Todd Sandel, "Linguistic Capital in Taiwan"

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

Sandel, T. L. (2003). Linguistic capital in Taiwan: The KMT’s Mandarin language policy and its perceived impact on language practices of bilingual Mandarin and Tai-gi speakers. Language in Society 32(4), 523-551. DOI: 10.10170S0047404503324030

This is an article I came across a long time ago but that I thought I should revisit in relation to the paper I'm working on. Sandel's article goes beyond analyzing language policies in postwar Taiwan or surveying Taiwanese people about their language attitudes to look more closely at how changing language policies and language attitudes are realized in everyday contexts--the choices people make regarding language use and the decisions they make about passing on language practices to the next generation. Together with Donna Ching-Kuei Sandel and his research assistants, Sandel interviews Taiwanese people about their language practices in the home in the context of the schooling they received--specifically the language policies they experienced in school. His focus is on families that use the Tai-gi language (also known by several other names, such as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiyu, and [problematically] as Minnanhua/Southern Min). 

Sandel divides postwar primary/secondary school language policies in Taiwan into three stages or generations. The first generation he identifies are Taiwanese who went to school between 1945 and 1975, during which they were required to speak only Mandarin and were punished (sometimes physically) for speaking fangyan (topolects--commonly called "dialects"--like Taiwanese, Hakka, or one of the Indigenous languages). Sandel's interviewees typically spoke Taigi at home but were suddenly forced to speak only Mandarin in school. 

Typically, according to his interviewees, they raised their children primarily in Mandarin rather than speaking to them in Taiwanese because they knew the pressures their children would feel at school. This resulted in a generation (the second generation that Sandel identifies) that spoke little Taiwanese. This generation, who went to school from about 1975-1987, were primarily monolingual Mandarin speakers, although Sandel points out that due to changes in language policy, more are now trying to learn to speak Taiwanese.

The third generation that Sandel identifies went to school at a time when the Mandarin-only policy was scrapped. Indeed, although Mandarin is still the language of instruction, students since the 1990s now have courses in "local languages" (also called "mother tongues"); however, the success of those programs has been threatened by the emphasis on learning English and on other factors (see, for instance, the International Journal of Taiwan Studies vol. 5, no. 2 for several articles about language and society in Taiwan). Among the parents of this generation, Sandel finds two different perspectives about whether to teach both Taiwanese and Mandarin in the home. While some parents feel they'll learn both languages naturally, through interaction with family and in the neighborhood, others feel they need to teach their children to speak Taiwanese, especially if they want them to speak without a "mainlander" accent. These different opinions seem to connect to whether the interviewees are primarily located in more rural/"small town" areas or in more urban areas. 

Sandel connects his findings to Bourdieu's discussions of habitus, which Sandel sees as a "product of the whole history of its relations with markets, or, in Taiwan’s situation, with succeeding colonial and ruling governments that defined the values of the language market" (p. 548). At the same time, however, Sandel agrees with Bucholtz, who argues that "one of the problems of Bourdieu’s theory of practice is that its insistence on the unconsciousness of practice 'reflects a general attenuation of agency' (1999:205)" (p. 548). 

In other words, his [Bourdieu's] theory explains why individuals respond to changing market values and unconsciously instantiate the dispositions, or habitus, of Taiwan, but it does not explain how or why individuals can consciously conform to, resist, or moderate a set of dispositions. ... Thus, we also need to consider the situation in Taiwan through the lens of its language ideologies. In doing so, we find evidence that a cluster of concepts is at play on this island, including perceptions of what is “true” or “good” for society, divergent perspectives within society, and individuals’ articulations of beliefs that rationalize or justify language structure and use. (p. 548)

I think Sandel's division of school language policies in postwar Taiwan can be useful to my project; my focus is primarily on writing, but I also need to consider language ideologies and policies regarding spoken language.  

Ti Wei & Fran Martin, "Pedagogies of food and ethical personhood: TV cooking shows in postwar Taiwan"

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

Wei, T., & Martin, F. (2015). Pedagogies of food and ethical personhood: TV cooking shows in postwar Taiwan. Asian Journal of Communication, 25(6), 636-651, DOI: 10.1080/01292986.2015.1007333

This article uses representative cooking personalities on Taiwanese TV--Fu Pei Mei (傅培梅), Chen Hong (陳鴻), and Master Ah-Ji (阿基師), together with Chef James (詹姆士)--to analyze "the history and changing cultural meanings of the cooking show in the context of Taiwan’s postwar social history and TV industry" (p. 637). The authors trace the transformation of television programming in Taiwan from its start in the martial law period to the commercialization of the industry in the post-martial law years, including the rise of cable TV. They show how the representative cooking shows reflected both changing industry priorities and some consistency in cultural values. They also contrast the more paternalistic authoritative approach to imparting lessons in cooking and "life ethics" in Taiwan with an ethics based on more "plural, practice-based everyday knowledges" that researchers have found in Western cooking shows (p. 637). 

In the case of Fu Pei Mei, the authors observe that her shows, which started in the early 1960s, reflected the KMT's goals of teaching the audience to see themselves as part of the Chinese nation. Fu's emphasis on mainland Chinese cultural traditions in her shows and in interviews with domestic and international audiences made her a representative of the KMT government's "soft power" in the ideological battle with the CCP (p. 641). At the same time, the authors argue that she represented a kind of modernity through her own image as an "autonomous, modern woman," as well as through her introduction of "modern" (Western cooking). As they conclude, Fu's image "can be seen as a fusion of traditional and modern elements of femininity" (p. 641). 

In comparison to Fu Pei Mei, Chen Hong's image, according to Wei and Martin, models "cosmopolitan taste, high cultural capital, and refined masculinity[, which] bespeaks an implicit pedagogical project centered on the production of a clearly (middle-)class-inflected aspirational ideal of young, urban, educated personhood" (p. 642). In addition, Chen also "reinforces his own authority" through his lessons in cooking and references to classical Chinese works (p. 644). Chen's image as a 型男 (which the authors translate as metrosexual) coincided with a rise in consumerism in post-martial law Taiwan that commodified cultural knowledge as cultural capital; it also fit in with the rising competitive cable media landscape. 

