Springer China’s Conquest of Taiwan in the Seventeenth Century: Victory at Full Moon

This is the first book to comprehensively cover the historical process leading to Taiwan’s integration with Mainland China in the seventeenth century. As such, it addresses the Taiwan question in the seventeenth century, presenting for the first time the process leading to the island’s integration with the mainland through the story of the Zheng family and Admiral Shi Lang.  The author has confirmed Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga)’s Ming loyalism and his politicization of the conflicts on the China coast. Thus, the author concludes that Zheng was a “revolutionary traditionalist” who transformed sheer violence into a political movement in an unprecedented way. He politicized the entire region and paved the way for the inevitable conflict with Mainland China. After repeated political talks had failed, the rising Qing China decided to take Taiwan by force. Though seaborne warfare was a formidable task at the time, the man who overcame these difficulties and completed the seemingly impossible mission was none other than Admiral Shi Lang.  The book provides a new and more justifiable assessment of the Admiral’s contribution to the conquest of Taiwan and pacification of coastal unrest. The book will be of interest to general readers as well as specialists researching security and warfare on the China coast.  From the Back Cover This is the first book to comprehensively cover the historical process leading to Taiwan’s integration with Mainland China in the seventeenth century. As such, it addresses the Taiwan question in the seventeenth century, presenting for the first time the process leading to the island’s integration with the mainland through the story of the Zheng family and Admiral Shi Lang.  The author has confirmed Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga)’s Ming loyalism and his politicization of the conflicts on the China coast. Thus, the author concludes that Zheng was a “revolutionary traditionalist” who transformed sheer violence into a political movement in an unprecedented way. He politicized the entire region and paved the way for the inevitable conflict with Mainland China. After repeated political talks had failed, the rising Qing China decided to take Taiwan by force. Though seaborne warfare was a formidable task at the time, the man who overcame these difficulties and completed the seemingly impossible mission was none other than Admiral Shi Lang.  The book provides a new and more justifiable assessment of the Admiral’s contribution to the conquest of Taiwan and pacification of coastal unrest. The book will be of interest to general readers as well as specialists researching security and warfare on the China coast.  About the Author As a disciple of the late Academician of Academia Sinica (1948) Kung-chuan Hsiao, the author is an indefatigable researcher and literary executor. With twenty singly authored scholarly books (many with multiple editions), eight edited or translated volumes, over one hundred scholarly articles, by his receipt in 2001 Choice’s distinguished list of “Outstanding Academic Titles,” the author ranks as one of admirable research leaders in the rather crowded field of late Imperial and modern Chinese history.  The author is recognized for his studies in several different areas. First, he works on several pivotal figures in late Qing and early Republican period, in which reform, revolution, and nationalism flourished in China.―Guo Songtao, Yan Fu, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Zhang Binglin, and Hu Shi. In particular, the author’s studies in the two extremely significant thinkers Kang and Zhang throw new perspectives on the late Qing and early Republican periods of Chinese thought. The result is a provocative and stimulating analysis of the two thinkers. The author’s command of the sources, his understanding of the intellectual trends, and his careful scholarship have marked him as one of the world’s leading experts on this important topic. Also his pu