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FEATURE: Residents fight to preserve military villages

At the conclusion of this year's military village conference in Taoyuan County earlier this month, military village preservationists reaffirmed their determination to preserve the unique cultural landscape of the nation's juan cun (眷村) by building a nationwide network of grassroots activists.

Military villages are residential compounds that were set up to house soldiers and their families who followed dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) from China in 1949.

At one point, as many as 880 military residential compounds were spread across the nation, housing more than 100,000 families. More than 80 percent of these have been demolished or have had their original architecture replaced with modern housing since the 1996 Statute Governing Reconstruction of Old Military Dependents' Villages (國軍老舊眷村改建條例). An add-on to the statute stipulates that the remaining military villages should be modernized by the end of 2009.

If the statute is not amended, the number of original military villages will keep dwindling, Association of Mainlander Taiwanese chief executive Huang Luo-fei (黃洛斐) said, referring to a draft amendment to the statute that would designate one-tenth of the remaining villages as historical sites, blocking renovations.

The amendment would also see ownership of the villages transferred from the Ministry of National Defense to local governments, which would gain the right to manage the villages and their preservation, Huang said.

With government action still up in the air, however, preservationists are taking their own action to save unique cultural assets that are at risk of vanishing.

The Hsinchu Military Dependants' Museum, founded earlier this year by local residents, commemorates what they have lost.

"We failed to save the buildings, but we collected old pictures, clothes and, of particular interest, cooking wares handmade from scrap iron taken from out-of-service airplanes at the nearby Hsinchu Air Force Base," museum cofounder Liu Chin-ping (劉金屏) said.

The museum exhibits 400 photos and artifacts from the 1950s to the 1970s from the private collections of veterans village residents.

"The culture in veterans villages is diverse and unique; you have a mixture of people from different provinces in China, Hoklo, Hakka, Aborigines and some once had Japanese residents," said Ku Chao-kuang (顧超光), president of the Cultural Development Confraternity for the Kaohsiung Military Housing Community.

"In a veterans village, you can find authentic homemade dishes from all the provinces of China. Some of the dishes can't be found anywhere else" in Taiwan, he said.

Taoyuan Culture Association chief executive Yen Yu-ying (顏毓瑩), called on the legislature to pass the amendment as soon as possible.

Taoyuan Country residents have fought a hard battle to preserve as much as possible of the Hsien-kuang Second Village (憲光二村), Yen said, but their small victories are only temporary. Although the county Cultural Affairs Bureau wants to preserve the village -- where this year's military village conference took place -- it has no authority over the defense ministry's property.

Activists launched the annual military village conference three years ago. Each conference is held together with a cultural festival that exhibits black-and-white photos of village life and offers a wide variety of village dishes as well as entertainment in the form of guided tours and operas brought over by soldiers' families.

"In addition to the annual conference, we regularly exchange information and lobby the legislature," Huang said.

All that hard work has produced some results.

"So far, local cultural affairs authorities have designated parts of or all of 17 veteran villages as historic sites," she said.

As long as the villages fall under the authority of the defense ministry, however, the designations are little more than symbolic, she said. But they have given preservationists hope that the central government will get the message.

"All the party caucuses have signed the draft amendment," Huang said. "So we hope, we really hope, that the amendments will be passed during this [legislative] session."
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