by Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo credit: Book Cover
CHRIS HORTON’S GHOST NATION is a comprehensive take on Taiwan’s history from a pan-Green perspective. In this sense, the book can be situated alongside other histories of Taiwan published for a general audience that have been published in past years.
Ghost Nation primarily details the history of Taiwan’s democratization, before shifting to Taiwan’s role in contemporary times. Much of the book’s focus is on the White Terror, the politics of identity formation, and how the shift to democracy was eventually achieved.
The book is benefited by Horton’s strong network, with interviews from political leaders of the time, such as Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan’s first democratically elected president, Marxist revolutionary Su Beng, and Yeh Chu-lan, the widow of free speech martyr Cheng Nan-jung and an activist in her own right. In this sense, the book balances both the perspectives of leaders as well as grassroots activists, telling the story of Taiwan’s democratization from a bottom-up perspective.
It is, of course, impossible for any single book to sum up the whole of Taiwan. As such, there are certain periods that are focused on more than others. The focus is, unsurprisingly, on the post-war period, rather than antecedents in the Japanese colonial period, or Qing Taiwan. But the book still finds time to detail Taiwan’s Indigenous history, as well as the way that Taiwan has long had a historical trajectory separate from that of China.
When it comes to contemporary politics, there is also less time to describe the period of rapprochement between Taiwan and China during the Ma administration, or provide a blow-by-blow account of the electoral contestation between the KMT and DPP in the wake of the Sunflower Movement. There is also less discussion of the Pelosi visit to Taiwan, the sharp rise in Chinese military threats that followed it, and Taiwan’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet, looking at Taiwan from the perspective of 2024 and with a general audience in mind, Ghost Nation provides a useful introduction and entry point to those who may not know much about Taiwan, but may want to know more in the future. And Horton, as one of the journalists who has covered Taiwan extensively in English for the past decade, was there for such events–just there is not enough space to fit that into the book.
In past years, in light of increased international discussion of the threat of invasion, there has often been the phenomenon of Western experts jumping onto the Taiwan bandwagon, coming from a place of relatively little knowledge. The result is often histories of Taiwan that remain curious China-centric, or know relatively little about the ground-level dynamics of Taiwanese politics.
This is not at all the case from Ghost Nation, which comes from one of the writers who has been based in and written on Taiwan extensively for more than a decade. In this sense, Ghost Nation is a strong entry in the journalistic documentation of Taiwan today, as it stands shaped by its recently post-authoritarian past.