From Taihoku Imperial University to National Taiwan University: The Spector of Colonialism in the Higher Education Taiwan in Taiwan

This paper focuses on the institutional and academic development and in National Taiwan University, which was once Taihoku Imperial University constructed as an educational institute for Japanese Southern Expansion Doctrine/ Nanshin-ron. The time span of this paper will be dated back to 1920s, when Taihoku Imperial University was founded, and continue from the period of KMT government to today.

I enquire into two perspectives: first: Southeast Asian studies in Taiwan between Japanese colonization and today; second, the related historical archives which bought and collected during Japan’s colonization and preserved after KMT took the office. From these two dimensions and with the case in National Taiwan University, we enable to discuss the theoretical, conceptual and methodological structures embedded in the higher education. Ultimately, I argue that taking Southeast Asian studies as example, the dual-colonization by Japanese and KMT in higher education institute evidently exists. The specter begins by coming back—the de-colonization of KMT from Japanese regime has produced another educational colonization. During the process, it had ignored the precious archives collected during Japanese colonization to create new and different institutions as well as intellectual ideologies in National Taiwan University.

Thus, it presents three paradoxes of de-colonization in postcolonial period in Taiwan. First is that “the specter begins by coming back”: the specter of colonization never disappears, but oppositely reinforced while the changes of political authority in a pre-colony along with the political establishment. Second, the academic freedom can never genuinely exist in the places once been colonialized. Third, the process of de-colonization in Taiwanese education has stagnated and kidnapped by the political agencies after the Japanese colonization, which could be so-called as intellectual colonialism by both KMT government and American influences and investments in Taiwan higher educational institutes after the mid twentieth century.