Wed Short Shorts: Please stop, Kerry Brown

Taiwan: you're never far from this

Interesting news for the KMT today. First, the political warfare military instructors are going to be phased out of educational institutions across the nation by 2020. In the old days they were responsible for following and reporting on the political views of students, and also for school discipline and punishment. Students viewed them with terror. Generally they were pro-KMT and enforced party ideologies and historical theology. Remnants of that attitude remain, as this video from Feb shows. But on the whole they have changed with democratization. Getting rid of the KMT's political presence in the government is one thing; rooting out its institutional presence is another, and more difficult. It will be another generation before that is gone...

Bigger news for the KMT is that the local factions are signalling they want evolution, if not revolution: they want local chapter heads to be elected by local chapters, not appointed by the Party center. This is a direct threat to the mainlander elites who really run things, since they've been accustomed to managing the patronage networks from above... from the KMT news organ:

According to Yao Chiang-lin (姚江臨), a member of KMT’s Central Standing Committee, former President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who was concurrently KMT chairman, had included direct election of local chapter directors as one of his party chairmanship election campaign planks. However, he did not fulfill his promise, nor did the following chairpersons, Wu Po-hsiung (吳伯雄), Eric Chu (朱立倫), and Hung Hsiu-chu.

As everyone has noted since the 1970s, if the KMT wants to survive, it will have to Taiwanize. This would be an important first step. Hung, backed by the mainlander old soldiers, is temporizing. Readers may recall back in February then Chairman Eric Chu appointed a bunch of retreads and old men to the Party Chapter Chair positions, signaling that there would be no "reform" on his watch.

A friend of mine put it:

More noise..... I wonder if this will be like the time the party majorly reformed following its big election losses in 2000, 2004, 2014....

Turning to the outside world...

Like far too many China scholars who seem unable to approach Taiwan except through a China frame, UK scholar and uber-commentator Kerry Brown expends billions of pixels trying to subsume Taiwan into China, and thus, utterly failing to understand Taiwan. His latest so-does-not-get-it effort in the Diplomat is how Tsai’s Apology Strengthens Taiwan’s Place at Front of Chinese Modernity...

This issue is a huge one. Han Chinese treatment of smaller ethnic communities in modern Chinese history has been one of the darkest and most taboo issues. Mongolians in the Inner Mongolian region during the Cultural Revolution, starting in 1966, endured terrible treatment, with official figures released a decade later admitting that over 20,000 had died. Chinese Muslims were forced to eat pork, and Tibetan monasteries were closed down, with many destroyed. Up to today, similar patterns of exclusion and poverty exist in China’s 55 recognized ethnic minority groups. Attempts to hold the government to account on these issues run the risk of being painted as politically motivated, separatist attacks. The idea of Beijing issuing an apology along the lines that Tsai has for its ethnic communities and the treatment they have received in the last decades, let alone centuries, is currently unimaginable.

Tsai’s apology will no doubt not be widely reported across the Strait. But it does stand as a major historic movement with relevance for all Chinese, not just those in Taiwan. It shows how a Han Chinese-dominated community can start to look at its behavior and record in relations between ethnic groups over the decades and admit to some hard truths. In this, Tsai has possibly been inspired by the actions of leaders like Kevin Rudd in Australia. Rudd’s groundbreaking decision when elected prime minister in 2008 to issue a formal apology to the country’s aborigines was a courageous act, and ranks as perhaps his most important achievement in power.

The framework for understanding Tsai's action is not "Chinese modernity". It can never be "Chinese modernity" because modernity in China is a Han-chauvinist, colonialist, and imperialist modernity, a modernity imposed on China by Han elites, a modernity stamping out local differences and local cultures and languages as fast as possible and replacing them with Han language, history, and values, because China is an empire that is attempting to cover itself with the hard candy shell of a state. Thus, the use of "ethnic groups" in the media and academia to describe Tibetans or Uighurs is a good example of China's soft power at work -- its deployment as a descriptor obscures the imperial nature of Chinese rule. China is an empire, its variegated peoples are occupied peoples, not "ethnic groups" as if they somehow were serendipitously found to be living in China (gosh, how did that happen?) and were not the subjects of imperial conquest.

When the PLA comes over, the destruction of Taiwan's culture and political independence will be just another example of Chinese colonialist modernity at work. Just as it was the first time the KMT imposed Chinese modernity on Taiwan in 1945...

Tsai's apology was not "Chinese" but Taiwanese. Her actions, as I noted in the long post below, are not a further development of "Chinese modernity" but the offering of an inclusive Taiwanese democratic alternative that is based on resistance to Han-centered Chinese modernity. Her apology was made possible by a Taiwan-centered modernity with Taiwan independence at its core, and itself is an act furthering independence.

Even Brown himself recognizes that no Han in China could apologize to those "ethnic groups". Hmmm, wonder why...

Note to KBrown: the people in Taiwan are Taiwanese, not Chinese. I am pretty sure you don't regard Kevin Rudd's apology as a beacon to British people everywhere. Tsai's apology to Taiwan's aborigines is similarly not a beacon to Chinese people everywhere. If Chinese people choose to be inspired by it, that would be awesome, but I don't hold out much hope...
_____________
Daily Links:

• Taiwan: World Leader in Crowdfunding
• The Cleaver Attack: another in the long line of silly decisions to let violent suspects out on bail
• DONT' MISS: my man Michal Thim in SCMP: China's divide and rule attitude in SE Asia is good for no one
• Taiwan dollar hits 12 month high as speculative money flows into Taiwan
• New film sheds light on sexual exploitation of minors in Taiwan
• Hilariously, China says Taiwan needs to make an effort to re-establish communication
• Excellent Nikkei piece backing up everything I've said: As Chinese tourism falls, other Asian tourism rises.
• New Bloom: Is ROC nationalism going to hold the DPP hostage in the SCS?
• Project 2049: Taiwan's Submarine program 
• News Lens: Behind the scenes with Taiwan's NPP
• DON'T MISS: Bob Kao of the Taiwan Law Blog is everywhere these days, and a good thing too. Here he is reviewing an important book on the US-Taiwan-China relationship in international law.

