"Such a theory of colonalism, or a discourse on colonial history, should be considered an event, a significant occurrence, in the history of colonization."

    “City” is a colonial project and product for the tribal society of indigenous people if we investigate the process of city’s formation. The colonizer determines the spatial organization according to specific functions to serve its political or economic interests. The colonial city also services as an agent of the civilizing project of the colonizer. Along with military violence, the colonizer employs the aesthetic form of city, the segregation of space and discursive interpretation of city to sustain a superior status and naturalize its dominance. Studying the life of a colonial city can help us to understand how a colonial power operates in a specific locality but relates to global situations well. 

    In this paper I situate “city” in the global colonization process from the 16^th century and analyze how the function and meaning of the city relates to the global politics and the global economy. In particular, the paper focuses on how city planning and public policy transform the spatial organization and city aesthetics. The paper uses Taipei as a case to analyze this colonial process. Taipei is the capital city in Taiwan now, and from the 16^th century it has been occupied by Spain, the Netherlands, Jen Chang-Kun, the Ch’ing Empire, Japan and most recently the KMT regime. I separate the historical stages according to the different colonial regime because the colonial power is the most important force to change the city landscape. In this paper I try to describe the most obvious characteristics of each regime and then define the colonial process in each case. 

   Most of the resources used in this paper are in Chinese and surely many mistranslation can not be avoided. Urbanization can also be seen as a “writing” process, in which the history of the city is inscribed on the city landscape, thus, the colonization of Taipei is a process of writing, interpreting, translating, erasing, and rewriting by the various colonizers. As for the voice of the colonized themselves, because of the limitation of time to write this paper, I do not discuss the resistance of these people. However they did resist, just as colonized people have done everywhere.

    Here is the story of Taipei……
 

    Taipei is located in the northern part of Taiwan Island in Taipei Basin. The basin, which is surrounded by mountains with the highest Qixing Mountain (1,220 meters)., is situated in the fork between Danshui River and Keelung River. The City itself, which slopes downward from east to west, occupies a total area of 27,179.97 hectares. The average temperature in Taipei is 22C. Average rainfall is 2,131 mm, with an average annual rainfall of 183 days a year. Danshui River, which lies to the west of Taipei and originates at the confluence of Dahan Creek and Xindian Creek, is not only the City’s main waterway, but also the second largest (160 kilometers) and the most important river in Taiwan. It converges with Jingmei Creek, Keelung River and Shuangxi Creek before flowing into the Taiwan Strait near Youchekou (see Fig. 1) (Urban Development Department, 1997:8).

    Geologically, Taipei can be broadly divided into volcanic, hill and basin areas. The volcanic areas are predominantly landsite and include cones and tablelands. The basin slopes from the east to the west from 1,100 meters to only a few meters above sea level. Most of its area is about 50 meters above sea level (Urban Development Department: 1997:9). 

    The region in Taipei basin about 300 to 650 meters high, consists of subtropical rain forest with cedar, arbutus and tree ferns. At a higher altitude (700 to 950 meters) there is temperate broadleaf forest, but this area is not large and has little variety. Above this is a mix of bush and grass where bamboo and miscanthus abound. The banks of the Danshui River are an excellent habitat that attracts about 250 kinds of birds (Urban Development Department, 1997:10). 

    Thirty million years ago, Taipei basin was sunk beneath the ocean. After millennia of alluvial deposits from the South China continental plate (in the area of Fujian province), a tectonic movement about 4 million years ago pushed Taiwan out from under the sea. Then, around 600,000 years ago, a fault along the Guanyin Mountain in the area of Linkou forced the hills downward to create the Taipei basin. Great changes in the weather 10,000 years ago caused the sea to rise, creating a lake in the Taipei basin. About 5,000 years ago, the waters receded and the basin became a center of human habitation (Urban Development Department, 1997:11). 

