The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [149]
Before the arrival of the KMT, Taiwan had been largely an agrarian society, with many families drawing little more than a subsistence income directly from the land. Those who remember that era describe a poor world, yet one infused with a slow-paced, simple beauty. Sayling Wen, co-author of Taiwan Experience, wrote that few people owned chairs or tables in his childhood village: families ate sweet-potato porridge as they stood or squatted around a wooden bench; when meals were cleared away, the bench might be moved under a tree and used as a place to nap. Children walked to school barefoot, and did not receive their first pair of shoes until their middle school years. At night, with no electricity, adults lit oil lamps while children captured fireflies and kept them in jars.
But this life would soon vanish forever. Within a few decades, the sleepy agricultural society of Taiwan would morph into a global high-tech superpower, one of the wealthiest regions per capita on the planet.
During the 1950s and 1960s American aid provided about 40 percent of Taiwan’s income. Between 1951 and 1964, Washington gave the Nationalists $100 million in funding every year, as well as free supplies in certain industries. But government officials recognized that if the United States had been unable to keep the Nationalists in power on the mainland, it might one day be unable or unwilling to do so on Taiwan. Taiwan would have to become self-reliant, and, thanks to aggressive economic planning, it succeeded.
First the Nationalist government introduced land reform and redistribution, coercing the native aristocracy to sell much of their property at low prices to tenant farmers. By monopolizing the rice and fertilizer markets, and through price controls that encouraged farmers to produce ever more crops, the Nationalists created a “developmental squeeze,” producing a surplus of capital which they funneled into nonagricultural industries.
Next they cultivated light industries for export. Investment and entrepreneurship were encouraged in labor-intensive fields, such as canned foods, household appliances, textiles, rubber, and plastic goods. “Turn your living room into a factory,” proclaimed Shieh Tung-ming, then the provincial governor and later the vice president of Taiwan. “Don’t cry about not having a production factory,” he advised the people. “The living room can be your factory.” This policy transformed typical households in Taiwan into warehouses stuffed with plastic, which the family would assemble for eventual export to other countries in exchange for hard currency. 45
Soon, the island’s success in exports resulted in huge trade surpluses. By 1965, when the United States cut off aid to Taiwan to husband its resources for the Vietnam War, the island had become financially, though not militarily, self-reliant. In fact, Taiwan had outstripped all other countries in its rate of growth, expanding faster than any other economy in the world. In the 1970s, the Nationalist government began investing in petrochemicals and steel, shifting the island’s attention from light to heavy industries. During that decade, Taiwanese companies also began manufacturing calculators and electronic games, which set the stage for Taiwan’s later entry into, and dominance of, certain sectors of the fast-growing computer industry.
The island’s economic boom propelled thousands of young Chinese to seek an education in preparation for a career in technology. This was a new trend, for under Japanese occupation the native Taiwanese had not been encouraged to study the physical sciences or engineering, perhaps out of concern that such expertise could be exploited to build weapons that would be used against their colonizers. Most sons of the elite had majored in non-defense-related fields, such as medicine and education. But now the hot fields on the island were physics and engineering—skills desperately sought by burgeoning high-tech industries both in Taiwan and abroad.†
Before long, Taiwan’s most valuable export would be its own