Abstract
There is something unusual about Hu Shaohua’s book—for starters, the title Foreign Policies Toward Taiwan has no subject. A natural question one may ask is whose foreign policies towards Taiwan? A quick look at the book’s table of contents will reveal the answer: the author seeks to examine more than a dozen countries’ policies towards the island nation. The countries that the author chooses to study vary in size and power (from the USA to Kiribati), and are spread out across the globe. With such a comprehensive scope, it is no longer surprising the book title has no subject. Had the author chosen one, it would have been ‘the World’s foreign policies toward Taiwan’.
However, for such a broad topic, the book is a short one. Its main body is divided into nine chapters across a mere 151 pages, including on average four to five pages of endnotes following each chapter. Foreign Policies Toward Taiwan has many bright spots. Overall, though, the imbalance between the book’s grand scope and its sporadic and brief chapters hurts the depth of analysis.
Let me start with the strengths of the book. The author is absolutely right in pointing out that the study of Taiwan’s relations with the world has been overshadowed by contemplations of the USA and China. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to view the study of Taiwan’s place in the world as a subfield of Sino-US relations. Hu should be applauded for attempting to expand the scope of examination to second, third and fourth-tier countries’ policies towards the island. The goal is ambitious but also sensible. It is worth asking to what extent we may examine other countries’ foreign policies independently of the Chinese and American influences.
Another strength of the book lies in Hu’s effort of trying to create a holistic approach to foreign policy analysis—a framework that the author terms as ‘4-P’ (player, preference, prospect and power). The author also examines the making and evolution of foreign policies at multiple levels: individual, domestic, and international. For decades, the study of international relations and foreign policy has been characterized by theoretical turf wars. By emphasizing linkage politics, He makes a genuine effort of bridging the gap between structuralist and norm-based theories.
Unfortunately, these ambitious goals, which the author lays out in the introduction chapter, fail to materialize in the eight empirical chapters to follow. I see two major problems. The first is that, if the author’s goal were to test the validity of his 4-P framework, it would be vital that this framework is present throughout the book. This is not the case. The only chapter where the reader can clearly tell the presence of the framework is the one on US–Taiwan relations. For other chapters, the reader needs to make her own effort to trying to find the relevance of the 4-P framework. In one case, namely the second chapter titled ‘Taiwan in the modern world’, the author simply states he would rely on another theoretical perspective, namely Immanuel Wallerstein’s World Systems Perspective (WSP), because it fits this chapter better. In doing so, Hu undermines his study somewhat. One cannot just pick whatever theory ‘better’ fits individual chapters. Some common analytical framework has to run through the study to create a binding, falsifiable argument. Otherwise, the practice would amount to theoretical cherry-picking and teleology. The result is not a holistic approach but a theoretical hodgepodge. For the second chapter to have retained a coherent analysis, Hu needed to address the connections between WSP and his own 4-P framework.
A related issue is that there is some confusion about what Hu is attempting to achieve; is his aim to test the validity of the 4-P framework or to offer a brief, lecture-like factual description of a number of countries’ policies towards Taiwan. The introduction seems to envision the first goal, but the following eight chapters veer towards the latter. If Hu’s focus is theoretical, the book does not really need to examine such a broad clustering of countries. If the author had chosen to do so, the book’s length would have had to be greatly expanded. After all, with chapter titles like ‘The US and Taiwan’, ‘Japan and Taiwan’, ‘The EU and Taiwan’ and ‘The Two Koreas and Taiwan’, each case in itself can support a book-length project. To use the chapter on two Koreas as an example: with only fourteen pages, it would be unreasonable to expect any in-depth analysis of how these two countries have dealt with Taiwan over time. These two countries have fundamentally different institutions, configurations of national interest and places in regional and global diplomacies. The 4-P framework could have helped tie these two countries together, yet it is hardly detectable.
The second major problem concerns the 4-P framework itself, specifically the lack of conceptual clarification regarding the various ‘Ps’. For instance, Hu treats ‘player’ and ‘preference’ as two independent variables. This invites the question of how one can delineate one variable from another; where does one variable’s relevance stops and the other’s starts? To put it another way—how do we talk about ‘players’ independently of their ‘preferences’ or the ‘prospects’ they seek to achieve? How do we talk about ‘players’ independently of the ‘powers’ they amass? What is a player in the absence of her preferences, prospects and power? The one chapter where this framework is most visible is the one on US–Taiwan relations. However, even this chapter does not offer much clarification on conceptual boundaries among these four independent variables. On the contrary, when the author talks about players, much discussion is on their preferences and prospects.
Overall, the value of Foreign Policies Toward Taiwan lies in Hu’s succinct description of a number of countries’ foreign policy trajectories towards Taiwan. As such, it would be helpful and informative to anyone who wants to acquire a factual foundation of understanding Taiwan’s relations with the world. On the theoretical front, though, the book’s analysis is cursory and incoherent. Ultimately, it fails to live up to the grand goal it proposes to achieve in the introduction chapter.