The setting for Becoming Taiwanese is Taiwan's northern port city of Jilong (also known as Keelong, Gelang, and Kiirun). With a swerve away from the two most often discussed settlements on the island (Tainan and Taipei/Taihoku), Evan Dawley has crafted a new lens to ponder the question of “becoming Taiwanese.” With that lens, he investigates institutional and social conditions in the city as revealed in statistical and archival evidence, exposing the complex conditions that brought key players into a performance of new ethnic identities.
Of the many things accomplished in Dawley's study, two stand out: first, his building out of a common assumption in Taiwan studies, and second, his explanation of how certain intellectual contradictions might have emerged in previous scholarship. A common argument is that Taiwanese consciousness emerged only with the coming of the Japanese colonial settlers, who named the various Chinese populations as “islanders.” Here Dawley shows how the intricacies of policy and practice led to that consciousness, and how the belongingness was performed in various social settings, bringing the multifaceted Taiwanese populations together. Second, Dawley's detailed analysis of the shifting policies and attitudes of the Japanese toward the Taiwanese, and vice versa, helps explain how other studies might arrive at divergent views of colonial conditions and consequences in Taiwan. It is a world of difference if your understanding of the colony emerges from conditions in 1915 versus those of 1935; the “colony” was a very unstable entity, and Dawley shows us just how that was so.
Dawley's introduction argues that “[f]rom the 1880s to the 1950s, Jilong was a city of bounded possibilities, a place where negotiations in the spaces between social groups, and with state actors, allowed unexpected identities and meanings to be constructed” (p. 26). The following chapters investigate those negotiations via different institutions and social processes.
Chapter 1 describes the physical, administrative, and social origins of the city, from its backwater status under the late Qing to its emergence as a modern colonial port city under the Japanese. Here Dawley also begins detailing the interplay between social processes and individual actions, particularly of six elite men (three Japanese and three Taiwanese).
Chapter 2 explores the various ways that Taiwanese built their new identity in the face of, or despite, Japanese vacillation between assimilationist and exclusionist policies. “The requirements of negotiating status and lifestyle, along with the project of creating the new urban spaces in Jilong, enabled islanders and [Japanese] settlers to produce an entirely new consciousness as both groups became Jilongese” (p. 117).
In chapter 3, Dawley explores the organizational culture of different types of civic groups that evolved during Japanese rule, as manifested in credit unions, the Public Welfare Society, and the Jilong Customs Assimilation Association. He shows how the two elite populations came together to forge institutional and social initiatives that contributed directly to Jilong becoming “the whole island's crown” (p. 146). The details of those efforts reveal, however, how such social groups worked both with and against each other in establishing the “territory” of their identities.
Of these early chapters, the materials in chapter 4, “Sacred Spaces: Religions and the Construction of Identities,” seem the most compelling. Perhaps this is because the institutions discussed here are so site-specific: shrines, temples, and altars. These are not just places that contain institutions; the places are the institutions. Early on, the two communities often worked in a symbiotic relationship, but as the colony moved into its later stages of assertive nationalism, the sacred space of the state, State Shintoism, pushed the local spaces into highly defensive and Taiwanese-identifying strongholds, placing them “at the heart of their ethnic identity” (p. 202).
Chapter 5 explores different manifestations of social welfare over the decades, especially as it shifted from the concerns of social and economic well-being, which “brought together islanders and Japanese in a shared operational space” (p. 244), to those of nationalism and custom reform, which colluded with other social divisions to widen the borders between the Taiwanese and Japanese.
In the last two chapters, Dawley deviates substantially in methodology and tone. Both chapters are structured temporally (1945–55), not thematically, employing a more narrative form rather than the social-science display of evidence. Dawley embeds the port city into the rapidly changing events of the early postwar period: the defeat of the Japanese colonial government, its replacement with the Chinese Nationalists, the infamous February 28 Incident and the martial law and reign of terror that followed, and finally the coming of the Nationalist central government to the island. Dawley shows how Jilong played a significant role in these critical moments, often providing the door through which the various players passed.
Epilogues are usually curious and cursory things: an author's stab at the future. Dawley does include a small foray past the 1950s, but his epilogue is more substantial and integral to the arguments of the study than might be expected. If there were a tendency in earlier chapters to lose the central narrative for the many details, here Dawley draws a clear trajectory of social change in the colonial urban space, summarizing many points made earlier, but with a different type of insight that only comes from stepping back and regarding his detailed and rigorous work.
