Lev Nachman on studying Taiwan from a disciplinary perspective

I'm listening to a podcast of an interview with Lev Nachman, a PhD candidate in political science at UC Irvine, and it's reminding me of what I quoted at the end of my previous post about doing what you can where you are for Taiwan. It also relates to what Hsin-i Sydney Hsieh says in her article about the need to take a non-China-centric approach to studying Taiwanese communication. Nachman says, 

One of the biggest ways that I've been actually able to pitch Taiwan in academia is not in a China context, but rather looking for more disciplinary avenues, such as peace and security studies, studies of democracy, both of which Taiwan easily falls into. And I'm very fortunate that UC Irvine has departments for both of these topics, and they give funding for graduate students who want to study these topics. You know, just at UC Irvine alone, when I go to these funding opportunities, and I say, "Hey, I'm interested in Taiwan," they say, "Great! That's a great case that we don't think about very often and it totally falls within the study of democracy and it totally falls within the study of peace and security." Even though Taiwan might not be as easily considered a[n] important topic in a China studies department, I'm able to get a lot of extra support from unexpected places. So another big piece of advice I have for people who are interested in Taiwan studies is to think outside the box and to think outside of a China-centric framework and realize that Taiwan is actually very interesting to so many other parts of academia. You just have to pitch it to them.

A good reminder. He also talks about some of the dilemmas that Taiwan studies faces in terms of the area's relationship(s) with China studies. He calls it a "lose-lose situation": either you are part of a China studies program and don't get much attention on Taiwan in courses, etc., or you have your own program but don't get many interested students. 

Here's the whole interview:

Hsin-i Sydney Yueh, "Beyond Cultural China: The Representation of Taiwan in US-based Speech Communication and Journalism Research"

Number five in an occasional series of summaries of articles related to communication practices in Taiwan.

Yueh, H.-i. S. (2020). Beyond Cultural China: The representation of Taiwan in US-based speech communication and journalism research. International Journal of Taiwan Studies, 3, 292-320, DOI:10.1163/24688800-00302006

Things are still busy, but I'm in the mood to read and summarize Hsin-i Sydney Yueh's article on how American articles in the fields of communication studies and journalism represent Taiwan. Yueh points out in the beginning the relative lack of speech comm and journalism participation in Taiwan Studies, as evidenced by a low number of communication-related topics at the annual North American Taiwan Studies Association (NATSA) conference. As she also notes, "while American speech communication and journalism education heavily influences communication education in Taiwan, it seems that Taiwanese communication gains little attention in the United States" (p. 293).

Yueh begins with a historical survey of early articles in speech comm and journalism about "Free China," and then moves on to introduce the two main scholarly organizations in the US that are devoted to Chinese communication: the Chinese Communication Association (CCA) and the Association of Chinese Communication Studies (ACCS), both of which are affiliated with the National Communication Association (NCA). They appear to be more distinguished by their disciplinary foci (CCA is mostly made up of scholars in journalism and mass comm, whereas ACCS has more of a speech comm focus) than by any geographical or political division. As she points out, both of them appear to hold a "Greater China scholarly framework" (p. 296). 

Yueh goes on to do a quantitative description of Taiwan-focused research published in journals published by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), the International Communication Association (ICA), and the NCA, finding a total of 72 articles published across 47 journals between the 1950s and 2010s. Furthermore, those 72 articles represent the work of 52 scholars. Over half of the articles used quantitative methods, and 23 used a qualitative approach. 

She continues by looking at the themes of the articles, finding the most popular to be topics such as newspapers, freedom of speech, public relations and advertising, government media control, electronic media, gender representation in the media, audience perception of the news, new media and social media user behavior, Taiwanese people's acculturation in the US, and political participation and elections (p. 304). (Evidently some articles contained more than one of these themes.)

