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Books: Delving into decades of doublethink on Taiwan

Books Chris Horton's 'Ghost Nation' untangles the island state's struggle to survive A woman holds cutouts of maps of China and Taiwan during a protest in Taipei denouncing China's military exercises in the waters surrounding Taiwan ahead of the island's first direct presidential elections in March 1996. © Reuters HAN GUANGE Merely describing Taiwan requires multiple feats of intellectual doublethink. The island is threatened almost daily by neighboring China, officially recognized by fewer than a dozen nations yet unofficially backed by the U.S., and perennially characterized as a "self-governing democracy" rather than in terms that might imply sovereignty and thus ruffle feathers in Beijing. Even that sentence would not escape challenge on either side of the strait that separates the two. How did we get here? Chris Horton's "Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and its Struggle for Survival " is an attempt to unpick this Gordian knot of international relations. It is punchy, passionate, and far from neutral. Maybe it could not be any other way. While flawed, it is an extremely readable outline of the awkward position of the Taiwanese people in the tangle of 21st-century geopolitics, and what is at stake in defense of their democracy.