by Brian Hioe

語言:
English
Photo Credit: Book Cover

WITH INCREASED international attention on Taiwan in past years–particularly with the rise in tensions in the Taiwan Strait–one now sees a curious phenomenon: that of the China hand who wishes to get in on the so-called “Taiwan story.” After all, what could be more exciting than writing on the “most dangerous place on Earth”?

This proves ironic. For many years, as international interest in Taiwan waned after the Chen Shui-bian presidency, Taiwan struggled with the phenomenon of “parachute journalists”; journalists, usually based in Beijing, who would hop over to Taiwan for a weekend whenever there was some story, but return to China soon thereafter. The stories that resulted invariably reflected the view from Beijing, rather than local perspectives from journalists and writers who lived and worked in Taiwan.

With the deterioration of press freedoms in Hong Kong and China, journalists pushed out of China set up shop in Taiwan around the time of the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. This led to a new wave of reporting on China that usually did more accurately reflect Taiwan’s experiences, seeing as such reporters were now based in Taiwan, and engaged and dialogued with their counterparts who were from Taiwan or had been based here much longer.

Now, one sees a corollary but different phenomenon–that of the China expert who wishes to get in on writing on Taiwan. There is indeed always more room for individuals writing on Taiwan. But some have taken the view that existing Taiwan experts must be sidelined or trampled on in order to build up one’s expertise as more formidable. And yet such views often reproduce pro-China perspectives, in that such individuals are primarily experts on China and not Taiwan, and Taiwan must be treated as ancillary to China.

The latest entry in this increasingly heady genre of book is Kerry Brown’s Why Taiwan Matters: A Short History of a Small Island that Will Dictate Our Future. Brown’s book has drawn controversy, in that the second edition of the book copies the title of Shelley Rigger’s seminal Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse. Though Brown was called on to change the title by reviewers, stealing the title of an existing classic on Taiwan clearly did not matter if it meant greater marketability. This is only the start of the book’s many issues.

BROWN REPRODUCES many of the pitfalls of writing on Taiwan immediately off the bat, probably due to his lack of familiarity with Taiwan outside of a China frame. His opening gloss of Taiwanese history, which takes up the first two chapters of his five-chapter book, roughly locates the genesis of Taiwan in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War.

Certainly, that is true if we are speaking of the history of contemporary Taiwan, if not modern Taiwan. But it is simply bad history to devote as little time as he does to pre-1947 Taiwan, when around 12% of Taiwanese today are descended from those who came to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War, and around 88% of Taiwanese are either Indigenous or descended from prior waves of Han migration.

No surprise, then, that the literary touchpoints he adds as flourishes to historical history as works of post-war waishengren literature as Pai Hsien-yung’s Taipei People–a book which depicts residents of Taiwan as solely preoccupied with their longing with China–rather than, say, Wu Zhuo-liu’s Asia’s Orphan, which reflects on Taiwan’s search for identity between consecutive waves of colonization.

Brown wishes to direct our attention to the question of whether Taiwan preserves Chinese tradition in a way that the Chinese mainland itself did not, given the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, rather than note the obvious fact that the KMT arrived in Taiwan after a 50-year Japanese colonial period. It is a rather oddly nuanced and monolithic view of history that is more interested in whether Taiwan somehow preserves a reified view of Chinese tradition, rather than noting the island’s shifting relation to the ruling forces of the Chinese mainland through the past four hundred years.

Brown, then, sees Taiwanese identity as only a post-war phenomenon tied to the rise of democracy rather than, again, noting the obvious fact that close to 90% of the population was already here by the time that the KMT arrived, whether Indigenous or Han. Taiwan was only ever a province of the Qing for a mere seven years, and the limited capacity for projecting power by the Ming and Qing dynasties onto what was seen as an island hinterland meant that it is questionable to what extent Taiwan was integrated into some notion of “China” projected backward through time into abstract history.

Brown fares better when discussing more contemporary history, such as Taiwan’s democratization and rise of its tech sector. This is where Brown does better than similar fare, such as Sulmaan Wasif Khan’s The Struggle for Taiwan, which struggles on contemporary developments because of Khan’s lack of knowledge of contemporary Taiwan as a recent student of its politics, but does far better on its history.

Nevertheless, as with other works in this genre, including Khan’s, Brown’s history of democratization is still primarily one of elite political figures. If Brown makes only a few token gestures in the direction of acknowledging the rising tide of social movements during this time, this points to how the Taiwanese people themselves prove curiously absent from Brown’s work.

