The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel: Essays on Political Philosophy in Our Modern Era of Interacting Cultures

14. Understanding the Taiwan Experience: An Historical Perspective (1989)

Chapter XIV h Understanding the Taiwan Experience: An Historical Perspective (1989) By Thomas A. Metzger and Ramon H. Myers Three main views about Taiwan’s historical development are currently prominent. One is prevalent in American and West European scholarly circles. It has been summed up by America’s most prominent China scholar, John K. Fairbank.1 He holds that Taiwan is part of China, but only a peripheral part. In 1949, it became “the island refuge of the defeated Nationalists,” that is, the Kuomintang (KMT), who ruled China until defeated in 1949 by the Chinese Communists. He adds that Taiwan’s economic and institutional development under the KMT has been successful, but that this success owes much to international and other circumstances absent in the case of the mainland, such as United States economic aid and diplomatic support. Therefore, Taiwan’s formula of success is irrelevant to the development problems faced by the rest of China. A second view, held by the KMT and its admirers, is that the international advantages enjoyed by Taiwan have been similar to those of many less successful developing nations. Indeed, many nations like Venezuela have done worse though blessed with greater advantages in terms of both natural resources and international trade conditions. Therefore, Taiwan’s success has been due more to domestic than international circumstances. As the only sizable part of the Chinese world that has successfully modernized, Taiwan offers many valuable lessons for Chinese on the mainland. 732 The Ivory Tower and the Marble Citadel A third view is that the Taiwan experience represents the struggles of the 20 million people living on Taiwan, “native Taiwanese” as well as post-1945 immigrants from the mainland, who have developed a new society on the boundary between the great Asian and the great Pacific powers. This view crystallized in the 1960s and is today common in Taiwan’s opposition political party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Its advocates believe that Taiwan’s true interests have historically evolved as partly or wholly different from those of the rest of China, and that Taiwan’s main problem has been the excessive influence of the mainland Chinese culture there. To what extent do historical facts support any of these views? Our sketch leans toward the second but does not fully refute the other two. It also indicates that history does not yield answers to some of the key interpretive and policy questions about Taiwan. What the history of Taiwan indubitably reveals is an epic about generations of men and women bravely pursuing great but often conflicting dreams. History until 1895 Lying at the same latitude as the middle of Mexico, Taiwan’s land area is about 14,000 square miles, one-and-a-half times the size of Massachusetts. Like the Japanese islands, Taiwan is only about 100 miles from the Asian mainland. Yet while Japan was filling up with people and beginning to develop a civilization by 600 A.D., Taiwan remained a wild, largely deserted piece of unwanted real estate for another thousand years, except for some aborigines who had lived there since about 4,000 B.C. Two events brought history to Taiwan: the expansion of Europe from the fifteenth century on, bringing Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch to Taiwan around 1600; and a population explosion in China during the next centuries that forced many coastal Chinese to emigrate to Taiwan. The last native Chinese dynasty, the Ming, never incorporated Taiwan. Instead, a Ming loyalist, the famous Koxinga (Cheng Ch’eng-kung), using 900 ships and 25,000 men, in 1661 threw out the Dutch and established a regime that lasted until 1683. The Ch’ing dynasty (1644–1912) defeated this 14. Understanding the Taiwan Experience (with R. H. Myers) 733 Ming outpost in 1684 and turned Taiwan into a regular Chinese prefecture. By the early 1800s, this prefecture’s population had reached some 2 million inhabitants, who had originated mainly in Fukien and Kwangtung. These migrants created the same kinds of rural and urban institutions found in their home provinces, replicated the flourishing free enterprise economy typical of China’s highly commercialized south-eastern provinces, and experienced much the same kind of limited imperial governmental presence.2 Always worried about coastal security, however, the Ch’ing state did not legalize immigration until 1875. By the 1860s, British and American merchants and missionaries were active in Taiwan. Some Presbyterians were especially successful. Their medical...