Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier: 1600-1800.

This absorbing study deals with the triangular relationship of Taiwan's indigenous Austronesian peoples, Chinese immigrants, and officialdom, and with the accompanying economic, demographic and social changes that transformed a little-known island into a branch of China's agrarian state. It refutes two widely accepted views of the province's history. The indigenous peoples of the plains were not driven into the mountains but established long-term accommodations with Chinese society. Early Taiwan was not a neglected frontier outpost but a key focus of imperial attention. In arguments that never lose their cogency - remarkable for a book of such size and detail - Professor Shepherd places a forgotten group in its rightful place close to the center of Taiwan's history, and at the same time opens up important new perspectives on how policy was formed and implemented in China's expanding eighteenth-century empire.

The plains aborigines, some of whose assimilated descendants can still be identified by surname in the Taiwanese countryside today, numbered fewer than 50,000 in the western plains, a figure that changed little from the rule of the Dutch (1624-61) to Japanese takeover in 1895. They consisted of at least eight different groups, none of which was permanently organized above the village level. A village was surrounded by a strip of horticultural land, then a wider band of hunting land under its jurisdiction; beyond that lay a zone where any village might hunt. The deer was the center of the economy, the Japanese market in particular importing huge quantities of deer pelts for clothing and battledress. The Dutch East India Company were quick to monopolize this export trade, and raised funds by issuing hunting licensing to Chinese traders. It controlled as many as 300 villages through its own interpreters and missionaries: "Villagers were summoned to church services by the firing of muskets and cannon," (p. 66), and taxed them by selling monopoly privileges to independent Dutch and Chinese tax farmers (ch. 3). Taxation was altered to cash allocations by the Cheng family's autonomous anti-Manchu regime (1661-83), and reduced when the Ch'ing administration was established (chs. 4 and 5).

Taiwan society was transformed by the Chinese settlers who flooded in under pressure of mainland famine and population pressure - temporarily in the turmoil of the dynastic change and permanently during the 18th century (ch. 6). With the help of monopoly merchants and interpreters they illegally acquired aborigine land or rented it, supplying aborigines with an income that helped to make up for a disastrous drop in deer products as a result of overhunting and agricultural encroachment. It took several decades for the court to respond to settler pressure on aborigine lands. In the eighteenth century boundaries were repeatedly demarcated, especially those with "raw" aborigine lands. A large-rent system evolved out of the deer trade tax as the result of a series of decrees, meticulously examined by the author, which established various categories of land subject to different taxes and rents, and protected aborigine ownership (ch. 9). These protective measures showed the imperial state recognized its obligation to the well being of non-Han subjects; indeed officials had no compunction in using the "civilized" aborigines against several revolts by various sub-ethnic Chinese settler groups as well as against the "raw" aborigines of the mountains (ch. 10). In 1788-90 the Ch'ing organized aborigine military colonies, a further attempt simultaneously to protect aborigines and to lower administrative costs. But the aborigines were becoming economically, demographically and politically peripheral, even by the end of the 18th century, as Taiwan's rice and sugar exports grew and Chinese settlers multiplied. As the deer herds dwindled, some men overcame their aversion for the women's work of agriculture; others were sent by their villages to the foothills to engage in ox herding, lumbering and hunting. Eventually the further destruction of animal habitats reduced them to marginal agriculture. In the 19th century the large-rents and accompanying tax exemptions were whittled away as the Ch'ing state tried to increase land tax revenue, and finally abolished by the Japanese colonial government. Thanks to official intervention this process took several hundred years to be complete. Throughout Shepherd finds the aborigines adaptive in the face of often oppressive conditions.

One of this work's many strengths is its treatment of acculturation, distinguished from assimilation which properly refers to felt identity rather than observable traits (ch. 11). The government did not object to cultural difference, which helped its divide-and-rule policy. It was concerned to create dutiful citizens by the wearing of the queue and by gradual Confucianization through a network of schools. Sinicization came less through schooling than from interaction with settler society, and it was highly selective and uneven. Aborigines were appalled by such Chinese customs as female infanticide, footbinding and night-soil fertilizing, but as the prestige of Chinese culture affected aborigine villages, the men quickly adapted to Chinese dress and introduced various consumer items (beds in one village were an article of display, their owners continuing to sleep amid deerskins on the floor). New methods of production took longer to be adopted because they threatened the sexual division of labor. The intermarriage of aborigine women with Han men had both cultural and social effects, especially in the early years when very few women were among the migrants. For aborigines, despite the advantageous contacts with Han, it meant the loss of women to Han communities; in the case of uxorilocal marriage it brought in men who would train their sons in Confucian ideas or resinify them as Chinese presence increased. Today acculturation is almost complete among plains aborigines, but Shepherd emphasizes that assimilation is not the necessary result; it can be reversed, for with the right political incentives people can reinvent their past traditions and assert a separate identity.

