 So welcome everyone to this MA Taiwan Studies Taster session. We have three speakers and we also have a current student and a former student who can also comment on what it's like taking Taiwan Studies modules and degrees at SOAS. Our first speaker is Dr. Dambiu who's going to be talking about her experience of teaching Taiwan through the angle of why Taiwan matters. Dr. Zhang has been teaching at SOAS for a long time going back into the something like 15 years and she teaches a couple of courses on culture and society and Taiwan's international relations. I'll be coming in after Dr. Zhang and I'll be looking at the topic of why Taiwan matters from the perspective of comparative politics. At SOAS I teach a couple of courses that look at Taiwan's domestic politics and also Taiwan in a comparative perspective compared to South Korea and Japan. And then our third speaker will be Max Lenge So who's a former undergraduate and postgraduate student at SOAS and now he works at SOAS at the center of Taiwan Studies with us. And he's taken a number of our modules and he's particularly specializing in history. So I think he may look at this topic from a historical perspective. So for now let me hand over to my colleague Dr. Zhang. Okay thank you very much. Let me share the screen then I'll start the presentation. Thank you. Can everyone see it? Great. Okay. So welcome to our session. My name is Zhang Beiyu. I'm the convener of two Taiwan Studies modules. How do I switch to the next? If you hover your mouse over the screen you should see a little arrow in the bottom left corner of the screen. Can you see it? Or if you click on the screen and then press the arrow? Yes. Yes. My apologies. Yes. Okay. So as you can see there are two modules I'm teaching at the moment. In the first half of my session, my part of the session, I will explore the issue of why Taiwan matters and why Taiwan is such a fantastic case studies in international relations. In the second half I will give you a taste what this after all this is a taste to a session. I'll give you a taste about how we look at identity construction case in Taiwan through a nation building project very very quickly. So both modules so the first one is about why Taiwan matters. The second one is giving you a case study about how you can make use of these particular modules. Okay. The former really examined how Taiwan connects with the outside world and how important is the politics of recognition. While the latter, the second one traces the trajectory of Taiwanese identity through its great social and the cultural transformation. Okay. Okay. Why Taiwan matters? Okay. This is something we're always trying to tell our students. First let's think about this fundamental question. Why Taiwan matters? If we look at this question from an international perspective, Taiwan's development are closely linked with Chinese movement in this region and also US-Asian-Pacific strategy. So Taiwan's international space and its you know this kind of its relationship with the world are also tightly intertwined with the relationship with China. So this this course usually when we offer this this course usually is to do with not just about Taiwan's international relations but also cross-strait relations. So on the one hand Taiwan's international relations and activities really depends on the temperature of cross-strait relations. On the other hand really if we see a very active Taiwan in international arena and a friendly Taiwan-US relations this will definitely aggravate China. So this development usually triggered this kind of coercive diplomacy and even military threat. So here are several reasons why I think it is important in terms of international relations. Okay first in international law Taiwan Taiwan study sorry Taiwan's status is very ambiguous. Despite its diplomatic isolation Taiwan has become an economic powerhouse with a full and mature democracy and one of the world's top producers of computer technology. Although its political and economic transformation have caught the attention of the world its lack of the fact the jewelry recognition has deepened Taiwan's international isolation. This kind of international standing really being damaged and its long-term exclusion from the international community has also dampened Taiwanese mentality. So this kind of national psyche wishing to be recognized is something very special and unique. So in the study of contested statehood Taiwan's case is considered the world's most unique one and has been ingenious in developing an elaborate network of reciprocal semi-formal this kind of representation representative against isolation. So this is something quite unusual if you look at contested states. Okay next another reason for studying Taiwan is really about its strangely powerful place in the world politics. Because of its historical relations with the US Taiwan is set to hold a salient position in the US China and Taiwan triangle. Whatever Taiwan does it has the potential of triggering military conflicts in Taiwan Strait and impacting on the regional security and risking dragging the US and Japan into a war they don't want to fight. Therefore Taiwan's international position has been described as you can see here as the tail waxed two dogs. Moreover the Taiwan issue has always been Chinese core interest. Okay we can see how important it is from a conversation between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump during their 2017 summit in Beijing. Xi Jinping explained to Trump that I quote the Taiwan issue is the most important most sensitive core issue in China-US relations and concerns the political basis of China-US relationship. So you can see actually this is something although it's a small in size its influence is much greater than its obvious geographical of physical size. Okay then the next if we think about why Taiwan matters then we need to think about its importance in the regional security. The China factor looms large in Taiwan's foreign policy and diplomatic relations. For Taiwan its international relations