 Well good afternoon everyone and thank you so much for coming to this wonderful event on this beautiful Canberra Day. My name is Roxanne Missingham and I'm the University Librarian and it's my privilege to introduce Mark for this public lecture. We started ANU with a Welcome to Country where we acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present. The ANU library and at China in the World are delighted to be working together on a series of events. There was a lecture last year, this year I think we're going to have to turn it into an annual series, Ben, where we are keen to engage the community, the Canberra community as well as the ANU community, on issues intellectual relating to Chinese study. We were very fortunate to sign a memorandum of understanding with the National Central Library from Taiwan and we have established a Taiwan Chinese Resource Centre which you will see in the front of the library on your way out and we do that in support of the fantastic work that is done by scholars at the University, particularly by those under Ben's purvey at the Australian Centre of China and the world, where they all obey him instantly, rush to publish and anything else that he tells them to do. Yes, that was our ringing endorsement. And it was Ben that recommended that we invite Mark Harrison to speak to us at our lecture this year and it was deferred for health reasons but we are delighted to see that Mark is well enough to arrive in Canberra, sit in the sunshine and then fly back to Tasmania. But that's okay. Mark has a BA Honours in Chinese from the University of Adelaide and completed his PhD in Monash University looking at Taiwan and its problems of identity. From 2002 to 2008 he worked as research fellow and lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster in London, UK. His work examines knowledge and representation in Chinese contexts exploring contemporary cultural and social life in Taiwan and mainland China. His current project is entitled China's Futures. I was really fortunate this morning to have read two of his book chapters which are in ANU Press Publications on Identity and they are extraordinary works that combine an understanding of social culture, of political culture, of Chinese culture and they were a real pleasure to read. So I encourage all of you after you've heard his lecture to not go and buy the book, go and read the book chapters. They are well worthwhile. But on that note I might hand over to you Mark and thank you so much for coming to give this lecture. Thanks Roxanne for that introduction and thanks for the invitation to come up and talk. It's always a pleasure to come to the ANU obviously and this is a really nice occasion to say something about my current thinking about Taiwan in fact. So this paper is about Taiwan and it's about its history and I guess we can call it its contemporary challenges. I'm trying to say something about the way the past lives in the present in Taiwan but also how the present is shaping the past. The past is being kind of reimagined in contemporary Taiwan and the meaning of the past is being transformed in I think quite radical and unexpected ways. So a lot of this material comes from a visit that I made to Taiwan thanks to the generosity of the Australian Centre on China and the world in June. So I travelled south. I saw a number of very interesting places and I'm trying to build on what I was seeing and shape it into an argument. So what I'm going to be talking about in the second half of this talk is mostly about Green Island which is off the coast of south-east Taiwan and the Green Island Human Rights Memorial Park which includes the New Life Re-education Camp and the Ministry of National Defence Green Island Reform and Re-education Prison also known as Oasis Villa and the histories of these buildings and these sites which overlap and have changed in very complex and surprisingly indeterminate ways over many decades. They are shifting expressions of the institutionalisation of authoritarianism in Taiwan during the martial law period, the eventual transition to democracy in the 1980s and 90s and now the memorialisation and the subjectification, if you like, of national memory in Taiwan. I'll first say before I get into all of that that saying anything about Taiwan is very, very difficult and anyone who tries to write about it faces this challenge. The name Taiwan itself is an unstable category. The history of Taiwan slips between many different histories so it includes the civilisations of the Pacific, there's Dutch imperial history in the 17th century, there's China's imperial and national histories, Taiwan is between the demise of the Qing and the founding of the Republic, the Chinese Civil War and the founding of the People's Republic and overall of that of course is Taiwan's central place in Japan's imperial and wartime history. So there's a multitude of ruptures that Taiwan sort of sits across. Out of all of that, Taiwan has been delivered as a word into the Chinese speaking world and it finds itself as an object of scholarship often within Chinese studies and I wanted to respond to the program of Taiwan Chinese studies with just some comments. Taiwan has a place you could call it in the corner of what I refer to as the cartographic practices of Chinese studies. So one of the things that Chinese studies does is it defines the meaning of China but it's also defined by the meaning of China. So the way I've phrased this in another setting is it hesitates between the passive and the active. Chinese studies is a very complex body of scholarly work. In that context there's a kind of cartographic practice that's sort of making a scholarly map as it were. Taiwan has a really complicated and interesting place. In the words of Homi Baba, he's