    It is not known exactly when humans began to inhabit Taipei basin, but archeological evidence suggests that people lived on the slopes of the surrounding mountains 7,000 years ago (Urban Development Department, 1997:11). Anthropologists recently discovered that the Ketagalan tribes, a branch of the Plains Aborigines (Austronesian people) inhabited in this area in the 13^th--14^th century, and some Ketagalan descendants still live in this area. We can estimate from Dutch censuses that in the 17^th century the total population was about 100,000 on the whole island. The Ketagalan had 37 villages located in Taipei’s basin and the whole population was 6,972 people (see Fig2). These aboriginal peoples lived by deer hunting and shifting cultivation of millet and rice. The first Dutch missionary, Candidus, was surprised to find that although the land was fertile and abundant, the indigenous people did not cultivate more than “absolutely necessary”. Aborigine farmers cultivated root crops, vegetables, fruits, and sugarcane in gardens and orchards or collected them from the wild. Rivers and the shoreline were also rich in crabs, shrimps, oysters and fish, which were collected by women. The teeming deer herds hunted by men yielded substantial supplies of venison for their diets and for a thriving trade. Rice was fermented for wine, which was offered as drink at all celebrations and as a sacrifice to the gods. Taboos and rituals focusing on the cultivation of grain emphasized the religious significance of these drinks and the importance of grain for subsistence as well (Shepherd, 1993: 32). 

    These aborigines lived in permanent village sites and only moved when warfare occurred. They protected their villages with impenetrable rings of dense, prickly bamboo. Within the village area, each household had a farmstead, with shelter for domestic animals, and patches of garden and orchard (Shepherd, 1993: 32-33). Households in villages practicing shifting cultivation generally gained exclusive rights to the crops they planted. They had the right to the fields they cleared only when they tilled them; more permanent allocations of land rights were unnecessary since uncleared land remained in plentiful supply. The distribution of the hunted animals depended on individual effort in hunting or constructing traps or snares and customary rules as well, which ordained that meat be distributed to spouses, senior kinsmen, age grades, and village political authorities (see Fig. 3)(Shepherd, 1993: 33). 
 

    The autonomous and self-sustainable livelihood of Taiwan’s Aborigines was strongly threatened by the colonial powers from the West and the North. Because of its natural resources and geographic location, Taiwan could not avoid being the prey of several colonizers in the countries that had recently become mercantilist. In the 16^th century, Portuguese sailors found this beautiful island with abundant green forest, called it “Illa Formosa” and drew it into the world map. In 1571, Spain landed in Manila of the Philippines and built it as a base for trade in East Asia. The Dutch founded the East India Company in 1602. In order to extend its business in East Asia, the Netherlands occupied Pounhu (a small island located in the Taiwan Strait) in 1603 and landed in Taijain (in the southern part of Taiwan) in 1624. Competing with the Netherlands and securing its trade in East Asia, Spain occupied northern Taiwan, including Keelong, Dan-Suin and I-Lan, from 1626 to 1662. Spain built fortresses on the highland in Keelong and Dan-Suin to protect the security of the settlers and manage the aboriginal villages. These castles were San Salvador, Eltenburg, San Domingo, Santissimo Trinidado, St. Antonio, St. Angustijn and St. Milan. Each castle could contain 300 people(李乾朗,1995:70).

    The objective of Spain in occupying northern Taiwan was to prevent an invasion by Japan and protect the security of Manila. The other objective was to resist the Netherlands and trade with the Min Empire (in China) and Japan. Paralleling these political and economic interests, Spain preached Roman Catholicism and employed northern Taiwan as a base (張勝彥, 1997:57). Religion is a psychological tool to construct the mind of the colonized and realize the political and economic interests of the colonizer as well. The colonizers used religion to mold the consciousness of the colonized to conform to that of the colonizers, thereby supplanting their original ideas about nature and human and destroying their self-identity. 4,000 aborigines converted to Roman Catholicism under Spanish colonization. The Spanish built several Roman Catholic churches including Todos Los Santos, San Luis Beltran, San Juan Bautista and San Jose in Keelong; Nuestra Senora de Rosario, Senar, Quimanri and Santo Domingo(李乾朗,1995:70). 

