Search

During the current global COVID-19 crisis Taiwan has portrayed itself as both an example for other countries to follow and as a country willing to assist others in their own efforts with the virus. Taiwan has also renewed efforts to participate in the World Health Organization (WHO), an organisation from which it is currently excluded. Although some countries have supported Taiwan's efforts to participate in the WHO or have praised its COVID-19 response, others have been silent or even critical, sometimes citing commitments to a "one China policy." In this paper, we use newly collected data to explore cross-national variation in support for Taiwan during the current pandemic. We find that a country's level of economic development and security ties with the US are strongly correlated with support for Taiwan while a country's economic ties to China is a less consistent predictor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most ethnic Chinese in northern Thailand are Thai citizens now, their everyday lives are a site where we can witness the political power entanglement of China, Taiwan and Thailand. With this in mind, this paper aims to look into the relationship between global China and overseas Chinese from the perspective of the ethnic Chinese in the northern borderlands of Thailand. The purpose is not just to disclose the multiplicity of global China in people's everyday lives, but also to complicate the picture of overseas Chinese as portrayed in top-down grand narratives about global China. I argue that the ongoing re-Sinicization in South-East Asia and the territorial geopolitics among China, Taiwan and Thailand have opened a conceptual space for the ethnic Chinese in northern Thailand to flexibly articulate themselves within the changing geopolitical economy. I use tea production and related Chinese-language education programmes, two separate but intertwined cases, to address these issues. By looking beyond the competition, conflict and dilemmas between China and Taiwan, I argue that Taiwan's previous engagement with agricultural transfer to Thailand and the rooting of pro-Taiwan identity and discourse in language education have paradoxically paved a way for China to stretch its influence into the everyday lives of the Chinese communities in the northern Thai borderlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Collapse of Nationalist China: How Chiang Kai-shek Lost China's Civil War" by Parks M. Coble is a book that revisits the reasons behind the Kuomintang's (KMT) defeat in China's civil war. Coble focuses on Chiang Kai-shek's fiscal policies, which led to hyperinflation and corruption, alienating the urban population and compromising the morale and combat effectiveness of the KMT's armies. The book draws on primary sources such as Chiang's diaries and the papers of KMT leaders T.V. Soong and H.H. Kung. Coble argues that Chiang's financial policy was a disaster, attributing it to his belief in the importance of a large army and his habit of covering budget deficits by increasing the money supply. The book also acknowledges the complexities of economic recovery in the aftermath of Japanese occupation and the legacy of colonialism. Overall, this concise and engaging reassessment of the KMT's defeat will be of interest to historians and accessible to students. [Extracted from the article]

Previous studies of East Asian welfare regimes focus on similarities between social security schemes. In contrast, this paper explores cross-national variations in public–private pension mixes in six welfare states: China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Our research echoes the pension policy analysis of international organisations but takes a step forward with emphasis on the historical and institutional characteristics of the respective pension systems. The analysis identifies three institutional patterns. First, the statist pension system (Taiwan and China) primarily relies on public pensions to provide old-age security, with private pensions playing a rather minor role. Second, in the dualist pension system (Japan and Korea) both public and private pensions work in parallel to ensure retirement income, though a clear security gap exists between workers in the formal and informal economies. Finally, the individualist pension system (Hong Kong and Singapore) is characterised by genuine fully funded individual accounts, emphasising citizens' own responsibilities for ensuring old-age security. These three types of pension systems demonstrate distinct institutional characteristics and policy outcomes, illustrated by the juxtaposition of their institutional structures as well as by the comparison of key indicators collected from government reports and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development statistics. The paper concludes with a theoretical reflection of East Asian pension policies and a diagnosis of the distinct challenges confronted by each of the various pension patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of circulation and sales of albums, the most popular pop music found in mainland China today is the Mandopop imported from Taiwan. The pop music that is genuinely locally produced in China by mainland producers and artists, and which is most notable to the outside world is probably the Chinese rock music and the wave of ‘northwest wind’ pop music produced locally in China in the late 1980s. However, after 2005, there emerged a new kind of Chinese pop that is commercially successful and a product of the national Pop Idol-like singing contest. This paper describes and explicates the broad popularity of this new wave of Chinese pop. Putting aside the overly discussed topic of democracy that comes out of such politicised Supergirl contests, this paper focuses on the nature of the melody and lyrics of pop idol winner Chris Li's songs and how their unique formulation evolves into an important ‘short wave’ of Chinese pop. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the role that veterans played in the construction of historical memory narratives in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan. I argue that veterans, who had long established a ‘language community’ with a particular way to speak about the war, found it difficult to communicate with post-war audiences that did not share that experience. The paper analyses six categories of ‘memory writing’ that veterans used to engage with memory debates: post-war diaries, ‘testimonial literature’, articles and literary works, surveys and oral histories, memoirs, and paratext. This study thus proposes that veterans do not avoid discussion of war, but can only be ‘heard’ by members of their language community, or by a post-war society that is prepared to ‘listen’ to their message with little mediation. This is a direct consequence of their experience of the war, and how they crafted their language community at that time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]