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Overview
In particular, during periods of soft authoritarianism in the Japanese colonial era and late twentieth century, autonomous women's movements emerged and operated within the political perimeters set by the authoritarian regimes. Women strove to replace the "Good Wife, Wise Mother" ideal with an individualist feminism that meshed social, political, and economic gender equity with the prevailing Confucian family ideology. However, during periods of hard authoritarianism from the 1930s to the 1960s, the autonomous movements collapsed.
The particular brand of Taiwanese feminism developed from numerous outside influences, including interactions among an East Asian sociopolitical milieu, various strands of Western feminism, and even Marxist-Leninist women's liberation programs in Soviet Russia. Chinese communism appears not to have played a significant role, due to the Chinese Nationalists' restriction of communication with the mainland during their rule on post-World War II Taiwan.
Notably, this study compares the perspectives of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, whose husband led as the president of the Republic of China on Taiwan from 1949 to 1975, and Hsiu-lien Annette Lu, Taiwan's vice president from 2000 to 2008. Delving into period sources such as the highly influential feminist monthly magazine Awakening as well as interviews with feminist leaders, Chang provides a comprehensive historical and cross-cultural analysis of the struggle for gender equality in Taiwan.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252033957 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 04/21/2009 |
| Edition description: | 1st Edition |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan
By DORIS T. CHANG
University of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03395-7
Chapter One
Feminist Discourses and Women's Movements under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945
In the early 1920s, Taiwanese feminist discourse emerged in the context of the Japanese colonial government's limited tolerance of political dissent. Beginning in the 1920s, the Taiwanese students who studied in China and Japan served as transmitters of a liberal strand of feminism and women's rights ideology (J: joken shugi; C: nüquan zhuyi) from the cosmopolitan centers of Western learning in Tokyo, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing to colonial Taiwan. Just as Taisho Japan imported Western ideas to enrich the pluralistic discourse of its democratic experiment, the May Fourth movement (1915–23) in China also imported Western ideas to launch a radical critique of Confucian patriarchy.
From the 1920s to 1931, enhancement of gender equality and women's status were important objectives of colonial Taiwan's social and political movements. As such, autonomous women's movements (funü yundong) had overlapping membership with other social and political movements. This chapter distinguishes the autonomous women's movements and organizations from their government-sponsored counterparts. Whereas the government-sponsored women's organizations served the purpose of carrying out the Japanese government's policies, the autonomous women's movements emerged from Taiwan's nascent civil society. The latter were independent of the government's direct control and patronage. Further, I analyze the ways in which gender, class, and ethnic inequalities in Taiwan were part of the discourses of the sociopolitical movements, and I discuss the impact of the government's policies on Taiwanese women's experiences.
Despite moderate toleration of political dissent in the 1920s, by the early 1930s the colonial government's intensified repression toward Taiwanese sociopolitical movements, led to the decline and collapse of the autonomous women's movements. From the early 1930s to Japan's defeat in World War II, a highly repressive political climate discouraged political dissent and the re-emergence of the independent women's movements. In this period, only government-sponsored women's organizations could flourish.
In order to situate women's experiences in a broader context, it is essential to understand Taiwan's historical background. Taiwan was the place of origin of Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian) languages. The indigenous inhabitants of Taiwan (yuanzhumin) were islanders who shared a common linguistic and ethnic heritage with Malays and Polynesian islanders in different parts of the Pacific. Taiwan (Tayouan) was the Malayo-Polynesian name of a bay area on the southwestern plain of the island where early immigrants from coastal southeastern China first settled. As the Chinese settlers expanded their land claim and commercial activities in different parts of the island, they began to refer to the entire island as Taiwan. In 1544, Portuguese sailors witnessed the lush vegetation on the island and named it Ilha Formosa (Beautiful Island). A century later, the Dutch colonized the island and built Fort Zeelandia on Tayouan to facilitate the Dutch East India Company's maritime commercial activities. In 1623, the Chinese government of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) recognized Dutch control over Taiwan. The Dutch colonial administration governed the island until 1662—the year that the Ming loyalist and pirate, Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), drove the Dutch out of Taiwan and created his own exile government on the island.
