As is clear to any observer of the Taiwan economic scene, there is a very real transformation of the landscape taking place in the western coastal plains, the Taipei basin and the plains of the north and northeast and the Ilan plain. Brick as a building material is replacing sun-dried adobe blocks; concrete tiles have become more common than thatch in villages as well as towns. Packaging materials which just a few years ago were of rude fibers and vegetable material have now become various grades of plastic. These changes, besides giving new color to the green backdrop of the landscape, suggest a new prosperity in the villages, towns and even hamlets of Taiwan.
At the same time, there is an on-going encroachment on the Class A paddy lands which exist adjacent to the settlements of the coastal plains due to the horizontal expansion of Taiwan territory. This pat tern is repeated from Fang Liao and environs in the south on 10 the top of the island and around to Ilan. The general willingness of the farmers to sell this land and move either to the cities or to inferior land is as telling a hallmark of the transformation in Taiwan as is the land use change itself.
The dynamics of this transformation are basically simple. Taiwan enjoys, for a while, a land, labor, skill and management advantage over not only neighboring countries but over countries of the Western Hemisphere which might also be considered for the piecework assembly role which many of Taiwan's newly established industries specialize in. Though other countries may be more competitive in one or even several of these qualities, few countries are able to present as attractive a total service as Taiwan. Add to this ensemble the political stability afforded by the peculiar wartime footing of the island and it is clear why foreign as well as local investors are so attracted to Taiwan.
In a macro-economic sense, then, there should be a relative homogeneity in Taiwan's response to this growth. In fact, however, the sectionalism apparent in this change is quite pronounced. And the area least affected by this metamorphosis is the Pacific littoral south of Suao to Taimali below Taitung and the Eastern Rift Valley. The reasons for the lag in this area range from the obvious problems of isolation and inaccessibility to the more covert problems of particular physical environment, local sense of backwardness vis a vis the western part of the island and the political and social necessity for a frontier.
Though the full record of Admiral Cheng Ho's encounter with Taiwan was destroyed early in the Ming dynasty because of the ascendance of anti-expansionist influence in the Ming court and the cessation of the voyages of exploration, the little note that was made of the island failed to give any mention at all of the eastern portion beyond the massive Central Mountain Range. This same unawareness continued through the various minor colonization experiments of the Dutch and the French. The Spanish, though they had attempted placer mining for gold along the east coast in the early 16th century, had not been encouraged enough by the experience to establish any settlement in the east. During these centuries, therefore, the eastern part of Taiwan was described as "too little-known" to be included in either foreign or Chinese maps. The only real use made of the east coast and the mountain reaches which so totally isolated it from the west was its function as a goal area for aborigines and probably some Han Chinese attempting to escape the growing pressures of taxation, immigration and regulation on the western coastal plains.
In the second half of the 19th century, however, the isolation of the east coast and rift valley was broken in part by three garrisons established by the Ch'ing court in an attempt to make manifest to the Japanese some control of this lonely part of the island. The settlements which grew up around these garrisons were all in the rift valley on the piedmont of the Central Range. They were able to gain full self-sufficiency and served basically as a focus for aborigine-Chinese friction. The settlement programs established by the Ch'ing government through the Fukien Provincial Government attracted speculators rather than farmers and, somewhat akin to the United States Homestead Act of the 1860s, functioned more as vehicles for individual empire building than the true settlement stimulators they were intended to be.
After 1895 and the Japanese domination of the island, a 14-year cadastral and land use survey of the island resulted in the decision by the Japanese to, for the first time, capitalize on the isolation of the east coast. The Japanese colonial authorities, desirous of providing on Taiwan a viable goal area for immigrating Japanese agricultural population, decided that population densities on the western coastal plains were already as great as those around the Inland Sea and Southern Honshu from which they intended to draw the migrants. It was wisely assumed that to add a Japanese minority to an already existing crowded situation would have intensified the early animosities between the Taiwanese and their paddy-raising colonial brethren. The relatively empty and level lands of the rift valley seemed to be the natural alternative to the west. With this decision having been made, three settlements were established in the eastern rift valley near the floundering Chinese settlements.
Though the history of these settlements is a chapter in the growth of eastern Taiwan too long to chronicle here, it is interesting to note that though they were initiated in the first decade of the 20th century, it was not until the early 1930s that they began to be self-supporting and began to return some capital to the Japanese through the production of sugar for export to the mother country. It was not until the home government began to establish very strict requirements that the settlers came with any valid expectation of what they would find in climate, crop tolerances and extraordinary demands unique to the area.
