Abstract

With the establishment of Manchukuo in 1932, Manchuria turned into Taiwan’s most important area to trade with in Chinese mainland. Taiwanese entrepreneurs from countryside and urban areas of Taiwan joined this “international” trade mostly opened by the Japanese merchants and the Japanese government. The reinforcement of the Taiwan-Manchukuo trade was made at the cost of the Manchukuo-Inland China trade. When the overseas Chinese in the Southeast Asia decreased their purchase of Taiwanese products which had been categorized as “Japanese” products because of Japanese invasion against China, the Taiwanese exclaimed that the imperial army in Manchukuo and North China had saved their economy. This historical account discloses that the Taiwanese and mainlanders who had to live together in the postwar Taiwan had actually been opposing with each other during the Sino-Japanese War. It explains to some extent the two ethnic groups’ much congruent memory of Japan in the post-1945 Taiwan.

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