Research monographs that cover the authoritarian Kuomintang (KMT) era on Taiwan are a rare species, and for good reason; it is all too easy to drift into either apologetics through focus on the regime’s significant economic achievements or excoriation by stressing its equally real human rights abuses and repressiveness. James Lin’s impressive monograph adroitly sidesteps both these tendencies. He situates the core ideas, institutions and personnel undergirding agrarian development in Taiwan in China itself in the Republican era from the 1920s until 1949. In the first chapter, he neatly demonstrations how in this nearly 30-year period, missionaries devoted to famine prevention, American professors and Chinese PhDs from Cornell’s agronomy programme, and China’s own home-grown mass-education movement engaged with experiments and organizations for rural development that privileged technocracy, applied research and rural extension service. These tendencies culminated in the establishment in late 1948 of the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, which would follow the KMT central government to Taiwan within a matter of months.

Without either minimizing the KMT’s authoritarianism or downplaying its technocratic achievements, In the Global Vanguard’s second and third chapters revisit well-trodden ground. Chapter two details the KMT’s much vaunted successes in pushing through land reform as evidence of its gradualist, capitalist path to development. Lin neatly separates the discursive myth of land reform in Taiwan (a technocratic and beneficent set of KMT programmes in which there were no losers, only winners) from the reality of land reform, which built on seldom- acknowledged earlier waves of land reforms under Japanese colonialism and was backed by martial law and military force. Lin resituates these successes in an explicitly global frame of international development. If gradualist land reform with compensation to landlords was the first plank in Taiwan’s “model” of rural development, the KMT’s promotion of technocratic agricultural science and revival of farmers’ associations was the second. Chapter three covers the broad contours of the Taiwan “model”: the transition from “a predominantly agrarian and rural society into a modern one” (p. 69). Here, Lin focuses on the ways in which reconstituted farmers’ associations served as the channel between top-down modernizing initiatives like credit extension and local implementation, and the plethora of new research institutes and university departments for applied agricultural research.

Chapters four through seven form the most novel, and most interesting, heart of the monograph. In these chapters, Lin demonstrates the ways in which the “model” of Taiwan’s technocratic approach to rural development was internationalized by export abroad in a Cold War context. Drawing on an extraordinary collection of archival sources and interviews, in chapters four and five, Lin examines how widely the KMT attempted to export its version of rural modernity, with agricultural missions dispatched to South Vietnam as early as 1959, followed by an explicit “Vanguard” programme to some two dozen countries in Africa, which reflected “an idealized image of Taiwan itself” (p. 121) to “bring a unique Taiwan experience, rooted in science and low-capital methods of the bootstrapping ethic of hard work, free from the colonial trappings and elite-centered development legacies from the West” (p. 123). Chapters six and seven outline the ways in which the Republic of China (ROC) further internationalized its technocratic vision of rural development through organizations it established in Taiwan to bring the international developing world to Taiwan itself. With funding from the Lincoln Foundation, the KMT set up the Land Reform Training Institute for bureaucrats and practitioners in developing countries to come to Taiwan for short-term courses to learn from a Taiwan model of “enlightened benevolence for the Third World” (p. 170). The final substantive chapter focuses on Taiwan’s heavy involvement with the “high modernist science” (p. 173) of the Green Revolution before and after the ROC’s ouster from the United Nations through two key institutions: the Food and Fertilizer Technology Center, which brought international teams of scientists to breed high-yielding strains of rice and disseminate fertilizer, and the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center, which attracted a similarly international group of scientists to conduct research on high-yield, high-quality crops to be cultivated across East and South-East Asia. Although first articulated by the KMT in China before 1950, mainlander goals, visions and networks of expertise created a model of rural development that “worked” for Taiwan and, in ways that its generators could never have foreseen, became part of a Taiwan brand that staked the island’s domestic and international claims to modernity through a combination of statist benevolence, capital investment, market reliance and technocratic high modernism. Lin is clear that in the end this multi-pronged effort wasn’t enough to preserve the Republic of China’s international standing. But as a source of domestic legitimacy, Taiwan’s vanguard status in agrarian development continues to be relevant. All interested in contemporary Taiwan history, as well as other audiences interested in agrarian development or the high modernism of the Green Revolution, should run, not walk, to get their hands on this informative and ground-breaking monograph.