Analysis: Taiwan Marks 80th Retrocession Day

TaiwanPlus News

Eighty years after Japanese control of Taiwan ended and rule by the Republic of China began – a moment marked in Taiwan by Retrocession Day – there is still controversy over what it really meant. To find out more about how the debate over Retrocession still endures to this day, TaiwanPlus spoke to Barak Kushner, professor of East Asian History at Cambridge University.

Transcript

00:00How did the Kuomintang justify its authority over Taiwan after 1945, and how do historians

00:06view this early period of their rule in Taiwan? The KMT, of course, will say that it's the one

00:13that got the mantle of authority and rule for China. It was free China, after all, until the

00:20early 1970s. It had a seat on the UN. It was one of the four great policemen and part of the UN,

00:26and given that charter and the mandate, and it was then allowed to retake Taiwan after the Cairo

00:32Declaration in 1943, and then the handover in 1945. That handover was a lot more dubious, I think. If

00:39we look at recent scholarship by Taiwanese historians like Chan Sui Lian, who in her new book,

00:46Taiwanese Political History, really kind of questions how solid KMT rule was over Taiwan

00:54in the initial years, and the Americans and the Brits were pretty unhappy with it and kept talking

00:58about maybe we should remove it because there's such tremendous corruption. But, of course, the KMT

01:05then wants to say they came in. They recolonize, in a sense, they re-synecize the Taiwanese to what

01:14they're supposed to have been, and that takes years. Could you tell us what the reaction was

01:19of early Taiwanese independent supporters when the KMT took over in 1945, and how did the KMT treat

01:27them? There's, of course, the other issue in Taiwan, which is those who want Taiwan to be

01:32independent. They were there in the late years of the Japanese colonial experience, but also in the

01:40early years when the KMT came in. They didn't want the KMT. They already felt that they were different

01:44than the Chinese nationalists, and they saw the corruption on the Chinese continent. They want

01:49to be independent, and they felt that they had gained that right by having experienced Japanese

01:54colonialism, but having advanced nonetheless. They also have to then be crushed by both the mainland

02:01Chinese interpretation of history, but also then the KMT, who cannot tolerate, it's not a multi-party

02:06universe. It's a one-party system.

02:08Now, you've written extensively about how Japan framed its empire in the early 21st century,

02:14but I wonder, could you tell me what narratives circulate in Japan about this 50-year period of

02:20colonial rule over Taiwan?

02:22There is a relatively commanding presence of conservative opinion in Japan that looks at the

02:28Taiwanese colonial experience as having trained and fed enough advancement to the Taiwanese so that

02:38they would become democratic by the 1990s, so that if they hadn't experienced Japanese colonialism,

02:44you wouldn't have the strong, robust, democratic machinery that you have in Taiwan today.

02:51They want to kind of take credit for that, and I think really we kind of see four different

02:57interpretations of that evolution and that history that are still in competition,

03:03that are all in competition in Taiwan, but then also regionally as well.

03:08Well, you know, I think that's a very important thing because it's something that's in there.

03:09I mean, I think you know what to do here in Japan but I think that's going to be the best

03:10to this whole thing.

03:12You know, what would I say?

03:13I think that's the most important thing about that being at the same time of a national

03:16of Californiaаксимia, so that I think that's a shot in the country that everybody takes so far

03:21to me, so that the same thing that I've really done is really a good idea.

03:22I really think that it's a great idea that I think that when you're fighting it as well,

03:24you know what is the most important thing about, and you know what you're thinking about.

03:26And that's so what happens, and that's a great idea that I think

03:27is that you're going to see a lot of times, but how can I assess it?

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