Ten years ago, anyone wanting to do research on Taiwan in the United States would have been hard-pressed to find enough scholarly publications on the subject. Today, this is far from the case. As one U.S. scholar puts it, since 1985 there has been “an explosion” of English-language books that deal with Taiwan either exclusively or comparatively. “If you go to the libraries in America and look at the index cards under the category of Taiwan, you'll find very few materials were published before the eighties,” says political scientist Alan Wachman. “Now you can find many of them, most of which came out only recently.”
The explosion in books and scholarly articles obviously reflects a newfound interest among scholars and research institutions in the study of Taiwan. Although most Sinologists still stick to mainland China as their primary area of research, more and more are taking pains to fit Taiwan into the picture of Chinese culture and affairs. And for a small but growing number, Taiwan studies is becoming a viable, legitimate field in its own right.
Wachman is among the new scholars taking a look at Taiwan. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1992 with a dissertation on Taiwan's democratization movement beginning in the 1980s. But the interest in Taiwan is not confined to younger academics or to doctoral dissertations. Established scholars and well-regarded publications are taking note of the island as well. The New York Review of Books published a critique of six new books on Taiwan in its October 1992 issue. The five-page analysis, written by Jonathan Spence, one of today's premier China scholars, dealt with books on a variety of topics, but ail focusing on what Spence calls the “other China.”
Other scholars who have been paying attention to Taiwan for a long time are now finding that the higher visibility of their field brings more opportunities for research. Among these is Murray Rubinstein, who teaches Chinese history at Baruch/CUNY and studies folk religion in Taiwan. He is now able to travel annually to Taiwan with the financial support of his school. “My goal is not just to understand Chinese folk religion, but the folk religion of the modern Taiwan people,” he says. “The origin goes way back to Fujian province on the mainland.”
The interest in Taiwan is even becoming institutionalized, with several academic groups popping up. These include the Taiwan Studies Group, under the Association for Asian Studies, and the Conference Group on Taiwan Studies, set up by the American Political Science Association. The most recent group is the Taiwan Studies Workshop (TSW), established two years ago at Harvard University's John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. It is the center's first group to focus on Taiwan since its founding in 1955. “At Harvard, we have an increasing number of students interested in Taiwan and the relations between Taiwan and mainland China,” says TSW director William Kirby. “But we didn't have any organization or program addressing those issues.”
The Harvard workshop is held once a month with an invited speaker presenting a formal paper on issues related to Taiwan. One of the recent speakers was Rubinstein, whose presentation centered on contemporary religious pilgrimages from Taiwan to Fujian province. Those attending TSW have the chance to read the paper beforehand and join in a series of discussions at the meeting. “The papers are published afterward to encourage new research and real academic exchange,” Kirby says.
Kirby, who is an established historian, was in Taipei last September to attend the Conference on Historical Materials on Taiwan History, organized by the History Department, National Taiwan University. He is one of many American scholars of Taiwan studies who have been invited to the island over the past decade for scholarly exchange programs or conferences.
Why is the American academic community giving so much more attention to the small island of Taiwan? One big reason is the many changes that have taken place in Taiwan since the 1980s. Foremost among these is its impressive economic development, which really took off in the mid-1980s, giving Taiwan the world's second largest foreign exchange reserves. “It was as if Taiwan didn't exist until it became rich,” Wachman says.
But just when the island was becoming home to an affluent society, it also began the transformation to democracy. Instead of the Kuomintang (KMT) dominating the island's politics as it had for the past forty years, opposition parties began taking an active and influential part in the political decision-making process. “These two things together,” says Michael Ying-mao Kau (高英茂), a professor of political science at Brown University, “helped put Taiwan in a more conspicuous position regarding academic research on China.”
According to Kau and other scholars in the United States, many academics who previously had no interest in Taiwan found themselves surprised at the way the island had developed. Such amazing growth was unheard of for any small economy that had long been dependent on outside control or foreign aid. As sociologist Thomas Gold, chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, explains, “The pattern of Taiwan's economic development simply does not fit into the economic development theories for a Third World country.”
