bourdieu_boy

Another book chapter

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:50:34 GMT

I have another chapter in a new book that just came out with HKU Press. The chapter is "How to Speak About Oneself: Theory and identity in Taiwan. Book blurb as follows.:

What difference does a region make? Are the new regional cultures of Northeast Asia the product of individuals fighting to overcome national trade barriers, or are they driven by governments promoting national interests in new ways? Are they the result of economic pursuits alone, or do cultural and political forces play a role? Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia takes a Cultural Studies approach to the cultural industries in Northeast Asia. The volume opens with an innovative section considering the discipline itself as a kind of cultural industry, highlighting the challenges and possibilities that arise from the context of Northeast Asia. Other essays on specific cultural industries and their products range in coverage from labor in the Korean animation industry to anti-Korean manga in Japan, the emergence of an East Asian brandscape, Chinese consumption of Japanese animation, the Asian regional strategy of the Pusan International Film Festival, and more.

The publication of Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia marks one of the first efforts to address the emergent shape and shaping of a distinctive Northeast Asian cultural sphere in our time and surely represents the best portrayal of the complex tapestry embracing the plural forces of nation, market and cultural industries that is currently constituting this new configuration. From 'Cool Japan,' regional 'brandscapes' to hybrid forms of animation, politicized cartoons, and regional pop music, these essays explore how cultural studies has expanded its disciplinary vocation to meet the demands of a cultural zone different from the usual suspects and expanded its reach to examine policy and the cultural industries implicated in figuring and producing this new cultural unity. Above all else, the collection authoritatively demonstrates the continuing tension between envisioning a Northeast Asian cultural imaginary as a displacement of older historical grievances capable of exceeding the nation and the more difficult labor of realizing political and economic cooperation among the region's nations to actualize a new history." – Harry Harootunian, New York University

"This timely and erudite intellectual interrogation of regionalism offers a potent counter-discourse to challenge nation-state boundaries and problematize the binary model of globalism/localism. There is no comparable book on the market." – Ming-bao Yue, University of Hawai'i at Manoa

_____________________________________

"Women" by Charlene Shih

Sun, 03 May 2009 00:58:37 GMT

An animated short film from 1999 by Los Angeles-based Taiwanese filmmaker Charlene Shih. It uses Chinese characters and references to shanshui painting as a basis of its artistic language. The title is a play on the English and pinyin romanization "women", meaning "us" in Chinese.

_____________________________________

Book chapter

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 05:08:44 GMT

I have a chapter in a new book that just came out with Routledge. Blurb as follows:

This inter-disciplinary volume of essays opens new points of departure for thinking about how Taiwan has been studied and represented in the past, for reflecting on the current state of ‘Taiwan Studies’, and for thinking about how Taiwan might be re-configured in the future.

As the study of Taiwan shifts from being a provincial back-water of sinology to an area in its own (albeit not sovereign) right, a combination of established and up and coming scholars working in the field of East Asian studies offer a re-reading and re-writing of culture in Taiwan. They show that sustained critical analysis of contemporary Taiwan using issues such as trauma, memory, history, tradition, modernity, post-modernity provides a useful point of departure for thinking through similar problematics and issues elsewhere in the world.

Re-writing Culture in Taiwan is a multidisciplinary book with its own distinctive collective voice which will appeal to anyone interested in Taiwan. With chapters on nationalism, anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, religion and museum studies, the breadth of ground covered is truly comprehensive.

_____________________________________

Cape No. 7 trailer

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:40:20 GMT

A relatively confusing trailer for Cape No.7, with rough English subtitles.

_____________________________________

Cape No.7

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 20:41:56 GMT

An editorial piece published in a newspaper this week in Australia.

Since August, the island of Taiwan has been in the grip of the movie phenomenon “Cape No.7”. It is a rare thing in any country, a locally-made film that has smashed box-office records, becoming not just the most successful local film of all time, but the second most successful film in Taiwan ever, after Titanic.