    However, Spain did not use a land tenure system to exploit the aborigines like that implemented by the Dutch in Southern Taiwan. In 1642 Holland defeated Spain and occupied Spanish castles. In 1662 Jen Chang-Kun (of the Min Empire in China) defeated the Dutch and ruled the whole island. Soon after, in 1683, the Ch’ing government defeated Jen Chang-Kun and claimed Taiwan as its territory(張勝彥, 1997:58). Taiwan entered another historical stage and encountered the greatest colonizer of the East—the Ch’ing Empire.
 

    In 1683, the Ch’ing government defeated Jen Chang-Kun. Some Chinese officials thought that Taiwan was an island inhabited by uncivilized barbarians and suggested that the Ch’ing government give it up and move those Chinese settlers and soldiers who had followed Jen Chang-Kun back to China. General Shi-Lun, who defeated the army of Jen Chang-Kun, argued that not only for the fertile land in Taiwan but also for the national secuity of the Ch’ing Empire, Taiwan should be integrated into the Ch’ing Empire. He emphasized that if the Ch’ing government lost Taiwan, then it would be occupied by pirates or by other countries. The Emperor agreed with General Shi-Lun’s opinion and incorporated Taiwan into the Ch’ing Empire’s territory. However, the Ch’ing government did not want to increase its guardian troops and financial burden. Of course, the welfare of the Taiwanese aborigines was not among its concerns(張勝彥, 1997:101). 

    How did the Ch’ing govern this island and deal with the relationship between the aborigines and Chinese settlers (the Han People)? Two important policies helped the Ch’ing government to manage this island with the least expenditure. One was the land tenure policy and the other was the Sinicization policy. First the Ch’ing Government classified the Taiwanese aborigines as “raw” or “cooked” according to their relation to Chinese authority (see Fig 4). The more docile aborigines who lived in villages or “tribes” on the western coastal plain were called “cooked” aborigines and interacted with the Han people more intensively in daily life. The Ch’ing government set up an “aboriginal boundary” to separate “cooked” aborigines from “raw” aborigines, who lived on central mountain and were more fierce and indomitable. The Ch’ing government also prohibited the Han people from crossing the boundary to interfere the livelihood of the Mountain Aborigines and cause any unstable situation in the frontier’s society (Shepherd, 1993:7).

    The Plains Aborigines on the other hand were seen as a means to control the Han settlers in Taiwan. From the beginning, the Ch’ing government attempted to limit Chinese migration to Taiwan because it feared Taiwan would become a rebel base, and it also feared that the Chinese settlers would become intruders and disturb the aboriginal community, which would damage the stability of the frontier’s society. The way for the Ch’ing government to control the Taiwan frontier was to preserve “the livelihoods of the Plains Aborigines, including their rights to land, and even enlist Plains Aborigines braves in pacification campaigns against rebellious Chinese settlers and other aborigines “ (Shepherd, 1993:3). The Ch’ing government also prohibited the Chinese settlers from bringing their families with them. This policy was able to pacify these migrant farm laborers and make them behave well in order to get access to the mainland and their families there (Shepherd, 1993:15). 

    The most important “civilizing” project of the Plains Aborigines was Confucian education, which was an important means by which the Ch’ing government effectively controlled the Plains Aborigines. Confident of the superiority of Chinese culture and Confucian morality, most Chinese officials assumed that civilization and sinicization of the Plains Aborigines would come gradually. These aborigines would understand the self-evident superiority of Confucian morality someday, but until then, they would conform to government control without question. The Chinese world order was a sinocentric one that defined the Han people’s Empire as the Central Kingdom of culture and civilization; all other countries or tribal societies stood outside its bounds were barbarians who needed Chinese culture to moralize and educate themselves. The important characteristics of this civilization were the Confucian social hierarchy, the five cardinal relationships (emperor and officials, father and son, teacher and student, elder and younger brother, husband and wife), and the forms of ritual propriety that embodied and expressed these principles. Confucianism actually defined the superiority of Chinese civilization in moral rather than economic, political, or technological terms. In Confucian political theory the dominator governs people by refining and transforming them through education (Shepherd, 1993:370).

