Democratic Deepening, Transitional Justice, and Taiwanese Identity
21 volumes
Vol. 1
By the late 1990s, Taiwan's political landscape stood at an unprecedented crossroads. More than half a century of uninterrupted Kuomintang rule had weathered the lifting of martial law in 1987, the full re-election of the legislature, and the first direct presidential election in 1996. Yet the island's democratic transition remained incomplete so long as no opposition party had ever assumed the highest office. Internal fissures within the KMT, disillusionment with "black gold" politics, and the maturing organizational strength of the Democratic Progressive Party converged to set the stage for a pivotal contest.
Vol. 2
In the spring of 2003, an unprecedented new coronavirus slipped quietly into Taiwan from abroad, and in April Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) erupted into a massive nosocomial outbreak inside Taipei Municipal Heping Hospital, becoming one of the gravest tests in Taiwan's postwar public-health history. That year, SARS spread across many parts of Asia, a disease transmitted by droplets at close range and carrying a fatality rate not to be taken lightly, plunging the whole of society into unprecedented panic.
Vol. 3
At 1:45 in the afternoon on March 19, 2004, President Chen Shui-bian and Vice President Annette Lu were standing in an open jeep on the third section of Jinhua Road in Tainan. There were firecrackers and crowds along the street, and two shots went off inside that noise without anybody registering them at once. Lu's right knee was grazed. Chen had an eleven-centimeter wound across his abdomen. The motorcade went on some distance before turning toward Chi Mei Hospital.
Vol. 4
On December 31, 2004, as the New Year's bells rang out over Taipei's Xinyi district, a skyscraper reaching 508 meters officially opened — Taipei 101, in that moment the tallest building in the world, lifting Taiwan's skyline onto the international stage. Before its completion, the Xinyi Planning District was still a rising new urban area, and the tower's springing up from the ground was like planting in this city a flag facing the world, symbolizing how Taiwan, after its economic takeoff and democratic transition, yearned to converse with the world in a wholly new posture.
Vol. 5
2006 was the third year of Chen Shui-bian's second term. In May, the president's son-in-law, Chao Chien-ming, came under investigation for insider trading in Taiwan Development Corporation stock. Then came the state affairs fund — a presidential budget line designated for confidential diplomacy, which was found to have been settled with false receipts. On November 3 the Special Investigation Division indicted First Lady Wu Shu-jen and three others, and stated in the indictment that the president was implicated and was not being charged only because of his immunity while in office.
Vol. 6
On January 5, 2007, the Taiwan High Speed Rail officially entered service. From that day, streamlined orange-and-white trains raced along the western corridor, compressing what had been a journey of several hours between north and south into roughly ninety minutes, thoroughly rewriting the Taiwanese imagination of distance and time, and turning the 'one-day living circle' from a slogan into daily reality.
Vol. 7
In the summer of 2008, a domestic film set against the backdrop of Hengchun in Pingtung — Cape No. 7 — opened quietly, yet through word of mouth it ignited a wave of moviegoing that swept across Taiwan, ultimately setting a box-office record for a local film in Taiwanese cinema history and coming to be seen as the pivotal starting point of Taiwan's domestic-film revival.
Vol. 8
Typhoon Morakot made landfall in Hualien on August 7, 2009. Its winds were not exceptional; it moved very slowly, and it emptied itself onto the mountains of southern Taiwan. The Alishan station recorded more than three thousand millimeters over three days, close to a full year's rainfall there. On August 8 the rainfall maps for Pingtung, Kaohsiung and Chiayi went past their upper bounds.
Vol. 9
Hung Chung-chiu was a corporal in the 542nd Brigade of the Sixth Army Corps, born in 1989, a graduate of National Cheng Kung University, and due to be discharged on July 6, 2013. At the end of June he was sent to detention barracks for bringing a camera-equipped phone into his unit. On the afternoon of July 3 he was put through physical training in the detention block at the Gaoshanding camp in Yangmei; the temperature that day was above thirty-five degrees. He collapsed partway through, was taken to hospital, and died the next day. The cause was disseminated intravascular coagulation brought on by heat exhaustion.
Vol. 10
Chi Po-lin was a civil servant at the National Expressway Engineering Bureau, and part of his job was photographing construction progress from the air. He had been shooting from helicopters since the 1990s, for more than twenty years. After Morakot in 2009, having seen the mountains of southern Taiwan opened up from above, he gave up the three years of service that stood between him and his pension, mortgaged his house, and went to make a film.