Taiwan was a colony of Japan from 1895 to 1945, when it was passed to the Chinese Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek, and Cape No.7 tells parallel love stories between the last days of colonial rule and the present day. In 1945, a young man is repatriated to Japan and writes love letters on the ship to the Taiwanese girl he is leaving behind. They are addressed in the old Japanese way to a place called Cape No.7 and are never delivered. Sixty years later, a young failed rock singer working as a postman is given the letters, and a chance at success and love with a Japanese woman who is promoting a rock music festival in his hometown.

Cape No.7 is a feel-good story of personal redemption, complete with rock concert finale and a public declaration of love by the hero, and perhaps Strictly Ballroom is the nearest Australian equivalent. However, rather than through family relationships, redemption is achieved by the narrative link to Taiwan’s Japanese past. Evoked with an intense nostalgia, the colonial love story offers the truth and virtue that allows the young man to find his way through his contemporary discontents.

The success of Cape No.7 and its representation of Taiwan’s colonial history comes during an improvement in Taiwan’s political relationship with China. In the legislative and presidential elections earlier this year, the Democratic Progressive Party suffered heavy election defeats to the KMT. The electorate was tired of the divisive identity politics of the former president Chen Shui-bian and the DPP had lost much of its moral authority through a series of corruption scandals. The KMT came back to power on a campaign to boost economic growth and repair China relations.

Many of the domestic economic promises of the KMT have proven to be very unrealistic, greatly exacerbated by the global economic crisis, and the popularity polls of the new president Ma Ying-jeou have fallen towards 25%.

On relations with China, however, the KMT government has pressed ahead with the support and encouragement of the Chinese side. Under a policy of “no independence, no unification and no military action”, as well as ingenious conceits such as the “1992 Consensus”, discussions between the Taiwanese and mainland China have reopened on fundamental issues such as trade and transport. After years of stalled negotiations, direct travel and freight links have been agreed and mainland Chinese tourists have been coming to Taiwan, albeit in small numbers.

The improvement in cross-straits relations has been very enthusiastically received by the international community, long frustrated with the brinkmanship of the previous DPP government and its willingness to confront China while relying on an assumption of US support.

Now, the symbolic gestures towards Taiwanese independence of the DPP have been replaced with symbolic, and some policy, actions far more accommodating towards China.

During the visit by the Chinese representative Chen Yunlin to Taipei in November for the new negotiations, events were carefully staged and words carefully framed to avoid any suggestion of Taiwan’s sovereign status. The visit overlapped with the very public arrests and detention of former president Chen Shui-bian and other senior DPP officials on corruption allegations, and last week President Ma reportedly ruled out a visit to Taiwan by the Dalai Lama in 2009.

Demonstrations were held in Taipei against the Chinese visit, with the largest attracting half a million people, and the police countered very hostile crowds with violence of a level not seen since the dark days of martial law in the late 1970s. A student movement has sprung up, the Wild Strawberries, who have been camped in the old Chiang Kai-shek Memorial square for several weeks.

However, the phenomenon of Cape No.7 is a reminder that some of the most important political changes are not seen on the streets. Since the lifting of martial law in Taiwan in 1987, a rich and profound process of history writing has been undertaken in politics, the media, academia and popular culture. Starting with the 2-28 Incident - the anti-Chinese Nationalist uprising of 1947 - and moving onto the Japanese colonial period and recently to the 1950s and 1960s, the Taiwanese have been recovering histories suppressed and erased during the period of authoritarian rule.

Cape No.7 is an upbeat marker of how those distinctive histories have become a received part of an affirming popular Taiwanese national history. The symbolic politics invoked by the new KMT government will no doubt have satisfied the Chinese government, and that is an important development in cross-straits relations, but Cape No.7 suggests that Taiwanese value both the history writing that is possible in a democracy and also enjoy the uniqueness of the histories that they have recovered.

Unfortunately, Cape No.7 has been banned in mainland China, and the representative Chen Yunlin has been reported as describing the film as expressing the legacy of “colonial brainwashing” of the Taiwanese by Japan. The Chinese blogsphere, while always overheated, has offered ferocious vitriol and condemnation of the film and of Taiwanese attitudes to Japan generally.

The international community might be happy about the direction of the new Taiwanese government, but it might also remain mindful that long-term and peaceful rapprochement between China and Taiwan will ultimately require an acknowledgement of the plurality of history and needs a way to acknowledge of the legitimacy of Taiwan’s unique historical experience. The success of Cape No.7 is a sign of just how far China and Taiwan yet have to go.

