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Taiwan: Rural Society Stuart

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Stuart E. Thompson
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Extract

Owen Rutter's somewhat idyllized picture of an essentially agricultural Taiwan could have portrayed the 1950s, or, equally, Taiwan at any time in the more than 300 years of Chinese settlement there. Most of the Chinese who crossed the Taiwan Straits to settle in Taiwan were peasant farmers, and, as they had done on continental China, they made their living by agriculture. In 1945, when the island reverted to China after 50 years as a Japanese colony, agriculture was still very much the predominant sector, and the majority of the population continued to rely on farming. But, from the late 1950s onwards, in the space of less than three decades, the pattern of more than three centuries has been radically altered. Industry has burgeoned to replace agriculture as the key sector, and, concomitantly, Taiwan's population is no longer characteristically rural. A massive outflow of rural people into the cities has left only one person in four living in the countryside

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Type
Taiwan Briefing
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 99 , September 1984, pp. 553 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1984

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References

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