Frans-Paul van der Putten
The Dutch historian and sinologist Leonard Blussé was one of the driving forces behind a series of publications of sources that have significantly contributed to the Dutch and Taiwanese understanding of their mutual history. In 1986, after many years of preparation, the first volume of the Daily Journals of Fort Zeelandia, Taiwan was published. The fourth and final volume appeared in 2000. Meanwhile, in the field of advanced technology, Y.C. Lo played a connecting role between the headquarters of Philips Electronics in Eindhoven and the concern’s activities in Taiwan. As director of Philips Taiwan, Lo helped the Dutch company become the largest foreign investor in Taiwan and a major player on the Chinese mainland. In 1996, Lo joined the board of directors of Philips Electronics, becoming the first person of Asian origin to hold a top position within the company.
The years 1970-1990 were a period of renewed contact between the Netherlands and Taiwan after approximately 300 years of very limited interaction. The rise of Taiwan, and East Asia as a whole, as an important economic center played a crucial role in this. At the same time, a new awareness emerged of the historical ties between the Netherlands and Taiwan in the seventeenth century. This article highlights the activities of two individuals who – each in their own field – played a role in connecting Taiwan and the Netherlands.
Leonard Blussé and the Daily Journals of Fort Zeelandia
When Leonard Blussé first arrived in Taiwan in 1970, there were hardly any cultural connections between the island and the Netherlands. Blussé had just graduated from Leiden University as a sinologist and was looking for an opportunity to improve his Chinese and conduct doctoral research. Since studying in China was impossible due to the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Taiwan was an excellent alternative.
Before leaving the Netherlands, Blussé met Professor Kristofer Schipper, the famous expert on Taoism. Schipper, employed by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), had conducted eight years of fieldwork in Taiwan investigating local religious practices. Schipper advised Blussé to apply for affiliation with the anthropology department of the National Taiwan University (NTU), because the freedom for foreign researchers to do fieldwork in Taiwan was considerably greater for anthropological work than in other disciplines. Blussé followed Schipper’s advice and conducted anthropological fieldwork among fishermen in the Penghu archipelago, where he encountered traditional local stories about the Dutch presence on the islands four hundred years earlier.
While tracing the historical origins of these stories, Blussé came into contact with Professor Ts’ao Yung-ho, head of the research library at NTU and Taiwan’s foremost historian on the Dutch East India Company (VOC). In his youth, Professor Ts’ao had been trained by famous Japanese scholars such as Nakamura Takashi and Iwao Seiichi, both experts on the history of the VOC. Before 1945, when Taiwan was a Japanese colony, Iwao and Nakamura taught at Taihoku Imperial University, the predecessor of NTU.
Iwao, aware of the immense value of Dutch archival material for Asian historiography, had collected a large quantity of handwritten copies of old VOC documents related to Taiwan for the NTU library. These copies were made at his request from originals in the Dutch General State Archives (now the National Archives) in The Hague before the outbreak of World War II. This collection also included the diaries of the Dutch governors of Taiwan. From Fort Zeelandia, each governor kept a daily journal from 1629 onwards, describing events in the colony.
Ts’ao considered these diaries so important that he typed out all the handwritten copies, thereby developing the skill to read seventeenth-century Dutch documents. He then wanted to publish the Daily Journals of Fort Zeelandia to make them accessible to researchers.
Until that point, making Dutch archival records available to Chinese and Japanese historians had been a Japanese-Taiwanese project. In close collaboration with Professor Ts’ao, who acted as his mentor, Leonard Blussé became involved in this endeavor and moved to Japan after a few years to continue his studies under Professors Iwao and Nakamura. After returning to the Netherlands, he was appointed at the Institute for the History of European Expansion and Reactions (IGEER) at Leiden University. With primarily Dutch (and later also Taiwanese) funding, he ensured that all the Daily Journals of Fort Zeelandia were collected, annotated, indexed, and published in a four-volume series that appeared between 1986 and 2000.
This was a Dutch-Taiwanese-Japanese partnership in which, on the Taiwanese side, Ts’ao Yung-ho and Chiang Shu-sheng, and on the Japanese side, Iwao and Nakamura, collaborated with the Dutch editors. Chiang Shu-sheng, who had meanwhile moved to the Netherlands, played an important role by translating and publishing all four volumes into Chinese.
The Daily Journals of Fort Zeelandia were gradually supplemented by other projects to make VOC sources about Taiwan widely accessible. These included: an index of all Dutch sources on Taiwan; the correspondence of the Dutch governors of Taiwan (both by Chiang Shu-sheng); the publication of the annual reports of the VOC governors-general in Batavia in Dutch and Chinese (by Cheng Shaogang); and a four-volume publication of VOC sources on the indigenous people of Taiwan (translated into English by Leonard Blussé and Natalie Everts).
As a result, an enormous amount of historical data about the seventeenth-century history of Taiwan has become available over the past forty years. The process initiated by Iwao Seiichi in the 1930s and continued by Ts’ao Yung-ho in the 1960s and 1970s ultimately resulted, via Leonard Blussé and Chiang Shu-sheng, in a wide range of source publications. These, in turn, formed the basis for much historical research into complex but important topics, such as the historical relationship between mainland China and Taiwan and the history of the indigenous people of Taiwan.