When the Dutch arrived in southern Taiwan in 1624, the Chinese immigrant community on the island was still relatively small. To neutralize the aboriginal population's fierce resistance against Chinese settlers and traders, the Dutch East India Company launched military campaigns to suppress its aboriginal neighbors. During its four decades of rule, the Dutch administration encouraged large-scale immigration of Chinese farmers, laborers, traders, and artisans to provide the necessary labor force for developing the island's fishing industry, commercial deer hunting, irrigation projects, and sugarcane and rice plantations. The result was a Sino-Dutch hybrid colony where the Chinese offered the necessary labor force and tax and trade revenues for the Dutch East India Company. Reciprocally, the Dutch provided Chinese colonists with military protection and administrative governance.
Due to the large influx of Chinese bachelors who settled in Taiwan and the practice of intermarrying with indigenous women to acquire the land and property of their wives' families, many bicultural couples served as bilingual interpreters. Historically, aborigine women with Chinese husbands played critical roles in conducting diplomacy and mediating trade between Chinese and indigenous communities.
Beginning in the seventeenth century, the majority of Chinese immigrants in Taiwan spoke the Hoklo (Minnan) dialect of coastal Fujian province in southeastern China, which lies across the Taiwan Strait from the island. In addition to the Fujianese community, a minority of Chinese were Hakka (Kejia) immigrants from the Guangdong (Canton) province. In 1683, the government of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) incorporated Taiwan into the Chinese Empire. In the subsequent century, Chinese culture emerged as the dominant culture of the island. Because the Fujianese community comprised 70 percent of the island's population, the Fujianese majority regarded their dialect as "the Taiwanese language."
After the mid-eighteenth century, the Qing government permitted Chinese men and women to emigrate to Taiwan as a family unit. Consequently, the number of Chinese women who permanently settled in Taiwan increased significantly. By virtue of residing on a maritime frontier of the Chinese Empire, women in Taiwan have historically enjoyed a higher status than their counterparts in mainland China. In the nineteenth century, Taiwan's customary law granted married women the right to own land. Due to the shortage of Chinese women in nineteenth-century Taiwan, it was also more common for Taiwanese widows to remarry. Yet, as ethnic Han Chinese, most people in Taiwan and mainland China shared the Confucian heritage from China's traditional past. As a patriarchal ideology, Confucianism ascribed inferior status to women and superior status to men in both family and society. While there were private academies for boys in Taiwan, girls were mostly home-schooled.
The advocacy of modern education for girls did not begin in Taiwan until the 1880s, when Presbyterian missionaries from Canada and Britain created girls' schools in Tamsui (Tanshui) and Tainan. In the girls' boarding school in Tainan, the traditional Chinese practice of footbinding was prohibited. Pupils were taught gender-specific knowledge and skills, such as home economics, methods of childcare, and family hygiene. In addition to preparing them to be future homemakers and mothers, the school was also committed to offering girls a well-rounded curriculum. In some respects, the curriculum of the Tainan girls' school was analogous to that of their male counterparts. Although boys and girls attended separate schools, students of both genders were taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and natural sciences. Because the missionaries devised a Romanization system to translate the Bible into the Minnan dialect (Hoklo Taiwanese), pupils of both genders were taught the Romanization system to enable them to read the Bible in the Taiwanese vernacular. In addition, physical education and field trips were integrated into the extracurricular activities of the school. Despite the Christian missionaries' efforts in promoting education for girls, their influence remained limited within a small community of Christian converts.
Girls' education in Taiwan did not become more widespread until the early twentieth century within the context of imperial Japan's modernization program. After China's defeat in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), it ceded Taiwan to Japan under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. As a new Asian power striving to be accepted as an equal among the Western powers, Japan was mindful of its national prestige and was eager to convert Taiwan into an ideal colony through modernization.
