 three in person and one online event. This week we're back to a purely online format. And today we're really delighted to welcome Professor Lin Weiping from National Taiwan University for her book talk on Island Fantasia, Imagining Subjects on the Military Frontline between Taiwan and China. The book came out in September 2021 and is published by the University of Cambridge Press. And one of the nice things, well there's a couple of nice things about this book, one of them is that the book is published on open access. So that means that anyone can get access to the book even if you're not affiliated to a university. We do, if you're SOAS students, you can get the e-book link from our SOAS library. And also the SOAS library has ordered the paperback but it hasn't quite arrived yet. Another thing that's really exciting about this book is that it's the first book in the University of Cambridge Press's Taiwan Studies book series. And I think it's another mark of how vibrant the field of Taiwan Studies is today. That we have, not only do we have this new series, we have a new series at Taiwan Series at Brille. We have the series at Routledge, which has now been going over 10 years. So it's a really exciting time. And running a Taiwan Series is not easy and I'm really delighted that Professor Lin Weiping was so persuasive to Cambridge to actually create this new kind of landmark in the field. Professor Lin did her PhD in anthropology at Cambridge, graduating in 1998. And she's currently a professor at National Taiwan University and although she's not been back to the UK Cambridge, she's a frequent visitor to Cambridge in the Harvard Cambridge. I'm also really delighted that she's doing this talk on a topic of Taiwan's offshore islands. It's something that we've often neglected in our Taiwan Studies project at SOAS. I was thinking back and the last time we had a talk that kind of dealt with MAZU was back in 2014, but we had a talk that looked at the casino referendums in MAZU and Ponghu. So that's about the only time we've covered this topic. So I'm really delighted that you'd be willing to share part of the research for this book. So let's give Professor Lin a very, very big SOAS welcome. Okay, over to you Professor Lin. Okay, thank you. Thank you, David. It's my great pleasure to speak to you today. Thank you, David again for inviting me to talk about my book, Island Fantasia. Let me set up the slides. Okay, so everyone can hear it, right? Good, good. Okay, I will start now. Island Fantasia is the first book of the New Taiwan Studies series by Cambridge University as David has already introduced it to you. It discusses, but this work, I'm also very happy that the first book is about MAZU, not the main island. It gives us a very fresh start. So it discusses the MAZU islands for long and isolated outposts of Southeast China who were certainly transformed into a military front line in 1949 by the Cold War and the communist and nationalist conflict. The Nationalist Army occupied the islands commencing more than 40 long years of military rule. With the lifting of martial law in 1992, the people of MAZU were confronted with the question of how to move forward. The ethnography and social history of the islands in this book focus on how individuals struggle to face their uncertain future by forging social imaginaries. So this book is not only about MAZU, but also about Taiwan and us in general. Okay, good. Let me show you where MAZU islands, where the MAZU islands are located. The map shows there are two groups of military islands between China and Taiwan. The southern islands, maybe most of you are much more familiar with our Jimen islands. They are comparatively large, low settled and well developed. MAZU is in the north. It's made of much smaller scattered isolates with limited resources. So we can take a closer look at these islands. From north to the south, they are called Xiyin, Dongyin, Beigang, Nangang, Xiju and Dongju. And you can see it's very close to China. It's very close to Fuzhou city. And most of them, or a lot of them came from, I mean they moved from Changle, Changle area. The MAZU, I first went to MAZU in 2006. It's the first time I came to this island because I was invited to participate in a conference called MAZU in MAZU. In English, you can say it's something like a goddess MAZU was buried in the MAZU islands. The islanders at that time were pondering whether they could use this myth. Goddess MAZU was buried there. Whether they could use this myth somehow to create a niche for themselves between China and Taiwan. So you see this triangle, let me show. This triangle, in this triangle, something wrong. In this triangle, MAZU is located at the top. And so it has China on his left-hand side and Taiwan on his right-hand side. The myth is based on a stellar erected by a military commander in 1963. This stellar now looks very blurred, very difficult to read, but the local people sort of reinterpreted and then made another stellar. And now it's erected in front of the Goddess temple. So the inscription says that after Goddess MAZU jumped into the sea to save her father and died, her corpse floated to the shore of MAZU. Her remains were buried there. Going by how oceanic waves work, it's probably not a true story, but the islanders seized upon it and set up a giant statue, as you can see on your right-hand side, you know, a giant statue of the Goddess. There were also other big projects in MAZU. In many places, you can see houses have been rebuilt and preserved in its own style. The attempt is to remake MAZU as an Eastern Fujian cultural village, Ming Dongwen Hua Chun. Temples were also rebuilt in Eastern Fujian style. I mean, after 2000, you know, you see a lot of projects were going on. So after an important temple was completed, the MAZU islanders undertook a cross-straight pilgrimage starting from Taiwan. As you can see here, they started from Jilong and they stopped in MAZU and then landed in Ningde and then take a huge detour from Ningde to Pingnan, Guotian, Fuzhou and then finally arrived at the root temple in Changle and then back to MAZU. The aim was to build new relations with China and to show how MAZU could be a connecting point between Taiwan and China. They even tried to draw in an American casino capitalist to build a large gambling resort. I guess this is probably what Daphit just mentioned. You know, probably you discussed this already. And in a way, I also, in my book, I also discussed this event in chapter 10. So anyway, I'm glad that I did not choose that chapter because I think, you know, probably you more or less heard about this but so I chose another story to discuss. However, they met significant opposition to this plan from young generation. I guess you or I probably, I think you have already discussed this. There are a lot of disagreement and referendum, you know, took place at the end. So we see how they continue, I mean, the MAZU people continually pursued possibilities to redefine themselves. Given this remarkable series of imaginative projects, I was curious about how did these imaginations come about? How do people negotiate different generations and power relations? In contemporary society, especially very individualist society, how is social imagination possible? According to Charles Taylor, his book published in 