Lecture Abstract:

Much of our understanding of forestry outside of Europe and Japan considers forestry to be part of a logic of empire: the metropole’s efforts to rationalize, survey, record and above all simplify for the purposes of legibility and control of resources as part of “science” and “modernization”. While not denying that this impetus is an important part of the forestry in the 20 th century, I suggest that it is itself an oversimplification. Building on the talk I gave last year on tree planting campaigns in China, here I place the experience of post 1945 Taiwan in a wider regional context that includes Japan and (South) Korea under first the Japanese imperium and the American informal empire. By considering the ways in which Chinese foresters understood science and modernization, adapted a series of Japanese and American norms to the sub-tropical ecosystem of Taiwan, and worked within the
context of an authoritarian and militarized state, we come closer understanding how informal empire worked on the ground, and what kinds of historical legacies it has left in wooded landscape and natural resource use today.

Lecture Summary:  

Last November 5, 2025, Professor Julia Strauss delivered an engaging lecture, “Empires of Forestry Revisited: Taiwan in 20th Century East Asia”, showing a concise analysis of forestry in East Asia. The context of her lecture was in examining Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea as prime laboratories for perceiving how non-Western forces created their own “empires of forestry” in the first half of the 20th century, only to be transformed by new systems of political practices in the second half.

The view of an “empire of forestry”, Professor Strauss suggests, emerged in South Asia and Germany, where trees were not solely ecological systems, but bodies of scientific management for timber production. France and Germany surfaced as places of what was later called modern forestry: standardized, carefully conducted regulation, utilization, and protection of woodlands. These views shone outward, extending to British colonial India, Japan, the United States, and even the Philippines, adjusting to local political and socio-economic situations.

Taiwan, under Japanese sovereignty, reveals the multiplicities of removing such models. Regardless of wide-ranging regulation, surveying, and experimental studies, the forestry project of Japan never satisfied its economic potential. As Professor Strauss stressed, Taiwanese timber turned out to be costly to obtain and could not compete with American Douglas fir in international markets. Colonial rulers reacted with a binary proposition: regularly transferring indigenous communities to more secluded uplands, while widening levels of supervisory management. Even as forests were made coherent to scientific forestry, the expected financial gains did not manifest. However, past the government-led view, Taiwan saw a more localized, significant commitment with trees, plaques, memorial trees, and “liberty trees”, which Professor Strauss constructed as a modernization of practices for the working class, a “from forest to trees” shift that stressed the variation of the value of forests to the social sphere.

South Korea suggested a strikingly different situation. Distinct from Taiwan, it had an entire kingdom with a community that is somewhat like-minded, and its forests were pre-structured with noble estates, elegant residences, and public territories.

The lecture of Professor Strauss did more than recap real situations; it suggested a structure to examine the formulation, systematization, and practice of forest management visions all over East Asia. With the help of unearthing explorations of scientific forestry views, from European laboratories to East Asian terrains, she highlighted the unsteady and debated structure of “present-day” forestry. Her research endeavors question oversimplified details of knowledge exchange, underscoring the reciprocity of industrial requirements, local settings, and developmental systems.

Morally, “Empires of Forestry Revisited” is not just about timber or trees, but is also about influence, transformation, and the steady intervention between the state, the world, and its populations. The lecture of Professor Strauss urges us to reexamine what we indicate as “modern forestry”, reminding us that forests are never solely environmental domains; they are seriously political, factual, and developmental soils, molded as much by community stakeholders as by stately initiatives.

Composed by: Lorraine Rodriguez Yu (TSE PhD student)