ming.

8 ANDREW D. MORRIS
THE CHINESE/MANCHU PRESENCE ON TAIWAN

In 1661, after fighting Manchu Qing forces for more than a decade, Zheng's fleet
of two hundred ships and twenty-five thousand men set sail from the south-
eastern Chinese coast for Taiwan. By this time, the number of Chinese settled in
Taiwan had reached some fifty thousand. This large fifth column was twenty
times larger than the entire Dutch occupation force, and it made Zheng's con-
quest easy. Zheng thus established the first Chinese administration of Taiwan-
ironically, a regime formed in rebellion against China's ruling Qing. Zheng died
four months later, but the easily appropriated elements of the story of this son
of a Chinese pirate and a]apanese mother now dwarf the import of the twenty-
one-year rule of his descendants on Taiwan. Diverse modern political forces In
China and evenlapan have sanctified Zheng for delivering Taiwan into Chinese
hands for the first time-notwithstanding the myth that Taiwan had "always"
been part of China. (Also ironic is the fact that before his sudden death, Zheng
schemed to capture Luzon and the Philippines, suggesting a different goal than
some consecrated mission of capturing Taiwan for Chinese posterity.)
The state administered by Zheng's son and grandson sought to expand
land cultivation and transform the culture, economy, polity, and agriculture of
Taiwan according to Chinese models. The regime proVided thousands of sol-
diers with land and supplies, encouraged thousands more Chinese migrant
farmers to open up new falmland, and established Chinese schools and Con-
fucian temples in settler and native areas. These new migrants qUickly made
themselves at home, naming their new settlements after their hometowns in
Fujian and Guangdong Provinces (Lin 1975, 5). Taiwan's position as a commer-
cial center in maritime East Asia continued, as the Zheng regime pursued for-
eign policy according to trading needs. Formal relations were established with
Japan, the Ryukyuan Kingdom, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and even
England. The government was staffed largely with merchants from Fujian
Province in China, another reason why one Taiwanese historian defines Zheng-
era Thiwan simply as a "merchant nation" (shangren guojia) (Hsu 1980a, 25-27;
Weng I 995).
During the Zheng period, the Chinese population, concentrated in the
southwestern coastal plain, began to rival the numbers of Austronesian natives
on Taiwan, doubling to roughly a hundred thousand after twenty-one years. Yet
these numbers were of no aid when forces of the Manchu Qing dynasty, taking
advantage of a famine on Taiwan, attacked in 1683. KOxinga's son Zheng ling
had hoped to negotiate independence from the Qing, promising to remain a
loyal tributary state like Korea (Ren 1996, 85, 154). The Kangxi emperor, ruling
that no ethnic Chinese state could exist separately from the dynasty, rejected
this offer. This Kangxi Doctrine was formalized when the Qing navy took Tai-
wan by force. Qing conquest seems to have been inspired more by Manchu an-
noyance at this defiant Chinese island than by practical considerations. Imme-
diately after taking this peripheral territory, Qing naval commander Shi Lang
attempted to sell the island back to the Dutch, and other high Qing officials

Taiwan's History 9
 planned to abandon and evacuate it altogether (Wills 1999, I02; Shepherd 1999,
108). Finally-for reasons not of Chinese historical destiny but of the very prac-
tical wish to keep the island out of the hands of pesky foreigners-Taiwan was
integrated into the empire in 1684 as a prefecture of FUjian Province.
Once the Qing made the decision to undertake formal administration of
Taiwan, Shi's forces moved quickly to consolidate rule and assure Chinese and
native populations of the new government's benevolent intentions. Yet Qing
officials were perhaps more nervous about this new frontier possession than
were its inhabitants; they feared that rebellions could erupt on this far-off
island, led by Chinese immigrant farmers incited by pirates and Ming remnants
or by native Austronesians frustrated and displaced by growing Chinese immi-
gration. These concerns guided the first century of Qing administration in Tai-
wan, marked by regulation of Chinese immigration to the island and cautious
respect for the natives' positions in the mountainous eastern half of the island.
Admiral Shi Lang qUickly moved to send back to the mainland any so-
journers in Taiwan with neither wife nor property (and thus seen as less ac-
countable), and it is estimated that as much as half of the Chinese population
departed by the end of 1684 (Shepherd 1993, 106). The Qing soon prohibited
family migration to Taiwan, hoping that any population there would consist of
seasonal migrant laborers only. This "agricultural colony" of Fujian Province
(DeGlopper Ig80, 143) had to be maintained by someone. Yet the promise that
this "island frontier" (Shepherd 1999) offered Chinese pioneer farmers, com-
bined with the grOWing population pressures in southeastern China, made it
hard for the Qing to maintain tight immigration controls for long. Immigration
continued, and in a few decades Taiwan became the rugged, disordered frontier
that the Qing so feared. For the next ISO years, these young rootless men would
make up as much as 30 percent of the Chinese population in Taiwan (Chen
1990, III).
There was a popular pioneer proverb that expressed the unlikely hopes of
fulfilling the domestic Taiwan dream: "Having a Wife is better than having a
god/'S Far away from their homes and without family ties, these Chinese men
turned to other forms of mutual support in religious societies and sworn
brotherhoods among men of the same ancestral places and dialects (Hsu
198ob, 88-go). Yet, as was true throughout so much of Chinese history, there
was an infinitesimally thin line between these societies' functions of mutual
support and the mutual competition that emerged between these same
groups. Disputes between these organizations on the rough frontier could eas-
ily erupt into violent communal strife (fen lei xiedou)-often between the three
main settler groups, Hoklos from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou Prefectures in Fu-
jian and the Hakkas from northeastern Guangdong-or into popular upriS-
ings against the Qing state.
Qing officials annoyed by this malarial frontier joked, with black humor,
that Taiwan produced "a minor revolt every three years, a major one every five
years." This was no exaggeration. During the 212 years of Qing rule in Taiwan,
171 "disturbances among the people" (minbian) were recorded-including 68

to ANDREW D. MORRIS
anti-Qing revolts and 38 battles fought between migrants from rival home pre-
fectures on the mainland (Chen 1987, II-I2; Hsu I980b, 94; Lamley 1981).6
Maintenance of a peaceful frontier became one of the dynasty's main ob-
jectives. For lack of an imperial military presence to handle such matters prop-
erly, rebellions were typically put down by hiring Austronesian natives or rival
settler groups to fight the rebels. During the 1721 Zhu Yigui Revolt, led by a pre-
cocious duck breeder committed to restoring the Ming dynasty, the Qing mili-
tary paid native Austronesian warriors a piece rate for every rebel they could kill
(Shepherd 1993, 147). The Qing also took more Confucian long-term measures
to prevent the rebellions in the first place, providing generous scholarships to
encourage more Taiwan residents to seek advancement via the imperial exam
system rather than through rebellion and forgiving farmers their land taxes
during droughts (209-213, 289).
Qing officials were also concerned about the Austronesian native popula-
tion, which they divided into two groups: the plains "cooked savages" (shufan,
literally "cooked," meaning matured by their exposure to the radiance of Chi-
nese/Manchu culture), who were seen as more trustworthy than the exotic "raw
savages" (shengfan) of the mountains. Qing officials feared, justifiably, an abo-
riginal "blowback"-that Chinese settlement in Taiwan could, by destroying
Austronesian ways of life, force these aboriginal people to strike back against the
settlers and the state. Accordingly, the first cenhlIY of Qing rule in Taiwan was
marked by coherent policies of protecting Austronesian land rights in the east-
ern half of Taiwan while hoping to acculturate these aboriginal peoples
through the Confucian exam system and the spread of Chinese farming tech-
niques (Shepherd 1993).
This level of attention to the remote Taiwan frontier was not maintained
indefinitely, however. When the pressures of great population growth,? offi-
cial corruption, and domestic unrest began to plague the proud Qing dynasty
in the late I700S, the administration of Taiwan was downgraded from an an-
noying but necessary responsibility to a nonpriority. For nearly a century,
from the 1780s until the I870S, Qing officials seemed in many ways to shut
their eyes, hold their noses, cross their fingers, and hope that the officials
judged to be "unfitted for responsible and administrative work" and corrupt
troops stationed on this far-off island would be sufficient to maintain peace
and regular rice shipments to FUjian (Davidson 1903, roo; Goddard 1966, 129).
This proved not to be the case, but thiS failure is not what revived the Qing
commitment to Taiwan. As was true with the faltering Ming court more than
two centuries before, it took a germinating imperialist interest-this time Japan-
ese, British, French, American, and German-in the island to convince the Qing
dynasty to renew its imperial title. In the r850s-18705, Qing sovereignty over Tai-
wan was openly challenged by American, British, Japanese, and German mer-
chants and governments in several humiliating incidents, especially with respect
to the Austronesian-populated eastern half of the island that the Qj.ng admitted
was "not yet entered in the maps" (wei ji shouru bantu) (Carrington 1977. 55-ro6i
Chan 1973, I35-r63i Gardella 1999, I67i Gordon 1976, 550-554; Huang 1986,

