Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)

Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)

by Sam Wineburg, 2018

I’m a history geek. I like learning about history for its own sake. But I don't expect everyone to share my geekery and there’s always going to be some student asking their teacher “When am I ever going to use this stuff in real life?” So let’s start with the title of the book. “Why should I learn history? I can look it up on my phone!” Does Wineburg provide a snappy, meme-worthy response?

Well, no, he doesn’t, and that’s fine. Instead, he gives us a book.

I first heard of Wineburg last September, when I came across his critique of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Wineburg is careful to note that he is not critiquing Zinn’s political stance. Rather, Wineburg’s point is that Zinn’s book should not occupy the central place it has in many American history curricula, because it is a polemic that doesn’t invite the reader to weigh historical evidence or really consider any interpretation besides Zinn’s own. That, Wineburg says, is not how to train students to think historically.

Now, I’m not going to weigh in here on whether this is a fair critique. I read Zinn’s book more than a decade ago, and I don’t want to evaluate what Wineburg wrote based on my spotty memory. But I liked the way Wineburg wrote about historical thinking enough that his book Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) went straight on my Christmas list.

I read the book in under two days. It’s smart, and engagingly written, although I'm not fit to comment on large swathes of it, specifically the parts dealing with American education. My own high school experience ended long before the advent of today’s classroom guidelines that Wineburg critiques. Come to think of it, I don't think I've even set foot in an American public school in well over a decade.

Despite my lack of familiarity with the current state of American education, I enjoyed this book because I'm convinced that history is worth studying. I might be an American by citizenship but I live abroad, in a country with a very peculiar history that one really must understand in order to grasp the local culture or politics in any substantial way. (But maybe every country is like that?) And, not just here but everywhere, so many of the political appeals we hear are grounded in a particular interpretation of history. One can’t properly evaluate an a Facebook political meme referencing something Franklin Roosevelt did in 1933 without thinking like a historian.

Why learn history when it’s already on your phone? So you can know how much credence to give to political memes that reference history, for one thing.

What do we mean by thinking like a historian? Wineburg gives one example where high school students were given President Harrison’s 1892 proclamation declaring Columbus Day a national holiday. Asked to analyze the document historically, students did a fine job seizing on, for example, the fact that Harrison’s proclamation made much of Divine Providence and “the devout faith of the discoverer”, which certainly contrasts with the fact that by our standards Columbus’s actions were hardly those of a good Christian. This fulfilled school guidelines that the students engage with the material critically.

But as Wineburg explains, this isn’t historical thinking. A historian would focus more on the document’s cultural and political milieu, and Harrison’s motivations in proclaiming this national holiday in 1892, which most likely involved pressure by Catholic immigrant groups who were interested in seeing this symbolic bit of Catholic cultural heritage integrated into the fabric of American life. More specifically, 1892 was an election year and Harrison must have hoped Columbus Day would please Catholic voters, particularly the important Italian vote.

In the next chapter, Wineburg considers George Washington’s 1789 proclamation establishing a national day of Thanksgiving. He showed it to a range of historians and non-historians, and the non-historians all thought the tone of the proclamation was strikingly religious. Depending on their own views on religion in public life, this met with varying degrees of approval, but all of them interpreted Washington's words through 21st-century lenses.

But the historians -- and only the historians -- recognized that Washington’s contemporaries would have had a very different reaction. At first glance, we moderns seize on the document’s religious tone, but note that Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found. There’s nothing specifically Christian here. Historians contextualize Washington’s proclamation as a Deist document, giving thanks to a remote Creator while avoiding sectarian language, and it is peppered with references to science and technology that mark it as a product of the Enlightenment.

Why learn history when it’s already on your phone? So we can better understand what people in the past were thinking. That’s awfully important when the past is constantly being invoked in order to justify modern-day views.

And Wineburg takes aim at the way schools are teaching this stuff, notably the idea, inspired by Bloom’s taxonomy, that children have to first be fed a large amount of factual information, then learn to think critically about it. Wineburg says this approach “distorts why we study history in the first place”, as it “implies the world of ideas is fully known and that critical thinking means gathering accepted facts in order to render judgement” (p.92). Later on, he criticizes the notion, apparently common in American history classrooms nowadays, that students should be taught to engage in “close reading” of historical texts, while the context these texts emerged from is downplayed (p. 99-100). This notion leads to people sizing up George Washington’s thanksgiving proclamation ahistorically, and reading its religious content in a very different way then was originally intended.