_____________________________________

Australian Taiwan Studies Network

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:21:20 GMT

Something I have been working on now I have returned home Australia.

The Australian Taiwan Studies Network is a long-overdue attempt from Australia to bring together academics doing research about the island of Taiwan. It is based around a "wiki", a closed interactive website. It is in its early days, but features internet generated content, such as news feeds, a forum, events calendar, and daily images of Taiwan. The Australian Taiwan Studies Network is based in Australia but open to scholars everywhere. The website requires registration and an "application" to join the network. Those interested can find it at:

http://atsn.wikidot.com

_____________________________________

University of Tasmania Faculty of Arts School of Asian Languages and Studies

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:52:48 GMT

After seven years in London, my new place of employment. The air is clean, the people are nice. The food is unbelievable. A seafood restaurant on the waterfront with its own fishing boat, serving the freshest fish I have ever eaten. It's the little things.

_____________________________________

BBC Beijing Olympics theme

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:31:48 GMT

The BBC's station identifier for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, animation produced by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett of Gorillaz, using the classical Chinese adventure novel Journey to the West as its theme.

_____________________________________

Assignment America

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:18:26 GMT

And nicely timed, CBS News America ran this Assignment America story this weekend.

_____________________________________

布莉絲手作雜貨

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:30:45 GMT

For reasons that are hopefully obvious, a dear friend sent us this rabbit. It is hand-made in Taiwan at a company called Bliss, monographed and with a choice of colours.

Bliss have a blog here: http://blog.yam.com/user/bubucat.html They sell their toys and accessories at a department store and markets around Taiwan.

_____________________________________

The role of the media in Taiwan's democratic consolidation

Sun, 11 May 2008 17:31:00 GMT

This weekend I have been at St Antony's College, Oxford, for a post-election workshop on democracy in Taiwan. My brief was the media, and among the political scientists and Washington hard-heads, I did my usual gesture at epistemological critique. We enjoyed "High Table" in the cafeteria ... I mean, college dining hall, as well as St Antony's very own range of undrinkable wines and sherry. The event was successful and enjoyable and concluded with a very pleasant dinner at a local Italian with academic luminaries and the sparkle of political celebrity in the form of Bi-khim Hsiao, "Taiwan's Natasha Stott-Despoja*", who was literally and metaphorically on the road to recovery after the unimaginable physical and emotional demands of the presidential election campaign.** I finished the event off British style with an arduous journey back to London through a range of transport failures that took hours.

Here is approximately what I had to say at the conference.

The importance of the media in democracies has long been recognized by essayists, activists and theorists, from Thomas Carlyle to Jurgen Habermas to Samuel Huntington.

The media is part of democratic process, delimiting the power of states and empowering citizens by functioning to produce civil society or the public sphere by mediating between the state and the public.

In Lipsett’s early work, the media are a function of modernization or more properly modernity, which is a pre-condition of democratization - the theme of modernization or modernity is one which occurs again and again with respect to Taiwan, and even the title of this event - “consolidation” alludes to the temporality implicit in the notion of modernity.

Especially through Huntington, the media in Taiwan has been understood as part of a positivist explanatory mechanism of Taiwan’s democratization, what I have referred to an an equation of democratization, in which linguistic categories, like “media”, the “middle class”, the “economy” etc are lined up in logically causal relationships. So the emergence of a newspaper reading middle class in Taiwan through a booming economy in the post-WWII era is understood as a factor to have caused democratization.

In my own work I have been critical of this mode of social analysis. The objectification of socio-political life in this mode of political science implies a political and moral response to that life. Democracy was caused by the struggle by democracy activists, not objective social processes that do not demand a political engagement with that struggle by observers.

In the context of Taiwan, these views about the media present powerful and I would suggest over-determining narratives of Taiwan’s history, especially valorizing the date of 1949 and the start of the so-called “Taiwanese economic miracle” or the Tiger or Little Dragon narrative.

So when we talk about the role of the media in democracy in Taiwan we can be encoding some very strong narratives of history and history-writing which carry certain assumptions about the structure of Taiwan’s history, and the issues of who writes it and why.

