Apples in action: Territoriality and land use politics of mountain agriculture in Taiwan (original) (raw)

"A bloodless social revolution": Land reform and multiple cropping in Cold War Taiwan, 1950-1979

Plants, People, Planet, 2024

Multiple cropping, the cultivation of several crops on the same land in a year, occupied an important part of Taiwan's agricultural research from 1950 to 1970. This research originated in the context of Taiwan's land reform and diversification programs and their connections to the government's political ambition to maximize food production. The study of how multiple cropping was politicized and depoliticized by different actors helps to expand the narratives of the Green Revolution in Asia, analyze their legacies, and highlight Taiwan's role in the international exchange of visions of agricultural development during the Cold War.

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Apples and oranges: political crops with and against the state in rural China

Journal of Political Ecology

In this article we bring together conceptual threads from political ecology, commodity geographies and agrarian studies to enable an inquiry into the political nature of crops. This inquiry is underpinned by the idea that crops are not just a means or a target of political projects, but can have effects through their webs of relations, and that their different capacities might mean that they may differently engage in political projects. This article examines how specialized cash crops in rural China are enrolled in state projects. We explore the cases of orange orchards and apple orchards in different locations in Hebei by detailing flows of capital and expertise, and smallholder-crop relations. Our analysis demonstrates that a political ecology of cash crops can provide insight into the politics of successive state projects that have been rolled out in China's agricultural communities. We argue that through evolving relations with smallholders, the attributes of the crops thems...

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Sowing Seeds and Knowledge: Agricultural Development in Taiwan and the World, 1925–1975

East Asian Science, Technology and Society, 2015

This article traces the rise of agricultural development in Taiwan and its interactions with the rest of the world, emphasizing the agency and transformations of the Global South. In the 1920s, American scientists and missionaries began experimenting with development in China through local universities and villages. From then until the early 1970s, American, Chinese, and Taiwanese scientists integrated farmers’ associations, laboratory research, agricultural extension, and applied industrial research. Starting in the 1960s with the rise of the Cold War, Taiwanese technocrats packaged their practices of agricultural development into missions sent abroad to Southeast Asia and Africa and in new multinational research centers established in Taiwan. This approach toward development combined different schools of thought: the modernist “Green Revolution” practice of massive technical inputs and selected, high-yielding crop cultivars, and socially oriented practices that utilized grassroots methods of knowledge collection and dissemination. The Taiwanese emphasized their successes in both high technology and social reformist approaches when implementing development in the Global South. Contrary to narratives that portray development as a high modernist project enacted by the Global North upon the Global South, this article argues that Global South actors co-opted and redeployed development for their own political purposes, following their own historical experiences with development, and in accordance with their own visions of modernity.

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Cultivating (post)colonialism: Architecture, landscape, and the politics of the Taiwan Sugar Corporation

Neocolonialism and Built Heritage, 2019

This study investigates the ways colonial-era institutions and infrastructures have shaped the environment and political discourse in postcolonial Taiwan. It traces the impact of China and Japan's rule on the island, including how the introduction of sugarcane agriculture by the Japanese and subsequent economic policies under the Kuomintang (KMT) regime contributed to environmental degradation. The paper analyzes the role of these colonial structures within the democratization process and the emergence of the environmentalist movement in the 1980s. The narrative examines how each political party utilizes land and infrastructure for nation-building agendas, carving distinct images of the Taiwanese landscape into public consciousness. The paper also explores the tensions between two primary political positions: unification with mainland China versus Taiwanese nationalism and independence. By contemplating how colonial structures may be repurposed to foster a more inclusive, democratic built environment, the study contributes to discussions about postcolonialism and geopolitics, considering their implications on cultural and environmental policies. Furthermore, it provides insight into the transformation of colonial infrastructures for community building, economic development, and historical narrative construction.

