Look to Windward

Look to Windward

by Iain M. Banks, 2000

My standard description of Iain M. Banks’s Culture books goes like this: The Culture is an advanced and enlightened interstellar society where everyone lives a life of ease and gets to develop their potential. That makes for boring fiction, which is why the Culture stories are actually about the Culture’s incredibly problematic foreign policy.

The Culture is very good at covertly interfering in other nations. In fact, they’ve elevated the practice to an art form. Just a few years ago, for instance, they interfered in the politics of a powerful spacefaring people known as the Chelgrians, rigging elections, manipulating the media, and basically doing everything that we Earthers in 2018 are all too familiar with, only far more subtly and with a much defter hand.

And yet.

The Minds -- the powerful superbeings who rule the Culture -- were astonished and dismayed when their actions unexpectedly triggered a massive Chelgrian civil war that killed billions of people. (Yes, billions. One thing you can say about Iain M. Banks: he didn't think small.) The chastened Culture publicly admitted their role in starting the war and brokered a peace deal, essentially saying “Our bad. Usually when we interfere we make things better. We have no idea what happened this time. Oh well, apologies and all that.”

Apparently some Chelgrians are still mad at the Culture, even though the war’s been over for more than a year and the Culture already said they were sorry. (I know, right? Totally inexplicable! Why don’t they just get over it?) This is how things stand when we join the action of Look to Windward.

Look to Windward has a fairly large number of viewpoint characters, but unlike Excession, the action here is firmly centered on a few core characters and one primary setting: the gigantic Culture orbital Masaq’. The Culture is far too vast a civilization to limit itself to puny little planets, and Masaq’ is an artificial habitat that is home to over fifty billion Culture citizens, along with a fair number of foreigners, one of whom is a Chlegrian composer named Ziller. A musical celebrity whose fame spans the galaxy, Ziller became disgusted with his own people years ago and has been living in self-imposed exile ever since. He watched his native culture’s self-destructive frenzy from the safety of his home on Masaq’, and he has no desire to return any time soon, if ever.

Meanwhile, Major Quilan of the Chelgrian military is on a collision course with Ziller. Quilan has been utterly traumatized by the loss of his wife in the war, he has nothing more to live for, and he would very much like to die -- a mental state that his his government’s special forces division found that they could make use of. Now Quilan is on his way to Masaq’ to persuade Ziller to return to Chelgrian space. That is absolutely the real reason Quilan is traveling to Masaq’, and it is a very believable story that everyone should believe. Why shouldn’t they believe it? After all, no one else can see the high-ranking military officer residing non-corporeally in Quilan’s head, whose mission is to make sure Quilan does what he’s supposed to do, which has nothing to do with persuading Ziller to return home with him. Ziller tells people that Quilan's been ordered to kill him, but maybe he's got an inflated sense of his own importance. Maybe Quilan's orders are to kill far more people than just one galaxy-renowned musician.

As for the fifty billion Culture natives living on Masaq’, we never really get inside their heads, or get to know any of them terribly well. The only viewpoint character who’s a native of the Culture is a solitary researcher named Uagen studying bizarre giant creatures in a surreal environment far away from Masaq’, who stumbles across evidence of the Chelgrian plot and tasks himself with getting a warning to the Culture in time. Uagen is the only one who can save the people of Masaq’! It’ll certainly be unfortunate for Uagen if the author has a taste for dramatic irony...

Masaq’ society is seen through the eyes of the two Chelgrian characters (and an amiable alien named Kabe who befriends both of them). The people of Masaq’ perform death-defying feats of aerial acrobatics flying through vast cloud environments, and they ride ceramic boats down rivers of lava. They passionately take sides over whether to string up an utterly useless cable car through an artificial desert, and the debate goes on for years.

In short, the people of the Culture have a LOT of free time on their hands, and another author would get all preachy about their luxurious, frivolous lifestyle, but fortunately Iain Banks is not that author. Really, who among us wouldn’t want to live a sweet, cushy life in the technological wonderland that is the Culture? The Chelgrians are bemused that these urbane fun-loving aesthetes are the same society that put their own society through such horrific trauma. The political allegory at the heart of the Culture novels is clear without being simplistic.

