Taiwan

• Other Names: 高砂 (Takasago), Formosa
• Chinese/Japanese: 台湾 (Táiwān / Taiwan)

Taiwan is an island located off the east coast of China. Home to numerous aboriginal groups, Taiwan became a base of operations for pirates and smugglers and the Portuguese in the 16th century, and the Dutch East India Company and Ming loyalist rebels in the 17th century, before being conquered by the Qing Dynasty towards the end of that century. The island was annexed by Japan in 1895, and regained its independence in 1945. Since 1949 it has constituted the territory of the Republic of China.

History

Medieval to 19th century

Though the Taiwan Strait is quite narrow, the crossing was historically relatively difficult. The seas could be quite dangerous, and typhoons presented a serious threat during certain times of year. Many areas were rendered relatively impassable by high mountains and malarial jungle. Further, aboriginal groups defended their territory tenaciously.

Chinese may have begun settling on Taiwan in the early Ming Dynasty, if not earlier. These small early communities consisted chiefly of merchant shippers and the like. In the 16th century, Ming policies banning Chinese from trading at Japanese or Southeast Asian ports made most of these previously above-board merchants and traders into illegal smugglers. Taiwan then thus became a haven of smugglers and pirates, along with sites in Kyushu, the Philippines, and elsewhere. These so-called wakô ("Japanese brigands") were mostly Chinese, but included Japanese, Koreans, and Southeast Asians as well, and raided ships and ports all along the Chinese and Korean coasts.

In the beginning years of the Edo period, several daimyô launched missions to attempt to establish trade relations with the island. These included a mission led by Arima Harunobu in 1609, and one led by the Ômura clan in 1616. However, all were unsuccessful, in large part because the indigenous peoples had no unified, centralized, or complexly structured government with whom the samurai could negotiate; on some of these missions, the samurai were attacked by the aborigines and suffered casualties.

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to explore the island, giving it the name "Beautiful Island" (Ilha Formosa). However, they did not establish a permanent base on the island, satisfied with their base on Macao. The Dutch established themselves on Taiwan beginning in 1622, and built the trading post of Fort Zeelandia in 1624 just outside of Anping Harbor (Tainan), while the Spanish established themselves around the same time with a short-lived base at Keelung on the northern end of the island. The Dutch then came into conflict with Japanese merchants already established on the island, as the two groups competed for control of the island's ports. In 1628, trader Hamada Yahyoee, acting on orders from Nagasaki bugyô Suetsugu Heizô, attacked the Dutch fort and captured the governor, Pieter Nuyts, who had led an unsuccessful mission to Japan the previous year. Nuyts was released soon afterwards, but the Japanese took his son and four others captive, exchanging them later for Nuyts himself, who then remained a hostage in Japan for four years. Events like these produced great difficulties for both the Dutch and Japanese trading communities on Taiwan, but formal relations between the shogunate and VOC were restored in 1632; tensions and conflicts between the Dutch and Japanese on the island dissipated further after the VOC gaining exclusive rights to trade at Nagasaki, and after the Japanese were forbidden to go abroad (or to return to Japan) after 1635.

The Dutch grew powerful on Taiwan, exporting for example as much as 1.85 million taels of silver (527,250 florins) from Japan via Taiwan in 1639 alone. By the 1640s, they had pushed both the Spanish and Japanese smugglers & pirates off the island. One of the fort's chief individual trading partners was the smuggler/pirate/trader Zheng Zhilong, who traded gold, silks, and other goods to the Dutch in exchange for Japanese silver, but also competed against them. Taiwan also became a major source of sugar in the region at this time. Some number of Chinese settlers gathered around the Spanish and Dutch settlements, but initially most of them returned to the Chinese mainland regularly, spending only part of the year on Taiwan, and thus leaving it to the Dutch to work out their position on the island (especially vis-a-vis the aborigines).

