Three Old Friends

This month the local expat zine Taiwanease (here too) is starting a new feature and they asked me to write on three books that had affected my view of Taiwan. Only three? Pure torture that was. So I left some of the more well-known books to others, and picked works that have had a strong influence on my life and the way I view Taiwan, that I thought deserved some more attention. Enjoy this slightly unedited version of the piece in Taiwanease.

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People often say that a good book is like an old friend. They're right -- like old friends, good books introduce you to other good books, and to interesting experiences that illuminate the world for you, and may even change your life. Here are three old friends of mine.....

Many years ago I took a class from Taiwan expert Robert Sutter and had to write a report on Taiwan’s economic development. In writing that report I discovered Samuel P. S. Ho's monumental 1978 work Economic Development of Taiwan 1860-1970. Stuffed full of charts and figures, meticulously organized, comprehensive, and written in accessible academic prose, it was Ho who first intimated to me that Taiwan’s economy might be an endlessly fascinating object of study.

Ho had produced the work during the 1970s, just prior to Alice Amsden’s seminal 1979 article in Modern China on the role of the state in Taiwan’s growth, an article that would ignite a decade of debates in development studies, economics, and international political economy, culminating in Wade’s Governing the Market. Sturdily balanced and carefully restrained, untouched by the parameters of that controversy, Ho provides the data that later axes would be ground upon. Many times I’ve leafed through the book to find both useful hard numbers and fascinating pieces of anecdotal data:

“The crushing of cane was done by stone rollers in primitive mills, of which 1,400 existed in the late nineteenth century. Even when foreign merchants demonstrated that more juice could be extracted from one passage of cane through an iron roller than three passages through a stone roller, the native merchants and money lenders who controlled the sugar crushing business were not interested in adopting the new machine.”

For anyone who wants to study Taiwan’s economy, Ho’s work remains a starting point whose many questions and data gaps are pointers to more specialized inquiry. For example, Ho’s discussion of the Japanese period led me back to an obscure work by a Taiwanese agricultural economist, some fellow named Lee Teng-hui, Intersectoral Capital Flows in the Economic Development of Taiwan, 1895-1960, which reads like a boring economic treatise but is actually a ringing condemnation of the KMT’s colonialist economic policies, and pointed me forward to Ka Chih-ming’s wonderful book on Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, Japanese Colonialism in Taiwan: Land Tenure, Development, and Dependency, 1895-1945. In the study of Taiwan’s economy, there are few who can match the work of Ho.

One of the books we had to purchase for the Taiwan course was an edited volume by Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin Winkler entitled Contending Approaches to the Political Economy of Taiwan, with articles by many prominent East Asian specialists, including Bruce Cumings, future AIT head Richard Bush, and Thomas Gold, author of the influential State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle. Contending Approaches came out in 1988, at the height of the debates over Taiwan’s political economy, and just prior to the “discovery” of Taiwan’s small- and medium-sized enterprises in the 1990s. Contending Approaches opened a whole new world of both Taiwan history and analytical stances to me. An especial revelation was Greenhalgh’s article on families and networks in Taiwan’s economic development. I had just finished Porter’s book on the competitive advantages of nations, which had a long discussion of industrial districts in Europe – that looked a lot like similar arrangements in Taiwan, as described by Greenhalgh. That article launched a lifelong interest in Taiwan’s small firms and the networks that bind them together.

Very different from the academic works above is David Kaplan’s Fires of the Dragon, which discusses the 1984 murder of writer Henry Liu in California by gangsters acting on orders from officials within the Taiwan Garrison Command. Kaplan interviewed everyone from Liu’s widow to the FBI agents involved in the case, reconstructing Henry Liu’s life against the complexities of US-Taiwan relations and the emerging Taiwan democracy and independence movement. Along the way we meet James Soong and Chiang Ching-kuo, Lin Yi-hsiung and Chen Wen-chen, Bamboo Union gangsters, Taiwanese students and mainlander democracy advocates, Taiwan agents who try to steal US torpedoes, bitter struggles for control of US Chinatowns by Chinese and KMT groups, and a host of well-meaning, competent US officials who inevitably get overruled by their foreign-policy conscious superiors. Fires of the Dragon is an excellent introduction to a turbulent and dynamic era, both internationally and in Taiwan.

In addition to the riveting history it provides, Fires of the Dragon was important to me for another reason: it was my personal introduction to the surehanded way in which the KMT managed the international media. When the book was published I was working for one of the offices of the independence movement in Washington, DC. My boss brought me a major newspaper review of the work that panned it totally, written, he noted, by a former vice-president of a prominent American thinktank. The thinktank had been a longtime recipient of KMT government funds, he explained.

A friend in need is a friend indeed, and these three books have provided much-needed illumination of the development and direction of life on the Beautiful Isle. I hope you find them as inspiring and educational as I have.

[Taiwan]