‘Crowded and resourceful’

On September 13, 1948, a team of Rockefeller Foundation officials and researchers of the Office of Population Research, Princeton University, embarked on a three-month trip in Asia that included Japan, its former colonies, Taiwan (1895–1945) and Korea (1910–1945), China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The devastation of World War II and its aftermath was evident: the influx of Japanese from its collapsed empire, civil war in China, a standoff in Korea, revolution in Indonesia, and uncertainties in a newly independent Philippines.Footnote ¹⁴ Taiwan, in contrast, seemed to be an outlier. ‘Asian imperialism had its positive aspects’, the report claimed, pointing out the improved farming, disease control, primary school education, railway and other infrastructure, and above all ‘census and vital statistics of unusual accuracy’.Footnote ¹⁵

Despite the team’s praise for the detailed statistics, Taiwan’s population also demonstrated an alarming trend. An island inhabited by Austronesian Indigenous peoples, Taiwan was annexed by the Qing Empire in the seventeenth century and became an agrarian frontier for settlers from Southern China. When the island was ceded to the Japanese Empire in 1895, the western plains, where most arable lands were located, had been converted into extensive paddy fields, supporting a population of roughly three million.Footnote ¹⁶ To intensify the extraction of rice and sugar, the Japanese Government-General expanded the irrigation area and introduced new production techniques. Meanwhile, a public health system was launched to protect Japanese citizens, which gradually extended to the Taiwanese countryside and reduced the infant mortality rate.Footnote ¹⁷ All of these factors were noted by the Rockefeller team. Drawing on Malthus’s concept of disease and famine as ‘checks’ for population growth, the report suggested the colonial regime had removed such checks by turning Taiwan into ‘a garden island where only the most venturesome of weeds could grow’, inadvertently leading to ‘a classical experiment in the potentiality of the Chinese peasant to reproduce his numbers under favorable conditions’, or a 93% population increase between 1895 and 1945.Footnote ¹⁸ This rapid growing population was thrown into a limbo: doubting the ability of the Republic of China (ROC) regime to restore and sustain the economy after its takeover, the team anxiously described the situation as the ‘political travesty of the Chinese liberation of the Chinese population of Taiwan’, warning that an ‘inundation from the Mainland would have reduced the Taiwanese to Chinese levels of living and absorbed their particular population into one of the greatest of all population problems’.Footnote ¹⁹

The establishment of the PRC and the ROC’s relocation to Taiwan in December 1949 seemed to realise the team’s worst fear. One million Mainlanders – half of them soldiers and three fourth men – were added to the island’s six million inhabitants.Footnote ²⁰ Positing itself as the de jure government of the entire China, the regime declared martial law, suppressed political dissents, and co-opted remaining Taiwanese elites.Footnote ²¹ As President Chiang Kai-shek considered the recovery of the mainland territory the top priority, it was the much larger population of China, rather than the population of this island province, that demanded attention. This focus on mainland territory was illustrated by ‘A Preliminary Draft of the Principle of Population Policy in China’, prepared by the Ministry of Interior in 1954. Believing that ‘the population problem of China is poverty and ignorance, not its quantity’, the document proposed industrial development and sanitation improvement once the civil war ended, while opposing both birth control and pronatalism.Footnote ²² Notably, the document was well aware of demographic transition theory and justified the conclusion with it: economic growth, education, and ‘advancement in culture’ (wenhua jinbu) would ultimately reduce fertility.Footnote ²³ In the end, no population policy was implemented in the early-1950s due to the opposition from the military.Footnote ²⁴

Though likely agreeing with the centrality of development in lowering fertility, technocrats, composed mainly of Mainlander officials in planning positions since the 1930s and Taiwanese elites educated in the colonial era, stressed the need for birth control. As the ROC depended on the United States for military and financial aid, American interests in trade and regional hegemony buttressed the technocrats’ position.Footnote ²⁵ An early proponent of population policy was the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR) founded in 1948.Footnote ²⁶ The JCRR was directed by three ROC and two American commissioners – later reduced to two and one – and employed roughly a hundred local technicians embedded in the provincial government and organised into a range of divisions: plant, animal, fisheries, forestry, health, irrigation, economics, rural credits, and farmers’ services. Many senior employees, from agronomists to public health experts, received Rockefeller Foundation fellowships to study in the United States.Footnote ²⁷

