Book Two of The Taiwan Experience, Democracy Takes Root, follows on from the first book in The Taiwan Experience trilogy, The Seeds of Democracy.

The e-book version of Book Two: Democracy Takes Root, like Book One, is divided into three parts. This e-book, The Ethnic Divide, is the first part of Book Two. Book Two I originally scheduled to be published in 2020. However, at that time I knew nothing of the coronavirus whose pandemic was to have such an impact on life almost everywhere in the world.

For that reason, and a couple of other, unrelated reasons, survival was the theme of the first several years of the 2020s for me, and I didn't have much time available for writing. Now I'm writing again, but I first gave priority to completing a couple of other books, The Way of the Shoestring Outdoor Photographer and Like Father, Like Son, and have only now (August 2025) been able to turn my attention to Book Two of The Taiwan Experience. Hopefully I am not being too optimistic in anticipating the completion of all three parts of this book in 2025. In the meantime, I have revised this first part of the book over the past couple of days for anyone who would like to read this now.

One important reason I am continuing to make this book available, as I write it so to speak, is that I feel the topic of the first part of this book - the ethnic divide - is one poorly understood by many foreign scholars, including some who are producing otherwise excellent works on Taiwan and its relations with the PRC. I hope that the decades of 'on-the-ground' observations contained herein will be useful in fleshing out other works on Taiwan through references that are difficult to get without spending very long periods of time in Taiwan.