Global History of East Asia - Lezione 30/10/2024 PDF

Global History of East Asia - Lezione 30/10/2024 The year 1895 is a year of great importance, not only for the island, but for East Asia in general. It’s somehow the combination of a series of discourses that we have already addressed in our previous classes. To sum up, we have seen how in the secon...

Global History of East Asia - Lezione 30/10/2024 The year 1895 is a year of great importance, not only for the island, but for East Asia in general. It’s somehow the combination of a series of discourses that we have already addressed in our previous classes. To sum up, we have seen how in the second half of the 19th century there has been this clash between two totally different world views, two different understandings of international relations, of political sovereignty, of what a State is and of different hierarchical States. We have seen that the Qing empire is trying to resist by combining some aspects of the new modern international order with the traditional role of China as the hegemonic power in East Asia, now that this idea of being the universal empire has faded away. This strategy of including some aspects of international relations and talking to the West through their language but still retaining the pinnacle of this tributary system, that is still ongoing in East Asia. However, we have seen that China has to face the rise of Japan. Japan, differently from China, has decided to embrace the international system, both theoretically and practically. The Meiji government in Japan has fully adopted the language, the concepts of international relations, and Japan is trying to demonstrate that it can lead East Asia towards a modernization, that is a westernization. But according to the Japanese thinkers and officially, this is the only way in which they can affirm their emerging power, not within the Chinese system, so they adopt the international system in order to challenge China from the inside of this east-asian order, which is crumbling. So, 1895 is the year in which the Chinese imperial system finally crumbles down and disappears from East Asia. Firstly, we need to see what happens and what consequences it has on Taiwan. We have seen that after the takeover in Taiwan in 1683, the Qing dynasty managed the island very cautiously: they tried to prevent the migration of large numbers of Chinese subjects to the island, they limited the contacts between settlers and aborigines and they limited the contact between Taiwan and the rest of the world. Then, following the forced opening of China and the new Japanese ambitions, Taiwan is again after more than one century of relative isolation or contact with the continent, the center of ambitions and strategies from the US, Great Britain and Japan, that already tried in the 70s to take Taiwan or at least to demonstrate that the Qing were not capable of handling the island. We have seen that Taiwan is finally a province of its own, from 1885 to 1895. In these ten years the Qing administration made the effort to modernize the island, to create new infrastructures, to reform the complex system of land property, in order to have better fiscal income. But these efforts, as generous as they could be, were not successful. In order to understand what happened in 1895, between China and Japan, and how this impacted Taiwan, we need to talk about another protagonist of this stage: Korea. Korea was, up to this point, possibly the most important tributary country in the tributary system of the Qing empire. Choson had close cultural connections to the Qing, and in general with the ideas of any Chinese empire, it had always acknowledged the superior role of the Chinese emperor; but it also enjoyed full autonomy within the kingdom. The decisions were in the hands of the king of Korea, and the Qing empire was just acting as the protector of Korea, but it was also in charge of Korean foreign relations: Korea could not sign any treaty with foreign countries, it always had to be done through the Qing administration. So even during the late 19th century, when China was forced to sign the Unequal Treaties, some western countries would also like to do that with Korea, but in order to do that they always had to pass through the Chinese administration. Japan, in its rise towards a status of great power, has already targeted the Ryukyu Islands, which by now have become fully part of the Japanese empire, in the 70s and 80s. Japan has tried to add Taiwan as well, but the Qing have reaffirmed their supremacy there. The new target is now Korea, because it is strategically part of this attempt of demolishing the Chinese tributary system. Western countries had accepted this idea so far, that the Qing had special authority over Korea. In the western understanding, both the Qing and Choson dynasty represented some form of backwardness, or oriental despotism; they represented these isolated worlds that did not want to communicate with the rest of the world. So, the image of Korea was tightly connected with the image of the Qing empire. For Japan it is easy, from a rhetorical point of view, to point out that also Korea needs some kind of leadership in order to emerge from this kind of “prehistory”, from this situation of isolation. So, Japan wants to act as the promoter of this new Korean independence. So, the Qing and the Meiji empire in Japan, started to have conversations on the status of Korea. Both empires want to avoid that one of the other can somehow take full control of Korea. So Japan fears that the Qing might decide to assert their control over Korea by taking it, and putting an end to the tributary system by maybe conquering Korea and transforming it into a province. On the other hand, the Qing fear that Japan might do the same thing they did with the Ryukyu Islands and the same thing they tried to do with Taiwan: declaring that according to the international law, there is nothing like these tributary relations, so either Korea is part of the Qing empire or it is an independent country. So, they put the Qing in front of this decision. In 1876, there was a treaty, the Treaty of Kanghwa, between the Qing empire and Meiji Japan, in which the two parts agreed to define Korea as an autonomous country. Here we really see the ambiguity of political concepts in full display, because the Chinese term that is used in this treaty, zizhu (自主), literally means to have authority over your own self, or self-ruling, which is very close to the Greek expression autonomos, that is power over your own self. The problem is that the same term with the same characters is interpreted in two totally different ways from China and Japan. For the Qing this term, zizhu, is the same term that was used in the tributary relations to indicate what we already know: that a tributary country was fully zizhu within its borders, so the kind of that country was fully autonomous, so the Qing emperor did not control that country in its domestic policies. For the Japanese this zizhu is supposed to be the translation into Chinese characters of the western concept of autonomy, of being an autonomous country, which means that you are not just autonomous within your borders but also on the international stage, so you can have your autonomous foreign policies and sign treaties with other countries. So as we can see the same concept has two totally different understandings: for the Qing it is fine to sign this treaty and to say that Korea is zizhu, as it has always been. But, the treaty states that no empire could intervene in internal affairs. So they agree on that, they justify it with the same concept, but this concept is meaning totally different things for the two parts. So with the treaty of Kanghwa, similarly to what had happened earlier with the Ryukyu, we see that Choson continues its tributary relations with the Chinese, so the dominant understanding of the concept of zizhu, also within Korea, remains the traditional tributary relation: so they remain autonomous, no one interferes in their internal affairs, but they are still part of the tributary system. This was not what Japan had in mind. So, until 1882 there was no treaty signed by Choson with foreign countries whatsoever. But after 1882, with some pressure from western countries, such as the US but also Italy and France, Korea has to sign these foreign treaties, but they were signed by the Qing government and not by the Choson administration. The US is trying to push Korea out of these tributary relations, similarly to Japan, but with less interest and less effort than Japan. After less than twenty years, in 1894, there are internal disorders in Korea: the authority of the king is threatened by internal rebellions, and the Qing, following the theory of the tributary system feels the order to intervene and protect the king. The Japanese consider this intervention of the Qing as a violation of the treaty, so they also intervene in order to fight against the Qing. That’s how we get to the first sino-japanese war in 1894-1895, in which these two empires are finally confronting each other to decide who is going to play the role of the hegemon in East Asia, and to see if the old tributary system can still survive and be used by the Qing empire to assert its power over the region, or if the new international order fueled by Japan has to take over East Asia as well. The conflict ends in a humiliating defeat for the Qing empire. It also puts an end to all the efforts that the Qing administration and the local government had done to modernize the navy, the army, and to demonstrate that the old theory by Zhang Zhidong (that you could use the Chinese spirit as the essence and western technology as a tool) could be an efficient answer to the crisis of the 19th century. What happens in this war is a demonstration that the Qing model of addressing modernization failed. The idea of splitting the modernization of technological aspects of society from the modernization of the political and the institutional systems, and even philosophical concepts and ideas, was wrong. Or, at least, it was not capable of surviving the competition with western countries. So probably per se, it could very well be a good solution, but the problem is that every theoretical solution has to be applied in a concrete setting, in which you have some powers that exert more influence than the others, and the Qing did not acknowledged enough that what they perceived as “just a western system” was actually becoming a global system, because of the nature of western theories and colonialism, that was transforming the world in a way that did not leave any space for alternative worldviews, not even at a regional level. The technological