Instead of making conjectural plans for the entire China, the JCRR took a pragmatic approach to development by limiting itself to Taiwan’s actual territory and population. A 1953 field survey, conducted by American officials and National Taiwan University, reflected this idea. Nineteen out of thirty-three surveyed areas witnessed at least 50% population increase since 1937 due to natural increase and influx of Mainland and Taiwanese migrants. While a minority of Mainlanders would secure employment in the government or in former Japanese-owned companies taken over by the ROC, the majority of the population, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds, supported themselves with peddling, mending, and pedicabbing. The ‘crowded and resourceful’ urban people were joined by rural folks from the ‘productive but crowded farmlands’.Footnote ²⁸ A mixed picture of poverty and vitality suggested the urgency to study the potentials and challenges of Taiwan’s demographic and economic reality. The report closed with four recommendations: the first two supported the development of natural and human resources involving the ‘careful cataloguing of population numbers and characteristics’, and the last two extolled the virtue of international cooperation in fact-finding missions since ‘the best possible answers to a situation can be arrived at only by the creative use of the elements within the situation itself’.Footnote ²⁹ In this vision, population became a scientific fact that could, and must, be studied and planned so as to ensure the island’s survival.

For the JCRR, the first step to formulate population policy was to understand demographic changes in socioeconomic transformation. In 1952–53, George Barclay, a Princeton demographer, was invited to study vital statistics in the colonial era. While the resulting book began with a caveat that it was not ‘concerned with the prospects for the island under the present Chinese Nationalist government’, Barclay clearly intended to apply his observation to postwar Taiwan.Footnote ³⁰ As he argued, by ignoring the traditional preference for large family, the colonial agricultural and health policies caused unprecedented population growth, while fertility decline associated with urbanisation and industrialisation barely touched the society. Barclay further warned, ‘familial attitudes supporting high levels of fertility’ appeared ‘eventually to be incompatible with an industrial system’; in stark contrast, ‘lowered birth rates’ were ‘probably automatic features of successful modernization’.Footnote ³¹ Taiwan’s development would be ‘illusory’ if population growth obstructed industrialisation and hindered the ‘‘automatic’ decline in fertility’.Footnote ³² By presenting unchecked population growth as the pitfall of colonial development, Barclay not only linked demographic transition to modernisation theory but also made it the foundation of the ROC’s legitimacy. If the colonial regime had already initiated the early stage of agriculture-led development, the ROC must prove itself by transforming the semi-agrarian economy into a fully-fledged industrial one through reduced fertility.

The connection between economic growth, ROC’s legitimacy, and demographic transition was the key justification for the JCRR’s policies. Through a gradual shift from import substitution to export expansion between 1952 and 1960, agricultural production grew by 54% and industrial production by 145%. The United States terminated financial assistance in 1965, declaring Taiwan a successful ‘graduate’ which no longer relied on foreign aid for economic growth.Footnote ³³ In practice, this denoted the island’s integration in the regional supply chain and continual dependence on foreign investment to maintain the export-driven growth. Expecting that Taiwan would gradually lose its competitive edge in labour cost, technocrats pushed for the expansion of secondary and vocational education.Footnote ³⁴ The increasing education budget invested in human resources therefore, added further rationale for family planning.

The JCRR’s multi-faceted strategy to push for family planning started to soften the military resistance by 1960. Already in the late-1950s, it had provided financial support to the China Family Planning Association to disseminate birth control advice and contraceptive, while utilising the Committee on Maternal and Child Health of the Provincial Health Department to study couples’ contraceptive practices, an approach later evolving into Knowledge, Attitudes and Practice (KAP) surveys.Footnote ³⁵ In 1959, the JCRR sponsored an unofficial family planning programme targeting mainly poor people such as ‘fishermen, salt field workers, and coal miners’ as well as urban inhabitants ‘in underprivileged district in cities’ and aimed to eventually expand the programme to all sectors of the society.Footnote ³⁶ In 1961, the persistent technocrats convinced the Governor of Taiwan, a former general, that enough children had been born to serve as future soldiers, and the regime’s priority should be the wellbeing of the current generation.Footnote ³⁷ A milestone occurred in 1962, when a Taiwan Population Studies Center, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Population Council, launched the Taichung Experiment with its counterpart in the University of Michigan. The study included home visits to 854 out of 2389 neighbourhoods in Taichung City and interviewed nearly 11,000 women about contraceptive use, which was followed up by the distribution of family planning knowledge and birth control devices.Footnote ³⁸ The study then served as the basis for the island-wide IUD promotion programme. A ‘population establishment’ in charge of family planning thus took shape in the JCRR’s Rural Health Division and the Provincial Health Department.Footnote ³⁹