Yet before the Japanese colonial government could launch its modernization program in Taiwan, it had to focus on the suppression of organized resistance against Japanese colonial rule. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Japanese government replaced traditional Taiwanese district heads with Japanese officials and Japanese-educated Taiwanese collaborators. In the economic realm, the colonial state conducted comprehensive island-wide land surveys and confiscated farms and forestlands in order to attract Japanese capital investments in camphor and sugarcane industries. Modern Japanese sugar factories gradually replaced traditional Taiwanese-owned sugar mills. Many Taiwanese sugarcane growers were reduced to tenant farmers who had no other choice but to sell their produce to Japanese-owned sugar companies at a fixed price. Deprived of their former status and livelihood, discontented Taiwanese elites and small farmers staged organized rebellions against the Japanese colonial state. In order to ensure that the legislative, executive, and military powers were concentrated in the office of the governor-general, the Imperial Diet in Tokyo passed Law No. 63 in 1896 to grant the governor-general the power to enact executive orders to be enforced in Taiwan. In this way, the Japanese state imposed a military dictatorship to suppress dissent, control the native population, and maintain social order on Taiwan until 1919.
Autonomous Women's Movements as Integral Parts of Colonial Taiwan's Social and Political Movements
In 1919, the Japanese government appointed a civilian governor-general and terminated military rule in Taiwan. In the era of Taisho democracy in Japan, the new governor-general tolerated limited political dissent in Taiwanese society within the parameters of his authoritarian rule. According to Ts'ai P'eihuo, a Taiwanese political leader in the 1920s, the spirit of liberal democracy under a constitutional monarchy (minponshugi) contributed to Taiwanese liberal reformers' quests for universal suffrage and political equality with their Japanese counterparts. To achieve this end, liberal reformers stepped up their efforts to petition for the creation of a Taiwan Parliament within the legal framework of imperial Japan's Meiji Constitution. Between 1922 and 1934, Taiwanese activists gathered signatures on both Taiwan and Japan's home islands for the annual submission to the petition committee of the Imperial Diet in Tokyo. To legitimize their cause, the Taiwanese solicited the political support of liberal-minded Japanese intellectuals, politicians, and journalists. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson's advocacy of national self-determination in 1918, the Taiwanese liberal reformers hoped that the creation of a Taiwan Parliament could enable Taiwanese home rule and preserve the island's cultural autonomy in the Japanese Empire. Encouraged by the passage of the bill for universal suffrage of Japanese male citizens at the Imperial Diet in 1925, the number of people who signed the petition increased significantly after 1926.
In Japan, the passage of Article 5 of the Revised Police Security Law in 1921 lifted the ban on women's participation in political gatherings. Consequently, Taiwanese women students in Japan were able to participate actively in the petition movement for a Taiwan Parliament. In the post–World War I era, Taiwanese students and intellectuals were keenly aware of the profound impact of the Great War on shaping the advancement of women's status in Europe and the United States. The passage of woman suffrage legislation in Britain (1918) and the United States (1920) became subjects of interest and discussion among the Taiwanese intelligentsia. On April 28, 1928, the Woman Suffrage movement in Japan obtained the endorsement of more than eighty members of the House of Representatives in the Imperial Diet to introduce and promote the passage of the Woman Suffrage Bill. Because Taiwanese men and women were denied the right to the franchise in the 1920s and early 1930s, liberal reformers envisaged the attainment of universal suffrage for Taiwanese of both genders as a means to legitimize self-rule on the basis of popular sovereignty. Yet, most liberal reformers prioritized the cause for the creation of a Taiwan Parliament over women's movements and issues.
Most writings on universal suffrage, improvement of Taiwanese women's status, and the creation of a local parliament were published in either The Taiwan Youth (Tai Oan Chheng Lian) or Taiwan People's News (Taiwan min bao). The Taiwan Youth was a magazine published by a group of Taiwanese Liberal reformers in Tokyo from 1920 to 1922. It was published in both the Japanese and Chinese languages to inform the public about the necessity of a Taiwan Parliament and to preserve Taiwanese language and culture. In 1923, Taiwan minbao (Taiwan minpo) was published in Tokyo as a bimonthly periodical with Chinese and Japanese columns. It became a weekly in 1925. In 1927, the colonial government granted Taiwan minbao permission to be published in Taiwan. By 1929, Taiwan minbao was replaced by Taiwan xinminbao (Taiwan shinminpo). During the 1920s and the 1930s, Taiwan minbao and its replacement were the only indigenous newspapers of Taiwanese sociopolitical movements owned and managed by the Taiwanese.
Throughout the 1920s, progressive Taiwanese intellectuals and students wrote numerous articles in The Taiwan Youth and Taiwan minbao to raise the awareness of women's issues. Most contributors to the magazines were members of the Taiwan Cultural Association (Taiwan wenhua xiehui). Established in Taihoku (Taipei) in 1921, the Taiwan Cultural Association was the home base of the Taiwan Petition movement for the creation of a local parliament. Its activists gathered signatures in Taiwan for the annual petitions to the Imperial Diet in Tokyo. To resist Japanese assimilation, its members often served as speakers in lecture tours throughout Taiwan seeking to promote Taiwan's culture and language.
As an organization dominated by liberal reformers of the Petition movement in the early 1920s, the Taiwan Cultural Association's membership nevertheless included many left-wing radicals. In both the radical and reformist wings, numerous women leaders and speakers emerged. They traveled throughout urban and rural Taiwan giving lectures on women's rights and various issues pertaining to women and labor. In other words, the Cultural Association provided these women a platform for disseminating ideas about women's rights and promoting the solidarity of the Taiwanese peasantry against the exploitation of Japanese-owned industries. Thus, the women's movements emerged within the sociopolitical context of the Taiwanese intelligentsia's protest against the second-class citizenship of the Taiwanese in the Japanese Empire. The goals of the women's movements were the emancipation of Taiwanese women from colonial domination, patriarchal oppression, and capitalist exploitation.
As a result of growing industrialization in colonial Taiwan there were increasing incidents of strikes and confrontations between Japanese capitalists and Taiwanese laborers beginning in the mid-1920s. In response to this trend, radical youths in the Cultural Association sought to redirect the financial and human resources of the Petition movement to mobilize workers and the peasantry against Japanese business owners. However, many moderate members of the older generation in the Cultural Association were landlords, wealthy merchants, and veterans of the Petition movement for a Taiwan Parliament, and they objected to the youths' reallocation of resources. Despite this opposition, the youth outvoted their elders in 1927.
After most moderate members of the Cultural Association either withdrew their membership or were expelled, they established the first political party in colonial Taiwan, the Taiwan Populist Party (Taiwan minzhongdang, 1927–1931). Its moderate reformist strategies notwithstanding, the Taiwan Populist Party nonetheless adopted several policies regarding women from the left-wing political parties in Japan. Like its Japanese counterparts, the Taiwan Populist Party demanded home rule for colonies as well as freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly. Its members opposed the trafficking of women and advocated gender equality and universal suffrage. Moreover, the party advocated the enactment of labor legislation to protect workers' and peasants' rights and enhance their standards of living.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan by DORIS T. CHANG Copyright © 2009 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................viiChronology of Taiwan's History....................ix
Note on Transcription....................xiii
Introduction....................1
1. Feminist Discourses and Women's Movements under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945....................17
2. The Kuomintang Policies on Women and Government-Affiliated Women's Organizations....................46
3. Hsiu-lien Annette Lu: The Pioneering Stage of the Postwar Autonomous Women's Movement and the Democratic Opposition, 1972–79....................78
4. Lee Yuan-chen and Awakening, 1982–89....................107
5. The Autonomous Women's Movement and Feminist Discourse in the Post–Martial Law Era....................118
Conclusion....................157
Notes....................167
Bibliography....................201
Index....................221