These views about democratization and its causes, the role of the media, and the kinds of narratives and epistemologies that are the foundation of these ideas, have come in for some sustained criticism in recent years, such as in my own work, and it might be fair to say that the simple links between media, literacy, modernity, modernization, development and democracy are largely unsustainable nowadays.

In the last five to ten years, Taiwan’s transformation has come to be understood as very much over the whole 20th century, not merely over the post-WWII decades, in narratives which incorporate the different aspects of modernization under Japan and in the late Qing. Therefore, the links between media, literacy, economic development and so forth are harder to sustain.

Furthermore, the links between media and democracy in these forms of analysis incorporate too many normative definitions of what a “media” is (and indeed a democracy). The Habermassian ideal of the media as a public sphere of rational argumentation and critical discussion in the context of Taiwan becomes a powerful (and unsustainable) value judgement of the state of Taiwan society and the development of the Taiwanese as a people.

But these norms do take us forward into the criticisms of the Taiwanese media that have beset its democratic transition especially in the Chen era.

The key question is whether there is something “wrong” with the Taiwanese media which is preventing the full realization of democracy in Taiwan.

There are many ways we can come at these issues:

In the first instance, are the issues of the “rightness” or “wrongness” of Taiwan’s media.

Criticisms of Taiwan’s media are often around the question of biases or politicization and also its sensationalism - its lack of objectivity.

The Taiwanese media has been criticized for being wholly partisan, especially in the deeply divisive Chen era. The major newspapers are all identified as blue or green and their reporting has been accused of aligning with the political interests associated with each side. So the reporting of the so-called corruption scandals involving Chen Shui-bian and his wife, or the visit by Lien Chan to China to meet Hu Jintao in 2005, have been characterized by a split between the Blue and Green sides of the media that covers these stories very differently.

In this way, rather than reporting information and facts in an objective way, the Taiwanese media are understood as being either political actors themselves or functioning as mouthpieces for the Blues and Greens.

In that context, some of the features of Taiwan’s media can be understood as a failure of democratization and a failure of modernity. So the limits and failings of the Taiwanese media are part of a deeply self-critical socio-political discourse in Taiwan. These are predicated on certain assumptions about the way a media “should” be, which is found in an idealized West, which itself suggests a kind of Taiwan-centric alterity. The Taiwanese “other” themselves.

The problem of the bias or politicization, and also of sensationalism, of Taiwan’s news media assumes that there is a normative standard for democratic media in which the reporting is unbiased or more true, or expresses a greater commitment to truth and objectivity than Taiwan’s media.

This notion is at the heart of the notion of an idealized public sphere, one of “rational argumentation and critical discussion”.

This ideal media is the so-called Fourth Estate, which functions to freely criticize the sites of power - government and business - in order to protect or empower the people against the misuse of power. The media should be objective, reporting facts without bias or partisanship or emotion or in the interests of power.

Therefore, the Taiwanese are unable to draw “objective” apolitical knowledge from their media about their social, political and economic circumstances. They are unable to be rational and modern.

And perhaps, given the intense commercialization of media, one could argue that they do not want to be rational, but are driven by desire, emotion, a pursuit of sensation, rather than rational analysis.

This idealized understanding of the media can and indeed has been subjected to a wide-ranging critique in Western media studies over decades. It can be argued that the media produces ideology around notions like capitalism, patriarchy, ethnicity, etc. In Taiwan, the deep contestation of its politics simply makes the bias visible.

One could argue that in Taiwan it is simply that the divisiveness of the media makes the biases and politicization visible, whereas in more unified media we simply do not notice the biases.

The ideal media also functions on the basis of a crude notion of objective truth that has also been opened up for critique through post-structuralism and the linking of notions of truth with language, knowledge and power.

Furthermore, the norms of disinterested news media suggest a valorization of a certain kind of politics - rational, instrumental, objective, non-ideological, which might be hard to sustain as a credible basis for real politics, especially in Taiwan, where the very nature of the key political problems are in the realm of ideology i.e. the identity issue. An appeal to objective and disinterested media would produce an inadequate media for Taiwan’s political circumstances.