_______________________
[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Why Taiwan Nationalism Exists

Heron now.

The Taipei Times reports on the regional disparities in the central government development budget:

According to the Ministry of Finance, Taipei is to receive NT$36.3 billion (US$1.2 billion), averaging NT$10 billion more than the New Taipei City and Greater Kaohsiung, which have larger populations than Taipei.

Taipei would receive an average of NT$13,500 per resident, almost double the amount per resident in New Taipei City, Yilan, Changhua and Hsinchu counties.

According to Ministry of Finance, fund distribution next year — not including a special overall planning fund — is estimated at NT$225 billion, a NT$17.3 billion increase from last year.

A total of NT$205 billion is to be distributed among 22 local governments, with NT$19.4 billion to be shared among townships, the ministry data said.

The five special municipalities and Taoyuan County, which is due to become the nation’s sixth special municipality on Dec. 25, are to receive more than NT$145.6 billion of the fund, the data showed.

The essence of colonialism is that it is extractive. The colonizer extracts resources from the colonized population and transfers them back to its own people. In the Taiwan case, that is Taipei sucking resources out of the south and spending them on the heavily pro-KMT city. This arrangement is one reason why Taipei people vote for the KMT year after year -- it results in concrete lifestyle benefits. The amazing metro system in Taipei is possible only because people in Pingtung and Chiayi are starved for development funds they need.

Why do the South and Center feel colonized? Simple: resources go out, but they don't come back. In recent years several cities have upgraded to the municipality level to gain a greater share of the nation's development resources. Currently the Act Governing the Allocation of revenues calls for 43% of revenue to go to special municipalities (Taipei, New Taipei, K-town, Taichung, and Tainan) and 57% to everywhere else. One reason the north gets away with more is that when Tainan and Taichung upgraded, they merged the city proper with the surrounding county, meaning that they got only modest total increases in funds, since the county and city had separate funding. New Taipei City, however, was not required to merge with anything, meaning that New Taipei City saw real increases in development funding, and the north continues to dominate in development funding.

As you can see, Taipei continues to retain more than its share, and yet as a center of headquarters, government, and finance, it produces nothing tradeable, just services (nearly half the nation's services are produced in Taipei). The real work of Taiwan takes place elsewhere, with Kaohsiung and Taoyuan (due to be upgraded to a municipality this year) producing nearly a third of the nation's industrial production. The independence sentiment so strong in central and southern Taiwan is the direct result of this transfer of resources out of the productive regions of Taiwan into Taipei. Note that Greater Kaohsiung's population is larger than Taipei's but it gets a smaller amount of development funding than Taipei.

This is why the DPP has consistently attempted to move government functions, and the government itself, out of Taipei and elsewhere. Just this year the Ma Administration recalled the Fisheries Agency to Taipei...
_______________________
[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Our Colonial Administration

A spider protects its hatchlings.

A while back I wrote on how the north of Taiwan is the center of a colonial state, whose periphery is essentially everything south of Hsinchu. The reflexive nature of this state is apparent even in the small stuff.

Let us recall that "independence" is in part a regional response to the way the north parasitizes the rest of the nation, sucking up its development money, exploiting its resources, impoverishing its governments, and eating up its promising young people. What people in the south want independence from is the colonial government in Taipei.

Thus, one of the DPP's most important policies is regional development balancing, and part of this are initiatives for moving government offices down to cities in central and southern Taiwan. Lin Jia-lung has even floated the idea of moving the legislature to Taichung (would save a lot of travel money, and think how easy it would be for legislators to keep up with their gangster contacts). A commentary in the Taipei Times yesterday recounted:

The administration of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) promoted more even allocation of resources, starting with the relocation of central government agencies south. Chen heralded the Council of Agriculture’s Fisheries Agency as the advance guard in this initiative.

When President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office, this policy was thrown into reverse and the agency began working on its return to Taipei, a process due to be completed by the end of this month.

The Chen Administration had sent the Fisheries Agency to the south. Immediately the Ma Administration, reflexively anxious to preserve and re-assert the coloniality of the north, recalled that Agency to Taipei (that's more of that famous pragmatism, no doubt, for which Ma was so touted by delusional media and experts prior to the 2008 election).

Hand-in-hand with the colonial structure of the government is the colonial attitude that southerns and Taiwanese are inferiors. That too was exampled this week as academics complained about the appointments to head the Museum of Taiwanese Literature -- two individuals with no expertise in that area.

Lung appointed the museum’s director and deputy director, but neither of them has a related academic background, nor authentic connections to Taiwanese literature studies, they said.

The move led prominent figures in the nation’s literary circles to charge that the museum’s mission statement has been abandoned to become a haven for political appointees and the museum has been turned into Lung’s “personal fiefdom.”

The move doesn't signal that Lung has made it her personal fiefdom. What it signals is that Lung hardly considers the positions to be serious and important.