are inevitably impacted by its cross-strait relations. Moreover the cross-strait tension has intensified since Taiwan's democratization. Paradoxically the economic integration and cooperation have also deepened since then. So this kind of paradoxical relations have complicated cross-strait relations and also in the regional security. The next I think we should also remember because of Taiwan's isolation it's to supplement this kind of shrinking international space and the presence to boost its global standing. Taiwan became almost like a pioneer in developing its informal ties. So for example there are at the current situation there are only 14 UN countries and the Holy See that formally recognize the ROC on Taiwan. However with very few formal diplomatic allies Taiwan still manages to trade with the world and also interacts with the majority UN members. Moreover the ROC passport actually performed very well. If we look at the 2021 Hanli passport index Taiwan's ranks is number 32 out of 199 countries. So that means that Taiwanese passport holders can travel the world into the world 400 sorry 145 countries in the world without a prior visa. In contrast the PRC passport holder ranked 70. They could only travel half as many countries that's 75 countries around the world without prior visa. So in many ways Taiwan's track two diplomacy is very powerful interesting and also quite creative. Okay lastly this is I was appealed to all the Soviet students as an institution. I think we have always a very proud to provide students with non-mainstream alternative and decolonized perspectives. In the western academic environment Beijing's view on Taiwan is often widely discussed and also disseminated either through official statements, academic work or in courses about China in most universities. So this course as so as allows you this kind of alternative viewpoint and provide you with very different ways of seeing. Hopefully it gives you an edge to your intellectual investigation and offers you a much fuller picture about Asia about China and about international politics. So I know I have a very short time to go so I will go through this very quickly. Okay the next one is a topic we will typically discuss in our course in the culture and society of Taiwan. This is a simple example about how a landscape was transformed into a national symbol and identity emblem. So we will quickly go through this and you can see this is how Taiwanese construct a national symbol of Yushan that's a J mountain or sometimes called Mount Morrison. Okay it's the highest mountain in not only in Taiwan but also in East Asia. So although the Yushan National Park was established in 1985 the promotion of Yushan as a national symbol only started very late in the 21st century. Since 2001 Yushan has been promoted by the Taiwanese government as Taiwan's sacred mountain Shengshan. It was described in many promotional leaflet and literature as the father of all Taiwanese and the local people's spiritual mountain and homeland. Therefore climbing Yushan is then interpreted as a sacred pilgrimage and a journey embodying Taiwanese spirit. So you can see here there are plenty of products or publications or creations about Yushan and themed around Yushan. Since the promotion was launched in 2001 a term Yushan Xue or the study of Yushan or Yushan discourse was coined to construct a nationalist discourse and to lend support to the growing Taiwan independent movement at the time. Okay but although the fervor has subsided but this idea about Yushan representing Taiwan has never really subsided pledges such as affection for Yushan and therefore by extension love for Taiwan have been made in the mass media extensively within only a few years Yushan seemed to have you know secured a sacred status as the national symbol. So in 2006 it was voted by the Taiwanese public to be one of the most iconic image to represent the island. Okay so you can see now you can climb the mountain you can get a certificate okay during the climbing seasons crowds gather on the summit and declaring love for Taiwan and celebrating their qualification as children of Taiwan okay and Yushan of course. So let's see this is the last state oh okay so in all fairness the campaign has promoted a better understanding about Yushan and also about the island so it's nothing wrong about loving your your your own landscape and having more a better understanding about the island. However neither environmental issues or the indigenous issues have been addressed in the construction of this particular national landscape. So in this progress sorry in this process Yushan Xue campaign has invented a modern myth to to resist political claim across the strait so even today the image of Yushan represents something quite different something quite dear to the Taiwanese it's still a symbolic national image. In this module now I'm coming back to this we will explore many aspects of Taiwanese culture and social issues from language usage and identity conflicts education and ideological construction to globalization and digital Taiwan so there are plenty of aspects in that module as well I'll stop here and thank you for giving me the time thank you how do I stop yeah stop share thank you. Great thanks thanks for you so I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the modules I'm involved in I should also say that like my colleague Max I'm also a SOAS graduate so I can also comment on what if like to be a SOAS student I think both as a SOAS student and as a SOAS academic one of the amazing things about SOAS is that we can actually study degrees and modules that you can't do in any other country as universities in the world and the way that we teach Taiwan I think is one example of this because we have more modules on Taiwan than any other university so of course we hope that you will consider taking our MA in Taiwan Studies but also if you are taking other postgraduate degrees at SOAS that is also possible to take any of our Taiwan Studies modules okay so I'm going to talk about this topic about why