2003, Social Imaginary is the way in which the members of the community imagine their existence. It forms the common understanding of how to carry out the collective practices that constitute a social life. However, in contemporary society, not just one but multiple social imaginations coexist. How do people negotiate collective imaginaries become an important question? Imagination can also be very irrational. So when we discuss imagination, how do we understand hope effect and fantasy entailed by it? This is what the, you know, book is concerned. Let me briefly review the literature on imagination and society. In the imagination community, I believe most of you read this book. Benedikt Anderson depicts how print capitalism generates a commonality among people and lays the basis for nationalism. In modernity at large, Arjan Oppadurai discusses how mass media brought about new kinds of imagination, which acquires an important power in contemporary life. Charles Taylor expands the discussion of social imaginary from print media to broader social institutions such as, you know, such as especially three types of social institutions, namely market economy, public sphere, and self-governed people. But Taylor's analysis does not delve into the infiltration process or the inherent tensions. It is not surprising that subsequent research focused on the technologies of imagination, that is the concrete process by which imaginative effects are engendered. In ensuring works, the function of medium has received much more attention. Crucially, the role of person or subject is still waiting to be incorporated. Still life, Henrietta Moore, she was the head of Cambridge University when I studied there. She has a book which explores how various kinds of mediums or the forms of the possible in her own words can reshape the self and thus how subjectification occurs. These mediums, as she pointed out, can magnify interior meanings and feelings, supplementing and extending individual sensations and emotions, and engendering new agency and social connections to one ethical imagination. Her work is very insightful for me. When I read her work after I left Cambridge, but then when I had the chance to read her this book, it's very inspiring for me. Because the mazu, if it was mazu in such a perfect way, the mazu islands in their long history were considered forbidden outposts, Fengshan Jingyang. There was very little farming land and the inhabitants were a largely transient population who made a living by fishing. In 1949, the conflict between the Communist Party and the National Party in China, as well as the US and Soviet Cold War, drastically changed the fate of mazu as it was abruptly turned into a military front line under strict control of the army. It's only after 1992, when military rule was lifted, that individual imagination gained much space to develop. In Island Fantasia, I explore how individuals after gaining freedom applied to different mediating technologies to reach out to people and together to draw new blueprints for the island's future. Importantly, I explore the unconscious effects, emotions and fantasies generated in this, in the subjectification process. So this is the context, the chapters of my book. The mediating technologies I discuss mostly in chapter eight, chapter eight about community building project, and then chapter nine across straight pilgrimage, and chapter 10 Asia Mediterranean Casino Resort. They formed part three of my book, but I want to emphasize not all of the projects succeeded, actually a lot of them failed. To explain why so many projects failed, yet the islanders still keep on trying new ways and struggling, we have to understand part two, new technologies of imagination, which summarizes part one and lays the basis for part three. As geographically, I'm influenced by Erin Mugler's book, The Age of Wild Ghosts. I guess probably you know about this book. It's about Southwest China, and who first raised the issue of social imaginary. And by Michael Sony's work Cold War Island, he did research in Yemen. So in a way, I get a lot of inspiration from this book. It gives me a basis to move on to mazu. Let me give you the background of digital mazu. Chapter five provides important information about mazu online, mazu Zhixunwang. It's a website reporting news about mazu islands. It started in 2001 when Facebook was not yet popular. The local newspaper Mazu Daily was under strict control of the government. On mazu online, netizens can use anonymous names to freely express what they think. New online selves disappear. They criticize the government and engage in conflicts with the local society. There are many controversies in this website. You know, some netizens sometimes kill each other. It's not always so smooth. But without doubt, mazu online has reshaped the islands from a springboard against communism, anti-communism, into a place with its own value and worth. Because all the news in this website only talk about mazu. So in this website, you can see everything happening in these islands. That's why I said, even there are so many controversies, this website in a way still forms the identity and the solidarity of mazu. And we confirm the value. I will discuss this later. Chapter six is about... Oh, sorry, I'm not going to discuss the whole, you know, this website. But I will choose only one from here. It's, you know, chapter six is about creating online war memory. The chapter zooms into individuals and the ways in which they have undergone transformation in the online world. Starting in 2005, a husband and a wife team began to publish a series of posts on mazu online. So it's here. It's here, Xia Shuhua and Lei Mengdi's work. It's still collected in this website. The images, so the posts have already, they have already published the posts and then turned into a book. But what I'm going to tell you is how this process happens. The images were drawn by Chen Tianxuan, a mazu islander who emigrated to Taiwan. And the text was written by his Taiwanese wife, Xia Shuhua, who had never lived in mazu. Given the enthusiastic response of netizen, the duo continued their collaboration for three years, cumulating in the book, the wartime childhood Lei Mengdi. Hereafter, I just use Lei Mengdi published in 2009. Much beloved, it was selected as a book of mazu, mazu zhi shu. Lei Mengdi means hooligan in the mazu dialect. Luimundia, that's what I heard them saying. And the expression Lei Mengdi is often used as a general term for boys. The book narrated in the first person by Lei Mengdi this represents both Chen Tianxuan's experiences as well as those of most mazu children. Below I will start to examine the writing of Lei Mengdi, analyzing how Chen Tianxuan's experiences growing up in mazu contain two kinds of self. One is an island social cultural self. The second is a military oppressed self. Then I discussed how a collective online memory is collected, is created. I asked Chen why his family had moved to Taiwan. He told me that mazu fishing economy had declined and his father could no longer support the family by fishing in Chaozi village. It's a village in Beigang. When Chen graduated from middle school, the whole family moved to Taiwan. Chen studied five arts and after graduation worked as a cartoonist for several animation companies. He lived