When Taisugar Moved the Country’s Leading Export
During the 1950s and 1960s, Taiwan's sugar railways supported the country's chief export: sugar cane. Accounting for 70-80% of all exports, sugar cane products and the trains that carried them from the country's rural west to the southern ports supported the economy in the way that semiconductors support Taiwan today. However, many of Taiwan Sugar Corporation’s railways and signal stations were closed by the late 1990s as tech advancements and changes outpaced the workhorses of a bygone era. Is there more can we learn about Taiwan's history and path to democracy from this period? In this episode, Dafydd Fell, director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, joins Alec MacDonald to discuss his and co-author Wang Hsiang's new book “The Twilight Years of Taiwan's Sugar Railways.”
