Book Review: Outcasts of Empire: Japan's Rule on Taiwan's "Savage Border," 1874-1945

Outcasts of Empire: Japan's Rule on Taiwan's "Savage Border," 1874-1945
Paul D. Barclay (Author)
Asia Pacific Modern
Philip E. Lilienthal Imprint in Asian Studies
University of California Press, 2018


In Outcasts of Empire: Japan's Rule on Taiwan's "Savage Border," 1874-1945, Paul Barclay tells this story, beginning with the Wushe Rebellion in 1930 led by Mona Ludao...:

The invasive and exploitative policies that provoked Mona and his confederates also eroded precolonial forms of social organization, authority, and ritual life among Taiwan’s indigenes. As it severed bonds between indigenes and their lands, in addition to prohibiting or reforming folkways it deemed injurious to its civilizing mission, the government-general nonetheless laid the groundwork for the emergence of Taiwan Indigenous Peoples as a conscious and agentive historical formation. By arresting the diffusion of Chinese language and customs into Taiwan’s interior, restricting geographic mobility across the so-called “Savage Border,” dividing the colony into normally and specially administered zones, and sanctioning a battery of projects in top-down ethnogenesis, the government-general inscribed a nearly indelible “Indigenous Territory” on the political map of Taiwan over the five decades of its existence.

...and tells it in narrative that is at once highly readable, deeply informed, illuminating, and sensitive to the humanity of every historical figure who appears in it. You can imagine my happiness in this age of unaffordable scholarly books that the book is available for free download. My deepest thanks to Dr. Barclay for not only writing this excellent book, but also for letting it be freely available.

Barclay's tale begins with the drama of the Wushe uprising, using it as a wedge to pry open the relations between the Japanese colonial state, run "on the cheap" as he frequently points out, and the original peoples of the island. Every aspect of their existence presented a quandary for Japan. Taiwan was that nation's first colony in a world of colonies and colonizers, and there was no reserve of experienced administrators and explorers that Japan could draw on. The nature of the aborigines themselves was elusive and the incoming Japanese state had only the most rudimentary body of knowledge about them to draw on. Moreover, the high mountain areas were inaccessible and unknown.

For the Han settlers on the plains Japanese rule was simpler. The initial period of Japanese rule was marked by rebellion after rebellion, ending with the crushing of the Tapani Revolt in 1915. This revolt complicated relations with the aborigines, since it drew off colonial resources urgently needed to extend Japanese rule into the highlands.

After that period of revolt in which the population was ruled via state brutality and terror, the settler population was ruled via what Barclay, drawing on existing theory, labels the "disciplinary state". The settlers could gradually be educated and disciplined into internalizing state-sanctioned behavioral norms and producing a surplus that could both fund the colonial government and provide some return on the massive investments of the Japanese state for the new colony.

However, this approach could never work for the peoples residing in the highlands of Taiwan. The colonial government simply lacked the resources to enforce disciplinary rule in the highlands of Taiwan. Thus, in Taiwan, as in so many other areas, the incoming colonial power created two areas: one where its disciplines could be enforced and the population gradually assimilated at least some of the expected norms, the other a special administrative district where peoples were exempt from the power of the disciplinary state and instead interacted with it in other ways. Those latter areas are what we call indigenous areas today. In Taiwan "the indigenous areas", like so many other aspects of Taiwanese life from the use of Penglai rice to Taiwanese deep sea tuna fishing practices, are constructions of the Japanese colonial state.

The story thus begins with the Japanese state's attempt to communicate, study, and trade with the peoples of the area. At first, because it was weak and underfunded, and its knowledge of aboriginal communities was poor, it had low-ranking colonial officials and soldiers marry aboriginal women and act as brokers between the state and its perceived subject peoples, and it conducted trade through intermediaries. These arrangements gave aboriginal leaders leverage, which the state found odious and obstructionist. Unlike the Japanese, the aborigines were experienced in handling imperial rule, and Barclay repeatedly notes how the frontier was a fluid place filled with hybrids: aboriginal leaders who lived in Chinese houses and acquired Han wives, Han who moved easily between the two worlds and spoke the languages of both, and flows of gifts and resources in both directions.

Eventually the state acquired enough power to dispense with such makeshifts and came to rule more directly. The broker-buffer and the power of aborigines to impose at least some limited terms on the colonial state's desire for profits and resources were a cost the state became unwilling to tolerate in its capitalist quest for the resources of Taiwan's mountains. In telling this history, Barclay never loses sight of that simple fact: the purpose of Taiwan, like every colony, was to make money for the "mother" country.

Every aspect of this book, from its copious illustrations, maps, and photos, to its insistence on  proper representation in labeling aborigines with their aboriginal names along with the other names they were known by, to its deep empirical and theoretical understandings of colonial processes and racial hierarchies, is an absolute delight. A Japan scholar, Barclay always has one comparative eye on developments in Japan -- the colonial processes to assimilate and suppress Taiwan were mirrored by similar processes in Korea, and by the Japanese state's ongoing program to create a state and a language at home out of its own unruly and variegated peoples. These programs frequently intersected, for example, when the State moved to ensure its low ranking soldiers and privates, often drawn from marginal and under-educated populations at home, instructed the aborigines in the "right" Japanese language forms.

Barclay points out that a key factor in the creation and preservation of an "indigenous" area in Taiwan was the deep appreciation of aboriginal artistic powers in Japan. This provided motivation for the state to research, construct, and produce aboriginal identities, and preserve a separate territorial and cultural space for them. Today aborigines in Taiwan are dependent on these Japanese representations and constructions of aboriginal lifeways in "recovering" their past practices and traditions.

Barclay's book is timely as well as informative. In the ceaseless struggle over local identities Taiwan's aboriginal peoples, today as yesterday, remain useful for demonstrating that Taiwan is different from Some Other Place. That they are so useful for such goals was both a purpose, and a legacy, of the Japanese colonial state in Taiwan.
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Blast from the Past: Carter Derecognition Memo

A friend dug this up and passed it around (link) one of the email groups...

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Jimmy Carter: Memorandum From the President on United States Relations With the People on Taiwan
DECEMBER 30, 1978

Memorandum for All Departments and Agencies

Subject: Relations with the People on Taiwan

As President of the United States, I have constitutional responsibility for the conduct of the foreign relations of the nation. The United States has announced that on January 1, 1979, it is recognizing the government of the People's Republic of China as the sole legal government of China and is terminating diplomatic relations with the Republic of China. The United States has also stated that, in the future, the American people will maintain commercial, cultural and other relations with the people of Taiwan without official government representation and without diplomatic relations. I am issuing this memorandum to facilitate maintaining those relations pending the enactment of legislation on the subject.

I therefore declare and direct that:

(A) Departments and agencies currently having authority to conduct or carry outprograms, transactions, or other relations with or relating to Taiwan are directed to conduct and carry out those programs, transactions, and relations beginning January 1, 1979, in accordance with such authority and, as appropriate, through the instrumentality referred to in paragraph D below.

(B) Existing international agreements and arrangements inforce between the United States and Taiwan shall continue in force and shall be performed and enforced by departments and agencies beginning January 1, 1979, in accordance with their terms and, as appropriate, through that instrumentality.

(c) In order to effectuate all of the provisions of this memorandum, whenever any law, regulation, or order of the United States refers to a foreign country, nation, state, government, or similar entity, departments and agencies shall construe those terms and apply those laws, regulations, or orders to include Taiwan.

(D) Inconducting and carrying out programs, transactions, and other relations with the people on Taiwan, interests of the people of the United States will be represented as appropriate by an unofficial instrumentality in corporate form, to be identified shortly.

(E) The above directives shall apply to and be carried out by all departments and agencies, except as I may otherwise determine.

I shall submit to the Congress a request for legislation relative to non-governmental relationships between the American people and the people on Taiwan.

This memorandum shall be published in the FEDERAL REGISTER.

JIMMY CARTER

[Filed with the Office of the Federal Register, 4:26 p.m., January 2, 1979]
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Camphor Press releases Shackleton's "Formosa Calling"

My friends at Camphor Press have released Formosa Calling, a harrowing account of the 2-28 massacre by Allan Shackleton...

Allan J. Shackleton was a New Zealand officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration assigned to in Taiwan at the time. His eyewitness account of the massacre is an important piece in understanding modern Taiwan’s founding tragedy. Shackleton tried for years to get Formosa Calling published, but it was deemed too politically sensitive during the Cold War when “Free China” was an ally of the Western world. 

This first person account has the authentic voice of a witness who lards nothing with literary artifice or exaggeration, and hits hard. Of the massacre's final days, for example, he writes....

During all these days I had been visiting a Japanese-trained Formosan doctor who was treating my ankle, and this day he had several interesting visitors. There was a man staying in the house who was frightened to go out as the military police might pick him up. They told interesting stories of the looting that was carried on by the military. In general this was done, not only to make good deficiencies in food and equipment, but also with the idea of re-selling and making money. Therefore, nothing was really exempt from the attentions of the soldiers. But more serious was the fact that there were lying about the streets in the mornings, the dead bodies of important people who had been dragged from their houses at night and shot. The military police had been making inquiries for a certain Council member who was over at Taito. He had gone to Taipei via Karenko and Suo while the trouble in Takao was on. He had, therefore, no connection with the rioting in Takao at all. But what he had done frequently was to ask the Government to establish law and justice in place of the travesty that was now being foisted on the people. He was therefore a marked man.

"He was therefore a marked man". Readable and interesting, this book makes a good counterpoint to George Kerr's masterpiece.
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Was Chiang Responsible for the 2-28 Massacre? Yes of course.

The March 2, 1947 telegram. Academia Historica via Taiwan News.

“Anyone with basic common sense can determine that Chiang is the one who should be held responsible,” Chen said (Japan Times).

Soon I must remove him , the Baron thought. He has almost outlasted his usefulness, almost reached the point of positive danger to my person. First, though, he must make the people of Arrakis hate him. Then - they will welcome my darling Feyd-Rautha as a savior .

A new telegram from 1947 published this month confirms, if any further evidence were needed for evidence-based minds, that KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek provided troops to Chen Yi, governor of Formosa, to murder the Taiwanese who had resisted KMT occupation. The wonder is not that there is disbelief about Chiang's role in the massacre. The wonder is that we are still asking the stupid question of whether Chiang is responsible.

The oddity of this discourse stands out. There's very little literature attempting to absolve Stalin or Pol Pot of their crimes. There is for Hitler, but only because he still has worshipers (precisely!). Why the struggle over Chiang's responsibility for 2-28? Same as for Corporal Schicklgruber: partly because there is enormous pressure from the KMT which reverberates down through time, as well as constant steering from pro-KMT academics that skews assessments of Chiang, and KMT funding for those who want to write about him, to block any negative presentations of their culture-hero Chiang Kai-shek, Joshua to Sun Yat-sen's Moses. The man has a personality cult, after all, with its own massive temple-memorial in downtown Taipei.

Several reports this week on the new information. Japan Times:

Among the new evidence is a letter dated March 2, 1947, sent by Taiwan Gov. Chen Yi to KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek informing him that he had requested Chief of the General Staff Chen Cheng to send more troops to crack down on civilian protests.

While Chiang publicly said he did not agree to send the troops until March 7, the March 2 letter is the newest proof that Chiang, who died in 1975, should shoulder most responsibility for the massacre, said Chen Yi-shen, an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History.

Published even earlier is a March 4 telegram that Chen Yi sent to Chiang requesting more troops from the mainland.

The telegram above requests army units with "superior qualities" to su4 qing1 (肅清) "eradicate" the protesters in Taiwan, whom he labeled "bandits". There's absolutely no question about the intent of the language. It's quite clear.

It was always been clear. Kerr observed in Formosa Betrayed that Chen Yi was simply playing for time while the army, equipped with hastily painted over American weapons and vehicles, arrived to kill the protesters. Taiwan News reported:

National Taiwan University Professor Chen Tsui-lien (陳翠蓮) said that the historians had been looking for the critical document of a telegraph issued by Chen Yi but to no avail, and the discovery has proved the assumption that Chen on the one hand tried to buy time by promising reform and appealing to the native Taiwanese not to take to the streets, but on the other hand pushed Chiang to send troops across the sea to end the uprising.

Ming-yeh and Gary Rawnsley have a well documented historical essay from 2001 on Chiang's culpability. They argue that Chiang did not intend that the response be violent, but his control of the faction-ridden bureaucracy and military was poor. The recent telegrams lay that set of apologetics, often put forth by pro-KMTers (which the Rawnsleys are not), forever to rest. The Rawnsleys lay out some of the old arguments for Chiang's culpability:

That the violent response to 2-28 went against direct orders issued by both Chiang Kai-shek and Chen Yi has been contested. Chen Yi-shen (陳儀深), for example, has advanced three key points that together make a compelling argument. First, why did Chiang not punish those who disobeyed him? In fact, Chiang rewarded Zhang Mu-tao, Chen Yi, and Peng Meng-qi for their military actions. Second, according to former members of the Taiwan Garrison Command, many individuals were singled out for execution on the orders of Chen Yi. Finally, temporary martial law‖ was proclaimed in Taiwan from February 28 to March 1, 1947, and then from March 9 to May 15, 1947. According to the law of Nationalist China, temporary martial law‖ could only be formally recognized when the highest local commander (Chen Yi) asked for official consent from the central government (Chiang Kaishek).

Their discussion of the then-documentary evidence is thorough and interesting, and contends that the factionalization of the KMT and the army was a major factor in the handling of the 2-28 revolt. Their conclusions:

Our conclusion is that, according to archival evidence, Chiang Kai-shek must bear a share of the responsibility for 2-28 in the following ways. First, Chiang was responsible for Chen Yi‘s appointment in the full knowledge of his record for violence in previously held administrative positions. Second, Chiang was preoccupied with the civil war in mainland China at the time, and was therefore vulnerable to misleading information, especially information that Communists were responsible for 2-28. In other words, Chiang Kai-shek was guilty of placing far too much trust in Chen Yi, and of having too little confidence in other sources of information. Third, the style of politics that Chiang Kai-shek had engineered allowed factionalism to dominate the administration and the military both in China and in Taiwan. During the crisis of 2-28, factional struggles were so intense and complicated that even Chiang could not exercise ultimate control over different local commanders. Nevertheless, we are unable to hold Chiang Kai-shek directly responsible for the massacre unless further archival evidence reveals otherwise.

It's a historians paper, very conservative, and it relies on archival evidence, which the Rawnsleys make clear is subject to new findings. The conclusion is reasonable, so long as you only think about the archives, and it is one that the KMT has attempted to steer historians into reaching.

But, the political reality is something else. The idea that Chiang would permit Chen Yi to amass an army in Fujian, and then transport it to a large productive island which he could use as a base for independent rule, without Chiang's express permission and approval, is absurd. Dictators do not operate that way: they trust no one, even close subordinates and especially close subordinates, and they do not hand them large armies for independent operations without good reason and without good control. There is no way that Chiang did not know what Chen Yi intended to do with those troops -- Chen Yi had already done so in the 1930s when he was governor of Fujian and massacred rebellious soldiers. Indeed, Chiang had known that. One could just as well argue that Chiang realized that if Formosa was going to be looted, Chen Yi was no man to scruple at killing to accomplish it.

