Ploughshare Village

Culture and Context in Taiwan

Stevan Harrell

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780295959467
• eBook ISBN: 9780295805634
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Social Sciences

This anthropological study of a workers' village in North Taiwan makes an important contribution to the comparative literature on Chinese and Taiwanese social organization. Based on fieldwork conducted in 1973 and 1978, the study is exceptional not only because of its excellent data but also because the village itself was unique. Unlike villages previously studied and written about, Ploughshare was neither an agricultural nor a fishing village, but rather one whose inhabitants earned their living mostly from coal mining, knitting, and other non-agrarian activities. Culture and environmental context thus shaped social organization there differently than in other Taiwanese villages. This ethnography links local data to surrounding socioeconomic spheres: it shows the village's relationship to its region, to Taiwan as a whole, and to the international economy. It also captures an important point in time, as Taiwan was undergoing the "economic miracle" that brought it into the ranks of developed countries. Stevan Harrell's new preface highlights changes not only in the village over the last several decades, but also in the ways that anthropologists think about culture and Taiwan. Ploughshare Village, with its rich descriptions and analyses, will be of value to anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and China specialists.

Ploughshare in the Socioeconomic System

Ploughshare has never been an isolated community. Neither, for that matter, have any significant number of other Chinese villages in historical times. Even in periods of the most intense economic and coercive closure (Skinner 1971), any community in a complex society will have relationships of trade, taxation, or conflict with the larger social system and its component parts. But Ploughshare has never even been relatively isolated; its particular place in the social division of labor as a village of people who have produced for the market or sold their labor, or both, means that most of its families have never even known the relative self-sufficiency of the peasant household that produces most of what it consumes and consumes most of what it produces. The tie between Ploughshare and the larger systems of which it is a part is thus the logical starting point for an analysis of Ploughshare’s social organization.

Throughout its history, Ploughshare has been part of a hierarchy of social and economic systems. At any one time, such systems exist at many different levels, but some of the levels will be relatively more closed or integral systems than others, and therefore more useful for analysis. The importance and degree of integration of particular levels also changes over time; I describe for each time period the most salient. In general, we can see Ploughshare as part of a local system, which includes all the communities for whom the basic-level market, and later administrative center, has been the nearby town of Sanxia. This local system is, in turn, part of a regional system, including all of the Chinese-inhabited parts of Taiwan from Taoyan and Zhongli in the south to Jilong in the north, with its market and administrative center at the twin cities of Megjia and Dadaocheng, which later became Taibei. This regional system, likewise, is part of an island system of Taiwan as a whole. And Taiwan is part of the world system. To understand Ploughshare, then, we must trace the evolution of this hierarchy of systems from the nineteenth century, when Ploughshare was founded, to the present day. This chapter analyzes the political and economic relations of this hierarchy of systems in three periods: the late Qing dynasty, the Japanese colonial period, and the postwar industrialization of Taiwan.

THE LATE QING DYNASTY

Taiwan

Taiwan has been inhabited since prehistoric times by aboriginal peoples of Malayo-Polynesian ancestry, and there has been some Chinese settlement in the island since the Song dynasty. Migration from the Chinese mainland to the island was rather restricted, however, until the late sixteenth century, and it was not until the period of nominal Dutch sovereignty (1624-62) that there were a large number of Chinese settlers. During the Dutch period, Chinese settlers around present-day Taiwan grew rice and sugar, and both crops were exported. There was a major influx of Chinese during the turmoil accompanying the dynastic turnover from Ming to Qing, greatly accelerated when the Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong (known in Western accounts as Koxinga) retreated to Taiwan from the mainland, drove out the Dutch colonial forces, and settled much of his army as farmers in the southwestern part of the island. By the time Zheng’s successors were conquered and the island nominally included in the Qing Empire as a prefecture of Fujian Province, there were Chinese farmers as far south as Dagou (later Gaoxiong) and as far north as Yunlin (Ho 1978, p. 10). Northern Taiwan was settled later and more slowly; it was not until the eighteenth century that the southwestern part of the Taibei Basin, in which Ploughshare is located, was opened up for Chinese cultivation. By 1811, Ho estimates that there were about 2,000,000 Chinese in Taiwan; this number probably increased by another million during the rest of the nineteenth century (ibid., p. 11).

During the eighteenth century, northern Taiwan in particular was largely a frontier outpost of southeastern China. Immigrants, primarily from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou prefectures in Fujian, and secondarily from the Hakka areas of northeastern Guangdong, were not permitted to settle permanently in Taiwan until the middle of the Qianlong period, in the mid-eighteenth century. Although there was some settlement prior to this date, settlers were not allowed to bring their families with them, so many of them crossed the straits to Taiwan in the spring, planted a crop, stayed until the fall harvest, then returned again.

