Taiwan Studies Revisited

Dafydd Fell, Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, Dafydd Fell, Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429535574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines and reviews some of the key figures in Taiwan Studies to plot the development of the field by revisiting their earlier influential books and bodies of work.

Often autobiographical in detail, each chapter asks the author to discuss the origins of their research and how their engagement with the field has developed since. The contributors then discuss their methodologies, fieldwork and arguments, as well as how their work was received at the time. They also go on to reflect on their chosen methods and core findings, assessing whether they have stood the test of time. Reflecting the diversity of the Taiwan Studies field, subjects covered in this volume include sociology, musicology, linguistics, comparative politics, international relations and anthropology. As such, this comprehensive overview adopts a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to understanding Taiwan.

Painting a picture of the changing state of international Taiwan Studies through the work of leading scholars, this book will be invaluable to students and scholars of Taiwan Studies, Chinese Studies and Asian politics, culture and society.

1

TAIWAN STUDIES REVISITED

Dafydd Fell and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao

A number of developments suggest that we are now witnessing a golden age of international Taiwan Studies (Fell 2017, Schubert 2017, Rawnsley 2017) in both Taiwan and in the world. This stands in stark contrast to the situation when we began studying Taiwan. At that time there was not yet really a sense of Taiwan Studies as a field, but instead Taiwan was often regarded as a marginal topic on the edge of Chinese Studies. While Fell (2008, 5) described Europe as a ‘Taiwan Studies desert’ in the late 1990s, there has been a remarkable transformation of the field over the last two decades. There has been a rapid expansion in the numbers of active Taiwan Studies programmes in overseas universities. There has also been a proliferation of Taiwan focused courses at European and American universities, with University of Texas at Austin and SOAS University of London standing out with their Taiwan Studies degree programmes (Chang and Fell 2019). Another important development has been the institutionalisation of conference organisations such as the North American Association of Taiwan Studies, the European Association of Taiwan Studies and the Japanese Association for Taiwan Studies. Another more recent breakthrough has been the three World Congresses of Taiwan Studies (2012, 2015 and 2018) initiated by Academia Sinica, Taiwan. There are also numerous promising signs in the realm of publications, with a number of active Taiwan Studies book series created after 2000 and the establishment of the International Journal of Taiwan Studies in 2018.

In the mid to late 1980s academic books on Taiwan in English were quite rare. Shelley Rigger’s (2002: 53) early review article found that only one or two English language books were being published per year on Taiwan’s politics in the mid to late 1980s. From 1989 though there was a progressive increase in the numbers of books being published on Taiwan’s politics, rising to a peak of almost 20 per year in 1999. Since Rigger’s article was published the expansion in Taiwan Studies books and journal publications has continued with the Routledge Research on Taiwan and Harrassowitz Studia Formosiana series playing key roles. Ten years after Rigger’s review, Jonathan Sullivan (2011) returned to update the state of the field in a number of articles, including one with the provocative title: ‘Is Taiwan Studies in Decline?’ Although his methodology was different from Rigger’s, his conclusions were similar on the health of the field. We also found similar optimistic results in a journal special edition collection of state of the field essays published in the newly launched International Journal of Taiwan Studies (Hsiao and Fell 2018).

In this book we propose an alternative way of plotting the development of the Taiwan Studies field by asking authors to revisit their earlier influential books or bodies of work. Generally we asked authors to revisit their earlier works at least ten years after the original publications. To a certain degree the chapters are autobiographical as authors discuss not only what sparked their initial research interest but also how their academic careers within the field have developed since their initial books hit the book stores.

In each case we asked the authors to address a number of themes in their chapters. First, we wanted to get a sense of the origins of their research projects and how they conducted the research design. Then they discuss the methodologies and sometimes the fieldwork they adopted to answer their core research questions. Next they briefly discuss the main findings and arguments in their respective books. Where the books had been reviewed we asked authors to outline how the books were reviewed by the critics and how they now feel about these reviews today?

Similarly we wanted the authors to reflect on how they feel about the methods and findings now. Has the study stood the test of time? Would they do anything differently if they could turn back the clock? We were also curious about what the authors did after these influential volumes. Have they continued studying the topic since and if so what are they doing differently? How have they built on their earlier studies? Have they moved into different research areas or are they still in the shadow of their earlier work?

We have selected books and published works that cut across key time periods in the development of the Taiwan Studies field. The chapters in the first part come from an era when English language academic publications on Taiwan were quite sparse. The earliest works revisited in our volume is the body of work by Michael Hsiao in Chapter 2. He revisits his early research on Taiwan’s civil society and social movements that began in the last decade of martial law and has continued since. Unlike the other chapters, Hsiao is revisiting a body of work that mainly consists of journal articles and book chapters. In the next chapter sociologist Thomas Gold revisits his 1986 volume State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle. In the book Gold reviews Taiwan’s development experience up to the mid-1980s, stressing the role of the state, but predicting that the political system would soon undergo major changes. The importance of Gold’s book is seen in Rigger’s (2002: 50) description of it as a classic ‘that awakened the field’. While Hsiao’s chapter stands out for revisiting a body of work rather than a book, Chapter 4 is the only one not written by an academic but a journalist, Simon Long. Although Long’s book Taiwan: China’s Last Frontier was published in 1991, it was mainly written in 1989. Writing for a wider audience, Long paints a vivid picture of Taiwan’s political scene as it was undergoing radical transformations both in its domestic and external politics in the mid to late 1980s.

In contrast, the chapters in the second part are from a time when the idea of Taiwan Studies as a field was starting to develop in the 1990s, particularly in Taiwan as well as North America. In the United States, it was during this period that the ME Sharpe Taiwan in the Modern World series reached its peak of book publications and the Taiwan Studies organisations began to be established, such as the North American Association of Taiwan Studies and Conference Group on Taiwan Studies at the American Political Science Association. Coming out in 1997, Christopher Hughes’s Taiwan and Chinese Nationalism: National Identity and Status in International Society was an important milestone for European Taiwan Studies. It was one of the first social science monographs on Taiwan published in Europe and would have a profound impact not only on the study of nationalism in Taiwan but also on promoting academic interest on Taiwan. The political scientist Jonathan Sullivan (2016) describes how as an undergraduate he found the book in the Leeds University Library and how this was the ‘book that got me hooked on Taiwan’. Then in Chapter 6 Shelley Rigger revisits her popular 1999 book Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy. This book was both groundbreaking in its overview of electoral politics in Taiwan but also made an important contribution to understanding Taiwan’s liberalisation and democratisation processes.

The books in the third part are from what could be viewed as the golden era of Taiwan Studies, when the field expands to see Europe also become a new hub for English publications in Taiwan Studies. Key developments include the creation of three Europe based book series, large numbers of Taiwan programmes were established in European universities and of course the European Association of Taiwan Studies was first established and soon became institutionalised.

The first three books in this section were all published in 2004. First the anthropologist Anru Lee revisits her book In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity. Using fieldwork in sunset industry factories in Central Taiwan, her beautiful book examines changing gender and labour politics at a time when Taiwan was going through economic restructuring. Next in Chapter 8 Melissa Brown looks back on her influential book Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power and Migration on Changing Identities. We can get a sense of the impact of her book from the fact that the journal Issues and Studies decided in late 2004 to publish a book review roundtable featuring eight of the leading scholars in the field as well as Brown herself (Issues and Studies book review roundtable 2004). A recent study of Taiwan related courses in the United States found that it is the third most used textbook (Hsieh and Wang 2018). The third book revisited from 2004 is Joseph Wong’s Healthy Democracies: Welfare Politics in Taiwan and South Korea. This study shows the transformative effect of democratisation on welfare system development in these two new democracies in East Asia.

Next we revisit three books that were published in 2005. First, in Chapter 10 Nancy Guy discusses her multi-prize winning Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan. Guy’s study uses the case of opera to reveal the intimate relationship between political change and cultural policy in Taiwan. This is followed by Fell’s first book Party Politics in Taiwan: Party Change and the Democratic Evolution of Taiwan, 1991–2004. The volume examines how and why Taiwan’s parties changed ideologically in the first decade and a half of multi-party democracy. Like Wong, Fell came to quite positive conclusions on the health of Taiwan’s democracy. The third book from 2005 is Henning Klöter’s Writing Taiwanese. The book focuses on the how, why and who questions concerning the writing of the Taiwanese or Hokkien language. In other words, it looks at how the Taiwanese language has been written in the past and present, what has been the ideology behind different writing systems, and the people or groups behind these systems. First published in 2011, Mikael Mattlin’s Politicized Society: The Long Shadow of One-Party Legacy is the newest book revisited in our collection and also the only one with a fully revised second edition (Mattlin 2018). Like a number of the other books revisited here, Mattlin looks at post democratic transition Taiwan but argues that the roots of the country’s intense politicization lie in the incomplete dismantling of the old one-party state.

To be honest, selecting which books to be revisited was not an easy task. The foremost criteria were to select books that have been popular and influential over the last three decades. In fact five of the books revisited here are among the ten listed by Sullivan (2016) in his review essay on the best academic publications on Taiwan’s politics. ¹ The books have also been widely used for Taiwan-related teaching courses, such as those at SOAS. There was also a personal element to the selection. For one of us editors (Fell), the books by Gold and Long were among the first he ever read on Taiwan as an undergraduate trying to find enough English language material to write a dissertation on Taiwan. Lee’s research also had a major impact on him. The first time he heard her presenting her research, which would be the basis of her book, was a critical moment that helped inspire him to start his own doctoral studies on Taiwan. The books by Hughes and Rigger were highly influential on him during his own PhD research. He can still recall sitting all day in Caves Book Store (敦煌書局) in Kaohsiung to read Hughes’ book as at the time the price of NT$3,000 seemed exorbitant.

