ABSTRACT
The story of agricultural development on Taiwan is rather impressive. Most of the labor force was engaged in subsistence agriculture, and most of the peasants lived in abject poverty, untouched by the cash economy. Integrating the Taiwanese peasantry into the imperial economy initially meant sweeping away the feudal system of land tenure that characterized the pre-Japanese era. The social, economic, and political patterns persisting into the 1940s remained typically colonial: there was a lack of higher education and upward mobility for the Taiwanese and an imposition of Japanese culture, particularly language, on the upper strata of the Taiwanese population. Preoccupied with the struggle against the Communists, the Chinese government largely ignored Taiwan between 1945 and 1949. Japanese emphasis on agricultural development on Taiwan was linked to concerns about domestic stability in the home islands, balance-of-payments savings, and imperial aspirations for power.
