ABSTRACT
This chapter looks back at Taiwan: China’s Last Frontier, published in 1991, but largely written in 1989, in the immediate aftermath of the suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests. It describes the circumstances of the book’s writing, the author’s background in Chinese studies, and the limitations of that discipline at a time when China itself was largely closed. It concludes that the book is flawed by an over-emphasis on the effects of the Tiananmen killings, and by its failure to foresee the rapid development of China, of cross-strait ties and of democratic politics in Taiwan. However, it finds that the author’s prognostications as to the future of the China–Taiwan relationship remain remarkably unchanged.
