At the time of my writing this, two days ago, five Chinese spies were caught and arrested in the Philippines. Three days ago Philippines President Marcos promised he would return the Typhoon (an American SMRF missile system) to the US if China backed off its aggression in the Western Philippine islands. The day before that, Chinese warships prevented the Philippine coast guard from rescuing some Philippine fishermen. Not long before that, they prevented a Philippine scientific research team from landing and conducting on a different Philippine island.

I am certain that if you, the reader, were to do a quick Google research of just two words: "Philippines" and "China" an abundance of new similar articles would appear. China is not a fair player on the global stage. Its actions with regard to its neighbors are not all that different from Japan a century ago or Austria in the Balkans around the dawn of the twentieth century. To put it in a more modern perspective, I demonstrated to my students how China's current actions against the PH is eerily similar to the scenario of Russia towards Ukraine from about 2010 to 2015... and we all know how that has played out. China is simply a banana republic style dictatorship with the economic, political, and military clout to pretend at legitimacy. As true as this is for places like the Philippines, Japan, or even Australia, it is ten times more true for the Republic of China, more commonly known as Taiwan.

The PRC (mainland China) has never given up pretensions of owning this island and to this day will refuse to negotiate with any country that recognizes Taiwan's independence. See again the economic, political, and military clout comment above and you can imagine how well that bodes for the island nation. What is more, any time anyone does anything that might offend the PRC, they retaliate by invading Taiwanese waters, launching missiles over or near the island, and calling it "military drills." As you can imagine, of late this is a nearly daily occurrence.

Despite this handicap, this little democratic island nation has thrived. It has earned much goodwill recently for being a model for the rest of the world on how to effectively combat COVID (or, as Trump calls it, "the China virus"). The Struggle for Taiwan by Sulmaan Wasif Khan charts the historical course of how this has come to be. He demonstrates how this was by no means a foregone conclusion and its much likelier fate should have parallelled that of Hong Kong. He doesn't take sides in equally criticizing or praising China, the US, or the Chiangs (Kai-shek and his son Ching-kuo). Khan demonstrates how, as with most history, we have arrived where we are at by a rambling combination of missteps and blind luck. For Taiwan to remain free of the PRC's despotic grip, we need even more blind luck in the days to come.

3.5/5 ⭐️
A look into Chinese and American relations as the issue of who controlled Taiwan was being decided.

What I liked:
- Well-researched
- Covered a wide span of time to really try to get at the issue

What I didn't like:
- The chapter organization! It was way too long of a time period in one chapter. The first chapter was almost 60 pages long. In NF books, I think more medium sized chapters (not too short, not too long) are important because they allow the reader to have a good stopping point and to digest the information just presented. Just so much happened in each chapter and I kept thinking why didn't this break here.
- I would say this is more about Chinese-American diplomacy issues that uses Taiwan as the mechanism for this. I wish there had been more analysis of how the people in Taiwan today feel.

I received my copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This book fell in an interesting place between academic nonfiction and general nonfiction which I enjoyed. The author wrote well and not much jargon was used. The book could have benefitted from more subheadings within its long chapters and a bit more consistency in the time line. Another way the book could have improved the as by detailing how governance of Taiwanese citizens has worked — how PRC legislation and policies effected the daily lives of Taiwanese people. Overall, this was a highly informative book about the US governments role in PRC-ROC relations over the past century or so