Politics of Ethnicity: Neocolonialism and Revolutionary Insurgency

Abstract

The euphoria over the liberation from fifty-one years of colonial rule was brief, and what the Taiwanese people had not expected was the barely disguised corruption, discrimination, and predation from the KMT officials. Throughout China, the KMT government’s takeover of the Japanese-occupied areas was nearly indistinguishable from plunder; hence “by the end of 1945,” Pepper (1986, 738) contends, many people “had acquired grievances for which the government’s policies and the behavior of its officials could be held directly responsible.” Taiwan’s prolonged separation from China as well as the significant modernization during the Japanese rule made the transition even more unbearable. How the nascent proletarians responded to the chaotic interregnum was of particular interest because they were among those who encountered the unanticipated ethnic domination directly because of their new status as state workers. This chapter will describe how the most conscious elements among state workers resorted to radical insurgency both during the 1947 uprising and in the subsequent clandestine revolutionary movement. The failure of both attempts sealed the Taiwanese workers’ subordination in the ethnic division of labor in the postwar era.