The current Hong Kong situation is the product of a long-term accumulation of crises and the consequences of the broader interplay of clashes among nations. Taiwan has long seen the PRC's treatment of Hong Kong as a barometer of its Taiwan policy. The “One Country, Two Systems” formula was proposed with an eye on Taiwan. In recent years, Beijing seemed to decouple the Hong Kong-Taiwan nexus as it began to turn the screws on Hong Kong. Taiwan has played a significant but often misunderstood role in Hong Kong's resistance to Chinese domination. This article explores the political impact of the Hong Kong-Taiwan civil society nexus from the early 2010s, through the Umbrella Movement (2014), to the Anti-Extradition Movement (2019) and the implementation of the National Security Law (2020). The ever-more repressive measures China imposed on both Hong Kong and Taiwan have given rise to close and lively exchanges between both civil societies. Taiwan may play a supporting role in Hong Kong's resistance to Chinese repression and subordination.

This article focuses on three of Tsushima Yūko's later works. It examines Tsushima's criticism of Japanese ruling policy, especially aboriginal policies in colonial Taiwan, in All Too Barbarian. The second, Reed Boat, Flying, exposes the repressed history of how, just after Japan's defeat in the Second World War, Japanese women returning from Manchuria who were raped by Russian or other foreign soldiers were forced into having abortions. Wildcat Dome, written after the 3.11 disasters, discloses how the inter-racial children born between Japanese women and American soldiers were discriminated against in postwar Japan.

In this article Izumikawa Yuki, an international relations expert, dispels two core misconceptions undergirding the notion that China is a particularly belligerent state that unilaterally engages in aggressive behavior threatening the national security of Japan. The first is that the Senkaku Islands, or Diaoyu Islands as they are known in China, are Japan's territory, on which China has been illegally or unfairly encroaching. The other misconception is that if and when China violently grabs Taiwan for itself, preventing Taiwan from gaining independence in some kind of “Taiwan contingency,” Japan will have the duty and the right to defend Taiwan's independence. Even only equipped with a simple map of Taiwan showing the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands close by, and having the knowledge that Taiwan was originally taken away from China by the Empire of Japan during the war of aggression known as the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), would make one suspicious of the “China threat theory,” but Izumikawa provides readers with some neglected facts concerning international law and history, and pokes holes in the narrative that is broadcasted daily by the mass media.

The main elements in Taiwan's green power shift are reviewed, with focus on developments since the election of the DPP government in early 2016 and its commitment to phase out nuclear power in Taiwan by 2025. The drivers of the shift are identified, concentrating on solar PV power and the potential for offshore wind power. Like other countries in East Asia similarly pursuing a green shift, Taiwan is as much concerned with the business and export prospects for green industry as with reducing carbon emissions. The argument is developed that further progress in Taiwan is linked to liberalization of the electric power sector, creating genuine competition for the quasi-monopoly, TaiPower.

Between 1894 and 1936, Imperial Japan fought several “small wars” against Tonghak Rebels, Taiwanese millenarians, Korean Righteous Armies, Germans in Shandong, Taiwan Indigenous Peoples, and “bandits” in Manchuria. Authoritative accounts of Japanese history ignore these wars, or sanitize them as “seizures,” “cessions,” or occasions for diplomatic maneuvers. The consigning the empire's “small wars” to footnotes (at best) has in turn promoted a view that Japanese history consists of alternating periods of “peacetime” (constitutionalism) and “wartime” (militarism), in accord with the canons of liberal political theory. However, the co-existence of “small wars” with imperial Japan's iconic wars indicates that Japan was a nation at war from 1894 through 1945. Therefore, the concept “Forever War” recommends itself for thinking about militarism and democracy as complementary formations, rather than as opposed forces. The Forever-War approach emphasizes lines of continuity that connect “limited wars” (that mobilized relatively few Japanese soldiers and civilians, but were nonetheless catastrophic for the colonized and occupied populations on the ground) with “total wars” (that mobilized the whole Japanese nation against the Qing, imperial Russia, nationalist China, and the United States). The steady if unspectacular operations of Forever War– armed occupations, settler colonialism, military honor-conferral events, and annual ceremonies at Yasukuni Shrine–continued with little interruption even during Japan's golden age of democracy and pacifism in the 1920s. This article argues that Forever War laid the infrastructural groundwork for “total war” in China from 1937 onwards, while it produced a nation of decorated, honored, and mourned veterans, in whose names the existing empire was defended at all costs against the United States in the 1940s. In Forever War—whether in imperial Japan or elsewhere–soldiering and military service become ends in themselves, and “supporting the troops” becomes part of unthinking, common sense.

China's international position is quite strong: it has leverage over Russia, which is increasingly dependent on China for economic and military aid; and it is in a strong bargaining position with the European Union, which relies on Chinese trade and investment. These circumstances might not seem conducive to improvement in China-U.S. relations, especially since many longstanding issues, such as on Taiwan and trade, remain unresolved. But progress in some areas, notably military-to-military talks, have (as Chinese officials see it) “stabilized” relations. This article argues that if the U.S. develops a China policy that emphasizes finding common ground rather than, as at present, devising ways to contain and deter China, some elements of China's foreign policy might change and serious tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea islands could be calmed. Furthermore, it addresses incentives–in particular, U.S. acceptance of the Chinese principle of partnership, not rivalry– to wean

This article investigates the history and contemporary development of the local antinuclear experience in Gongliao district, Taiwan. It traces villagers' intricate relations with political parties, their frustration with the decision making process, and efforts to sustain local anti-nuclear momentum at a time when the anti-nuclear movement was in decline. By exploring local villagers' three decades of antinuclear efforts, this article focuses on their change of tactics, networks and ideologies, and explains how these changes had happened. It argues that local anti-nuclear activists played an important role in transforming an antinuclear movement from a party-led activity to an issue-based protest independent of party control. The transformation was facilitated by the deepening of a place-based consciousness among local activists.