UPDATE: Ben responds and adds
_______________________
[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

PAPER ON PARADE: Japan's First War Reporter: Kishida Ginkō and the 1874 Taiwan Expedition

The Japanese memorial to the Mudan Incident.

Brush in hand, you fervently followed the barbarian-smiters,
Filling your books with curious reports and various oddities.
For 100 days, your ‘News’ was reported to the world:
A bold once-in-a-lifetime journey made on a military tour.
Were it not for this prose being published in Ginza,
How would children ever learn about Taiwan?
I recall words in your account that still make me shiver –
The drunken savage behind you draws his bow taut. -- from a poem inspired by Ginko's reports

Time for another installment of our regularly irregular feature here at The View, Paper on Parade. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across what sounded like an interesting paper, Japan's First War Reporter: Kishida Ginkō and the Taiwan Expedition, by Matthew Fraleigh. The life of Kishida Ginko (1833-1905), one of those bigger-than-life personalities that 19th century colonialism seemed to have an unending knack for discovering, coincides with the rise of the Meiji state and Japan's outward and southward colonial movement, as well as its diplomatic campaign to deploy both western and eastern concepts of sovereignty against the Manchus in China. Far earlier than other Meiji thinkers, Ginko developed a vision of Japan as not merely an importer of "advanced civilization" but also as an exporter of it to the uncolonized areas south of Japan.

Ginko was born the eldest son of a relatively prosperous farming clan. He became a master of traditional Chinese learning and fell in with a group of critics of the Shogunate's foreign policy, at first advocating a fiery xenophobic nationalism that moderated over time. Forced into hiding in 1858 with many other critics, he came into contact with scholars of western learning, and had an eye illness healed by an American missionary doctor. Ginko later marketed eye drops used to cure the disease, making money that he used to fund charitable activities, and was introduced by the American doctor to the world of newspapers.

During the latter half of the 1860s Ginko founded a couple of newspapers. He sought to write in a style  accessible to readers of all social classes. Fraleigh observes of this period:

In 1868, Ginko founded another newspaper in Yokohama, Moshiogusa, and in its first issue he declared that just as newspapers were indispensable for the nation, clarity and intelligibility were essential in newspaper writing. Moshiogusa enjoyed a successful run during these tumultuous years, lasting through 1870. A few years later, Ginko’s assumption of the role of Japan’s first war correspondent in the Taiwan Expedition brought him widespread fame and cemented his reputation as a journalist, but in Moshiogusa we see a domestic precursor as it published articles in its inaugural year reporting on battles between Tokugawa and imperial forces.

In 1873 he moved to another newspaper. Even before going to Taiwan, Ginko was an important figure in the formative stages of the Japanese newspaper industry.

When the campaign in Taiwan was announced, Ginko asked for a spot as a war reporter but was initially refused on the grounds that military campaigns should be secret. Ginko resourcefully got around this by getting a job as a clerk on the expedition with one of the industrialists supplying the army.

The first installment of his groundbreaking feature 'News from Taiwan' appeared in April. Ginko not only reported on the expedition but also, in this first installment, explained to his audience just what a war correspondent was.The expedition also was accompanied by a war correspondent from the NY Herald, E. H. House. It would be interesting to know if the two men ever spoke, for Ginko did know some English, and had actually helped the doctor who healed his eye compile a Japanese-English dictionary.

The current grave of the Okinawan seamen outside of Checheng, Taiwan.

The ostensible purpose of the 1874 expedition was to punish the aborigines of Taiwan for killing 54 fishermen from Okinawa in 1871, and perhaps, for another incident in which four sailors were stranded in Taiwan and attacked, in 1873. The expedition's other purposes, however, were more important. As anyone familiar with 19th century maps of Taiwan knows, the southern end of the island, the mountains, and the east coast were considered to be savage territory outside of Qing control. The Japanese were aware that if they could demonstrate a "civilizing mission" then that territory could fall under their control. More importantly, both the Qing dynasty and the Japanese claimed some sort of suzerainty over Okinawa and its associated islands. By formally acting on behalf of the Okinawans, the Japanese, who had just annexed Okinawa a few years before, would strengthen their claim to the island -- for the Qing denied all responsibility for the area, not only in that incident, but in the previous Rover Incident as well. In fact the Japanese expedition would cause the Qing to perform a 180 on the aboriginal areas and thereafter begin to claim them as their own.

The campaign, and the clash over Okinawa and Taiwan, must also be seen against the backdrop of both Tokyo and Beijing's deployment of eastern and western concepts of sovereignty against each other depending on context and perceptions of their respective usefulness. Understanding that both Imperial states deftly manipulated these concepts of sovereignty is an additional blow to self-serving claims that the Qing used some special East Asian concept of sovereignty that entitles modern China to everything the Qing ever held, found in papers such as this one on the Senkakus I looked at a while back.

The Japanese move into southern Taiwan was in part the brainchild of Charles LeGendre, formerly the US consul in Amoy, who had subsequently gone on to Japan. Readers will recall that we last met LeGendre during his 1867 punitive expedition into what is now the Hengchun Peninsula and Kenting. In his new post in Japan he enthusiastically suggested to many people that Japan should make a move into Taiwan. Kishida Ginko, Fraleigh concludes from circumstantial evidence, must have been one of the individuals Le Gendre spoke to.

The Stone Gates, the gorge where the main battle was fought, looking northeast into aboriginal territory.

The expedition was delayed by storms and political intervention by the Powers -- the troops were to travel on ships hired from the British and Americans, who withdrew their ships to avoid offending the Qing dynasty. Thus fully half of his installments on the Taiwan expedition were completed during this period when it was delayed.

