Formosa—Repository Of Chinese Values

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31089, 18 June 1966, Page 4

Formosa—Repository Of Chinese Values

Formosa: A Study in Chinese History. By W. G. Goddard, Macmillan. 221 pp. Bibliography and Index.

What is Formosa—an island off the China coast which its Portuguese discoverers called “beautiful”; the headquarters of the Government of “Free China”; or an international problem which can only be solved by the island’s incorporation in the Communist mainland? This book, by an Australian University lecturer and diplomat, provides a different answer from those of Western observers faced with the intractable issue of “the two Chinas.” To Mr Goddard, Formosa is the repository of the values which make Chinese civilisation great, it is a blueprint for the spiritual and economic revival of the mainland, and it is the one state in Asia which enjoys domestic peace. Mr Goddard, writing with passionate conviction about a land he loves from long acquaintance, has tried to rescue Formosa from the role of pawn in the game of power politics. He wants it recognised as a unique society, historically part of China, yet far ahead, economically and culturally, of the China of Mao Tse-tung. Sometimes he pleads too strongly, He is dazzled by the personality of Chiang Kai-shek and totally uncritical of Nationalist Chinese rule. Yet his case, built from an absorbing narrative of Formosan history, deserves close study by those concerned with events in New Zealand’s “near north.” Formosa has been settled by successive waves of migrants, beginning with a proto-Malay people akin to the Maoris. Each wave has pushed the earlier inhabitants further into the mountainous interior. It has been subject to colonial activities by the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish. French, English, Americans and Japanese. Not till 1683 did it acknowledge the overlordship of China. Shortly before that it enjoyed its most glorious period as the headquarters of the pirate Cheng Cheng-kung, whose activities ranged from Japan to Malaya, who drove the Dutch from their forts, and whose object was the restoration of the Ming dynasty in Manchu Peking. Then, as now, Formosa formed a refuge for the political groups defeated on the mainland. According to Mr Goddard, then as now, it also became the repository of Chinese culture and the exiled home of Chinese scholars and literati. In more recent times it has led the mainland both politically and in technical innovation. It had the first railway, the first electric street-lighting in China. In 1895, rather than submit to Japanese domination, as directed by the weak central government in Peking, Formosa’s scholars declared

the island the first republic in Asia and resisted the Japanese army for a year, an episode which provided Sun Yat-sen with the inspiration for the Chinese republic of 1912.

Today, after 50 years’ rule by Japan and 15 by Chiang Kai-shek, Formosa has an industrial growth rate second only to Japan. Its agricultural production, after a series of far-sighted measures of land-reform, has increased by 50 per cent since 1952,

a rate only exceeded by South Korea and Thailand.

Even more, Formosa Is a society which is successfully blending two great themes—the preservation of traditional Chinese and Confucian values, and the introduction of Western technology. “Among the Chinese more than any other people in history, the poet and the painter, rather than the politician, have been the true guide to history and the march of destiny.” Mr Goddard pleads that this situa-

tion, which exists, he says, on Formosa but not in mainland China, must be preserved if China is to emerge, reunited, to true greatness. “At some future time the Chinese mainland will be as Formosa is today.” Chiang Kai-shek’s place of exile has demonstrated that China’s ancient values can be preserved in a progressive enviroment.

But ail is not well. The great danger for Formosa’s future lies not in the mainland regime but in the prospect of “Americanisation”— and with it, the loss of the spiritual mission to lead the revitalisation of China. Here, Mr Goddard believes Australia and New Zealand could help. By greater contact with Formosa they could temper the influence of the worst aspects of American culture, and at the same time gain much from a closer association with this island repository of Chinese civilisation.