Taiwan's History 11
 240-244; LeGendre r874, 5). Domestic rebellions every few years were one thing,
but repeated foreign incursions in Taiwan were another. In 1874 the Qingbegan
considering how to strengthen their own claims to the island in order to halt
these imperialist plans.
For the next two decades, and especially after a French invasion of Taiwan
in 1884, the Qing sought to integrate Taiwan back into the empire after nearly a
century of utter neglect (and to teach the foreigners a thing or two) by turning
the island into a "foundation of national wealth and power" (Kuo 1973, 237).
Upgraded in 1885 from a prefecture of Fujian Province to a province in its own
right, Taiwan became the object of several modernizing reforms in military, in-
dustrial, educational, commercial, political, communications, and administra-
tive spheres, particularly in the north. These reforms were as progressive as any
in the empire, but the sudden influx of scholars and businessmen from the
well-to-do central coast of China into the new capital at Taibei alienated many
of the settlers who had done so much of the grunt work in recently reclaiming
this northern part of the frontier (Chen 1956, 7; Lamley 1977, 201; Morris 2002,
5-8). This period also saw the abrupt reintegration of Taiwan into the world
marketplace, as Taiwan's economy and society were qUickly reordered to pro-
vide for the efficient export of tea (Taiwan's "green gold"), camphor and sugar,
accompanied by the import of foreign cotton, wool, and opium (Gardella 1999,
171-176).
Yet even this work to establish a Qing dynasty presence over every inch of
Taiwan could not prevent the interest of the eager imperialists of the Japanese
military, who hoped to protect their nation from European and American ex-
pansion in Asia by expanding their influence in the same fashion as these West-
ern powers. Many in China sensed this looming threat and made attempts to
keep Taiwan out ofJapanese hands. In 1894, Yung Wing, famed as the first Chi-
nese graduate of an American university (Yale, 1854), proposed instead leasing
Taiwan to a Western powel at the price of $400 million for ninety-nine years
(Yung 19 0 9, 244).
The reckoning finally came in r89S, when Japan defeated the Qing in the
Sino-Japanese War, started by theJapanese in 1894 over the weighty Chinese in-
fluence in Korea. In the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Japan demanded possession of
Taiwan, along with an indemnity of 200 million ounces of silver and various in-
dustrial privileges in China. Li Hongzhang, the unfortunate Qing envoy en-
trusted with the Japanese negotiations, sought to save the island by trying to
convince the Japanese of just how troublesome Taiwan could be, what with the
malaria, the BritiSh opium pushers, and the dangerous rebels who rose up from
time to time to kill officials. The strategy failed, however; his counterpart Ito Hi-
robumi merely answered, "We have not swallowed [Taiwan] yet and we are very
hungry" (NCHI89S).
Eventually, the decision to trade Taiwan for an end to the war became an
easy one for the Qing. The governor of Taiwan, Tang Jingsong, learned of the
cession two days later in a simple telegram, in which the imperial court re-
minded him that "Taiwan is certainly important to us, but obviously not as im-
portant as Beijing ... since Taiwan is all by itself out there in the ocean, we

12 ANDREW D. MORRIS
would not be able to help defend Taiwan anyway" (Lishi Jiaoxue 1954, 51). For-
saken by Beijing, the scholarly elite of Taibei formulated another strategy of
avoiding colonization by the Japanese: an independent Taiwan, which could
not be ceded legally by the Qing. These elites, with the reluctant cooperation of
Governor Tang, founded the Taiwan Republic (with Tang as president) and is-
sued the following statement: "The Qing court has not heard the mandate of
the people; in ceding Taiwan they totally ignored our anger. . . . The public is
full of grief and fury; a call for autonomy [zizhu] will arouse the people.... We
must unite the people and gentry of Taiwan and establish a Taiwan Republic
[Taiwan minzhuguo]. Together we will push forward a draft of a constitution,
taking the good points of the American and French models.... This will be
Asia's first republic" (Zheng 1981, 81).
In terms of international Jaw, the Taiwan Republic's advent 1endered
meaningless the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which ceded the island (Chen and
Reisman 1972, 633). Yet the legal status of Asia's first republic was no match for
the military might of Asia's first modern imperialist power. By the end of 1895,
any large-scale organized resistance was squashed, and the Japanese were able
to purchase with special privileges and honors the cooperation of gentry lead-
ers up and down the island in helping to suppress the local anti-Japanese guer-
rilla activities that would plague the new government for years (Lamley 1964,
215-225).
Many in Japan had supported the war with China as a way of prOVing
Japan's new imperialist mettle, in order that "Japan could no longer be regarded
as a mere Far Eastern park ... [but] should now be reckoned with as a definite
world power," but they had not seriously conSidered taking on any colonies in
the process. After Taiwan fell into their laps, some Japanese offiCials even sug-
gested the by now very unoriginal idea of selling the island to France for 100
million yen-an amount that would have been more than Japan's annual gov-
ernment expenditure (Chen 1977, 62, 71; Halliday 1975, 85). But for others in
Japan, the conquest of this "stone pointing toward the south" was a first step in
the "southern strategy" (nanshin) of establishing a Japanese presence through-
out Southeast Asia-and their view won out. Another deciding factor was the
"living space" argument. Many Japanese were overjoyed that their population,
constrained for so many centuries by Japan's mountainous terrain, could now
look to colonies like Taiwan (and soon Korea and Manchuria) as extra living
space for a surplusJapanese population, which could then exploit the resources
of the colonies to help feed the healthy, growing homeland (Peattie 1984, 89).
It was for these reasons that, in just days, Taiwan went from being a model
proVince of the Qing dynasty to Asia's first republic and then to the first colony
of Asia's newest imperialist power.

JAPANESE COLONY

After taking command of Taiwan, the Japanese lost no time in transforming it

and its people. This newest symbol of Japan's imperial power could not con-

Taiwan's History 13
 tinue to look the way it had under what the Japanese saw as the obsolescence
and decay of Chinese culture. This "laboratory," as Civil Administrator Gota
Shimpei saw Taiwan, would be the perfect site to test the most modern theories
of colonialism and showcase the brilliance of Japanese modernity. Two official
doctrines ofJapanese colonialism-"assimilation" (d6ka) and "equal treatment
under one [imperial] view" (isshi dojil1)-were representative of the enlight-
ened, humanitarian ethos promised under Japanese rule. Not everyone in Tai-
wan took these pronouncements to heart, however. Over the next several years
until 1902, the Japanese killed some twenty thousand "bandits" and "rebels"
leading attacks on occupyingJapanese forces (Lamley 1999,207).8
Besides force, theJapanese also used more constructive colonialist justifica-
tions to pacify Taiwanese hard feelings. The colonial administration portrayed
itself as a strong, strict, but benevolent force working for the betterment of Tai-
wan's people, even if the natives could not appreciate it. Under Gota's civil ad-
ministration, the Japanese continued the modernization projects begun under
the Qing dynasty, building modern roads and railroads, establishing intensive
and invasive police institutions, expanding postal and telegraph networks, in-
troducing modern banking and currency measures, founding modern hospitals
and public health services, standardizing weights and measures, entering Tai-
wan in the Greenwich time system, and even publicizing these advances
through the use of propagandist motion pictures. The Japanese undertook the
modernization of every aspect of agriculture in Taiwan, systematizing and ex-
panding production of sugar, rice, and camphor, developing improved breeds
of poultry and pigs, fruits and vegetables, and tea (Li 1995, 123-124; Williams
1980,229; Wu 1995).
Yet this colonialist modernization program was a mixed bag. Improving
the lives of Taiwanese farmers was clearly secondary to the obvious colonial
goal of ensuring richer and richer exports back to Japan. Nitobe lnaza, a Quaker
in charge of these agricultural modernizations, put it plainly: "Merely being
kind to [colonial subjects] is insufficient. Primitive peoples are motivated by
awe" (Peattie 1984, 88).9 Chief among Japan's "primitives" were Taiwan's Aus-
tronesian aboriginal population; Gota and Nitobe in fact used many American
policies of "civilizing," policing, and destroying Native Americans as a model
for their own aboriginal policies in Taiwan (Knapp and Hauptman r980 ).10
Japan's fifty-year administration of Taiwan came to be defined by this
model of the strict colonial overlord working in mysterious ways for the better-
ment of his native subjects. (Indeed, one important source of income used to
pay for these agricultural modernizations was the 12,420,000 yen that the
Japanese were able to earn from their official monopoly on opium sales in Tai-
wan from 1898 to 1907 [Ka 1995, 54-55]). The Japanese education system was
extended to Taiwan, but Taiwanese youth were rarely able to complete educa-
tion past the elementary level. Taiwanese were promised fair treatment as good
Japanese imperial subjects, but Tokyo's extraordinary (and unconstitutional)
"Law No. 63" gave the ordinances of the Japanese governor-general of Taiwan
the same status as the law of Japan, making him an independent lawmaker
unto himself until 1921 (Chen 1984, 251-252).