Wineburg gives us glimpses of history classes, taught to pre-teens and teens, that do encourage historical thinking related to topics such as Jamestown and the story of Pocahontas, and Rosa Parks’ act of civil disobedience. My own classroom teaching at the moment does not include much history, but it’s not impossible I’ll find myself teaching history at some future point, and Wineburg’s descriptions of of teaching methodology -- and references to the useful work he and his colleagues have done at the Stanford History Education Group -- are something I shall keep around for future use.

Finally, Wineburg brings up the ability to critically evaluate online sources of information, a skill that’s important to more than just history. Wineburg has written about this topic at length -- most recently, he’s written in The Pacific Standard on the importance of media literacy, and how we should be teaching young people to approach the Web in the same way as professional fact checkers.

In the book, Wineburg takes, as an example, the websites of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Pediatricians. Both organizations have professional-looking websites. Both publish very similar-looking content. But they are very different. The former is “the world’s largest professional organization of pediatricians”. The latter is “a splinter group that broke away from the main group in 2002 over the issue of adoption by same-sex couples”. The former has a paid staff of 450 and “offers continuing education on everything from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) to the importance of wearing bicycle helmets during adolescence”. The latter has one full-time employee, offers no continuing education, and has “come under withering criticism for its virulently anti-gay stance” (p. 146).

Yet they both maintain very professional-looking websites, and to a student doing online research, they both appear to be established, reputable organizations. A professional fact-checker can quickly suss out the differences between the two; a high school student might not have been taught to.

A high school student might be taught not to trust Wikipedia as a source of information, but this is far too simplistic; a professional fact checker will look up both of these organizations on Wikipedia, and focus on the references section and the “Talk” page, sometimes barely even skimming the main body of the article.

(To Google's credit, when I searched for both organizations, it brought the true nature of the American College of Pediatricians prominently to my attention. But, of course, we can't trust Google to consistently do this.)

Needless to say, on any politically contentious issue, who runs a website is particularly important information if you want to know whether to trust it, and many websites do not make that information particularly clear. To properly judge these sites, a well-trained student will look up the organization purportedly behind it, probably opening up several new browser tabs in order to compare different takes. And yet, apparently many high school students are still taught to look for spelling mistakes, banner ads, and the like as “telltale signs of digital dubiousness”, based on an article, amazingly, from 1998 (p. 156). This is utterly disconnected from the reality of the contemporary Web, where untrustworthy sources of information are just as slickly produced as any.

Now to end my post with my own bit of ill-organized ranting.

In our current media landscape, we’ve got people getting airtime on cable news and creating social media memes saying things like: “The Nazis were actually National Socialists, you know” or “Did you know the Democrats used to be the party of slavery and then segregation?”. These people clearly do not have an audience of history buffs in mind -- their whole schtick assumes we’re not history buffs. (If you're feeling irritated that in this paragraph I'm picking stuff that American right-wingers tend to say, rest assured I have no doubt you can think of examples of liberals and leftists doing the same thing. I'm not trying to play a silly game of Liberals v Conservatives here.)

Incidentally, in my high school American history class (which wasn’t even AP or Honors history), our textbook went into great detail about how the platforms of the major parties have changed and evolved between the mid-1800s and the present. You can imagine how ridiculous it looks to me now when some clown tells me something I regurgitated on a quiz in 10th grade and acts like it's something I didn't know because it's been deliberately suppressed. But I recognize that some people will be more susceptible to this sort of thing.

It’s not that people aren’t taught enough facts about history at school. It’s that they’re taught plenty about history, and then it all goes the way of the quadratic formula, the basics of molecular chemistry, the conjugations of French verbs, and everything else that gets memorized for a test and then is never needed again. Lost in the recesses of the brain.

