Let’s hope they’ll be smart enough to let people try to solve their own problems.
I should point out that the patron-client system is in no way confined to regimes we would think of as colonial. But perhaps colonial is as colonial does.
This article analyzed the party list votes from the last election.
Each diagram is party. Each dot represents a rural or urban village. An orange dot means the party obtained a low percentage of votes in this village, and a blue dot means it received a high percentage of votes in this village. The x-axis of each diagram is the medium income of the village, and the y-axis of each diagram is the average age.
By the way, 13 of the top 20 wealthiest villages are in Taipei city. The rest goes to New Taipei with 1, Hsinchu with 4, and Zhanghua with 2. None of Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan, Kaohsiung’s villages made it into the top 20.
After running the k-nearest neighbors analysis, we get the graphs below, which gives us an idea of the relationship between age, affluence and how people cast their votes. The k-nearest neighbors analysis divides all villages into four quadrants. Q1 is older and affluent, Q2 is older and less affluent, Q3 is younger and less affluent and Q4 is younger and affluent. An orange dot means the party obtained a low percentage of votes in this village, and a blue dot means it received a high percentage of votes in this village.
KMT:
The Kuomingtang did well with older villages, and affluent villages. However, KMT also enjoyed a high percentage of votes in the young and less affluent villages, which were mostly Aboriginal villages.
DPP:
The most affluent villages did not vote for the Democratic Progressive Party. It did well in mid-high to mid to low income villages. It also had more pull in older villages.
PFP:
The People’s First Party actually did poorly in older and more affluent villages. It did surprisingly well in younger villages though.
NPP:
The New Power Party got most of its votes from young and affluent villages.
GSDP
The Green Social Democratic Party got most of its votes from affluent villages.
New Party:
The new party’s vote distribution is very similar to the GSDP, however with less support in the younger villages.
TSU:
The Taiwan Solidarity Union got most of its votes from older villages across the board.
MKT:
The MKT has the most diverse pattern. There’s no strong connection between age or affluence to voting for the MKT.
FHL:
The Faith Hope League got most of its votes from affluent communities. I wonder Taiwan’s Christians are more affluent in general.
Interesting. Christianity came from China. Christianity was all but unknown under the Japanese who pushed Shinto onto Taiwanese.
Sure, Jesus was the great-great-grand son of a Han dynasty Chinese soldier who served under Zhang Qian during his second expedition into the Asian steppes (119 B.C.E.). After avoiding capture by the Huns, Jesus’ great great grand father eventually settled down in Judea. The family never forgot about their Chinese roots, and Jesus is a malformed Chinese name 葉敘 (Yep-su)…
Have you heard about a large chain of hospitals in Taiwan called Mackay memorial hospital? Mackay was preaching in Taiwan since 1871, and he was from Canada. Did you know Mackay’s children and students were victims and witnesses to KMT’s atrocities in the 228 incident? It’s one of the reasons why his church, the Presbyterian church is anti-KMT and pro-Taiwan independence. There were many Christian and Catholic missions working in Taiwan before Mackay, since the days of Dutch and Spanish era.
Gospel of Matthew in Sirayan, translated around 1650.
Hagnau ka D’lligh–Matiktik ka na sasoulat ti–MATTHEUS–Naunamou ki lbægh ki soulat
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Ah, yes. How silly of me. The Portuguese and the Dutch are Christians. They forced their religion onto the aborigines. Just as Japan forced Shinto onto everybody on Taiwan. People have been free to worship whom they please in the ROC.
Worship of CKS was forced on everyone. His image was placed in popular shrines, in many cases just switching the worship from Shinto to Chiang.
Chiang Ching-kuo had to be a good son and made sure that people did not forget his father. And he ended the practice of worship when he made sure that nothing special was done for him when he left this earth. The ROC has changed. It’s a full and bright democracy where the opposition party is now the ruling party. I could not be more proud.
Why not split the thread about religion to Culture and History forum, so we can verify Dirt’s dream about how the Japanese forced a religion onto Taiwanese?
I agree w/Hansioux’s post that Dirt’s initial comment on Christianity coming from China is unfounded and somewhat surprising. As for Dirt’s later comments that the ROC has been more religiously tolerant than Imperial Japan, that may have merit for discussion, but it is a different point entirely than what Handioux was responding to.
For God’s sake, don’t move anything to the religion forum. Now that the “Tibetan Buddhism is not Buddhism” people have taken over, that forum is uninhabitable for normal discussion.