Just before the expedition finally sailed, Ginko produced a map of Taiwan explicitly showing that the Qing did not own a large chunk of the island, and pointing out that the Qing did not dispute that fact, either. The map, scholars have argued, must have come from Le Gendre. Fraleigh observes: "In this way, Ginko’s ‘News From Taiwan’ served as one of the major vehicles through which the expansionist proposals of LeGendre, and the imperialistic discourse upon which they were based, found their way
into the public sphere."

In addition to highlighting the blank space that southeastern and eastern Taiwan were on Qing maps, Ginko also presented the aborigines of Taiwan to his readers. In doing so he followed the Qing practice of referring to the "cooked" aborigines who mingled with the local Han population, and the "raw" savages who preferred to keep their distance from their would-be civilizers. Fraleigh notes that:

Among those indigenes on the extremes, [Ginko] singled out the Mudan (Botan) group of the southeast as being ‘evil in temperament, and unlike human beings. They are fond of fighting, butchering and eating the flesh of those whom they defeat’. Robert Eskildsen has argued that one of the innovations of Japan’s mimetic imperialism was its exaggeration of the putative savagery of Taiwan’s indigenes. By accentuating the savagery of others, he argues, Japan could eliminate the potential middle ground into which it might fall, thereby shoring up its own claims to being ‘civilized’.

Ginko not only discussed the lives and habits of the aborigines of Formosa in great detail, he also presented to his readers a vision of Japan as a civilizing force that would build a colony in Formosa after the locals had been subdued, stationing troops in the area south of the Qing border, and teaching the natives how to be civilized people. The Meiji government was then in the process of developing Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, and the northern areas of Honshu, then peopled by the Ainu. Ginko compared the aborigines of Formosa with the indigenes of northern Japan, thus drawing a link between an extant colonial project and the one he envisioned for the future.

Like many writers on Taiwan in that era, Ginko saw it as a land of great potential, which he presented to readers in tropes that will be familiar to anyone who has ever read a book about Taiwan: Taiwan has great potential but the Chinese were just too lazy to take advantage of it. Fraleigh has a nifty quote from one of Ginko's newspaper articles:

....but having come [here] and seen it, for me it has nothing to do with a desire to amass a larger territory or a desire to amass a larger population or some such thing. I simply want to see this island opened up. That is the position that I hold. If we look at the condition of the country now, it is not the case that it is difficult to invigorate it and make it thrive. Rather, the fact of the matter is that it has been abandoned and left to languish. But there’s no use now in blaming the Chinese for their lazy negligence.

Also like so many of us with a passion for Taiwan, Ginko began exploring the island's terrain and local cultures.

Mudan town and the area today.

Shortly after the climactic battle in June Ginko was forced to return to Japan due to illness. Continuing his reporting, he also strove to keep Taiwan in the public eye. He began a nine-part series entitled 'Taiwan Manuscript'. Remarkably, however, his enthusiasm for Taiwan and for a Japanese colonial project on the island were not shared by most of his contemporaries. At the end of 1874 the two Imperial Courts, Qing and Japanese, reached a settlement of the issue and the possibility of a Japanese colony on Taiwan faded into the future.

Ginko went on to engage in other entrepreneurial and philanthropic projects, particularly in China, and continued to write and publish. He felt it crucial that Japanese clearly understand the nations around them. His vision of Japan projecting outward its "civilizing" force would not be realized, however, until the end of his life. Yet he remains an enduring figure in Japanese media history, and an important forerunner of the many talented Japanese who would give devoted service to Japan's imperial cause on the island of Taiwan.

The Battle of the Stone Gate, from the 1876 Taiwan Expedition Panorama. The painting is based on a photo that no longer exists. Kishida Ginko, already famous at the time, is shown in civilian clothing on the left.
______________
REF: Fraleigh, Matthew(2010) 'Japan's First War Reporter: Kishida Ginkō and the Taiwan Expedition', Japanese Studies, 30: 1, 43 — 66
_______________________ 
[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

Cultural Survival on Taiwan's Orchid Island

I'd just like to point to this awesome piece by Linda Gail Arrigo, with Si Jilgilan (Huang Ching-Wen) and Si Maraos (Chung Chi-Fu) on the Tao of Orchid Island, the nuclear issue, the confrontation with KMT marginalization and political control, and resistance and recolonization. A fascinating piece....

Since the opening of tourist travel to the island in 1971 and increased freedom of speech in the late 1980s, Taipower and the military installations remaining on the island have resorted to the buy-off tactics common in governmental and commercial dealings with environmental movements in Taiwan. Bribes have been dispersed from the government in the form of compensation for the salted-cement housing, and from Taipower in the form of land rents and “community compensation” or “appreciation” (hui kuei jin) for the onus of the nuclear waste site. Both have brought community and environmental disaster.

The compensation programs that began eight years ago placed large sums of money in the hands of local government administrators, creating unprecedented opportunities for skimming if those elected locally cooperated with the ruling KMT and Taipower. The Orchid Island community compensation amounts to about NT$90 million (US$2.5 million) annually (1), a sum supposedly slated for 60 percent medical welfare, 30 percent education, and 10 percent infrastructure.

As is the case elsewhere in Taiwan, the indigenous people, especially those in remote areas, are already dependent on and subject to control by the penetrating structure of the KMT, which for many decades held sway over their land rights and handed out patronage jobs in local government and in police and military forces. Community compensation exacerbates the problem. And the structure buys the vote at election time, perpetuating itself. Because of the corruption, a monumental amount of cement has been poured on the island in recent years. One major project paved the road ringing the island, but in addition to the road surface, a foot-high concrete wall was built on both sides of the road to keep the pigs out of the way of vehicles. (Wildlife experts warn that the wall may also block the spawning migrations of land crabs, traditionally a prized food source.)

Read the whole thing: it is long, detailed, and well worth the time invested.
_______________________
[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

1904 NY Times article resurrected as antidote to KMT propaganda. Please no.

Now making the rounds in the Taiwanese community is a 1904 NY Times article on Japanese colonialism in Formosa. There's a Chinese-English translation on this blog (check out the cool pics) and the original may be had here.

The article is the usual mix of fact and fiction. After a few general comments on the difficulty of colonization, the article states:

For this reason Japan’s first attempt at colonizing is particularly interesting, especially as the Island of Formosa, which is Japan’s first colony, probably so-called offers difficulties to a colonizing nation which in the past have appeared insurmountable to many other nations.

But of course, this is not Japan's first attempt at colonization. By the time that article was printed, Okinawa had been a formally annexed Japanese territory for a quarter-century, and its influence there dated back to the 17th century. Let's not even mention Hokkaido.

The rest of the article carries on in a similar vein:

The Spanish and the Dutch made attempts at colonizing Formosa, but they gave it up in despair. The Chinese left the land virtually a wilderness, and the French and English, who might easily enough have acquired it, preferred not to put their foot into the interior of that savage island.

In reality, the Spanish were tossed by the Dutch; the Dutch were tossed off by Koxinga. They didn't "give up in despair." The Qing did not leave the island "virtually a wilderness". The English did not take a crack at Taiwan because they did not want to touch off a general war among the Powers over a subdivision of the Qing empire, and the French were defeated by the Qing in their invasion. It almost makes one wish blogs had been invented in 1904; what fun bloggers would have had with this piece!

Only a few years have elapsed since the island has been completely pacified. Nevertheless, the economic ordinary progress which has already been made is very striking. The increased prosperity of the inhabitants may be seen from the fact that the general revenue, which is principally derived from Government works and undertakings, the opium monopoly, customs, and various taxes has expanded from 2,711,822 yen in 1896 to 12,738,587 yen in 1903, having grown almost tenfold.

It would not be difficult to show that the rest of the article is colonialist propaganda, especially with the 20-20 historical hindsight we have. For example, the gains in rice production the writer alludes to were largely the result of the completion of a cadastral survey in 1904 that increased the amount of land the government was measuring and taxing, not from actual production boosts. In keeping with its mix of truth and falsehood, it is true that Japan poured money like water into the island -- the budget for Taiwan was a major political issue in the first decade of the 20th century in Japan. But the island being completely pacified, that is nonsense. Nearly thirty more years of fighting against the aborigines remained, along with a few revolts from the local Han population.

From comments on email lists I have seen, some clearly see this article as an antidote to KMT claims about having developed Taiwan. It cannot be used this way; it is merely some American correspondent's paean to Japanese colonialism, written in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War, when Japan was sourcing military equipment from the US and was still condescendingly regarded as a junior and admirable member of the colonial club. Its crushing defeat of Russia, which would open eyes around the world, was another year in the future, and Homer Lea's prescient novel of World War II, The Valor of Ignorance, was still five years from its 1909 publication.

It contains no more truth or falsehood than similar KMT claims, and cannot be used to confront them. It is interesting solely as an artifact of attitudes and ideologies about the colonialism of its day. The opposite of ideology is methodology; to oppose the ideological constructions of history, historical methodology is necessary. I suggest Ho's monumental The Economic Development of Taiwan 1860-1970 as a good place to start opposing historical methodology to colonial ideology.
_______________________
[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Now Online: The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the Advocacy of Local Autonomy, by Christine Louise Lin

Mark from Pinyin News writes to tell me that he has put online Christine Lin's 100 page magnum opus on the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the independence and democracy movement originally published in Sino-Platonic Papers. The file is 8.44 mb, so give it some time. Lots of fascinating detail on language, politics, and culture:

By the end of World War II, Japanese was the primary means of written communication among the educated. However, churchgoers who did not know how to write in Japanese continued to use romanized Taiwanese to communicate with each other. The romanized Taiwanese vernacular was mostly used by Taiwanese Christians and was not a widely used means of mass communication outside of the Presbyterian Church. Although romanization was an easier system for people to learn, the government prohibited non-church publications from using it, and the knowledge of Taiwanese romanization was regarded as a symbol of being Christian. Tainan Theological College promoted literacy in Taiwanese by using romanization for the register used for teaching classes. The College also used romanized Taiwanese script for drafting sermons, reading the Bible, and singing hymns.

...or....

In 1974, copies of a Taiwanese-English dictionary, compiled by a Canadian Presbyterian missionary, Bernard L. M. Embree, under the auspices of the Taipei Language Institute were smuggled into Taiwan after the Nationalist government had banned their circulation on the island. The Nationalists banned the dictionary because it contained romanized Taiwanese. A government official said, "We have no objection to the dictionary being used by foreigners. They could use it in mimeographed form. But we don't want it published as a book and sold publicly because of the Romanization it contains. Chinese should not be learning Chinese through Romanization." The irony of this statement was that the dictionary not only gave the romanized forms of words, but also the Chinese characters. The romanization was present since it allowed for a more accurate pronunciation of the words. However, the government did not fmd any use of romanization tolerable since it believed romanization promoted the Taiwanese language. From the beginning of Nationalist rule in Taiwan, the KMT government limited the use of Taiwanese and implemented a program of "Mandarization," in which they forced schools, the military, and the government to use only Mandarin Chinese. Native Taiwanese, who were much more comfortable with their own language, despised this policy since the government limited television programming in Taiwanese to only one and a half hours per day.

