Social Movements During Japanese Rule in Taiwan

On December 16, 1923, the Taiwan Governor-General's Office launched a sweeping island-wide crackdown.

Chiang Wei-shui was 34 at the time, running a clinic called "Ta-an Hospital" in Dadaocheng. That morning, police walked into his clinic. He was taken away and imprisoned in the Taipei Prison, charged with organizing a prohibited political association. Four months later he was released, put on a white Western suit, and continued walking the streets.

Nobody anticipated that this physician's life would become entangled with the fate of an entire era. On August 5, 1931, he died of typhoid fever. Only four and a half years had passed since he most loudly cried out "Compatriots must unite."

✦ In the 1920s, Taiwan's social movements erupted within the brief window of Taisho Democracy: 15 parliamentary petitions, 24,100 members in peasant unions, an underground Communist Party calling for Taiwanese independence from a Shanghai room. The movement's end came when each faction declared the others traitors, leaving the colonizers almost nothing to do. The 677 surveillance documents left behind by Japanese police became the only complete map of that era.

Inside the Empire's Archive

The "Taiwan Materials Related to Modern Political and Social Movements Held in Japan" at the National Museum of Taiwan History is a strange body of historical documents: 999 pages, 677 items, 261 already translated into Chinese, totaling 630,000 characters. These are Japanese police surveillance reports, analysis memoranda from Governor-General officials — paper traces left by the colonial empire as it tried to understand (and simultaneously destroy) Taiwanese people's political activities.¹¹

Reading them today carries a strange irony: documents the empire used to monitor resistance have become the most complete map through which later generations can understand that resistance.

Looking back through these 677 documents, the outline of the 1920s Taiwan social movements becomes clear. You can see how anxious the colonial authorities were about each organization, how police followed every speech into every village. The colonizers' anxiety, in turn, validates how real that movement was.

The Brief Opening of Taisho Democracy

To understand why 1921 was the starting point of Taiwan's social movements, one must first understand what was happening in Japan itself that year.

The Taisho Democracy movement reached its peak in the late 1910s: the universal suffrage movement, labor organization, media freedom. The entire Taisho era (1912–1926) was a period of relative political openness in Japan, and this window allowed Taiwanese intellectuals studying in Tokyo to glimpse another possibility for the first time.

On January 30, 1921, Lin Hsien-tang led 178 signatories in petitioning the Japanese Imperial Diet to establish a "Taiwan Parliament" with legislative authority. This was the first time Taiwanese people had organized to make political demands to the empire — not with a sword, but with a document.¹

On October 17 of the same year, the Taiwan Cultural Association was founded at Chingxiu Girls' School in Dadaocheng. Lin Hsien-tang served as general president, Yang Chi-chen as deputy, and Chiang Wei-shui as managing trustee, with 41 trustees and 44 councilors. The association's charter stated its purpose as "to assist the development of Taiwan's culture." In the colonial context, the two characters "culture" were politics that could pass censorship.²

📝 Curator's Note
The parliamentary petition movement submitted a total of 15 petitions over 14 years (1921–1934), each one failing and each one gathering more signatures. Tenacity and disillusionment: this movement was both simultaneously — which is also why it deserves to be remembered.

Taiwan's Medical Chart

On November 28, 1921, Chiang Wei-shui published "Clinical Lecture Notes" in the first issue of the Taiwan Cultural Association Bulletin.

Speaking in a physician's voice, he wrote up a medical chart for Taiwan society. The patient was called "Taiwan," diagnosed as "a mentally deficient child of world civilization," with the cause being "malnutrition of knowledge." Under the symptom column, he wrote:

"Moral decay, degenerate human hearts, rampant material desire, impoverished spiritual life, ugly customs, entrenched superstition."³

The prescription: formal school education, supplementary education, kindergartens, libraries, newspaper reading clubs — all in "maximum dosage."

This essay later became the theoretical foundation for the Cultural Association's promotion of a new cultural movement. Chiang Wei-shui's strategy was: first make people aware they were sick, and then they would want to heal.

The Anger in the Soil

Parliamentary petitions were the language of intellectuals. But another root of Taiwan's social movements grew in the countryside.

