As the Taiwan Strait emerges as one of the world's geopolitical flashpoints, two contending narratives are the driving forces for this conflict. On the side of People's Republic of China (PRC), an increasingly strident Chinese ethnic nationalism asserts that Taiwan is an inseparable part of the fatherland and the failure to reincorporate this self-governing island amounts to a shameful persistence of humiliation by foreign powers. On the other hand, a civic nationalism has taken root in democratized Taiwan, as its islanders are determined to take the future in their own hands. Observers typically date the ascendency of Taiwan nationalism to 2000, when the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) first won the presidential election, thus ending the 55-year reign of Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalists) in the postwar era. The DPP was in power in 2000–2008 and has again become the ruling party since 2016, and both periods witnessed tensions in Taiwan–China relations.
Yet, Taiwan nationalism has an oft-neglected germination process; before its emergence as a political force, a cultural nativism surfaced in the writings and debates regarding Taiwan's colonial history, literature, and the youth's role in the 1970s. A-chin Hsiau's superb book offers an in-depth examination of this extraordinarily productive decade. He draws a richly detailed story of soul-searching by young intellectuals of both Mainlander and Taiwanese origins and how they jointly came to the conclusion to prioritize social and political reforms. This “return-to-reality” generation grabbled with the increasingly jarring unreality of the Kuomintang's ossified claims to represent the authentic Chinese government and to suspend political freedoms in the name of anticommunist campaigns, particularly when the international community began to switch diplomatic recognition by recognizing the PRC. According to Hsiau, the 1960s in Taiwan were characterized by an exile mentality and a culture of resignation and passivity among intellectuals, especially those of Mainlander origins, who saw no future staying in Taiwan (Chapter 2). The student movement to protect the Diaoyutai Island (1970–1971) represented a rude awakening out of the prolonged lethargy. Although students' patriotic stirrings were ineffectual and brief, it fostered an active generation as they became “conscientized” about the society that has nourished them as well its problems (Chapter 3).
While the turbulent 1970s saw the rise of political opposition, culminating in the 1979 Formosa Magazine, Hsiau's lens of cultural politics focuses on three main discursive arenas (colonial literature, Nativist Literature, and the history of anti-Japanese opposition). In these cases, young intellectuals took the Kuomintang's Chinese nationalism narrative as the taken-for-granted starting points, and yet derived conclusions that were different from, if not critical of, the ruling incumbents. Chapter 4 analyzes the rediscovery of literary authors and works during the Japanese colonial period. Long suppressed by the postwar regime's re-sinicization policy, Taiwan's Japanese-era literature gained a second life by being packaged as the embodiment of “Chinese nationalism” for its opposition to colonialism. Chapter 5 revisits the famed 1977–1978 debate on Nativist Literature. As the realistic depiction of the plight of Taiwan's peasants, workers, and fishermen gained traction, pro-regime writers launched an assault by accusing these works harboring pro-communist and separatist sentiments. The Nativist Literature supporters stressed its authentic Chineseness to fend off these political charges. Hsiau notes that some of the participants in the debate revised their accounts in the 1980s, and the Nativist Literature was later seen as “based on the island's soil” and animated by a “Taiwanese consciousness.” Chapter 6 looks at the how the history of the anti-Japanese movement became a frequent trope among the 1970s opposition leaders. By rescuing Taiwanese anti-colonial resistance in the 1920s from historical oblivion and presenting it in the light of an official Chinese nationalism narrative, dissidents attempted to justify their raison d'etre. Adopting such an anti-colonial frame inevitably led to a more radical conclusion. If Taiwan has witnessed successive migration waves from China and been ruled by different colonial powers, islanders should form a political community and strive for their own autonomy. Hsiau appears to view a book by Annette Lu (former Vice-president in 2000–2008) published shortly before the Formosa Magazine Incident in December 1979 as the terminus of a generation's intellectual journey (pp. 157–160). Lu suggested that all residents were Taiwanese and that the Republic of China should declare its independence. In hindsight, such prescient insight from the late 1970s was akin to the guiding philosophy of the current DPP government under Tsai Ing-wen (2016).
A decade-long effort in debating and polemic-writing about literary and historical issues generated political implications. The official ideology of Chinese nationalism began as the assumed premises, and yet the conclusion of an embryonic Taiwanese nationalism amounted to its antithesis. By taking the theoretical inspiration from the recent narrative turn in social sciences, Hsiau's book offers a fascinating account of how narratives and discourses not only reflect the external facts, but also participate in the co-construction of reality. Young intellectuals' exchanges in the public sphere have a life of its own, and critical reflection has the liberating power to break free from preexisting restraints. As such, the book also has wider implications for contemporary China. After giving up on revolutionary aspirations, PRC leaders increasingly relied on the Chinese nationalism narrative for their legitimacy − a situation not dissimilar to Taiwan's Kuomintang up to the 1980s. Understanding that Xi Jinping's China represented a more repressive atmosphere than Taiwan of the 1970s, can we apply the theoretical lens to explain the continuous emergence of Chinese dissidents in the post-Tiananmen era? As an official ideology thoroughly indoctrinated through education and mass media, nationalism can be earnestly embraced by young citizens. But that alone does not guarantee slavish loyalty to the regime, since knowledgeable people regularly spot discrepancies between ideological pretensions and no-so-convenient realities.
