Movement In Taiwan Research Articles

‘We want kids, not nukes’: a critical discourse analysis of newspaper representations of children in anti-nuclear movements in Taiwan, 1987–2019

ABSTRACT Environmental Sociology has addressed gender, racial, and class dynamics within environmental movements, but the involvement of children, particularly in East Asia, remains under-researched. This article examines the representations of children in the news articles of Taiwanese anti-nuclear movements. With critical discourse analysis, the study examines 154 newspaper articles from two major newspapers published between 1987 and 2019. This article characterizes the representations of children in the news in three types: as slogans, as silent participants, and as defenders of rights. The paper shows that children have been reported in the news articles since the inception of the anti-nuclear movements, but their opinions were only recently reported. Dismissing children’s voices in the news articles could be related to undermining children’s capacity and agency to form views. The shifting representations of children in the news articles symbolize evolving power relations between children and adults, which are fluid, dynamic, and diverse rather than static. This article calls for a reflection on how children are represented in mass media and how the representations reveal the underlying presumption of children by adults.

From “Unification” To “Independence”: The Change of Taiwan’s Authorities’ Positioning on Cross-Strait Relations under The Rise of Emerging Middle Class

After the Chinese Civil War, Taiwan went through a process of profound structural change in its economy towards industrialization, which was most characterized by the growing power of the middle class under an industrialized society, a power that in turn acted on Taiwanese society and pushed forward the process of democratization in Taiwan. Contrary to the booming economy of Taiwan, the international status of the region has been in tatters. After the Restoration of the lawful rights of the People's Republic of China in the United Nations, the Taiwan authorities have completely lost the international recognition of representing the whole of China, and the legitimacy of the martial law rule based on this has been gradually eroded. With the authoritarian rule in danger, the society of Taiwan is in urgent need of reforms. The emergence of a large and self-centered middle class became an important stimulus for Taiwan's democratic transition, and the 1980s saw the rise of social movements in Taiwan, with the idea of "Taiwan's independence" being raised more and more frequently in the course of exchanges with the Kuomintang (KMT) authorities. This paper will use stimulus-response theory to examine how the stimulus of the rise of the emerging middle class has affected the evolution of the Taiwan authorities' positioning of cross-strait relations from "unification" to "independence", and finally draw the conclusions of this paper.

What Is the Process of Data Practitioners Utilizing Open Government Data?

ABSTRACTOpen Government Data (OGD) plays a crucial role in enhancing governance transparency, fostering civic engagement, and fostering collaboration between the public and private sectors. To effectively promote the development of the OGD Movement in Taiwan from a pragmatic perspective, this research employs a qualitative approach to investigate the behaviors of 35 data practitioners, drawing upon the principles of grounded theory. The findings reveal that OGD practitioners' behavioral patterns can be categorized into seven distinct phases, namely “Requirement Analysis,” “Functionality Design,” “OGD Awareness,” “OGD Access,” “Data Cleansing,” “Implementation,” and “Optimization and Maintenance.” Additionally, this study identifies “OGD quality” and “Interaction with the government” as critical factors influencing the data practitioners' developmental process. In conclusion, the research presents specific recommendations to enhance the OGD utilization environment and provides directions for further research endeavors.

Marry or not for democracy and love: Dialogic framing in the Taiwan marriage equality movement and countermovement

Dialogic framing means that the frames are constructed through interaction among multiple parties in a discursive system with socio-cultural specificities. The meaning of a frame is articulated through such dialogic interaction and under constant contestation. We used the marriage equality movement in Taiwan as a case study and demonstrated how dialogic framing could advance the understanding of framing in the digital mobilization of collective actions. Analyzing Facebook posts by opposing advocacy groups, we identified “collective identity” and “rights” as two dominant frames. Marriage equality activists framed legalizing same-sex marriage as a testament to the democratic progress of Taiwan and a validation of gay and lesbian people’s right of love. The countermovement challenged this framing by arguing that equalizing gay love to heterosexual marital love violated the civil rights of the silent majority. The queer critique of marriage as state-sanctioned regulation of sexual citizenship and the very state power being critiqued are also constitutive of the dialogic framing of collective actions for or against same-sex marriage on social media.

