Taiwan Roundtable Discussion On Cold War/Martial Law Formations of Taiwanese America

Monday, May 13, 2024
Hoover Institution | Stanford University

On behalf of Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and its National Security Task Force the Hoover Institution held a Taiwan Roundtable Discussion On Cold War / Martial Law Formations of Taiwanese America on Monday, May 13, 2024 from 2-3:30 p.m. PT in Stauffer Auditorium.

From the 1960s to 1980s, more than a hundred thousand Taiwanese students migrated to the US for graduate study in science, technology, engineering, and medicine fields as part of the special Cold War relationship between the US and the authoritarian Kuomintang (KMT) government in Taiwan. This same time period overlapped with a 38-year period of martial law in Taiwan, during which the KMT surveilled and terrorized Taiwanese nationals not only in Taiwan but also in the U.S., Japan, and other locations around the world. In the U.S., this occurred with the full knowledge and tacit permission of the US state.

With information drawn from extensive interviews and archival research, we'll discuss how Taiwanese students were politicized and organized themselves on U.S. university campuses under these dual conditions of selective Cold War migration and martial law, and how their politics were more heterogeneous and far-reaching than how they are typically remembered today.

FEATURING

Wendy Cheng
Professor
Chair, Intercollegiate American Studies Program
Core Faculty, Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies
Scripps College

Wendy Cheng is Professor of American Studies and core faculty in the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at Scripps College. She is the author of Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (University of Washington Press, 2023) and The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012).

MODERATOR

Kharis Templeman
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution

Kharis Templeman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and part of the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific. Templeman is a political scientist (Ph.D. 2012, Michigan) with research interests in Taiwan politics, democratization, elections and election management, party system development, and politics and security issues in Pacific Asia.

[mikemaas]

I think "Taiwanese" as a name for simply Chinese residing in Taiwan is badly in need of deobfuscation. I lived in Taiwan from 1973-1977 as a foreign student. At that time "Taiwanese" described the pre WWII population whose native Chinese dialect was "Taiwan Hua" actually a mainland dialect originally LeiZhou Hua that became the dialect of most of the Southern coast of China. The later immigration waves post WWII spoke mainly Mandarin (Putong Hua) and were referred to mostly as "waishen" designating their status as having been born and migrating from outside Taiwan. If we now start to refer to all Chinese in Taiwan as "Taiwanese" all of this history is lost to obfuscation. I don't have a solution only a concern that the intricacies of this history will be lost unless care is taken.

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Do the negative feelings about the Kuomintang government fuel the feelings of those in Taiwan that want unification with China or is that motivated by something else or greater?

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