Words Like Colored Glass: The Role of the Press in Taiwan's Democratization Process.

• Author: Dalton, Greg

Daniel Berman. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992) 237pp,

At We end of We Second World War, few would have expected that Taiwan would take the fast track to economic prosperity. Japan had occupied the island for several decades, the allies had bombed it heavily during the war and the corrupt and incompetent Chinese Nationalist regime retreated there from the mainland after losing the civil war to the Communists. Taiwan had virtually no natural resources or foreign exchange reserves. In just 40 years, however, it amassed the world's largest foreign exchange reserves and achieved one of the highest savings rates. By the late 1980s, Taiwan had reached a level of economic development that had required centuries to evolve in Europe and North America.

Words Like Colored Glass celebrates Taiwan's triumph by examining its social and political development through the lens of print media that, according to author Daniel Berman, have been at the "cutting edge of reform." The author examines the Kuomintang's (KMT) competing goals of pursuing a vigorous market economy and retaining tight control over information and the news media. Several political magazines successfully maneuvered between tight regulatory constraints and a dynamic political environment to become vehicles for launching opposition political parties in the 1980s. As a result, the ruling KMT regime was forced to adopt gradual democratic reforms. Now in the 1990s, the news media remain a critical component of that ongoing reform process.

The book's aptly chosen title is borrowed from Tzu Ssu, a grandson of Confucius, who said: "Words are like colored glass. What they do not illuminate, they serve to obscure." That saying is especially true in the world of Chinese-language journalism. According to some readers, the only way to understand a newspaper in China or Taiwan is to hold it up to a mirror: What the government says it will do, it won't. What the government said it didn't do, it did.

Unfortunately, Berman does not analyze this critical aspect of the print media in Taiwan. Compelling as it is, the book would have been more effective had it offered some insight into the way in which readers of Taiwanese newspapers and political magazines look through the colored glass to find some truth in the government-controlled news media. Berman offers few examples of the opaque language used by savvy editors and writers to convey messages to their readers that would have otherwise landed them in jail. There are also few...