Populism in Taiwan: Rethinking the Neo-liberalism–Populism Nexus

Contemporary scholarship on populism, albeit involving divergent approaches and polarised diagnoses of populism’s political impacts, commonly attributes the recent populist surge to the peril of neo-liberal encroachment. However, such a neo-liberal–populist proposition encounters discrepant experiences when applied in non-Western contexts, including in East Asia. To recalibrate the conceptual framework, this article employs Gramsci-inspired scholarship on hegemony and populism – the notion of “the integral state” and non-reductionist class politics in particular – and utilises Taiwan as a case to expound upon the entanglement of democratisation, neo-liberalisation, and various forms of populist politics. Situating the post-2000 surge of multiple popular movements in Taiwan’s hegemonic restructuring since the 1980s, this article identifies a course of bifurcated development between “liberal populism of the bourgeois hegemony” and the “neo-liberal populism of the multitude” that embodies various ways in which neo-liberalism intersects with populist politics. Highlighting the constant boundary-redrawing of the integral state and its associated class politics along the hegemonic restructuring processes, Taiwan’s case exemplifies a critical approach to rethinking the over-determined relations between populism and neo-liberalism for other East Asian states and beyond.

The Spread and Influence of the Communist Thought in Early Taiwan

The early communist movement in Taiwan was closely connected with the mainland, and had important influence and status. The early Taiwan Communist Movement was influenced by Japan and the Communist International, which gave birth to a series of social groups including the Communist Party, created a group of communist revolutionaries and disseminators who remained famous for thousands of years, promoted the spread of Marxist classics in Taiwan, and also triggered a large-scale movement of Taiwanese workers and farmers.

Rescuing Public Health From the Global Capitalist Regime: The Public Health Liberation Movement in Taiwan

In the past, scholars of academic dependency have tended to focus their discussions on social sciences while treating other fields as separate. They suggest that in order to escape dependency, alternative discourse and autonomy should be developed. In this paper, we examine the Public Health Liberation (PHL) movement in Taiwan and theorize on the marketization and medicalization of the healthcare system since the 1980s as a dependency syndrome. The PHL was initiated by a group of public health scholars—with the second author of this paper being one of its key protagonists—and frontline public health practitioners after the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak in 2003. Inspired by the mass mobilization model in public health in Asian and Latin American countries, particularly China, the Philippines, and Nicaragua, PHL trains grassroots public health educators, nurtures critical research, and has built a network of activists for radical public health reform in Taiwan. Based on participatory action research, this paper analyzes the emergence of this influential public health movement and situates it within the global context of neoliberal health reforms.

Imagining sovereign futures: the marriage equality movement in Taiwan

ABSTRACT How do social movements respond to geopolitical uncertainties and mobilize aspirations and imagined futures for progressive social change? Building on scholarship on social movements and imagined futures, this article provides an empirical analysis of Taiwan’s marriage equality movement as it navigated the shifting horizon of the nation’s future. With the economic and diplomatic rise of mainland China, Taiwan has confronted with an increasing international isolation due to the nation’s lack of widespread external legitimacy as a nation-state. Given this geopolitical context, Taiwan’s marriage equality movement not simply drew on the globalized notion of equal rights for same-sex couples. Instead, it rearticulated the meaning of ‘equality’ of sexual minorities in parallel to Taiwan’s aspirational equal status as a nation-state in the global sphere. Through the intimate entanglement of LGBT rights claims and sovereign aspirations, the marriage equality movement became a powerful emblem of the national vision that differentiated Taiwan from mainland China. This article thus provides new insights for scholarship on social movements and imagined futures, geopolitics, and gender and sexual rights movements.

