CHAPTER 4- THE PROLONGED COLONIZATION
4.2 THE HISOTRY OF LAND POLICY AND DEVELOPMENT
4.2.2 CHINESE NATIONALIST PARTY RULING PERIEOD: A
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Remnant of Electric Fence The Japanese Military Outpost
Figure 10- The Japanese Colonial Remnants (Source: Data Collected by Author)
By the ends of Japanese period, the Japanese state had given each aboriginal person a Japanese name, and had them included in a household registration system.
“They thus found themselves in the difficult position: resentful for the loss of their traditional lands, but thankful for the better medical care and other benefits of
modernity that were first brought to them by the Japanese” (Simon, 2007). At the end of the Japanese colonial period, colonization of Taiwan from 1895 saw
hunter-gatherer societies displaced from their customary lands – at worst destroyed, at best radically transformed.
4.2.2 CHINESE NATIONALIST PARTY RULING PERIEOD: A BANKRUPT MOUNTAIN ECONOMY
After the Second World War, the Japanese handed Taiwan back to the Chinese and the island fell under the control of the Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist
government. For indigenous peoples and native Taiwanese, Taiwan’s transfer to Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China was just a change from one violent colonial regime to another. In order to consolidate its rule, the KMT government massacred
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over 20,000 people in the ‘February 28th Incident’ and imprisoned countless dissidents, including indigenous people, in the forty years of martial law that followed.
The new Chinese state inherited Japanese system of administration. The most enduring legacy of Japanese colonialism was its imposition of Reserved Land system.
This doctrine assumed that all lands belonged to the Empire. The KMT retained the same concept. The post-colonial administrations did not veer from western concept of land use and ownership. The constitutions articulate all lands of public domain, waters, minerals, and other natural resources are owned by the state. With adaptations through time, including more forced relocations and further limitations on indigenous land, many institutions created by the Japanese have continued to the present day. The Chinese Nationalists took over the schools, clinics, police stations, military outposts, and irrigation systems, as well as the industrial infrastructure that had been built by the Japanese.
The new Chinese state relocated entire indigenous communities in order to make room for national parks, industrial zones and reservoirs; or simply to facilitate administration and social control. The government nationalized traditional territories where hunting, fishing and slash-and-burn agriculture had been prevalent. Most lands with development potential were quickly turned over to either government or Chinese capitalists. ROC administrators, building on Japanese-era institutional precedents, modernized the framework of indigeneity.
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The Chinese Nationalists continued the process of alienating the indigenous peoples from their lands. In 1945, the aborigines who made their living in the
mountains were under a control as strict as during the Japanese occupation. What had changed was only the rhetoric of suppression. The control of the mountain
populations; movements was cleverly disguised as a move to establish the huge area of the Central Mountains into a “mountain peoples reserve district”. This district was under the “direct control of the provincial Mountain Administration Unit and
occupied an area of 15,815 sq km 44 per cent of the total island” (Brown, 2011).
According to the community member’s memory:
“We were not allowed to collect wood 40 years ago. We were also constrained into the tiny, crowded area. Our man lost the integrity because we had to hide from the police, and hide from the officials of Forestry Bureau, and even hide the officials of the Bureau of Mine. If one day the government would give the land back to us, I would teach my kid how to set the trap as if my father taught me. I remembered vividly when I followed my father to the mountain, he discovered the wild boar. My father then asked me to climbed the tree. After he killed the boar, he asked me to eat the raw meat from the neck part because I could gain the energy and courage.
Nowadays, I give the raw meat to the the kid in the village, they are not dare to eat that. It is because the assimilation policy.” 13
The most important legal change since then was in 1966 when ROC did a land census and required aboriginal people to register land ownership as individuals.
(Simon, 2006) In addition, Reserve land was semi-privatized beginning in 1964, albeit with the proviso that reserve land can only be bought and sold between individuals with legal indigenous identity. In 1968, aboriginal individuals and
13 Interview conducted by the author with LS on July 25, 2017.
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families could register to receive the usufruct rights of land. Although those rights could only be sold or rented legally to other aboriginal individuals, it became
common for non-aboriginal individuals to gain access to land by paying off aboriginal individuals and registering in their names. On much of the land, the aboriginal users were required to either cultivate the land or return it to the township government.
“Once ceded to the township government, the local authorities had the power to transfer the usufruct rights to outsiders, including corporations interested in natural resource exploitation. These policies diminished the amount of land owned by aboriginal individuals” (Simon, 2007).
Of a substantial portion of the district supposedly reserved for the aborigines, over 87 per cent was declared a ‘state-owned forest’. During the past decades, Kuomintang bureaucrats franchised Han merchants to lumber the forest, and rapid, unchecked deforestation has taken place. None of the other natural resources in the mountain areas were at the disposal of the aborigines. Both the above-the-ground wealth – the forests – and the under-the-ground wealth – the mines – were ‘state-owned’ and the government franchised these out for lumbering or mining only to Han-established economic interests. It is this dual process – governmental monopoly on the one hand and private appropriation on the other – which not only siphoned out the mountains’ resources but also destroyed the natural economy. As the economy expanded in the 1970s, many aboriginal individuals moved into the cities looking for work in construction and export-oriented factories.
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Figure 11- Space Where Was Appropriated Form Indigenous Cultures and Then
‘Gifted Back’ as Reserved Land14 (Source: Open Platform for Government Data)
For Taiwan’s aborigines, Kuomintang rule has meant they have had to face what has been described “as a deadly crisis”. This crisis goes along with the “ecocide” are caused by terms of various developments.
14 Yellow mark is the Japanese Reserved Land but Present day, it is not. Orange mark refer that it has been the Reserved Land. Red mark indicates, there is not Reserved Land during the Japanese colonial rule but it is the Reserved Land nowadays.
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