After the mid-1700s, immigration became permanent, and a settled Chinese society, with villages of farming families, began to form (Wolf and Huang 1980, pp. 42-43). The island was an exporter of rice and sugar, primarily to northern China. Society, however, was still far from being a carbon copy of the relatively peaceful, orderly countryside of eighteenth-century society on the mainland. The Qing government was unable or unwilling to exert much direct political control over the island, and local communities thus became virtually self-governing under the rule of locally powerful families (Meskill 1970). These “fledgling gentry,” as Meskill calls them, organized irrigation works, clearing of land and, importantly, defense against hostile aboriginal peoples being driven slowly back into the island’s mountainous interior by the spread of Chinese agriculture in the western plains and foothills. As the island’s good agricultural districts gained population, military feuds between Fujianese and Hakkas, or between Fujianese of diverse origins on the mainland, became ever more frequent, culminating in the great battles in the mid-nineteenth century (Wang 1976, p. 73; see Lamley 1981, p. 309).

In the mid-1800s, Chinese society in Taiwan had lost some of its former wild frontier character, and the opening up of Danshui, Jilong, and Anping as treaty ports placed Taiwan in a position of a trading partner not only with the Chinese mainland and Japan, as previously, but also with the Western powers, particularly England, the Netherlands, and the United States (Ho 1978, pp. 13-15). Its traditional exports of rice and sugar continued, and the important camphor trade of northern Taiwan was supplemented by tea after the 1860s. Its imports consisted primarily of consumer goods, by far the most valuable of which was opium. Wang (1976, p. 74) speaks of British ships at Jilong exchanging opium, not produced in Taiwan but rather widely used, for camphor during this period. The total volume of trade was rather small, however, for most of Taiwan’s rural folk were engaged in production for personal consumption, mainly of rice and sweet potatoes, selling only a small surplus on the market.

Taiwan was thus only marginally included within world political and economic systems throughout most of the Qing. Ignored by its own nominal government, producing mostly for its own consumption, much of the population was relatively self-sufficient. There are, however, important exceptions to this generalization. There were extensive sugar-producing districts, primarily in the south, and tea districts in the north, whose economy was totally dependent on foreign trade. Ploughshare, as we shall see, was one of these exceptional communities.

The first real attempt to develop Taiwan’s polity and economy came under the late Qing governor Liu Mingchuan, who ruled from 1884 to 1891. An official with considerable experience in various posts on the mainland, he took over with the Qing court’s decision to raise Taiwan from the status of a prefecture of Fujian to a province in its own right, and he proceeded apace with schemes of political and economic reform. With the help of foreign engineers, he laid plans for China’s first railroad, to run the length of the island from Jilong to Dagou. He began the dredging of Jilong harbor so that Taiwan would gain its first deepwater port. He adopted a policy of entering the mountains and governing the aborigines, who continued to be at war with Chinese settlers, particularly camphor workers (Davidson 1903, p. 405). For this purpose he set up local militia and organized military expeditions into aborigine territory. And Liu set about political reform, issuing an ambitious series of regulations for village government designed to make local officials responsible to the Qing bureaucrats and to break the power of impromptu justice (Wang 1976, p. 66).

Few of Liu’s plans amounted to much, however. The railroad, beginning at Jilong, never got past Xinzhu, and even that stretch was primitive and inefficient (Davidson 1903, p. 751). The dredging of Jilong harbor never got anywhere, and the military expeditions to pacify the aborigines often had the opposite effect, finally ending inconclusively. There is little record of the impact of Liu’s political reforms, but it was not long before he was dismissed from his post (supposedly because of factional opposition at court) in 1891, and the Japanese takeover in 1895 brought about a much more thoroughgoing political control than Liu had ever envisioned. Liu Mingchuan tried to turn Taiwan into a political and economic system in the 1880s, but was stifled in his efforts; almost all of his plans would be fulfilled under the Japanese.

