What happens when we think of Taiwan as a revolutionary place?: A Conversation with Catherine Chou, co-author of REVOLUTIONARY TAIWAN

Those who’ve monitored English-language online discourse on “Taiwan issues” for the past decade or so may be familiar with the lucid lyricism and rigorous clarity of Catherine Chou (perhaps first known by her then-Twitter handle, “@catielila.”)

I’ve long admired Catherine for her rare ability to braid political theory, historical context, and lived affect; how she insists that Taiwan’s story be told not only honestly and intelligibly, but with great dignity and deference to the people living there. In a growing quagmire of bad “Taiwan takes” with limited credibility, nuance, and compassion, Catherine’s perspective becomes even more vital.

In 2024, Catherine and co-author Mark Harrison published Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order (Cambria Press). The book asks: how has Taiwan made and remade nationhood under conditions that consistently deny it recognition as such? Tracing Taiwan’s postwar incorporation into the Republic of China, the violence of authoritarian rule following the 228 Incident, the KMT’s retreat to the island after 1949, and the subsequent unravelling of ROC legitimacy amid Cold War realignments, the book charts how Taiwan came to be politically synonymous with a state that both claims and constrains it.

Written in beautiful, clear prose and grounded in local histories and observations, Revolutionary Taiwan avoids heavy theoretical vocabulary without sacrificing analytical depth. Its four thematic chapters, framed by a prologue and epilogue, offer readers a nuanced account of contested nationhood, one that mirrors Taiwan’s own political condition.

As Chou and Harrison write, “a coherent national Taiwanese story cannot be told in terms that will be understood within the international system,” an order in which Taiwan is said to possess neither territory nor history. Yet it is precisely this contradiction that animates the book’s most generative insights. Taiwanese identity here is not assumed, but historically chosen—“declared rather than assumed; not simply born but inculcated.”

In this interview, I speak with Catherine about what it means to write tenderly from within that contradiction, why Taiwan’s unfinished revolution deserves new political languages, and Revolutionary Taiwan’s place in the diasporic imagination.

Leona: I’d love to start with the origin story of Revolutionary Taiwan. How did this project come together, and how did your co-authorship take shape? 

Catherine: Growing up, I had this sort of wild idea that I should write a book explaining how contemporary Taiwan came to be – this under-recognized nation-state that had emerged from martial law and intense geopolitical pressure with a distinct sense of its own history and identity. I had the privilege of being raised by parents who loved Taiwan, who brought us to visit often, spoke Tâi-gí to us, talked openly to us about the politics and history of the island, and raised us in community with other Taiwanese Americans. Because of this, I was frustrated by mainstream discourse in English about Taiwan that seemed to completely overlook people like my family. Yet like most millennial children-of-immigrants, I did not have literacy in my heritage languages and was thus stymied in my ability to research about Taiwan. 

Leona: I could really sense that you felt called to write this, but I thought it was interesting that it wasn’t your primary academic focus at first, right? 

Catherine: The field of Taiwan Studies was still nascent in the US and I didn’t have enough confidence as a young adult to seek it out and contribute to it. I went to graduate school in early modern European history instead, an invaluable experience that taught me how professional historians write history: by making arguments and providing frameworks, and by utilizing material that has been overlooked or could be interpreted in alternative ways.  

Leona: But it’s like that Frank Bidart poem– “what you love is your fate.”

Catherine: About ten years ago, I decided that I would try to write my book and began searching for ways to level-up my skills while juggling full-time work. I started a Twitter account and tweeted my way into meeting a community of writers, academics, and journalists focused on Taiwan, including most significantly my future co-author, Mark Harrison, senior lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Tasmania. When the pandemic hit and my work moved online, I renewed my Taiwan passport and ended up staying for nearly two years, during which time I gained more proficiency in Chinese characters and Tâi-gí romanization, travelled the main island and Green Island, and met with Mark weekly on Google Meets. 

I am fully indebted to him for taking on this unpaid, years-long project with me. Mark has been studying Taiwan since the late 1980s. He has an archive of writing and photographs stretching from the end of martial law to the present. He is one of the leading commentators on Taiwan in Australia, a country that has so much in common with Taiwan as a Pacific Island, an indigenous homeland, a ‘middle power’, and yet often (like so many other places) discounts the views of Taiwanese people and the centrality of Taiwan to the functioning of the modern world. So we wrote this book for a global Anglophone audience. 

Leona: I think we at TaiwaneseAmerican.org were lucky to be an early witness to this project! Seven years ago, we published a compelling, sharp essay of yours in commemoration of the 228 Massacre, in which you’d declared that “Taiwan’s Revolution is here… [and] has no single declaration of independence but rather dozens.” 

I remember being so struck by the incisive way you articulated the “creative accounting” of the Taiwanese people to “live between hope and delusion, to pursue both peace and revolution at the same time.” 

