The Cold War and post-Cold War dynamics of Taiwan and East Asia in people's security perspective

This paper was originally written as a keynote speech for a specific occasion, an international forum that was held by the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT) in Taipei in February 2001, to discuss Taiwan's international status in the post-Cold War era. The PCT is known as a strong advocate of Taiwan independence and democratization, and I had this specific audience in mind in organizing this paper. My concern was that the independence advocacy that had aptly expressed people's aspirations in the democratization movement under the iron-fist rule of KMT was being subsumed, as Taiwan polity was Taiwanized and democratized, into a banal statist discourse. This discourse, I am afraid, has distanced itself from its original popular source and become the elite politicians' discourse, indifferent to the everyday life and security of the people in Taiwan. I approached this problematic from the perspective of 'people's security', which I discussed in my previous essay on the topic in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies , vol. 2, no. 1. As the mutual relationships between East Asian countries had to be shaped overwhelming by the US Cold War rhetoric and material influences, discussing Taiwan with regard to the transition to the post-Cold War era required me to go, albeit in outline, into the basics of these relationships as well as the modes of US hegemony in this region both in the Cold War and post-Cold War settings. I felt that characterization of these diverse elements, if sketchy, was indispensable to discussing the topic, Taiwan today. At my friends' suggestion, I tried to revise the original paper to fit into the concerns of the general readership, with the different aspects mentioned more fully explained. However, I have found this difficult as it would require me to write a completely new article, or maybe a whole book. So I present this paper almost as it was written for the original PCT audience.     

Facing history,resolving disputes,working towards peace in East Asia: a statement by the Minjian East Asia Forum

Preface ?Concerned with the escalation of territorial disputes in East Asia since July, we proposed setting up the Minjian East Asia Forum (the Forum hereafter) on October 6, 2012, serving as a platform for East Asian people to face regional disputes and exchange opinions together. Minjian is a Chinese term that has counterparts in Japanese, as minkan, and in Korean as mingan, based on the same Chinese characters. Although used differently with different meanings in each context, minjian, as used here, refers to the non-governmental, popular voices and organizations, initiated by the people. Although the Forum was started to respond to and engage in the recent territorial disputes, it was not created out of thin air, but on the foundation of East Asian solidarities built by many predecessors over the last 30 years.1 “In the last two decades, we have participated in the minjian, read here as people-based and hence non-governmental, solidarity movement of various kinds—including Asia Regional Network for Alternatives (ARENA, 1980s), the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements (2000–), the East Asia Critical Journals Conference (2006–), and West Heavens: India China Summit on Social Thought (2010–). We also established the Inter-Asia School (2011–) and organized the first Asian Circle of Thought in Shanghai (2012) as well as the Modern Asian Thought project (2012–). In doing this work, we follow the footsteps of Ashis Nandy, Muto Ichiyo, Chen Yingzhen, Paik Nak-Chung, and the late Mizoguchi Yuzo. In moving around Asia, we created a linkage between circles of critical intellectuals and movement, and by talking to friends in the circle of thought, we came to realize that within the entire expanse of Asia, East Asia is the region that experiences the greatest difficulty in stepping outside of the Cold War division and in reimagining the region as a collectivity. Especially when China and India are fast developing their economies, we must be more aware of the social contradictions and inequalities that are deepening in the region, as well as the role each state plays in the global inter-state system. In this complex and volatile context, we must try to find a better road to development—for public good, justice, equality, and world peace. Unfortunately, the party politics in each state has blocked the proactive interaction within the region for its own interest. Even when East Asian states are imagining an East Asian community, a common platform for civil societies to communicate and address issues that are of regional significance is achingly absent. In this sense, our imagination of ‘minjian East Asia’ is a people-based, non-governmental platform for regional dialogue that attempts to check and balance the exchange of interest based on party politics, and monitor the governments, preventing them from making arbitrary decisions that will escalate tension and threaten peace in the region” (Chen et al. 2013 Chen, Kuan-Hsing, Chih-Ming Wang and Qingya Hu. 2013. Minjian East Asia Forum: feelings and imaginations. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 14(2) ,, this issue[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). We expect the Forum (with the secretariat to be based in Seoul) to become a people-to-people network that will continue to extend beyond borders and express people's voices, fostering the steady development of peace in Asia and the world through communication, conversation, and collaboration.     

National pride,social trust,and cultural nativism: Findings from East and Southeast Asia

Using the latest (fourth) wave of Asian Barometer Survey (2014–2016), this study examines how national pride and two types of trust (general and particular) are related to nativist preference (cultural nativism), independent of anti-immigration attitudes, among citizens in East and Southeast Asian countries. Findings from multilevel models show that, at the individual level, national pride and particular trust are positively related to cultural nativism, while general trust is negatively related. At the subnational-regional level, we also find significant contextual effects. Living in geographic areas with greater national pride is positively associated with nativist preference, as is residency in places with higher levels of particular trust. In contrast, residency in subnational contexts with higher levels of general trust is negatively associated. Finally, the association between national pride and cultural nativism is stronger in regions with greater contextual national pride.     