There's a sense among Banks aficionados that Look to Windward closes out the main cycle of Culture novels. (After an eight-year break, Banks would go on to write three more novels set in this universe, which I’ll get around to reading sooner or later.) Eight hundred years have passed since the sequence began with Consider Phlebas. The epic war between the Culture and the Idirans that was the setting of Consider Phlebas bookends the saga -- the war is now long consigned to history, and yet the lingering effects of the war are remembered throughout Look to Windward. The Mind that runs Masaq’ is a traumatized veteran, still dealing with guilt over atrocities it committed centuries ago, and it ends up playing a key role in the story’s climax.

Now that I’ve reached the end of the initial run of Culture novels, I appreciate what Banks has accomplished. The Culture is a wonderful place to live, but a supremely uninteresting place to set stories (‘May you live in interesting times’ applies here), which is why the focus is always on the Culture’s relations with societies that aren’t quite so damn perfect. The Culture is a high-tech socialist-libertarian paradise, where everyone is free to live the life they want, and the whole thing is ruled by near-omnipotent Minds who can and will commit horrific acts to ensure the society keeps running smoothly. Nothing’s simple in this universe.

I can see where the Culture novels might not be everyone's cup of tea. He doesn't even try to make his universe scientifically plausible (which is better than trying and failing), though I see that as painting boldly, without restraint, across a magnificently broad canvas. Also, Banks was clearly more confident writing male characters than female ones -- this includes the no-middle-initial Iain Banks novels I've read, not just Iain M. Banks. And I could imagine people turned off by his liking for grotesque violence (somewhat toned down in Look to Windward, apart from a nightmarish Culture assassin we meet near the end) and shocking plot twists late in the game (present in Look to Windward, though not remotely on the same level as, say, Use of Weapons).

But the man could write, and write engagingly, and write scenes that stay in my mind long after the book is finished. Even Consider Phlebas and Excession, which I found slightly more of a chore to get through than the others, are full of incredibly engaging stretches and highly memorable bits. It's easy to see how this particular Scotsman found so many readers, among SF fans and non-fans alike.

The Affinities

The Affinities

Robert Charles Wilson, 2015

Our hero, Adam, is a graphic design student in Toronto. He has an unsettled home life and uncertain finances, but things begin to look up for him when he takes the Affinities test and learns that he’s a Tau.

You see, there’s a company called InterAlia that claims that by giving you an intensive personality test, they may be able to sort you into one of twenty-two Affinities. These will be people whose minds work like yours. They will think like you and you will think like them, and the social cohesion will allow you to make the closest friends you've ever had, and easily work together on collaborative projects.

When Adam meets up with other Taus in the area, they do indeed change his life, as he finds a warm, welcoming community that he’d never realized existed. Tau Affinity provides him with a network of contacts that he can use to find work and achieve financial stability, and his new friends help him free himself of his dysfunctional family.

Judging from online discussion that I’ve seen, it was at this point that many readers began to feel dissatisfied with the novel. InterAlia's test has a Sorting Hat feel to it, but this book won’t inspire any Facebook quizzes promising to reveal your true Affinity, because the Affinities aren’t really about classifying human beings into easily caricatured groups.

The Taus have an in-universe reputation as laid-back potheads who are good with money, and another major Affinity is said to be rigidly hierarchical, but Wilson’s intention for this book has little to do with the distinctions between different Affinities and therefore he barely mentions any details about most of the others.

Instead, what interests Wilson is how society reacts to these Affinities, which can appear to outsiders to be cult-like or elitist, as Taus have access to a range of services not available to those who don’t qualify based on the personality test, and this exclusiveness is only magnified by the fact that a large segment of the population don’t qualify for membership in any Affinity at all. Wilson also looks at how these Affinities react to stress: the Affinities eventually outgrow the for-profit corporation InterAlia, and when this happens their agendas come into conflict.

In other words, this is sociological speculative fiction: what interests Wilson is how our sense of community may evolve in the future. We’ve all heard the Bowling Alone-esque worries that life is becoming more fragmented and humans are becoming more isolated, and in Affinities, Wilson gives us a glimpse of a society that is inventing novel frameworks for humans to work together.

When people of the same Affinity work together, they are capable of doing great things, but as long as they continue to work the way they do, they will always be exclusive clubs. As long as the Taus exist, outsiders will always look at the advantages their members enjoy, advantages which are closed to outsiders, and feel envy, even contempt.

