The President's Family: Uncovering the Ties and Nepotism of Taiwan's Elite Families (Classic Commemorative Edition)

This is a representative work by Chen Rouzhen, a renowned Taiwanese historian and intellectual heir, as a political journalist and columnist. ※Classic Commemorative Edition※
Understand an important aspect of the Chiang Kai-shek father and son's rule and the party-state system in the fifty years after the war.

The "phase of time" is fascinating. We are always in it, yet we are also outside it. -- Chen Rouyi
Since 2003, Chen Rouzhen has changed her focus and stopped writing political commentary columns. She is full of interest and curiosity and has devoted herself to understanding the Japanese era. She has continued to publish many popular works such as "Taiwan's First Experience of Western Civilization", "Everyone is an Era", and "A Carpenter and His Taiwan Expo", which have filled many gaps in the history of Taiwanese life.

The Chen Rouzhen we know so well is the one who once confessed in an interview, "I just can't believe we didn't understand what Japan was like back then." Unconstrained by frameworks, she seamlessly connects us today with those of the past through intriguing themes that only she could invent. Looking back, we discover her profound research and unconventional qualities, evident even in her early days as a political journalist. With martial law about to be lifted, Chen Rouzhen entered the news industry. As an outlier, she transitioned from mainstream media to dissident outlets. Her sharp observations, she documented the "intertwined structures of politics and business" in her 1999 book, The President's Family.

"The President's Family" depicts "a" super-network of relationships. With over 4,000 wedding announcements and notices, supplemented by numerous monographs and private family trees provided by various sources, it traces the interconnected and interwoven web of political and business relationships, revealing the umbilical cords and nepotism of Taiwan's powerful families. After its publication, this book has become a must-have desk book for news professionals in newspapers and other fields for more than a decade (to understand which family is which, to distinguish who is whose, and to have a structural understanding of Taiwan's social classes), and ordinary readers can finally get a glimpse of the faces of the "ruling elite class". From the text description or genealogical illustrations, they will be surprised to find that a certain high-ranking official or a certain wealthy person is a relative, or that the "family origins" of a certain person are still the key to his or her success.

The presidents referred to in this book include four presidents (Chiang Kai-shek, Yen Chia-kan, Chiang Ching-kuo, and Lee Teng-hui) and six vice presidents (Chen Cheng, Yen Chia-kan, Hsieh Tung-min, Lee Teng-hui, Lee Yuan-tsut, and Lien Chan) from the post-war period until 2000. The book is divided into 31 chapters, but each chapter actually covers more than one family. Chen Rou-yun emphasizes that the affiliated families do not mean they are unimportant or less powerful than the main family, and they are worth further investigation. As for the time point of the main text of this edition, it still uses June 1999 as the base point. Although the positions of the people mentioned have changed, "family relationships are eternal, and the stories of their rise to power remain unchanged."

When the decision was made to publish a new edition in 2021, Chen Rouzhen not only revised some of the text but also did her best to add dozens of family genealogies. In her unfinished preface to the new edition, she noted that in the second decade since the book's publication, Taiwan's politics have undergone a shift from blue to green. Economically, the liberalization of cross-strait relations has led to the rise of a new elite. However, the complex core of the upper class is unlikely to collapse in the short term. The party-state system is now a thing of the past, with some glimmers of hope, but unlikely to be revived. The past decade has seen the imprisonment of Ho Shou-chuan and Lin Wei-shan, the impotence of Koo Yen-tsok in handling the Women's Federation, the failure of Eric Chu and Ting Shou-chung in their bids for Taipei mayor, the loss of Wu Chih-yang in even the Taoyuan mayoral seat, the successive deaths of Lee Teng-hui, Koo Lian-song, Koo Cheng-yun, Shen Jun-shan, Pastor Kao Chun-ming, Lin Yu-lin, and the three brothers Lin Rong, the aging of Lien Chan and Wu Po-hsiung, the disappearance of Chen Lu-an, the so-called century-long marriage between Mr. Jin of South China and Ms. Jin of Shin Kong Bank, and the mutual lawsuits brought to court...all these events have cast a dusky glow over the core of power.

The new opportunities brought by the rise of electronics and the internet have created a wealthy class disconnected from the old upper echelons. While their voices are growing, their presence is visible, and their social influence is only increasing, they are also gradually eroding, until at first glance, only a few financial holding families seem to remain visible. Yet, even though the structures that seemed robust thirty years ago have already decayed, "The President's Family," a significant monograph constructed from a vast amount of data, remains remarkably relevant today, offering a crucial insight into the postwar Chiang Kai-shek regime and the party-state.

It turns out that the changing times are so confusing, yet so clear.
We are always both within and outside. -- Chen Rouzhen ※ As time passes, modern photos of people from the same era are easily searchable online, so this commemorative edition does not focus on them. Some old family photos are not included because their sources cannot be confirmed. We hope readers will forgive us for this.

2022-07-16

麥田

560

9786263102385