capacities and also the power of the discourse of the West, that had rationalized and hierarchized all the populations, were so strong that they were difficult to resist, especially if the empire that was trying to resist was, like the Qing, a very weak empire internally. Why was the Qing empire so weak, also within its own borders? We should not forget that the Qing were still perceived as foreigners that were ruling over China. Of course it is easy to be an ethnic minority ruling over a large territory, if you have a very strong military, if you can affirm your control, so the people will accept you. We mentioned that during the Manchu conquest of China there was a strong resistance against the Qing, but we also mentioned the fact that the strength of the Manchu army made the resistance impossible at some point. In the late 17th century, every effort of seriously resisting the Qing, even using the racist argument against the Manchu had been put aside by the strength of the Manchu. So, whenever some intellectuals or officials tried to raise the question of the Manchu as non- chinese or non-confucian, they were put to silence or even killed. So, for the entirety of the 18th century there was no resistance against the Qing and not in terms of xenophobic resistance. With the crisis of the 19th century this is also changing in China, the weaker the Qing empire becomes, the more it is humiliated by foreign powers, the more we see a resurgence of a racist discourse against the Manchu. That is a very strong phenomenon that we see from the mid 19th century onwards. One of the early examples of this is the Taipei rebellion, the civil war that took place in the mid 19th century in China, when in Southern China a sect of rebels really threatened the authority of the Qing. It took more or less twenty years for the Qing to smash the rebellion, that was led by a man who had also suffered from psychiatric problems (he presented himself as the brother of Jesus Christ), but in his discourse and his rhetoric against the Manchu he uses terms such as: “the Manchu devils”, “the barbarians”, etc. So, there is a resurgence of a xenophobic attitude against the Manchu as a population. Later, even after the defeat of the Taipei rebellion, and especially after the defeat with Japan, in the years following 1895, there is a rediscovery (especially by the younger intellectuals) of all the anti-Manchu discourses at the time of the Ming-Qing transition. So, the intellectuals that wrote during the 17th century are rediscovered, their works recirculate and there is a number of activists that now start blaming the Qing and viewing them as a problem for China. Within China we see this emerging revolutionary discourse that targets not just the Qing as a dynasty that is not capable of addressing the real problems of their time, but also the Manchu, as a population that is not capable of governing China, that should have never started governing China as they are barbarians. So, we have this lack of legitimacy of the Qing dynasty that makes it very, very difficult for them to articulate a new view and to resist the spreading of a foreign system. They had a very small margin of movement in political terms, as they already lacked strong legitimacy. Especially if you think of the general atmosphere of the late 19th century, early 20th century, which is the moment of the rising of nationalism worldwide: the idea that one territory should belong to one nation, which is a compact community, linguistically, religiously, ethnically. This idea of a homogeneous nation that is still in some of our discourses today, this fiction of linking a territory to a presumed identity which is obviously constructed, is emerging during this period: it is not a coincidence that in the same year you see the collapse of all the multiethnic empires: the Ottoman empire, the Qing empire, the Habsburg empire etc., they represented a model that could not fit into the new concept of nation-states, that were presumed to represent a self-determined community that shared the same identity. Obviously the Manchu had based the strength of their empire on totally different assumptions: the idea of having a coexistence between different ethnicities, with the Manchu at the top, but with the Qing themselves also trying to represent all the other cultural components of the empire. The typical depictions of the Manchu emperors were cosplays of various cultures: the Qing emperor is portrayed as the Manchu emperor, as the Confucian leader, as the Tibetan buddhist, as the Mongol Khan, etc. So the idea was that an empire should not have one culture, one language, one religion, but should be a huge territory that represented the coexistence (of course in hierarchical terms) of cultures. Now, we have a totally different view. Obviously Japan is much better at fitting this national framework, because of its peculiarities as an archipelago (a geographical boundary that already created a sort of homogeneity), but also for the preservation in terms of the lineage of the emperor that was always the same family from the origins of Japan, the idea of a common language, of a common shinto religion and so on. Many of these aspects are actually recreated or particularly stressed by the Meiji, but the raw material that the Meiji had in creating a new nation out of Japan is much easier to model than the ideal that was in China at the time. The Qing could not make China into a Manchu nation, of course, because they were a minority, but they could also not say that China represents a Chinese culture and a Chinese ethnicity, because they would just delegitimize themselves. So, it is not just a clash on different views on how to relate with other countries but also on what a state and a nation should be. And now, after the defeat of the Qing empire, within China we have Chinese intellectuals that start promoting a nationalist discourse. They very openly say that the problem is that they are ruled by foreign oppressors, so they should get rid of the Manchu and recreate China as the “China of the Chinese”. The Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895 puts an end to the war, it is very humiliating for the Qing, and from the depiction of the signing of the treaty you really have an image of these two worlds colliding. In the picture the Qing are on the left, they are still dressed with confucian traditional clothing, on the right side the Meiji officials are dressed like their European counterparts. They represent the adoption of western modernisation: the Japanese officials are aware that they are adopting western values, and they also think that these values are easily adoptable by non-western countries. Differently from the Chinese hierarchical system, that can only be based on Confucianism and on the acceptance of the Chinese worldview, the western system is less related to cultural contexts, and can be transplanted somewhere else. In terms of language, humiliating the Qing, the Japanese want the reference version of the Treaty of Shimonoseki to be an English one, as it already happened in previous documents. This humiliated the Chinese side, who saw that their language that for centuries was also the written official language of many East Asian countries for a long period (including Japan) was now replaced by English. Now, written Chinese was just the language of the Qing empire, and it could be interpreted by the Qing as they wanted (as we saw with the concept of zizhu), now there can be no ambiguity and the language of reference has to be English, even when interpreting treaties. Why are we talking about the Treaty of Shimonoseki? The consequence of this treaty is that Taiwan has to be ceded to Japan. It might be surprising to find out that a war fought over Korea now ends up with the island of Taiwan taken by Japan. But Taiwan was really in the mind of the Japanese government as a key part of the operation of dismantling the Chinese tributary system and substituting it with a new Japanese order. So now Taiwan goes under the control of the Japanese. What about Korea? The result of this conflict is that now Japan forces China to acknowledge not just the concept of zizhu in very vague terms but as a formal independence for Korea. The only Chinese privileges are actually transferred to Japan in western countries, because Korea is not ready yet. So, the fate of Korea really represents the hypocrisy of the new international systems: formally it supports the independence and the quality for each country, but it also allows the creation of colonies, protectorates, because if you are not ready and not westernized yet, you cannot really enjoy the privileges of independence and self-determination. Years later, in the 1920s, the rhetoric of self-determination will really become a global concept, especially under the impulse of the American president Woodrow Wilson. Even Wilson, when he talks about self-determination as a sort of universal right, he often specifies that self-determination requires a sort of maturity. Wilson will use this rhetorical tool for the case of the Philippines, which were of interest for the US, as they wanted to preserve a sort of colonial control over the Philippines. So, Wilson will explicitly repeat in his writings and his talks that self-determination is not for everybody. This is definitely the idea of Japan and of the western powers, so Korea is independent, but this is just a formal passage before it becomes a protectorate of Japan in 1905, so just after 10 years. Then, a few years later, it will then become a proper Japanese colony. So, the fate of Korea that moves from tributary state to colony, really exemplifies the fact that in both the systems that clashed during this war, what really matters is power and strength. There is empirically a possibility of creating hierarchies in both systems, with different languages and arguments, but both systems can put specific territories, countries or states in a position of oppression and inferiority. At least, in the tributary system Korea enjoyed a kind of domestic autonomy, which of course a protectorate or a colonizer will not allow; but at the same time, in the tributary system there was no margin whatsoever for imagining an autonomous state in relation to the external world. Of course, even colonies do not have this possibility, but as we saw from history, colonies can start a decolonisation process and with the concept of self-determination they can become independent states. So, in both systems you have hierarchies but also margins of movement. The fate of Korea, however, is really sad. In world politics and international relations you can have different laws and policies, but sadly, what