Notably, since birth rate already began to drop prior to the Taichung Experiment, the report of the study painted contraceptive acceptance as both a cause and a result of Taiwan’s success in development: ‘If a high rate or level of development is conducive to changes in fertility and family planning practice, Taiwan appears to be ready’.Footnote ⁴⁰ This readiness, the report argued, could be found across the rural-urban divide: 18% of couples surveyed in Taichung were farmers, and 66% had at least either husband or wife once working in agriculture; yet farmers’ enrolment rate was close to non-farmers, and many rural families outside the city came to receive contraceptives.Footnote ⁴¹ The report attributed this transformation to what it called the ‘most important means of diffusing widely the influence and benefits of the development effort’: the land reform in the 1950s.Footnote ⁴²

Land of modernisation

If urban-industrial development was central to modernisation and demographic transition theories, the land reform was the JCRR’s method to bring the presumed benefits of modernisation, namely capitalist production and market economy, from cities to the countryside, while reinforcing urban development through cheap food and surplus labour.Footnote ⁴³ The reform started with a rent ceiling in 1949, a series of public land sales since 1951, and a land-to-the-tiller policy in 1953. All paddies over three hectares were transferred to tenants. After turning most tenants into owner-cultivators, the JCRR mobilised them through the state-sponsored farmers’ associations, incorporating them into the agricultural administration and extension systems for the distribution of agrochemicals, seeds, and irrigation water.Footnote ⁴⁴

The consolidation of the smallholder system had profound impacts on the rural population, chiefly the increasing productivity and rural surplus without the introduction of mechanisation or expansion of the farm. In fact, average farm size continued to shrink. Land scarcity had been an issue since the colonial era. From 1911 to 1960, the rural population increased by 125%, but arable land by a mere 26%; the farm labour force expanded by only 50%, indicating rural inhabitants’ need to take on non-farm jobs. Peculiarly, despite the rising population-to-land ratio, crop area per labour increased by 30%.Footnote ⁴⁵ For JCRR’s economists, this phenomenon could be explained by the spread of multiple cropping: in the 1920s, farmers already planted two rice crops plus a winter crop, while in postwar era a summer crop was added between the two rice harvests.Footnote ⁴⁶ As a result, each labour became more productive by intensifying land use and minimising the fallow area and time. How to interpret the success of multiple cropping became a highly political topic. For more recent scholarship, the actual contribution of land reform on productivity was relatively limited, and the adoption of new seeds and chemical fertilisers should be the main reason behind the productivity increase.Footnote ⁴⁷

The JCRR clearly acknowledged the benefits of technology but sought to brand the land reform as the precondition for the adoption of technology. As its 1958 annual report claimed, technology that increased food production ‘would merely have boosted the individual gains of a small number of big landlords if efforts had not been made to achieve equitable distribution’.Footnote ⁴⁸ For the officials, it was the land reform and the resulting smallholder-based farmers’ association that enabled the dissemination of high-yielding seeds, irrigation water, and fertilisers. In this way, the spread of multiple cropping became not only a technological success but a political triumph. Moreover, the JCRR imagined a synergy between rural and urban development: while freeing farmers from heavy rent and giving the majority of them land ownership, the land reform also compensated landlords with shares in state-owned enterprises, leading to a shift of capital to urban-industrial development. It further facilitated the migration of rural surplus labour by discouraging farm expansion through strict tenure and land sales regulation.Footnote ⁴⁹ With few opportunities for farm enlargement, the traditional preferences for a big family faced mounting financial pressure.