Therefore, the notion that Taiwan’s media fails to live up to an ideal, and that therefore its democracy is wanting can be argued against when the media has long been understood not to adhere to its own ideals.

Nevertheless, the well-known frustration that the Taiwanese electorate have for their media does point to a real issue, one that suggests a challenge to the legitimacy of Taiwan’s democratic system.

One way to explore what precisely the problem is is through the notion of the media as a mechanism for self-representation in Taiwan, as a mechanism through which the Taiwanese know themselves as Taiwanese.

We can recognize that the media are only one site of power within Taiwan and suggest disconnections between socio-political knowledge and politics - disconnections between how people know about themselves and their politics and whether and how that knowledge is expressed in the media.

Therefore, in a media in which notions of truth or meaningful representation are hard to sustain, the Taiwanese suffer from what, in other work of mine, I have referred to as Taiwan’s crisis of representation. The structural problems of the Taiwanese media make it hard to the Taiwanese to know themselves in it.

A dimension to this is the prevalence of opinion over reporting. The political talk-shows and opinion columns suggest a very politically-aware electorate but one in which the public sphere generated by the media, supposedly a site of rational and instrumental debate about the nation’s issues, has become instead a confused discursive space in which the truth of any assertion is impossible to determine because of the competing claims on legitimacy over knowledge.

For example, political opinion is expressed as objective opinion, and legitimized by academic credentials. There is a complex contestation going on in Taiwan over the legitimization of knowledge.

Another dimension might be the intense commercialization of Taiwan’s media, in which sensationalism becomes the currency of media truths, or similarly the ownership of Taiwan’s media, so that views and information conveyed by certain media is undermined by its links to political and state institutions.

Again, it has to be said that this might not be unique to Taiwan. The rise of cable news in the US shows a similar drift towards news as commentary and a failure to be able to determine what the truth might look like when it is presented in the media. Indeed, it has been said the the comedy news programs, such as The Daily Show, are where a kind of truth can now be found.

Another aspect might be the currency of “rumours”, which are extra-media forms of social and political knowledge, operating in parallel to the news media, and ones which are hard to quantify, control, and are operating without much in the way of institutional regulation, or legitimizing practices, unlike other sites of socio-political knowledge like academia, politics, the media.

In Taiwan this means layers of social and political meaning in which tacit knowledge emerges to fill the gaps left by public knowledge in the media.

This points to a certain form continuity between the martial law and democratic periods: the best example is the exhortations to fight communism and recover the mainland that featured as ritual acts of subjection before the power of the KMT party-state under martial law.

So there is a crisis of representation in the media which is what drives the level of anxiety that the Taiwanese have towards politics and civil society, but that crisis does not express and enact authoritarianism as it did in the martial law period.

The media is perhaps just as politicized, but is now pluralistic and deregulated, and yet still fails to represent a Taiwanese social life with which the Taiwanese people can identify.

The current state of the media suggests that the transformation of Taiwan is indeed profound and complete, but that the media continues to exhibit a different kind of representational crisis. The Taiwanese do not know themselves in their own media as a coherent national people and this creates an on-going sense of disquiet and unease about their politics.

* Or Australia's Bi-khim Hsiao.
** And, indeed, a political life and a life in politics.
_____________________________________

Beijing Olympics torch relay

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:50:31 GMT

The rolling PR disaster that has been the global torch relay for the Beijing Olympics is in Australia at the moment for a run around the nation’s capital, Canberra. I had piece in the Canberra Times about it today.

When the Beijing Olympic torch relay runs through Canberra, it does so as an overloaded symbolic event, preempted by global news reporting in which protests and counter-protests have dominated the relay’s image-making.

The purpose of the relay, as suggested by the ACT Torch Relay Planning Committee, is to “cheer on our Australian heroes”. This is a perhaps optimistic but not unreasonable attempt to wrest the meaning of the torch back for an Australian audience. Yet it only adds even more to the weight of meanings that have burdened the torch since it was lit.

The lighting occurred in Greece with an invented ceremony. Through references to classical Greek civilization, it invoked the performance of an immutable historical tradition while actually looking like something out of a Ray Harryhausen movie.