Vol. 11
On the night of March 18, 2014, a group of students and citizens climbed over the walls, broke through the police lines, and stormed into the legislative chamber on Jinan Road in Taipei, launching an occupation that would last twenty-four days. This movement, later known as the Sunflower Student Movement, was one of the largest and most far-reaching civic movements in Taiwan since the lifting of martial law, and the first time the younger generation intervened so directly and resolutely in the decision of a major national policy.
Vol. 12
On December 28, 2015, the Southern Branch of the National Palace Museum officially opened for trial operation in Taibao City, Chiayi County, bringing the Palace Museum's collection — long concentrated at Waishuangxi in Taipei — systematically into Taiwan's south for the first time. Positioned as a 'Museum of Asian Art and Culture,' this branch was not merely a newly built exhibition hall, but carried a profound contemporary ideal — cultural equity, and a southern perspective that repositioned Taiwan.
Vol. 13
On January 16, 2016, Tsai Ing-wen was elected president with 6,894,744 votes, 56.12 percent. On the same day the Democratic Progressive Party took sixty-eight seats in the legislature, its first outright majority. Executive and legislative power changed hands together in a single election, something that had not happened since the first direct presidential vote in 1996.
Vol. 14
On May 17, 2019, Taiwan's Legislative Yuan passed on its third reading the Enforcement Act of Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748, allowing two people of the same sex to establish a permanent union in marriage by law, and Taiwan thereby became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage.
Vol. 15
At half past nine on the morning of 1 October 2019, the bridge across the harbour at Nanfang'ao in Yilan broke in the middle and came down. A tanker truck that was just coming off the bridge fell with the deck, was pinned under a steel girder and caught fire. Three fishing boats were moored below, the Hsin Tai Sheng 33, 266 and 366, and all three were crushed under the fallen deck.
Vol. 16
On December 31, 2019, the Centers for Disease Control sent an email to the World Health Organization mentioning cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan and asking whether there was human-to-human transmission. The email would later be quoted endlessly. On the day itself nobody in Taiwan noticed. Three weeks after that, on January 20, the Central Epidemic Command Center was stood up, with Health Minister Chen Shih-chung as its commander.
Vol. 17
In April 1976, nineteen engineers from the Industrial Technology Research Institute flew to Pennsylvania and moved into an RCA plant for training. Their average age was twenty-eight, and what they had come to learn was a seven-micron process for integrated circuits. The transfer agreement cost about three and a half million US dollars, and there were legislators at the time who asked why the government was paying that much for a business somebody else was preparing to shut down.
Vol. 18
Entering the twenty-first century, the Taiwan Strait once again became one of the most closely watched flashpoints in world politics. The relative equilibrium of the late 1990s — a tacit framework built upon the 1992 talks and Lee Teng-hui's cautious pragmatism — gave way under the weight of three interlocking shifts: Taiwan's consolidating democratic identity, the People's Republic of China's accelerating military and economic power, and the gradual erosion of the post-Cold War status quo in the Indo-Pacific.
Vol. 19
When martial law was lifted in 1987 and the ban on new political parties and newspapers followed, Taiwan inherited a forty-year backlog of unacknowledged political violence. The February 28 Incident of 1947, in which an uprising against post-war Kuomintang rule was crushed with an estimated ten to twenty thousand dead, had been an unspeakable subject for two generations. Tens of thousands more had been executed, imprisoned, or blacklisted under the White Terror of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, their files sealed and their families silenced. Democratization without reckoning, many argued, would be democratization in name only.
Vol. 20
Entering the twenty-first century, Taiwanese society gradually awoke to a profound crisis: the mother tongues passed down for generations on this island — Taiwanese (Taiwanese Hokkien), Hakka, and the languages of the various Indigenous peoples — were rapidly being lost, and many of the younger generation could no longer fluently speak the language of their grandparents; some Indigenous languages even faced the endangered plight of having only a handful of elders left who could speak them.
Vol. 21
"Are you Taiwanese, Chinese, or both?" This deceptively plain survey question, first posed systematically by National Chengchi University's Election Study Center in 1992, has become one of the most telling barometers of a society in quiet revolution. At the outset, fewer than twenty percent of respondents answered "Taiwanese only." Three decades later, that figure exceeds sixty percent, while exclusively Chinese identification has collapsed to near single digits. No amount of policy, propaganda, or protest could have produced the shift alone; it is the cumulative work of democratic elections, a free press, generational turnover, cross-strait estrangement, and an expanding civic imagination.