The last cooking program that Wei and Martin examine reflects the consolidation of the cable industry in Taiwan and the increasing competition for viewers that resulted in an emphasis in lifestyle programming on entertainment over information. In this media landscape, cooking shows like Metrosexual Uber-Chef (型男大主廚) tended to stress entertaining audiences over teaching them about cooking or inculcating ethical values. While Master Ah-Ji, the older chef paired with the younger "metrosexual" James in the program, represents traditional values such as "frugality, endurance, obedience, and so on" (p. 647), in the context of a more postmodern and entertainment-oriented show, "[t]his older discourse of the ‘self-made man’ was thus unexpectedly effectively – or perhaps, absurdly – fused into a postmodern form of entertainment TV" (p. 647). Master Ah-Ji maintains, argue the authors, a different kind of cultural capital than the two previous chefs--one that reflects the values of an industrializing Taiwan of the 1970s.

One thing that the article made me think about was the evolution of the pedagogical project of Chineseness that they suggest characterized Fu Pei Mei's shows. It's interesting that, according to the authors, an important part of Fu's cultural pedagogy connected her audience to the Chinese mainland (they quote her as frequently saying, "we northerners" when referring to her own background); being Chinese, in this sense, was concretely tied to the KMT project of "mainland-izing" Taiwan by emphasizing geographic relations as well as culinary connections.  I'm reminded, in fact, of PRC foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying's widely mocked tweet arguing for the PRC's sovereignty over Taiwan based on the large number of Shandong dumpling places and Shanxi noodle restaurants in Taipei. 

As Rachel Cheung observes, the tweet found a receptive domestic audience. Cheung quotes scholar Gina Anne Tam, who argues that domestic Twitter users were Hua's primary audience, and the tweet was calculated "to muddy a logically indefensible case with appeals to vague feelings." And, as Cheung notes, these emotional/culinary appeals were further supported by observations that many of Taipei's own streets have been named after Chinese locations (a project that was also part of the KMT's "mainland-ization" of Taiwan during the martial law period). It appears, then, that the culinary/geographic connections exemplified by Fu Pei Mei's cooking programs have come full circle.

In contrast to Fu's appeals to geography, in Chen Hong's work, Chineseness is represented by references to classical texts and sayings. As the Wei and Martin suggest, "the ethical dimension connects with the value of literary education" (p. 644). In a sense, then, Chinese identity as represented by Chen Hong is based on shared texts. Arguably--at least based on Wei and Martin's descriptions of the programs--Ah Ji's authority is the most rooted in the particularities of Taiwan's late martial law historical context, since it appears that he reflects the values that purportedly built Taiwan's "economic miracle." This appears to be less based on an appeal to a common Chinese (in terms of mainland-based) identity and more on an appeal to the common experiences of the people of Taiwan.

Another point to raise regarding Ah-Ji is his "fall from grace" subsequent to a 2014 scandal reported in Next Magazine. According to Wikipedia, there is some controversy over whether he intentionally stepped away from the media, but it appears he is no longer a television personality. He appears, however, to have a following on Facebook, which suggests how Wei and Martin's article might be followed up in the future, in regards to how social media might contribute to the further evolution of cooking shows in Taiwan. (In the TTV program linked to below, Chen Hong touches on social media and "self-media" [自媒體] and how it has changed the media landscape and how it affects self-promotion and interaction.) 

One final point: the authors describe Chen Hong as losing popularity in Taiwan after 2005. That might be the case, but more interesting are the recent developments in his professional life. Ah-Hong (陳鴻) has evidently expanded his audiences to Southeast Asia in addition to Taiwan, suggesting an appeal to "Greater China" and "Overseas Chinese." In this program about him from TTV, he talks about the challenges of life, arguing that they have taught him important life lessons that he is grateful for (and indirectly teaching viewers to consider the lessons he has learned). 

In addition, the reception in Taiwan of Ah-Hong's openness about his sexuality suggests a further development in the relationship of celebrity and "ethical personhood" in Taiwan. There are probably articles about this (guess I should look for them), but the general acceptance (with some vocal exceptions) of LGBTQ people in Taiwan is reflected in, and perhaps encouraged by, the visibility of public figures such as Ah-Hong and others who have been public about their sexuality. In addition to Ah-Hong, I think of Li Jing 利菁, for instance--"Taiwan's first mainstream transgender entertainer," and Audrey Tang 唐鳳, Taiwan's first transgender cabinet official. Their openness could be described as a kind of pedagogy of ethical personhood that has contributed to Taiwan's status as the most LGBTQ-friendly country in Asia.

Overall, it seems that Wei and Martin's article has given me a lot to think about!

Morgan Chih-tung Huang & Rong-xuan Chu, "A Political Linguistics Analysis of President Tsai Ing-wen’s Apology to Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples"

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

黃之棟、朱容萱，2019，「總統道歉的語言學：【蔡英文總統代表政府向原住民族道歉文】的政治語言學分析」《政治科學論叢》，82，81-114。Morgan Chih-tung Huang & Rong-xuan Chu, "Zongtong daoqiande yuyanxue: 'Tsai Ing-wen daibiao zhengfu xiang Yuanzhuminzu daoqianwen' de zhengzhi yuyanxue fenxi" [A Political Linguistics Analysis of President Tsai Ing-wen’s Apology to Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples]. Taiwanese Journal of Political Science 82: 81-114.

This is the article by Huang and Chu that I mentioned in my last posting.  I'm going to summarize this generally, and then I'll comment on a few particularly interesting points that might be expanded on.

Huang and Chu take a political linguistics approach to analyzing Tsai Ing-wen's speech. They identify her speech as an example of a genre of political apologies, which includes historical apologies where the speaker is not the transgressor ("apologizer ≠ transgressor") and the group being apologized to is not necessarily the people who directly suffered the wrongs that are being apologized for (although I assume they would suffer the results of that historical wrongdoing). They contrast these political apologies with interpersonal apologies, in that political (or "national") apologies are not an "expression of remorse" or an "admission of guilt," but are more an assumption of responsibility for actions of the past.  