From this implausible start, the torch relay has not functioned effectively as spectacle, like the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic games that can dazzle and overwhelm their spectators. Instead, the effect has been to produce a symbolic event in which the symbolism is untethered by real history, and as such is free to be appropriated and disrupted by the prevailing politics that circulate around it.

Of course, as a single, unifying symbol, the Olympic torch should work well as an object whose multiple meanings can be juxtaposed and overlaid by governments, the Olympic organizers and and the rather forlorn and forgotten corporate sponsors to achieve a wide range of political, ideological and marketing effects. But in the era of 24 hour news and sophisticated global protest movements, those meanings have been harder to control than the promoters might have hoped.

For the Olympic organizers, athletes and relay runners, the torch has increasingly hopelessly tried to represent the Olympics, and while it is in Canberra, our “Australian heroes” and their participation in the games.

For the Tibet and human rights movements around the world, the Beijing Olympic torch has simply represented the Chinese state, and has become a legitimate object of political action on that basis. The sometimes violent protest actions around the torch relay over the last month have played out as an allegory of the real violence and struggles for power within China between the state and those who oppose it.

The actual Chinese state, meanwhile, has clearly hoped to achieve a conflation of itself with the Olympics through its global presentation of the torch, thus transubstantiating the meaning of both to signify an Olympian Chinese national triumph.

So the torch relay has been presented by China as a tracing across the globe of its ascendancy. As a symbol of power the torch is legitimized by being taken to the sites of power of the countries it visits - to Downing Street, the Arc de Triomphe, and in Australia to Canberra and past Parliament House and the Australian War Memorial.

In symbolizing power in this way, those who hold the torch have struggled to define its meaning on their own terms or in their own interests. Cheering on our Australian heroes cannot compete with China self-consciously signaling its return as a global superpower. This has produced the heated public debate and hand-wringing, including participant withdrawals and protest actions, that have characterized some of the relay legs. In others, it has only been the heavy hand of the host states that has prevented trouble.

The overburdening of the torch with meaning has made Chinese indignation at its uneasy reception around the world somewhat disingenuous. The Chinese organizers have not helped themselves, either, with the deployment of Chinese state paramilitary cadets as “torch attendants”. Their cheery blue tracksuits have taken on a rather sinister quality and they have presented the world’s media with striking, but exactly the wrong, images. In London especially, the behaviour of these young men in front of 10 Downing Street showed a gratuitous disregard for the significance of their location, hinting by their unthinking presence at its centre of government at a symbolic violation of the very national sovereignty of the United Kingdom.

The Australian prime minister, whose own symbolic antennae are nothing if not sensitive, ruled out the presence of the torch attendants in the Australian leg, although the results of that remain to be seen. However, since the early protests in London, international Chinese communities not officially connected to the Chinese government have been mobilizing to support the torch as it travels around the world.

In this political movement, the meaning of the torch has become the “sacred flame of the motherland”, leaving behind any bounded connection to the Olympic games in a general sense. It has come to represent China as an historical and civilizational meaning, woven into the century-long narrative of China’s struggle to define a post-imperial modern national identity, with a symbolism possibly beyond even the control of the Chinese government. In the rhetoric of this new movement one can hear echoes of Chinese nationalist movements going back through the Diaoyutai Islands protests of the 1970s, the May Fourth movement in the 1920s and even the 1905 Anti-American boycott.

In Australia, Chinese students have been traveling to Canberra for the relay out of a fervent sense of duty and pride. Their nationalism may leave many Australians uncomfortable, although our own can be equally humourless and forceful.

Any person who chooses to identify him or herself as Chinese has much to be proud of in this Olympic year. The historical achievements of China’s magnificent civilization have immeasurably enriched the human experience, while its current economic and social transformations are offering an extraordinary release of creative potential for the world. But for no good reason for a country in which all its citizens have access to some level of education and lots of media, China remains resolutely undemocratic, with a government that ultimately has no limits to the means it can use to maintain its power.

Australians are right to think about China’s future, and the Beijing Olympic torch relay in Canberra will highlight those concerns in our national discourse. But symbolically weighed down as much as it is, a stylishly-decorated aluminium torch being taken around Canberra will never be able to express the richness and complexity of a relationship with China that is and needs to be fully cultivated in scholarship, politics, the economy, culture and a shared social life.

