Taiwan: A New History

 

Taiwan: A New History (Expanded Edition)
Edited by Murray A. Rubinstein

This is a collection of seventeen articles on the history of Taiwan, from before the Dutch colonial period to the end of the 20th century (the expanded edition adds an updated chapter that takes us to the year 2007). Compiled by Murray A. Rubinstein, who also contributed two articles on modern Taiwan, the book covers politics, economics, society and literature.

The chapters take us through a more-or-less comprehensive history of the country, though as a collection of articles by multiple authors, the coverage can be a bit idiosyncratic. Some chapters go into wonky detail, others less so. A novice to Taiwanese history may find it tough going at times, but there’s a lot here to interest a reader who’s already broadly familiar with the overall arc of Taiwanese history and would like to learn more.

I read the book sequentially, but the fact that it’s a compilation means the reader can jump in at any point without compunction. As most of the book was completed in the 1990s, much of the language and description comes across as a bit dated: in the introduction, Rubinstein writes of Taipei as the “stronghold of the ‘ethnic’ mainlander population that still dominates the central government”, and a bit later refers to the pre-MRT Taipei suburbs as “choking sprawl” (p. ix-x). Thinking historically, though, this is not an unfair description.

The unusual second chapter is one I will remember. “The Politics of Taiwan Aboriginal Origins” by Michael Stainton outlines three theories of the origins of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples: briefly, that ancestors of the Indigenous people migrated to Taiwan from Southeast Asia (the “southern origin” theory); that they migrated from China (“northern origin”); and that the ancestors of Taiwan’s Indigenous people, having migrated from what is now China in remote prehistory and after a long cultural incubation in Taiwan, eventually spread throughout Southeast Asia and became the ancestors of today’s Austronesian peoples.

But the purpose of Stainton’s article is not to weigh the evidence for and against the different theories; rather, he looks at how the different theories have been championed by various modern political ideologies, to justify Japanese hegemony in the first half of the twentieth century and Chinese dominion over Taiwan in the second half. As the chapter’s true focus is on modern politics, strictly speaking this breaks the chronological order that the book is arranged in, but in my opinion the chapter nevertheless makes sense here. It is inevitable that history will be appropriated and interpreted for political ends, a place like Taiwan will certainly be no exception, and Stainton’s chapter gives the sequential reader a foretaste of modern ideological battles.

From here the book progresses roughly chronologically, with various experts on Taiwanese history (mostly Westerners, with a few exceptions) sketching out overviews of their particular eras and topics.  As I mentioned, some chapters are wonkier than others, and authors come in with their own biases and preconceptions; I felt I detected a pro-KMT slant in “A Bastion Created, A Regime Reformed, An Economy Reengineered 1949-1970” by Peter Chen-main Wang, but not so in other chapters.

Most chapters focus on the political, economic and/or social aspects of a particular era of Taiwanese history, but some are more idiosyncratic. One early chapter, “Up the Mountains and Out to the Sea” by Eduard B. Vermeer, describes Fujianese economy and society in the 1600s and barely mentions Taiwan (the relevance to the book is that this was the era of the first large-scale Han migration to Taiwan, which was largely from Fujian). Later in the book, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang contributes two chapters on Taiwanese literature, a topic that I had been mostly unfamiliar with.

And then there's Robert P. Weller’s “Identity and Social Change in Taiwanese Religion”. In the book’s sole chapter that occasionally uses a Taiwanese romanization system (I’m not savvy enough to tell you which one) rather than Wade-Giles, Weller writes a fascinating overview of Taiwanese religion that fits in not only Tudi Gong and Matsu (or Tho-te Kong and Ma Co, in the chapter’s orthography) but also modern religious organizations as well. 

Weller credits the “amorphous” quality of Taiwan’s folk religion, with its variety of gods and beliefs in ghosts, as helping it survive social and political changes: “Had it ever achieved a truly systematic orthodoxy, this religion might have faced a crisis during Taiwan’s centuries of constant transformation. Instead, there has been a regular reproportioning and reinterpretation of the complex elements that had always been there.” (p. 353)

The narrative history chapters that form the bulk of the book contain lots of fascinating nuggets that I was formerly unaware of. For example, “Between Assimilation and Independence, 1945 - 1948” by Steven Phillips gave me an interesting look at Taiwan in the brief year-and-a-half window between August 1945 and February 1947, when the press was freer than it would be at any point prior to the 1990s, possibly because (oddly, considering official fears that after 50 years of colonial rule the Taiwanese were more Japanese than Chinese) the ROC authorities were surprised at the level of criticism they were receiving from their new Taiwanese subjects. 

“Taiwan’s Socioeconomic Modernization” by Murray A. Rubinstein, amid its general coverage of Taiwan’s development, gives us a fascinating description of Guanghua Market in Taipei in the 1970s: “a two-story bazaar where one could buy cheap antiques, old books and magazines, and student paintings. It was a delightful and always busy site that one could enjoy walking through, searching the stalls at one’s leisure.” (p. 374) A far cry from today’s electronics market that stretches far beyond the original structure. Later in the chapter, Rubinstein describes Taiwanese urban sprawl in the 1980s and 1990s, and while the intent is to stress the amount of growth and urbanization, it all seems positively quaint from the standpoint of 2021.

In the final chapters, authors Rubinstein and Cal Clark describe the period that laid the foundations of modern Taiwan politics, the Lee Teng-hui and early Chen Shui-bian administrations. I was reminded that while I like to think of myself as a politics nerd, I really am an amateur, and there is much I am unfamiliar with. I read of a strange time, not so long ago, when the National Assembly still existed, the Legislative Yuan was far larger than it is now, and the New Party was not only seen as a major force in Taiwan party politics, but occasionally teamed up with the DPP in short-lived anti-KMT coalitions, which needless to say would be unthinkable today. I need to read up more on how the structure of the ROC government evolved during this transitional period.

The sections on the evolution of cross-strait relations during the Lee Teng-hui and early Chen Shui-bian era also intrigues me, although I would like to read something more meaty than the tantalizing but short tidbits that these chapters provide, such as the interesting diplomatic case of Liberia, which tried to maintain full diplomatic relations with both China and Taiwan in the 1990s. I did notice the book never mentions the ‘1992 Consensus’, either the phrase itself or any particular agreement that the phrase could refer to, but to be fair the relevant chapter was completed in 1999, when the 1992 Consensus did not exist yet.

All in all, “Taiwan: A New History” filled in several gaps in my understanding of Taiwanese history (while making me aware of many other gaps), and exposed me to some interesting new perspectives. It’s not quite the English-language general introduction to Taiwan that I have been pining for, but the reader who already knows a moderate amount about Taiwan will find plenty of interest here.