Consequently, Taiwan’s history of democratization is described only in terms of elite actors as Lee Teng-hui or subsequent presidents as Ma Ying-jeou and Tsai Ing-wen. So much for democracy, supposedly rule by the people and not a small clique of elites. When there are passing allusions to democracy movement figures, these are invariably the few figures known in the English-speaking world–again, gesturing toward Brown’s actual lack of knowledge on the subject of Taiwan. To his credit, Brown relates a number of ground-level anecdotes about contemporary democracy in action, which does make this a cut better than other works; at the very least, he did travel to Taiwan and walk around during elections.

And yet, there is the obvious fact that Brown simply does not understand what democracy is very well if one wishes to discuss democracy only in terms of a handful of elite actors. Democracy is, after all, or should be precisely the opposite of elite politics. The movements that forced recalcitrant political leaders to the negotiating table, such as the Wild Lily Movement of 1990 or the Sunflower Movement of 2014, only receive brief mentions. Indeed, any history of China in the last thirty years would be remiss to devote as little time to Tiananmen Square as Brown does to any of Taiwan’s social movements since 1990. Furthermore, Brown, strangely enough, seems to attribute Taiwan’s embarking on democratization to the fallout of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, rather than understanding the inter-ethnic politics of Taiwan that led to the rise of Lee Teng-hui as Taiwan’s first benshengren president.

No surprise that Brown’s account of cross-strait relations, too, wholly privileges these elite actors. But Brown’s account of why China desires Taiwan is all too limited in historical perspective–he sees China as bent toward conquest of Taiwan on nationalistic terms, as pushed for by Xi Jinping, rather than take a broader view that can understand China’s ambitions on Taiwan as not originating in the political ambition of, after all, one Chinese political leader. It has not only been Xi Jinping who has desired Taiwan. Likewise, a materialist view of history generally suspects that China has practical reasons for desiring Taiwan that do not solely boil down to nationalistic abstraction, such as Taiwan’s key geopolitical position in the Asia Pacific.

This caps off the book’s conclusions, which are Brown’s recommendations for solutions to the possible conflict in the Taiwan Strait. These are, unsurprisingly, solutions entirely predicated on the view that Taiwan must take a step back in reestablishing communications with China. Nevertheless, Brown fundamentally misunderstands something crucial about the cross-strait relationship–it is China that refuses to communicate with Taiwan, rather than the other way around.

DPP leaders, such as Tsai Ing-wen and Lai Ching-te, themselves have expressed a desire to meet with Xi Jinping to dial back cross-strait tensions, only to have their intentions framed as aggression toward China in an act of victim-blaming. Brown frames them invariably as provocateurs rather than credit them for such attempts at outreach.

And Brown is simply not very attentive as to why the Taiwanese public rejected when KMT leaders such as Ma Ying-jeou sought closer ties with Xi, such that this was responded to by social movement discontent as never had been seen before in Taiwanese history–in the form of the 2014 Sunflower Movement. Such moves were read as the actions of a former authoritarian government that had returned to power, seeking to negotiate with a fellow authoritarian government across the Taiwan Strait–naturally, the public feared having their political freedoms, achieved through decades of struggle, abruptly taken away. In the wake of the 2019 Hong Kong protests and the brutal repression that followed, or in light of the ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, there is also even less reason for Taiwan to have blind faith in what the Chinese government claims, raising further questions as why Brown believes this is the best solution for Taiwan.

All this points toward that Brown neither understands contemporary Taiwanese identity nor does he understand its contemporary democracy. Brown does not seem to understand that contemporary Taiwanese identity did not develop only as a reaction to what occurred in China in the past thirty years, but obviously has deeper roots when it is a minority of the population that came to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War.

Nor does Brown understand that, while Taiwanese identity is one of the ingredients of Taiwan’s contemporary democracy, it is not reducible to that either–people prize their democracy for more than just nationalist reasons. In attributing the origins of Taiwanese identity as only a reaction to events in China, Brown attributes no agency to Taiwan. But, ironically, he does precisely the opposite in suggesting that it is only Taiwan that has agency and not China when he intimates that it is Taiwan which is unwilling to communicate with China.

All too typical when the attempt is made to bury an earlier work that did, in fact, treat Taiwan as having historical, sociocultural, and political dynamics that were related to but not reducible to those of the Chinese mainland. It seems that in an era that some have termed the “new Cold War”, with the resurgence of tensions between the US and China, efforts must be made to bury works that sought to describe Taiwan in its own right, much as occurred during the Cold War.
No more articles