Because they're writing for a political science audience, Huang and Chu go to some length explaining the differences between a linguistic approach to studying apology speeches and a political science approach. Important to the distinction between a linguistic approach and a political science approach is the view in linguistics that the language used in the speech act reflects the way that the speech act is framed and the often unstated assumptions of the speaker. They systematically analyze what was said through the speech's use of illocutionary devices (such as the use of language showing that this was an apology and not just an expression of regret for the other's suffering), the use of pronouns to clarify the relationships between the part(ies) apologizing and those being apologized to, and the parties or points that are left out of the speech (importantly, they argue, Tsai focuses on speaking on behalf of the government rather than the [Han] people of Taiwan, so that the non-Indigenous society of Taiwan is absent from the speech). They also argue that Tsai's framing of the apology risks recolonizing Taiwan's history despite her attempt to decolonize it The speech, they argue, is based on a Han historical perspective that both generally ignores pre-Han Taiwan (here they allude to Lien Heng's famous dictum, 台灣固無史也) and because it relegates Indigenous peoples to a passive role in relation to the colonial governments that controlled Taiwan over the past 400 years.

The article analyzes the speech acts in Tsai's apology in depth, so if you read Chinese, I recommend reading this. For the rest of this post, I want to highlight a couple of points that Huang and Chu make. One is in response to a question I asked in my last posting, where I was wondering about the Mandarin words Tsai was using that Chu and Huang had translated as "will." In this paper, they point out that Tsai uses "會" several times in that "will" capacity, such as when she says,「我會以總統的身分，親自擔任召集人」(In my role as president, I will personally serve as convener [of the Indigenous Transitional Justice Committee].) So that answers that question.

The other point I want to mention is their discussion of Tsai's use of the Atayal (泰雅族) terms balay and sbalay, which she translates as "truth" (真相) and "reconciliation" (和解). Chu and Huang observe that after the apology section of her speech, Tsai raises the issue of truth and reconciliation by introducing these two Indigenous concepts. They argue that the effects of this are that it (re)frames the apology in terms of reconciliation. The problem here, they argue, is that reconciliation is then assumed to be the goal for the Indigenous audience as well as that of the non-Indigenous listeners, so that the apology itself becomes secondary to the (hope for) reconciliation. As Chu and Huang point out, "reconciliation" might not actually be the goal of the apology process for the Indigenous audience, but Tsai's redefinition of apology in terms of truth and reconciliation doesn't leave them much room for their own possible expectation for the fixing of responsibility and consideration of compensation. 

Chu and Huang don't go into this much, but to me what's especially interesting about this whole issue is Tsai's use of Atayal concepts to introduce truth and reconciliation. One would assume that she could have just used the Chinese terms 真相 and 和解, since they've often been used in the contexts of transitional justice for 2-28 and the White Terror. In fact, as Chu and Huang suggest, Tsai goes out of her way to frame truth and reconciliation as an Indigenous practice in her speech. They quote the following (my translation):

In Indigenous culture, when one party offends another person in the tribe and there is a desire for reconciliation, the elders will bring the perpetrator and the victim together. Bringing them together isn't for a direct apology, but rather to enable the parties to honestly speak out their own mental journey (心路歷程). After this process of speaking the truth, the elders will ask everyone to drink together to let the past really be past. This is Sbalay. (p. 94) 

But is it? As Da-Wei Kuan and Guy C. Charlton (2020) argue in another context, 

If we perceive sbalay as a ritual process, then every action within the process could be viewed as “texts.” To interpret these texts, it is an [sic] important to fully grasp the meaning of sbalay. Yet “meaning” is not denoted by the ritual process itself but is given by the social and spatial “contexts” surrounding these actions that give these texts meanings. Were it not for these social and spatial contexts, the ritual itself becomes detached, meaningless, and decontextualized. (p. 232)

Tsai focuses on the process but ignores the social and spatial contexts that Kuan and Charlton emphasize. In fact, in their other article, Huang and Chu (2021) observe that the apology ceremony was held in the Presidential building, which used to be the offices of the Japanese Government-General during the Japanese colonial period. As one of their interviewees wonders about this context, "Why do you [President Tsai] ask the Taiwanese aborigines to go to the perpetrator’s home to accept your apology?" (p. 94). Even worse, Huang and Chu point out that some Indigenous attendees felt that they were being "summoned" to an audience with "the emperor," demonstrating that "the government doesn’t understand aboriginal ceremonies" (p. 95). Finally, they argue that Tsai simultaneously plays the roles of apologizer (perpetrator), elder/mediator, and (in her role as a descendent of a Paiwan grandmother) victim. I'm not sure about the last of these since they point out in both articles that she never referred to her own Indigenous heritage in the speech, but I agree that it was odd for the representative of the perpetrators to also play the role of the elder/mediator. As Huang and Chu (2021) note, "from the perspective of Taiwanese aborigines (Kisasa and Lo, 2016a, 2016b), such a suggestive priest/clergyperson image implied that Tsai was located at the top of the power structure, commanding forgiveness and reconciliation between the two parties" (p. 95).

All of the above suggests some of the dangers accompanying colonizers' adoption of the rhetoric or cultural practices of the colonized when attempting to apologize for past (or present) transgressions. That said, I would love to hear from people more knowledgeable about Indigenous rhetoric (particularly Taiwanese Indigenous rhetoric) about this topic. I am admittedly not anything near an expert on this, so I'm eager to get feedback on my summary/analysis/interpretation of these articles and topics!

Rong-Xuan Chu & Chih-Tung Huang, "The day after the apology: A critical discourse analysis of President Tsai’s national apology to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples"

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

Chu, R.-X., & Huang, C.-T. (2021). The day after the apology: A critical discourse analysis of President Tsai’s national apology to Taiwan’s indigenous peoples. Discourse Studies, 23(1), 84-101, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445620942875

I want to start this by saying that this post will primarily focus on the article--I'm not, at this point, going to get into a larger discussion of what the Tsai administration has done in terms of reconciliation with or reparations to the Indigenous people since the time of her apology. 

Rong-Xuan Chu, according to her bio at the bottom of the article, is an applied linguist; Chih-Tung Huang, according to his bio, is an Indigenous scholar who is interested in ethnic/indigenous policy. This article focuses on the August 1, 2016 official apology given by Taiwan's president on behalf of the R.O.C. government to the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan for the R.O.C.'s role in the oppression of the Indigenous people. It analyzes the language of Tsai's apology speech, including her uses of the verb "apologize," the modal verb "will," and pronouns "I," "we," and "they." They explain that she directly apologizes instead of expressing "regret" (a term that is usually seen as not being an apology, as they point out, and as Hang Zhang observed in an article on the Hainan Island plane incident of 2001). 

