How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch Spanish, and Han Colonization in the 17th century Tonio Andrade Chapters 1-3, 8-9 Preface: Is Taiwan Chinese . In the 1600s, people from China started to settle in mainland of China - most were from the province of Fujian and spoke the dialect of Chinese known as southern Min, but they were joined later by Hakka Chinese, and then in the late 1940's by around 2 million Mandarin speaker (pg. 18) . 3 decades of Maoism stripped away parts of the mainland and China's traditional culture, but Taiwan preserves customs, festivals, and schools of thought Introduction . In 1600, Taiwan was a wild land, inhabited by headhunters and visited mainly by pirates and fishermen. A hundred years later it was a prefecture of the Chinese Empire, home to a hundred thousand Chinese colonists. (pg. 22) . Intensive Chinese colonization began abruptly in the 1630s, shortly after the Fitch East Company established a trading port in Taiwan . The Dutch offered tax breaks and free land to Chinese colonists, using their powerful military to protect pioneers from aboriginal assault - They were trying to encourage Chinese immigration so they could use the resources the land provided which was rice and sugar and use them as trading, but the Taiwan people refused . In this way the company created a calculable economic and social environment, making Taiwan a safe place for Chinese to move to and invest in, whether they were poor peasants or rich entrepreneurs (pg. 22) . We will hear about Chinese pirates who infiltrated the Dutch administration; samurai who took Taiwanese aborigines to Japan to persuade the shogun to attack the Dutch; aborigines who attacked Chinese hunters; peasant rebels who cried, "Kill, Kill, Kill the Hollandish dogs!" and, finally, the Chinese merchant prince Zheng Chenggong, whose army swept the Dutch out of Taiwan and established Chinese rule. (pg. 23) . How do we understand the great colonial movements that have shaped our modern world? . Historians have focused a lot on European colonialism, paying little attention to non-western counter-examples - Taiwan is a place where European and non-European colonialism met, and where 2 different civilizations encountered "people without history" . How did people from these small European countries establish colonies on an island that had already aroused the interest of merchants from the two most powerful states of East Asia? . And in 1662, how was the Dutch East India Company, which was at the height of its powers, ousted from Taiwan, one of its most profitable possessions?
. The answer is, it turns out that colonialism-at least in East Asia-has less to do with superior technology or military prowess than with motivation. European states were eager to sponsor overseas adventurism. East Asian states were, for the most part, not. (pg. 240 China and the Seas . " China does not have colonialism. If it did, much of Southeast Asia would now be Chinese" (Pg. 24) . The ceremony expressed a Confucian ideal: The