44) From Yalta to Vietnam: American Foreign Policy in the Cold War by David Horowitz interesting looking the complex world of international diplomacy during the Cold War. This of course is a product of the time of publication and so deep analysis isn’t really present though so I found myself reading this with a different perspective.
45) Japanese Taiwan: Colonial Rule and its Contested Legacy by Andrew Morris (Editor) and Christopher Gerteis (Editor) in the 21st century world, colonialism and imperialism are not viewed in a positive light and rightly so. In the case of Taiwan though, this is also where colonialism and the brutality of it has also left a cultural mark on the country and for those who are not ‘mainlanders’ a term the Taiwanese (people who are of Hoklo, indigenous or Hakka descent who were the three main groups on Taiwan at the time of Japanese colonisation) use to describe people who are descended from Chiang’s KMT forces who fled to Taiwan in 1949 we consider it as part of our heritage using it to distance and separate ourselves from mainland Chinese. This is an academic study, so it is very detailed and certainly not to everyone’s reading tastes, but as someone whose maternal roots (being Hoklo) are from this period of history I see it more as a study of my personal family history and ended up with a greater understanding of the period as well as deeper understanding of what it means to be Taiwanese. In addition to this, demonstrating the ever deepening divide between the Beijing friendly KMT and pro-independence movement as this publication is fairly recent in terms of Taiwan’s recent history and the ever increasing threat from Beijing. Another interesting aspect of this was learning about Taiwan’s indigenous population of which I knew very little about not only in colonial times, but also during the years under the thumb of Chiang Kai Shek since of course unlike my mother’s family and the Hakka people who if you do go back far enough do have mainland Chinese roots and come from today’s Fujian and Guangdong provinces respectively (the Taiwanese language is the dialect spoken in Fujian) are of course the original inhabitants of the island known at that point as Formosa. It now seems fitting that the current President of Taiwan Tsai Ing Wen is of indigenous and Hakka ancestry and that Taiwan’s first elected Lee Teng-Hui was the first president of Taiwan to be born in the island, but also during the period of Japanese occupation as a testament to the changing scope of what it means to be Taiwanese
Last edited by Crazy_Babe; 07/17/21 05:29 AM.
