 Welcome to this online book launch of Taiwan Studies Revisited. My name's David Bell and I co-edited this new book with Michael Xiao from academia, Seneca. The book itself was published late 2019 and we held the Taiwan book launch of the book at the Taiwan Sociology Association's annual conference in late 2019. We did plan to run book launch sessions in the spring of 2020 in the US, Germany and London. But unfortunately as a result of the current crisis we've had to postpone those launch events. So I thought it would be a good idea to do an online book launch and I'll do some follow-up things for this later. Now one of the things that the book tries to do is to engage with the question about the state of the field of Taiwan studies. To what extent are we currently enjoying a golden era of Taiwan studies as I have argued in a number of publications. This idea is almost unthinkable when we think about where the field was when many of us started studying Taiwan in 1980s or 1990s. At that point we couldn't really talk about a field of Taiwan studies. The study of Taiwan was often on the margins of Chinese studies. There were very very few social science publications for example on Taiwan and no Taiwan studies associations. But the way the field has developed over the last two to three decades has been quite remarkable. For example we've seen the emergence of Taiwan studies associations in America, the North America Taiwan Studies Association, the European Association of Taiwan Studies and there's also been a large number of Taiwan studies centers or institutes established in Europe and North America. We've also seen remarkable progress in the field of publications. So for example we have a number of Taiwan studies book series such as the Harassovitz and also Rowlage Taiwan Studies book series and in 2018 we had an important breakthrough with the establishment of the International Journal of Taiwan Studies. Now how did we actually go about putting this book together? Well we started off with a number of panels at the Second World Congress of Taiwan Studies and then we followed up with a series of Taiwan studies revisited lectures in London over the last three to four years. It's been quite a long process putting this book together but we're delighted that we finally managed to achieve it last year. So what are we trying to do in the book? Well essentially what we're trying to do is to come up with an alternative method of plotting the development of the Taiwan studies field and the way that we do this is to ask authors of influential volumes in the Taiwan studies field to revisit their works 10 or even 20 years after these books first hit the bookstores. This means that many of the revisited chapters in this book are quite autobiographical. In other words we hear about how the authors first started researching Taiwan and how their careers in Taiwan studies have evolved since those initial publications. In each case we asked the authors to think about a number of themes when they were putting together their chapters. For example we want to know about the origins of the research. How did they first become attracted to doing Taiwan politics, society research? We also want to know about research. We also want to know about the field work that was involved in putting together their books and early publications. How do they design those projects? In each case the authors will briefly summarize their key findings and arguments. They'll talk about how the books were received by their academic peers particularly in the form of journal book reviews and we're also quite curious about how the authors will feel about these reviews 10 or 20 years later. We also want to know about how do the authors feel about their books now when they reread them after a decade or more? To what extent have the books really stood the test of time? To what extent would authors actually change anything if they could kind of go back in time? Do they make any mistakes on their journeys? Lastly we were really curious about how the authors' careers had evolved over time. To what extent have they been able to stay in the field of Taiwan studies? Particularly as it's often said that particularly in North America that Taiwan studies is in decline or under threat from Chinese studies. How have they changed their topics of research over time? Are they still in the shadow of their influential first books? Now the book is then divided into three parts and these parts are meant to reflect different stages in the development of the Taiwan studies field. The first part looks at publications in the 1980s and early 1990s when we still couldn't really talk about a Taiwan studies field. So the first chapter in the book is by Michael Schell from academia cynica and this chapter is a little bit of an exception because he's revisiting a body of work rather than a single book because Michael Schell mainly published journal articles and book chapters and here we look at the evolution of his academic career looking at civil society and social movements in Taiwan and how his research in these areas has changed over time. This is followed by a revisiting of Thomas Gold's stain society in the Taiwan miracle that came out in 1986. This was a really influential book. For example, Shelly Rigger talks about it as being the classic that awakened the field. And then we're followed by the third book in part one and like Michael Schell's, it's also a slightly exceptional volume because this time it's not written by a academic but by a journalist. Simon Long who worked for the BBC and also the Economist. So his book that came out in 1991 Taiwan China's Last Frontier and here we see a book that was written for a much wider audience than many of the books that are covered in this in its volume. Here I should point out point out that selecting the books was quite a challenge for us and to a certain extent and many of the books were ones that I would say that had a big influence on myself first as a student, as a researcher and also as someone that teaches Taiwan studies. So for example Simon's book