Institutionalization and social system construction

Taiwan has passed through Spanish and Dutch control (1624-1662), the Ming dynasty (1883-1895), the Qing dynasty (1895-1945), and the Nationalist government (1945 up until the present). Up to now, there have been five political systems which have existed in Taiwan. But only up until Japanese colonization had any political system produced by political relations and bureaucratic relations covered the entire island. Political regimes before the Japanese had their political rule limited to the western plains of Taiwan. Although central mountain areas and the eastern sections of Taiwan were part of what political regimes declared to be their territory, this was not part of actual bureaucratic administration. As a result, the construction of a comprehensive Taiwanese social system and its institutionalization has the Japanese colonial period as an important temporal benchmark.

From the point of view of labor history, considerations of the labor system cannot be separated from the history of political rule and related economic history.

Whenever a new political regime attempted to establish labor relations, it had to have some degree of integration with the previous system, in order that after consolidating power, it could undertake reform.

Zheng Shui-ping has researched the history of coolies in Taiwan, pointing out that when Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and other European countries colonized Europe and India, they used the “slave system” and “unfree labor” or “partially coerced labor”, usually using Indians or ethnic Chinese as unskilled laborers engaged as

“porters”, and physical laborers.²⁰⁹ Similar to enslavement of black slaves, during

207 Xu Pei-xian, "Ri zhi shiqi taiwan de shiye buxi xuexiao," Shi da Taiwan shi xuebao, No. 6 (December 2013):

101-48.

208 For example, National Cheng Kung University originally excluded the teaching of Japanese colonial history, and it was not until 1990 that higher education in Tainan began teaching the history of the Japanese colonial period. Wang Yao-de, "Ri zhi shiqi tainan gaodeng gongye xuexiao sheli zhi yanjiu," p. 25-26.

209 Zheng Shui-ping, "Taiwan kuli yanjiu－hei nu, wu gui, kuli zhi tuibian," i-Taiwn Study, No. 5 (July 2011):

21-47, DOI: 10.30122/ITS.201107.0004. p. 26.

the Ming dynasty, in southeast coastal regions, military force was used to coerce prisoners of war as captives to acquire manpower. Later on, this became using deception and coercion to force individual to sign contracts.

Because the Chinese had more experience as servants or slaves, they were considered easier to manage than indigenous residents of Taiwan or Southeast Asians. As a result, with the European Dutch Indies company expanding its influence, the use of ethnic Chinese as coolies also expanded, including the use of local settlements and villages. This led to the formation of “coolie society”, including the coolie recruiters that managed the system of coolie recruiting, and involving the construction of “coolie halls.” The coolie system took care of the economic requirements of European countries, and the coolie system enlivened trade in ports, with local characteristics, contracts, mandates, and rewards, leading to a complex connectivity, and a situation in which the individuals’ social lives were interdependent and associated with each other at all levels.

After Japan came to control Taiwan, with the large need for labor power, there first took place national legal regulation of the coolie system, unlike during the Qing dynasty. During the Qing dynasty, private citizens acted as coolie recruiters, whereas during the Japanese, this was directly managed by the police and military.

During this time, the coolie system served as a means for scholars, farmers, artisans and merchants, untouchables, and classless individuals to potentially raise their social status. Contrastingly, during the Japanese colonial period, “coolie”

was a registered form of identity, including “coolie identification papers” and

“coolie residence permit,” which was registered and managed at local police stations.²¹⁰ Coolie residences were seen as third-class structures (bathroom, tea room, transportation) at the bottom of the society. However, individuals could be promoted in class through education.²¹¹

According to fieldwork by Zheng Shui-ping, in the Penghu Shrine in what is today Kaohsiung,²¹² there were 55 such rooms for coolies. Their nature was completely different from the "State Temple of the Martial God"²¹³ set up by the government or the "village temple"²¹⁴ in the local village. This history is shown in that in the present day, local faction head Zhang Sheng-wu²¹⁵ is called “coole recruiter,” as the person who maintains the Penghu Shrine. With the support of the shrine, he serves as a political candidate and also serves as a Kaohsiung city councillor. It can

210 The police station was the smallest unit in the policing system. The Japanese term, "Hashutsujo" is still used by the Taiwanese police system.

