| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Steven E. Phillips. Between Assimilation and Independence: The Taiwanese Encounter Nationalist China, 1945–1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 256. $55.00.
After studying in Taiwan over thirty years ago, three incidents remained buried in my memory: one of our Taiwanese teachers was arrested, the caretaker at a Confucian temple urged me to speak either Japanese or the Taiwan language with him as he could not speak Mandarin (guoyu), and some Taiwanese youths made fun of my Mandarin. The memories surfaced when I read Steven Phillips's book on the interaction between the Guomindang (GMD) and the Taiwanese during the late 1940s. He is perfectly right, in my case as well as those of most of my classmates, when he writes that "Americans ... paid little attention to the Taiwanese because the islanders' 'provincial' agenda did not fit neatly into the Cold War context" (p. 142).	1
After an informative introductory chapter, including an adumbrated look at pre-1895 Taiwan history, Phillips devotes a chapter to the half-century of Japanese occupation of the island (1895–1945). He makes clear that the Taiwanese reaction was a complex one. They felt abandoned by China when the latter signed the island over to the Japanese in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. This "abandonment" later was used as a reason for not welcoming rule by the mainlanders in 1945. At the same time, the elite recognized that the Japanese created economic prosperity and law and order. And yet, Taiwanese were treated as second-class subjects of the Japanese emperors during the occupation. Hence, the main response of the Taiwanese elite was to struggle for increased autonomy within the Japanese empire rather than for outright independence.	. . .

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