Nobody says the KMT and USA has no part of it. In fact, they have. What we are trying to say is that the progress the KMT made in Taiwan was due to:
a) Very good existent infrastructure
b) Easy possibility of implementation of land reform, because most of the land was “ownerless” - due to the fact that their Japanese owners were gone
c) USA aid
d) Money stolen from China
With all this implemented, plus with the fact that most of the capable businessmen from the richest areas from China came along, made the country explode.
About the fact that Japanese where exporting most of the crops to Japan, there where never accounts of hunger in Taiwan during the Japanese tenure, meaning that the Japanese where careful enough with it. The same didn’t happen with the KMT, when mostly all the crops were sent to China to be sold in the black market… under the pretext of aid to fight the war against the communists…
I believe that apart from the usual utter absence of intellectual honesty and impartiality, your post or more specifically the sentence quoted above is also sorely missing the qualifier “but failed dismally to make any inroads into getting them to adopt any of the above in Taiwan.” [/quote]
Unfortunately, I can’t write that, because that was not the general view of things in the 1930s. After the KMT came public order, and with it, public behavior, underwent a massive deterioration in Taiwan. I suggest you see Kerr’s two books on Taiwan, Formosa Betrayed and Formosa: LIcensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement, which discuss that process. Most of the commentators agree that great progress was made under Japanese rule. I think there is some (flattering) account of this in Through Formosa, Owen Rutter’s work on their journey in the Japanese colony.
I generally try to glance further than my window, plasma. It’s how one develops an understanding o things.