The political reality is that Chiang had to know what he was doing and why, or else it wouldn't have happened. Chiang had people in Chen Yi's organization watching Chen Yi and reporting to Chiang, because that is how organizations everywhere in the Chinese world are conducted, from cram schools to the President's office (the army's political officers were gone as a result of the war and not to be reinstituted until 1950 when the KMT had to clamp down on the army to maintain control in Taiwan). Moreover, Chiang had a stream of independent reports on the situation in Taiwan, some of which suggested that Chen Yi be replaced because he was stirring up a revolt, and when the revolt occurred, that Chen Yi's administration was a major cause. Indeed, the Americans and local newspapers had told Chiang so months in advance of the massacre.

Much of the discussion of Chiang's culpability hinges on the (unspoken) assumption that Chiang would have acted to right the situation, had he known/properly understood/had not been distracted. This is what normal people would do. Hence it is typical to construct a set of explanations of why Chiang didn't act sooner. But Chiang is not a normal person, but a murderous dictator who ran a brutal police state. What if that assumption is wrong?

Why did Chiang retain a subordinate who was known to brutal -- whom Chiang knew was brutal and a terrible administrator because he had been told so again and again when Chen Yi was running Fujian Province -- and likely to stir up a revolt? Why would he retain that subordinate in Taiwan who he had repeated warnings about? Why was Chen Yi permitted to brew up a revolt? One interpretation is that Chiang was busy with the civil war and distracted, etc. We've all heard that. Indeed, after Chen Yi was removed from Taiwan, he was sent to run Zhejiang Province.

But another is: his known brutality is precisely why Chiang left him in Taiwan. Here was an island fresh out of Japanese hands with a wide range of people who were "tainted" by long association with the Japanese, who would have to be suppressed. Remember what happened to the individuals in the collaborationist Wang Jing-wei government: most of them were liquidated. But Chiang couldn't simply walk into Formosa and execute everyone, he needed an excuse. And Chen Yi obligingly furnished him with one...
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Taiwan News Latest: Incorporating 2-28 into PRC history

The 199 outside Checheng.

The PRC's incorporation of 2-28 into the CCP historical narrative drew lots of attention this week, including in my latest piece for Taiwan News. Because of the western media habit of lengthy quoting of CCP agents without comment or fact check, I wonder if...

Sooner or later it will begin to find its way into articles, interviews, and similar, sometimes given the same weight as robust scholarly history from "the other side." Readers are invited to imagine what PRC state actors like Shen, often quoted at length in the western media, will be permitted to say because of this new narrative.

With the absurd claims to the Senkakus, PRC clout has created a situation where western media avoid comment on the PRC claim, and repeat and repeat and repeat it, legitimizing it. Any marketer can tell you the key to getting ideas accepted is to repeat them. They don't have to have any particular content or to be truthful, they just have to be repeated. That is a key to effective propaganda.

Taiwan Sentinel commented here. Brian Hioe has a great review of the PRC's assimilationist historical narratives at New Bloom. Brian notes:

Commemoration of the 228 Massacre still remains a sore spot for the KMT, who act as China’s proxies in Taiwan and continue to largely deny historical wrongdoing during the 228 Massacre or in the White Terror which followed. As such, Chinese commemoration of the 228 Massacre may perhaps represent China distancing itself from the KMT. Seeing as commemoration of the 228 Massacre was historically pushed for by the DPP, which emerged out of Taiwan’s democracy movement, this may represent the CCP backing away from the KMT and shifting towards attempting to co-opt the DPP, given the generally floundering political fortunes of the KMT in recent times. This remains to be seen.

...and....

Attempts to create a similar figure to Wencheng have been attempted with the historical figure of the “Fragrant Concubine,” a Uighur concubine of the Qianlong emperor. Similarly, in many contemporary historical depictions of Genghis Khan in China, Genghis Khan is treated as though he were a Chinese and not a Mongolian emperor, not only to absorb the historical fame of Genghis Khan into Chinese history, but to justify Chinese claims over inner Mongolia. There exist similar attempts in many filmic depictions of Chinese ethnic minorities, propaganda efforts that the Chinese government plans to step up with the announcement of plans to produce fifty-five films featuring China’s ethnic minorities in the near future, with one film for each ethnic minority.

The observation that the CCP is possibly attempting to distance itself from the KMT is probably not right, though Hioe is quite right to point it out, and the 2-28 commemoration narrative may eventually be used that way. However, scholar Kharis Templeman pointed out that the PRC's incorporation of 2-28 into its historical fantasies is much older than I had realized, meaning that it is probably not targeted at the KMT at present. He dug up these stamps from 1977 (the 2007 commemoration a few years ago was mentioned in the local media).

Much depends on what historical events the CCP targets and how hard it targets them...
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US Vietnam War Servicemen R&R in Taipei + Links

Alexander of the amazing blog Synapticism sent this around Facebook. This is part one of a three part series on US Vietnam servicemen doing R and R in Taipei -- he described it as cringeworthy as you would expect. Mention of Taipei starts after the 6 min mark, but part two is the good part.
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Daily Links:

• Ralph Jennings' awful piece on 3 reasons China is better than Taiwan caused a storm of indignant laughter across the intertubes on Reddit and Facebook. Dissident, activist, and politician Wuer Kaixi responded at Medium.com. FOARP, very familiar with both China and Taiwan, also has a piece.
• Speaking of silliness, this hilaribad piece on why you shouldn't leave Hong Kong for Taiwan will leave you ROFLMAO. A definite quality drop for EJN insight there....
• News Lens consistently puts out good stuff on Taiwan. Here is one on the new union for media workers. And another on revitalizing Dadaocheng.
• Scholar Gary Rawnsley discusses Taiwan's inability to talk to the outside world.
• Individuals who protested the name "Chinese Taipei" at a recent baseball match and had the banner ripped from their hands in a video that went viral on social media, received an apology from the baseball association.
• KMT hacks on the asset law. The smell of fear is strong....
• Tourism crisis = blessing in disguise
• Semiconductor industry revenues to rise
• Taipei number 2 holiday destination among S Koreans
• Focus has a good three parter on the effects of the Hsuehshan Tunnel, (part2, part3)

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[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!

Way Cool: Cache of Japanese Military Maps of Asia

Yup: Yuanli's town slogan is "A vision of the future."

A friend passed this around Facebook: a trove of Japanese military maps made prior to WWII with incredible detail and information. A teaser...

These maps were captured in the waning days of World War II as the U.S. Army took control of Japan. American soldiers confiscated thousands of secret Japanese military maps and the plates used to print them, then shipped them to the United States for safekeeping.

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Not surprisingly, the Japanese surveyors weren’t always welcomed in other countries. In 1895, angry locals in Korea killed several assistants on a Japanese survey team, Kobayashi writes. (Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and held it until the end of World War II.) Two decades later, Japan sent secret survey teams into China. These men disguised themselves as traveling merchants and made their maps equipped only with a compass and by counting their steps to mark distance.

In the age-old tradition of cartographic copying, the Japanese often built on maps they’d captured from their foes, adding their own notes and details on top of the original. Cyrillic script is visible in the Japanese map above of Vladivostok, Russia, for example. Naturally, their enemies did the same thing. The formerly classified U.S. Army map of Okinawa below, printed in 1945, is based on a captured Japanese map.

Stanford is currently putting the maps online. There is a topical index here and many maps of Taiwan -- here is one collection, the red not yet digitized, the green are accessible. Here is a Keelung map, and here is a Taichung map at 1:50,000. Click somewhere inside the viewing frame to see the map, it sometimes doesn't appear unless you click in that frame. Sometimes you have to grab and move the map around in the viewer to actually see it, they digitized a lot of unnecessary area around the map, so the first thing you see sometimes is a lot of useless gray area (on some maps click on the upper right corner of the map box for full screen and move the image around til you see the map). The maps are fully zoomable. Way cool.
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The Diplomat on The Evolution of the New Taiwan Identity: Plus ca change

The marvelous Miaoli 16, which runs along the south side of the Mingde Reservoir.

