Becoming Taiwanese

Becoming Taiwanese
Author: Evan N. Dawley
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1684175984

"What does it mean to be Taiwanese? This question sits at the heart of Taiwan’s modern history and its place in the world. In contrast to the prevailing scholarly focus on Taiwan after 1987, Becoming Taiwanese examines the important first era in the history of Taiwanese identity construction during the early twentieth century, in the place that served as the crucible for the formation of new identities: the northern port city of Jilong (Keelung).Part colonial urban social history, part exploration of the relationship between modern ethnicity and nationalism, Becoming Taiwanese offers new insights into ethnic identity formation. Evan Dawley examines how people from China’s southeastern coast became rooted in Taiwan; how the transfer to Japanese colonial rule established new contexts and relationships that promoted the formation of distinct urban, ethnic, and national identities; and how the so-called retrocession to China replicated earlier patterns and reinforced those same identities. Based on original research in Taiwan and Japan, and focused on the settings and practices of social organizations, religion, and social welfare, as well as the local elites who served as community gatekeepers, Becoming Taiwanese fundamentally challenges our understanding of what it means to be Taiwanese."

Dictators and their Secret Police

Dictators and their Secret Police
Author: Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2016-08-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1316712567

How do dictators stay in power? When, and how, do they use repression to do so? Dictators and their Secret Police explores the role of the coercive apparatus under authoritarian rule in Asia - how these secret organizations originated, how they operated, and how their violence affected ordinary citizens. Greitens argues that autocrats face a coercive dilemma: whether to create internal security forces designed to manage popular mobilization, or defend against potential coup. Violence against civilians, she suggests, is a byproduct of their attempt to resolve this dilemma. Drawing on a wealth of new historical evidence, this book challenges conventional wisdom on dictatorship: what autocrats are threatened by, how they respond, and how this affects the lives and security of the millions under their rule. It offers an unprecedented view into the use of surveillance, coercion, and violence, and sheds new light on the institutional and social foundations of authoritarian power.

Taiwan’s COVID-19 Experience

Taiwan’s COVID-19 Experience
Author: Ming-Cheng M. Lo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2024-06-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1040085679

This book explores and develops the ongoing conversation about how Taiwan navigated through the COVID-19 pandemic. Emphasizing the themes of governance and governmentality, it moves the foci of the discussion from COVID policies to the social and political orders undergirding the statecraft of pandemic management. Furthermore, it analyzes how the pandemic fostered a historical moment at which new forms of governance and governmentality were beginning to take root. It also situates Taiwan’s precarious nationhood in its global context, thereby challenging a prevalent methodological nationalism – the assumption that the nation is a natural unit of analysis whose borders are more or less unquestioned – and contributing to decolonizing Western theories with perspectives from the Global South. Presenting rich original materials on the legal and public debates, individual reflections, and grassroots campaigns during COVID, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Taiwan's governance and social health policy, as well as medical anthropology and sociology.

Space and Everyday Lives of Children in Hong Kong

Space and Everyday Lives of Children in Hong Kong
Author: Stella Meng Wang
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2024-01-23
Genre: Education
ISBN: 3031444019

Deploying a spatial approach towards children’s everyday life in interwar Hong Kong, this book considers the context-specific development of five transnational movements: the garden city movement; imperial hygiene movement; nationalist sentiments; the Young Women's Christian Association; and the Girl Guide. Locating these transnational cultural movements in four layers of context, from the most immediate to the most global, including the context of Hong Kong, Republican China, the British empire, and global influences, this book shows Hong Kong as a distinctive colonial domain where the imperatives around race, gender and class produced new products of empire where the child, the garden, the school and sport turned out to be the main dynamics in play in the interwar period.

Sentiment, Reason, and Law

Sentiment, Reason, and Law
Author: Jeffrey T. Martin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501740067

What if the job of police was to cultivate the political will of a community to live with itself (rather than enforce law, keep order, or fight crime)? In Sentiment, Reason, and Law, Jeffrey T. Martin describes a world where that is the case. The Republic of China on Taiwan spent nearly four decades as a single-party state under dictatorial rule (1949–1987) before transitioning to liberal democracy. Here, Martin describes the social life of a neighborhood police station during the first rotation in executive power following the democratic transition. He shows an apparent paradox of how a strong democratic order was built on a foundation of weak police powers, and demonstrates how that was made possible by the continuity of an illiberal idea of policing. His conclusion from this paradox is that the purpose of the police was to cultivate the political will of the community rather than enforce laws and keep order. As Sentiment, Reason, and Law shows, the police force in Taiwan exists as an "anthropological fact," bringing an order of reality that is always, simultaneously and inseparably, meaningful and material. Martin unveils the power of this fact, demonstrating how the politics of sentiment that took shape under autocratic rule continued to operate in everyday policing in the early phase of the democratic transformation, even as a more democratic mode of public reason and the ultimate power of legal right were becoming more significant.

