The contributors to this special issue examine the role successive colonialisms played in forging a distinct Taiwanese identity and the theoretical implications the Taiwanese experience of colonialism raises regarding the making of modern national identities. In addition to its indigenous culture, a long succession of colonial rulers--variously the Netherlands, Spain, the kingdom of Tungning, the Ming and Qing dynasties, Japan, and Kuomintang China--have forged a distinctive Taiwanese national identity. The Taiwan case suggests that it is misleading to approach colonialism as an obstacle to national identity without also accounting for the ways in which colonialism has historically factored into the constitution of national identities. The contributors address the ways in which the colonizer's culture transformed the colonized, setting them in new historical directions, even if those directions were not what the colonizers expected. Contributors: Shu-jung Chen, Leo T. S. Ching, Ya-Chung Chuang, Arif Dirlik, P. Kerim Friedman, Ping-hui Liao, Nikky Lin, Jing Tsu, Yin Wang, Fang-chih Irene Yang

Presents an updated account of Hong Kong and its culture two decades after its reversion to China. In Found in Transition, Yiu-Wai Chu examines the fate of Hong Kong’s unique cultural identity in the contexts of both global capitalism and the increasing influence of China. Drawing on recent developments, especially with respect to language, movies, and popular songs as modes of resistance to “Mainlandization” and different forms of censorship, Chu explores the challenges facing Hong Kong twenty years after its reversion to China as a Special Administrative Region. Highlighting locality and hybridity along postcolonial lines of interpretation, he also attempts to imagine the future of Hong Kong by utilizing Hong Kong studies as a method. Chu argues that the study of Hong Kong—the place where the impact of the rise of China is most intensely felt—can shed light on emergent crises in different areas of the world. As such, this book represents a consequential follow-up to the author’s Lost in Transition and a valuable contribution to international, area, and cultural studies. “This is a wide-ranging and worthy sequel to Chu’s Lost in Transition. By juxtaposing a series of critical issues—urban development, self-writing, language education, and cultural production, among others—that have confounded those who care deeply about this former British colony, Chu offers his readers an intelligent and sensitive guide to connect and make sense of the various debates, and he places the conundrums Hong Kong faces in the contexts of both the limits of neoliberal capitalism and the ‘Age of China.’” — Leo K. Shin, author of The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and Expansion on the Ming Borderlands

This book is in the Cambria Sinophone World Series, headed by Victor H. Mair (University of Pennsylvania). In the early 1990s, the people of Taiwan gained the right to vote for their executive and legislature. In building a democratic society, they transformed how they saw themselves and their homeland. The outcome of democratization was nothing less than revolutionary, producing a new, de facto nation and people that can be justly called "Taiwanese." Yet this revolution remains unfinished and incomplete. In an era of increasing US-China rivalry, the People's Republic of China (PRC) claims sovereignty over Taiwan and insists that "reunification" is the historic mission of all peoples on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The PRC threatens war with and over the island, inviting a crisis that would engulf the region and beyond. Common ideas about Taiwan-that it "split with China in 1949" or "sees itself as the true China"-fail to explain why the Taiwanese withstand pressure from the PRC to relinquish their democratic self-governance. Revolutionary Taiwan sheds light on this. Each chapter shows how democratization in Taiwan constituted a revolution, changing not just the form of government but also how Taiwanese people conceptualized the island, coming to see it a complete nation unto itself. At the same time, however, Beijing has blocked the "normal" endpoint of this revolution: an open declaration of statehood and welcome into the global community. Revolutionary Taiwan: Making Nationhood in a Changing World Order brings the Taiwan story to a general audience. It will appeal to students and readers interested in international relations, contemporary geopolitics, and East Asian Studies. Informed by years of academic research and life in Taiwan, this book provides an entry point to a remarkable place and people.

