A Cautionary Tale for Nation-Builders

Abstract

This tightly argued institutional analysis of “statebuilding by imposition” in two colonial settings contends that Japan successfully built the machinery of a “high-scope” state in Taiwan while the United States largely failed in a similar effort in the Philippine Islands. Success, in this analysis, is measured by a colonial state’s ability to enforce rules evenly over the surface of governed terrain. Under predecessor “low-scope” states—the Qing in Taiwan (1684–1895) and the Spanish Empire in the Philippines (1570s–1898)—each archipelago was governed through the mediation of local strongmen, landed elites, religious institutions, and other non-state actors. Rules were unevenly enforced, the state relatively weak. The key to Japan’s effective successor state in Taiwan was its pragmatic re-evaluation of failed policies in the initial years of rule (1895–1898), and its re-invention of the baojia system of mutual responsibility and tithing from 1898 onward. The revamped baojia (renamed hokō to reflect Japanese pronunciation) put Japanese beat cops in charge of a Taiwanese-operated network of surveillance, taxation, and rule-implementation units, allowing the colonial state to extend its writ to the grassroots level.