 Okay, hello, hello world. I hope you are as excited as I am about Dr. David Bell's world premier book launch of his third single authored book, Taiwan's Green Parties. Welcome everyone to this exciting book launch event at the center of Taiwan Studies in the School of Oriental and African Studies. So as my name is Jewel Lowe, I'm one of the first people to read and check the final manuscript of this book. And I observed much of the book's fieldwork over the last eight years. So when today's speaker, the book author, Dr. Bell, asked if I'd like to introduce him at his world first book launch of Taiwan's Green Parties, I happily and proudly accepted the invitation. Dr. David Bell is the director of the Center of Taiwan Studies at SOADS. He has published many articles about Taiwan. He has edited and co-edited books about Taiwan. He has read books about Taiwan. And today we are celebrating the launch of his third single authored book about Taiwan's Green Parties. I'm from Taiwan myself and I'm very pleased for Taiwan that there are many scholars working pretty hard for Taiwan outside of Taiwan. Dr. Bell is one of the hard-working scholars. His most remarkable achievements in Taiwan studies outside of Taiwan are, firstly, he helped establish European Association of Taiwan Studies, EADS. Yes, EADS started at and from SOADS. Secondly, he has developed comprehensive Taiwan Studies programs at SOADS. Thirdly, he has been editing this research on Taiwan book series. Next, then I move to the empirical chapter. The series has 37 books published. Last time I counted, including the forthcoming ones. With all these amazing accolades under his belt, one may wonder why he decided to write a book about Taiwan's Green Parties. We will soon find out in his talk later. Since I have the honor to have read the book, here are some of my humble thoughts about his latest page-turner. One of the good things living with an academic is you get to know people to attract, both domestic, when writing a PhD thesis, you have to have a set of crystal clear research questions and a rock solid framework for organizing your research materials and writing your thesis. The book has followed what Dr. Bell has always preached. On top of that, he has managed to give each well thought through chapter an interestingly attractive title. All the effort he put into writing the book has made repeating this academic book thoroughly enjoyable. The book has been written with great sincerity. He has told the stories. As he tells the stories in detail, you can get a clear picture of how the Green Parties have developed in Taiwan. And the development can provide valuable lessons for any alternative political parties. Now, enough from the book author's wife talking about the book. This here, Dr. Bell's speech on his latest masterpiece. Over to you, Dr. Bell. Fantastic. Thank you all for that kind introduction. Can you all see the PowerPoint now? Yes. Okay, fantastic. So welcome to this book launch of Taiwan's Green Parties, Alternative Politics in Taiwan. So it's a kind of a very special occasion for me. Essentially, it's my second PhD book. My first book came out of my PhD and for an academic, it's very hard to get out of the shadow of the first PhD book once we get into regular academic life with pressures of teaching and administration. As soon as I finished my first book, I started out on my second PhD style book, but it was a failed book project after five, six years. And so today's a special occasion to actually achieve that second style PhD book. It's not entirely out of the shadow of the first book. To a certain extent, I'm building on the first book. But I think in some ways, I think I've improved on what I managed in the first book. I think a further thing I would add about the book is that the book has a very strong so-ass flavour. If you've been involved in Centre of Taiwan Studies events over the last 10 years, you'll have met many of the characters that feature in the book. In the book, I interview about 50 Green Party figures. I think something like 17 or 18 of them have appeared at SOAS, either on Green Party and Tree Party delegations, but also as speakers. So we've been able to host speakers from a range of Taiwanese social movements, including the feminist, environmental, indigenous and LGBT rights movements. Many of those activist scholars have spoken about their activism at SOAS. Because this is a book launch, I'm not going to go into a huge amount of detail into the content of the book, but I'm going to try and give you a taste of what I've tried to do in this book. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to first talk a little bit about how I ended up writing a book on Taiwan's alternative parties. I'll talk a little bit about the research questions that I used to structure my analysis. And I'll talk about some of the research material and field work that's made this project such an enjoyable one. I'll talk briefly about the chapter structure and just talk a little bit about a couple of the stories that feature in the various chapters. And then lastly, I'll talk a little bit about what I plan to do next with this project. Sometimes when we finish a book project, we want to move on to something new, but I'm not quite ready to move on to something new. So how did I end up writing a book on Taiwan's Green Parties? Well, my interest on Taiwan's small parties began on some of my earliest visits to Taiwan, both as a student and in my early years working in Taiwan. And in those years, at the