A 1964 survey of thirty-six townships found that, among 1250 former tenant households, family size had increased from 7.69 to 9.96 after the reform.Footnote ⁵⁰ The typical farm labour per household was nonetheless just three people, meaning most did not stay on the farm: more children attended middle schools or above in towns and cities, while young people worked as seasonal migrants in factories outside the harvesting and planting seasons.Footnote ⁵¹ Instead of acquiring lands, farmers invested in children’s education, house renovation, and consumer items such as radios, electrical fans, and sewing machines.Footnote ⁵² Changing economic structures then influenced reproductive decisions: a 1965 survey after Taichung Experiment, for instance, found 30% of IUD acceptors were women outside the targeted city, and among them 41% were married to farmers, though their cohort only made up 33% of the population. For population experts, the growing number of rural women – two-thirds of them had more than four children – seeking contraceptives indicated that economic conditions in the countryside had translated demographic pressure into incentives for limiting family size.Footnote ⁵³

For the JCRR, the land reform, by integrating the countryside into the economic and value systems of cities, hastened its modernisation. One key theorist of the modernisation effects of land reform was sociologist Yang Maochun, trained at Columbia University and joining the National Taiwan University in 1958. In the report following the above survey in 1964, Yang distinguished modernisation from Westernisation, industrialisation, or democratisation, defining it as a moment when ‘people in a community intentionally or unintentionally break away from their old traditions and adopt new thinking, new things, and new practices in their daily life and work’.Footnote ⁵⁴ This embrace of novelty was fostered by land reform that reduced landlords’ power without excessive centralised planning. Liberated from elite or state control, the new farmer, Yang argued, had a ‘new feeling of being free’ and a ‘consciousness of now being the social and legal equal’ of landlords; the lifted morale that ‘generated happiness, hope, and optimism in the farmers’ hearts’ in turn ‘created the spirit, the power, and the magic by which bodies and machines could be set in motion’.Footnote ⁵⁵

The rhetoric that extolled farmers’ freedom must be read in the political context of the Cold War. In the 1950s and 60s, the JCRR presented its programme as a case of how ‘free world’ countries could balance the interests of farmers and capitalists, individuals and the nation, while contrasting Taiwan’s land reform with its counterpart in the PRC, which the JCRR caricatured as a violent class struggle that ended in disastrous famines during the PRC’s radical agricultural collectivisation experiments in the late-1950s, or the ‘Great Leap Forward’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In reality, what the JCRR’s narrative of freedom reflected was the regime’s need for legitimacy and technocrats’ plan to mould farmers into rational actors under the capitalist economic system.

The quest for ROC’s survival in Cold War Taiwan eventually led to the creation of the dual plans for human and land fertility: a population establishment in the JCRR’s collaboration with the Provincial Health Department, and a ‘Green Revolution establishment’ in its connection with the Provincial Food Bureau in charge of fertiliser distribution and rice procurement and the Provincial Department of Agriculture and Forestry supervising the extension system and farmers’ associations (Figure 2).Footnote ⁵⁷

Figure 2.

Network of population and agricultural policies in Taiwan from the 1950s to the 1970s. Solid lines indicate supervision while dashed lines indicate coordination.

Planning family, planning community

In 1964, following the suppression of Taiwan’s last cholera outbreak in 1962 and the near eradication of malaria, the Rural Health Division decided to shift its focus from infectious diseases to nutrition, technical services, community healthcare, and family planning.Footnote ⁵⁸ In 1969, the central government officially made fertility reduction a national policy. The population policy, embedded in the rural health system, could rely on a readily available network of local governments, health stations (weisheng suo), and farmers’ associations to implement its target.Footnote ⁵⁹

As family planning entered full swing, the JCRR sought to combine the population and Green Revolution establishment in the countryside, where nearly half of the population still resided in 1970.Footnote ⁶⁰ New experts were needed for the project. Since the extension of farm technology was mostly carried out by male fieldworkers, the addition of birth control to the extension network necessitated the employment of more women in three kinds of roles: home economics fieldworkers in farmers’ associations, public health nurses in health stations, and family planning fieldworkers recruited by the Provincial Health Department. Home economics fieldworkers had a wide range of responsibilities from surveying sanitation and efficiency in toilets, kitchen, gardens, and chicken coops to organising classes for sewing, cooking, food processing, and bookkeeping.Footnote ⁶¹ In the family planning effort, their function was to propagate the programme with lectures, slideshows, and house visits, raising women’s awareness, and referring them to health workers. As one home economics fieldworker admitted in 1967 in the extension magazine Fengnian, family planning was ‘the most difficult’ among her various responsibilities. When starting her job in 1963, ‘most people did not believe family planning could improve household livelihoods’, and she spent five years explaining contraception methods and only gradually gained the trust of local people by recruiting the help of women who had accepted IUDs as policy promoters in home economics classes.Footnote ⁶²

