Between Assimilation and Independence: The Taiwanese Encounter Nationalist China, 1945-1950 (review)

In mid-summer 2004, as this review was being written, China had just completed large-scale war games on an offshore island resembling the Pescadores, the United States had conducted maneuvers with aircraft carrier groups near the Taiwan Strait, and Taiwan was debating the purchase of a massive and very pricey package of advanced American weaponry, although its independence-leaning leaders assume that the United States will come to their aid in any event. Fundamental to all of this nerve-wracking and very literal saber rattling is the question of Taiwan's relation to mainland China and who has the right and power to determine it. Steven Phillips' book, published in the shadow of this ongoing test of wills, provides a much-needed context to help us understand the historical origins and evolution of this struggle, as well as the mindset of Taiwan's local elite.

Phillips argues that the Taiwanese elite in the early years of Guomindang rule continued a drive, begun during the Japanese colonial era, of seeking more autonomy from an outside power to manage the island's affairs. A theme running throughout the book is how these external forces (the Qing, the Japanese imperialists, and the Guomindang regime) tried to remake Taiwan (which all viewed as a locality) structurally and psychologically to accord with and be loyal to a larger entity. The local elite tried to situate the island somewhere between assimilation and independence. But this raised, and continues to raise, questions on the nature of this middle ground: does it tend more toward self-government (zizhi) within a centralized state or toward autonomy (zizhu), which can be understood as inclining in the direction of independence?

Phillips situates his book within the theoretical literature on the nation, referring to Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined community" and Ernest Gellner's work on the role of a common identity in defining a nation. Whether or not a community that sees itself as a distinct nation is able to establish a "state" to administer its own affairs is a separate issue. And even if there is this sense of a shared community and also acceptance that it is part of a larger, more complex state that comprises numerous communities, how much room does each have to govern itself? The leaders of the "state," with its centralizing tendencies, and of the local community may have very different, and potentially deadly, ideas and goals about the optimal relation between the two units. Should the goal of the local elite be to enhance the power of the center or to consolidate a sphere of local self-rule?

The empirical chapters of the book trace this debate from the Qing through the violent early years of the Nationalists' retreat to Taiwan. The book focuses very much on elites, using memoirs, literary works, government documents and archives, newspaper accounts, and scholarly analyses (the study of Taiwan's history is burgeoning on the island) as data.

The discussion of the Japanese era serves primarily to set the stage for a detailed examination of the early Retrocession period, aiming to show how the colonial experience influenced the psychology of Taiwan's elites and set a pattern for interaction between the elites and a central government. Nonetheless, I was surprised not to see any reference to Leo Ching's Becoming Japanese: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (University of California Press, 2001 ), A-chin Hsiau's Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism (Routledge, 2000 ), or to how the Taishô Democracy era in Japan provided Japanese advocates and a supportive environment for the home rule movement. This would have helped to highlight the influence of external actors and trends (such as the Third Wave of Democracy in recent decades) on events in Taiwan. The limited use of Japanese-language materials and the absence of scholarly works in Japanese on the colonial and postcolonial eras by Taiwanese...