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This paper expands upon a hitherto underexplored finding by Rich and Banerjee's 2015 model which finds that Taiwan has done comparatively better with non-democracies in Africa. The paper proposes that democratisation makes an African state more responsive to domestic economic imperatives and thus more likely to form relations with the demographically and economically larger People's Republic of China because of the prospective trade, aid and investment gains to be made once such a switch is affected. Seven case studies conducted over the 2001–2018 period yield results which are in line with this hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taiwan is a liminal site of modernity in Asia. It is a modern exemplar as a liberal democracy with a developed economy, but is mostly unrecognized as a nation-state in the international system. In its liminality, however, it traces contours of modern power and their epistemological expression. This paper presents an account of Taiwan as an object of knowledge and representation in instances of scholarship and policy, Taiwanese politics, urban development and art, arguing that the narratives through which Taiwan is understood embed a lived experience as Taiwanese under forms of epistemological domination. The paper then explores Taiwanese responses of co-option and resistance in alternative sites of knowledge, and it concludes that the critical unexamined force in Taiwan’s experience of modernity is violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]