Public health nurses similarly faced difficulties. While their roles in providing vaccination, medicine, and basic health care for children and mother were welcomed in the countryside, home visits could meet with resistance: a father-in-law might refuse to let a nurse in because of his desire to have more grandchildren, or a family might consider these visits as unwanted intrusion to their privacy.Footnote ⁶³ Crucially, although family planning in Taiwan imposed neither punishment nor rewards on the targeted population, local health stations did have quotas to achieve in terms of the number of contraceptive devices distributed: exceeding quotas led to salary bonus, and underperformance meant reprimand from superiors. The system put the most stress on the specialised family planning fieldworkers. Unlike public health nurses or home economics fieldworkers, their sole duty was to disseminate contraceptives, and frequent failure to meet quotas could cause the termination of their contracts.Footnote ⁶⁴ Most of them were married women recruited locally by health stations who received just three weeks of training: a week of crash courses in the principles of family planning, women’s health, contraceptive methods, and statistics, a week of practical workshops in house visit, public speech, and data collection, and finally a week of basic civil service skills.Footnote ⁶⁵

Lacking direct incentives or sanctions to persuade the public, building rapport and winning people’s trust became an integral part of fieldworkers’ profession. Oral history revealed that many fieldworkers started by integrating themselves in local communities, softening people’s resistance by checking the health of children and elderly, and bringing up family planning only after repeated visits, especially when women mentioned their recent economic or health issues – a perfect timing to suggest contraceptives as a solution.Footnote ⁶⁶ Fieldworkers sometimes took the initiative in amplifying their message. For instance, before showing a family planning film, a fieldworker decided to first circle the village with a truck, attract the crowd with a loudspeaker, and finally use the local temple for screening to maximise the attendance.Footnote ⁶⁷

Ultimately, this extensive network of policy implementation aimed to transform the public into agents of development themselves. A pivotal idea in the JCRR’s imagination was the creation of economically innovative communities that would identify local development goals and mobilise their own resources to achieve them. In 1965, the Provincial Health Department added community development (shequ fazhan) to its agenda and cooperated with municipal governments in planning and financing infrastructure such as sewage treatment, toilets, and running water.Footnote ⁶⁸ Subsequently, the community development programme spread from public health to agricultural extension. Farmers’ associations were in charge of recruiting locals as voluntary infrastructure workers and instructors in production techniques.Footnote ⁶⁹ Home economics fieldworkers and extension officers led meetings in which family planning was discussed alongside other topics as diverse as goose raising, mushroom production, and environmental beautification. In the 1970s, community initiatives expanded from 14 villages to 75 rural areas with the aim to ‘eliminate the farmers’ habit of relying on others’ and ‘accelerate village development through self-support and self-help’.Footnote ⁷⁰ In this vision, development was no longer only the business of government but would be led chiefly by the community.

The ambition was captured by sociologist Yang Maochun, who had participated in JCRR’s surveys and theorised the modernisation influences of land reform. In a 1972 article in Community Development, a journal edited by the Provincial Department of Health, Yang envisioned a scientific process of community development centring on a research committee that would meet regularly and foster discussion among all residents. This, Yang believed, would enable the people to realise the issues they faced, develop fact-finding abilities, create a shared commitment, discover potential resources, and restore their confidence in the neighbourhood.Footnote ⁷¹ Once the research was completed, Yang argued that all residents should participate by providing tools, labour, funds, and knowledge. The support of governments and universities were indispensable, but they must serve as sponsors rather than leaders in projects, which were the sole responsibility of development committees run by the communities themselves.Footnote ⁷² In a sense, a community committee functioned like a miniature JCRR: an agency targeting concrete issues with scientific methods, building internal development capacities, and soliciting external funds and technical advice when necessary.

While writing about communities in general, rather than just those in the countryside, Yang clearly linked community development to rural modernisation. On the one hand, the Department of Agriculture Extension in National Taiwan University, which Yang founded in 1960, was the first to offer community development courses. On the other hand, he stressed how most communities were originally agrarian and community-led studies may recover ‘stories about how our ancestors started from scratch’ (baishou chengjia).Footnote ⁷³ As Yang argued, ‘studying the national and community history with a scientific outlook and a desire to honour our past is the best way to ignite patriotism’; such patriotism ‘is not a narrow-minded, ignorant, and conservative hubris’, but a conviction that ‘our nation or community will not end with us or with this generation’, and that ‘we will make it strong and thriving, on par with the rich nations’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The quest of modernisation in agricultural and population policies culminated in the growth of and through communities. With the island rapidly urbanising, its agrarian root were now imagined as the foundation for bottom-up development.

