Taiwan - Little Known & Much Misunderstood
AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE TO CURRENT CONDITIONS
Historical Perspective
"To show its present condition and prospects, and to afford the world at large an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the potentialities of a little known but much misunderstood island is the object of the following pages".
" Preface to "Formosa"
J. D. CLARK, M.J.I.,
EDITOR OF THE SHANGHAI MERCURY
1896.
Introduction
Taiwan, also known officially as the Republic of China on Taiwan, is a country of 21 million people. In terms of population and GNP it is the second largest of Asia's mini-dragons. Isolated diplomatically by Beijing, which (officially at least) still seeks to resolve the civil war it failed to completely win almost half a century ago by incorporating Taiwan into the PRC on its own terms, the Taiwanese have prospered in adversity. Yet today's economic prosperity of the island is no accident. The people of Taiwan were by nature seafarers and traders with centuries of commercial experience and business networks behind them. The country was occupied by the Japanese for a little more than half a century and at liberation in 1945, despite the devastation of war, it retained a relatively well organised infrastructural base.
Always more prosperous than the Chinese mainland, Taiwan did not suffer from the tyrannies of distance and social revolution that, until recently, have hampered both the social and the economic development of China proper. It is more than a century since the editor of the Shanghai Mercury published what was possibly the very first 'business guide' to Taiwan and his book makes for fascinating reading. Unfortunately, to many people, Taiwan remains to this day "little known and much misunderstood".
The world at large may use and know Taiwan's products but it understands little of the background to Taiwan's current economic prosperity and political adversity. Taking a cue from Clarke writing a century ago, this introductory chapter is devoted to providing an essential thumbnail picture of this fascinating island -Isle Formosa- which in 1950 was one of the world's poorest countries but which by the present decade had prospered to the extent that it now holds the world's third largest currency reserves (valued at more than US$83 billion in April 1998).
The Origins of Chinese Settlement
Taiwan today is a part of China, but not part of the Peoples Republic. Its people are predominantly Chinese. Its culture and philosophic traditions are those of the Han people. But it was not always so.
Taiwan was not formally annexed to China until 1683 at the start of the Ch'ing Dynasty. Indeed until the fifteenth century, the Chinese barely paid any attention to Taiwan at all. China's annexation of Taiwan, following a brief period of Dutch colonisation, has to be seen in the context of the general southward expansion of the Chinese people over the centuries as available land in the heartland of China became over-populated. If the movement of the Chinese to Taiwan has a single distinctive feature it is that, for the first time, it had involved settlement across open water rather than being a landward expansion.
From its earliest days, Chinese society in Taiwan developed features quite distinctive from the prevailing norm. Geographically, Taiwan is part of an island chain that stretches from the Kuriles in the north through to the Philippines in the south. Its coastline was considered hazardous by the early mariners: the western coast facing the mainland of China consists of a narrow coastal plain stretching the length of the island but which quickly gives way to high and inhospitable mountains in the east. It is terrain that held scant attraction for people who were used to farming fertile river valleys.
Since historic times, China has always had a population problem. By the fifteenth century, the problem of over-population had already become acute in the coastal province of Fujien. According to contemporary Chinese records, by the year AD1500, the amount of arable land per head of population in Fujien was only half the national average. The Fujienese had little option but to turn away from farming and towards the sea where they became first coastal traders and, later, colonisers as well. Coinciding with the move of European seafarers into the East Asian region a flourishing trade quickly developed with the Dutch and Portuguese, trading in sugar, textile, metalware and porcelain.
Taiwan quickly became a haven for pirates and a base for smuggling foreign goods into China. Under imperial edicts of the time, Chinese were prohibited from trading in their own ships and Imperial law required all trade to be carried in foreign vessels -an edict the Fujienese were happy to ignore.
It was the Dutch who, looking for a base to rival the Portuguese settlement in Macau, first formally colonised Taiwan in the seventeenth century. The Dutch, needing labour and other support, brought with them the first true Chinese settlers from Fujien province. Quickly however, the Europeans stationed on Taiwan became overwhelmed by the people brought in to assist them.
For the next two centuries Taiwan remained at the outer limits of the Chinese empire.
It was China's 'wild west' - a frontier area lacking coordinated government and controlled by local chieftains who based their support largely on clan loyalties and lineage. Imperial control was exercised spasmodically and was confined to the administrative area of Tainan in the south of Taiwan. Tainan and the nearby fishing village of Kaohsiung became the focus of Chinese control.
At the time of its formal annexation to China in the nineteenth century, Taiwan was still a crude and lawless place. The merchant society that had developed in Taiwan, and which had been honed on the values of foreign trade and commercial profit, was often at odds with the more traditional Confucian traditions of agrarianism and self-sufficiency dominant on the mainland of China. This situation continued until the start of the present century when the Japanese, encouraged by Chinese weakness, incorporated Taiwan into the Japanese empire and shifted the capital and the port from the south of the island to Taipei and Keelung in the North, closer to Japan.