The Diplomat ran a piece on the evolution of the Taiwanese Identity by Linda van der Horst, a nice echo of my post on Albert Axelbank's piece from the 1960s. It was well meaning, but wrong in several particulars and I think in its overall interpretation of the situation. Some small errors:

The KMT was established on the mainland in 1911 and retreated to Taiwan after its defeat by Mao Zedong’s Communists.

The KMT was established in 1912, disbanded, and then reformed in 1919. I think the writer means to say the Republic of China, not KMT [UPDATE: Linda van der Horst says the mistake was caught but not corrected in time for publication]. The next error is far more serious...[MT: and is now corrected]

An overwhelming majority of Taiwanese do indeed share blood with the Chinese across the strait. Chinese migration to the island started in the 17th century, when the Dutch arrived on “Formosa” (Portuguese for beautiful) and needed farmers to cultivate the land. The indigenous tribes that they found were hunter-gatherers and not farmers, so the Dutch sailed across the strait and in some cases literally captured Chinese farmers that they brought back to farm the island.

Nope. The indigenous tribes were accomplished farmers operating resource rich societies plugged into trading networks that crossed southeast Asia, not hunter-gatherers, a fact easily learned (for example). The Chinese were imported because the Dutch colonialists needed a tractable population dependent on the Dutch, that would produce a surplus, farming that land in a way the Dutch could count and tax. Unlike the aborigines, who would happily trade but would not consider themselves taxable subjects, and resisted Dutch rule.

Massive kudos to her for using the phrase "pro-Taiwan" to describe Lee Teng-hui. One beer on me if we ever meet....

Those are minor issues. The piece itself presents what has become the conventional view of the "rising Taiwan identity", especially in the media. Being Taiwanese means having aboriginal ancestors...

“If your ancestors have been in Taiwan long enough [pre-1949], then there is a big chance you will have indigenous blood,” said Chun-chieh Chi, professor in ethnic relations at the National Dong-Hwa University in Taiwan. Every era – indigenous, Dutch, Spanish, Hokkien Chinese, Japanese, Nationalists – left its own imprint on Taiwan’s inter-marrying population.

...this search for aboriginal ancestors is a way to assert a non-Chinese identity through nostalgic search for an alternative ancestry, but the truth is that a huge chunk of the post-1949 population also carries Austronesian gene markers, because the peoples of South China from which many in that population come, prior to the Han in-migration that began in the last quarter of the first millenium CE, were Austronesian peoples just like the Taiwan aborigines. The various Boat People of southern China, as in Hong Kong, for example, are thought by some scholars to be remnant populations of these peoples.

The interesting point here, as the writer observes, is not so much Taiwanese are finding such ancestors but that they feel a need to. Foreigners often assert that aboriginal "blood" heritage makes the Taiwanese different, but the reality is that the deep and pervasive aboriginal cultural influence on Taiwanese culture is the key inheritance of the Taiwanese. These ideas about differences of "blood", updated with the term "genes", remain a form of primitive nationalist essentialism that should have no place in modern discourse. Though in fairness, ideas about "aboriginal blood" are generally asserted against the Chinese claim of "Chinese blood" for Taiwanese...

van der Horst couples a cite of Gerrit van der Wees of FAPA, the pro-Taiwan association in Washington DC, and polls...

The percentage of people identifying as Taiwanese has hit another record high, according to a poll released in late May by the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation – 80 percent of respondents said they identified as Taiwanese, whereas only 8.1 percent identified as Chinese, and 7.6 percent as both. This has been gradually on the rise since the 1990s, when a majority of people identified as Chinese or both Chinese and Taiwanese.

This rise in Taiwanese identity has gone hand in hand with the democratization of Taiwan after martial law was lifted in the late 1980s, because “people were able to openly express themselves and discover their identity under the new democratic period,” says Gerrit van der Wees, a former Dutch diplomat and lecturer in the history of Taiwan at George Mason University in Virginia.

The explanation of van der Wees (it is related to democracy), coupled with polls showing how it emerges in the 1990s, makes a neat narrative about the development of the "rising Taiwan identity" (bear in mind that people do not discover identities; they construct them). Never mind that the poll van der Horst uses is probably not reliable.

But what has gone before? What did the "rising Taiwan identity" rise from?

Note this paragraph, because it displays the function of the "rising Taiwan identity" as a media catchphrase/trope:

Chinese and Taiwanese national identity can co-exist, argues Dr. Shiao-chi Shen in his doctorate at Columbia University. “The decline of Chinese national identity is hence not the result of the rise of Taiwanese identity, but of the rise of China,” Shen argues. Its dominance and the “one China” principle “removed the important component of the Republic of China (ROC) from the Chinese national identity in Taiwan.”

van der Horst appears to be using this quote to argue that prior to the "rising Taiwan identity" the locals had an ROC Chinese identity. Which is totally bogus pro-KMT nonsense.

What occurred in the 1990s was not "rising Taiwan identity" but a shift in the nature of the Taiwan identity itself. Prior to democratization the people perceived themselves as Taiwanese and asserted this identity not against China, but against the KMT. Taiwaneseness was how you fought the KMT: the point of reference for the construction of the pre-democracy identity was KMT authoritarianism and exploitation, as recounted in countless works of the period. Indeed, politicians fighting the KMT were known as tangwai, "outside the party", a term which still relates them to the Party. The KMT attempted to control all expressions of Taiwaneseness, from religious festivals to language, to subsume Taiwaneseness into Chinese culture, and to suppress independence. This massive apparatus of state control testifies to the broadness and strength of that identity.

In the 1990s democratization opened up new avenues for exploring the idea of Taiwaneseness and what it means. Several things happened in the 1990s. First, the DPP established itself as a legitimate and legal alternative to the KMT and standard bearer of Taiwan-centered politics. The rise of democratic politics meant that the Taiwan identity could no longer by defined as resistance to the System: the tangwai were now part of the system in the form of the DPP and its allies. Further, the KMT under Lee Tung-hui, who was president throughout the entire decade, co-opted many DPP programs and positions, and thus, appeared to be Taiwanizing. That made it difficult to oppose the KMT as an anti-Taiwanese party.

The reason polls from the early 1990s show a strong proportion of "Chinese" is because the old Taiwanese identity had learned long before to lie to the State and how to safely discuss their identity. With democratization, people started telling the truth to pollsters. Let me shamelessly steal Frank Muyard's compilation of polls...

The 1989 numbers are from a UDN poll, which appears maybe to have flipped the dual identity/Chinese columns, but the high number is indicative -- nobody was sure they could speak out about their Taiwan identity in safety. In 1989 Lee Teng-hui and diehard mainlander rightiest Hau Pei-tsun were still tussling for control of the KMT and the government. The non-mainstream (rightist) faction lost key struggles within the Party and in 1993 many exited to form the New Party. Observe that in the numbers collected by Muyard the Chinese identity collapses quickly -- between 1992 (recall that there was still a national security law under which dissidents were kept in jail) and 1996 it falls by a third and by 2000 has completely disappeared except among old mainlanders. People don't give up complex nationalist social identities within a single short decade. The shift occurred because people lied to pollsters and then stopped lying. Another sign of that is the fall in the "no response" answer...

The "dual" identity remains relatively stable, testimony not to some confusion about identity but to the many meanings of the term "Chinese". Polls do not ask people to define "hua ren" or "Chunghua mintzu" as they relate to themselves, probably deliberately, to avoid providing evidence that "We're Chinese" for Taiwanese means something like what "We're Europeans" or "We're Westerners" means for Frenchmen. Muyard points out, however, that over time, when you give those polled the choice of "Taiwanese" or "Chinese", the number who choose "Taiwanese" has rising past 70%.