Free Speech and Social Movements — Demonstration by Occupation in a Democracy

Protest by occupation of public spaces has been a feature of 21st century activism around the world. The Occupy movement, ‘Arab Spring’, Occupy Central in Hong Kong and the Sunflower movement in Taiwan have sparked popular interest in such demonstrations. However, there has been relatively little legal analysis of American occupation-based protests and the role of social movements in a democracy. The article takes the Occupy movement as its case study, examining intermediate court Occupy cases to show how political expression is limited by the US Supreme Court’s free speech principles. It argues that First Amendment free speech principles are ill-suited to protecting the protest activities characteristic of contemporary social movements, and should be revised. The article is interdisciplinary, drawing on the work of well-known social scientist Charles Tilly. It is presented in three parts. The first explains Tilly’s theory of a social movement, then focusses on the intersection between social movement campaigns and the right to free speech. The second part analyses the definitions of freedom of speech developed by the US Supreme Court, relying on Tilly’s work to show that the definitions do not fully recognise the expressive nature of social movements. The failure of the intermediate court Occupy cases can be explained by the courts’ inability to appreciate the significance of occupation-based protest, due to their reliance on the Supreme Court doctrine. The third part contends that Supreme Court principles need to be revised to fully recognise the contribution of the social movement to American public discourse. The article contributes to the journal theme by providing an analysis of the role of today’s social movements as agents of change. It highlights the opportunities for those movements—and the limits on them—to bring about social change through free speech litigation.

How long-distance nationalism shapes ‘us’ preferences of first-generation Taiwanese Americans

Although researchers have identified conditions for marital formation across and along ethnic lines, few efforts have been made to clarify factors behind in-group rejection. This article looks at one specific aspect of rejection within ‘us’ through the lens of long-distance nationalism. The data were collected from islander-origin first-generation Taiwanese Americans in a transnational community organization in the San Diego area, whose ancestors can be traced to provinces in southeast China. The long-term development of the islanders-led nationalist movement in Taiwan has made these immigrants long-distance nationalists by default. The article finds that although all immigrants identify ‘us’ with Taiwanese American, they have developed two types of transnational attachment (homeland and home) affecting their different ways of transforming ‘us’ into ‘marriageable us.’ While immigrants with homeland attachment have developed a Taiwan-first hyphenated identity that excludes Chinese people from the group of ‘us’ and ‘marriageable us,’ those who have a home attachment apply a symbolic approach to Taiwanese ethnicity resulting in the decoupling of ‘us’ and ‘marriageable us.’ By showing in-group heterogeneity in the transformation of ‘us’ into ‘marriageable us’ in the context of Taiwanese immigration to the United States, this article identifies community organizations as a mechanism for supporting the variance of transnational attachment.