Seiji Shirane's Imperial Gateway: Colonial Taiwan and Japan's Expansion in South China and Southeast Asia, 1895–1945 (forthcoming with Cornell University Press in December 2022) explores the political, social, and economic significance of colonial Taiwan in the southern expansion of Japan's empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. Here's the unabridged introduction to the volume.

China's consistent message to the U.S. since Donald Trump 's election is the need for deeper cooperation. But Trump and his hawkish advisers and Congressmembers seem bent on a trade war and closer ties to Taiwan. His strategy is that once the Middle East and Ukraine are “solved,” he will be positioned to force Xi Jinping's hand. But the Chinese have options for dealing with U.S. economic pressure. Still, Trump might bargain on U.S. security ties if he can get a deal on trade. The most likely outcome is more tension in U.S.-China relations and a further drift toward Cold War-era competition.

Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895 and in the Second World War was geographically central in Japan’s wartime possessions and strategically important, with military airfields, ports, and a copper mine. Its sixteen prisoner-of-war camps included four labour camps. Taiwan was also the first place to which senior officers and colonial officials were dispersed after the Allied surrenders in Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines. Forty-five doctors from the British, Australian, Dutch and American forces were identified who spent at least part of their captivity on Taiwan. This article uses their personal accounts, official documents and secondary sources to describe them and their work. Although the oldest had experience in the First World War and some had practised in the region, others were young, recently-qualified generalists. Most were transferred between several camps, with one consequence that few contemporaneous medical records survive. Doctors shared the risks and hardships of all prisoners: they lost weight and had the same nutritional disorders, infections and infestations as their patients. Two died. They became significant, scrutinised figures in the camps. Their patients valued their work and understood that they lacked resources for fully effective medical practice.

The home rule movements in Taiwan and Korea were two major events that took place at a time when the Taisho Emperor was embracing a more liberal atmosphere. While Taiwan asked for equal standing within the Japanese empire, Korea wanted political independence from colonial rule. The different framing strategies adopted by the social activists lead to the following empirical puzzles: How did the public intellectuals and social activists define their colonial grievances in Taiwan and Korea and seize the window of opportunity in the post-WWI era? And what framing strategies did they apply in promoting their ideas of self-determination?

This article proposes a comparative analysis of Taiwan’s and Korea’s mobilization of international norms, and it investigates how their framing strategies were used in their respective home rule movements during the colonial era. Their rhetoric and mobilization finally led to Japan’s shift to a more conciliatory policy in these two colonies. The finding contributes to the theoretical development of norm contestation and discourse analysis in international relations.

The organizational structure of this article is presented as follows. First, it engages the current literature on social movements, norm diffusion, and East Asian politics, and it explores the framing strategies of the resistance to Japan’s rule by comparing Taiwanese and Korean social movements in the early 1900s. Second, this study offers a framework of norm contestation in capturing how activists in Taiwan and Korea promoted the principle of self-determination. Third, it addresses alternative explanations on the structural factors and agency in these two movements.

The East Asian democracies (EAD) of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have received little attention from the international political science community working on populism. By analyzing the last two to three decades of research on EAD we look for clues to help us explain why there is so little interest. In our review we encounter cases of eclectic conceptualization, suboptimal data, innovative categorization, binary analytics, and even political bias, all of which may weaken the persuasiveness of the respective research in the eyes of critical colleagues. Our key finding, however, is that all studies on EAD implicitly refer to local political standards as the baseline from which alleged populist behavior is identified and labeled. In direct comparison, the populist characteristics of East Asian politicians appear to be less pronounced than those of sledgehammer populists like Donald Trump, Hugo Chavez, or Boris Johnson. Consequently, scholars working on the latter may be less curious about the former. Our findings, therefore, confront us with the question of what to use as a baseline for the measurement of potentially populist phenomena. We argue for the application of what is locally considered standard political behavior and conclude that such a practice has the potential to draw more attention to cases from Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Japan is the only place in the world where bananas are marketed and priced by cultivation altitude. In the late 1980s, plantation managers sourcing the fruit from the southern Philippine region of Mindanao discovered a paradigm-shifting formula: the higher up one grew, the sweeter the bananas became. And the sweeter the bananas were, the closer they were to replicating the taste of colonial Taiwanese bananas, lost in the switch to Philippine supply. This paper offers the first transnational history of the banana’s transition along the spectrum from a fungible commodity to a nonfungible product in the Asia-Pacific region. Engaging critical studies of commodities and plantations, it takes fungibility as the characteristic that makes goods interchangeable and as the principle that renders landscape and labor as empty vessels open to the projection of others’ desires. The paper argues that the introduction of kōchi saibai banana or “highland cultivated bananas” for the Japanese market brought not the reversal of fungible life to the Philippine highlands but rather its continuation. In so doing, this work critiques conceptual frameworks that understand fungibility through the idioms of liquidification and immateriality. Instead, it proposes a topographical approach, which sees processes of fungibilization as operating through the profoundly material rearrangement of human and environmental communities. By focusing on the tensions between fungibility and differentiation, this paper offers an account of both an idiosyncratic marketing strategy particular to the Philippines and Japan, and a dynamic that pervades the creation of all commodities under capitalism.