In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.”
I laughed out loud at that.
This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to Taiwan’s domestic standards when transplanted to new markets.
Photo: EPA-EFE
I laughed because of missing historical context that was irrelevant to the points being made, but form the backdrop to modern Taiwan.
In the 1980s and 1990s Taiwan had what can only be described as a swaggering, big dick culture. That culture has a huge monument, and it is a singular attraction well-known around the world.
When it was completed it was the world’s tallest building and the first ever built over half a kilometer tall.
Photo: Reuters
If you are in Taipei, just look up.
It is Taipei 101.
JEALOUSY
During the Japanese colonial period of 1895-1945 Taiwanese were oppressed as second-class citizens, paid and educated less than their Japanese counterparts. Despite this subjugation, they did take some solace in the fact that aside from the Japanese themselves, the Taiwanese were among the wealthiest, best educated and most modern of all East Asians at the time.
The arrival of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-led Republic of China (ROC) in exile changed the situation drastically. The newly arrived Chinese went on a looting spree both to fund the ROC’s Chinese Civil War efforts and to line their own pockets.
Protests by the local population were crushed in a massacre, known as the 228 Incident, leading to an uprising, which was brutally suppressed. Finally losing the civil war, the ROC relocated to Taipei and began a period of martial law and white terror that brutally oppressed the local population to a degree even the Japanese had not.
Not only did they wreck the economy, they barred locals from positions in government, state-owned enterprises and nearly all important, lucrative positions available, unless they were part of the enforcement mechanism of the local KMT political patronage factions.
With a fair bit of jealousy, many Taiwanese unfairly felt a sense of shame at having fallen behind their Filipino neighbors, whose economy rose to take the number two spot in East Asia behind Japan. The Filipinos replaced the Taiwanese in higher education, wealth and modernity.
Learning from their loss to the Communists, the KMT enacted land reforms which combined with massive American aid and president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) decision to invest in Taiwan, the Taiwanese started to see significant improvements in their lives in the 1970s, somewhat restoring their image of themselves.
LOCAL PROSPERITY
By the 1980s, money was sloshing around the Taiwanese countryside. Farmers lucky enough to live near Taipei or other major cities became rich overnight selling their land to feed the expanding property boom.
With capital and cheap labor plentiful, farmland across the nation was converted to factories. For the first time since the Manchurian Qing Dynasty, locals were amassing significant wealth that had previously largely been the preserve of the Japanese and the newly arrived Chinese exiles and their families.
Much of this went to paying off officials to ignore the illegal factories, their terrible safety and labor practices and the toxic industrial waste dumped into the irrigation systems that fed into the rice fields.
These factories were low-end manufacturing, making socks, plastic buckets or whatever they could find a market for. The bosses of customers and suppliers often drank Kaoliang liquor at lunch and fancier alcohols in the evening to cement relationships.
At the time, Taiwanese entrepreneurs thought that getting drunk together was a way to truly get to know who they were doing business with, and whether they could trust them. They did not trust non-drinkers, forcing many into drinking who would otherwise not have wanted to.
Far from the quality and meticulous attention to detail that the piece introduced at the start of this column highlighted, these low-end entrepreneurs had an “it will do” mentality. Considering how drunk they were, this is not surprising.
Even today, there are tens of thousands of factories illegally occupying farmland in central Taiwan alone, but now are in the curious limbo of having to register with the government, obey labor and environmental laws and pay their taxes. Local governments keep kicking the can down the road because there is not enough affordable, legally zoned land available for them.
FLAUNTING IT
By the 1980s and 1990s, entrepreneurs, gangsters and corrupt politicians had enough wealth to enjoy it and flaunt it. Expensive debauchery was the norm, showing off fancy cars, expensive watches, fine cognac and teas, and outrageously expensive tables and uncomfortable chairs made out of lacquered rare wood. With some having recently been farmers or having family members still farming, often outside of public view their own homes had flimsy plywood walls and cheap, plastic home appliances and utensils.
The aesthetic of the era was ostentatious, though I found it delightfully and amusingly over-the-top tacky. They did a terrible job of copying what they thought was European class, with lots of plaster cast cherubs, faux gold fixtures and frosted glass featuring scenes from Greek and Roman mythology, with the 15 century Italian Birth of Venus depicting her with her arm covering her breasts appearing out of the waves on a large clamshell being partially popular.
Sex was openly advertised, with posters for strip shows plastered on any available wall, and topless dancing women at funerals and traveling medicine shows. Even the lighters featured stickers of naked women.
Large portions of the workforce served these people in one form or another, and had to respond to their every beck and call, almost no matter how imperious and arrogant the demand. They were compensated for these indignities by fast-rising salaries and large tips.
Taiwanese businessmen spread out across Southeast Asia and China, bringing this culture with them. They were widely reviled for their crude, arrogant and ostentatious lording it over everyone mentality.
ERECTING TAIPEI 101
By the late 1990s, three factors started to cause this culture to unravel: Democracy, economics and opportunity. By the early to mid-2000s it was largely gone. We will examine this transformation in a future column.
Though a thoroughly modern and popular site today, Taipei 101 is the final monument to that swaggering, hyper-masculine era.
In 1997, a consortium won the right to a 70-year lease to the land. That suggests that it was conceived years earlier at the height of this era.
In keeping with the ethos of the time it was an audacious project. Building the world’s tallest building in the Taipei plane, which was formed by tectonic activity (ie, earthquakes) and situated on what was a lakebed, required impressive engineering to build safely. The cautious Japanese would never have greenlit such a project.
It is widely considered an engineering marvel able to withstand typhoons and earthquakes, and the technology employed is studied around the world. It is something for Taiwanese to be proud of, at least for as long as it stands.
As glitzy and glamorous and popular with tourists as it is today, I can not forget the origins of Taipei 101.
The swaggering, big dick culture that ended their reign by building the world’s largest erection.
Donovan’s Deep Dives is a regular column by Courtney Donovan Smith (石東文) who writes in-depth analysis on everything about Taiwan’s political scene and geopolitics. Donovan is also the central Taiwan correspondent at ICRT FM100 Radio News, co-publisher of Compass Magazine, co-founder Taiwan Report (report.tw) and former chair of the Taichung American Chamber of Commerce. Follow him on X: @donovan_smith.
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