was one that I referred to when I was doing my undergraduate dissertation on Taiwan. Well in contrast the books from part two are books that were critically important for me when I was actually doing my own PhD research and these come from the late 1990s when the Taiwan studies field was starting to emerge. For example at this point in time the North American Taiwan Studies Conference was starting to become institutionalized and also having an impact on Europe. In other words European Taiwan studies scholars were going to NASA and then trying to think about how we could bring back that experience to Europe. So the next chapter sees Christopher Hughes revisit his 1997 book Taiwan and Chinese nationalism, National Identity and Status in International Society. Interestingly of all our Taiwan studies revisited lectures this was the most popular one with the largest audience and this I think was this book was very important for a number of reasons. It was one of the first European scholars to publish a social science monograph on Taiwan and it's still even today a very influential book when it comes to our understanding of nationalism in Taiwan. And I can still recall reading this book in a bookstore in Galshaw before I started my PhD because of course unfortunately these kind of books were just so expensive and so I had to kind of read the book in the bookstore at the time. And then this is followed by another book that had a huge influence on me and that's Politics in Taiwan Voting for Democracy by Shelly Rigger from the US and in this book this is the book that I love to use for both my research and teaching. Shelly Rigger not only looks in depth at how local electropartics worked in Taiwan but she also comes up with a theory to explain Taiwan's democratic transition. Next then we move to part three which I call Into the Golden Era of Taiwan Studies. And first we have three books that are revisited that were published in 2004 starting with In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity, Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan's Economic Restructuring by Li Anru which looks at gender and politics in a time when Taiwan's economy is going through a transitional period. And she does this by in-depth anthropological fieldwork in sunset industries in Jianghua County in central Taiwan. Then this is followed by a revisiting of Melissa Brown's Is Taiwan Chinese, the impact of culture and power and migration on changing identities. Of all our volumes is perhaps the most reviewed and controversial volumes. It created media attention and the largest number of book reviews. And then the third volume that we revisit that was published in 2004 is Joseph Wong's Healthy Democracy, Welfare Politics in Taiwan and South Korea which tries to look at the relationship between democracy and welfare state development in two northeast Asian transitional democracies. And again it's another volume that I find that's very very useful for teaching. And it was also a volume that was being developed around the same kind of time as my first book. In other words we were both looking at the quality of democracy in Taiwan but from quite different angles. Then we move into 2005 where we have three books that they revisited that were published that year. First we have Nancy Geyer's Peeking Opera and Politics in Taiwan where she looks at the relationship between political change and cultural policy through the lens of Peeking Opera in transitional Taiwan. Then we have two European based scholars books revisited that were also published in 2005. We have my book Party Politics in Taiwan which tries to look at how Taiwan's three main political parties changed ideologically in the first decade of multi-party politics from 1991 to 2000. And I do have a little bit of an update for 2004. And then secondly we have Henning Clota's Written Taiwanese which was published in the Horatowitz's Studio for Moeziana Taiwan book series where he looks at the issues surrounding how the Taiwanese language or Hokkien is written. And then of course the final book that we revisit in this volume is the most recent one and that's Mikhail Matlin's Politicized Society. The Long Shadow of Taiwan's One Party Legacy. And what makes this volume really quite exceptional is not only is it the most recent one to be published it's also the only one where we've seen a significantly updated and revised second edition of the books that we look at here. And what Matlin does is try to look at the long-term legacy of Taiwan's authoritarian experience on modern-day democracy. Now let me just talk briefly about some of the things of the book. Well one of them was the origins. In other words how do we actually fall in love with our topics? And I think that as you read the chapters you will really get a sense of the passion that many of us feel for our first book topic. So that's one of the reasons why we keep coming back to this topic. I would say that this aspect of the book is the most autobiographical. And I would say for me as an editor it's probably the part that I found most enjoyable. For many of us it was that initial first experience of visiting or studying in Taiwan that had a huge impact. And this kind of gives us a feel of what Taiwan was like for example in the martial law period. For example Thomas Gold first visits Taiwan as a language student in 1969. We also hear how to a large extent the topics that we looked at for our PhDs that became our first books were often rather accidental. So for example in a number of the chapters we see a Tiananmen effect. In other words the impact of the Chinese crackdown protests in Beijing in 1989 had an impact on a number of the chapters. So for example Melissa Brown talks about how in the aftermath of Tiananmen it was impossible or near impossible to have the freedom to do in-depth anthropological work. So this contributed to her switching her focus to Taiwan. And in my case I've been due to do my language training in Beijing but again because of Tiananmen I switched my focus I switched my location to Taiwan and that was a kind