Statebuilding by Imposition

Statebuilding by Imposition
Author: Reo Matsuzaki
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2019-03-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501734849

How do modern states emerge from the turmoil of undergoverned spaces? This is the question Reo Matsuzaki ponders in Statebuilding by Imposition. Comparing Taiwan and the Philippines under the colonial rule of Japan and the United States, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he shows similar situations produce different outcomes and yet lead us to one conclusion. Contemporary statebuilding efforts by the US and the UN start from the premise that strong states can and should be constructed through the establishment of representative government institutions, a liberalized economy, and laws that protect private property and advance personal liberties. But when statebuilding runs into widespread popular resistance, as it did in both Taiwan the Philippines, statebuilding success depends on reconfiguring the very fabric of society, embracing local elites rather than the broad population, and giving elites the power to discipline the people. In Taiwan under Japanese rule, local elites behaved as obedient and effective intermediaries and contributed to government authority; in the Philippines under US rule, they became the very cause of the state's weakness by aggrandizing wealth, corrupting the bureaucracy, and obstructing policy enforcement. As Statebuilding by Imposition details, Taiwanese and Filipino history teaches us that the imposition of democracy is no guarantee of success when forming a new state and that illiberal actions may actually be more effective. Matsuzaki's controversial political history forces us to question whether statebuilding, given what it would take for this to result in the construction of a strong state, is the best way to address undergoverned spaces in the world today.

Policing in Taiwan

Policing in Taiwan
Author: Liqun Cao
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2014-05-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135916497

The police in Taiwan played a critical role in the largely peaceful transition from an authoritarian regime to a democracy. While the temptation to intervene in domestic politics was great, the top-down pressure to maintain a neutral standing facilitated an orderly regime change. This is the first monograph to examine the role of the police as a linkage between the state and civil society during the democratic transition and the role of the police in contemporary Taiwan. Starting with a brief history of Taiwan, this book examines the development of policing in Taiwan from a comparative, environmental, historical, operational, philosophical and political perspective; considers the role of the police in the democratic transition; and draws comparisons between police cultures in the East and in the West – both now and in the past. Taiwan operates as a modern country within an East Asian culture and this book shows that Taiwan’s move towards democracy may have political ramifications for the rest of the nations in the area. Including references to literature on policing in China and the U.S, this book about Taiwan police may serve as a springboard for academics and students to learn about similar cultures in this important area of the world. Policing in Taiwan will be of interest to academics and students who are engaged in the study of criminology, criminal justice, policing studies and Asian studies, as well as the general reader.

Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora

Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora
Author: Chee-Beng Tan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2013-02-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136230955

With around 40 million people worldwide, the ethnic Chinese and the Chinese in diaspora form the largest diaspora in the world. The economic reform of China which began in the late 1970s marked a huge phase of migration from China, and the new migrants, many of whom were well educated, have had a major impact on the local societies and on China. This is the first interdisciplinary Handbook to examine the Chinese diaspora, and provides a comprehensive analysis of the processes and effects of Chinese migration under the headings of: Population and distribution Mainland China and Taiwan’s policies on the Chinese overseas Migration: past and present Economic and political involvement Localization, transnational networks and identity Education, literature and media The Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora brings together a significant number of specialists from a number of diverse disciplines and covers the major areas of the study of Chinese overseas. This Handbook is therefore an important and valuable reference work for students, scholars and policy makers worldwide who wish to understand the global phenomena of Chinese migration, transnational connections and their cultural and identity transformation.

The United States, China, and Taiwan

The United States, China, and Taiwan
Author: Robert Blackwill
Publisher: Council on Foreign Relations Press
Total Pages: 102
Release: 2021-02-11
Genre:
ISBN: 9780876092835

Taiwan "is becoming the most dangerous flash point in the world for a possible war that involves the United States, China, and probably other major powers," warn Robert D. Blackwill, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy, and Philip Zelikow, University of Virginia White Burkett Miller professor of history. In a new Council Special Report, The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War, the authors argue that the United States should change and clarify its strategy to prevent war over Taiwan. "The U.S. strategic objective regarding Taiwan should be to preserve its political and economic autonomy, its dynamism as a free society, and U.S.-allied deterrence-without triggering a Chinese attack on Taiwan." "We do not think it is politically or militarily realistic to count on a U.S. military defeat of various kinds of Chinese assaults on Taiwan, uncoordinated with allies. Nor is it realistic to presume that, after such a frustrating clash, the United States would or should simply escalate to some sort of wide-scale war against China with comprehensive blockades or strikes against targets on the Chinese mainland." "If U.S. campaign plans postulate such unrealistic scenarios," the authors add, "they will likely be rejected by an American president and by the U.S. Congress." But, they observe, "the resulting U.S. paralysis would not be the result of presidential weakness or timidity. It might arise because the most powerful country in the world did not have credible options prepared for the most dangerous military crisis looming in front of it." Proposing "a realistic strategic objective for Taiwan, and the associated policy prescriptions, to sustain the political balance that has kept the peace for the last fifty years," the authors urge the Joe Biden administration to affirm that it is not trying to change Taiwan's status; work with its allies, especially Japan, to prepare new plans that could challenge Chinese military moves against Taiwan and help Taiwan defend itself, yet put the burden of widening a war on China; and visibly plan, beforehand, for the disruption and mobilization that could follow a wider war, but without assuming that such a war would or should escalate to the Chinese, Japanese, or American homelands. "The horrendous global consequences of a war between the United States and China, most likely over Taiwan, should preoccupy the Biden team, beginning with the president," the authors conclude.