Culture of Taiwan - KMT Era Cultural Policy

KMT Era Cultural Policy

During the early postwar period the Chinese Nationalist Party “Kuomintang” (KMT) suppressed Taiwanese cultural expression and barred Taiwanese from cosmopolitan life except in the spheres of science and technology (1994 Winckler:29). The authoritarian KMT dominated public cultural space and Chinese nationalist networks became a part of cultural institutions, leaving little resource for cultural autonomy to grow.

Under the early KMT, Taiwan was realigned from a Japanese imperial center to a Chinese nationalist center, under the influence of KMT and American geo-political interests. Although American cultural activities were modest, they played a significant role in Taiwan’s developing cultural scene. The KMT claimed a loss of morale led to “losing China” and thus the state issued a series of ideological reforms aimed to “retake" China, which became the major state cultural program of the time. The immediate preoccupation with losing China diverted long term investment in the humanities and social sciences. On another level, the state’s main objective was to “sinicize” the Taiwanese by teaching them Mandarin Chinese and Nationalist ideology through compulsory primary education.

By the late 1940s the KMT had eliminated dissent for its cultural policies. When Taiwanese had resumed the cultural activities, which were outlawed by the Japanese in 1937, the Nationalist attitude was that Taiwanese had been Japanese “slaves” and would therefore have to complete a period of moral and ideological tutelage before they could enjoy their full rights as citizens of the Republic of China. The February 28 Incident destroyed Taiwan’s urban elite and the arrival of the mainlander elite ensured Nationalist domination of urban cultural centers.

In 1953, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek issued his first major opinion on culture to complete Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People, which included prescribing Nationalist curriculum for education, building facilities for intellectual and physical recreation and the major state cultural program of promoting anti-communist propaganda (Winckler 1994:30). In regard to Taiwanese cultural life, the major thrust was for “universalization” of education in Mandarin, which was enforced by law. Despite the hard-line Chinese control over culture, the Soviet advances in technology led to a new Nationalist focus on building closer cooperation with American universities and developing engineering programs (Wilson 1970). The American presence in Taiwan also encouraged Taiwanese to resume some politically, ethnically neutral cultural activities, which was expressed in a flourishing Taiwanese-language media market.

Between the 1960s and the 1980s Taiwan's culture was commonly described in contrasts between Taiwan (Free China) and China (Communist China), often drawing from the official tropes of Taiwan as a bastion of traditional Chinese culture, which had preserved “true” Chinese values and culture against the “false” Chinese culture of post Communist China. At the same time, Taiwanese cultural expressions were brutally suppressed by Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Party. In response to the Cultural Revolution of China, the government of Taiwan began promoting the Chinese Cultural Renaissance" (中華文化復興運動), with a myriad of programs designed to promote traditional Chinese culture to counter the communist movement on the mainland which aimed at uprooting the "Four Olds". These programs involved subsidized publication of Chinese Classics, the symbolic functions of the National Palace Museum, promoting famous prewar scholars to prominent positions in government and academic institutions, textbook and curriculum design with a focus on the official view of “traditional” Chinese culture and involvement in social and community events and the exemplification of Confucian ideology intertwined with Sun Yat-sen thought.