Peter Chow is to be congratulated for assembling this collection of fascinating studies of various aspects of Taiwanese politics, sociology, culture and economics during the past century. The chapters include analyses of aspects of Taiwanese history hitherto little discussed in Anglophone literature, thus making an important and original contribution to the international field of interdisciplinary Taiwan studies. As with many such volumes, however, the reader is sometimes left struggling to draw connections between the various contributions and identify, or understand, overarching themes.
The volume is divided into five clearly demarcated “parts,” with an introduction followed by sections on: “Taiwanese identity, political development and international relations”; “economic development since the 1920s”; “societal and educational development”; and “literature and cultural development in Taiwan.” These subtitles, in conjunction with the title of the volume as a whole, lead one to expect a strong thematic focus on “development,” and significant attention in the introductory chapter to unpacking and explaining the meanings attached to this distinctly slippery and contentious concept (likewise the meanings of “colonialism” and “modernity”). But Chow's introduction eschews that potentially interesting discussion, and is instead largely confined to summarizing the contents of the chapters that follow.
What Chow does emphasize in his introductory chapter is that Taiwan's developmental path has been “unique” (p. 3). By this he means uniquely successful, as evidenced by his emphasis on Taiwan's achievement of “economic growth with equity” (p. 12) and its high ranking today in global indices of democracy (p. 13), gender equity, multicultural tolerance and so forth. There is undeniable justice in such claims, and good reason for taking every opportunity to remind the global public of Taiwan's achievements. Nevertheless, we expect academic publications also to highlight aspects of nuance and complexity in the story of any society. Assertions of “uniqueness,” even when true, are typically banal and analytically unhelpful. In order to identify precisely what is peculiar, and why, about a particular society, we need some comparative context, or some broader theoretical underpinning for the analysis, but these are largely lacking here (there are no references in the index either to Korea or Hong Kong). Chow rightly asserts that “Taiwan's development provides a compelling case study for comparative development” (p. 13), but the value of the Taiwanese “case” for comparative purposes is left unexplained and unexplored in his introductory discussion.
Some broader contextualization of the Taiwanese “case,” informed by his long career as a foreign observer of Chinese societies, is provided by Edward Friedman in a short, sharp and highly readable foreword. Friedman, too, is full of admiration for the vibrant, diverse and exceptionally liberal society that contemporary Taiwan has become. But even while praising Taiwan for practising “one of the world's most enlightened first people's policies” (p. xvi), he notes that enduring resentment at the legacy of “Hokkien settler colonialism since the seventeenth century” means that, even today, indigenous Taiwanese tend not to vote for “the Hokkien majority Democratic Progressive Party” (DPP) (p. xvii). During one of my own visits to Taiwan, in 2004, I recall seeing DPP election posters depicting the party's presidential and vice-presidential candidates dressed in indigenous costume – a rather crass exercise in cultural appropriation. Friedman, reminiscing about a much earlier and vastly different political era, tells of a visit to Orchid Island in 1966 when Austronesian islanders asked him “when the U.S. Marines would be returning to liberate indigenous people from the Mainlanders,” by which they meant the ethnically Hokkien settler population (p. xvii). Nonetheless, any concerns today over indigenous or other minority rights on Taiwan pale in comparison with the political oppression we see in People's Republic of China (PRC). As Friedman observes, “Taiwan is not China,” at least in the sense that “it promotes human rights for all its people” (p. xvii).
The question of whether, or in what sense, “Taiwan is China” is of course absolutely central both to domestic politics on the island and to its international relationships, discussed together in “Part Two” of this volume. June Teufel Dreyer provides us with a highly informative overview of “Taiwan's international relations,” focusing on the post-1979 period, concluding that “Taiwan has played a weak hand with skill” (p. 34). Yi-Shen Chen then analyses the constitutional changes that have accompanied the steady undermining, internationally and domestically, of claims by the post-Civil War Republic of China (ROC) regime to represent “China” as a whole. Quoting Masahiro Wakabayashi (contributor of another short foreword to this volume), Chen characterizes this process as the “Taiwan-isation of the ROC” (p. 47). Turning from questions of law to those of culture and ethnicity, Chang Lung-chih's chapter, “Rethinking Taiwanese ethnicity,” provides a helpful overview of the current state of relevant historical scholarship. Of particular interest here is the recent work of Dominic Yang on “Mainlanders” (migrants from mainland China during and after the Civil War of the 1940s), portraying them as a “Taiwanese” ethnic group whose often traumatic collective memories perhaps deserve more attention from wider society. The final contribution in this section is from Shiau-Chi Shen, who offers a sophisticated analysis of polling data on identity consciousness on Taiwan since the 1990s. She suggests that the dramatic decline over the past 30 years in self-identification as “Chinese” is attributable not only to generational change (i.e. the passing away of first-generation mainlander migrants), but also to a weakening of identification with the ROC state. While support for or opposition to “unification” with the PRC do not necessarily map directly onto shifts in identity consciousness, there is a clear connection. And here, perhaps unsurprisingly, Chen concludes that “the PRC's exclusive and rigid version of the ‘one China principle’” (p. 89) has turned decisively against unification many of those who still acknowledge both Chinese and Taiwanese dimensions to their identity.
