Taiwan sent a large contingent of athletes to the Olympics this year. Wearing their much-admired uniforms designed by Just In XX — blue for the sky, sea and mountains of Taiwan — they navigated the Seine under a flag showing the team’s permitted name “Chinese Taipei.”
This quadrennial humiliation, a legacy of the unfinished civil war between China’s ruling Communist Party and its predecessor, the Nationalist Party, or KMT, brings home to Taiwan’s twenty-three million people the grim reality of their status as citizens of a country whose name cannot be uttered. Young Taiwanese in Paris were understandably delighted when the French television commentator explained that “Chinese Taipei” would be more familiar to viewers as Taiwan. It was a Lacanian moment: they felt seen.
How Taiwan should be seen, what image it should present to the world, is a question that preoccupies the government in Taipei as it manoeuvres for advantage in the fraught strategic environment of the north Pacific. Jonathan Clement’s Rebel Island, a new short history of Taiwan from antiquity to the present, introduces an English-language readership to how things have come to this pass and what is now at stake.
Clements writes accessible narrative histories of East Asia designed for a general readership. In this book, his informative accounts of time and place are interleaved with human interest stories written in a no-nonsense style to provide a bird’s-eye view of the challenging terrain that is Taiwan’s past. China is visible on the horizon, but the “tides of history,” to quote the title of the book’s closing chapter, have been taking Taiwan further and further away from it. Following these tides, Clements has produced a book that is more about a Northeast Asian nation-in-the-making than about a province of China.
In the war of words over Taiwan, history is one of the most significant battlegrounds. Much as Australian history was once given a starting point of 1788, the history of Taiwan has often been written as if it started in 1624, the year the Dutch colonised Taiwan (or part of it, as Clements shows). From the perspective of its indigenous peoples — Austronesian speakers with a history of settlement dating back more than four millennia — this looks like the beginning of a complex but relatively recent colonial history: the Dutch in southern Taiwan (1624); the Spanish in the north (1626); Koxinga’s anti-Manchus loyalists (1661); the Manchus themselves (1683) presiding for two centuries over the expansion of Taiwan’s Chinese population and the attrition of indigenous lands; the Japanese (1895), who incorporated Taiwan into their growing empire; and then the Chinese again (1945), under the Nationalist government of the Republic of China.
From a Chinese point of view, the shortlived Dutch period looks like a harbinger of the “century of humiliations” they suffered at the hands of the British and other imperialist powers. In Taiwan it has come to have quite a different meaning. During this year, the quadricentennial of the Dutch arrival, the National Museum of Taiwan History is running an exhibition called “Beyond 1624: Taiwan, World Island,” an upbeat presentation tracing the Age of Discovery’s impact on Taiwan and the island’s place in the trading networks that helped make the modern world. Contemporary Taiwan aspires to visibility in the world.
Historians in China push back at accounts that grant primacy to the West, pointing to documentation of contact between China and Taiwan in earlier centuries as evidence of China’s long-established sovereignty. Clements is clearly sceptical of this argument. Contacts over many centuries there no doubt were, but they are more likely to have involved pirates than officials. Research by Tonio Andrade, cited in Rebel Island, shows that substantial Chinese agrarian settlements on the island began only under the Dutch.
Taiwanese historians, their number steadily growing over the past quarter of a century, are pushing back in another direction altogether. Rejecting the “four hundred years” version of their history, they have turned to historical archaeology, anthropology and ethnography to develop a deep history grounded in the land and its First Peoples, who link Taiwan to an ancient and definitively non-Sinic past. Clements not only recognises but is in sympathy with this approach. Distinctively, he foregrounds the indigenous experience of, and agency in, the island’s history.
Rebel Island begins on exactly this note, relating the story of a violent encounter between the Koalut of southern Taiwan and a party of shipwrecked Americans. When reports of the deaths of Americans at the hands of the Koalut reached the American consul in Fujian, he launched a punitive expedition. This pattern of events is both reminiscent of and different from clashes between indigenous and intruders in colonial Australia. One difference is that the Koalut (a sub-group of Taiwan’s second-largest indigenous group, the Paiwan) had muskets and were better able than their Australian counterparts to defend themselves against the intruders. Another is that the punitive expedition culminated in a treaty of sorts.
As Clements points out, a “treaty” between the American consul and the Paiwan implies that the territory concerned was not under Chinese jurisdiction. What then was this claimed Chinese sovereignty over the island, exactly? And even granted such sovereignty, should Taiwan be considered part of “China” — a cultural entity in search of an autochthonous polity — or was it rather a colony of the Manchus, who in 1683 had seized it from an earlier colonial power, the anti-Manchu loyalist regime of Koxinga?
