''Formosa Betrayed'' is a 1965 book written by

George H. Kerr George H. Kerr (November 7, 1911 – August 27, 1992), also known in Taiwan as 葛超智 (or 柯喬治), was a United States diplomat during World War II, and in later years he was an author and an academic. His published works and archived pap ...

, a US diplomatic officer in Taiwan, who witnessed the February 28 Incident, and the corruption and killings committed by the

Kuomintang The Kuomintang (KMT), also referred to as the Guomindang (GMD), the Nationalist Party of China (NPC) or the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP), is a major political party in the Republic of China, initially on the Chinese mainland and in Tai ...

(KMT, Chinese Nationalist Party) in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

after

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. ''Formosa Betrayed'' is one of the most influential books about

's transition from Japanese colonial rule. Kerr was working for the

American Foreign Service The United States Foreign Service is the primary personnel system used by the diplomatic service of the United States federal government, under the aegis of the United States Department of State. It consists of over 13,000 professionals carryi ...

at the time of the transition, and was present in Taiwan during the KMT occupation and resulting aftermath. ''Formosa Betrayed'' sharply rebuked the Nationalist administration and made arguments in favor of

Taiwanese independence The Taiwan independence movement is a political movement which advocates the formal declaration of an independent and sovereign Taiwanese state, as opposed to Chinese unification or the status quo in Cross-Strait relations. Currently, Tai ...

. The book was originally published in 1965 by

Houghton Mifflin The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , ''asteriskos'', "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often voc ...

. A Chinese-language translation was made in 1974, the English-language version was republished in 1976 by

Da Capo Press Da Capo Press is an American publishing company with headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts. It is now an imprint of Hachette Books. History Founded in 1964 as a publisher of music books, as a division of Plenum Publishers, it had additional of ...

, a second English-language edition was published by Taiwan Publishing Co. in 1992, and a new Chinese-language translation was released in 2014.

References

Editions

* * * * * * * Da Capo Press books History books about Taiwan {{Taiwan-hist-book-stub