Andre’s Reviews > Between Assimilation and Independence: The Taiwanese Encounter Nationalist China, 1945-1950 > Status Update

What? Done already? That makes it even more puzzling that he spend so much time on japanese colonial and republican china eras.

yeah, Taiwans experience with the nationalists is even more complex than standard colonial rule.

Interesting thoughts: Reasons for not assuming the nationalists were not colonizers because the nationalists never considered themselves and Taiwan was more economically advanced than the mainland and the immigration after 1945 were more exiles than colonists. But the book says that it has some validity after all due to many similarities with the japanese colonizers.

finally, the nationalist period from 1945 on. And interesting. Not only where many nationalist party members in japan early on, and played it down as much as their communist training, but the nationalists brought japanese advicors back to train troops in Taiwan. So basically they were exactly what they accused the taiwanese off.

As interesting as it is to read how different taiwanese dealt with the japanese colonials, but I still ask why all of this is here. Is that really necessary to go into so much detail?

so basically the nationalists looked for communists on Taiwan where there were almost none. Ironic.

It is not just chinese historians who found it difficult to free themselves from mythological constructions of the Boxer Movement, that is a problem in general And as interesting as some of this stuff is, I had to ask myself constently why it is here. Is it really necessary to bring this up?

boy the chaos of the uprising sounds like a good material for a show or a film. All the chaos, the uprisings, the violence.

Hm, I saw version of the "the dogs left and the swine came" statement a few times. The dogs are the japanese and the swine the chinese, only this one here stated also that the chinese were uncultured.

So the nationalists demanded standard mandarin from the taiwanese but many newly arrived mainlanders could not speak understandable mandarin as well. And I noticed that the author also used the term dialects instead of languages. I think he might have fallen for nationalist propaganda as well.