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The main purpose of this thesis is to critically analyse the film industry in Taiwan from a political economy perspective and to compare Taiwan’s film industry with that of Hong Kong. The thesis will examine the development of the film industries in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1990s and analyse the decline of these film industries. The study takes into account how the governments’ policies have been framed and examines the interaction between the governments and the industries in the 1990s. This thesis will start by expounding the approach of political economy and explain how it will be applied to the study of Taiwan’s film industry. The approach of political economy will provide a historical analysis of the film industry and review the industry’s development in terms of both political influence and economic factors. This approach will provide a more comprehensive study of these film industries. The framework assumes that the development of the film industry in Taiwan has been influenced by government policy and especially government subsidies and that this policy has directed the industry. A film in Taiwan is regarded as an art form, perhaps with a diplomatic purpose, rather than as a commercial cultural product. A film in Hong Kong is mainly made for the commercial market with the purpose of entertaining audiences. The distinction between Taiwanese cinema and Hong Kong cinema provides a diverse view of the Chinese-language film market. After examining the development of the film industry in Taiwan and Hong Kong from a political economy perspective a new image for the Chinese- language film sphere will be discussed. The advantages and disadvantages of the film industry in two places will be summarised and used to provide some suggestions for the future development of “New Chinese Cinema” in the twenty-first century.

This thesis considers the claim that people with appropriate training can discriminate between different printed materials even when they do not look at them, by using their finger-tips instead of their eyes to perceive what is on the paper. This is known as ‘finger-reading ability’. Four stages were proposed to develop a well controlled paradigm of finger-reading training using stringent controls. The first experiment conducted was designed to determine the limits of tactile relief recognition. It is about to what extent are people able to recognise printed characters through the medium of touch. The study, in particular, examined the extent to which characters on a sheet of paper must be elevated above the plane of the paper in order for them to be recognisable by touch. Six elevations (0.05mm, 0.1mm, 0.2mm, 0.3mm, 0.4mm, 0.5mm) of eight digits recognition tasks were presented to 24 children and 24 adults. The performance of recognising eight digits with all six elevations was significantly lower in the child group compared to the adult group. Poorer tactile relief acuity in children may represent an immature tactile mechanism. In the second experiment, eighteen children aged 7 to 12 were tested individually and asked to determine the identity of a target by means of directly touching a flat two-digit number varying between four different colours on paper, using a newly developed finger-reading training paradigm. Questionnaires measured participants’ mental imagery, paranormal beliefs and tactual experience. It was predicted that a quarter of the child participants, after finger-reading for eight hours, would demonstrate finger-reading ability. Overall, no significant results were found. The third experiment included three phases, a selection study, a confirmation study and a training study, in the hope to select possibly talented participants; 1,771 participants aged from six to thirteen joined in this experiment which failed in its objective of selecting potential children to acquire finger-reading ability.