The majority of the books in Part III are from the younger generation of scholars that received their PhDs in the golden era of Taiwan Studies after 2000. Another common feature is that many of the authors have played important roles in promoting the field of Taiwan Studies and have been active participants in international Taiwan Studies. Fell and Klöter, among others, for instance, were driving forces in the early development of the European Association of Taiwan Studies conferences. This contribution includes not only presenting their research but also many of the authors in our volume have been involved in the institutional building of Taiwan Studies outside Taiwan.

The chapters also can give readers a sense of the diversity of the Taiwan Studies field. Academic fields represented include sociology, public policy, musicology, linguistics, comparative politics, international relations, anthropology, migration studies, gender studies and political economy. Moreover, the majority of these revisited books adopt an interdisciplinary approach to understanding Taiwan. For many of us, involvement in Taiwan Studies is a way to break out of the sometimes narrow confines of our own disciplinary worlds. There is also much diversity in terms of the research methods scholars have typically used. Although extensive fieldwork is the basis for the vast majority of the original research, interviews, survey data, archival and content analysis have also been used by some of the authors.

We hope this revisited book will also have practical value to new and established scholars. For instance, many of the books revisited here are based on research originally conducted for doctoral studies. Thus many authors touch upon the experiences of PhD research design as well as turning PhD theses into book manuscripts, the so-called ‘dethesisising’ process.

The origins of this volume lie in a number of papers given on Taiwan Studies Revisited panels at the Second World Congress of Taiwan Studies that was held at SOAS in June 2015, co-organised by Academia Sinica (Taiwan) and SOAS (UK). However, only the chapters by Wong, Fell, Mattlin and Klöter were first presented at the World Congress. We then followed this up with a number of Taiwan Studies revisited lectures in London, where the speakers were then invited to contribute chapters. Chapter authors who the joined the SOAS Taiwan Studies Revisited Lecture Series were Gold, Lee, Long Hughes, Rigger and Guy.

Research origins

How did we become so passionate about the research that led to these books? For many of us it was the initial experience of visiting Taiwan for study or work that sparked our interest. However, there was often a degree of the accidental in the ultimate decision on the research topic. Gold, Hughes, Fell, Rigger, Brown and Mattlin all returned for doctoral fieldwork after earlier stays in Taiwan. Gold for instance first came to Taiwan in 1969 to study Chinese and later returned to teach English at Tunghai University in the early 1970s. Gold had originally planned to look at a PRC topic. His decision to switch his doctoral focus to Taiwan was influenced by changes in US–China relations and so he ended up following his advisor’s suggestion to take Taiwan as his case. Rigger had also planned to do her dissertation on China and specifically on its minority politics; however, this plan had to be dropped following the Tiananmen Incident in 1989. Having previously been in Taiwan as an undergraduate she made the decision to switch her research topic and location. In fact the Tiananmen effect on Taiwan Studies features in a number of chapters. Brown recalls for instance how in the aftermath of Tiananmen it was impossible to get free fieldwork access to rural Chinese villages, so research in Taiwan made sense for an anthropologist.

We also see the accidental nature of the origins of our research interest in cases where some of us actually changed our topics after arriving in Taiwan to start our fieldwork! For instance, Guy arrived planning to research the composition and performance of newly written Peking opera but found that as a result of political changes her ‘dissertation topic had basically evaporated’. Instead she shifted her focus to how political policy had affected Peking opera in Taiwan. Lee states how she came to Taiwan for fieldwork in the mid-1990s with an interest in gender and the global economy and planned to research the conditions of laid-off female factory workers. However, on discovering the challenges of finding a systematic set of interviewees, she had to radically change her approach and topic. Instead it was the chance introduction to a boss of a textile factory in Changhua County that led her to what would be her fieldwork location for the next two and a half years. This was where she would go on to develop her research on how traditional family culture and the developmentalist discourse shape the lives of Taiwanese women workers.

A common thread in a number of chapters is how Chinese Studies in the UK almost completely ignored Taiwan compared with the United States, where going to Taiwan for language training was much more common. Hughes, Fell and Long recall the lack of discussion of Taiwan in their courses. Despite being a Cambridge Chinese graduate, Long first became interested in Taiwan through work first as a banker and then a journa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Taiwan Studies revisited
• PART I: 1980s–early 1990s
• PART II: 1990s
• PART III: 2000s towards a golden era
• Index