Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan

Margaret Hillenbrand, author of Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China:
In Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan, A-chin Hsiau’s striking achievement is to demonstrate how committed activists who came of age during the era of martial law used indirect politics to pave the way for Taiwan’s later democratization. Hsiau shows compellingly how youth and its passions have the power to remake the world even amid political repression.

J. Megan Greene, author of The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan: Science Policy and the Quest for Modernization:
Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan explores an understudied period and adds nuance to the scholarly conversation about Taiwanese identity. Through detailed analysis, this book exposes how history has been rewritten to serve various identity construction efforts in Taiwan. It sheds new light on just how complicated and changeable identity can be.

Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, author of Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law:
In this theoretically informed and empirically grounded study, A-chin Hsiau locates the genesis of the prevailing cultural nativism in twenty-first-century Taiwan in the postwar generation’s “return-to-reality” movement of the 1970s. The work powerfully illuminates the early stages of the ascendance of an island-centered historical narrative that presently rivals, and is poised to supplant, the erstwhile dominant Sinocentric national discourse.