    One official of the Chin Government, Shen Ch’I-yuan, argued that good government would transform the Han immigrants into rooted local inhabitants, cooked aborigines into Han, and raw aborigines into cooked. He thought that the ultimate expectation of Confucian governance was not just that aborigines would become civilized, law-abiding subjects, but that they would all be transformed into Han people. To achieve these goals, officials in Taiwan initiated a variety of schemes to institute formal instruction of aborigine youths and set up tribal schools (Shepherd, 1993:372). 

    The other important institution of Sinicization was intermarriage between the Chinese and the aborigines. Many of the plains groups were matriarchal societies and married uxorilocally. Because the “woman’s side of the house” extended aborigine families, aborigines lacked the patrilineally transmitted surnames that the Chinese considered a hallmark of a well-ordered kinship system. In 1758 the Ch’ing government announced the Sinicization policy that all family units should adopt a wide variety of Han surnames. As a result, some of the Plains Aborigines chose a surname by its meaning or by the sound resemblance to their aboriginal names (Shepherd, 1993:384). 

    In Plains Aboriginal society, youths chose their own marriage partners through courtship, and premarital sexual liaisons were condoned and even celebrated. This marriage customs were extremely different from the Chinese parental arrangement of marriage. However, the great challenge to Plains Aborigine families and society came from the loss of aborigine women who married Han immigrants without families. Because a Han son-in-law might provide Chinese business and political connections for his wife’s kin and cooperate with them in economic enterprises, more and more aboriginal women chose to marry Chinese. In these virilocal marriages (the couple lived in the husband’s house), intermarriage meant the loss of aborigine women to Han communities. But when marriage was uxorilocal (the couple lived in the wife’s house), with industrious Chinese as sons-in-law, the aborigine family would increase its income but eventually paid for this increase with a loss in land to the Chinese because a Chinese laborer who married an aborigine bride uxorilocally could eventually gain control of the land inherited by his wife. These Chinese males might adopt aborigine customs, dress, and speech, but they would raise their children with a sense of Chinese identity and their sons would own the land (Shepherd, 1993:384-386). Gradually, Chinese culture and Confucian morality became dominant in this island; the Plains Aborigines were Sinicized and lost their land through intermarriage. 

    As previously mentioned, Taipei basin was full of marshland and inhabited by Ketagalan people, who built 37 villages and lived on shifting cultivation and deer-hunting (see Fig ). In 1709 five Chinese settlers applied for a license from the Ch’ing government to cultivate the wild land around Dan-Suin area. Gradually the Han settlers followed the Dan-Suin river and built their settlement in Taipei basin. They traded wine, meat and cloth with the indigenous people and cultivated fields. From 1733 to 1800, about 70 years, the land of Taipei basin was almost entirely cultivated and transformed into a Han village (侯怡泓,1987:57).

    Taipei did not develop from a small settlement and become a city gradually, but instead grew by incorporating with different small villages. About 1740, Shin-Chuan developed because of its excellent location near the Dan-Suin river, then became the political and economic center of Taipei. Manga developed after Shin-Chuan due to the deposits of harbor. The name Manga derives from the word for the kind of boats that the Plains Aborigines would row into Manga to trade. In 1808 the Ch’ing government stationd about 1,400 soldiers in Manga. In 1820 Manga became the political, economic and military center of northern Taiwan. About 4,500 households inhabited Manga. 

    A massive clan feud between the Jiangiou and the Quanzhou immigrants in 1853 greatly decreased Manga’s prosperity. Its harbor also began to silt up and the local inhabitants became increasely insular. Consequently, the commercial center moved again to Dadaocheng, located in the northwest of Taipei. The location was named after the plaza used for drying grains. The earliest streets in Dadaocheng were built between 1851 and 1875. Chinese merchants imported commodities from northern China, Shiamen and Hong Kong to trade with local farmers and aborigines, and exported oil, rice, sugar, tea and camphene to China, Japan and the West. These merchants organized themselves as trade unions that also contributed to the prosperity of Dadaocheng. 

