Taiwan Today

Taiwan is increasingly characterized with reference to the variety of ethnicities represented by its residents. Not surpris ingly, a growing portion of these residents come to the island from foreign lands with academic goals, to avail themselves of ROC resources that are not available to them in their home countries. They study in the nation's top colleges and universities, in pursuit of knowledge--and for advanced degrees that may prove uniquely marketable when they return to their homelands.

In the novel Fortress Besieged, author Chien Chung-shu describes young Chinese students in the 1930s flocking over seas en masse to obtain academic degrees and then, upon their return, being admired as sages. An analogous situation has existed at certain points in Taiwan's history, with many of the island's intelligentsia traveling to points beyond in pursuit of scholarly achievement. ROC President Lee Teng-hui, for example, did undergraduate work at Kyoto Imperial University, and graduate study at Iowa State University and Cornell University. Today, however, the ROC has world-class colleges and universities of its own, attracting overseas students from the same academic powerhouse nations that educated many of this country's leaders.

Consider the numbers. In 1955 (the first year for which statistics are available), a total of fourteen foreigners with no family ties to China were enrolled in academic institutions in Taiwan, and only two of them came from outside of Asia. By comparison, the same figure for the 1998-99 school year was 5,109, and almost a third of these arrived from outside of greater Asia.

Although the majority of Taiwan's foreign students study at language institutes, a sizeable proportion represents a rela tively new breed: the China expert-in-training. These are serious academicians, often showing up with at least a BA or BS already under their belts, and they are hungry to learn about the Chinese world, either to advance their careers or simply out of intellectual curiosity. Theirs are the eager minds that are turning Taiwan into the island that teaches the world about the East. While some future China scholars head to Beijing, Hong Kong or Singapore, the growing number of those choosing Taiwan points to advantages here which are offered nowhere else. Some cite the liberal political environment or the authen ticity of local Chinese culture, while others come just to pick up some language skills and then end up staying.

When Jason Blatt of Colorado Springs began his studies here in 1997, the Republic of China had just seen its first open presidential election. Hoping to pursue a master's degree in mainland Chinese politics, Blatt figured that the best venue for his studies would be Taiwan, since it was free of the propaganda machines of Beijing. He found what he was looking for at National Chengchi University's Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies. "I thought it would probably be the best place to do research about mainland China.... There are materials here you can't find anywhere else in the world," he explains. These materials include, for example, his school library's unique collection of declassified documents from and about the Chinese Communist Party, some of which date back to the 1920s.

For Blatt's fellow Chengchi master's candidate Peter Kobayashi, the decision to study in Taiwan was a mixture of luck and economics. Kobayashi had traveled from his native Tokyo to the United Kingdom, where he took a degree and studied some Mandarin informally with Chinese classmates. When he came to Taiwan for a couple of months to further his command of the language, he assumed he would eventually move on to Hong Kong or Singapore for graduate work in Chinese studies. "But actually, I decided it would be better to come back here, because the tuition was much cheaper and because I already knew what Taiwan was about, so it wasn't a totally strange place to me."

Though Blatt and Kobayashi were attracted to Chengchi for different reasons, both saw their degrees from there as having potential cache. "When I started, I was planning on going back to the States to try to become a Taiwan expert, in which case it would have been really handy [to have obtained a master's degree in Taiwan]," says Blatt. "People were always pretty impressed when I told them I was studying here." And although he has now thrown himself into a career in journalism, Blatt admits that his status as a Chengchi graduate student played a major role in getting him his current jobs: he now works as a reporter for Taiwan's TVBS cable news network, and as a freelance correspondent for Hong Kong's South China Morning Post and CNN.

For Kobayashi, the luster of a Taiwanese MA in mainland Chinese studies was even strong enough to overcome the fact that foreign degrees are not recognized by Japanese universities. "Mainland China is the focus of attention worldwide, especially in places like Japan where people are starting to invest there, so I thought it would be easier for me to find a job if I knew something about it," he says. "They are definitely short of people who can speak Mandarin, so although your degree is not recognized in Japan, there should still be many people who are seeking graduates from Chinese-speaking institutions."

But employment is not always the prime motivator. Yumiko Ebisutani's reasons for coming from Osaka to National Taiwan University had more to do with her passion for the philosophy of Chuang-tzu, and her love of Taiwan. Ebisutani had originally planned to get her master's degree in Chinese literature in Beijing, but when visa problems caused some delays, she took a semester-long detour here and found herself unable to leave. "I came down to study for just half a year and found that Taiwan is a really great place.... The people are very nice, and the sense of Chinese culture seems especially strong here," she explains.

Although she has not yet decided how she will use her degree or whether she wants to go on to get a doctorate, Ebisutani explains that studying classical Chinese philosophy in a Chinese environment is reward enough.

While mainland politics and classical literature may be popular choices for the China expert of tomorrow, they are by no means the only subjects that interest foreign graduate students. Consider the case of Timothy Fox, an American currently seeking his Ph.D. from the English department of Tamkang University.