However, they also argue that her use of "will," a modal that can refer to both future and present actions, weakens the commitment to change because it "allow[s] for a certain degree of ambiguity and doubt regarding her determination to uphold the reconciliation" (p. 90). They also argue that "will" can in places denote "capacity or power," which suggests that "Tsai viewed her government as the power holder who could influence the success or failure of the reconciliation" (p. 91). 

It's at this point where I wish the authors had specified which Mandarin modal verb(s) Tsai was using that meant "will." Are all the wills in English translating the same word in Chinese? The authors published an article in Chinese in 2019 on Tsai's apology speech, which I guess I'll have to read at some point to answer this to my satisfaction.

They also look at the pronouns used in the speech, noting that Tsai seems to separate Indigenous people from the rest of Taiwan's society by using "they" to refer to them while using the second-person plural to refer to the government and (presumably non-Indigenous) Taiwanese citizens. 

In discussing the political context of the apology, they observe (among other things), the KMT response in the form of a Q&A with Hung Hsiu-chu, former KMT chairperson, who said, “I wonder whether she [President Tsai] deliberately wants to use the aboriginal conception of Taiwan’s history to exclude the Han/Chinese nationality from the history and even to achieve de-sinicisation” (p. 92, translated by the authors--in a video of her comments, Hung says, 「要懷疑她是不是想用這個，故意用這個所謂的原住民史觀來排斥這個漢民族的史觀，甚至去中國化的一個史觀，結果形成一個另外一個史觀？我覺得，不能講說我們懷疑她的這個動機跟用心，但是難免會讓人家打上問號」。 I'd add that her use of 所謂的--"so-called"--in describing the Indigenous historical perspective seems dismissive either of Tsai's conception of that perspective or of the perspective itself.)  

The authors go on to argue that the whole apology ceremony received mixed reviews from the public--and, especially important, from the Indigenous recipients of the apology. While some appreciated it, there were several complaints. The venue, which was the President's mansion, was criticized as requiring the victims "to go to the perpetrator's home to accept [the] apology" (p. 94), and the staging of the apology, the authors argue, resembled an emperor summoning Indigenous subjects to an audience. 

In the end, Chu and Huang argue that "the apology did not seem to bring comfort to the indigenous peoples, rather it reawakened the long-simmering conflict between the Taiwanese government and the indigenous population over historically unresolved disputes" (p. 96). They conclude, however, that it was an important first step. 

There are other points brought up in the article that make it worth a second reading. I'm not as familiar with CDA (critical discourse analysis) to evaluate the authors' success with this approach or whether the article is making a theoretical contribution to CDA. I'll leave that to others. (Feel free to comment!)

Stephen J. Hartnett, et al., "Postcolonial Remembering in Taiwan: 228 and Transitional Justice as 'The End of Fear'"

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

Hartnett, S. J., Dodge, P. S.-W., & Keränen, L. B. (2020). Postcolonial remembering in Taiwan: 228 and transitional justice as “the end of fear.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 13(3), 238-256, DOI: 10.1080/17513057.2019.1614206

I just saw that Hartnett has a book coming out next July taking a communications perspective on the US-China-Taiwan relationship, which reminded me that I had this article in my files, waiting to be summarized. I'm interested in this article also because although it's found in an intercultural communication journal, it's one of the few published works about Taiwan in rhetorical studies.

The authors begin with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen's 2017 Facebook post addressing China on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre and China's response to that, arguing that the way both sides marshaled arguments about the June 4 and February 28, 1947 massacres demonstrates that "public memories about China’s TSM and Taiwan’s 228 serve as sites of bitter contestation about historical events, their political legacies, their resulting communicative patterns, and what they foreshadow for both Taiwan’s emerging democratic life and China’s rise to global power" (p. 239). The authors want to add to the scholarly conversation about 228 by "examin[ing] the rhetorical work of postcolonial remembering, an anti-authoritarian reclamation project wherein confronting the damage caused by past atrocities fuels Taiwan’s emerging discourse of democracy, multiculturalism, and national autonomy" (p. 239).

Readers might feel this kind of topic isn't typical of an article in a journal focused on intercultural communication, and the authors acknowledge this by pointing to prior research that calls for more postcolonial perspectives in intercultural communication. They argue that their study can also "extend a line of research asking how postcolonial remembering in Asia can help drive both contemporary politics and collective imaginings of possible futures" (p. 240).

The authors also raise a few points that I have been thinking about lately: one has to do with the delicate balance between demonstrating allyship and participating in what Teju Cole has called "the white savior industrial complex." Part of my own worry about writing about Taiwan, besides "getting it wrong" (though to be honest, if you write anything about Taiwan's place in the world, someone is going to say you're wrong), is that my motivations will be questioned in terms of my identity as a white American male. (And perhaps rightly so.) Hartnett, et al. (I'm not sure how all of the authors identify racially, ethnically, and otherwise) deal with this by briefly referencing Linda Alcott's famous article, "The Problem of Speaking for Others," then referencing A Borrowed Voice: Taiwan Human Rights through International Networks, 1960-1980, by Linda Arrigo and Lynn Miles. Folks familiar with the history of Taiwan's democratization probably know of Arrigo (艾琳達) and Miles (梅心怡), who used their international connections to advocate for Taiwanese political prisoners and more generally for human rights in Taiwan. Their book, which depicts the work of Arrigo, Miles, and other international advocates for Taiwan, lends to Hartnett, et al., the idea of "lending a voice." As the authors put it, "Our work, then, is offered in the spirit of solidarity with our local collaborators--not speaking 'for' but 'with' and 'alongside' them--and with the hope of supporting the ongoing process of transitional justice in Taiwan" (p. 242).

That last quote alludes to another issue I've been thinking about and have asked some people in Taiwan Studies about--the relationship between academics and advocacy. Different disciplines, of course, treat this question differently. When I asked about this during an online session with some senior Taiwan Studies scholars (part of the 2020 Taiwan Studies Summer School), though, the response was generally to the effect that doing rigorous scholarship was the best way to advocate for Taiwan (my memory might be faulty on this, so if you were there and remember differently, let me know!). The quote at the end of the above paragraph takes a more activist stance that, if I'm not mistaken, is more typical of rhetorical studies--it implies that scholarship can (should?) consciously be a social justice project. 

