The Other Taiwan, 1945-92

Murray A. Rubinstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315485157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Examines the effects of the socio-economic post-war transformation on Taiwan's political system, environment, religious structures, the relationships between the sexes and the different ethnic populations. A complex revisionist portrait of the country emerges.

Part I
Contexts

The two chapters in this section provide background and context for the more detailed studies to follow.

Alan Wachman's chapter attempts to come to grips with two central issues that the people of Taiwan are now facing. One is political liberalization. The second is the way in which one defines Taiwan in terms of what Wachman has called the "competing claims" of national and ethnic identity. By using a host of very diverse and often antagonistic voices, Wachman conveys the sense of crisis now pervading Taiwan and provides some explanations for this many layered crisis.

Hai-yuan Chu's chapter provides an understanding of how Taiwanese see their lives today. Comparing survey data over a five-year period, he begins by asking his informants how satisfied they are with the lives they lead in modern Taiwan. He focuses on questions of personal relationships such as those between husband and wife, parent and child, and friend and friend. Here he finds high levels of satisfaction. However, when people are asked about how they feel about their own level of academic success, their own financial condition, and their own sense of the time they have for leisure activities, their responses were far less positive.

Next, Chu explores how his respondents view the public realm. He asks how people feel about the political changes taking place on the island and then inquires about their connection to the society—the degree of alienation they feel. Attitudes toward the work ethic and toward instruments of social control are next. This, in turn, leads to a series of questions about the way people see Taiwan's social problems. These problems include juvenile delinquency, public security, pollution of the environment, the rising cost of living, and political corruption.

He concludes by examining how people see and respond to the increasing secularization of life. He finds that people are aware of and disturbed by such secularization and that they are responding to this "assault of the modern" by returning to folk religion and by involving themselves in such sectarian religions as Yiguan Dao (the Connected Path).

Chapter 1
Competing Identities in Taiwan

Alan M. Wachman

The two political problems most evident in Taiwan since the mid-1980s have been: (1) the demands for greater participation, fairness, and equity in the political system, and (2) the absence of consensus regarding national identity. These problems are related. In the past, those who believed that Taiwan should be governed as a sovereign state by officials elected exclusively from among the residents of Taiwan demanded greater opportunities for political participation from those in power who restricted political participation by authoritarian means. The aim of those in power was to ensure that they could maintain the claim that they were not simply the rulers of Taiwan, but the sole legitimate government of all China, of which Taiwan was one part.

Until the middle of the 1980s, those people demanding greater opportunities to participate in the political process that governed their lives were repressed—sometimes quite brutally. At issue in the competition between the government and the opposition were fundamental questions of political power. Whether one associated oneself with the government or the opposition, however, was a matter of identity. Although the conflict between competing views of national identity has been a central characteristic of political life in Taiwan and, to a great degree, defined the struggle between the opposition and the government, as a subject of investigation it has been largely ignored by those who study Taiwan.

Analysts of Taiwan tended to examine the island from an economic or international perspective. The dynamism of Taiwan's economic growth from a poor agricultural-based economy at the end of the Second World War to a thriving, industrialized, export economy with one of the world's greatest reserves of foreign exchange in the current era was, naturally, an attractive subject of examination. People were more curious about the "Taiwan miracle" or about Taiwan as one of East Asia's "four little dragons" than about the internal politics of the island.

Taiwan's conflictual relations with the People's Republic of China (PRC), the quandary concerning reunification, and decisions made by many states to abandon formal ties with Taiwan as a way to grease relations with Peking all contributed to a view of Taiwan as a piece of the international affairs puzzle. Yet, works about Taiwan's role in the diplomatic or strategic realms paid scant attention to the restive domestic politics of the island or to the controversies festering there.

Indeed, the struggle for political reform in Taiwan was not studied much by scholars outside the island until liberalizations initiated in 1987 were well under way. From the onset of reforms, scholars began to show interest in the political life within Taiwan, rather than simply viewing Taiwan as a factor affecting politics elsewhere, and as those reforms have proceeded, political liberalization in Taiwan has attracted attention from scholars scrambling to offer explanations of the changes that are taking place. Even so, far less attention has been paid to Taiwan's progress toward democracy than, for example, to the PRC's resistance to reform. Perhaps because Taiwan is not the PRC, it is overlooked, save by a small community of subspecialists in the "China field" and, of course, by the island's own social scientists.¹ So far, no work has focused on national identity as a matter of contention that both drives the process of reform and threatens the consolidation of democracy in Taiwan.

China’s Tribulations

Problems in Taiwan pertaining to national identity reflect a dilemma that has burdened Chinese political and intellectual elites for most of the twentieth century. In the past, there was little question that China—Chung-Kuo—was a term that represented a nation, a culture, and a polity. In common parlance the term "Chinese" has been used as an ethnic category referring to those who are considered Han.² Chinese were assumed to come from a common racial type, a common linguistic stock, and a common cultural heritage. To be Chinese implied not only a particular ethnicity, but that one lived in the Chinese polity, or considered China as home if one resided abroad. These assumptions are no longer unquestioned on Taiwan.³

The conflict with Western powers that flared up in the mid-nineteenth century was a watershed. It marked the start of a long, gradual unraveling of the Chinese illusion of cultural supremacy and political cohesion. The process that began with the Opium Wars was advanced by China's losses to Japan and Russia around the turn of the century, and went into full spin through the 1920s and 1930s. The consciousness of China as a unity and as a bastion of civilization was shattered by the trauma of repeated ruination.

