Search

While borders traverse both land and sea, current research has mostly concentrated on issues concerning terrestrial borders. Simultaneously, a new body of scholarship has shown how the seemingly boundless oceans are in actuality subject to a variety of bordering forces. As such, we review current research on maritime borders in geography and other related disciplines in three categories: oceanic resource extraction and environmental conservation, volume geography and wet ontology, and concepts of ocean frontiers and voluminous states. Conclusively, we propose land-ocean inter-bordering, multiple materialities, and mobile state power as three future issues to respond to the rapid-changing maritime borders. [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 development of offshore wind farms has been a way for the state to repackage national development projects using green energy discourses. In Taiwan, where the further development of nuclear power is suspended due to public antinuclear sentiment, offshore wind farms have been heavily promoted as a way of meeting electricity demand. The planned site for offshore wind farms, mainly the intertidal zone along the coast of Changhua County, overlaps with both oyster farms and the habitat of Taiwanese humpbacked dolphins, categorized as a critically endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. This has resulted in a clash between conserving the oyster farming landscape, protecting an endangered species, and developing green energy. Facing this dilemma, pro–wind farm discourses that highlight concerns about global climate change have gradually supplanted those stressing the welfare of oysters and dolphins, even though the latter have been used successfully as local icons by movements opposing previous development projects on the intertidal zone. This article reconsiders the politics of territorialization implied by the "green" label affixed to offshore wind farm projects and other forms of green energy in general. As such, the meaning of offshore wind farms, as a newly discovered energy resource, is intertwined with the changing meanings of both dolphins and oyster farms, as rival nonhuman objects of resource exploitation and natural conservation. The territorialization of such resources in the emerging discursive space of green energy has proceeded via relational placemaking with nonlinear connections among multiple human and nonhuman elements. Key Words: conservation, intertidal zone, landscape, renewable resources, resource frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay outlines the symbolic and material transformation of mountain agriculture in Taiwan by tracing the historical trajectories of temperate fruit production, and of apple growing in particular. Specifically, we look at the area of Lishan, a major production centre for apples and other temperate fruits in Taiwan's Central Mountain Range in order to explore the relationship between the mountain agriculture and the politics of territorialisation. Focusing on the post‐war era, we argue that the development of mountain agriculture in Taiwan, and upland fruit growing in particular, has operated as a 'more‐than‐human political technology'. The territory of Lishan is not just a passive geographical space, but engaged in a process of becoming, which re‐makes the mountain areas of Taiwan into 'apple zones' both spatially and socially. The spatial dimension centres on processes of political territorialisation, economic deterritorialisation and combined reterritorialisations whereby apple plantations have transformed the landscape from one focused on strategic politics to one embedded within development and market frameworks which entail their own particular forms of politics. The social dimensions are centred on the politics of forging connections among different elements circulating through the mountain areas of Taiwan, including apples, soldiers, transport infrastructures and agricultural policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with the concept of territorialization through telling the story of the transformation of Chinese former Kuomintang (KMT) soldiers of Yunnanese origin and their descendants living in northern Thailand, from being opium and heroin traders and smugglers, to becoming mercenaries fighting against the Communist Party of Thailand in northern Thailand on behalf of the Thai military, to finally transforming into tea farmers and traders through receiving development aid support provided from the Republic of China (Taiwan). Taiwan's development aid was ostensibly only for humanitarian purposes, but in reality also had important underlying political objectives. We argue territorialization is a more-than-human political technology. In particular, it is argued that territorialization frequently combines both military politics and development politics, even though the literature often separates these two elements, as if they are not frequently intertwined and interrelated. Here, we show how these two forms of politics, one explicit and one much less so, can come together to create new social and economic realities, ones with important geographical and geopolitical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that frontiers are dilemmas composed of multiple dualities, be they exclusive and inclusive powers, connected space and national periphery, or modernity and primitiveness. These dilemmas, in consequence, become the mechanism to create a leeway for the state to 'tailor' different meanings of frontier to meet the contingent market demands. I use tea production on China's southwest frontier as an example to demonstrate that dilemma is not an end result, but a mechanism to rearticulate the relationship among frontier, the state and the market economy. Specifically, I argue that dilemmas on China's southwest frontier have been forged by the Chinese state with its incompatible desires between 'modernisation' and 'primitiveness' of the tea landscapes in Yunnan, a province on China's southwest frontier. Meanwhile, the incompatible desires and the resulting dilemmas on China's southwest frontier have further mobilised the state to flexibly rework its power to reconstruct the frontier to meet contingent market demand. Based on the shifting meanings of tea landscapes, the state has flexibly 'shuttled through' the dilemmas between development of modernisation and preservation of primitiveness on the frontier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the effects of blogging as an approach to journal writing in the EFL writing classroom by means of a 16-week comparative experiment involving two groups of EFL college students. The experimental group (EG) was required to blog daily while the control group (CG) was asked to do so using traditional pen-and-paper methods. The writing performance and general attitudes to and perceptions of journal writing in both groups were evaluated through a writing test and a semi-structured survey. The research results show that blogging a journal helped the students to achieve a greater improvement in their writing than did the regular pen-and-paper treatment. Additionally, although both groups developed similar learning attitudes in general, the EG experienced significantly less anxiety in writing than did the CG. This suggests that the blogging approach is an effective approach for students in developing both writing skills and learning attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]