Show and Tell Project 3

For this Show and Tell project, I decided to look deeper into the history of Taiwan from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Taiwan was incorporated into the Qing Empire in 1683 when the Manchu army defeated the forces of Koxinga, a Ming Dynasty loyalist.¹ Taiwan became a colony of Japan in 1895 after the Japanese defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War, and the Japanese occupied Taiwan until 1945.² The Japanese conquered many other Asian countries, including Korea and parts of Northeastern China (Manchuria), as seen in the 1939 map below. Japan lost its colonies after World War II, and Taiwan became known as the Republic of China, led by Chiang Kai-Shek.³ The Guomindang fled to Taiwan after they lost the civil war with the Communists in 1949.

The Japanese established a colonial government once they took over Taiwan. In the chapter “Shaping Administration in Colonial Taiwan,” the author argues that the government of Taiwan was similar to the government of Japan. Taiwan, like Japan, had a small bureaucracy, and most of the governance was done through “extra-bureaucrats,”⁴ people who worked in technical support, administrative assistants, and police officers. Police officers were at the top of the hierarchy in local government.⁵ The Japanese had a system called hokō, which involved dividing Taiwan into local administrative units.⁶ The Japanese government had a high level of social control in Japan because it was very involved in towns and villages, and there was a strong police presence to maintain order in the colony.

Under Japanese rule, the Taiwanese were discriminated against and expected to give up their own culture. A Taiwan Times article from 1937 called “A Chat with the Governor-General About Discontinuing Chinese Columns in Daily Newspapers” announced that the newspaper would no longer publish columns written in Taiwanese. This article was originally written in Japanese. The writer justifies their decision to stop publishing Taiwanese columns by saying that “the Japanese language and Japanese rhetoric offers a shortcut to mastering and embodying the spirit of the empire, and failure to rely on the language gives rise to the feeling of ‘scratching an itch through your boots.’”⁷ The Japanese wanted Taiwanese people to assimilate into Japanese culture so they could be united with the rest of the empire and embrace patriotism. I also found it interesting that the author used the phrase “Japanese rhetoric,”⁸ showing that the Japanese government wanted the Taiwanese to take on their attitudes and ways of thinking, not just using the same words. The Japanese imperial government was limiting Taiwanese people’s right to express themselves in their own language. I would like to read a source from a Taiwanese person reacting to this change to see if any of them agreed that removing Taiwanese columns would “lead to spiritual and material happiness for the local inhabitants of this island.”⁹

Another one of our class readings, “A Patient Named Taiwan” by Chiang Wei-Shui (published in 1921), expands on the identities of Taiwanese people. Chiang was ethnically Chinese and born in Taiwan, and he was writing in Japanese. He was a political activist and a founder of the Taiwanese Cultural Association, which split into different groups that resisted the Japanese at varying levels.¹⁰ Chiang’s passage is formatted like a doctor’s evaluation and diagnosis of a sick patient. He wrote that Taiwan weakened and lost its morals during the Qing Dynasty, and then under the Japanese, Taiwan improved a little bit but was still struggling because of “two hundred years of slow poisoning.”¹¹ Chiang’s “diagnosis” of Taiwan was “a mentally retarded child of world culture”¹² because he viewed Taiwan as culturally underdeveloped and corrupted in moral character. Due to his background, it was surprising to me how he described Taiwanese culture in such negative terms. Despite the harsh descriptions, Chiang seemed to have some hope that Taiwan’s culture could improve if people became more educated at all levels because he said that this “treatment” could cure Taiwan in the next twenty years.¹³ Taiwanese people were trying to establish their own national identity, which could have been difficult at this time because they were ruled over by one empire after another. 

Overall, Taiwan had a complex history from 1895-1949. It was a colony of different empires for hundreds of years previously, and Taiwanese culture was discriminated against by the Japanese when they took over. Both factors affected Taiwan’s formation of a national identity. After Taiwan became independent from Japan, it had a complicated connection with the People’s Republic of China, and still does. I look forward to learning more about how Taiwan established itself separately from Japan after World War II, and about Taiwan’s relationship with the PRC in the modern day. 

Bibliography:

14.1: “A Patient Named Taiwan.” In The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection. Third ed. Edited by Janet Chen et. al. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

A Chat with the Governor-General About Discontinuing Chinese Columns in Daily Newspapers.” In The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, edited by Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Michelle Yeh and Ming-ju Fan. Columbia Univ. Press, 2014.

Caroline, Ts’ai Hui-yu. “Shaping Administration in Colonial Taiwan, 1895–1945.” In Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945: History, Culture, Memory, Edited by Ping-hui Liao and David Der-wei Wang, 97-121. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Mack, Lauren. “A Brief History of Taiwan.” ThoughtCo. June 3, 2022. https://www.thoughtco.com/brief-history-of-taiwan-688021.

1. Lauren Mack, “A Brief History of Taiwan,” Thoughtco, June 3, 2022, https://www.thoughtco.com/brief-history-of-taiwan-688021
2. Mack, “A Brief History of Taiwan”
3. Mack, “A Brief History of Taiwan”
4. Caroline Ts’ai Hui-yu, “Shaping Colonial Administration in Taiwan, 1895-1945,” in Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945: History, Culture, Memory, edited by Ping-hui Liao and David Der-wei Wang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 99.
5. Caroline, “Shaping Administration in Colonial Taiwan,” 102.
6. Caroline, “Shaping Administration in Colonial Taiwan,” 115.
7. “A Chat with the Governor-General About Discontinuing Chinese Columns in Daily Newspapers,” in The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, edited by Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Michelle Yeh and Ming-ju Fan, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 103-104.
8. “A Chat With The Governor General,” 103.
9. “A Chat With The Governor General,” 104.
10. 14.1: “A Patient Named Taiwan,” in The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection, third ed, edited by Janet Chen et. al., (New York: WW Norton and Company, 2014), 249-251.
11. “A Patient Named Taiwan,” 250.
12. “A Patient Named Taiwan,” 251.
13. “A Patient Named Taiwan,” 251.