When Taiwan was a colony under Japanese rule, imperial politics and economic expansion allowed Taiwanese to travel throughout Eastern Asia. During this period, China, which had a cultural affinity with Taiwan, became the point of reference for Taiwanese intellectuals to seek cultural enlightenment and decolonization because of China’s geographical location, modernity, and social movements. This study explored the structure of beliefs about China held by Taiwanese intellectuals as well as their experiences as sojourners and their written texts by examining the editorials, events, communications with China, and editors’ notes recorded in the Taiwan Minbao series of newspapers. The subjects of this study were Taiwanese intellectuals under Japanese rule who were active in Taiwan’s sociopolitical and cultural enlightenment movements in the 1920s. In addition to being experienced in living in China, they were bilingual as a result of receiving both traditional Chinese education and modern colonial education. On the basis of the critical periods in Taiwan’s social thought transformation, the years of 1920, 1927, 1937, and 1945 were selected as temporal points, with “China” as the parameter, to analyze how multiple overlapping identities affect Taiwanese intellectuals’ cognition and cultural vision about China under Japanese rule.
According to this problematic and research route, the Taiwanese intellectuals’ writings regarding places and circumstances in China, history and culture, and their emotions as travelers all reflect their perspectives of and experiences with colonial society, the modern world and culture, and capitalist hegemony at the periphery of the empire. Gradational changes in their narratives about China, political practices, and mental structure demonstrate how Taiwanese intellectuals used modernity and colonialism as a model for their narratives from the 1920s to 1945. The focus of their speculations shifted from cultural enlightenment of intellectuals to the survival and reality of the general public. Their narrative perspective also changed from personal explorations of modernization and emotional conflicts with ethnicity to social observations of the alienation that resulted from the conflict between imperial capital and ethnic capital. Historical events and changes that occurred in 1937 once again forced Taiwanese to confront colonialism. Therefore, Taiwanese intellectuals' Chinese narrative skips the reality of Japan colonial expansion in China intentionally, and discusses safeguarding of national culture and wartime reconstruction. The mental structure of Taiwanese intellectuals under Japanese rule was deeply influenced by two concerns: delayed modernity and decolonization. Thus, after the 1920s, the element of modernity in Taiwanese narratives of China diverged from normative concepts of values toward the contemporary significance of social situations, moved onto the modern war that served as the symbol of the era, and finally evolved into the mentality of democratic politics. Furthermore, Taiwanese migration changed from a mode of centrifugal search beyond the island to a centripetal search approach within the island. Therefore, their feelings about China changed from recognition to alienation.
The objective of this study, which examines the experiences of Taiwanese intellectuals in China and their writings, was to reveal the mental framework of intellectuals in Taiwan under Japanese rule who searched for identity, belonging, and the value of enlightenment through geographical relocation. In addition, this study explored how the meaning of “China,” originally constructed through the concepts of Chineseness, modernity, and migration changed in Taiwan throughout the decolonization process. The Chinese narratives demonstrated Taiwanese intellectuals with double-edge position of non-Chinese and non-Japanese how to response their self-survival problem after going through different periods and geographical spaces of China. Their experiences and writings about China form real introspective interpretations of modernity by Taiwan’s political actors, witnessing the gradual emergence of modernity in Taiwan.