In October 1925, sugarcane farmers in Erlin, Changhua refused to accept unfair purchase prices from the Lin Pen-yuan Sugar Company. Their demands were direct to the point of simplicity: cane purchase prices should be negotiated by both parties; sugarcane weighing should have farmers' representatives as witnesses; fertilizer purchases should be freely available from the market, not monopolized by the sugar company.⁵

On October 23, police conducted a large-scale sweep, arresting 93 people, of whom 39 were indicted. This was the "Erlin Sugarcane Farmers Incident," the first gunshot of Taiwan's peasant movement.

On June 28, 1926, inspired by the Erlin incident, Chien Chi and others established the island-wide "Taiwan Peasant Union." Its expansion shocked colonial authorities: at its peak, the union had 24,100 members spread throughout Taiwan's rural areas.⁵

In April 1927, Japanese socialist lawyer Fusetsu Tatsuji came to Taiwan to defend the Erlin farmers. Over eight days he traveled to 30 locations across the island, giving speeches. He later wrote that the farmers showed "unexpectedly high interest in the issues of proletarian liberation."¹²

The Most Ironic Slogan

On January 2, 1927, Chiang Wei-shui published an essay titled "This Year's Slogan," in which he wrote:

"Compatriots must unite; unity is true strength!"⁹

This is the sentence he is most remembered for. Ironically, the very year he spoke these words, Taiwan's social movement was undergoing its most thorough split.

From 1926 onward, left-wing forces within the Cultural Association continued to grow; by 1927, the faction of Lien Wen-ching and Chien Chi had seized control of the association. Founding members including Lin Hsien-tang, Tsai Pei-huo, and Chiang Wei-shui found themselves in the minority and were forced to withdraw. On July 10, 1927, they gathered at Chuyinglou in Taichung's Xinfu Town to establish the "Taiwan People's Party" — the first political party established by Taiwanese people under Japanese rule.⁶

On May 1 of the same year, approximately 6,000 workers participated in the island's first ever island-scale general strike, demanding improved labor conditions.¹⁰ The General Federation of Labor Unions sided with Chiang Wei-shui.

But the right wing also began to depart. Within the People's Party, the faction led by Chiang Wei-shui moved increasingly leftward; he later argued the party should "center on the agricultural and working classes, with agriculture, labor, commerce, and students as a common front." Tsai Pei-huo, who had long relied on Lin Hsien-tang's funding, could not accept this direction and criticized Chiang Wei-shui:

"It is deeply regrettable to center on an ignorant agricultural and working class and attempt reckless and thoughtless actions."⁸

Nine People in the French Concession in Shanghai

On April 15, 1928, nine people convened a secret congress in a room in Shanghai's French Concession. Those present included Hsieh Hsueh-hung (serving as congress chairperson), Lin Mu-shun, and representatives from the Chinese Communist Party and the Korean Communist Party.

They announced the establishment of the "Taiwan Communist Party." Total membership was only 18 people.

The three major positions they declared that day were things no public organization under Japanese rule dared to say aloud: Taiwan independence, establishment of a Taiwan Republic, building a worker-peasant government.⁷

Lin Mu-shun drafted the "Political Outline" and "Worker-Peasant Movement Outline" at that congress, producing the first political document in Taiwan's history to have "Taiwan ethnic self-determination" as its guiding principle. This document predated the February 28, 1947 Incident by a full 19 years.

📊 Era Coordinates

Year	Event
1921.1.30	First Taiwan Parliament Petition (178 signatories)
1921.10.17	Taiwan Cultural Association founded
1923.12.16	Peace Police Law Incident: Chiang Wei-shui and others arrested
1925.10.23	Erlin Sugarcane Farmers Incident (93 arrested)
1926.6.28	Taiwan Peasant Union established
1927.1.2	Chiang Wei-shui publishes "This Year's Slogan"
1927.7.10	Taiwan People's Party established
1928.4.15	Taiwan Communist Party founded in Shanghai
1930.8	Taiwan Local Autonomy League established
1931.2.18	Taiwan People's Party declared dissolved by police on the spot
1931.8.5	Chiang Wei-shui dies of illness, aged 40
1934.9.2	Lin Hsien-tang and others resolve to halt parliamentary petition movement

Four-Way Power Struggle

By 1930, Taiwan's social movement had split into at least four mutually opposing camps:

The Cultural Association (left-wing dominated version after 1927) and the Peasant Union: Held that class struggle was the core, and sneered at any "compromising" autonomy line.