    Trade in tea and camphene brought by the foreign business firms greatly influenced the development of Dadaocheng and Taipei city. In 1861, the Chi’ng government was defeated by England and France; as a result, Tainan, Dan-Suin, Keelong and Kaosiung were opened as foreign trading ports according to the Teijin Treaty. England, France and Germany sent consuls to Taiwan and founded customhouses in the port city for trade. In 1866, the English merchant John Dodd imported tea species to Taipei to grow. In 1872, six foreign business firms monopolized the trade in Taiwan’s tea. Due to the good quality of the tea, the tea trade made Dadaocheng from a local commodity market to an international trade station. The tea farmers cut down camphene trees to make camphene then grew tea on the hill around Taipei basin. Tea exports not only made Taipei the most important city of Taiwan because of the revenue, but also changed the natural landscape of Taipei basin as well(侯怡泓,1987:63). 

    In this historical stage, European settlers’ invasion caused many wars in East Asia in 19^th century. The Ch’ing government considered Taiwan’s increasingly important role as a national security frontier and decided to increase control. Imperial Commissioner Shen Bao-zhen was authorized to make the city the administrative center of northern Taiwan. In 1883, the ideal city began in the area bounded by Xindrung, Manga and Dadaocheng. Taipei was one of the last cities to be built according to the traditional principles of geomancy.

    The ideal regular gridiron structure of streets and blocks was precisely aligned the four cardinal directions and emphasized the north-south axis. The symbolic organization according to Fong [Feng]-Shui theory was adjusted in construction by twist of east and west walls in order to direct to the highest mountain (Qixing Mountain). The building of Taipei-Fu, the Government complex, directing to the North Star created the central north-south axis. The formal grid structure of Chinese Ideal City plan and the application of Fong [Feng]-Shui theory transformed Taipei City to the imagination of Chinese world order (Chuang, 1992:28). In 1887, Taiwan was formally founded as a province of the Ch’ing Empire and Taipei was the provincial capital (see Fig.5). 

    Nevertheless, the Ch’ing Empire was an agricultural state and self- sustainable country, Taiwan was defined as a defensive frontier not an advanced site to expand its Empire. Unlike other industrial nation-state, they needed to expand their territory for natural resources and trade market. Furthermore, the Ch’ing government refused to modernize its political institution and economic production; as a result, compared to other industrialized nation-state, it was weak in national defense. In 1895, the Ch’ing Empire was defeated by a newly modernized Japan in the Sino-Japanese war. Taiwan was the sacrifice of the war and become the first colony of the young Japanese Empire.
 

    Japan is the first modernized country in East Asia; however at that time Japan had not entered into the highly monopolistic capitalist stage. The material conditions limited Japan to realize the financial capitalist imperialism. However, in the ideological level, Japan had already become an empire. Some Japanese scholars claimed that: “ Since Taiwan now is our territory, this give our great Japan a chance to expand itself. If we can develop Taiwan successfully, then it will become a base to south-advance to the Philippines, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore (矢內原忠雄, 1987:10). 

    In order to control the highly sinicized society in Taiwan, the Japan government implemented its assimilation policy gradually; the first was the “No Guidance Stage”, the second stage was “The Interior Territory Elongation” , the third was “The Japanization Policy”. Taiwan Governor-General Office was totally controlled by the Japanese colonizers, the local government was under the police’s dominance as well. Almost every affair in daily life were interfered by the policemen. Employing this police’s institution, the Japanese government could control this island thoroughly and transform Taiwanese to the docile Japanese and loyal national citizens.

    In the aspect of city planning, Taiwan was imported a modern concept of city planning and architectural management institution from the West by the Japanese colonizer. Building an orderly, well-managed and high efficient colonial city could contribute to the political and economic interests of the colonizer through its dominance of the whole country, and the great colonial architecture also had a visionary and bodily disciplinary effect on the colonized. But the most threaten thing for the Japanese colonial officials were the local diseases, especially Taiwan is located in the interface of tropic and sub-tropic region, where the climate is hot and humid and extremely different from the Japan’s locality. 