Taiwan matters from the perspective of comparative politics I teach two postgraduate modules that are heavily focused on Taiwan at SOAS election social movements and gender in Taiwan and comparing democracies in in northeast Asia and what I'm going to try and do is talk about some of the ways that the Taiwan is relevant in the study of comparative politics particularly in terms of being a very valuable case study something that Dr. Jung touched upon in her opening talk so let me then start with the theme of electoral and party politics and why is Taiwan such a great place to look at these topics well with Taiwan's now been a democracy for over three decades this means we have a large amount of electoral data and Taiwan in many ways is a really easy place to study when it comes to electoral politics because of the ease of getting the critical data that we need for studying electoral politics for example because of the ease of internet data we can get political communication data for example we can find election ads on youtube or on the party's websites we also can easily get survey data on changing public opinion both academic and media sources are extremely user friendly and lastly we can get the electoral voting data so that means that even at a distance we can do really good quality electoral studies research we can engage with key debates such as do campaigns matter and how do we actually explain electoral campaign outcomes and in this module we will look at a rate what makes good and bad political communication and I think this topic of electoral politics also has an important practical side because so many SOA students will go on to be involved in political communication electoral campaigning after they graduate from SOA so there's a lot we can learn practically from this topic a second something is party politics and again Taiwan is a really interesting case to look at because of the stability of Taiwan's party politics the same two political parties have dominated Taiwan's politics for over three decades and this makes Taiwan quite different from a lot of new democracies and because so much of the electoral and party politics literature and framework come out of European or North American experience so there we have the chance to try and test do these theories work in an Asian democracy so for example for my newest book I look at the question of Taiwan's green parties so that enables me to engage with a international literature on small and movement parties do those theories work for Taiwan's green party the second big theme that I look at in in this module is that of social movements it's one of the topics that students find particularly interesting and probably because Taiwan's social movements have been relatively successful and so we'll look at a range of social movements case studies and this again allows us to engage with big theoretical questions for example how do we measure the impact of social movements how do we understand success and failure how to explain success and failure of social movements so one of the one key kind of case study that we often look at is the sunflower movement in which we have a student led occupation of Taiwan's parliament for three weeks and this is actually able to change China-Taiwan relations it's able to have a successful impact in a way that the main opposition party wasn't so how do we explain this kind of success should we focus more on political opportunity structure should we look at alliances so these are some of the the big questions that we look at we look at Taiwanese social movements the third big theme that we look at on this module is that of gender politics and again I think Taiwan is a really fascinating case study for a number of reasons Taiwan generally is regarded as a relatively gender equal country and it's also one of the countries with the highest level of female political representation why is that how do we explain the difference between Taiwan and let's say South Korea and Japan and furthermore does this high level of political female representation really matter for gender equality do we see a causal relationship and again this allows us to engage with international debates on gender politics another key case study to look at is same-sex marriage why was Taiwan the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage but what kind of theories can we use and what challenges does Taiwan still have when it comes to gender equality so that gives you a sense of some of the themes and case studies that we look at on the election social movements and gender of Taiwan courts which is one of the core modules on MA Taiwan studies I'm not going to go into the same depth on the comparing democracies module but I'm just going to just mention some of the things that I think are particularly interesting in this kind of approach so this module also looks at a range of comparative politics and comparative sociology themes but the difference is that we look at three countries together South Korea Taiwan and and Japan this means we can't go into the same kind of depth as we do in the the Taiwan politics class but I think there's advantages to doing this kind of comparative analysis this also allows us to test theories but we can do two case or three case comparison so we can look at a number of similar topics such as political corruption can we see a relationship between democracy and political corruption why do we see higher levels of political corruption in the South Korean case compared to to Taiwan so again by looking at these countries comparatively we can again engage with a range of comparative politics and theories and frameworks and I look forward to your questions and hopefully to uh teaching you uh uh so let's so now let me now um hand over to um um my former student and colleague um um max okay thank you David go ahead um so yes as uh been covered by both definitely be you I was a student uh at so us taking the vast majority of the Taiwan studies courses and so to regress the question of why Taiwan matters I thought the best