Six years since democratically taking power, President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) administration has failed to redress the injustice done to tens of thousands of small landowners whose land was seized as a result of the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) Land Reform Act (實施耕者有其田條例) implemented in 1953.
Transitional justice is an academic term that enjoys a great deal of currency in the Chen administration. It refers to the attempts of newly democratic countries to right wrongs committed by earlier authoritarian governments.
While the Chen administration has managed to render some transitional justice to the victims of the 228 Incident and to at least publicize the issue of the KMT's stolen assets, nothing has been done for the victims of the KMT's land reform.
To implement its land reform program, the KMT government classified Taiwanese farmers as landlords or tenant farmers. The term "landlord" became a synonym for a class of exploiters who were to be eliminated, while "tenant farmer" referred to the vast numbers of the poor who were being exploited.
Research on the KMT's land policy in China, however, shows that the KMT classified and defined farming households very differently before it came to Taiwan.
In 1928, the Central Land Commission issued a survey on land holdings in rural China. The survey divided farming households into five classes: poor peasants, middle class peasants, rich peasants, small and medium sized landlords and large scale landlords.
It defined a small landlord as one who owned the equivalent of 3.07 hectares of land. By this standard, only 6.77 percent of Taiwan's peasant households in the early 1950s qualified as small landlords.
In 1933, the Cabinet issued another study defining Chinese landlords as those who owned at least 5.12 hectares. By this standard, just 2.88 percent of Taiwan's landowners would have qualified as landlords.
And in 1941, the Bureau of Statistics defined a landlord as someone owning 18.41 hectares. By this standard, just 0.9 percent of Taiwan's farming households would have qualified. The Bureau of Statistics identified 1,545 such landlords in its study covering 89 counties in 11 Chinese provinces.
The results of these studies showed that the vast majority of Taiwanese farming households owned less farmland than landlords in China did.
But when the KMT carried out land reform in Taiwan, it reclassified farming households and redefined the meaning of landlord. In effect, practically anyone who rented out land was classified as a landlord, no matter how little land he actually owned.
The result was that a total of 106,049 households were classified as landlords. The vast majority were in fact land owners who rented out land that they owned. Most owned no more than a few thousand square meters. Nevertheless, if these owners had rented their land out, it was appropriated and they lost their titles.
Deprived of the title to their land, many of these former landowners fell into poverty. A contemporary team of observers estimated that more than 2 million people were affected.
Those in power controlled and manipulated land reform in Taiwan by controlling and manipulating the classification and definition of agrarian households to suit their changing needs. The Taiwanese landowners who held titles to their land were of course given no say in the matter.
More than 50 years later, those small landowners -- unfairly labeled landlords -- are still waiting for justice.
Hsu Shih-jung is a professor in the Department of Land Economics at National Chengchi University.
Translated by Michael Fahey
A failure by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to respond to Israel’s brilliant 12-day (June 12-23) bombing and special operations war against Iran, topped by US President Donald Trump’s ordering the June 21 bombing of Iranian deep underground nuclear weapons fuel processing sites, has been noted by some as demonstrating a profound lack of resolve, even “impotence,” by China. However, this would be a dangerous underestimation of CCP ambitions and its broader and more profound military response to the Trump Administration — a challenge that includes an acceleration of its strategies to assist nuclear proxy states, and developing a wide array
Eating at a breakfast shop the other day, I turned to an old man sitting at the table next to mine. “Hey, did you hear that the Legislative Yuan passed a bill to give everyone NT$10,000 [US$340]?” I said, pointing to a newspaper headline. The old man cursed, then said: “Yeah, the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] canceled the NT$100 billion subsidy for Taiwan Power Co and announced they would give everyone NT$10,000 instead. “Nice. Now they are saying that if electricity prices go up, we can just use that cash to pay for it,” he said. “I have no time for drivel like
Twenty-four Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers are facing recall votes on Saturday, prompting nearly all KMT officials and lawmakers to rally their supporters over the past weekend, urging them to vote “no” in a bid to retain their seats and preserve the KMT’s majority in the Legislative Yuan. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which had largely kept its distance from the civic recall campaigns, earlier this month instructed its officials and staff to support the recall groups in a final push to protect the nation. The justification for the recalls has increasingly been framed as a “resistance” movement against China and
Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) reportedly told the EU’s top diplomat that China does not want Russia to lose in Ukraine, because the US could shift its focus to countering Beijing. Wang made the comment while meeting with EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas on July 2 at the 13th China-EU High-Level Strategic Dialogue in Brussels, the South China Morning Post and CNN reported. Although contrary to China’s claim of neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, such a frank remark suggests Beijing might prefer a protracted war to keep the US from focusing on