one of my favourite writers, Taiwan is its slippage, its excess, its difference that reveals some strategic limitation or prohibition within the authoritative discourse itself. So there's something about Taiwan within the Chinese world that sort of speaks against the centre that somehow is more Chinese than China and somehow fundamentally not Chinese at all. It's all of those things simultaneously. It illustrates really powerfully the instability of the category of China but it also sheds an enormous amount of light on what it means to do Chinese studies. Taiwan's presence as an object of knowledge is interstitial therefore. So any analysis of Taiwanese culture, of its society, its politics, these are all necessarily by definition attempts to fix its meaning as something and when you try and do that you interpose identity politics and political ideologies. So once you start talking about Taiwan as a thing unto itself you're immediately embedded in really, really complicated contemporary geopolitics and identity politics and every interposition of scholarly work invites further explication. There's a really recursive quality to try and say something about Taiwan and so you're pulled into a kind of recursion that destabilises the category Taiwan itself. So it's just an incredibly difficult thing to write about. I always feel when I try and talk about Taiwan to spend the first sort of half a page or page just trying to stabilise the category just before you can go on and say anything. Of course there's a very particular institutional response to this at a global level which is the rejection of Chinese studies altogether and the creation of something called Taiwan Studies and so there's well-established organisations in North America and in Europe who understand Taiwan as a scholarly category unto itself completely different from Chinese Studies. I'm actually quite ambivalent about that move to be honest. I think Taiwan does have a place in Chinese Studies. It depends on how again how you define Chinese Studies and Taiwan Studies as a body of knowledge unto itself can also be a little inward looking, a little closed off, it can be a little too green can I say use that term in the Taiwan politics sense. Having said all of this about the nature of Taiwan about trying to locate it within Chinese Studies I will give a brief summary of Taiwanese history. I have occasionally tried not doing this the last time I tried it the first question was could you please just give a summary of Taiwanese history. The history isn't well known and so it is useful to sort of track through it. So Taiwan as many of us know has an indigenous peoples the members of what is evocatively known as the civilization of the voyaging canoe. These are people who sailed across the Pacific on gigantic ocean going canoes and they started in Taiwan and they settled the entire Pacific. Taiwan was a Dutch colonial territory in the 17th century between the Ming and the Qing and its Chinese history begins with the Zhenchangong interregnum from 1662 to 1683 which was a short lived kingdom loyal to the Ming dynasty and that was defeated by the Qing in 1683 and Taiwan was brought under central imperial authority as a prefecture of Fujian actually and that was actually the first really official imperial authority exercised over Taiwan. It achieved its own provincial status in 1885 and then in 1895 of course it was ceded by the Qing to Japan as a colony as a result of the 1894 Sino-Japanese War. The story of Japanese colonial Taiwan is an extraordinarily fascinating one which I won't go into I'm happy to. As all of this is going on in Taiwan of course the Qing Empire collapsed in 1911 the Republic of China was founded and then the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 and the mainland entered a period of civil war. At the end of World War II Taiwan was returned or was given to the governance of the Republic of China led by the KMT or the Chinese Nationalists as a province. It became a province of the Republic of China and in 1947 the single most important event in modern Taiwanese history could the 228 Uprising where the Taiwanese rose up against Chinese nationalist rule and their rebellion was crushed with really extraordinary violence and their violence has echoed absolutely to the present. And out of that violence a Taiwanese nationalist movement emerged with a political structure and ideology and nationalist historiography all of the things that inform contemporary Taiwanese politics today and then of course in 1949 the national government of the Republic of China relocated to Taipei fleeing from the advancing communists of the People's Republic of China. The post-49 history is which I'll just sketch broadly it is germane to my argument is told in a very particular way by policy makers, scholarship in the Anglo sphere and by the Taiwan government and it's been told in this way for many years. So under US hegemony which Taiwan fell under as a result of the outbreak of the Korean War it was drawn into the bipolar geopolitics of the Cold War. And it also became as a matter of policy a model province that the KMT were using as an exemplar to inspire the Chinese suffering under the yoke of communism on the mainland and it became through the 50s the very exemplar of a post-World War II a developmental state. The 50s were developmental economics of the period so land reform, the land of the Tilla program industrial policy capital controls import substitution but then in 1960 the Taiwan government implemented what at the time was a radical program but we now call it the prototype of neoliberalism so free capital controls privatization foreign investment deregulation many things like that and it laid the foundation for the Taiwan economic miracle and so the