It was hard to imagine much had been left uncovered by this book (reviewed in the Taipei Times, Feb. 27, 2025, and listed as a notable 2025 book about Taiwan in the Taipei Times, Jan. 2, 2026). Yet, this short monograph — magnanimously recommended to me by Tinn for taking “a different approach” — reimagines the story of Taiwan’s engineers through a lens that is both novel and instructive. Indeed, Lin’s book (reviewed in the Taipei Times, Aug. 14, 2025) is an excellent companion piece to Engineers and the Two Taiwans. Both highlight institutionalized inequality in career opportunities between “local” Taiwanese, or “islanders,” and “mainlanders,” or those who arrived from China after World War II. While berating local Taiwanese talent as underqualified and morally lacking, the KMT administration ironically perpetuated the divide with its own two-tier system.
