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In this interesting book, Joshua Fan tells the story of the roughly two million people, mostly low-ranking male veterans of the Chinese Civil War, who fled to Taiwan by land, sea and air in the late 1940s as the demise of the Kuomintang (KMT) government became apparent. As one of the "largest waves of migration, not just in Chinese history, but also in world historyâ[euro] (p. 19), this is a tale worth telling. His central point, that the overwhelming majority of these individuals remained "homelessâ[euro] - in the material sense in the 1950s and psychologically for four decades after the war - aims to challenge scholarship and the "commonly accepted oversimplificationâ[euro] (p. 2) in Taiwan that mainlanders (waishengren) enjoyed privileged status in politics and society. With the exception of air force personnel, high-ranking army brass and politicians, Fan contends that most ordinary soldiers suffered widespread discrimination, trauma, marriage woes and heartbreak owing to low rank, poverty, language barriers, lack of education, connections and other family resources, and their association with a despised regime. In this respect, China's Homeless Generation is an important contribution to the literature on veterans in China and elsewhere in the world. This literature is cognizant of variations among veterans based mostly on pre-war socioeconomic variables, while also noting their shared difficulties readjusting to civilian life after war.
Fan's account is based on the personal histories of 890 people drawn from new collections of oral history materials that emerged in Taiwan during the 1990s, as well as 25 interviews with members of this homeless generation. These sources are appropriate for his primary goal of "let[ting] the survivors speak for themselves whenever possibleâ[euro] (p. xv) and "documentingâ[euro] (p.147) their experiences; the book, therefore, is more descriptive than analytical and theoretical. Arranged chronologically beginning from...