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FOREWORD

For such a modest book this one has taken a long time to finish, but that’s because the story itself was incomplete. In the spring of 1990 I went on assignment through the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China, heading towards Southeast Asia. At the time all those places, but especially the Soviet Union, seemed to be vibrating in the expectation that important events were underway or about to begin.

The end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Eastern Bloc (and of the Berlin Wall that symbolized it) came with what struck many people as an unstoppable counter-revolution in the Soviet Union. The situation there was the mirror image of that in China, where the pro-democracy movement had been suppressed so cruelly. Yet the two occurrences clearly were manifestations of the same urge, a demand for democracy in many regions of the world that had had no recent experience of it.

The following year I went for the first time to Taiwan, which was still a one-party state in the long shadow of Chiang Kai-shek and his family. I returned there in 1995 when Taiwan had transformed itself into a vigorous and indeed raucous and rambunctious democracy. My purpose on these two trips to the island was similar to my purpose in going to Russia and China: to get a look at the effects of seismic change while it was still going on. I was not posing as a literary travel writer, making semi-fictional characters from pieces of individuals encountered along the way. Neither was I being a reporter, writing only of forces and background without reference to history and culture. These pages, set down shortly after returning from notes made on the spot, are from an older tradition. Most of the material appeared long ago, often in substantially different form, in two obscure books of mine, Year of the Horse: A Journey Through Russia and China and The Other China: Journey’s Around Taiwan, both long out of print. Reading the texts now, I itch to rewrite them, obscuring my naïveté and bringing my spur-of-the-moment comments into line with what we all know actually happened next. But I resist and try to confine my perfect hindsight to an afterword. For all its infelicities, this collection of notes remains what it was then: simply an indication of how matters looked at the time to someone who was there because he wished to be.