_____________________________________

Reviews - Cloud Gate

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 06:39:05 GMT

The British press have offered up their reviews of Cloud Gate:

The left-wing Guardian

The right-wing, Murdoch-owned Times

The even more left-wing Independent

The right-wing Conservative Party favourite, Daily Telegraph

All broadly in agreement.

_____________________________________

雲門舞集 - 水月

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:30:46 GMT

An excerpt of of a performance by the Cloud Gate dance company from Taiwan, founded in 1973 by Lin Hwai-min, of one of Lin's most famous pieces, Moon Water. Video requires Quicktime 7.

Later this year I am returning to Australia after nearly seven years living among the British in Great Britain. In early 2002, not long after I arrived here, I went to Sadler's Wells to see Moon Water by Cloud Gate, the famous contemporary dance company from Taiwan. It was a memorable evening. Cloud Gate have been back to London more than once in the intervening years, and indeed, I was lucky enough to be invited to an after-performance reception for the company at the Barbican in 2005. But this week, Cloud Gate have returned to do an encore of Moon Water, and we saw it last night. The performance seemed more vivid and intense than the first time. It made more sense, and it seemed to offer bookends on this period living here.

The whole work is set to Bach's suites for solo cello and makes complex references to a number of movement styles, but especially tai chi and qi gong. At the end of the piece, the stage is flooded with water, which reflects the dancers' bodies and movements. It's amazing.

_____________________________________

London Beijing Olympic torch relay

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 21:01:45 GMT

Beijing Olympics torch relay in London. Video requires Quicktime 7. As is now known, the blue tracksuited guards are Chinese military police cadets. Apparently, the British police called them "Smurfs".

It was a day of a certain amount of drama over the torch relay in London on Sunday. Both Sky News and the BBC gave it non-stop tv coverage through the day and both were on the lookout for any moment of violence.

The protests were almost all on the Tibet issue but there were a couple of elisions. One was that there seemed to be large numbers of people out in explicit support of China, but these were largely ignored by the media coverage, and secondly was the occasionally crass but rather hopeless sponsorship of the event by Samsung.

Ultimately, one can see how the symbolism of the torch was being messily and confusingly fought over. British Olympians and relay participants were trying to position the torch as representative of the Olympics while the protesters were treating the torch as simply representing the Chinese state.

Meanwhile, the actual Chinese state is clearly hoping to achieve a conflation of itself with the Olympics through its global deployment of the single unifying symbol of the torch, thus transubstantiating the meaning of both. It conspicuously failed to do so in London.

The photo-op by British PM Gordon Brown seemed to express these doubled meanings. At No.10 Downing St. he stood smiling next to the athlete holding the torch but pointedly refused to hold it himself. He seemed to be judging his proximity to the torch as some measure of his association with its different symbolic meanings.

The media went for a simple morality tale of power versus the powerless, in this case allegorically represented by the torch and the protesters, playing out on London streets the real violence and struggle for power within China. The pro-China supporters didn't really fit into this narrative, and poor Samsung and their mobile phones had no chance in such a symbolically overloaded event.

_____________________________________

DPP Super Sunday rally, March 16

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:22:26 GMT

Democratic Progressive Party Super Sunday Rally, Taipei, 16 March. Video requires Quicktime 7.

The "Trojan Horse" at this rally (0:21) was an elaborate visual pun on policy and personalities in the election campaign. It expresses a critique of a KMT policy for a free trade agreement between China and Taiwan, a so-called "one China market", as a "trojan horse" undermining Taiwanese sovereignty. And the surname of the KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou also means "horse". Ma, horse, trojan horse, free trade agreement, giant wooden horse on wheels to be pushed around the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.

_____________________________________

DPP presidential election campaign rally, March 21 2008

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:00:54 GMT

The main Democratic Progressive Party rally for Hsieh Chang-ting's presidential campaign in Taipei, March 21. Video requires Quicktime 7.

It's hard not to get caught up in the drama of these events, and the DPP are the masters of political theatre, but the voters made their choice loud and clear.

_____________________________________

Hsieh Chang-ting’s campaign headquarters, Kaohsiung

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 15:25:31 GMT

Hsieh Chang-ting's campaign headquarters, Kaohsiung. Video requires Quicktime 7.

