Crab and Frog Motion Paradigm Shift: Decoding and Deciphering Taipei and Beijing's Dialectical Politics (review)

In this long and very challenging book, Peter Kieng-Hong Yu gives us a distinctive and off-beat approach to the cluster of problems related to the PRC-ROC relationship. Dr. Ku has long been thinking about this problem in East Asian national-provincial relations and has produced a previous book and numerous articles and conference papers on the topic of cross-Strait relations. If I read his career record and his own words correctly, he has always been outside the trans Pacific scholarly mainstream, and this book reinforces my sense of his career as it lays out in exhaustive detail his new approach to understanding the dynamics of the China-Taiwan relationship (and follows, as Paul McCartney might say, a "long and winding road"). In this interestingly titled book (a title that provides the key to his basic theoretical/methodological construct), Ku, a New York University-trained Ph.D. who has taught on Taiwan and is now teaching at the University of Singapore, presents the reader with a bold but at times confusing attempt to rethink the way we understand both the domestic politics in China and Taiwan and the nature of cross-Strait relations.

The book begins with a rather unusual preface (which I will discuss at length in the conclusion to this review). It is then divided into four major sections. The first section contains four very complex chapters that focus, more or less, on theoretical and methodological issues. The second section presents what the author considers a set of "case studies" that deal with China. The third section contains another set of "case studies" that focus on Taiwan. The fourth and final section—and the longest in the book—covers, in Yu's words, "Taiwan, China and the World." Whether these chapters can indeed be thought of as case studies in a conventional sense is an open question. I do not think they can, but in his particular use of terminology—for example, in the way he describes and implements his own overlapping set of theoretical constructs—Yu clearly marches to his own drummer. This weighty, complex, and audacious volume then ends with an all-too-brief, but disturbing and very defensive, conclusion in which Yu spells out, in prescient fashion, his quite justified fears of the tidal wave of criticism that will wash over him and his distinctive "thinking outside the box" attempt to create a cross-Strait "final theory."¹

I offer this overview as a chart to a book that many will find difficult to navigate; this book, like Marcel Proust's gorgeously written, richly detailed, exhaustive, and complex act of personal and quasi-fictional recovery, In Search of Lost Time, needs a good road map.² Having said this, I must add that the only comparison one can make between Yu and Proust is the degree of confusion that each author's work creates in the reader when he or she attempts to read it. Now, I realize that Yu will use my line as further evidence of the brilliance of his book in his new publicity sheet or his revised preface to the revised edition.

The first section of this modern international relations odyssey takes the reader into the realm of theory and methodology (such as it is). In four complex (or convoluted?) chapters Yu lays out his own theories and his own methods of analysis. Each of us at one time or another has tried our hand at theory, developing a framework or set of ideas and then trying to show how the data we have chosen substantiate or prove our theoretical construct. But theory does not define reality; it is supposed to explain reality. And, as cosmologists and theoretical physicists have shown us, simplicity is the rule: the simpler the explanation, the more people will be willing to accept...