While one could imagine further books being written in this universe, I felt that Wilson intends for The Affinities to remain a singleton -- the end of the book gives the strong impression that human society is continuing to evolve and the Affinities will ultimately turn out to have been merely a stage in society’s development.

But really, this is the story of our protagonist Adam. Remember him? I last mentioned him five or six paragraphs ago. The Affinities follows Adam through his twenties and thirties, as he falls in and out of love, gains and loses employment, and gets involved in more than one dangerous scheme -- and during this time his life is completely bound up with Tau Affinity. Wilson’s a good enough prose writer that the book’s engaging even when dealing with the most ordinary details of Adam’s life.

If you pick up The Affinities imagining you’ll be able to say “I think I’d fit into ________ Affinity!”, you’ll be disappointed. If you’d like to explore an alternative way human beings can find community, you’ll have much more realistic expectations.

IELTS and "Taiwan, China"

www.ielts.org -- screenshot taken on October 14, 2018

Last weekend, the UK-based English examinations service IELTS changed its designation for Taiwan to “Taiwan, China”. This has caused a huge amount of outrage in the IELTS community over the past week.

IELTS is an English proficiency exam, taken predominantly by people who wish to study in English in foreign countries. As of one week ago, a young Taiwanese person using the IELTS.org website to register for IELTS needs to declare they are from “Taiwan, China”. That is, frankly speaking, insulting.

It's fine to not be an expert in East Asian geopolitics. No one is an expert in everything. So here is a brief explanation of why we are so angry about this.

Q: Isn’t “Taiwan, China” technically correct?

A: You’re thinking of the “Republic of China”, the official name of Taiwan’s government. (Why is it the Republic of China? Long interesting story, well worth reading up on, but I won’t insert a history lecture here.) If Taiwan were designated “Taiwan (Republic of China)” or “Taiwan (ROC)”, there would be no anger and outrage. At worst, there would be a lot of eye-rolling, as the Republic of China is a contentious issue here in Taiwan and I can assure you many Taiwanese people have strong opinions on this matter. But that’s not what happened here.

Q: So why is “Taiwan, China” so offensive?

A: First, ask yourself this. When someone hears the word “China”, do they think of the Republic of China, de facto capital Taipei, population 23 million? Or do they think of the People’s Republic of China, capital Beijing, population 1.4 billion? Most people outside of East Asia aren’t even aware that there’s an entity called the “Republic of China” that’s separate from China. The Chinese government is well aware of this and uses it to its advantage.

I’m not going to mince words here. The government of the PRC would like nothing more than to take over Taiwan and incorporate it into their territory (and it’s easy to see why -- geopolitically it would be a wonderful strategic prize). This is not the ranting of a conspiracy monger -- China isn’t even trying to hide its intentions. Publicly at least, they won’t rule out the use of military force to conquer Taiwan. But as that would be extremely risky, they would much rather wear Taiwan down, demoralizing it so that its people see annexation as the inevitable choice.

Whether China takes Taiwan by force or by “peaceful” coercion, it doesn’t want the rest of the world to see it as a larger country taking over a smaller, less powerful country. That would look very bad. Instead, China wants the rest of the world to see Taiwan as a recalcitrant part of China that needs to be brought to heel. That’s why (among many things) it’s got people pushing to change “Taiwan” on those drop-down menus to things like “Taiwan, China” or “Taiwan, Province of China”. It’s all about changing the world’s perception of Taiwan so that if Invasion Day comes, the rest of the world doesn’t see Xi Jinping as another Hitler invading Poland.

And every airline that lists Taiwan as China and every educational institution that forces students to declare their country as “Taiwan, China” is complicit in this. With Beijing -- not politically neutral.

Imagine how you would feel if, every time you had to fill out an online form, you had to cross your fingers because you knew your country’s name might be twisted in a deliberately insulting way. And the hopelessness you would feel if you knew that it wasn’t an aberration, but rather fast becoming the norm.

(It's worth noting that, as of October 14, IELTS still lists Hong Kong as Hong Kong and Macau as Macau. No need to change them to "Hong Kong, China" and "Macau, China" -- because they're actually ruled by China.)

Q: Hey, wait. Didn’t I hear somewhere that the Taiwanese government sees itself as the rightful government of all of China?