The second thing that occurred in the 1990s was the rise of China -- here the good doctor Shen is half-right, bless his deep Blue heart. The new identity is not centered on resistance to the KMT anymore, but on resistance to and experience of China and "Chineseness". Old school Taiwanese independence activists are full of hate for the KMT and constantly ask when Taiwan will be independent. New style Taiwan identity types regard the KMT as yesterday's failed politics, tainted with China and Chineseness, and the independence question as settled: everyone in Taiwan is pro-independence and Taiwan is already independent. Scholar Frank Muyard identifies a key moment: in Nov 1987 people in Taiwan were finally legally allowed to visit China. From that point on, Taiwan people began to experience how different they were from Chinese, a process only accelerated by the arrival of millions of Chinese tourists on Taiwan, and the movement of hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese to China.

This difference between the old and new Taiwanese identities is also seen in the most recent generation of aborigines embracing the new Taiwanese identity and more slowly, the DPP, which is beginning to make inroads in aboriginal areas. The new Taiwan identity is not an anti-KMT identity but a pro-Taiwan identity, and the previous generation of aborigines was solidly pro-KMT.

I've already talked too much, but let's make one last point: what is the function of the "rising Taiwanese identity" as a media trope? Anthropologist Scott Simon pointed it out to me in a conversation on Facebook: the trope de-legitimates this Taiwan identity by rendering it as a "new" thing, recently emerged. Newness is bad for political legitimacy. Humans have a near-universal drive to locate legitimacy in something old, one reason Taiwanese are working out their new identity by searching for aboriginal ancestors: "look, we're old in the land." The antiquity of aborigines in Taiwan is thus pressed into service as a source of legitimacy for the new Taiwan identity. But the Sunflowers, that concrete manifestation of the "new identity", themselves recognized its connection to the old anti-KMT identity when they ceremonially welcomed the previous generation of activists to the Legislative Yuan during the occupation. They know their roots, even if the international press is either ignorant or ignoring.

Of course, that idea of "newness" for the Taiwan identity also helps legitimate the old days of the old governing party. What? New media tropes helping the pro-China party? Plus ca change...

REF: My thanks to Robert Kelly, whose long comment on the post on Axelbank's article inspired this piece.
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Daily Links:

• DON'T MISS: Taipower's myth of power shortages. Nuclear reactor restart controversies
• ETHNICITY: This attack on an old mainlander in a public park sparked a public furor. Cole comments here. The woman turns out to be mainlander on one side. A false flag attack? I don't ordinarily lean that way, but the woman had to know what she was doing. This incident has led to a bill to ban "ethnic discrimination" -- hilarious given the KMT's long history of ethnic divide-and-rule governance and discrimination against Taiwanese -- as well as claims from KMT Chair Hung that the transitional justice movement is a form of ethnic discrimination. LOL. Two KMT lawmakers called on KMT to apologize to the aborigines. The KMT is feeling the heat from the DPP moves to court the aboriginal votes.
• HAHA: Certainly the dumbest thing I have ever read from the Taiwan diplomatic corps, on the "history" of "Taiwan's" claims in the South China Sea.
• Here is the Scottish court judgment on Zain Dean extradition. The really stupid thing was Dean was out on bail after killing a man, so he, like so many before, fled. I hope the legislature puts an end to this ability to flee bail. It's a blight on our justice system.
• Taipower selects advisors for new wind farm
• Clinton's likely Asia policy team
• Government pooh-poohs talk of deal for fishing rights in Phils waters. The previous "agreement" was not a fishing agreement, but one about jurisdiction in cases against fishing boats.
• Government training for farmers
• Hilarious ad for one of my favorite restaurants: North Korea loves The Salt Lick
• NPR: Taiwan's aborigines hope for better future with the new administration
• Reporters Without Frontiers on press freedom in Taiwan
• The last of Josh Ellis' posts on Miaokou night market in Keelung
• Tonio Andrade, who has written some wonderful stuff on Taiwan, has a new book out on the Gunpowder age in China and Europe.

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Blast from the Past: Harper's Magazine, September 1963 Chiang Kai-shek's Silent Enemies

The famous old tofu street off the Miaoli 62 east of Dahu.

I was reading Ong Iok-tek's Taiwan: A History of Agonies when I encountered a cite from an article I had never seen before, "Chiang Kai-shek's Silent Enemies" by Albert Axelbank (Harper's Magazine, Sept, 1963):

If a poll were taken now to determine what status Formosans want for their island, I am sure that at least a two-thirds majority would favor independence. Of course, such a poll is impossible since just the mention of the words "independence" or "self-determination" on Formosa is taboo. But responsible Formosan leaders, both Kuomintang and opposition members, have told me that more than 90 per cent of the people desire the establishment of an independent Formosan republic — shunning both Communist and Nationalist Chinese ties.

This comment ought to give pause to the increasingly common claim in the media that support for independence in Taiwan is "rising" -- everyone familiar with Taiwan history knows it has had majority support in Taiwan since the arrival of the KMT in 1945. The article is very comparable to Douglas Mendel's 1970 classic The Politics of Formosan Nationalism in its brutally frank revelations of KMT rule on Formosa. Both Mendel and Axelbank lived on Taiwan at the same time. Axelbank writes:

From late 1960 till the middle of 1962 I was the bureau manager on Formosa for United Press International and I watched a steady flow of repressive acts directed against the population by the Nationalist government. I traveled widely over the island and spoke to hundreds of Formosans, including city mayors, provincial officials, merchants, doctors, soldiers, teachers, farmers, and pedicab drivers. Usually I took with me a Japanese interpreter since most of the Formosans preferred to speak Japanese although a few had received degrees at American universities and spoke fluent English. 

Mendel reported that he too spoke Japanese in discussing the KMT. Think Taiwaneseness is a creation of the Chen Administration? Rising in the present era? Axelbank observes:

I have often started to address a group of Formosans as, "You Chinese . . ." only to be pointedly told: "We are Taiwanese, not Chinese." (Taiwanese is the Japanese as well as Chinese name for Formosans.) There is, incidentally, very little intermarriage today between "mainlanders" — as the Chinese are called — and Formosans. Not long ago I heard a Formosan student say in a journalism class: "If I married a Chinese girl, my mother would lock me out of her house."

As many scholars have observed, the colonizer creates the identity of the oppressed through the acts of repression which demonstrate to the locals that colonizer and colonized are different and the colonized are inferior. It was the Japanese and the KMT who taught the Taiwanese that they were Taiwanese. Axelbank describes the regime in pointedly colonial terms:

Thus, in the 1,500-man National Assembly — it elects the President and Vice President and amends the Constitution — there are fewer than forty Formosans. In the Legislative Yuan (Parliament) of over 500 members, no more than two dozen are Formosans. There is only one Formosan in the Cabinet — the Minister of the Interior. There are no Formosa-born ambassadors. And in the 600,000-man military today — of which Formosans provide more than 75 per cent of the ground troops — the number of Formosan officers above the rank of colonel can be counted on both hands despite the existence of nearly 1,000 generals and admirals. In many police units, such as the Peace Preservation Corps of the Formosa Garrison Command, Formosans are almost nonexistent.

This tradition continues today: recall that President Ma appointed mainlanders to most high appointed positions... Axelbank also met opposition leaders:

When I visited the home of a noted Formosan opposition provincial assemblyman, he turned up the volume of his radio "so that police won't be able to tape-record our conversation." He told me: "I sleep with two suitcases near my bed every night. In one bag I've packed things I'll need if police come to arrest me and I have time to escape; the other's filled with some personal items if the police toss me in jail."

Axelbank's narrative also echoes Mendel's in that it shows how hollow the government's economic claims were, in fact using government sources:

If land reform aided the farmers, excessive government demands in the form of taxes have to a large extent negated these gains. At the end of 1961, for instance, the government-controlled press admitted that increased "defense" taxes on the farmer had actually lowered his standard of living to almost what it was ten years before.

.....

Last year, to help meet its defense costs, the government levied a highly unpopular 30 per cent "counterattack surtax." Formosans were irked not only because the tax hit their pocketbooks, but also because the tax was okayed by the Legislative Yuan (which passed it in ten minutes) where the number of Formosan members is about 5 per cent of the total.

