The Gaze of Colonial Police on the Colonized: Discourse on the Colonial Police, Social Control and Space Reform in Colonial Taiwan

• Main Authors: Ming-chih Tsai, 蔡明志
• Other Authors: Chao-ching Fu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/64118442078782562188

博士 === 國立成功大學 === 建築學系碩博士班 === 96 === The colonial empire was accustomed to use colonial police as means for social control in its colonies. In Taiwan, the local police system during the Japanese period, although at the lowest rank, made the power of colonial government approaching the deepest places of the colonized Taiwanese society by its dispersive deployment, omnipotence, and its integration with hoko system. This thesis, elaborates the concept of “colonial modernity” of “collaboration”, regards the local police with hoko organization as a colonial collaboration, and intends to explore its contribution to the modern spatial formation in colonial Taiwan. This text-based study introduces the Taiwanese writers’ works to reveal the impression of the colonized people to the process and the result of space reform executing during the Japanese period. The main text is divided into three parts, which are: “police architecture”, “the eye of police”, and “space policing”. “Police architecture” reconstructs the histories of different building types for the local police at different rank over the course of periods. “The eye of police” illustrates how the local police exercised the spatial deployment of its officials and police architecture making Taiwan as a “panoptic society” as Foucault argued, or as a “police state” as Goto Shimpei said. This also expresses the “gaze/ be gazed” relation of power between the colonial government and the colonized society. “Space policing” expounds the role of local police and hoko organization played as “an informal space building system” in the process of spatial reforming in colonial Taiwan, and extended the category of spatial reforming from “colonial cities” to “colonial locals”. This collaboration not only produced space, but also policed space. However, the space reforming driven by this collaboration was based on the exploitation to the Taiwanese. Meanwhile, they were deprived the right to use the space reformed. Therefore, the “modernity” in the process of modernization of Taiwanese cities and countries was always implicated the “coloniality”.