A: You’re just not letting me get away without giving a history lecture, are you? Look, back in the 1950s and 1960s, the rulers of Taiwan were the same guys who ruled China before Mao took over in 1949, and they absolutely saw themselves as the rightful rulers of China and produced loads of official propaganda to that effect. They also headed a terribly unpleasant military dictatorship and Taiwan is much better off not being ruled by them any more. There are still a few “retake the Mainland!” guys around, but today few people under the age of 80 seriously think the Republic of China ought to retake its old territory.

The Taiwanese government’s claims on China are a relic of an earlier age. They still maintain them because the Chinese government has threatened war if Taiwan makes a break with its past -- that would, in China’s eyes, mean Taiwan was officially taking steps away from eventual unification. It’s possible that China is bluffing. But it’s awfully easy to say Taiwan should call China’s bluff when you’re not the one with missiles pointed at you.

Yes, there are some Taiwanese (a very small minority) who genuinely want Taiwan to be a part of China. That is because human beings are capable of holding a variety of political positions, and Taiwan is a free country where people can be open about their political beliefs. It’s not the opinion of most Taiwanese.

Q: But aren’t Taiwanese people (culturally/ethnically/linguistically) Chinese anway?

A: OK, there is a lot that can be said here, from the fact that this is an extremely reductionist and ridiculous way to decide if a country should legitimately exist or not, to the fact that not all Taiwanese have Chinese ancestors. But I’m just going to make an observation.

According to Wikipedia, nearly three quarters of the population of Singapore is of Chinese heritage. But no Singaporean is afraid that they’ll have to start telling foreigners that they’re from “Singapore, China”.

Singaporeans, and the millions of people in Thailand, Malaysia, etc. who also self-identify as Chinese, have a luxury that Taiwanese people lack. They can call themselves Chinese all they want and no one will think that de-legitimizes their actual native country. Beijing’s not putting out disinformation that Singapore is a wayward Chinese province. As far as I know, Beijing doesn’t have missiles pointed at Singapore to keep them from acting too independent.

Q: Who are you? You’re not even Taiwanese, are you?

A: I’ve lived in Taiwan since 2007. Currently, in my day job, I work with Taiwanese students who want to study abroad in English-speaking countries. A significant part of this job involves teaching IELTS preparation classes, which gives me a look at how Taiwanese young people view this and other exams.

Q: So why don’t we hear from Taiwanese people, rather than a Westerner like you?

A: Taiwanese people have definitely noticed and I can anecdotally say that people are very concerned and angry. But look, let me point something out.

In August, the TOEFL exam did the same thing -- they changed Taiwan’s designation to “Taiwan, China”. The protest from Taiwan was impressive, with “an open letter that claimed to have the backing of more than 5,000 students”.

As of today, TOEFL hasn’t changed anything. Honestly, can you blame Taiwanese people if they are becoming fatigued at fighting the same battle, again and again, and nothing happens?

This is a battle that I have watched over the past few years, and I felt I just had to say something.

It boils down to this: challenges to Taiwan's international nomenclature happen as a result of China's push to make people think Taiwan (or the Republic of China, if you prefer that name) is not a legitimate country. That way, if it gets forcibly taken over, there won’t be so much outrage. When I put it that way, it sounds like the mad ravings of an unhinged person. But not a single part of it is disputable.

ADDENDUM 10/17:

This went viral more than I thought it would! Thanks to everyone who helped spread it around.

I hope this post actually does some good.

Thank you to all who commented. I published all comments that made sense. I did not publish the “comment” from the person who copied-and-pasted a paragraph about the U.S.’s One China policy. I know what the One China policy is, I do not think it’s relevant to IELTS, and if you think it’s relevant, you need to make that case, but you’re not doing so if you just copy-and-paste a paragraph and you submit it with no added commentary of your own.

Finally, for people who wish to send an email of complaint, the address is globalielts AT ielts DOT org.

Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

Rutger Bregman, 2017

Rutger Bregman is a young Dutch writer (uncomfortably younger than me!) who has become prominent in recent years for his proposals for how developed nations can significantly improve living standards for both their citizens and, in fact, all of humanity.

Does he have a TED Talk you can watch? Of course he does.

In his book Utopia for Realists, Bregman advocates:

• Universal basic income (UBI). Wealthy countries should have implemented this years ago to alleviate poverty; in the future, as more and more of our jobs are automated, it will become even more important. 
• Shorter workweeks. You can’t make workers more productive by making them work longer, as you hit a point of severely diminishing returns. Additionally, less overworked people make better citizens, more engaged in the life of the community.
• Dramatically liberalized immigration. Open borders would be ideal, but if wealthy countries admit even a modestly higher number of immigrants from poor nations, it could pay impressive dividends in economic growth and poverty reduction.