Back to Taiwan studies, Hsiau has successfully established himself as the leading scholar on the 1970s with his previous publications in Chinese. Mostly adopted from his preceding works, this book is sure to attract more English-language readers to the prehistory of democratic Taiwan. Throughout the 1970s, the Kuomintang's authoritarian reign remained consolidated and serious challenges from the opposition did not arise until last few years of that decade. Nevertheless, across different fields of cultural production, dissident intellectuals came into being and their various discursive engagements have fostered a pro-reform generational outlook. The subsequent emergence of social movements and political liberalization signified by the government's decision to end martial law in 1987 cannot be understood without a critical look at this eventful decade. Previously, social scientists, sociologists in particular, devoted most of their research to post-1987 Taiwan because issues such as labor, gender, indigenous people, ethnic politics, and so on only emerged then. What happened before that used to belong exclusively to the province of historians. Hsiau is a trailblazing sociologist who thus ventures into unfamiliar terrain. This well-crafted monograph demonstrates the valuable insights from sociological theories in solving historical puzzles.
At the core of this book is a documentation of the gradual process of identity indigenization, as the 1970s youth shifted from imagined Chinese nationhood to the concerns of existing problems in Taiwan. By the end of that decade, Taiwanese nationalism as a public discourse was still not present. The opposition raised the demand for self-determination only in the early 1980s, and the advocacy for Taiwan independence was belatedly decriminalized in 1992. Hsiau rightfully cautions against a simplified reading of the 1970s that viewed the following development as a linear and inevitable evolution out of that decade: “any notion of a closet Taiwanese national identity is anachronistic in Taiwan for the 1970s” (p. 3). Such assertion is undoubtedly true for the protagonists surveyed in this book, who had imbibed the regime-imposed Chinese nationalism from education, but what about those who rejected such an official narrative from the very beginning? An overseas Taiwan independence movement started immediately following the February 28 Incident of 1947, and by 1970, it has evolved into a global campaign of Taiwanese diaspora communities. Also in that decade, Taiwan's jail was already full of political prisoners who had advocated for this radical doctrine. Granted that their presence was barely felt then as Taiwan was under the regime's watertight control, it serves as a cautious qualification that cultural nativism represented only one route to political nationalism alongside other trajectories.
The book is methodologically anchored in the cultural sociology of narrative identity, which rejects both essentialism (narrative being the authentic expression of an inner selfsame self) and instrumentalism (narrative being a tool for maximizing one's own interests). Between these two extremes, there exists a vast territory of different articulations between external narratives and internal identities. People use a preexisting figure of speech because it is politically safe, familiar to the audience, or sincerely embraced by the speaker. Different strategic considerations and various levels of awareness existed when Taiwan's 1970s intellectuals evoked the theme of Chinese nationalism, and yet, an archival researcher has to proceed with the methodological assumption that what is publicly narrated represents the true voice of the speaker. Renarration of identity (the final chapter title), or the ongoing revision of one's own story according to the latest happenings, is a universal and constant process. In this regard, the claim “we have to consider the possibility that if a person says he or she feels Chinese, he or she is at the moment in time” (p. 172, original emphasis) might appear abrupt. Readers might have hoped that the author could have bracketed the investigation of the “true intentions” of those 1970s intellectual participants without having to endorse these expressions as being authentic or true. Previously, Hsiau has sparked a series of debates among Taiwan literature scholars, particularly because he documented the detailed changes of some intellectual giants like Ye Shitao, who is now revered as the founding father in the field. Apparently, for the sake of brevity, Hsiau chose not to incorporate his previous methodological responses and reflections, which have been published in Chinese. Interested readers for this debate can consult these works.
Finally, the search for identity among the Taiwanese youth does not stop at the end of the 1970s. The recent decade witnessed a powerful outpouring of youthful activisms, evidenced in the 2014 Sunflower Movement, the agitation for marriage equality, the solidarity campaign for Hong Kong's prodemocracy movement in 2019, and the electoral support for the DPP in the 2020 presidential election. The result is that Taiwan's youthful generation emerged as the staunchest supporters for political independence, even though they face the growing risk of PRC's invasion. By the yardstick of the current young Taiwanese, the 1970s debate appears hopelessly elitist (limited to few select intellectual luminaries), restrictive (limited to paper publication venues), and high-brow (failing to mention the economic woes of overeducated precariat). As such, it will be an intellectually stimulating project to study the evolving cultural politics of the Taiwanese youth of the 2010s and beyond, by following the same methodological guidelines of cultural sociology.
In short, the publication of Hsiau's book is a milestone of international Taiwan studies and be incorporated into the essential reading list for any related courses. The book lays bare an inspiring story of how a seemingly innocent discussion of a nation's past history and literary works could have caused a political tsunami that ended up engulfing the repressive incumbents in the years to come. The troubled stories of Taiwanese people with their own identities have generated a wealth of research literature, including Leo Ching's Becoming Japanese Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Reference Ching2001), Melissa Brown's Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on Changing Identities (Reference Brown2004), and Evan Dawley's Becoming Taiwanese: Ethnogenesis in a Colonial City (Reference Dawley2019). Hsiau's book is sure to join this pantheon. With a solid scholarship, Hsiau has woven a convincing narrative of the power of ideas, and the moving saga of how Taiwanese youth's difficult search for their true selves should find wider resonance in present-day Taiwan, China, and beyond.