Taiwanese economy began just to accelerate at an incredible speed from 1960 up until the early 1990s it became an Asian tiger of course right through this period Taiwan is also a military dictatorship it has a terrible human rights record and as the economy is going incredibly successfully activists were testing the limits of state power constantly they're agitating for democratic reform and then Taiwan entered a post-industrial phase of its hyper growth in the 1980s and its politics shifted and it began a transition to democracy so the DPP, the Democratic Progressive Party was founded in 1986, martial law lifted in 1987 and then there was a series of really complex constitutional reforms in the early 90s which enabled democratic elections for the office of president of the Republic of China by the residents of the island of Taiwan but also kept the peace across the Taiwan Straits and I think we would do well to look at that story in the early 90s and recognize how the subtlety and the sophistication of that constitutional reform laid the groundwork for prosperity in the region and certainly Australia's prosperity because it could have gone horribly wrong if they got it wrong and the 1990s and the 2000s the Taiwan story as we know has been the consolidation of its democratic system so the presidential election starting in 1996 every four years and the legitimization of Taiwanese identity so that with the DPP Taiwanese identity politics are part of the political landscape so Taiwan's democracy has been lauded as an example as an exemplar of third wave democratization to use the political science term it's also the foundation of Taiwan's security it's a thing that keeps Taiwan safe ultimately and in Taiwan you have democracy democratic sovereignty and nationhood rights and subjectivity and capitalism all of these different things are intertwined in Taiwan today into a coherent and very powerful story and the way of telling this story is structured not just by the story of modernization which it is but of modernity itself Taiwan is an exemplar of modernity in a really foundational sense of course it stands as radically different to communist modernization on the mainland as created by the people's Republic of China which has an entirely different pathway of modernity and modernization it's also I think has overlapped with and contested with on Taiwan itself the vision of post-imperial nationalist modernization of the Republic of China because we can forget that in the very early decades of the ROC there was a vision of nationalist modernization which is actually quite different from what the Taiwanese ended up creating and these things overlap and contest and that contestation has driven Taiwan's extremely volatile and very bitter partisan politics it's often within Taiwan within its own public debate this is often framed as incomplete democratic consolidation there's this idea that all of this contestation means that Taiwan hasn't quite yet achieved a fully-cohered democratic system people also talk about a public sphere that is insufficiently rational it's often a term that Taiwanese people use as prone to emotion rather than sober technocratic progress and of course this is part of how the blues and the greens the KMT and the DPP engage in their political contestation the stories are they're fairly familiar I think to many of us one of the things that's come to me in the last few years is that although there is this very familiar story which informs Taiwanese politics in the last decade or so and I it's sort of maybe three or four years ago that I started to really get a sense of this that on the margins of this modern Taiwan particularly in the world of art writers, artists activists there's a distinctive something particularly distinctive has entered Taiwan's public sphere which I generally categorize as a kind of malaise or a kind of anxiety there's a very particular tone that you get when you talk to Taiwanese people about modern Taiwan and where it's going and it's framed in this very curious way it's present in art and culture in Taiwan it hovered over the sunflower movement I think very particularly it also hovered over and it was it flowed through the presidential election campaign last year where I think people people felt a strange sense that things weren't quite right it's also present and this certainly came to me on the trip that I made in the middle of the year what has come to be the extraordinary fixation that the Taiwanese have come to have on their history so Taiwan today is drowning in history history, memory and nostalgia art, urban development, museums memorials these are proliferating from one end of the island to the other and I'll come back to this point at the very end so structures for example that even 10 years ago, certainly 20 years ago old Japanese colonial structures or buildings from the 50s that would have been demolished to make way for factories and apartment buildings everything going on nowadays is being turned into an arts precinct or a cultural zone or something in which art and memory and history is given a kind of space to occupy there's a sense that the very foundations of the story of Taiwanese modernity are being rewritten or rethought on the margins and it's introducing a kind of doubt about the integrity of Taiwan's experience of modernity that's seeping and coursing through Taiwan's body politic so I argued elsewhere a little while ago that what is driving this I think is a recognition that the story of Taiwan is a story of modernity and modernization has effaced what is its most fundamental and foundational characteristic which is violence so at the center of the Taiwan story that the received narratives do not address is an experience of violence and when I say violence