`Taiwan in a Changing World' has its charms

In the normal way of things I don't have any objection to self-published books. Indeed, the reverse is true. Why should an ever-shrinking number of commercial mega-publishers have a monopoly on what the world reads? The opportunity that technology provides for cheap self-publishing should be welcomed rather than looked down on. And many literary masterpieces, including James Joyce's Ulysses, have been effectively self-published in the first instance (Ulysses was published by a friend of Joyce who owned a bookshop, which amounts to the same thing).

Nonetheless, when it comes to books of political and social analysis, it does inevitably cross one's mind that there are a large number of academic publishers, especially in the US, who specialize in this sort of thing. And it is slightly unusual to come across a book like Taiwan in a Changing World, written by someone active in the field of public service and diplomatic affairs, that is privately published by the author. You would expect such a book to be able to find an university publisher somewhere to take it under its wing.

When you open this book, however, you begin to understand the situation. This is not a ground-breaking analysis of its subject, something that uncovers new sources or offers a novel and eye-opening point of view. Instead, it's an account of Taiwan's current situation, and its history since 1949, essentially for readers who know next to nothing of the place when they begin to read. It has the feeling of having been written quite fast, and of offering a benign, not ill-informed, but nevertheless not over-researched, break-down of recent events.

But this is not to say it doesn't possess a certain charm. Harish Kapur has written books on a very wide range of topics -- six books on China, for instance, plus three on India, and two on the former Soviet Union and its relations with its neighbors, many published by markedly out-of-the-way concerns. This kind of generalist approach is today rather out of fashion, but it isn't therefore to be despised. It results in books that non-specialists can readily understand, and holds out the possibility of a global view of things that conventional academic specialists wouldn't for the life of them dare to attempt.

There are some annoying errors and inconsistencies nonetheless. Kapur keeps referring in the notes to The China Yearbook for 1997 and 2000 when what he means is The Republic of China Yearbook, correctly named in his bibliography. (It's nowadays called theTaiwan Yearbook). Again, he spells Lee Teng-hui's family name "Lee" here and "Li" there, gives Taiwan's population as 22 million on one page and 23 million on another, writes "as already mentioned earlier" (either "already" or "earlier" is redundant), and so on. These are small matters but they're unsettling. The author's analysis of Taiwan's situation in the modern world, however, cannot be faulted so easily.

Harish Kapur's general conclusions are for the most part the common wisdom on the subject -- that independence, "which is what most Taiwanese want," is "hardly feasible under the present circumstances" and that China's desire to integrate the island is neither acceptable to the Taiwanese nor to the international community. Some compromise solution is therefore desirable, and what such a solution would be exactly would depend on the negotiating capacities of the two parties. There are, in other words, no surprises to be found here.