The return of rural questions

Presenting modernisation as rapid social changes that would ultimately benefit the people and the community, Yang had ignored the uneven development that modernisation induced. In sharp contrast with Yang’s idealism about rural community, signs of rural decline started to surface in the late 1960s. After the end of American financial aid in 1965, the JCRR, according to its second Chair Shen Zonghan, faced ‘difficult times’ due to budget cut, and a dwindling share of agriculture in the economy following the great industrial expansion triggered anxiety over the future relevance of farming to Taiwan’s development.Footnote ⁷⁵ In response, the JCRR reoriented its policy focus. Remarking on the twentieth anniversary of its foundation, the report in 1968 suggested that its mandate was ‘no longer confined to the solution of problems of food shortage’ since the island moved from ‘a period of dire need’ to ‘an era of innovation’.Footnote ⁷⁶ In essence, this denoted a renewed push for agricultural modernisation through new technology and commodities.

Processing industries was at the centre of the Green Revolution establishment in the 1960s: canned products such as pineapple, mushrooms, and asparagus were the biggest agricultural export item in 1967, making up 28% of the value and surpassing that of banana (20%), sugar (16%), and rice (8%).Footnote ⁷⁷ Many farmers also diversified into the production of fresh vegetables, fruits, animals, and fish to meet international and domestic demands, especially by taking advantage of the newly opened highland farms for temperate fruit production and reclaimed coast for aquaculture.Footnote ⁷⁸ The rise of new cash crops was nevertheless accompanied by the decline of older ways of farming. By 1970, the migration from the countryside had reduced the efficiency of the labour-intensive rice farming system.Footnote ⁷⁹ The multiple cropping index peaked in 1966 and began to decline, yet the diversification index still continued to increase.Footnote ⁸⁰ This indicated the rise of specialised farmers who planted fewer crops but boosted the total number of items on the market.

The JCRR initially read this impact of demographic transition on agriculture as conducive to its modernisation mandate. In a 1972 article in Fengnian, the chief of the Agricultural Economics Division argued that Taiwan’s agriculture eventually had to shift from labour-to capital-intensive, and from paddy rice to more profitable land use like orchards, aquaculture, and dairy. These changes could be positive, the article insisted, if the government and the farmers’ association cooperated in extending credits to those willing to expand their operation, purchase new machines, and invest in processing and marketing facilities.Footnote ⁸¹ However, while seeking to replace the smallholder system with mechanised agribusiness, the JCRR could not simply sideline rice farmers whose contribution to food security were vital for Taiwan’s stability. In its 1974 annual report, the JCRR highlighted the importance of food supplies amid the world-wide grain shortage.Footnote ⁸² Calling the proliferation of ‘mechanized and commercialized operation’ a ‘necessary and inevitable’ part of modernisation, it acknowledged that ‘the family farm has been and will continue to be the basic unit of production’, and that future development must ‘protect and advance the interest of the over 800,000 small farms which form the backbone of our agriculture’.Footnote ⁸³

For the first time, the JCRR’s vision was confronted with the contradiction of its own plan: whereas the consolidation of the smallholder system through land reform was politically and economically desirable in the 1950s, it sought to reverse the policy in the name of mechanisation. Yet amid the climate of the 1970s – especially diplomatic crises induced by the ROC’s loss of its seat in the United Nations in 1971 – and the perennial anxiety over food security, a policy undermining smallholders’ land rights would be politically risky. In the end, an eclectic policy for enlarging farm operations was launched under the Accelerated Rural Development Program in 1972. The programme preserved the small family farm, but encouraged farmers to rent adjacent fields and exempted long-term workers from tenant protection.Footnote ⁸⁴ Understanding that many farmers remained reluctant to rent out, let alone sell, their holdings, the JCRR offered an alternative: group farming (gongtong zaipei).

