Hydraulic Taiwan: Colonial Conservation under Japanese Imperial and Chinese Nationalist Rule, 1895-1964
Citation
Hayashi, John Hitchcock. 2023. Hydraulic Taiwan: Colonial Conservation under Japanese Imperial and Chinese Nationalist Rule, 1895-1964. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.Abstract
This dissertation argues that conservation was a powerful historical force in Taiwan under Japanese colonial and early Republican Chinese rule. Unlike the Qing empire before it, the Japanese colonial state was committed to politically integrating Taiwan’s mountainous interior and the indigenous peoples living there; Japanese forces fought brutal wars to suppress resistance and accomplish this. Historians have conventionally treated this history separately from the agrarian development, urbanization, acculturation, and industrialization that took place in the Han Chinese-dominated lowlands. Yet highland and lowland Taiwan were irrevocably linked in both material fact and historical process by the rivers that flowed down from the mountains into the sea. From the outset of colonial rule, scientists and colonial officials saw rivers as bearers of both great potential riches and existential threats. Conserving water became a way to expand supplies of existing resources, such as sugarcane, rice, and timber, while generating another vital resource—hydroelectricity—entirely anew.Following destructive floods in the early 1910s, forestry scientists were increasingly successful in bringing attention to the causes of flooding in Taiwan’s hills and mountains. Although natural processes, Japanese loggers, and Han settlers all contributed to worsening erosion, it was highland indigenes whose lifestyles were targeted for the most dramatic reform. Water conservancy was claimed as justification for the forced relocation of tens of thousands of indigenous peoples from mountain villages to the foothills, where they faced new ecological threats. This coincided with a shift in focus within flood control management from rivers, then river watersheds, and finally to reservoir watersheds created by dam construction. Hydroelectric development and the onset of World War II intensified scrutiny on highland environments and people living amongst them. After 1945, the Republic of China government cooperated with American financial and technical backers to revive Japanese colonial plans for harnessing the island’s rivers. Through locating hydraulic science and technology in relation to direct and indirect dispossessions experienced by diverse colonized peoples across two successive regimes in Taiwan, this dissertation gives an account of the island’s integration. Tracing how ethnicized environmental rule took shape amidst this integration contributes to our understanding of modern conservation as science, practice, and social process.
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