Murakami Haruki and the historical memory of East Asia

Abstract

In this article, I would like to focus on an analysis of internal logic of the ‘Haruki phenomenon’ as a symptom in current East Asian public culture. In particular, I will discuss how Haruki searches for the healing method for the ‘60s complex’ among Japan’s ‘Sixties’ Kids,’ including Haruki himself, through an analysis of his novels Norwegian Wood (2000[1987]) and Kafka on the Shore (2005[2002]). In the process of analysis, we can witness that Haruki abandoned his task of ‘reconciliation with the 1960s’ through faith, rather than facing it directly, and fiznally stripped the 1960s of historicity and reality. He regarded the ‘reconciliation with the 1960s’ as something beyond an individual’s ability. Transforming the 1960s from a history of postwar Japan into an object of abstract and universal nostalgia, which is closed to the present, Haruki effectively met the latent desire of the East Asian people, who were experiencing the dissolution of their ideologies, at the right time. This is the essence of the Haruki phenomenon that emerged in East Asia over the last decade. I use the phrase ‘nostalgia that lost its nationality’ to describe the uncanny cultural phenomenon of East Asian readers longing for the 1960s pictured in Haruki’s novels as if this were their own past, despite their very different national memories. Nostalgia, a cultural symptom of the postmodern society, where remembering the nation’s past totally is impossible, is a blank imitation deprived of its original source. In short, the substance of the Haruki phenomenon is nostalgia that developed from a desire to forget the traumatic memories of the national histories in individual East Asian countries.     

Implications of Chinese empire discourses in East Asia: critical studies on China

Abstract

China is characterized by a long history, vast land, huge population and diversity unprecedented in world history. In addition, she is a unique case that has successfully completed the transition from empire to the nation-state. Therefore, her historical independence and her continuity become very important subject areas for research, and the concept “empire” re-emerges as a major means of explanation. The essential defining features of empire are tolerance and expansion. I have been reviewing discourses on “China as Empire,” looking at studies of the tributary system, the civilization-state, and the Tianxia view raised from both inside and outside of China. A common characteristic of these discourses is the perception that the past, present and future of China cannot be fully explained by Western concepts such as nation-state. They also reveal that the supposed continuity with the past, which is overemphasized in many studies, does not necessarily always correspond with historical reality. The key focus of the empire discourses is the project of future China. Finally, I put a particular emphasis upon the “perspective of peripheries” in order to find ways to demonstrate the benefits of viewing China as an empire, while also overcoming the weaknesses of empire theory. It is the reason why I apply to the analysis of the empire discourses the “compound state” theory incubated as a way of reunification of the Korean Peninsula.     

Teenage Kicks: Exploring cultural value from a youth perspective

In contemporary accounts of cultural value, young people's perspectives are often restricted to analyses of their encounters with formal cultural institutions or schools or to debates surrounding the cultural implications of new digital spaces and technologies. Other studies have been dominated by instrumental accounts exploring the potential economic benefit and skills development facilitated by young people's cultural encounters and experiences. In this paper we examine the findings of a nine month project, which set out to explore what cultural value means to young people in Bristol. Between October 2013 and March 2014, the Arts and Humanities Research Council “Teenage Kicks” project organised 14 workshops at 7 different locations across the city, with young people aged 11–20. Working in collaboration with a network of cultural and arts organisations, the study gathered a range of empirical data investigating the complex ecologies of young people's everyday/“lived” cultures and values. Young people's own accounts of their cultural practices challenge normative definitions of culture and cultural value but also demonstrate how these definitions act to reproduce social inequalities in relation to cultural participation and social and cultural capital. The paper concludes that cultural policy-makers should listen and take young people's voices seriously in re-imaging the city's cultural offer for all young people.     

Decolonizing educational/curriculum studies in East Asia: problematizing shadow education in South Korea

This essay review critically engages Young Chun Kim's book, Shadow Education and the Curriculum and Culture of Schooling in South Korea, by responding to two central questions at its heart: What does decolonization of educational research mean and what does it look like? In what way can cultural studies of countries with histories of colonized educational systems challenge the inertia to recapitulate colonized historical consciousness? Kim provides theoretical and empirical foundations for generating intellectual space that reveals the dialectical relationship between the dominant modes of discourse in educational research and aspirations of the colonized to envision their own educational culture and history.     

The camera in pain: memories of the Cold War in East Asian independent documentaries

Abstract

This article begins with a discussion of the changing topography of cultural production in East Asia over the last 25?years, especially as it concerns the genre of independent documentary film, and then it turns to three independent documentaries filmed in Japan and North Korea, South Korea and Japan, and China, respectively: Yang Yong-hi's Dear Pyongyang (2005 Dear Pyongyang. 2005. Directed by Yang Yong-hi. Busan International Film Festival. [Google Scholar]), Mun Jeong-hyun's Grandmother's Flower (2007 Grandmother's Flower. 2007. Directed by Mun Jeong-hyun. Busan International Film Festival: [Google Scholar]), and Wang Bing's He Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2006). Erased from the official historical record and excluded from public commemoration, the alternate history of pain traced by these documentaries resubmits the Cold War to examination from deep inside its most private wounds. In the process, the filmmakers encounter not only the memories of the earlier generation that lived through the most violent episodes of the Cold War, but also come to question their own history and identities within the process of the Cold War's decomposition.     

