Particularly influential organizations that propagate its dissemination are the North American Taiwan Studies Association (NTSA), a non-profit that was founded in 1994, the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS), established in 2004, and the Japan Association for Taiwan Studies (JATS). Very few people in China studies took Taiwan seriously as something worth studying in its own right, aside from a few anthropologists and linguists.”Woodworth adds that Taiwan eventually began to be seen as a subject of intrinsic interest, as well as a “democratic counter-example to China.”One of the foremost figures in Taiwan studies is Dafydd Fell, director of the Center of Taiwan Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and joint founder of EATS. “In more institutional form, we only start to get Taiwan studies organizations in the 1990s, such as the North American Taiwan Studies Association. Fell feels the role of Taiwan studies is to raise interest in Taiwan, inform through media engagement, and advise governments on handling relationships with Taiwan. “While these are topics that are popular subjects of research in international Taiwan studies, most scholars focus on analyzing rather than prescribing how Taiwan should handle relations with China.”He also suggests that the “old method” of Taiwan studies, which regarded Taiwan as only having a 400-year history – a Chinese and Eurocentric viewpoint – has partially been replaced by scholarship on subjects like Austronesian migration out of Taiwan.
Continue reading...