in Taiwan for 27 years without even returning once to mazu. I asked him if he hadn't missed the island. He frowned and said, as far as I am concerned, it wasn't such a great place. Shu Hua had been telling me for a long time that she wanted to go back with me to see it but I just told her that it's a barren and dying place. I only went back in 2005 because of the land dispute with the government. Then I asked him, when you came here, came to Taipei, did you contact other people from mazu in Taiwan? He replied, I didn't go get to know any others from mazu aside from occasional contact with some high school mates. Nevertheless, during this time, he would occasionally post a few cartoons on mazu online, criticizing the state for fooling the people and occupying their land. This is about, for example, this one, this is actually Lai Mengdi himself and that's his mother. So these policemen or soldiers came to say, oh, please let us use your land when we, Guangfu, Dalu, take the China back, we will return the land back to you. But finally, it never, you know, it never happened. So he was very angry and then posted something like this very, you know, when he had time to draw. I asked Qian why he started drawing the Lai Mengdi series. His wife, Xia Shuhua, sitting beside me, I interviewed them together, answered that when she joined her husband as he went home to negotiate his land dispute with the government, she was very moved to see his hometown for the first time. So she wrote about her feelings in an essay entitled Total Luna Eclipse Yuequan Shi and posted it on mazu online. To her surprise, the click rate was so high. So encouraged that she continued to write. The enthusiastic response of netizens also inspired her cartoonist husband to begin, you know, join her and, you know, started to illustrate her work, the island cultural self. Opening the book, what immediately lives to the eye is the carefully drawn village of Chaozi where Lai Mengdi grew up. In this drawing, Qian recreates the houses of the 1960s with incredible accuracy, so detailed as you can see. Even though more than half of them have already disappeared today and he never ever went back to the island for almost 30 years, he could still paint it in such a detailed way. So the precision undoubtedly shows that his youth was the most important period in his life. Family, below the drawing, Xia provides a wonderful description of how Lai Mengdi's family managed to support eight people, two pigs, and a dozen of chickens. Everyone has a job to do. Household economy, during Lai Mengdi's childhood, the ocean around Mato Island still tamed with small shrimp. Processing shrimp was a complex process that required the participation of the whole family. So I remember when I did a few work there, I tried to, you know, ask people, how did they do the shrimp, you know, how do they dry the shrimp or something? I never got to know the details until when I saw the book, you know, everything is clear to me, until, you know, when I see these pictures, you know, these drawings, everything is closed, you know, so clear to me. So he say, so you can see when the fishing boats returned, the shrimp was firstly sorted on the beach, then taken back to each family's fishing hut to be buoyed, to, you know, dried, and laid out bamboo, you know, mats. You can see the process. And to continue to dry in the sun, all before it could be sold, or in chairs. Chen also made extremely detailed depictions of village ceremonies and events such as weddings. In the small communities of Mato, when a wedding was held, the family would borrow tables and chairs from anyone they could. Children's party, the islands carry on the customs of Eastern Fujian, where the tradition was that wedding celebrations lasted three days with a separate men's party, women's party, and children's party. The children's party would be held three days before the wedding, before the banquicks began, children would beat a gong and shout as loudly as possible. The gongs ringing come and drink. When they heard, when the kids heard the sound of the gong, the other, you know, the other children would happily run over to join the fun. And he also painted Lantern Festival, Yuan Xiaojie. You know, it's the most important ritual in Mato. And he also, he painted Deity Yang, you know, the local deity in Mato, taming demons on the, on the sea. We saw his personal, you know, fantasy. As he grew up, Leimundi often played by the seaside and enjoyed the beauty of the ocean. The exquisite scenery of Mato was imprinted on his mind through his childhood games. So we see here, you know, he, he was swimming and then, you know, actually there's a woman. I don't know whether you can see this woman lying on the beach, the beach. And this is where his hometown, he walks back and forth. And he's looking at us, you know, this is, you know, with such a lovely eye, with such lovely eyes. The military, the military really oppressed herself. Leimundi is the first book to describe the physical and psychological harm that military rule wrecks on the islanders. The terror, oppression and trauma of the, of the time are evoked through the visceral content, paralleling the social, cultural context of Mato described earlier. Terror. Given the haste with which Zhang Kai-shek's army came to Mato, many soldiers were billeted in the homes of islanders. The second floor of Leimundi's house was turned into the military bureau. Leimundi often heard the young soldiers' low sobs mixed with their helpless terror. In the, in the night, it seemed they were often forsaken by the world. Not only soldiers, but the Mato islanders were also faced terror. Once Leimundi's father and a few other men from the village disappeared for several days after accidentally crossing the international boundary while fishing. Every so often, fishermen from mainland China who had drifted off horse in the mist would appear in the village and Leimundi watched them be blindfolded and dragged it off by soldiers. Trauma. The trauma of the military rule was mostly keenly felt when loved ones met with violence or abuse. The women of Chaozi often went to the seaside to gather shellfish in order to supplement their household incomes. One day, Leimundi's mother and aunts went to gather wild vegetables. They were caught and held by soldiers from the garrison. And only when village leaders came to negotiate were they released. That night, his mother kept crying in pain. And as Leimundi saw her back, he saw that she was bruised as though she had been beaten. From then on, whenever she went to the seaside, Leimundi would wait until dusk, gazing anxiously towards the mountain ridge until he glimpsed her and could relax. Body injuries meant or crippled to characters frequently appeared in the Leimundi series. They are heard usually by these lemlaes, which is, you know, you can see how he drew this. Leimundi's mother's story is perhaps the most tragic. As a young newlywed, her new husband was conscripted into a war game, a war game, and then mortally wounded by a lame line. Unfortunately, at that time, marriage was a matter of agreement between two families. And the remote islands did not issue marriage licenses. These marriages were not recognized by the government. So not only was Leimundi's mother ineligible for compensation, the young widow had