Gold was perhaps the first to introduce Taiwan's unique experience to the world with his book State & Society in the Taiwan Miracle, published in 1986. The reason Taiwan did not fit into the usual models, he says, is that many development theories popular in the 1960s and 1970s were influenced by Marxist and Leninist thought. These theories emphasized that Third World countries had failed to grow economically or democratically because they had been held back by Western imperialism. “But Taiwan's economy developed very rapidly along with its political change in the eighties,” Gold says. “So many scholars are asking the question, Why?”
Inspired by these dramatic changes in Taiwan, some China experts started to include Taiwan in their studies after the mid-1980s. Andrew Nathan, a professor of political science and director of the East Asian Institute at Columbia University, admits that his interest in Taiwan started when the pace of democratization stepped up in 1986. He has now expanded his interest to include the growing relationship between Taiwan and Mainland China, which he describes as “subtle.” Other scholars have been drawn to Taiwan's technological development, including Denis Fred Simon, director of the Center for Technology and International Affairs at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy.
Taiwan's development is also attracting attention as a comparative model for scholars specializing in other developing regions. Gold's reports on modem Taiwan's socio-economic development inspired a Latin America expert at Berkeley to expand his comparative studies.
“Now he not only studies Taiwan,” Gold says, “but also other areas in Asia, such as Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore.”
Another reason for the new interest in Taiwan studies is a general change in attitudes about both Taiwan and Mainland China. Previously, many scholars seemed awed by the immense influence of the mainland. They also accepted the mainland's own view of Taiwan, as simply a part of China. As Michael Kau explains, “Many people in the U.S. thought Taiwan was simply too small to exert any power compared with the great China.”
Other scholars find a more direct connection between Taiwan studies and prevailing political views. “American scholars of China are very much affected by politics,” says Alan Wachman. During the fifties, sixties, and seventies, Taiwan studies was politically, thus academically, unacceptable. In general, American intellectuals were enthusiastic about Communist China and looked at the KMT as a corrupt government. As a scholar of Taiwan studies during that time, Gold remembers the wry comments he used to get from colleagues. “Studying Taiwan was considered academic suicide,” he says. “You would be looked at within your community as a freak. People who did study Taiwan were often considered very right-wing, probably paid by the KMT, or spokespersons for the government on Taiwan.”
Before 1980, the U.S. government also offered incentives for studying Communist China rather than Taiwan. For example, in the 1960s the government set up the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the PRC (cscp), later known as the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China (cscc), to provide research funds.
“All the research about China [funded by cscp] was done in the name of national defense,” Michael Kau says, “because China and the Soviet Union presented a security threat to the U.S.”
But even during much of this era, because the mainland was closed to most of the outside world, many American and European scholars used Taiwan as a base for their studies about Mainland China and Chinese culture. Many of them studied at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies in Taipei, established by Stanford University in 1963. Others did research or fieldwork in Taiwan simply because they did not have access to the mainland. “They felt that doing research in Taiwan would be relevant not to the understanding of Taiwan but to the understanding of traditional China,” says Columbia University anthropologist Myron Cohen. “By focusing on the Chinese tradition in Taiwan, they felt they could say something about China as a whole.”
There are a number of examples of well-known research done in this fashion. Stanford anthropologist Arthur Wolf, for example, used Taiwan to study traditional Chinese family and marriage customs. Taiwan was also the base for Rubinstein, who came to the island to collect information about the development of Chinese Christianity. And Columbia's Andrew Nathan did his dissertation research in Taiwan focusing on the Chinese governments of the Warlord Period in the 1910s and I 920s. “If I could have, I'm sure I would have gone to the mainland instead of Taiwan to do my research,” Nathan says.