The Northern Region

The process of permanent settlement in northern Taiwan was very different from that in the south. The south, settled earlier, was opened up to a large extent by the efforts of Zheng Chenggong’s forces, but the north remained a backwater during Zheng’s tenure as ruler. When large-scale permanent settlement came about in the eighteenth century, it was by means of the government’s granting of patent, or dazu, rights to wealthy entrepreneurs, some of them from Amoy and others from South Taiwan. These patent holders were given rights as tax farmers on large tracts of land, and in turn they contracted with large gangs of laborers, usually recruited from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou prefectures, to clear the tropical rain forest that covered the land and convert it to cultivation of rice or other crops. Sometimes the clearing workers would then bring their families over to settle on the cleared land; sometimes other settlers would be recruited. These settlers, in turn, paid a small percentage of their crop to the patent holders, and were free to sublet their lands, usually at rental rates of 40 to 60 percent (Wickberg 1981, p. 213) to tenant farmers who actually cultivated the land. Three tiers of land rights developed: the patent holders, the landlords proper, and the tenant cultivators. On some land, and this seems to have been the case ordinarily with tea land,¹ there was no intermediate landlord, the smallholding peasant cultivating his own land and owing a small portion (usually 10-15 percent) of its crop to the dazu holder.

As agricultural society emerged in the eighteenth century, settlers from different parts of China tended to settle in different areas of the north. In the southwestern Taibei Basin, Yingge, Sanxia, Dingpu, Shitouxi-Ganyuan, Shanzijiao, Pengcuo and Xizhou were all settled by people from Anxi County of Quanzhou Prefecture. To the south, near Taoyuan, were Zhangzhou people, who also inhabited Banqiao and Zhonghe. Finally Shulin was an ethnic mixture, with Anxi, other Quanzhou, and Zhangzhou people all represented (Wang 1976, p. 72). There was some strife in this area, culminating when the great battle of 1856 over control of the port at Mengjia spread to the surrounding countryside and most of the Zhangzhou people who remained within Anxi areas were driven out.

The north of Taiwan has neither the rich soils nor the extensive plains of the south and center of the island; thus in the nineteenth century the economy of the north developed important sectors that were given over to the growing of cash crops and to some secondary industries associated with the agricultural products. Before the 1860s, the principal among these was camphor, produced by distillation from the wood of a large tree that grows along the lower slopes of Taiwan’s interior mountains. Camphor workers were, of all Chinese, the most likely to be involved in fighting with aborigines; the grisly raids and reprisals on both sides testify to the motivation of the settlers for an income from this product and to the determination of the aborigines not to concede an inch of territory without a fight (Davidson 1903, p. 405). The most important camphor center in North Taiwan was at Dakekan (later Daxi), which was reported to have over 20,000 camphor stills in 1870–Sanxia had about 150 (Wang 1976, p. 75).

Tea, on the other hand, was a relative late-comer to Taiwan’s economy. Some had apparently been grown before the 1860s, but it was only when the British trader John Dodd introduced cuttings from Anxi in 1865 and 1866 that the tea industry became important. Once introduced, it grew rapidly. In 1866, Taiwan exported 82 metric tons of processed tea leaves; by 1888 that total had grown to over 8,000 metric tons (Ho 1978, p. 21). Tea was grown in the hilly areas all over northern Taiwan from this time on—Sanxia is frequently mentioned in old sources as one of the more prominent tea districts (Davidson 1903, p. 398). It was grown primarily by small holders with about a hectare of gardens each, employing mostly family labor, and by a few larger farmers with six or eight hectares, which required large numbers of laborers, mostly unmarried women, to do the picking. The tea was allowed to ferment somewhat, giving it the characteristic flavor of Oolong, and dried in local processing plants, then shipped to the merchant houses, both Chinese and foreign, of Dadaocheng (present-day Yanping district in Taibei). There it was further cleaned, dried, and boxed for shipment, usually transshipment through Amoy and on to the American and, to a lesser extent, European markets. Formosa Oolong, as it was called, was considered a superior grade of tea to what was produced in China, and was thus intended for a high-priced market in America (Davidson 1903, p. 372).

By the 1880s, northern Taiwan, not so well-endowed for rice agriculture as other parts of the island, had developed a considerable cash-cropping sector, dependent on foreign trade for its prosperity. Davidson (ibid., pp. 375-76) describes well the rising and falling fortunes of local growers and processors as they reacted to the ups and downs of the speculators in the Dadaocheng market. This dependency did not link the tea districts of North Taiwan into an island-level economy; rather it integrated them into the world economy, with apparently very little trade taking place with the center and south of Taiwan. North Taiwan had at this time become underdeveloped in a sense: it exported primary products to a world market over which it had very little control (Chirot 1977, pp. 34-36).