The incursion of Western forces—brash, demanding, and different—led to a vain attempt by the empire to repel its assailants. These efforts only highlighted China's weakness and vulnerability and made a mockery of the accepted notion of greatness. Proposals for reform at the end of the last century and early in the twentieth century led to failure. By the second decade of this century, the empire had disintegrated and then vanished. The hope for recovery grew more and more remote as, again, China tumbled into the churning uncertainties of anarchy. The successive acts played out by pompous and ineffectual figures in Peking made manifest the irrelevance of the drama itself. There was no leadership, there was no capital, there was no state. Again, China was ground into defeat.

The Treaty of Versailles, which followed World War I, brought fresh evidence of China's powerlessness and marginality in the minds of the strong and wealthy states of the West. Shan-tung Province, recovered from the German colonial grasp, was turned over to Japan, another reminder of China's decrepitude. Unable to rise beyond internecine struggles, corruption, and dissolution, Chinese intellectuals lashed out with frustration, anger, and despair at their own civilization. They felt betrayed by the values and institutions they had been primed to preserve.

During the May Fourth Movement (1919), intellectuals flaunted China's helplessness by seeking cures from beyond China. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, young minds viewed the hapless state into which China had deteriorated as a mirror of its cultural and political hubris. They sought to cure China's ills with medicines from abroad. They looked to the powerful and prosperous states of Europe for tonics and relief. But the palliatives from the West were not easily injected into the body China.

During this century, China's intellectuals have sought in vain for ideological systems that would make China strong again. Despite the conscious efforts to sustain some aspects of China's past, without the unity provided by a moral order under which political, social, and personal norms cohered for long stretches of Chinese history, elements that survived the collapse of the empire now lay in an unstructured store of memories and sensibilities. Chinese intelligentsia have picked at this heap of unintegrated cultural ingredients like scavengers in the hope that a strand here or a shred there could be woven into a new cultural fabric. Now, as in the past, whatever they create will be influenced by the world outside China and is very likely to incorporate values and institutions that were once alien to the Chinese.

Taiwan’s Travails

Taiwan's most intractable problems are political and stem from differing views of the island's national identity. The roots of these matters lie deep in Taiwan's past. For one thing, Taiwan's political status has never been unassailable. China (understood as the mainland) has been governed in several ways: by Chinese exercising dominion over the entire empire, by Chinese exercising power in regions that competed for control of the whole empire, and by foreigners who wrested control of China from Chinese, but who were ultimately routed and replaced by Chinese rulers. This has not been the case in Taiwan. Taiwan has not always been considered part of China, has often been governed by non-Chinese, and has never been ruled exclusively by people who consider Taiwan as home.

Taiwan was first inhabited by Chinese immigrants in the seventeenth century, but was then under the control of the Dutch until 1662, when the island was taken by a colorful figure known as Koxinga (Cheng Ch'eng-kung), the son of a Chinese pirate and a Japanese woman. The island was ruled as a separate kingdom until 1683 when it was conquered by forces of the Ch'ing, the Manchu dynasty that had taken control of China in 1644. Taiwan was then "under the careless and weak" control of the Manchus who were, themselves, alien rulers of China. Although the Manchus adopted Chinese manners, values, and administrative systems, they were foreigners.⁴

When the Ch'ing dynasty was defeated in war by Japan m 1895, Taiwan was severed from the rest of China and taken by the Japanese as part of the settlement extracted under the Treaty of Shimonoseki, and from 1895 until Japan was defeated at the end of the Second World War fifty years later, Taiwan was a Japanese colony. The legacy of Japanese rule runs deeply among those residents of Taiwan old enough to remember and has shaped mannerisms and customs on the island. Japan's presence is visible even to those who have no personal memory of Taiwan's days as a colony because Japan directed the construction of an industrial base and transportation infrastructure that is often cited as a contributing factor in Taiwan's subsequent "miraculous" economic development.⁵

It was decided at the Cairo Conference of December 1943, and reaffirmed at the Potsdam Conference of July 1945, that following the defeat of Japan, Taiwan would be turned over to China. As Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party (Kuo Min Tang, or KMT) were viewed as governing the Republic of China (ROC), it was to KMT forces that the Japanese formally surrendered control of Taiwan on October 25, 1945. The KMT military administration that took control of the island initiated "a period of rapid underdevelopment," as Taiwan was plundered for booty that could be used to support the KMT's battle with the Communists on the mainland. "Economically, politically, and culturally [Taiwan] was suddenly yanked out of the Japanese orbit and appended to China in another colonial relationship."⁶

The relationship between the residents of Taiwan—newly freed from Japan's colonial rule—and the representatives of the KMT was sour from the start. Those who first arrived from the mainland to take control of the island were viewed as carpetbaggers, bunglers, or thieves. By 1947, the animosity had built to such a degree that the unintentional shooting by a government agent of a bystander present at the arrest of a street vendor triggered a demonstration that led to a violent island-wide uprising.⁷ Residents of Taiwan lashed out against the KMT and other immigrants from the mainland. This outbreak of hostilities was brought under control and Taiwan was thereafter subjected to a brutal period of repression, retribution, and mass executions.

In 1949, when the KMT lost control of the mainland to the Commun...