I've been researching information about the relationship between Korea,
Japan, and Taiwan and how each one views the other. Someone brought up the
story below as an illustration of why the Taiwanese have a much more
favorable view of the Japanese than do Koreans (i.e. the Japanese unified
the island, modernized its infrastructure, and raised the quality of life):
When the first Chinese soldiers were stationed on Taiwan in 1945, it was the first time most of them had seen running water. In a restaurant one day, some yokels from inland China, fascinated by the water running from the tap, inquired as to how they too could acquire a tap. The barman directed them to the plumbing supply store, where the soldiers gleefully procured a tap and returned to their barracks, where they nailed the tap to the wall. When no water came out, they returned to the bar and beat the barman to death for lying to them.This sounds like just the sort of apocryphal story resentful Taiwanese would have spread to disparage the KMT. However, at the time this story takes place, Taiwan's infrastructure and quality of life, to my knowledge, was much greater than what most of the Chinese Nationalist soldiers had been used to in China:
After World War I, Tokyo decided to put greater emphasis on the economic development of the island, appointing civilian technocrats rather than generals or admirals as governors. The colonial government built transportation and communications infrastructure, established an education and a public health system, and, in an early "green revolution," modernized agriculture through the use of scientifically bred seeds. Agricultural processing industries sprouted. (Richard Bush, Untying the Knot, p. 15)
3 comments:
while over the years there have been many many "little stories" like this from who knows where
I strongly suspect this was a men made by politicians or people I called "neo-Hokkien racists"....
purposely try to downgrade the images of mainlanders and their descents from 1949 era. While I am one of these "late Chines. descents" and it always bothers me when I heard a story like this
I pay my tax, did my services, etc etc etc but believe me it's never enough in the eyes of these disgusting "neo-Hokkian racists", just because their ancesters came over and burned the villages of aboriginals and gained some lands a couple of hundred years earlier
dirty Han politicians(骯髒漢人政客)!!
You my friend have been here long enough to make a better educated judgement
yuck so no more
Anon, both sides have done a fabulous job of demonizing and demoralizing each other.
It's not as though this story is set yesterday. It's set over sixty years ago, when many people in Taiwan were bitter over, what they saw as, outsiders coming in from less developed regions of Asia. It has very little to do with the well-established history of the Han-people themselves over the last two thousand years.
If you're sure this was fabricated by "neo-Hokkien-racists," then prove it.
If you think it was slandarizing from non-Hans, then there's no reason to tell me because (as I wrote in the article) I started with the assumption that it's not true.
I've written quite a bit about both the views of waishenren towards benshenren, and vice versa. And, being an outsider, I get to look at the situation without original baggage. That has afforded me the insight to know that both sides are blowing a lot of hot air and a little bit of truth.
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