Mendel points out that some work in his day showed that Taiwan did not regain the living standards it had known in the late Japanese era until the mid-1960s. Many people forget that the 1950s were not an era of export-oriented manufacturing but of an insular island economy floating on a sea of US cash, with few exports, governed by a regime that did little more than loot it. The export-oriented Taiwan Miracle really began after 1960 and especially after 1965 as Japanese and US firms invested heavily on the island.

The KMT government typically begins its economic data on Taiwan in 1950, hiding the huge economic crash that Taiwan suffered between 1945 and 1950 in the wake of war, the KMT looting of the island's assets, and the move to Taiwan of hundreds of thousands of Chinese. Most scholars follow suit, perpetuating, inadvertently for the most part, this sly bit of KMT history-construction. Today it has been forgotten how impoverished 1950s and early 1960s Taiwan really was. For the Taiwanese of that day, they were not experiencing "growth" but a decade-long recovery to return to the living standards they had known in the late Japanese period.

Axelbank ends with a long discussion of the island's future. After reviewing the potential successors to Chiang Kai-shek, he finishes with a plea to the US to encourage the regime to reform itself: disband the secret police, allow political activity, end martial law. At one point, he records:

Some Formosans, who assume that the island's political complexion will remain unchanged for the next fifteen or twenty years, foresee that the time will come when younger generation Formosans — and mainlanders who have become "Formosanized" — will live in harmony under a government run predominantly by Formosans. Other Formosans are pessimistic; they darkly envision eventual control over the island by Communist China — unless the island is soon sliced off from its present "Chinese" connections.

Today we are living through the first, and struggling to avoid the second.
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藤坪溪Bridge: Then and Now

This famous bridge was completed in 1907 and carried trains across a valley in Miaoli until destroyed in the great 1935 earthquake.

Today it is the famous Longteng Broken Bridge, a tourist trap on one of the area's many pretty roads. Don't miss the ride there if you're biking in Miaoli.
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Pat Frank's Review of A Pail of Oysters

The text of the review of A Pail of Oysters cited above. Many of you will know Pat Frank for his novel Alas, Babylon, the tale of a nuclear war between the USSR and the US, and its aftermath.

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Light on Formosa "A Pail of Oysters," by Vern Sneider (G. P. Putnam. 311 pp. $3.50), records the lije and aspirations of a simple Formosan peasant. Pal Frank, who reviews it here, is the author of "Hold Back the Night," a novel of the Korean War, and "The Long Way Round," the memoirs of a Far Eastern correspondent.


By Pat Frank

IT is not often that one is privileged to read a novel like the new one by the author of "The Teahouse of the August Moon." Vern Sneider's "A Pail of Oysters" combines beauty of expression, originality of thought, and contemporary historical importance; it is a bright light thrust into the infected peritonium of Formosa, into a region murky with propaganda. It is a true light, which shows nothing as sheer black or white, but in many shades of gray.

It is a novel that will infuriate some, and delight others. It may be denounced by the China Lobby's kept journalists and legislators, yet it may also be vilified by the Communists. Its theme is quite simple. The people of Formosa are Formosans, not Chinese Communists or Chinese Nationalists. Since about the last person a visiting American is likely to meet in Formosa is a true Formosan, Mr. Sneider presents an entirely new picture of the strategically and politically important island. Formosa is more than a pawn in the world struggle. It is at least a Castle, but within the Castle its rightful owners (if you believe in Woodrow Wilson's selfdetermination of peoples) are at best servants and at worst slaves. The Castle is presently the property of Chiang Kai-shek. If Chiang were not in occupancy, and protected by the American Navy, it would be subject to Mao Tse-tung. Mr. Sneider carefully points out the similarities between the two, as dictators, and operators of police states. Strangely, their methods stem from the same source—the Kremlin.

Among all Formosans Li Liu is the poorest and most humble. He is of a family of oyster growers who work in the tidal flats. In the beginning he saves a pail of oysters from scavenging Save-the-Country soldiers who guard the flats against invasion by the People's Liberation Army.

To understand this book it must be understood that this pail of oysters is as important to the family of Li Liu as a bank account, insurance, and credit, all combined, is to an American family. This pail of oysters can be traded for rice, millet, a new needle to replace the one that broke, and quinine to keep the father alive.

Li Liu is trusted with some of the oysters to trade for rice in the farmland that lies back of the tideland. So begins an adventure that takes him to the capital, Taipei, and companionship with two people his own age, a brother and sister owned by an entrepreneur of the city. In his skilful presentation of Formosans, the characters make statements shocking until examined, evaluated, and finally judged true. Like the Japanese occupation of Formosa. "The Japanese took," says a landowner, "yet they gave, too. They gave us electric lights; and the great irrigation ditches which bring water so we can grow rice . . . and the improved rice. They took, but they always left plenty for us . . . not like these swine."

Two Americans rise as strong characters. Both are correspondents. One is "an old China hand" who accepts corruption and prefers to look the other way while murder is done. The other is "a good man." We have "bad men" and "good men" in our ubiquitous Westerns, and so we might as well have them in our Easterns.

Mr. Sneider was a platoon commander in the Pacific, and a commander of regimental scouts during World War IL As a member of U. S. military government he bossed a city of 5,000 refugees on Okinawa. He went to Korea in 1945, and had charge of sheltering and feeding a million refugees fleeing from the Communists north of Parallel 38. His novel, I feel, should be especially recommended to Congressmen and statesmen who "made" Formosa for forty-eight hours on Far Eastern junkets, and who were most unlikely to meet, or talk to, anyone like Li Liu, or his friends, Precious Jade and Didi. If they read it they will comprehend why all our money and all our men can't put Chiang Kai-shek together again.
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1985 Diane Sawyer on the Henry Liu killing

This segment discusses the killing of a writer and critic of the Nationalist regime on Taiwan in California in 1984. The incident affected US relations with the KMT, and helped inspire the recent movie Formosa Betrayed. h/t to KL.
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Election.... from 1977

A friend who is cleaning out his grandfather's closets sent this to me:

This is an article we found hidden inside an old radio from November 5th, 1977.

It describes the upcoming local elections and describes how there are 58 candidates running with 41 representing he KMT and 17 dangwai.

This election would prove to be a watershed moment in Taiwan's democratic history as one of the dangwai candidates was none other than Hsu Hsin-Laing, and the ballot irregularities in his district would go on to spark the Chung-Li incident in which the regime was forced to show its weak hand amid rioting as they could no longer, politically, respond to civil unrest with large scale state violence, paving the way for further tests of the regime by the Formosa activists.

How far we have come. Even thinking back to before Chen was elected, I remember the inevitability of the KMT. They were always going to win and always control the government. They were seen, locally, as an entrenched power that had money and decades of patronage to draw from to bend society to its will.

Things have come far... "dangwai" are the candidates from outside the KMT. They would eventually coalesce to form the DPP.
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Bu Dai Xi: Origins?

Haystacks in Chiayi

From "Puppets and Cultural Identity in Taiwan", Jean-Luc Penso, pp 169-178. In Objects, Heritage, and Cultural Identity, edited by Muyard, Frank, Chou Liang-kai, and Dreyer, Serge. Taiwan Historica, 2009:

The first use of puppets was for divinatory purposes but their use became more secular over the centuries. Puppets played an essential role in the creation of the most respected and secular Chinese opera, since the art of puppets actually initiated opera. Many facts corroborate this argument. For example, the actors' gestures and particularly, the way they walk are not natural, but copy a puppet's movements. Another example is to be found in the way actors call puppeteers "Master", while a puppeteer would not have to show this form of respect to an actor.

According to Jacques Pampaneau, a specialist in Chinese theater, the glove puppets called "po-te-hi" in Taiwanese or "budaixi" (布岱戲) in Mandarin are believed to have come from India by the maritime route (Pimpaneau 1977). The name for glove puppets in Sanskrit is "pu ta li", close to "po-te-hi" and "budaixi", but once again, nothing is certain regarding this possible influence.