early period of Taiwan's democratization, a number of movement parties first appeared on the scene. And a number of these were labor-linked political parties. So this kind of caught my initial interest. But it wasn't really until I started my PhD that I started to go into the subject of Taiwan's small parties in more depth. My first book, Party Politics in Taiwan, looked at the evolution of three political parties between 1991 and 2004. These included two mainstream parties, DVP and the KMT. But the third party case was the new party. And I kept being quite puzzled at why my explanatory frameworks that work for the big parties didn't work so well for the small party, the new party. Why would the party act in a way that seemed irrational and seemed like electoral suicide? So after I finished my first book, I made my first attempt to kind of make sense of the evolution of Taiwan's small parties in a journal article in 2005 that talked about the evolution of Taiwan's new or small parties. And when I started writing the current Green Party's book, I went back and looked at that first article and found that I devoted a couple of short paragraphs to the early history of the Taiwan Green Party. But I think at that point, I think it was still unimaginable that I would end up spending nine years working on a project on something that was really no more than a footnote in these early writings. The key kind of turning point came in 2012, and it was the result of a random email from one of my former students, Yuanyu, and she'd formerly been a SOAS student in anthropology. And I'd been quite amazed to see that this student within months of graduating from SOAS had gone on to stand for a national parliament in Taiwan for the Green Party. And in October 2012, she sent me an email asking if I would share news about a Australian Green Party research fund to see if any of any of our students would be interested in bidding for this fund. I thought the project looked really interesting. So I decided to design a project that looked at the Taiwan Green Party together with a Taiwanese academic and former Green Party leader, Pongyuan. And although we were not successful at getting the funding from the Australian Greens, we did decide to go ahead with our planned research project. And that was to hold a couple of focus groups to look at the initial development of the Taiwan Green Party. The focus groups included figures that had been involved since the party's foundation in the mid-1990s, and those that had been involved in the most recent election, at that point in time, in January of 2012. And if I still had some doubts, the focus groups really left me hooked on the subject. It was so different from dealing with mainstream parties. The passion, idealism, anger that I saw in these focus groups really left me fascinated and gave me a huge amount of data to start the project. Now, of course, we also need academic justifications for engaging in any research project. And one of the ways that I've tried to deal with this topic is to link the Taiwan case with broader comparative literature on small and movement political parties. And when I go through the research questions, I'll talk about how I try to make those connections. There's also quite a large literature on global green parties. And again, I'm trying to engage with some of those theories. Do the kind of theories that have mainly evolved from European small and green parties work for a Taiwanese case. Another of my academic justifications is that I wanted to try to bring a different perspective on the way we understand Taiwan's civil society and party system. And even though the book is focused on the green party as well as some of the it's kind of linked political groupings, I've always tried to engage with topics of civil society and the party system. A lot of the literature that I've read on green parties in Europe hasn't been particularly exciting. Often it's been a little bit dry and dull. And what I've tried to do is to bring in the flavours and the human stories of Taiwan's green parties. And I'm hoping that readers will enjoy these stories and be moved by the huge sacrifices that the participants in this struggle for environmental and social justice have paid. Okay, let me then come on to the big research questions which really drive this project. They're a little bit different from those that I used for my first book Party Politics in Taiwan. So Party Politics in Taiwan looked at a how question, in other words, how the main parties had changed. A why question which looked at why they changed. And a so what question which looked at the implications of those changes. In the case of this new book, I've been a little bit more ambitious. Not only in the time I cover, which is the first 24 years, but I try to cover more questions. And so the first question is a how question. So I'm interested in how the party has changed over its 24 year history. My who question really focuses on what kind of people have led the party and represented the party over the years, but also what kind of people have supported the party. Then I have my so what questions. And here I'm focusing on mainly focusing on two dimensions. I'm focusing on the electoral impact of the of the parties. But I also look at the international engagement. In other words, I'm looking at the way that the Green Party has engaged with other Green parties within this global greens and Asia Pacific greens network. And then I come to my why questions. And I have three core why questions. A