This book's almost nonsensical, but brilliantly chosen title, Inseparable Separation, captures the deep dilemma that Hanren (Chinese) on both sides of the Taiwan Strait have had to confront since 1950. In that year Chinese troops marched into Korea, and, in response, United States president Harry Truman sent the American Seventh fleet into that now famous hundred-mile body of water that separates the PRC from the ROC to this day. By doing so he and subsequent American leaders insured the continued existence of the Guomindang regime that had taken over Taiwan from the Japanese in August 1945.

This book defines and analyzes the stages of the now sixty-one-year-long process of strategic and tactical policy development and implementation designed to make the “Inseparable Separation” come to an end. It examines public negotiations as well as private, one-on-one initiatives. This book's central objective is stated in the introduction:

The clarity of these two core sentences gives the reader a good sense of how the authors present their data and analyses. The book allows readers to understand a complex subject without feeling talked down to.

Inseparable Separation is organized into a formal introduction, eight substantive chapters, and a carefully written conclusion that pulls the various narrative and analytical threads together. The relatively brief introduction sets things up carefully and crisply and presents useful summaries of the chapters that follow. The first chapter covers the events leading to creation of two different Chinas. The chapter ends as the United States begins its retreat in the face of the Chinese military intervention in Korea, places its naval forces in the Taiwan Strait, and makes the ROC a client state. Chapter 2 covers the longest period, from the first bombing of the Taiwan-held offshore islands in the mid-1950s to the Kissinger and Nixon visits of the early 1970s and the signing of the Shanghai Communiqué.

The chapters that follow cover less ground but contain more detailed analyses of the stages of the development of China's long- and short-range policies toward Taiwan. Each chapter takes us closer and closer to the situation we find today. The authors show how the person-to-person and company-to-company non-governmental ties between Taiwanese and Chinese that began a year before the death of Jiang Jingguo (Chiang Ching-kuo) in 1988 have helped to force closer state-to-state ties between the PRC and the ROC in a host of ways and on a number of levels. These shifts in policy and policy implementation are complex events, which the authors spell out in clear and understandable terms. The conclusion neatly brings things together.

One of the strengths of the book is its periodization of the China-Taiwan relationship since the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972. Organizing each chapter around key events and trends that they have discerned, the authors, in effect, reinvent time and how we see the past. This willingness to disregard conventional notations of periodization is brave and perhaps startling—and it makes the book work as well as it does. The reconceptualization of periodization is based on the authors' deep reading of the sources they had access to, interviews they conducted, and what must be called close-at-hand participant observation.

Another strength of the book is in what its authors do not do: they do not give us page after page of arcane game theory or other modes of IR-speak. This book is blessedly jargon free and meta-theory free. The great achievement of the two authors of this long, dense, and sophisticated study is to have made this complex and often volatile situation—this “inseparable separation”—clear and comprehensible to a wide set of audiences. We do read the official statements, but are also taken into the more intimate processes of Cross-Strait interaction. We read the hidden or secret history of high level quasi-private contacts, of go-betweens acting as conduits of communication, and of meetings taking place between seemingly implacable enemies. Here we have real-life high drama that exceeds the wildest flights of our imagination.

When you reach the last page and put it down, you realize what a stunning piece of scholarship you have had the privilege to read. The book provides a crystal-clear picture of one of the great intra-national and international dramas of the past sixty years—a drama not yet in its final act—that centers on the attempt of two different Chinas to again become one.