History of Taiwan

Taiwan's aboriginal peoples, who originated in Austronesia and southern China, have lived on Taiwan for 12,000 to 15,000 years. Significant migration to Taiwan from the Chinese mainland began as early as A.D. 500. Dutch traders first claimed the island in 1624 as a base for Dutch commerce with Japan and the China coast. Two years later, the Spanish established a settlement on the northwest coast of Taiwan which they occupied until 1642 when they were driven out by the Dutch. Dutch colonists administered the island and its predominantly aboriginal population until 1661. The first major influx of migrants from the Chinese mainland came during the Dutch period, sparked by the political and economic chaos on the China coast during the Manchu invasion and the end of the Ming Dynasty.

In 1664, a Chinese fleet led by the Ming loyalist Cheng Ch'eng-kung (Zheng Chenggong, known in the West as Koxinga) retreated from the mainland and occupied Taiwan. Cheng expelled the Dutch and established Taiwan as a base in his attempt to restore the Ming Dynasty. He died shortly thereafter, and in 1683 his successors submitted to Manchu (Qing Dynasty) control. From 1680 the Qing Dynasty ruled Taiwan as a prefecture and in 1875 divided the island into two prefectures, north and south. In 1887 the island was made into a separate Chinese province.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, migration from Fujian and Guangdong provinces steadily increased, and Chinese supplanted aborigines as the dominant population group. In 1895, a weakened Imperial China ceded Taiwan to Japan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki following the First Sino-Japanese war.

During its 50 years (1895-1945) of colonial rule, Japan expended considerable effort in developing Taiwan's economy. At the same time, Japanese rule led to the "Japanization" of the island including compulsory Japanese education and forcing residents of Taiwan to adopt Japanese names.

Post-war years

At the end of World War II in 1945, Taiwan reverted to Chinese rule. During the immediate postwar period, the Nationalist Chinese administration on Taiwan (Kuomintang) was repressive and corrupt, leading to local discontent. Anti-mainlander violence flared on February 28, 1947, prompted by an incident in which a cigarette seller was injured and a passerby was shot to death by Nationalist authorities. The island-wide rioting was brutally put down by Nationalist Chinese troops, who killed thousands of people. As a result of the February 28 Incident, the native Taiwanese felt a deep-seated bitterness to the mainlanders. Until 1995, the KMT authorities suppressed accounts of this episode in Taiwan history. In 1995 a monument was dedicated to the victims of the "2-28 Incident," and for the first time Taiwan's leader, President Lee Teng-hui, publicly apologized for the Nationalists' brutality.

From the 1930s onward a civil war was underway on the mainland between Chiang Kai-shek's KMT government and the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong. When the civil war ended in 1949, 2 million refugees, predominantly from the nationalist government, military, and business community, fled to Taiwan. In October 1949 the People's Republic of China (P.R.C.) was founded on the mainland by the victorious communists, several months before Chiang Kai-shek had established in December 1949 a "provisional" KMT capital in Taipei.

During the 1950s, the KMT authorities implemented a far-reaching and highly successful land reform program on Taiwan. They redistributed land among small farmers and compensated large landowners with commodities certificates and stock in state-owned industries. Although this left some large landowners impoverished, others turned their compensation into capital and started commercial and industrial enterprises. These entrepreneurs were to become Taiwan's first industrial capitalists. Together with refugee businessmen from the mainland, they managed Taiwan's transition from an agricultural to a commercial, industrial economy.

First, two million Kuomintang supporters fled to the island in 1949, establishing the small island of less than 20 million as the sea of the Republic of China. Interestingly enough, the Ming dynasty survived for a brief period of time in exile in Taiwan. Taiwan thus benefited from the flight of many well-educated, bourgeois Chinese.

Second, Taiwan, and for that matter all four of the Tigers befitted economically from previous foreign rule or influence, whether it was British commerce in Hong Kong and Singapore, or Japanese industrialization and American land reform in Taiwan. In a sense, Taiwan benefited from Marx’s export of the dialectic through imperialism. Furthermore, each of the tigers was an artificial polity severed from larger neighbors—Communist China in the case of Taiwan and Hong Kong, Malaysia for Singapore. Likewise, South Korea was a produce to postwar division and bloody civil war. Each therefore felt acute insecurity, which was translated into political structures that restricted civil liberties and subordinated short-term social well-being for economic growth

Third and moreover, nor could its economy, wrenched in quick succession from Japan’s orbit and then China’s, have developed without direct American aid, which constituted more than 30 percent of domestic investment from 1951 to 1962. Land reform, government planning, US aid and investment, and free universal education brought huge advancement in industry and agriculture, and living standards. The Americans deserve credit for reforming landownership in Taiwan, a crucial step in modernizing the economy. It extremely unlikely that Chiang Kai-shek would have revolutionized Mainland Chinese society to that extent if he had defeated the Communist Revolution.

One again, the transformation of Taiwan cannot be understood without reference to the larger geopolitical framework. Although aid was cut back in the 1970s, it was crucial in the formative years, spurring industrialization and security and economic links were maintained. Uncertainty about the US commitment accelerated the country’s shift from subsidized import-substitution in the 1950s to export-led growth. Like Korea, Taiwan moved from cheap, labor-intensive manufactures, such as textiles and toys, into an expansion of heavy industry and infrastructure in the 1970s, and then to advanced electronics in the subsequent decade.

Taiwan has developed steadily into a major international trading power with more than $218 billion in two-way trade. Tremendous prosperity on the island was accompanied by economic and social stability. Chiang Kai-shek's successor, his son Chiang Ching-kuo, began to liberalize Taiwan's political system, a process that has continued when President Lee Teng-hui took office in 1988. Under Lee, Taiwan underwent a process of localization in which local culture and history was promoted over a pan-China viewpoint. The direct election of Lee Teng-hui as president in 1996 was followed by Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chen Shui-bian's election victory in March 2000.