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Paper short abstract:

The paper studies agrarian technocrats using marginal lands in Taiwan to settle retired servicemen retreating from mainland China. Although some projects did succeed in generating profits, many were criticized for environmental consequences as the island democratized by the end of the Cold War.

Paper long abstract:

This paper studies the vision of marginal land development in Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR), an agency created by the Republic of China (ROC) government with American aid in 1948. Following its defeat in the Chinese Civil War, the ROC relocated to Taiwan—an island inhabited by the Indigenous Austronesian peoples, settled by ethnic Chinese in the seventeenth century, ceded to Japanese in 1895, and took over by the ROC in 1945. To enhance the government’s legitimacy among the older generation of settlers, the JCRR redistributed lands from landed elites to tenant farmers. For the hundreds of thousands of soldiers arriving from the mainland, the majority stayed in the densely-populated western plains, but several thousands were recruited in the 1950s and 60s to develop what the state considered “marginal lands”: slopes and valleys in Indigenous territories and reclaimed tidal lands and riverbanks. This paper investigates how retired servicemen were envisioned by the ROC as anticommunist warriors fighting for the lost mainland, and by the JCRR as agents of development boosting Taiwan’s economy. However, although some highland orchards did become an economic success by the 1970s, many reclaimed lands failed to become agriculturally productive due to unfavorable environmental conditions. As the government democratized in the 1980s, both projects became focus of environmental struggle to reduce soil erosion in mountains and wetland destruction along the coast, and retired servicemen began to demand state compensation, thus demonstrating the ambivalent results of state-directed colonization during the Cold War.