My agent recently asked me a question on behalf of another author, whose book had been refused from a printworks in China. The author had been discussing the natural habitat of certain flora, and made the mistake of saying in, rather than on Taiwan. It was left to me to explain the concerns of the Chinese printer – it was unlikely that there was some kind of censor shouting at him down the phone, but Beijing had just made “support of Taiwanese sovereignty” a crime that carried a maximum penalty of death. Printing the word “in” rather than “on” would imply that Taiwan was not merely an island, but a country and it was more than the printer’s job was worth.
Chris Horton’s book, Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and its Struggle for Survival, is printed and bound in Croydon, nowhere near any fretful Chinese printers. It charts the shifting sense of who owns Taiwan and who speaks for it across the centuries, and offers many examples of roads not taken or paths less travelled. Horton notes, for example, that whereas the Dutch ruled Taiwan for 38 years, the Ming-loyalist Zheng family only held it for 22. However, in that brief time, the Zhengs introduced many indelible elements of the island’s “Chinese” identity, including the very plum trees that provide the blossom that serves as the national flower emblem of the Republic of China. Then again, he also notes that when imperial China signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, it ceded Taiwan to Japan in perpetuity.
Horton devotes two chapters to the delicate dance of “One China” from the moment in Cairo when the Allies agreed that the Republic of China could have Taiwan back from Japan, through Beijing’s claim that as the inheritor of the Republic’s ruler and power, Taiwan should hence default to the People’s Republic, and if it did not do so, it was a rebel province. The story is liable to be well-known to anyone reading this blog, but Horton’s approach deals with it through the lens of fluctuating American political will, with time out for some entertaining rants about the editorial policy of some of his bosses. The issue of whether or not Taiwan can be called a “country”, remains a hot political potato, and Horton seethes about the way that the world is locked in step to the American position, and has to constantly come up with “awkward workarounds.”
While it is fashionable these days to blame the Americans for absolutely everything, I feel the need to point out (as does Horton), that the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué deliberately used language that neither Beijing nor Taipei could dispute – that both governments agreed that Taiwan was part of China. They just didn’t agree who was in charge of China itself. It took a regime change in Taipei itself, with the Democratic Progressive Party challenging the rhetoric of the mainlanders who had been in charge for 30 years, for the language to begin to creak.
Horton eschews much of the traditional book-cracking in libraries for a research methodology that rarely strays far from a computer with an internet connection. This does him little harm with a focus that does cover the early history of Taiwan, but rushes through it in favour of the later twentieth century. As one might expect, he is particularly good on the various media splashes and spats that he has witnessed personally, and there is some lovely coverage of the semantics of junketry, such as the time in 2020 that representatives of the People’s Republic gate-crashed a Taiwanese event in Fiji, complaining about the presence of the ROC flag on a cake, or the domestic impact of Tsai Ing-wen’s public apology for the treatment of indigenous people, to which she invited not only representatives of the surviving tribes, but those of the “Pingpu” peoples whose cultures had been so thoroughly assimilated that they still struggle for official recognition.
Horton zooms in on the ethnically meaningful menu served at William Lai’s inaugural banquet, which makes for fruitful comparison with the similarly politicised food served at Chen Shui-bian’s twenty years earlier. He also has an eye for all sorts of interesting details, such as the fact that Chiang Kai-shek fled mainland China on a private plane donated to him by the United States, and named after his wife. Occasionally, the rhythm of the text slows to single human-interest moments, forming memorable illustrations of broader historical points, such as an old lady’s quest to discover the fate of her grandfather in the Cold War purges, or the fact that KMT political officers are still a common presence on campuses, even though their activities today rarely extent beyond stopping kids smoking outside the gates.
Horton buys an iced tea at a convenience store, and observes in 2025 that the date shown on his receipt is year 114 of the Republic, because the Taiwanese authorities’ desire to manipulate reality extends to the marking of time. He strokes his chin at statues in Chiang Kai-shek’s memorial park, and observes that the late dictator is often posed in bronze in conversation with the Republic’s founder Sun Yat-sen, as if the pair of them were far more chummy than they really were.
He dwells on the initiation of the “White Terror” in 1947, which he terms the Kuomintang’s “original sin”, and describes in Taiwanese terms as yidu, a “residual poison.” He proclaims that Peter Huang’s assassination attempt on Chiang Ching-kuo in New York in 1970 was literally the “first shot” of the decade’s anti-KMT protest movement, and devotes ample space to its grand moments, such as the war on Formosa magazine, the Kaohsiung Incident, and the assassination of the journalist Henry Liu by a Triad hit squad in California. These events are all well-known today, but were not even whispered during my own student days in Taiwan in 1991.
Like others, Horton foregrounds the importance of the TSMC, the company that makes so many of the world’s computer chips, but relates this solidly to the modern world’s obsession with Artificial Intelligence, for which TSMC also produces the latest chips for Nvidia.
This is very much a book of the moment, concentrating on the immediate fall-out from the re-election of Donald Trump at the end of 2024, and its likely impact on the money that the US sends to China. Horton has facts and figures on hand about the immense amount of money spent by the previous Trump administration on shoring up Taiwan (three times the amount spent by Biden), and also on the collateral politics, such as the degree to which Vladimir Putin needs Xi Jinping’s help in Ukraine, and how that affects Russia’s stance on Taiwanese sovereignty.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan.
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