 Okay, so welcome to tonight's SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies seminar. Tonight we're going to do another lecture in our series called Taiwan Studies Revisited. And what we've tried to do in this series is to get authors to come back and look at works they published roughly at least ten years ago and look at how they feel about the book after the passage of time to what extent does the book still work? How was the book received by audiences at the time? And how have authors' works in the field of Taiwan Studies developed since that original publication? We've had a very exciting range of speakers in this series so far with books that have gone back 30 years. For example, Simon Long's book, Tom Gold, Nancy Guy, my own book, Mikhail Matlin, Henning Clota. And the objective here is to put together a book which looks at Taiwan Studies and how it's developed through this lens of revisiting classic works in the field. Tonight I'm really delighted to welcome back Christopher Hughes, who many of you know. For example, if you're at LSE you may have met him, but many of us know him through his work because he features so heavily in the reading list for a number of our courses here at SOAS. His original book that he's going to be discussing today came out back in 1997, Taiwan and Chinese Nationalism. So we have over 20 years anniversary, but I should also mention that Chris is a former SOAS student and so that's going back almost 30 years. So we have another anniversary. Now, when Chris first started studying Taiwan, very few people were working on Taiwan in, I can say in Europe, but especially in the UK. So Chris was really one of the pioneers in UK and European Taiwan studies. I guess along with people like Steve Tan, Chris was one of the first people to actually do kind of serious research on Taiwan. I think he had a huge influence on many of us who joined the field slightly later. Yesterday I was with another colleague and we were talking about our own memories of when Chris's book first came out. So my colleague remembered reading it as an undergraduate when he was at the University of Leeds. When I first became aware of the book, I was still living in Taiwan and started to think about doing a PhD. His book was among a number of publications that helped motivate me and shaped my future research direction. But of course, at that point in time, his book was a hardback. And I think those of you that have any idea about academic publishing know how expensive hardbacks can be. So I can still remember. I've got a pirate edition. At that point in time, I found a book in Donghuang bookstore in Gaoshuang. So then I still remember seeing the price tag of $3,000, which 20 years ago was quite a lot of money. I'm trying to think how many hours of books you've been teaching. So at that point I had to just sit in the bookstore and read it. Although I probably did later on, I did take the pirated route. Although the one good thing is that actually now the paperback is out. So in short, Chris has been a pioneer, but he's not only started to develop the field in Europe and the UK, but he's continued. And that's why his work I think is so important. And that's why we're still looking at not only this book, but the way he tries to develop his research on nationalism in Taiwan over the last 20 years. Chris has given many talks at SOAS, and I think that may reflect how many of you are here tonight. I did warn Chris that it could be standing room only. And he wasn't really convinced, but I'm delighted that so many of you have made it. Some of you, of course, have had at least only three hours of Taiwanese politics classes today. And I'm really delighted to see many of you are still here, which says something about the quality of Chris's work. So let's give Chris another big SOAS welcome home.