14 ANDREW D. MORRIS
 Taiwanese "natives" could be only second-class imperial subjects under
Japanese colonial rule-no surprise, given the government's attempts to master
the policies first employed by the British in India, the French in Algeria, or the
Germans in Alsace-Lorraine (Fraser 1988, 95; Peattie 1984, 88).11 But second-
class imperial subjects were still imperial subjects, and early in this colonial era
the Japanese set out to teach the Taiwanese people how to act as such. In 1903, it
became official policy to expand Japanese language use to Taiwanese subjects,
for the purpose of "assimilating" them into Japanese colonial society (Wu 1987,
7). Elementary schools, founded in 1896 for Taiwanese boys and girls (You 1988,
272), became ground zero for this experiment, as the new administration
sought to attract students away from the Chinese-style shufang private schools
by merely hiring their tutors to teach in Japanese schools. But this schooling
was typically available for children of the upper classes only; in 1915, only 9.6
percent of elementary-age children were enrolled in schools. As late as r919,
after twenty-four years of colonial administration, only some 1.51 percent of
the Taiwanese population of 3.54 million had been acculturated in Japanese
schools. Where the education system could not do the job, Taiwanese elites, ea-
ger to demonstrate their Japanese imperial morality, founded public societies
such as the Acculturation Society (Tongfeng Hui) or the Native Language Prohi-
bition Society (Tuyu Jinzhi Hui) in the decade before 1920 to extend Japanese
language education in their home cities (Tsurumi 1977, 13-44; Wu 1987, 8, 12).
The first decade of the 1900S saw the launch of several other movements to
transform Taiwanese into good (if second-class) imperial subjects by eradicating
what the Japanese saw as two of the "lowest customs" 0apanese roshuj Chinese
louxi) of Taiwan's ethnic Chinese population: the binding of women's feet and
men's wearing of the Manchu-style queue (or pigtail). In 1897, Japanese newspa-
pers in Taiwan reported, perhaps apocryphally, that several foot-bound Tai-
wanese women were killed in a typhoon because they were not able to leave
their homes (Wu 1995). A colonywide anti-footbinding movement had begun
in earnest by 1900, with elites all over Taiwan transforming their community
leadership along Japanese lines by forming local Natural Feet Societies (Tian-
ranzu Hui) and newspapers holding public speaking contests on the topic of
anti-footbinding (Wu r986, 73-80; Wu 1995).
In 19II the colonial government publicly started pressuring men to mod-
ernize their image, opining that the modern West would continue to laugh at
Taiwanese if their men were still wearing queues and scholars' robes in the
twentieth century (Wang r960, 14). Taiwanese community leaders, in organiza-
tions such as the Society for the Improvement of Folk Customs (Fengsu Gailiang
Hui), called the queue unnatural, inconvenient, uneconomical, and unhy-
gienic, and declared victory in 1915 when it estimated that only eighty thou-
sand queue wearers (or just 5.7 percent of the male population) still remained in
Taiwan (Wang 1960, 21-22).12
This acculturation campaign, part of what many Japanese saw as their "civ-
ilizing mission" (bunmei kaika) in Taiwan, also was the keystone of]apanese im-
perial rhetoric that separated their benevolent colonial project from the proven
violence of Western colonialism (Ching 2001,103; Ka 1995,59). An important

Taiwan's History 15
 side effect of such an ideology, however, was the production of Taiwanese colo­
nial subjects who demanded to be treated as equal subjects under the gaze of
the emperor. President Woodrow Wilson's thoughts on self-determination for
all the peoples of the world, voiced at the end of World War I, became a guiding
light for Taiwanese political activists, as well as for young thinkers in China, Ko­
rea, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines. In 1918, Taiwanese students and intel­
lectuals in Tokyo founded an EnUghtenment Society (Keihatsukai) in order to
work for Taiwanese equality within the Japanese Empire. Groups such as the
New People's Society (Shinminkai), the Taiwanese Cultural Association (Taiwan
Bunka Ky5kai), and a journal called Taiwan Youth (Taiwan seinen) soon followed.
These Taiwanese elites in Tokyo fought for a "self-determination" defined not
by Taiwanese independence but by the right to vote for their own representa­
tives to Japan's National Diet-and for the abolition of the hated Law No. 63,
which institutionalized discrimination in Taiwan (Kerr 1974, II9-I2S). The
League for the Establishment of a Formosan Parliament (Taiwan Gikai Kisei
Domei) even submitted fifteen official petitions between 1921 and 1934, re­
questing formal self-governance on the island (Fulda 2002, 366). The colonial
government by no means appreciated this literal but creative use of the Japan­
ese authorities' official ideology of "equal treatment." Movement leaders were
threatened and harassed, had business licenses revoked and loans recalled, and,
during the crackdown following the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, were arrested and
imprisoned as "agitators."
The issue of Taiwanese status within the empire was a compelling one in a
maturingJapanese Empire, as the 1920S saw a growingjapanese understanding
of Taiwan as a genuine part of their nation. During this era of the "extension of
the homeland" (naichi enchin more and more japanese were educated, offi­
cially registered, and even buried in Taiwan. These developments worked to give
more gravity to the groWing intellectual movement for "local autonomy" (or
"home rule," chihO jitsu) (Kerr 1974,122). Furthermore,Japanese once opposed
to these notions also came to see this "reformist" movement calling for equality
under the emperor as infinitely preferable to more radical forms of anticolonial­
ism led by socialist study groups. An example of the latter was the Taiwanese
Communist Party, founded in r928 and dedicated to overthrowing Japanese
imperialism altogether and establishing an independent Taiwan Republic (Tai­
wan Gong-hueguo) (Hsiau 2000, 30-34; Hsiao and Sullivan 1983; Lu 1992,
SS-62).13
By the 1930S, Taiwan had been transformed into a relatively stable, peace­
ful, and prosperous Japanese colony.14 Thousands of college-educated Tai­
wanese, as one scholar described, "entered the ranks ofjapanese [intellectuals],
becoming almost indistinguishable from them."lS Taiwan had become a reli­
able "sugar bowl" and "rice basket," providing foodstuffs and light industrial
products for Japan's home islandsi one proud example of this transformation
was the 81 percent increase in land productivity achieved over the period
1901-1938 (Ka I99S, 6r). The calm could be disrupted, as with the 1930 Musha
(Chinese: Wushe) Rebellion, when Throko tribesmen killed 197 japanese as re-

16 ANDREW D. MORRIS
venge for the repeated sexual assaults carried out on local women by Japanese
police. Yet the official system of "local autonomy," ensuring more low-level offi­
cial control byJapanese colonists and Taiwanese elites, continued to evolve and
was extended gradually to more Cities and administrative districts during the
1920S and 1930S. In 1935, local elections were held, with suffrage extended to
the 3.3 percent ofthe population Uapanese or Taiwanese) who had paid taxes of
5 yen or over and who could write the name of their candidate (Wu 1996).
These expanded rights for Taiwanese as Japanese subjects would soon be
accompanied by additional responsibilities as Japanese as well, with the be­
ginning ofjapan's "total war" against China in 1937. The colonial regime began
to forcibly desinicize Taiwan's ethnic Chinese majority, to be replaced by pure
imperial Japanese culture in an intense Movement to Create Imperial Subjects
(Kominka Undo). During wartime, in order to mobilize true Japanese senti­
ments, use of the national language was pushed even harder. Chinese-language
sections of newspapers were eliminated, Taiwanese public servants were or­
dered to speak only Japanese, and Taiwanese language was forbidden on public
buses (Chou 1995,126; Wu 1987,69). Japanese-speaking Taiwanese families be­
came eligible for a 50 percent raise in salary (Wu 1995). In 1940, the govern­
ment even unveiled a public campaign to "sweep away non-Japanese speakers"
(kokugo hukaisha 0 issosu) (Chou 1995, 134).
That same year the colonial regime announced a name-changing (kai­
seimei) campaign, encouraging Taiwanese (not forcing, as in Korea) who spoke
Japanese and had the stuff of a good imperial subject to take Japanese names.
One applied through the local government for this privilege, and those whose
requests were approved had to follow several guidelines in choosing their new
name; for example, the use of Chinese place names was forbidden. Eventually
some 7 percent of Taiwanese people made thiS change-an especially signifi­
cant step, given the Chinese importance of the surname in connecting to one's
ancestors (Lamley 1999, 240; Wu 1995).
Any "un-Japanese" cultural institution could be suppressed during the
K6minka Movement. Taiwanese Buddhist temples were transformed into offi­
cial Shinto shrines, and traditional puppet theater was banned, as was the wear­
ing of traditional Chinese clothing in public (Lamley 1999, 241-242). The colo­
nial school system played a crucial role in this movement, and by 1944, 71.31
percent of Taiwan's school-age population was enrolled in elementary schools
learning Japanese ways (Hsiau 2000, 46). Yet the supreme measure of equality
as Japanese subjects was delivered in 1941 with the encouragement that Tai­
wanese men volunteer to serve-and "die beautifully," if need be-in the Impe­
ria1]apanese military. Indeed, Li Qiao, in his epic novel Wintry Night, describes
members of the Taiwan Youth Labor Corps in Miaoli in 1943, singing (2001,
1 85):

For Heaven we fight the unrighteous;

Soldiers loyal and true are we.

