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Among the private press, Gonglun bao had been the most critical of the KMT. The paper was shut down by the government in the early s. Guowu ribao remained small and insignificant. Zili wanbao, which was also famous for criticizing the government, did not become important until the s and the s. By the end of the decade, it was without a doubt the most commercially successful news agency in Taiwan.
This remarkable achievement was a result of astute marketing campaigns and advertisement strategies, as well as a carefully maintained relationship with the Nationalist authorities.
Except on two notable occasions, Lianhe bao supported the KMT, and offered only moderate criticisms of the government. Searching for a second career, Wang took over a small and failing civilian newspaper owned by a friend. He later hatched a plan to join it with two other private newspapers to form Lianhe bao. The first was leading a campaign against further government restrictions on media and publication in These were second chances that many of his competitors in the civilian press did not get.
Wang was skillful in his defence, and came out unscathed on both occasions. Before the late s and the early s, the publication industry in Taiwan was so completely dominated by the KMT that printed words seldom told the native Taiwanese and aboriginal side of the story. The author acknowledges the biases and limitations of newspapers published under martial law. It is indeed important for contemporary researchers to take all printed sources produced under the watchful eyes of KMT censors with a grain of salt—whether they were books, newspapers, journal magazines, official reports, or social survey data.
That being said, Zhongyang ribao and Lianhe bao offer a plethora of interesting and illuminating traces, which shed light on the social world of the civil war migrants in Taiwan. Notwithstanding official propaganda and trumped-up facts, these two newspapers are a goldmine of information for this study because of two important reasons. First, the editors, the journalists, and the readers of Zhongyang ribao and Lianhe bao were mostly mainlanders, especially during the s and 60s. The content reflected the perspective of the civil war migrants, albeit censored by the KMT.
Second, newspapers in post-war Taiwan were not merely propaganda instruments of the state.
They also served as important social media. With wide circulation, Zhongyang ribao and Lianhe bao were the most important, if not the only source of information for the In order to exert a tight control on the media, the KMT announced a series of laws and regulations from to , which limited the freedom of speech and put a cap on the number of private newspapers. The press censorship laws were not rescinded until the January of See Wang Tien-pin, Taiwan baoye shi, Without the Internet and the television, people used newspapers to find accommodations, to look for jobs, to locate separated relatives, and to search for love matches.
While the front pages of these two newspapers were filled with monotonous anti-Communist slogans and official misinformation, the social news section, the arts and literature section, and the commercial ads section located in the back pages contained fascinating traces pertaining to the lives of the civil war migrants. These included social commentaries on housing shortage, news reports on crimes and suicides, debates on how to regulate the burgeoning illegal sex industry in the cities, and so on.
The classified ads were especially interesting. These tiny cubicles of information were paid for by real people with real needs. They offer remarkable insights into a variety of social phenomena in early post-war Taiwan. The information provided by Zhongyang ribao and Lianhe bao also led the author to other important sources.
For example, through the advertisements posted on the newspapers, the author was able to obtain titles of a dozen magazines published during the s and the s. Finally, in order to gain a more comprehensive perspective of the various social phenomena reported by the newspapers, the author spent several additional months scouring the libraries and archives of Academia Sinica and the National Central Library for other types of historical records. Since the 19th century, there has been some debate within the community of academic historians in North America in regard to the pros and cons of using newspapers as a chief primary source.
Many have raised concerns about the political and commercial interests behind news coverage. Nowadays, the general consensus among academic historians seems to be that newspapers could provide illuminating evidence, but the 47 reports in early post-war Taiwan have suggested that profit-driven civilian press such as Lianhe bao had a tendency to provide extensive coverage of sensationalized stories involving murders, rapes, and suicides. Consequently, anecdotal evidence derived from the newspapers needs to be checked with archival sources.
The author thus embarked on a new round of research. The results were a wide range of population statistics and social survey data collected by various government agencies, as well as studies produced by a university and a university hospital in Taipei. Many of these will be presented in tables and graphs.