This is why, as Wineburg argues, teaching students to think like a historian is so important -- rather than teaching history by filling students’ brains with loads of facts, then checking knowledge via multiple-choice tests. Wineburg is right that multiple-choice tests are easy to assess by machine, but I suspect there might be another factor at work.

Any teacher who seeks to give their students a worthwhile lesson on, say, the Emancipation Proclamation could potentially offend parents who might object to their child’s teacher “bringing politics into the classroom”. But it’s impossible to separate history from politics, and to argue otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of history, or of politics, or both. So how do you teach kids about history without leaving yourself open to charges of bringing politics into the classroom? Well, you teach a bunch of facts that no one can reasonably dispute and then you give a multiple choice quiz:

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in: a. 1861, b. 1862, c. 1863, d. 1864

See, no one’s going to be offended by the political slant of THAT question! I genuinely suspect this is a factor behind a lot of boring history teaching.

How do you really teach kids about history without leaving yourself open to charges of bringing politics into the classroom? I think the answer is: you can't. And how to deal with that reality is a whole different discussion.

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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Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator

Robert Harris’s trilogy Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator takes ancient Roman politics and makes it easily comprehensible for us moderns. His Romans are depicted as dissembling, duplicitous schemers, with motivations that we can easily get our heads around.

The trilogy centers on Marcus Tullius Cicero, influential politician of the first century BC and one of the best-documented individuals who lived in that world. Our narrator is his secretary, all-round right-hand man, and literal slave Tiro. Cicero was one of the few prominent Roman politicians who did not have a notable military career, which means this story is relatively light on the military side of things but very heavy on the life of a high-flying Roman lawyer and the machinery of politics. This was the period when the Roman Republic entered its death throes, with the machinery of the state breaking apart as powerful men tried new and creative methods to subvert it.

When you cover Cicero, you cover the Republic’s final decades. The first book, Imperium, deals with the first part of our protagonist’s public life. He rose to fame through his successful prosecution of the corrupt governor of Sicily, and used the case to launch his political career; the novel ends with his election as Consul in 63 BC. This was when Pompey and Crassus were the most powerful figures in Rome. Everyone knew Julius Caesar as a politician on the rise, but he had not yet begun his formidable military career.

The second book, Lustrum (or Conspirata in some countries) covers Cicero’s time as Consul and the years immediately after. This was the age of Lucius Sergius Catilina and his failed coup d’etat which inadvertently gave Cicero his greatest chance to shine in the history books. It was also the age of Publius Clodius Pulcher, the ancient world’s version of an Internet troll who found himself in a position of power. Book Two ends as Cicero’s political enemies force him to leave Rome in 58 BC; he goes into exile in Greece, where he sits in the dark and angrily obsesses about all that has been done to wrong him.

In the third book, Dictator, Cicero returns to Rome and navigates the tough political waters of the final years of the old order, as the Republic collapses amid civil war and dictatorship (hey title drop!). In the end, he is assassinated by agents of the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC. I hope that hasn’t spoiled too many potential readers, but in all fairness, very few prominent Romans of this time period managed to die of natural causes.

Robert Harris sticks close to the historical facts, sometimes in remarkable detail. More than once I went to Wikipedia to read up on the real-life counterpart to what Harris described, only to find that his depiction of events was basically quite accurate. If you don’t yet know much about the shaky final decades of the Republic, a great deal of what you’ll learn from these books will actually be correct! But this is still a work of fiction. Cicero is one of the best-documented people of his century, and yet the patchiness of the historical record gives Harris ample room to speculate and confabulate, particularly around the quotidian details of Cicero’s life and certain episodes from his public life. This was perhaps most true during Cataline’s attempted coup: I think it was Dan Carlin who pointed out in one of his podcasts that it’s impossible for us moderns to really know what happened in the conspiracy, as most of our sources ultimately trace back to Cicero’s version of events -- obviously not an objective source of information!

In our times we’ve got this subliminal idea that the ancient Romans were these dignified men in togas, striking a pose and making a speech, always in an upper-class British accent for some reason. At least, that’s how I used to imagine them. Then the more I learned about what they were really like, the more they struck me as, basically, Klingons. Violent and more than a little alien. Harris’s Romans aren’t like us -- for example, basically all upper-class Romans own slaves, but they’re not defensive about it like nineteenth-century American slaveholders, because it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody that slavery might be considered morally wrong. And there’s plenty of casual misogyny that comes with the era, of course.

