KIN4340 – Taiwan Studies
Course content
This course will introduce you to the complexities of Taiwan’s culture, history, society and political status and practices. Curriculum and classes will focus on issues of particular importance: history, politics, cross-strait relations, Taiwanese and Chinese identities, Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, languages of Taiwan, religion, gender, literature, and other aspects of Taiwanese society and culture.
Taiwan is a small island with a large population (23.5 million) and is of huge importance both for China and the world. Taiwan is the 8th largest economy in Asia and the 22nd in the world. It is geographically situated in a spot with potential escalating conflicts between the world’s main powers, and it is increasingly seen as a counter movement to growing trends of totalitarianism elsewhere.
Before annexation by the Qing dynasty in 1683, the island had a complex history involving indigenous peoples, colonization by the Netherlands and Spain, and the Kingdom of Tungning. At the end of World War 2, Taiwan had been a Japanese colony for fifty years. After the civil war in China and take-over by Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, the losing part, Kuomintang and its leader Chiang Kai-shek, fled to Taiwan and built a new authoritarian regime there. Starting in the 1960s, Taiwan along with the other so-called Asian Tigers (South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong) experienced rapid industrialisation and high economic growth, and later developed into high-income economies. From the mid-1980s, Taiwan has gone through a remarkable transformation into what some analysts call Asia’s most well-functioning democracy.
In this course, students will learn how to study Taiwan from different approaches and through a variety of sources and media, The classes are taught by the teacher responsible for the course in collaboration with guest lecturers with relevant research background.
Topics previous years:
Learning outcome
- You will learn to identify, read, summarize, critically assess, and analyse sources relevant to the study of key topics in Taiwanese and Chinese culture and history.
- You will learn to organize and write academic essays within a short deadline.
- You will learn to express