Thursday, October 19, 2006

Time article from 1946 on Taiwan

Shrimpcrackers, who has a great blog of his own, posted this link to a 1946 article from Time describing the looting of Taiwan by the KMT at Forumosa:

At last, eight months after V-J day, sugar-starved China was getting supplies from its new sugarbowl, Formosa. Ships were plying the 400 miles from Kiirun to Shanghai with the first of 150,000 tons of Japanese stores confiscated by the Chinese Army that took over the island, under U.S. tutelage, last fall. But the resumption of trade with tropically lush, industrially rich Formosa was a sweet-&-sour business.

Formosans complained that the Chinese occupation army was looting stocks, letting crops, refineries, railroads and power plants go to rack & ruin. Just as angry Shanghailanders, who could buy only from the government-backed Formosa Sugar Co., feared that a colossal sugar corner was being rigged in the already disastrous black market.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

One detail I noticed. "Lake of the Moon and Sun" is WAY more poetic than "Sun Moon Lake".