Taiwan Today

“By definition, Taiwan studies, or ‘Taiwanology,’ with its connection to awareness of a national identity, is directed at specific elements of local culture accumulated from ancient to present times,” says senior academic Chuang Wan-shou (莊萬壽), who has founded Taiwan studies departments at two domestic universities. “At home, Taiwan studies can help identify common, collectively held values, as well as promote identification with the land,” he says. “When studied overseas, the discipline increases understanding of Taiwan’s historical or cultural realities, which helps to fill in a sometimes blank spot in East Asia.”

Taiwan studies reveals a very lively culture that deserves international attention, Chuang says, but adds that “we have to make our own efforts first before foreigners can join us.” In some sectors, however, foreigners already seem to be developing an appreciation of Taiwan’s culture and history. In April this year, for example, the Kyoto, Japan-based League of Historical Cities approved three new members. In addition to Hebron, Palestine and Kutaisi, Georgia, Tainan City in southern Taiwan was admitted to the league. The league has 95 member cities in 59 countries or regions worldwide, traces its origins to the 1987 World Conference of Historical Cities in Kyoto and became a formal organization under its present name in 1994.

Tainan was recognized as a historical city because it served as Taiwan’s administrative center until the late 19th century and because of its lengthy history of inhabitation “by people long before the Dutch rule in the 17th century,” the league said. Those early inhabitants include the Austronesian Siraya people, who lived in the Tainan area for centuries before Dutch or Chinese settlers arrived. To preserve the culture of a society that was once the most powerful in Taiwan, an active Siraya culture association was formed in Tainan in the late 1990s and the Siraya National Scenic Area was established there in 2005.

Countering Misperceptions

Spreading awareness of the country’s indigenous peoples and their millennia-old traditions helps counter the misperception that Taiwan is a small land with a shallow culture, particularly when Taiwan is compared with mainland China, according to Hsiao Hsin-huang (蕭新煌), director of the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan’s foremost research institution. While Academia Sinica held its first International Conference on Sinology in 1980, interest in focusing exclusively on Taiwan was limited prior to the lifting of martial law in 1987. Consequently, as democracy and social rights strengthened, Taiwanese people began to examine the richness of their own culture and interest in Taiwan studies grew.

Chuang began promoting Taiwan studies in the early 1990s when he served as head of the Humanistic Education Center at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) in Taipei. Among other approaches, the center offered awards for student writings on local topics and organized international forums on Taiwan’s culture.

The professor had previously taught in NTNU’s Department of Chinese, which focuses on fostering competent Chinese-language teachers for junior and senior high schools and emphasizes research on Chinese culture. Chuang notes that his academic background in Sinology falls in line with modern mainland China’s liberalistic vein, which opposes authoritarianism by critically analyzing the Confucian system of thought and values. “The age-old Han Chinese tradition has an undeniable force as far as cultural structure and degree of penetration, but traditional Sinology tends to present so-called ‘unchangeable truths’ that lack a proper philosophical basis,” Chuang says. “Along with developing Taiwan studies, we can promote a modern version of Sinology that is imbued with Taiwan’s perspectives and critical analysis.”

The preparatory office for today’s Institute of Taiwan History at Academia Sinica was established in 1994. That event, Hsiao notes, marked the emergence of a “new tradition” focusing on Taiwan’s culture in its own right. “Understanding of our history would be incomplete if Taiwan studies were only conducted from the perspective of Chinese culture,” says Hsiao, who is also a professor at National Taiwan University’s Department of Sociology. “The discipline puts a major focus on the period of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan [1895–1945].”

In 1997, the Ministry of Education introduced a junior high school program called “Knowing Taiwan” that focused exclusively on the country’s history, geography and society instead of introducing those subjects as supplements to a narrative focusing on Chinese influences. Tertiary education began focusing on local influences that same year, with Aletheia University in today’s New Taipei City establishing the Department of Taiwan Literature, which was “the first in the world,” according to the department. In the years since, more than a dozen departments or graduate institutes have been set up at universities around the country that are dedicated to studying Taiwan’s culture, history, language or literature.

Interest in Taiwan studies continued to grow in the 2000s. In 2004, the status of Academia Sinica’s preparatory office was upgraded and it was formally named the Institute of Taiwan History, while more research centers sprang up at universities. Chuang, for example, became the principal founder of NTNU’s Graduate Institute of Taiwan Culture, Languages and Literature, which started recruiting students in 2003 and has since been expanded into a department. He then went on to found the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Studies at Chang Jung Christian University in Tainan, which began recruiting in 2005.

The growing focus on Taiwan studies trickled down to the secondary school level in 2006, before which high school textbooks largely treated Taiwan’s history as part of Chinese history. In the new history textbooks, information on Taiwan’s history was expanded into one of three separate, major sections, with the other two being Chinese and world history.

A Taiwan studies milestone was reached in April this year, when archaeologists, anthropologists and scholars from many other disciplines participated in the first World Congress of Taiwan Studies, arguably the largest event of its kind ever held. The three-day forum saw input from around 170 local and foreign scholars with expertise in various fields including archaeology, art, economics, history, indigenous Austronesian studies, law, linguistics, literature, political science, religion and sociology. The groundbreaking congress took place at Academia Sinica and was organized by the Institute of Sociology, the Institute of Taiwan History and nine of the academy’s other institutes or centers.

