The Inaugural Prof Chwei-Liang Chiou Memorial Lecture on Taiwan Democracy, Macquarie University

The webinar is supported by Macquarie University in memory of Prof Chwei-Liang Chiou AM (1938-2021).  In this lecture, Dr Rwei-ren Wu (吳叡人), Associate Research Fellow of the Institute of Taiwan History in Academia Sinica (Taiwan), will deliver a talk entitled “Caught between Empires: Democracy and Nation-State Formation in Taiwan”. In Dr Wu’s presentation, he will review the historical development and transition of Taiwan from a colony to Asia’s most vibrant democratic society. As the Taiwan Strait emerges as one of the world’s geopolitical flashpoints, what does history contribute to our understanding of Taiwan’s position today? To better understand the search for democracy and nation-state formation in Taiwan over hundreds of years, this lecture delineates a schematic explanatory framework for Taiwan’s nation-state formation and political history. Dr Wu argues that the three long-term historical processes of settler indigenization, social integration and the accumulative formation of state institutions that had taken place since the sixteenth century converged with the democratisation of the 1990s, eventually resulting in the contemporary form of the Taiwanese state. A case of state-formation that took place at what Rokkan and Urwin called the “interface” between multiple empires or geopolitical centers, Taiwan’s nation-state formation, albeit largely completed, is nevertheless facing new threats of disintegration under the pressures of the imperialising China.