Article #2
The Qing
Period of Rule, 1683-1895
The Qing administration ordered forces to Taiwan not
out of a desire to possess the island, but rather to rid the dynasty of a pesky
opponent. The military initiative
of 1683 in Taiwan was part of a
successful year for the Qing as it faced down various opponents who for nearly
a century had kept the Manchus from securing firm control of southern
China. While the Qing court now had
achieved its territorial aims, moving on the Zhengs of Taiwan was the next
logical move in the effort to defeat all opponents of the dynasty. Catching the Zheng regime at a time of
disarray, after the death of Zheng Jing when the administration on Taiwan was
rent by rival factions and regent politics, Qing forces took control of Taiwan
proper on 22 August 1683. Forces under
General Shi Lang, the architect of the Taiwan campaign, then turned their
attention to Penghu, where Zheng military leader Liu Guxuan was mounting a
spirited defense. Within seven days Qing
forces pierced Liu’s defenses and took control of Penghu. Now the question arose as to what the Qing
Dynasty would do with Taiwan in the aftermath of its ousting of the Zheng
regime.
The sort of question now before the Qing court had
not been posed upon the defeat of Qing opponents in Guangdong, Guangxi,
Jiangsi, Jiangsu, and Fujian. These were
all understood to be provinces historically under the authority of any court
operating in the Chinese imperial style.
Taiwan had no such historical connection. Any occupation by representatives of the Qing
Dynasty would be the first from any Chinese administration to do so, and if
they elected to occupy Taiwan, they would do so as outside governing
authorities arriving to impose a new regime on the Taiwanese population,
succeeding Dutch and Zheng family operatives who had done the same.
In a vigorous debate at the Qing court, most
officials argued for abandonment of the island to the aborigines and those Han
Chinese who had made their way to Taiwan.
These officials said that Taiwan was not big enough to add significantly
to the territorial expanse of China, and that while Taiwan’s soils had proven
productive, the island’s size and population were not sufficient significantly
to expand the tax and agrarian base of the empire.[ii] The fact that Han Chinese now constituted a
sizable percentage of Taiwan’s population counted for little: Traditionally, such emigrants were scorned
for leaving their native places in pursuit of material gain, opting to take
residence outside the imperial glory of China.
Despite stiff opposition, the military official Shi
Lang, he who had engineered the Qing victory over the Zheng regime, eventually
won Qing decision makers to his two key arguments for retaining control of Taiwan. He reminded the Qing rulers that the island
had long been a staging base for pirates and other renegades who had caused
their Ming predecessors much misery. And
he pointed out that taking control of Taiwan would prevent any attempt on the
part of the Dutch or other Europeans to reassert Western authority on an island
of significant agricultural potential and possessing a favorable location for
trading activities. On the strength of
these arguments grounded in matters of geo-strategic concern, the Qing
administration decided to occupy Taiwan and enter the island on the official
map of China.
With the decision to enter Taiwan on the map of China
and assume governance of the island, the Qing court now faced another important
decision, also accompanied by a debate along two lines of thinking. One view was that Han Chinese settlement of
Taiwan should be promoted energetically, in tandem with a decided initiative to
sinicize the aborigines. The other view
held that sinicization of the aborigines would be so vigorously opposed by the
latter as to require too great an investment of dynastic resources and
misplaced imperial energy; therefore,
Han Chinese settlement should be subject to severe restrictions, and great care
should be taken not to rile the aborigines unnecessarily. The latter view won out and remained official
policy well into the 19th century, with the exception of a brief
pro-colonization phase during the rule of the Yongzheng emperor.(r.
1722-1735). Immigration into Taiwan from
mainland China was subject to applications reviewed with great care by the
military circuit intendant for Taiwan and Xiamen, and subject also to the
review of the magistrate for coastal defense.
Only single males were to apply, with the thought that they would till
the land or otherwise work on Taiwan for a specified period, then return to
their home villages in Fujian. No
families were to settle Taiwan, and there was an effort to prevent Hakka from
Chaozhou or Huizhou from gaining permission for immigration into Taiwan.
With regard to governance of the aborigines, Qing
policy endeavored to leave the native people of Taiwan largely to their own
affairs. The aborigines were required to
pay a manageable per capita tax in kind to an official, often also an
aborigine, given responsibility for collecting the tax, typically yielded as
deer hides. Various lines of demarcation
were drawn attempting to prevent Han Chinese penetration into traditionally
aboriginal territory. But the whole
effort to restrict Han Chinese immigration into Taiwan, and to prevent their
encroachment into aboriginal territory, proved very difficult. There were too many hungry Hakka (who
successfully circumvented official proscriptions) and Fujianese eager to try their
luck across the Taiwan Strait. And, once
on the island, many of these immigrants advanced ever southward, eastward and
northward into lands that the aborigines traditionally thought of as their own,
not as tightly held personal property, but territory for hunting, fishing, and
farming.[iii] Between 1684 and 1785, the Han Chinese
population of Taiwan increased from 175,000 to 415,000 [iv](roughly
equal to the aboriginal population at this point), with people hailing
originally from Zhangzhou and Quanzhou in Fujian making energetic thrusts
across the Jianan plain and from there to Zhanghua, Fengyuan, and Taizhong, a
pattern that by the late 18th century would reveal significant Han
Chinese settlement in the areas now known as Xinzhu, Danshui, and Taibei. Meanwhile, Hakka people proved insistent in
their efforts to settle areas today known as Chisan, Linbian, Donggang, and Fengliao.