The idea to hold the congress was hatched about two years ago when Wang Fan-sen (王汎森), one of Academia Sinica’s three vice presidents and a specialist in Chinese history from the middle of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) to the modern era, was preparing for the fourth International Conference on Sinology, which was held in June this year. In their opening speeches at the congress, Wang and Wong Chi-huey (翁啟惠), Academia Sinica’s president, said they welcomed the trend that has seen Taiwan studies gain independent academic status. Looking to the future, Hsiao hopes that the event will be held every two to three years at home or abroad and thereby provide an ongoing platform for integrating the efforts of universities and research centers in the field.

The Taiwan studies trend has also spread to universities and research institutions worldwide. The University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, for example, cites Taiwan’s “critical geo-strategic position in the Asia-Pacific Region” as one of the reasons the school established its Taiwan Studies Programme in 1999. A second university in the British capital entered the Taiwan studies field when the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) held its first London Taiwan Seminar in 2000. In 2003, the LSE expanded on that effort to launch the Taiwan Culture Research Programme, which was renamed the Taiwan Research Programme (TRP) in 2008. The TRP’s conferences, lectures, online journal, seminars and workshops seek to promote debate and dialogue on Taiwan by providing comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives.

In Germany, the European Research Center on Contemporary Taiwan was formed in 2008 at the University of Tübingen to promote postgraduate research in the fields of cross-strait relations, economics, law, politics and sociology. Two of the latest overseas programs were established earlier this year, with the Institute of Oriental Studies under the Russian Academy of Sciences setting up the Center for Taiwan Studies and The Chinese University of Hong Kong launching the Taiwan Research Center.

International academic associations have also played an important role in the development of Taiwan studies since the mid-1990s. The North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) was founded at Yale University in the United States in 1994, for example, while the Japan Association for Taiwan Studies was formed at the University of Tokyo in 1997. In June, Hsiao attended a conference held by the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS), which was set up in London in 2004, at the University of Southern Denmark in Sonderborg. That conference marked the ninth annual meeting since the inception of EATS. A number of these international Taiwan studies-related groups or research units have received financial support from Taiwan’s public and private sectors. NATSA, for example, has received funding from the Republic of China’s Ministry of Education, among other governmental organizations, and the Taiwan Research Fund, an organization founded and led by scholar Huang Huang-hsiung (黃煌雄), among other privately operated groups.

It is no surprise that international and local academics pursue Taiwan studies from different angles. In general, Chuang says domestic Taiwan studies programs tend to focus on the narrower academic sense of the discipline, while international programs are inclined to stress wider socio-political applications. As for specific subjects, history, culture and literature are the major fields emerging for Taiwan studies at home, while overseas programs largely focus on the economics, politics and society of contemporary Taiwan, as well as the country’s relationship with mainland China, he says.

Hsiao attributes the variations seen between local and overseas Taiwan studies programs to fundamental differences in motivation. “The international approach to studying Taiwan’s experiences implies the intention to help sustain its recently formed democracy, while we want to build an independent discipline with its own academic integrity and identity,” he says.

In his keynote speech at the 2012 EATS conference, Hsiao noted that the rising interest in Taiwan studies accords with the increasing emphasis being placed on area studies worldwide. “Taiwan is a proper subject for area studies, just as with any other country in the world, and Taiwan could make a significant contribution to that intellectual tradition,” he says.

Hsiao also believes that Taiwan studies and Sinology play complementary roles. “The emergence of Taiwan studies as an independent discipline is not meant to be a confrontation, but rather a juxtaposition or connection with China studies,” he says. The sociologist points out that the two disciplines differ not only in subject matter, but also in perspective, as Taiwan has a richer heritage of foreign influences and embraces ethnic groups more than most other Mandarin-speaking societies.

Lai Ming-teh (賴明德) is a professor in the Department of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language at Chung Yuan Christian University in Taoyuan County, northern Taiwan, as well as a standing board member of the World Chinese Language Association, which was established in 1972 in Taipei to promote Mandarin research and education at home and abroad. In Lai’s view, Taiwan’s written script makes the country’s culture all the more worthy of academic interest. “The use of traditional Han characters is also part of Taiwanology,” he says. While mainland China introduced more than 2,000 simplified characters in the mid-1950s to promote literacy, Taiwan has continued to use the more complex traditional characters. “It’s a major indicator of the unbroken Chinese cultural tradition in Taiwan,” Lai says. “In contrast with simplified characters, which were mostly abridged in a random manner, our characters retain the logic of word-formation principles.”

Sympathetic Understanding

Looking toward the future development of Taiwan studies, Chuang believes that the field should reflect the nation’s pluralism, calling for the development of a tolerant discipline that includes and recognizes all social influences, such as those of Han Chinese origin. “Sympathetic understanding of Taiwan’s diverse cultures is the basis of Taiwan studies,” he says. To ensure the further development of the discipline, he urges improving documentation systems, developing more thorough methodologies and studying the life histories of ordinary people.

Hsiao believes that for Taiwan studies to continue to grow, no aspect of the country’s experience should be placed off-limits. “Taiwan studies should be totally free and open to all possibilities,” he says, adding that such a taboo-free, essentially academic approach to Taiwan studies is not likely to develop in mainland China, where researchers’ views on Taiwan can be dogmatic due to mainland China’s insistent territorial claim over the island.

Most of all, Hsiao believes that the discipline of Taiwan studies is entering an exciting new era. “With a new vision, we’re looking to our own history and also creating history,” he says. “This job is not only historical, but also historic.”

Write to Pat Gao at cjkao@mofa.gov.tw