A third issue, then, concerns the disciplinary perspective. In addition to the activist stance I have suggested above, where the authors align themselves both with advocates like Arrigo and Miles and with their own "local collaborators," the article takes on what is to people who study Taiwan a familiar story, telling it partially in the language of rhetorical studies so as to introduce Taiwan's history to a new audience. There's a need for this, I think: what I call the "shaped roughly like a tobacco leaf" approach to writing about Taiwan for people who don't have much idea about the place. Kerim Friedman wrote about this on the Anthro(dendum) blog. While it can be annoying to have to explain KMT governance of postwar Taiwan (how many synonyms can you find for "incompetent and corrupt"?), Kerim notes that

the real problem is that nobody would demand these histories if it wasn’t for the fact that Taiwan’s own government (until the end of Martial Law in 1987) and the government of the People’s Republic of China both had a shared interest in sowing confusion about the history of Taiwan in order to portray Taiwan as part of China.

So a lot of this article is necessarily pretty obvious to anyone knowledgable about Taiwan: there's the narrative of 228 and the White Terror, the story of the rise of the dangwai that led to establishment of the DPP and the end to martial law, and descriptions of the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum and the Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park. These familiar/unfamiliar elements are made relevant to communication studies scholars by reference to transitional justice, postcolonial remembering, public memory work, and other concepts often used in the field of rhetoric (and, to be honest, other fields of study). If I have the opportunity, I would like to show this article to a colleague who doesn't know much about Taiwan and see what they think of it. Does it give a new perspective on those topics that I mentioned above? Does it give a new perspective on Taiwan, which, thanks to the news media, I'm guessing a lot of people think "split with the mainland in 1949?" This could be the value of this article: if it can begin to bring Taiwan on its own terms into the orbit of rhetorical studies, if it can begin to make Taiwan's fascinating history a relevant part of the field on its own, then it will be serving a valuable purpose even if its content might be "old hat" to those in Taiwan Studies. (And selfishly, I look forward to citing it in my own work rather than having to repeat the whole "shaped roughly like a tobacco leaf" narrative!)

Well, I haven't summarized this article as much as I have analyzed (possibly critiqued) it. I recommend it, though, and if you are not a Taiwan Studies person, let me know what you think of it!

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. 

Isabelle Cheng, "We want productive workers, not fertile women: The expediency of employing Southeast Asian caregivers in Taiwan"

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

Cheng, I. (2020). We want productive workers, not fertile women: The expediency of employing Southeast Asian caregivers in Taiwan. Asia Pacific Viewpoint. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1111/apv.12275

I decided to follow up on that article I mentioned at the end of my summary of Hsin-I Cheng's (2018) article on relational citizenship. 

Cheng begins her article with an anecdote from 2014 of an Indonesian caregiver in Taiwan who told her of being given an injection before her arrival to prevent her from becoming pregnant. Shocked, Cheng decided to try to find out more about this practice.

Cheng focuses on the legislation in Taiwan that casts foreign caregivers as "temporary, supplementary and disposable outsiders" who are excluded from the "national community" (p. 2). 

Taking a top-down approach, the study identifies four major laws concerning naturalisation, residency, employment, mobility and fertility that regulate the lives of foreign caregivers, and analyses parliamentary debates, government policy briefings, press releases and migrant handbooks. It also examines longitudinal social survey results in order to understand how the host society perceives Southeast Asian migrants. (p. 2)

Cheng describes "migrant women’s self-identities as workers, victims, carers and human beings ... [as] deeply entangled" (p. 3). She points to how they are typically discussed in terms of their victimhood and their status as important sources of income for their families back at home. Their sexuality and reproduction, she argues, are not seen as a topic for research due in part to "methodological sexism"; in society, they are more often seen either in terms of morality (in their home countries) or as "a threat to profitability" (from the point of view of their agents) (p. 3). From the point of view of the host state (in this case, Taiwan), "their potential to give birth (particularly to mixed children fathered by local men) ... [leads to their being] considered a threat to the cohesion of national identity" (p. 4). Thus, the goal of the host society (and the state) is to ensure that migrant women remain productive (but not reproductive) as workers who can remain outsiders to the society rather than settling in as residents.  

Cheng illustrates this by tracing the history of legislation regarding migrant women caregivers since they have been able to legally come to Taiwan starting in 1992. She first points out that the need for migrant caregivers has grown out of the aging of Taiwanese society, the traditional emphasis on providing elder care at home, and the increasing participation of Taiwanese women in the workplace. While there is a desire (at least on the part of the government) for local caregivers (in the form of middle-aged Taiwanese women), that kind of work has been looked down upon as "dirty, difficult and demeaning" (p. 5), (ironically) through its association with foreign caregivers. The pay for migrant caregivers is also artificially kept down through a government cap on their income. "However," Cheng argues, "this economic cheapness [that makes the migrant women desirable as workers] runs in tandem with the perceived socio-political costs of accommodating foreign women at the prime age of fertility who are seen as the undesirable other" (p. 5).

Cheng looks at the development of four laws that govern the position of foreign caregivers in Taiwan: the Nationality Act, the Immigration Act, the Employment Services Act, and the Labour Standards Act. She points out how these acts developed and work together to render foreign caregivers ineligible for naturalization despite the extensions on how long they were allowed to work in Taiwan (up to 14 years); in effect, they are "permanently temporary" (p. 5, emphasis in original), which benefits Taiwanese society by providing cheap long-term workers while at the same time avoiding the purported "social problems" their presence might bring (problems that Cheng points out legislators didn't define, except for the fear that they would become involved with local men) (p. 5). Criticism of these and other measures to control the movements of migrant women, such as not allowing them to decide for themselves to change jobs, have not resulted in effective policies to protect their rights (p. 7). 

Cheng next goes through the history of required pregnancy screenings for foreign caregivers, which was required for 10 years (until 2002) before coming to Taiwan, right after arrival, and every six months during residence in Taiwan. Caregivers found to be pregnant would be expelled. Although the requirement to be tested every six months was abolished in 2002, it was not until 2015 that the final pregnancy test (the pre-entry test) was no longer required (p. 8). Unfortunately, migrant caregivers are not always informed of their rights because the handbook is only published in Chinese and English. [This makes me want to find information about the status of the teaching of Chinese to migrant workers in Taiwan. (And English, too, although I'm reminded of Pei-Chia Lan's 2003 article (pdf), "'They have more money but I speak better English!' Transnational encounters between Filipina domestics and Taiwanese employers."] The handbook still discourages migrant workers from getting pregnant, warning of "dire consequences" to the mother and the child, particularly if the child is born out of wedlock (p. 8). 