There is not a single natural overland link between the eastern rift valley and the markets and population of the western coastal plains of the island. The Central Range rises steeply out of the sea and encloses the entire valley in an arc which faces toward the Pacific Ocean. The potential coastal plain of such a situation is also denied the east by the existence of the Coastal Range which interrupts the seaward flow of the Central Range streams.
The first significant road to link the eastern part of the island with the western part was the Suao Hualien Highway which the Japanese completed in 1928. Though the road path had been established by the Chinese in the last decades of the 19th century, the road had never functioned as a real via because of the failure to keep it open. By 1928 the series of tunnels and cliff-hanging single-lane roadways was finished and this began to give real impetus to the growth of Hualien. Lying at the head of the rift valley as it does, Hualien and its new activity began to influence the transportation network in the valley proper. The 30" narrow gauge railway was enlarged from its local sugar cane transportation role and by the early 1930s the valley floor was tied by rail connection to the growing port and city of Hualien in the north and to less rapidly developing Taitung in the south. At the same time, a road system connecting the city of Taitung with the villages on the east face of the Coastal Range was begun. This just recently has been completed through a break in the mountains to Kwang Fu. The east face of the mountains north to Hualien has also just established a road connection to that city.
The other uniting roadways are the highway from Taitung through the southern reaches of the Central Range to Fang Liao where the railway assumes part of the traffic load. It was not until the mid-1930s that the road began to function in any economic sense for the unification of eastern Taiwan and the western coastal plains. The other more recent and very spectacular link to the outer world from the east is the East-West Cross-Island Highway, completed initially at the end of the 1950s but continually in need of maintenance to function in an all-season capacity. Though this highway does offer an alternative for transport to and from the west, the high cost of maintenance and greater ton-mile costs than from Taipei, coupled with its unreliability during the major parts of the long summer and fall typhoon season, has made its function primarily one of tourist and commuter transport.
The totally artificial port of Hualien was berthing ships of 2,600 tons in 1939 and it was enlarged to accommodate vessels of up to 10,000 tons in the early 1960s. With the increasingly reliable road connections with the west, the passenger function of the port has played a decreasing role and it has become more of a cargo warehousing and transshipment depot.
The economic costs of these transport inadequacies, though much less pronounced than they were, are reflected in the slightly higher commodity costs in eastern Taiwan and a greater threat of breakage in the shipment of goods in either direction. There is also the potentially costly obstruction of goods flow due to slides on the precariously balanced Su-Hua Highway and the East-West Highway. Even the rail and highway link which exists between Hualien and Taitung is subject to costly breaks with the wash outs of anyone of the many bridges which cross the approximately 18 streams which pour into the valley. Development of the valley up to this point has been closely tied to the creation of lines of transport which integrate the valley and its population with the more productive west. Such a pattern is likely to remain valid in the future.
Were the factors in the retarded development of eastern Taiwan related solely to isolation, there would be both a simple solution and evidence of at least parallel prosperity in the subsistence populations in the eastern and western portions of the island. There are additional factors, however, which contribute to the peculiar history of the east.
The immediacy with which the Coastal Range ascends to its surprising heights creates a very powerful orographic barrier between the east and the west. As a result of this barrier, there are produced two distinct climatic features which have no parallel on the island in like latitudes on the western coastal plains. Firstly, the amount of insolation in the east is approximately one half that of stations in the west. This is the result in part of the cloud cover which hangs over the narrow valley against the flanks of the Central Range. In as much as productivity of any crop is in part predicated upon the sunlight available for the plant's photosynthesis, this insolation deficiency is significant in the yields for the eastern farmer.
A second characteristic generated by this orographic barrier is the intensity with which the powerful summer storms pour down this steep face into the valley. Given a more gradual gradient, there would be less carrying power in the streams but as it is, at times of peak intensity they are able to deliver massive quantities of boulders and gravel to the more than a dozen deltas which occur through the valley. Not only does such a pattern cover otherwise potentially good alluvium with useless rocks, but it also gives the high water stream flow tremendous destructive power. The height of the mountain flank also increases the amount of water to be carried by the streams so that, the flow range in some streams from minimum flow to maximum flow is from zero to under 10 cusecs (10 cubic meters of water past a given point in a second) to over 500 cusecs. This means that all construction of bridges must take into account calamity times of' a magnitude exceeding normal times by a factor of approximately 20 to 30 or even 50. Such a necessity obviously increases capital expenditure requisite for secure settlement and transportation.