This book is written to convince the layperson and does not presume any specialist knowledge, although that means many people will find it regurgitates the basics. I’ve already read a fair bit on UBI -- I think the best overall introduction is Dylan Matthews’ 2017 article on Vox. And as it happens, I was midway through reading Bregman’s book when Rose Eveleth put out an episode of her “Flash Forward” podcast also exploring the topic of UBI. It’s definitely in the zeitgeist these days.

So why read Bregman’s book when one could cobble together the same material from online articles?

Put simply, Bregman knows how to frame an issue, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he chose the title Utopia for Realists. Bregman feels that we have lost our ability to think big, to dream that the world could be better and to believe that we have the ability to make it so.

Frankly, I think his first chapter makes a few tone-deaf statements that could turn off some readers; writing of today’s politics, he says “what now separates right from left is a percentage point or two on the income tax rate” (p. 15), and I’m sure many of us would dearly love to live in a place where that’s true.

But he means well; his point is that policies that could dramatically improve our lives and forestall misery are out there, but just beyond the reach of the Overton window, a concept that he defines in the final chapter, and frankly should be in more people’s mental lexicons anyway.

He repeatedly makes the point that the policies he would like to see implemented are less radical than many of us imagine. Richard Nixon, no one’s idea of a leftist radical, would have liked to see some form of UBI implemented in the 1970s, and Bregman devotes a chapter to the idea’s slow death.

He blames the failure of basic income on our cultural reservations about giving poor people money, which he says are not based on any empirical foundation. We have this prejudice that people shouldn’t get money they haven’t worked for, but this is counterproductive if we want a society that functions for everyone.

In short, he thinks that we’re being held back by irrational prejudices and distrust of ideas that feel different from what we’re used to. This is, essentially, his core argument, which he also applies to some other issues that don’t fit neatly into the three biggies that I laid out above: the growth of the financial sector (he’s not such a fan), and foreign aid to developing countries (let’s do what’s been empirically shown to work, he says).

In the end, he calls on us to follow in the footsteps of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman -- not in terms of their ideas, but rather the confidence and willingness that these prominent economists had to reshape the world in the 20th century. As he writes, “ideas, however outrageous, have changed the world, and they will again” (p. 250).

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Taiwan's Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia

Taiwan's Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia

by Richard C. Kagan, 2007

This slim book (just 163 pages, not counting appendices) is an overview of the life and career of Lee Teng-hui, the man who was president of Taiwan from 1988 to 2000.

The man who climbed to the top of an authoritarian government, and retired as president of a democracy.

The man who headed the Republic of China, a political entity that he had no love for and would just as soon have seen abolished.

Lee Teng-hui is an immensely important figure in Taiwanese political history. It’s not too much to say that he is the most important and influential political figure ever to have been born and raised in Taiwan.

What is more, he is a fascinating personality to study. Either he dramatically shifted his political views and allegiances late in his career, or (as is more likely, and as Kagan believes) he concealed his fundamental beliefs for decades in order to rise to prominence in the ROC. Either way, I absolutely expect that for decades to come, historians for decades will study what made the man tick.

Richard C. Kagan, who interviewed Lee in person while researching this book, has done an excellent job explaining Lee’s importance to the reader. He has also clearly expressed his own great admiration for Lee. Unfortunately, I fear that this admiration has affected his ability to give a balanced portrayal of his subject. I learned a lot from Taiwan’s Statesman, but I couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that I wasn’t getting the whole picture, and I wondered if there was material that could have been included but wasn’t because it showed Lee in a less flattering light.

Kagan’s book is a tough one to summarize. So I take a blank piece of paper and I draw two perpendicular lines on it, dividing it into quarters. I label the upper left quadrant “Small things I liked”, and then I label the other quadrants “Small things I didn’t like so much”, “Big things I wasn’t sure about”, and “Big things I liked”.

My review of Richard C. Kagan’s Taiwan’s Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia will follow this pattern. That means I’m going annoy everybody by burying the important stuff down in the second half of this post.

To begin with small things I liked, I learned many things about 20th century Taiwanese history that I had not known before.

