 Great pleasure to introduce the keynote speaker for this morning, Dr. Mark Harrison. Mark comes from the University of Tasmania, although he's not a native Tasmanian. He's an expert on Taiwan. He's probably Australia's, how should I put this, forthcoming leading light in Taiwan studies. He's the author of legitimacy, meaning, and knowledge in the making of Taiwan Identity, and the editor of the Margins of Becoming Identity and Culture in Taiwan. He's also a member of the management group of the Australian Centre on China in the World. He's our Tasmanian representative. He is also a great friend, personal friend, and in the making of this conference, the chief, how should I put this, interlocutor, expert advisor on how the whole thing should be conceived and run and so forth, he's been an extraordinary help, support and inspiration for this conference. Before I invite him to take the lectern, I'd also like to say that in and around this conference, there have been discussions among some of us. Led, I have to say, by Xiao Xin Huang, Michael Xiao, who has suggested that this conference demonstrates that within Australia and New Zealand, there is now a growing cohort of people interested in Taiwan and Taiwan studies. And we can only agree. And having put together this kind of an event, it would be great to see some kind of legacy come from it. We're not sure what kind of legacy that will be. It may be in the nature of an Australian New Zealand Taiwan Studies Association, some kind of interest group, some kind of networking. But nonetheless, we are hoping to establish some kind of Taiwan studies way of continuing and encouraging the study of Taiwan in Australia and New Zealand. We have your emails from your applications to this conference. And you can expect to be communicated with by one of three of us, or perhaps the three of us collectively, in the next few months. And those three are Mark and myself and Tai Tan Huang, who will stand up now. Tan Huang is the newly appointed lecturer in Taiwan Studies here in the ANU Department of East Asian Studies. So we will act as a kind of coordinating reference group or something. And so we'll be communicating with you over the next few months and hope that you will respond accordingly. Thanks so much. So it's now my very great pleasure, as I say, to introduce Mark and invite him to take the lectern for the final keynote address of this conference. Thanks, Mark. Well, thanks, Ben, for those words of introduction. Thanks to CRW for putting on this conference and also to all of the supporting organizations such as Academia, Seneca, and TECA, and so forth. It's an honour, indeed, to be invited to talk today. I did want to take advantage of the opportunity of being the last keynote to speak on behalf of all of us who have participated in this event, and thank Ben for his incredibly good natured and tireless work, making the conference work in the last three days. And I'd like also to thank Nancy for everything that she's been doing in the last three days. And maybe we could round up a call. OK, so this paper is about stories and storytelling and the way stories produce how we understand Taiwan. It's gesturing towards some big themes in accordance with what I would call the performative expectations of a keynote as a kind of academic practice. And its goal is to try and say something about how, by being engaged in the task of producing scholarship about Taiwan, we are negotiating what could be called the geopolitics of storytelling. By convention, what we call stories implies the practices of invention, creativity, telling untruths even. Stories are told by storytellers. And conventionally, we would think of those people as writers, filmmakers, artists, and performers in the narrative arts, like literature and cinema. And this understanding of the practices of storytelling and storytellers can be positioned in opposition to the scholarship and policy analysis that is produced by policymakers, business people, and academics. And here, conventionally, the imperative or the goal is to engage with a reality and to do so in an objective and rigorous style. Scholarship and policy, and I'm using those two words sort of broadly. They're broadly speaking in comforts much of what we're doing in this conference. Scholarship and policy assume that the social world is a reality that is available to be methodologically and methodologically apprehended and explained and over which decisions can be made. So reality is describable and measurable and theorizable. And in these ways, we say that we know the world and we know the social world. Contrasting stories and scholarship and policy and policy analysis in this very contrived way, in a way that skirts over vast areas of philosophy and social theory. And I'll wave in the direction of Paul Reker, but I've been deliberately not sort of name-checked continental philosophy in this piece, or indeed any other theorist or anything like that, as a kind of strategy to not be drawn into that world. So skirting over all of this philosophy and social theory is a way of reminding us about the different possible ways of knowing the social world. So it addresses the nature of what we can hold to be true about social life and where such truths can be found and the practices by which we uncover them. And needless to say, scholarship and policy analysis can also be understood as forms of storytelling. So in the work that we do as scholars and policy people, we are telling stories as well as as much as we like to think we're telling truths. And by deliberately blurring the distinction between storytelling and scholarship and policy, between fiction and nonfiction, as it were, it has the effect of displacing the idea or the concept of a hard reality by which scholarship and policy are grounded and legitimized. So it's just trying to break that a little bit and just sort of get us to think a little bit about that. The idea that truths are produced by narratives is a well-established observation. And it leads us towards the idea of relative truths. So truth is just someone's version of the story. But that idea glosses over what I'm trying to address which is the task or the practice of making narratives or making stories from empirical reality, from the reality with which we live. And that practice of making stories out of social life is politically constitutive. So it makes the real and it makes the truth that we understand to be the real in very particular ways and in particular interests. If you understand it as storytelling, it opens the question of who's telling the stories and who is listening and why they're listening and what are the institutional arrangements around that. Taiwan has been the object of a large amount of scholarly analysis and policy work over many decades. These scholarly accounts describe Taiwan and explain Taiwan and its social, economic and political life. They generate empirical truths about Taiwan through quantitative analyses, depictions of social and cultural practices and political and economic events and trends. So for example, empirically, we can say that in 2013, 2% of Taiwan's GDP was agriculture, 29.4% was industry and 68.6% was services. So these statistics are true. They're empirically, verifiably, measurably true. But they're also made meaningful and important through their place in a narrative about Taiwan. They're part of a tellable story. And over the decades, told in different ways and at different times, a dominant story for Taiwan has emerged, which is its transformation into a modern liberal post-industrial democracy. It's a story with a narrative arc of modernization. Taiwan's modernization has a material reality as a lived experience for generations of Taiwanese people. So in talking about stories and the practice of telling stories, I'm not trying to say that there isn't a lived experience that people have gone through in Taiwan over generations. There is a truth and there is a reality to people's lives. And we need to take that seriously as scholars, I think. But those myriad of lived experiences are rendered as the story of modernization by scholarship and policy. The task or the practice of telling the story of the modernization of Taiwan is politically constitutive of Taiwan's place in geopolitics and its story is told through specific narrative effects. So beginnings, plot points, denouements, and narrative arcs. So there's a reality and we tell stories and we make stories out of that reality as scholars, but it's produced in very particular ways with particular narrative effects. So if Taiwan is a modern democratic post-industrial society today, narratively, for example, until quite recently, although less so now, a common starting point for much Taiwan scholarship and policy analysis that describes this modernization has been 1949 or a vaguely defined early 1950s. Starting in 1949 is still very common in media reporting. We have phrases like split amid civil war in 1949 or fled to