I mean political violence the violence of the martial law period but I'm also thinking emotional violence the damage done to every family there's not a family across the island that has not had some impact from especially the martial law period that has played and it's exercised legacy in their family history of violence I think that's a key element of damage to the environment through this breakneck modernization there's a sense in which violence has not been accounted for and on the margins of the consensus discourse are people wanting somehow to account for it and of trying to find a way to do that this I think has been validated this year in two particularly interesting ways one was the announcement by the new president President Tsai Ing-wan of the formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission which she made in her inauguration speech and also her apology to Taiwan's indigenous people which she gave a few months ago both of these are really important moments of the state facing a history of violence but of course this process has only begun as far as the state is concerned and so I think Taiwan has entered a really really complicated period what I want to do now is then try and draw out what that means and try and draw out what if Taiwan has a history of violence how does that actually work how can we understand what does that actually mean in terms of people's lives and politics and culture so history lives in the present so this history of violence lives in the present but it arrives transformed it doesn't arrive as it was it's transformed by politics and moral forces so I want to trace one particular fragment of history and try and say something about the way it has been rendered and it has been re-rendered in the present and this is where I want to talk about Green Island so off the southeast coast of Taiwan it's an hour ferry ride from Taidong if you're brave enough because you're sailing out into the Pacific Ocean it's reasonably terrifying I have to tell you Green Island is a volcanic atoll there's a road around it which is 18km in total length the weather facing the Pacific is extraordinarily rugged during the Japanese era Green Island was known as Kaishortou which is burned island and it's an appropriate name I can say because it's very very harsh in the summer there was a prison on Green Island in the Japanese period in 1945 the island was renamed Luta or Green Island by Taiwan's KMT government and in 1951 having been saved by the Korean War the Chinese Nationalists they established their own prison on Green Island for political prisoners the New Life Corrections Center operated from 1951 until 1965 and the Ministry of National Defense, Green Island Reform and Re-Education Prison known as Oasis Villa or Lujo Sanzong operated from 1972 to 1987 the original buildings of the New Life Corrections Center from the 50s are now mostly gone there are some kind of stone and concrete shells there's some foundations that remain Oasis Villa is mostly intact and it's been restored and maintained and of course now it's a museum there are later buildings though which were being built on this quite large site in the 1970s right up until the mid-80s and these buildings are mostly derelict including this one the history of these buildings is very complicated many institutions played across their management and their construction the derelict buildings include the library where major Guoting Liang was the head of the library he was a major in the army who was associated with supposedly a coup attempt against Chiang Kai-shek organized by General Sun Li-ran and Sun Li-ran spent the rest of his life under house arrest but Guoting Liang ended up spending most of his life on Green Island from 1955 until 1988 and of course he died in very mysterious circumstances in 1991 when he fell from a train so these buildings and their histories blur into each other the boundaries of the prison sites constantly shifted over these decades there was construction new buildings, new administrative structures the legal and penal system of the martial law also developed over many decades and I can say having investigated this in a great deal of detail there's actually contradictory accounts of which building belongs to which who managed what and when everything was built and what exactly everything was for in the martial law period all of these buildings were part of a complex of military security, legal and incarceration institutions that operated in sites right across Taiwan so there's in Taipei in Shindian and Taidong and on Green Island and they oversaw an opaque system across Taiwan of surveillance secret military trials of dissenters their detention and their transportation and their incarceration and their ideological reeducation so all of these buildings and including their construction and their decay in a way one expression of what ultimately by the 1980s have become a vast state economy of authoritarianism and this is a vast enterprise this is ministries and bureaus and organizations and thousands and thousands of people managing this system it's an economy of authoritarianism it's also an economy of violence it's institutionalized violence it's very elaborate by the 1980s by the mid-80s however as politics began to shift that economy itself was starting also to shift into something that we would recognize more as a kind of civic justice and penal system so Oasis Villa was reorganized in 1987 and there were new buildings built from 1985 to 1987 the site of all of the site was transferred from the Ministry of National Defense to the Ministry of Justice and some of the buildings and a new complex was constructed called the Green Island Vacational Training Centre and that was intended to train prisoners for life after