Weeds are conquering the gardens, and the last elderly residents of Sanchung's Air Force First Village (空軍三重一村) are moving out. As village chairman Wang Chih-hsin (王繼新) leads a tour of his childhood home, a now-vanished world comes to life in his mind.
He points to the concrete platform built for a Japanese anti-aircraft battery. Villagers gave it a tarp and added stone tables, wood chairs and electrical wiring to make it a central gathering space. He wanders through the empty lanes where children played games and rode bicycles. He cracks open a creaky gate to a lonely house covered by an overgrown banana tree.
"Because I grew up here, there is some kind of bond. I feel for every person and all the buildings and plants, the trees and the flowers," Wang says, choking back tears as he shuts the gate. "It's sad to see the whole thing disappear … for all the people to go away and disperse."
Once a defining part of Taiwan's urban landscape, veterans' villages like this one are being abandoned, left to wild dogs and the derelict, awaiting transformation into parks, cultural institutions or commercial real estate. Built for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops who fled China with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in the late 1940s, these were once proud islands of Mainlander culture, separated from the surrounding neighborhoods by walls and gates, dialects and customs. When the last juan cun (眷村), or military dependents' village, is torn down in 2009, a unique subculture will disappear — and a chapter of Taiwan's history will come to a close.
Unlike other symbols of the KMT's migration to Taiwan, veterans' villages have, for the most part, faded away peacefully — generally, the change has not been seen as a triumph of Taiwanese identity over Chinese traditionalism. Originally built from bamboo and straw as temporary barracks for troops preparing to retake China, the compounds were never intended to be permanent. After decades of unplanned-for expansion, they were blocking urban development and becoming dangerous places to live.
In 1982, there were roughly 880 veterans villages housing more than 100,000 families. Four fifths of these were in northern Taiwan, with the rest scattered across the country as far as Penghu and Matsu. Using stronger materials like bricks and tiles, residents had expanded their homes until in many cases only narrow alleys separated units, turning the villages into low-slung warrens of decaying, jerry-rigged architecture.
The government in 1996 passed the Statute Governing Reconstruction of Old Military Dependents' Villages (國軍老舊眷村改建條例), which budgeted money to demolish the villages and replace them with modern, high-rise housing. Though motivated in part by concerns for the residents' welfare, the decision was also political. The KMT under then-president Lee Tung-hui (李登輝) was pursuing a policy of localization, one that alienated many living in the veterans villages, which had been "storehouses of votes" for his party. Subsidizing the construction of new homes was seen as a ploy to prevent the veterans and their families from voting for the New Party, which had broken from the KMT over Lee's Taiwan-first agenda.
Inevitably, the ethnic angle was exploited. Alarmed by the pace of redevelopment — more than 700 villages have already been torn down — preservationists proposed an amendment to the Statute Governing Reconstruction of Old Military Dependents' Villages giving local governments incentives to preserve cultural and architectural aspects of the villages. The amendment enjoyed broad support, until earlier this year when KMT legislators Chu Fong-chi (朱鳳芝) and Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) proposed additional amendments that would compensate veterans who never received housing in the villages. The move gave Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators an opening to attack the preservation effort, calling it another example of government largess for veterans, one that used money that could more fairly be spent on subsidies for fishermen and farmers, groups that are predominately Taiwanese.
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