Press Policies by Goto Shinpei in Colonial Taiwan: Enacting the Colonial Press Laws and Integrating the Local Public Sphere

Abstract

This study examines and describes newspaper publishing activities and press policies in early colonial Taiwan by analyzing local newspapers, mainland Japanese newspapers, English newspapers published in Japan and China, and the archives of Goto Shinpei and the Government-General of Taiwan. These materials have been rarely examined in previous studies.

Newspapers were first published in Taiwan by Europeans at the end of the Qing Dynasty. When Taiwan came under Japanese rule, newspapers published by the Japanese adhered to mainland Japanese press laws, controlling the public sphere in Japanese-, Chinese-, and English-language media. During that time, public opinion in Taiwan, mainland Japan, and various international communities criticized the Government-General. However, when Goto became the Chief of Civil Affairs in the Government-General of Taiwan in 1898, he newly integrated Taiwan’s public sphere, which had been separate from mainland Japan and other overseas jurisdictions.

To compete with the publications by Europeans in Taiwan, which were protected by extraterritoriality under existing unequal treaties, Goto introduced new colonial press laws in 1900. Because these laws adopted a territoriality principle, any national seeking to publish newspapers in Taiwan required prior permission from the Government-General. Under these circumstances, three major newspapers, published in each of three cities, took a leading role in developing Taiwan press system. To attract Han Taiwanese intellectuals, both Japanese- and Chinese-language columns were placed in these Japanese-managed newspapers.

Readers of those hybrid ethnic newspapers were usually referred to as shinshi “gentlemen,” a word connecting the concept of eastern shishen “scholar-gentry” to the western concept of the bourgeois. Thus, there was a variation on Habermas’s “bourgeois public sphere” that could be reasonably described as a “gentlemanly public sphere,” drawing prosperous, educated, and respectable Japanese and Han Taiwanese collaborators, who supported Goto’s policy of modernization in colonial Taiwan.