prison it had a much more kind of conventional prison function as we would understand it but many of these buildings were abandoned in 1992 and ultimately an entirely new prison was built a bit further down the road which is still there there's a real prison there I walked up to the gates and I was told no uncertain terms that I needed to turn around and walk away and so a lot of these buildings were abandoned in 1992 and the campaign began a political campaign to restore the buildings and to recognize that they had historic value and to turn them into sites of remembrance and then they began to transition away from the Ministry of Justice to the National Tourism Bureau and then ultimately to the Ministry of Culture I was swimming the very famous democracy and Tony's nationalist activist who led that campaign in 97 so from the late 90's the structure of Taiwan's engagement with its past began to change began to take on a new form so this dispersed economy of state violence this dispersed economy of authoritarianism was re-territorialized as it were to what I'm calling an economy of memory and I'll come back to what I mean by that so the Green Island Human Rights Memorial was constructed just on the coast opposite Oasis Villa in 1999 2002 the Taiwan government designated the entire site as a memorial and it became the Green Island Human Rights Culture Park since 2012 the site has largely fallen under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Culture and again this expresses this really complicated institutional transformation from Ministry of National Defence Ministry of Justice to the Ministry of Culture from the militarist to the political juridical to the socio-cultural I say largely under the Ministry of Culture because there's also the Green Island Municipal Government there's the Taidong Tourism Authority and the Taidong County Government all of whom essentially fight over the management of this site in ways that are interesting today Oasis Villa is a museum site and as is the New Life Correction Centre there's a museum building in the New Life Correction Centre which has dioramas and a kind of model of the original prison site it's got displays describing the very difficult daily lives of the prisoners it like the Jingmei Human Rights Museum in Taipei it makes much use of the names of the inmates there's a number of locations where every single name is inscribed in one form or another on the literal boundary of the two sites the New Life Correction Centre in Oasis Villa are derelict buildings that were occupied until 1992 and include some of the buildings that were used for the vocational training centre and these buildings are subject currently to a Ministry of Culture Restoration Plan which was written last year but it seemed to me that their symbolic decay or their actual decay symbolically represented the incomplete restoration of Taiwan's history of violence so one of the derelict buildings in the New Life Correction Centre is a mess hall which is this one here and on the walls are painted slogans offering aphorisms for moral education so some of them are well known Changyu there's Zichang so you know Self-Reliance is one of them but there are a couple here which you can see on the back which will be immediately recognisable to any native Chinese speaker as adaptations of some of the sayings of Zhu Bo Lu Master Zhu and his maxims for a well-managed household which is a document written at the very early Qing period and the one that is there says with every bowl of gruel or rice you should recall that its production is not easy with half a length of silk or hemp always remember that to make things is very hard and so Zhu Bo Lu wrote he was a late Ming moralist and a writer and his text or the maxims for the well-managed household has 53 maxims on daily living I've got some of them here if taxes are paid early then although one's purse be light one will feel great satisfaction to be humble before people who are older and more experienced will serve in time of trouble value and wealth but sliding parents everything a son etc etc etc these maxims are some of the most widely produced examples of popular Confucianism and they're part of a Chinese imaginary and they crop up everywhere they're in almanacs and lots of different you find them in lots of different forms in temples all kinds of things and they're part of a Chinese imaginary an encompassing worldview of language, phraseology meaning and textual practice that seeps into a Chinese every day and becomes naturalized and normalized in people's lives and knowing these phrases and being familiar with them just recognizing them is part of how people feel Chinese and experience Chinese subjectivity just through their familiarity with these phrases and their presence in a mess hall in a military prison on Green Island is therefore entirely appropriate because it's entirely in keeping with China. The Chinese nationalists were particularly fixated on moral education as the foundation of nation building this is at the heart of the new life movement in the 1930s and they really began to develop this idea through the 50s and 60s on Taiwan so the Chinese nationalists, the KMT they mobilized these notions of moral education and they promoted them in schools, in the military, the media especially from the 1960s actually with the cultural renaissance movement that's where it really took off as a big thing this is what Alan Chun refers to as the culturalization of politics in nationalist China of taking the exercise of power and investing it and legitimizing it with cultural meaning disguising its politics as it were with, in this case sort of horial popular Confucianism from the early Qing this delivered a form of moral education legitimized by popular classical