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Reviewed by:
  • The Rise of Modern Taiwan
  • Cal Clark (bio)
Keith Maguire . The Rise of Modern Taiwan. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1998. vii, 223 pp. Hardcover $68.95, ISBN 1-85521-847-x.

Taiwan's image is somewhat mixed in terms of what it has accomplished. On the one hand the island has long been credited with an "economic miracle," and, over the last decade, it has added a surprisingly easy and complete democratization to its list of accomplishments. Conversely, its ambiguous diplomatic status creates considerable danger whenever difficulties in cross-Strait relations with China heat up. Keith Maguire has captured these contradictory trends well in The Rise of Modern Taiwan. Maguire's text provides an excellent short overview of Taiwan's economic and political development. Individual chapters describe the rise and the fall of the Nationalist (Kuomintang or KMT) Party and its Republic of China (ROC) on the Chinese mainland during the first half of the twentieth century; the KMT's reforms after evacuating to Taiwan in 1949; the economic miracle; the democratization of the late 1980s and 1990s; questions of sovereignty in its relations with the People's Republic of China and their linkage to the central issue of national identity in the ROC's domestic politics; the all-important ties with the United States; relations (and official non-relations) with the PRC; and how Taiwan's "flexible diplomacy" of the 1990s has affected its relations with the rest of the world.

One strength of this book is its fairly strong focus on foreign affairs, which tends to be slighted in many texts on Taiwan's economic and political development. Maguire shows how the question of sovereignty is central to the ongoing "Cold War" rivalry between the PRC and ROC. The PRC has always claimed sovereignty over Taiwan. Consequently, it rejects any negotiations or interactions with Taiwan in which Taiwan's government is treated as an equal, as an affront to its sovereignty and the "one China" principle. Strangely, perhaps, the ROC did not challenge the "one China" position until the 1990s, despite the fact that this accelerated its own diplomatic isolation in the 1970s and 1980s (probably because the authoritarian Chiang Kai-shek regime feared that renouncing "one China" could lead to a domestic challenge to its legitimacy by the large majority of "Islanders" or pre-1945 residents of Taiwan). Obviously, the view that Taiwan is a "renegade province" means that the two governments cannot "do business" on an equal footing. Thus, Taiwan's leaders argue that "unification" under China's terms would simply result in the island's absorption into the current PRC—which is manifestly unacceptable to almost everyone, including both the current supporters and opponents of the KMT administration.

Maguire makes the perceptive argument that the PRC's hard line on the sovereignty question almost certainly dooms any attempt to achieve its proclaimed [End Page 144] goal of unification by any means short of a full-scale invasion. Thus, China's leaders would seemingly have a strong interest in finding a formula to give the ROC enough "face" on the sovereignty question to enter into a meaningful dialogue with the PRC. Maguire suggests that both the ROC and PRC governments could be considered two distinct "Chinese states" that would enter into negotiations for the reunification of China. This formulation is certainly timely—not in the positive sense that it seems likely to promote a diplomatic breakthrough, but in the very negative one that its unilateral proclamation by ROC President Lee Teng-hui in the summer of 1999 provoked outrage in Beijing, where it was equated with a near proclamation of "Taiwan Independence." While the concept of two Chinese states is clearly not going to be viable in the near future, Maguire's broader conclusion that China's stance on sovereignty is a barrier to finding a solution for cross-Strait relations remains valid.

The treatments of economic and political development in Taiwan are generally good as well. Maguire notes that the island's "economic miracle" rests upon a series of structural transformations that were made possible by continuous flexibility. Both state leadership and private entrepreneurship are (correctly, in my view) given credit for Taiwan's...

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