My main reservation here is that Shepherd did not struggle more to escape the cultural perspective of his sources. One wonders at the use of the term aborigines, with "dawn-of-history" associations that are not shared by the Chinese term yuan-chu-min. Shepherd intends the term to mean only inhabitants in situ before the arrival of colonists; he notes too, not very persuasively, that the contemporary movement seeking rights for the yuan-chu-min uses "aborigine" as its official English translation. In this book aborigines (but not Chinese or Manchu) appear in various stages of "civilization" in reproduced sets of Chinese illustrations, but aborigine individuals are rarely identified in the text in spite of the large number of named Chinese and Manchus. The effect is to characterize aborigines exclusively by degree of acculturation to Chinese ways, just as the Chinese did. The culture of the aborigines, which Shepherd has investigated in a valuable article on the religion of the Siraya, the largest group, is seen as peripheral to the argument; there is little mention of Chinese cult worship, a central feature of settler society and surely an important means of aborigines' assimilation. The numerous references to headhunting prompt no analysis of this presumed institution, and its attribution to mountain as well as plains aborigines - sharply distinguished in other respects by this study - makes one wonder whether headhunting was practiced as a cult (as distinct from mutilation of battle dead pour encourager les autres, a habit both Chinese and Dutch were fond of). Could it not be one of those attributes like cannibalism that few actually do but many imagine in their worst enemies? Yet one cannot quarrel with Shepherd's close but unsentimental attention to the native Taiwanese in this book or with his interpretation, so this is not a substantive criticism.

Statecraft may not be of obvious concern to readers of this journal, but its thorough exploration is essential in the author's reconstruction of the changes in frontier society I have outlined. Shepherd's analysis of edicts and memorials, the staple of this kind of work, is exemplary. The meticulous treatment of broad topics over many decades (as in chapters 9 and 10 on land rights and military colonies, each over 25,000 words long) permits the reconstruction of policy formation and precedent law, always against the background of sudden events and long term changes in this most unstable and dynamic frontier. This technique avoids the legalistic simplification of earlier studies, reveals the underlying motives behind almost decade-by-decade policy switches, and permits a critical assessment of each memorial and edict in the light of shifting frontier realities. Rather than halting abruptly at 1800, Shepherd has familiarized himself with the excellent materials on modern Taiwan (particularly in the Japanese period) to evaluate eighteenth-century policy. Detail is never for its own sake, and is used to build up as illuminating a picture of Ch'ing administration (note especially chs. 7 and 8) as we have anywhere in the large literature on this subject. The abiding impression is of the extremely narrow constraints of agrarian empire given a land-based fiscal system and rapidly growing population. Administrative incorporation of frontier regions was resisted unless these were of overriding strategic importance. But the pressure of migration and agricultural settlement was irresistible. It led first to increasing military costs, next to direct control and land taxation, then to encouragement of settlement to increase taxes, and at last to the abolition of native land claims.

Much more in this fine study will repay close reading. Shepherd is at his best when he explains why Siraya villages were larger than others (uxorilocal marriage, age-grades and endogamy); how government control differed in Taiwan from elsewhere (see especially Appendix D, Measures of Governmental Presence); how the military was organized, a neglected aspect of Ch'ing administration; where aborigine villages were and how tax quotas changed; how Taiwan population figures can be reconstructed with the help of cultivated acreage figures and of backprojections from the superb Japanese colonial materials; and how Taiwan compares with other frontiers, North American as well as Chinese. This is the best book on early Taiwan in any language, and should promote more frontier research as not peripheral but central in the study of early modern Chinese politics and society. It deserves to have wide influence on studies of ethnicity and acculturation, of frontier reclamation and land law, in China and elsewhere.

Donald S. Sutton Carnegie Mellon University