THE HISTORY OF TAIWAN

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THE CHINA JOURNAL, NO. 65, JANUARY 2011
Review Essay
THE HISTORY OF TAIWAN
J. Bruce Jacobs∗
Marriage and Mandatory Abortion among the 17th-century Siraya, by John
Robert Shepherd. Arlington: American Ethnological Society Monograph Series,
No. 6, 1995 (re-issued in 2010). iv + 99 pp. US$18.00 (paperback).
How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the
Seventeenth Century, by Tonio Andrade. New York: Columbia University Press,
2008. xix + 300 pp. US$60.00 (hardcover).
The Colonial “Civilizing Process” in Dutch Formosa, 1624–1662, by Chiu Hsin-
hui. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008. xxviii + 346 pp. US$114.00 (hardcover).
Taiwan in Japan’s Empire Building: An Institutional Approach to Colonial
Engineering, by Hui-yu Caroline Ts’ai. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.
xviii + 323 pp. £75.00 (hardcover).
Chinese colonial perspectives have distorted the writing of Taiwan’s history.
Thus, under the colonial dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek, the official China
Yearbook declared: “In history and culture, Taiwan is an integral part of
continental China”.1 Similarly, the Chinese White Paper on Taiwan in 1993
wrote, “Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times” 2 [original emphasis]
and its 2000 follow-up stated that Taiwan is “an inalienable part of China”.3
These Chinese colonial perspectives gained some “academic respectability” in
the mid-1960s. W. G. Goddard, an Australian with “a close and partly clandestine
∗ The author gratefully acknowledges that an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant
for “A History of Taiwan” has supported the writing of this review essay.
1 China Yearbook 1969–70 (Taipei: China Publishing Co., [1970]), p. 94.
2 The Taiwan Question and Reunification of China (Taiwan Affairs Office & Information
Office [of the] State Council [of ] The People’s Republic of China, 1993, accessed 15 April
2010); available from http://www.china.org.cn/e-white/taiwan/index.htm, section I.
3 Taiwan Affairs Office and the Information Office of the State Council, The One-China
Principle and the Taiwan Issue (2000, accessed 15 April 2010); available from
http://www.gov.cn/english/official/2005-07/27/content_17613.htm, foreword.

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relationship with the Nationalist Chinese government in Taipei”,4 published a history
of Taiwan asserting that the first Chinese that came to Taiwan were Hakkas who
arrived towards the end of the Song Dynasty during 1250–79 C.E.5 In fact, Goddard
cites no evidence for this “fact”, yet well-known scholars who write about Taiwan,
such as Denny Roy6 and John Copper,7 have parroted his claim. We now know that
Han Chinese did not come to Taiwan in substantial numbers until the 17th century
and those who first came were Hokkien, not Hakkas.
The authoritarian regime of Chiang Kai-shek and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo,
restricted the study of Taiwan. Only after Chiang Ching-kuo’s death in January 1988
and the subsequent democratization under the leadership of President Lee Teng-hui
did Taiwan studies start to flourish on the island. The number of books published on
Taiwan increased exponentially while the proportion of MA history theses on Taiwan
doubled following Lee’s accession to the presidency.8 While much of this new
research is in Chinese, more work is also being published in English and in Japanese.
This new research gives us very new perspectives on Taiwan’s history.
Reconstructing Taiwan’s Real History
When the Dutch arrived in Taiwan in 1623–24, Taiwan was an island of Austronesian
aboriginal peoples. At that time, Taiwan had no permanent Han Chinese
communities. Han Chinese came to Taiwan temporarily for trade with the aborigines,
for fishing and for piracy, and Dutch estimates suggest that they totaled at most from
several hundred to about 1,500 persons.9 When the Spanish came to northern Taiwan
4 Jeremy E. Taylor, “Taipei’s ‘Britisher’: W. G. Goddard and the Promotion of Nationalist
China in the Cold-War Commonwealth”, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 9,
No. 2 (2007), p. 128.
5 W. G. Goddard, Formosa: A Study in Chinese History (London: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 25-
26. Goddard’s book was simultaneously published in East Lansing by Michigan State
University Press.
