The transition from authoritarianism to democracy has been a powerful impetus in research about Taiwan since the 1990s. Taiwan offered profound social, political, and cultural changes over that period for political science, cultural studies, anthropology and many other disciplines to explain and describe. The narrative of change has been, ultimately, modernity, and a wide range of scholarship has sought to account for the many ways Taiwan became modern in the twentieth century.
This narrative has given an impetus to scholarship, but it also locates scholarly work about Taiwan in a moral and political teleology, implicitly or explicitly describing a society becoming freer, more just, more open or more prosperous. In the 1990s and 2000s, that teleology was historical, created by Taiwan's experience of authoritarianism, but more recently, as that experience has retreated into memory, China has offered a territorialized counterpoint to Taiwan's development, especially with the threatening politics of the...