Taiwan in 1949 as ways of acknowledging the history of Taiwan's relations with mainland China. Starting in 1949 narratively leaves out the 228 incident and Taiwan's colonial history. So there's nothing neutral about starting in 1949 as a narrative effect. And looking at Taiwan in this way reveals the different kinds of truths that we tell and who are telling them and perhaps on whose behalf. So up until the 1970s, when Taiwan was still called free China or nationalist China, starting the story in 1949, seamlessly wrote Taiwan into the history of the Republic of China. By starting in 49, the alternative, more complex narratives of the story of Taiwan under Japan, the crisis of 228 and so forth, are neatly exonized. In so doing, it is a narrative device that legitimized the authority of Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT by telling the Taiwan story is that of a China divided in the context of the Cold War and also in the context of a very particular history of modern China. It erases the key narrative events that tell the Taiwan story as one of resistance or opposition. The notion of free China unraveled in the 1970s of course and it disappeared with US-China rapprochement by the end of that decade. By the time the Cold War came to an end with Perestroika and China's open door in the 1980s, Taiwan as free China had metamorphosed smoothly into an Asian tiger or a little dragon. The Asian tiger is also a story with a narrative structure. This time it starts usually in the early 1950s. This is Taiwan's era of hyper growth which caught the attention of the Western world in the 1980s and 90s. And scholars like Ezra Vogel wrote that Taiwan had leapt from a traditional rural society to a post-industrial one in four decades, achieving what took Europe 200 years which is nothing less than modernity itself. It's empirically true to say that from the 1950s to the 1990s, Taiwan experienced a spectacular period of economic growth with an adjusted real per capita GDP in 1952 of 890 US dollars growing to 20,110 in 2011 which is a 22-fold increase. In 1952, 32% of the economy was agriculture. 19.7 was industry and 48.1 was services. And the story in that period, of course, has been the decline almost completely of agriculture as a segment of the economy. However, it's a narrative and one that informs and gives meaning to the statistical representations of Taiwan's hyper-growth economy. The Asian tiger, as a narrative, erases Taiwan's Qing and Japanese colonial histories. The contribution of the economic miracle to the Qing imperial government's modernization program under the last governor, Liu Min-Chuan, and the massive investment in industrialized agriculture and education in the Japanese colonial era are not part of the Asian tiger story. And if they were, it would be a really, really different story. Instead, Taiwan's economic modernization begins with the help of American advisors, a new generation of social scientists and economists creating modern social science in many ways in Taiwan, in organizations like the Joint Chinese American Commission for Rural Reconstruction, which had been relocated from the mainland to Taiwan after 49. They implemented land reform and then radical free trade and open market economic policies from the late 1950s. Like the date of 1949, this narrativization of a real experience produces truths that are politically constitutive. It marginalizes the history of the Republic of China and it is helped in that by the parallel story of the People's Republic of China, which of course has its own narratives completely, which I've contested in many ways. And I'll talk about those in a moment. It also asserts the narrative autonomy of Taiwan and the Asian tiger story is really intrinsic to Taiwan identity and the production of it in the 1990s. It also writes the Taiwan story smoothly into the emergence of US hegemony in Asia. In the 1990s, by the time we get to the 90s, Taiwan's tiger was in the context of its contrast to the state of many Western economies in the post-Cold War era. In the West, the story was unemployment, debt and de-industrialization. In Taiwan, on the other hand, was a policy exemplar with minimal welfareism and open markets and export-oriented trade, generating huge trade surpluses. It also had better people in the policy and the politics and the morality of this discussion. The Taiwanese were understood in the Asian tiger narrative as being hardworking and abstemious. In other words, Taiwan lost its place in the geopolitics of the Cold War and in the history of the Chinese Civil War, but it gained an important place in the complex entanglements of policy and morality that characterized the rise of neoliberalism in the Anglo sphere. So Taiwan and the other Asian tigers showed the right way to achieve economic growth and it was through neoliberal economic policies, not through decades of investment in long gone imperial governments that it achieved its economic miracle. And as a final example, the empirical truth of Taiwan's democracy also has a narrative structure that in its telling is politically constitutive of the geopolitics in which Taiwan is embedded. So that the new more, or at least the beginning of the conclusion of the narrative of the transformation into a modern liberal democracy is usually given as 1987 and the lifting of martial law. The establishment of Taiwan's modern democratic institutions continued well into the 1990s and indeed after the elections in November last year, a new process of institutional renewal has started, it seems. 1987 is not necessarily the most important empirical moment, but narratively, the notion of a date, you could choose 1996, the first democratic presidential election of 2000 when power went to the DPP, but the notion of a date enables the telling of a story of Taiwan's realization of modern liberal democracy after decades of economic development and authoritarianism. As a date for democratization, 1987 locates Taiwan within an epistemological framework of narrative. So you can start to track it in time, you can say it's actually a rhyme, which as a function of its temporality enables democracy to be told as the outcome or the result of Taiwan's modernization. So when we tell this story, we sort of we explain it in this way. The epistemology of this narrative structure enabled the possibility of explaining Taiwan's democratization empirically through a temporal relationship of cause and effect. In the 1990s, Samuel Huntington, although there are numerous others, lip-serving Balasau and so forth, offered a very bold version of this model or this explanation in his piece, How Countries Democratize. And the argument which is well established runs that economic modernization during authoritarianism creates the social conditions for political change through urbanization, media literacy, the shift in social power towards a rising middle class who demand greater say of their political lives. So democracy is the predictable outcome and the narrative moment of 1987 demonstrates the truth of that outcome as a kind of mechanical unfolding of history. An explanation of democratization like this is eminently open to critique and it certainly has been. So the argument is tautological and teleological and it presents causal and temporal relationships between different pre-given elements of a society that together comprise the social and subjective experience we call modernity. So urbanization, consumerism, economic growth and democracy are all versions of one, all features of one version of modernity. But by inserting a date, it enables them to be turned into a tellable story. We constructed them temporarily and it creates the explainability of Taiwan's democratization. These contradictions and the logical way they play out were canvassed more philosophically in Francis Fukuyama's famous and much debated even today essay, The End of History. So Fukuyama offers a kind of reimagined Hegelianism and he argues that liberal democratic market oriented societies are the natural outcome of social change. Not so much through a series of causal relationships as in Huntington, but as a normalized process of a society resolving its contradictions and arriving upon for Taiwan in 1987, its idealized form. Fukuyama was writing at the end of the Cold War with democratic transitions in Eastern Europe and South Korea and Taiwan and so forth. It was an era of US triumphalism and that is part of why his essay attracted the attention that it did at the time. And to put it another way, although not the way that he himself does, it is the unipolar world of unchallenged US global power in which Western liberal free market democracies have been normalized as the teleological endpoint of modernity and it's that teleological endpoint that has created the unipolar world of US hegemony. So there's a kind of circularity to his argument. The End of History essay was very much an academic pinata when it was published and it still is and in recent