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Sugar in the days of Koxinga

From Hui-Wen Lin. On Colonial Industries: the Remnants of Bygone Sugar Factories in Taiwan (International Journal of Social Science and Humanity, Vol. 5, No. 11, November 2015)

When Koxinga came to Taiwan in 1661, Taiwan's sugar industry policies were still much the same as under Dutch rule, and although Koxinga's exiled Chinese regime brought along many Han Chinese immigrants and China's traditional political system, his anti-Qing stance had much the same effect as Holland had on Taiwan's sugar industry. The foreign trade benefits of Taiwan's sugar industry were mostly used to fund his political campaigns to resist the Qing dynasty. However, the majority of Han immigrants and soldiers who helped cultivate lands had a large impact on land development in Taiwan. The Han Chinese also took over the Taiwanese sugar industry from the Dutch, and after becoming the main power in Taiwan, places that produced sugar were referred to as tangbu. Business models for these tangbu were divided into niugua bu (sugar factories operated by 15-40 people and 15-30 oxen), niuben bu (small organizations that covered everything from growing sugar cane to making sugar; as members were few, sugar production could be commissioned or pressed sugar cane could be purchased), gongjia bu (joint stock sugar factories owned by 2-5 people), and toujia bu (factories invested in and established by a single capitalist) [2]. The place names in Taiwan which still contain this bu today are the areas in which sugar was manufactured in the past. Koxinga's political power in Taiwan lasted little longer than two decades, and in 1684, Taiwan became part of the Qing dynasty. Its lands were developed even further, attracting large numbers of immigrants. England, the US, and France soon became part of Taiwan's sugar trade.

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Taiwan and Cocaine in the Japanese era

Fill er up.

There's a blurb in George Kerr's immortal Formosa Betrayed where he discusses the tons of coca leaf that vanished when the KMT took over Taiwan in 1945. That little remark is a clue to vast network of coca growing and processing that helped fund the Japanese colony in Taiwan, but was also part of a larger worldwide explosion of coca growing in the colonies of imperial powers of Europe as well. Consider:

The rapid rise of the Dutch to prominence in the world coca and cocaine trades took interested parties by surprise, especially the Peruvians, who until 1900 felt they enjoyed a natural birthright to the world coca market. In 1904 the Dutch island of Java (now part of Indonesia) exported only 26 tons of coca leaf; this figure soared to 800 tons in 1912 and 1,700 tons in 1920, glutting the world the world market. The Dutch built an especially productive and integrated industrial cocaine regime, but it was dismantled by decree almost as quickly as it arose.(p332)

The British also took an interest in coca production in India, but German chemists produced the cheapest cocaine out of Peru, driving most other nations out of the business at the turn of the century, and making the nation the world center of coca leaf and cocaine production. Even the Japanese bought land in Peru, and a thriving expat community helped run the cocaine business in that country.

According to the Gootenberg book cited above, Japan's interest in cocaine grew out of the State's involvement in the production of drugs. A Japanese chemist who had worked for Parke-Davis during heyday of its production of cocaine (as an anesthetic) returned to Japan and brought his expertise in cocaine manufacture with him. By the 1910s Japan's big sugar interests in Formosa had begun to invest in coca production. By the 1930s Japan was one of the largest makers and sellers of cocaine in Asia. Gootenberg observes that you can view Japan's production of cocaine as part of the larger Japanese policy of economic self-sufficiency and state-capital marriage (recall that Japan didn't define some drugs as legal and others as illegal like the US; it had no "drug problem"), or you can see it as something increasingly sinister and illicit. The latter view predominated in the US and among nations interested in stamping out the trade after 1930.

Gootenberg writes in another paper:

By 1920, Japan itself produced more than 4,000 lbs. of cocaine, which then doubled to 8,000 by 1922 (see TABLE 4). Official figures for the 1930s shrunk to just under 2,000 lbs., if considered by some historians and contemporary League officials as doctored for international consumption. (This is a hard charge to prove, though Karch has tried by putative estimates of coca-alkaloid capacity.) Exports across Asia officially dropped to negligible levels, though complaints registered about Japanese firms and reporting, as well as cases of deliberate smuggling (such as the “Fujitsuru” and “Taiwan Governor” brand vials in India). Other specialists have noted growing diplomatic cooperation between Japan and international drug officials, at least until the invasions of Manchuria and China, when opiates became a major issue. The firms making cocaine and morphine were among Japan’s largest: Hoshi, Sankyo, Koto and Shiongo Pharmaceuticals, and enjoyed growing links to major trading trusts (such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi) and to interlocking governmental, colonial and military officials. In 1934, we know that Taiwan’s [Chiayi] district kept 694 acres under intensive coca cultivation (by Taiwan Shoyaku and Hoshi); earlier plots on Iowa Jima and Okinawa fall off the record. About 300,000 pounds of Formosan leaf were harvested annually in the late 1930s.

In yet another work, Gootenberg says that by the late 1920s Taiwan was producing 3 tons of cocaine per year (Columbia produced 350 tons in 2010 according to the UN), a figure he questions in one of his books (below). The major producers were Sankyo and Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, which combined had 684 acres under cultivation in Chiayi.  Jennings' book on Japan's opium policies in Korea says in a footnote...

By the mid-1920s, Hoshi's Taiwan plantation was producing an average of 40-50,000 pounds of dried coca leaves per year, while his Peru operation average 20-25,000 pounds a year. The raw coca was shipped to Japan for processing, and most of the cocaine probably wound up in the illicit traffic in China.

Hoshi was thick with the Opium Monopoly in Taiwan and knew Goto Shinpei. In Taiwan he bought semi-refined morphine from the Opium Monopoly, shipped it back to Japan, and processed it into heroin, perfectly legal in those days. Having vanquished the opium laws, Hoshi then branched into cocaine. Gootenberg says that Formosan coca leaf had three great advantages: the Foreign Office handed out permits for it like candy, it was much cheaper to ship it to Asia than Peruvian cocaine, and it had more alkaloids than Peruvian leaf (in fact yielded twice as much cocaine as Andean coca). Gootenberg writes:

Once the refined cocaine was produced in Tokyo, Japanese law made disposing of the cocaine an easy matter. Smugglers did not even bother to repackage the standard 700-gram packages they bought from wholesalers. As a result, the brand names of the Japanese manufacturers such as Hoshi Pharmacueticals, Dai Nippon, and Sankyo Pharmaceuticals, were as well known in Calcutta as they were in Tokyo, even though medicinal cocaine exports to India were nil. 

Hoshi would also be involved in attempting to set up cinchona production for quinine in Taiwan's mountains, cultivating the first cinchona trees in 1922 and producing the first quinine in 1934 (link).

For a period in the late 1920s and early 1930s, according to Gootenberg, the Taiwan military government took over production of cocaine at one of the local firms, supplying its own label for the packaging which said "Taiwan Governor General, Central Factory." That label eventually supplanted the other leading Japanese label in India, and the British Governor-General there complained loudly about it. The Imperial Military was deeply involved in the drug trade, as papers unearthed by the US Occupation showed, escorting tramp steamers laden with opium and apparently, carrying cocaine from Taiwan to China after the war began.

Gootenberg also presents some simple calculations based on South American and Javanese examples that the Japanese were vastly underreporting their cocaine production in Taiwan, which he contends should have been nearly 7 tons annually. The Japanese "cooked their books" as the US Occupation showed; during the 1920s Japan was importing a million pounds of coca leaf from Java alone, and Japanese also operated coca plantations on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In fact after the 1920s Japan's problem was disposing of all this production, since cocaine became little used in medicine.

The war ended this "autonomous" Japanese sphere of cocaine production; the fact that Japan's production was beyond western ability to control was likely the real driver of US complaints about Japan's cocaine trade. The British also feared competition with opium from cocaine, while the US, the moral crusader on drug use, coincidentally had no colonies which produced cocaine.

