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TAIWAN IN JAPAN'S EMPIRE-BUILDING: An Institutional Approach to Colonial Engineering. By Huiyu Caroline Tsai. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. xvii, 323pp. (Tables, figures.) US$140.00, cloth. ISBN 9780415-44738-6.
Opinions regarding Taiwan's relationship to mainland China - about actual or imagined degrees of political, cultural and legal affiliation - perforce involve assessments ofjapanese colonial rule (1895-1945) . Insofar as Japan's impact was transformative, die island's history is quite separate from that of the mainland (which did not undergo fifty years of Japanese colonial domination). Hui-yu Caroline Ts'ai's exhaustively researched analysis of empire building in early twentieth-century Taiwan contributes to this politically charged debate, but it is primarily a scholar's book.
Ts'ai argues that Japanese colonial administration was extended down through successive layers of Taiwanese society via the agency of an "extrabureaucracy." This "extra-bureaucracy" consisted of staffers, specialists, Taiwanese village leaders, native clerks and others who shouldered the burden of empire without obtaining a formal bureaucratic rank or a civilservice career. Ts'ai indicates diat, even where formal bureaucracy existed, it was staffed largely by Japanese recruited outside of the examination system, through channels designed to address labour shortages and utilize practical experience. The formal bureaucracy, based on Prussian models imported by Meiji state builders, was created...