Democratizing Taiwan

J. Bruce Jacobs is Professor of Asian Languages and Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 1975. Professor Jacobs has published numerous works on Taiwan and China over the past forty years.

"...it is rare and welcome to see a focused, pithy and readable destillation of a lifetime's experience covering a subject - Taiwan's democracy - that affects us all more than we care to realise." - Nick Frisch, in: South China Morning Post, April 29, 2012"For the most part, however, Democratizing Taiwan is a valuable rundown of the forces and events that brought Taiwan peacefully from authoritarian one-party rule dominated by one segment of the population to broad-based political participation and the free expression of human rights. Although perhaps more detailed than the general reader will require, it will provide solid reference for the serious student of Taiwan affairs. [..] Heavily annotated with citations to published sources, the book is also enriched by the author’s personal observations and interviews from his frequent trips to Taiwan over the decades. His analysis is particularly keen when evaluating Taiwan’s electoral process and the outcome of various key elections, including many that he witnessed." - Don Shapiro, in: Taiwan Business Topics (December 2012)"...Democratizing Taiwan is an important, and eminently accessible, addition to a relatively small body of literature that looks specifically at the unique experiment that is Taiwan’s emergence as a democracy." - J. Michael Cole, in: Taipei Times, 15 January 2013"The author has clearly achieved his main goal [of "explaining Taiwan’s democratization"]: in seven chapters... he convincingly identifies the major factors of Taiwan’s democratization... and analyses its key episodes, particularly since 1988 when Lee Teng-hui succeeded Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s son, as president of the Republic of China." - Jean-Pierre Cabestan, in: The China Quarterly 212 (December 2012)"In this book, Bruce Jacobs gives a powerful account of how Taiwan became democratic, presenting the main actors and key developments. (…) Jacobs also described the similarities between the Japanese colonial government and Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalists, who came over from China in 1945-49, and ruled the island with iron fist for some 40 years, until democratization set in the mid- 1980s.(…) Jacobs is strongest in his description of events and personalities during the presidencies of Lee Teng-hui (1988-2000) and Chen Shui-bian (2000-2008) when most of the island’s progress towards a full democracy took place. (…) Conclusion: excellent account of Taiwan’s process of democratization. Highly recommended." - Gerrit van der Wees, in: Taiwan Communiqué, 140 (February/March 2013)"This is an excellent study of an important subject. It is not likely to be superseded any time soon." - James D. Seymour, Chinese University of Hong Kong, in: The China Review, 13 (2013)"This new title, a contemporary account that benefits from analytical distance from the heady (and murky) 1980s and ’90s, is a worthy addition to the list of important works on Taiwan’s democratic transition. Jacobs has long been one of the sharpest analysts of Taiwanese politics, and his encyclopedic knowledge and mastery of empirical material is in evidence in this dense and balanced account. (...) Although this is a well-known story, Jacobs re-tells it very well, drawing on a large range of sources, many of them Chinese, and materials that provide enormous detail and nuance. (…) Jacobs is characteristically forthright (not hesitating to call the one-party era KMT a colonial regime on a par with the Japanese), and his judgements are offered pithily throughout (…). In short, this is a well-written and well-researched account of political developments in Taiwan in the past 100 years or so. For Taiwan scholars it is a very useful reference, covering major (and minor) events in the detail that we sometimes forget. Students will especially benefit from a single text covering political developments in Taiwan.(…) Democratizing Taiwan comes highly recommended to those looking for a concise and rigorous account of the events and behind-the-scenes machinations that ultimately led to Taiwan becoming a fully fledged democracy." - Jonathan Sullivan, University of Nottingham, in: The China Journal, 70 (2013)"This book provides new insights into Taiwan's democratization process, and is recommended for anyone who wants to find out more about the vicissitudes of political control and democratic reforms in Taiwan today." - Jason Lim, University of Wollongong, in: Asian Studies Review, 38"In Democratizing Taiwan, Bruce Jacobs, a scholar with decades of experience in Taiwan studies, has distilled his knowledge into a volume that examines political change from the 1970s to 2011. Jacobs focuses more on constructing a narrative than discussing models of political development. This makes for a clearly written volume from which nonspecialists can learn much. This account reviews Taiwan under Japanese and Nationalist rule and then introduces some of the factors that contributed to democratization. The volume devotes most of its attention to the presidencies of Lee Teng-hui, Chen Shui-bian, and Ma Ying-jeou. Democratizing Taiwan is rich with detail on polling data and election competition at both the island-wide and local levels." - Steven Phillips, in: China Review International, 19 (4/2012)"Jacobs’ (2012) thick description of the process of democratization in Taiwan is a rich work firmly in the tradition of information-gathering that, in turn, fosters conceptual clarity or analysis in Asian studies." - O. Fiona Yap: "‘East is East, and West is West’? Reimagining Asian Exceptionalism and the Study of Democratization", in: Government and Opposition, Vol. 50, No. 1 (2015), pp. 140–163