Description

My Fight for a New Taiwan

One Woman's Journey from Prison to Power

Hsiu-lien Lu and Ashley Esarey
Foreword by Jerome A. Cohen

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  • $34.95t hardcover (9780295993645) Add to Cart
  • Published: April 2014
  • Subject Listing: Asian Studies, Autobiography, Political Science
  • Bibliographic information: 344 pp., 28 illus., 6 x 9 in.
  • Contents

Lu Hsiu-lien's journey is the story of Taiwan. Through her successive drives for gender equality, human rights, political reform, Taiwan independence, and, currently, environmental protection, Lu has played a key role in Taiwan's evolution from dictatorship to democracy. The election in 2000 of Democratic Progressive Party leader Chen Shui-bian to the presidency, with Lu as his vice president, ended more than fifty years of rule by the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party).

Taiwan's painful struggle for democratization is dramatized here in the life of Lu, a feminist leader and pro-democracy advocate who was imprisoned for more than five years in the 1980s. Unlike such famous Asian women politicians as Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi, India's Indira Gandhi, and Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto, Lu Hsiu-lien grew up in a family without political connections. Her impoverished parents twice attempted to give her away for adoption, and as an adult she survived cancer and imprisonment, later achieving success as an elected politician-the first self-made woman to serve with such prominence in Asia.

My Fight for a New Taiwan's rich narrative gives readers an insider's perspective on Taiwan's unique blend of Chinese and indigenous culture and recent social transformation.
Lu Hsiu-lien (Annette Lu) is a graduate of National Taiwan University, the University of Illinois, and Harvard Law School. She was vice president of the Republic of China from 2000 to 2008 and currently is president of Green 21 Taiwan Alliance. Ashley Esarey , a former journalist, held the An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University and currently is visiting assistant professor of political science and East Asian studies at the University of Alberta.
"It is rare to read a political memoir that is so self-aware and candid, and where the subject becomes such a striking individual to the reader. Lu's immense energy, organizing skills, and ability to twist arms come across very clearly. . . . [My Fight for a New Taiwan is] not only about Lu's gaining high office in a democracy, but also about how she mightily helped to found that democracy."
-Ross Terrill, author of Mao: A Biography; The New Chinese Emperor; and Madame Mao: The White-Boned Demon

"This is a highly personal, powerful, and at times moving self-portrait by a remarkable woman whose sheer personality, determination, and courage transformed her from the daughter of a shopkeeper in Taoyuan County to the first female elected vice president of Taiwan."
-Steve Tsang, University of Nottingham

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