Taiwan acted as a fill-in for Mainland China for more than twenty years. In 1979, Washington and Beijing established formal relations, making it possible for scholars to conduct research in Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Xian. Shortly afterward, the number of Americans doing research in Taiwan dropped dramatically. The island faded into an obscure corner in U.S. academic circles for the next fifteen years, until its economic and political transformation caught scholars' attention in the mid-1980s.
But once American scholars were allowed to visit the mainland, some of the initial enthusiasm began to wear off. Some of them discovered a disparity between the theories they had held and the realities of the Communist Chinese system. What happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989 added to their disenchantment. “The incident showed a strong contrast between the mainland and Taiwan at a time when Americans were beginning to change their mind about Taiwan due to its democratic movement,” says Thomas Metzger, a senior research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Ramon Myers, scholar-curator of the institution's East Asian Collection, also thinks the Tiananmen incident was partly responsible for the recent rise of Taiwan studies.
Changes in Taiwan's political climate also gave scholars greater freedom in pursuing research about the island. Those who might have been interested earlier found many topics were too politically sensitive. That is one reason why much of the research done in Taiwan before 1980 was in the less controversial field of anthropology. “In the I 970s, one had to be careful about what one said,” Rubinstein says. “And you always had the feeling of being watched.” When William Kirby, a professor of political science at Harvard, was doing his dissertation in Taipei in the 1970s, he was visited without notice by several people claiming to be policemen and who showed great concern about his work in Taiwan. “Their English was too good for Taiwan policemen,” he says with a laugh.
At that time, it would have been very difficult for Edwin Winckler, a research fellow at Columbia University's East Asian Institute, to collect data for his studies on Taiwan's political development, including information about the opposition. “In the I 970s,” he says, “I couldn't talk to anyone about Taiwan because there were no Taiwan political scientists who had freedom to do anything.”
But this kind of situation was eliminated with the end of martial law in 1987 and the subsequent progress in democratization. A good example of the change that has taken place can be seen in studies of the February 28 (2-28) Incident, a clash in 1947 between the newly arrived Nationalists from the mainland and the local Chinese population that led to numerous people being executed or imprisoned. For many years, study or even discussion of the 2-28 Incident was taboo, especially regarding the number of people put to death by the Nationalists. It was not until recently that the ROC government allowed scholars access to documents concerning the incident, and that Fu-mei Chang Chen (陳張富美), a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, was able to publish her study on the incident in Taiwan under her real name.
Kirby, who thinks he would never be visited by the “police” in today's Taiwan, can't think of any subject that is now too sensitive for scholars to approach. Some researchers have also been able to uncover more complete data on studies done in earlier, more sensitive decades. Hill Gates, an anthropology professor at Stanford University, started doing research in the 1960s on small communities and neighborhoods in Taiwan; she says many aspects of government operations at the community level have become much clearer to her now that people in Taiwan are able to talk freely.
Columbia's Andrew Nathan also says it has become much easier to gather information. “Now you can go to almost any government archives or library in Taiwan for information,” he says. Thomas Gold has taken advantage of the new environment to interview hundreds of people in Taiwan about how the island's social structure has changed due to political and economic changes. “Taiwan now has the reputation for easy access to information for scholarly investigation,” he says.
Information on Taiwan is also more readily available in American university libraries. This includes Chinese newspapers and magazines, published both in the United States and Taiwan, old pictures and maps of Taiwan, and even official ROC government documents. Harvard claims to have more than three hundred gazetteers published in Taiwan. And Ramon Myers boasts that Stanford's Hoover Institution has the most complete collection of data about Taiwan from the Ming dynasty (1386-1644) to the present. With the help of research fellow Fu-mei Chang Chen, who was born in Taiwan, the institution has collected numerous land deeds, marriage certificates, and adoption papers from the Ching dynasty (1644-1911). Chen is also responsible for collecting data on the 2-28 Incident.