Coca plants will grow most anywhere; it is something of a historical accident that today South America and not Taiwan or Java is the world center of the trade, a result of the US victory in WWII and Japan's destruction of the coca plantations in Java. Imagine the alternate universe where I am posting pictures of coca plants on farms in Chiayi during my rides there...
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Hegemonic Warfare Watch: Fun Fun Fun over the Senkakus

A lonely road somewhere in Chiayi.

A piece in The Diplomat observes that China's bogus ADIZ over the East China Sea was used to turn back a Lao Airlines flight...

A little-noticed report published earlier this week in Air Transport World showcases one such case. Although considerably ambiguity continues to surround this incident, according to that report, a Lao Airlines flight flying from South Korea’s Gimehae International Airport to Laos was asked to turn back by Chinese air traffic controllers and complied. The report notes that the Chinese air traffic controllers told the aircraft that it did not have adequate approval to pass through China’s airspace. According to the report, the flight (No. QV916), an Airbus A320, was an hour into its scheduled flight path, “which would have put the aircraft over disputed areas of the China Sea,” before it turned back. Starting last year, Chinese air traffic authorities began to require that all civilian flights flying through the East China Sea ADIZ file pre-flight plans, transponder details, and other technical details ahead of their flights, according to the Air Transport World report. The incident involving QV916 is the first instance of a commercial flight being turned back due to a failure to comply with Chinese air traffic authority requirements, but at least 55 airlines worldwide are complying with the terms of China’s ADIZ.

Laos is very tight with China economically, so they didn't complain. I had been wondering if Beijing had arranged with Laos to do this to increase the legitimacy of their ADIZ, but that's because I am paranoid.

Over at Thinking-Taiwan, J Michael Cole observed that the KMT was far more interested in the ROC claim to the Senkakus than the public at large:

Perhaps even more importantly, though far less acknowledged, is the fact that unlike Chinese and Japanese nationalists, most Taiwanese couldn’t care less about the islets. Segments of the Taiwanese public paid attention when the dispute with Japan prevented Taiwanese fishermen from making a living, but the fisheries agreementsigned in April 2013 by Taipei and Tokyo, after 16 long years of stalled efforts, resolved that matter. In other words, whatever interest most Taiwanese paid to the issue stemmed from practical rather than ideological considerations.

But this is not the picture you will get if you listen to the official rhetoric in Taipei or to members of President Ma’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), both of which emphasize Taiwan’s (or the Republic of China’s) sovereignty claims over the islets. A most recent example of this was the Presidential Office’s reaction to remarks made by former president Lee Teng-hui during a visit to Tokyo, in which he stated that, in his view, the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islets are part of Japanese territory. Although Mr. Lee had made similar comments in the past, this time around the response was much more indignant.

In a way, in the die-hard KMT mind, the ROC exists because it makes claims. In the Ma Administration's practical foreign policy, whose goal is to isolate Taiwan from its neighbors, the Senkakus are a useful issue for irritating relations with Japan.
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Student history curriculum protester commits suicide

Taiwan was rocked yesterday with the news that a student protester, facing likely prosecution, committed suicide, allegedly after an abusive, pressuring visit from the principal of his school and zero support for his actions from his parents. In traditional style, he killed himself via carbon monoxide poisoning by burning charcoal, a favorite suicide method in Asia since it does not mar the body and is supposed to be painless (2007 post). Just the souls of those who learn of these senseless tragedies.

The dead student had intended his suicide to drive action, and sure enough, protesters reached new heights of fury, and they stormed the MOE last night. Cole writes:

The occupation—one of several direct actions in the past two years—occurs after months of snowballing protests over efforts by the government to make “minor” changes to curriculum guidelines. Critics say the process lacked transparency and that the new Sino-centric content imposed by the guidelines distorts history and whitewashes the authoritarian period in the nation’s history. The dissidents also maintain that members of the 10-person committee in charge of the “minor” adjustments, set up by then-minister of education Chiang Wei-ling in January 2014, are not suited to handle the matter. Chief among them is convener Wang Hsiao-po, a vice chairman of the Alliance for the Reunification of China.

Occupation is probably a good idea for now, but come the fall the students will have to stage walkouts and sit-ins, and teach-ins. Cole points out that this social activist movement, like preceding ones, is not being orchestrated by the DPP. The KMT accuses the DPP of being behind all these movements, a charge that is completely hilarious to anyone who has ever dealt with DPP Administration. It seems sometimes that they can barely orchestrate coffee for the staff, never mind a major social protest. Instead, the students use social media to organize themselves. The LINE messages of the dead student were posted online, in fact, showing not only that he likely meant to make a statement, but that LINE is a major medium for this kind of communication. Back to Cole...

Lin, who had dropped out of a trade school in June, told a TV talk show that school officials visited his home, pressured his parents, and warned him that if he didn’t cease and desist, his criminal record risked compromising his future job prospects. School officials pointed out that Lin had been a troubled student and that the visit to his home had nothing to do with his suicide.

UDN posted a video of a parent trying to take his kid home and being refused (Solidarity with the description). Such scenes were commonplace during the Sunflower movement. The generation of people in their 40s and 50s is timid and fearful, the true Strawberries of Taiwan.

Although the Ministry of Education has said the students are engaged in illegal activities, ironic since back in February the Taipei Court ruled against the changes...

The Taiwan Association for Human Rights challenged the changes in court. Although the Taipei High Administrative Court in February ruled against the ministry’s decision to implement the adjustments, the ministry went ahead with them.

To get the changes in, the Ministry has promised that questions about the material will not be on the exam, and also threatened textbook publishers, implicitly, with revocation of permits if the new material is not included.

The curriculum revisions also take place against other sources of student anger: the revised 12 year curriculum is widely despised by students... (Brookings)

Nine-year compulsory education was implemented in Taiwan in 1968. As society and the economy have changed, a 12-year compulsory curriculum was developed and in 2010 the Ministry of Education announced that its development was completed and ready to implement. In 2011, the “Project of the Implementation of 12-year Basic Education [十二年國民基本教育實施計畫]” was audited and set to commence in 2014 – though as noted above the new curriculum itself is not yet being taught. The new curriculum aims to lead instruction in schools, give directions to students, clarify values, and prescribe certain actions (馮朝霖 et al., 2011). A reform of national curriculum concerns must not only attempt to envision the future, but also involves a dialogue on varieties of educational values and the choices amongst them (范信賢, 2010). In other words, a common understanding among a wide range of stakeholders is necessary.

...and the terrible job market that students are graduating into. The history curriculum with its pro-China changes is an easily identified and obviously abusive "reform", but there's an underlying anger here that student activists could probably find a way to harness.

The KMT of course blamed the DPP for the student's death. *sigh* The KMT news organ reported on Presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu's determination to amend the history curriculum once she is in power:

The controversy surrounding adjustments to the high school history textbook guidelines continues to heat up. Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), Deputy Legislative Speaker and the KMT’s 2016 Presidential candidate, yesterday said on a TVBS political talkshow that if she should be elected President, she would definitely amend the textbook guidelines in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic of China.

Hung stressed that when the DPP came to power in 2000, the Chen Shui-bian administration had altered, to a great degree, the history textbook guidelines based on a Taiwan-independence movement perspective, and what the Education Ministry was currently doing was to re-adjust the existing history textbook guidelines to conform to the ROC Constitution.

Hung went on to remind the opposition parties that they should not incite young people to violate the law by breaking into government buildings just because the opposition had obtained political gains from last year’s student movement, during which student protesters broke into the Legislative Yuan compound to occupy the legislative chamber for nearly a month in a show of opposition to the cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement.

One of the little successes of the protesters is to compel Hung to constantly re-affirm her far-right Chineseness in public. This will be important in creating her image among local voters.
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