years it's been undermined from all sides by geopolitical events. But as a story or even a mythos, the enormous ideological force, it still exerts or it captures actually, is still very visible. So Chinese communism is stronger than it has ever been 25 years after June 4th, but analysts in the Anglosphere leap on every sign of economic and political crisis that might demonstrate the failure of the Chinese model and validate the continuing relevance of the idea of a natural or correct course of history towards democracy. The US war in Iraq was a catastrophic attempt to end history in the Middle East by the use of military power in imperial defiance of empirical reality. And for Taiwan, its status at the end of history is still one of the foundational ideological guarantors of its security. It's as important now as the concept of free China was 50 years ago. And that is because understood as a story which is told and heard enthusiastically in centers of power around the world, its narrative structure, which includes the achievement of liberal democracy, embeds the Taiwan stories within the epistemologies of Western modernity itself. So in the world of Huntington of Fukuyama, that policy world, Taiwan's transition to democracy as a story validates the epistemological commitment to the explainability of human societies. Through a set of reductive objective categories where we divide society into culture, politics, economics and so forth, Taiwan's democratization is the predictable outcome of the laws of social and political science. In other words, as a story, Taiwan's transformation from rural tradition to post-industrial liberal democracy that could be observed empirically to have occurred with the lifting of martial law in 1987 is as much about the quality of explainability or noability of Taiwan. As a place available to being explained, Taiwan validates a foundational component of the Western Episteme and its reality, the reality of that lived experience of change is constituted within geopolitics and it constitutes geopolitics. So we tell the story of Taiwan because we have the power to tell it. We have the power in the Western Episteme to explain it. The singular story of Taiwan's economic development and then transformation into a liberal democracy that starts in the early 1950s described the lived experience of the Taiwanese but as a story it also is the story of Taiwan's epistemological domination. Where this takes us is the idea that there's a body of scholarship and policy about Taiwan that can be understood as a story of its transformation into a modern liberal democracy. It is legitimized by empirical data but its claim to be true is structured and created by narrative devices that are geopolitically constitutive. As a story, the very features through which it makes sense locates Taiwan within this dominant episteme of Western modernity. Sketched in this very, very programmatic way, a really broad brush, the frameworks for analyses of Taiwan's development are revealed as extremely limited, very, very partial. As a story, rather than an empirical truth, one can see the limited range of the story. We can see the kinds of people who are telling the story and the kinds of people who are hearing it. And this is the anglophone dominated institutions of scholarship policymaking and the media which make up much of our political lives. The partiality of this narration of Taiwan's modernization illuminates how Taiwan is not only known, however, as a singular story of its transformation into a modern liberal democracy, but negotiates with the plurality of other practices of storytelling. So if you tell the stories of modernization as this, you know, the transformation into a democracy, you describe it in the way that I have for you. It's a very small number of people, very distinctive kinds of people are telling the story. And there are a whole other bunch of people who are also telling the story of Taiwan. And one of the things that makes Taiwan so important is that as well as being produced as an object of knowledge told as a comprehensible story by the geopolitics of a Western epistemology, a Taiwan story is also simultaneously told in a Chinese episteme. It's beyond the scope of this paper to do more than wave towards this episteme and acknowledge it. In the task of making the world make sense, the Chinese speaking world is distinctively different to the Anglesphere with classical traditions and philosophy, religion and literature that make for different boundaries and architectures of knowledge. So morality and codified social practices are encompassed in the Sinosphere as paths to truth and the knowability of the social world. The Chinese episteme includes a very sharp recognition of the nature of language as socially constitutive. A world knowable as Chinese also addresses geographical territory as one of its legitimizing principles. And what counts as knowledge or social knowledge in the Chinese speaking world is also wholly mediated by China's own experience of modernity and the crisis of its late imperial encounter with European power. And in many ways, drawing attention to the way Taiwan is known through Western and Chinese epistemes highlights how that encounter is still very much ongoing and Taiwan is absolutely at the center of it. It is possible to say, having sketched over this that there is the concept, a political and philosophical concept of an intrinsic epistemological coherence to and boundedness of the Chinese speaking world. So the idea is that China understands itself as coherent and bounded. This is part of what makes the Chinese speaking world the Chinese speaking world. And this episteme is not merely endures in modern China but it mobilizes and it is mobilized for political action and social practices. So the idea of the boundedness of the Chinese world is foundational to the political and social order in China itself. From the point of view of mainland China, as surely as Taiwan's transformation into a modern democracy validates the commanding heights of a knowable and explainable world for a Western episteme, Taiwan's status in the episteme of the Sinosphere as naturally and self-evidently Chinese validates the concept of a Chinese order and from that China's place in the world. This epistemic structure finds its place in the policy and politics of the PRC and one can draw out a parallel critique to what one finds in the Anglo-sphere or the Franco-sphere such as Taiwan's place at the end of history. So the well-known examples we all know, the 1993 White Paper from the state, the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, Taiwan has been part of China since ancient times, the 2000 White Paper, Taiwan is an inalible part of China. All the facts and laws about Taiwan prove that Taiwan is an inalible part of Chinese territory. Like the empirical truth of Taiwan's miraculous transformation from rural tradition to post-industrial democracy, facts are less important than the place of Taiwan in China's story or mythos. China's story about Taiwan also has its own narrative structure, one whose mythical starting point in the mists of history legitimizes the idea of an eternal and intrinsic nature to the Chinese world. While the PRC's own identification of 1949 serves the same function as it does for the KMT of writing Taiwan into the story of post-imperial China while marginalizing the alternative narratives of Qing and Japanese governance. So Taiwan's intrinsic Chinese-ness is asserted by mainland China and from that, the notion of a coherent and bounded Chinese episteme and from that, the idea of a Chinese sociopolitical order that can be mobilized for the exercise of power which today is done by the Chinese Communist Party. Ultimately, asserting Taiwan's Chinese identity to assert the concept of a Chinese world distinct from the West, excuse me. Asserting Taiwan's Chinese identity is to assert the concept of a Chinese world distinct from the West. So this epistemic claim that Taiwan can be known as Chinese expressed through the political and military force of the PRC is as prescribed and as limited as Taiwan's epistemic status as an exemplar of the end of history. That is to say both of these speak with a great deal of force but they still speak from very particular and very limited institutional settings. So in offering this critique of the forms of the telling of the Taiwan story, one cannot but note that by locating knowledge so firmly within the realm of geopolitical power, the stories of the lived experiences of the people of the island or what could be called the truer stories of Taiwan depending on how you look for truths have seemingly vanished. They've been as a word camouflaged by the stories of free China, the tiger economy, democratization and Taiwan's being part of China. The purpose of recounting these dominating stories though is to say that if we understand our own subjective implication in these epistemological structures of geopolitics