What’s more, the weirdness of antiquity is presented in a very matter-of-fact way. Many things about this Rome are strange to us; not only does this large city not have a police force, but there doesn't even seem to be an ancient police analogue that provides a similar function -- when someone hires a gang of thugs to harass you and explicitly threaten your life, you either barricade yourself in your home and wait it out, or you find your own gang of thugs.

And of course the schedule of important public events involves publicly slaughtering a bull and examining its entrails; why wouldn’t that be a thing you do?

Yet, if time travel really allowed us unfiltered access to the real people of this culture, I wonder if their mindsets wouldn’t be even stranger to us than Harris’s recreation.

Cicero himself comes across as a very intelligent and hard-working schemer whose moral core allowed him to operate with considerable flexibility. I’m sensing a very cynical view of politics in these books, though it’s hard to feel idealistic when describing this particular time period. I can overlook Cicero’s rampant bribery, on both the giving and receiving ends (assuming Harris’s depiction is approximately accurate), if this is indeed how things were done at the time. And while I don’t have to like it, I can’t single out Cicero for being a slave owner when Rome was a slave state.

What I cannot overlook is pushing through the executions of several Romans without trial in the wake of Cataline’s failed coup. Not cool, Cicero. I might have admired you as something of an admirable character at the remove of 2,000 years, but I’m afraid those summary executions are a dealbreaker, Cicero.

I can just imagine you here right now, rolling your eyes and muttering “Here we go…”. I know you never lived down those executions. For the rest of your life, your political enemies used them as a cudgel against you. But you see, that makes it worse. That means executing people without trial was not considered normal in your society. That means you don’t get special consideration by being a Long-Ago Person who followed different rules. Robert Harris did his best to conjecture what the hell motivated you, but as a modern person who grows more opposed to authoritarianism with every passing year, I must say you crossed a line on that day in 63 BC.

Or, to put it another way, now I’m righteously indignant about something that a politician did almost twenty-one hundred years ago. And it’s all thanks to Robert Harris bringing him to life.

Forbidden Nation

In his 2005 book Forbidden Nation, Canadian journalist Jonathan Manthorpe tells the history of Taiwan. More a book-length work of journalism than an academic work, Forbidden Nation does not strive to be comprehensive. Fortunately, it is well-written and engaging -- but in the end, I wished Manthorpe had paid more attention to certain aspects of Taiwan’s history than he did.

The preface gives us a concise recap of Taiwan’s international position, told from a pro-Taiwan perspective. Apart from the references to President Chen Shui-bian, every sentence in the preface could have been written in 2018 rather than 2005. (The book jacket proclaims in now thirteen-year-old prose: “It is clear that Taiwan has now entered the decade in which its independence will be won or lost.”) The chapter that follows describes the shooting of Chen and Annette Lu the day before the presidential election in March 2004, using the attempted assassination as a frame to introduce other issues in Taiwanese history and society, such as the last years of the KMT dictatorship and the deep roots that organized crime has in Taiwan.

Manthorpe then takes us back in time, to give us a fuller history of Taiwan’s place in the world. This is where we begin to see that Manthorpe is primarily going to show us Taiwan through foreigners’ eyes. Of course, this is unavoidable in the beginning; the native Taiwanese of the first millennium AD did not write things down for future historians. It’s amusing to read the very early attempts by China to subjugate the island (which they tended to get mixed up with Okinawa). The first time China tried to assert military supremacy over Taiwan came in 607 AD, when a military expedition headed by General Chen Ling tried to get the islanders to acknowledge the supremacy of the Emperor of China. The Taiwanese were not interested.

