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Winner of the Joseph Levenson Post-1900 Book Prize This cultural study of public space examines the cityscape of Taipei, Taiwan, in rich descriptive prose. Contemplating a series of seemingly banal subjects--maps, public art, parks--Joseph Allen peels back layers of obscured history to reveal forces that caused cultural objects to be celebrated, despised, destroyed, or transformed as Taipei experienced successive regime changes and waves of displacement. In this thoughtful stroll through the city, we learn to look beyond surface ephemera, moving from the general to the particular to see sociocultural phenomena in their historical and contemporary contexts. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBdGIoox7zM

\"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 study differentiates the risk perception and influencing factors of climate change along the dimensions of global severity and personal threat. Using the 2013 Taiwan Social Change Survey (TSGS) data (N = 2001) as a representative sample of adults from Taiwan, we investigated the influencing factors of the risk perceptions of climate change in these two dimensions (global severity and personal threat). Logistic regression models were used to examine the correlations of individual factors (gender, age, education, climate-related disaster experience and risk awareness, marital status, employment status, household income, and perceived social status) and societal factors (religion, organizational embeddedness, and political affiliations) with the above two dimensions. The results demonstrate that climate-related disaster experience has no significant impact on either the perception of global severity or the perception of personal impact. However, climate-related risk awareness (regarding typhoons, in particular) is positively associated with both dimensions of the perceived risks of climate change. With higher education, individuals are more concerned about global severity than personal threat. Regarding societal factors, the supporters of political parties have higher risk perceptions of climate change than people who have no party affiliation. Religious believers have higher risk perceptions of personal threat than non-religious people. This paper ends with a discussion about the effectiveness of efforts to enhance risk perception of climate change with regard to global severity and personal threat.

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.

Collecting reliable responses to sensitive survey questions is challenging, since respondents may be more likely to refuse to respond or to provide biased responses. To address these challenges, Warner (J Am Stat Assoc 60:63–69, 1965) pioneered the randomized response (RR) technique to estimate proportions of individuals in a population with either of two possible attributes. The RR technique can overcome non-response and underreporting biases because it doesn’t reveal the respondent’s attribute, and a generalization of the random component of the response by Christofides (Metrika 57:195–200, 2003) improves estimation properties. In this study, we develop a new RR model to estimate proportions of individuals with each of multiple categories of an attribute using a single sensitive question by means of only one randomization device based on Christofides’s (Metrika 57:195–200, 2003) model. Under the proposed model, a respondent reports the absolute difference between an integer associated with his or her attribute and a random integer. In a part of this research, we conduct a simulation study of the relative efficiency of the proposed methods. The technique is illustrated using data from the 2012 Family and Gender Module of the Taiwan Social Change Survey to estimate the proportions of individuals of different sexual orientations, and the results are compared with the results of direct inquiry from the same survey.

Taiwan’s democratization has been accompanied by profound shifts in its ethnic landscape and cultural identity. In addition to the four established groups—Indigenous peoples, Hoklo, Hakka, and Mainlanders—a “fifth group” of migrant workers and marriage migrants from Southeast Asia has reconfigured national discourses on multiculturalism. Drawing on nationally representative data from the Taiwan Social Change Survey (2008–2018), this study traces evolving public attitudes toward multiculturalism. The findings reveal a steady rise in multicultural acceptance over the decade, paralleled by a decline in ethnocentrism. Endorsement of globalization consistently predicted higher acceptance, while ethnocentrism remained the most significant barrier. Intimate contact with marriage migrants fostered greater social closeness, and the effect of general contact strengthened over time. Younger age, higher educational attainment, and weaker adherence to Confucian values were also positively associated with inclusive attitudes. These results underscore the importance of ideological orientation and the quality of contact in shaping multicultural attitudes within democratizing contexts.

While most of the existing research on religion and volunteering has been conducted in Western, predominantly Christian settings, how religion and volunteering are related in non-Western, non-Christian societies have not yet been sufficiently studied. Recently more and more researchers are becoming more interested in religion and volunteering in Taiwan and are conducting case studies on the Tzu Chi Association. However, the relationship between multi-dimensional religiosity and volunteering in Taiwan has not yet been examined. This study attempts to contribute to this literature by analysing one of the most extensive sampling surveys in Taiwan. I found that (1) various kinds of religiosity in Taiwan, other than belonging to Buddhist organisations, have different effects on both religious and secular volunteering; (2) religious volunteering and secular volunteering were different with respect to their correlation with multi-dimensional religiosity; (3) religious participation is a significant factor in promoting respondent's religious volunteering but it is not a significant factor on respondent's secular volunteering; (4) some religiosities, such as belief in spirits and karmic charity, are negative determinants of volunteering; and (5) spiritual behaviour is a significant and positive determinant of both religious volunteering and secular volunteering. In addition, the implications and future research directions are discussed.