Rethinking State and Society in
Modern Taiwanese Historiography
Abstract / This review article introduces three major research trends in studying state-society relations of modern Taiwan, namely Chinese local history, Japanese colonial history and East Asian
regional history. Using the examples from U. S. China studies, the Taiwan Modernization debate, and
post-colonial histories, I discuss major methodological issues that play out in area studies, periodization, and the concept of colonial modernity with special attention to different conceptualizations and
paradigm shifts in contemporary Taiwanese historiography. The conclusion calls for new emphasis on
the historicity, spatiality and cultural specificity of state-society relations with more dynamic frameworks of global, regional, and local networks and interactions to overcome the dichotomy and
Eurocentrism of conventional scholarship.
Lung-Chih Chang
Significant Reserach Achievements of Academia Sinica
120
Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica
Long viewed as Chinese frontier history, as
Japanese colonial history and as development
case studies, the history of Taiwan has become a
bourgeoning intellectual field following the political democratization and social movements in the
1980s. No longer satisfied with the subordinate
status and marginal treatment of Taiwan in orthodox Chinese and Japanese national historiographies, a new generation of historians endeavored
to recover the neglected experience of the people
and re-interpreted the periphery as center with its
own momentum and innovations.
One of the representative examples that
reflect the paradigm shifts in contemporary
Taiwanese historiography is the changing perspectives on state-society relations in modern
Taiwan. Originating from the scholarships of
modern European history and Western social sciences, the study of state and society has been an
important subject and analytic framework in
Taiwan studies. The following discussion will
introduce three major research trends in Taiwan
history with special attention to different conceptualizations on state-society relations.
(1) Taiwan history as Chinese
local history: U.S. China
Studies since the 1970s
The study of Taiwan history has been part
of orthodox Japanese colonial scholarship since
1895 and became part of Chinese national historiography after the regime change in 1945. It was
not until the late 1960s that arrival of American
and European scholars provided new impetus to
Taiwan studies. Functioning as a "surrogate
China" for U.S. area studies, Taiwan became the
ideal field site for anthropologists, and the richness of Qing and Japanese historical collections
also attracted the attention of historians.
Meanwhile, the paradigm shifts in post-war
Humanities
and Social Sciences
【Fig 1】The history of Taiwan has been viewed as
Chinese frontier history, as Japanese colonial
history and as development case studies
before the 1980s.
(2) Taiwan history as Japanese
colonial history: the Taiwan
Mod-ernization Debate in
the 1980s
In mid-1984 a debate on the "modernization of Taiwan" broke out among historians. The
focus of the dispute is the contribution of Qing
【Fig 3】Recent scholarship since the 1990s sheds new
light on the complexity of Taiwan's colonial
modernity from the comparative perspective of
East Asian regional history.
and Japanese governments in the modernization
of the island. For example, historian Yang Bichuan gave credit to the Japanese civil administrator Goto Shimpei for laying the infrastructure
of modern Taiwan while historian Dai Guohui
emphasized the modernizing efforts of Qing governor Liu Mingchuan. Despite the ideological
splits, both sides of the debate shared the
assumption of modernization and adopted the
rhetoric of nationalism.
Significant Reserach Achievements of Academia Sinica
U.S. historiography on modern China have led to
the rise of the China-centered approach since the
1970s. In terms of state-society relations, new
debates on elite activism, civil society and the
public sphere as well as formulations such as
state involution and cultural nexus of power have
replaced the old model of Chinese gentry studies.
The intellectual trajectory and new empirical and
conceptual efforts in studying state-society relations can be found in the representative works by
Johanna Meskill, Harry Lamley, John Shepherd
and Mark Allee on the history of immigration,
land tenure, elite family and legal culture of Qing
Taiwan. In Taiwan, two formulations in the mid1970s by social anthropologist Chen Chi-nan and
historian Li Kuo-chi later became influential
interpretive schemes of social transformation in
Qing Taiwan known as the "indigenization vs.
mainlandization" debate.
【Fig 2】The Taiwan-centered historiography since the
1980s re-examines the political, economic and
cultural relations between empire, state and
society.
121
Humanities
and Social
Sciences
Institute of Taiwan History
The debate also raises important issues of
continuity and changes in the periodization of
modern Taiwan history. For example, political
historian Wu Mi-cha stresses the impact of
regime change on the islander's consciousness
while economic historian Lin Man-houng and
social historian Ang Kaim trace the late Qing
legacies in early Japanese rule. And the important works by Huang Fu-san, Hsu Hsueh-chi and
Wu Wen-hsing also point out the complex interactions between Taiwanese elite families and the
state. In contrast to a historian's focus on the state
and local elite, social scientists such as Tu Chaoyen, Ka Chih-ming and Chen Shao-hsing tend to
analyze capitalist development, social structure
and institutional changes in Taiwan's modern
transition.
(3) Taiwan history in East Asian
regional history: post-colonial historiography in the
1990s
Significant Reserach Achievements of Academia Sinica
122
The introduction of post-colonial historiography and cultural studies sheds new light on the
study of state-society relations in Taiwan in the
1990s. In two representative collections edited by
Wu Mi-cha and Wakabayashi Masahiro, a new
generation of Taiwanese and Japanese historians
began to question the static and linear narrative
of conventional modernist/nationalist scholarship
and endeavored to re-contextualize Taiwan's
colonial experience and re-conceptualize modernity from new theoretical and comparative perspectives.
Drawing from recent revisions in Qing
frontier history and Japanese colonial studies,
historians have become more sensitive to imperial features of Qing expansionism and the role of
empire building in modern Japan. For example,
Emma Teng studies Qing colonial discourse and
imagined geography of Taiwan; Wu Rwei-ren
outlines the contextual and intellectual formations of Formosan ideology under Japanese colonialism; Ya Jen-to elaborates the Faucauldian
concept of colonial governmentality; and Paul
Katz details the state-elite interactions and conflicts during Japanese territorialization of
Taiwan's southern border zone. From the emphasis on multiplicity and dynamics to the exploration of internal historical trends and regional
networks, these new academic efforts not only
challenge conventional definitions of state-society relations but offer a new analytic approach to
"Taiwan-centered" history.
For the above discussion, it is noteworthy
that scholars of state-society relations have been
influenced by different paradigms of social science and cultural studies. In addition to the institutional study of state capacity and autonomy,
more attention has been directed toward cultural
analysis of modern political power recently. And
a new emphasis on cultural nationalism and comparative colonialism has also transformed scholarship on the development of the modern state
and capitalism. With new conceptualizations of
such questions as governmentatily and territoriality, researchers have become more sensitive to
the historicity, spatiality, and social-cultural
specificity of Taiwan's state-society relations.
The future academic challenge is to overcome the
dichotomy and Eurocentrism of conventional
state-society scholarship with more dynamic
frameworks of global, regional, and local networks and interactions.
The original paper was published in Bulletin of the
Institute of Modern History Academia Sinica 54
(2006): 170-128.