Whatever the case, those same Manchus, or their descendants, gave the island away to Japan in 1895 as part of the settlement of the 1894 Sino-Japanese war. The result was a rebellion on the island and the founding, on paper at least, of the Republic of Formosa. Although it died almost before it was born, the republic created “a thorny legal precedent,” according to Clements, because “when Taiwan was ‘returned’ to its rightful owners after World War II, who were those owners — the political inheritors of the Manchus who had given it away, or the Taiwanese who had fought for it?”
The 1895 rebellion was not the first popular uprising on the island and it would not, of course, be the last. Those uprisings give Clements the title of his book and also provide it with one of its major themes. The parties to these disputes were not constant: a 1721 revolt pitched Chinese settlers against the Qing dynasty, briefly promising the re-emergence of a Ming loyalist regime on the island; the 1895 rebellion was directed against the incoming Japanese; the Musha Incident of 1930 involved the indigenous Seediq against the Japanese; and the 1947 uprising pitched the now-Japanised Taiwanese against the newly arrived mainlanders.
Under the Nationalist government — in fact, a Chinese government in exile — Taiwanese found themselves enduring a martial law regime that inspired nostalgia for Japanese rule. The years 1949–87 are remembered as a period of White Terror, with covert and finally overt political resistance leading to detentions, executions and extra-judicial killings. Clements mentions the murders in 1980 of the mother-in-law and twin daughters of dissident Lin Yi-hsiung and, in 1984, of Henry Liu, an outspoken critic of the KMT, who was killed in the garage of his San Francisco home.
By the 1980s, a new generation of rebels was emerging. Student movements, an increasingly potent force, helped to usher in multiparty democracy (the Wild Lilies movement of 1990), to expand freedom of political expression (the Wild Strawberries of 2008) and to defeat compromising trade agreements with China (the Sunflowers of 2014).
“It’s right to rebel,” Mao Zedong assured students during the Cultural Revolution. His successors didn’t agree, and in 1989 moved decisively to crush the protests in Tiananmen Square. The rebel island proved more difficult to rein in. Elections in Taiwan that very year presaged the end of the KMT’s political hegemony and the beginning of a slow drift away from mainland moorings. The independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, would in the end provide a powerful and appealing alternative to the KMT, provoking China to issue increasingly explicit warnings against crossing the line. Clements quotes Xi Jinping at the nineteenth party congress in 2017: “We have firm will, full confidence and sufficient capability to defeat any form of Taiwan independence succession plot.”
On relations with China, Taiwan remains divided. The political legacy of the KMT era is a “blue” camp that excoriates the “green” DPP for endangering the country and hurting it economically with its independence sympathies. Yet not even rusted-on blues are anxious for Taiwan to be swallowed up by China. The KMT has been trying hard to dispel its prevailing image as a pro-China party, aware that it is not paying dividends politically. Clements completed this book just before the 2024 elections, when many voters felt that it was time for a change but nonetheless ended up voting for the DPP presidential candidate. Lai Ching-te, a man known as “a pragmatic worker for independence.”
There is, of course, more to Taiwan than a history of rebellion. One of its remarkable achievements in the democratic era is its dominance of the manufacture of the computer chips. So vital is this industry to the functioning of the modern world that it is widely regarded as a deterrent to war between China and Taiwan. By 2020, as Clements notes, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s factory in Taichung alone was supplying 37 per cent of the world’s annual computing power — this in a country with a population smaller than Australia’s.
Other signal achievements can be found in the democratic-era laws that have made Taiwan the very model of an open, progressive Asian society. The features became a hallmark of Taiwan under the presidency of Tsai Ing-wen, winner of successive elections in 2016 and 2020. Tsai’s leadership provided, to quote Clements, “a safe space for numerous progressive opportunities” (emphasis in the original). These included a national apology to indigenous Taiwanese, the promotion of indigenous languages, and same-sex marriage legislation.
The image of a diverse, liberal, tech-savvy society that emerges from the final chapter of this book is probably one that most Taiwanese would be happy with. It is consistent with the themes on show at the Taiwan Culture Pavilion in Paris this year, where visitors have been offered a riotous celebration of democracy, technology and music served up with bubble tea.
A history of Taiwan written at this point in time can hardly avoid being about cross-strait relations. Rebel Island is a Taiwan-centred history that is nonetheless, at its heart, about this problem. In the conclusion, Clements turns explicitly to the much-debated question of whether war is likely in the Taiwan Strait. He seems to think not, pointing to China–Taiwan trade’s “topping $110 billion” as something that “neither can really afford to jeopardise.”
The value of this trade, however, has been falling year on year as Taiwan pivots elsewhere, following not only the money but also the “southbound” policy adopted under Tsai Ing-wen. Declining trade is more than matched by falling investment in China, which was 40 per cent lower in 2023 than in 2022. Taiwanese businesses are turning elsewhere. Countries in Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam, are reaping the benefits, complicating regional security considerations for China. In trade and industry, as in politics, it seems that a peaceful rebellion is underway in Taiwan. •
Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan
By Jonathan Clements | Scribe | $49.99 | 320 pages