and try and look from outside of our own institutional settings, it makes it much easier to see the ways that Taiwanese tell their own stories of modernization. And they tell it in ways that express our shared domination by geopolitics and the way they co-op that and the way they resist that. They're in many ways are telling the story I think the story of the failure of Taiwan's modernization and the way they're trying to renew the promise of it. Within Taiwan in the everyday party politics is the key institutional setting for telling the experience of modernization as a story. As we all know the reality of democratic politics which is supposedly the climax of modernization has been met with a great deal of disillusionment by many Taiwanese in recent years. One way to understand this frustration is by understanding green and blue politics as practices that have translated these geopolitically constitutive narratives into the local context of Taiwan's political life. On the green side of politics the story of its transformation into a modern liberal democracy is translated into a story of nationhood. The DPP has developed a powerful account of the Taiwanese nation forged in the struggle against the implacable authoritarianism of the KMT. The democracy struggle is recounted in particular ways with key events, people and political categories, the Donghua activists, the Gaosheng incident, the moral and the moral struggle against the regime and its security apparatus. The DPP's version of democratization and the creation of a modern Taiwan approximates the Western narrative of economic and political modernization. Democracy is an idealized end point of Taiwan's transformation at the end of a single narrative thread for the Greens and it's like a line along which Taiwan travels mostly forward but sometimes backwards. So DPP supporters have spent the last six years claiming that the KMT has been taking Taiwan backwards along this narrative to the authoritarian era. The KMT also tells a story of Taiwan's modernization using the lives of the Taiwanese and their story also concludes with the realization of democratization. Democracy as the end point of modernization was the main theme of President Ma's double 10 address last year and he warned and cautioned about the continuing need for democratic commitment and renewal in the ROC. But the KMT tells the narrative of Taiwan's democratization very differently to the DPP. Institutionally, for example, it's celebrate the role of Jiang Jinguo but it has very little to say about Cheng Xia-shek. Ma Yingzhou has been a key voice for lauding Taiwan's democratic achievements, mobilizing the narrative of democratic transformation domestically and internationally. But simultaneously, he also celebrates the legacy of 5,000 years of Chinese civilization. And for him, one has to assume Taiwan's democracy is the end point is the end point of a story of modernization that can also be told over 5,000 years, not 60 years. So the KMT has attempted to combine the story of Taiwan's development as a modern liberal democracy, simultaneously with its place in an enduring Chinese episteme and not very satisfactorily, I think we can agree. In both of these stories, there is overlap and compromise. 228 in particular has come to stand as an original injustice whose memorialization and status as a sanctioned memory by the state symbolizes or represents the successful transition to democracy in the 90s for both the KMT and the DPP. In this critique, party politics in Taiwan is fundamentally memetic or imitating of the epistemological forces of Western and Chinese power. Indeed, it is this very memesis that is mobilized by both sides of politics against each other and internationally. In other words, the story of Taiwan, told by party politics, has failed to develop a language of political practice that does much more than simply reproduce the specific structures of domination in which Taiwan is located. Importantly, when Taiwanese political leaders have stepped beyond those prescribed limits, such as with the DPP's version of Taiwanese nationalism, they've confronted very powerful geopolitical forces. So Taiwan's Chinese identity and its democracy are both acceptable stories internationally, but its nationalism meets strong resistance and even derision. That Taiwan's party politics offer only an incomplete or limited narration of the lived experience of modernization for many Taiwanese can be seen in the emergence of this new era of student activism that has culminated last year with a sunflower movement and in the election of anti-political politicians like Kawincha as Taifemeer. In activist politics, we can glimpse an effort by the Taiwanese to recognize and critique other versions of the story of Taiwan. And these are ones that might not look like stories at all. Urban space is an important instance. That is, urban planners and architects are also Taiwan's storytellers and they blur the distinction between narrative and materiality. In Taipei, the practice of rendering the story of Taiwan's modernization, including the transition to democracy, happened in the urban environment through the development of the Shini district. So on the one hand, Shini has the imposing Taipei City Government Building which was built in the early 90s to create a kind of alternative city center and represent the shift in power away from the presidential building. But so the remaking of the development of Shini represents this new political era, but most of Shini is commercialized public space and it's dominated by Taipei 101. So Shini and its blocks of expensive housing and its shopping precincts is an urban environment designed for consumption, work, and leisure. So it also tells the story of the realization of liberal market, the realization of liberal market oriented democracy with a particular frame, the same kind of timeframe, but it doesn't tell it as a story at the end of history but as of the remaking of Taiwan by global capital. The Western stories of Taiwan's development into a liberal democracy do nothing more than imply the importance of global capital. China's story of Taiwan's place in the Chinese socio-political order has no accounts of global capital at all and neither do the DPP nor the KMT have a serious argument to make about capital and its impact on Taiwan. But the urban environment and its planners and architects tell the story of Taiwan's transformation using the same narrative structure as the story of democratization but they have capital as a constitutive force. And around the same time, as Shini was being built, another great urban development project was being unleashed in Taipei, one that tells its own Taiwan story and that's the MRT. So it's a vast public space and it's a democratic one in the way that it's reworked the spatial political economy of Taipei but that it does not proclaim itself as a symbol of Taiwan's transformation into a democracy expresses more than anything how inadequate are our representational forms of Taiwan's modernization. The MRT did not establish new democratic political institutions but it restructured land ownership and the symbolic and financial value of land. It recast the American presence in Taiwan by bypassing Tianwu and going through Beito and the Deng Shui line. And so the American story was marginalized by the MRT. The Japanese colonial story was kind of revived by the urban development project that is the MRT with all of the hot springs that have been restored in Beito. The MRT, as we also know, has remade social practices and subjectivity in Taiwan. It, for one of a better word, has civilized urban behavior. The intense regulation of people on the system around queuing and eating and drinking and so forth has created and embodied Taiwanese subjectivity as modern. For the Taiwanese, the effects of the MRT, as we all know, have crossed the yellow line and been naturalized as an appropriate modern behavior for all of the city and indeed the entire island. Again, urban development tells unexpected stories, ones unaccounted for by the practice of explaining Taiwan's modernization. The civilizing effect of the MRT has transformed the behavior of the citizens of Taiwan powerfully and effectively in ways that the proponents of the new life movement in mainland China in the 1930s would recognize and celebrate. Madame Chiang Kai-shek exhorted the citizens of the new republic not to spit or eat in public or wander slack jawed across the roads and she no doubt would have thoroughly approved of the orderly conduct of Taipei's commuters. So the MRT tells a story of modernization as a place of bodies in regulated motion that has been part of the Chinese aspirations for post-imperial modernization for almost 100 years. The point of these detours through party politics and urban development is to show how the practices of making a story from the experiences of the Taiwanese produce accounts that are politically constitutive but that are also