Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and the Search for a New Taiwan (review)

Talk about a timely book! As this review was being written in the fall of 2003 , Taiwan's government and people were in the throes of debating whether to have an island-wide referendum to vote on the future status of Taiwan, and whether to revise the constitution, imposed on the island many years ago by the then Kuomintang-controlled government of the Republic of China, so as to reflect the realities of the new Taiwan of the twenty-first century. In turn, the government of the People's Republic of China was heaping public scorn on anyone in or out of Taiwan who was supporting these initiatives. The status of Taiwan is one of the great issues still unresolved from the Cold War, with very real potential to upset the peace in Asia and the world. Anyone wanting truly to understand these momentous issues could benefit from reading this anthology of papers that Stéphane Corcuff, a French scholar of Taiwan studies and a lecturer in Asian politics and Chinese language at the Université de la Rochelle, has put together.

This book is but one of the latest in the excellent series Taiwan in the Modern World, which is published by Sharpe and edited by Murray Rubinstein. This series is a fine resource for those interested in Taiwan studies, and is reflective of the maturity and scholarly rigor that the field of Taiwan studies has acquired in recent decades. Memories of the Future evolved out of one of the annual conferences held by the North American Taiwan Studies Association. All ten contributions to this book were initially papers presented at conferences in the 1990s and subsequently revised and updated to fit the format of a collected anthology and mesh together as an integrated collection. The result is impressive.

This, of course, is hardly the first book to address the critical issue of national identity, which has become a hot topic in academic circles that is sweeping through many countries and regions of the world, as culture groups of one sort or another strive to assert their rights and try to find their identity. The very concept of the nation-state is undergoing scrutiny. To some extent, we are seeing the same sort of yearnings for autonomy or independence that pressed so hard on the participants in the Versailles Conference after World War I, or on the victorious Allies after World War II. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the breakup of Yugoslavia—these are among the more prominent recent events that have led to a resurgence of aspirations of national identity.

Now it is Taiwan's turn. It took Taiwan more than forty years after the government of the Republic of China fled there in 1949 to reach the stage where identity issues could be openly debated in public, not only for the sake of the island as a whole but also for the various culture groups within the island's population and the roles they might play within Taiwan. China is deathly afraid of this trend in Taiwan, not because Taiwan by itself is all that important to the future of the People's Republic but because China fears that the acceptance of Taiwan's independence could set a dangerous precedent for separatist movements in Tibet and Xinjiang and lead to the physical breakup of the Chinese empire. The most treasonous term in China today is "splittism."

Alan M. Wachman has written one of the most recent books (also in the Sharpe Taiwan series) to address the issue of Taiwan's national identity, in his case in the context of the democratization movement.¹ But Wachman's is an expansion and publication of his doctoral dissertation, and the focus is primarily the context of the post-1949 scene. By...