The Way of Mounstainside and Seashore：The Transitions of the Hua-Tung Roads (1874~1982)

• Main Authors: wu,tung-chan, 吳東展
• Other Authors: Li Hsiao-feng
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/11617817169610068749

碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 台灣文化研究所 === 97 === People build roads to connect places. The construction of the highways connecting the settlements between Hualien and Taitung in the East Rift Valley (Hua-tong tsong-ku) had been gradually completing since the late nineteenth century, though this century-long construction were interfered by natural disasters which usually damaged people’s efforts in a moment. This study reviewed the discourses and opinions on the construction of highways in the East Rift Valley to discuss the politics between the state and the local gentries. It revealed that the local gentries eventually found the strategy to demonstrate the importance of the East Rift Valley in corresponding to the state’s ownprovision for obtaining the support to the highway construction. This study starts from Japanese’s first intrusion in 1874. Based on the official data, this study reconstructed the route of the first government-maintained highway between Hualien and Taitung. During the Japanese colonization after 1895, the development sponsored by the Governor-General of Taiwan and Japanese corporations formed the early stage of today’s Hualien-Taitung Highway. This stage deeply influenced the development of transportation in the East Taiwan. The development in this period demonstrated the pattern that the state sponsorship to the development of the East Rift Valley greatly relies on the state’s interest in this area. The local gentries’ discourses and opinions after 1945 are accessible in Keng Shen Newspaper and the Gazettes of Taiwan Provincial Assembly (Taiwan-Sheng-Yi-Hui Kong-Pao). The review of these opinions showed the hard efforts of the local people, governments, and representatives in appealing to the state support for completing the highways. This study demonstrated the shift of strategy from appealing for helping the agriculture industry to convincing the state with the potential tourism industry. The new strategy successfully obtained the state's financial support on highway construction. After 1975, the two highways connecting Hualien and Taitung became tourism-oriented highways. The local gentries realized that the appealing for developing tourism could easily obtain the state's positive feedback and smartly used this strategy to ask more state funding for satisfying their local interests. In conclusion, from reviewing the history of the highway construction in the East Rift Valley, this study showed the pattern of the interaction between the state and the financial-disadvantaged region. In this pattern of interaction, appealing for tourism was a good strategy to obtain financial support to boost local economy and satisfy the state's expectation. This pattern has dominated the interaction between the local and the state for several decades, and deeply influenced the politics in the East Rift Valley.