This article analyses Taiwan's economic changes that have occurred from the Japanese colonization of Taiwan in 1895 to the recent Asian financial crisis, focusing on the interplay between policy and structure. Pre-colonial Taiwan was a frontier society with a settlement economy, primarily subsistence-based, and with a thin state structure, politically barely governed by the Qing dynasty. Under Japanese rule, Taiwan was turned into an essentially open economy and an agrarian base of the Japanese Empire. In the post-Second World War era, the Taiwanese economy under the Nationalist regime was briefly turned inward for import substitution industrialization, but rapidly transformed into one based on industrial exports in labour-intensive sectors, and increasingly on modern services as well. By the end of the century, Taiwan had already become the world's third largest maker of information technology products, behind the United States and Japan. The permutation of ownership structure was equally drastic. Dominant Japanese capital in the pre-war era became omnipresent state capital in the immediate post-war era. Subsequently, however, indigenous private capital overwhelmed the industrial sector and, towards the end of the century, made inroads in the financial sector as well.

In the 20th century, Taiwan has experienced two cycles of regime evolution, during which the Japanese colonial regime and the Nationalist émigré regime consecutively dominated its political history each for about half a century.For our analysis, a political regime is defined as an ensemble of patterns that determines the methods of access to the principal public offices; the characteristics of the actors admitted to or excluded from such access; the strategies that actors may use to gain access; and the rules that are followed in the making of publicly binding decisions. See Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, “What democracy is... and is not,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1991). The two regimes, each wrestling with the challenge of subordinating the native society to its authoritarian rule, vision of nation-building and state-building agenda, travelled a comparable trajectory of institutional adjustment and adaptation. Each had shifted its heavy reliance on extensive use of coercive measures during the installation stage to selective co-optation, and to limited electoral opening as the incumbent elite tried to consolidate and partially institutionalize its rule.

As I set out to write this contribution, a series of earthquakes transformed a large part of Taiwan causing me to rethink the project. They reconfirmed that humans are not the only factor determining a landscape – a point sometimes forgotten in an age when our ability to modify the earth seems to be increasing exponentially. The subsequent “earthshaking” election of Chen Shui-bian to president brought to the fore an age-old problem: how much do natural events like earthquakes or floods influence society? Is it merely the governmental response to a “natural” disaster that affects politics? Whatever the speculation, our ability to sort out the “human” from the “natural” landscape remains problematic. As work proceeded, it became clear that it would be difficult to gather comparative data in a fashion which could do justice to a sort of “sequent occupance” study of the Taiwan landscape with five slices of time as I had originally planned: the beginning of the century, around 1925, the middle of the century, around 1975 and the end of the century.

Few notions in the contemporary world elicit such public demonstration and widespread passion as that of the nation. Even at the end of the 20th century, national conflagrations from Kosovo to East Timor still seize headlines from global treaties and space explorations. While scholars argue that the nation is intersubjectively imagined, discursively produced, and “narrated” and “performed” out of shreds and fragments, the notion, far from being an outmoded concept, shows every sign of gathering strength, intertwined with and supplanting deep-seated religious beliefs and social progress as a sanctified norm.For theoretical discussions of the nation, see especially Benedict Andersen, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990). Between the local, the national and the supranational whose demarcations are themselves contested, various discursive strands intersect and dispute, vying to redraw maps or rewrite histories. The terrifying devastation allegiance to different nations can unleash therefore weighs heavily on a retrospective on Taiwan, in a double bind of dispassion and engagement. The subject is a particularly sensitive one, for the very invocation of the name “Taiwan,” depending on its context, manner and intonation, implicates particular ideological stances.

During the Cold War period, particularly after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, Japan's political and security relations with the People's Republic of China and Taiwan had to cope with the realities of “two Chinas,” with the history of the Japanese colonization of Taiwan and its military aggression in China compelling post-war Japan to assume basically “non-strategic” security orientation. The fundamental argument in this article is that Japan's de facto “two Chinas” policy throughout much of the post-war period was not the result of careful consideration of its security priorities, but was rather a choice by default.

Nei waiyou bie, neijin wai song “treat insiders and outsiders differently,” “be strict internally, relaxed to the outside world,” so goes the Chinese authorities' line on managing foreigners. For historical and nationalistic reasons, foreigners occupy an extremely sensitive position in China today. To the outside world China's leaders talk of “friendship” (youhao guanxi) and celebrate “foreign friends” (waiguo pengyou). But in their internal documents these catch-phrases are simply the tropes of a deliberate strategy to control and manage foreigners' presence and activities in China.

In the early decades of the 20th century, Chinese identities were subjected to profound challenges posed by the West. Traditional Chinese linkages between gender and power were shaken by contact with aggressive western imperialism. Although there are numerous studies on this impact, almost nothing has been written on its effects on the Chinese constructions of masculinity. Did East-West contact significantly change the male ideal? If so, how did the new image integrate traditional and Western gender configurations? This article first examines the theoretical basis of masculinity models in traditional China, and then analyses the ways in which a Western context could alter the ways Chinese intellectuals reconstruct these models to arrive at a new male prototype. As one of the best known examples of the interface between East and West, Lao She's (1899–1966) novel Er Ma (The Two Mas) will be used as a case study. The 1920s was a time when many Westernized intellectuals such as Xu Zhimo were totally enamoured by European civilization, to such an extent that Xu's influential friend Hu Shi once called for a “wholesale Westernization” of Chinese culture. While there was a great diversity of masculine ideals in this period, the effects on the male identity from contact with the West were fundamental and enduring, and the images presented in The Two Mas were in many respects typical of the Republican era.