Development and Diplomacy

In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan, James Lin, 2025.

Landscape (Mountains), Umberto Boccioni, 1916.

Taiwan today is mostly known for two deeply intertwined things: a high-tech semiconductor industry and a fraught geopolitical situation. Because of these it is far more newsworthy than its 24 million strong population might suggest. But half a century ago, before books on semiconductors were sold in airports, Taiwan was known for something else: successful agrarian development and a fraught geopolitical situation—and these too were entangled. So entangled, in fact, that one might argue that agrarian development is what made Taiwan, or more formally the Republic of China (ROC), more than just a garrison state.

This is precisely what James Lin aims to argue within In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan. Lin argues that, for Taiwan, “agrarian development became an instrument of state power and a hegemonic discourse that state leaders and ROC elites on Taiwan utilised to shape societal behaviour and further their own political ends”. For domestic and then international reasons, the Guomindang (GMD), which ruled Taiwan as a one-party state from 1949 to 1987, found agrarian development as useful a political tool as an economic one.

To call In the Global Vanguard a history of Taiwan might be a misnomer. More accurately, this is a history of the ROC’s agrarian development efforts, both at home and abroad. As such, Lin goes into more detail about the ROC’s agrarian problems in mainland China, before the Second World War, than he does with Taiwan under Japanese rule, which enters his narrative only briefly. When the GMD retreats to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese Civil War, Lin’s focus moves with it.

In the Global Vanguard is also as much, if not more, about the discourses that surrounded development than the economic history of agrarian development itself. This is not a book overflowing with statistics, charts, and econometrics. Rather, Lin’s focus is the reformers, scientists, bureaucrats, and organisations who made the realities, and the myths, of Taiwanese agrarian development in the twentieth century.

When people talk about agrarian development they usually talk about one of two things: land reform or technology. Taiwan is certainly famous mostly for the former — even if this fame is likely erroneous. For contemporary readers, this is largely due to the influence of Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works, a widely read book espousing the narrative that land reform facilitated the ‘Taiwanese miracle” of the 50s and 60s. But Studwell was merely repeating an orthodoxy that the GMD had mythologised for decades.

From 1948 to 1951, the GMD placed a ceiling on rents, sold public lands, and in some cases, forced land sales of land from large estates to tenant farmers. Lin writes that these reforms sought “to turn landlords into industrial capitalists, tenant farmers into petty capitalists, and land into financial capital”. Whether these reforms had a significant impact on agricultural productivity is unclear: Lin cites recent much-discussed work by

Oliver Kim

and Jen-Kuan Wang that argues even the most effective land reforms only explain at most one-sixth of rice yield growth in the fifties.

But it is unquestionable that the “miracle narrative of land reform” caught on quickly. The reforms were mythologised by figures such as Chen Cheng, who wrote the influential Land Reform in Taiwan in 1961, and Lee Teng-hui, a man famous as Taiwan’s president during democratisation, but who was earlier an influential agricultural economist. Cheng’s book in particular, Lin suggests, “shaped understandings by both Taiwanese and developing world audiences of what Taiwanese land reform was”. As such, In the Global Vanguard dissects its themes at length.

Lin actually has a wider point to make here — that land reform, by projecting an image of technocratic modernisation and social progress, was a means by which most decolonising regimes could “demonstrate their commitment to the downtrodden masses that had suddenly realised their political strength”. The GMD had a particularly strong reason to do this, having just been kicked from the mainland precisely for failing to win China’s downtrodden masses.

But other countries did too. And Taiwan, eager to keep international support for its UN seat as China’s rightful government, was happy to teach them how. In 1968 Taiwan established the Land Reform Training Institute (LTRI), built to preach land reform by sending technocrats around the world, from Brunei to Micronesia and beyond.

I was somewhat disappointed by Lin’s chapter on the LTRI, which should have brought into focus how Taiwan’s semi-mythological land reform metastasised abroad. Instead the chapter is basically just an intellectual history of the LTRI. There are more words on the ideas and influence of Henry George than what happened actually in in the dozens of countries the institute influenced. This does lead to some great finds, such as this diagram from a paper by Chen Sun that attempts to demonstrate how Sun Yat-sen’s (founder of the ROC) “Three Principles” creates a middle path between capitalism and socialism. However, this is not enough to grasp a clear picture of how the LTRI actually mattered.