Qing taxation policy was formulated so as to minimize
opposition, especially from local landholding elites whose support the dynasty
needed to maintain control. The typical
rate of taxation on the annual agricultural yield was 15%, held as a
responsibility of the landowners but usually collected by the latter from
tenant farmers, who paid another 15% of the yield for a total of about 30% as
their effective rental rate. In some
areas this latter figure totaled 50% and in a few rose as high as 70%. Qing policy also allowed a lively and
moderately taxed mercantile activity from which various town-centered
commercial actors benefited in a geographically far-flung trade involving ships
sailing out of the Netherlands and Japan;
Manila, and Luzon on the Philippines;
and various Chinese ports located at coastal areas of Jiangsu, Zhejiang,
Fujian, and Guangdong. Exports from
Taiwan typically included rice, sugarcane, venison, camphor, hemp, and fish
fins; imports into the island commonly
listed manufactured goods such as umbrellas, thread, gauze, bricks, gongs, cut
felt, and paper materials; and food and
agricultural goods such as oranges, pomelos, tangerines, cakes, and dried
persimmons. Merchant associations were
formed in various places, the first among them in Luermen (1740) and Fengshan
(1768).
Despite articulating generally successful economic
policies, the Qing rulers were not successful in preventing violent
conflicts. Small-scale episodes
frequently found Han Chinese pitted against aborigines resentful over
territorial encroachments; other
incidents found people of Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, and Hakka ancestry in opposition
to each other; still others saw one or
another of these groups rise up against local magistrates; and the most serious violent outbreaks
occurred as more general rebellions against the whole proposition of Qing rule
on Taiwan. The longest of these latter
conflicts in duration, and the most costly in terms of bloodshed, were the Zhu
Yigui Rebellion of 1722 and, especially, the Lin Shuangwen Rebellion of
1787-1788. Taiwan proved to be a
difficult frontier region in which to secure the unswerving loyalty of the
local population. Deals were constantly
cut with local notables who had no great love for the representatives of Qing
officialdom, but who could be responsive to promises of better political,
social, and economic position if cooperating in keeping unruly elements under
control.
Much changed on Taiwan due to the cumulative impact
of the Opium War (1839-1842), Anglo-Chinese War (1856-1860), and Sino-French
War (1884-1885). Each of these conflicts
brought an ever greater presence of Europeans into the lives of people both on
Taiwan and in China, as the Qing court was forced to open treaty ports all
along the Chinese coast and on Taiwan;
Danshui was the first of the latter, opening as a result of British
demands in the Treaty of Nanjing (1842).
During the 1868-1894 period, the value of Taiwanese trade with Western
powers and Japan was five times the value of Taiwanese trade with merchants in
China, a trade which featured imports into Taiwan of many manufactured items
but in which the most lucrative item for sale on the Taiwanese market by
European traders was opium. The most
valuable export from Taiwan during those same years was not the traditionally
emphasized rice or sugarcane; these
continued to play an important role, but when the hillsides of northern Taiwan
were found to be excellent for growing tea, well over 100 firms, especially
British, rushed in to take advantage of what proved to be a very lucrative item
for sale on the European market.
Concerned over the growing presence and demands of
foreigners in China and on Taiwan, the Qing court sent a succession of vigorous
officials to articulate policy for the whole island. The leaders included Shen Baozhen
(1874-1875), Ding Richang (1875-1878) and, especially, Liu Mingchuan
(1884-1891).[v] During the latter’s tenure of power, in 1887,
Taiwan was for the first time designated a province (previously it had held
only the status of a prefecture within Fujian province). Liu’s policies included administering
geological surveys and implementing land reform, thereby increasing the value
of Taiwan’s agriculture, forestry, and mining sectors to the government; promotion of the shipping industry, railroad
building, and road building;
modernization of machinery in the coal-mining, sugar-refining, and
brick-making industries; and successful
efforts to bring electrical lighting and the telephone and telegraph to Taibei
and other key urban centers. Under Liu’s
energetic leadership, Taiwan became a showcase for the Self-Strengthening
Movement, the Qing dynasty’s attempt to incorporate material elements of
modernity firmly within the context of Chinese culture and governing style. But the Qing court eventually scaled down its
support for Liu’s efforts and relented when rivals and opponents petitioned for
his removal. Liu left Taiwan in 1891,
much less assertive leadership ensued, and by 1895 governance of Taiwan was no
longer an issue for the Qing court, for it had lost control of Taiwan.
In retrospect, the Qing interlude was just another period during which outside ruling powers asserted control over the Taiwanese population. Two far more important such periods followed, and neither of the much more vigorous outside powers in question controlled all of China during their years of occupation of Taiwan. This long span of 116 years was taken up first by the Japanese, who gained possession of the island of Taiwan in the Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed in the aftermath of Japanese defeat of the Qing in the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese War.
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