truly matters is power, and the power of asserting your own will over another population, and if you have the tool to do that, you can find a legal way to articulate these hierarchical relations. This is what happened to Korea in just ten years: it wnt from a tributary state to a protectorate, to a colony, with foreign powers discussing its independence and autonomy, but in reality only transferring Korea from one hierarchical system to another. For Taiwan there is no zizhu or independence whatsoever, it is just a pure territorial transfer of an island that was a province of China, and now it becomes a colony of Japan. But what happens in Taiwan? Not everybody is happy to accept the fate of the island. The Qing empire was quite quick in getting rid of Taiwan. We know that from the Kangxi emperor there was no real love story between the Qing empire and Taiwan, which was defined as a ball of mud, as a useless tropical island full of diseases, populated by aboriginals, an island that could always be a source of annoyance and turbulence that had to be controlled. So, the Qing never really felt that Taiwan was their trop priority. But now, Taiwan was populated by a local elite, a local gentry, the land owners, and also by the officials that had first operated in the province of Fujian and after 1885 as the administrators of the new province of Taiwan. So, even if the Qing had no real problem in ceding Taiwan to Japan, and it was much better to give Taiwan to Japan than any other portion of the Chinese territory (Japan was willing to have north-eastern portions of China). But, in Taiwan, in 1895, the date of the takeover of Japan, there was a huge reaction, unexpected by the Qing, and the local gentry really organized an armed resistance against the japanese takeover. They tried to have the support of the Qing administration, but the Qing decided to remain silent, so there was a silent approval, but no real support. Obviously, the Qing had just been defeated by the Japanese in a humiliating way, if they did not respect the treaty, Japan would have humiliated them again. So, they have to respect the terms of the treaty, but they do not condemn the resistance of the Taiwanese gentry. What is interesting about this episode that took a couple of months, is the fact that the people that promoted this resistance had this brilliant idea of not just proclaiming their loyalty to the Qing, that would not be enough, but they proclaimed a new state of Taiwan, the Republic of Formosa. The republic of Formosa. (Formosa was the first name of Taiwan given by the Portuguese, and it means “beautiful”). Technically this is the first republic proclaimed in east Asia. The man who became the first president is Tang Jingsong, who was also the governor of Taiwan under the Qing. Already from this fact (of the same person acting both as the last imperial governor of Taiwan and the first and only President of this republic), it is evident that there was a strategic use of the term “Republic”. It was not really the result of a decade of intellectual elaborations of Republicanism or of struggles to make Taiwan into a Republic, it was just an escamotage to catch the attention of western powers. If we try to look a t it from the mind of the proponents it was a clever idea, they thought: “if we say that like Japan we are adopting the western institutions and principles, and that we want to become a self determined democracy, maybe the western powers will hear our resistance and they will put pressure on Japan to stop them from taking the island”. This was the last resort of these people. One person in particular, Cheng Jitong, who was immediately made into the foreign minister (he had studied in France, and so was quite an expert in the political language of the West) who had the duty of convincing the foreign powers to support the Republic of Formosa. Obviously the western countries did not really want to mingle between Japanese and Chinese issues. (This could remind us of the last attempt of the Ming emperor to convert to Catholicism and write a letter to the Pope hoping that he would intervene and save the Ming empire from the Qing). This last resort was just a geopolitical tool, to signal to the West to come and help them. This is the official declaration of the Republic of Formosa: As you see in the second line, in this declaration they use the expression “People of Formosa”, similar to what the Americans use even now “we, people of the United States”. It is a totally different rhetoric from the imperial way of talking about the subjects of the Son of Heaven (Emperor). In the third line, the derogatory term “Japanese slaves” is used to define the Japanese, as people that were inferior to the Chinese Empire. So, at the same time we see the use of a modern language to talk about self determination, but also the imperial rhetoric of putting the Japanese back to their place. This declaration is a very quick attempt to convince the world that this republic is not only formal but also institutionally, technically, that there are elections. The concept used is again “zi zhu” 自主, self-government, but this time in the more modern sense. Also “Min Zhu” 民主, democracy, and “zili” 自立, autonomy, all in the modern, westernized sense. This episode, which will end very quickly (as the Japanese will not certainly stop in front of this extemporary Republic with no foreign help), opens a series of questions that have been analyzed by some historians. Was this really a long-term plan for the independence of Taiwan? Or was it just an attempt to save Taiwan from the Japanese and then bring it back into the Chinese order? This is not clear, but the fact that all the people who participated in this republic were also somehow members of the Qing administration suggests that the long term strategy was not really of creating a new republic. Maybe the project was to first create a republic just to save the island from Japan, and then re-establish a tributary relation with the Qing to bring Taiwan back into the Chinese System. So there was this idea that this was not a real push for independence but just a passage for the creation of a new hierarchical relation with the Qing. Other supporters might have had in mind a real project for Taiwanese independence. After less than one month, on June 3rd, the Japanese Army arrives in the north of Taiwan, and on June 6th the President Tang Jingsong, after less than a month of service as the president of Formosa, flees to China. This caused anger among the other supporters of the Republic, as their president immediately escaped and got back to Qing China (this is another signal that probably the republican project was not really long term). The last republican enforcers flee south, to Tainam, and finally in October the Japanese conquer Tainam and this declared the end of this republican experiment. There are two trends of interpretation about this historical page: 1. The first tendency is just to define these three months of republic as a joke, as a ridiculous farce that had no serious possibility of succeeding but was done in a very instrumental and clumsy way, with an imperial governor becoming the president with no real preparation for the island in becoming a republic. This view was shared also by some Chinese intellectuals who harshly judged this episode. 2. Other historians, mostly Taiwanese, try to stress, on the contrary, on the fact that this episode, even if unsuccessful, was the first attempt at articulating an idea of self- government of the island. From a Taiwanese perspective, any historical example of Taiwanese self determination can be used in demolishing the narrative that Taiwan has always been part of China and that it should return to China. Qiu Fengjia was one of the members of the Republican resistance and was the vice president of this republic. He was also a poet, one of those classical intellectuals of imperial China, people who were in charge of political affairs but at the same time had literary interests. He is an interesting witness of this transition of power. He fled to China just after the president, but he felt heartbroken, he would have loved to remain, he felt a real connection to Taiwan. With him we see the expression of a Taiwanese identity, although it is still a Taiwanese-Chinese identity (it is very difficult to disentangle the two). He tries to express in his poems his disdain for what happened, stressing his connection to Taiwan, but at the same time also stressing his loyalism to China (even if we don’t if the loyalism was towards China as an ideal, towards the Qing or even the Ming Empire, or if he was creating a real Taiwanese identity). His poems are interesting also because it is difficult to understand his identity in a clear way. For sure we know that he had a strong anti-Japanese sentiment after the defeat, and he calls Japan the “Giant serpent from the East”, that is trying to strangle China and that has taken Taiwan. He says “I would like to cut the serpent but I have not enough strength”. (It also refers to Taiwan itself who was not strong enough to defend itself from Japan).  