How Taiwanese Vegetables Became the Envy of the World
By James Lin, author of In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan
As a young graduate student, I wanted to explore Taiwan’s economic “miracle.” From the 1950s to 1990s, Taiwan’s GDP per capita grew an astonishing 800%. Curious about what might be in the archives around New York City where I was studying, I made an appointment and then took the subway to the Ford Foundation.
Despite being in the middle of one of the busiest metropolises in the world, with just the archivist and me in the basement archives, I felt like I was in a different world. I dug into documents related to Taiwan, and one caught my attention. It was a report of how Taiwan’s efforts at breeding and disseminating improved varieties of broccoli rabe would resolve the ills of the world—hunger, famine, malnutrition.
How could broccoli rabe make the world a better place? Over the next decade, I traced the arc of agricultural development in libraries and archives across the world, from Ithaca, NY to Shanhua, Taiwan. The more I delved into this question, the more I unearthed a time when Taiwan’s contributions to the world weren’t in advanced semiconductors, but rather rice and vegetables.
From remote communities in Phú Yên, Vietnam, to scientific conferences in Côte d’Ivoire, agricultural technicians and scientists from Taiwan extolled what they portrayed as a Taiwan model of development. Taiwanese methods, they argued, could bring all the benefits of economic growth to the decolonizing Global South: independence, power, and modernity. For instance, officials in the Republic of Vietnam were drawn to the fact that Taiwan, just a few decades earlier also a former agrarian colony, was able to quickly modernize and develop without substantial capital, all while successfully resisting the allure of communism. Taiwanese experts highlighted for their development world counterparts a shared rural identity, ethos of hard work and pragmatism, and most importantly, graphs and charts of Taiwan’s successes. The Taiwan model worked in Taiwan, and it could work in your nation, too, they said.
Yet, behind this success narrative was a history of authoritarianism and settler colonialism. Taiwan in 1945 was handed over to the Republic of China government, led by the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party. From 1949 until 1987, Taiwan was ruled under a 38-year period of martial law, where the Kuomintang government that occupied the island enacted a regime of terror backed by military rule designed to keep residents disciplined.
The stick of martial law was complemented by the carrot of economic growth. The Kuomintang began to underscore from the 1950s to the 1980s their success in developing rural Taiwan into a modern nation. Kuomintang-enacted land reform was portrayed as a project of financial ingenuity, legal modernity, and social welfare. By turning land into productive capital, as well as landlords and peasants into capitalists, the Kuomintang claimed they had a win-win solution to catalyze economic growth while addressing inequity suffered by tenant farmers. And when Taiwanese technicians and scientists were sought after by other nations around the world, from Africa to Southeast Asia, the ruling Kuomintang highlighted those missions to a domestic audience as evidence of the Kuomintang’s own modernity and technical prowess. Development formed a new imaginary, shaping how Taiwanese saw themselves and their relationship to the rest of the world. Kuomintang-controlled media proclaimed the Taiwanese were leading a vanguard of developing nations in the Global South.
Today in Taiwan, a society now renowned for its technological innovations, this history defined a generation of Taiwanese. In 2016, when KMT presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu campaigned on a populist message of making Taiwan great again, he was harkening back to an era of developmental success under the KMT in the 1980s. Complementing the growing research from the field of Taiwan Studies on serial colonialism and historical memory, understanding development is key for explaining the rise of modern Taiwan.
Elsewhere in the world, economic success is often utilized as justification—or distraction—for autocratic and authoritarian measures. Development can be powerfully alluring. By critically examining the relationship between science, economy, and society, my book offers one example of its power and global reach.