Another quality of the physical environment of the east which is frequently listed in the inventory of reasons for the east's non-attractiveness to either migrants or developers is the greater frequency of both typhoons and earthquakes. The typhoons play off the east face of the Central Range and in the corridor of the valley. The earthquakes reflect the still apparent instability of the forces which created the graben of the rift valley initially. Though really devastating earthquakes are no more prevalent in the eastern coast area than they are in the west, there is a higher incidence of minor quakes and tremors. Since the decision to migrate to and / or invest capital in an area is a human decision, the subjective belief that the east is more threatened is adequate to retard both movement to and development in the region.
A final consideration of the physical geography offers still another shortcoming of the area which is related in part to the already mentioned stream pattern. This is the generally acidic, porous and frequently stony soils of the valley proper. Even beyond the deltas the alluvial distribution of the gravels and pebbles of the Pacific-flowing streams influences the fertility and the potential fertility of the valley. The greater labor demanded in the initial clearing as well as the construction of more solid bunds and dikes all combine to make the farming experience more demanding in the eastern valley. Though lower initial land cost mitigates this somewhat, the cost of removal of the rocks and gravel is usually in terms of labor borne by the farmer. Such knowledge prior to location in the valley has the effect of reducing the immigration unless demographic pressures in the hearth area (the western plains in this case) are so intense that the labor investment promises to bring a better return than continued existence in the west.
This consideration of the relative merits of the eastern valley vis a vis agricultural lands in the west brings up the final considerations in this discussion of the unique development of the eastern rift valley.
As in any migration, the decision-making process is influenced by a complex of positives in the goal area and negatives in the hearth area. Initial positives in the goal area (the eastern Taiwan rift valley) were very few for the first migrants who were the aborigines and Chinese in flight from personal or general conditions they disliked in the west. As settlement continued, however, communication from the east 'began to leak back to the west and there came to be a greater balance in positives and negatives. This of course was particularly true with the post-restoration intensification of land use both on the plains and slopes of western Taiwan. In the early 1950s considerable migrations began from the Changhua and Miaoli areas. This was in part stimulated by the ability of the Taiwanese to buy up plain land from the Ami aborigines who had little chance to compete effectively with the more sophisticated farming and business techniques of the Taiwanese from the west. Taiwanese began to gain ascendance in the agrarian control of the lowlands, while the Hakka, long accustomed to slopeland farming from both mainland and western Taiwan tradition, began to farm more intensively both virgin and aborigine farmed slopes. As feedback continued, the pattern of family and partial-village migration continued at a pace adequate to give Hualien and Taitung hsien(counties) the most rapid population of the province between he early 1950s and early 1960s.
Another dimension was added to the role of the eastern valley as a pioneer area. The national government began to see the valley as a domestic colonial area for its increasing numbers of retired military personnel. Through both national and provincial government agencies, and also on a completely independent level, mainlanders who may have had agrarian back grounds in the late 1930s and early 1940s came again to the land. The official programs have centered around the creation of wet paddy land from the rocky deltas by the input of massive amounts of human labor in a process of actual soil creation through burial of rocks and delivery of silt through the establishment of irrigation and flood control systems. On the independent side have come retired army men who have opted to open up or use more intensively slopelands of the mountain margins of the rift valley. Though such occurrences (with significant exceptions) are illegal, the pioneer flavor of the valley persists as defined by the government's inability or disinclination to halt such activities.
Development therefore does exist and is continuing in the east. But in terms of playing a role in the overall economic emergence of Taiwan as a modern and industrial area, the eastern portion of the island has little significance.
The processes of industrialization, export-oriented commercial activity, production of sophisticated durable goods for home consumption and removal of superior agricultural land from the agrarian sector which presently characterize the development of western and northeastern Taiwan do not characterize the eastern coast or the eastern rift valley. The reasons for the singular history of the east are historic isolation, difficult transportation access, unfavorable elements of the physical geography of the east and the need for a country to have an overflow area. Though eastern Taiwan will eventually emerge as a productive' and capital-generating segment of Taiwan's economic whole, its pattern of development will continue to be distinct from that of the western coastal plains. Tourism and mining may very well assume a relative economic importance not shared by other hsien in the province of Taiwan. And the east will continue to function as the spillover basin for all types of people who find the eastern rigor and isolation more attractive to them than the particular economic dynamics and attendant crowding of the west.