A major reason for the increase in information on Taiwan is the island's own efforts to promote Taiwan studies. In fact, a major incentive for scholars to take up such research has been the marked increase in funding from Taiwan sources, especially the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (see box). The ROC government has also set up information offices in eight major American cities to help students and scholars with their research. Edwin Winckler is among those who are pleased about the establishment of the Chinese Information and Culture Center Library in New York. “The ROC government should have done it a long time ago,” he says.
Still, many researchers find that the available English information about Taiwan is not sufficient. Winckler complains that although the ROC's New York library is a valuable resource, it does not provide all the newspapers and major magazines published in Taiwan or adequate information about the opposition Democratic Progressive Party. Others would like to see more English translations of the reports and books published by scholars in Taiwan. Although many American China scholars read Chinese, they prefer having materials in their own language.
Thomas Gold suggests Taiwan scholars could work together with an American publisher such as M.E. Sharpe, which has already published a series of books on Taiwan.
Although it has made much headway In recent years, the field of Taiwan studies still has a long way to go before gaining legitimate status in the international academic community. Few American scholars focus on Taiwan, and few graduate students write their dissertations on Taiwan. Language is also a drawback in attracting China scholars to Taiwan studies. “We need to train more scholars who can speak not only Mandarin but also Taiwanese,” says William Kirby of the Taiwan Studies Workshop. “If you want to learn more about Taiwan, you'd better speak the local dialect.”
Winckler points out that most China experts retain the old attitude that Taiwan does not warrant much attention in its own right. Why? “Because of the great China chauvinism,” he says. “They don't want to wake up.” But even Winckler believes that the need for paying more attention to Taiwan does not mean it should be relegated to a field in itself, outside the broader subject of China studies. “There shouldn't be a term called Taiwan studies at all,” he says.
For many academics, focusing on Taiwan studies does not open up many career opportunities. “Many universities cannot afford to hire a professor teaching exclusively about Taiwan,” explains Alan Wachman. “So professionally it does not make a lot of sense to identify yourself as a scholar of Taiwan. You still need to identify yourself as a scholar of China.” Instead of teaching, Wachman now co-directs the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, a joint program in the mainland sponsored by the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and Nanjing University.
Other scholars are not as pessimistic. Michael Ying-mao Kau believes scholars can still survive by focusing on Taiwan studies. “Only your teaching perspective and scope have to be broader,” he says. Sociologist Thomas Gold, for example, has been able to achieve recognition as a well-known Taiwan expert in the United States. But because he is the only China expert in U.C. Berkeley's Sociology Department, he must keep a wider focus. His courses include only one section on Taiwan. “We'd be shorthanded if we offered courses dealing with Taiwan,” he says.
Murray Rubinstein, however, is lucky enough to have the financial support of Baruch/CUNY to pursue his studies of Taiwan; yet he still prefers to describe himself as “primarily a historian of China.”
Even if Taiwan is having a hard time finding its own place in the academic world, many scholars recognize the need to include it in their broader studies of Mainland China. The island's growing influence, both in Mainland China and in the Asian region, is attracting their attention. “More and more there are ties between Taiwan and mainland China, politically, economically, and culturally,” says Andrew Nathan. “If you are not interested in Taiwan, still you'd better know something about it because the mainland is impacted by Taiwan.”
Michael Ying-mao Kau sees a growing need to look at Taiwan in comparative studies with the rest of East Asia or even Southeast Asia. Through its extensive investments in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, Kau points out,Taiwan is becoming an important actor in an increasingly important region. “What happens to that part of the world will be increasingly crucial to the whole world,” he says.
And of course it is important for Taiwan itself to find a discernible role in international scholarship if it wants to gain greater political recognition around the world. An interest in Taiwan studies could help the island in its efforts to become a member of the United Nations, GATT, and other world bodies. In fact, Taiwan's uncertain diplomatic position is in many ways similar to the situation of Taiwan studies. “Taiwan is important economically,” Kau says, “but it still is not on the intellectual map of the academic world.”