Editorial

Editorial Margherita Zanasi This May 2021 issue presents five research articles and five book reviews. The first two articles, by Jenny Huangfu Day and Helena F. S. Lopes, present two different views of the history of education during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Day reveals the increasingly nationalist and propagandist nature of education in the wartime base of the Nationalist government, while Lopes emphasizes the emerging cosmopolitanism of the refugee enclave of Macao, “a peripheral territory at the crossroads of several empires.” According to Day, the Second Sino-Japanese War offered the Nationalist Government an opportunity to realize its aims of unifying educational materials and turning textbooks into tools for political mobilization. The new textbooks were designed to inspire anti-Japanese and anti-Communist sentiments, engendering the kind of patriotic citizenry the government believed was essential to sustaining its war effort. The war, therefore, put an end to the earlier lively debates on educational materials and the more liberal trends they represented while also deeply transforming the textbook industry. Lopes’s article focuses on the activities of the Chinese students and educators who fled to Macao to escape the Japanese occupation. This mass migration contributed to the development of a cosmopolitan educational landscape because the schools that relocated to Macao relied for funding and operations on complex transnational networks. Students and educators also became the targets of competing mobilization attempts. While the Nationalist government hoped to gain their support for its war effort, Macao’s authorities viewed them as precious social and human capital to be tapped for the development of the colony. Juliane Noth’s and Qiliang He’s articles focus on Maoist China’s explorations of, respectively, gendered revolutionary propaganda and competing spatial practices. On the basis of an examination of images of young female activists and workers, Noth argues that these “idealized images” were part of Maoist propaganda intended to establish a militant interpretation of femininity. The militant aesthetic of the images ultimately legitimized violent class struggle during the Cultural Revolution. He’s article focuses on a park in Hangzhou that was designed and restructured by the Communist government with the intent to create a politicized space both for showcasing the new Socialist China and for the performance of participatory propaganda. This original intention, however, was ultimately derailed as different actors made use of the park in their own ways in pursuit of diverse agendas. In the fifth research article, Spencer Stewart discusses the important role played by scientists and extension workers in improving the quality of cotton grown in China during the Republican period. Influenced by international models of agricultural extension, these [End Page 103] scientists promoted community production to manage how newly imported standardized American cotton was cultivated, processed, and sold. These crop communities reorganized economic and social networks in the villages, creating new links among farmers, scientists, bankers, and industrialists. The five book reviews are available online through Project MUSE. Jie Li comments on Andrew F. Jones’s book, which places 1960s Chinese popular music in the global context of the Cold War. Norbert Francis reviews Fu-Lai Tony Yu and Diana Kwan’s work on pro-democracy social movements in Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong, and Hannah Theaker discusses Benno Weiner’s study of Tibet during the first decade of the People’s Republic of China. Finally, Juanjuan Peng reviews Robert Cliver’s book on the workers of the silk industry in the 1950s and Taomo Zhou comments on Covell Meyskens’s work on the Third Front industrialization campaign. Juliane Noth is the author featured for this issue in our interview series, available at http://hstcconline.org/interviews-with-authors/. [End Page 104] Copyright © 2021 Twentieth Century China Journal, Inc

From martial law to Sunflower: the evolution of Taiwan's student movement

PurposeThis paper explores how the student movement in Taiwan transformed after the abolition of martial law. After democratization, there were three large-scale student protests, in 1990, 2008 and 2014. This paper explores the development through this period of student movement organizations, issues and interrelations between organizations and individuals.Design/methodology/approachThe study of the process of transformation and development is based on an analysis of newspaper and magazine articles and books about the student movement. To provide an insider's view, magazines, statements and meeting memos written by activists are also included.FindingsAs a legacy of the student movement in the 1980s, the 1990 Wild Lily protest advocated democratization and organized a cross-school alliance. This pattern declined, however, because it proved hard to recruit participants after democratization. Instead, student activists returned to education-related issues, and the scale of student organizations remained small. The 2008 Wild Strawberry protest was carried out by autonomous, self-organized groups, which reflected the emergence of individuals as activists. Afterward, student movement organizations attempted to create multiple networks consisted of various issues and participants. These groups built solidarity by cooperating on education and political issues and became the base for the 2014 Sunflower protest.Originality/valueThis paper explores the rarely described historical context for the student movement between large-scale student protests in Taiwan and provides a more comprehensive understanding of the interrelation of organizations and individuals in contemporary social movements.

Towards a contemporary queer pop theater in Taiwan: the feminine fascinations of Dress in Code

ABSTRACT Premiered in 2016, Ear East Ensemble’s Dress in Code sets its stories across the late Ming Dynasty, the White Terror period, and contemporary Taiwan, weaving together issues of queer and national disidentification. Critics question the legitimacy of actress Ying-Xuan Hsieh playing a cross-dressing male Kuomintang detective, arguing that her comedic dansō reijin performance eclipses the themes of political and sexual violence as imposed by authoritarian regimes and patriarchy. Yet this essay argues that her presentation ironically enables the theatricality of a multilayered gender performance to reach its climax through the feminine fascinations mobilized by the audience and the performer and, simultaneously, activates wild femininities that problematize the logocentric progressivism promoted by pro-China officials since 1949. Specifically, this essay investigates the theatrical and the performing texts, as well as analyzing the ways in which the multilayered gender performance, as a parodic tactic, protests a possible contemporary queer pop theater that not only amplifies the diverse critiques of queer studies but also responds to the current impasse of feminist movements in Taiwan.

