ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the level of cooperation between Taiwanese merchants and the government of the Republic of China (ROC) in the trade between the Taiwan and Japan. The existing literature would have us believe that the ROC government during the early post-war period did indeed suppress the Taiwanese elite from the Japanese colonial period. It has even been claimed that, the local elite stratum had turned into a vacuum'. The development of Taiwanese chambers of commerce had started during the Japanese colonial era. Some of the pre-war membership survived into the post-war period. The contrast between the discontinuity of the political elite and the continuity of the commercial elite for Taiwan-Japan trade from pre-war to early post-war Taiwan can be further illustrated by the gap between the intellectual establishment and the politico-economic alliance. Taniguchi's particular aim in negotiations was to engineer the barter of Taiwan's rice for a type of fertilizer less suited to Japanese soils than the Taiwanese equivalents.
