188 Book Reviews
Françoise Mengin (2015) Fragments of an Unfinished War: Taiwanese Entrepreneurs and the Partition of China. London: Hurst Publishers. xix + 393 pages, £30 (hb), isbn: 978-0190264055. (Originally published as Fragments d’une guerre inachevée. Les entrepreneurs taiwa- nais et la partition de la Chine, Paris: Karthala, 2013.)
A territory divided by a suspended civil war—that is how political scientist Françoise Mengin represents the two sides of the Taiwan Strait in her recently translated book. The focus of the volume is on the Taiwanese entrepreneurs, Taishang. The author traces the contingent process through which they be- came central to the island’s economic growth and how they crossed the strait to become major investors in the People’s Republic of China (prc). Mengin’s goal is to show how the China–Taiwan dispute appears from the perspective of economic history. It is an approach to political economy that puts the state at the centre of analysis. Consequently, economy is described as a set of regulated activities. The author argues that economic behaviour across the Taiwan Strait has been shaped by two sets of legislations, one recognised and the other not. The author’s historical emphasis explains the chronological arrangement of the book. Mengin sets out by affirming that the communist revolution in 1949 was mirrored by a Nationalist counterrevolution on Taiwan. The island was turned into a stronghold from which the mainland would be retaken by force. Such were the origins of an island regime hostile to free enterprise: it protected those businesses that served the needs of the militarised and state- dominated economy and favoured capitalists from mainland China over local entrepreneurs. This may seem an unlikely setting for the development of an internationally competitive sector of small and medium-sized enterprises, but Mengin maintains that this is precisely what happened. Taiwanese entrepre- neurs were excluded from a domestic market dominated by rentier industrial- ists tied to the Kuomintang (kmt). However, the author argues that this very exclusion forced them into a highly competitive and unprotected sector on the fringes of the island economy, which opened up to the global market with the Nineteen-Point Reform in 1960. Here, the author emphatically rejects the theory that Taiwan would have been a developmental state. By stressing the contingencies of the island’s path toward high economic growth, she positions herself against researchers who provide ex post facto rationality to the deci- sions of an anti-entrepreneurial state that unwittingly chased the Taishang onto the world market. Mengin continues to see parallel trajectories during and following the in- ternational community’s progressive derecognition of Taiwan in the 1970s.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi 10.1163/24688800-00201013
At this point, both mainland China and Taiwan entered into what she calls a Thermidorian phase: without abandoning their original goals, the two regimes postponed their utopian agenda and sought economic responses to political crisis. Here she is following Jean-François Bayart, who considers contemporary ‘Thermidorism’ to be the turn of revolutionary regimes to ‘managerial reason’ as well as to a strategy of opening up to the ‘capitalist world economy’ (p. 83). For China and Taiwan, this meant that plans for communism, on the one hand, and nationalist victory, on the other, were put on indefinite hold in favour of economic liberalisation and opening up to the world economy. In practice, the position that economic activity was politically neutral created the conditions for Taishang investment on the mainland long before the two governments formally authorised it. While the democratisation of the Nationalist regime firmly rooted the Republic of China (roc) on Taiwan, it did not spell the end of the China– Taiwan dispute. The one-China principle remained the condition for political exchange across the Taiwan Strait, which led to legal consequences that ben- efited Taiwanese investment on the mainland. Mengin is particularly sensible to how regulations produce unexpected economic opportunities and modes of circumvention. In the Taishang relocating to the mainland, she sees a group whose unique status as transnational entrepreneurs crossing an unrecognised border gave them a comparative advantage over foreign investors. Taiwanese entrepreneurs enjoyed benefits reserved both for foreigners and for Chinese. Through collusion with local officials, they thrived in a legal vacuum where strategic adaption was more important than a legal framework that only de- veloped ex post facto. The last chapter of the book argues that the ruling elites’ readiness to sepa- rate economy from politics has led to a strategic subjection of the Taishang to the one-China principle. Turning to Taiwanese political discourse, the author shows how the entrepreneurs have indirectly become agents of Chinese sover- eignty. Their seemingly economic and technical demands are deeply political as they relate to the concrete meaning of the unrecognised border between Taiwan and the mainland. Indeed, Mengin notes a general depoliticisation on the island because no political party can present a realistic solution to the problem of the border’s nonrecognition. Françoise Mengin seamlessly brings together recent research on Taiwanese history and economy with important theoretical works on globalisation, na- tionalism, postcolonialism, and the concept of politics. She relies on a large body of empirical literature written in French, English, and Chinese, to which she adds (in the second half of the book) her own observations from fieldwork
international journal of taiwan studies 2 (2019) 177-193