partial, contested and negotiated. The stories told to negotiate Taiwan's place in geopolitics are themselves partial and contested and they too are negotiated around and around. But this is not an attempt to escape from this with the hope of telling a story that is authentically Taiwanese or one that makes the claim to be the true story of Taiwan that is somehow epistemologically free from Western and Chinese structures of knowledge. In an institutional setting like this such as in the performative practice of a conference keynote, writing and speaking from outside of dominant epistemological formations is actually impossible. And this is because if we try to do that then we aren't doing a keynote or we aren't doing scholarship or policy or even planning or politics. We're doing something else. And the thing we're doing is art. And art does not render the empirical reality of a lived experience as narratives in the same way that scholarship or policy or even planning does. So art is a category of human creativity has its own vast institutional arrangements and structures of value. There are contingent institutional processes that make out good or bad, the celebrity and commerce and so forth. So I acknowledge that. In the context of this discussion which is about the politics of how we understand Taiwan through the stories we tell, Taiwanese art or art that wants to say something about Taiwan is by its nature as art an expression of the meaning of the Taiwanese experience that is unsystematic, unconstrained by empirical truth and makes no claim on narrative completeness. It tells us about Taiwan but not by trying to explain Taiwan's modernization or democracy through objective causal relationships. It is by definition, it is necessarily partial and individual and subjective. For artists who want to say something about Taiwan's experience over time, free from the requirement to legitimize their work through the notions of empirical truth, the material they engage with, the material they must engage with in order to speak about Taiwan meaningfully is memory. Memory is not facts or dates. It does not plan to be true in the way that history or the historiographical scholarship does. It includes individual emotions, things that are said and unsaid in families. Memory is the senses, the sensorial body, it is subjectivity. It's a path to knowing about a place that scholarship and policy by definition cannot engage with. In Taiwan today, art is the practice where memory can be expressed and still be memory and artists are creating the material that can be rendered into a different story of Taiwan's lived experience of modernization. They are doing so on the margins in work that does not really count yet as knowledge or narrative, but speaks against the dominant structures in which formal makers of knowledge, such as ourselves, are embedded. So the scholars and the policy makers and the politicians. To choose some sort of arbitrary examples that just sort of have interested me in the last year from my time in Taiwan last year. In August, 2014, the well-known dance organization that Tsaijouyue Dance Research Institute performed a work called Moon of Green Island, which is a very sparse interpretation of the violence of imprisonment under martial law. In this work, the dancers representing prisoners and guards were indistinguishable with all of them wearing or dressed identically in white cotton. Some of them were blindfolded, some of them knelt, some of them shouted abuse in Taiwanese. The experience of imprisonment as evoked in this work was inchoate. It was left without context of resolution. It expressed the unthinking and undifferentiated violence of a political system at that time that made people violent to each other. In Tainan this year, in June, at the small photo aura gallery space, the exhibition Tsufui Tsai, in that exhibition, the artist Su Yu-shen, displayed dozens of family photographs in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We created using a photographic process to turn them into copper etchings. The images were ordinary and quotidian. There was a family at home, there were families posing formally, families showing off a new baby, there were people out in the streets enjoying the opportunities of leisure and entertainment in the new modern economy of Taiwan. The images on the copper plates were deliberately faint and they required the viewer to peer closely at them to make them out. But as the artist Su himself said explicitly, the purpose of the work was to take the fragile ephemera of these photos and make them permanent and hard in metal. He set out to fix and secure the ephemeral nature of the memory of the period, memories of the everyday, that have no capacity to render themselves as a narrative of Taiwan's modernization, but stand alone as fragments of personal stories. Recently too, ways of remembering have begun to flow beyond the island and across generations. So there are four American novels that I'm aware of that are either written or being written that address Taiwan's modernization. The New York-born Kim Liao is completing a biographical work drawn from the life of her grandfather, Liao Wenquai, who was one of the most prominent campaigners for Taiwan independence in the late 1940s and early 50s. Eva Law, who's a Taiwan-born but raised in the US writer, is writing a fictionalized account of the life of her great-uncle, Lorthul Chun, who was a well-known anti-KMT and democracy activist in the 50s and 60s, who was exiled in the US. Julie Wu has just completed or just published her novel, The Third's Son, which tells the story of Japanese colonial Taiwan. And Shawnee Young Ryan, of course, is here today, has just completed a new novel that tells a family's story against Taiwan's history, beginning its narrative on February 28th, 1947. These are three young women writers writing as women and as Americans and as second-generation Taiwanese, writing mostly about men and against the production of Taiwan as an object of knowledge, but instead seeming to take up the task of evoking Taiwan as memories from beyond the boundaries of the island. In Ryan's work, the politics of history writing is subsumed to an engagement with the nature of memory itself, who work captures the way sensorial and emotional memories of the everyday enrich and haunt lives across generations and give the martial law era in Taiwan its unique and troubling form in the present. The tastes and smells of a Taiwan long gone are alongside the memories of fear and anger of fathers and mothers living under the duress of the white terror. Memories too are of decisions made in moments that live as guilt and anxieties across generations. And lastly, one must note, the exhibition curated by Olivia Kircher is part of this conference. Photographs and artworks by a number of Taiwanese artists from the 1950s and 1960s capturing moments of the everyday in Taiwan. The exhibition itself is not art, it's curatorial practice, but it's a practice that takes art and uses it to tell the story of change in Taiwan that is a counterpoint to scholarly knowledge. It's in dialogue with this entire conference. It makes no attempt to be a complete record or an explanation, but instead through the work of artists reminds us that Taiwan is an experience lived in the everyday that can be told as irreducible to dominant geopolitics by trying to capture the fix and fixing the forgotten subjective moments as art. All of this work and there are numerous other instances are flowing and seeping into the cracks and gaps of the structures of knowledge of Taiwan. Rendering modern liberal democratic Taiwan as a narrative of modernization has left out the subjective, ephemeral and fragmentary nature of that story as a lived experience. But that experience has returned as memories that haunt Taiwan, generating a malaise or an anxiety in the way that many Taiwanese feel that their island's story is incomplete or somehow not their own story. To put it another way, it is Taiwan's transformation telling the story of Taiwan's transformation, making it a story into a liberal modern democracy rendered as a narrative geopolitically and told in Taiwan's politics that is itself a barrier to addressing the past. In 1950, a man called Wu Yeming was arrested for distributing a flyer that it was alleged to promote communism. He was released from prison in 1982 in his early 1960s on medical grounds after 32 years. Compounding the tragedy of his imprisonment was that he had gone blind because of cataracts. Wu emerged from prison into Taiwan's extraordinary economic transformation, the leap to modernization of the Taiwan, the tiger economy, just a few years away from the lifting of martial law and the moment of democratization. So Wu Yeming lived through the telling of Taiwan's story as a transformation into a modern liberal democracy. But he has no place in the rise of the middle class. He did not engage in the Deng Wai movement or the Galsheng