With these two poems we have the poetical elaboration of his displaced identity. The fact that he felt Taiwanese but he was also Chinese and at that point he didn’t know where to go and where to belong. The history of Taiwan is characterized by colonialism, first by the Portuguese, then the Qing and then Japan, these were all forms of colonialism. But it is also a history of displacement, in the sense that they struggle with the idea of fitting somewhere, they have a split identity, they are on an island but they are connected to China, to Japan, or to the West. So it is a constant struggle in the process of fitting between perceived identity, cultural identity and the location where they are. So in the first poem we see that he still cries when thinking about Taiwan, but (in the second) when he goes back to China, his old country, it turns into an alien realm, he feels like a guest. This feeling represents the struggle of Taiwanese people for decades. At this point we have the beginning of the long page of Japanese colonialism over Taiwan. It is the fifth layer of colonialism in Taiwan (Dutch, Spanish, Koxinga, the Qing and now the Japanese), the most impactful. It lasts fifty years, so technically less than the Qing, but they are fifty years under a modern empire that has a clear colonial project, so the investments are much larger than what the Qing did for more than one century. The Japanese experience will leave a mark on Taiwanese history, very visible also today. The peculiarity is that if one might think that Taiwanese people today would hate Japan, because of colonialism. In fact, it is the contrary. There is a very soft assessment of Japanese colonialism, if not even some kind of strange nostalgia of the Japanese period. There is a rediscovery of all the Japanese figures that contributed to the development of Taiwan, and in some museums in Taipei it is possible to see statues of the Japanese governors, with the explanations of how Japanese scientists contributed to the birth of modern science in Taiwan. This is the consequence of a much larger geopolitical issue. For a portion of contemporary Taiwan that wants to underline the separation from China, Japan is an ally to the cause. Taiwan is actually Japan’s first colony, as the Ryukyu islands were not a colony, they had been included in the regular administration of the Japanese empire, they had become a prefecture. For Japan it was important to manage this colony properly, to give an image to the western countries that Japan too could be a good colonizer. Therefore there was a debate on what type of colonialism to apply in Taiwan. There were, in fact, different western models of colonization (the British generally tended to have a smaller colonial elite and to have the support of the local governments; the French had a more pervasive view of colonialism, so to take control of the colony). There is also the problem of what to do with the possibility of having subjects remaining with a double citizenship: was it thinkable of adding a japanese citizenship to the previous chinese one? How would that work? They gave a deadline in 1897 to choose whether people wanted to be part of Taiwan under the Japanese, or they wanted to go back to China. We might think that this was something good from the Japanese, however we must remember that even if there were people who would have gladly accepted to return to China, they physically could not, as all of their lands, activities and properties were in Taiwan, and they had no way of surviving in China leaving everything behind. The Japanese immediately started to invest a lot on Taiwan, the island had to become the showcase of the quality of Japanese imperialism (we have to keep in mind that at that time being a colonial power was a good thing). It was part of a competition among states to be the best colonizer. They started to present Taiwan to different world faires, world exhibitions in the late 1800s in Europe and in the United States, to show how their colony was doing. Modernizing Taiwan became a fundamental aspect of Japanese imperialism, because it had to be the demonstration of Japanese strength. This modernization was also based on the limited effort of the previous Qing empire. Kodama Gentaro (left) and Goto Shinpei (right) are two of the most important figures in this first phase of colonialism. In the early years the choices made by the Japanese were more those of a British style colonialism. A small Japanese elite (with no forced migration for Japanese people to Taiwan), who tried to rule over this chinese aboriginal society, with the help of the local gentry and the former Qing administration. They tried to convince the former Qing officials and the big families to cooperate. This was their first attempt,and we will see how this will change drastically. Kodama Gentaro was governor from 1898 to 1906, but he was also the Minister of War in Tokyo. So we see the importance of Taiwan, which was assigned to a top member of Japan. But, because of his importance in Tokyo, Kodama Gentaro was mostly in charge of the security of the island and the preservation of stability in military terms. All of the other aspects of colonization, the civil affairs, were in the hands of Goto Shinpei. He also had another important role in Japan, later, as mayor of Tokyo. He was in charge of the daily affairs in Taiwan, so how to transform Taiwan and the lives of the Taiwanese under Japanese control. He really starts a huge work of modernization both in terms of material infrastructures but also in social services. A post and a telegram system is created, railways are traced along the island, a new harbor is created in the North, and a hydroelectric generator plant. Also the shipping line, which the Qing had tried to create but were not successful because they did not have contact with the global traders. Now the Japanese did not have that problem anymore because they were including Taiwan into their own empire. The road network was extended three times from 1899 to 1906, and in 1899 the Bank of Taiwan was created to create investments. The Japanese also had to address the issue of land property. They did that with a Cadastral survey that was supposed to discover all the “hidden lands”, land that was not declared, that was owned, cultivated but not officially declared so the state could not collect taxes. They also respected, until 1911, the idea of reservation lands for the aborigines in the mountains, formalizing the old Qing policy of letting the aborigines stay (similar to what the Americans did with some native groups in the same period). The taxes are increased, especially those paid by the small owners. The small owners now had to pay directly the taxes to the colonial government, there was no passage to the tenants like before. In this way there was a direct revenue for all those projects of renovation. The general strategy in terms of economy is to fully integrate Taiwan into the Japanese economy, and to fully exploit Taiwan’s agricultural potential to benefit the mainland. This is the aspect of colonialism that the Qing empire lacked, that of exploiting the resources and the labor to benefit the center, the Qing’s was more an occupational colonialism for security purposes. This economic aspect is proper to the German model of colonialism. With the exception of tea trade that remained infiltrated to the western interests, all the other productions are now passed under Japanese control. There was an exclusion of external interests and powers. There were small companies, very rudimentary companies, for example for the production of sugar, that throughout the 1900 century grew in Taiwan. Some of them became a bit larger, and all these companies were engulfed by larger japanese companies, so they entered a new model of industrial production. This made Taiwan the main provider of sugar for Japan, which increased the consumption of sweet products in this period in Japan.  Sbobina Global History of East Asia 31/10/24 Ginevra Maria Rando Yesterday, we concluded our class by looking at the first measures taken by the Japanese in the first colonization process, mainly the creation of a sort of occupation colony, with a very thin Japanese colonial administration and the attempts at including in the government of the island (the local gentry). We have talked about the early economic measures, industrial initiatives that very quickly built over the earlier Qing organization (ten years in which Taiwan had been a province of the Qing). We have seen how the agriculture of Taiwan was very quickly integrated in the Japanese imperial system to serve the needs of the colonial center province. This grew to the rearticulation of important activities: Taiwan had a sugar production, the establishment of the Japanese monopoly over the economic activities in Taiwan with exception of tea trade. In the prime years, the Taiwanese economy was fully integrated in the Japanese system. The cover of today’s lesson is 1921, the year in which the “Taiwanese cultural association” was established [...] and we will see what was the Japanese reaction. Now let’s see more closely the structure of Taiwan as a Japanese colony. Let’s start with racial hierarchy, which is typical of any colonial structure. In the case of Japan, this hierarchy is faced in different terms and in different frameworks, but it’s still the same kind of hierarchy in which a group of people belonging to the metropoly or the central colonial empire are superior to the aboriginals.  The japanese term used were naichijin (people who lived in actual Japan and enjoyed superior living) hontojin (people who are originally from the island). Keep in mind that even if we are talking about hontojin, it’s a category which mostly refers to the Chinese while the aboriginals are even more discriminated [...]. However, the emperor of Japan was supposed to behave as a benevolent father (it’s some kind of reminiscence of older imperial forms although here we are in a fully constitution monarchy modeled on the Western system). In terms of rhetoric, the Japanese emperor was supposed to have “isshi doujin” so the same attitude towards all the subjects that were Japanese citizens. It’s ambiguously used above all when we talk about the colonial subjects just like Taiwan that had always the possibility of extracting some of the Chinese hontojin and transforming them into royal servants of the Emperor, so this is always also a part of the colonial game, to provide some kind of benefits to all the colonial people who accepted the colonial power. This is done through this form of “shinso”, a title that is awarded to the Taiwanese who cooperated with the Japanese colonial system. It’s a way to create a new élite in Taiwan, a different élite from the original one, composed of people who have access to higher levels of society because they accepted Japanese rule. However, this discourse of promoting some of the locals by making them into royal subjects, still cannot deconstruct the racial differences because as we know the idea of race as biological determined is something that emerges in the European intellectual spheres and it’s also a consequence of the new studies of mankind, scientific approaches. Many books discussed the scientific differences in race trying to demonstrate the fact that Africans were inferior because they had lower mental capacity because of the conformation of their brain. It was this kind of scientific racist which was quite popular. All the other concepts that Japan adopted in order to construct a new identity as a colonial power that is on the same level of Western powers, both the racial hierarchy and the language are included. Mostly through Japan, this kind of racial discourse also migrated to China. Yesterday, we talked about the emerge of a racial discourse against the Manchu in China. So, in the entire East-Asian continent, these views of race as genetically determined, as biological facts (political and cultural) are circulating, and Japan is the most productive place in which these European concepts are understood, rearticulated, translated and migrated to China. They are used in different ways, when these views of racial differences are used in China, they are not used to demonstrate the inferiority of the Chinese, but they are