Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Names used to address Taiwan--such as taiwan and zhonghuamingguo (Republic of China [ROC])--are symbols defining Taiwan’s political realities, each with their own unique historical significance. Since his election in 2000, Taiwan's president Chen Shui-bien has had to alternate between taiwan and ROC to strike a balance among conflicting ideas about Taiwan’s national identity. The act is grounded in complex political discourse dictating that Taiwan must not be seen as separate from the Sinic world and simultaneously to respond to steadily rising Taiwanese consciousness. Facing intercessions by the United States and China, as well as ever-present domestic clashes, rhetorical exigency requires the president to fashion unique political discourse concerning what Taiwan is and ought to be. This study explores how these names and related expressions are used in Chen's public addresses to the nation and how their development reflects the struggle over Taiwan’s national identity.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Layers of migration and colonization have produced a complex culture in Taiwan, with society in a rapid state of flux. On the surface, Taiwan looks very much like many of the cosmopolitan areas in the world in which cultural hybridity is a byproduct of globalization. However, when closely looking at Taiwan society, one notices a seemingly paradoxical force pushing the island in the opposite direction. The drastic political and social changes in recent decades have created a desperate need for Taiwan to search for local identity and subjectivity. This paper examines the continuing search for answers to the question of “what is Taiwan culture?” along with the formation of Taiwan identity amid the variety of postcolonial discourses and globalization processes. I argue that the debate is very much shaped by political attitudes toward Taiwan’s future. Notions of globalization and hybridity have emerged from the debate, but are too often not critically examined. I call for media scholars to pay attention to cultural politics in Taiwan and I also suggest possibilities for research in this area.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper wants to study how the PRC perceive the Taiwan Problem and explain how it made and implemented Taiwan policy incrementally from three perspectives(individual actors,domestic structures, and contextual constraints).

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The mainstream discourse on cross-strait relations tends to reproduce the “crisis” than transform it. Analysts in Taiwan are complicit by loyally following US concepts, prescriptions, and strategies for the region. Some, however, are beginning to contest this traditional subjugation of Taiwan’s interests and identity to US and Chinese hegemony. Nonetheless, they still abide by the US paradigm of triangular relations. This paper notes a third, emerging discourse that reframes US-China-Taiwan relations through a postcolonial understanding of sovereignty, cross-strait relations, and Taiwanese subjectivity. We characterize these three options, in reverse order, in Hirschman’s terms of “exit,” “voice, and “loyalty.” But we amend these with Ling’s differentiation of “formal” and “substantive” mimicry for “loyalty” and “voice,” respectively. Both reflect conditions of postcolonial hybridity that mature, eventually, into a paradigmatic breakthrough or “exit.”

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study applies framing analysis to online news in China by examining how two mainstream websites, www.people.com.cn (referred hereafter as people) and www.sina.com.cn (referred hereafter as sina) in Mainland China frame Taiwan’s 2004 presidential election and how the presence of news frames varies within the same website as well as between different websites.

Factor analysis gauges four distinguished news frames: military consequences, game, ideology and conflict. Post hoc analyses show that, within people, conflict frame is used less often than three other frames. Between websites, the conflict frame is more salient in sina than in people.

The author suggests that in China, online news frames are identical with the frames underlying traditional mainstream media’s coverage on Taiwan. Generic frames and issue-specific frames can be detected simultaneously. This study also verifies the validity of the deductive approach in measuring news frames.