In the early 1990s, the people of Taiwan gained the right to vote for their executive and legislature branches of government. Yet the People’s Republic of China (PRC) claims sovereignty over Taiwan and insists that “reunification” is the historic mission of all peoples on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The PRC threatens war with and over the island, inviting a crisis that would engulf the region and beyond. Did Taiwan “split with China in 1949” or “see itself as the true China”? How do these ideas both fall short of explaining why the Taiwanese withstand pressure from the PRC to relinquish their democratic self-governance. Chou and Harrison's book helps show how democratization in Taiwan constituted a revolution, changing not just the form of government but also how Taiwanese people see their island as a nation. 

Catherine Lila Chou is Assistant Professor in World History at National Chengchi University 國立政治大學 in Taipei, Taiwan. For the previous six years, she taught at Grinnell College in Iowa, where she was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in May 2024. She received her PhD in early modern British and European history from Stanford University in 2016, and BA in History from Princeton University in 2006. She was also a Five College Fellow at Amherst College in Massachusetts from 2014-15 and an Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow at Villanova University near Philadelphia from 2017-18. In addition to co-authoring Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order (Cambria Press, 2024) with Mark Harrison, Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Tasmania, she has a forthcoming book, Parliament in the British Political Imagination, 1550-1600 to be published by Manchester University Press, 2025. 

Mark Harrison is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Tasmania and was previously a Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster in London. He is also an Expert Associate of the National Security College at the Australian National University and co-editor of the Brill Taiwan Studies series. He writes widely on Taiwan politics and society, bringing a background in social theory together with key Taiwan Studies problematics of Taiwan’s politics and international relations, and with Catherine Chou he is he author of Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order, (Cambria, 2024). He is currently engaged with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute on an Australian Department of Defence Strategic Policy Grant project on Australian domestic political and institutional responses to a Taiwan Strait crisis.