used to show the superiority of the Han Chinese versus the Manchus, for example. It’s a kind of language used in different ways to serve different political agendas. In the case of Japan, it is used to demonstrate the biological superiority of the Japanese race compared to the rest of the Asian races. This is very important to understand how the Japanese imperialist approach is sustained in terms of political discourses. When Japan, later, in WW2 will try to conquer a large portion of east asia, this discourse will be very present. It’s a very interesting approach because, at the same time, Japanese imposed a difference between Asian and the western by saying we, as japanese, are closer to other asians and we are more empowered to control or to govern because we are similar, but at the same time this similarity is also an hierarchical similarity because the Japanese are superior to this other south-east asia population. This discourse is somehow spread in Taiwan because it was the first colony of Japan. In legal terms, for the first 10 years of colonial control over Taiwan, the governor of Taiwan has a special power (law 63) by which he can issue executive ordinances. It means that the governor of Taiwan could take autonomous decisions without waiting for the approval of Tokyo. So there is the autonomy, which is instrumental in the launch of all these early reforms and transformations in Taiwan because they needed them very quickly in order to make a very rapid transformation of the island, so the governor in general needs to act fast. Law 63 gives this kind of autonomy that can be used both for colonization and for positive transformations (introduction of schools, hospitals, measures of hygiene), but they can be used for quicker forms of repression or law enforcement without passing through the political debate of Tokyo. In the picture you see the palace of the Japanese colonial governor in Taiwan which was modeled on the German architecture of the time. In the late 19th century, Japan was looking very intensely at the German or the Prussian example for many aspects of the Meiji organization. The most interesting example for Meiji was Great Britain. However, from the 1880s onwards, Prussia became the most important example to follow above all for the militarization and the organization of the army and the efficiency of the empire. Prussia had much more power than Great Britain, so it’s not surprising that the German example also reflected through architecture. This palace can still be seen in Taipei and it’s the palace of the President of Taiwan [...].. Talking about the positive aspects of this period, we have to start with education. Japanese authorities tried to build a new network of education and institutions of schools at every level. Meiji Japan had invested a lot in the creation of a new modern educational system and they had succeeded because it had become an example for East Asia. It’s not a coincidence that a lot of Chinese in the late 18th century when Qing gave the opportunity to travel and study abroad, they went to Japan. So the education system is a legacy in contemporary Japan as well.. The elementary schools were supposed to give a basic training in the Japanese language, in the Chinese classics and in the scientific field. This is a huge difference compared to the Chinese traditional education which was based on the studying of the Chinese classics and humanities. Science always played a very marginal role, this is one of the big reasons behind the qing decrisis. The Japanese had a different approach based on the Western example, they had more scientific and practical classes. There are secondary schools and then there is the opening of group colleges in Taipei, which is a sort of university focused on the formation of doctors but it also worked as a public hospital. These policies were meant also to improve the health situation in Taiwan. As we had said many times, the climate in Taiwan was a factor that helped many times the spread of tropical diseases. However, these schools are for the colonial children and for some privileged members of the society. Many Taiwanese boys are still attending the traditional shufang (traditional schools) that had been in place since the Qing period. Schools in which boys were trained to write in Chinese, reading and learning about classical Chinese culture [...]. Domanda di una studentessa: “Only boys were allowed?” In the shufang, yes, but the Japanese also introduced female education (an innovation compared to the traditional Chinese system in which only boys were allowed to get an education). When we talk about traditional Chinese education, all these forms of education were potentially directed towards the imperial examination: the highest form of title that you could get; passing the different level of the state examination meant having both a title and a job in the imperial administration. The requirement to pass the exam was a full knowledge of the classics. These examinations, until the late 19th century, were not examinations on scientific fields or on the knowledge of foreign languages or economics, it was just about the knowledge of the classics, the ability to comment on the classics and to talk about certain topics. It was the same system that had been in place since the Song dynasty, the 7th-10th century, and also the lowest level was kind of an introduction to this path and it was just for men. In 1900, the two leaders of the Japanese administration, Goto Shinpei (the Head of the civilian affairs) and Kodama, wanted to integrate the Chinese local élite. It’s part of the attempt of having a smaller population colony on the island and using the local élite to cooperate with the Japanese. So they organized the “yobunkai (conference to uplift culture)”. It’s an effort to show to the big Taiwanese families that the Japanese authorities wanted to cooperate with them. They didn’t want to displace them but make them part of the colonial program and they also articulate this kind of joint effort in modernizing the island by preserving confucianism as a traditional form of social organization and cultural reference to the classics, but, at the same time, joining the modernizing effort of the Japanese. However, the lineage of these families is not very enthusiastic, there is a mixture of anxiety, lack of trust towards the Japanese authorities and resentment for what had recently happened (ex. the takeover on the island). This conference is a failure since there are no further efforts by the colonial authorities to create a stable institution for cooperation. On the contrary, this strategy that is now increasingly used is the creation of a new Taiwanese élite through this “Shinso”, the social promotion of the Taiwanese élite in order to displace the former one which had refused to cooperate. But we are still in the first part of the Japanese colonial experience in which the main strategy is to use a limited number of Japanese human resources on the island and to try to cooperate as much as possible with the locals under the strict control of the government. There is also, culturally speaking, the attempt at creating a kind of double layer in terms of culture: the Japanese culture and the preservation of the Chinese culture for the locals. It’s hierarchy but still the coexistence of these two cultures and languages is allowed. In this phase, the Japanese are not trying to eradicate Chinese culture from Taiwan. This will change later in a radical way. How to control society? Despite having the military, economics, and racial discourse, you need some measures to control a society which is outnumbering you and has its own networks. This is not comparable to an unstructured society like the one the Dutch colonists found in the aboriginal (?). Taiwanese society was well structured. So the Japanese authorities introduced a system of social control and organization which was part of the Chinese tradition.  It was reenacted by the Japanese and applied with much more strength. We are talking about the hoko system, based on the baojia system. The baojia was already introduced earlier in Chinese history and had been already established on Taiwan by the Qing in 1733 but it remained a very weak system. It’s a system of mutual control. Every family becomes part of a group of 10 families that control one another and the head of these 10 families report to the administration. Every unit of 10 families leads to the constitution of a mega unit called “ho” that includes 100 families in which you have mutual control. In concrete terms, you as an individual and a member of a family which is constantly under the eye of the other families and the leaders of both the families and the larger groups communicate and cooperate with the Japanese police so they inform them if there are any kinds of disturbances. It’s a very elaborate system of mutual surveillance that does not really require daily surveillance by the police, it just creates this system of mutual control. The heads of these units receive titles and are part of this new machine. They inform especially if there is any attempt of resistance towards the occupation. The system allows the colonial authorities to rely on the police rather than on the army. It remained in place until 1944, a year before the end of the Japanese colonization. It remained instrumental in the creation of Japanese control. This was the reenactment of the traditional Chinese system that is deep in Confucianism. Confucianism is based on the family as the basic unit of the state. So the idea of giving to the families powers of control is perfectly confucianist, in the sense that you do not need a direct dimension of a state if you can’t have families regulating themselves and participating in the government. It’s not just philosophically in line with Confucianism but also strategically in line with the needs of imperial administrations that had to control huge territory with limited numbers of men and technologies. This was an obvious choice for the Chinese empires in order to combine the necessity of capillary control of society with the lack of enough people to control every corner of the empire. The Japanese are very happy to use this system in Taiwan. The difference is that now, at the top of the hoko system, now you have a modern state and legal system. It would have worked even if they had kept it during the end of the colonization experience. We have talked about what’s going on on the island, but now that Taiwan is part of Japan we have to say something about the political debate in Japan and how it had an impact on the management of the island by the Japanese. Although it was an empire, it was still a constitutional