approach I could do was to share with you all my student experience with Taiwan studies and also my personal experience with Taiwan itself so to give you a sense of my background I'm a history major and I primarily focused on diaspora histories and the manipulation of identity then moving on to republican chinese history from the 1920s onwards my first interaction with Taiwan and Taiwanese history itself was to take my first year undergraduate course um it was a half course in indigenous history looking the legacy and the development of Taiwan's austronesian indigenous peoples and what I quickly discovered is that uh from taking this this first step this small step into Taiwanese history and culture and so on is that you'll discover that Taiwan really possesses a strength beyond size that is quite rare to see on the international stage and just to give some points of example by taking uh David's course on Taiwanese politics and views course on Taiwanese society and history you'll find that an understanding of Taiwan really unlocks more nuanced and refined comparative analyses across disciplines so for example an understanding of Taiwan cultural dynamics and history with china really helps break down these quite toxic narratives of civilization states great power binaries and particularly this sense of cultural essentialization and another thing we see as uh BU covered with uh mention of Taiwan's question state here or contested statehood looking at Taiwan and how well it functions despite this exclusion on the international stage really helped raise important questions on prescribed notions of statehood and what makes a national community with the passport example is a key case and then going to my personal experience um again as I mentioned looking at these questions of identity i manipulation i realized when i when i was after going to taiwan coming back doing these MA courses in society law history and so on you quickly realized that taiwan is quite a special case in the sense that it's preserved so much chinese history culture norms and so on but all at the same time is more than its chineseness and what i found by observing in taiwan studying in taiwan is that the real beauty of taiwan is its diversity and it is at the same and it is uh with this it is the only society in the sinosphere and what i mean by that is countries and places that have been significantly influenced by the chinese cultural world which is actively seeking to decolonize society rather than reappropriate or harness colonial legacies as in the prc or in singapore and when you go a bit deeper beyond taiwan studies and look into you know the lived life world of taiwan you'll realize that it is still the center of so much both regionally and internationally still taiwan is the the vast holds the vast majority of chinese language music and that's across multiple chinese languages whether that be hokkien haka or manjune itself it is so often first that coordinates different social movements and interaction between environmentalism labor rights labor unions and so on and same and as i said before it is a place that really filled this unique role in the global stage of introducing chineseness and chinese culture to audiences rather than prescribing as so many other places do so yes um i'll keep it brief and um if you have any other questions about my experience in student um taiwan so as yeah we perhaps we can cover it in the q and a i suppose the last thing to say is that yeah from all this this is why taiwan matters and it's why that the center of taiwan studies at so as matters for taiwan studies as well thank you fantastic thanks um max so i think what we should now do then is um we'll open up to questions and um and so that means we we have two former solar students and a current one um so we can i think we should be able to come your question from a range of angles um so yeah um can they they can only use chat is that right they can um yeah so you would be able to unmute yourself if you're listening in or to use the chat so what you need to do is click on the little q and a bar at the bottom of the screen and once you submit that each of the panelists will be able to see and we can type a response and we can also answer them live right so we have one question um that's coming from catherine i don't know if um somebody wants to perhaps answer that one um live um and it's a question about the open modules that are available um as part of the course okay um so so catherine do you mean that um okay um so i think coming up for this uh next year all of the taiwan modules will be will be running um so if you're on another degree they will be they will be available um so all the the taiwan modules are um are open so coming up for the next year we'll have the taiwan film cast we'll have elections uh social movement agenda we'll have taiwan cross-party relations and interactions we'll have culture and society in taiwan uh and we'll have yeah and the um uh comparing democracy so all of those will be um uh running the the module that max mentioned was a um a year one undergrad um um uh kind of um um semi formal class i should say so i don't think that um um that wouldn't be available for um a postgraduate student the other thing i would say is that um one of the amazing things about studying taiwan so is that um we have so many um module related events um in a normal year we run something like 50 to 60 even sometimes even 70 uh taiwan studies events uh which are meant to supplement the uh the modules um so for example we run the the summer school that normally runs in late june early july um so if any of you want to kind of get a sense of what it's like being a solar student um keep an eye on the center of taiwan studies events page um come and join some of the events um i know that online events are not quite the same as in person uh events but i think you could still get a um an um an early sense of this in fact we have just this uh week we have events on um tomorrow afternoon and also on friday afternoon um and um um i think