published_or_final_version / Comparative Asian Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Social Work and Social Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The consolidation of Taiwanese identity in recent years has been accompanied by two interrelated paradoxes: a continued language shift from local Taiwanese languages to Mandarin Chinese, and the increasing subordination of the Hoklo majority culture in ethnic policy and public identity discourses. While the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) gradually relaxed its Mandarin-only policy following democratization in the late 1980s, the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) made little change to Taiwan’s language regime during its two-term presidency (2000-2008). Rejecting proposals for the co-officialization of the Hoklo majority language (generally referred to as Taiwanese), the DPP government instead vainly put forward proposals for the recognition of all of Taiwan’s languages (Mandarin, Hoklo, Hakka, as well as the languages of 12 Aboriginal groups) as equal national languages. What explains the limited success of Taiwanese language normalization and the marginalization of the Hoklo majority culture in the process of Taiwanese identity consolidation? This dissertation tries to answer this question through an analysis of the Taiwanese linguistic normalization movement, with a focus on local language education, standardization, and official recognition. This research is based on extensive fieldwork including in-depth elite interviews, analysis of legislative records and official documents, and quantitative analysis of large-N survey data. This dissertation is framed as a response to David Laitin’s work on linguistic normalization, which regards language and identity shifts as overlapping phenomena and posits that nationalist leaders have an incentive to promote a shift to local culture so as to create a cultural basis for political autonomy claims. In contrast, this dissertation argues that Taiwan’s counterintuitive ethnolinguistic outcomes are largely attributable to the ethnic structure of the party cleavage, itself based on national identity. In fact, the ethnolinguistic distribution of the electorate across cleavage categories has led parties to adopt distinctive strategies in an attempt to broaden their ethnic support bases. On the one hand, the DPP and KMT have strived to play down their respective de-Sinicization and Sinicization ideologies as well as their Hoklo and Chinese ethnocultural cores, a strategy I refer to as ethnonationalist underbidding. On the other hand, parties have competed to portray themselves as the legitimate protectors of minority interests by promoting Hakka and Aboriginal cultures, a strategy I term minority-oriented outbidding. The concomitant logics of underbidding and outbidding have discouraged parties from appealing to ethnonationalist rhetoric, prompting them to express their antagonistic ideologies of Taiwanese and Chinese nationalism through typically liberal conceptions of language rights. The fact that Taiwanese nationalism has been centred on the democratic institutions of the Republic of China rather than Taiwanese ethnocultural distinctiveness has further legitimated the continuation of Mandarin as common language. In addition to providing a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the Taiwanese language normalization movement, this dissertation proposes a reassessment of the relationship between national culture and identity by expounding the fundaments of a simple model of cultural regime creation based on cross-cleavage ethnolinguistic distributions, variables that are largely absent in Laitin’s work. / published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

There is no abstract available for this dissertation.

Drawing upon field work, mass media accounts, and Canadian government internal documents, this thesis considers how settler/Aboriginal power relations were reproduced when Taiwan Aboriginal artefacts held by the Royal Ontario Museum were used in a 2001 exhibition in Taipei to commemorate the centennial of the death of the Taiwanese nationalist hero, George Leslie Mackay (1 844-1 901). I argue that this exhibition and related Taiwan-Canada state Aboriginal exchanges have been hierarchically structured by organizational narratives in which coalitions of settler state institutions function as adept heroes who quest to help inept Aboriginal peoples deal with various reified difficulties such as "cultural loss" or "economic development." Aboriginal participants are portrayed as thankful for the heroes' sacrifices and thereby morally validate the heroes' quests and relations between settlers and Aborigines. Helping Aborigines thereby allows for moral claims by involved institutions that just@ the use of Aboriginal exchanges to advance multiple institutional agendas including Canadian government nation branding, Taiwanese government informal diplomacy, and corporate advertising.

No description available.