But there’s one in particular that I’d like to mention here -- it’s not exactly a small thing, but it’s not directly connected to Lee Teng-hui, and it was news to me.

Apparently in 1971, amid the departure of the ROC from the United Nations, Vice Foreign Minister Yang Hsi-kun made a proposal to Chiang Kai-shek to rebrand the country as the “Chinese Republic of Taiwan”, with “Chinese” specifically said to be an ethnic/cultural term rather than a political one. Chiang was said to be receptive to this idea. Judging by a US State Department telegram by Ambassador Walter McConaughy (printed as Appendix A), the key obstacles were Chiang’s need for more assurances that US support would be forthcoming -- and the opposition of his wife and his wife’s family.

In other words, in 1971 Chiang Kai-shek was open to the idea of declaring an independent Taiwan. This was the first I’d heard about this incredibly interesting “what-if” scenario, and while it doesn’t make me re-think my impression of Chiang as a nasty dictator, it does suggest he may have had pragmatic depths that I hadn’t given him credit for.

Next, the small things I didn’t like so much. This is going to be nitpicky. Hold on tight.

Chapter 1 starts by describing the 1996 Presidential election, and on page three we have the remarkable sentence “It was the first democratic election in Taiwan since the country’s establishment in 1911”. I can think of two different ways that sentence could have been edited so as not to make readers familiar with Taiwan stop and stare for several seconds, then shake their heads and move on. An editor should have caught this.

In Chapter 2, Kagan gives a quick overview of Taiwan’s ethnic mix, and when discussing the Hakka, he says they are not Han Chinese, which is a questionable assertion but I’ll let it slide because “Han” is hardly a rigorously defined term. But then he says “their language was not related to the Sinitic language group”, which as far as I know is just plain incorrect -- Hakka is indisputably a Sinitic language just as much as, say, Spanish is a Romance language. (Note that I’m hardly an authority here -- if I’m clearly wrong, somebody say so please.)

Finally, I’m used to, shall we say, creative Romanization when it comes to Taiwanese names, but Kagan’s book still made me stumble. On page 61, he writes of Ng Yu-jin, apparently a very prominent Taiwanese emigre and critic of the regime in the 1960s. I think this is the same person as Ng Chiau-tong, but putting “Ng Yu-jin” into Google gets me nowhere, Kagan never gives us the Chinese characters for anyone’s name, and I’m frustrated that I’m still not sure one way or another.

Okay, now let’s get to the meat of this review. Here are the big things I wasn’t sure about. Let’s just put it this way: Kagan’s book inspired me to look up the pronunciation of “hagiography”, a word I had never had to say out loud before.

Look, my overall impression of Lee Teng-hui is generally positive. The man inherited an authoritarian government that, although it was becoming more free, still curtailed basic freedoms that we take for granted today. Twelve years later, he retired as leader of a free democracy. This is very impressive and I do not deny that Lee’s accomplishments are admirable.

But that doesn’t mean Lee should be treated as a saintly figure above any criticism. I found two points where Kagan makes tentative criticisms of Lee Teng-hui. On pages 78-79, he criticizes Lee’s keeping detailed dossiers on city council members when he was Mayor of Taipei from 1978 to 1981, and on page 112, he says Lee’s failure to hold the military and secret service accountable for attacks on dissidents “hampered reform efforts and policy innovations throughout his presidency”.

I found literally no other place this book is critical of him. Otherwise Lee is held up as this brilliant man who navigated his way through the ROC government, first as governor and then as vice president, because he saw that doing this was the best way to help his beloved country of Taiwan.

Unfortunately, I’m not knowledgeable enough to point out many ways in which Kagan should have treated Lee more critically. Someone better-informed about the period might be able to do a better job. But I do have one specific observation.

Cheng Nan-jung (also romanized as Nylon Deng, among several other ways) dramatically committed suicide on April 7, 1989, when facing imminent arrest for publishing banned political commentary. It’s easy to forget this now, but when Cheng killed himself, Lee Teng-hui had already been President for more than one year and two months.

There is no mention of this incident in Kagan’s book, even though it is very well-known and Cheng has become a widely recognized martyr for Taiwanese democracy. There are mentions of government repression and state-sponsored assassinations during the presidency of Chiang Ching-kuo, but not after Chiang’s death on January 13, 1988. But we do hear about Lee being magnanimous towards protestors in March 1990 (heavily contrasted with the Tiananmen Square protests of the previous year).