In glory we depart,

Taiwan's History 17
 Leaving the motherland,
Never to return unless victorious.
Bravely, we vow to fight to the death.
Banzai! Banzai!

For years, Taiwan elites had been requesting this "privilege" as part of their ap­
peal for equal treatment (Kondo 1996, 34-36). Between r94r and 1945, some
two hundred thousand Taiwanese volunteered or were drafted into the armed
services, with more than thirty thousand of these young men making the
supreme sacrifice for their emperor (Lin r996, 2r7-227).16
Pressures to conform and desires to be accepted aside, however, Japan's
war against China, the land of their ancestors, was clearly a difficult war for
most Taiwanese to support. I ? Taiwanese subjects learned their position in the
imperial order the hard way. Even though rice shipments to Japan decreased
during wartime because of the lack of available ships, the rice not sent to
Japan was stored rather than being distributed back to the Taiwanese popula­
tion. The adult rice ration in 1943 was 414 cc (less than a cup and a half) a
day-an amount justified by wartime pseudoscientists' "findings" on just
how little caloric intake humans actually needed to survive (Kerr r965, 38; Wu
r996). The men who gloriously volunteered for the military were also accom­
panied by at least twelve hundred young Taiwanese women who were de­
ceived or taken by force to war fronts in China, Indonesia, the Philippines,
Burma, Singapore, Borneo, or Okinawa to serve as sex slaves that the Japanese
military grotesquely called "comfort women" (Wang and Chian 1997). This
suffering and overall hypocrisy, characterized byJapanese novelist Ozaki Hot­
suki as bestOWing the honor "not to live as Japanese, but to die as Japanese"
(Ching 2000, 252), brought most Taiwanese to anticipate the defeat of the
Japanese military and a return of the island to Chinese rule after five decades
of colonialism.
Yet the question that remained for the Taiwanese was: Which Chinese rule?
Would Taiwan be restored to independence? Would it be incorporated into the
Republic of China (ROC) government on the mainland, the successor regime to
the Qing dynasty that ceded Taiwan fifty years earlier? No such questions trou­
bled the minds of the American, British, and Chinese Allied Powers, however,
which had resolved at Cairo (without consulting any actual Taiwanese people)
to award Taiwan to the ROC government led by Chiang Kai-shek Giang
Jieshi),1B
In 1945, at war's end, Taiwan had been heavily bombed in American air
strikes but largely spared from the hell of invasion suffered on other Japanese is­
lands, such as Okinawa. General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of
the Allied Command in the Pacific, authorized Taiwan's surrender to Generalis­
simo Chiang Kai-shek and his ROC government as a trustee on behalf of the Al­
lied Powers (Chen and Reisman 1972, 6n). This surrender itself implied nothing
about whether the ROC was the rightful "owner" of Taiwan. At the same time,
Vietnam was also surrendered to Chiang as a trustee on behalf of the Allied

18 ANDREW D. MORRIS
Powers; Manchuria and North Korea to Joseph Stalin as another such trustee;
South Korea to U.S. General John Hodge as another, and so on (Taiwan Docu­
ments Project 1945). It did begin decades of debate over the legal status of Tai­
wan-namely, over the right of the ROC to accept command in 1945 over an
island ceded to Japan by the defunct Qing dynasty in 1895.19 Yet these debates
could not change the fact that as of October 1945, Taiwan's half-century as "the
Orphan of Asia" was over, and now the island's people had a new master-the
government of the Republic of China.

RETROCESSION: 1945-1949

Elation was the typical Taiwanese reaction to the news that the Japanese colo­
nial authorities would be leaving their island. During the two months between
Japanese defeat and the arrival of ROC forces, Taiwanese elites worked to ensure
a smooth transition to Chinese rule. Several Taiwanese intellectuals approached
the Japanese about possible support for an independent Taiwan regime, but
they met with the stern opposition of the last Japanese governor of Taiwan,
Ando Likichi (Kondo 1996, 666; Ito 1993, 133).20 Meanwhile, most elites turned
their attention to the imminent arrival of Chinese forces, founding Preparatory
Committees to Welcome the National Government and fervently organizing
basic propaganda projects on behalf of their new Chinese rulers (Phillips 1999,
280).
This sense of appreciation would not last long, however, as Taiwanese
people soon learned their place under the ROC government, which was wholly
dominated by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Guomindang, also commonly
called KMT for Kuomintang). Due to the island's unique status as a former
Japanese colony, Chinese leaders decided to govern the new Taiwan Province in
quite a different way than the rest of the ROC. Taiwan came under joint party­
government.military administration, with Governor-General Chen Yi enjoy­
ing a very broad mixture of civilian and military powers shockingly reminiscent
of the early Japanese governors (Phillips 1999, 282). For haVing lived in relative
peace under the modernizing Japanese colonial regime for fifty years, Tai­
wanese people were dismissed as brainwashed "slaves" who did not deserve the
relatively modern conditions that they enjoyed (especially in comparison to
conditions in China after eight years of war againstJapan).
Perhaps not understanding the excitement most islanders felt about being
annexed by the ROC, the conquering regime immediately began working in
Taiwan toward two main goals that had little to do with the hopes of the re­
cently liberated Taiwanese. First was the project of replacing any Japanese or un­
orthodox customs with Chinese, in order to make the island safe for ROC rule.
Nothing bothered the Nationalists more than the fact, after eight years of awful
war against Japan, that their newest and richest province looked, acted, and
sounded Japanese!21 The new regime's second goal was to use Taiwan's relative
wealth-in 1939, Taiwan's per capita value of foreign trade was thirty-nine

Taiwan's History 19
 times that of China (Chen and Reisman 1972, 6n)-to win their new civil war
on the mainiand against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The implementation of these measures served qUickly to erase the gOOd­
will that the new government had won just for being Chinese. As Taiwan was
officially and forcibly resinicized, unemployment lines became distinctly Tai­
wanized. Some 37,000 Taiwanese government workers lost their jobs in the
transition, a trend made the more galling by the fact that only 22 percent of the
posts in the Guomindang official bureaucracy were held by Taiwanese, as op­
posed to 56 percent of the posts under the Japanese (Lai et al. 1991, 65). A pro­
gram of de-Taiwanization, designed to "eradicate the slave mentality" among
Taiwanese, meant the banning of Japanese newspaper pages, rendering voice­
less an entire generation of intellectuals educated under the Japanese and prop­
agating an official cult of the benevolent and sagely dictator Chiang Kai-shek,
honored as "Savior of the People" and "Grand Family Head" (Hsiau 2000,
53-54; Chang 1993, 141).
The ROC's takeover of Taiwan also involved the establishment of control
over all aspects of the economy for the public (but far too often, the private)
good. The official "Taiwan Provincialjapanese Property Managing Committee"
enriched the ROC state and its officials by relieVing governmental organi­
zations, enterprises, and individuals of 50,856 pieces of property worth
10,990,900,000 yen, or some 17 percent of Taiwan's 1946 net domestic product
(Ito 1993, 141; Lai et al. 1991, 71). Since Taiwan now belonged to the ROC, what
belonged to Taiwan would belong to the ROC as well; organized carpetbagging
units descended on Chinese Taiwan, stripping the island of everything from
railway wiring and signal eqUipment to luggage on random rail baggage cars,
industrial machinery, plumbing eqUipment, and entire factories-all to be sent
back to Shanghai, Xiamen, or other coastal mainland cities (Kerr 1965,132-135;
Peng 1972, 49). This was in addition to the great amounts of raw materials­
sugar, coal, salt, and cement-appropriated and shipped to the mainland in of­
ficial fashion. Inflation qUickly set in, reaching a rate of 350 percent during the
first eight months of Guomindang rule (Lai et a1. 1991, 73, 81). Official neglect
also reached staggeringly dangerous levels. It was probably no coincidence that
the first cholera epidemic to strike Taiwan in twenty-seven years came in the
summer ofr946, after just several months ofNationalist rule, killing some 1,460
Taiwanese. Others were diagnosed with the bubonic plague, totally eradicated
by the Japanese thirty years before the arrival of Chinese forces. The govern­
ment had other worries, however; as the director of Public Health explained,
"after all, only the poor people are contracting the disease" (Kerr 1965, 179-180).
Tensions were only exacerbated by the condescension with which so many
Taiwanese viewed these arrivals from a very poor China. The follOWing passage
vividly expresses the shock that so many self-conSciously modern Taiwanese
felt in 1945 upon their first contact with "China" in fifty years:

The ship docked, the gangways were lowered, and off came the troops of
China, the victors. The first man to appear was a bedraggled fellow who

o ANDREW D. MORRIS
 looked and behaved more like a coolie than a soldier, walking off with a
carrying pole across his shoulder, from which was suspended his umbrella,
sleeping mat, cooking pot, and cup. Others like him followed, some with
shoes, some without. Few had guns. With no attempt to maintain order or
discipline, they pushed off the ship, glad to be on firm land, but hesitant to
face the Japanese lined up and saluting smartly on both sides. My father
wondered what the Japanese could possibly think. He had never felt so
ashamed in his life. Using a]apanese expression, he said, "If there had been
a hole nearby, I would have crawled in!" (Peng 1972, 51-52)