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Forest Claims, Conflicts and Commodification: The Political Ecology of Tibetan Mushroom-Harvesting Villages in Yunnan Province, China

The China Quarterly, 2000

Villages scattered along the steep slopes of north-west Yunnan present a serene picture of colourful prayer flags fluttering from rooftops and only the occasional vehicle raising dust from dirt roads. But for the past few years, summers have been a time of intense and often violent conflict. In late July, neighbouring villages prepare to fight once again over access to forests which produce wild matsutake mushrooms, a high-value Japanese luxury food that has been harvested and exported from the region for the past 12 years. The quiet summer nightlife in the nearby county seat has been transformed to a bustling mushroom market busiest between midnight and dawn. Why has this market come into existence, and what have been its effects on access to and control over forest resources?

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"A highly cultivated country": Charles Le Gendre's mappings of western Taiwan, 1869-1870 Cover Page

Democratizing Control Over the Landscape: A Genealogy of Taiwan’s Infrastructural Bureaucracy

From the South: Global Perspectives on Landscape & Territory, 2019

The essay explores the genealogy of bureaucratic organization within a process of democratization in the administration of large-scale landscape infrastructure in Taiwan. Relying on a combination of historical research, mapping, on-site investigation, and field interviews, three types of interconnected organizations are highlighted: the local grassroots administrative system (hoko/lilin), irrigation associations, and the Taiwan Sugar Corporation. Each operate on different drives and abilities to alter the local environment to suit their interests. Highlighting the coevolution of these organizations reveals the successes and gaps in their abilities to solve key issues that arise as a result of large-scale operations on the landscape. Each of these organizations has evolved from their established origins under an authoritarian colonial state in Taiwan, and have grown to embody new forms of decentralized, democratic control over the environment. This has largely been driven by politics of democratization and the ability of democratic institutions to respond to acute imbalances and local differences across the landscape. In looking to democratize environmental processes, much can be learned from how these once colonial institutions have undergone democratic change, and the organizational pressures that they face today in confronting an evolving set of challenges such as climate change, political divergence and economic stress.

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Tea forest in the making: Tea production and the ambiguity of modernity on China's southwest frontier

The simultaneous but incompatible desires for both ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘advancement’’ have produced the ‘‘ambiguity of modernity’’ in the areas of minority nationalities (shaoshu minzu diqu) on China’s south- west frontier. This paper, in accordance, directly addresses the ambiguity of modernity through the inves- tigation of the tea landscape in Yunnan. This essay builds on Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier’s ‘‘global assemblage’’ framework to analyze the relationship between the ‘‘global form’’ of modernity and the sit- uated assemblages of ‘‘ambiguity of modernity’’ in southwest China. Data are based on ethnographic research in the village of Mangjing, located in Jingmai Mountain, a renowned tea mountain in Yunnan. Most of the villagers in Mangjing are one of the minority nationalities of China, Bulang. I discuss the state-led project in transforming the modern tea plantation for ‘‘restoring’’ a landscape deemed as ‘‘ancient tea forest’’ (guchalin) in Mangjing. In addition, I address Bulang villagers’ and government offi- cials’ multiple responses to the transformation of tea landscapes. I argue that the transformation of tea landscapes has been the practice to turn the ‘‘global form’’ of modernity into the shifting ‘‘assemblages’’ amongst tradition, modernity, science, and nature. The ambiguity of modernity has emerged from the shifting assemblages, providing both the state and Bulang villagers more leeway to symbolically and physically (re)produce meanings for the tea landscapes to meet the contingent market demand for tea. The transformation of tea landscapes, however, has become another process to perpetuate Bulang villag- ers’ social status of being ‘‘low quality’’ as China’s minority nationalities.

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Anxiety of food nationalism: Dilemmas of bordering in the Vietnam-Taiwan tea trade Cover Page

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Humanities and Social Sciences Land and economic policies of Japan in the colonial Taiwan frontier: A case study on the Da-Nanao plain Cover Page