Equally unpersuasive is Yu’s argument that the KMT should join forces with like-minded elements in China in fostering full democracy, efforts that surely would take us closer to war in the Taiwan Strait than anything the Lee and Chen administrations ever did in the name of Taiwanese independence. Toward the book’s end, Yu himself admits that the CCP prioritizes its hold on power and only sees the possibility of democracy “with Chinese characteristics” at some distant point in the future. He also ignores the impact that more than 110 years of separate rule has had on identity in Taiwan and people’s desire to link their destinies with a regime that, to all, is an alien one.
Sadly, the relatively simple — and by no means original — theory at the core of The Second Long March is marred by damnably poor editing and the author’s tendency to jump from one point to another without any seeming connection between them, which is distracting and often confusing. Outrageous passages, such as his claim that 650,000 natives of Taiwan — or one-tenth of the population — were slaughtered by Imperial Japanese forces during the colonial period (the figure is closer to 30,000, according to many experts, while only Chinese propaganda supports such numbers), serve to discredit Yu and raise questions about the intentions of his badly written, flawed and ultimately unconvincing his book.
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