When the residents of Taiwan learned that they were to be ceded to Japan, there was a fiery reaction. Shops shut down and general strikes were held, to express the people's opposition and to beg the government to reject this treaty ceding them over to foreign rule.

When it was seen that all such protests were of no avail, the provincial government attempted to take matters into its own hands, vowing to fight the Japanese occupation to the death. The province of Taiwan was renamed the Democratic Nation of Taiwan, and the provincial governor T'ang Ching-sung, now declared president, prepared to lead his people in a war of resistance against the Japanese imperialists.

Learning of this plan, the Japanese dispatched troops to take the island by force. On June 6, 1895, the Japanese force skirted the formidable fortifications at Keelung and Tam- sui and landed at Ao-di to occupy Taipei' city. As they pushed south, they were repeatedly confronted by Chinese resistance fighters with heavy losses on both sides. By September, however, all resistance had collapsed and the whole of Taiwan had fallen under Japanese rule. This demonstrates the determination of the Japanese to occupy Taiwan at whatever cost, in the face of the heroic and immortal resistance of Taiwan's loyal Chinese patriots.

The laws applied by the Japanese to Taiwan differed greatly from those observed in Japan itself. Three different sets of laws came to be used over the fifty years of Japanese rule. First, in the initial nine months of the occupation, there was martial law, under which there was no law except whatever was ordered by the governor- general of Taiwan. Next, from April of 1895 until 1921, the governor-general's special orders still had the binding force of law, but regular legislation was conducted by the administrative agencies; the governor- general could still do as he pleased without any interference from popular dissent. In the third period, from 1922 until Taiwan was reclaimed by China after WWII, Taiwan was theoretically ruled by a legal system identical to that used in Japan, but actually the governor-general retained the right to issue orders to supplement this system "whenever necessary." In 'reality, the rights of the people of Taiwan remained unprotected by the law.

The governor-general enacted an extremely ruthless law for the punishment of "bandits, " by which term he meant all people unwilling to submit to Japanese rule. By means of this law approximately 11,950 resisters were massacred between 1898 and 1902. In 1907, a revolutionary uprising was led by Ts'ai Ch'ing-lin in the Hsin-chu region. Similar incidents followed in 1911, 1912, 1914 and 1915. The uprisings of 1912 and 1915 were the most severe of these, known respectively as the Miao-li Incident and the Chiao-pa-nien Incident, both of which were violently suppressed by the Japanese.

The Miao-ii Incident:

Lo Fu-hsing, a native of Kwangtung, came to Taiwan with his father and took up residence in Miao-li. Sympathetic to the revolutionary movement, he soon joined the Tung Meng Hui, a revolu- tionary prototype of the Nationalist Party (KMT), and frequently travelled between Taipei and Miao-li to propagandize for the revolutionary movement. He established a branch office for the Tung Meng Hui in Miao-li and a "revolutionary contact center" in Taipei. Encouraged and inspired by his example, great multitudes of compatriots in these areas soon joined the party. Under his direction the party secretly plotted to drive the Japanese imperialists off the island. Unfortunately, a Japanese spy had infiltrated their meetings, and mass arrests were made of party members, including Lo Fu-hsing, who was subsequently put to death by hanging in a Taipei prison. This uprising was instigated as part of a patriotic revolutionary movement by members of the revolutionary party, and thus fundamentally differed from all the previous incidents of rebellion.

The Chiao-pa-nien Incident:

YO Ch'ing- fang, a native of Tainan, after seeing the Japanese devastation of his home town, vowed to avenge the Chinese people and awaited an opportunity to strike. He holed up in a temple, which he made the center of his anti-Japanese activities, at the same time using the pretext of taking collections for repair of the temple to gather funds for the revolutionary movement.In 1915 his party membership was revealed and the Japanese authorities ordered his arrest. YO fled, and with his party comrades prepared a military strike at the Japanese occupiers. His army fought the Japanese at Chiao-pa-nien; the Japanese troops suffered heavy losses, thus fulfilling YO's vow to avenge the insult to the Chinese nation, but they soon opened fire on the civilian population, killing or injuring a total of over ten thousand innocent people. This was the largest of all the anti-Japanese uprisings in Taiwan, and the one with the greatest number of casualties. It taught the Chinese that it was futile to confront Japanese imperialism with their inadequate armed force, which only led to unnecessary loss of life. As for the Japanese, they began to realize that the spirit of Taiwan's Chinese population could not be forever suppressed by mere military superiority.

In their 50 years occupation of Taiwan, the Japanese maintained throughout a policy of repression to keep the people in a state of powerlessness. The Taiwanese population was reduced to a life of great hardship and suffered all manner of deprivations. After the Marco Polo Bridge incident of July 7, 1937, and the full scale Japanese invasion of China which followed, the Japanese authorities in Taiwan embarked on a drive to eliminate Chinese customs and the Chinese way of life in Taiwan and bring the people of Taiwan entirely in line with the Japanese wry of life. This movement took many forms, including making the Taiwanese adopt Japanese names and surnames, promoting Japanese as the official language and encourageing the people to speak it at home, wearing Japanese dress, learning Japanese customs and habits, and even worshipping Japanese gods. All this was aimed at eliminating the awareness of the Chinese in Taiwan of their own ethnicity. The Taiwanese were even compelled to enlist as volunteers in the Japanese armed services. Fortunately these oppressions soon came to an end with the defeat of Japan in 1945, and with the retrocession of Taiwan to the Republic Of China the Taiwanese put behind them forever this shameful period of imperialistic exploitation.

Under the colonial policies which characterized the period of Japanese rule, the Japanese authorities were principally bent on the economic exploitation of Taiwan. Hence all their efforts at building ulD Taiwan's infrastructure were intended to serve the interests of colonialism and economic exploitation. The following are some of the more significant projects undertaken by the Japanese colonial authorities: A north-south highway was built with military labour down the west coast of Taiwan; railway lines were built linking Keelung with Kaohsiung, and Hualien with Taitung.The Alishan mountain railway was also completed in 1911. Commercial harbors were constructed at Keelung, Kaohsiung and Hualien, as well as a number of fishing harbors. Several large drainage schemes were completed in Taoyuan, Chiayi and Tainan, and flood dykes were built in the lower Tamsui river, north of Taipei. Improvements of various kinds were also introduced in agriculture, industry and medicine.