They offer interesting information on the social profile of the civil war migrants, and help substantiate evidence found in the newspapers. The first and the most obvious question that one might raise about aggregated social data gathered by government institutions under the KMT is once again the validity of the information collected.
We will learn in the next section that the regime-in-exile actually inflated the size of its standing army during the s to in order to deter the CCP invasion. However, not all official numbers were fabricated. In the same section, the readers will also discover that the island-wide population census conducted by the Nationalist authorities in was a totally different story. Most importantly, the social data compiled by the provincial and municipal authorities in Taiwan were confidential information.
They were intended only for the eyes government officials. Moreover, the information gathered from the newspapers has to be analyzed and compared in conjunction with other types of sources. This is a typical question faced by number crunchers across different disciplines in the Social Sciences, and a nagging one. The author would admit that this is a difficult question which cannot be answered with satisfaction. Due to the lack of historical evidence, we know very little about how the social data were collected in Taiwan before the s except for the census. Even if we do gain insight on the shortcomings and biases of these reports, historians cannot go back in time to conduct their own surveys.
The only defence that the author would offer is that this monograph, like many other historical studies, is not set up to prove or disprove a particular social theory or to deal with problems associated with numerical causality. Rather, the objective is to tell a plausible story based on as much historical information as possible.
Social surveys and population statistics produced in the past are just one type of evidence utilized. They alone do not constitute social reality, but offer traces that enable historians to formulate interpretations of the past.
Based on the primary sources and investigative methodology stated above, the following sections will provide a preliminary social history of the civil war migrants in early post-war Taiwan. The unfolding narrative of this chapter will demonstrate the efficacy of using a combination of media sources and social survey data to tell the story.
A large collection of secondary sources, as well as some memoirs and personal narratives will also be employed as collaborating evidence. In some extreme cases, it has become difficult for scholars in certain areas of research to employ statistical data in supporting their arguments. The situation prompted a growing number of scholars to propose a more eclectic approach, which recognizes both the contributions and shortcomings of quantitative methods. Most were repatriated back to Japan between late and early , leaving the local inhabitants at around 6 million.
The Japanese had constructed state-of-the-art military installations, railways, industries, hydroelectric dams; built modern cities, where a small number of colonial elites thrived during fifty years of Japanese rule.
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However, the island was still a predominantly agrarian society in The intensive American bombing during the Pacific War destroyed a large number of roads, factories, and buildings in major cities between and Simply put, the situation was bleak for both the civil war exiles and the local population, who bore the brunt of the great exodus. Nonetheless, there is a twist to the story. The size of the The number is based on the last population census conducted by the Japanese colonial government in Nowadays, these figures have become conventional wisdom to be cited without the need for references.
Nevertheless, Corcuff was the first Western researcher to point out that the existing numbers might be too high because the KMT puffed up its standing army on paper in order to deter Communist invasion. This is despite the fact that there have been many different calculations. These included civil servants, journalists, merchants, migrant labour, and KMT garrison troops.
Their number was around 30, to 40, These people also became political exiles because the war had prevented them from returning to mainland China until the late s. For more, see Table 1. Nonetheless, there is a reasonable range of estimates based on the available sources. In the light of these facts, the numbers put forward by preceding studies are too high.
There are a few obvious problems to begin with when one tries to determine the exact number of the exiled population. First, there was no reliable national census in mainland China before that would allow the demographers at the present time to extrapolate back using mathematical models.
Third, the fall of government and disorganized mass flight made keeping accurate records extremely difficult, if not utterly impossible. For instance, the entrance and departure logs of the customs services in Taiwan do exist, but they are grossly inadequate.
The hotel breakfast is nothing special, but filling. Taipei Bike Tours. Green World ZhongXiao. Exile, displacement, and collective memory played a quintessential role in shaping the civil war migrants and their descendants. Costco is also a 2 minute walk away, and another mall called UTown is a short taxi ride from Fushin. We had a queen-sized bed which was raised up.
Many snuck in undetected, or entered with fake identifications. To make things worse, a considerable number of military personnel and their families arrived in restricted zones—airfields and naval bases that were not accessible to civilian customs officials.