Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan: Youth, Narrative, Nationalism (Global Chinese Culture)

Review
In this theoretically informed and empirically grounded study, A-chin Hsiau locates the genesis of the prevailing cultural nativism in twenty-first-century Taiwan in the postwar generation’s “return-to-reality” movement of the 1970s. The work powerfully illuminates the early stages of the ascendance of an island-centered historical narrative that presently rivals, and is poised to supplant, the erstwhile dominant Sinocentric national discourse. -- Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, author of Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law
Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan explores an understudied period and adds nuance to the scholarly conversation about Taiwanese identity. Through detailed analysis, this book exposes how history has been rewritten to serve various identity construction efforts in Taiwan. It sheds new light on just how complicated and changeable identity can be. -- J. Megan Greene, author of The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan: Science Policy and the Quest for Modernization
In Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan, A-chin Hsiau’s striking achievement is to demonstrate how committed activists who came of age during the era of martial law used indirect politics to pave the way for Taiwan’s later democratization. Hsiau shows compellingly how youth and its passions have the power to remake the world even amid political repression. -- Margaret Hillenbrand, author of Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China
Hsiau provides a sensible and nuanced interpretive account of how nativist discourse, cultural nationalism, and youth activism in 1970s Taiwan shaped its path toward democracy and thereby transformed global post–Cold War politics. This book is required reading for students and scholars of Asian and transregional studies. -- Ping-hui Liao, coeditor of Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945: History, Culture, Memory
A milestone of international Taiwan studies . . .With a solid scholarship, Hsiau has woven a convincing narrative of the power of ideas, and the moving saga of how Taiwanese youth's difficult search for their true selves should find wider resonance in present-day Taiwan, China, and beyond. ― International Journal of Asian Studies
Good introductory reading for students of Taiwanese literature, culture, politics, and contemporary history. ― Pacific Affairs
A landmark piece of scholarship. ― Global Asia
Relevant to sociology, history and Taiwan studies, but most of all to Chinese studies writ large . . . an important contribution to understanding China's rise in the international system, local societal reactions to Taiwan's global marginalization, and the apparently sudden emergence of Taiwanese nationalism in the 1970s. ― The China Quarterly
In the aftermath of 1949, Taiwan’s elites saw themselves as embodying China in exile both politically and culturally. The island―officially known as the Republic of China―was a temporary home to await the reconquest of the mainland. Taiwan, not the People’s Republic, represented China internationally until the early 1970s. Yet in recent decades Taiwan has increasingly come to see itself as a modern nation-state.
A-chin Hsiau traces the origins of Taiwanese national identity to the 1970s, when a surge of domestic dissent and youth activism transformed society, politics, and culture in ways that continue to be felt. After major diplomatic setbacks at the beginning of the 1970s posed a serious challenge to Kuomintang authoritarian rule, a younger generation without firsthand experience of life on the mainland began openly challenging the status quo. Hsiau examines how student activists, writers, and dissident researchers of Taiwanese anticolonial movements, despite accepting Chinese nationalist narratives, began to foreground Taiwan’s political and social past and present. Their activism, creative work, and historical explorations played pivotal roles in bringing to lig