[To add something about Lan's (2003) article: she observes that in 2002, the percentage of Filipina domestic workers in Taiwan dropped drastically, and the percentage of Indonesian workers rose almost as dramatically (p. 155). She attributes this to employers' beliefs that Indonesians are more complaint than Filipinas, a characterization that she associates with social and linguistic factors: 

Indonesian workers, who speak little English in general, are less capable to verbally bargain with their employers. Besides, Indonesian migrants are even more isolated in Taiwan than their Filipina counterparts, who are at least able to retrieve information by reading English newspapers and have affiliations with Catholic churches and NGOs that offer some legal assistance and counseling. (p. 156)

"Indonesian workers in Taiwan," Lan goes on, "... have no choice but to learn Mandarin Chinese or Holo-Taiwanese for the sake of communication. As such, Taiwanese employers get the upper hand in their linguistic exchanges and social interactions with Indonesian maids" (p. 156). This adds another, sociolinguistic, element to what Isabelle Cheng, Hsin-I Cheng, and Todd Sandel have discussed.]

Cheng points out that although the government has changed some policies in response to human rights associations' criticisms and in order to be able to continue to brand Taiwan as a nation "founded on human rights protection" (人權立國), those policies don't necessarily reflect the views of Taiwan's citizens, the majority of whom (according to surveys) view Southeast Asian migrants as undesirable (p. 9). Taiwanese are willing to 'import' Southeast Asian caregivers, but they are not interested in having them become part of society. As Cheng puts it, "Such a scenario makes Taiwan a ‘walled’ migration state (Hollifield, 2004) which embraces economic openness for the purposes of reaping the fruit of migration but ensures socio-political closure in gatekeeping the boundaries of national community" (p. 9).

I would note that of the surveys Cheng mentions toward the end, the most recent one that specifically addressed the question of whether foreign workers should be allowed to become residents was from 2006; She also cites a 2018 survey that asked whether Taiwan should encourage immigration from Southeast Asia--only 8.4% agreed with this idea (p. 9). I'm not sure how this information squares with Sandel's discussion of foreign brides as the "fifth ethnic group," except perhaps to note Cheng's argument that at this point in time, it appears that the state and the populace are evidently not in agreement about the place of Southeast Asian migrants in Taiwan. This article doesn't touch on Hsin-I Cheng's point about foreign brides being characterized in terms of their relationships with Taiwanese husbands, in-laws, or children. Perhaps the survey statistic points to a difference between how individual decisions by families to try to carry on the family name are viewed versus how a possible official decision to encourage Southeast Asian immigration on a larger scale would be viewed. I'd have to get a look at the actual questions used in the cited survey. (Unfortunately, the website doesn't seem to be working right now. I guess I'll try to come back to it later to see.) 

I got the wrong survey--that link is to the 2006 survey. The correct (2018) survey is reported on in this article by Timothy Rich in The Diplomat: Rich surveyed 1000 Taiwanese on the web, asking them one of four questions: "Taiwan should encourage immigration," "Taiwan should encourage immigration of skilled workers," "Taiwan should encourage immigration from Southeast Asian countries," or "Taiwan should encourage immigration of skilled workers from Southeast Asian countries." As he reports, questions that included the idea of "skilled workers" scored higher than those that didn't, although "skilled Southeast Asian immigration" was agreed to by only 44.6% of the respondents to that question, and the question about immigration from Southeast Asian countries that didn't mention skilled workers was agreed to (as Cheng notes) by only 8.4% of its respondents. Not being a statistics guy, I can't vouch for his methods (and he's not asking me to!). Web surveys can be a bit iffy, of course, since the respondents are kind of self-selecting. It would have been interesting, for instance, to get a little demographic information about who responded and how he sought out the respondents. I'd like to see if this kind of survey has been conducted with a larger group.

Going back to the 2006 survey that Isabelle Cheng cites, I'd note that there's one question in the survey (questions here; pdf) that asks, "Do you agree or disagree with the statement, 'Foreign laborers who work legally in Taiwan for at least seven years should be allowed to apply for long-term residency'?" (請問您贊不贊成若「外籍勞工在台灣合法工作七年以上，就可申請長期居留」？). Cheng notes that 67.6% of respondents disagreed with the statement in 2006. 

There are more recent surveys, but the questions seem to be different. This 2016 survey asks questions about attitudes towards a son's or friend's decision to marry someone from the Mainland, an overseas Chinese from Southeast Asia, a Vietnamese, or a Southeast Asian who's not of Chinese ethnicity. It also asks questions about whether the government should restrict Mainland Chinese or Southeast Asian spouses from obtaining Taiwan ID cards. Nothing, though, about foreign laborers. 

There are some questions in this survey from 2015 about whether foreigners should be allowed to get ROC citizenship: they divide the groups into "European/American/Japanese professionals" (歐美日專業人士), "Domestic helpers from Southeast Asia" (東南亞的外傭), "Laborers or fishermen from Southeast Asia" (東南亞籍的勞工或漁工), " Let's look at the answers: 

For European/American/Japanese professionals: 

• Should strictly restrict: 26.9% (I'm taking the first column of percentages)
• Should restrict a bit: 24.6%
• Should try not to limit: 45.2%
• (The rest, 3.3%, didn't answer or said they didn't know)

For Domestic helpers from Southeast Asia:

• Should strictly restrict: 47.8%
• Should restrict a bit: 25.7%
• Should try not to limit: 23.6%
• (The rest, 2.9%, didn't answer or said they didn't know)

For Laborers or fishermen from Southeast Asia:

• Should strictly restrict: 51.2%
• Should restrict a bit: 24.3%
• Should try not to limit: 21.6%
• (The rest, 2.9%, didn't answer or said they didn't know)

Notably, the numbers for domestic helpers and laborers/fishermen, while not great, seem a bit better than what Rich found (although of course the questions are different). 

OK, probably no one has read this far, so I'll stop here. But there are a lot of interesting surveys on that site. Might take another look at them some time.

Hsin-I Cheng, "Relational citizenship: Examining Taiwanese membership development through immigrant framing in public discourses"

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

Cheng, H.-I. (2018) Relational citizenship: Examining Taiwanese membership development through immigrant framing in public discourses. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 11(2), 154-172, DOI: 10.1080/17513057.2018.1426778

I decided to read this article to get some insight into one of the questions I had in response to Sandel (2017). Cheng appears to be directly addressing my question when she writes, "This paper intends to discern the ways migrant spouses in Taiwan are discussed in public discourse" (p. 155).

