Review

A review for the China Quarterly

Lien Heng: Taiwan’s Search for Identity and Tradition
Shu-hui Wu
Indiana University Press, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, Bloomington, Indiana, 2005.

Lien Heng (1878-1936) was a leading intellectual in Taiwan, active during the Japanese colonial period from 1895 to 1945. His contemporary claim to fame is two-fold, that he wrote the first modern history of Taiwan, T’aiwan t’ung-shih (The General History of Taiwan) published in 1920, and that he is the grandfather of the former Chairman of the KMT and failed presidential candidate Lien Chan.

Those two facts are enough to warrant academic interest in Lien, but as Shu-hui Wu’s book amply demonstrates, scholarly knowledge of Lien’s whole life and work is a significant addition to the tremendous amount of scholarship currently being undertaken on Taiwan’s Japanese colonial history. Lien’s life as an historian, poet and political activist has been overshadowed by his contemporaries, especially Lin Hsien-t’ang and T’sai P’ei-huo, and therefore Wu’s biography is timely and important.

Wu’s book tracks through Lien’s life in broadly chronological order, from his early years born into a prosperous southern Taiwanese family. Lien’s father, Lien Yung-ch’ang, ran a large food and agricultural business with an estate, and from these comfortable circumstances, Lien developed as a young scholar-poet, then journalist and newspaper editor and into a serious historian. Lien’s life expresses the complex developments in Taiwan over the end of Ch’ing rule and Japanese colonial rule. In his early life the imperial education system maintained tenuous viability as a path to social advancement, and with its sudden dissolution by colonialization, many young educated Taiwanese made the transition from nascent careers in the imperial state to those more imagined in modernity, as journalists, fiction writers and editors. And yet Chinese imperial culture retained a powerful legitimacy on Taiwan under the Japanese, and took on an elegiac, nostalgic quality. Lien and his friends and colleagues continued to aspire to the life of a Confucian gentleman-scholar, which they played out in poetry societies and their assumption of the role of the legitimate representatives of the people of Taiwan.

Wu effectively traces the complex shifts in responses to Japanese rule among different generations of Taiwanese. Hung Hsü, who wrote Shih-shih san-tzu-ching (Narrating Contemporary Affairs) struggled to maintain a Ch’ing identity for Taiwan; Ts’ai P’ei-huo could be seen as a Taiwanese proto-nationalist; while in between them in age and attitudes was Lien – committed to Chinese intellectual life, but also deeply attached to Taiwan.

Wu locates Lien’s life within the milieu of the time, discussing his involvement in Taiwan’s political movements, such as the Assimilation Society and the Taiwan Cultural Association, and his close relationships with Itagaki Taisuke and Lin Hsien-t’ang. She also details his times in China and Japan, and shows the movement of ideas and writings among activists and intellectuals up to and after the May Fourth era between China and Japan and over to Taiwan, including an excellent account of visit by Liang Ch’i-ch’ao in 1911.

The last section of Lien Heng: Taiwan’s Search for Identity and Tradition is devoted to his General History. Wu describes the influence on Lien of Liang’s reworking classical Chinese historiography, producing Taiwanese history as an unfolding teleology from settlement through development, and ending with Japan’s annexation. But she is also open in criticizing Lien’s failure to take on Hu Shih’s fundamentally modern historiography. Lien treated the written record as truth, rather than applying principles of skepticism and verifiability and reproduced a significant number of historical errors in his work.

Also very effective is Wu’s tracing of the connections between Lien’s historiography and that of the historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien, showing the limits of Lien’s creative historical method and his attachment to classical Chinese culture. Lien used biographies and explicitly emphasized Confucianist morality as an implicit explanatory mechanism for Taiwan’s historical development.

Where Lien Heng: Taiwan’s Search for Identity and Tradition is less effective is its own lack of an explicit historiography or attention to the methodological issues of academic biographies. Wu’s approach is fundamentally descriptive of Lien’s material and intellectual life, but does not address where the boundaries of such an approach should be drawn. She offers the tantalizing anecdote of Lien’s relationship with Wang Hsiang-ch’an, who was a Taiwanese geisha, opening a glimpse into Taiwan’s rich social world of the period, but does not follow through into what is potentially as interesting as Lien’s intellectual activities.

More fundamental is the problem of Lien and Taiwanese identity, which is often implied in Wu’s text. She emphasizes his love of the island, especially its natural environment, and his desire to document its historical and cultural development. Simply writing a history of Taiwan is a complex ideological act of identity-making. Yet much of Lien’s intellectual activity was directed towards the self-conscious cultivation of his Chinese intellectual heritage. The contradictions between Lien’s own goals and his place within the articulations of Taiwanese identity needs a strong statement of historiography and methodology to fully explore and assess Lien’s place in Taiwan’s development as a polity and a legitimate, bounded discourse in its own right. Lien Heng: Taiwan’s Search for Identity and Tradition is not able to fully elaborate how Lien might be so assessed.

Nevertheless, its achievement as a very strong and detailed history, including a wealth of new material covering an enormous range of historical sources makes Lien Heng: Taiwan’s Search for Identity and Tradition a valuable addition to scholarship on Taiwan’s colonial period.

The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan

Another book review, from earlier this year, for the China Quarterly. University of Hawai'i Press, David Jordan, Andrew Morris, and Marc Moskowitz are the editors

The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan, David Jordan, Andrew Morris, and Marc Moskowitz (eds.) University of Hawai'i Press, 2005.