that would be a great way to get a feel of that connection between um uh academic events and the uh and the modules for example tomorrow we have a session on uh the china impact on on taiwan um well on friday we have a session on uh movement uh parties so um in a kind of a kind of a long way i'm not sure will i um i answered that but feel free to kind of follow up i think perhaps um maybe you could expand a bit on the culture and society module to to give um katherine a bit of a taste or a sense of uh some of the more specific things we cover in the course well thanks um thanks katherine um i think based on your question it seems that you are more interested in uh indigenous focused um topics i have to say because that's very specific um but i think in our course in culture and society course you can have some sort of um emphasis on it and but i can't guarantee you because we can only offer a certain kind of more general uh uh course to students so um that will be part of the uh syllabus it won't be uh the main focus i'm sorry if it's not what you are looking for but i will advise you to if you are coming to sewers i think you should at least have a go at us uh because i think we cannot separate indigenous issues from overall uh social issues so the best way of approaching indigenous uh topics is to understand the greater contacts so um of course it's up to you yeah let me um just follow up um um i think the other thing to mention is that one of the amazing things about the sewers master is the dissertation um and um and i think that we can come at um uh topics such as gender or indigenous studies from a range of of disciplinary angles i think a lot of people will engage on that in their assignments or in their dissertation so for example um uh you could look at something like indigenous voting behavior you know elections that topic um um or um indigenous issues in taiwan's international relations um and and and also we've had students have looked at indigenous issues comparatively for example one of my students did a dissertation that looked at indigenous um rights in japan and taiwan comparatively i can see we've got another question from um miranda okay do you think there's a link between the fact that taiwan is one of the most gender equal societies as well as um um b did you were you going to um respond on that one i could see your smile no i i just um feel that statement um might be not so uh but there you go um whether it is really a gender equal society uh wow this i think many people will tell you no if you are a woman um yeah i mean let me let me kind of um uh follow up i mean i think that is one of the really interesting things about discussing this issue i mean in other words how to actually measure gender equality um the taiwan government will always tell us in their public diplomacy uh how gender equal taiwan is and it's one of the ways that taiwan tries to brand itself but i think if we um and this actually came out in one of my classes this morning um if we look at these issues from other angles for example if we look at it from um marriage migration we um and we look at some of these issues from a family angle we can see a continuation of a lot of patriarchal practices um so that that's i think why um it's quite interesting when we kind of combine some of these modules on taiwan um in other words if we just take the kind of international relations we miss um so much in in the way that taiwan society um operates but i think that it's it's a great question because there's so many kind of angles we can um we can uh we can look at um okay we have another question um and yeah um um for um rojita's question there's two separate modules so the um election social movements and gender in taiwan so that module is purely looking at taiwan using comparative politics frameworks while the comparing democracies in northeast asia uh is a purely comparative uh module so in other words with the comparing democracies module every week we look at the three countries together but on a different theme uh so for example uh today and yesterday we were looking at the three countries from the angle of migration so for example uh looking at why do we see similar patterns of marriage and labor migration in these three cases to what extent are the um claims to be multicultural society really uh persuasive to what extent is the understanding of multiculturalism different in northeast asia compared to european countries um so the answer to your question is the comparing democracies is purely comparative it's it's um you have to look at um uh the the case is comparatively for the taiwan one it's more using comparative politics frameworks and theories to look at taiwan we probably have about two minutes left in of the session before we'll have to wrap up so if anybody has any more questions do feel free to pop them in the chat and you can always um follow up and ask us questions by by email um and also just keep an eye as i think max has put the center's events uh page there um so just feel free to kind of um uh follow up with us if there's anything that we kind of missed or if any kind of questions come to your mind after the the session absolutely i think that might be asked um you can also pop your um i can pop my email in the chat and if anybody has any questions then feel free to send them to me and i can make sure that they get to the relevant person in the department um as well or perhaps if you just have questions about applied so ask them what that looks like in terms of the application form then we're also really happy to help you with those as well i've put my email in there as well yep and i suppose we we should say we look forward to senior applications and hopefully seeing you at um at so as i think um max myself and adela would probably say coming to so as we're probably one of the best decisions of our our lives all righty i will end in the session but thank you everybody for joining us and please don't hesitate to follow up if we can help with anything but take care and thanks for joining us