“Part Three,” on the economic aspects of Taiwan's modern development, begins with a very long, but also very interesting chapter by Frank S. T. Hsiao on the prewar antecedents of Taiwan's postwar “economic miracle,” focusing especially on links between Southeast Asia and early industrialization on the island. Hsiao shows how colonial Taiwan was assigned by its Japanese rulers a special role in extending imperial trading ties with Southeast Asia – a role that rapidly assumed greater importance from the mid-1930s onwards. He emphasizes how many aspects of Japanese developmental colonialism in Taiwan, not least the expansion of educational provision, laid the foundations for the island's rapid postwar development. While this observation is not new, Hsiao sheds light on the hitherto under-appreciated extent to which Japan's promotion of Taiwan's economic links to the “South Sea Islands” laid the foundations for postwar trade with this region, and foreshadowed the recent pursuit of a “New Southbound Policy” by Tsai Ing-wen's DPP administration. In his subsequent chapter tracing “the path of Taiwan's economic development from follower to innovator,” Peter Chow resumes the celebratory tone of his introductory essay, hailing Taiwan as an economic “model” for developing countries today. Finally, Abraham Lin's contribution on “Money and banking in Taiwan” explores the ways in which currency policy has reflected shifts in Taiwanese identity and the island's international standing and relationships.
Lin's is one of several chapters that would have benefitted from more thorough copy-editing for accuracy of language, another being Michael Hsiao's chapter on the history of civil society movements in Taiwan, which opens “Part Four” on “societal and educational development.” Reviewing a century of developments from 1920 to 2020, Hsiao shows both the vicissitudes of civil society over this period, and the extent to which the emergence since the 1970s of a politically successful opposition to the KMT has depended on the coalescing of a variety of different organizations and pressure groups. However, his analysis at times comes over as excessively partisan, as for example when he declares that in 2008 “Taiwan witnessed the second democratic regime change when the authoritarian KMT re-installed its state power” (p. 212). However much one may find fault with many policies of the Ma Ying-jeow administration, describing it as “authoritarian” seems somewhat harsh; this is, after all, a regime that peacefully ceded power in 2016 after defeat in a free and fair election – something that the ostensibly democratic USA has recently struggled to achieve.
The following chapter by Wan-yao Chou, on “a century of colonial education by Japan and the KMT/ROC party-state” evinces a similarly partisan tone in its branding of both Japan and the KMT as “colonial.” Chou's chapter nonetheless provides a very informative and astute overview of the relationship between education, identity formation and Taiwan's eventual democratization. A particular strength is her extensive use of Japanese sources, enabling her to draw connections and comparisons between the Japanese colonial and Martial law eras to an extent that is all too rare in English-language analyses of Taiwanese education. This leads her to conclude that “If Japanese education taught colonial children to love their homeland Taiwan [albeit as part of the Japanese empire], postwar KMT/ROC education taught them to love the mainland as their real homeland [largely eschewing Taiwan-related content]” (p. 233). However, Chou makes no reference to the fairly extensive English-language scholarship on the politics of contemporary Taiwanese schooling, particularly the history curriculum – e.g. the work of Corcuff (Reference Corcuff, Vickers and Jones2005) or Jones (Reference Jones, Morris, Shimazu and Vickers2013).
