A hundred miles off the coast of mainland China, Taiwan is a Pacific island first settled several thousand years ago by Austronesian peoples arriving by sea from the west. It lies at the strategically important intersection of Northeast and Southeast Asia and, for centuries, has been a key node in international trading networks. It is also a key site in which the “entanglement of the desires of the west and the products of the east” (p. 5) has played out. Taiwan's history of the past 400 years has been structured by successive waves of migration and colonialism, the layers of which are manifest everywhere in contemporary Taiwanese society and culture. It is increasingly untenable to deny that the unique hybrid quality of “Taiwaneseness” is the product of these complex and fluid socio-cultural legacies.
Befitting a scholar with oceanic interests, Alsford neatly encapsulates the diversity of Taiwan's colonial experiences by listing the vessels that have plied its ports across time: Chinese junks; Japanese shuisen; Southeast Asian jongs; Spanish galleons; Dutch and English men-of-war. To this list of vessels active in the Taiwan Strait we might add People's Liberation Army and US Navy aircraft carriers and destroyers, and the container ships that symbolize Taiwan's status as a global trading power. As the dominant supplier of the world's most advanced semi-conductors, and a central component of the “first island chain” and the “Free and Indo-Pacific”, Taiwan remains as entangled and contested as ever. And Taiwan is still not free from the spectre of colonialism.
One perspective is that Taiwan is yet to complete the process of decolonization, since it remains legally and functionally tied to the Republic of China (ROC) and the émigré regime of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). The counter-argument, recently articulated by former President Tsai Ing-wen, is that democratization represented de facto decolonization by liberating the Taiwanese people to determine their own rulers. Due to external factors – the People's Republic of China's equation that “independence = war” and the United States’ objection to independence for the same reason – continuation of the “colonial” ROC framework is a necessary condition for Taiwan to retain its autonomy. Yet, within the constraints of the ROC framework, a significant contest to determine “what Taiwan is” has been playing out for the last thirty years.
When the KMT ruled Taiwan under conditions of Martial Law (1947–1987), any acknowledgement of Taiwanese culture, history, or subjectivity was actively (sometimes brutally) subordinated to a strict Republican Chinese orthodoxy. Democratization opened up political and discursive space for the re-evaluation of Taiwan's historical experience and exploration of cultural identities. What was once taboo under KMT authoritarian rule became a major political project under the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), with an assist from Taiwanese historians, anthropologists, and literature scholars. It was manifest in changes to the curriculum, textbooks, museums, and public spaces as the exclusive emphasis on Taiwan's Chinese heritage under the KMT gave way to recognition of the multiple layers of cultural, linguistic, and ethnic experience that makes Taiwan unique.
Reimagining Taiwan in this way is inherently political, marking a break with both the exclusive Chinese nationalism of KMT authoritarian rule and consolidating Taiwan's distinctness from the PRC. Under Tsai Ing-wen, one of the individuals covered in the book, there was a deliberate effort to expand how Taiwan is imagined, metaphorically removing it from the Taiwan Strait and China's sphere of influence, and repositioning it as a global democracy, a regional stakeholder and an oceanic and Pacific island entity. While processes of “Taiwanization” and “de-Sinicization” are subject to much political contestation, the broader juxtaposition of a democratic Taiwan and authoritarian PRC have facilitated the emergence of consensus that Taiwan is a discrete and distinct entity.
Taiwan's Chinese heritage is undeniable, but the recognition that Taiwaneseness is composed of multiple layers of diverse cultural, linguistic, and ethnic components has weakened its former dominance. It helps to explain why Taiwan's emerging multicultural civic nationalism is able to accommodate Chinese cultural elements alongside constituent others. Admittedly, the contest to shape the national imaginary remains highly salient in Taiwanese politics, even if, as noted in this book and elsewhere, two thirds of Taiwanese people now identify as Taiwanese rather than Chinese or both.
Alsford's innovative study contributes an appreciation of the layers of complexity in the Taiwanese historical experience and a rejection of homogenous Chineseness articulated during the authoritarian period and in contemporary PRC discourses about Taiwan. Inspired by Chaucer – with the historic Dadaocheng district of Taipei a proxy for Canterbury – Alsford tells the stories of twenty-four individuals and situates their lives in a social history of Taiwan. In doing so, he guides the reader on an extrapolation of how these lives are interpreted by and illuminate contemporary Taiwanese society. Eschewing the linear, event- and elite-driven narratives common to most political histories available in English, he broadens history telling about Taiwan and produces a human account of where Taiwan is coming from and where it might go. Intriguing characters and exciting yarns populate a free-flowing narrative expressed with pace and verve. This is a recipe for a successful crossover book, and reaching readers beyond academia would be beneficial for the quality of international discourse about Taiwan.
The book is structured somewhat like Taiwan's initially unintuitive postal address system, with its districts, road sections, lanes and alleys. For a first-time visitor it can appear idiosyncratic or capricious, until the logic becomes clear. The book has three thematic parts (“A Social History”, “Pivotal Events”, “Being Taiwan”) under which individual stories appear under multiple themes (“Becoming Japanese”, “Pathways to War”, “A New Hope”, etc.) in chronological order. This approach means that three timelines run through the book. This can produce awkward results, such as contemporaneously active figures appearing a hundred pages apart. Yet, there is also something cinematic about this organization, indeed somewhat redolent of Taiwanese New Wave directors’ penchant for fractured chronologies and parallel storylines.
Taiwan specialists will be familiar with protagonists like Su Beng, Sanmao, Fan Yun, Chen Chu, Chang Rong-fa, and Tsai Ing-wen. But alongside these celebrities of Taiwan's political history there are reclaimed stories of ordinary people with extraordinary lives; a hunter, a miner, a preacher, and a refugee among them. It is thrilling to read these stories and the author is right to say that “the history of Taiwan is made up by its people” (p. 232). Taiwan is constituted by the experience of its people, yet it is not fully able to author its futures. Former President Lee Teng-hui noted in the 1990s that this was the tragedy of being Taiwanese. But in the decades since, Taiwan has slewed off passivity and pessimism to become a beacon of industry, creativity, and resistance.
The choice of twenty-four individual stories covering more than a hundred years and eschewing the comprehensive “big history” approach means that there are gaps. The author tells us that rather than an incomplete history, it is instead “an invitation for further discoveries” (p. 22), which is a clever bit of finesse that I have no quarrel with. The cast of political actors and other figures is dominated by those on “the left”, which in Taiwan's context means those associated with the underground opposition and independence movement that subsequently became centred around the DPP in 1986. Given that the project to embrace the diversity of Taiwanese history and identity is largely associated with the DPP, that is understandable. But it also means that key figures – and ordinary people – from the KMT during the authoritarian era and later do not feature. It is right and proper to foreground the broader conception of Taiwan's experience, but it is also useful to get a sense of why it is so important by establishing the suffocating narrowness of the exclusive Chinese identity imposed on Taiwan during the 1945–1987 period. It is unusual to read a social and political history without a starring role for (the KMT's) “Mr Democracy” Lee Teng-hui. And if we are talking about pop stars whose experience illuminates identity and cross-Strait politics, A-mei would have made a more revealing choice than Tzuyu. Other choices will no doubt prompt debate, which the author acknowledges and rightly welcomes.
Widely read, this book can bring more nuance to popular western representations of Taiwan, which remain narrowly defined by sovereignty and security, and well-meaning but reductive platitudes about Taiwan's democracy. An appreciation for Taiwan's complexities – beyond the esoterica of international law and foreign relations – is seldom available to readers of English in such an accessible and enjoyable form.
