Taipei Summer 2024 Vol 36

It’s summertime, and life in Taipei is both easy and breezy. Let’s take a tour of some of the fun things you can get up to, during the day and in the evening, indoors and outdoors. In one of our three Cover Story articles, we’re your guide to places of play after dark in eastern Taipei’s Songshan and Nangang districts – where to “party it up, watch a live performance, or just relax by the river.” In another article, enjoy a primer on the panoramic cityscape views and gourmet dining served up on the popular double-decker Taipei Sightseeing Bus and Taipei Restaurant Bus. And in the third article, it’s a night at the edutainment hotspot TaipeiEYE, which provides visitors with rich and intimate sampler showcases of Taiwanese and Peking opera. In our A Day in Taipei segment, we present two “urban walks” outings. One destination is the cosmopolitan Minsheng Community, a leafy street neighborhood in the downtown core percolating with iconoclastic owner-operated shops, cafés, and eateries. The other is the natural environment of Neihu District, tucked up against and up into the mountains in the Taipei Basin’s northeast corner, a place of sizeable lakes, pleasant mountain trails, and a colorful harvest of attractions. The feasting on the taste of natural beauties continues in our Out in Nature offerings. The Maokong area, best known for tea farms, teahouses, and tea cuisines, and now for scenic-view cafés as well, is a prime locale for hiking enthusiasts, laced with high-quality trails. Next, you’ll meet the photogenic Taipei Tree Frog and Bamboo Pit Viper on local nighttime nature photography. Rounding out this issue’s selection of experience possibilities, in DIY Fun join CookInn Taiwan’s enjoyable cooking classes, available in di­erent languages, preparing Taiwanese food and drink classics; in Fine Food savor quintessential Taipei summer cuisine, from fruit-tea drinks to shaved-ice treats to – despite the rising temperatures – piping-hot stir fries; and in Where to... learn about the excitingly diverse range of facilities at the many modern city-run sports centers. The Taipei of summer serves up endless delights – let the TAIPEI Summer 2024 issue be your take-along guide!

The Asia-Pacific Regional Security Assessment (APRSA) examines key regional security policies and challenges relevant to the proceedings of the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s premier defence summit convened by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). It is published and launched at the Dialogue and the issues analysed within its covers are central to discussions at the event and beyond. This eleventh edition comes as the APRSA celebrates its first decade. A dozen IISS experts reflect on a decade of change and continuity across major security policies and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific region. Three themes materialise across six chapters: the pressure and constraints surrounding great-power competition, the enduring value of alliances and partnerships and the impact of advanced and emerging technology for regional security dynamics. In addition to the introduction, the APRSA will now feature a special-topic chapter providing a deeper analysis of an enduring security policy and challenge. The other five chapters investigate further key dimensions of the regional security environment, supported by maps, graphs, charts and tables. The six chapters of this year’s APRSA cover the following topics: Combined military exercises in the Asia-Pacific Crisis management between the United States and China India’s defence partnership in the Asia-Pacific Diplomatic approaches to managing the Myanmar conflict Disinformation campaigns in the Asia-Pacific The Asia-Pacific air-to-air challenge

This volume represents the latest research in cultural anthropology on an ascendant and globalizing China, covering the many different dimensions of China’s ascendancy both within China itself and beyond. It focuses not only on the real and perceived successes of China in the past four decades, but also on the difficulties, tensions, and dangers that have emerged as a result of rapid economic development: class polarization, state expansion, psychological distress, and environmental degradation. Including contributions by some of the most well-known cultural anthropologists of China, as well as rising innovative younger scholars, this book documents and analyzes China’s multifaceted transformations in the modern era—both within Chinese society and in Chinese relations with the outside world. It features the unique perspective of anthropology, with its on-the-ground deep cultural immersion through long-term fieldwork, coupled with a macrolevel global perspective, a strong historical perspective, and theoretically engaged analyses to present a balanced account of China’s ascendancy. Anthropology of Ascendant China: Histories, Attainments, and Tribulations is suitable for students and scholars in Anthropology, Sociology, History, Political Science, and East Asian Studies, as well as those working on contemporary Chinese society and culture more broadly.

