Military dependents' village
| Military dependents' village | |||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 眷村 | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| Transcriptions | |
|---|---|
| Standard Mandarin | |
| Hanyu Pinyin | Juàncūn |
| Southern Min | |
| Hokkien POJ | Kòan-chhun Kòan-chhoan |
A military dependents' village (Chinese: 眷村) is a community in Taiwan built in the late 1940s and the 1950s whose original purpose was to serve as provisional housing for soldiers of the Republic of China Armed Forces and their dependents from mainland China after the Government of the Republic of China (ROC) and the Kuomintang (KMT) retreated to Taiwan in 1949. They ended up becoming permanent settlements, forming distinct cultures as enclaves of mainlanders in Taiwanese cities. Over the years, many military dependents' villages have suffered from urban problems such as housing dereliction, abandonment, urban decay, and urban slum.
The houses in these villages were often haphazardly and poorly constructed, having been built hastily and with limited funding. The residents had no private land ownership rights for the houses they lived in, as the land was government property.
In the 1990s, the government began an aggressive program of demolishing these villages and replacing them with highrises, giving the residents rights to live in the new apartments. As of late 2006, there are around 170 left out of an original number of 879, and there are efforts to preserve some as historic sites.
In a broad sense, the word can also mean the quarters for U.S. Military Advisory Group officers and their dependents in Taiwan.
In the 1950s, most Dependents' Villages, except the legacy from the Japanese colonization, were built with minimal building standards on public land. The very common properties were built with straw-laid roof and mud-consolidated bamboo wall. It was only after the 1960s that the military reconstructed properties with bricks; and at the same time incorporated private toilets, bathrooms, kitchens, main pillars, roof tiles and electrical circuits into the properties. Till this, the properties of the Dependents Village had finally reached the same standards aligning with the rest of the architectures in Taiwan. By the end of the 1970s, Taiwan's property market was heated up with tremendous amount of newly built and renovated properties. However, due to housing ownership problems, houses in the Dependents Villages could not been rebuilt and replaced. Most of them suffered from outdated facilities and crowdedness. Each house had only 6–10 ping (1 ping ~= 3.3 square metres) excluded the attached garden. Hence brick construction or reinforced brick-built, low level Juan Cun properties had been comparatively derelict, especially within inner urban area.
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