Contested Taiwan: Sovereignty, Social Movements, and Party Formation

by Lev Nachman, James Lin (series_editor), William Lavely (series_editor)

226 pages, Hardcover

Published August 19, 2025

Reviews

[David Frazier · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nachman is a go-to commentator on Taiwanese public opinion and elections, and I really wanted to like his book, but he is clearly publishing here as part of the academic career game and not to please readers. Out of 158 pages of text before footnotes, there’s maybe 40-50 pages of actual content, and it’s buried in huge amounts of filler. If you bother to sort the wheat from the chaff, you’ll find that the actual research is about a third party in Taiwanese politics, the New Power Party (NPP), that had its moment in the sun from 2016-2020 but now barely exists, so the relevance to Taiwan’s current political situation is tenuous. The filler is, first of all, huge amounts of redundancy and fluffy language. Then you have an over-general history of Taiwan’s post martial law politics (there’s much better out there, even on Wikipedia), a long chapter on Ukrainian politics (just… why?!), and his fairly boring and technical argument about “movement parties” in “contested states” (poli-sci nerd stuff), which is actually fine, only he kept beating it like a dead horse. I feel like he could’ve condensed this to a tight 60-70 pages and then it would be good, albeit niche, but maybe he’s going for tenure or whatever.

[Syntaxx · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent deep-dive into the origins and goals of the Sunflower movement in Taiwan