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Taiwan: Rural Society Stuart

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Stuart E. Thompson
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Extract

Owen Rutter's somewhat idyllized picture of an essentially agricultural Taiwan could have portrayed the 1950s, or, equally, Taiwan at any time in the more than 300 years of Chinese settlement there. Most of the Chinese who crossed the Taiwan Straits to settle in Taiwan were peasant farmers, and, as they had done on continental China, they made their living by agriculture. In 1945, when the island reverted to China after 50 years as a Japanese colony, agriculture was still very much the predominant sector, and the majority of the population continued to rely on farming. But, from the late 1950s onwards, in the space of less than three decades, the pattern of more than three centuries has been radically altered. Industry has burgeoned to replace agriculture as the key sector, and, concomitantly, Taiwan's population is no longer characteristically rural. A massive outflow of rural people into the cities has left only one person in four living in the countryside

Type
Taiwan Briefing
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 99 , September 1984 , pp. 553 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1984

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References

1. Crissman, Lawrence, “The structure of local and regional systems,” in Ahern, E. M. and Gates, H. (eds.), The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society (Stanford: Stanford University, 1981), p. 117Google Scholar;

2. One estimate is that about 77% of the population were living in cities in 1980. See Pannell, Clifton W. and Ma, Lawrence J. C., China. The Geography of Development and Modernization (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), p. 293Google Scholar;

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7. Hill Gates has provided a cogent analysis of the changing nature of the link between ethnic identity and social class relations in post-1949 Taiwan. See Gates, Hill, “Ethnicity and social class,” in Ahern, and Gates, (eds.), The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, pp. 241–81Google Scholar;

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11. Ibid..

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21. The traditional agricultural mainstays (rice, sugar cane and sweet potatoes) are the least profitable, and overall production of these crops has been in decline. On the other hand, fruit and vegetable cultivation, together with livestock and aquacultural production, have been growth areas. Certain crops geared for export – notably bananas, straw mushrooms, pineapples and asparagus n have been successfully introduced.

22. Stevan Harrell has noted the unprofitability of agriculture for northern Taiwan, “ … agriculture of any sort no longer provides a decent living or opportunities for expansion in northern Taiwan. Anyone who wants to keep up with the urban, or at least the core, rise in living standards, must engage in industry.” Ploughshare Village: Culture and Context in Taiwan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 48Google Scholar;

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30. Ho, Samuel P. S., “Decentralized industrialization and rural development: evidence from Taiwan,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, No. 27 (1979), p. 83Google Scholar; For an understanding of modern rural Taiwan this is a key article.

31. Ibid.. n. 93.

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39. The average size of landholdings for farming-families is only 109 hectare. Taiwan Statistical Data Yearbook, 1983.

40. See Steven Harrell, Ploughshare Village, Ch. 3.

41. See Burton Pasternak, Kinship and Community, for a trenchant discussion of the effect of frontier conditions on lineage formation.

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