incident. He didn't run for office to challenge the authority of the K and T. Wu's life was silenced by the state for 32 years. But it has been silenced again by Taiwan's status at the end of history in which individual suffering and tragedy is lost in the natural or automatic unfolding of history towards liberalism. It's lost again in the claim that Taiwan is a part of the PRC. It's lost also in the skyscrapers and shiny buildings of Xin'i which tell the story of the power of global capital over Taiwan. When reflecting upon Wu Yeming and countless others lost and forgotten in prisons in Taiwan and Dimash's law and forgotten again or left stranded in the past by the story of Taiwan that ends with the triumph or the success of modernization and democratization. Artists and writers in their gathering of these fragments of memories from which we can tell new stories about Taiwan show us what is missing from our, show us that what is missing from our accounts of Taiwan, the thing that we never address adequately. What is missing from our accounts is violence. Whether addressed directly as in the dance performance, Moon of Green Island or in Shawnee Young Ryan's work or obliquely in the melancholy tone of Su Youshan's family history images. An account of the story of Taiwan is coming into focus I think in which violence is foundational. Modernization in Taiwan is a violent story. It's epistemic in the place of Taiwan as a merely a plot point in U.S. or PRC geopolitical contestation over the decades. It is literal and bodily in the terrible human rights record of Taiwan and Dimash's law that has left unspoken stories of suffering and personal betrayals and death in the family stories of every single Taiwanese person. Violence is in the remaking of the urban environment. The story that is being rendered today on the margins from the lived experience of generations of Taiwanese is one that understands that violence is foundational to that experience. Violence already has a place in the Taiwan story in what has become sanctioned and memorialized accountings of 228 and in the Taiwanese nationalist accounts of Taiwan as a nation forged in the struggle against the KMT. One must acknowledge to the work of Lunging Tai as the former minister of culture in opening the martial law archives and beginning the process of institutionalizing memory from that period. This argument is not about instances of violence or crimes and justice. It's about giving a name to the constitutive force of Taiwan's modernization and calling it what it is, which is violence. Just to conclude, this sounds very hard and negative. So as a coder, I'll note that here in Canberra, as we look with the view from the south, we can share with our Taiwanese colleagues our parallel task of retelling the Australian story, not as one of the commanding nation building, but as one instead of colonial and national violence. It's a process that we've been undertaking for decades. We can also, in conclusion, celebrate the intellectual and epistemological freedom that Taiwan is a place, that the island of Taiwan grants to the Taiwanese, to the Taiwanese diaspora and to scholars of Taiwan to think and rethink its foundational principles. And this is not modernization, this is actually the modernity itself. Thanks very much. I'd like to thank Mark for that deeply thoughtful interrogation of Taiwan's history, the way we tell Taiwan's history and, in general, the telling of stories themselves. If you'd like to remove yourself for any questions, so please. Thanks, Mark, for a very thoughtful paper. I think it is important to reflect on the ways in which we tell the story of the Taiwan experience and also some of the agendas behind it. And for the few art historians here in the theater, I think we do appreciate the fact that you are foregrounding the role of art in this sort of narrative on the Taiwan experience, which is often overlooked by scholars in Taiwan studies. However, I am wondering if you've been looking at all of the 1990s when artists, I think, were, to some extent, conforming to the dominant political ideology in this sort of telling, telling the story of Taiwan from the colonial period through to democratization. I don't know if you're aware of artist Yang Maolin, for example, who did a major series called Made in Taiwan, where it was very much based on that dominant or promoted particularly by the DPP at the time in Chinshuabian, that political narrative. And I'm just wondering if you've considered that particular period. I think there has been a shift in the visual arts to artists, I guess, becoming more introspective and not explicitly incorporating these kind of national symbols in their work, but I think the 1990s was a very different period. Thanks. I'm trying to write something like this to make this happen. I would probably say we need to go back and look at the way those artists were negotiating the structures of power that they were finding themselves in that location and the way that they wanted to. So artists in the 90s were negotiating at the particular set of power structures and trying to find ways through that and found themselves with legitimization from, as you say, the DPP and so forth. So I wouldn't sit here and claim to offer a complete account. I would only say that there are, they're being attentive to the negotiation of these stories and how they've taken place over many, many years. It's a really useful way of seeing the Taiwan story. It's a really dynamic one, the one that is, as I said, it's, in many ways, it's circular and one can't escape from its circularity, but one can look at different times in Taiwan's history and see the way outside of dominant epistemes, it's mostly artists who've sort of found ways into them and have often had that their ways of thinking about the story of Taiwan then taken up and reincorporated and reimagined. You go back to the 50s and 60s and where it's authoritarianism, art is not really art at all in that context. I mean, it becomes another kind of institutional practice because of those political structures, so it's got to be negotiated in really, really different ways. So I'm not, in using art, I'm deploying it as a way to get us to think about the structures through which we constitute our knowledge, basically, and to recognize that there are people outside of scholarship and policy in these sort of hard areas that are, in many ways, the most creative and important to address. Hi, thank you, Mark. Thank you very much for that fantastic keynote address. You spoke about public space telling a particular story, in this case, E, and telling the story of the globalization and corporatization of Taiwan. I wonder if you've... One of the things that struck me when I first went to Taiwan was nostalgia cafes and those sort of spaces which primarily young Taiwanese were taking me to sort of engage in this idealized, in a way, idealized history of Taiwan, maybe to go, we'd all go together and eat what would be seen as sort of traditional Taiwanese food. And I wonder how you sort of interpret those spaces. Yeah, nostalgia is a really interesting thing. I mean, nostalgia is much theorized. My initial sort of move towards nostalgia would be to say it's very postmodern. It's the commercialization or the commodification of memory and history and so forth and turning it into a commodified experience. I've changed my view on that actually and I've started, certainly in the time that I've been in Taiwan more recently, have come to see that the Taiwanese are engaging with memory with a tremendous sense of anxiety. That's, you know, we all know that Taiwan is in a really peculiar mode at the moment. There's a malaise, there's an anxiety, there's a sense of constant sort of annoying, sort of disquiet. And looking at nostalgia rather than as postmodern, I would see it as an anxiety about memory and an anxiety about who controls it, how it's used, the capacity of people to mobilize it, memory as a site of resistance. And by the time you get to a nostalgia cafe or a sort of traditional Taiwanese restaurant, that's fairly, that process is quite distant from that sort of, you know, the moment where you're drinking a coffee. But I think part of what's making those spaces meaningful is the idea that it's much more than simply commercialized memory or commodified memory. It's that people just have the sense that they want to reflect upon the past. The structures that tell the stories of the past somehow don't capture how people have subjectively experienced those at past. And so this is one way to sort of try and negotiate that emotion. When you talk about, it's very hard to sort of talk about this in a theoretical way, which is why I think art is so interesting, because art doesn't theorize, it just sort of does stuff that is its own thing and it doesn't need to be comprehensive. And it's, so a nostalgia cafe is equally not attempting to make a complex political argument about Taiwan's modernization. It's just