The strongest sections of In the Global Vanguard are those on the other pillar of agrarian development: technology. As mentioned before, technical change, most crucially chemical fertilisers, is what really produced Taiwan’s agrarian miracle. The “Taiwan model” of agrarian development was not so much about land reform as it was about rural organisation and agricultural science, and it is insights in these areas which Taiwan exported abroad for political gain.

Taiwan had already started its Green Revolution before the war as part of the Japanese empire. From 1902 Taiwan imported chemical fertilisers from Japan. One of my favourite facts from Lin’s book is that, according to the UN in 1946, Taiwan used more chemical fertiliser than all mainland China even though its population was less than 1.5% as large. The war disrupted this, and managing fertiliser supplies became a priority for the GMD after 1949. Fascinatingly, the result was a state monopoly. Farmers had to pay for fertiliser in rice, at a rate of exchange which highly favoured the state — the state acquired 19% of rice output this way, useful to feed the full 5% of Taiwan’s population under arms.

This system, of course, depressed rice prices and raised fertiliser prices, not ideal for development. But this did not stop Taiwanese development. Taiwan was classified by the United States as a “developed nation” in 1965, such was its success. Cost-effective reforms to fertiliser and land use, crop education, and organisational methods more than made up for any somewhat medieval fertiliser-barter system.

Finally, this brings us to the quasi-titular “Operation Vanguard”, Taiwan’s 60s agricultural development program in Africa. As with the later LTRI, Vanguard was a scheme by Taiwan to use it agricultural and nation-building success at home to shore up its geopolitical position abroad. Overall, about six-hundred Taiwanese technicians stayed in Africa, many for six or seven years. The Free China Review described them in 1962 as “Straw Hat Diplomats”.

Lin’s basic conclusion is that Vanguard achieved little in material terms. The Taiwanese sought to replace local diets with rice, which struggled to appeal. Without the levers of economic policy, the Taiwanese technicians could not enact changes to make fertiliser cheaper or labour more mobile. The model farms they built for demonstration often fell into disrepair after they left.

But, as Lin sharply notes, “Taiwanese development in Africa was more about the Taiwanese themselves. For the ROC elite, this was coming to terms with an impending existential crisis.” This crisis would not be abated. As we know, Taiwan lost UN recognition in 1971. So Operation Vanguard does not appear particularly successful on either count. But Lin, in a classic historian’s move, salvages the situation, arguing that through Vanguard and the political usage of economic development, “Taiwanese intellectuals were beginning to locate a postcolonial identity through South-to-South aid”. As I mentioned earlier, In the Global Vanguard is intellectual history first and economic history second.

In his final paragraph, Lin reflects on some shortcomings of development as a discipline today. It remains “remarkably ahistorical”, he suggests, and has lost “the recognition that development is itself not a science… [it] is subject to the context in which it is constructed and practiced and is defined and ultimately restrained by the politics, culture, and society under which it is formed”. Lin’s history (that I have haphazardly sketched above) of the intersections between development and diplomacy in Taiwan is surprising and valuable. But I do not think In the Global Vanguard has much to say about development studies as a discipline today. There is a thread in the book suggestive of a broader critique of development. But, ironically enough, it is not properly developed, surfacing only on occasion from Lin’s otherwise talented weave of intellectual, political, and economic history.

Returning to Lin’s subtitle, can we argue agrarian development made modern Taiwan? In the Global Vanguard has me convinced. The ROC after 1949 was in a unique situation, claiming to rule half a billion people it didn’t. As the years passed, and it became increasingly clear that reconquest was unlikely, a new source of legitimacy had to fill this China-shaped hole. Wealth, development, and modernity took this role and eventually sculpted a nation from an exiled government and an ex-Japanese colony. That Taiwan was eager to broadcast this success to the world is unsurprising if you consider the existential stakes involved. I doubt many airport bookstores will stock In the Global Vanguard — but they should.

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