In the 1980s, the stunning success of Japan and the rapid growth of Asia's "Four Tigers"--Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore--was widely reported in the Western media, thoroughly discussed by academics, and written about by numerous authors. Since the late 1990s, however, attention has been focused on the economic and political rise of China.
For people in Taiwan, the transformation of its giant neighbor is a source of both excitement and anxiety. China's 1.32 billion people are a huge potential market. But in international relations, Beijing is using its growing clout to promote a "One China" policy and box Taipei in.
"We are in the midst of a China fever. Taiwan is no doubt losing out in its efforts to attract attention from the rest of the world when the latter is infatuated with China," says Steve Tsang, Louis Cha Fellow and University Reader in Politics at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and director of the college's Taiwan Studies Program (TSP).
Notwithstanding the world's fascination with China, overseas scholars are showing increasing interest in Taiwan. Taiwan-themed academic conferences and workshops are now regular events in Europe and North America, and institutes devoted to the new field of Taiwan Studies have been set up in the United States, the UK, Germany, Australia and other countries.
Some of the reasons for this interest are set out on the website of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., which has created a Taiwan Education and Research Program: "The need for more focused and advanced study of Taiwan arises from Taiwan's unique international position and internal development. Taiwan's troubled relationship with the People's Republic of China remains a key issue affecting the foreign policy of the United States.... At the same time, Taiwan's distinctive experience in areas such as democratization and economic development has made Taiwan a model for other societies and a rich field for comparative study."
The North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) was established in 1994. "The number of members has been growing over the years. Currently, there are 100 to 120 active members," says NATSA President Huey-tyng Gau.
"The growth in [Taiwan-related] research has been visible in the conferences we run," says Dafydd Fell, a lecturer and research fellow in Taiwan Studies at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
Taiwan Studies has been taught at SOAS since 1999. In 2006, the school became the first institute outside Taiwan to offer a master's degree course in the field.
Increasing Interest
"Each year we get overwhelmed by an increasing number of applications to present research," explains Fell, who runs the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS). The association's informal existence dates back to 2004, when the first European conference on Taiwan studies was held in London. EATS was formalized in 2006, the same year SOAS established its Center for Taiwan Studies. The fourth EATS conference was held last April in Stockholm, Sweden.
"It is also interesting to note that apart from [our members in] the UK, France and Germany, we are getting increasing numbers of participants from Eastern Europe, especially Poland and the Czech Republic," adds Fell.
The London School of Economics and Political Science, another part of the University of London, has been holding annual London Taiwan Workshops since 2002. This summer, the school's Taiwan Culture Research Program began publishing electronically a new journal devoted to "interdisciplinary studies that use Taiwan as a point of comparison."
Taiwan studies is a broad area, the boundaries of which have yet to be fixed. "There's an open question as to what exactly Taiwan studies is. It hasn't been exhaustively defined," says Jeffrey Martin, an assistant professor in the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Studies at Chang Jung Christian University (CJCU) in South Taiwan's Tainan County.
Martin is an example of overseas academic interest in Taiwan. An American, he researched Taiwan's police for his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago's Department of Anthropology.
More than 20 graduate institutes and college departments in Taiwan now offer Taiwan-centric courses, although CJCU's was the first to use the words "Taiwan studies" in its title when it was founded in 2005. According to the institute's website, its mission includes developing "academic, pedagogical and cultural resources that embody and extend the perspective of Taiwanese subjectivity."
Taiwan's economic success was once widely reported by Western media, but attention has now switched to a rising China. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)
As recently as the early 1980s, Taiwan studies as such did not exist in Taiwan. The proliferation of courses with local themes is one aspect of a broad cultural shift known variously as "Taiwanese consciousness," "localization" or bentuhua.
For most of the post-World War II period, Taiwan's government regarded the island as being defined by its ancestral and cultural links to China--and promoted this stance, to the exclusion of other viewpoints, through its media and education policies. Proponents of localization, by contrast, stress the uniqueness of Taiwan's culture, and do not regard the island simply as an appendage of China.
Diversity of Influences
For many working in the field of Taiwan studies, China's influence on the island is just one of several that have shaped its history and people. "Taiwan's location in the world has made it an intersection of global historical flows," says Martin.
The 13th Annual North American Taiwan Studies Conference (NATSC), which was held June 8-10 this year at the Pyle Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, took a similar tack. The official main theme was "Taiwan in the Nexus of 'Empires,'" and participants were invited to reflect on how the presence of competing empires impacted Taiwan, and on the responses of Taiwanese people.
"Before the 1980s, Taiwan and its related studies was not a distinct subject of academic inquiry," says K.C. Tu, professor and holder of the Lai Ho and Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
"However, since the 1990s, in response to social and political changes in Taiwan, scholars began to venture in search of Taiwan's national identity, so as to be able to represent its distinctive culture. Consequently, Taiwan studies has increasingly attracted international scholarly attention," he explains.
"As director of the Center for Taiwan Studies at UCSB, I strive to promote the study of Taiwan and its people, society, history, and culture from global perspectives, making it a distinct research field in academia in the United States and worldwide," says Tu, a translator and poet.
CJCU's Martin describes Taiwan studies as "slightly incoherent but extremely fecund," and goes on to say: "[Taiwan studies] isn't yet a field in its own right. It doesn't have defined methods. It's a conversation between people trained in history, geography, literary theory, political science, anthropological theory, and other social sciences."
Gau points out that NATSCs feature scholars from disciplines that include "anthropology, education, sociology, political science, law, economics, communications, journalism, Eastern Asian studies, psychology, geography, history, urban planning, science, [and] linguistics."
