The Institute for Chinese Studies presents:
One China, Many Taiwans
Ian Rowen
Kyushu University Institute for Advanced Study
Abstract: One China, Many Taiwans shows how tourism performs and transforms territory. While the People’s Republic of China pointed over a thousand missiles across the Taiwan Strait, it sent millions of tourists in the same direction with the encouragement of Taiwan’s politicians and businesspeople starting in 2008. One China, Many Taiwans examines how tourism, one of several strategies employed by the PRC at exerting political control over Taiwan, worked out in practice. Based on extensive ethnographic study, I argue that contrary to the PRC’s efforts to incorporate Taiwan as part of an undivided “One China”, tourism aggravated tensions between the two polities, polarized Taiwanese society, and pushed Taiwanese popular sentiment farther towards support for national self-determination.
In the process, Taiwan’s already-surreal staging of state sovereignty bifurcated into what could be described as “Two Taiwans”—the Taiwan performed as a part of China for Chinese group tourists, versus the Taiwan experienced as a site of everyday life by local residents and some independent tourists. The split corresponded with a growing fissure of domestic political economy, amplifying a conflict between those business, civil society and state actors that had an interest in sustaining a PRC-oriented tourist industry versus those that did not. These tourism-inflected Two Taiwans are among the most vivid manifestations of inconsistent nationalisms spanning a territory that was already realizing a distinct, and distinctively inclusive, subjectivity. Indeed, Taiwan’s identity is increasingly predicated on a pluralistic civic nationalism in which not just one or two, but many Taiwans co-exist more or less comfortably, even as it is existentially threatened.
Ian Rowen is Associate Professor at the Kyushu University Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism (Cornell University Press, 2022), and the editor of Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror (Cambria Press, 2021). He earned his PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder.