In The Struggle across the Taiwan Strait (Hoover Institution Press, 2006), Hoover fellows Ramon Myers and Jialin Zhang have written a short, concise history that informs readers as to how China divided, in 1949, into two regimes that have struggled ever since to achieve increasingly incompatible political goals.
The authors describe how, for more than a half century, the competing authorities had struggled to unify China. Then, on March 18, 2000, a political earthquake shook Taiwan when Taiwan’s people elected a new political regime that changed the rules of the game. This newly elected regime championed a new belief system, “Taiwan nationalism,” as the authors refer to it, that has not only intensified the struggle with the Mainland Chinese authorities but locked both sides into a new contest that increases the probability of war rather than peace.
Ramon H. Myers, Hoover senior fellow,is the coauthor of The First Chinese Democracy: Political Life in the Republic of China on Taiwan(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998) and author of numerous articles about Taiwan’s political and economic history. His most recent publication, as coeditor with Michel Oksenberg and David L. Shambaugh, is Making China Policy: Lessons from the Bush and Clinton Administrations(Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
Jialin Zhang is a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution. He received his degree at the Moscow Institute of International Relations in 1960 and served as a senior fellow at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies. He is the author of several Hoover Institution essays: China’s Response to the Downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (1994), An Assessment of Chinese Thinking on Trade Liberalization (1997), U.S.-China Trade Issues after the WTO and the PNTR Deal—A Chinese Perspective (2000), and The Debate on China’s Exchange Rate—Should or Will it Revalue? (2004). He is also the co author of The Turnover of Political Power in Taiwan (2002).
The Struggle across the Taiwan Strait
by Ramon H. Myers and Jialin Zhang
ISBN: 0-8179-4692-6 $15.00
168 pages July 2006
New Book Details Historical Divide between Mainland China and Taiwan