The idea of group farming first entered the Green Revolution establishment in 1963, when rice growers in adjacent fields were encouraged to pool resources together to introduce improved varieties, rent machines, manage irrigation, and conduct pest control. While rural co-ops in charge of rice nursery, transplanting, and pest control had been promoted since the 1910s by the colonial extension system and by postwar farmers’ associations, the 1960s programme put more emphasis on farmers’ income and labour saving.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1968, an extension officer wrote in Fengnian to stress the urgency of these initiatives. Citing the figure that nearly one-third of farmers had less than 0.5 hectares of land and another one-third only 0.5 to 1 hectare, the author depicted group farming as smallholders’ best chance to rationalise their labour input. By joining their holdings together, smallholders could purchase labour-saving technologies, spend only a fraction of their time farming, and divest their energy in other industries like livestock production; moreover, they could develop collective marketing schemes, standardising quality and exploiting the economies of scale. To prove these benefits, 359 and 398 group farming areas were set up for the two rice crops in 1967, each involving around twenty farmers and 15 hectares of paddy field, and reaping a profit per hectare 20% higher than control areas.Footnote ⁸⁶

The JCRR’s reversal of its smallholder-based policy reflected a deeper change in Taiwan’s agricultural economy. Initially, farm enlargement was not considered necessary for mechanisation: in the 1950s and 60s, the JCRR envisioned that small labour saving technology such as power tillers and garden tractors could be smoothly adopted by the existing smallholder system.Footnote ⁸⁷ To facilitate smallholder mechanisation, a land consolidation (nongdi chonghua) campaign was launched in 1962 to reorganise paddy fields into neat, rectangular plots conducive to the driving of machines and access to irrigation ditches.Footnote ⁸⁸ The later push for farm enlargement was induced not by a lack of productivity per se but wrong kind of productivity, namely the oversupply of rice. With changing dietary preferences, increasing meat consumption, and the industrialisation of animal production based on compound feed, the volume of imported grain increased dramatically in the 1970s.Footnote ⁸⁹ In 1977, Taiwan bought US$1.7 billion worth of agricultural products, of which 28% were wheat, maize, and soy, and the total import volume exceeded that of export by US$400 million.Footnote ⁹⁰ Rice, which remained the most commonly produced item, changed from a source of export revenue to a financial burden for the government, which started to procure rice at above market price in 1973.Footnote ⁹¹ As stopping the subsidy would be politically unpopular, the JCRR planned to eventually replace the large number of rice smallholders with a smaller number of large farms for hog, chicken, fish, vegetables, and fruits desired by the urban market. Group farming was then selected as the middle way between the present smallholder system and the future large capital-intensive production.Footnote ⁹²

Yet the economic and demographic reality in the countryside had undermined the prospect of group farming from the beginning. As economists soon discovered, the majority of farmers only joined the initiatives to receive subsidy and left once difficulties over coordination or production emerged.Footnote ⁹³ Instead of combining their lands, farmers who had enough capital hired contractors for mechanised planting and harvesting services (daigeng), and those lacking the resources kept their small holdings and took industrial jobs.Footnote ⁹⁴ With farm expansion ending in failure, rising labour cost and aging workforce further impeded smallholder operation. A 1977 article in Fengnian cautioned that, in the past ten years, the percentage of farmers below thirty had declined by 24.5%, and those above fifty-five increased by 83.3%. The outcome was worrying: increasing difficulties for farmers’ associations to recruit new members, the brain drain of better-educated youth who could otherwise disseminate new technology, and an uncertain demographic future due to women’s preference to marry into urban families.Footnote ⁹⁵ The officials’ belief in the synergy between productivity and population control failed to address this dilemma. As another article in Fengnian insisted, the ‘prioritization of quality over quantity’ (zhongzhi bu zhongliang) in reproduction was the strategy to advance both the quality and quantity of agricultural production.Footnote ⁹⁶ Refusing to admit failure, the technocrats in the 1970s continued to emphasise the potential to use the dwindling rural population as an incentive to foster mechanisation despite the fact that agriculture had ceased to be a profitable venture for most rural residents in the urbanised and industrialised society farmers helped to build.

By the time the JCRR was terminated following the end of formal diplomatic relations with the United States in 1979, the Green Revolution establishment was in a deep crisis. In contrast, the population establishment was triumphant. Although some later demographers would consider the rapid economic change itself, rather than the deliberate birth control programme, the root of Taiwan’s demographic transition, family planning was declared a success in 1986 when the natural increase rate dropped below the target of 1.25%.Footnote ⁹⁷ Conversely, Taiwan’s once celebrated agricultural sector was threatened by trade liberalisation and cheap imported American grains. After the end of martial law in July 1987, mass rural protests exposed the state’s failure to respond to farmers’ needs.Footnote ⁹⁸ The imagined synergy between agricultural and population policies, urban and rural development, had broken down irrevocably.