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 light and reshaping indigenous and national identities. In so doing, Hsiau contends, they laid the basis for Taiwanese nationalism and the eventual democratization of Taiwan.

Offering bracing new perspectives on nationalism, democratization, and identity in Taiwan, this book has significant implications spanning sociology, history, political science, and East Asian studies.

"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

"Beyond the richness of the corpus and the finesse of the analyses, it is above all the theoretical approach adopted by the author that makes this publication essential in the field of Taiwan studies." - China Perspectives

"The focus on narrative makes this a valuable study of the creation of a usable past by continually altering memories of historical events and figures, and it allows Hsiau to take declarations of Chinese national identity by the return-to-reality generation at face value. He should be applauded for challenging essentialist and instrumentalist explanations and for highlighting the continued salience of Chinese identity." - Journal of Asian Studies