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This comprehensive book explores contemporary Taiwan from the perspective of the Taiwanese themselves. In a unique set of original essays, leading Taiwanese figures consider the country's history, politics, society, economy, identity, and future prospects. The volume provides a forum for a diversity of local voices, who are rarely heard in the power struggle between China and the United States over Taiwan's future. Whether it will be absorbed by China, continue in its current limbo as an unrecognized state, or seek outright independence and national sovereignty remains an open question. Reflecting the deep ethnic and political differences that are essential to understanding Taiwan today, this work provides a nuanced introduction to its role in international politics. --Provided by publisher.

In the past two decades, a uniform representation of cutified femininity prevails in the Taiwanese media, evidenced by the shift of Taiwan's popular cultural taste from a Chinese-centered tradition to a mixed absorption from neighboring cultural capitals in the global market. This book argues that the native term \"sajiao\" is the key to understand the phenomenon. Originally referring to a set of persuasive tactics through imitating a spoiled child's gestures and ways of speaking to get attention or material goods, sajiao is commonly understood to be women's weapon to manipulate men in the Mandarin-speaking communities. By re-interpreting sajiao as a \"feminine\" tactic, or the tactic of the weak, the book aims to propose a \"feminine framework\" in exploring identity politics in the following three aspects: the rising obsession with the immature female image in Taiwan's popular culture, the adoption of the feminine communication style in native speakers' everyday language and interactions, and the competing discourses between dominant/subordinate, central/peripheral, global/local, and Chinese/Taiwanese in shaping the identity politics in current Taiwanese society. The micro-analysis of everyday language politics leads the reader to examine layers of discourse about gender, identity, and communication, and finally to inquire how to situate or categorize \"Taiwan\" in area studies. The \"feminine framework\" is a useful theoretical tool that not only deconstructs everyday communication practice but also provides a bottom-up, alternative angle in analyzing Taiwan's role in political, economic, and cultural flows in East Asia. The massive imports of popular cultural products in the late 80s, mainly from Japan, fermented the kawaii (Japanese cute) type of femininity in regulating everyday communication and the perception of gender roles in Taiwan. The popularity of the baby-like female image is concurrent with the simmering debate on Taiwanese identity. Taiwan offers a unique perspective for observing identity politics because it still holds an undetermined status in the international community. The collective uncertainty about the island's future and the diminishing voice in the international society become the backdrop for the growth of defining, interpreting, and appropriating sajiao elements in the popular culture. This book offers an in-depth examination of the interplay among local historical contexts, cross-border capitalist exchange, and everyday communication that shapes the dialogism of Taiwanese identity.

\"An interdisciplinary analysis of Taiwanese popular culture over the past two decades, examining various shifts in the country's identity politics\"--Provided by publisher.

This chapter contains sections titled: Cosmopolitan References and Tacit Subjects Globalization, Sexual Sameness, and the Question of National Language Conclusions: Gay Language, Global Finance, Cosmopolitan Reference, and Masculine Privilege References

\"The Taiwan Voter examines the critical role ethnic and national identities play in politics, utilizing the case of Taiwan. Although elections there often raise international tensions, and have led to military demonstrations by China, no scholarly books have examined how Taiwan's voters make electoral choices in a dangerous environment. Critiquing the conventional interpretation of politics as an ideological battle between liberals and conservatives, The Taiwan Voter demonstrates in Taiwan the party system and voters' responses are shaped by one powerful determinant of national identity--the China factor. Taiwan's electoral politics draws international scholarly interest because of the prominent role of ethnic and national identification. While in most countries the many tangled strands of competing identities are daunting for scholarly analysis, in Taiwan the cleavages are powerful and limited in number, so the logic of interrelationships among issues, partisanship, and identity are particularly clear. The Taiwan Voter unites experts to investigate the ways in which social identities, policy views, and partisan preferences intersect and influence each other.These novel findings have wide applicability to other countries, and will be of interest to a broad range of social scientists interested in identity politics\"-- Provided by publisher.

The Construction of National Identity in Taiwan's Media, 1896-2012 provides the most comprehensive analysis of the development of Taiwan's media and the formation of national identity in Taiwan's media from 1896 to 2012.

The \"one China\" policy officially supported by the People's Republic of China, the United States, and other countries asserts that there is only one China and Taiwan is a part of it. The debate over whether the people of Taiwan are Chinese or independently Taiwanese is, Melissa J. Brown argues, a matter of identity: Han ethnic identity, Chinese national identity, and the relationship of both of these to the new Taiwanese identity forged in the 1990s. In a unique comparison of ethnographic and historical case studies drawn from both Taiwan and China, Brown's book shows how identity is shaped by social experience—not culture and ancestry, as is commonly claimed in political rhetoric.

This study examines voter perceptions of political party similarity using data from a validated online survey conducted in Taiwan. It primarily collects qualitative data through open-ended questions, complemented by Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) and feature matching techniques. The findings reveal that party competition in Taiwan is multidimensional, extending beyond traditional blue-green and unification-independence divides. Notably, local Taiwanese issues and social concerns have become increasingly prominent among emerging third parties. Feature matching results show that 22.53% of respondents clearly distinguish the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), while 11.42% identify the New Power Party (NPP), differentiating it from the pan-green camp as part of the emerging third force. Taiwan’s unique political context, shaped by democratization, cross-strait tensions, and the rise of influential third parties, provides valuable insights for comparative politics. The study offers an analytical framework for understanding party system evolution in emerging democracies and deepens our grasp of how identity politics and diverse political engagement transform political competition. This framework enables scholars to systematically capture complex voter perceptions in multi-party systems and facilitates comparative analysis across political environments marked by identity-based polarization and increasing party plurality.

This article analyzes outbound tourism from mainland China to Hong Kong and Taiwan, two territories claimed by the People's Republic of China, to unpack the geopolitics of the state and the everyday, to theorize the mutual constitution of the tourist and the nation-state, and to explore the role of tourism in new forms of protest and resistance. Based on ethnographies of tourism practices and spaces of resistance conducted between 2012 and 2015 and supported by ethnographic content analysis, this article demonstrates that tourism mobilities are entangled with shifting forms of sovereignty, territoriality, and bordering. The case of China, the world's fastest growing tourism market, is exemplary. Tourism is profoundly affecting spatial, social, political, and economic order throughout the wider region, reconfiguring leisure spaces and economies, transportation infrastructure, popular political discourse, and geopolitical imaginaries. At the same time that tourism is being used to project Chinese state authority over Taiwan and consolidate control over Tibet and Xinjiang, it has also triggered popular protest in Hong Kong (including the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement and its aftermath), and international protest over the territorially contested South China Sea. This article argues that embodied, everyday practices such as tourism cannot be divorced from state-scale geopolitics and that future research should pay closer attention to its unpredictable political instrumentalities and chaotic effects. In dialogue with both mobilities research and borders studies, it sheds light not only on the vivid particularities of the region but on the cultural politics and geopolitics of tourism in general.