标题: 2022.06.28 关于台湾的最佳五本书 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-7-6 23:11 标题: 2022.06.28 关于台湾的最佳五本书 Economist Reads | Taiwan
Our former Asia columnist on what to read to grasp the looming crisis in Taiwan
The best five books for understanding a likely flashpoint
People wear a face mask walk past a Taiwan flag, as Taiwan adds 333 domestic cases and 2 imported cases, in Taipei, Taiwan, 17 May 2021. The capital Taipei and New Taipei have forced non essential businesses such cinemas and book stores to close and rolled out compulsory mask wearing in outdoor areas whilst suspending large activities and encouraging people to receive Covid test and vaccination. (Photo by Ceng Shou Yi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Jun 28th 2022 (Updated Jul 5th 2022)
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This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit our collection to discover “The Economist reads” guides, guest essays and more seasonal distractions.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has drawn new attention to Taiwan’s precarious international position. Just as Vladimir Putin argues Ukraine and Russia are “one nation”, so China maintains Taiwan is now and has always been “part of China”. Unlike Ukraine, however, Taiwan—once known as “Formosa”—has no international support for the idea that it is an independent country. China insists other countries follow a “one-China policy”, according no official recognition to the government in Taipei. China is intent on eventual “reunification” with Taiwan, and has never ruled out the resort to the use of force to achieve this, if peaceful means take too long. Much foreign writing on Taiwan tacitly accepts China’s position, referring to Taiwan as a “renegade province”. But its history is much more complicated and contentious than this implies. These books—four “classics” and an excellent recent round-up—give a flavour of that history, helping to explain why “the Taiwan issue” is so dangerous, and so hard to resolve.
The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China. By Jay Taylor. Belknap Press; 752 pages; $25 and £20.95
The origins of Taiwan’s current predicament lie in the end of the second world war. The island had been a Japanese colony since 1895, but the victorious allies agreed that on Japan’s surrender, it should be returned to China, where Chiang Kai-shek’s ruling Kuomintang (kmt) was about to become embroiled in civil war with the Chinese Communist Party. As it lost the war, it retreated to Taiwan and for decades maintained the fiction that it was the legitimate government of all of China. Alliance with the dictatorship Chiang established there seemed to be one of those embarrassing right-wing entanglements the cold war foisted on America. Chiang himself, with his glamorous wife, Soong Mayling, his cool, austere manner and his comic-book title, “the Generalissimo”, seemed to be somewhere on the spectrum between joke and monster. This enthralling book by a historian at Harvard explodes these caricatured conventional views of both Chiang and the Chinese civil war. The picture that emerges is of a far more subtle and prescient thinker than the man America’s General Joseph Stilwell used to refer to as “peanut”, and Britain’s chief of staff, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, dismissed as “a cross between a pine marten and a ferret”.
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Formosa Betrayed. By George H. Kerr. Camphor Press; 520 pages; $19.99 and £15.99
For many young Taiwanese, the Japanese surrender held the promise of “liberation”. But that was not the way it turned out. Chiang’s Nationalist troops behaved like a conquering army and local resentment built up. In February 1947, after the police beat up an old woman selling cigarettes without a licence, local anger boiled over into an island-wide insurrection, put down at the cost of thousands of lives, including many members of Taiwan’s social and intellectual elite. The definitive English-language account of this period was written by an eyewitness, George Kerr, who was an American diplomat. Besides chronicling the kmt’s repression and “white terror”, he also described the thoroughness with which the island was in effect looted, as Nationalist numbers were bolstered by the arrival of 1.5m-2m refugees from mainland China after the civil war there ended in their defeat in 1949. The book, translated into Chinese in 1974, had a huge influence on the small and oppressed Taiwan independence movement that flickered at home and, in particular, among activists who had fled into exile. The events of “February 28th” or “228” colour Taiwan’s politics to this day.
A Taste of Freedom: Memoirs of a Taiwanese Independence Leader. By Peng Ming-min. Camphor Press; 234 pages; $12.99 and £9.99
One of those exiles was Peng Ming-min, who died this year at the age of 98. A member of the fifth generation of his family on the island, Peng was a star student in the last years of Japanese rule, winning a place at university in Japan itself. For all the horrors of the immediate post-war period, Peng did rather well when he went home. He became a respected authority on international law, and won a job advising Taiwan’s—ie, in those days, “China’s”—delegation at the United Nations. But he was still apolitical. This became untenable. How could he lend his prestige to the government’s nonsense about recovering the mainland, and connive in its discrimination against Formosans like himself? In 1964 he and two friends drafted a manifesto insisting “that there is one China and one Formosa”. The knock on the door came before the manifesto was distributed. He was sentenced to eight years in prison but freed to house arrest the following year, from where he achieved an elaborate escape in 1970 via Hong Kong to Sweden. The authorities suspected, wrongly, that the cia had spirited Peng out. Peng did move to America, where he became a prominent international spokesman for Taiwan’s opposition. It came too late for this memoir, published in 1972, but he eventually made a happier homecoming, to a freer Taiwan, in 1992, where he was a losing candidate in the first free presidential election in 1996.
Island China. By Ralph Clough. Harvard University Press; 264 pages; $65 and £54.95
The survival of Taiwan’s de facto independence has always relied in part on its ties with America. Until Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, there was a fairly clear-cut cold-war divide: America backed its wartime ally, Chiang Kai-shek, against a Communist regime in Beijing it shunned, until Mao Zedong’s split with the Soviet Union opened up a chance for America to “play the China card”. Ralph Clough, a China and Taiwan hand in the State Department, provided one of the earliest and clearest explanations of why Taiwan was the “ticking time-bomb” in US-China policy. Published on the eve of America’s partial abandonment of Taiwan (it switched diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic on January 1st 1979), “Island China” offered a prescient warning. It also provided one of the first and best accounts of the island’s modern history and the social and political tensions beginning to strain the fabric of the kmt dictatorship (led, after Chiang Kai-shek’s death in 1975, by his less rigid son, Chiang Ching-kuo). The divide between the “mainlander” elite whose families arrived in the late 1940s and the “native Taiwanese”, on the island for generations, was to define politics as Chiang Ching-kuo tentatively liberalised.
The Trouble with Taiwan. By Kerry Brown and Kalley Wu Tzu Hui. Bloomsbury; 272 pages; $17.95 and £12.99
That this selection is dominated by books written decades ago is not because not much good has appeared lately—far from it. Rather it is that history and the basic issues remain unaltered and the risk of an eventual confrontation over Taiwan’s future grows even starker. This excellent volume, by a British professor of Chinese studies (yet another former diplomat) and a Taiwanese academic researcher, both provides a good summary of the history and brings the story up to date. It is hard to be optimistic about Taiwan’s long-term future, but the authors do at least try to to avoid the hand-wringing gloom of much commentary. They note how Taiwan is far more than just a geopolitical issue for China. An open, free, democratic society, it offers an alternative vision of Chinese modernity, and hence one that is deeply threatening to the Chinese Communist Party. They argue that, if there is hope, it is in starting to think in a different way about some of the issues that make Taiwan seem doomed by irreconcilable contradictions: about national identity, statehood and sovereignty. “Above all,” they conclude, “the question of what it means to be ‘Chinese’ needs a rethink.”
Our editor-at-large is himself the author of a book, from 1992, on the Taiwan issue:
Taiwan: China’s Last Frontier. Taiwan: China’s Last Frontier. By Simon Long. Macmillan. 264 pages
A history of Taiwan-China relations, written as they were being transformed by the dramatic democratisation of Taiwan on the one hand, and on the other by the global reassessment of Communist rule in China that followed the Beijing massacre of 1989.
He also contributed a chapter to “Taiwan Studies Revisited”, Edited by Dafydd Fell and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, Routledge, 2019, a collection of essays by the authors of books on Taiwan, reassessing their earlier work with the benefit of hindsight.