Taiwan People's Party (led by Chiang Wei-shui): Caught between the class line and the ethnic line, attempting to address workers and farmers simultaneously.

Taiwan Local Autonomy League (Tsai Pei-huo and Lin Hsien-tang faction, established August 1930): Advocated for parliamentary progress within the existing institutional framework, seeking Japanese recognition through a moderate line.

Taiwan Communist Party: An underground organization seeking Comintern guidance, the most radical and the most vulnerable.

In August 1930, the Cultural Association and Peasant Union jointly issued a statement harshly criticizing the Local Autonomy League's position as "compromise," "entreaty," and "suggestion," having "completely suppressed the ethnic militant spirit." The People's Party did not escape either: the Cultural Association/Peasant Union called the People's Party's opposition to the autonomy league merely "fearing the dispersion of its own power," wanting to "deceive the proletarian people."⁸

At this point, Chiang Wei-shui had one year left to live. The People's Party had half a year before its dissolution.

The Last Year

On February 18, 1931, the Taiwan People's Party held its fourth full party conference. The police superintendent appeared at the venue, displayed a "prohibition of association order," and announced the dissolution of the People's Party on the spot.⁶

On August 5 of the same year, Chiang Wei-shui died of typhoid in Taipei, aged 40.

On August 23, more than 5,000 people gathered outside Yongle Theater in Dadaocheng to see him off. Condolence telegrams arrived from Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xiamen, Tokyo, and Kyoto — over 200 in total. The Taiwan People's Party's party organ wrote in those days: "Though Mr. Wei-shui has gone, the soul of Taiwan's people still lives."⁹

On September 2, 1934, Lin Hsien-tang and more than twenty others sat down in the conference room of the Greater East Trust Company in Taichung. Three hours later, they resolved: to halt the Taiwan Parliament Petition movement.

What they said was: continuing has become meaningless.

Fourteen years. Fifteen petitions. Zero responses.

An Incomplete Map

Those 677 Japanese police surveillance documents are today housed in the National Museum of Taiwan History, beside the Tainan City Library.

They document how people of an era attempted to carve out space for their own affairs within the colonial margins — with petitions, with clinical diagnoses, with founding congresses, with rural speeches, with declarations in secret rooms. They also document how these efforts exhausted themselves through mutual suspicion, already depleted before the empire had a chance to act.

Among the 5,000 people at Chiang Wei-shui's public funeral, nobody knew of the 1945 sudden reversal in Taiwan's fate; nobody knew that the slogan "Compatriots must unite" he had shouted would appear half a century later in a completely different context at a political rally. The organizational training and political consciousness left behind by this movement continued to lie dormant after the 228 Incident and re-emerged in another form during Taiwan's democratic transition.

History rarely advances in the way people imagine. The people of that era exhausted every method they knew, leaving behind these documents, these ruptures, and the fact that 5,000 people appeared spontaneously that afternoon. That — perhaps — is the last unforged thing that era left behind.

Further Reading

• Chiang Wei-shui — Wikipedia: A comprehensive biographical entry on Chiang Wei-shui, including the background of "Clinical Lecture Notes," the founding history of the Taiwan People's Party, and pictorial historical materials from the 1931 public funeral.
• Taiwan Parliament Petition Movement — National Cultural Memory Bank, Ministry of Culture: Official Ministry of Culture entry detailing the number of signatories for each of the 15 petitions, Japanese responses, and the scene of the 1934 resolution to halt the movement.
• Taiwan Peasant Union — Academia Sinica Institute of Taiwan History Archives: Primary source index from Academia Sinica, containing documents related to the Peasant Union, including police investigation records from the Erlin and Zhongli incidents.
• A century of struggle over Taiwan's cultural self-consciousness — LSE Research Online: An English-language academic paper analyzing the impact of Chiang Wei-shui and the Cultural Association on Taiwan's civil society from a century-long perspective, providing an international comparative colonial history lens.

References