It is about four in the morning and I am reading through a book on the history of Chinese law for my research on Chinese treason trials. The book, however, is a mainland Chinese work, a bit heavy on the Communist propaganda, entitled A Legal History of the Chinese Revolution (中国革命法制史). I saw plenty of this kind of work in many a Beijing bookstore. However, I didn’t get it in Beijing, but photocopied relevant sections from the library of Taiwan’s Academia Sinica when I was there last month.
As I was copying the publication information in order to correctly cite the book in a paper I’m working on, I noticed something straight out of the cold war and China’s unfinished civil war between mainland China and nationalist China on Taiwan:
A stamp on the middle of my photocopy of the book’s cover which reads:
限制閱讀
“Restricted Reading”
I realized that this, like many books once locked up in libraries and archives across Taiwan, was marked as a Communist book, and thus during most of Taiwan’s postwar period would have been off limits to most readers.