Go thou and read!
_______________________
[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Paper on Parade: Taiwan: Baseball, Colonialism, and Nationalism

Baseball in Taiwan is growing in international stature. Several of the major league teams have scouts here, and Taiwan is now regularly sending players to the major leagues. If you haven't been to a local baseball game, you're missing an important part of Taiwan culture.

But where did it all come from? Andrew Morris' excellent book chapter, Taiwan: Baseball, Colonialism, and Nationalism, provides an engaging discussion of the history of baseball in Taiwan, and its connection to the various nationalisms and colonialisms that have shaped the history of Taiwan...

President Chen’s attention to the game marks only the latest chapter in the history of Taiwanese baseball, a game that has become much more than just a sport. It is a colonial legacy that was planted and sunk deep roots during the fifty-year Japanese occupation of the island from 1895 to 1945. The professional version of the game in Taiwan is a reminder of the profound influence of transnational capitalism on Taiwan.

Taiwan’s complicated history has given rise Taiwan’s complicated history has given rise to the need to present and understand Taiwan as part of the world community in its own right, not as part of the People’s Republic of China (prc). Much of contemporary Taiwanese culture, thus, emphasizes both the global and the local, and the blending of the two. Professional baseball in Taiwan is a perfect example of this self-conscious, ideological combination of the cosmopolitan and the provincial, the international and the Taiwanese. The history of professional baseball in Taiwan, in many ways, is nothing more or less than the history of the effort to create a “baseball culture” that could speak to both of these striking and complementary aspects of Taiwanese life.

Baseball began, of course, in the Japanese colonial era. The game was already established in Japan by the 1890s, and was imported to Taiwan as early as 1897. By 1915 there were 15 all-Japanese teams on the island. In the early 1910s, however, locals were already being encouraged to participate. In the 1925 a team composed entirely of Amis went to Japan and gained great fame, winning 4 of 9 games against Japanese school teams. Then came the Chiayi years....

The most famous of all Taiwanese baseball traditions was that born at the Jiayi Agriculture and Forestry Institute (abbreviated Kanô) in the late 1920s. Under the guidance of Manager Kondô Hyôtarô, a former standout player who had toured the United States with his high school team, Kanô dominated Taiwan baseball in the decade before the Pacific War. What made the Kanô team special was its tri-ethnic composition; in 1931 its starting nine was made up of two Han Taiwanese, four Taiwan aborigines, and three Japanese players. Kanô won the Taiwan championship, earning the right to play in the hallowed Ko¯shien High School Baseball Tournament, held near Osaka, five times between 1931 and 193 . The best of these, the 1931 squad, was the first team ever to qualify for Ko¯shien with Taiwanese (aborigine or Han) players on its roster. Kanô placed second in the twenty-three-team tournament that year, their skills and intensity winning the hearts of the Japanese public, and remaining a popular nostalgic symbol even today in Japan. This team of Han, Aboriginal, and Japanese players “proved” to nationally minded Japanese the colonial myth of “assimilation” (dôka)—that both Han and aborigine Taiwanese were willing and able to take part alongside Japanese in the cultural rituals of the Japanese state. Of course, the irony is that the six Taiwanese players on the starting roster probably also saw their victories as a statement of Taiwanese (Han or aborigine) will and skill that could no longer be dismissed by the Japanese colonizing power.

...there's so much to this wonderful paper -- from details like the death of the founder of the Amis team in 1947 in 2-28, to the broad sweep of history: the incorporation of baseball into the service of the KMT state, and later, into the service of US Cold War transnational capitalism.

My favorite part is his discussion of how Taiwan's little league teams in the US became a battleground for pro-Taiwan and pro-China groups:

....In 1969 frenzied Taiwanese fans shouted upon the Golden Dragons’ victory, “The players are all Taiwanese! Taiwan has stood up!” Taiwanese supporters soon raised the stakes in this implicit protest against the Guomindang government. In 1971, as the Tainan Giants swept to a world championship, Taiwanese independence activists at Williamsport hired an airplane to fly over the stadium towing a bilingual banner reading, “Long Live Taiwan Independence, Go Go Taiwan.” The Taiwan teams’ games attracted fans from all points of the political spectrum, so each Taiwan independence flag or banner was matched by pro-Nationalist fans waving flags and cheering for the “Chinese” team. The pro-state fans had an advantage, however, in the dozens of New York Chinatown thugs hired by the Guomindang to identify and rough up Taiwan independence activists at the games. The 1971 championship game was interrupted when a dozen of these toughs ran across the field to rip down a banner reading in English and Chinese, “Team of Taiwan, Go Taiwan.”

In 1972, when the Taibei Braves challenged for the world title, the Guomindang was better prepared, renting every single commercial aircraft for miles around to keep the Taiwan independence crowd from repeating their coup. Some seventy to eighty roc military cadets training in the United States were also recruited to Williamsport to, as they shouted while beating Taiwanese male and female supporters with wooden clubs, “Kill the traitors!”...