As time passes and written documentation of Taiwan becomes more abundant, Taiwan’s place in the East Asian geopolitical and economic scene comes into much sharper focus. Manthorpe dedicates ample space to the 17th century, starting with the pirate-businessman Li Dan (spelled Li Tan here), who built up a great international business empire in the spaces between Chinese, Japanese, English and Dutch authorities. His heir was Zheng Zhilong (Cheng Chih-lung), who founded the Zheng (Cheng) dynasty, of which Zheng’s son, who became known as Koxinga, is the most famous member. When it comes to descriptions of the age of Koxinga, one could do a lot worse than Manthorpe’s work. The book describes how Koxinga’s forces actually came very close to toppling the Qing entirely when they besieged Nanjing in 1659, a fact that I had been entirely unaware of. According to Manthorpe, the Qing were saved only when they launched a well-timed attack on Koxinga’s forces just after Koxinga and his top aides drank themselves silly celebrating his birthday.

Koxinga was, of course, the one who kicked the Dutch off Taiwan in 1662; his descendants then ruled the island until 1683. Manthorpe provides a detailed and readable account of Koxinga’s conquest of Taiwan, and then the years of his family’s rule. Assuming his description is accurate (I’m no expert), this is not a bad short introduction to Taiwan in the 1600s.

But here we see one of my two big gripes about the book. Manthorpe does a good job bringing history to life through concise biographies of people who are important to Taiwan. Li Dan, the pirate lord from Fujian. The Zhengs, also based in Fujian. Liu Mingchuan, the Qing governor of Taiwan in the late 19th century. And many Westerners who played small parts in Taiwan’s story are also remembered. For instance, there’s Maurice Benyowsky, a Hungarian count who found himself on Taiwan’s east coast in 1771. (Long story.) He gets a full page, and just to be clear, I don't deny he had an interesting life. Even George Psalmanazar, famous for regaling western Europe with his fascinating and entirely made-up tales of life in Taiwan (which he almost certainly never visited), gets a page.

But no Taiwanese individuals prior to the 20th century seem to have any agency at all in Manthorpe’s pages, apart from a few rebel leaders who were all eventually chopped to pieces by the Qing authorities. Of course, one could certainly argue that this reflects reality; Taiwan’s destiny prior to the last decades of the 20th century was indeed primarily in the hands of outside forces. But I would have liked to see more Taiwanese perspectives. It would have been interesting if Manthorpe had chosen some local Taiwanese people who represented different aspects of pre-modern Taiwanese society and fleshed them out to the same extent as the various Chinese and Western figures he described. For the record, the earliest Taiwanese individual who Manthorpe seems to think warrants much discussion is Lin Hsien-tang, political activist in the early 20th century.

Into the modern era, Manthorpe’s focus continues to be rather idiosyncratic -- why does he give us so many more biographical details of Chiang Ching-kuo’s life, as opposed to Chiang Kai-shek or Lee Teng-hui, for instance? He devotes several pages to relations between the PRC and the USA from the 1960s to the 2000s, which is not unreasonable, but it makes it all the more frustrating that he pays comparatively little attention to the White Terror and Taiwan’s democratization. This is my other big source of dissatisfaction with “Forbidden Nation”. I suppose it’s unfair to criticize Manthorpe for where he chooses to focus -- after all, it’s his book, not mine. But the impression one gets from these sections is that the Taiwanese are people that things happen to, rather than people who do things.

Manthorpe concludes by looking at the results and aftermath of the 2004 election, and I feel he’s ending on a high note by putting the focus in the final chapter squarely on Taiwanese politics and its relations with China. For all my gripes, Forbidden Nation is well-written and informative about the areas where it chooses to focus on. I wouldn’t recommend it as a general history of Taiwan for newcomers to the topic, but it’s an interesting read for those who are already knowledgeable about Taiwan -- and know what he’s giving short shrift to.

Forbidden Nation covers similar ground to Denny Roy's Taiwan: A Political History, which is near it on our bookshelf. Overall, Roy’s book goes into much more detail, especially about the ROC period, although it was written before the 2004 elections. The tone of Roy’s book is also much more objective -- while he’s obviously sympathetic to Taiwan as a nation, he doesn’t state his pro-Taiwan views as explicitly as Manthorpe (and I’m not saying this because I disagree with Manthorpe -- in fact, I largely agree with him). Manthorpe’s book has a much livelier prose style and is a quicker, easier read.