    In order to implement new sanitation program and reform the public health’s condition, the Japanese government actively engaged in constructing the sewerage facility, controlling household architecture, separating unsanitary activities and setting park and segregative official residential area. Among these new steps, the sewerage program was considered as the most important. But before building the sewerage system, the plan of the streets and roads had to confirm first. As a result, from 1899 to 1911, the Japanese founded the institution of city zoning regulation and implemented in major cities in Taiwan. This institution gave the local government the authority to readjust the city zoning and gave the local police to control the city architecture. The major aspects of this institution was:

1.The restriction of building on the reserved zoning

    In order to construct the sewerage facility as convenient as possible in the future, in 1899 the “The Rules of Sewerage in Taiwan” was promulgated. The new rules restricted people to build any buildings on the reserved land. 

2.The control of household’s buildings

    In order to prevent diseases and maintain public health, in 1900 “The Architectural Rules of Household in Taiwan” was promulgated. All the plans and designs of the construction of buildings had to official formal admission. The local governors need to investigate the whole designs according to the rules to prevent the damage of mice, humidity, earthquake, fire and water drainage. Especially the design of toilet, bathroom and bathroom were the focal points of the investigation.

3.The Committee of City Zoning

    “The Committee of City Zoning in Taipei” was founded in 1897 and responsible for the investigation of “City Zoning Regulation” and the sanitary facility. The committee was the consultant organization of the Governor-General. All the committee members were organized by the experienced officials in Taiwan Governor-General Office or from the military department. The city planning and city zoning readjust had to be reviewed by the Governor-General Office(張景森,1993:10-14). 

    The City Zoning Regulation not only contributed to the public health and diseases prevention, it also distorted and demolished the previous Chinese city’s fabric and Chinese buildings. For examples, the Taipei Confucian Temple was used for barracks and sickrooms in the beginning. The previous ideal city of the Taipei Fu was destroyed and the city walls were tore down in order to widen the streets and roads. The streetscape changed because of new style of facade. The gates of city was symbolically left but several great and fascinating governmental buildings were erected nearly to demonstrate the superior colonial power of the Japanese government(李乾朗,1995:272).

    In the beginning of the colonization, the Japanese government had realized that to remap a great city plan and build grand architectures is the necessary conditions for effective colonization. At that time, the Japanese just had experienced modern architectural movement (1870~) and this movement also influenced Taiwan’s colonial architecture. The Japanese colonizer employed baroque and geometry planning to rearrange the spatial organization of Taipei and reinforce the colonial power of Japan. Taipei was the most important political center, so all the official buildings were directly designed by the Construction Department of the Governor-General Office or by the national competition. For example, the buildings of Governor-General Office were a winning work of 50,000 Japanese dollar in 1909(see Fig. 6). This grand renaissance building was made of reinforced concrete instead of Chinese wood structure. It was five-story high building and the greatest building at that time. The building was directing to the east-west axis instead of the north-south axis of the Chinese ideal city. Following the Governor-General Office, the other governmental buildings were built by this architectural style and direction(李乾朗, 1995:273-275).

    To build Taiwan as the Japanese south-advanced site to the Southeast Asia, the Japanese government had built long-term expansion plan of several major cities and reformed the characteristics of these cities. For example, Taipei was a political center, Taichung was a residential city and Kaosiung and Keelong were ports and industrial cities. Many cities flourishing in the Ch’ing dynasty were decayed in this period. However, the Japanese government had completed 72 cities’ city plans totally and announced “The New Plan for Greater Taipei” in which Taipei was designed as a city of 66.76 square kilometers and 600,000 population in 1932(李乾朗, 1995:273-275).

    This modern city planning made by the Japanese colonial power transformed Taipei to one of the most modernized city in East Asia. The city function of Taipei effectively dominated the whole island and contributed large amount of agricultural production to the Japanese colonizers. Under the Japanese colonial modernization, Taiwan’s society had transform from Chinese folk society to modern society that was very different from the social situation in China. This big social and cultural gap with the contradict nationalism between China and Japan in the World War Two caused the 228 massacre in 1947 and the internal social division in the next historical stage.
 