to bear the burden of losing her husband or on her own. Madhu locked in mist. These intractable problems seem to be the inexorable fate of the islands. Leimundi can only stand behind the barbed wire and stare out hopelessly at his own island of Fegan, so you see Leimundi. I mean, imagine him standing in another place and gazing the island, Fegan. In Leimundi, the word mist is very frequently used as a metaphor for Madhu Kot in a war zone atmosphere. I quote, it was a special feeling to run through thick mist. It was as though you knew how long the road was, but could never know how deep the mist was, and quote, the Madhu Islands frequently experienced fork. When all communication with the outside world was cut off, Chen builds a metaphor of the war zone atmosphere as a mist that locks Madhu down so that people are lost in a miasma, unable to orient themselves or tell which direction they are heading. For this reason, distant Taiwan became a treasured island, Baodao. When I heard this word, I was so surprised because in Taiwan, you hardly, you know, people say that it's like Guidao, but when I heard this, you know, from Madhu people's mouth, I was so surprised. They said it's Baodao for them at that time. Leimundi was eager to grow up because his mother often said to him, when you are older, you can go to the treasured island of Taiwan. When he was around 15, his family moved to Taiwan, leaving his, their geography of pain behind. Healing through a wife's pain. This, these rich accounts of war zone were written by a Taiwanese woman who had never lived in Madhu herself, Chen's wife, Xia Zhuhua. The dual creation process generally involved Chen telling a story to Xia, who would then write it down. Chen explained, I quote, she managed, she manages to capture the experiences of the Madhu people. It will be hard for a local Madhu person to write this way. Her relatively distant relationship with Madhu allows her a certain objectivity, end quote. Of course, Xia's texts do not merely transmit Chen's memories. She often adds a twist to Chen's mournful stories of military rule. For example, in the section of Mist, she lights up the hope for the future of the islands. I quote, the sun that had disappeared behind the mountains would rise again next morning and the mist would finally be dispelled. End quote. The hope for future, the hope for future transfigured from past sorrows had helped Chen gradually face his painful childhood and reach a sense of self-transcendence and salvation through the writing process. Then I move on to talk about the relay of memories. The Lamondis stories have received tremendous support and participation from Madhu Islanders. Whenever a story was published online, netizens often enthusiastically shared similar experiences of their own. For example, Huan Jinhua, who had emigrated to Canada, wrote, I quote, reading Xia Shu Hua's work is like looking at an old photograph. Certainly I see how I made it through. Things at that time were muddled and confusing. End quote. Netizens support. Netizens provided a crucial emotional ballast for the couple to persist with the project. For instance, Tien Xuan wrote on Madhu online, this afternoon I exhausted myself revising a drawing of Kitchen. But when I saw the response of my fellow villager, Mu'er, I failed to revive. So he had to, he saw the touching words given written by his fellow villagers so he could continue. Indeed, one could say that this work of more than three years could not have been completed without netizens. Throughout the process, there was a collaboration between the creators and the readers. And the locals, not locals, all of which brought the series to life. As one netizens commented, each time I was not just moved by your stories, they are also all of those readers who are moved by you and their responses really touched me. So we can see the boundary between the individual and the social becomes blurred. Unsurprisingly, when the Le Monde series was collected and published as a book in 2009, it was celebrated by netizens who felt that Le Monde's childhood echoed a much wider experience. So I saw their posts, they said, Le Monde's childhood under military rule is also our childhood. And another netizen says that it's a period of we all went through. And they are memories that we all have. New subject, new module. Online media not only provided new forms of sociality to Tian Shun, who had been displaced and had the loan refused to confront his past and his homeland, but also brought a new understanding of the place. He explained, these past a few years as I have tried to get my land back from the government, I've returned to module to do land surveys. Only now I appreciate how my parents had to work in this terribly remote and difficult place. But now we have new technologies and we can have a different kind of lifestyle on module from the one we had before. This is to say, Tian Shun has not only discovered a new module, but also fresh possibilities for the future. In a new era equipped with the new technologies, he imagines that he could remake his hometown into a new world to re-inhabit and to transcend his painful past. He also began to ask for the land back. I quote, I'm not asking all of the land back from the government, only for the places that have stories. Like the spot on the beach where my mother used to collect shellfish, these soldiers chase her and beat her until she was black and blue. Tian Shun's narration shows that what he's fighting for is not compensation, but rather the right to attach a sense of purpose to his life, a meaning for his existence. Having been reawakened in a process of creating Laemondie, the afflictions of military rule, which previously caused him so much suffering, have now filled him with new power. By grappling directly with the humiliation and oppression, his family suffered. He's attempting to rediscover his morals emotions and effects, as well as to restore ethical value to the people who were abused by the state. As for his wife, Xiao Shunhua, he told me, he said, she told me, she said, I've been writing advertising copy for my whole life, but it wasn't until I started working on Laemondie series that I truly found joy in writing. Although the Laemondie series has already ended, Xiao has not stopped writing. Now she continues writing things for herself. Inclusion, internet writing as subjectification. In this talk, we have seen that online writing and drawing is a process of subjectification. It is so not only for Chen and his wife, but also for all the participating netizens. But it is only, it is particularly in Chen that we see most clearly how by drawing, writing, and sharing his work, he was gradually healed, turning himself into a subject, bringing more emotions and effects together. He was able to transcend his old selves and to discover his capacity to act. The Laemondie series is also much more than just a Chen's personal reminiscence. It was chosen as a book of mazu precisely because it offer a collectivity in the person, representing the painful and violent experiences of a people under military rule in the form of a single child's story. That this web-based series of wartime memories could be woven so quickly, reminds us of a key effect of internet technology in contemporary society. The ability to read and write