Chinese culture for the purpose of nation building it also created a distinctive national subjectivity the nationalists were reactionary in a technical sense they were incredibly fixated on communism and Taiwanese nationalism but they were also focused in a more active sense on infusing nation building and national subjectivity with a distinctively moral dimension there's one of the features of Chinese nationalism and the history of the Republic of China it has a moral morality is at the heart of its subject making it's particularly striking in the context of Taiwan and its hyper growth economy so in Taiwan subjectivity is also valorized by the economically productive citizen that you get in any kind of capitalist economy so the good person is the person who's making money and is getting a job and doing all that sort of stuff and the nationalists of course reconciled these too they understood a good citizen as someone who was both economically productive and also morally righteous in a kind of slightly cheesy Confucian sense these things these things work together in a form of righteous nation building and indeed it's perhaps not entirely surprising that the engine of Taiwan's economic growth are the so called SMEs the small and medium sized enterprises family units which are both sites of Confucian morality but also sites of economic activity so it worked particularly well for the nationalists from the 50s up until the 80s so moral education in Taiwan is institutionalized in its school system in curriculum there were local and national essaying and speech competitions in which school children had to stand up and recite popular texts like these ones these texts mobilized Chinese traditions of a particular form so popular conservative and familiar classical culture so they are all part of a process of nation building in which was making a kind of Chinese every day in people's lives it's at once familiar but also disciplinary it's very it's part of the disciplining of the subject so in Green Island of course these maxims were visited upon the prisoners and the guards in Green Island on the prison sites in this case relatively late this building was built I think it's hard to find out in 1985 which is why it's in this strange state it's derelict but it's not completely collapsed so as the prison site was transitioning from its military rule to its military governance to its judicial governance and the message in the mess hall of course is one of discipline and self-abnegation at the service of the state and its ideology so these aphorisms are signifiers of an ideologically and institutionally constructed Chinese imaginary and everyday Chineseness and all that sort of stuff a Chinese worldview but it's one that is imposed with ideological political and if necessary I'm sure violent force in that location through the institutions of authoritarianism so what you get with these aphorisms then the transmission of early Qing popular imperial culture through the nation building ideology of the Republic and then transformed into a particular kind of patrician banality into an economy of state violence in the martial law period the maxims intersected with violence of course and they mobilized this classical legacy and in this way the maxims and these aphorisms are a mechanism for concealing or effacing this violence so it's not just an experience of lived violence it's a violent place it's a place in which you're living in an economy of violence but you're still looking at these rather cheesy patrician aphorisms which are telling you to mind every bowl of rice and every bowl of gruel that you're eating little moral tales that you're being told so these maxims are concealing they're effacing they're doing a very particular thing in this context and I'm sure for the people who were seeing them you could call them, I'm sure they were sites of microaggressions people would have looked at them and read them angrily they wouldn't have just read them and said oh yes I must mind every bowl of rice they would have felt very aggrieved at having been confronted by them if they were stuck in a prison nowadays of course everything is very different authoritarianism has gone Taiwan is a democracy and the institutional transformation that this was all that arrived upon all of these sites happened a long time ago which is why some of them are derelict so what this means I think is that the aphorisms now when you see them now left behind in a derelict building have become a a space that exists across multiple planes of temporality there's a kind of series of echoes so at the time they were these sites of violence these sites of aggression microaggressions that have faced the true nature of the violence that people were subjected to but when you see them now they're very very different things they've taken on a radically different sort of meaning their echoes they are received again from the past in the present but they are functioning very very differently the violence of the past arrives in these these little aphorisms through a kind of recursive double reading so seen today they are no longer sites of violence they're sites of remembrance or forgetting you can read them as an example of the Chinese every day from the early Qing you can read them as sites of violence but you can also read them as the transformation of those things you can read them now as artifacts that expressed the way people had to live 40, 50 years ago on Green Island they are texts that capture the notion of memorialization and remembrance in a very particular way so the economy of violence of these texts once concealed has now been revealed so you can see them and you can know everything that happened behind them but like they're meaning in the martial law period they