TY - JOUR AU1 - Lin, Syaru Shirley AB - Reviews 217 Hsiao-ting Lin. Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. ix, 338 pp. Hardcover $39.95, ISBN 978-0-674-65981-0. Nearly seven decades after the end of the Chinese civil war, Taiwan and China continue to be governed separately, and Taiwan has emerged as an autonomous de facto state. Furthermore, as the recent Trump-Kim summits remind us, the legacy of the Korean war continues to be salient, part of which is the reintroduction of the United States into the conflict between Taiwan and China, replacing Truman’s earlier policy of not providing military aid to safeguard Taiwan. Hsiao-ting Lin, a research fellow in the Hoover Institution’s East Asian Collections, provides an account of Taiwan’s history from the Cairo Declaration of November 1943 to the Nationalist government’s 1952 Peace Treaty with Japan and its 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States. Accidental State provides an excellent analysis of the debates within two of the most important national stakeholders during this important historical period—Taiwan and the United States—even as it also suggests an even longer list of research topics that future students of Taiwanese history may choose to address. Taiwan’s emergence as a TI - Accidental State: Chiang Kai-shek, the United States, and the Making of Taiwan Hsiao-ting Lin (review) JF - China Review International DA - 2019-08-15 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/university-of-hawai-i-press/accidental-state-chiang-kai-shek-the-united-states-and-the-making-of-40LNIpfJ9U SP - 217 EP - 220 VL - 24 IS - 3 DP - DeepDyve ER -