Taiwan: A Political History (review)

Taiwan: A Political History is precisely what the title suggests: a history of Taiwan focusing on important political events and their significance. Less attention is given to economic development, social events, or military issues, although these areas are not excluded when the author can relate them to politics. Roy begins with Taiwan's very early history and ends with the Chen Shui-bian administration in 2002. This book is well researched and well written and contains few mistakes. The chronological approach used by the author is easy for the reader to follow.

In the introductory chapter Roy lays the groundwork for what follows with some basic information about Taiwan. However, he gives scant attention to the anthropological evidence elucidating Taiwan's prehistory or to China's early contact with the island (both of which provide grist for some writers to argue that Taiwan is or is not part of China). Roy seems to want to avoid this issue, which can be a morass—although some readers will think that he should have addressed it. The author begins his serious analysis with the seventeenth century and the massive Chinese settlement of Taiwan. He covers the Dutch period and self-rule in the 1600s and the subsequent Chinese rule (more than two hundred years) in somewhat terse fashion and devotes only a chapter to the Japanese period (1895-1945). The rest of the book, about four-fifths of it, covers the post-1945 period. Some readers may disagree with this treatment; in the opinion of this reviewer it is justified in order to devote more space to Taiwan's recent political history, which is perhaps of greater relevance to the present.

Roy states in the preface that many books on Taiwan are "biased either for or against the Kuomintang or Taiwan independence," that he is beholden to no political organization, and that he aims for a balanced assessment. It is certainly true that the literature on Taiwan, almost without exception (if written by someone from Taiwan), propounds either separation from China or unification with it.

Thus the author starts off with a big advantage. However, a couple of pages later, in a brief chronology, he cites the "KMT murder" of Henry Liu in California as a major event of 1984. It was indeed an important event. But since a local gang did the killing, and since the person in Taiwan who ordered it, even though a government official, was only a member and not a leader of the KMT, this seems an unfair statement. This is particularly so inasmuch as, according to a gang leader's later testimony, the killers were only instructed to "get" Liu in retaliation for Liu's exposing of agents from Taiwan operating in China who were executed because of him. (Liu was a triple agent for the United States, China, and Taiwan.)

The rest of the book follows the same pattern. Roy provides the reader with a patently sympathetic view of the Taiwanese (early Chinese immigrants) and a less than sanguine view of the mainland Chinese who ruled the island after World War II and moved there in large numbers after the Nationalist defeat in China in 1949. This "pro-Native Taiwanese" view is common among Western writers. It stems from the effort to find a scapegoat for the "loss" of China to communism in 1949—and Chiang Kai-shek was it. Roy clearly views Chiang in a very negative way, even though Chiang has been getting better press recently as it is now recognized that he was the force behind the Taiwan "economic miracle," and, perhaps indirectly, behind its "political miracle" (economic modernization making political modernization inevitable) as well.

Considerable space is devoted to describing "white terror," or oppressive KMT rule, and what happened to Taiwanese during this period. What Roy says here is generally true, and he will enlighten many readers about this aspect of Taiwan's politics during the early years...