One Island, Many Histories

Michelle T. King reviews Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison’s “Revolutionary Taiwan” and Anna Beth Keim’s “Heaven Does Not Block All Roads.”

By Michelle T. KingAugust 27, 2025

• History

• Biography & Autobiography

HOW DO YOU tell the history of Taiwan? The question may seem innocent enough, yet to anyone who is even casually familiar with Taiwan’s complex and contested political history, it is anything but. Take a look, for example, at the keywords that show up in titles of recent English-language books about the place: we are told that Taiwan’s situation is a “crisis,” a “struggle,” or a “battle,” that Taiwan is a “rebel island” spelling “trouble.” At the same time, more than one author has felt the need to remind audiences as to “why Taiwan matters.”

What we know about Taiwan is simultaneously overdetermined and underinformed. Most people recognize that the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan is caught up in the middle of a larger geopolitical rivalry between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the United States. Yet how many would be able to say anything more about the daily rhythms of life or past experiences of Taiwan’s 23 million inhabitants, and the way they have moved through their days—working, learning, fighting, laughing, loving, eating, and dreaming? Is it possible to tell a history of Taiwan on its own terms, as more than just a prized possession or geopolitical pawn?

Two recent books, Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison’s Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order (2024) and Anna Beth Keim’s Heaven Does Not Block All Roads: A History of Taiwan Through the Life of Huang Chin-tao (2025), attempt to do just that, featuring Taiwan-centered histories that begin and end on the island itself. While each book approaches the challenge in a different way, both move toward the same goal—articulating distinct Taiwanese historical pasts while harboring hopes for a democratic future, even as the pressure from the PRC mounts and the realistic possibility of such a prospect seems to diminish daily.

My own awareness of Taiwan-centered history came rather late. Despite my parents having immigrated to the United States from Taiwan in the 1960s, we never traveled there while I was growing up. It wasn’t until I returned as an adult in 2013, as part of a study tour for young American scholars, that I first encountered this new (to me) perspective on the past. At one stop, we visited the National Museum of Taiwan History in Tainan (Taiwan’s oldest city, located in the south of the island), which had just opened its doors two years earlier. The main exhibit told the history of Taiwan from the perspective of the place itself and what it had witnessed, including those who had come and gone, and those who had stayed behind: Indigenous peoples, European colonists, Han Chinese migrants. Displays also dwelt on Taiwan’s 50 years as a Japanese colony during the first half of the 20th century, which meant that Taiwanese colonial subjects were recruited by the Imperial Japanese Army to work and fight against the ROC during World War II—lives and experiences I had never previously thought about or imagined.

As a professional historian, I could sense the curatorial care that had been taken to create this exhibit, and the motivations behind articulating a different sense of Taiwan’s past. But the real lesson came during our walk back to the bus, when a museum staffer proudly told me that he did not consider himself Chinese at all, only Taiwanese. I was taken aback: as the daughter of mainlanders who always described themselves as Chinese, I had never thought of those identities as mutually exclusive, but they obviously were for this young man. Indeed, since it first began tracking responses in 1992, National Chengchi University’s annual poll on the self-identification of Taiwan’s inhabitants has seen a steady rise in the number of those who identify as fully Taiwanese (now close to two-thirds), and a steady decline in those who consider themselves both Chinese and Taiwanese (close to one-third) or fully Chinese (less than three percent).

In their book, Chou, who teaches world history in Taiwan, and Harrison, who holds a post in Chinese studies at the University of Tasmania, recognize the inherent tension at the heart of their historical subject. “This book places Taiwan at its center,” they declare, and note that this in itself is “necessarily and unavoidably a political act.” PRC partisans will, of course, reject any status accorded to Taiwan other than as an inalienable possession of China. But rather than falling into the familiar tale of Taiwan’s past and future as an unfinished tug of war between the PRC and the ROC, Chou and Harrison regard Taiwan as an entity unto itself, with its own history and destiny, to be distinguished from whatever government or political party happens to have controlled it at any given point in time.

The articulation of a Taiwan-centered historical narrative has come into ever sharper focus since the successful push for a multiparty democracy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and a related rise in public recognition of Taiwanese identity. There are now more than a dozen political parties in Taiwan, which support a variety of positions, not just regarding the future status of the country but also on a wide range of other topics, including gender rights, labor rights, social justice, the economy, and the environment. It is this democratization process that Chou and Harrison see as “revolutionary,” even as it remains unfinished, “changing not just the form of government over the island but also how Taiwanese people conceptualiz[e] the land they liv[e] on, as a whole and complete nation unto itself.”

The authors have purposely chosen not to present a chronological narrative about Taiwan’s past, since a linear presentation of sequential political control underscores the claims of the regimes in charge rather than the experiences of those under the yoke. Instead, they offer several alternative historical narratives, centering on the perspectives of Indigenous groups, on early advocates for a distinct Taiwanese identity during the Japanese colonial period, and on victims of the violent political crackdown that followed widespread protests against Nationalist Party corruption in 1947. This period of protest and subsequent repression is collectively referred to as the “February 28 Incident,” for the day after the event that set it off: government officers in Taipei hit a Taiwanese woman from whom they were attempting to confiscate contraband cigarettes, shooting a bystander in the ensuing fracas. Each of these moments reframes the story to emphasize experiences outside the formerly dominant Nationalist Party narrative, dimming the significance of 1949 as a historical marker. The book is also peppered with astute observations about the precarity of Taiwan’s international status, as well as the ever-tenacious desire of its inhabitants to insist on their right to exist, which the authors call a “politics of the normal.” Chou and Harrison explain that, for Taiwanese people, “everyday life is a form of resistance to relentless efforts to define their identity on their behalf.”