From the early 1990s, the study of Taiwan has flourished into what is almost a field in its own right. Yet despite this growth, Taiwan Studies remains an unstable and inchoate area of scholarship. Beyond key issues like democratization, national identity, and the “miracle economy”, it has no dominant problematics, discursive structures or proscribed methodologies. And unlike Chinese Studies, it is too small a field to be clearly demarcated into sub-fields. As a result, the study of Taiwan is unusually open to any and all possible topics for study. Indeed, the free play of the range of subjects in Taiwan Studies is one aspect of the continuing establishment and consolidation of the meaning of “Taiwan” itself, and of a Taiwanese identity, over the last ten to twenty years.“The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular culture in Taiwan”, edited by David Jordan, Andrew Morris, and Marc Moskowitz, is in the first instance an excellent contribution to this developing field, but it is also indicative of the challenges to producing legitimate academic knowledge of Taiwan.
The book begins with a review of Taiwanese history, which is a even now can be a necessary opening step to establish the discursive boundaries of a scholarly project on Taiwan. The introductory chapter presents what has become a received history of Taiwan, organizing it by ruling regimes over the last four centuries. This history was established most clearly in English by the work of Thomas Gold in the mid-1980s and here it is filled out with much detail and nuance.

The body of the book is divided into four sections organized into generalizing categories: religion, the public sphere, economic life, and popular entertainment. The methodologies include social history in Morris’s chapter on baseball, anthropology in Katz’s work on chicken-beheading rites, and media studies in Chu’s chapter on talk-back television. Simon’s work on gay and lesbian identity and Chin-ju Lin’s chapter on Filipino domestic workers in Taiwan also add an important critical dimension.

All of the individual chapters are worthwhile contributions to knowledge of contemporary Taiwan. As a whole, the book suffers to varying degrees from an inconsistent application of social theorizing across each chapter. Chien-juh Gu’s piece on Amway in Taiwan offers many remarkable insights into the socio-economic history of the direct selling as it has been “translated” into a Taiwanese social experience, but applies the work of Foucault somewhat programatically to fill out its descriptive analysis. SImilarly, Shuenn-der Yu’s chapter on night markets can only acknowledge the broad theoretical categories of space and time, as well as the Taiwan-specific category of xiangtu, within a detailed account of social practices.

In contrast, Moskovitz’s short concluding chapter on the film Ghost Story works with some pointed Freudian concepts drawn effectively from cinema studies, and integrates them effectively into some anthropological insights.

However, the chapter highlights a key issue in the study of Taiwan which the book fails to thoroughly address, which is where to set the boundaries of a specifically Taiwanese experience under scholarly analysis. Moskovitz’s chapter begins with a rather cursory attempt to argue why a Hong Kong film should find a place in a book on Taiwanese popular culture. Ghost Story’s success in the Taiwanese commercial film market might make it a legitimate object of study as a film on Taiwan, but the underlying question is the specific basis upon which it can be classified as “Taiwanese”. Moskovitz identifies it as Hong Kong film, and is therefore posits the operation of a complex inter-cultural relationship which the chapter and the book overall does not explicitly address.

A fundamental issue in the study of Taiwan continues to be the discursive operations through which a specifically Taiwanese culture is being identified and inscribed, and the ideological implications for drawing such a boundary in terms of the elaboration of Taiwanese identity. “The Minor Arts of Daily Life” is a valuable contribution to the study of Taiwan, but this larger question remains unaddressed.

Envisioning Taiwan

A book review for the SOAS Bulletin.

Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, June Yip, Duke University Press, 2004.

In the last ten years, there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in Taiwan, as its democratic political transformation has consolidated, and its relationship with mainland China has become openly difficult, and it has asserted its autonomy and identity. Just as Taiwanese themselves have laid claim to the legitimacy of a specifically “Taiwanese” cultural and social experience, so too has scholarly attention turned to elucidate precisely what that might mean. In its position across Asia's discursive boundaries, between China and Japan and Asia and the west, as well as the more conceptual boundaries of modernity and post-modernity, scholars have found Taiwan one of the richest and most complex sites of politics, culture and identity in Asia. Indeed, it is now possible to see sufficient coherence to this scholarship to talk about the emergence of a “Taiwan Studies”.

Review of The Hobbit, at aged 9

We're moving offices this week, and I packed up a box of miscellany which I had shipped all the way from Australia and which included this. I couldn't believe it. I remember being terrified as it came to my turn to read it out to the class in the library at Artarmon Primary School. The thrills and anxieties of childhood.

The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkein is an exciting and delightful tale of high adventure, undertaken by a company of dwarves, in search of dragon-guarded treasure. Accompanying them on this perilous quest is a rather reluctant Mr Bilbo Baggins, a comfort-loving, unambitious Hobbit, who surprises even himself by his resourcefulness and skill as a burglar.

He encounters giant spiders in the frightening, dark and magical forest of Mirkwood. Evil goblins that live in the unexplored depths of the Great Misty Mountains, where he also discovers the magical ring owned by Gollum, which has the remarkable ability to make the wearer invisible, but unbeknowns to him posses (sic) a far greater power than he ever imagined.

In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture

A book review published in the magazine Art Asia Pacific while I was at the Australian National University as a visiting fellow.

In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture, by Geremie Barmé, Columbia University Press, 1999.

Geremie Barmé has a well-earned reputation as l’enfant terrible of Chinese Studies in Australia. With an early career as a journalist in Hong Kong, his forays into installations and film-making, a penchant for anti-academy-speak – not to mention saying “fuck” on national television during coverage of the handover of Hong Kong – Barmé is a colourful iconoclast whose academic output is only one part of a virtuosic oevre.