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DANGEROUS STRAIT: The US-Taiwan-China Crisis. Edited by Nancy Bernkopf Tucker. New York: Columbia University Press. 2005. xii, 272 pp. (Tables.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 0-231-13564-5.
Based on a workshop sponsored by the US State Department in 2003, this edited volume navigates into the dangerous Taiwan Strait. In-between Tucker's introduction and her wrap-up piece on strategic ambiguity are six chapters written by scholars and policy analysts on Taiwan's political and military development, cross-strait economic exchanges and the US policy toward triangular relations. Shelley Rigger chooses three policy debates in recent years-the fourth nuclear power plant project, the "one country on either side" announcement and the referendum proposal-to evaluate Taiwan's record of democratic consolidation and concludes that further improvements in political institutions and regime performance are desperately needed.
Since the national/state identity controversy has been the root cause of Taiwan's deferred consolidation, Steven Phillips revisits die history of Taiwan's independence movement (TIM) since 1945 and shows how a "disorderly, faction-ridden nationalist coalition lacking international support" (p. 68) stumbled along the way to its current stage with the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)...