A century of struggle over Taiwans cultural self-consciousness:the life and afterlife of Chiang Wei-shui and the Taiwan Cultural Association

This chapter examines a century of struggle over Taiwan's politico-cultural self-consciousness with a focus on the life and afterlife of Chiang Wei-shui and the Taiwan Cultural Association (TCA). The politicocultural policies over the last century centred on colonial impositions and (de)constructions of 'people's sense of themselves' in Taiwan from (1) anti-Japanization to Japanization; (2) from deJapanization to re-China-ization; and (3) from de-China-ization to Taiwanization. This chapter explores Chiang's thoughts on culture and demonstrates Chiang's prognosis of the health of the Han population on the island. Shih argues that Chiang intended to invoke the members' selfconsciousness as a colonized class of people. Chiang's effort seemed to have been an unintended consequence of his primary concern of modernizing culture to make it fitter for the contemporary world. For their afterlife, Shih shows Chiang and the TCA were ignored and forgotten for six decades from war mobilization in Japanese colonization till the late 1980's. Shih finally investigates the TCA and Chiang's legacies during dangwai campaign and concludes that the 1920s as Taiwan's "Self-conscious Age".