More specifically, Cheng describes her two research questions about migrant spouses as follows: 

How are recent immigrant spouses in Taiwan discussed in public discourses? And, what cultural logic buttresses the constructions of newcomers’ belongingness in Taiwan? (p. 155)

She focuses on the portrayal of female immigrant spouses in print news media, but also conducted interviews with social workers and attended citizenship celebrations for immigrant spouses (p. 159).

Cheng develops her concept of relational citizenship by contrasting the traditional Western concept of citizenship that conceptualizes it in terms of legal rights that are theoretically (though not in practice) portrayed as universal with Donati's (1995; 2011) concept of "societal citizenship" that argues for "relational rights" of citizenship along with the more traditional Western legal rights. To Donati's conceptualization, Cheng adds more Taiwan-specific perspectives on relationships, drawing on the contrast between qing (情, described as "connective feelings" that have "traditionally served as the foundation for Chinese moral behavior" [p. 157]) and fa (法, "regulations and laws"). Noting that "Confucian societies aim to reach harmonious relations ... before employing regulations and laws," she observes that trying to balance these two approaches to "organizing societies ... remains a constant struggle for modern Chinese societies" (p. 157).

In the specific case of immigrant spouses, Cheng argues that foreign spouses (mostly female immigrants coming from China, Vietnam, and Indonesia to marry Taiwanese men) are primarily depicted in the news media in terms of their relationships to the Taiwanese people with whom they are associated (as wives, mothers, or daughters-in-law). Furthermore, she observes that at an Immigration Day celebration she attended, two Taiwanese speakers--a government official and an elementary school principal--described the contributions of the immigrant spouses in terms of their ability to reproduce. Cheng notes that both of the speakers--both women--jokingly lamented that they "cannot compete" with the immigrant spouses' reproductive powers (one speaker calls them an "army of reproduction" [shenglijun, 生力軍]), and she argues that such language "replicates the ethos of objectifying women citizens as reproduction machines," though she doesn't comment on the arguably racist connotations of casting the immigrant women in particular as "reproductive machines" (p. 161).

Cheng points out that relational citizenship in Taiwan means that citizenship for foreign spouses is also conditional. On the one hand, she cites the news story of a foreign spouse who despite overstaying her residency was able to keep her Alien Residence Certificate (which connotes permanent residency, a stage toward citizenship for the foreign spouses). The language of the article emphasizes the need of her four children for their mother (p. 163). On the other hand, she cites another story of a foreign spouse who lost her Taiwanese citizenship for having an extramarital affair. (Cheng notes that the foreign spouse wondered publicly why a government official didn't lose his citizenship for having an affair). The woman, says Cheng, "obviously was positioned in a further, more precarious, and lower hierarchical relation as a citizen compared to those of the male governmental official. ... The compounded effects of racialized nationalism and patriarchy, which controls women's body more stringently, complicated her Taiwanese identity" (p. 162). 

These two examples hint at what Cheng later points about about how citizenship becomes "a moral matter": at one of the celebrations she attended, she observed immigrant spouses being praised for their filial piety and care for their families and their families' businesses. "In these public endorsements," she writes, "marital immigrants are expected to perform duties to satisfy their immediate and distant interdependent groups as a way to enhance their value" (the capitalist connotations of this are not lost on Cheng) (p. 164). 

Cheng also points out, though, the possibilities for multicultural identities and relationships when she describes an immigrant mother and her daughter singing a Vietnamese song together" at a celebration. At these performances," she argues, the "local core value of being an 'ideal' female relational partner is tied to the progressive ideology of multiculturalism, demonstrated through Southeast Asian food stands, games with quizzes on various cultural traditions, and multilingual singing and dances onstage. The displayed relational citizenship reinforces Taiwan's image as a pluralistic society able to strengthen its long-cherished cultural values even within these multicultural families" (p. 165).

Cheng admits, however, that the multiculturalism celebrated in such activities can "depoliticize real differences derived from historical legacies and consequently mitigate political support for certain cultural communities" (p. 166) And citing other research (including a 2015 book by Todd Sandel), she concedes that relational citizenship does not mean that legal citizenship rights aren't important. She also concedes that there are questions about, for instance, "who should be making the efforts to relate to whom" (p. 167). But, she concludes, the concept of relational citizenship could be useful in helping to reimagine "interactions that occur between citizens and immigrants/migrants as [occurring between] interdependent and relational partners" (p. 167). This could help address the discourse around citizen-immigrant relations by emphasizing immigrants' relations with others, as in "immigrant mother," rather than individualistic legalistic identities like "undocumented immigrant" (p. 167). 

The article served my purpose of getting a sense of how foreign spouses in Taiwan are portrayed in public discourse. One thing I didn't mention in my summary was Cheng's contrast between how foreign spouses are more often discussed in terms of qing, while foreign laborers (waiji laogong 外籍勞工) are portrayed in terms of fa--the foreign laborers don't have any rights to permanent residency or citizenship, and there doesn't seem to be any place for them in the concept of relational citizenship. This leads me to wonder, though, how relational citizenship can be applied in situations where the immigrant is not related to anyone--if they are not someone's parent or spouse, if they are not related to anyone in the country they have migrated to. It suggests to me that the concept or use of relational citizenship might be useful in some circumstances, such as with immigrant spouses in Taiwan (though even there it sounds a bit problematic), its range of application otherwise might be rather narrow. 

[Update, 8/22/20: While Twitter-surfing I just saw a reference on Jonathan Sullivan's feed to this open-access article: "We want productive workers, not fertile women: The expediency of employing Southeast Asian caregivers in Taiwan," by Isabelle Cheng. It seems to address some of the problems with the "relational citizenship" model in Hsin-I Cheng's article. Isabelle Cheng writes in the abstract, "‘Bringing the state back in’ to its analysis, this article argues that this legislation is not only market‐driven but socio‐politically expedient in that it sanctions the continued employment of foreign caregivers as productive workers rather than as fertile women, while simultaneously casting them as the undesirable other. Taiwan thus becomes a ‘migration state’ with an open economy but a closed national community." I'll have to read this when I get a chance...]