Having spent some seven years as an English language instructor at Taipei's Chinese Culture University, Fox began to realize that his master's degree from Rutgers would not be enough to get him a promotion to the rank of professor. "So I thought, Why not study English literature?" he explains. "This way I would not only be able to teach language, but also be able to teach literature...and, being in Taiwan, I decided to concentrate on Chinese-American literature." A couple of years later, after hours of Shakespeare, Jacobian drama, and Greek tragedy, Fox is now writing his dissertation on US author Frank Chin, whose novel Donald Duk is a standard feature of many high school curricula in the United States.

Although the mental picture of a Taiwanese professor explaining African-American literature to a guy from New Jersey might seem a little absurd, Fox assures us it is not. "Some of my teachers were Americans themselves, but of the ones from here, most of them had gotten their degrees in the [United States].... They have a better grasp of American literature than I do, and are better read than I am." And while Fox has no plans to leave Taiwan (he jokingly refers to himself as a "New Taiwan ese"), he is sure that if he were to go back, his degree would be just as valuable as one obtained from a university in an English-speaking nation.

Of course, doing graduate work in a foreign country is by no means an easy task. The most obvious pitfall is language, and although overseas students are required to take a Mandarin test (as a student of English, Fox is a rare exception), many are daunted by the pressure of performing academically in Chinese. Even for Ebisutani, whose love of the language is her prime reason for being in Taiwan, the switch from studying in her native tongue is the hardest part of her coursework.

For Kobayashi, whose Mandarin is self-taught, the stress of studying in Chinese has been immense. "During the first term, I had a lot of trouble taking notes, because the teachers speak really fast...so I had to copy other students' notes for the examination," he says. And the frequent 10,000-character essays he was assigned were no picnic, either. Blatt, however, had an easier time bridging the language gap, having spent eight years in Taiwan before entering his master's program. Nonethe less, he admits that some courses, such as his Marxism class, would have been hard to comprehend even in English. In fact, in Blatt's case, the problem wasn't too much Chinese, but rather, not enough of it.

"Many of the teachers are educated in the States, and when they come back, some of them take material they studied [there] and graft it onto their own curriculum, so it ends up being a lesson in English rather than a lesson in the subject," he explains. "They'll have us read [excerpts from] an English textbook, which is great for me but not so good for the other students." To Blatt's mind, this sort of "undeserved awe" accorded foreign China experts is inappropriate for a top Taiwanese university.

Yet beyond the language barrier, other problems come up--simply from being a foreigner. Kobayashi remembers one professor, originally from the Chinese mainland, who had survived the Second World War and was rumored to have a grudge against the Japanese. "I heard that some of my older fellow students who were from Japan never passed his class. In fact, I became the first Japanese student I know of to pass his course on the first try. It was okay, but I could tell that he really didn't like Japanese students." On the other hand, he admits that some of his teachers had a special affinity for visitors to Taiwan, and paid him extra attention.

Sometimes, what foreign students lack is not related to language or the attitude of their instructors, but rather to the experience beyond the world of books and lectures. Lee Ta-wei, dean of academic affairs at National Taiwan Normal Univer sity (NTNU), has a keen understanding of some of these problems since he himself was once an overseas graduate student. Having earned his MA from the University of Eastern Michigan and his Ph.D. from Penn State, Lee sees similarities and differences between his experience and those of the foreigners at NTNU.

Like Ebisutani and Kobayashi, Lee found that language was the toughest nut to crack--he says it took him six months before he felt comfortable in his new English-speaking environment. But one problem that did not trouble Lee was fitting in with the Americans at his school. "We had more chances to meet local students in the States," he says, explaining that both of the universities he attended had mixers organized by the foreign student office, giving him and his Taiwanese classmates a chance to get to know their US counterparts. "Host family" programs also helped fuel this interaction.

Unfortunately, this is not always the case with foreigners studying in Taiwan--particularly with the graduate degree candidates, who tend to have less time to socialize. "I don't think [the overseas and local students] mix well," Lee says. "You can see groups of foreign students hanging around together, living together, but it's rarer to see them mixing with locals. I don't think that's good, and I hope we can improve that."

While not all budding China scholars necessarily feel isolated from the Chinese, many agree that some progress could be made in this area. Kobayashi agrees that although he has made a large enough circle of Taiwanese friends, some of his classmates can seem a little aloof. "The [local] students here who had studied Japanese and were interested in speaking some of it with me were very nice to me. But I also found that a few of the local students who had been studying together in the same department at the same university...tended to be a bit cliquey."

Earlier in this century, if someone in the West claimed to be a China expert, then it usually meant that person had received formal instruction about this part of the world in his or her own country, at most taking an occasional research trip here. At that time, few people other than missionaries spoke Mandarin well enough to study in it. But today, in spite of language and cultural differences, young scholars are arriving by the planeful, seeking Taiwan's understanding of the Chi nese world.

Copyright 1999 by Michael Kitchen.