The Wound That Never Closed: Taiwan, China and the End of Strategic Ambiguity is free on Amazon for five days, beginning the afternoon of September 23.

The Taiwan crisis did not start this month. My book did not either.

Last year I wrote The Wound That Never Closed: Taiwan, China and the End of Strategic Ambiguity, a book about Taiwan, China, and the end of strategic ambiguity: the seventy-year habit of managing an unresolved question instead of answering it. At the time, it felt like a niche argument for people who already followed the region closely.

That has changed quickly. Taiwan has moved from a specialist subject to front-page news, and many people are now trying to get up to speed on decades of history, law, and strategy in a matter of days. This book was written for exactly that moment.

It starts in 1895, not 2024, because the present crisis did not begin this year. The story runs through empire, war, civil war, competing claims of sovereignty, and the long, uneasy arrangement that let everyone postpone the hardest questions. The headlines make more sense once you can see the history underneath them.

I am not writing as a partisan, and this is not a brief for any one side. It is an attempt to lay out the legal foundations, military realities, economic pressures, and historical throughline as plainly as I could. That means taking the arguments seriously, including the ones that are inconvenient, rather than pretending the issue can be reduced to a slogan.

Living in Hong Kong gives some of those questions a particular weight. The parallels are not exact, and they should not be treated as a shortcut. But Hong Kong is a reminder that legal language, political promises, economic confidence, and lived reality can move at different speeds until, suddenly, they do not.

For five days starting the afternoon of September 23, the book will be free on Amazon. No credit card or Kindle device is required: it can be read in any browser. If you have been meaning to understand the Taiwan question rather than simply react to the headlines, this is a good window to do it. Just press the orange button that says buy now for $0.00.

Download: The Wound That Never Closed: Taiwan, China and the end of Strategic Ambiguity