provided by web too meant that netizens could immediately receive and respond. And this made online collective creations possible. Whenever they live in mazu, Taiwan or elsewhere in the world, mazu people can come together and interact in the virtual world, composing their war memory, their war memory communally. Through the course of the process, netizens participated in a social curation, mingling the individual and social, thereby producing a new collective identity. These memories, furthermore, caring as they do, the Lord of shared traumatic experiences are imbued with power and agency that could erupt at any moment. Laemondie, this is an important foundation for part three of the book in which I discuss how the history of common struggle has become an internal motivating force for the people of mazu. Ever since they were freed from the military rule, they persist in creating new social imaginaries to pursue better futures for the islands in the face of uncertain future. The people of mazu not only use internet technology, but also applied all kinds of ways which I discussed in part three of this book. For example, community project pilgrimage or even casino, building, trying to build a casino to connect themselves with the broader world. With the summary of the key chapter in my book, let me stop here now. We can continue the discussion with comments and questions. Thank you. Fantastic. That was a fascinating talk. I've got so many kind of questions as you were kind of going through that chapter. The discussion about that military oppressed self got a reminder a bit of some of the accounts we've heard from activists from places like Mochil and also Ponco about the role of the military. Let me just start then with one kind of technical question and then one broader one. I was really curious about the Leibniz drawings and whether or not these were based entirely on memory or he was also using photographs, particularly if these were done before he went back. So that was kind of the first question. And the other question I had that was, you talked about how they'd framed Taiwan as the treasure island, the Baldal. And I was thinking about whether that might have changed, particularly as a result of the tourism from China and whether or not for some in Marzl, the kind of the ideal land that actually become places like Fuzhou as you're so close to Fuzhou. Okay. Thank you, David. These are very good questions I will try to answer. Why he, when I interviewed him, he hardly show me of photographs. He told me that it's mostly dependent on his memories. But he also told me actually in the posts, you can also see that when he posted something, netizens will respond to it and then say, oh, something, you know, you need to revise a little bit. And then he would go back. He would go back to see, you know, to check. And then in a way, we discover the land. That's why at the end he said, oh, now we have so much technology now, right? So he, you know, he feel that Marzl nowadays is so different from what he was before. So this creation process really helps him. So on one hand, netizens will, you know, sort of respond to what he wrote or what he drew. And at the same time, he would also fly back to see whether it's correct or not. His memory is correct or not. So during the interview, during our interview, he never showed me any photo that he used. So it's very much based on memories. And also I found all the, most of the paintings there, I mean, in the Lemon D series, are about the past, the past. So it's always much more about his memory. Yeah. Okay. So your second question is about whether Marzl turns into great, whether Bao Dao turns into Great Dao. No. Right. I think this is, yeah, because after, you know, DPP rent, right? So Shi Mingde says something, you know, Shi Mingde says something that we, so for Taiwanese independence, he implied that we can sort of drop Jingmen and Marzl. That creates, you know, such a sorrow for them. You know, they feel that they are going to be deserted, to be deserted by DPP. So they started to feel very complicated to form that complicated image to Marzl. So for example, let me tell you something funny. You know, because I learned some simple Marzl dialect in front of, because Teng Shouchen is here, I don't dare to speak much Marzl dialect, but I didn't really, you know, I didn't really spend time in learning the dialect. And then, you know, I remember once I was buying things in the market, you know, Marzl market. So they, I was queuing to buy some Damping, you know, Damping, right? So I heard people saying that, oh, she's Taiwan-known, Taiwan-ren. So they use their dialect, right? So she is Taiwan-known and then give us the Damping first, you know, sort of something like that. So you can see that kind of thing. Of course, this, you know, because the military rule, you know, it tries to, the rule tries to make the island a sort of independent place, which can be fight for by itself. So you see if another land, another island was taken over by the Chinese government, then the other island has had to be able to fight for itself. So the connections with islands or with Taiwan are very much cut off. So in a way, you know, so that's why they started to form that kind of imagination, you know, of Taiwan, which is a precious island. But now they can easily, you know, come back and forth. And also because of DPP, it's mean the same. So they started that kind of very ambiguous, very, even they hated, you know, they hated DPP so much. So Baodao is no longer Baodao, but it wasn't Guidao so much, you know, for them. Okay, let me hand over then to one of my students. Tony, did you want to come in with your question? Yes, can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you, Professor Ling. It's quite interesting book. Here I have a paperback. Yeah, and so I really was enjoying reading it. And I have, and also my research interest is quite related to the offshore islands study and the human mobility part. So I basically have very much questions. Let me start with my first one, which is in your lecture about the online and offline topic. When you are talking about the Lehman's story in your tale that you, I feel like there's a focus on storytelling as a practice. In this case, you are also mentioned about the netizens and the online sounds. But I'm also aware that, you know, the social media or digital media is changing generation by generation so fast. So maybe in your fieldwork, it's still the website generation. But currently we are embracing the Facebook, maybe Twitter. And I do think that the change of the social media itself, the platform itself, are do facilitating more social relations in between the netizens. So I do feel is that it's more like changing the netizen or the online self into an online space where people are inhabitating, but also experiencing their everyday life, not just about the production of the content, but also the response or reproduce of the content. So my question is like as we as an anthropologist, how do we cope with this switch change of the digital media? And my second question is about the human mobility. For example, in your tale in Le Monde, the last, the ending of that is Le Monde have his longing of going to Taiwan. I also follow up with David's kind of idea that maybe the Baodau is kind of idea