'Ghost Nation' puts Taiwan’s history in present context

Chris Horton’s “Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival” is a portrait of a society that has fought, again and again, to assert its own existence.

Taiwan sits at the epicenter of a political power competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, but its story is still too often told as a subplot in someone else’s narrative. For readers in Japan, “Ghost Nation” offers something rare: a history that takes seriously the enduring weight of Japan’s colonial legacy in shaping Taiwan’s identity and its democracy.

Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival, by Chris Horton. 336 pages. PAN MACMILLAN, nonfiction.

Horton, a veteran correspondent who has lived in Taiwan for more than a decade, devotes substantial space to the transformative years of Japanese rule (1895-1945). He resists the tendency to treat this period as a historical footnote, instead presenting it as foundational to modern Taiwan. Japanese administrators unified the island under a single government, modernized its infrastructure, introduced universal education and developed agricultural innovations such as ponlai rice — still Taiwan’s dominant rice variety.

The book does not gloss over the darker side of the Empire of Japan, documenting the bloody pacification campaigns, uprisings like the 1930 Musha Incident and cultural assimilation policies that sought to make Taiwanese people not just legal but also cultural imperial subjects. Yet it also shows how modernization under Japan nurtured new political consciousness: In 1923, Taiwan’s first aviator, Hsieh Wen-ta, flew over Tokyo to drop leaflets demanding representative democracy.

Horton explicitly links this colonial legacy to Taiwan’s contested identity today. “Both the later ROC (Republic of China) military dictatorship and the CCP party-state that seeks to annex (Taiwan) today have done their best to downplay Japan’s massive influence on Taiwanese identity,” he writes in “Ghost Nation.” “This makes good sense, as this transformative Japanese influence undercuts their assertion that the Taiwanese are Chinese.”

Postwar Japan reappears in the book as a quiet but crucial partner: Its own democratic transformation influenced Taiwan’s, and leaders like Lee Teng-hui — Taiwan’s first elected president and a fluent Japanese speaker — forged close ties with Tokyo.

Horton brings the story into the present by tracing how Japan and Taiwan now find themselves aligned strategically and technologically. He highlights Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s investment in Kumamoto, where its first fabrication plant in Japan became operational in 2024. This partnership is emblematic of how the two economies are further knitting together.

While “Ghost Nation” is thoroughly researched and compellingly written, it is unapologetically partisan, leaning toward the pro-Green perspective and emphasizing Taiwan’s hard-won democratic gains. Horton spares little sympathy for the Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalist party that ruled Taiwan for decades of authoritarian one-party rule. The book lays out in unsparing detail the atrocities of the 228 Incident — a brutal 1947 government crackdown on protestors that sparked mass killings — and the White Terror, a period of martial law and political repression (1949-92) during which thousands of Taiwanese were imprisoned or executed for dissent.

Horton’s book is both a history lesson and a quiet warning. The ghosts of Taiwan’s past are not just Taiwan’s: They haunt all of us who care about the survival of free societies in the shadow of authoritarian power.