China, China Scholarship and China Scholars in Postcolonial Taiwan

摘要

China scholarship in Taiwan, in social sciences as well as humanities disciplines, is constituted by the choices of scholars over encountered and constantly reinterpreted imaginations of how China's names, identities and images are contextualised. Due to its colonial history, its civil war and Cold War legacies, and internal cleavages, China scholarship in Taiwan is characterised by strategic shifting among the Japanese, American and Chinese approaches to China, as well as their combination and recombination. The mechanism of choice, including travels that orient, reorient and disorient existing views on China, produces conjunctive scholarship. The rich repertoire of views on China, together with the politics of identity, challenge the objectivist stance of the social sciences to the extent that no view on China could be exempted from political implications and politicised social scrutiny. Concerns over exigent propriety in a social setting are internal to knowledge production. Therefore, understanding the process with which the historically derived approaches inform the China scholarship in Taiwan through the mechanism of encountering reveals both the uncertain nature of knowledge, in general, and the uncertain meaning associated with China worldwide, in particular.