1st Edition
Colonial Administration and Land Reform in East Asia
This book argues that as colonialism brought the concept of individual, as opposed to collective, land ownership to indigenous society, along with Western surveying techniques, the changes that resulted altered the relationship of the state to its citizens, and, thereby, the structure of local societies. The book considers these issues in all of East Asia, including China, Japan and Korea, focusing in particular on Hong Kong, which was subject to British rule from 1842 to 1997, and on Taiwan, which was subject to Japanese rule from 1895 to 1945. The book discusses how, although the main impact of land ownership by individuals and modern surveying were felt after colonialism had ended, it is by studying the introduction of these factors that their impact can be most clearly understood.
Part I
1. Landlords, Squatters, and Tenants: Fundamental Concepts of Land Administration in Early Colonial Hong Kong
2. The Meiji Land Reform and the Formation of Modern Land Rights in Japan
Part II
3. Institutionalizing Public-service Land Holding in Early Japanese Colonial Taiwan: The Transformation of School Land
4. Lineage Properties in Civil Law: Notes on Public Property for Sacrifice in Taiwan
5. Temple property management in colonial Taiwan: the case of the Yimin Temple of Xinzhu county
Part III
6. The Traditional Law of the New Territories, before and after 1899
7. Institutions of Credit and the Land Market in the New Territories of Hong Kong: Local Social Structuring and Colonization
Part IV
8. Trigonometrical Survey and the Land Maps in China, 1368-1950
9. Launching the Land Revolution: Taiwan Land Survey in the Early Twentieth Century
10. The Two Land Investigations in Modern Taiwan: What Made the Japanese Survey different from the Qing Dynasty's
11. Land Reform and Colonial Land Legislation in Korea, 1894-1910e
Part V
12. Too little, too late: China catching up on land registration technology in the 1930s
Biography
Sui-Wai Cheung is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