small why question I have is to explain party formation. The next big why question tries to explain party change. So why do we see changes in organization? Why do we see changes in the issue focus of the party? And then the final why question, which I probably devote the most space to, is trying to explain the electoral performance of the Green Party. So all these questions allow us to engage with international comparative theories and frameworks. And I think it also shows I think it's a key challenge that we have when we do Taiwan studies is how do we make our project interesting to audiences beyond Taiwan? And that's the reason why I do try to engage with these theoretical approaches. Okay, what I'm going to do next then is talk about some of the research material that I've used to answer these questions. And I think it's one of these reasons why I've really enjoyed this work. Firstly, we have focus groups. This was something that I hadn't done for my earlier work. And it was something I really enjoyed and generated a huge amount of fantastic data that features very heavily in the book. I did focus groups both for party leaders and activists, but I also did focus groups for party members, both in the Gulsion branch and the Taipei branch. The second type of data that features very heavily is interviews with party supporters, party leaders and party candidates. When it comes to party figures, I've interviewed something like 50 figures. However, what made this project different from my earlier work was that I interviewed a number of these party figures multiple times during the eight years that I was working on the project. Most of the interviews were done face-to-face, and it was only in the final part of the project when I was based in the UK and I was trying to analyse the 2020 election that I did quite a lot of online interviews. We also did a number of in-depth supporter interviews, and in 2016 we also did an online survey of party supporters. And here I'm often using the term we, because at the first stage of this project, I was working very closely with a Taiwanese professor and former party leader, Pong Ye-wen, and the first couple of publications that came out of this project were co-authored. Okay, another really wonderful data set, again that I didn't use in my first book, was Central Election Commission databases, and here particularly useful were the election gazettes. And I've got an example of an election gazette from the 2020 Taiwanese election where we see the party's policy proposals, the candidates' names, their ages, where they're born, the education, and their experience. And e-book, the e-book I think answers questions of how the party's changed and who the party is. These electoral gazettes were extremely useful material because we could look at multiple years electoral gazettes. Okay, a further source that was useful that again wasn't really available for my first book was online sources. We have party websites, for example. We have a huge amount of data from candidate and party social media. Candidate blogs were also extremely useful. For example, Panzen's blog was very useful for some of the middle-term election campaigns. And also there was a huge amount of audio-visual material available as a result of YouTube. So I could look at party news items. And again, it meant even if elections hadn't been on the spot, I could get a feel of these campaigns. Now, one item that does tie you with my first book was political advertising analysis. And again, I try to bring as much of this as possible when I'm looking at the party's communication strategies. For example, I looked at party posters such as this one from 2008 with the slogan, after I grew up, I want to save the world with the Green Party. And on the right, we have a clip from the Green Party's 2016 TV election ad. One that I think a lot of my students have seen me analyzing over the years. So here we can get a sense about the kind of appeals that the party's been making, both environmental but also gender-related appeals. What about the writing then? How did the writing evolve? Again, I think this is something quite important. It's something that both as PhD students but also as established academics we often really struggle with. Why did it take me so long to go from December of 2012 to finishing the book in late 2020? In the initial stage, I published a couple of journal articles and looked at the early development of the party quite broadly, together with Pong Yeowen. But I kind of felt that our data was so rich that we really had more than enough for a book project. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to persuade Dr Pong to join me for the book project. I kept delaying starting writing the book. Originally, I would hope to finish the book at the 2016 election and eventually it got delayed to the 2020 election, which was not so bad as it allowed me to cover a very different campaign. After thinking about the project for so long, when I actually came down to writing it, the process was surprisingly smooth. I had been on an easy jet flight in October of 2019. Maybe because there was no screen, I suddenly worked out my book structure. To a large extent, the book structure with a few slight revisions is almost the same to the one that I drew up on that short easy jet flight. When I actually started the writing, it went quite smoothly. I think I probably wrote most of the book in November 2019 through to January 2020 with a couple of other short writing periods in March of 