Taiwan’s Postwar Reconstruction and the Reassertion of Taiwanese Consciousness

• In Event: Ground Forces in Action: Local Actors in the Emerging Regional Order of Greater China, 1945-50

Abstract

Upon gaining control of Taiwan in 1945, the Republic of China faced two daunting tasks: reconstructing the island’s heavily damaged cities and assimilating the residents to a Chinese national identity. Most Nationalist officials approached these projects with a combination of limited knowledge about Taiwan’s recent past and a relative lack of concern with Taiwanese interests. Instead, they relied on a conviction that state-led developmentalist programs would achieve the former goal, and that a range of educational and social reforms would accomplish the resinification of the population. An examination of the process of rebuilding the northern port city of Jilong sheds new light on how the Nationalist retrocession project brought a limited degree of success in physical reconstruction, while it provoked a strident defense of the identity that Taiwanese had forged during the decades of Japanese rule. This identity was primarily ethnic in character, in that it accommodated to the political context of successive nation-states without adopting the prevailing nationalistic consciousness. In the face of Chinese efforts to transform them, Taiwanese in Jilong acted in defense of their ethnic community within the local municipal council, temples and religious festivals, and social welfare institutions.

Author

• Evan Dawley, Goucher College