Todd L. Sandel, "Communication Modes, Taiwanese"

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

Sandel, T. L. (2017). Communication modes, Taiwanese. In Y. Y. Kim (Ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (pp. 1-5). John Wiley & Sons. DOI: 10.1002/9781118783665.ieicc0149

Sandel's short chapter covers a broad but somewhat idiosyncratic set of language practices and cultural attitudes in Taiwan, from the differences between "Standard [Mandarin] Chinese" and Taiwan Guoyu (台灣國語), to a comparison between language practices/identity in southern and northern Taiwan, to the gendered language practice of sajiao (撒嬌), to the discourse of multiculturalism in Taiwan, to Taiwanese admiration of Japan. In a four-page chapter (the last page consists of cross-references and a reference list), it's a somewhat dizzying trip through Taiwanese culture, but it gives me a sense of the difficulty one might have if tasked with the job of describing in a limited space the "communication modes" of contemporary Taiwan--what to include? What to leave out? 

Some things I learned from the article:

• The term Taike (台客) was originally the way Mainland gang members referred to Taiwanese gang members in the 1960s (I'm assuming he's referring to members of Mainland gangs and members of Taiwanese gangs, since I don't think there were many gangs that incorporated both groups back then--someone correct me if I'm wrong since I'm no expert on the history of gangs in Taiwan.)
• Sandel argues that by the 2000s, "foreign brides" from southeast Asia and China "were recognized as Taiwan’s 'fifth ethnic group,' not a threat but a treasure who could help facilitate connections between Taiwan, the nations of Southeast Asia, and China." He gives as evidence the fact that in the 2016 elections, there was no "anti-immigrant" rhetoric used by any political party as part of their campaign.
• Sandel mentions a movie I haven't seen, Wansei Back Home (灣生回家, 2015), which is a documentary about Taiwan-born Japanese citizens who had to leave Taiwan at the end of World War II. (Actually, I have heard of the film in the context of a scandal a few years ago about the producer of the film, who admitted to having lied about being a Taiwan-born Japanese. Evidently, though, the film itself wasn't falsified.)

Some things I have questions about:

• Is sajiao, which Sandel characterizes as a practice "associated with 'Mainlanders,'" not practiced as much by non-Mainlander Taiwanese? Is it practiced much in China?
• How inclusive is the multicultural discourse in Taiwan? How do most Taiwanese people feel about viewing "foreign brides" (外籍新娘) as part of Taiwanese society?
• Have the concepts of hen Tai (很台) and Taike (台客) become points of pride for Taiwanese, as the term "queer" has been co-opted by the LGBTQ+ community? (This also leads me to wonder about the communication modes of the LGBTQ+ community in Taiwan.)

Sumei Wang, "Radio and Urban Rhythms in 1930s Colonial Taiwan"

I'm going to do some blogging about scholarly articles I've found related to communication practices in Taiwan. I thought I'd start with this one because I saw that there's an exhibition on the history of communications technology in Taiwan that has opened in Taipei. 

Wang, Sumei. (2018). Radio and urban rhythms in 1930s colonial Taiwan. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 38(1), 147-162. https://doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2017.1285152

Wang's article traces the rise of radio broadcasting in colonial Taiwan, from its beginnings in 1925 through the 1930s, which is her main period of focus. She makes the argument that although some scholars see the mass culture created by media like radio as "an instrument of social control and a vehicle for the promotion of hegemony" (p. 159), the advent of radio in Taiwan was more than that. Along with  phonographs, newspapers, cafés, dance halls, and theaters, radio created a consumer culture in Taiwan among the urban middle class. At the same time, she argues that radio contributed to a shift in the rhythms of Taiwanese culture by bringing a standardized way of telling time from the public sphere and into the home. (Until 1921, "clocks were synchronized according to the sound of a cannon fired daily by the military at 12:00 p.m." [p. 153].) Wang points out that "[a]fter the advent of the radio in Taiwan, every day at 11:59 am and 9:20 PM, immediately before the end of broadcasting, the radio announcer began a count- down: 50, 40, ... 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 s. The audience gradually became used to the temporal order provided by the radio" (p. 154).

Wang also discusses the programming provided on station JFAK, Taipei's first radio station that was established by the Taiwan Hōsō Kyōkai (THK). 

 

JFAK Radio Tower (原台北放送局放送亭), New Park, Taipei

She notes that the station did not only broadcast programs about Japan: 

Because the population of Japanese residents numbered only 270,000 in Taiwan, compared with the five million native Taiwanese, THK acknowledged that, to increase the number of radio subscribers, the programmes had to attract Taiwanese listeners. Therefore, programmes on Taiwanese music, history, entertainment, and business information were introduced. The radio station also invited artists to perform their music in real-time broadcasts, and reviewed newly released pop records (p. 151)

Not only did some THK programs have a Taiwan focus, but  

[o]n 9 September 1934, THK produced the programme ‘Taiwanese Evening’, made available to listeners across all of the Japanese territories, and it later became a regular monthly show. This revealed that Taiwan was not only a passive receiver situated on the fringe of the Japanese Empire; on the contrary, through radio broadcasting, it could transmit its own culture to the mainland, and thus was also an exporter of culture. (p. 151)

Wang's article goes beyond radio, however, and in fact it is sometimes a bit challenging to understand the reason that radio is the focus of the title and abstract--there's also a lot in the article about newspapers, phonographs, and even bus schedules and their contribution to urban life and "structured punctuality" in 1930s Taiwan. At the beginning of the article, Wang proposes to use Lin Huikun's (林煇焜) 1933 serial novel Inviolable Destiny (《爭へぬ運命》, later translated into Chinese as 《命運難違》) as evidence for the common role of radio in urban life in colonial Taiwan. However, many of her examples from the serialized novel have to do with other 

rich depictions of urban life at the time. For example, buses, taxies and bicycles pass through busy cities; viewing movies in theatres was a form of popular entertainment for urban residents; and young females could visit public spaces unaccompanied. All of these examples indicate modern life in metropolitan Taipei. (p. 155)

Overall, though, the article does a good job of depicting urban life in 1930s Taipei. It reminds me of the book 台灣西方文明初體驗 (Taiwan's First Experiences of Western Civilization), by 陳柔縉 (Chen Rouxin). And it has introduced me to a new work of Taiwanese fiction that I would like to read some day. (《命運難違》is available in Chinese translation, though it comes in two volumes. Maybe I'll buy it next time I'm in Taiwan...)