of a life-changing had a life-changing effect and that this photograph is from a political concert that I went to in that year as a language student after Tiananmen. One of the practical things that I think really comes out of this book is the way that the authors talk about the de-thesizing process. In other words how did we actually change our PhDs into academic book publications? I think it's an important challenge to junior researchers and not always a straightforward process. Now in some of the chapters we see that the process was relatively straightforward in other words that the book was very closely related to the PhD for example in Henin Clota or my case. So for example in my case apart from toning down the literature review and adding an updated chapter I didn't change too much but in some cases what we see is the authors went through quite radical revisions. So for example Shelly Riggers PhD was really focused on local factional electoral politics but the book itself became much more focused on how to explain Taiwan's democratic transition. In the case of Tom Gold's book to a large extent his book was built on his historical chapter, his context chapter in his PhD and then it was expanded. So this meant that he was actually able to publish a lot of the in-depth empirical case studies in his PhD. So I would say that of all the volumes his one saw the greatest change between the PhD and the eventual book. Another major theme in our chapters is how we try to make our work on Taiwan understandable to broader audiences beyond Taiwan studies specialist and the way that many of us have done that is to try to link our work to theories social science or humanities theories and debates. For example many of the chapters in the book look at how we try to link Taiwan to democratic theories. So for example how can we understand Taiwan's democratization process and what was the impact of democracy on various aspects of Taiwanese society? How do we understand the quality of Taiwan's democracy? These are themes that cut across a lot of our chapters. What is the role of civil society in Taiwan's democracy? For example this is something that we see in a lot of Michael Schell's work. We were also curious to see how our authors had responded to book reviews. Often we take book reviews as something quite personal and what I thought was quite interesting was to see how some of the authors tried to incorporate some of the book review suggestions in their subsequent work. So for example in Nancy Guy's case some of the reviews suggested that she should pay more attention to picking opera audiences in Taiwan and she incorporated this idea into her second book The Magic of Beverly Sills where she did some quite detailed fan stories in her second book. In the case of Mikhail Matlin he was able to bring in some of the reviewer's suggestions for his first edition into his updated and revised second edition. In my case some of the reviewer felt that the coverage in my first book Party Politics in Taiwan was too narrow just mainly focusing on ideological change. So in response to these reviews I've tried to broaden the way that I look at Taiwanese political parties. For example giving more attention to small parties and more attention to party organizations. So for example my first post-PhD project looked at candidate selection in Taiwanese parties. And finally we were interested to see how authors had what they'd done after their PhD books and here there's not really a common pattern. We found very very diverse post first book trajectories. Some of the authors moved away from Taiwan studies. For example Hughes and Gold often moved towards a study of China while Nancy Guy's second book was focusing on a US based soprano. So with no kind of Taiwan focus. But I think that in many cases what we found was that authors were kind of dragged or drawn back to the study of Taiwan later in their careers. Others have continued to try to build on the foundation of their first book. So for example Henny Kloeter has continued to look at various aspects of the Taiwanese language. Leandro has continued to work on various topics related to gender and politics in Taiwan. And I've tried to look at the Taiwanese party politics again from a range of different angles. But I guess I should also say that at times some of us have tried to make a break and to kind of get out of the shadow of our first book. But I think that a common theme for a lot of us has been that it's been quite hard to kind of match the quality of our first book partly because of the time and focus we had on our first book. For example some of the authors spent up to two years doing their PhD fieldwork while in our kind of post PhD lives it's very difficult for us to manage more than a few weeks or a few months at most in the field in Taiwan. So we've often had to change our research topics and research methods as a result of different academic pressures. So let me just add a few kind of concluding remarks on this book. What we were hoping to do was by revisiting these influential works to offer a very different perspective on the development of the Taiwan Studies field. We hope that readers will be inspired to actually look back and read the original works and also our subsequent body of work. We hope that the book can convince junior and upcoming scholars that it is possible to develop a career in the field of Taiwan Studies if the right strategies are adopted. So we hope there's some useful lessons both for junior career researchers but also to the next generation of Taiwan Studies scholars. And lastly how to buy the book. The book is available with most major Taiwanese books such as Tenpin or Bokolai, books.com.tw. It's available from the publisher from roundish.com from Amazon. And if you have any questions about the book, the chapters please feel free to email me at df2atsoas.ac.uk. And hopefully in the next few weeks I'll do some follow-up sessions where I invite individual authors to talk about their experiences of revisiting their books. So I hope you enjoy Taiwan Studies revisiting it.