In 1895 Japan acquired Taiwan as its first formal colony after a resounding victory in the Sino-Japanese war. For the next fifty years, Japanese rule devastated and transformed the entire socioeconomic and political fabric of Taiwanese society. In Becoming Japanese, Leo Ching examines the formation of Taiwanese political and cultural identities under the dominant Japanese colonial discourse of assimilation (dôka) and imperialization (kôminka) from the early 1920s to the end of the Japanese Empire in 1945. Becoming Japanese analyzes the ways in which the Taiwanese struggled, negotiated, and collaborated with Japanese colonialism during the cultural practices of assimilation and imperialization. It chronicles a historiography of colonial identity formations that delineates the shift from a collective and heterogeneous political horizon into a personal and inner struggle of "becoming Japanese." Representing Japanese colonialism in Taiwan as a topography of multiple associations and identifications made possible through the triangulation of imperialist Japan, nationalist China, and colonial Taiwan, Ching demonstrates the irreducible tension and contradiction inherent in the formations and transformations of colonial identities. Throughout the colonial period, Taiwanese elites imagined and constructed China as a discursive space where various forms of cultural identification and national affiliation were projected. Successfully bridging history and literary studies, this bold and imaginative book rethinks the history of Japanese rule in Taiwan by radically expanding its approach to colonial discourses.

This book enriches and reorients our understanding of postcolonial queer East Asia. Challenging a heteronormative understanding of Taiwan’s past and present, it provides fresh critical analyses of a range of topics from queer criminality and literature in the 1950s and 1960s to the growing popularity of cross-dressing performance and tongzhi (gay and lesbian) cinema on the cusp of a new millennium. Together, the contributions provide a detailed account of the rise and transformations of queer cultures in post-World War II Taiwan.

Why did the "Shandong Question" vanish in the May Fourth narrative? How did conservatives and traditionalists endure admist the progressive wave of the new culture movement? What role did Confucian ritualism and religion play in shaping May Fourth literature? Is an uncanny connection hidden between “Return Qingdao” and “Liberate Hong Kong”? This volume, edited by Carlos Yu-Kai Lin and Victor H. Mair, and with contributors from across the fields of intellectual history, literature and languages, philosophy, and Asian studies, answers these questions and offers new insights into the May Fourth movement. It explores this pivotal historical event both as a singular occurrence and as a sustaining cultural-intellectual campaign. The new volume is brimming with fresh perspectives, uncovering these enigmas, and unveiling the nuanced and intricate world of the May Fourth to its discening readers.

The Sediq and Truku Indigenous peoples on the mountainous island of Formosa – today called Taiwan – say that their ancestors emerged in the beginning of time from Pusu Qhuni, a tree-covered boulder in the highlands. Living in the mountain forests, they observed the sacred law of Gaya, seeking equilibrium with other humans, the spirits, animals, and plants. They developed a politics in which each community preserved its autonomy and sharing was valued more highly than personal accumulation of goods or power. These lifeworlds were shattered by colonialism, capitalist development, and cultural imperialism in the twentieth century. Based on two decades of ethnographic field research, Truly Human portrays these peoples’ lifeworlds, teachings, political struggles for recognition, and relations with non-human animals. Taking seriously their ontological claims that Gaya offers moral guidance to all humans, Scott E. Simon reflects on what this particular form of Indigenous resurgence reveals about human rights, sovereignty, and the good of all kind. Truly Human contributes to a decolonizing anthropology at a time when all humans need Indigenous land-based teachings more than ever.

This collection examines literature and film studies from the late colonial and early postcolonial periods in Taiwan and Korea, and highlights the similarities and differences of Taiwanese and Korean popular culture by focusing on the representation of gender, genre, state regulation, and spectatorship. Calling for the “de-colonializing” and “de–Cold Warring” of the two ex-colonies and anticommunist allies, the book places Taiwan and Korea side by side in a “trans-war” frame. Considering Taiwan–Korea relations along a new trans-war axis, the book focuses on the continuities between the late colonial period’s Asia-Pacific War and the consequent Korean War and the ongoing conflict between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, facilitated by Cold War power struggles. The collection also invites a meaningful transcolonial reconsideration of East Asian cultural and literary flows, beyond the conventional colonizer/colonized dichotomy and ideological antagonism. ​

One China, Many Taiwans shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. In 2008, as the People's Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan's politicians and businesspeople. Contrary to the PRC's efforts to use tourism to incorporate Taiwan into an imaginary "One China," tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther toward support for national self-determination. Consequently, Taiwan was performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists versus experienced as a place of everyday life. Taiwan's national identity grew increasingly plural, such that not just one or two, but many Taiwans coexisted, even as it faced an existential military threat. Ian Rowen's treatment of tourism as a political technology provides a new theoretical lens for social scientists to examine the impacts of tourism in the region and worldwide.