Mini Dragons – Taiwan (1991)

This is the Taiwan episode from a 1991 Australian documentary series about the four little dragons, or Asian tigers. Like all documentaries, it says as much about the maker as the subject. In this instance it expresses Australia’s uncertain reorientation towards Asia and the appeal of, and anxiety caused by, the success of the Asian economies at a time when Australia’s was painfully restructuring along neo-liberal lines. It also says a lot about Taiwan, and although there are some simplifications, it gets the major issues pretty right, and offers some interesting images of the politics of the period. And in the last year many of those issues seemed to have returned to beset Taiwanese political and social life.
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