Die Einführung des Waldorfschulkonzepts in Taiwan ging mit einer großen Unzufriedenheit mit der Staatsschule einher. Die Protagonisten der taiwanischen Waldorfschulbewegung kritisierten den übermächtige Einfluss „der staatspolitischen Ideologie“ und die Übergewichtung der kognitiven Förderung der Schüler im taiwanischen Schulwesen. Damit ist der Anspruch entfaltet: Die Gründung der taiwanischen Waldorfschulen sollte sowohl den Zensurendruck abmildern, in der eigenen Ausgestlatung autonom bleiebn, auch Elemente der indigenen Kutltur in den Unterricht einfließen lassen. Die vorliegende Studie geht folgenden Fragen systematisch nach. Inwieweit und mit welchen Begründungen wurde das von Waldorfpädagogen vertretene Konzept in den taiwanischen Waldorfschulen übernommen und umgesetzt? Kommt die Beseitigung des prüfungsorientierten Unterrichts in den taiwanischen Waldorfschulen tatsächlich zur Verwirklichung? Inwieweit kommt die Übernahme des Waldorfschulkonzepts der regionalen Kultur Taiwans wirklich entgegen? Welche „Elemente der jeweils regionalen Kulturen“ (Siehe Holger Niederhausen. 2008 S. 36) werden in den auf Taiwan angesiedelten Waldorfschulen gepflegt oder vernachlässigt? / The Waldorf-school-concept has been widespread in many countries of the World. Until 2008 there are totaling 1000 Waldorf schools on the World. Is there an “intercultural Standard” under this concept? Is the “Waldorf-initiative” an optional method for creating an intercultural standard for schooling? The focus of this Study is the following: 1 The “peculiarity” of the “original” Waldorf-school-concept and the Peculiarity in Taiwanese Waldorf schools; 2. The distinction or the homogeneity of these two Peculiarities; 3. The reasons of the distinction and the pertinent implications with cultural difference.

This thesis investigates the interplay between international politics and cyberspace, and explains how Taiwan's cybersecurity policy was formed prior to 2016. It examines how politics can shape or reshape the future direction of technologies. By using Taiwan as the object of the case study, the central research question is, "How is Taiwan counterbalancing China's rising power in cyberspace and what are the implications?" The investigation for the first part of the research question provides a general account of issues affecting Taiwan's practice of cybersecurity policy via a constructivist approach. While I do not deny the technology determinist's logic that new technology can drive the way of politics, the empirical observations from Taiwan focus our attention on a different perspective, that politics can still reshape future direction and the use of technology. It explains to us through the case of Taiwan how politics trump both technical decisions and direction of technology, and further exposes the underlying knowledge structure within Taiwanese policy makers' "world." While this knowledge structure, as a form of theory, constitutes the world we live in, the second part of the research question scrutinizes this taken-for-granted knowledge structure. I challenge well-accepted assumptions regarding cyberwarfare to investigate its limitations and explore its problematic effects within the context of Taiwan. By using the principles of Critical Security Studies, I argue that an alternative conceptualization of cybersecurity can still embrace the security end that Taiwan intends to achieve, and propose a critical strategy to engage Taiwan's security challenge while avoiding adverse consequences from cyberwarfare. Looking closely at the case of Taiwan's cybersecurity contributes to the broader International Relations (IR) literature concerning the effects of norms and interest, and extends a constructivist approach to the domain of cyberspace. It also allows knowledge in Cybersecurity Studies to establish a dialogue with IR literature, and reduces the knowledge gap of Taiwan's cybersecurity in Taiwan studies. This project was conducted via interdisciplinary approaches situated at the intersection of IR, Cybersecurity Studies, and Taiwan Studies, and is a timely reminder of the need to examine Taiwan's security with a more contemporary, localized, and theoretically-grounded framework that will help policymakers understand the new challenges that they face in the 21st Century. It is a discourse of resistance to the current discussions that centre on cyberwarfare and instead turns our attention to true cybersecurity.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries