Four “classics” and an excellent recent round-up give a flavour of its history, helping to explain why “the Taiwan issue” is so dangerous, and so hard to resolve. From our summer reads collection
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.
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 and a Taiwanese academic researcher, both provides a good summary of the history and brings the story up to date.
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.
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