Transpacific precarities: responding to Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found and Rita Wong’s forage in East Asia

ABSTRACT

This essay investigates the stakes involved in responding to transpacific texts in East Asia, specifically in universities in Macau and Taiwan. It focuses on responses to two texts that represent in distinct ways precariatized lives in a transpacific frame: Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found, a text that uncovers a path from Laos to a refugee camp in Thailand to Canada, a path made legible through a scrapbook kept by Thammavongsa’s father; and Rita Wong’s forage, a text that cuts across and between South China and North America to track the movements of peoples and goods and waste, including the movement of electronic waste (or “e-waste”). By discussing selected responses to these texts, this essay investigates how such responses can be considered as part of a long-term pedagogical process of cultivating imaginations and striving to develop forms of responsibility to what this essay calls transpacific precarities. It suggests that carefully attending to such responses, always partial and in progress, can help us to better understand Asian American studies in East Asia as it continues to evolve through acts of teaching and learning in different sites.     

Conviviality as a politics of endurance: the refugee emergency and the consolations of artistic intervention

ABSTRACT

Against the impasse of despair in the public response to the refugee emergency, artistic interventions emerge to offer fleeting significant opportunities for restorative and reparative action. This article takes up conviviality as a conceptual tool to understand artistic interventions to the forced migration and asylum issues that variably aim for healing, empathy, and reflexivity. Drawing on comparative research consisting of interviews of artists in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States and textual analyses of their performances, we discuss specific motivations and diverse representational practices that aim to enact togetherness-in-difference. We discuss the potentials and risks of convivial artistic productions, which we argue produce a politics of endurance that, as Feldman has said, helps “people live better with circumstances they cannot change.”     

East Asia informal networks beyond the borders: sharing of ideas,skills, and experiences against capitalization of the commons

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the practices of networking by cultural collectives relating to art/activism in Asia. In recent years, independent, grassroots cultural and social spaces based on equal membership and multi-level networks have been created in this area. These spaces also function as experimental places to create models of alternative societies featuring sustainable lifestyles by connecting people beyond separate genres, such as art, music, agriculture, and craft. Thus, the practice of creating such places leads to an attempt to form new social relationships for common life, creation, and labor through the networking of individuals’ lives, which have become withdrawn, isolated, and forcefully separated by repressive social structures. Moreover, gathering at these places creates a collective subjectivity and shared emotions among their members. In many areas, collective political and artistic practices have been created, which transcend borders, cultures, and languages. The sharing processes of such practices have been steadily advancing.     

The politics of imagining Asia: a genealogical analysis

Abstract

Following the recent trends of globalization and regionalization, the idea of Asia has been revived in political, economic, and cultural fields. This essay examines some of the various uses of this idea in modern East Asian and especially Chinese history. The essay consists of four parts. Part One discusses the derivativeness of the idea of Asia, that is, how this idea developed from modern European history, especially the nineteenth‐century European narrative of ‘World History,’ and it points out how the early modern Japanese ‘theory of shedding Asia’ derived from this narrative. Part Two studies the relationship between the idea of Asia and two forms of populism against the background of the Chinese and Russian revolutions – one, exemplified by Russian Narodism, attempted to use Asian particularity to challenge modern capitalism; the other, represented by Sun Yat‐sen, attempted to construct a nation‐state according to a socialist revolutionary program, and to develop agricultural capitalism under the particular social conditions of Asia. Part Three considers the differences and tensions between the ‘Great Asia‐ism’ of Chinese revolutionaries such as Sun and the Japanese idea of East Asia (Tōyō),and it discusses the need to overcome the categories of nation‐state and international relations in order to understand the question of Asia. Part Four discusses the need to go beyond early modern maritime‐centered accounts, nationalist frameworks, and Eurocentrism in re‐examining the question of Asia through historical research by focusing on the particular legacies of Asia and Toyo (such as the tributary system) and the problems of ‘early modernity.’     

Trajectories,institutions, and re-locations: a conversation on Inter-Asia outside Asia

ABSTRACT

This conversation explores the resonances of the Inter-Asia project outside the geographical boundaries of Asia. The participants, who represent diverse national, institutional, and professional experiences, discuss the following topics: how Asia and the Inter-Asia project has affected their intellectual trajectories; navigating academic institutions and formations; the changing meaning of diaspora and migration and their effects on language and communication; and the relationship between the academy and social movements. Particular attention is paid to reframing Australia and Canada from an Inter-Asia perspective.