Taiwan Lives: A Social and Political History by Niki J. P. Alsford

In a 2021 article, the Economist Magazine called Taiwan the "most dangerous place on Earth," suggesting that China and the United States were on a collision course over the future of this independent island state of 23.4 million people. Such a conflict is potentially catastrophic for all humanity, not only because it involves two of the most dominant economies and nuclear superpowers. It is also because Taiwan (also known as the Republic of China, ROC) is indispensable for the global digital and AI economy, currently producing over 90 percent of the world's most advanced microchips.

The Taiwan Strait has been one of the major flashpoints in Asia since the onset of the Cold War. The trouble began in 1949 when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's American-backed Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) government (i.e., the ROC) fled across the sea to Taiwan after being defeated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in mainland China. Since then, notwithstanding shifting relations of hostility, détente, and friendship between Beijing and Washington, the ROC/Taiwan has been a key strategic ally and trading partner of the United States in the West Pacific. Meanwhile, the victorious CCP established the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. The PRC considers Taiwan an inseparable part of its national territory without exercising actual control. Today, Taiwan remains one of the most difficult and intractable issues between China and the United States.

The centrality of Taiwan in United States–China relations and the global high-tech industry means that there is no shortage of books and articles on the island. Yet a majority of these publications place the Taiwan Strait standoff at the center of their narratives or analyses. We know how the authorities in Beijing, Washington, D.C., or even Tokyo view Taiwan. We hear very little from the Taiwanese in contrast, as if their voices are inconsequential in the greater scheme of things.

Insightful general-purpose reference books or textbooks on the history of Taiwan do exist in the English-speaking world. Murray Rubinstein's Taiwan: A New History (1999), Denny Roy's Taiwan: A Political History (2003), Jonathan Manthorpe's Forbidden Nation: A History of Taiwan (2005), and Shelley Rigger's Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse (2011) are good examples. However, these works were written more than a decade ago amid Taiwan's historic democratic transition and consolidation. Since then, there has been a general disregard for Taiwan and the local Taiwanese scholarship. Thus, in recent years, when the Chinese leader Xi Jinping began to coerce the island state to "unify" with the PRC, threatening an invasion, there is suddenly a need for new information. Western scholars, policymakers, and journalists seek explanations for the strong and persistent Taiwanese resistance toward Chinese overtures for political integration. An important explanation for Taiwan's insistence on its political independence can be found in the island's complicated past and its people's constant struggle for self-determination against outside colonial forces. This understanding goes beyond the conventional Cold War-era interpretation of the conflict between the "two Chinas" (i.e., the ROC vs. the PRC) that has been the dominant discourse on Taiwan.

Niki J. P. Alsford's Taiwan Lives provides a new look on Taiwan history. Prioritizing social history over political history, the book places Taiwan and its people at the center of analysis. Alsford states that "Taiwan continues to be framed as a shrimp between two whales. The importance of this book thus lies in the study of that shrimp—not to ignore the whales but to give the shrimp center stage" (p. 13). In doing so, Alsford adopts an interpretative framework that many local historians in contemporary Taiwan have come to identify with, namely, the island's multilayered coloniality. Due to Taiwan's strategic location, since the early seventeenth century, its history has been shaped by competing colonial forces in East Asia. These include Spanish and Dutch mercantilist colonialism, ethnic Chinese (Hoklo and Hakka) settler colonialism, British treaty-port colonialism, Japanese colonialism, the "exile colonialism" (p. 7) of Chiang Kai-shek's KMT regime, and last but not least, the American and PRC neocolonialist influences that have become salient in our time. The endeavors of the people in Taiwan for self-rule, recognition, and a shared identity at different times against multiple forms and layers of outside domination is the main theme of the book.

Different from most academic history books, Alsford's Taiwan Lives employs a narrative structure that revolves around personal life stories. The main content is formed by twenty-four biographies in three thematic parts that each run on its own chronological order—A Social History, Pivotal Events, and Being Taiwan. An analytical background section precedes each of the biographies, providing a broader political and socioeconomic context for the readers to situate, assess, and appreciate the life of each protagonist. According to Alsford, this narrative arrangement allows readers "to interlace the many threads of Taiwan's past" (p. 11).

Part I, A Social History, is made up of thirteen chapters (i.e., individual tales) that cover the period from the second half of the nineteenth century to the 2016 Taiwan presidential election. The book opens with a section on Qing dynasty settler colonialism and the treaty port trade in Tamsui through the eyes of a British merchant and colonial agent (John Dodd). A discussion of the Japanese colonial period follows. This section contains three stories documenting the lives of two male Taiwanese landlords/entrepreneurs (Ku/Koo Hsien-jung and Lin Shih) and a Japanese female philanthropist (Shimizu Teruko). Taiwan's participation in World War II as part of the Japanese empire is narrated through the tales of an indigenous Taiwanese soldier who fought in Papua New Guinea, a British prisoner of war (POW) captured in Singapore who languished in northern Taiwan's gold mines, and a Taiwanese child laborer drafted by the colonial authorities to manufacture military aircrafts in Japan. The next section focuses on the White Terror suppression under the United States-backed KMT dictatorship. This history is illustrated by the careers of George H. Kerr, an American diplomat sympathetic to the Taiwanese cause, and two well-known Taiwanese nationalists forced into exile by Chiang Kai-shek's regime: Presbyterian pastor Shoki Coe and historian Su Beng. In the last section, the vitality, creativity, and civic activism of democratized Taiwan are epitomized by the lives of three exceptionally talented women: writer Sanmao, social activist, scholar, and politician Fan Yun, and a Taiwanese member of a popular K-pop group, Chou Tzu-yu (Tzuyu).