On Saturday, Taiwan votes in its presidential election, and a group of us are here from European academic institutions. The result is as ever unpredictable, although the KMT's Ma Ying-jeou remains the front-runner. On Thursday afternoon, at the campaign office of the DPP candidate Hsieh Chang-ting, preparations for the final huge rallies on Friday night are in full swing. Here volunteers prepare the ubiquitous party flags for rally-goers.

_____________________________________

On radio

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 03:50:38 GMT

Next Saturday March 22 is the Taiwanese presidential election. ABC Radio National's "Rear Vision" program is covering Taiwan this week, and I was interviewed for it last Monday at the ABC studios in Portland Place in London. Overall, the interviewer was well informed, but the references in the introduction to an "independence referendum" show how far the media has to go before it understands the Taiwanese situation.

The likely election result seemed to be favouring the KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou, but some bad behaviour by KMT legislators and the situation in Tibet might have given the DPP a sniff in the last couple of days. It is going to be an intense week.

A link to the program on ABC RN is here:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/rearvision/stories/2008/2189619.htm

_____________________________________

Hong Kong

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 21:28:32 GMT

I stopped in Hong Kong on my way to Taipei yesterday to take up a long-standing offer to have a local's view of the city. Hong Kong is a place I have been to more times that I can remember but somewhere I never feel I have had a chance to get to know.

Hong Kong island from the Star Ferry terminal. Duh.

The People's Bookshop coffeeshop in Causeway Bay. Maoist kitch/po-mo cool, Hong Kong style. The Little Red Book is actually the menu.

The New Territories.

The new MTR line that runs to the New Territories. Makes just about every other subway system in the world look 19th century.

_____________________________________

Back in Taipei

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 16:22:48 GMT

I am back in Taipei for the Taiwanese presidential election next Saturday, staying at the Far Eastern Shangri-la on Tunhua S Rd again. I like the way the Far Eastern puts those moist towels you use to freshen up with in the passenger seat glove compartment of the BMW 735 they send to pick you up from the airport.

_____________________________________

In the news

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:04:11 GMT

We made the news... kind of.

A note about an event some of us were involved in just last night at the School of Oriental and African Studies about the legislative and presidential elections in Taiwan.

http://tw.news.yahoo.com/article/url/d/a/080228/5/ub5j.html

_____________________________________

Democracy

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:31:11 GMT

A montage of video from the January 2008 Legislative elections in Taiwan. Video requires Quicktime 7.

Last month a group of us from Europe were in Taiwan for the legislative elections. The dramatic wins by the opposition KMT stunned the Democratic Progressive Party, but for reasons that have been widely canvassed, the results leave the presidential election in March open and uncertain. The video has footage from the DPP rally in Longshan, then the KMT rally in Sanchong, with both events occasionally bordering on the comic, then at a school in southern Taipei of actual vote counting. At that point, they were counting the two referenda held simultaneously with the legislature vote. Overall, the mood in Taiwan is depressed and negative, with deep dissatisfaction towards both sides of politics from the electorate and profound mistrust and animosity between the two main parties. Yet, to watch the practice of democracy in a classroom with the volunteer vote counters, who were local teachers, was rather moving.

_____________________________________

Taipei

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:51:23 GMT

It has been a very long time since an update. There have been some life-changing personal and professional interventions over the last several months.

Meanwhile, I am currently in Taipei for the Legislative elections this coming Saturday. Here is a view from where we are staying, featuring Taipei 101, the world's tallest building rising more than half a kilometre above the city.

_____________________________________

Burma

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:29:34 GMT

I have a project on television news reportage of China that over the last month has captured a large amount of the coverage of the protests and crackdown in Burma. It has been difficult to see the coverage dry up just as the Burmese government's action became most severe. The news media is critical to the viability of global campaigns like that fighting for change in Burma, and the news media clearly know this, but the mechanisms of daily and 24 hour news and its ultimate goal of delivering the news as a product, is adverse to its own political possibilities. By way of a response, I have started uploading all the material I have on Burma in chronological order to a video sharing website. It forms a kind of account of the protests and their suppression. The website is here and all the material should be online over the next week or two.

_____________________________________