6 Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 14.
7 John F. Copper, Taiwan: Nation-State or Province? (Boulder: Westview, 1990), pp. 8, 138.
8 Fu-chang Wang, “Why Bother about School Textbooks?: An Analysis of the Origin of the
Disputes over Renshi Taiwan School Textbooks in 1997”, in John Makeham and A-Chin
Hsiau (eds), Cultural, Ethnic, and Political Nationalism in Contemporary Taiwan:
Bentuhua (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 70-71.
9 Leonard Blussé, “Dutch Protestant Missionaries as Protagonists of the Territorial
Expansion of the VOC on Formosa”, in Dick Kooiman, Otto van den Muizenberg and
Peter van der Meer (eds), Conversion, Competition, and Conflict: Essays on the Role of
Religion in Asia (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1984), p. 177; John Robert Shepherd,
Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1993), p. 85; Chiu Hsin-hui, The Colonial “Civilizing Process” in Dutch
Formosa, 1624-1662 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008), p. 128.

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a few years after the Dutch, they found virtually no Han Chinese there.10 The
aboriginal population of Taiwan at the time was about 100,000.11
Almost fifty years ago, one of the earliest Western scholars on Taiwan history,
Laurence G. Thompson, noted: “The most striking fact about the historical
knowledge of Formosa is the lack of it in Chinese records. It is truly astonishing
that this very large island … should have remained virtually beyond the ken of
Chinese writers until late Ming times (seventeenth century)”.12 An early text from
about c. 1350 may refer to Taiwan, but it mentions no Han Chinese there and states
“the foreign countries start with this one”.13
Around 1600, Japanese pirates used Taiwan as a base to attack Fujian.
Thompson translates an account by Chen Di, who visited Taiwan in 1603 as part
of an expedition to drive out Japanese pirates. Chen Di’s account of Taiwan’s
aborigines is very close to the accounts of the Dutch who came (and stayed) two
decades later.14 Thus, both Chen Di and the Dutch mention the uxorilocal family
system, the marriage system whereby the husband lived in men’s quarters and
visited his wife’s house without being announced, the long hair of the men and
the fact that older women broke their eyeteeth, headhunting by the men, and the
proliferation of deer on the island.
The aboriginal group with whom the Dutch had the closest contact, around
what is now Tainan, were the Siraya. Today, much of the Sirayan culture has been
lost. Only recently have activists begun trying to reclaim their culture with, for
example, the publication of a massive 1200-page Siraya glossary in Siraya,
English and Chinese, based on the 17th-century Dutch translation of the Gospel of
St. Matthew into Siraya.15
John Robert Shepherd, an historian and anthropologist, has reconstructed 17th-
century Sirayan culture and marriage practices at the time the Dutch arrived. He has
discovered a consistency in Dutch accounts which are reinforced by a widespread
examination of other Taiwan aboriginal tribes both historically and in modern
times and by studies of other Austronesian and non-Austronesian communities.16
10 Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in
the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 83.
11 John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft, pp. 7, 14; Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became
Chinese, p. 30.
12 Laurence G. Thompson, “The Earliest Chinese Eyewitness Accounts of the Formosan
Aborigines”, Monumenta Serica, No. 23 (1964), p. 163.
13 Ibid., pp. 168-69; quote from p. 169.
14 For the translation of Chen Di’s “An Account of the Eastern Barbarians” (Dongfan ji), see
ibid., pp. 172-78.
15 Edgar L. Macapili, Siraya Glossary: Based on the Gospel of St. Matthew in Formosan
(Sinkan Dialect), A Preliminary Survey (Hsin-hua, Tainan County: Tainan Pe-po Siraya
Culture Association, 2008).
16 John Robert Shepherd, Marriage and Mandatory Abortion Among the 17th-century Siraya
(Arlington: American Ethnological Society Monograph Series, No. 6, 1995 [re-issued
2010]).

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Shepherd notes that the Dutch repeatedly commented that Siraya women often had
more than ten abortions before beginning childbirth in their thirties.