don't arrive as sites of remembrance or memory neutrally or naturally or unproblematically so they're arriving embedded in a new set of institutions and that themselves create new ways in very particular ways of reading them in particular we are being guided to read them so the memorial sites, the museums, the restored buildings the unrestored buildings, the Jingmei Human Rights Museum and Taipei all of these sites all of them have a very particular and elaborated form of institutional guidance as to the correct way to read the past and understand what happened in Taiwan so in the case of the Green Island Human Rights Museum it has a particular set of precepts it is to understand history of the striving for human rights in Taiwan to be aware of the importance of protecting the environment and to build up a culture of freedom and peace Green Island and Jingmei and Taipei are very pedagogical in their impetus their specific goal in all of the material they produce is to educate the Taiwanese people in the present about the suffering of political prisoners in the past so as to avoid repeating those mistakes that's what people say the guides who take you around so the displays in the museums the projects of which there are many to record the experiences of prisoners numerous instances of the museums where former prisoners reflect and reminisce in various displays all of these are part of a narrative of survival of people telling their stories that is explicitly in the material the museums produce intended to educate the Taiwanese out of the fear that they will forget and this is part of that anxiety and it's not just museums, the DPP does this as well in other words, you can see where I'm going the museumification of Green Island is itself a form of moral education the visitor is guided through these exhibitions and the artifacts including the ones yet to be restored the recreations of the experience of prisoners all of that sort of stuff to come to the correct way of reading them we're being guided through these places so this is a form of moral education which echoes the moral education of republic in China but it's not to create the kind of idealized national citizen of the ROC of the republic but rather it invokes a kind of idealized Taiwanese democratic citizen and this is a very distinctive form of democratic subjectivity this isn't the Habermasian ideal of the rational technocratic subject who sort of looks at all of the information and makes the most rational choice as a voter or as a as a policy maker as those enlightenment traditions this is a democratic citizen for whom citizenship is grounded in an understanding of the moral lessons of Taiwan's struggle for democracy and those lessons are expressed through the subjective experience of political prisoners they are embodied and idealized through the lives of those prisoners through notions of forbearance dignity suffering in the face of unreasonable and capricious violence so when you see these these aphorisms now you're being guided to double read them you're being guided to recognize that what they express is the suffering of the prisoners as part of a form of moral education so do we lose maxims these maxims for the management of a well managed household they're available to be read as a new kind of moral lesson just as they were available to be read as a kind of expression of nationalist citizenship so in conclusion if do we lose writing in its usage in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s concealed a kind of economy of authoritarian violence what kind of economy do they conceal now and this is my conclusion Green Island is just one memorial site in Taiwan among dozens of memorial sites that are proliferating as I said at the beginning there are two 228 museums in Taipei there are multiple 228 memorials there's a new relatively new white terror memorial near the presidential building in Taipei there are memorial websites there are multiple memory projects being conducted by the Ministry of Culture by academia, Seneca universities there's an absolute explosion of cultural products of books, of comics, movies all of these dealing with the past and uncovering, revealing, capturing all of those things in lots of different ways some of them are funny, some of them are mostly very, very serious there's also as I said at the beginning the repurposing of historic sites for creative zones and art precincts that steep Taiwanese contemporary art in the past that locate contemporary art in historic locations as it were to cleanse or sanctify the past through the ideals of artistic expression with all of the moral dimension that that captures so all of these suggest an altogether different array of institutional economics what might be called an economy of memory so memory in Taiwan is not simply the public memorialization of what once might have been kept private as a social process it isn't a few things it isn't just like Anzac Day or the war memorial it's an expanding array it's a proliferating, it's growing an expanding array of institutional arrangements that are engaging in the act of democratic Taiwanese excuse me national subject making and they're going through that in the same way that the KMT did 50 years ago my final comment will be that this is an interesting challenge the question that it raises ultimately is will it really work for the Taiwanese, will they get to the end of this process and think well we don't seem to have got to the core here we've just sort of created another institution of moral education to train us to be good democratic subjects so where will that lead I think it would lead to continuing contestation and continuing and acrimonious and complex debate within Taiwanese society so I'll stop there and say thank you very much