monarchy and there were political parties. There was a debate on different views on how to run the empire and the society, but also related to the management of the new territories and colonies. For example, a man like Itagaki Taisuke: he was the founder of the Japanese Liberal Party in 1881 he served as Home minister in different cabinets he was interested in how to run Taiwan according to his perspective. He rejected the idea that Taiwanese subjects should be treated differently from the other Japanese subjects. In doing so, however, he proposed the assimilation of the Taiwanese. Rather than occupying the colony and leading the local élite under his control, it could be better to make them into active subjects of the Japanese empire, to make them into political subjects thus participating in the debates. That’s why in 1914 he established the Taiwanese assimilation association. What’s interesting about Itagaki’s view is that, starting from the refusal of this racist hierarchy, it somehow provides an argument for views that want to eradicate Chinese culture in Taiwan. It’s not really his intention, he’s moving onto this idea of making the Taiwanese fully participate in the society. But if you assimilate then you are eradicating the culture. This is a very sensitive and alive debate if you think about the different positions on the issue of multiculturalism. What would the right approach to migrants be? Should we let them preserve their culture while creating different cultural worlds within the country or should we assimilate? [...] It’s something we are still discussing and haven’t found a solution because both paths can lead to problems: the assimilation has a cultural impact on erasing the cultural and identities, but at the same time, if you allow multiculturalism then it can lead to the creation of ghettos that block communication. How to manage this dilemma is still a part of political debate and it was the same back in the 19th century in Japan. Itagaki’s main purpose was to abolish this racial view especially because the Chinese are still asiansso we should not treat them like this, but as we will see later, the same assimilation approach will be used the Kominka movement by the colonial authorities of Japan that wanted to fully eradicate the Taiwanese identity and make them into 100% Japanese subjects. At that time, 1914-1915, the governors of Taiwan were very suspicious about this kind of approach, not because they were happy to preserve Chinese culture, but because they thought that assimilating the Taiwanese culture was too risky and would give some political powers. They preferred a system of colonial control over a local society which is left alone in terms of cultural life. That’s why governor Sakuma dismantled this Taiwan assimilation association, which counted 3000 members (so some members of the local society wanted to be fully part of the Japanese empire). Let’s keep in mind that the attitude of the colonized people is often much more complex than what you think. There were portions of local society that were eager to comprehend the Japanese and wanted to be recognized and to cooperate. It’s not surprising that Itagaki’s attempt had success in Taiwan and was seen with such terror by the governors because the situation was ready for this. In the early 1920s, there was a transformation also in the colonial administration of Taiwan. According to some historians, we can address this period as a moment of colonial moderated approach. The governor Den Kenjiro was a civilian, differently from his predecessors who were always men from the military from 1895 to 1919. He followed Itagaki’s approach, so after a few years we see a bigger success of the assimilation imperialism. He wanted to “japanize” Taiwan and to extend some of the rights that are active in Japan to the Taiwanese. So, if the first part of the colonial administration in Japan was characterized by Law 63 (a law that granted autonomy for Taiwan and separated the administration of Taiwan from Japan), now the characteristic law is Law 3 (1921) through which the governor could apply Japanese law much more easily in Taiwan. So it was the opposite. It’s easier now just to transfer to Taiwan all the legal regulations that are valid in Japan, coherently to this idea of making Taiwan more and more Japanese. In 1922, governor Den also introduced new regulations that allowed the enrollment in the new modern schools not on the Japanese ethnicity but on the knowledge of the Japanese language. It is part of this effort as well. So those who wanted to participate in the new education, they had to learn japanese and if they knew japanese, even if they are hontojin, they could enter the school. However, in Tokyo, there is a debate on the degree of autonomy that Taiwan could have. There was also a constant negotiation between the governor of Taiwan and the governor of Tokyo. Obviously governors in Taiwan wanted to have funds, but their decisions were not very in line with the strategic decisions made by the governor in Tokyo. In 1929, the central government in Tokyo introduced the Ministry of Colonial affairs, which now has direct supervision over the governors of Taiwan. That is a clearl message from Tokyo that whatever happens in Taiwan has to be supervised by the ministry of colonial affairs there. In the meantime, Japan had enlarged its colonial power to Korea and it would become much bigger until World War II. In summary, until 1936 we had different approaches and a constant passage from one to another. Some governors wanted to separate the Japanese society from the local families society, others wanted to cooperate, others wanted to assimilate. There is a constant parallel obstination from these two approaches. After 1936, for evident geopolitical reasons, the policies of the Japanese were much clearer: there was one strategy. Also, as a reflection of the Taisho period, (Japan had a political debate relatively to openness) Japan’s appearance is also in debate on different perspectives. The Japanese approach is just one part of the story, now we have to say something more about the local families. The local gentry has refused to participate and there is a new élite emerging in Taiwan and it’s more ready to cooperate with Japanese, but we have to address from the Taiwanese perspectives this important topic: the principle of self-determination. Self-determination is a key-word in the political discourse of the 20th century. It’s a key-word still today. Many conferences around the world are based on this idea of the self-determination of people. People have the right to self-determined and to consequently to have a state of their own. Self-determination as a clear political concept emerged in the early 20th century after WW1 when all the old empires were destroyed and new nations were born. Those new nations were born on the idea that the coolant needs to be state because the Polish people exist as such and with such they need their state, Lithuanians need their state and so on.  This principle was strongly encouraged by two protagonists of the post WW1 world: Woodrow Wilson, the United State president, who was the architect of post WW1 order (he inspired the league of nations and was very active in elaborating and proposing self-determination as a key political principle) and Vladimir Lenin, in the context of the Soviet Union, he was active in the creation of the organization of international soviet party in promoting self-determination. According to him, especially people outside the Soviet Union had the right to have their own state. If self-determination is already quite confused as a principle because, if you think about it, there is one big philosophical issue behind it: what is the unit? Who decides what a “people” is? Is it a collective identity? Do we assume that people naturally exist? If we do, it should be obvious that we have units that are all the same and have the same set of beliefs and can act as a body But who decides for that body if we have accepted the fact that people exist as such, then how do these people express themselves? Obviously there have to be some leaders, but are we sure that these leaders are speaking on behalf of the community? From a political and philosophical point of view, self-determination is a very complex idea and it can lead to positive or negative outends. Self-determination was instrumental in the end of colonial empires and the idea that colonized people had the right to decide for themselves and not behind the tutelage of other powers. If we now have an independent state in Africa or in Asia, it’s largely thanks to this principle of self-determination. Self-determination became the engine for some civil wars, too. Look at what happened in Yugoslavia. People who had already used the concept of self-determination to become Yugoslavs, they used the same right to make it explode. Potentially, self-determination can be used for any group at any level. One of the most important scholars of self-determination as a political concept, professor Cassese wrote that when self-determination appears and it’s used is like opening a Pandora's box, it’s potentially destructive and its consequences are still ongoing today. As every political concept, it really depends on how it’s used and for what purposes. Now we have to look at the earlier history of self-determination. When it appeared for the first time, it was applied for the European context. Woodrow Wilson used self-determination to refer to the European states that are merging after WW1, he is not thinking about Asia or Africa. As it was anticipated, Woodrow Wilson had a negative response towards the possibility of applying the self-determination concept to some Asian contexts, like the Philippines. He said no because they are not mature enough. There is a sort of consensus among the historians scholars on the fact that Wilson considered self-determination not in purely ethnic terms, it was not enough to be considered as people in the more traditional terms, there was a cultural and a political side. If you had an historical tradition of some forms and cultural maturity, then you could access the concept of self-determination. Lenin had a different approach, he was much stronger anti-colonial approach. Self-determination has a way of resisting against colonial powers. So we have two different orientations that started circulating outside of Europe and the United States and if you look at the international history of the 20th century in East Asia, it’s really the history of self-determination because all these young intellectuals in China, Vietnam, Korea reflected on this issue and wanted to demonstrate that their people could have