Explore this one yourself, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
_______________________
[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

More on the ECFA Cartoons: Guest Post

My friend and budding scholar Drew Kerslake, who has spent many years studying the original peoples of Taiwan, won a Wiki award for his work on the Wiki page on Taiwan aborigines, and is full of insight into local colonialisms, had a few thoughts on the ECFA cartoons which he has graciously consented to let me use as a guest post. Without further ado:

+++++++++++

This was on my mind last night, so I thought I would riff on it this morning.

The issue of "racism" from the article above has been discussed at length already, but I think there is still a little meat on those bones that may warrant a little deeper discussion.

First, we must assume that the agency that created this campaign was a professional outfit (probably owned in-part by the KMT) and therefore they do not deserve a mulligan for ignorance, as professional advertising agencies are usually staffed by experts in semiotics, human psychology, semantics and other disciplines from which they can best manipulate opinion.

Is this cartoon racist?

My short answer would be "no". It is not "racist". Contemporary Chinese nationalism i.e. R.O.C. and P.R.C. ideologies are both rooted in the concepts of racialism, which were popular around the end of the 19th Century as a political reaction to social-Darwinism. Racialism is a basic assumption that there are distinct "races" of human beings on earth. The early Sunists (followers and contemporaries of Sun Yat-sen) adopted racialism as one part of their nationalization program to help validate their project as they sought to discredit the Manchu Qing empire by simple virtue of "blood" and thus question future Qing legitimacy based on biology. The Sunists constructed a racial cosmology in which "white and yellow races" were superior and the "brown and black races" were "degraded" and "inferior". This is where racism enters the picture, but by Sunist definitions Taiwanese are "yellow" and "share the same blood" as all yellow people and therefore we are not dealing with an issue of "race", bigoted surely, but racist, no.

I feel this is more of an issue of Taiwan's problematic post-coloniality under the R.O.C. Much of the early Republican movement was characterized by the recurrent themes of modernism and scientism. The Sunists often used the latter to validate the former. The Republicans positioned themselves as modernists armed with "science" to destroy traditional Confucianism and traditional "backward" folk beliefs. The political actors from within the new Republican government positioned the state as a strong centrality and a transformational power from which they could modernize "China" to compete in the great Darwinian battles among nations. The state structure positioned citizens on a trajectory of modern vs. backward, with those more closely aligned with state ideology to be the most "advanced" and those who embraced Confucian traditionalism of folk beliefs to be "backward".

The R.O.C.'s rejection of traditionalism remained intact until the 1970's, when the P.R.C. and tang-wai activists began to seriously question the R.O.C.'s legitimacy, and then a major shift to a state centered traditionalism was promoted with the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement, designed to invent and promote state sponsored Cultural production. The products of this movement are what we now consider to represent traditional "Chinese" culture.

For the colonizer, the role as a “civilizer” is implicit on defining the objects of their civilizing project (Said 1979: 44-45). The resulting definitions must contain two exclusive, yet interrelated parts: A convincing demonstration of the people’s inferiority and the people’s ability to become “civilized” under colonial rule. By providing definitions for peripheral people, the civilizer provides the colonized with a set parameter of comparison with the colonizer and a reason they must become “civilized”(Harrell 1996: 8-17).Often, the distance between the periphery and the center is imagined, not simply as physical space, but in terms of time. By projecting the “other” in terms of temporal displacement or “denial of coevalness”, the colonizer distances himself from the colonized (Fabian 1983).

In the case of the cartoon images we see a clear example of Hoklo and Hakka as "ethnic other/periphery", with the KMT and its representatives firmly in place as the "civilized center" or as "advanced" on a constructed trajectory using the dichotomies of forwardness and backwardness/ advancement and degradation/modern and backward/ civilized and uncivilized .

The Taipei Times article states:

The comics portray Yi-ge as a 45-year old Hoklo-speaking man from Tainan City who works as a salesman in an unspecified traditional industry. According to his profile, Yi-ge is a vocational school graduate who speaks “Taiwanese Mandarin” and knows very little about the proposed ECFA. He is content being a follower in all things, but when it comes to protecting himself, he “goes all-out.”

We can see the Hoklo, Yi-ge character, is located in the "backward" south and the Hakka woman is located in "more-forward" Hsinchu, a stereotypical location for Hakka. Both places are "away" from the metropole or civilized center (symbol of modernity). Yi-ge is represented with little education. Formal Mandarin is used to symbolically represent modernity/advancement while "Taiwanese Mandarin" is represented as "degraded" or "less-authentic" form. The State provides all the answers which elude Yi-ge, as he has not been transformed, and only by allowing himself to be transformed by submitting to state power, can he then understand the elusive mysteries and "advance". We see this trope in nationalisms and missionary projects where the object suffers from an innate "lack" and the civilizer inserts itself to provide for the lack, which validates the civilizing project. Still, the relationship between civilizer and his object maintains an indelible colonial "taint".

Yi-ge is depicted as lacking education (a point of contact with the state) and education has deep social and class functions in Taiwanese society as far as social mobility is concerned. Education is also an indoctrination point for state ideology. The greater contact has with education, the greater chance they may be transformed by the civilizer. Here we see the KMT class construction is reliant on contact points with the indoctrination points of state structure.

I still think the symbolism runs deeper yet.

At first glance the characters are depicted to resemble opposites. Yi-ge the lowly, uneducated, blue collar worker, juxtaposed with Fa Sao, an educated, upwardly mobile Hakka. Although this may be a ploy to score political points with the Hakka, which have gradually shifted support behind DPP candidates, the cartoon depictions serve to degrade both Hakka and Hoklo speakers to the fetishized objects of colonial desire.