2020. After the first book reviews came in, I then did some adjustment, some revisions and I added the final two chapters, the 2020 election and my concluding chapter. Let me now then move on and briefly talk about each of the main chapters. Chapter two really goes over the frameworks and reviews the literature where I'm locating my book. I talk about the explanatory frameworks for my key research questions. I'm not going to really go into those in this session. I'm going to jump straight into chapter three, which is called Beautiful Accidents. This term comes from one of the party founders' comments about why the Green Party was first formed in 1996. But as you've noticed, the book title is Green Parties. So in this chapter, I talk about the formation of three parties. The Green Party in 1996, in January 1996, the Trees Party in the summer of 2014. And I also talk about a forgotten Green Party that was established in the summer of 1995. I was attracted by a footnote in Hermann Show's book about an early attempt to create a Green Party. And I started to look in detail and found this actually received quite a lot of media attention in Taiwan in the summer of 1995. The party even had a founding ceremony and TV coverage, but it was a steel-born Green Party. It never registered with the Ministry of Interior. But for me, it was a really interesting story because the concept behind this failed Green Party was quite different from the subsequent Green Party that was founded six months later. But once again, in this chapter, I'm able to engage with theories of party formation but also theories of party switching. Because to a certain extent, the formation of the Trees Party is a splinter party out of the Green Party. So again, that allows me to engage with a different set of conceptual theories to link the Taiwan case. If I was asked about my favourite chapter, then I think this one is probably, it may well be my favourite chapter. Partly because at the time of party formation there's so much hope for the future. Nothing has gone wrong yet. The next chapter looks at the impact. And I mainly look at the impact of the Green Party through two angles. One is in terms of the electoral impact. So here I'm looking at the electoral record. And again, this allows us to look at the consequences of Taiwan's electoral system. So for example, I look at Han's voters who were particularly worried. This candidate on the left, Gao Mengding, was elected in the Green Party's first National Assembly election just weeks after the party had been established. But I also talk about the international impact of the Green Party. And I think one of the things that I found really interesting is that sometimes when the Green Party was electorally quite quiet, it actually was very active internationally. And I also found that a lot of Green Party figures found the international engagement particularly meaningful compared to domestic politics. And here we have an example of where the Green Party delegation came to sow us in the spring of 2017. The international engagement enables Taiwan to engage internationally in a way that is often prevented from doing so as a result of China's diplomatic pressures. And one of my favourite stories in the book concerns the way that the England and Wales Green Party helped the Taiwan Green Party in its first election. And one of the stories I tell in the international section is about how Penny Kemp from the England and Wales Green Party visited Taiwan during that first election campaign. At a time when Taiwan was in the cross-trade crisis of 1995-96. And this is one of the things that I hope to write on in more detail about this kind of forgotten side of UK-Taiwan relations. In Chapter 5, I look at the who question. In other words, I look at who are the Green Parties, who are their leaders, who are their candidates and who are their supporters. And I felt this was quite important to get a sense of the personalities that we're going to look at in the subsequent empirical chapters. So one of the really difficult decisions was who to include, which personalities should I include. In this picture we see two of the personalities who I chose to focus on. One of them is Linda Erigo, who has visited SOAS, and I think many of you will know quite well, who was heavily involved in the Green Party in the first period from the mid-1990s through to the early 2000s, helping develop the party's international engagement. And then the second on the right is party founder Gao Cheng Yan, who had been blacklisted by the KMT in the 1970s, 1980s, as a result of his political activism in the US. And he's a key figure in Taiwan's environmental movement in the early 1990s. And he's the one Green Party figure that stood for election the most times. But of course I also talk in this chapter about the kind of people that have supported the party, as well as the kind of people the party has nominated. And overall I think we can see that the party has tended to nominate more female candidates than other parties. It's also the first parties to nominate openly LGBT candidates. And it's also been more willing to nominate younger politicians. Okay, next then I move to the empirical chapters. And generally what I do in the empirical chapters is focus on a number of those key questions. The how question looks at the, how the party has changed. The why question tries to explain the electoral performance. And the first, this chapter looks at the first Green Party election campaign in January of 19, in March