Taiwanese resentment of the corruption and waste that plagued the island
under the Nationalists often was voiced in class terms; stories circulated about
the military forces that the Taiwanese derided as "blanket soldiers" washing
their rice in toilet bowls, mistaking hair dryers for fantastic pistols, and stealing
bicycles but not being able to ride them. Taiwanese protests against the Guo­
mindang began to take the shape of direct (and unanimously unfavorable)
comparisons with the]apanese colonial regime. Voicing such concerns loudly
was not wise, however, and was treated as the work of "disloyal subversives"
who could only be planning Communist rebellion against the ROC. The gov­
ernment gave lip service to their promises of democracy; in 1946 public elec­
tions were held for village and town councils, who then elected county and city
council representatives, who then elected a Provincial Consultative Assembly.
These organs were very heavily represented by Taiwanese citizens, but they were
given only "consultative" or advisory powers and thus could do little to relieve
the frustration that was growing so rapidly (Phillips 1999, 286).
Disaster struck on the evening of February 27, 1947, when several Guomin­
dang agents beat a forty-year-old widow for the offense of selling black market
cigarettes. When word spread of the incident, pent-up Taiwanese anger at the
Nationalist regime erupted in forms ranging from organized protests to pre­
meditated violence against random mainland officials and soldiers. Protesters
removed the characters for "China" from official and commercial signs, others
put up Japanese-language banners screaming "Down with Military Tyranny,"
while others chanted Taiwanese-language slogans such as "The Taiwanese want
revenge now!" "Beat the mainlanders!" "Kill the pigs!" "Let Taiwan rule itselfl"
and "Let's have a new democracy!" Even angrier Taibei residents began interro­
gating any mainlanders they could find and beating the unlucky ones who
could not answer in]apanese or Taiwanese languages (Lai et al. 1991, IOS-I07).
Over the next four days, through March 4, violence erupted throughout all of
Taiwan's cities as the retribution for one original act of violence grew into a £Ull­
fledged urban uprising against Guomindangrule (121-134).
As this raw Taiwanese rage boiled over in the streets, elites in Taibei and
other cities qUickly founded Resolution Committees (Chuli Weiyuanhui) in or­
der to negotiate between the Taiwanese majority and the Nationalist military
government. These committees were in fact dominated by pro-Guomindang
Taiwanese elites who should have been able to formulate demands amenable to

Taiwan's History 21
 the government. Negotiations between these committees and the state stalled
for days, but the commander of the Fourth Gendarme Regiment called on the
Taibei Resolution Committee on March 8 to promise: "The Central Govern­
ment will not dispatch troops to Taiwan" (Kerr 1965, 291). He was lying. Begin­
ning that same day, two entile divisions of ROC troops were transferred to Tai­
wan from the mainland, and a reign of state terror against its opponents began.
The Resolution Committees wele abolished, and some outspoken members
were tortured and executed (Lai et a1. 1991, 138-150; Peng 1972, 70). Chinese
troops landing on Taiwan began 1andom killings of Taiwanese as soon as they
came ashore, many shooting guns loaded with soft-nosed dum-dum bullets de­
signed to wound even more painfully (Kerr 1965, 260). As Peng Ming-min (Peng
Mingmin) remembered: "As the Nationalist troops came ashore they moved out
quickly through Keelung Uilong] streets, shooting and bayoneting men and
boys, raping women, and looting homes and shops. Some Formosans were
seized and stuffed alive into burlap bags found piled up at the sugar warehouse
doors, and were then simply tossed into the harbor. Others were merely tied up
or chained before being thrown from the piers" (Peng 1972, 69-70).
For the next several months, thousands of Taiwanese elites who were seen
as posing a th1eat to the regime-professors, doctors, lawyers, professionals, col­
lege and even high school students-were systematically arrested and executed
in cold blood (Vecchione 1998). As George Kerr, a U.S. State Department official
stationed in Taiwan at the time, described: "By March 17 the pattern of terror
and revenge had emerged very clearly. First to be destroyed were all established
critics of the Government. Then in their turn came Settlement Committee
members and their principal aides, all youths who had taken part in the interim
policing of Taipei, middle school students, middle school teachers, lawyers,
economic leaders and members of influential families, and at last, anyone who
in the preceding eighteen months had given offense to a mainland Chinese,
causing him to 'lose face'" (Kerr 1965, 299-300).
Anyone highly educated or accomplished in the Japanese language and/or
culture could be targeted, as the "poisonous" Japanese influence on Taiwan was
blamed for the uprising (especially since so many of the protests and insurrec­
tionary radio broadcasts had been in Japanese). Taiwan was cleansed of any
Japanese items-records, publications, flags, and so on, which were confis­
cated-at the same time as it was being cleansed over the next several months
of its Japanese-educated elites, dual processes of finally "sinicizing" Taiwan for
good (Hsiau 2000, 57-58). It was this kind of violence that led Taiwanese such
as dissident Peng Ming-min's father, a prominent Presbyterian doctor in Gao­
xiong, to abandon totally their "Chinese" identity: "He went so far as to cry out
that he was ashamed of his Chinese blood and wished that his children after
him would always marry foreigners until his descendants could no longer claim
to be Chinese" (Peng 1972,69).
Final numerical estimates of the massacres of the spring and summer of
1947 vary Widely, from an official government report estimating sixty-three

:Z2 ANDREW D. MORRIS

hundred total casualties to anti-Guomindang activists' own estimates that
more than twenty thousand Taiwanese were killed in the suppression (Lai et a1.
1991, 158-159)· And what was called the "white terror" (baise kongbu) did not
end in 1947; by the mid-1950s, the government had some fourteen thousand
political prisoners (both Taiwanese and mainlander) in custody and had exe­
cuted probably one or two thousand more (Taylor 2000, 2II-212).
In 1949, the Republic of China government was chased out of mainland
China by a victorious Chinese Communist Party after more than three years of
civil war. In what can only be called a cruel irony, this newest Chinese province
ofTaiwan, the province in which the ROC government had the least legitimacy,
became home to the entire regime. At the time of the 1947 uprising, Chiang
Kai-shek, author of that year's brutal measures, could hardly have imagined
that in just two years, this most despised and "poisoned" province of Taiwan
would be all that he and his party would ever control again. Considering that
even in the early 1990S, some anti-Nationalist activists would still be screaming
that "KMT" really stood for "Kill Many Taiwanese" (Xu Rongshu 1991), the title
of one book on the 1947 uprising-A Tragic Beginning-is thus all too accurate in
describing early Nationalist rule of Taiwan (Lai et a1. 1991).

FREE CHINA: 1950-PRESENT

By 1949, the fundamentally brutal nature of Guomindang rule in Taiwan, and

the loss of all hope of avoiding a Communist victory in China, conVinced the
Truman Administration to give up on Chiang's "ChiNats," to swear off publicly
aiding Chiang, and to allow the island to be "liberated" by the CCP. Yet the as­
sumptions of the Cold War qUickly led General Douglas MacArthur and other
policy makers to question this decision, as a worldwide struggle against Soviet
and Chinese Communism could not allow the surrender of any possible anti­
Communist allies, no matter how brutal or unpopular. When North Korean
forces invaded South Korea in]une 1950, launching the first hot war of the Cold
War era, the importance of keeping Taiwan-this potential "unsinkable aircraft
carrier"-out of Communist Chinese hands became crucial. Thus, the U.S. mil­
itary command was ordered to defend Taiwan as a base of operations against
China, renewing the ROC's status as a loyal client state and giving tacit Ameri­
can approval to the harsh regime for more than two decades to come (Garver
1997, 16-31).
Only in 1979 did the United States recognize the Communist People's Re­
public of China (PRq regime as the government of China. Thus, for thirty
years, the American government mouthed the inane fiction that Chiang's ROC
regime on Taiwan was the rightful government of China. During the 1950S and
1960s, Americans referred to the ROC on Taiwan as "Free China" with a straight
face, a notion made possible only in comparison to the uncannily low stan­
dards set by three decades of Maoist rule in the PRC. This "Free China" myth

