This article examines the New Taiwan Series (NTS), a journal published between 1947 and 1948 in Hong Kong by Taiwanese socialists who fled the island following the 228 Uprising. It does so to intervene in ongoing debates in the field of Sinophone studies. While two major theorizations of the Sinophone exist—one that sees the field as a network of minoritized sites that operate against China-centrism, and the other grounding the Sinophone in a lyrical negotiation with cultural China—neither framework is sufficient for understanding the complex subject positions taken by Taiwanese socialists during these years. For the NTS, social activism was not a flattened binary of either ethnic identification with or resistance to a “China” articulated in terms devoid of political-economic analysis. Rather, politics had to dialectically integrate minoritarian aspirations (Taiwanese sovereignty) with majoritarian projects (the Chinese Revolution). The NTS thus encourages us to reimagine the Sinophone in socialist terms, where two analytical lenses—one grounded in the endogenous local and the other in the exogenous revolutionary center—are dialectically intertwined. The NTS navigated the resulting tensions of such a dialectical stance, making it a critical archive of Taiwanese socialist thought before the 1949 rupture.

In “Diversionary Dragons, or ‘Talking Tough in Taipei’” (Journal of East Asian Studies 9, 3: 369–398), Yitan Li, Patrick James, and A. Cooper Drury presented a newly created data set to show that Chen Shui-bian used independence rhetoric and confrontation with the mainland as a diversionary tactic in the face of domestic political difficulties. In the present exchange, Jonathan Sullivan challenges the authors' understanding of how the Democratic Progressive Party used the Taiwan independence issue—and the authors' interpretation of independence—and raises questions about the coding of press coverage as a means of identifying underlying preferences. The authors respond, concluding that the future use of such diversionary tactics is by no means foreclosed.

Most of the contemporary policy debate regarding economic interdependence and peace has focused on devising responses either in favor of or in opposition to the prevailing notion that trade is positively and unconditionally correlated with peace. The China and Taiwan case—noteworthy for the simultaneous presence of an ever-increasing economic interdependence and an adversarial political relationship—provides an interesting counterexample to the leading positions in the literature. What is missing in the literature is a model that studies states' decisions to trade and initiate conflict as a function not only of their own utility but also of their perceptions about how their opponent will respond. States' decisions to trade depend on the likelihood that their prospective trade partner will initiate a conflict, and decisions to initiate a conflict depend on perceptions of the likelihood that the target will concede. In this article, the authors develop a model that expands the domain of the trade-peace analysis by endogenizing and analyzing states' decisions to trade and initiate conflicts.