The act of transforming the "ethnicities" into cartoon characitures serves to diminutize them to become "childlike". It is common for the colonizer/civilizer to depict their object as childlike or female to reduce the object's imagined "power" as thus diminish contact between the civilizer and their object as one of an unequal power relationship. This is particularly salient in patriarchal societies like Han and Judeo-Christian groups. The scientism promoted by the R.O.C. determined females to be similar to children and vast amounts of literature were produced to lend scientific support to traditional female roles (Dikotter 1995). We can see other examples of diminutizing the object in the 2004 tourism campaign, "Naruwan, Welcome to Taiwan", in which a cartoon Amis girl became the symbol for Taiwan. The Amis character allowed the state to appropriate and deploy (subjugate) the indigene for their own political project while reducing the complex meme of indigene into a /tame/harmless/impotent/childlike face.

Both cartoon characters in the ECFA promotion are reduced to cartoon images and therefore both are having their power reduced and usurped by the KMT state (civilizer). But beyond that... Often, when there is contact between the civilizer/colonizer and their "object", an act of mimesis occurs as one attempts to mimic and replicate the object before them. It is an attempt to capture, hold, possess and control the power of the object (Taussig 1993). We see this in cave paintings, tribal art and in the souvenirs brought back from around the globe. On a more local level, one can go to the Nine Tribes Cultural Park and purchase their own Aborigine doll, dressed in a "Tarzan" leopard skin to bring home. These all act as a means of capturing some essence or power of the original object.

In the case of the cartoon figures we can clearly see that they have been located by the civilizing center, and they have determined by the center to be lacking modernity, but transformable into something "better" if they only follow the prescribed program (Of course, like an unruly child Yi-ge does not readily get with the program). They have been visually transformed into weaker/lesser human beings for the appropriation/consumption by the civilizer, which holds a desire to appropriate their object's power to grant a political mandate to rule.

What I can't believe is that this is still playing out in 2009.

Andrew Kerslake

References:

Dikotter, Frank.1995. Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period. Honolulu, HI. University of Hawaii Press.

Fabian, Johannes.1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.

Harrell, Stevan, ed. 1995. Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.

Taussig, Michael. (1993). Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York, Routlege.

Taipei Times article

_______________________
[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Japan Focus: Taiwan in the Chinese Imagination, 17-19th Century

Emma Teng, who has written an excellent book on Taiwan, discusses some aspects of it at JapanFocus:

The legacy of Qing imperialism for modern China has been profound: because the People's Republic of China (PRC) now claims sovereignty over virtually all the territory acquired by the last dynasty, the impact of Qing expansionism continues to be felt by the people of Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, and other former frontier regions. Separatist ("splittist" in PRC jargon) movements in all these areas have met with staunch opposition from the Chinese state, which considers such lands inseparable parts of China's sacred territory. Hence, the PRC claims Taiwan--which was a Japanese colony between 1895 and 1945 and which has been ruled by a separate (and recently democratic) government as the Republic of China (ROC) since 1949--as "sovereign territory" that must be returned to the Chinese motherland with due speed. Ironically, the "territorial integrity" that Chinese nationalists seek to defend is based on a territorial image of "China" created by an invading Manchu dynasty, and not the older Ming image.

Of the former Qing frontiers, Taiwan is of particular interest because the question of the island's sovereignty in the postwar era remains unresolved and hotly contested: Is Taiwan de facto a "sovereign state," or is it, in the words of the U.S. media, a "renegade province" of China? [9] Taiwan's relationship to the PRC and the question whether Taiwan might officially declare independence were leading issues in the 2000 presidential race in Taiwan, and remain hot-button topics. In an attempt to influence the outcome of that election, the PRC issued a thinly veiled threat of force: "To safeguard China's sovereignty and territorial integrity and realize the reunification of the two sides of the straits, the Chinese government has the right to resort to any necessary means." [10] The "Taiwan issue" (involving arms sales to Taiwan) is the prickliest thorn in U.S.-China relations and has the potential to bring the two powers into armed conflict. [11] The geopolitical importance of Taiwan combined with Taiwan's emergence since 1987 as a "Chinese democracy" has contributed to the growth of Taiwan Studies as an important new field in Asia and the United States.

And on writing about Chinese colonialism:

Although the primary focus of Taiwan's Imagined Geography is the Qing construction of Taiwan's imagined geography, in writing this book I also hoped to challenge prevailing preconceptions of "the colonizer"and "the colonized"by examining a non-Western imperial power. The presumption that colonizers were European and the colonized non-European is deeply entrenched both inside and outside the academy. The very notion of studying "Chinese colonialism"thus seems alien to many. On more than one occasion, I have been asked: "What do you mean by "Chinese colonial travel writing'? Do you mean European colonial travel writing about China?"The idea that "imperialism" is essentially a Western phenomenon has also been reinforced by scholars of modern China's "postcoloniality,"who have tended to focus on China's historical experiences with Western imperialism while ignoring China's own history as an imperialist power. [13] This is due in no small part to the PRC's ardent denials that the Chinese were ever anything but victims of imperialism; hence official PRC discourse refers to Qing expansionism as "national unification,"and talk of "Chinese imperialism"is heresy. [14] I seek to remedy this situation by asserting that China's postcoloniality must also be understood in terms of the legacy of Qing expansionism.

The whole article is interesting; it opens with the diary of an early Qing official named Yu Yonghe who came to Taiwan in the late 17th century, more fully told in Out of China, Macabe Keliher's wonderful tale of his trip.

[Taiwan] [China]