In his analysis, Shepherd emphasizes three variables relevant to this process. First,
the Siraya practiced uxorilocal marriage. Second, the Sirayan men had a strong age-
grade system and lived in men’s accommodation until their early forties. Third, the
Siraya and other Austronesian groups believed that men involved in hunting, including
head-hunting, faced grave dangers if they also became fathers. Thus, Sirayan women
practiced abortion until their husbands retired from hunting in their early forties.
Shepherd also notes that early abortion by manipulation was actually safer than
childbirth in the absence of modern medical facilities. Fortunately, this important
monograph has been reissued and is now readily available to those interested.
Two important, new books vastly increase the literature about the Dutch
period (1624–62) in English. Both reflect considerable research conducted over a
long period of time and both use considerable Dutch-language documentation.
Tonio Andrade’s book concentrates on how the Dutch dealt with Taiwan’s
aborigines and imported Chinese to Taiwan, how they handled rebellious
Chinese, how the Dutch government in Taiwan tried to gain resources and support
from their superiors in Batavia, and how they finally failed to counteract the
threat of Zheng Chenggong. Andrade’s book also contains two useful chapters on
the Spanish period in northern Taiwan (1626–42).
Andrade reinforces our knowledge that it was the Dutch who brought large
numbers of Chinese to Taiwan. In addition to agriculture, the Chinese were also used
for hunting deer, which provided important export products for the Dutch (as they had
provided for the aborigines before the Dutch). Unfortunately, Dutch policies and
Chinese technologies killed off the once plentiful deer and created an economic crisis
for the aborigines. The Dutch believed that the Chinese provided Taiwan with wealth:
“The Chinese are the only bees on Formosa that give honey”.17 Andrade argues that
the Dutch were able to make money in Taiwan because they provided the Chinese
colonists with a military and administrative structure that supported their efforts.
I find two aspects of Andrade’s analysis unconvincing. First, the conception of
“co-colonization” to describe the import of Chinese to Taiwan seems unnecessary
and even confusing. Second, the title and text suggest that Taiwan became
“Chinese” under Zheng Chenggong. This represents a misreading of the history of
Taiwan under Zheng and his family.
Another unusual aspect of Andrade’s book is that it is also published as an
electronic book at http://www.gutenberg-e.org/andrade/index.html, and many of the
maps and illustrations are available only in the electronic version. In addition, and
perhaps more importantly, the conventionally published book has no index; to find
the index, one must go to http://www.gutenberg-e.org/andrade/HTBC_Index.html.
Chiu Hsin-hui is the author of another important book on the Dutch period.
Taiwan’s aborigines had no writing system, but Chiu tries to provide an understanding
17 Quote from Dutch governor Nicholas Verburg, in Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became
Chinese, p. 158.

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of aboriginal points of view through the Dutch sources. She also follows a number of
Dutch expeditions to areas of new Dutch exploration/invasion and discusses the
various aboriginal responses. Chiu’s book complements Andrade’s book in many
useful ways.
Until recently, those who do not read Dutch were dependent upon William
Campbell’s 1903 book, Formosa Under the Dutch, for English translations of
Dutch sources.18 More recently, the doyen of Dutch studies of Taiwan (and Chiu
Hsin-hui’s doctoral supervisor), Leonard Blussé, has co-edited four volumes of
key Dutch documents together with English translations.19 These volumes greatly
enhance accessibility to the Dutch period for both Dutch and non-Dutch readers.
After the voyages from Europe of Vasco da Gama around Africa to India in
1498 and Christopher Columbus to the New World in 1492, followed by the
circumnavigation of the globe by Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition in 1519–22,
the European empires expanded in Asia quite rapidly. The Spanish empire based
in Manila and the Dutch empire based in Batavia were in particular competition,
as the Spanish controlled the Netherlands until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
In addition, the Dutch were Protestants, while the Spanish were Catholics. Thus,
it is no surprise that the Spanish felt a need to establish a base in northern Taiwan,
within two years of the Dutch coming to southern Taiwan.