of the tourism. So I was thinking, is there any, your observation on how post the, during the military like period, but also the post military like a free time period, like how the change of the human abilities on Ma Zhu are influencing this idea of imagination of subjectivity of Ma Zhu. Yeah, thank you. Okay, thank you for your questions. They are very good. Thank you. The reading is in such a, you know, with such great effort. Let me ask you a first question first. When I first went to Ma Zhu, which is, it's around 2007. Even at that time, website, I don't have internet connect, you know, we don't have Wi-Fi at all. So I still practice the kind of very traditional way of interviewing and then something like this, you know, just do face-to-face interview or something. Until one day one, the website organizers asked me, you said, oh, Professor Lin, how come you don't study us? Right? You only, you know, use this method, but we, Ma Zhu people, don't apply this, do not just do this, you know, face-to-face interaction. We talk a lot on the webpage. So why don't you read and then respond to us? Something like this. So I was so frightened that, you know, in 2007, it was, you know, it has already this kind of, this kind of website is already a part of their life. So it's also the period in which I engage the most. Because I spent six months in the islands, you know, I mean, doing very intensive fieldwork. And after that, I went back, you know, in the summers. Right? So it's six months, which I have a very sort of intensive engagement with the people and also the website. That's why I more or less use that kind of period that I read a lot, you know, there. So of course I understand that nowadays people use Facebook or Ma Zhu people do not use Twitter much. They use Facebook a lot. So even the organizer, the website organizer understands it. And he has already changed it into a kind of different website from what he was, you know, in 2007. So he told me that now he tried to make it like a, you know, like a Google that people get to know or when the aircraft, you know, has the aircraft come to like Ma Zhu or, you know, just because of the fog, it goes back. So they can get some sort of daily information on the, make it, he tried to make it necessary for people's daily life. So, yeah, it's true that that's why you, what you are saying is correct, you know, the media's are changing, you know, who knows, you know, when, I mean, nowadays students don't use Facebook anymore, right? They use Instagram. So after 10 years, Instagrams were disappear. So the point is to how, you know, I use this as an example to discuss how people form social imaginary. So of course you can use Facebook or Twitter to discuss how people negotiate with each other on Facebook or in Twitter or in Instagram, in all the media, mediating technologies to form their, so to form the social imaginary. That's the purpose of my book. So that's why later on they, I discuss why they, you know, when they practice pilgrimage, it's also a way that they want to form their social imaginary because they want to see whether they could take the road of connecting point that they could still, even they are not反共跳板, but they still can connect to China with Taiwan. They remind each other, you know, that we are still very important. Ma Zhu is still very important. Please look at us. I think that's the point, you know, they, yeah, this is my answer to the first question. And then the second question, human mobility. Of course, that's why I write chapter seven, eight, and nine and 10. Each time, it's gradually, you see Asia, the casino thing, they try to make it itself into Asian Mediterranean. But at the beginning, they just want to say, oh, we are Mingdong, we want to become a village of, cultural village of Eastern Fujian, right? So with the time moves on, you know, when they get to know more and more people, when they connect with the broader world, or when these American, you know, not just American casino, casino capitalists, there's so many casino capitalists came to visit them. So they started to realize, oh, we Ma Zhu have so much potential. We could do this that, you know, that we never imagined before. So that's how they, you know, people came to visit them, right? And they had interactions with them. So that's why, you know, they feel, oh, we can do more and more things. The flow of people make them, you know, understand themselves even more. So sure, this human mobility, as you said, you know, mobility, people can come in and, you know, certainly gradually change the way they understand themselves and also the way they understand the world. Great, I can see we've got a couple of questions in the text questions. Lian Dong, who can't talk now, he's asked this. So thanks for your inspiring talk. I'd like to know more about how you differentiate between memory and imagination. In your presentation, it seems like that you demonstrate memory and imagination separately, but how are they interviewed in your case study? Also imagination seems future-oriented in your argument while memory-past-oriented. I wondered if you'd discussed this in your book. Mm-hmm. Right, okay. In my book, I basically use, you know, I think each person has its own memory or its own imagination, but what I mostly focus on is how an individual memory turn into a collective memory or how is it possible? How is it possible that an individual imagination could turn into a collective imagination? So for example, in this chapter, I discuss memory, right? So the next chapter, I discuss someone's great imagination about pilgrimage or someone thinks that we could become an Asian Mediterranean by drawing this capitalism, casino capitalism. We can form another kind of imagination. So in this case, in this, so my focus more is on imagination. Memory is a way that I use to discuss how imaginative or ethical, how is ethical imagination possible? Yeah, so yeah, this is my answer to Ando. Mm-hmm. Okay, and Boshi, did you wanna come in? We've got Chen Boshi from University of Cambridge. Oh, hi, thank you very much, Professor Lin, can you hear me? Yeah, sure. My question is maybe unrelated to the talk today, but I wonder how the Cold War presence figures in today's module because a couple of years ago, they met with an American anthropologist at Yale by the name of Michael Koh, who was sent to Ma Zhu, actually by Chen Island. So it's even a smaller island of Ma Zhu in the 50s. So he worked for this Western enterprises, Xifang Gongsi, which took the name of Gongsi, but it was actually formed by the CIA as some kind of Cold War operation. So you did mention this enterprise briefly, like once in your book, so I was wondering if you come across any of its former workers or data in your fieldwork. Thank you. Okay, thank you for Boshi's question. About Cold War or Xifang Gongsi, I think historians are much more interested in this. When I went to Xiju, don't do Xiju, Xiju, yeah. When I went to Xiju with Michael Sony, we tried to sort of try to discover the content of these Xifang Gongsi or something like this, but we got very little data. We tried to interview people, but what they say, we always end up with very little data. So for me, it becomes very difficult to develop. That's why most historians in Taiwan are not interested in module at all. This is the