211 Zheng Shui-ping, "Taiwan ri zhi shiqi zhinmindi 'kuli' leixing neibu jiegou－yi gaoxiong deng xinxing gang shi wei zhongxin," i-Taiwn Study, No. 6 (October 2012): 28-63, DOI: 10.30122/ITS.201210.0005. p. 32.

212 These coolies who came from Penghu to Taiwan established this shrine, offering sacrifices to King Zhu of 10,000 years. King Zhu's vernacular name is Zhu You-de, who practiced medicine and saved innumerable people, leading people to build a monument to him, and praying to him for health.

213 Religious sacrifice is usually to specific gods or heroes, most often with regards to the origin of a people or legend

214 Villages sacrifice to specific gods to seek for food and clothing occurs according to the economic characteristics of the village.

215 Zhang Shou-wu has a high school education, and is not a member of a political party. He served as a member of the 4th Kaohsiung City Council and two-time chairman of the Kaohsiung Fishermen's Association.

be seen that the “coolie system” has become a social relation through history up to today, particularly in port cities, in which through the course of development the labor demand for coolies has left an influence on social relations that has lasted up to this time²¹⁶, and which still influences Kaohsiung today.

The process of industrialization and the process of electrification in Taiwan, includes the establishment of a telephone system. The establishment of a hardware telecommunications network had a definitive influence on embedded social relations. Xiao Xu-zhi, from the perspective of social integration, explains the communication technology of the telegram as influencing Taiwanese society in contributing to the social ability to compile and analyze data, taking the view that this social integration can be explained on three levels, as fallows.

First, the development of newspapers using electric telecommunications increased greatly during the Japanese colonial period, allowing for social integration between Taiwan and Japan. Secondly, political governance went hand-in-hand with the spread of news and allowed for the spread of Japanese governance over Taiwan.

Under this structure, because rice merchants were under the domination of sugar manufacturers, with regards to “rice-sugar mutual restraint²¹⁷”, they could contact rice merchants in the Chamber of Commerce in Japan to form an opposition movement.²¹⁸ Although it appeared as though they were oppressed by the governor-general’s office in Taiwan, in reality, at the same time, such resistance led to the further social integration of Taiwan and China. Third, Taiwanese telecommunications industry workers could, through testing and training, move upwards in terms of social mobility, to display their strength in social integration.²¹⁹

An important characteristic of the Japanese colonial period was that the national workforce was mobilized in the production system, leading to the agricultural industry becoming state-managed. Under this system of state-management, this was not to say that the products produced by the agricultural industry in terms of kind were decided by the administrators, but that goods which did not fit regulations set by the nation-state were not allowed to enter into the market. This included regulations set on different kinds of personnel, economic schools,

216 Ports and their markets which have become cities in Taiwan include Keelung, Tainan, and Kaohsiung.

217 "Rice-sugar mutual restraint” refers to the phenomenon of rice and sugar cane competing with each other for agricultural land in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period. In the course of this, sugar manufacturing associations implemented the "Rice Price Standards Act" to try and suppress the cultivation of rice. On the other hand, the governor-general's office encouraged farmers to grow rice to try and achieve policy goals of feeding the Japanese population.

See Ka Chih-ming, Mi tang xiangke─riben zhimin zhuyi xia taiwan de fazhan yu congshu, taiwan shehui xue congshu (Taipei: Cun que chuban she, 2003) and Chen Zhao-yong and Ka Chih-ming, "Mi tang xiangke:

Gengdi de zhengduo huo liyi de chontu", Taiwanese Journal of Sociology, No. 35 (December 2005): 23-73, DOI: 10.6786/TJS.200512.0023.

218 The rice grain opposition movement took place due to the bumper harvest of Japanese rice in the 1930s.

As a result, the price of rice plummeted, and the Japanese government attempted to regulate Taiwanese and Korean rice. A counter-attack campaign was initiated by Lin Xian-tang, Yang Zhaojia, and others.

