This article traces the rise of agricultural development in Taiwan and its interactions with the rest of the world, emphasizing the agency and transformations of the Global South. In the 1920s, American scientists and missionaries began experimenting with development in China through local universities and villages. From then until the early 1970s, American, Chinese, and Taiwanese scientists integrated farmers' associations, laboratory research, agricultural extension, and applied industrial research. Starting in the 1960s with the rise of the Cold War, Taiwanese technocrats packaged their practices of agricultural development into missions sent abroad to Southeast Asia and Africa and in new multinational research centers established in Taiwan. This approach toward development combined different schools of thought: the modernist “Green Revolution” practice of massive technical inputs and selected, high-yielding crop cultivars, and socially oriented practices that utilized grassroots methods of knowledge collection and dissemination. The Taiwanese emphasized their successes in both high technology and social reformist approaches when implementing development in the Global South. Contrary to narratives that portray development as a high modernist project enacted by the Global North upon the Global South, this article argues that Global South actors co-opted and redeployed development for their own political purposes, following their own historical experiences with development, and in accordance with their own visions of modernity.
Skip Nav Destination
Close
Article navigation
1 June 2015
Research Article|
February 01 2015
Sowing Seeds and Knowledge: Agricultural Development in Taiwan and the World, 1925–1975
James Lin
James Lin
Department of History, University of California, Berkeley
e-mail: jameslin@berkeley.eduJames Lin is a PhD candidate in history at the University of California, Berkeley. He works on international history, with a focus on the United States, China, and the world. His dissertation, from which this article is drawn, is an intellectual history of international development.
Search for other works by this author on:
East Asian Science, Technology and Society (2015) 9 (2): 127–149.
Article history
Received:
December 31 2013
Accepted:
October 06 2014
Citation
James Lin; Sowing Seeds and Knowledge: Agricultural Development in Taiwan and the World, 1925–1975. East Asian Science, Technology and Society 1 June 2015; 9 (2): 127–149. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-2872116
Download citation file:
Close
Advertisement