point, because we had very little information and no written things. So I think some historians are still making their effort, but I did not really pursue this because I think as an anthropologist, my job is to understand the lived world of people. So if they can't really provide you answers, then I just don't really, because we are much more concerned with how people experience the Cold War. That's why in my chapter, especially I think chapter four, I discussed gambling during the Cold War, right? How did they fight with the military? These military people did not allow them to gamble, so they intentionally did this. It's also a way to protest the government. So more or less I see myself as an anthropologist and even I want to face the issue of Cold War, I will study or I will consider from the local people's perspective. And Xifang Gong is that historian, student. Thank you very much, thank you. Okay, fantastic. So Patrick, did you want to come in with your question? Yes, thank you very much. My name is Hou Guanghao and I'm teaching at the National Kimo University. So we had an email interactions with Professor Thao. And first allow me to thank Professor Thao very much for providing this public access to this, today's talk. And I still privileged to be able to participate it because I was also asked by China Quarterly to write a book review for Professor Lin's book. And I'm a student of politics, but I don't know why China Quarterly asked me properly because I guess probably they think I've been teaching at Jingmen for a decade, I think, yes. I find Professor Lin's book very well written and her writing style is very clear. But I still have several technical questions to ask if I hope, I wish Professor Lin would be able to, would be willing to teach me. First question is about some definitions of several important concepts which I am not very familiar with. For example, the first one is imaginary. And I'm wondering what would be the relationship between imaginary and identity? And you started the book by discussing Benedict Anderson's imagined community. So this question pops up immediately when I first read the chapter. And I also, I'm also wondering what would be their relationships? I mean, imaginary and identity with subjectification. I think I know what Professor Lin wants to discuss through reading the whole book, but I'm just wondering if you could be so kind to clarify a bit for me. And the second question is, I find your framework, the conceptual framework that you presented in your first chapter is very interesting. And I think they do have lots of potential to be applied to other examination or other studies of different social political phenomenons. I'm wondering if you can develop at this occasion to develop a bit more about the utilities of your framework, apart from using it to study an island like Marshall or Jimman. The other, the third questions is about your methodology. And because the China quality also asked me to introduce a bit. So I'm wondering apart from, in addition to your introduction previously provided, and you said you use very traditional face-to-face interviews. And do you have any other methods to help you to conduct your fieldwork? Or how long did you stay in Marshall for your fieldwork? And how long did you spend on conducting this project? And the fourth question is about the potential audience. I can find, I can see that this topic would be very interesting for political scientists, especially scholars of international relations. For example, the scholar, Dr. Chen, I suppose, Chen Boxi from Cambridge is five and a half wrong. And the question he addresses can be classified as a topic of international relations. But I don't know if your book can be widely used in anthropology, for example, teaching or for advanced reading by postgraduate students. This is just a question for me to back in for teaching from you. So thank you very much, Indy. Right, right. Thank you. Very good questions. Yeah, okay, I know, I try to answer as much as possible. Okay, you asked me about imaginary imagination and identity. Yeah, that's a very good question. Because I think, you know, mazu people, they came from Chang Le, Chang Le Xian, right? They were not Taiwanese. And they were trapped in this place in 1949. They told me a lot of stories that their relatives they just cannot come back. So they also, they are really in between, you see, they were from China, but they cannot go to China. They were not Taiwanese, but they now belong to ROC. So identity is such a big issue, you know, they keep on asking themselves who we are, you know, who are we, we are, we, you know, they are sort of in between. So sometimes when I asked them, you know, they will say, oh, we are from Chang Le. I will teach my kids, they are from Chang Le people. But when I go to kids, they will say, we are mazu, we are mazu. That Chang Le is our past. That's our parents identity, not us, right? So I think this is why at the end in chapter 10, I was talking about the, you know, I was talking about the casino issue, why the young generation came out and, you know, voted against the, you know, the casino resort because they want to, you know, they want to have their homeland. This is mazu is their homeland. And they don't want that kind of past that their parents have. So I think, you know, why I talk about imagination because they, by these series of, this series of imaginative works, either at the beginning they say, oh, we try to build Ming Dong Wenhua Village. So in a way, they identify themselves with Ming Dong Rai Eastern Fujian. And later on, they say, oh, we want to become the connecting point between Taiwan and China. So sort of they try to, you know, their identity is still that, oh, we could, you know, play the role Liaison, right? The road or bridge, we could. But then finally they find, they said, oh, no, we are not going to do this. We will become the Asia Mediterranean, new identity, right? We face the Asia. This is our world. Taiwan and mazu is no more just narrowed in a very small place between China, and Taiwan, right? Or in the beginning it's just a Ming Dong Wenhua Village. So at the end they say, oh, we are a part of Asia. So it's a way in their imagination. They are also exploring their identities. This is what I'm saying. I think it's a process, you know, they are trying to find, that's why I think in the future there will be more and more projects coming on because no one knows who they, they are not really sure who they are yet. So there will be more projects, more, you know, blueprints for their future. And this relates to your second question, subjectification, subject in making, you know? So in a way, I think they are trying to define who we are, you know, subjectification. In the past, in the earlier period, they are just, you know, Haidao the Xiaohai, or they were sort of, you know, offshore islands in the China empires, right? You see, they are no in Qianlong, I wrote it in chapter one, the Long History, their houses would be, you know, burned down just by an emperor and then call them back, you know, so this is just a, you know, sort of a pirate's islands. And then second, in the second period, they were controlled by the government, right? So they are, I wrote a story that a young guy told me, he said, oh, see these guys, they have