What was once obscure is now well-documented: the colonial history of Taiwan under the VOC. Leonard Blussé played a central role in this and has recently supervised several young Taiwanese scholars to the PhD level at Leiden University. These scholars now teach at various universities in Taiwan.
Y.C. Lo and Philips Taiwan
In 1966, Philips was the first company from mainland Europe to invest in modern Taiwan, when Philips’ semiconductor division established a memory core assembly plant in Kaohsiung. Shortly thereafter, the company began hiring Taiwanese engineers to replace the Dutch specialists who had set up the factory. One of the locally recruited technicians was Y.C. Lo (Yi-Chiang Lo), who was born on the Chinese mainland and grew up in Taiwan. He joined Philips Taiwan in 1969.
This was not the first time a major Dutch company had established a presence in Taiwan. The VOC did so in the seventeenth century, and Shell had a Taiwanese sales and distribution organization in the decades before World War II. But never before had someone from Taiwan been in a position to play an influential role within the business relationship between the island and the Netherlands. At a time when Taiwanese companies were not yet investing in the Netherlands, Lo was part of the first generation of Taiwanese for whom such a role was within reach.
Philips Taiwan grew from a modest assembly operation in an export processing zone in the 1960s-1990s into one of the largest industrial enterprises in Taiwan. As the company flourished, so did Lo’s career. In 1978, he was appointed general manager of the Kaohsiung factory. Ten years later, he became director of Philips Taiwan, which by then encompassed a wide range of large-scale manufacturing, R&D, and sales activities for semiconductors and consumer electronics.
Moreover, Philips Taiwan played an important stimulating and coordinating role in Philips’ expansion into mainland China. In the mid-1980s, Lo was directly involved in helping establish a new production facility in Nanjing. He saw the rise of China as a major production location not as a threat, but as an opportunity for both Philips and Taiwan. As Lo argued, Taiwan was the ideal gateway for Philips’ industrial expansion into China, because the island’s state-led development model was not significantly different from what the Chinese government was implementing in the 1980s and 1990s. The managers and technicians of Philips Taiwan were thus familiar not only with Chinese culture but also with the economic system of mainland China. Ultimately, China would become the main production base for Philips worldwide.
Y.C. Lo considered himself a connector, someone who used his position in a multinational corporation to help develop Taiwan, and his connection to Taiwan to help develop the company. He convinced Philips to produce computer monitor tubes and semiconductors in Taiwan, and to help establish the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which was founded in 1987 with significant financial and technological support from the Dutch company. Subsequently, Lo joined the board of directors of TSMC.
In 1988, Lo persuaded Philips to forgo exercising their right to increase their ownership stake from the original 27.5% to 51%. That option would have given Philips control over TSMC, but under existing financial regulations, the Taiwanese company would then not have been allowed to be listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange. TSMC’s growth opportunities would likely have been limited as a result. Philips agreed to remain a minority shareholder and gradually reduced their ownership stake over the years, while TSMC was able to expand and grow into one of the most valuable companies in the world.
As a senior manager, Lo used his influence to introduce Japanese management techniques to optimize the performance of Philips Taiwan. Although this required fundamental changes in the way the organization worked, as well as convincing a highly skeptical headquarters in the Netherlands, Lo pushed through the changes he deemed necessary. He was convinced that Asian management techniques were more advanced than Western ones and wanted Philips to learn from what Asia had to offer.
Lo led Philips Taiwan during a period when the company played a key role in Philips’ expansion in the East Asian region. He did this until 1996, when he left Taiwan for a position at the company’s headquarters in Eindhoven. There, he joined Philips’ board of management and assumed the role of chairman of the components division. By that time, Philips Taiwan was the third-largest industrial company in Taiwan and the island’s largest foreign enterprise. In 1999, Lo retired from Philips due to health problems.
The success of Philips Taiwan was the result of the efforts of many Taiwanese, Dutch, and other employees. Furthermore, influential figures such as K.T. Li, Taiwan’s Minister of Economic Affairs, and Frits Philips, the director of Philips, had been crucial in forging the initial collaboration between the two parties. But Y.C. Lo was the most visible embodiment of the symbiotic relationship between Philips and Taiwan. He ensured that both parties benefited enormously from their cooperation in the 1980s and 1990s.
Further reading
Blussé, Leonard J., Everts, Nathalie C., Milde, Wouter E. (eds.) (1986-2000), De Dagregisters van het Kasteel Zeelandia, Taiwan 1629-1662 [The Daily Journals of Fort Zeelandia, Taiwan 1629-1662] 4 volumes, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Stolte, Carolien, Alicia Schrikker and Frans-Paul van der Putten (2011), “The Red-Haired Barbarian from Leiden: Interview with Leonard Blussé.”, Itinerario 35/1, pp. 7-24.
Putten, Frans-Paul van der (2004), “Corporate Governance and the Eclectic Paradigm: The Investment Motives of Philips in Taiwan in the 1960s”, Enterprise and Society 5/3.
This is a translation of a chapter from the book Since 1624 Taiwanese – Dutch Connections Mila Davids, Ann Heylen, Eric Berkers and Tim Riswick (eds.), SHT: Eindhoven 2024. The chapter is based on interviews by the author with Leonard Blussé and Y.C. Lo conducted in 2023 and 2000, respectively.
Thanks to Joep den Teuling for his help with this translation from English.
Dr Frans-Paul van der Putten is a researcher and advisor on China and geopolitics at ChinaGeopolitics www.chinageopolitics.nl
