Living in martial law in Taiwan in the early 1970s, we used to say that there were no “politics” there, by which we meant that all power was concentrated in the hands of the Kuomintang (KMT, Nationalist Party), which rapidly and decisively suppressed any challenge to its one-party rule. Contrast that with Taiwan since the end of martial law in 1987, especially the Chen Shui-bian era (2000–2008), when it seems as if pretty much everything is subject to contestation. Documenting and explaining this politicization of Taiwan society is the subject of Mikael Mattlin's book.

The book's organizing concept is “structural politicization,” which means, in essence, that “polarizing political conflict spreads to many corners of society” (p. 5). Politics is seen as a zero-sum game, and the tolerance for different opinions is very low. The author emphasizes that understanding this phenomenon requires looking beyond formal political institutions to explore this conflict throughout social life. The culprit for this often debilitating politicization is the legacy of decades of one-party rule by the KMT. When democratization began the KMT believed it could manage the transition to multiparty politics and would never lose a presidential election. The totally unexpected loss in 2000 was the crisis that opened the door to understanding politics at the deeper level of actual practice, which is where Mattlin focuses his research.

After a theoretical exegesis, Mattlin proceeds with an overview of the formal political system under the KMT and then its transition from authoritarianism. The core of the book is the study of four cases of extreme political conflict: the battle over nuclear power plants; literal and figurative slugfests in the Legislative Yuan; what he calls “asymmetric integration” (of the economies of Taiwan and mainland China without concomitant political integration, which is related to the issues of identity and of independence or unification); and referenda and elections. He makes the argument that “the underlying cleavage in Taiwanese society” is not that of ethnicity, but “the question of nationness … and the two clearly demarcated competing political elites that are committed to opposing interpretations of the nation” (p. 202), that is to say, allegiance or opposition to the idea of the KMT's Republic of China and strength of Chinese tradition in contemporary Taiwan. Many Taiwanese as well as mainlanders hold this allegiance; the cleavage predates liberalization.

Digging deeply, based on many interviews and extended fieldwork observation as well as Chinese and English sources, Mattlin illustrates in great detail how the formal reforms have not brought about an equal degree of transformation in practice, or in political culture or psychology. He traces this to the legacy in part of Chinese tradition, but more importantly to the KMT's rule. The KMT left an institutional legacy: incremental transition, the semi-presidential system, asymmetric integration with the mainland, the patronage state, and a “nested pyramid” social structure of political factions that switch loyalties based not on ideology but patronage.

Taiwanese society is by no means unique in the level of politicization or in the strength of the legacy of predemocratic institutions. It is refreshing that Mattlin, who is based in Finland, brings a European sensibility to the study of Taiwan. Rather than comparing Taiwan to the United States, which, I agree, is a fundamentally misguided approach, he draws more on the post-communist transitions in Eastern Europe. One big difference, of course, is that Taiwan has not experienced state collapse, but an incremental, if sometimes rocky, democratic transition. Arguing that any society bears the birthmarks of the ancien régime is hardly a novel idea, but the main contribution of the book is the fine detail that it presents. (I must note that there is a very lively European Association of Taiwan Studies whose scholarly activities are making a significant mark on the field, free of many of the intellectual blinders many Americans and American-trained Taiwanese wear.)

Saying that, I did find myself periodically getting bogged down in the trees and having trouble remembering what the forest was. It is also noteworthy that events that seemed so darned important at the time now seem somewhat quaint. It is perhaps testimony to the rapidity with which Taiwan continues to remake itself that so many major crises of the Chen era have been overshadowed. This book does provide a very useful set of concepts and a framework for understanding this ongoing transformation, as well as a guide for where to look to understand how “politics” is practiced in Taiwan at the level of formal institutions and at the often very dirty, and by far more interesting, grassroots.