Taiwan's History 23
 was not attractive because it was cheap either: Chiang's regime was funded by
American taxpayers to the tune of U.S. $4 billion over the period 195 1- 1965 Oa­
coby 1966, 38, lI8).
Guomindang rule in Taiwan after 1950 was of a different sort than the aw­
fullate 19405, as the party began a long transformation into a "soft authoritar­
ian" regime. The civil war in China and the Nationalists' landing on Taiwan
were disastrous enough that Chiang Kai-shek led his party through a period of
serious, reflective reorganization from r950 to 1952. One of the most important
reforms was the transformation of the Guomindang into a party that, while still
not democratic, was much more representative of the general population than
it had been in China. Serious efforts were made to recruit peasant Taiwanese
farmers, workers, and intellectuals, although a glass ceiling that favored main­
landers over Taiwanese was in place well into the r970s (Dickson 1993, 79-81).
The ROC government's insistence that it should be governing all of China
meant that Taiwanese people were represented in the government only "pro­
portional to their percentage of the 500 million people of China, giving them
three per cent representation in their own homeland" (Chen and Reisman 1972,
614-615).
For the next two decades, Chiang and his ruling Guomindang were dedi­
cated to thiS goal of retaking the Chinese motherland, often with explicit
American aid. Tactics ranged from the quaint (sending care packages of choco­
late, shoes, and pistols to Chinese "compatriots" by balloon) to the daring
(landing hundreds of agents on PRC territory to set up rebel radio stations in
hopes of sparking a counterrevolution), the sleazy (growing opium in northern
Burma to fund prO-ROC forces in that border region), and the purely terrorist
(blowing up a PRC-chartered Air India jet in 1955 in an attempt to assassinate
Premier Zhou Enlai). (And Chiang was not done with Zhou, either; in 1971 his
spies planned again to kill 2hou, this time with a trained "kamikaze dog" wear­
ing a remote-controlled bomb [Minnick 1995, 55].)22
There was more to life in Taiwan than these cross-straits intrigues, however.
Chiang's authoritarian rule was coterminous with-and in many ways related
to-an incredible economic transformation that brought to "the Orphan of
Asia" a major role in the world economy. The Guomindang was determined to
assure that the economic collapse that spelled its doom in China would not be
repeated in Taiwan. Land reform was instituted fairly, peacefully, and effectively
during the early 1950S. Rents were reduced to a maximum of 37.5 percent of an­
nual yields, and great expanses of public land were sold to tenant farmers (Wang
1999, 324). One of the most foresighted elements of this land reform was to use
stocks and bonds to purchase excess lands from wealthy landholders and then
sen these lands to more than 194,000 tenant farming families (Yang 1970,82).
Of the billions of American taxpayers' dollars flowing into Taiwan during
the 1950S, the minority not earmarked for the military was funneled into com­
munications, transportation, and agricultural and industrial development. The
American government, hoping to prove that capitalism was a superior form of
development, encouraged and subsidized heavy export production in Taiwan,

24 ANDREW D. MORRIS
hollowing out American postwar industry but providing an invaluable boost to
Taiwan's economy Oohnson 2000, 195; Wang 1999, 328-332). Oakland and
Cleveland's loss was Taiwanese industry's gain: By the 1980S, almost half of Tai­
wan's exports were purchased by Americans (Rubinstein 1999a, 375). An impor­
tant characteristic anaiwan's industrial development-and one that led to the
uncommon equality of income distribution on the island-was the importance
of small-scale factories that could be set up and run by members of the rural
lower middle classes (Ho 1979; Wang 1999,333). These government strategies
and American aid programs, when combined with high household saVings
rates (13 percent in 1963) and a highly successful education system, produced an
economic boom so dramatic and comprehensive that outsiders could only de­
scribe it as the "Taiwan miracle." The Guomindang was fortunate, for it took an
economic program this miraculous to sustain the Taiwanese people's faith in
the ROC government after the "tragic beginning" of the late 1940S.
The economic transformation under Chiang did not imply or account for
an equally miraculous political liberalization. "Retaking the mainland" was the
only acceptable political orientation; any institution or practice that did not re­
flect this goal could be suppressed. The 1950S literary world was dominated by
the semiofficial genre of "combat literature" (zhandou wenyi) (Hsiau 2000, 66).
For the purposes of "unity," only Mandarin Chinese was technically acceptable
in government offices, courts, and schools. As the most stubborn and persistent
reminder of a unique Taiwanese identity, Taiwanese language was targeted bru­
tally as an inferior "dialect." Even young students speaking Taiwanese were rou­
tinely beaten, humiliated, or fined (even into the 1990S) as the Guornindang
and its supporters continued to work to "sinicize" this complicated island. In
1994, President Lee Teng-hui (Li Denghui) stirred painful memories of this Na­
tionalist legacy when he spoke to reporters about how his children had been
made to wear "a dunce board around their necks in school as punishment for
speaking Taiwanese" (Hsiau 2000, 125).
Signs of civil society were slow to develop unde1 Guomindang rule. On the
one hand, dissidents such as Peng Ming-min, chairman of the National1aiwan
University Political Science Department and advisor to the ROC United Nations
delegation, were still imprisoned for pUbliC, high-profile acts of defiance. 23 On
the other, everyday 1aiwanese found more room for free expression in the thou­
sands of civic organizations, such as Rotary and Lions Clubs, founded in an era
of very slow but sure political liberalization. Opponents of the Chiang regime
who pounced on signs of weakness in the ROC's international standing were
punished mercilessly, at the same time that the government worked to incul­
cate in the Taiwanese public a sense of nationalism and loyalty to the govern­
ment as their own.
One such crisis in the early 1970S was the gradual erosion of the ROC's
claim to represent "Free China" on the international stage. Though the United
States had championed this regime as the rightful Chinese government for
more than two decades (and would continue to do so untii 1979)-and pres­
sured many of its allies to do the same-the PRC had been successful in con­

Taiwan's History 25
 vincing more and more First, Second, and Third World nations to recognize it as
the true government of China. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's strategic
shift toward "serious dialogue" with Communist China as a way to isolate the
Soviet Union doomed the Chiang regime's international position. In 1971, the
ROC delegation walked out of the United Nations General Assembly immedi­
ately before the assembly voted to award China's UN seat to the PRC and to "ex­
pel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shekfrom the place which they
unlawfully occupy at the United Nations" (Appleton 1972). It was a tellingly
strong rebuke to Chiang's ROC, one of the founders of the UN and a Security
Council member, and one that could only wound Chiang's legitimacy in Tai­
wan as well.
Opponents of the Chiang regime who favored Taiwan's independence
from any Chinese rule took advantage of this development with coordinated
protests all over the world, chaining themselves together in public places to call
for recognition of Taiwan as an independent nation seated in the UN (Peng
1972,259). A final indignity for the ROC government came the next year, with
Nixon's 1972 visit to China. There, hoping to garner PRC help in ending the war
in Vietnam, Nixon ended the ROC's special relationship with the United States
by signing the Shanghai Communique, which "acknowledge[d] ... there is
but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China" (Joint Communique, 1972).
This was the sorry state of the island nation when Generalissimo Chiang
Kai-shek died in 1975. Long incapacitated, Chiang had already left government
affairs to his son Chiang Ching-kuo Giang Jingguo) for several years. The young
Chiang, who had lived in Taiwan longer than he had lived in China, had a
much more tolerant view of Taiwanese culture and political actiVity, and almost
immediately set out to increase Taiwanese participation at the highest levels of
ROC governance (Taylor 2000, 326). This new tolerance was in some ways an
answer to persistent demands for a government that reflected the true popula­
tion ofTaiwan. A"native" (xiangtu) literature movement was inaugurated in the
1970S as cultural elites sought to rediscover the beauty of Taiwanese culture,
suppressed for so long under the Guomindang (Hsiau 2000, 68). While many
mainlander officials saw this kind of pro-Taiwan stance as a threat, Chiang
Ching-kuo welcomed it, even going so far as to say that after four decades of liv­
ingin Taiwan, he was "Taiwanese," too. 24
This libe1alization under the young Chiang came in fits and starts. His gov­
ernment still used force to suppress dissidents, sometimes acting through ultra­
nationalist secret societies that visited violent wrath upon opponents of the mi­
nority Guomindang regime. One famous case was that of the Gaoxiong Eight,
dissidents associated with FomlOsa magazine who were given long sentences for
their provocative roles in a World Human Rights Day rally in 1979. The Iron
Blood Patriots, a radical gang associated with one of Chiang Ching-kuo's sons,
added their own kind of justice, murdering the twin daughters and mother of
one of the defendants, Lin Yixiong. This same Chiang son was also found to be
behind the Bamboo Gang's murder in Daly City, California, of Henry Liu, au­
thor of an unflattering biography of President Chiang (Taylor 2000, 357, 386).

26 ANDREW D. MORRIS
 Simultaneously, however, Chiang was taking steps to guarantee that he
would be succeeded by Taiwanese leaders who could carryon a pro-Taiwan
Guomindang legacy, not by mainlanders with more loyalty to the long-lost
mainland than to the Nationalists' Taiwan base. This mission eventually led
Chiang to make three decisions in 1986-1987 that flew in the face of Guomin-
dang orthodoxy: ending martial law, ending mainland "representation" in the
ROC's elected bodies, and choosing as his personal successor Lee Teng-hui, a
Japanese- and American-educated agricultural economist (Taylor 2000, 408,
418). When Chiang died suddenly in 1988, Lee was named president and Guo-
mindang chairman, and the "Taiwanization" of the Chinese Nationalist Party
had truly begun.

TAIWAN FOR THE TAIWANESE?

Lee's twelve-year presidential reign, the second longest in the history of the
ROC, saw Taiwan irreversibly transformed from Chiang'S "soft authoritarian"
regime to a free democratic society. By 1989 a viable opposition, the Democratic
Progressive Party (DPPj Minzhu]inbu Dang), arisen from Taiwan independence
forces persecuted so violently under the Chiangs, was seriously challenging the
Guomindang in county and provincial elections. In 199r, the government ter-
minated the "Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Commu-
nist Rebellion"-the formal name for martial law-and the limitations on con-
stitutional freedoms it mandated for four decades under the Chiangs. This

A 1991 pro-DPP handbill

urging Taiwanese not to
go along with the
Guomindang (KMD in
their project of reunifying
with mainland China.
(literally, "Please do not
board this [KMT] flight.")