Catherine: My 2019 guest essay for TaiwaneseAmerican.org was the first time I was able to publicly work through some of these ideas. I had visited Cuba in January 2019, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the ‘victory of the Cuban Revolution’, and besides the strange positionality of being an American in Cuba, I was also struck by the parallels between Cuba and Taiwan, as island nations that are under-recognized diplomatically and also both so  central and marginal to geopolitics. (Indeed, there is a novel by Huang Chong Kai called The Formosan Exchange that imagines the populations of Cuba and Taiwan just magically switching one day, and the resulting global fallout.) I wanted to ask: what happens when we think of Taiwan as a revolutionary place, or Taiwanese nationalism as a revolutionary force? 

If you ask what makes Taiwan de facto independent, a lot of people will point to the currency, president, passport, and so on. But these are artifacts of the Republic of China. What makes Taiwan a country (or at least ‘not the same as China’), I would argue, is that people here by and large identify as Taiwanese; they have shared norms and a vocabulary that values everyday democracy; and they see their ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ as centered on the main island of Taiwan and its outlying islands. How did this come to be? In our book, Mark and I show that the process of fighting for local rule, self-rule, and now international recognition as Taiwan (not just as the ROC), transformed how people here saw themselves and the place they lived in. Thus, we contend, these movements for self-rule and for democracy were revolutionary in nature. They nurtured a sense of Taiwanese consciousness and Taiwanese nationalism that had not existed in the same way beforehand. 

Throughout our book, we offer our readers alternative frameworks for understanding Taiwan, not as ‘free China’ or the ‘true China’ or a ‘province of China’, but as a nation in its own right. We present the stories of Taiwan as an indigenous homeland; of the century-long fight for self rule, starting under the Japanese Empire in the 1920s; of the resistance to the ‘one China’ project of the exiled Kuomintang (KMT) that started with the uprisings of February 28, 1947; and now the resistance to the ‘one China’ project of the People’s Republic of China, resistance that is civic as well as military, and highly eclectic and participatory in nature. 

Leona: For Taiwanese American readers, there’s an inherent awkwardness in our position: we mostly operate in an international system that treats Taiwan’s nationhood as radical, while the lived experience of those in Taiwan often understands that nationhood as ordinary and self-evident. We’re removed from the everyday texture of Taiwan’s “overlapping and doubled realities,” yet as members of the diaspora, we also have a great deal at stake.

As a Taiwanese American who deepened her understanding of Taiwan through living there and writing this book, what perspectives did you gain that weren’t accessible to you while living in the United States? 

Catherine: I got a lot more than I bargained for by co-writing this book. Over the pandemic, I became part of a still-growing community of Taiwanese Americans in Taiwan. Some were 1.5 generation and moving back, many like me were second generation and living here for the first time. I arrived just at the cusp of some major initiatives to make it easier for second- and third-generation diaspora to settle in Taiwan. First, in 2025, the government eliminated the residency requirement for people born abroad, with at least one Taiwanese parent, to obtain national ID and household registration, which together provide full civic rights including voting. Second, the new Gold Card and Talent Taiwan offices have provided visas, networking, and logistical support to thousands of people moving to Taiwan as adults, including many Taiwanese Americans.

Leona: And that changed your life in yet another way!

Catherine: Yes, I eventually made the decision to leave a treasured job in the US to take up long-term residence here in Taipei, in order to have a family. Now I’m raising a child here and work a local job. Continuing to improve my Mandarin has become a matter of professional survival, since I teach bilingually and have an inbox full of Chinese-language emails. At the same time, I’m able to access so many more resources for teaching our child Tâi-gí. 

Leona: What’s that been like?

Moving to Taiwan in my late 30s led me to reflect a lot on the everyday damage and challenge posed by Chinese coercion. I will often get asked if I am afraid of invasion. The answer to that is yes. But more than that, living in a place that has seen so much political turmoil and is so  marginalized, excluded, and threatened (even if, please God, invasion never comes), means that there are a lot of factors pushing people out of Taiwan. My own father left in the 1980s largely for political reasons, as one of thousands of dissident students. There was a wave of people who left in the mid 1990s due to the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. Today, young people leave for better salaries and working conditions (which is as much an issue of work culture in Taiwan as anything else). Ironically, just at the point when more people than ever in Taiwan identify as Taiwanese, it has proved hard to make and retain new Taiwanese, due to a low birth rate, emigration, and restrictive naturalization. These last few issues, at least, are possible for Taiwanese officials and citizens to address more directly.

Leona: And what do you hope Taiwanese American readers, in particular, will come away with as they engage with this work?

The process of researching and writing Revolutionary Taiwan taught me that it is possible for diaspora to deepen our engagement with Taiwan at any stage of our lives, from any starting point. I wanted this book to be a resource for diaspora in particular, since I understand how big the linguistic and experiential gap between diaspora and born-and-raised Taiwanese can be. 

If you’ve ever thought you’d like to spend more time in Taiwan, to work or study here; to improve your language skills; or to learn more about the history and politics of this complicated place, I hope you feel empowered and encouraged to do so. The diaspora are an amazing resource for Taiwan, I truly believe that.

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Kathy Cheng and Thankful Registry: Giving with Heart Representation in the Asian American Community: A Roundtable Discussion Taiwanese Music and the World: Interview with FireEX “To be left ignorant about Asian American history is to erase who we are as a people”: Ellie Yang Camp’s “Louder Than the Lies”