Drawing on a wide range of Chinese historical and contemporary texts, Contemporary Taiwanese Cultural Nationalism addresses diverse subjects including nationalist literature; language ideology; the crafting of a national history; the impact of Japanese colonialism and the increasingly strained relationship between China and Taiwan. This book is essential reading for all scholars of the history, culture and politics of Taiwan.

In March 2000, for the first time in its history, Taiwan witnessed a democratic change in ruling parties. Given the contrasting stances on Taiwan's political and cultural belonging held by the defeated party, the KMT, and the new ruling party, the pro-independence DPP, the change wasa historical turning point. Although there has been increasing interest in Taiwan Studies in the last decade, no single volume has yet addressed the complexity and impact of the change in ruling parties in Taiwan. This book aims to fill that gap by comparing the years before and after the DPP's transition to power. Although the analytical starting point is the regime change of 2000, the scope of topics goes beyond party politics. Designed to provide an all-encompassing view, the thirteen chapters examine and evaluate the extent to which the change in Taiwan's ruling party has resulted in a political, social, economic and cultural transformation of the island. They build a complex picture of the differences and the perhaps surprisingly high degree of continuities between the two regimes. The book addresses readers interested in interdisciplinary approaches to Taiwan's recent political, social, and cultural changes.

In recent decades Taiwan has increasingly come to see itself as a modern nation-state. A-chin Hsiau traces the origins of Taiwanese national identity to the 1970s, when a surge of domestic dissent and youth activism transformed society, politics, and culture in ways that continue to be felt.

DIVTraces the growth and evolution of a Taiwan's sense of itself as a separate and distinct entity by examining the diverse ways a discourse of nation has been produced in the Taiwanese cultural imagination./div

This volume analyzes what is arguably the single most important aspect of cultural and political change in Taiwan over the past quarter-century: the trend toward 'indigenization' (bentuhua). Focusing on the indigenization of politics and culture and its close connection with the identity politics of ethnicity and nationalism, this volume is an attempt to map prominent contours of the indigenization paradigm as it has unfolded in Taiwan. The opening chapters concern the origin and nature of the trend toward indigenization with its roots in the unique historical trajectory of politics and culture in Taiwan. Subsequent chapters deal with responses and reactions to indigenization in a variety of social, cultural and intellectual domains.

This book provides a detailed snapshot of cultural policies in China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. In addition to an historical overview of the culture-state relationships in East Asia, it provides an analysis of contemporary developments occurring in the regions' cultural policies and the challenges they are facing.

This book will examine the recent development of school music education in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to illustrate how national policies for music in the school curriculum integrate music cultures and non-musical values in the relationship between national cultural identity and globalization. It will examine the ways in which policies for national identity formation and globalization interact to complement and contradict each other in the content of music education in these three Chinese territories. Meanwhile, tensions posed by the complex relationship between cultural diversity and political change have also led to a crisis of national identity in these three localities. The research methods of this book involve an analysis of official approved music textbooks, a survey questionnaire distributed to students attending music education programmes as well as primary and secondary school music teachers, and in-depth interviews with student teachers and schoolteachers in the three territories.

Critiques the idea of a Chinese cultural identity and argues that such identities are instead determined by geopolitical and economic forces. Forget Chineseness provides a critical interpretation of not only discourses of Chinese identity—Chineseness—but also of how they have reflected differences between “Chinese” societies, such as in Hong Kong, Taiwan, People’s Republic of China, Singapore, and communities overseas. Allen Chun asserts that while identity does have meaning in cultural, representational terms, it is more importantly a product of its embeddedness in specific entanglements of modernity, colonialism, nation-state formation, and globalization. By articulating these processes underlying institutional practices in relation to public mindsets, it is possible to explain various epistemic moments that form the basis for their sociopolitical transformation. From a broader perspective, this should have salient ramifications for prevailing discussions of identity politics. The concept of identity has not only been predicated on flawed notions of ethnicity and culture in the social sciences but it has also been acutely exacerbated by polarizing assumptions that drive our understanding of identity politics.

This inter-disciplinary volume of essays opens new points of departure for thinking about how Taiwan has been studied and represented in the past, for reflecting on the current state of 'Taiwan Studies', and for thinking about how Taiwan might be re-configured in the future. As the study of Taiwan shifts from being a provincial back-water of sinology to an area in its own (albeit not sovereign) right, a combination of established and up and coming scholars working in the field of East Asian studies offer a re-reading and re-writing of culture in Taiwan. They show that sustained critical analysis of contemporary Taiwan using issues such as trauma, memory, history, tradition, modernity, post-modernity provides a useful point of departure for thinking through similar problematics and issues elsewhere in the world. Re-writing Culture in Taiwan is a multidisciplinary book with its own distinctive collective voice which will appeal to anyone interested in Taiwan. With chapters on nationalism, anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, religion and museum studies, the breadth of ground covered is truly comprehensive.

In the last two decades, Chinese transnationalism has become a distinctive domain within the new "flexible" capitalism emerging in the Asia-Pacific region. Ungrounded Empires maps this domain as the intersection of cultural politics and global capitalism, drawing on recent ethnographic research to critique the impact of late capitalism's institutions--flexibility, travel, subcontracting, multiculturalism, and mass media--upon transnational Chinese subjectives. Interweaving anthropology and cultural studies with interpretive political economy, these essays offer a wide range of perspectives on "overseas Chinese" and their unique location in the global arena.