sort of slipping into a gap that people feel the need to be filled, I think. I was really struck by your discussion of the MRT, which I think for people who haven't lived in Taiwan, it may be hard to appreciate why a subway could be so important culturally. And of course, probably mostly for Taipei residents who use it on their daily commute. But it does strike me as an institution with a lot of cultural clout, not just in the municipality, but as something that is kind of an aspirational institution, like it promotes an idealized vision of the citizenry, extending even to things like how people treat their elders, not just queuing up, but like relations between the generations and creating this sense of unity among a populace, and even bringing art into the subways, the Taipei Literature Festival, excerpts or kind of pop art. And then extending even outside of the underground spaces with this kind of public-private partnership with a giant bicycle corporation, so that it becomes like a ubiquitous presence around Taipei. And it's even a model that makes Taipei and kind of Taiwan as a model for emulation for other potentially global cities. So, and there's so much kind of gloom and doom or pessimism or China looking over one's shoulder, but this is one area that I think, I've detected a lot of kind of local pride in this organization as being something that all foreigners will come into contact with if they come to Taiwan, that it's part of Taiwan's best face that's kind of separate from a lot of the national politics that we often come into contact with. So I thought that was a really great insight. Yeah, you're totally right. The MRT is amazing. I like the brown line. I like the Mujia line, which nobody else does. It's like, it's the most fun. It's like a ride. And it's, but you're right. And I think what you've just illustrated is the way it's so much more than just a subway system. It's a, it is, the way I describe it was it tells the story of Taiwan's modernization in urban planning and urban development. But the way it's used, as you say, the way the space is a public space is used in ways that are extremely modern. It expresses exactly that. It's a, it just does a whole lot of things that you don't expect it to do as a subway system, but would make, make perfect sense as a, as a vast public space that is, has been built in the era of democracy that somehow captures that, that thing. But I mean, the point that I made about new life and how the regulation of bodies, which is slightly facetious, but, but there is that thing in, in the post-imperial's Chinese story of, of the aspirations for modernization, which is regulated bodies and people behaving themselves well in a very disciplined way. There is that connection too. I mean, it can be used to tell different stories depending on what you want to draw out from it. It can be rendered into different stories. Taiwan versus other, that's civilized space. Yeah. But there's a whole Gaosheng Taipei thing as well. You know, Taipei got an MRT and then Gaosheng had to have one, of course, because, you know, and then Taijong has been trying to build on to Jason Hu for the last 10 years, notably unsuccessfully, et cetera, et cetera. There's a whole, you know, there's a whole geopolitics and then the spatial politics and a political economy as well. There's a, there are multiple readings. And you have a whole conference on the MRT. You have it on the MRT. That, that's a good idea. In this context, I was particularly struck with your discussion that you just, I suggested to again there about bodily regulation on the MRT, and in particular, civic pride in that bodily regulation. It's not, it's not a sense of being enforced on people. People are actually proud of the way people behave on it. And in that way, I think Chris referred to this legally. It's also become a site of an evocation of the differences between Taiwanese people and mainland people. And I'm sure we've all seen incidents on the MRT precisely of Taiwanese locals being proud of the way they behave and pointing out in implicit or explicit ways, the way that other people are not behaving in the correct way on the MRT. And that experience is mobilized in different ways. So on the green side, people mobilize that to say, well, look, you know, we're not Chinese at all and look at these uncivilized people. But on the blue side, they'll say, you know, we're really Chinese and we carry the legacy of the 5,000 years in the Republic and the communists are just turned everyone into barbarians. So these things can be mobilized and it's the internalization of bodily regulation. That's what makes the MRT. People have made it, they've internalized it, which of course is the failure of new life, which is when you try and force people from outside to do it, it doesn't work. It just ends up seeming silly. But the MRT is very different. Which I'll be thinking about for a long time, I think. And I'm not sure if I can formulate my question. I'd actually like to ask you sort of about your academic and pedagogical practice in the light of the talk that you've given us because I'm sitting here as a historian, feeling a little indicted. And rightly so, right? Because I think, you know, we're used as historians to thinking about how our selection of markers is a way of domesticating and taming a narrative, right? Which is, we hope we're conveying meaning that's really there, but we wonder if it's all in our minds as we try and present it to our students' minds. And so that part was familiar to me, but the insight that what is obscured is violence is, I think, very important and very applicable to narrativity in general, not just Taiwan, right? So in the light of that, how do you think and how do you teach? That's a broad question. I scream, I like everyone. I don't actually, I would say that all of the work we do is partial, okay? So one can, the idea that one can sort of encompass and say, this is the true story of Taiwan, I've discovered it, I've uncovered this thing and here it is, is the truth escapes. Just as you think you've got it, suddenly it pops out somewhere else and you think, oh, and you try and grab that and it can't be encompassed and I guess one has to recognize that. In my own scholarly practice, it ends up being writing about writing. So as you write, you narrate the process of writing, but this can get a bit sort of tedious. It gets a bit, you know. And I guess to locate that sort of a little bit, well, I said two things. What I was aiming at in the talk was not really historians, obviously one respects them. But it was more locating knowledge in geopolitics. And so this, and I use this phrase scholarship and policy, scholarship and policy analysis to sort of evoke this world of these pronouncements upon the Taiwan story that where it's explained and it's deployed and it's used in a sort of way, which is very different institutionally from what a lot of historians do. But whether historians can sort of escape that, I'm not sure, you could tell me. So I was sort of aiming in that direction rather than sort of down towards historians. And I guess a little bit biographically until last year, I had been wondering what it was that I wanted to keep saying about Taiwan. Do we keep telling the story of democratization? Do we keep saying, in one way or another, do we keep saying, artist or your book, this event has happened or that thing has happened and look, it's more democracy? Or do we actually, and it didn't seem to be capturing the sense that you have when you're in Taiwan at the moment. There isn't that sense of being at the end of history at all. There's a sense that people are deeply troubled. And I was just trying to say something about that sense that I had when I was there, that people were communicating to me. And one way to do that is to sort of break open the structures that make it hard for us to talk about it, hard for us to see it. Because that's part of the problem with narrative is that by definition, it excludes things. It's actually a barrier. I didn't make this point very strongly in the talk, but the idea that democracy itself or democratization is actually a barrier to addressing the past rather than an enabler I think is really critical. The martial law here in particular is extremely difficult to address. It's been, the phrase I used in the discussion of Mr. Wu is that it's been stranded somehow. When you're a liberal democracy, but you've gone through this process, what becomes of that period where things were terrible? What is its continuing relevance? You can turn it into history and you can do various things with it, but it's much more than that. It's a lived experience now in the present. It lives on in people's lives. But these overarching structures actually make it very hard for the Taiwanese, I think, and us to engage with that. And the people who I think are doing it are artists, which comes back to Sophie, your comment. This is maybe just really now. If we were