As the Ming Dynasty fell in the 1640s, many loyalists fled to the south of China, and to Taiwan; after being driven out of mainland China in 1646, they launched numerous raids on the South China coast, and continued to hold out against the Qing until the 1680s. A Qing attempt to blockade Taiwan in 1656 failed; the following year, they implemented a policy known as qianjie, pulling populations away from the south China coast, in order to protect them from raids. Further Qing attacks on the island in 1664 and 1665 also failed.

Meanwhile, Zheng Zhilong's son Zheng Chenggong (Coxinga) took Fort Zeelandia in 1662, driving the Dutch from the island. He died later that year, but his son, and then grandson, continued to command the trade and combat efforts. The loyalists sent a number of requests to the Tokugawa shogunate asking for support, but ultimately received none. While the Qing was preoccupied dealing with the Revolt of Three Feudatories in 1673-1681, the loyalists continued to expand their lively and profitable trade networks, and before long, the population of Chinese on the island reached 100,000. They grew and exported considerable amounts of rice and sugar, as well as engaging in businesses such as shipbuilding and trading in salt.

Following the end of the Revolt of the Three Feudatories, the Qing assembled a fleet of some three hundred warships, to be commanded by Shi Lang, one of Zheng Zhilong's men who had surrendered to the Manchus in the 1650s and whose father, brother, and son had all been killed by Zheng Chenggong. Shi Lang set sail from Fujian in early July 1683, destroying forces loyal to the Zhengs on the Pescadores before making his way to Taiwan, where he vanquished the last of the Ming loyalists within three months, claiming the island for Chinese territory for the first time in history. There were debates at court as to what to do with Taiwan; while Shi Lang and others advocated that it be used as a fortress helping to defend the coast from European navies (and, incidentally, as a trading site), other court officials adhered more closely to the traditional view associating maritime trade with disorder, and with piracy and smuggling, and feared that it would lead to dangerous outflows of silver from the country, and of vital state secrets. In the end, the Kangxi Emperor decided to incorporate Taiwan into Fujian province, designating it a prefecture with its capital at Tainan, and dividing it into three counties, each governed by a civilian magistrate. A force of 8,000 men would be garrisoned on the island. However, the Qing did not colonize Taiwan; Chinese immigration to Taiwan was to be severely restricted, and while Chinese military and civilian settlement did, in the end, end up pushing many aboriginal tribes from the plains into the mountains, large portions of the island were essentially left completely under aboriginal control. For the next two centuries or so, Taiwan was to be something of a frontier land, occupied by opportunists, maritime traders, and optimistic farmer/settlers, governed by local officials who made considerable personal fortunes managing commercial and other affairs in the Fujian/Taiwan region, while higher-level authorities remained largely hands-off.

Late 19th century

Thus it was that nearly two hundred years later, in the 1870s, while there were some very long-established official, mercantile, and agricultural communities & lineages on the island, there were still significant portions of the island where the aboriginal peoples were dominant and where Qing officials had no effective power or control. This set of circumstances would have significant foreign relations impacts as the region moved into the late 19th century.

In 1871, a number of Miyako Islanders became shipwrecked on Taiwan, where they encountered and were killed by a group of Taiwanese aborigines. The Meiji government responded with a punitive military expedition, led by Saigô Tsugumichi and launched to punish the aborigines for the murder of Japanese subjects. The fighting lasted less than two months. This invasion spurred considerable tensions, however, between Japan and China, with China rejecting Japan's claims that the Miyako Islanders were Japanese subjects, and asserting its own claims over Taiwan while denying responsibility for the aborigines' actions. Woodblock prints widely circulated in Japan depicting and describing the events of the expedition are considered the first shinbun nishiki-e, or "news prints," informing the public of official contemporary events in a relatively timely and accurate manner. A treaty was signed in October of that year in which China admitted less than total sovereign control over certain areas of southern Taiwan (i.e. areas dominated by aboriginal groups), recognized the Ryukyuan peoples as Japanese subjects, and agreed to pay an indemnity of 500,000 taels to Japan. The tensions still simmered, however, and very nearly came to all-out war before the decade was up, in order to decide more definitively Chinese and Japanese claims to both Taiwan and the Ryûkyû Islands. The issue was complicated by advice from Westerners, Charles DeLong and Charles LeGendre, who suggested to the Japanese that since the Chinese did not exert effective (de facto) control over those sections of Taiwan dominated by the aborigines, that territory was essentially terra nullius, and if Japan were to occupy the territory, under Western/modern international law, it could be rightfully Japan's.

