Andre’s Reviews > Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895 > Status Update

these excerpts from "Small Sea Travelogue" are really boring. Only the sometimes descriptions of the "Savages" make this in any way worthwile and the author stated that earlier anyway.

Tell me about the constant west = colonizer and the rest = colonized dichotomy. This is so strong that when you think about it, it basically repeats and feeds what it alleged critiques.

Now look at that, in the Rover incident general LeGendre basically points out that the Qing also act on the "that land has only savages so it is mine".

Couldn't it be argued that the spread of Mandarin in Taiwan is colonial as well as it was not common there until the KMT enforced it?
Also:
Theorists sometimes admit Japan as the single example of a non-Western imperial power. But as Leo Ching has shown, there is still some reluctance even then to accepting Japan as a "true" imperialist.
I might have to check Ching's book.

The very idea of "national reunification" between China and Taiwan is predicated on the denial of Qing imperialism. Hence the PRC has a vested interest in maintaining the idea that imperialism was solely the doing of European men. In official PRC accounts of Qing history, Qing expansionism is never spoken of as "imperialism"; rather, it is recast as "national unification"(tongyi).

The very idea of "national reunification" between China and Taiwan is predicated on the denial of Qing imperialism. Hence the PRC has a vested interest in maintaining the idea that imperialism was solely the doing of European men. In official PRC accounts of Qing history, Qing expansionism is never spoken of as "imperialism"; rather, it is recast as "national unification"(tongyi).

Tell me about the common assumption that colonizers were only European men...

So under the Qianlong emperor East Turkistanis and Mongols were no longer references as "dog-Muslims" and "barbarians" but it was totally ok to call Taiwan indigenes as "savages" and Qing officials were not censored when they referred to them as animals. The reason? They and other frontier peoples were considered superfluous, unlike the former two as well as Han, Tibetans and Manchus.

Oh, so Taiwn did not become an official chinese province until 1887 (Hey, that was the year when the Qing claimed in a political dispute with the German empire that Korea was a chinese colony) and that was lost im1895 when Taiwan became a Japanese colony until 1945... so technically, it was longer a Japanese colony than an official chinese province... very interesting.

Holy shit is this similar to "Western" colonial discourses in the Americas and Australia.