    How to define the nature of the KMT regime that retreated from China because of civil war in 1949 and received Taiwan from Japan is a very controversial issue in Taiwan now. Most Chinese scholars strongly refuse to define the KMT regime as an internal colonial state because this definition will challenge the legitimacy of the privilege of the new Chinese immigrants after 1949. However, from the local Taiwanese viewpoint, the KMT regimes really possessed the characteristics of the colonial government, for example:

1.The dominant elites in highly consistence

    The KMT regime built a complicated statecraft to symbolize the whole China, and the new Chinese immigrants almost occupied the position of the dominant class. They followed and implemented the policies of the KMT regime and formed a close relation of authoritarianism and clientelism. 

2.Strict social control by the Martial Law

    The Martial Law was implement from 1950 and it restricted the freedom of immigration, speech, assembly and association and media control. 

3.The education of nationalist ideology

    Through schools’ education and mass media’s dissemination, to spread the Chinese culture, anticommunist ideas and other ideologies that served the interests of the state. The KMT government even fabricated a version of historical and geographic textbook to prove its legitimate dominance of whole China and Taiwan.

4.To entice and differentiate the local elites

    The KMT regime used the local election to absorb the local elites and gave them interests for loyalty. It also used the distribution of the interests to destroy the consolidation of these local Taiwanese.

5.The supervised agencies

    The spies of supervised agencies were spread everywhere to report the behaviors of certain people. This institution really had its psychological effect to threaten the dominated to behave well and censor themselves automatically.

6.Alienation of the local power 

    Because of the high-pressure domination and the loss of local elites in 228 massacre, the local people were apathetic about public affairs. Most local Taiwanese engaged themselves in running business(張勝彥,1997: 308-310).

    In political sphere the KMT government effectively built its colonial statecraft to manage the whole island. In economic situation the KMT regime inherited the colonial legacies from the Japanese government, which were the agricultural business, including land management, forestry investigation, irrigation facility, fertilizers and species, and some basic industries. The KMT government received 822 Japanese businesses, sold 376 businesses and the others were transformed to public enterprises belong to the government. 

    In 1950 the Korea War happened, Taiwan’s location as a strategic point for military action was increasingly important. The U.S. began its military aid and economic aid to Taiwan to employ Taiwan as an anticommunist frontier; the military aid was about 2,480,000,000 US dollars and the economic aid was 1,480,000,000 US dollars from 1951 to 1967. All these financial aids and the direct investment or technology transfer counted about 20,500,000,000 US dollars, and this contributed to stabilize Taiwan’s financial situation and initiate the dependent development on the U.S. after World War Two.

    However, the KMT regime did not care about long-term city planning in Taiwan, it also educated the people that they would return to China someday, staying in Taiwan was just a transitional period. As a result, most of the institution and policies were inherit directly from the Japanese government. However, the KMT government took some symbolic actions to demonstrate the Chinese dominance and built an imaginary fatherland, for example, it demolish the Japanese shrines, monumental buildings and stone tablets and changed the street names to project the whole China. 

    With the ideology of temporary staying, the KMT government did not seriously resolve the housing problems even though the population was rapidly increasing because of 1,000,000 Chinese soldiers and refugees. Most of the Japanese official residential areas were occupied by those dominant Chinese elites, but many Chinese refugees were left invisible; they moved to major cities and built temporal squatters to live by themselves. The urban function was almost paralyzed, as a result some servicemen’s residential community was built to meet the housing demand. These communities also resulted in spatial segregation of the Chinese and local Taiwanese. However 292,894 people (about 28.13% of the whole population in Taipei) still lived in temporal squatters in 1964 and many Chinese poor people still have not own their own houses now. During almost 40 years’ domination, the KMT government tried hard to define illegal settlement, how to legitimate some settlements and how to evict them without serious resistance. The ideology of temporary residence in Taiwan blinded the government to provide policy to house these people. (張景森,1993:43-53). 