In addition to the two chapters in Andrade’s book, we now have three important
works on the Spanish period by José Eugenio Borao Matteo. Two very substantial
volumes of documents provide both the original language of the document (usually
Spanish) and an English translation.20 Borao has used these documents to write an
important monograph on the Spanish period as well.21 The Spanish colonization
of Taiwan proved less financially successful than the Dutch and the Spanish were
ultimately forced to withdraw under both Dutch and aboriginal pressure.
18 Rev. Wm. Campbell, Formosa Under the Dutch: Described from Contemporary Records
with Explanatory Notes and a Bibliography of the Island (London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner & Co., 1903). This book has been re-published many times in Taiwan over the
past decades.
19 Leonard Blussé, Natalie Everts and Evelien Frech (eds), The Formosan Encounter. Notes
on Formosa’s Aboriginal Society: A Selection of Documents from Dutch Archival Sources,
Vol. I: 1623-1635 (Taipei: Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, 1999); Leonard
Blussé and Natalie Everts (eds), The Formosan Encounter. Notes on Formosa’s Aboriginal
Society: A Selection of Documents from Dutch Archival Sources, Vol. II: 1636-1645
(Taipei: Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, 2000); Leonard Blussé and
Natalie Everts (eds), The Formosan Encounter. Notes on Formosa’s Aboriginal
Society: A Selection of Documents from Dutch Archival Sources, Vol. III: 1646-1654
(Taipei: Shung Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines, 2006). Volume IV, on the period
from 1655 to 1662, is due to be published in the last quarter of 2010.
20 José Eugenio Borao Mateo (ed.), Spaniards in Taiwan (Documents), Vol. I: 1582-1642
(Taipei: SMC Publishing Co., 2001); José Eugenio Borao Mateo (ed.), Spaniards in
Taiwan (Documents), Vol. II: 1642-1682 (Taipei: SMC Publishing Co., 2002).
21 José Eugenio Borao Mateo, The Spanish Experience in Taiwan, 1626-1642: The Baroque
Ending of a Renaissance Endeavor (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009).

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Chinese historians have long declared that it was Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功
(Koxinga 國姓爺) who made Taiwan Chinese. Zheng opposed the Manchus and
on the surface supported the Southern Ming that continued until the death of its
last pretender in 1662, the same year that Zheng defeated the Dutch in Taiwan as
well as the year he himself died. In fact, however, the relationship between Zheng
and the Southern Ming was not particularly close. Andrade,22 John Wills23 and
Lynn Struve, the preeminent historian of the Southern Ming,24 all raise questions
about Zheng’s loyalty to the Southern Ming. Struve writes:
[I]n effect [Zheng’s administration] constituted a special government for a
special zone … it was his organization. The Yung-li [Yongli] court always was
far away, and communications between the emperor and Cheng [Zheng] were
both slow and intermittent. So although Cheng was faultlessly conscientious on
a formal level about remaining a loyal servant of the throne … actually he was
free to do as he saw fit and, in effect, was king in his own sizable domain …
Thus, in the Southeast the symbolic presence but actual absence of a Ming
court gave Cheng Ch’eng-kung the flexibility and independence that he needed
to successfully conflate his own interests with those of the Ming, and to
perform at his best for the loyalist cause.25
The Zheng regime at most doubled the population of Han Chinese in Taiwan,
from between 30,000 to 50,000 at the end of the Dutch period to between 50,000
to 100,000 at the end of the Zheng period.26 As noted earlier, at this time Taiwan
had an aboriginal population of about 100,000,27 so Han Chinese still constituted
a minority.28
Many Chinese who claim that Taiwan is Chinese also look at the Manchu period
(1683–1895 in Taiwan) as Chinese. In fact, the Manchu Empire was twice the size of
the Ming, and China was one of its colonies, just as India was one of the colonies of
the British Empire. In addition, the Manchus ruled Taiwan differently from China:
22 Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese, p. 234, p. 248 n. 43.
23 John E. Wills, Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994), pp. 228-29.
24 Lynn A. Struve, The Southern Ming, 1644-1662 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984),
p. 190.