When discussing how Taiwan has generally been represented in these studies, Yueh notes, 

Unlike anthropologists in the 1980s, who started considering the ontological status of Taiwan (Simon, 2018), the assumed route of understanding traditional Chinese culture through Taiwan is a less debated issue in speech communication and journalism studies. The CCA and the ACCS seemed to establish a strong Greater China framework that can be extended and connected to the Taiwan-based Chinese Communication Society (CCS) and the PRC-based Communication Association of China (CAC) (Kim, Chen & Miyahara, 2008). (p. 306)

As evidence of this "Greater China Framework," Yueh cites an article that alternates between calling Taiwanese people "Taiwanese" and "Chinese" and another that refers to "Chinese in Taiwan" (p. 307). She also reveals some of her own struggles explaining her "national, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic identities to an academic audience" (p. 307). But, as she points out, even if Taiwan is considered in the disciplines of journalism and communications to be part of "Greater China" or "Cultural China," it is still marginalized in the scholarship: 

In any recent edited book comprising ten or more chapters that is concerned with communication phenomena or journalistic practices in cultural China, it would be common to see only one chapter or no chapters about Taiwan (for example, see Lee, 2000; Wu, 2008). (pp. 307-308)

Therefore, she argues, the idea that Taiwan should represent or be studied as part of "Cultural China" should be abandoned: "Starting from recognising ... [Taiwan's] ‘marginality’ on the world map ..., scholars can find new theoretical routes and opportunities to represent Taiwan in communication and journalism research" (p. 308). Her next section introduces quantitative and qualitative communication and journalism scholarship on Taiwan that suggests ways in which Taiwan can be more properly foregrounded and moved out of the Greater China framework.

She also points out problems with how Taiwan has figured in intercultural and international communication research that has sought to provide East Asian alternatives to Western theories of communication. She critiques some studies that are classified as "bottom-up" research for being simply "literature reviews of Chinese communication or Chinese history and culture," and proposes that "Taiwan can provide a bottom-up solution in terms of decolonising both Western and Chinese perspectives on international and intercultural communication" (p. 312, emphasis mine).

While some of her sources are rhetorical studies, I wanted to zero in on the field of rhetoric a little more, so I did a quick and unscientific survey of published rhetoric articles about Taiwan and presentations at the Rhetoric Society of America biennial conferences that focused on Taiwan, and there wasn't much. Between 2004 and 2018, there were five presented papers at RSA about Taiwan, two of them by yours truly (my count might be off since, besides my own papers, I only counted papers that included "Taiwan" in the title). 

There are even fewer articles about rhetorical practices in Taiwan that have been published in rhetoric journals based in the US. Stephen John Hartnett has written or co-authored several articles published in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and The Quarterly Journal of Speech, taking a rhetorical perspective on China's foreign and domestic affairs, but his mentions of Taiwan are generally as an obstacle to US-China relations or as, from China's point of view, an internal issue (and often, Taiwan shows up in a list of other countries or territories that have issues with China, like Tibet, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc.). One notable exception is a 2020 article co-authored by Hartnett that examines public memory related to the February 28, 1947 Incident. (Yueh cites this article; I'll have to summarize this article later on.)

Yowei Kang and Kenneth C. C. Yang have written in The Howard Journal of Communications about "The rhetoric of ethnic identity construction among Taiwanese immigrants in the United States" (2011), which I'll add to my collection of articles I need to review. Otherwise, there isn't that much out there in the field of rhetoric. 

In 2006, I had a manuscript based on a 2005 conference paper (itself based on a 2001 graduate seminar paper) entitled "Naming Taiwan" rejected by the QJS--it had problems, I'm sure, but I was surprised to read one of the criticisms that complained that this manuscript about Taiwanese presidential inaugural addresses didn't tell the reviewer anything important about American presidential inaugurals (!?). 

Fortunately, in 2014, Hui-ching Chang and Richard Holt published a book with Routledge entitled Language, Politics and Identity in Taiwan: Naming China, that in part analyzes the rhetoric of presidential inaugurals. Yueh cites this book, along with some of their articles. It's notable, though, that the book is part of Routledge's "Research on Taiwan" series rather than a communications series, and that only two of the four journal articles from them that she cites were published in communications journals. (I'm not faulting them for this--it could be evidence of the difficulties of publishing about Taiwan in communication journals. One of the articles, "Taiwan and ROC: A critical analysis of President Chen’s construction of Taiwan identity in national speeches, 2000–2007" was published in a journal called National Identities.)

At any rate, I've been thinking recently of something Jenna Cody said about the need to help put Taiwan more in the spotlight: 

This is also a call to all of you, my readers (yes, all twelve of you). Look at what you already do — your life, your career, your field — and figure out how you can contribute to Taiwan that way. What soft power impact can you have, in your respective fields?

Besides noting that if she has 12 readers, that's at least twice as many as I have, I resonate with her call, even with all of my concerns about making sure I don't become a "self-appointed ally" or a "white savior." I guess that's why I'm doing this series on communications studies articles about Taiwan--to inform myself as well as the five or so people who might be reading these posts.