    Many national, regional or urban plans had been made although they did not have the possibility to implement because of lacking of analysis of the reality. “City Planning, drawing on the desk, hanging on the wall” was a self- ridiculous proverb of the city planners in Taiwan. For example, urban construction, technician education, public health and public housing were ascribed as important infrastructures of “Four Years Economic Development” from1961-1964. Moreover, in 1964 the planning experts, Mr. and Mrs. Monson were invited to Taiwan to give some advises about urban planning and improve spatial efficiency. They predicted that the urban population would increase to 17,000,000 that would damage the economic development in Taiwan. They suggested that government had to make a “National Land Development Plan” and try to distribute the population reasonably and create several cities to attract the industries and the population. This planning ideology that pursued the efficiency of spatial organization and treated urban planning as tool of economic development was the postwar paradigm of the third world countries(張景森,1993:65-69). However, the national and regional plans were not really implemented and uneven development between Taipei city and countryside was exaggerated because of the unequal resources investment of the government and the specific political situation of Taipei.

    For the KMT regime, city planning was not only a dominant tool but also the mechanism of interests distribution. The KMT government invested most public resources and facilities in Taipei and removed the polluted factories to its periphery cities and towns. Consequently, Taipei city and the dominant elites could maintain a hegemonic center to control other area in Taiwan. Some local elites described the status of the non-Taipei region just as colonies (蔡采秀,1996:338). The KMT government also used city planning to favor the local elites and local factions to get interests from local construction and land speculation. Most local factions in Taiwan were related to the construction business. They also provided cheap, low quality, mass-produced apartments for most low and middle class or rural –urban immigrants to resolve the housing problem. These local factions would show their support and loyalty for the KMT government through the mobilization of election. This pattern of exchange of interests and loyalty between the KMT regime and the local elites contributed to the effective colonial dominance for almost half century(蔡采秀,1996:338-348).

    In 1987 the Martial Law was abandoned. The urban population was over 2,600,000. A new historical stage is coming, the process of political democratization, economic liberalization and cultural localization are proceeding simultaneously. Diverse social movements with different concerns are flourishing and the city landscape is changing by these interactive powers. However, Taiwan is also entering the new global economy at the same time, so is it a process of decolonization that the people already gained their autonomy, or a process of recolonization that Taiwan is integrated into the new world order? 
 

    Spain, the Netherlands, Jen Chang-Kun, the Ch’ing Empire, Japan and the KMT regime, these different colonial regimes came to Taiwan with their specific colonial projects. These projects ignored even opposed to the interests of the local people living on this island, especially when these projects contradicted and were inconsistent to each other but they occurred on the same site and transformed the landscape dramatically. These colonial project had different concepts of space and time, the notions of domesticity, the boundary of public and private, the class distinction, the cultural taste and the aesthetic judgement, but they all disguised as civilizing projects to favor these colonized people. 

    For Spain, Taipei was a site to disseminate its business and religion to East Asia and a frontier to prevent Japanese invading Manila. The Ch’ing Empire treated Taiwan as a safeguarded frontier to protest the agricultural empire state from the threat of the European colonizers. Through the process of sinicization, the Ch’ing Empire successfully transformed this island to a Chinese dominant society. Japan was the first modernized Empire in Asia, Taiwan was its first colony to experiment the Japanese colonialism that incorporated the concepts and institutions of the European modernization. The KMT regime from China built an imaginary fatherland with a sophisticated bureaucracy that controlled the whole island and absorbed the resources from the rural area. With the colonial legacies from Japan and the military and economic aids from the U.S., Taiwan successfully achieved a dependent development and armed itself as an anticommunist frontier.

    Four hundred years of colonization has gone, now the new millennium is coming. Some local people are engaged in weaving their memory, rewriting their own history and preserving local historical relics; in contract, some people are devoted to chasing the economic growth, renewing the obsolete settlements and erecting the modern high-rising skyscraper. In order to promote the competitive ability over other countries, the government is declaring that people need to step out of the miserable past and look forward to the 21th century. Following this announcement, a series of policies are implemented to construct Taiwan as an Asia-Pacific management center and integrate itself in the new global politics and capitalism. No matter these policies are new dominant projects to manipulate the people’s consciousness and achieve specific political or economic interests or they are sophisticated strategies to escape away from the inquiry of self-identity and the threat from the global hegemony. Amnesia of Taipei, with an indifferent mask to cover all the pains of colonial trauma, is the most desolate landscape in the end of this millennium. 

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