Chiang Kai-shek’s government still hopes that one day its people will return to the mainland.  This hope has changed from hope of victory in a civil war to hope of revolutionary developments within Communist China which might lead to the creation of a more liberal government in which men with KMT loyalties could find a place.  Because they are Chinese, the present government and, it is believed, the majority of the people, consider themselves a part of China from which they are temporarily separated.  Therefore they reject the idea, proposed by some American politicians, that Taiwan should become an independent state.  There are, mainly in the United States and Japan, groups of Taiwan-Chinese who favour an independent Taiwan, which naturally would be close to Japan politically and economically.  One may agree with their belief that Taiwan, now larger than many European countries, could exist and flourish as an independent country; yet few Chinese will wish to divorce themselves from the world’s largest society.

3 Communist China

Both Taiwan and mainland China have developed extremely quickly.  The reasons do not seem to lie solely in the form of government, for the pre-conditions for a “takeoff” existed in China as early as the 1920’s, if not earlier.  That is, the quick development of China could have started forty years ago but was prevented, primarily for political reasons.  One of the main pre-conditions for quick development is that a large part of the population is inured to hard and repetitive work.  The Chinese farmer was accustomed to such work; he put more time and energy into his land than any other farmer.  He and his fellows were the industrial workers of the future:  reliable, hard-working, tractable, intelligent.  To train them was easy, and absenteeism was never a serious problem, as it is in other developing nations.  Another pre-condition is the existence of sufficient trained people to manage industry.  Forty years ago China had enough such men to start modernization; foreign assistance would have been necessary in some fields, but only briefly.

Another requirement (at least in the period before radio and television) is general literacy.  Meaningful statistical data on literacy in China before 1937 are lacking.  Some authors remark that before 1800 probably all upper-class sons and most daughters were educated, and that men in the middle and even in the lower classes often had some degree of literacy.  In this context “educated” means that these persons could read classical poetry and essays written in literary Chinese, which was not the language of daily conversation.  “Literacy,” however, might mean only that a person could read and write some 600 characters, enough to conduct a business and to read simple stories.  Although newspapers today have a stock of about 6,000 characters, only some 600 characters are commonly used, and a farmer or worker can manage well with a knowledge of about 100 characters.  Statements to the effect that in 1935 some 70 per cent of all men and 95 per cent of all women were illiterate must include the last category in these figures.  In any case, the literacy program of the Nationalist government had penetrated the countryside and had reached even outlying villages before the Pacific War.