219 Xiao Xu-zhi, "Chayi sudu yu jieli wangluo: Ri zhi shiqi taiwan de dianbao yu shehui," Chanbo yanjiu yu shijian 6, No. 2 (July 2016): 87-116, DOI: 10.6123/JCRP.2016.016.

processing plants, commerce, farming, irrigation association, as ranked according to industrial standards, allowing Taiwanese farmers to move towards a level of

“commodification”. This caused Taiwanese farmers not only to grow crops for their own needs, but to become inseparably linked with the market and have a more intimate connection with other social elements.

Ka Chih-ming²²⁰ describes several phenomena as appearing in the process of the commercialization of Taiwanese farming. 1. The farmer’s crop production gradually separated from solely fulfilling needs of self-sufficiency, and turned towards production with the aim of sale on the market. 2. Land transfer changed from being founded on personal ties, such as dividing land between members of a family as inheritance, and became something purely for sale on the market. 3.

Other factors of production such as fertilizer or tools changed into something that one depended on the market to provide. 4. The farmer’s model of dividing labor became separated from what was directly related to them, with farmers selling their products through commercial middlemen, and their livelihoods increasingly dependent on the market, with market considerations forming the basis of their decision-making.

But rather than compare the commercialization of the agricultural industry with related products, this did not lead to a situation like in England, where farmers were forced to leave their land, with the majority of residents on farmland moving to the city after industrialization. In other words, the process of the commercialization of Taiwanese agricultural workers did not reach the point at which they became proletarians that could only sell their labor power on the market, i.e. it was without the classic dissolution of social relations and mass proletarianization.²²¹

Ka points out that, first, with the shortage of Japanese capital and the resistance of Taiwanese indigenous people, this led to the use of Taiwanese capital in order to provide for the construction of infrastructure projects, leading the government to be a major force of commercialization in Taiwan. Second, the Taiwanese governor-general preserved household production, leading family-based production models which existed previously to modernize. Third, the socioeconomic relations that existed beforehand resisted outside capital, while leading to the appearance of two types of production models. Fourth, the commercialization of agriculture had an effect on farmers, forming relations of perpendicular integration between Japanese capital and family relations.

We might use land reforms under the Japanese as an example. Then-Taiwan governor-general Gotō Shinpei, recruited Japanese scholar Santarō Okamatsu and others to come to Taiwan, to research the traditional agricultural system that already existed in Taiwan, and to study law and customs in order to decide how to conduct land reform to accommodate the evolutionary trends of the old system and the past system of ownership, as well as how to use law and land surveying to

220 Ka Chih-ming, "Ri ju taiwan nongcun zhi shangpin hua yu xiaonong jingji zhi xingcheng," Zhongyang yan jiu yuan minzu xue yanjiu suo jikan, No. 68 (June 1990): 1-39, DOI: 10.7116/BIEAS.199006.0001.

221 Ibid., p. 4.

measure the private ownership of property, maintaining assurances for land to be bought and sold freely under the law.

This was different from Liu Mingchuan’s reforms during the Qing dynasty; his reforms were carried out because the importance of land for the government was in terms of property taxes, that is, of the physical tax or head tax that is traditionally imposed on the output of agricultural products. At the same time, the majority of expenditures were invested into public works, such as water irrigation systems, improvement of crops variety, fertilizer, pest prevention, transportation, agricultural training, raising agricultural productivity, etc. In the long-term, funds for these kind of expenditures were recovered through levying taxes and monopoly rights, the result being that the working population and the government had an interactive relation, different from during the Qing dynasty in which taxation was a unidirectional relation between those being taxed and those doing the taxing. Outside of this, the farming industry thrived day by day, with agricultural products not only being grown to provide food sufficiency for farmers, but as something which could be converted to money to be used in the market.

The other aspect of commercialization was that this allowed for capital accumulation, with farmers having the possibility of accumulating wealth after the commercialization of agriculture. The major industries of the time relied on Japanese capital, the government, and national monopolies as the major sources of investment, with nowhere for the people’s capital to go and thus returning to the land as a form of investment. This led land to take on more value than simply as farmland, leading to the increase of land prices. According to investigation, between 1914 and 1937, rice paddies increased in size from production of 150 hectoliters to 290 hectoliters, but the price of each field increased from 823 yuan to 3,385 yuan.²²² This is not unlike the rise in land prices in present Taiwan.

