Notes from the Field | Shinyi Hsieh, Exploring the Many Taiwans Beyond “The Other China” in Asian Studies

I recently attended a public talk by Prof. Jeffery Wasserstrom at Unbound Books and Coffee, an inspirational new and important diasporic community space in San Francisco Chinatown. The talk, entitled “Taiwan’s Path Through Modern Asian History,” was part of the bookstore’s Taiwan Season series. He quickly acknowledged his expertise lay more in activist movements in Hong Kong and Thailand, and in PRC history. His passion for public history and public-facing events was very real, and he beautifully narrated the transnational history and interconnectedness of the youth movements.

But the speaker also reflected at some length on why the talk was not primarily about Taiwan, and on why he had not chosen Taiwan as his dissertation field site. Sometimes, Taiwan seemed to equal, in his words, “the other China.”

The talk stayed with me, and brought me back to a broader question I have been thinking about for a long time: how Taiwan is understood in Asian Studies, and what gets lost when it is mainly framed as “the other China.”

Toward the end of the talk, the speaker shared his journey of becoming a sinologist in the 1980s, reflecting on his choice of field site. He spoke about the anticipation he and many others of his generation shared for a democratizing China, while Taiwan remained under martial law. He also recalled perceptions at the time that the PRC offered greater gender equality than Taiwan, and uncertainty of the paths history would take.

At one point, the speaker reflected that, as he remembered it, few people in the mid- or late 1980s would have expected Taiwan, rather than mainland China, to become democratic.

I think that was an interesting turning point, and the conversation continued during the Q&A. The discussion flowed into questions about “the other China,” with some people wanting to know more about Taiwan and how Taiwan’s experience might offer a lesson.

For many observers in Western academic circles might not have anticipated that, and I agree that none of us can predict the future.

But Taiwan’s political history also gives us another perspective: local political dissidents in Taiwan were so on fire.

The Dangwai/Tangwai (黨外, outside the party) movement was at its height during the 1980s, as pro-democracy, pro-independence, and anti-KMT political activism expanded under a Nationalist regime that still prohibited the formation of rival political parties. And then don’t forget the migrant student activists in Japan, the U.S., and Europe. These were real people organizing, writing, and protesting. Not to mention that Indigenous movements, gender and feminist movements, labor movements, and many others had their own trajectories that cannot simply be folded into a singular story of Taiwan’s political movement.[1]

I truly care about China’s future, but I think reducing Taiwan and Taiwan’s history as “the other China” is not very fair. Of course, looking toward someone else’s history for inspiration is something people have always done, especially when we care deeply about a struggle of our own. Comparison can generate new political imagination, but it can also slip into tokenization and misrepresentation.

If we focus entirely on how Taiwan’s “success” might have implications for the future of China and other Sinophone spaces, we might overlook the social inequities within Taiwan: Southeast Asian migrant workers and labor issues, settler colonialism, the need to reckon with martial law and other historical injustices, and our complicated and sometimes conflicting relationships with and attitudes toward the Japanese Empire.

In contrast to “the other China,” many of us within NATSA, the predominantly student- and early-career-led Taiwan studies community in North America, have been talking about “the many Taiwans.” What we mean by that is: if we simplify Taiwan’s history and its values into “the other China,” we ignore Indigenous Taiwan, trans-empire Taiwan, the environmental history of Taiwan, and the things, souls, and spirits that cannot be captured through the framing of “the other China”.

As I said earlier, I care about China’s future, about people’s struggles, and especially about grassroots movements at this particular moment. The question for me is therefore not whether Taiwan should be connected to China, Hong Kong, or other political struggles. Of course there are connections. The harder question is how we might validate one another’s struggles and experiences while building coalitions and solidarity mindfully.

I often return here to Black feminist writer Audre Lorde. Writing in confrontation with White feminists and the ways Black feminist intellectual work could be tokenized and selectively appropriated, Lorde asked: “Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old and distorted connection between us?”[2]

I do not bring Audre Lorde into this essay simply as an analogy to prove my point about Taiwan. Doing so would reproduce exactly the practice she was criticizing. Black feminist thought has been central to my own thinking and practice as a Taiwanese immigrant working in POC educational justice spaces in the Bay Area, and I want to acknowledge that intellectual and political debt here.

