[Informal] Empires of Forestry Revisited: Taiwan in 20th Century East Asia

日期： 2025/11/04

時間： 10:00~12:00

地點： 檔案館第三會議室

主持人： 傅家倩教授（近史所副研究員）

主講人：朱莉Julia C. Strauss教授（倫敦大學亞非學院政治國際關係系榮譽退休教授）

主辦單位： 西學與中國研究群

摘要：
Much of our understanding of forestry outside of Europe and Japan considers forestry to be part of a logic of empire: the metropole’s efforts to rationalize, survey, record and above all simplify for the purposes of legibility and control of resources as part of “science” and “modernization”. While not denying that this impetus is an important part of the forestry in the 20th century, I suggest that it is itself an oversimplification. Building on the talk I gave last year on tree planting campaigns in China, here I place the experience of post 1945 Taiwan in a wider regional context that includes Japan and (South) Korea under first the Japanese imperium and the American informal empire. By considering the ways in which Chinese foresters understood science and modernization, adapted a series of Japanese and American norms to the sub-tropical ecosystem of Taiwan, and worked within the context of an authoritarian and militarized state, we come closer understanding how informal empire worked on the ground, and what kinds of historical legacies it has left in wooded landscape and natural resource use today.