Discussing a significant success attributable both to civil society activism and, arguably, to education, Doris Chang's final chapter in this section analyses the “transformation of women's status in Taiwan” from 1920 to 2020. Chang notes significant progress in women's political involvement and economic productivity, underpinned by advances in gender equality legislation, despite continuing “horizontal segregation” limiting female involvement in certain occupations. But more emphasis could have been given to the considerable price that women, and Taiwanese families in general, have had to pay for this welcome progress, as evidenced by the island's chronically low birthrate. Here we need to look for explanations to the residual weakness of public welfare provision, the disproportionate burden on women as default carers for dependent family members, and, perhaps most of all, the pressure on families (and especially mothers) resulting from intense competition for educational credentials (see Vickers and Lin Reference Vickers and Lin2022).
The four chapters of the book's final section, Part Five on “Literature and Cultural Development,” feature material especially likely to be new or unfamiliar to non-Taiwanese readers. These include an analysis by Yin-Chen Kang of the emergence of a form of “modern theatre” (or “sin kiok”) in Japanese-ruled Taiwan, heavily influenced by the dramatic forms then current in the colonial metropolis. Although this new theatre was subject to varying levels of censorship by the Japanese, intensifying during the wartime period of kominka, Kang (echoing Chou's analysis of education) sees the postwar policies of the KMT's Martial law regime as, if anything, even more repressive. In her analysis of Taiwan's modern literature “between China and the world,” Michelle Yeh then provides a brief but informative and highly readable overview of the evolution of the literary scene over the past century. Once again, the intermingling of Japanese and Chinese influences and visions of modernity constitutes a central theme. With respect to the post-war period, Yeh shows how the thematic focus of literary output has broadened and diversified, especially since the 1970s, with work engaging with an ever wider range of experiences (feminist, indigenous, queer, etc.), and experimenting with an widening range of genres. At the same time, intensifying trends of nativism and internationalization have reinforced a “binary opposition” in the articulation of Taiwanese identity: “pro-Taiwan means anti-China” (p. 304). Nativism has meanwhile lent heightened status and official support to previously overlooked art forms, such as Taiwanese “opeila,” discussed by Jasmine Yu-Hsin Chen in her chapter here. A contemporary, hybridized sub-genre of Taiwanese opera, incorporating Japanese and Chinese elements along with other influences, “opeila” was long overlooked or suppressed by Mainlander elites intent on establishing Peking Opera as the “national” operatic form. But following democratization and the nativist turn since the 1990s, “opeila” has come into its own.
Shih Fang-long's concluding chapter, “A century of struggle over Taiwan's cultural self-consciousness,” provides a fascinating analysis of the “life and afterlife” of the colonial-era Taiwan Cultural Association and its founder Chiang Wei-shui. Shih's purpose is not only to trace the origins and evolution of the TCA (founded in 1921) and Chiang's role in it, but to show how he and his association have come to assume new significance for contemporary advocates of Taiwanese “self-consciousness.” Chiang's emphatic assertion of the ethnically Han identity of Taiwan's inhabitants, along with his advocacy for the island's potential as a cultural bridge between Japan and China, sit rather awkwardly with the concerns of many of his successors today. Particularly since around 1990, many nativists have sought to invoke Chiang's legacy, while downplaying or denying both his self-identification as culturally “Chinese” and his core concern with culture rather than nationalist politics.
However, it is very hard to escape politics or polemic in discussions of contemporary Taiwanese history, culture and society. This volume testifies to that difficulty, with some contributors (e.g. Shih) analysing the politically driven appropriation and reinterpretation of aspects of Taiwan's cultural legacy, while others engage in more or less overtly politicized polemics of their own. The very cover of the book seems to plant a banner firmly in the nativist camp, with a map of Taiwan encompassing jumbled keywords such as “democracy,” “education,” “self-consciousness” and “modernism” set in a sea of pastel green. Celebrating Taiwan's successes is not necessarily problematic – indeed, as Edward Friedman writes in his Foreword, Taiwan's “global significance,” or the stakes riding on the island's fate for the Asia-Pacific and the wider world, underline the importance of promoting global awareness and understanding of its undeniable “historical humane achievements” (p. xvii). In order to do so effectively, however, it is crucial that scholars diligently cultivate their own “self-consciousness” and regard for complexity, especially when dealing with slippery concepts such as “modernity,” “development” and “colonialism.” Showcasing Taiwanese scholars' capacity for sophisticated, nuanced historical analysis, and their freedom to exercise it – both evident in many contributions to this volume – constitutes one very significant way in which Taiwan can offer a model to other contemporary societies, whether “developing” or “developed.”