I study weird Jesus theories–including the ones where he went to India, Tibet, Egypt, and/or England during his “Lost Years”–but have never heard anything about China, so when I read the last post first, I wondered if I had missed one. But no, false alarm. Carry on. Christianity did spread into China at a much earlier date than is normally realized, and result in some cool cultural artifacts (see the so-called “Jesus Sutras,” which were miscellaneous Chinese Nestorian writings from the Tang Dynasty and up). As for Taiwan, while the Dutch and Spanish did spread Protestantism and Calvinism to the island, it didn’t stick–missionaries had to come back and start from scratch during the 19th century. (Dominicans from the Philippines, vs. English and Canadian Presbyterian missionaries such as Mackay.)
The Japanese did establish elements of State Shinto, but by that time did not officially regard Shinto as a religion (meaning that one couldn’t plead the principle of religious freedom in order to get out of bowing to the emperor or his symbol), but something more like a family of obligatory civil rituals. Buddhist groups faced pressure to affiliate with Japanese parent lineages, and there were some restrictions on Daoism / the folk religion, including parades and such. (The 228 Park and the museum there were originally the site of a Mazu temple which burned down, and was not allowed to be rebuilt.) Ordinary families faced pressure to install Shinto-style shrines in their homes, in much the same spirit that they were encouraged to assume Japanese names. Existing Christian groups were allowed to continue their missionary work, and even open new churches, but new missionaries were generally not allowed into the country (except from Japan, in the case of the Orthodox). So now you know.
What is wrong with introducing Shinto? Was there any forced conversion of native Taiwanese to Shinto?
Give me a rough number of the native Taiwanese population converted to Shinto, either be coercion or voluntarily. Is it 1%, 10%, 30%?
What are the kind rituals of Shinto that Taiwanese in 1895 to 1945 were forced to practice?
So with regard to religions on Taiwan, any religion that originated on the Eurasian continent was NOT forced upon, but the religion from Japan was forced upon. Is that what you mean?
Anyways I don’t remember my grandma complaining about not being allowed to worship whatever she wanted to worship. She burned an insane amount of ghost money in her life despite being a Buddhist supposedly. She was born in 1922 and worked as a maid in a Japanese household before marrying my grandpa, who worked at Taiwan Rail before the end of the war.
No one “converted” to Shinto. As I said, it was not regarded as a religion, but as a set of secular rituals, so everyone was assumed / expected to conform to it by (for example) “worshipping” the emperor, or his symbol, when called upon to do so.
Yes, there were street parades, but there was also official concern that temple fairs were a waste of resources. (The early KMT said similar things, though they later decided that a vibrant folk religion would boost their claim to represent religion and culture against godless Communism.) It wasn’t all-or-nothing.
Bowed to the Emperor like we bowed to Sun Yet-san, ChiangI and Chang II? I’m really confused at what you’re getting at.
You see worshiping, to Taiwanese, means “bobi,” which means protect me, grant me wishes, and heal me.
What you’re saying is, while the native Taiwanese bowed to the Emperor, they were saying " Hey you, Tenno Heika, make me rich! Make my son do well at school, with all your mighty power." Is that what you mean?
How about God save the Queen? Is that worshipping for the Anglophones?
It was ambiguous. The meaning of “religion” is not absolutely clear, and a number of phenomena (such as Confucianism, or the “civil religion” practices you mention) could be interpreted either way. In Japan, Meiji-era Shinto bodies first tried to separate Shinto cults from Buddhist ones (and from local folk festivals), then organized missionaries. An early problem that came up almost immediately was: if Shinto was a religion, then what were its teachings and beliefs, e.g. on the afterlife? Missionaries really needed answers to these things!
Instead of calling it a religion, which will prompt us to ask about the teaching, why not just call it a belief?
Basically, what you’d do with a “belief” in the context of Taiwan, is that you’d enshrine a dead person and believe that the dead has some sort of magic power that can affect your world, and you’d communicate with the dead verbally or through other means.
In this case we are speaking more of ritual and hierarchy than belief per se. On the other hand, the belief dimension was not entirely absent. Thus spake Wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_S … _in_Taiwan
Compare the situation with Confucianism and other forms of “Chinese” political / cultural identity, such as KMT activity. While bodies of belief can be identified, and most people have to study this stuff in school, the main thing seems to be to bow when people tell you to.
the Japanese set up a Shinto shrine for koxinga.
Koxinga is no diety, and that’s hardly a “religion.” Koxinga was Japanese and was never worshiped in Taiwan until the Japanese found him convenient to be a spokesperson against the whiteanglo devils きちくべいえい.