Taiwan's History 27
Taiwanese phone cards
from the mid'1990S
commemorating both
(top) the modern
elements of the Japanese
occupation period and
(bottom) liao Tianding, a
Robin Hood figure who
supposedly bedeviled
Japanese police with his
thievery and bravado.

gesture signaled finally that administering Taiwan-not recovering mainland

China-was the real goal of the Guomindang. Since then, Taiwan has held two
direct presidential elections. Those held in 1996 and captured by Lee Teng-hui
were billed as the first in the five thousand years of Chinese history. In 2000,
the Taiwanese DPP candidate, Chen Shui-bian (Chen Shuibian), captured vic-
tory for his once-illegal pro-independence party.25
This "quiet revolution" (ningjing geming) and the Taiwan population's con-
spicuous reveling in their new political freedoms (as demonstrated in the essays
by Alice Chu and Scott Simon in this volume) have also resulted in a new dia-
logue on ethnicity and the notion of Taiwan as a multiethnic, multicultural na-
tion. The new native leadership of the DPP and Guomindang often portrayed
their struggles as those of "the Taiwanese" vs. "the mainlanders." However, two
culturally and linguistically distinct minority groups-the Hakkas (approxi-
mately r2 percent ofTaiwan's population) and Taiwan's several aboriginal tribes
(2 percent)-were ignored in this formulation, in much the same way that they
had been ignored by Japanese and Guomindang regimes describing a mono-
lithic and inferior "Taiwanese" native population. As a result, both of these
groups have taken advantage of this new political era to state their own claims

:z8 ANDREW D. MORRIS

to cultural and political significance (and even self-government) and to chal-
lenge a new Hoklo chauvinism often present in the new "Taiwanese" politics. 26
Taiwan's economic boom also continued during this astounding political
liberalization of the 1990S. Taiwan's export strategy led to huge trade surpluses
that, although angering trading partners-including the United States-allowed
the ROC to amass mammoth foreign exchange reserves ranking first or second in
the world through most of the 1990S.27 Since the W80s, the electronics and in-
formation technology industries have headed this export strategy, a fact made
possible by the government's unusually high expenditures in education (Woo
1991, I039). This "green silicon island" (lUse xi dao) has been the world's third
most important supplier of computer hardware (after the United States and
Japan) since 1995 (Republic ofChina Yearbook 20or). In 1999, Taiwan's gross na-
tional product was U.S. $290.5 billion, the seventeenth largest in the world. 2B
Unfortunately, however, in many cases the people of this tiny island achieved
such great wealth by devastating their own environment, destroying wildlife,
agricultural land, and freshwater sources, while saturating the air and soil with
the chemical and metallic by-products of industry (Williams and Chang 1994,
242-244).
Perhaps the most important tension in Taiwan at the turn of the millen-
nium is the presence of the People's Republic of China right across the Taiwan
Straits. Abandoning its original position that Taiwan was a separate nation, dis-
tinguished culturally from the rest of China (Hsiao and Sullivan 1979, 447-458),
the Chinese Communist Party during the 1990S stepped up its campaign to "re-
unify" the entire Chinese nation by extending its control to Taiwan. Relying,
often very successfully, on the brute force of nationalism to distract its citizens
from political repression and the volatility of market transformations, the CCP
has convinced not only their own people but most of the rest of the world that
the PRC has legal title to Taiwan-an island that has never been under its con-
trol. Without realizing the possible boon that such an argument could be to
diehard loyalists of the Ryukyuan, DutCh, Spanish, and Japanese empires, the
PRe's argument is based on the fact that since Taiwan was once part of the
Manchu Qing empire, it should be part of China in perpetuity. The great major-
ity of people in Taiwan look at the immense changes that have occurred in Tai-
wan and China in the century plus since Taiwan's cession by the Qing, and they
prefer the autonomy that has existed under more than fifty years of ROC rule.29
The PRC's main strategy has been to isolate Taiwan diplomatically on the
international stage, most successfully by blocking any attempts by Taiwan to
reenter the United Nations after three decades of exclusion from that body. The
PRC also is able to use its almost superpower status and economic clout to pre-
vent virtually any international recognition of Taiwan as a sovereign state. The
pettiness of these measures can be mind-boggling, such as the PRe's uncondi-
tional demand that any international organization recognize Taiwan's diplO-
matic representatives, Little League and Olympic teams, or even Miss Universe
contestants (CND 2000) only as representatives of "Chinese TaipeL" But they
can also be deadly. In 1999, Beijing used its pull in the World Health Organiza-

Taiwan's History 29
 tion (WHO) to keep Taiwan out of the international body and its citizens ineli-
gible to benefit from or contribute to advancements made by WHO (AFP 1999).
In September 1999, after a disastrous earthquake struck in central Taiwan,
killing over two thousand people, the PRC government prevented UN and Russ-
ian rescue teams from reaching Taiwan for more than two days, explaining that
"as Taiwan is not a member of the UN, then aid must be channeled through Bei-
jing" (AFP 1999; CND 1999).30
As one China watcher puts it, for the PRC's leaders, "Taiwan is an obses-
sion, one that creates a hideous spectacle of a large dictatorship trying to intim-
idate a small democracy" (Chang 2001,37). Yet this forceful approach to resolv-
ing the "Taiwan question" is exactly what many people inside mainland China
have learned to welcome. InJuly 1999, a rare public opinion poll conducted in
Chinese cities found that 86.9 percent of those surveyed favored an invasion of
Taiwan "if necessary" (Reuters 1999).31
These actions have earned the PRC great enmity among many Taiwanese,
yet many businessmen from Taiwan have found the profits to be made in China
more significant than the threats to their nation's sovereignty. Taiwan busi-
nesses, large and small, see China as an endless supply of cheap exploitable la-
bor and loose environmental regulations. As a key to maintaining a "competi-
tive edge," these enterprises have invested more than U.S. $100 billion in
China, even as this has hollowed out Taiwan's own industrial base (Hsing 1998;
Studwe1l2002, 280). As one Taiwan journalist writes, "Beyond the fact that the
water, power, and environmental protection costs [in China] are all low, land
can be acquired for next to nothing. Every Taiwanese businessman who comes
here feels like a prince-complete with his own fiefdom" (Li 2001, 9). Conse-
quently, a huge trade (U.S. $25.84 billion in 1999) links Taiwan and China, a fact
that many observers feel makes some form of reunification inevitable in the
near future (Republic of China Yearbook 2001). Even in Taiwan itself, the strug-
gling tourism industry is looking to well-heeled mainland Chinese tourists as a
new source of income; as one business leader said in 2001, "Taiwan can become
China's Hawaii" (AP 2001). The PRC government also Wisely uses these growing
ties in order to sell Taiwan officials, academics, and businessmen on the finan-
cial benefits of reunification and has succeeded in pushing figures such as Presi-
dent Chen Shui-bian onto the defensive, calling for "economic war" against
China (The Economist 2000, 48; ITO 2001).
Taiwan's unique status at the turn of the twenty-first century is reflected
best in one recent series of events. Liberal International, a London-based coali-
tion of eighty-four liberal political parties from Sixty-seven countries, selected
President Chen Shui-bian to receive its 2001 Prize for Freedom, hailing his
"solid record as a human rights activist" (Taipei Government Information Of-
fice 2001). Liberal International was scheduled to present the award in Copen-
hagen, Denmark. Yet because of political pressure from China-which forbids
its diplomatic allies to allow visits by Taiwanese leaders-the Danish govern-
ment refused to grant Chen a visa so he could receive the Freedom prize. And
when Liberal International offered to present the award to Chen at a later Euro-

30 ANDREW D. MORRIS
pean Parliament meeting in Strasbourg, the French government also refused to
issue Chen a visa. 32
Though it is Asia's most vibrant democracy, Taiwan's leaders must beg for
visas to visit the United States or other countries that supposedly stand for prin-
ciples of freedom and liberty. With the admission ofTuvalu into the UN in 2000,
the Republic of China on Taiwan is the last nation in the world to be excluded
from the world body. The world's seventeenth largest economy, Taiwan is recog-
nized by less than two dozen tiny African and Caribbean nations. A sovereign
nation in every way, Taiwan has to justify continually why it should not be swal-
lowed up by the PRC, a regime that has never administered an inch of Taiwan's
territory. And, intimately tied culturally and economically to China, Taiwan's fu-
ture as a sovereign nation depends on its ability to convince the world of its his-
torical independence from the mainland. Yet somehow these singular condi-
tions seem fitting for Taiwan, an island whose history, as the following chapters
describe, has been nothing if not complicated and extraordinary.