of 1996. And I chose to call this Professor Gull catching the missiles, because one of the reasons, one of the ways that the Green Party was able to attract both domestic and international attention was taken advantage of the cross-rate missile crisis of 1996. And Professor Gull went out into the missile zone to show, to take a strong stand against the China threat. And this was in fact one of the reasons why the global Greens in Europe first became aware of the Taiwan Green Party because of the media attention of Professor Gull going to catch the missiles. So one of the things I do in this chapter is try to explain the variation in the Green Party candidates electoral performance. Why does one get elected and why do some do pretty well and some do not quite so well. Okay, then I moved to the second campaign in 1998, which is a local election. So even though there were national elections, the party focused on local county and city council elections. The reason why it's working with the Australian Green was, why did the party generally do much worse two years later, and why was one campaign, particularly strong network. The campaign that was particularly strong was that of my co-author Pongyuan, who was almost elected to the Taipei city council. The reason why I call this, is it okay to frequent sexual nightclubs was that Pong's campaign, it was a strong campaign with a strong campaign team. But one of the reasons why it was better than the other campaigns was it was able to take advantage of this issue about whether it was okay to frequent, whether it was okay for politicians or civil servants to frequent sexual nightclubs. And this helped her to get the necessary media attention. And here we can see one of the press conferences on this topic. The next chapter is rather different, because it doesn't really focus on election campaigns, because the Green Party only ran a small number of token campaigns between 1999 and 2005. Instead, the focus is on why did the party collapse after 1998. And then I focus on how Pongyuan and a number of her colleagues were able to rebuild the party starting in 2004, and get it ready again to start competing in elections. And as with step down, a variety of perspectives and stories on each of these, these puzzles, and then try to come to a conclusion about which ones are more persuasive. Okay, next then I move to the way that the party returns to elections between 2006 and 2009. And again, each of my kind of subheadings have some meaning. For example, in 2002 about how active they are an alliance with a Labour rights group. And we see a news conference on the left here between the Green Party and a Labour rights group. So it was known as the Red Green Alliance of 2008. And then we have a picture of the tree top protest from a by election in 2009. But despite these efforts, in these first three elections, the party is still less successful electorally than it had been in the 1990s. So again, the question is, how do we explain these patterns? And what I tend to do is look at a mixture of both party system factors, but also I look at the party agency looking at the strategies that the party adopts. Then in the next chapter, I look at the party's attempt to become a relevant political party with a set of organizational reforms. And we do see improved results in both the local elections in 2010 and the national elections in 2012. It's also noteworthy that in 2010, the Green Party is the first party to nominate openly LGBT candidates. So I think quite an important moment in the struggle for LGBT rights. In 2012, we see the party again contesting national elections. And much of the focus is on Pan Sen and his alliance in one district with the, I think there's a number of factors. However, for me, the campaign that I find most interesting in 2012 is that of Zhang Yuqi. And in this case, we have someone who's really lacking resources. So we have a housewife environmentalist whose campaign consists of her two young daughters. And we see how she's still able to be one of the best vote winners despite this lack of resources. So for me, that was one of the most moving stories, understanding the way that she campaigned with her young daughters. Okay, so then we move to a new round of organizational reform. The party leadership switches to Li Gengshen. And we have an attempt to make the party much more institutionalized. And we see this in the 2014 local elections, which are much, the campaign is much better resourced. And we start to get the first breakthroughs at the local level with Zhou Jianjie and Wahauyu both getting elected. But overall, though, there was a sense of both congratulations but also disappointment. Because many of the candidates did less well than they'd expected. And also this new organizational framework led to the party split that I discussed in chapter three. So this was one of the reasons why I chose to borrow the name of Xiu Tai Lin's film, Unfinished Progress, which was a documentary about Wang Jiuming as my subheading. In other words, the progress had been made but it was still not complete. And we see that in the 2016 campaign when the Green Party works in alliance with the Social Democratic Party. However, despite this alliance, it's unable to make a breakthrough and only improves by a limited amount compared to 2012. In other words, it goes up from 1.7 to 2.5% of the vote. Despite the fact that it was an older party and it had been doing pretty well in the polls early in the campaign. And as with the other empirical