Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Pacific, 1895–1945

For the history connecting East Asia with the West, there is much literature about contact and trade across the Atlantic Ocean from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.1 This paper notes the rapid growth of the Pacific Ocean in linking Asia with the larger world in the early twentieth century by perceiving the economic relationships between Taiwan and Hong Kong while Japan colonized Taiwan. The Pacific route from Taiwan directly to America or through Japan largely replaced the Hong Kong–Atlantic–Europe–USA route to move Taiwan's export products to countries in the West. Other than still using Hong Kong as a trans-shipping point to connect with the world, Japan utilized Taiwan as a trans-shipping point to sell Japanese products to South China, and Taiwan's tea was sold directly to Southeast Asia rather than going through Hong Kong. Taiwan's exports to Japan took the place of its exports to China. Japanese and American goods dominated over European goods or Chinese goods from Hong Kong for Taiwan's import. Japanese and Taiwanese merchants (including some anti-Japanese merchants) overrode the British and Chinese merchants in Hong Kong to carry on the Taiwan–Hong Kong trade. America's westward expansion towards the Pacific, the rise of the Pacific shipping marked by the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, and the rise of Japan relative to China, restructured intra-Asian relations and those between Asia and the rest of the world.