Best Books on Taiwan, the Republic of China and Cold War in Asia

In December 1949, Chiang Kai-shek and the remnants of the Nationalist government fled to Taiwan after losing the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong's Communist forces. What followed was one of the more peculiar situations of the Cold War: a government that claimed to represent all of China, ruling an island of eight million people, recognized by the United States and most of the Western world as the legitimate government of the world's most populous country. For decades, the Republic of China held China's seat at the United Nations. Its air force flew reconnaissance missions over the mainland. Its soldiers were occasionally inserted onto the coast for sabotage operations. And its people lived under martial law from 1949 to 1987, the longest period of martial law in modern history. This story is less well-known than it deserves to be, in part because Western Cold War historiography has tended to focus on Europe and in part because Taiwan's own reckoning with its authoritarian past is relatively recent. ## The Cold War in Asia: The Wide Lens For context on how Taiwan fit into the broader American Cold War strategy in Asia, Bruce Cumings's *The Korean War: A History* is a counterintuitive but useful starting point. Cumings argues that the Korean War and the Taiwan Strait crises of the 1950s were intimately connected, that American intervention in Korea was partly driven by fear of what would happen if the Asian periphery fell to Communism, and that the decision to defend Taiwan was part of the same logic. Cumings is a controversial figure, and his interpretations provoke strong disagreement from other historians. But his insistence that the Asian Cold War needs to be understood on its own terms, not just as a sideshow to the European confrontation, is a corrective that has influenced the whole field. ## Taiwan's Specific Story For the Taiwan story specifically, George Kerr's *Formosa Betrayed* is a foundational text. Kerr was an American diplomat who was in Taiwan in the immediate postwar period and witnessed the February 28 Incident of 1947, when Nationalist troops killed thousands of Taiwanese civilians in the suppression of a popular uprising. The massacre was covered up for decades and Kerr's account was one of the earliest to document it for an English-language audience. The book is both history and memoir, and its anger is obvious. But Kerr had access and he was there, and his account of how the Nationalist government treated the Taiwanese population in the early years has been broadly confirmed by subsequent scholarship. ## Understanding the Miracle and the Authoritarianism One of the strangest things about Taiwan's Cold War history is that the authoritarian period coincided with extraordinary economic development. Taiwan's transformation from a poor agricultural economy to a high-income industrial one during the 1960s and 1970s is one of the most dramatic development stories of the twentieth century. Shelley Rigger's *Why Taiwan Matters: Small Island, Global Powerhouse* addresses this paradox directly. Rigger is a political scientist who has spent her career studying Taiwan, and she makes the case that Taiwan's success was not accidental. The Nationalist government, whatever its authoritarianism, invested heavily in education and land reform, broke up the old landlord class, and created conditions for industrial development. The book also covers the democratization process of the 1980s and 1990s, which is arguably Taiwan's most important and underreported achievement. A society that spent forty years under martial law managed a peaceful transition to full democracy, an outcome that was far from guaranteed. ## Why Taiwan Is Still a Live Issue Taiwan's Cold War history is not purely historical. The same basic dispute, over whether Taiwan is part of China or something else, remains unresolved. The military balance across the Taiwan Strait has shifted significantly in China's favor over the past two decades. American commitments are deliberately ambiguous. And Taiwanese public opinion has been moving, steadily and clearly, toward identifying as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. Understanding how this situation developed requires understanding the Cold War origins, the specific choices made in 1949 and 1950, the decisions that turned a temporary military standoff into a permanent political arrangement. These books give you that foundation. ## Further Reading Explore more books on Asian history and Cold War politics at [/category/history](/category/history).