While imperialism may result in some benefits for those under rule, weighing up individual cases of good and bad misses a crucial point about the structures of empire

South China Morning Post
Date: 14 JAN 2018
By: Rana Mitter

Taiwan’s politics, even today, is shaped by the memory of the years when Chiang Kai-

A delegation from Taiwan seeking the establishment of an assembly in Tokyo on February 11, 1923. Photo: Handout

shek’s Nationalists ruled the island during the cold war. The battle between the “mainlanders” who poured in at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949 and the indigenous Taiwanese still resonates in today’s politics.

In contrast, one other relatively recent historical experience seems much less relevant: the period of Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan from 1895 to 1945. The younger generation hardly talk about those years. The older generation – and one has to be in one’s 80s or older to have any real memory of the period – often speak of the Japanese occupation with equanimity, even nostalgia.    [FULL  STORY]