Part II, Pivotal Events, consists of six chapters that shed light on individuals living through three dynamic and tumultuous episodes in Taiwan history. These episodes are crucial for the formation of a Taiwan national identity different from China and Japan. They are: (i) the establishment of the Taiwan Cultural Association in 1921, (ii) the 228 Incident in 1947, and (iii) the protests for democracy against the KMT martial law in the late 1970s and '80s. Alsford focuses on the thinking and the activism of two prominent Taiwanese elites (Chiang Wei-shui and Li Chunsheng) to illustrate the political and cultural enlightenment in colonial Taiwan under Japan's Taishō Democracy. This was the time when the seeds of Taiwanese identity and self-determination were first planted. Alsford then presents the trials and tribulations of two ordinary women (Lin Chiang-mai and Jin Su-qin) to depict the traumatic events of the 228 Massacre and the mainland exodus to Taiwan in the late 1940s. Part II ends with the lived experiences of famous political dissidents Huang Hsin-chieh and Chen Chu. Both were jailed by the KMT authorities in the aftermath of the 1979 Kaohsiung Incident. The incident is widely considered as the starting point of Taiwan's path to democracy. By examining the lives of Huang and Chen, Alsford provides a concise history of the political opposition and the fight for freedom in Cold War Taiwan.

Part III, Being Taiwan, contains five chapters that illuminate key aspects of Taiwan's development through the achievements of five outstanding individuals. The first chapter focuses on American anthropologist Arthur P. Wolf, who did ethnographic fieldwork in the rural villages of northern Taiwan during the Cold War. Wolf's pioneering research alongside the work done by his wife and students made significant contributions to the study of Qing society and Japanese colonialism in Taiwan. The second chapter presents the rags-to-riches story of Taiwanese shipping, hotel, and airline mogul Chang Yung-fa. Chang's success in building the Evergreen Group, a multibillion-dollar global conglomerate, exemplifies Taiwanese work ethic, business acumen, and cosmopolitan outlook, characteristics that have propelled the island's export-oriented industrialization and economic prosperity since the 1970s. The next two chapters focus on epidemiologist Chen Chien-jen and indigenous activist Icyang Parod. Chen was elected as the vice president of Taiwan in 2016, while Icyang Parod served multiple terms as Taiwan's Minister of the Council of Indigenous Peoples. By examining the career trajectories of these two extraordinary figures, Alsford draws attention to democratized Taiwan's effective campaigns against SARS and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as its endeavors to offer an official apology to the island's indigenous communities and restore indigenous cultures, languages, and traditional rights. The book's final chapter turns the spotlight on Chen's running mate in 2016, the island's able and charismatic female president Tsai Ing-wen, the incumbent when Alsford wrote the book. During her presidency, Tsai instituted key reforms that further solidified Taiwan's reputation as a tolerant, open, and progressive nation. More importantly, she stood up to the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who began to exert pressure on Taiwan in 2017. Tsai's determination to safeguard the island's democratic institutions and way of life against Beijing's encroachment and bullying acts embodies both the collective will and the resiliency of contemporary Taiwanese society.

Alsford's book should be commended for its nuanced and in-depth illustration of Taiwanese agency, history, and the Taiwanese quest for freedom, recognition, and identity. It should also be praised for its interpretative framework of multilayered colonialism and its biographic structure that takes a deep dive of major historiographical issues through intimate life stories, an effective narrative strategy to get the readers emotionally invested.

Many of the twenty-four individuals that Alsford chooses to focus on are political elites and influential businessmen. That said, there is a special attention paid to the marginalized indigenous history and perspective, a critical aspect that other publications on Taiwan history sometimes lack or touch upon only sparingly. There are also engaging tales of ordinary men, women, and children whose lives were intricately tied to the island's monumental events. The chapters that this reviewer enjoys the most are the World War II chapters, namely, the grim, confounding, and convoluted journeys of the indigenous soldier, the British POW, and the child laborer. I also appreciate the stories as well as the original and thought-provoking analytical sections offered by the chapters on Shimizu Teruko, Lin Chiang-mai, Jin Su-qin, Sanmao, Chou Tzu-yu, and Arthur Wolf.

The episodic and biographical structure of the book makes Alsford's Taiwan Lives a versatile source book for teaching Taiwan history in the upper high school and undergraduate levels. That said, most students probably need an experienced instructor to make full use of the content since the book does not provide a coherent narrative thread that can tie all the chapters together. Readers who do not have a basic understanding of the trajectory of Taiwan history might appreciate the vivid snapshots offered by the individual chapters but be frustrated by the same lack of a coherent thread.

To be fair, writing a comprehensive history of Taiwan is a difficult task due to the island's checkered past situating at the crossroads of Chinese, Japanese, and American colonial and neocolonial influences. Alsford's attempt to model the book after the fourteenth-century British literary canon, the Canterbury Tales, twenty-four stories that are considered to be an important foundational text for the English literature and identity, evinces an intention to perhaps do the same for Taiwan. In response to the Economist Magazine article, Alsford argues that "Taiwan is not dangerous; those who advocate for conflict to change its course are dangerous" (p. 13). This is a fine statement. I can't agree with it more.