Though the book is rich in analytical insights, it is challenging in the space of one short, introductory volume to dismantle dominant narratives about Taiwan’s modern history and establish new ones simultaneously. Readers already familiar with the larger contours of Taiwan’s history will benefit from an adjustment of perspective, but readers unfamiliar with Taiwan’s modern past may find it difficult to keep the claims and counterclaims of contested histories straight, especially when delivered nonsequentially. It’s complicated, the authors seem to imply, and perhaps unapologetically so: only by avoiding what author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has called “the danger of a single story” (or, in this case, the double story of the PRC versus the ROC) can the authors honor the multiple entangled realities of Taiwan’s modern past.

Anna Beth Keim, in her debut book, takes an entirely different approach to telling the history of Taiwan, which she does through the life of one individual, Huang Chin-tao (1926–2019). He was, by turns, a resistance fighter, political prisoner, and democracy activist, who packed into his 92 years enough action and suffering to last several lifetimes. Keim’s focus on a single life would seem to contradict Adichie’s admonition, but instead the opposite holds true. Drawing primarily on Huang’s autobiography, Keim tells a riveting, well-paced story, deftly interweaving vivid details with necessary background to make sense of Huang’s broader historical contexts. The result is cinematic. Huang’s life and its messy contours ultimately echo Walt Whitman’s famous line: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

By dint of the time and place of his birth, and due to his dogged character, Huang experienced every tragic twist and turn of Taiwan’s modern history—and somehow managed to survive. Born during the Japanese colonial period, Huang was sent to a Japanese school in Taichung, Taiwan’s second-largest city, where he learned kendo from a beloved Japanese teacher, even as he was teased and humiliated by other Japanese boys. Later, at the age of 16, he volunteered to join the Japanese navy as a mechanic, becoming one of those 200,000 Taiwanese colonial subjects fighting on the side of Japan whom I had first learned about in the museum of Taiwan history. He was sent to secure the Japanese occupation of the island of Hainan, south of the Chinese mainland, and later was trained for combat. After the Japanese defeat in World War II, Huang was sent to an ROC prisoner of war camp on Hainan, from which he escaped. He then tried to return to Taiwan on a rickety boat hired with others, a trip of over 600 miles. Along the way, they ran into pirates, lost all their possessions, and nearly died in storms, but somehow still managed to make it back to Taiwan—which, in the interim, had changed hands from being under Japanese control to being part of the ROC at the conclusion of the war.

After his return, Huang was once again caught up in a change of political tides, this time the anti–Nationalist Party uprising that followed February 28, 1947. Huang joined a small armed brigade to fight against Nationalist forces. His unit clashed with them at the Battle of Wuniulan before being forced to scatter. Eventually, resistance across Taiwan was crushed by mainland reinforcements. Huang tried to evade detection as the Nationalists clamped down, and he even joined the ROC Marine Corps. Repeatedly detained for short periods and then released over several years, Huang was finally sentenced and jailed for insurgency in 1952, at the age of 26.

In total, Huang spent 24 years in prison, including several on Green Island, Taiwan’s version of Alcatraz. It is something of a miracle that he survived when so many of his fellow prisoners did not, whether they died by execution, torture, malnutrition, or disease. Some had penned manifestos promoting democracy, but others were imprisoned merely on the slight suspicion that they had fed resistance fighters. All in all, some 20,000 people may have been killed or disappeared over these decades of White Terror under Nationalist martial law. After Chiang Kai-shek’s death in 1975, Huang was finally released. Yet outside of prison, Huang did not retire to a quiet life: his transformation into a democracy advocate in the 1980s was the last stage of his remarkable career. Huang emerged as a founding member of the Taichung branch of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party in 1986. In old age, he continued to tell his story and lead tours around Wuniulan, teaching a new generation of young activists about Taiwan’s past.

What makes Keim’s depiction of Huang’s life so compelling is her recognition that a single human life can be messy, that “no history—his own or Taiwan’s—fits into a neat box.” In his later years, Huang often engaged in petty squabbles with another elderly resistance fighter over whose version of the past was the truth. Nor does Huang himself offer any “nuggets of profundity” when Keim, a veteran freelance journalist, interviews him as an elderly man: he is a doer and a fighter, not a thinker and a writer. It is instead Keim’s vision that frames Huang’s life and gives it deeper meaning, setting enough nuanced contexts to display its many facets, both good and bad.

There is no single Taiwan story, much as various groups have continually tried to stamp one imprint on its past and future. It is a glorious cacophony, influenced by decades of Japanese colonialism, and containing the voices of Taiwanese of Hokkien and Hakka origins, of Indigenous peoples, of mainlanders from the 1949 generation and their descendants, and, today, of new immigrants from Southeast Asia. Their stories collide, come together, and break apart at different moments, and this is precisely the point. Yet one thing all of these voices do share is simply the desire to be free to tell their own stories, for as long as they are able.