This also connects with conversations I have had with NATSA colleagues, such as Yi-Ting Chung, a doctoral candidate in history at Stanford, about the importance of being aware of how we think of building solidarity: we may share something in common, but we are still different, and positionality matters. There are always tensions and risks while organizing across differences, and that’s okay. To me, acknowledging those tensions is more genuine than simply taking somebody else’s struggle and applying it to ourselves as inspiration. Taiwan’s history risks being flattened into an appropriative source of inspiration, rather than being understood in all of its complexity. That can also be unfair.

Especially because we have to admit that epistemic power imbalances exist within these spaces. There are very few stable, institutionalized positions or intellectual homes in the U.S. for historians whose primary field is Taiwan history. Depending on your research period, you often need to identify yourself as either a China historian or a Japan historian. And on the other side of the Pacific, there is a whole group of scholars doing Taiwan history whose nuanced scholarship has not been widely translated, circulated, or acknowledged in the English-speaking world.

That creates a strange dead loop for Taiwan history, at least in the U.S.: when people want to talk about China’s future, attention suddenly moves toward Taiwan, but the actual study of Taiwan remains institutionally unsupported. And maybe that’s why narrowing Taiwan down to “the other China” felt so frustrating to me. It is not that those comparisons or connections are illegitimate. It’s that Taiwan has so many histories, peoples, struggles, contradictions, and possibilities that deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms.

There are reasons for optimism. More recently, we have witnessed something of a boom in English-language historical scholarship on Taiwan in U.S. academia. These books do not necessarily fall directly within the category of political history, but many are grappling with identity formation, knowledge production, sovereignty, society, and what it means to center Taiwan historically. James Lin’s In the Global Vanguards (2025), Honghong Tinn’s Island Tinkerers (2025), Seiji Shirane’s Imperial Gateway (2022), Fang Yu Hu’s Good Wife, Wise Mother (2024), Wendy Cheng’s Island X (2023), and Evan Dawley’s forthcoming Taiwan: A People’s History are among the recent examples that come to mind. We have also seen Taiwan Studies programs, fellowships, workshops, courses, and archival projects established throughout the years in the U.S., often led by people with real passion and commitment.[3]

This emerging momentum is exciting, and I hope we can carry if forward into more sustained institutional support devoted to Taiwan history and the broader field of Taiwan Studies. Perhaps the transformation from “the other China” to “the many Taiwans” can itself become a collective intellectual project: an effort to make room for another unpredictable, contested, and inspiring chapter in the story of the many Taiwans.[4]

Notes

[1] There is plenty of scholarship and public-facing historical work available for those who know where to look. The long history of writing Taiwan’s resistance movements has itself been intertwined with Taiwan’s democratization. Huiling Hu’s book Taiwan’s Spring: The Democracy Movement Before the End of Martial Law (臺灣之春: 解嚴前的臺灣民主運動) (Taipei: SpringHill Publishing, 2020); Cuilian Chen’s Taiwanese Resistance and Identity, 1920–1950 (臺灣人的抵抗與認同 1920–1950) (Taipei: SpringHill Publishing, 2025) are two foundational books of a much larger body of local Taiwanese scholarship and historical writing.

[2] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed Press, 2007), 68.

[3] For example, the University of Minnesota hosts Primary Sources on Taiwan, a living project of English-translated historical sources on Taiwan from Japanese colonial rule to the present, compiled by Drs. Wayne Soon and Evan Dawley with contributions from multiple translators. Institutionally, Dr. Pei-Chia Lan, after more than two decades at National Taiwan University, begins her role as director of Stanford’s Taiwan Studies Program in September 2026.

[4] I appreciate Dr. Sarah Plovnick her generous feedback and edits; to Yi-Ting Chung for reviewing the manuscript, and to Dr. Hung-Ling Yeh, Chih-Hung Su, Chung-Hsuan Huang from Taiwan for reviewing the sources I cited and helping to amplify locally grounded, nuanced scholarship that deserves greater attention in English-language academic conversations.

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Shinyi Hsieh received her PhD in the History of Health Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in June 2023. She currently works on STEMM educational justice research, teaching, and program evaluation within UCSF’s Division of Graduate Education and Postdoctoral Affairs, while developing a book manuscript tentatively titled Reckoning the Global Health Margins: Children, Women, and Animals in Transpacific Campaigns in Postwar Taiwan. shinyi.hsieh@ucsf.edu

To cite this essay, please use the bibliographic entry suggested below:

Shinyi Hsieh, “Exploring the Many Taiwans Beyond ‘The Other China’ in Asian Studies,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, September 17, 2026; https://doi.org/10.52698/IWFA9247.