In the end, in 1879, Japan unilaterally annexed the Ryukyus over Beijing's objections, but negotiations between the two sides, facilitated in part by Ulysses S. Grant, prevented the outbreak of further violent conflict.

Japanese Colony (1895-1945)

The colonization of Taiwan has been described by historian Mark Peattie as "an imperial accessory, a laboratory where the 'new boy' among the colonial powers could show off his modernizing skills, not the heart of Japan's strategic concerns." Those concerns lay chiefly in Korea.

The Japanese authorities in Taiwan were headed by a Governor-General, with Kabayama Sukenori being the first to hold the post, assisted by a Chief of Home Affairs. Among Kabayama's first acts was to establish a local police force, to quell anti-Japanese protests and maintain order, since it was too expensive to maintain true military units on the island. Police were stationed in nearly every village and town outside of the most remote aboriginal-dominated areas, and came to serve as low-level colonial officials, not just working to maintain the peace, but also to collect taxes, oversee public works projects, and otherwise oversee or implement colonial projects. These police included many Ryukyuans, while other Ryukyuans served in Taiwan as teachers, and in other positions; these people, who had only just "become" "Japanese" a few decades earlier, and who spoke pidgin or creole Japanese, were now the representatives of the Japanese people and of the Empire, teaching Japanese language, culture, attitudes, civics, to the "colonized" Taiwanese.

Though Tokyo had some experience guiding colonial administration, as it had done in Okinawa and Hokkaidô, it had no particular long-term plans for Taiwan, and at first allowed an administrative vacuum to develop; into this vacuum flowed military officials inexperienced at political and economic administration, and civilian entrepreneur adventurers and settlers simply looking to make easy profits. It was not until several years later, under the fourth governor-general, Kodama Gentarô, and his Chief of Home Affairs Gotô Shinpei, that a directed system of administration and development was more fully put into place. Eager to avoid embarrassment in the eyes of the colonial powers of the world, Gotô directed extensive research efforts which then served as the basis for administrative decisions and policies. Over the course of the next ten years or so, the Kodama-Gotô administration transformed Taiwan into a well-coordinate and economically viable territory.

Among Gotô's many reforms was the revival of a traditional Chinese village system known as bǎojiǎ (保甲, J: hokô), which was used to maintain the peace alongside the official police system, as well as for a variety of local administrative tasks, including information gathering, the search and seizure of those suspected of planning uprisings, and as militias. While this was not expanded to other parts of the empire, Japanese officials drew upon the experiment with the baojia system in Taiwan to later appropriate or make use of traditional leadership structures in other regions.

State Shinto was expanded to Taiwan, with the Grand Shrine of Taiwan being established in 1901.

Scholars such as Torii Ryûzô and Yanagi Sôetsu began to expound on the connections between Taiwan (particularly the aboriginal cultures) and Japan. Yanagi emphasized the connections, his mingei theory suggesting Taiwan, along with Okinawa, Korea, and Hokkaidô, as storehouses of traditional culture, where that which has been lost in the modernization process in mainland Japan can still be seen; meanwhile, however, archaeologists and anthropologists like Torii found that the Okinawans and Ainu had more in common with the Japanese people than with the Taiwanese. Both of these theories, in different ways, were cited in support of Japanese colonial activities, and cultural assimilation policies, throughout the Empire.

Republic of China

Following the Japanese defeat in World War II, Taiwan was restored to Chinese sovereignty. It remained connected to the mainland for only four years, however, splitting off in 1949 as the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government of the Republic of China fled into exile on the island, leaving the Communist government to establish the People's Republic of China as ruling the entire Chinese mainland.

References

• Mark Peattie and Ramon Myers (eds.), The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945, Princeton University Press (1984).