Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0361/03612.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 22KB | 371 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03612}
$Pretitle{263}
$Title{Taiwan
Chapter 3A.   Historical Setting}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{The Director Foreign Area Studies}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{chinese
china
taiwan
island
japanese
century
first
dynasty
japan
koxinga}
$Date{1971}
$Log{}
Country:     Taiwan
Book:        Area Handbook for the Republic of China
Author:      The Director Foreign Area Studies
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1971

Chapter 3A.   Historical Setting

     The island of Taiwan has a recorded history that, in important ways,
dates back only to the seventeenth century. The island first came to the
attention of outsiders as a base of operations for Japanese and Chinese
pirates in the early sixteenth century. Throughout much of the seventeeth
century control of the island was contested between Spain and Holland until
the last Europeans were expelled in 1662 by Cheng Ch'eng-kung (known in the
West as Koxinga), a pirate chief of mixed Chinese and Japanese parentage.

     Although a Chinese claim to the possession of Taiwan was made during the
latter part of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), the Manchu Dynasty (1644-1911)
was the first to rule and administer the island effectively from the Chinese
capital. After losing Korea in a war with Japan in 1894, China was forced in
1895 to cede Taiwan to Japan. At the end of World War II the Republic of China
regained the island. Since 1949 the island has been the seat of the government
of the Republic of China, headed by Chiang Kai-shek.

     The cultural history of the Republic of China now established on Taiwan
is that of China itself. Chinese culture originated, probably in the Yellow
River Valley of what is now North China, no later than 2200 B.C. According to
archaeological evidence, by 1500 B.C. this culture had reached a high state of
organization, accompanied by advanced bronze technology, writing, a precise
calendar, and a system of ethics so advanced that it has survived to the
present day.

     While there were times, such as during the T'ang Dynasty (A.D. 618-906),
when China welcomed foreign ideas and gave positions of great prominence to
foreigners, basically China was inward-looking and self-satisfied during most
of its history. The Chinese considered themselves in possession of the "Middle
Kingdom," the universal empire, and the only fount of worthwhile culture. They
believed that, while foreign ideas, inventions, and religions might add
interesting variation, they could never offer anything vital or basic. The
Chinese had no concept of national sovereignty. All that was not China was
considered to consist of tributary states or uncivilized barbarians who did
not even know enough to acknowledge the innate superiority of Chinese culture.

     It took half a century of depredations, economic exploitation, and
humiliations by Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan to shake
China's confidence in the superiority of its traditional ways. When the
Chinese Empire, which first had been unified politically in 221 B.C., after
many vicissitudes, finally disintegrated in 1911, the first reaction on the
part of political leaders was an attempt to introduce European concepts and
institutions at the expense of Chinese values. By the 1920s, when this had
proved impossible, the political leadership split among those who wanted to
return to traditional Chinese values combined with Western technology and
organization and those who thought that the Bolshevik Revolution inspired by
Marxist-Leninist ideas was the only relevant model for China.

     In late 1967 the second school of thought was personified by Mao
Tse-tung, in whose name a so-called Cultural Revolution was sweeping the
entire Chinese mainland in an attempt to uproot all vestiges of Chinese
culture. The first school of thought was personified by Chiang Kai-shek, head
of the Republic of China, who controlled the island of Taiwan and several
small islands of the southeastern China coast.

Origins of the Chinese Nation

     The rulers of the earliest Chinese dynasties often are referred to as
emperors, but before 221 B.C., they were in fact the supreme chiefs of a loose
tribal federation. At best they were titular monarchs whose power was entirely
dependent upon the allegiance of a large number of local rulers. The political
system in China during the Chou Dynasty (1122 B.C.-256 B.C.) has been compared
to a period of similar length in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire
and the dominance of nation states.

     The last five centuries of the Chou Dynasty were times of intermittent
warfare among various local rulers for territorial aggrandizement. The power
of the Chou Dynasty decreased continually between 722 and 481 B.C. After that
date, and before the fall of the dynasty in 256 B.C., the dynastic ruler
continued to have only nominal authority and was helpless to diminish the
increasing fierceness of the practically continual warfare among the seven
most powerful states.

     In 221 B.C., King Ch'eng of the succeeding Ch'in Dynasty became the first
emperor of a unified and centralized China. All power was in the hands of the
imperial court which dominated in unprecedented fashion all social, economic,
and intellectual life of the empire through a civil service. Feudal ranks and
privileges were abolished, and all private individuals were disarmed. Weights,
measures, axle-lengths, laws, and writing became standardized. Neighboring
non-Chinese peoples were forced to accept Chinese suzerainty. Public works,
especially the construction of roads and fortifications, were undertaken on an
unprecedented scale. The Great Wall of China was begun at this time by forced
labor assigned as punishment for the infractions of laws and as a means of
repressing scholars who disagreed openly with official doctrine (see ch. 10,
Religion).

     During times of vigor the Chinese Empire included what are now North
Korea, North Vietnam, Burma, Laos, Outer Mongolia, and large parts of Soviet
Central Asia though some of these held a nominal tributary status and were not
integrated into the empire. At such times the empire was able to exercise
dominion over areas several times as large as those occupied by the Chinese
people themselves. In the first century A.D., during the Han Dynasty (206
B.C.-A.D. 220), Chinese armies reached the shores of the Caspian Sea.

     A civil service system and a code of laws were perfected during the T'ang
period, which also was considered the golden age of literature and art. During
the same dynasty printing was invented. Buddhism, which had been introduced
during Han times, flourished, and Mazdaism, Manichaeism, Islam, and Nestorian
Christianity were propagated widely. Foreigners were made welcome, and many
served in the imperial government.

     The Chinese lived under Mongol domination from 1280 to 1368 and under the
Ming Dynasty from 1368 until 1644, when the Manchus took advantage of a
Chinese civil war to establish themselves in North China. Forty years later
they controlled the entire empire. Though originally foreign invaders, the
Manchus soon adopted Chinese customs, language, and outlook. By the time the
dynasty fell in 1911 they had become totally absorbed.

     Chinese settlement expanded chiefly southward, displacing more primitive
tribal peoples, partly as a result of population pressures, but also because
of repeated invasions from the north by the Huns, the Chieh, the Hsien Pei,
the Ti, the Mongols, the Tartars, the Manchus, and others. This pattern began
before the fourth century and continued until the seventeenth century, by
which time there was very little unused arable and fertile soil left on the
Chinese mainland. It was then, especially during times of famine, that Chinese
communities began to become conspicuous throughout Southeast Asia, the
Philippines, and Taiwan.

Conquest and Settlement of Taiwan

Early History

     There is no general agreement regarding the origin of Taiwan's aboriginal
population or th