The underlying structure, incentives and costs shaping international relations, state behaviour and the nature of power are profoundly different today to how they were in the past, in ways that are scarcely recognised and widely misunderstood. For much of history, world politics was marked by profound scarcity in resources, information and security. A series of historical revolutions has largely tamed this scarcity in ways few could have imagined. These revolutions, however, have generated new, potentially catastrophic challenges for the world – the problems of plenty. In this Adelphi book, Francis J. Gavin argues that the institutions, practices, theories and policies that helped explain and largely tamed scarcity by generating massive prosperity, and which were sometimes used to justify punishing conquest, are often unsuitable for addressing the problems of plenty. Successful grand strategy in this new age of abundance requires new thinking. New conceptual lenses, innovative policies and processes, and transformed institutions will be essential for confronting and solving the problems of plenty, without undermining the expanding efforts against scarcity.

This book provides an overall picture of East Asian international politics during the early interwar period and examines the various foreign policy trends of the major powers involved, including Japan, China, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Based on extensive original research, it posits that East Asia experienced four waves of international change during the interwar period: the transition to the post-World War I international order; the appearance of Nationalist China and the Soviet Union as actors in East Asian international politics; the Japanese invasion of Manchuria; and Japanese implementation of the North China Buffer State Strategy. It considers the new challenges brought about by each of these waves, how the powers – particularly Japan, Britain, and the United States – were able to meet these challenges by working together, and how this became more difficult as time went on. It argues that the Washington System – the international order established at the 1921–1922 Washington Naval Conference – was not a break with the past, as is frequently argued, on account of new forms of foreign policy, including the ideological approaches of the United States and the Soviet Union, but that rather spheres of influence diplomacy continued as before. In addition, in discussing Japanese foreign policy, the book provides a comprehensive picture of the diversity of views towards China among Japanese actors and the ways these shifted over time. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

This book explores and develops the ongoing conversation about how Taiwan navigated through the COVID-19 pandemic. Emphasizing the themes of governance and governmentality, it moves the foci of the discussion from COVID policies to the social and political orders undergirding the statecraft of pandemic management. Furthermore, it analyzes how the pandemic fostered a historical moment at which new forms of governance and governmentality were beginning to take root. It also situates Taiwan’s precarious nationhood in its global context, thereby challenging a prevalent methodological nationalism – the assumption that the nation is a natural unit of analysis whose borders are more or less unquestioned – and contributing to decolonizing Western theories with perspectives from the Global South. Presenting rich original materials on the legal and public debates, individual reflections, and grassroots campaigns during COVID, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Taiwan's governance and social health policy, as well as medical anthropology and sociology.

A concise, definitive history of the precarious relationship among the US, China, and Taiwan As tensions over Taiwan escalate, the United States and China stand on the brink of a catastrophic war. Resolving the impasse demands we understand how it began. In 1943, the Allies declared that Japanese-held Taiwan would return to China at the conclusion of World War II. The Chinese civil war led to a change of plans. The Communist Party came to power in China and the defeated Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan, where he was afforded US protection. The specter of conflict has loomed ever since. In The Struggle for Taiwan, Sulmaan Wasif Khan offers the first comprehensive history of the triangular relationship between the United States, China, and Taiwan, exploring America’s ambivalent commitment to Taiwan’s defense, China’s bitterness about the separation, and Taiwan’s impressive transformation into a flourishing democracy. War is not inevitable, Khan shows, but to avoid it, decision-makers must heed the lessons of the past. From the White Terror to the Taiwan Straits Crises, from the normalization of Sino-American relations to Trump-era rising tensions, The Struggle for Taiwan charts the paths to our present predicament to show what futures might be possible.

In imperial China, people moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth in different ways and for many reasons. Eunuchs, boy actresses, and clergy left behind normative gender roles defined by family and procreation. “Stone maidens”—women deemed physically incapable of vaginal intercourse—might depart from families or marriages to become Buddhist or Daoist nuns. Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit. Yet they were often punished harshly for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire,” suspected of sexual predation, even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for many years. Exploring these histories and many more, this book is a groundbreaking study of transgender lives and practices in late imperial China. Through close readings of court cases, as well as Ming and Qing fiction and nineteenth-century newspaper accounts, Matthew H. Sommer examines the social, legal, and cultural histories of gender crossing. He considers a range of transgender experiences, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular social contexts and penalized in others. Sommer scrutinizes the ways Qing legal authorities and literati writers represented and understood gender-nonconforming people and practices, contrasting official ideology with popular mentalities. An unprecedented account of China’s transgender histories, this book also sheds new light on a range of themes in Ming and Qing law, religion, medicine, literature, and culture.