Sanxia in North Taiwan

The economic hinterland of Sanxia, which in the nineteenth century seems to have included, for some purposes at least, nearly all the Anxi areas in the southwestern Taibei Basin, is divided ecologically into two zones. In the flood plains of the Dakekan and Sanxia rivers, and in a few foothill plateaus, the land is flat and rice can be grown. In these areas, such as Ganyuan-Shitouxi, Longenpu-Liucuopu-Maiziyuan, and the lower part of Hengxi, it appears that rice growing was the major occupation of most of the inhabitants in the nineteenth century (Ahern 1973, pp. 11-13; Harrell 1981c). Along the mountain slopes and in the upper reaches of the river valleys, however, the terrain is unsuitable for rice cultivation and must be put either to cash crops, such as tea, or used for various kinds of forestry, such as distilling camphor or manufacturing charcoal. It is the character of this second ecological zone that gave Sanxia its special place in the economy of nineteenth-century northern Taiwan.

The first zone was opened earlier. Most of the plain between Sanxia and the Dakekan River was under rice cultivation before the middle of the eighteenth century, and it is recorded that Sanxia itself was already a considerable town in 1786 (Wang 1976, p. 50). Even the flatter areas to the south of the town were brought under cultivation in the eighteenth century: Jiaoxi in mid-Qianlong (1760s); Bazhang and Zhongpu in 1756. Areas at higher elevations, though penetrated by Chinese in the 1700s, were not fully opened up until the late Jiaqing and early Daoguang periods—the 1810s and 1820s. Most of the Chinese in the area were still rice farmers, though a few appear to have supplemented their income by working nearby forests for camphor or rattan. In the 1820s, indigo plantations were established on the hills near Chengfu by a wealthy merchant from Mengjia who imported workers from Fujian. A dyeing industry then grew up in Sanxia town, persisting until the twentieth century. Most of the dyed cloth was exported to Fujian (Wang 1976, p. 74). With this one exception, the hills remained aborigine country. Chinese guarded against attacks but rarely ventured far into the mountains (Ahern 1973, pp. 12-13).

The transport system of Sanxia shows a similar temporal development. Roads from three to ten feet wide connected Sanxia with Yingge, and thence Taoyuan; with Ganyuan and thence Shulin; with Hengxi; and with Dakekan by way of Zhongzhuang by the end of the Qianlong period (1796). But roads leading to Chengfu, Dapu, and other points in the hills were not built until the early nineteenth century. It was in 1840 that the road from Hengxi through Chengfu and Ankeng connected Sanxia with Xindian on the other side of the mountains (Wang 1976, pp. 70-71).

The development of the mountain areas of Sanxia did not really come until the introduction of tea in the 1860s, and then it came very quickly. Hengxi and Chengfu in particular, and the mountains surrounding the plateau of Ploughshare and Shisantian as well as the districts around Mayuan and Tudigongkeng, seem to have received large influxes of tea planters in the last half of the nineteenth century.

By the 1880s, Sanxia was anything but a self-sufficient economic system. Its forests produced some camphor and much charcoal, as well as wood for a furniture industry that grew up in Sanxia town. Cash crops, first indigo and then tea, were grown for eventual export, and tied a considerable portion of Sanxia’s population into the international economy. And when, in the late nineteenth century, the Lim family of Banqiao, the wealthiest family in the southern Taibei Basin, bought great tracts of land in Ganyuan-Shitouxi and parts of Hengxi, it meant that much of the rice produced by Sanxia’s fertile plains was also exported from the area. The town itself boasted a wide range of commercial establishments, many of them dealing in the products of the nearby countryside, and the population of the area is estimated by Wang to have been about 2,000 households, or perhaps 10,000 people, in 1895 (Wang 1976, p. 64). Probably about 40-50 percent of these households grew tea.²

Ploughshare

The relationship between ecology and the social and economic position of Ploughshare is a paradoxical one. With its neighbor Shisantian, Ploughshare is situated on one of those plateaus that are extensions of the lowland, rice-growing zone of the Sanxia system. But its economy, and thus its place in the system, are controlled, unlike those of Shisantian, by the characteristics of the upland zone. This seems to have come about in the following way.

The first mention of Ploughshare in any historical source comes in the 1760s, when a Chinese family settled there and cultivated crops on the nearby mountainsides, probably those to the north of Blacksmith Gulch. Formal dazu rights to Ploughshare and Shisantian were given by the aboriginal patent holders to a Chinese in 1779, but the land does not appear to have been cleared at that time (John Shepherd, personal communication). Around 1800, the area was divided into three “camps” of lowland aborigines who began to clear the land in about 1816. By the 1820s, most of the land was cleared, and the xiaozu (landlo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface to the 2015 Edition
• A Note on Romanization
• Introduction
• 1. Ploughshare in the Socioeconomic System
• 2. The Changing Nature of Work
• 3. Social Inequality
• 4. Community Relations
• 5. Family Organization
• 6. The Organization of Religion
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index