On 21st October 1971, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 2758, with 76 votes for, 35 votes against and 17 abstentions. The Republic of China (ROC), a founding member of the United Nations, had since 1949 been reduced to ruling effectively only in Taiwan, but still maintained the fiction of ruling China. For ROC nationalists, the vocabulary was harsh, a decision to restore all rights “to the People's Republic of China and to recognize the representatives of its Government as the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations, and to expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the place which they unlawfully occupy at the United Nations and in all the organizations related to it.”
For everyone on Taiwan, including Chiang himself as well as the exiles and refugees who had come with him to Taiwan and the Taiwanese who had learned to accommodate the newcomers, this was a rude awakening. The American decision to include Diaoyutai (Senkaku Islands) in the 1971 Okinawa Reversion Agreement was also perceived in Taiwan as a major crisis.
Academia Sinica's A-chin Hsiau, specialist in the sociology of Taiwanese nationalism, explores the meaning of this historical turning point to the generation that came to adulthood in its wake. He calls them the “return-to-reality generation” because, unlike their parents, they could no longer idealize the Japanese period nor view Taiwan as a place of exile. No matter their family origins, they could only embrace Taiwan and devote themselves as youths to make the democracy they had been taught about a reality. He calls the resulting identity shift “the single most important reorientation in post-war Taiwan, because it formed the matrix of the cultural politics of Taiwanese nationalism and democratization in the following decades” (p. 9).
Hsiau's methods are a uniquely literary form of qualitative sociology. Through an analysis of the writings of young intellectuals and activists, he explores three groups of actors: cultural activists who rediscovered the writings of Japanese-era Taiwanese authors (Taiwan xinwenxue); writers and advocates of “Nativist literature” (xiangtu wenxue); and political dissidents who studied Taiwan's anti-colonial movement of the 1920s and 1930s (p. 9). The introduction and first three chapters explain the theoretical framework of generational sociology and nationalism, and offer an important historical background. Hsiau then dedicates a chapter to each of these three groups of authors. He unabashedly focuses on Taiwan's literary and political elite, with no mention of how widely their ideas are spread in other segments of society. But these activists and intellectuals are certainly important historical actors. Scholars of Taiwanese history and literature will relish the 53 pages of footnotes with references to the original writings.
Hsiau's argument is coherent and convincing. He shows how cultural activists and writers, struggling to understand the end of Japanese colonialism and the new relationship they formed with the incoming Republic of China, initially embraced Chinese nationalism. They believed the official narrative that China had suffered a century of national humiliation and, regardless of their origins, affirmed their Chinese identities. It was only in the end of the Dangwai (“outside-the-party”) movement that, beginning with Lü Hsiulien's later works, they started to affirm a distinct Taiwanese identity. This book is a creative contribution to Taiwan sociology because, rather than focusing on differences between “four ethnic groups,” it examines how different generations imagined Taiwan.
Hsiau contributes to the sociology of national identity by charting a course between essentialism and instrumentalism. He argues against notions that people are ontologically Chinese or Taiwanese and that only colonial or other political oppression convinced them otherwise. He also argues against the idea, sometimes expressed by opponents of Taiwan's efforts to gain international space, that national identities are merely instruments of political struggle. Instead, national identities are woven from existing materials and are judged from within by individual hearts and minds (p. 172). Changing narratives are ways in which different generations take a place in the world.
The book is appropriately part of Columbia University Press's Series on Global Chinese Culture. The ROC had brought to Taiwan a political identity of national humiliation and redemption, which Hsiau claims is “the very same master narrative in the PRC” (p. 9). Despite the government's propaganda efforts and censorship, a generation of Taiwanese activists embraced localized national identity and democracy. Hsiau concludes ominously by examining how the PRC, since its entry into the UN, has only made Chinese nationalism even more hegemonic. The Taiwanese now seem to be defending their incipient nation against a resurgent Chinese empire. “As always,” he closes, “history is testing this island country. The future of its democracy and indigenized cultural development remains threatened” (p. 173).
This book provides new perspectives on the greater saga of China taking a place in the international political system. It shows the local and generational ways that people on Taiwan dealt with the ROC, finally asserting a Taiwanese national identity after the state lost international standing. It is relevant to sociology, history and Taiwan studies, but most of all to Chinese studies writ large. The grainy detail about Taiwanese authors may make it a daunting read for sociology undergraduates. In fact, the book will be most relevant to readers with intimate knowledge of Taiwanese politics. But it remains an important contribution to understanding China's rise in the international system, local societal reactions to Taiwan's global marginalization, and the apparently sudden emergence of Taiwanese nationalism in the 1970s.
