There has been a spate of recent articles proffering when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will likely be capable of invading Taiwan. The prognostications are interesting but unhelpful as they distract from the reality of the range of coercive actions the PRC may impose on Taiwan and what could happen now as a result of the PRC increasing pressure and a related military accident or misstep in the vicinity of Taiwan.

In December 1949, Chiang Kai-shek moved the capitol of the Republic of China (ROC) to Taipei. He intended the relocation to be temporary. He had already moved his government multiple times: when the Empire of Japan invaded China, when World War II ended, and again when Mao Zedong’s Communist insurgents took the upper hand in the Chinese Civil War.

The late nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in representations of the Japanese emperor: He was photographed as well as depicted in popular commercial polychrome woodblock prints, or nishiki-e.1 Up to this time, as Donald Keene, a biographer of Emperor Meiji, explained concisely, the monarchy in Japan was “nonvisual.”²