the right to self-determination. Certainly, when we talk about self-determination in Taiwan, we have to keep in mind this important influence, but we also have to talk about two other important influences that helped model the different aspects in Taiwan on self-determination. One is what was going on in Japan: in the Taisho period, it’s a movement of relatively openness (it’s considered a sort of liberal period) before the age of militarism. The other is the Chinese impact: the concept of self-determination has totally transformed the Chinese international landscape and it’s influencing in a different way the Taiwanese discourse. Now we will do a sort of recap of what has happened in China until this moment: in 1919 we had a Republic so the Empire had collapsed. Now we will see how and why, and there was a nationalist movement that was anti-japanese. So imagine being a Taiwanese political activist and you have these multiple influences and different options: either get closer to an anti-japanese narratives thus embracing your self-determination in an anti-japanese way, or stick to the Japanese figure and use the self-determination within the Japanese empire, or being influenced by Lenin or Wilson and articulate self-determination for the Taiwanese as new people that are not Japanese or Chinese. When we look at the intellectual history of that period, we have to keep in mind the global intellectuals. What has happened in China? In 1895, China was defeated by the Japanese and they had to give Taiwan to Japan. The defeat by Japan was possibly the most humiliating page in Chinese history at that moment. It was much worse than the Opium War because it had been lost against European powers and there was always the excuse of saying that they were Europeans and had superior technology even if culturally the superiority does not exist. But losing to Japan, an Asian power and a country which had learnt everything from China (from a Chinese point of view,Japanese were uncivilized before learning how to create a state in the Tang period), it was a shock for the Chinese. Differently from the previous defeats, because of the emerge of new media such as newspapers, magazines, and new intellectuals organizations which had a huge impact on Chinese society, there were revolts and initiatives which really wanted to demonstrate the rage of the Qing. Immediately after the treaty of Shimonoseki, there was a group of people (intellectuals) who tried to convince the emperor to launch new ambitious reforms in 1888 but this was a total failure due to his young age and the fact that he was under the influence of his aunt Cixi and she blocked the attempt of reforming the state. It’s interesting to see that the reforms of 1888 was the first reaction to this shock and was largely modeled on the Meiji empire: they wanted to make the young Chinese emperor into a sort of Meiji emperor. That’s because they studied in detail the reforms introduced in Japan and they wanted to introduce them in China and the man behind it was Kang Youwei. In 1900, there was another humiliating page for the Qing empire: the Boxer rebellion. It was an organized force in Northern China whose name is due to the practice of martial arts. These rebels, at first, fought against the Qing (traditional anti-imperial movement), but very quickly the court tried to hijack the rebellion against the Western powers (Cixi convinced the Boxer rebels that the court would support them if they fought against the Westerners, which were the real problem). By doing so, the movement became a pro-Qing movement against the Westerners. The result is that these boxers could take control of Beijing by killing a German innovant, but the court didn’t do anything to stop the rebellion and in a total crazy moment, Cixi declared war against all the external Western powers. At that point, the Western powers and Japan sent their own armies in Beijing defeating the rebels and humiliating the Qing who had to face the military occupation of the capitol by an army of seven foreign powers. 1901-1911: the Qing court was forced to adopt radical reforms. Paradoxically, we are now creating all the factors that will accelerate the decline of the Qing. 1. they disempowers the local centers 2. they give powers to the local assembly 3. they had to create a new army which is independent from the governors  4. they had to abolish the traditional imperial examination (1905) thus creating new schools like Japan did. They underlined all the factors of the negligence of the power. In the meantime, that racist anti-manchu discourse is now everywhere among the Chinese intellectuals. New concepts from abroad travel in China, especially the idea of Republicans and in this case it’s a different form of Republican than the Republic of Formosa (extemporary adoption of the term Republic), here we have a serious engagement: people who are going to study in different countries who got familiar with these concepts and organized political groups, publications, journals. Intellectual society is now core-controlled. This is something new because the intellectual world of imperial China had always been under the control of the court, it was ultimately legitimized by the court. The traditional intellectuals studied confucianism, participated in the imperial examination so this sphere was always connected to the court. Now, the intellectual sphere is totally disconnected and it involves the Chinese overseas organizing movements, activities and publications. In 1905, Sun Yatsen (clever organizer of these groups) who had a very close connection to the Chinese-American community, created a party, the Tongmenghui. Tongmenghui: political organization that has the clear purpose of substituting the Manchu with a new government that has to be a Republic. Sun Yat-sen is clearly a Chinese nationalist in the sense that he considered China as the country of the Han Chinese, so he wanted to recreate China as a Republic that represented the Han ethnicity and there is no room for other ethnicities which should have their own republics. This is a coherent application of the self-determination concept. If we assume that there is something like the Han ethnicity, it should have its own country which is China. In 1911, for some reasons, one local rebellion (Wuchang uprising) caused a series of protests and secessions of different provinces. So technically speaking, when we talk about the collapse of the Qing empire, we are first talking about a process of secession of provinces from the imperial center. They declare their independence from Beijing and these rebelled provinces then declare the birth of the Republic of China. Sun Yatsen was in Colorado at that time, he came back and became the first president. Then, in a couple of months he had to give power to Yuan Shikai. Sun Yatsen had no military power and you can’t rule without it, so he had to make an agreement with Yuan Shikai, a powerful general who was a very clever politician who had made agreements with the Qing and the revolutionaries, so he was waiting for the best offer. He agreed to preserve the Republic but he wanted to become the President. China from 1912 is a Republic. However the Republican page in Chinese history could have been a short page like the Republic of Formosa and we could be talking about this today like a funny couple of years because Yuan Shikai already had a clear plan of re-establishing the dynasty. He wanted to do that already in 1913, but he had to wait a bit. He had American and Japanese counselors who helped him prepare the institutions and the constitution of a new Constitutional monarchy, but he died because of uraemia and this let China stay a Republic, otherwise we could have seen another dynasty. He died in 1925, but China is now in total chaos. The state is fragmented, there is no strong leader anymore and the following decade is known as the World War period. It’s a typical military fragmentation scenario in which you have local generals with their armies and their regimes. There is still one legally recognized Republic of China in Beijing, but in many years the authority of that Republic was very thin and large portions of the Chinese territory were not controlled. Western powers are always profiting from this situation and so is Japan. 1919: The Chinese public learnt about previous agreements, made by Yuan Shikai which are confirmed by his successors, to keep incredible privileges to Japan, mostly economic and legal ones. When this is known by the Chinese public, there is the eruption of protests. It’s a purely nationalist movement which preserves China from external intrusions. It’s a very important page in the history of China, according to some historians modern China was not born in 1912, but in 1919 with the “May 4th movement” because, for the first time, there is the emerge of national consciousness and the use of terms in debates like “democracy”, “science”, concepts that are fully modern. If the revolution itself was not entirely a modern phenomenon because of an élite transition of power, in 1919 you have a fully modern debate in China. This has consequences on Taiwan, too.  