25 Ibid., pp. 154, 156.
26 John E. Wills, “The Seventeenth-Century Transformation: Taiwan Under the Dutch and
the Cheng Regime”, in Murray A. Rubinstein (ed.), Taiwan: A New History (Armonk:
M. E. Sharpe, 1999), p. 98.
27 Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese, p. 30; John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft,
pp. 7, 14.
28 The most recent biography of Zheng in English is Jonathan Clements, Coxinga and the
Fall of the Ming Dynasty (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 2005). A useful, classic biography is
Ralph C. Crozier, Koxinga and Chinese Nationalism: History, Myth, and the Hero
(Cambridge MA: East Asian Center, Harvard University, 1977).

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for example, officials had different terms of office.29 In addition, the Manchus did not
control the highland areas of Taiwan. Thus, for example, the American consul to
Amoy, Charles LeGendre, signed a treaty in 1867 directly with aboriginal Chief
Tauketok, rather than with the Manchu government.30 In summary, Manchu rule in
Taiwan was loose, minimal and partial—and it was Manchu, not Chinese. No recent
works on the Manchu period in Taiwan have been published in English, but we have
Shepherd’s magisterial study,31 Teng’s significant examination of Chinese travel
accounts32 and the key earlier analysis of Meskill on regional rule in Taiwan during
the Manchu period.33
In democratic Taiwan, scholars have given a renewed emphasis to the Japanese
period (1895–1945) when much of the initial impetus for Taiwan’s modernization
took place. Hui-yu Caroline Ts’ai, a research fellow in the Institute of Taiwan
History, Academia Sinica, has been a leader of this research, and her new book,
Taiwan in Japan’s Empire Building, is a welcome addition to the literature
in many respects.
This book makes some important contributions. It contributes to overcoming a
monochromatic view of the Japanese period, arguing very strongly in a number of
fields that Japan’s rule over Taiwan went through a series of stages. Ts’ai also
often introduces her encyclopedic knowledge of the Japanese period in Taiwan,
and provides important sources and a very substantial 30-page bibliography.
Sadly, however, the book also has some shortcomings. Part of the problem is
poor organization. The book seems to flip between topics in a way that, to me at
least, made little sense. Sometimes Ts’ai writes about Japan and sometimes about
Taiwan and sometimes about Korea and other Japanese colonies, but too often the
text does not make the actual subject of the discussion clear. On occasions, she also
goes into fairly long discursions about various sources, but in the end fails to make
clear what she herself believes. This shortcoming is particularly evident in Chapter 1
about law and in Chapters 8 and 9 about Taiwan identity. There are several books
in English which are much better introductions to the Japanese period. The 1974
book by George Kerr, who was in Taiwan during the Japanese period and was later
an eyewitness to the 28 February (1947) uprising, still serves as an excellent
introduction. 34 Patricia Tsurumi’s book on education is also very useful,
29 R. Kent Guy, personal communication, University of Washington, 24 October 2007.
30 For LeGendre’s first person account, see James W. Davidson, The Island of Formosa: Past
and Present (London: Macmillan and Co., 1903), pp. 117-22.
31 John Robert Shepherd, Statecraft.
32 Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and
Pictures, 1683-1895 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004).
33 Johanna M. Meskill, A Chinese Pioneer Family: The Lins of Wufeng, Taiwan 1729-1895
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
34 George H. Kerr, Formosa: Licensed Revolution and the Home Rule Movement 1895-1945
(Honolulu: University of Hawai‘I Press, 1974). Kerr, of course, was the author of George
H. Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).

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and actually covers a broader scope.35 Another very helpful piece is Harry
Lamley’s substantial, more recent book chapter. 36 A relatively recent edited
collection also raises important questions.37
The Japanese period (1895–1945) and the period of authoritarian Kuomintang
rule under Presidents Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo (1945–88) share
five similarities with regard to their nature and the timing of key policies. First,
both regimes systematically discriminated against native Taiwanese and treated
them as second-class citizens. Second, both regimes clamped down very hard in
their early years, each regime killing more than ten thousand Taiwanese. Third,
both regimes then relied on heavy political oppression for about 25 years. Fourth,
after about 25 years, the two regimes liberalized owing to both international and
domestic political pressures. Finally, as both regimes again came under pressure
from their own actions (World War II started by Japan and the repression of the
Kaohsiung Incident by the Kuomintang), both again returned to policies of
oppression.38 The Japanese regime only came to an end with Japan’s defeat in
World War II, while Chiang Ching-kuo’s death gave new President Lee Teng-hui
opportunities for democratization, opportunities which he grasped with the help of
the then opposition Democratic Progressive Party.
