To my utter shock, after I had been studying anthropology and Chinese and moved to Hong Kong to teach, two other Joseph Boscos emerged who also, as improbable as it seems, were interested in Taiwan and China. (There are still other Joe Boscos, but let’s not go there…)
One is a lawyer who worked for former Massachusetts Governor John Volpe, then went to Washington as Volpe’s special assistant when he was named Secretary of Transportation by President Nixon. That Joe Bosco has also been a professor at Georgetown and is a national security consultant. His full name is Joseph A. Bosco (I don’t have a middle name or initial). He wrote a few opinion pieces that led some friends to wonder what had happened to “me”; in a 2001 Washington Post op-ed and a Taipei Times column, he argued against China’s legal claims to be able to use force to unite Taiwan with the mainland. He argued for the containment of China, and for pressing China on issues of US interest, thus taking a politically conservative or hawkish point of view. A 2010 LA Times opinion piece argues the US should end the policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ and make clear that it would protect Taiwan from attack, and in return Taiwan should agree to “forgo formal independence for now.” He also makes a point that I tend to agree with, which is that “Two democratic peoples could peacefully manage the question of unification, independence or association.” (Still, much work would need to be done to convince Beijing that this policy is not designed to stealthily promote Taiwan independence.) Articles in 2010 included one in the Washington Times on the need to contain China’s growing threat and a call in the Christian Science Monitor for Obama to call a summit of Nobel Peace Prize winners to protest China’s jailing of Liu Xiaobo. You can find his webpage here.
The other Joseph Bosco (who like the Georgetown lawyer also had the middle initial “A”, but did not use it) was a journalist and the author of a book on the OJ Simpson trial. I only had occasion to meet him once in November 2006 before he died at a relatively young 61 years of age in July 2010 (see his LA Times obituary here). He had his fans, but seemed to have some enemies (judging by some blogs and an LA Times column). He was very nice in person when we met, but seemed sometimes pugnacious in his blogs, other times regretful about unspecified choices in his life. In 2002, he took a job teaching English in Fujian, and the next year moved to Beijing where he was Visiting Professor of Journalism at the Beijing Foreign Studies University. During his time in Fujian, the journalist Joseph Bosco developed strong opinions on the Taiwan issue, though unfortunately (for posterity, but fortunately in other ways), his blog entries are no longer on the web. The journalist Joseph Bosco viewed himself as a liberal, but since he had never been in Taiwan, he viewed the issue exclusively through PRC eyes. He dismissed and disparaged Taiwanese claims for independence, noting that the PRC will never accept an independent Taiwan. He wrote so glowingly of the PRC that he attracted the attention of the right wing press. The glowing piece on China was actually an attack on the other Joseph Bosco, so I felt caught in a battle of Joseph Boscos!
Needless to say, I am not them. The Library of Congress knows me as Bosco, Joseph, 1957- since I don’t have a middle name. I considered taking a middle name or initial, but a librarian told me that would be even more confusing. So there we are. Bosco is not a common surname in Italy; this site will show you, however, that the name is not rare and is spread throughout Italy (for the record, my Bosco ancestors are from Vasto, in the Abruzzi, and 3 generations before that arrived in Vasto from the Marche according to family tradition, but from Puglia further south according to government records). Joseph, or Giuseppe, is probably the most common male given name in Italy; San Giuseppe, on 19 March, was once a national holiday. So that is why there are 3 of us. And actually, there are more: some are in finance, and there’s a professor of sports medicine at NYU. But it is still quite some coincidence that there are 3 Joseph Boscos (Boschi?) who have written about Taiwan and China.
I am also known by my Chinese name LIN Zhou (林舟). Lin is a common surname and means forest (which is what Bosco means in Italian). Zhou sounds like “Joe.” I hope any other Joseph Boscos take different Chinese names (at least a different character, like 周 or 州 or even 粥 ;) to avoid confusion!