Technology Transfer in Early Twentieth-Century East Asia:
Thoughts for a Comparative Research Project
Philip C. Brown
Department of History
The Ohio State University
Professor Brown’s current research in Taiwan is part of a broader project thatexamines changing approaches to dealing with the risk of floods and landslides in Japanand East Asia over the 19th and 20th centuries. Efforts to deal with these hazards fall into
two broad categories, restricting human activities in areas subject to floods andlandslides, or deliberately altering the environment and landscape through humanengineering. Professor Brown’s most recent book employed traditional historicalanalysis along with GIS to explore one variant of the former, a system of Japanese
landholding called warichi 割地, a system of land tenures that gave each cultivator an
identically structured portfolio of cultivation rights which spread environmental andcultivation risk equally among cultivators.
Professor Brown’s current research explores efforts to re-engineer nature as a meansof reducing damage to human life and property, a process that employed newtechnologies, some developed in the West, to ameliorate flood and landslide risk. Suchefforts have not attracted historians’ attention and the history of technology in East Asia
in the 19th century remains limited. As it is, the history of technology primarilyemphasizes the development of new, technologies in the West and the transfer of thosetechnologies among Western nations. Secondarily, another thread explores new
developments which enabled conquest of distant lands -- Imperialism. A consequenceof these conquests was the movement of Western technologies into colonial settings.
English language studies treat this process, including development of railroads and theengineering of dams, especially in British-controlled India. Nonetheless, thesemovements represent only one part of the influence of Imperialism on technologicaltransfer.
There are two important problems with this perspective.
1. Even technologies that are not new, when used in new ways or introduced
into new environments can have major impacts.
2. Not all modern imperialists were Western.
Regarding the former issue, David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old has had a majorrole in drawing attention to the importance of studying the post-invention history oftechnology. He shows, for example, the ways in which old technologies, abandoned inU.S. slaughterhouses, transformed the Brazilian beef industry.
Regarding the second point, while English language studies leave the impressionthat Imperialism was entirely Western, but as the people of Taiwan, China and Korea
know well, that was not the case. In East Asia, the role of Imperialist wasquintessentially filled by Japan, not a European nation. As a nation with its own
program of economic diversification and technological development, Japan, too, had thepotential to introduce new technologies into its colonial territories. That potential
included the possibility of introducing new water and flood control mechanisms into its
subject territories.
Of course, Japan’s position as an agent of technological transfer in the early 20thcentury was rather awkward, especially in relationship to those technologies associatedwith construction of large civil engineering projects such as dams. Before Japan could
export these technologies, it had to either develop them on their own, or import them.
The involvement of one Japanese engineer, Aoyama Akira, whose experience working
on the Panama Canal brought new approaches to actual civil engineering project such asthe Iwabuchi diversion gate in Tokyo. Projects like Iwabuchi, and the later Okotsu
Diversion Channel, suggest not only rapid advances in Japanese industrialization andimplementation of modern construction technology, but also the limitations of progress
to date.
How do all of these factors come together to shape Japan’s role as a purveyor oftechnology in its own colonial territories? To what degree does Japan repeat the patternof European imperialist enterprises? To what degree does the pattern of technology
transfer in the Japanese Empire follow a distinctive course? Do former colonies assess
Japan’s role in “developing” their economies in ways that parallel assessments offormer European colonies of the role of their former overlords?
These are large questions, and my current project represents a small start on
exploring these and related issues. As start, Professor Brown is exploring two civilengineering projects, one in Taiwan, and one in northeast China. The former project, theWushantou project and its related endeavors, began in 1920 and was completed tenyears later. The latter, the Fengman Dam, was begun in 1937, and while water passed
through it by early spring, 1943. Nonetheless, the dam was not completed by war’s end.
Kuomintang leadership could not advance the project and it remained for the PRC torecover from Russian capture of the dam’s turbines and complete the dam. Each dam, atthe start of its construction, was the largest civil engineering project in East Asia.
The two projects are interesting from several standpoints. First, they provide ameasure of the degree to which heavy engineering technologies were a) managed by
Japan and b) produced in Japan. Japan’s progress in industrialization up to the 1920s
had been highly evaluated, but there were limits evident. How were these revealed inthese projects? Did the wartime circumstances surrounding the Fengman project
influence its construction or its quality relative to work in Taiwan and Japan?
Second, and in many ways the question that drew me into this comparison, why
have Chinese and Taiwanese reactions to these two projects been so different? Thearchitect of the Wushantou project, Hatta Yoichi, has been lionized in Taiwan, while theFengman project is treated as the epitome of worst aspects of the Japanese occupation ofChina’s northeast. When did these different assessments of these projects develop?
Was animosity present in Taiwan at first, and if so, when did people begin toevaluate the project more positively? What were the attitudes of Taiwanese toward theJapanese during construction? Does a positive evaluation only take place only after theend of World War II? Even if post-war, was such a reaction a function of the relations
between the PRC and the ROC? Does the opening of relations between the US andChina mark a turning point?
Conversely, my limited explorations of the Fengman project suggest additionalinteresting perspectives. The questions of Chinese reactions to the project during
construction are as important as they are for Wushantou, but the on-set of full-scale war
by 1941 created new circumstances for construction: Did labor conditions change? If so,
did that have an impact on quality of construction? Did wartime circumstances create
resentment in the 1940s that survived the war’s end into the re-assertion of Kuomintang
control? Were such assessments similar to the critiques offered by the new PRC regime
beginning in 1949, critiques that continue to be found in Chinese publications? Sharppublic critiques to the contrary, there are some indications that residents are notparticularly concerned about the past. Are such responses just indicators of a dulling ofoft-repeated political lines?
Third, what were the environmental impacts of these two projects? In both cases,transformation of the environment was an objective, limiting floods and providing
irrigation waters chief among them. The Wushantou project also sought to stem
salinization of lowland areas and improve agricultural productivity. Yet we may also
ask whether, beyond these intended consequences, there were less fortunate, unintended
consequences.
In sum, Professor Brown’s interests in the Wushantou and Fengman projects spansthe history of technology and environmental history over the twentieth century.