Apart from infrastructure development in the course of a society’s economic development, the formation of a society with rule of law is an important index for

“socialization.” Much research has begun discussion from the starting point of the traditional system of decrees, but there are other indirect facts that one needs to more closely fit into a narrative regarding social development and social relations.

When concepts of labor and life become linked for workers, how can one provide assurances for one’s ability to live? This becomes an important issue.

Given this line of thinking, for life insurance to appear in such a society is a common phenomenon, expressing the following dimension of social development:

With the importance given to contracts in society, to the extent that contracts are to protect the interests of both sides under the law, and under circumstances in which medical statistics have also developed to the point that life insurance can base itself on them such that society understands the ways of life of workers — then life insurance can serve as a way of assurances for one’s life and the lives of one’s family.

222 Ibid., p. 19

According to information from Japanese life insurance companies, in 1945, 500,000 life insurance contracts had been signed in Taiwan. Of these, 70% were signed by Taiwanese, this being 350,000 contracts. Japanese people in Taiwan were thirty percent of contracts, this being around 150,000 contracts. Looking at Taiwanese people, for every three families, there was one life insurance contract, a rate of insurance that means 5.69% of persons had taken out life insurance. This rate of insurance would only return in 1979.²²³

In researching this high rate of life insurance in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period, the majority of researchers agree that, from the onset, the life insurance industry was integrated across all of Taiwan.

The life insurance system originally spread from Japan to Taiwan, in addition to the fact that this was promoted by the governor-general. Although the Japanese regime later became indebted, with a rise in the price index, the rate of people taking out life insurance plans continued to increase. This kind of development has led many researchers to believe that, after the Sino-Japanese War began, the state created ideologies for mobilization such as saving the nation. Consequently, life insurance rode this trend, since there was a need to create a patriotic image of society, and so this led to a rise in life insurance.

However, Zang Yao-feng believes that appeals to the nation and the policy of the governor-general may have had a complementary relation with the life insurance industry, but this is a post-facto explanation of the relation between policy and industry, lacking analysis of the market mechanisms. Seeing as industry has the aim of seeking profit, policy incentives cannot themselves be the only cause of generating profits, seeing as it is impossible for industrialists to invest only on the basis of policy.

Applying this logic to insurance policy holders, the nation-state enforcing compulsory insurance leads to a certain level of life insurance, without any explanation for the behavior of Taiwanese in having a high number of life insurance policies. As a result, Zeng Yao-feng has conducted a new inquiry starting from the point of view of the life insurance industry, discovering that among the three important sources of profit for the life insurance industry (discrepancies in the mortality rate, profit margin discrepancy, insurance premium discrepancies), the difference in mortality between Taiwanese and Japanese seems to be an important factor in whether Japanese insurers generate a surplus in Taiwan. The insurance documents excavated by Zeng Yao-feng reveal that, compared to Japanese, relatively speaking, comparing Taiwanese insurance policy holders of various ages, their blood pressure was lower than Japanese, perhaps indicating that the rate of cardiovascular disease for Taiwanese was lower than that for Japanese.

Apart from this, in comparing mortality rates with Japanese, outside of for those low in age, most Taiwanese were not concerned with the rate of mortality,

223 Ceng Yao-feng, "Ri zhi shiqi taiwan shouxian shi yanjiu de huigu yu zhanwang," Chung-Hsing Journal of History, No. 23 (June 2011): 115-30, DOI: 10.29624/CHJH.201106.0005.

whether male or female, and mortality rates for each were lower than in Japan.

These statistics gathered by the insurance industry, then, may explain that, apart from encouragement by government policy, there were market mechanisms which led to the flourishing development of the insurance industry in Taiwan.

In discussing policy aimed at providing for the elderly, Liu Jia-yong raises the issue that contemporary Taiwan is highly concerned with care for the elderly, but that this tendency only began late after political democratization. Furthermore, in discussing development during the Japanese period, he believes that there are misinterpretations about the social significance of care of elderly begun in Taiwan

In discussing policy aimed at providing for the elderly, Liu Jia-yong raises the issue that contemporary Taiwan is highly concerned with care for the elderly, but that this tendency only began late after political democratization. Furthermore, in discussing development during the Japanese period, he believes that there are misinterpretations about the social significance of care of elderly begun in Taiwan