guns, how can I fight with them? You know, we have to obey them or something. But then you see only in the third period, you see, you know, people can come up, they can use internet to speak, to criticize the government. So it's the subjectification I'm talking about. They can say what they like, they can, in the past, they can only gamble and then, you know, sort of protest, right? Whereas in the new, after 1992, when the martial law was lifted, they get the power, they get the agency, right? The government has to listen to them. My landlord works for the government. So he said, oh, professor in every time, every morning, the first thing I do when I wake up is to read mazu online, mazu zishunwang. So I can be sure that, oh, whether I can keep my job or not or something like that. Okay, so your important question, third question is that, whether I can apply the result of this work to other areas, of course, that's my intention, right? Or not really my implication. Of course, I want to apply this to other areas beyond mazu, who else does it want to do this? Everyone wants to do this, right? But I have to admit that I have some limits. And I think every place has its own particular history and political situations that it needs professor, it needs also more careful reading. So at the end, I did not really, really, for example, I did not cite Okinawa or I did not really cite other places which have probably the same situations. But I did write in the introduction. I say that the roots in us and the in-betweenness revealed or illustrated in this book could echo what we are in the first, in the 21st century. You see the roots, the roots, the smers. When I hear them talking about themselves, I also feel so. You see, Taiwan is just like a mazu in a way. Mazu is a prison of Taiwan, right? You see Taiwan is between China and America, US. Every place is like this. UK is also between United States and continent, Europe continent, right? So it dwindle or you know, you see. So this is the feeling, you know, the precarious feelings that I have tried to transmit, very a kind of precarity, precarious feelings that everybody has, the rootslessness and the in-betweenness that you find in humanities and you find in contemporary political situations. You see, Ukraine between Russia and Europe, right? Something like this. And the United States between China and Europe. So yeah, it's in a way that I try to transmit by not going deeper to the details, which I probably not really good at, yeah. So you also- Maybe because we're kind of running out of time, maybe we'll have to leave that fourth question. Do you mind if I bring in Songchuan? I think we've only got about five minutes left and it'd be good to get a mazu's take on today's presentation. Thank you for David. Thank you Waving Opses for fascinating, amazing talk. I probably also can thank you on behalf of Mazu Islanders for your amazing research. My question is really related to what you have been talking about earlier. I want to learn a bit more the KMT and the PPT relationship, Minjinan and Guomindan here. So we know Mazu Islanders really have really a lot of complicated relationship with KMT. On the one hand they really benefit from economic kind of policies and also on the other hand the occupation and then colonization in a way. So it's very complicated. And then you mentioned about the Siminders kind of his kind of policy about the Mazu. Then recently we see Minjinan really got a lot of new policy going on. And it's especially your student Li Wen. Now he's stationed there. So I want to kind of, would you mind like to talk a bit more about maybe the future of the Minjinan kind of positions, ways going and then the political situation of Mazu and the Minjinan school here. Thank you. Okay, Song Chen, thank you for raising Li Wen, the representative of DPP in Mazu. He actually did a lot of, he tried to change the image of DPP in Mazu. And I think he's been doing important things. For example, let me give you an example. Between the ocean now suffers a lot of pollution, right? Either the light or those dredging ships and the birds which are dying, right? They are no more coming to lay eggs or something like that. So I think at least was after we have Li Wen, after DPP sent a representative in Mazu. I think things are starting to change. For example, he proposed an idea which I, he proposed something to DPP which I think are very important because Mazu in the past, even now practices sort of restricted water which is, meaning each island, the China ships cannot, the restricted water is only six kilometers. So it means that China ships can come so close to Mazu whereas in international law or marine law, each place can have, they call it territorial waters which is 22 kilometers, right? So you see, so Li Wen say, Li Wen say, oh, if we say that, oh, we need to have 22 kilometers, China will protest, China will be so unhappy. So Li Wen say, oh, let me, let us expand it and then at least connect the six islands into a zone. So he called it a conservation zone to protect the birds, right? So I think that's a very interesting idea. He's tried to shun off the very political issues by say we have to preserve the birds but at the same time expand the ecological protection a little bit more. And then Li Wen, of course, he does a lot of things to bring Mazu back to ROC, right? So Li Wen never says Taiwan, he always says ROC tries to mediate the relation between the Mazu people and ROC. I think that's very important. So DPP should not forget Mazu. David, can you hear me? Yeah, fantastic. So we're kind of bringing things to a close here. We managed to fit in quite a lot of questions and I'm pretty sure a lot of you will now be inspired to go ahead and read the book and perhaps also try and get access to the Le Men Di book as well, which I think was really kind of exciting. I don't know how soldier you've kind of, whether that kind of brought back any memories for you as well. We all, I should also note that next week, which will be our last week of term, we will have one in-person event. We will be inviting the writer, Melissa Foul, for her book launch of her new novel, Peach Blossom Springs, that'll be on Tuesday, March 22nd at six o'clock and that'll be an in-person event. And but before we close, I think we should give Professor Lin a very, very big round of applause. Thank you. Please email me if you have further questions. You know, I am, because of tight limit, I can't really speak too much. Thank you for your wonderful questions. And if people would want to, if anyone wants to get into the group picture, would you like to turn on your cameras and how are you going to, we'll take a screenshot of the group? Yes, yes. Oh, which is lovely. Okay, so take a picture. Three. If you give us a minute or two, I think we've got a few more cameras coming on. Oh. All right. All right. I'll take a picture now. Three, two, one. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everyone for fantastic questions and see many of you in SOAS this week and then at Melissa's talk next week. Thank you, Tafiq for inviting me again. Thank you for everyone coming to this talk. Hope you can make it here in person in the future. Sure, sure. I'd love to. Thank you everyone. Bye then. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye. Bye bye.