Class Notes, Thursday

• Taiwan was controlled by the Dutch for a very short amount of time. But not the whole island.
• Ming Loyalists who fled to coastal regions during Qing invasion.
• Zheng Chenggong - one of the people who sought to take advantage of the Qing invasion and “Ming Loyalists” to forward his own political agenda. Qing forced people to move off the coast in the areas near Taiwan in order to fuck up his economy. Zhang had nobody to trade with.
• Qing conquest of Taiwan took place in the 1680s. Controversy is over whether people from mainland China were allowed to (or supposed to) go to Taiwan. As population exploded, mainlanders immigrated to Taiwan.
• Aborigines = “Mountain People” – considered not PC, it stemmed from them “taking to the hills” in order to avoid the people who encroached on their island. They originate from Polynesia. They resemble Filipino people more than Chinese. However, due to several generations together, the appearances aren’t so separate anymore.
• Initially the Han were not supposed to go to Taiwan. The Qing government actually tried to protect Taiwanese Aboriginal land rights. The Han “leased” land from aborigines, then they sublet it. This gave de facto ownership to the Han settlers.
• What kind of place did the Han encounter when they came to Taiwan?
• Disease-ridden; miasma of tropical disease, etc.
• It’s a tropical island; it was very overgrown.
• The land wasn’t agricultural.
• Deer and other animal populations declined sharply as the Han moved into the area. (Poor Elephants). There was a market for deer skins, the Dutch East India Company sold them to Japan. Since the Japanese were willing to pay exorbitant prices, the profits caused deer massacres. There was also trade in deer products between Taiwan and the coast of China. Deer Products traded to Han Chinese for Iron, Salt, and other things. Deer = Common Resource. This pillaging of the Deer causes the deer population to decline, and the Deer Products also disappear, making people unhappy. This trade was a huge source of profit to the Han, but was actually fairly damaging to the aborigines. Once there were no more deer to hunt, Commercial Agriculture rose as an important economy.
• Aborigines had two choices: assimilate or retreat. “Raw Aborigines” retreated into the hills to avoid assimilation into commercial agricultural system of the Han. “Cooked Aborigines” adopted the Han system of intensive agriculture. {This can be used to tie common resource issues into longer term social and economic issues}