I don't think Lee is personally to blame for Cheng’s death, and this incident is not the moral equivalent to the government-approved killings that went on under the Chiang Ching-kuo regime. But it shows that the ROC government continued to act as a repressive authoritarian regime well into Lee’s presidency, and here Kagan’s book is largely silent, apart from the brief criticism (p 112) that I mentioned above.

This kind of whitewashing is a serious flaw in Kagan’s book. It’s not so much about omitting Cheng specifically, but rather the impression that we’re getting a very one-sided portrayal of Lee, where inconvenient facts and narratives are sidelined.

I understand that Kagan strongly respected Lee, whom he interviewed in person several times. But I don’t want to read about only the good things. Denny Roy’s 2003 book Taiwan: A Political History takes a much more cynical view of Lee’s time in power, but it isn’t even necessarily cynicism that I want; I would just like to see more balance.

The hagiographic treatment of Lee, the frequent mentions of Lee’s Christianity and the occasional comparisons of Taiwan to Israel, which, he writes, “also faces a dogmatic enemy that claims rights to the soil and lives of its population” (p. 16) made me wonder if Kagan’s target audience was politically conservative Americans (and those of similar political sympathies) with the intent to build up Lee Teng-hui as a great man that we should all look up to and respect, and put forward his vision of a free and democratic Taiwan as something we should all support.

But despite the sanitized portrayal of Lee Teng-hui, there are still some big things I liked about the book, apart from just picking up odd facts I didn’t know.

First, hagiography it may be, but Kagan still got to know Lee Teng-hui personally during the process of researching and writing, and so even if it’s incomplete, what we’re getting here is a vivid portrait of the man -- one side of him, at least. Kagan traces the development of Lee’s political views and beliefs and stresses the intellectual influences of both Zen Buddhism and Presbyterian Christianity -- for instance, he notes that Faust is one of Lee’s favorite books and then uses Faust as a metaphor for Lee’s relationship with the KMT (p. 85-86). Even if Kagan’s repeated references to Lee’s intellectual diet are a bit over-done (I'm not sure if I think so or not), the presumably authentic look inside Lee’s mind is still interesting.

Kagan can’t help but describe Lee in such colorful prose as: “If one painted his vision, it would not hang in a picture frame. It would be splashed all over the neighborhood with expressions of creativity, chaos, unpredictability, strings of relationships, and loose threads for future connections.” (p. 133)

Second, the closing chapters give us a vivid look at Lee’s conception of nationhood.

My wife Jenna took this picture in the National Museum of Taiwan History in Tainan. It says: People from all parts of the world who once visited Taiwan used different languages to name this island and its inhabitants. But how do those who live there regard themselves? Taiwan is composed of different ethnic groups with disparate languages and cultures. Thus the term "Taiwanese" is a form of self affirmation impossible to define with a particular language or ethnicity. All those who identify with and are concerned about Taiwan, who love and accept Taiwan, and who wish to live together in this land can declare with a loud voice "I am a Taiwanese." Contrast this with the racial basis of nationhood that you see in China, in Korea, in Japan. It also fits perfectly with Lee’s ideas, at least as interpreted by Kagan.

“For Lee”, Kagan writes, “Taiwanese identity arises from a natural ecological relationship among individuals from different ethnic, language, and immigrant groups who must try to benefit each other in order to survive and create a future for their descendents.” (p. 137)

Kagan goes on to write, “Lee is an islander who views his realm . . . as a place of exile for all the immigrants who have sought their own small place in a world apart from the chaos and exploitation of outsiders. This mentality stands in contradiction to the self-consciousness of the rulers of an empire, who see outsiders as a threat and a source of physical and cultural invasion. . . . the mentality of an islander, such as Lee, is to reject constructing the nation in terms of ethnic or national identity.” (p. 138)

This is obviously an ideal to strive towards, rather than a fact that exists on the ground today. Present-day Taiwan has a long way to go when it comes to reducing discrimination against foreigners -- and I’m not talking about white folks like me, I’m talking about the Southeast Asians who come to Taiwan seeking work opportunities and a better life and are often treated horribly by their employers.

I believe that Lee’s ideal, of a pluralistic society of people engaged in mutually beneficial relationships, is one worth striving for.

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