The Kominka Movement in Taiwan : Policy Formulation and the Spread of the Tanka

The Kominka Movement in Taiwan : Policy Formulation and the Spread of the Tanka

Social Movements in Taiwan and Hong Kong

We propose the logic of communitive action to analyze digitally networked social movements. Through an examination of Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, we offer an explanatory framework of community consciousness that elucidates a new type of leadership, and discuss crowdsourcing as a supplement to the theory of social movements in the digital age.

‘Only filial piety can produce heirs, not homosexuals!’: an exploration of the glocalised rhetoric of the pro-family movement in Taiwan

ABSTRACT Taiwan became the first Asian country to legalise same-sex marriage in 2019. The call of legalising same-sex marriage began in 2013, along with the emergence of the Christian-led pro-family movement. Religious backlash came to its peak in 2013 and successfully gained politicians’ and public’s support to fight against same-sex marriages and LGBT-inclusive gender equity education. The rhetoric device of the pro-family movement in Taiwan can be connected to rhetoric devices of pro-family and anti-gender movements across the globe. By analysing the narrative of two Christian newspapers, Chinese Christian Tribune and Christian Daily, this article points out three perspectives that made up the picture of Confucian apocalypse. In this article, the concept of ‘Confucian apocalypse’ is used to illustrate the process of indigenisation of global pro-family and anti-gender movements in Taiwan where the Christian population is around 5.5%.

Social Movements in Taiwan’s Democratic Transition: Linking Activists to the Changing Political Environment, written by Fan, Yun, (2019)

Social Movements in Taiwan’s Democratic Transition: Linking Activists to the Changing Political Environment, written by Fan, Yun, (2019)

Communication Battles on Facebook in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement and Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

Many have suggested that communication on social media could mobilize participation in social movements. Often overlooked is the use of social media communication by opponents of social movements to counteract the change advocated. Collecting data from the Facebook Graph API, this study examines both types of communication on public pages of Facebook in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan in 2014. It analyzes the content of public messages (1,389 from Hong Kong and 999 from Taiwan) collected on 10 pro- and neutral/anti-movement pages in each movement to study the framing process of the movements in the flow of communication. Changes in frames from posts to comments and then replies provide evidence of frame contestation, which are discussed in terms of counter-framing by counter-movements in online social networks. This is the first comparative study of communication in social movements of Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Masculinity and Femininity: Comparing and Contrasting Two Modern Buddhist Movements in Taiwan, Foguang Shan and Ci Ji

This article examines how modern Chinese Buddhism has been influenced by its interactions with the modern world. For our purposes, ‘modern Chinese Buddhism’ refers to a form of what has become known in the West as ‘Engaged Buddhism,’ but in Chinese is known by titles that can be translated as ‘Humanistic Buddhism’ or ‘Buddhism for Human Life.’ This tradition was initiated on the Chinese mainland between the two World Wars by the monk Tai Xu (1890–1947). Its main branches have flourished in Taiwan, whence two of them have spread worldwide. The most successful, at least in numerical terms, has been Fo Guang Shan (the Buddha’s Light Mountain) and Ci Ji (the Buddhist Compassion and Relief Society), the former founded by a personal disciple of Tai Xu, Xing Yun, the latter founded by Zheng Yan. Both of them are now very old but remain powerful charismatic leaders.

The Kominka Movement in Taiwan : Policy Formulation and the Spread of the Tanka

The Kominka Movement in Taiwan : Policy Formulation and the Spread of the Tanka