Historians studying Taiwan’s past long placed it within one of two national paradigms: with a few notable exceptions, such as Ts’ao Yung-ho’s oceanic vision of island history and Su Beng’s history of anti-state resistance, it was a part of either China’s or Japan’s history. However, during the past two decades, there has been a dramatic and welcome expansion of scholarship that, without disconnecting Taiwan from these relevant national and imperial contexts, has placed it at the center of its own history. That shift has allowed for a much deeper understanding of the historical experiences of Taiwan’s diverse populations, which in turn has facilitated the incorporation of Taiwan into broad comparative frameworks.

This roundtable provides a survey of this paradigm shift through six examples of new research on Taiwanese history during the twentieth century that foregrounds Taiwan and its peoples and engages with both the long-established and new comparative frameworks. Tadashi Ishikawa will discuss the circulation of gendered knowledge between Japan and Taiwan and analyze how ordinary Taiwanese men and women both encountered and shaped those ideas, in the context of intellectual discourses and the judicial system. Fang Yu Hu will use oral histories from Taiwanese in Manchuria during the 1930s and 1940s to understand their duality as colonized subjects and colonial agents, focusing on how they used their education, Han ethnicity, and gender to their own benefit before and after Japan’s defeat. Evan Dawley will examine the unstable position of Taiwanese who were located outside of Taiwan at the end of World War II, viewing them within a longer history of nation-building through Chinese diasporas by the government of the Republic of China as a unique challenge to that national project. Rebecca Nedostup will place “postwar” Taiwan in a regional and global history of displacement by considering seizures of land and property and violence against the person as coeval events in the creation of the ROC on Taiwan, and asking if the transitional justice projects that are legacies of that displacement allow Taiwan’s particularities to fit into broader historiographies. Dominic Yang will investigate issues of memory and memorialization by examining the construction of, and people’s engagement with, statues and monuments to Chiang Kai-shek, before and after Taiwan’s democratization, with special attention to the problem of why their removal remains so controversial decades after the end of martial law. Wayne Soon will present on Taiwan’s recent activities in controlling COVID, situating its remarkable success within the context of longstanding Taiwanese struggles with democracy, borders, sovereignty, and infectious diseases over the past century. As a group, the presenters will demonstrate that this new Taiwan history, which concentrates on the Japanese colonial era and especially on the post-1945 period, both revises earlier scholarship on Taiwan and the Taiwanese and contributes to the global history of the twentieth century.