Taiwan has a rich and unique history. A part of China it may well be but (and as the Chinese in Taiwan are quick to point out) Taiwan has never been part of the Peoples Republic. In considering Taiwan as a part of China, "China" needs to be considered in continental and historical rather than in politically convenient nationalistic terms. As at least one commentator has previously pointed out, "China", in its historical context, has far more in common with the Holy Roman Empire than it does with a modern nation state. Viewed in this light, Taiwan today is but one of the many faces of China.
Foundation of the Modern State
The principles under which Taiwan, the Pescadores and other islands were to be returned to Chinese rule were established at the First Cairo Conference between the Great Powers in the closing days of the Second World War and reaffirmed at Potsdam. Through this arrangement, China (then led by Nationalist General Chiang Kai-Shek) regained the sovereignty over Taiwan it lost during the period of Japanese occupation. In 1949, as the Chinese Civil War drew to a close and the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong wrested control of the Mainland from Chiang's Nationalist Kuomintang Party, the latter fled to Taiwan with his army intending to regroup and resume the fight.
Altogether around one and a half million people, including some 600,000 soldiers as well as their families, fled to Taiwan during the closing days of the Civil War. As a result, the island's population increased rapidly from around 6 million people in 1946 to 7.5 million by 1950. The Nationalist Kuomintang troops were able to hold the battle lines at two small islands, Kinmen and Matsu, just off the Fujien coast, an advance position still occupied today. An invasion of Taiwan itself by the Communist troops was fully expected but fate intervened. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.
and the bogging down of PLA troops in the Korean conflict, not to mention the dispatch of the US 7th fleet into the Taiwan (Formosan) Straits gave the Nationalists the time they so desperately needed.
From the outset, the Kuomintang leadership maintained that their stay in Taiwan would be temporary and until such time as they regained control of the Mainland from the Communist forces. For this reason, and in order to maintain law and order under a restive local population, the island was governed under martial law and no opposition to the martial government was tolerated. Such policies further alienated the mandarin-Chinese speaking KMT from the native Taiwanese (who predominantly spoke a local dialect related to that spoken in Fujien). Relations between the two Chinese groups remained tense for many years and only now is this tension beginning to disappear as the government moves to repair past wounds and injustices.
The healing process remains painful for many.
Nevertheless, the KMT -with American aid- proved itself capable of repairing Taiwan's war shattered economy. An excellent and far-reaching land reform program was introduced in the 1950s which resulted in a far more equitable income distribution than is found in many other Asian countries and which is the foundation of much of the wealth of the native Taiwanese population today. Rapid industrialisation, which followed the land reform program, saw Taiwan emerge from being one of the poorest to one of the wealthiest places in Modern Asia. Taiwan was on course to become the first of the Asian mini-dragons.
In October 1991, the Republic of China (Taiwan) lost its seat in the United Nations. A further blow to local esteem came in January 1979 when the United States withdrew its recognition from the R.O.C. in favour of the Peoples Republic of China in Beijing. In the face of pressure from Beijing, which has sought to isolate Taiwan diplomatically, most countries within the developed world have withdrawn their diplomatic recognition from Taipei in favour of the PRC. However, because of the strength of its economy and its transition from martial law state to a multi-party democracy, this lack of formal recognition has not prevented most countries from maintaining close unofficial links with Taiwan.
President Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975 from a heart attack at the age of 87. His son, Chiang Ching-Kuo became President of the ROC in 1978 and, in the context of Taiwan being a single party state at the time, was re-elected for a second term. For a while it appeared that a pattern of dynastic succession could be emerging but, to his credit, it was Chiang Ching-kuo who laid the foundation for the present multi-party state that exists today.
In 1986, after almost forty years of being a single party state governed by martial law, a group of dissident politicians banded together to form a new political party -the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The DPP was allowed to form despite a ban on the convening of new political parties. After much debate the KMT, on the specific orders of Chiang Ching-kuo, decided not to interfere. The first DPP candidates were elected to the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan's Parliament) in 1986 and were permitted to take their seats in the Legislature. The ground had been laid for development of a multi-party state. The first free elections permitted after the DPP was formally recognised by the authorities came in 1989. In that election, which was marred by many claims of vote buying (a claim that is still common in local elections well into the '90s) the KMT took approximately 70% of the vote with the remainder going mostly to the DPP.
In 1987, thirty-eight years of martial law were formally ended in one of the last important acts by President Chiang Chingkuo before his untimely death in January 1988. He was succeeded by Dr. Lee Teng-hui, a University professor and agricultural scientist. Lee Teng-hui became the first native Taiwanese to hold the Presidency and retains the Presidency to this time -having become the first person to be elected to the office by popular vote in March of 1996.
virtual-asia.com |