Taiwan's History 31
 Notes

CHAPTER 1. TAIWAN'S HISTORY

1. Despite the important protestations of Lydia Liu (1999, 131-134), "barbarian" still
seems the best English term available for translating the cha1acte1 "yi, "which, before it was
used to describe westerners, referred to less-civilized peoples from homelands located to
the east of China proper.
2. For explanations of some of these terms, see Cao 1980, 43; Carrington 1977. 79;
Fang 1994, 13; Goddard 1966, 129; Hsu I98oa, 9; Nakamura 1954, II4; Phillips 1999,277;
Stainton 1999b, 37.
3. Even by the mid·eighteenth century, the popular novel Yesou puyan (A country
codger's words of exposure) still portrayed Taiwan as an island fundamentally different
from China and orthodox Confucian values, an "allegoric wilderness" populated with
lethai female sex-demons (Epstein 2001,219-221).
4. These various names were meant to transliterate the native Austronesian name
"Tayouan," which in the native Sirayan language means "coastal area" and actually desig-
nated only the area now called Tainan on the southern coastal plain (and which was pur-
chased from the Siraya by the Dutch for fifteen pieces of cloth in 1625) (Hsu Ig80a, 12).
5. In Hollien, "U bau khaqhau cit-e thi: -gong-cuo." Thanks to David Schak and Ricky
Pai for supplying this information.
6. In addition, seventeen were classified as native Austronesian anti-Qing move-
ments, and several other revolts were organized through pioneer and native cooperation
(Chen 1987, II-I2i Shepherd 1993,130-132).
7. Annual population growth was 2.2 percent over the period 1683-18II (Ka 1995,39),
a rate resulting in a doubling every thirty-three years!
8. The Japanese lost seve1al hund1ed troops to these rebel attacks-but also several
thousand troops to malaria (Fraser 1988, 94).
9. Nitobe would become the first chair of Colonial Studies atTokyo University, and he
was immortalized on the 5,000 yen bill.
roo These Indian-fighting techniques were also complemented by the Japanese
regime's own contribution to "savage" management: the first air raids in Asian history, car-
ried out on umuly mountain villages in r913-r914 (Kerr r974, 104).

219
 II. The japanese government even enlisted the services of a British official adviser to
help implement the "successful" techniques of British colonial rule in Egypt (Townsend
2000,102).
12. Other Taiwanese elites, refusing to become totally "japanized," accepted the anti-
queue movement but resented the attack on the traditional Chinese scholars' robe, form-
ing Societies to Cut the Queue but Keep the Clothes (Duanfa Bugaizhuang Hui) (Wang
1960,20).
13. By the late 1920S, many Taiwanese student organizations in China had also come
to call explicitly for independence as the solution to the exploitation of their island (Lan
2000, 16-23).
14. The population, still 95 percent rural, was 4.6 million, including 228,000 japan-
ese, most of whom wele professionals, merchants, industrialists, and bureaucrats (Fraser
1988, lOO).
15. Scholar 0 Ikutoku, cited in Tsurumi 1977, 177-
16. The japanese government has never compensated those Taiwanese wounded or
the families of those killed in World War II on the grotesquely legalistic grounds that after
1945 they were not japanese nationals.
17. In fact, during the first several months of the war, more than a thousand cases
were reported of Taiwanese cursing Japanese officials and police (Lai et a!. 1991, 26).
18. Technically, the British did not agree to this condition, only that Taiwan "shall be
renounced by Japan" (Chiu 1973, 2°5-207). What is more, this Cairo Declaration, which
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill noted "merely contained a statement of com-
mon purpose," and the 1945 Potsdam Declaration that confirmed Cairo, are not docu-
ments that under international legal norms could create Chinese title to Taiwan (Chen
and Reisman 1972, 635-637).
19. The question is complicated enough that an entire academic subgenre has grown
around this topic. For example, see Peng and Huang 1976 and Chen and Reisman 1972.
20. Ando soon would be convicted and sentenced to death as a war criminal, but he
evidently felt obligated to honor the precise details of the surrender signed by his emperor.
2I. Also annoying was the fact that the residents of Taiwan cared more about the
japanese treatment of tllem than they did about]apanese war crimes and brutalities carried
out in far-off Chinese places like Nanjing or Manchuria.
22. The PRC made several strikes back against the HOC regime on Taiwan. One mem-
orable example was the drugging of Taiwanese Olympic decathlete C. K. Yang (Yang
Chuanguang), the world record holder and overwhelming favorite to win gold at the 1964
Tokyo Olympics, by two traitorous teammates who spiked his event-day orange juice and
then defected to the PRC (CP 1997).
23. This did not stop ROC postal authorities from issuing an "International Year for
Human Rights" set of stamps for r968.
24. One reason that this peaceful pro-Taiwan sentiment was acceptable to Chiang
was that the alternative was the rise of a pro-independence terrorist movement. In 1970,
Chiang had been shot at by radical pro-independence assassins in New York. In 1976, ex-
tremists sabotaged a power station in southern Taiwan and sent a letter bomb to Provincial
Governor Xie Dongmin that blew off his left hand (Martin 1985, 24-29). In all, these pro-
independence terrorists carried out twenty-one attacks on ROC officials or offices
throughout the world between 1978 and 1981 (Tyson 1987, 165).
25. As of August 200l, there were ninety-five political palties in Taiwan, representing
every possible social, economic, and political platform (CP 08/or/200r).
26. See Stainton 1999a, 419-435 on the "Aboriginal self-government" movement in
the 1990s.
27. At the end of 1999, foreign exchange reserves were U.S. $ro6.2 billion, the third
highest in the world (Republic ofChina Yearbook 20or).
28. One unique aspect of this development, seen by many as a possible model for de-
velopment in mainland China, is the overwhelming role of the state in Taiwan's economy.

220 Notes to Pages 75-29

In the .late 1990s, the ROC government and the then-ruling Guomindang owned or con-
troUed about 50 percent of all corporate assets on the island, which accounted for 30 per-
cent of Taiwan's gross national product Gohmon 2000, ISS).
29. Since Nixon's visit to China, the United States has recognized this claim for thirty
years, in order to keep healthy economic relations wlill the PRe. Many argue that the
United States has definite interests in keeping Taiwan and the PRC separate and in avoid-
ing competition with this potentiai super-rich pan-Chinese power. The United States re-
serves the right to sell arms to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act of r979, and thus it
wins great profits for America's arms dealers. In 1996, when the PRC engaged in provoca-
tive war games and live-fire missile tests in order to disrupt Taiwan's first-ever direct presi-
dential election, the United States sent two aircraft carriers into the region (although not
into the straits themselves) to guard Taiwan.
But on the whole, the United States has been very complicit in the PRe's claims on
the island. Perhaps the firmest show of support for the PRC came during President Bill
Clinton's administration. When Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui stopped in Honolulu 011
his way to Central America in 1994, the U.S. State Department denied him a visa even for
one night after consulting with PRC officials on the issue (Mann 1999, 315). In China in
r998, Clinton made a "deep, deep kowtow" to his hosts, volunteering in a speech in Shang-
hai that the United States would support no future for Taiwan other than absorption into
the PRC (BG 1998, A-II). Then, in 1999, the United States for the first time opposed Tai-
wan's bid to rejOin the United Nations (He 200r, 8).
30. The PRC Ministry of Foreign Mfairs, claiming to represent the people of Taiwan,
then proceeded to "thank" the international community for its concern and donations,
an abhorrent move that Taiwan foreign minister Jason Hu likened to China "looting a
burning house" (Reuters 1999).
31. In accordance with this "public opInion," plans relating to such an invasion of
Taiwan make up 52 percent oHhe current PRC military budget (He 200I, 9).
32. The French foreign ministry did agree to allow First Lady Wu Shuzhen to receive
the award on Chen's behalf, under the followlng illiberal conditions: that she not pass
through Paris, that she leave France immediately after accepting the award, and that she
not speak to reporters while in France (ITO 2001).

CHAPTER 2. FOWL PLAY

Author's note: [would like to thank David K.]ordan, Marc Moskowitz, Andrew Morris, and
the two anonymous reviewers for the University of Hawai' i Press for all their helpful com-
ments and suggestions.
r. For more on these issues, see Ch'li T'ung-tsu 196I; Esherick and Rankin 1990;
Goodman 1995; Kuhn I99I; and Rowe 1989.
2. See, for example, Allee I994; Lamley 198I; Ownby I996; and ter Haar 1998.
3. See the following groundbreaking works: Chiu Hei-yuan I988; Harrell and Huang
r994; and Rubinstein I994.
4. See, for example, Bernhardt and Huang 1994; Huang 1996; Karasawa 1993; Macauley
1994, 1998; Reed 2000; Zhou 1995.
5. [ have already published extensively on these Iituals (see Katz 2000, 2001, n.d.)
and plan to write a book-length manuscript on this subject in the future.
6. The use of the term "elder brother" suggests that Ch'en and Wang may have been
sworn brothers.
7. For more on this cult, see Harrell 1974; Lin r995; 1ai 1997; and Thompson 1975·
8. For a discussion of scapegoats in the context of Chinese religion, see Katz 1995a,
1995b.
9. Implying that the deceased will not enjoy the benefits of mortuary rites intended
to transform a ghost into an ancestor.
IO. See also Kataoka 1921, 7.

Notes to Pages 29-43 221