An Alternative Framework: Colonized Taiwan
In this review I wish to suggest an alternative framework for analyzing Taiwan’s
history. From the arrival of the Dutch in 1624 until the death of Chiang Ching-
kuo in 1988, Taiwan was ruled by a sequence of six foreign regimes: (i) the Dutch
(1624–62), (ii) the Spanish (1626–42), who ruled for a time in north Taiwan
simultaneously with the Dutch, (iii) the Zheng family (1662–83), (iv) the
Manchus (1683–1895), (v) the Japanese (1895–1945) and (vi) the authoritarian
Chinese Nationalist regime (1945–88). If we define a colonial regime as “rule by
outsiders for the benefit of the outsiders”, then clearly all of these regimes were
colonial. This perspective is not new: Su Beng (史明) made this very point in
his path-breaking history of Taiwan first published in Japanese in 1962,39
35 E. Patricia Tsurumi, Japanese Colonial Education in Taiwan, 1895-1945 (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 1977).
36 Harry J. Lamley, “Taiwan Under Japanese Rule, 1895–1945: The Vicissitudes of
Colonialism”, in Murray A. Rubinstein (ed.), Taiwan: A New History, pp. 201-60.
37 Liao Ping-hui and David Der-wei Wang (eds), Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-
1945: History, Culture, Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). Hui-yu
Caroline Ts’ai is a contributor to this edited collection and in her book often critiques
contributors to this volume.
38 For a fuller explication of these five similarities, see J. Bruce Jacobs, “Taiwan’s Colonial
History and Postcolonial Nationalism”, in Peter C.Y. Chow (ed.), The “One China” Dilemma
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 41-42.
39 Shi Mei, Taiwanjin yonhyakunenshi: himerareta shokuminchi kaihō no ichidanmen (The
Four-hundred-year History of the Taiwanese: Hidden Section of Colonial Liberation)
(Tokyo: Otowa Shobō, 1962).

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later published with revisions in Chinese40 and finally, in a greatly abridged
version, in English.41
Taiwan’s history continues to be fascinating because so much of it remains
contested. It is clear, however, that Taiwan’s history has little to do with China’s
history. In fact, in his 16 July 1936 interview with Edgar Snow, even Mao Zedong
said that Taiwan should be independent.42 Alan Wachman, in his recent study,
demonstrated that neither the Kuomintang nor the Chinese Communist Party
claimed Taiwan for China until 1942. 43 The claim that Taiwan’s history is
inseparable from that of China comes from the Kuomintang colonial government
based in Nanjing from 1945 to 1949 and in Taipei from 1949 to 1988, and from
the would-be colonial government based in Beijing from 1949 to the present.
These claims are based on political assertions; they are not based on history.
40 Shi Ming, Taiwan ren sibai nian shi (Hanwen ban) (Four Hundred Years History of
Taiwanese [Chinese edition]) (San Jose: Paradise Culture Associates, 1980).
41 Su Beng, Taiwan’s 400 Year History: The Origins and Continuing Development of the
Taiwanese Society and People (Washington: Taiwanese Cultural Grassroots Association,
1986). Born in 1918 and originally named Shih Chao-hui, Su remains active even though
he is now over 90 years old; see Shih Hsiu-chuan, “Su Beng: Staying True to the Fight for
Independence”, Taipei Times, 1 December 2009, p. 3.
42 Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (New York: Grove Press [Black Cat Edition], 1961
[1938]), p. 96. We know that the CCP vetted the draft text of Snow’s book before it was
published.
43 Alan M. Wachman, Why Taiwan? Geostrategic Rationales for China’s Territorial Integrity
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), Chapters 4 and 5.