writing the sort of, thinking about this stuff in the 90s, we'd be saying something different, but this is certainly what I was saying now in the last 12 months. Yes, thank you, Professor. Thank you for elaborating on EMRT, because I believe, especially for foreigners living in Taipei, it's a very important space for socialization, both in the sense of inclusion and rejection. Inclusion because while riding the EMRT, many locals will try to shut you up, it'd be friend you. Rejection because as a foreign youth, sometimes notice that locals are reluctant to seek next to you or you see an advertisement showing a foreigner breaking the rule, eating food and being scolded by the locals with them. And also it's a very important window through which foreigners observe social developments for the social auditors in Taipei. On a humoristic note, there's a very interesting Facebook page called the Taipei EMRT Wall of Shame, which you can see some very colorful things happening on the EMRT. I just wanted to say this, thank you again. Professor, can I ask you a question? Yes. As someone who lives in Danshui, have you noticed a change in the nature of Danshui since the EMRT line went through and is so closely and easily connected to the city of Taipei? Yes, the EMRT has a deeply influenced social economic developments in Danshui, especially because the line is going to be extended. And so I believe at the end of next year, or the beginning of 2016, Danshui station won't be determined as there will be further station. And that prompt is sort of the development of a new area in Danshui, just called a sort of new Danshui. So the EMRT is a vector of social economic development and change also for Danshui. But if we think that at the end of 2015, the EMRT network will be extended to connect Taipei International Airport to the city. Well, the implications, I believe, are gonna be huge. And it's also being used, I suspect, as a political argument for the sake of the 2016 presidential elections. Thank you. Thanks, Mark. I thought that was a really interesting piece. But I wanna ask you four follow-on questions. In writing, in giving this analysis, are you sort of setting up straw men to knock them down? Can a writer ever write completely? I mean, you have a limited number of space. Can you actually cover everything in your perspective? Is it really true to say people haven't mentioned violence? I mean, I think you could talk about a lot of analyses of Taiwan where violence is quite an important part. And then do also some people write a variety of stories. You know, when you're dealing with different issues, the story comes up a bit differently. I guess some of that follows a little bit from Ryan's questions. The first one was what again? No, that's, sorry. I'm sorry, I heard your answer. Yeah, I said, what was your first question again? Are you setting up straw men? Are you setting up straw men? They're not going down. Yeah, you could argue that. You know, I would probably phrase it when negotiating geopolitical structures of power. And so the straw men aren't really straw. They still exist. I mean, there's still forces that we have to somehow, you know, the story of Taiwan's modernization is still a real story. It's still, as I said, validates. It's a story that is one of the ideological guarantors of Taiwan's security. So you can paint them in the programmatic way that I did. And you can look for more subtle versions of them. But I think they can look like straw men, but I would argue they still have kind of political force. Your second question was, write completely? No, you can't, of course. That's the point. That's the nature of, it's the un-totalizable nature of text. You can never write completely. The problem is that sometimes people think they can or people write as if they can. And people do scholarship that sort of makes claim on, like on completeness. And of course, other things then pop out and little counter examples or counter instances sort of emerge unexpectedly. You try and cover that as well. But that's the nature of writing itself. Yeah, that's the very, the nature of language is that it's un-totalizable. Your third question was? Violent. Violence. Yeah, yeah. I distinguish at the end, I didn't elaborate it, but I distinguish at the end between sort of the way that the lived experience of the Taiwanese is rendered as a story. And the idea that there's plenty of violence in it, 228, obviously. And people have written an enormous amount about violent incidents and violent moments and acts of violence. But what I was saying was that I was distinguishing between those events and officially like bodily events. And violence as the story of modernization. The story of modernization as a violent story, as intrinsically, foundationally, fundamentally violent. Understanding it as that. So when we talk about urban space, when we talk about political change, we don't sort of, we talk about it as a kind of positive story that's ended with liberal democratic modernity or modernization. But one can tell it in a really different way, which is as a story of violence. And the analogy you could make is with Australia, where we've gone through this very painful process of rethinking our national story, not as a story of nation building. When I was at school, I went on a school trip to the Snowy Mountain hydroelectric scheme as ideological indoctrination in this very particular nation building story. But since the 80s, certainly, we've begun telling the Australian story as one of colonial and national violence. But it's deeply contested. It's deeply a source of much anger. And we debate it continually. And I guess what I'm saying is that the Taiwanese are entering that process. And they're starting to rethink what it means to be Taiwanese and it means to have suffered violence and in multiple directions and to sort of have to try and come to terms with that. And so it isn't just about writing about 228 or the Zhongli incident or the Gaussian incident. It isn't those sort of moments that punctuate a particular story. It's recognizing that violence is constitutive. It's foundational. So it's a story of violence is what I was saying. And your last question. Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, that's... Absolutely, yeah. And one can use that as the idea of how stories are written or the turning the lived experience into a story is a methodological device. It's a kind of critical device. It's a way of looking at all of the experiences and saying, well, how have people actually turned these into the story about Taiwan that we tell? And the point of digressing through urban development was to say that the stories of Taiwan often don't look like stories at all. So architects and urban planners have told the story of Taiwan. But we don't generally think of them in that way. And writers have, and there's a multiplicity of them and they flow and they create space and they fill space. And that's the experience of Taiwan. And that's the task of Taiwan studies is to try and sort of recognize that that's what's going on and recognizing and recognize that that's what makes Taiwan so important. Because my last comment was, what's amazing about Taiwan is that it gives us, it grants us is the way I would phrase it. It grants us the right to do that. It sort of allows us to do that. It's not like China. When you're China is this incredibly, the way China is constituted as a story is something that you must confront as a scholar. You fight this thing continually. But the island of Taiwan has made it possible, has granted the right of all of us Taiwanese people, the Taiwanese diaspora and Taiwan scholars to actually engage in this amazingly sort of positive and rich and creative process. We'll take one more because time's almost up. Yes, up the back here please. Hi, I said teacher from Taiwan and I'm teaching in the Chinese department. Well, I think I'm also, I would like to make a comment. I'm also answering the gentleman there in red. When I introduce the realism stories, I also introduce idealism stories to my student. I will try to make it balanced. Otherwise, my student might get offended, you know. For instance, like when I introduce the novel written by Huang Chunming, I will also introduce the novel written by Xiao Li Hong because they are totally different styles. The person, they have different styles. And when I written, sorry, I just said realism. I think the realism and idealism, it's different. I mean, they have different ideology. Okay, thanks. And I guess my response is that Taiwan writers have been producing amazing accounts of the story of Taiwan. But it's, we can, but they're not the only ones who write the story. And we also, Taiwan's study scholars do it, policy makers do it, business people do it, government planners do it. And we can recognize and celebrate and engage with that process and try and understand the stories that are on the margins that are coming to the center at the moment.