chapters, I look at a mixture of party system factors such as the rise of the new power party and the DPP's strategies. But I also look at problems within the GVTs campaign, including its poor handling of its relations with its ally, the Social Democratic Party. And of course, we do have the China factor in the background of this campaign. And the teenage idol here I'm referring to is the Jiu Jiu Incident. Okay, now I move to the 2018 election. This was the last campaign where I was actually able to be in Taiwan for field work. And once again, we have another round on the thing and reorganization. So basically we could say we have our third or fourth model. But this model of the Green Party is rather different. And we can get a sense of this from the party leader or the most influential party figure, Wang Haoyu's comment. This time we're not just campaigning on ideals, we're campaigning to get elected. However, for many Green Party supporters, it felt like the party was selling its soul. It was losing its ideals. For example, we have an alternative approach here, alternative understanding. The people who are left don't really understand the Green Party's values or don't stress these values. They care more about political calculations and that can damage our reputation. So many long-term Green Party supporters began to have doubts about the direction the party was moving into at this point in time. So again, the party does do pretty well. It does slightly improve on its 2014 performance. But we can see that there's a price to this new approach. And then I come to the most recent election in January of 2020. And I call it the Deng Huiwen or Wang Haoyu campaigns. Because these two figures, the controversial Wang Haoyu and the psychiatrist and media figure, Deng Huiwen, were the most visible figures in this campaign. Originally, I would have expected that Party Founder Gao Chengyan, who had come back to stand, would be the focus. And he did try to remind voters of what he did back in 1996, but also back in 1994 when he led a recall campaign against the 2020 KMT presidential candidate, Han Guoyu. However, his candidacy was really overshadowed by Deng and Wang. And this chapter was quite a hard one for me to write because I was writing it and doing the research during the campaign. And of course, I was doing this at distance, so it had to rely quite a lot on online interviews. And it's a very complex campaign. And I think it's the first time that I've, when I've been writing, that I've talked about a Machiavellian plot. And I remember being really excited the first time that I use this term to describe this chapter. So the puzzle for this chapter is why, despite losing so many former supporters, does the party still do almost the same as 2016? And I think the candidacy of Donghui Wen was a key factor. And then I come to my final concluding chapter where I look at what happened after the setback of 2020. How did the party recover after the controversial Wang Haoyu had left the party? How does it try to rebuild bridges? And lastly, I try to do something that I promised to do nine years ago. And that was to talk about some of the practical lessons for the party. So when I first got the email from Yuanyu in December, October 2012, I said that this was something we would do. And I've talked a little bit about some possible lessons based on my observations over the last nine years. OK, so lastly, what am I going to do next? Well, this is the first of what will be a number of book talks. And I plan to do some in Europe and also in American universities. But another thing I really want to do with this book is to engage with Green Party audiences. So I'm hoping to do some sessions with local Green Parties in the future, because I believe that the book should have value beyond academic audiences. And I also hope to do some sessions in Taiwan as well. The other thing that I'm very, very excited about is I'm now working on a Chinese version of the book. But it won't just be a translated book. A DPP co-authors, Pongyuan, who I'm delighted has rejoined the project, and also Wang Yen Han, who spoke at SOAS in 2017. So both are former Green Party leaders. So my hope is that the new version of the book will bring in their perspective. The shift has continued to be their experiences and observations. And we're currently in the process of rewriting this book. And hopefully we hope to finish this year. So lastly, there's so many people I need to thank for making this book possible. In the acknowledgments, I particularly highlight three people. Pongyuan, Yuanyu, and of course, Duoluo, who you saw opening today's session, who's helped me so much over the last nine years, including checking the manuscripts. And whenever she was checking the manuscripts and I heard her very loud laughter, I knew that I'd got that part right. So now the book is only out in hardback and ebook. The ebook, I think, is priced a little bit better. We do have the book in the SOAS library. So if you're a SOAS student, you can get access. And please do encourage your local librarians to order the book if you don't have access to the SOAS library. So the sooner I sell enough hardbacks, then I can get the paper back out. And finally, thanks everyone for listening. If you are a SOAS student of mine, you've heard me talking about this project for nine years. And I've really done it. So thanks for all your support. And thanks to all the Green Party figures for helping me along the way. And let me finish here. Thank you. Thank you.