At SOAS, graduate students can take courses in Taiwanese politics, Taiwan's economic development, Taiwanese cinema, Taiwan's society and culture, and Hokkien language. "We have the widest range of Taiwan-related graduate courses of any institution outside Taiwan," asserts Fell, who says that around 20 students per year take these courses. "Courses on Taiwanese cinema and Hokkien are also available to undergraduate students."
Strategic Dimensions
The TSP at St. Antony's College is designed to promote the study and research of Taiwan's politics, society, external relations and economy, says Tsang. It organizes seminars three times a year and an international conference once per year. It also sponsors lecture visits to Taiwan by research fellows of the college.
TSP seminars often feature high-profile speakers. In the 2006-2007 academic year, these included Douglas Paal, former director of the American Institute in Taiwan; Ramon Myers, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution; and Michael Hsin-huang Hsiao, the executive director of the Center for Asia-Pacific Studies at Academia Sinica.
Paal spoke on Taiwan's relations with China and the United States; Myers looked at how changes in the 1950s paved the way for Taiwan's political and economic transformation, while Hsiao's paper was titled "Challenges to Taiwan's New Democracy and the Rise of a New National Identity."
"The TSP's heavy emphasis on politics, international relations, and security issues reflects my personal strengths," explains Tsang. "The TSP as such covers work on economic, social and environmental issues as well, but it does not do much if any work on the geography or local cultures of Taiwan. Ethnic relations are part of the social dimension of Taiwan's developments, and are covered."
"Most people outside of China and Taiwan are not well informed of Taiwan and incorrectly see Taiwan as a 'renegade province' of China. Most people do not now think of Taiwan when they are interested in Chinese culture or civilization--they go directly to China for that," says Tsang. "There is indeed much that Taiwan can do to ride on the 'China fever'... [but it is] an uphill effort."
Taiwan's religious heterodoxy is a rich field for scholars. Some are already looking at the links between Taiwanese and Chinese folk religions. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)
UCSB's Center for Taiwan Studies focuses on Taiwanese literature, which is also one of the strengths of the Taiwan Research Unit (TRU), part of the Department of Chinese Languages and Literatures at Ruhr University, Bochum, in Germany. The TRU was created in 2002, the culmination of a three-year project funded by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.
The same foundation has provided financial support for the EATS, the NATSA, Harvard University's Taiwan Studies Workshop, and the Taiwan Studies Unit (established in 1996) at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia.
NATSA's main financial backer is, according to its website, the Taiwan Research Fund (TRF), an organization founded and still led by activist-scholar Huang Huang-hsiung.
The TRF played a major role in "breaking through taboos" surrounding the study of Taiwan, and shifting interest in the island from the margins of academia to the mainstream, says Gau.
Other sponsors of the 13th Annual North American Taiwan Studies Conference included Taiwan's Ministry of Education and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
According to the UCSB website, the Lai Ho and Wu Cho-liu Endowed Chair in Taiwan Studies was established with a gift of US$500,000 from "a number of individual donors associated with the Taiwanese American Foundation of San Diego.... The benefactors said they made the gift to help position the campus as an international center for the exploration of Taiwan's literature, history, and culture."
Interaction Between Traditions
Japan ruled Taiwan for 50 years until its defeat in World War II, and Taiwan studies has a much longer history in that country than it does in any other, Taiwan included. The Japan Association for Taiwan Studies plays a similar role to NATSA and EATS; Tenri University hosts a Society for Taiwan Studies.
CJCU's Martin, who teaches in Mandarin, says there is "very little movement back-and-forth between the Taiwan studies that has been done in Chinese, and Taiwan studies conducted in and written up in English. They seem to be two independent traditions."
Interaction between the two traditions seems to be increasing, however. National Chengchi University's English-language master's degree course in Taiwan studies is taught entirely by Taiwanese professors. And CJCU began an English-language Taiwan Studies program this summer.
At NATSA events, participants--most of whom are Taiwanese scholars or students based at US universities--can present in English, Mandarin or any of Taiwan's local languages.
Taiwan Studies scholars based in Europe are working to enhance cross-border cooperation. "We have just launched a collaborative program for Taiwan studies teaching in Europe. This involves outstanding Taiwanese scholars coming to four universities--SOAS, Edinburgh in Scotland, and Heidelberg and Tubingen in Germany--to give lectures and courses. In addition, SOAS Taiwan Studies staff will give short courses on Taiwan politics, economy and culture at the other three universities," says SOAS's Fell. The program is subsidized by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.
"Recently, France's University Lyon-III formed a pact with Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University to launch its own Taiwan studies program," says Fell.
There is international collaboration in research as well as teaching. Fell, for instance, is working on a joint project on democracy within political parties with a scholar at Academia Sinica's Institute of Political Science.
The amount of published information about Taiwan available outside the country has greatly increased, according to Fell. "I first got interested in research on Taiwan as a BA student in the late 1980s, and I recall how little there was in the UK libraries on Taiwan," he says. "The picture has changed radically since the late 1990s, with a huge surge in English-language publications about Taiwan."
The emergence of Taiwan studies as a subject in its own right with its own institutions and journals does not mean China specialists are turning their gaze away from the island. The American Association for Chinese Studies (AACS), for instance, is explicit about its continuing curiosity. In a message posted on the AACS's website, the AACS's biannual American Journal of Chinese Studies reminds scholars that the journal, "has a strong interest in manuscripts dealing with Taiwan... [readers] are urged to submit Taiwan related manuscripts."
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Steven Crook is a writer based in Tainan County.
Copyright © 2007 by Steven Crook