For what concerns these three people: Kang Youwei, on the left, (the man who tried to reform the empire in 1908 and he was still dressed in traditional clothes; his project of making China into a sort of Meiji Japan failed) Liang Qichao, in the middle, Kang’s pupil (the most important intellectual in the period leading to the reform May 4th and after; he is the one who introduced a lot of new political concepts in the Chinese discourse. He professionally addressed Western thoughts, greek philosophy, the role of education in the creation of a new state) Sun Yat-sen (the man who created the Republic who, after losing power in 1912, was constantly trying to regain power and to reorganize a new Republic in Southern China. Intellectually speaking, he is the most pragmatic of the three also because he had a totally different background since he was a medical doctor. That’s maybe why Kang Youwei hated him with contempt and called him “the doctor” in a derogatory way because in the Confucianism perspective if you study medicine you are inferior) Kang Youwei and Sun Yatsen were enemies, they had different platforms because Kang Youwei remained loyal to the imperial one to preserve Chinese monarchy. Even when Kang Youwei had to flee from China and moved to the United States, he was obsessed with Sun Yat-sen. There are letters of Kang Youwei in which he planned Sun Yatsen’s murder [...] Sun Yatsen was the most pragmatic one and when it comes to the idea of a Chinese identity and Chinese self-determination, he is a key figure. In the early phase of the revolution, he thought about China as the China of the Chinese (Han country), as soon as he took power the Qing were sent first to the forbidden city and then in exile. So when China became a Republic, suddenly Sun Yat Sen changed his mind about self-determination. He understood that the Republic of China couldn’t afford losing all those territories populated by minorities and so that’s how this concept became a cultural self-determination of the Chinese people in their entirety including the Manchu, the Mongols, the Tibetants because they are part of the Chinese history and they cannot be separated. This is an instrumental choice in order to avoid the process of creating different Republicans. His successors had to accept Mongolia because the Soviet made them accept it, but Tibet was never recognized as well as Turkestan and other realities ethnically diverse. Thanks to this conceptual device, China could preserve the imperial legacy even in the Republic period. That’s a key passage because today we are talking about how the Republic of China covered the exact territory of the Qing dynasty and this is just because of the rearticulation of Chinese self-determination, otherwise at the end of the Qing a logical solution would have been the creation of self-determined states like in the Ottoman Empire. Within Chinese discourse, the problem of self-determination is just in a very specific special way, not sticking to the ethnic path but rather preferring a more cultural-historical understanding of identity. Legally speaking this is demonstrated by the fact that differently from other empires which were dismantled, the first constitution of the Republic of China had a specific article in which it’s said that the extent of the Chinese republic coincided with the extent of the Qing empire, so the legitimacy of the Chinese Republic was connected to the Qing Empire. This is a very important passage, it’s a clear legitimacy from the Qing empire to the Republic of China. This explains why there were no problems in preserving the territories. Sun Yatsen transformed the concept into a multicultural one. You can really trace this transformation especially in the earlier 1920s, there are different lectures regarding Sun Yatsen’s political philosophy, in which the idea of nationalism was totally different from the earlier cases, he has matured a view by which you cannot simply talk about nationalism and self-determination in ethnic terms, but the person who make it constitutional was Yuan Shikai. So why is this interesting when it comes to Taiwan? Because when you think about the reaction of the Taiwanese and the debate on Taiwanese identity, there is a clear struggle between either sticking to a view of Taiwan as part of a Chinese national identity, or to stick to a more limited view of self-determination as Taiwan as a Taiwanese nation with its own peculiarities. Then, there is the third option, the colonial one, in which Taiwan is somehow autonomous within a larger empire. There are multiple options, but the Chinese discourse clearly has an impact in preventing the emerge of a strong purely Taiwanese identity, because it resonates with some Taiwanese intellectuals. For example, Lin Xiantang, who was a good friend of Liang Qichao (there is an exchange of letters between the two). He proposed the creation of a sort of Taiwanese autonomy, but he was thinking about Taiwan as a unit in a larger framework, either in the pages of the Japanese colonial system or in a larger Chinese Republic. It’s not the articulation of a pure Taiwanese identity as different or separated. It’s interesting to see that Liang Qichao had suggested him to think about the Taiwanese autonomy or even self-government as the Irish did before Ireland became independent (Ireland became independent in 1921, before that movement it was part of the British empire but intellectuals at that time were trying to find a solution to have an Irish autonomy within the larger empire). Do not focus on the idea of self-determination of Taiwan as an independent country but rather think about Taiwan as a self-government unit in a larger context. For Liang Qichao, Taiwan was also a part of the Chinese world. You see how many nuances you have around the same concept of self-determination. What to do with Taiwan? How to articulate self-determination? The creation of the Taiwanese assimilation association in 1921 was the first attempt of giving a Taiwanese response to this dilemma. If we want to look at the limited context of Taiwan in the late 1910s-1920s, we cannot avoid talking about the global history of East Asia. Global history 21 nov You will see that the 60s are a much less eventful decade in Taiwan's history. So the 50s deserve more attention because that's where the current situation actually begins. We have seen the Korean War, the first trade crisis, the American interests in the area, the Cold War, etc. So we still have to complete our look at the 50s. Although the cover for today's class of the 60s is this year, 1966, it's not a big event, but it's significant in relation to the understanding of the economic growth of the 60s, as we will see is the characteristic of this decade. So 1966, this Kaohsiung, Kaohsiung is a city in Taiwan, export processing zone is open. We will see why this is symptomatic of a transformation of the Taiwanese economy. But first, let's get back to Chiang Kai- shek. Here you see him with his sunglasses, still planning the counteroffensive. So we have to talk about Chiang's obsession with concluding the civil war, retaking China. The world is moving on. China is now controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. And it's very unrealistic to imagine that Chiang Kai-shek could retake China, but he's still, we have seen the 10 points yesterday, if you remember the 10 instructions to the population, be ready for war, eat well, be healthy, resist the enemy. So there is this state of war. The Kuomintang keeps planning every year the fan gong, they call it, so the reconquest of the mainland. They have military plans, very detailed strategies that are officially produced every year with the idea of retaking the mainland. Although the emphasis is diminished every year, people are now adjusting to their new life and the horizon of the civil war is now quite distant. But Chiang Kai-shek keeps dreaming about the collapse of communist China, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the arrival of the Americans that will help him. And he's even very, very optimistic about World War III. So he's so obsessed with the idea of retaking China that we see from his personal reflection even happy with the idea that World War III might erupt because he thinks, well, World War III is the only option I have to jump in the total chaos of a global conflict and regain China. So while we have the major powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, both trying with the nuclear deterrence to avoid a World War III, because they know that World War III will probably be the last conflict for mankind, or as Einstein said, I don't exactly know which weapon World War III will be fought, but I know that the fourth will be fought with stones and woods so that mankind will return back to the primitive age after a nuclear apocalypse. So the major powers are acting a bit more responsibly. While other minor powers have less to lose in a global conflict. In the case of Chiang Kai-shek, they're even hoping that it might happen. We have seen that the first trade crisis actually was started by Chiang Kai-shek with some limited belonging of the coast that was concluded because of the American, somehow, use of the nuclear deterrence to stop the conflict and because Mao had really no interests in opening a conflict with the United States or launching another. In other words, they just wanted to keep Taiwan within the one-China narrative, so to keep the fact alive. Now we are moving towards the second trade crisis that takes place in 1958. The second trade crisis, I already anticipated, I have anticipated now, is basically a copy of the first trade crisis, so limited conflict between the small islands and the mainland, and it again ends with nothing new. So the situation is again frozen. The difference is that in this case, if we want to simplify what happened, it's the Soviet Union that uses the nuclear deterrence threats first to stop a potential conflict around the island. And this happens because in 1958, Krusciov, who did not have a very good relation with Mao at the beginning, from 1956 to 1958, but in 1958, Krusciov visits the PRC. He tries to show some kind of alliance with Mao, although the tensions in the Communist camp are quite strong, but in 1958, Krusciov goes to China. He shows that he's at the side of Mao, and actually in 1957, there has been an interesting episode, marginal episode, it's not very well known, in Taiwan. Actually, a wave of protests against the Americans. The Americans were the big protectors of Chiang Kai-shek. But not every Taiwanese was happy with that. In 1957, there is a story that starts like a novel. A Chinese man was killed by a jealous American husband who lived in Taiwan, and there was this love affair, and he kills the Chinese man. Because this man had an affair with his wife. The U.S. court just acquits him, declares the American man innocent, because of the extraterritorial principle that the American citizen is judged by the Americans. The Americans declare him innocent. And this is met with outrage. They feel like they are still in the unequal treaties period, that they are treated like an inferior country, that the Americans are like colonizers that have their own judicial system. So there is a wave of protests, of riots, very violent riots that even target the American embassy. From the U.S., there is a perception of the Taiwanese, or the Republic of China, as showing ingratitude toward the Americans. They even think that Chiang Kai-shek organized the riots to put pressure on the United States, because we have talked about this, where Chiang Kai-shek had the ambition of launching military actions, and he was kept on a leash by the Americans, who did not want to start a noble conflict. So there was this mutual distrust between the Americans and Chiang Kai-shek. They were forced to be allies, but this incident demonstrates that the relation was not quite easy. While on the other side, we have seen there was a partial rapprochement between Krusciov and Mao. So in 1958, we have the the second strait crisis, that is quite specular to the first, because this time it's the communists starting shelling the two small islands. They might have the perception that this time they can play this