TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — On Saturday night in Taipei, down a quiet alley in the city’s Wanhua District, just a couple of blocks from the glowing screen-lit concourses of Ximending, a small bookshop rooted in the Xi-era Hong Kong and China diasporas hosted a capacity crowd for an event with an American writer.
Chris Horton, a journalist based in Taiwan for over a decade, had come to Nowhere Books to give a talk for the release of the Mandarin edition of his book “Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival” (幽影之國：台灣的故事與其奮鬥求生的400年). Over the past year, he has traveled around Asia, Europe, and North America promoting it.
Horton has written on Taiwan for a long list of international publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Nikkei Asia, and Bloomberg, where he was a staff writer. Before moving to Taiwan, he lived for many years in China followed by a stint in Hong Kong.
Although long known to people who follow English-language news about Taiwan, Horton’s profile has risen with the book’s publication, with the likes of Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) even photographed handing out copies to visiting lawmakers.
The following draws on Horton’s talk and written responses to questions from Taiwan News.
On the relevance of the Mandarin edition of Ghost Nation
“I have been very lucky to have interviewed a lot of the people who have shaped modern Taiwan,” Horton wrote to Taiwan News. “That includes the last interviews given by both Lee Teng-hui and Su Beng, as well as the first interview with Tsai Ing-wen after she stepped down as president.”
“I also had the good fortune to interview Lin Fei-fan shortly before he was appointed to the National Security Council — he really opened up about his political journey, starting with when his father would take him to protests as a kid. I think Kolas Yotaka's words describing the subtle and less-subtle types of discrimination faced by Indigenous Taiwanese might offer food for thought for non-Indigenous Taiwanese.”
“I also know how difficult it can be to explain Taiwan to foreigners. I hope the book can be useful to Taiwanese people who want their foreign partners, family, and friends to better understand their homeland so that they can have more substantial discussions of Taiwan's past, present, and future.”
On Chinese namefare over Taiwan
“Taiwan isn’t seen even when it is seen,” Horton told the audience at his event. “When you win a gold medal in the Olympics, you have this ridiculous flag, this Olympic flag with the plum blossom and the KMT emblem in the center, and nobody in the world knows what that is.”
“Actually, that KMT emblem is very appropriate because it was the KMT who negotiated the whole Zhonghua Taibei (中華台北, Chinese Taipei) silliness in 1981,” he explained.
He went on to note that Beijing has pressured journalists to refer to Tibet by the Chinese name Xizang (西藏), while East Turkestan becomes Xinjiang (新疆), meaning “new frontier” or “new territory”; Inner Mongolia becomes Beijiang (北疆), or “northern frontier”; and even Manchuria, homeland of the Manchus whose loose and overextended Qing Empire provides the historical basis for many of China’s expansive territorial claims, is simply Dongbei (東北), or “the northeast,” in contemporary CCP parlance.
“That’s what awaits Taiwan if it becomes part of China,” he said.
On historical misconceptions about Taiwan
“I lived in China for 13 years and Hong Kong for two before ever visiting Taiwan,” Horton wrote in an email. “I'd absorbed much more of the CCP line on Taiwan than I thought I had.”
“I didn't realize the Dutch were the first outsiders to colonize Taiwan. I didn't realize just how big Japan's influence on modern Taiwanese identity was and still is. I had no idea about 228 — not only the atrocities committed by the KMT, but also how the United States provided material support and political cover for the massacres of March 1947.”
“When I first arrived in Taiwan, most international coverage of Taiwan was done by China-based reporters who wrote about Taiwan from a Chinese perspective, often only including Chinese and KMT commentators. I didn't know at the time that the four years between 1945 and 1949 were the only four years in all of human history that a Chinese-identifying government based in China controlled all of Taiwan. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that Taiwan controlled territory across the strait in Kinmen and Matsu.”
On whether Taiwan has become less of a ghost in recent years
“I started writing the book in 2022. In the four-plus years since then, I would say the world sees and understands Taiwan much better than before. While there is much room for improvement of international media coverage of Taiwan, it is being covered with more breadth and depth than ever before, although starting from a relatively low bar,” he wrote.
“Regarding Taiwan's global visibility, it is worth noting that China does not control this; it is the rest of the world's countries who actually control how visible Taiwan is, and most of them tend to pretend Taiwan and their relations with Taiwan don't exist in order to avoid offending Beijing. The CCP knows this, which is why it attempts to disrupt or suppress any display of Taiwan's sovereignty or international solidarity with Taiwan anywhere on the planet.”
“It is the complicity of the world's largest and most powerful democracies in Taiwan's international isolation that I find most hypocritical. That said, as with international journalism, I would say that this has improved noticeably in recent years, and the diplomatic corps in Taipei is bigger than it's ever been since Taiwan's democratization in the 1990s, and Taipei-based diplomats have been more vocal than ever in speaking up for Taiwan, both here on the ground and when reporting back to their capitals.”
On whether he is more concerned about Taiwan than before
“Certainly more,” Horton wrote. “While I don't think an attack by China is likely this year or the next, I do see the next presidential election being likely to precipitate a crisis.”
“Should Lai win, then Xi may abandon hope of the KMT ever returning to power and decide to increase pressure. Should the KMT win, the government would in all likelihood move closer to Beijing, leading to social unrest.”
“Meanwhile as the PLA continues to upgrade its capabilities, especially in drones and robots, I worry that Taiwan's ability to deter is being weakened by the KMT-TPP coalition that currently controls the Legislative Yuan. With the PLA leadership whittled down by Xi's ongoing purge, Taiwan has a golden opportunity right now to build up its domestic defense industry, especially drones.”
“But for Taiwanese companies to make large long-term investments, there must be signalling from the government that it is committed to procurement going forward. The KMT and TPP stripped that signalling from Lai's special defense budget, resulting in the stunting of the drone industry's development here, and just as crucially, wasted time as Xi works to get his military in order.”
Green shoots and room to maneuver
“Taiwan’s visibility is not determined by Taiwan, and it’s not determined by China; it’s determined by the outside world,” Horton said to the crowd as the evening wore on. Regarding the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, where China recently failed to pressure organizers to change the name of the Taiwan pavilion to an unintelligible jumble of letters at a major art world event, he said, “That was Taiwan winning one. China took its ball and went home. And that doesn’t happen very often.”
“What was the key?” he said. “Local solidarity. The communists aren’t good at what they do. They’re just relentless.”
He reminded the largely Taiwanese audience that Taiwan has leverage too: last year, a threat to restrict semiconductor exports to South Africa after the country downgraded Taiwan’s representative offices and sought to force its Pretoria office to relocate to Johannesburg marked a more assertive turn in Taiwanese diplomacy.
Toward the close of the event, Horton asked, “If everyone starts calling Taiwan a country, what’s Beijing going to do? Blow up the whole world?”
The line drew a burst of uneasy laughter from the audience. Soon afterward, attendees began lining up for the book signing.
