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An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including history of science in East Asia; Korean and Taiwanese academic contexts; and conversations among Asian societies.

Hotel booking websites to collect information about hospitality products/services are becoming more popular in the hotel industry. As a result, the importance of these websites for tourism firms marketing their services and products through electronic word of mouth (eWOM) on these hotel booking websites continues to grow. Despite its importance, there has been little research on how guests interact with information to increase eWOM. This paper creates a new scale for assessing guest interaction with Meituan.com information to fill this void. To this end, a three-step mixed-methods approach using open-ended surveys and published relevant research is used. Data were gathered from 440 hotel guests in Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong. Using SmartPLS 4, confirmatory factor analysis revealed 33 final items for the new scale. This paper significantly contributes to potential guest behavior by creating and confirming this new scale in the hospitality context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of Taiwanese nationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s that rapidly, radically, but "peacefully" replaced Chinese nationalism to become the hegemonic discourse in two decades is a political "miracle." My paper argues that this compressed political transformation would not have been possible without the help of psychoanalytic discourse mediated by critical theory in the activist and critical intellectual circles. In the context of the (post-) Cold War era, there was a peculiar form of decolonization equated with de-Sinicization. At stake is a translational concept that itself becomes untranslatable: zhu-ti-xing, the Chinese word for subjectivity. By analyzing the conflicts within the Chinese-speaking activists and intellectuals in the United States and in Taiwan, I will demonstrate in this paper the ways in which the Lacanian idea of the subject as having a lack becomes a critical tool for the advocates for the independence of Taiwan to break through the existing discursive inertia and to effectively make Taiwan a nation without essence, a nation of zhu-ti-xing/subjectivity, and to facilitate the fitting of this new hegemony into the ideology of Pax Americana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines urban and well-educated Taiwanese women's resistance to the dominance of the valorization of female appearance, providing ethnography of undoing beauty in East Asia's era of post-developmentalism. Findings reveal the importance of the factor of time in their resistance to bodily grooming. First, participants have a "holistic" understanding of "doing beauty"; they consider this set of gender inequalities "chrono-normativity," which serves as a vector of social control. Second, the burden of long-term sustainability of aesthetic investment often turns into an unbearable weight that includes an endless quest for extreme slenderness, the exhausting immaterial labor of enacting cuteness and hetero-likability, and the difficulty of long-term financial affordability. Third, due to a bleak economic outlook and strong gender inequalities, disapproval of the quest for beauty showcases women's rejection of pursuing market success based on an aspirational and future-oriented temporality. Participants' "lying down" attitude and their emphasis on "assured little happiness" are witness to an anti-aspirational temporality, since women seek a present-focused and non-dominated experience of temporality. I argue that this anti-aspirationalism should be seen as an alternative configuration of neoliberal rationality where the care of the self and its ethos of individualism eclipse the pursuit of economic productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the protection of a manuscript written by Hsiu Lien Lu, a Taiwanese politician on a toilet paper. Topics discussed include the friction of a textile was being used to keep the toilet paper fixed in one place, textiles with different surface roughness values were being tested to find out the most suitable one for the display of the manuscript, and polyester films of different thicknesses were used to provide a static effect to the paper since static electricity is helpful in keeping photographic objects intact.

Publications in Renal Failure in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) between 1992 and 2021 were analyzed. Six publication indicators: total, independent, collaborative, first author, corresponding author, and single author publications as well as their related citation indicators, were used to compare performances of countries, institutes, and authors. Comparison of the highly cited papers and journal's impact factor (IF) contributors was discussed. In addition, the main research topics in the journal were presented. Results show that China published the most total articles and reviews, as well as the first-author papers and corresponding-author papers in the journal. The Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan ranked the top in five publication indicators: total, single-institution, inter-institutionally collaborative, first author, and corresponding-author papers. A low percentage of productive authors emerged as a journal IF contributor. Similarly, only a limited relationship between highly cited papers and IF contributing papers was found. Publications related to hemodialysis, chronic kidney disease, and acute kidney injury were the most popular topic, while meta-analysis was new focus in the last decade in the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of quality culture (QC) development in Taiwan which has recently undergone major reforms of quality assurance (QA) policies. The implementation of internal quality assurance (IQA) initiatives has been an indispensable condition to form a QC in higher education which contributes to a fundamental and comprehensive evolution of Taiwanese higher education. To explore the government's policy strategies and transformation of QA approaches, this paper interviews policymakers, QA experts and academics. This paper identifies common features and distinct characteristics of QC in Taiwan's higher education, and its relations to QA mechanisms. These perspectives offer a different way of conceptualising QC in QA policies. Furthermore, QC development has not only served the purpose of enhancing quality in higher education but has also acted as a driver for QA and higher education changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the image of Taiwan (the Republic of China) in the Polish communist press in the mid-1950s. It focuses on the news coverage related to the two Polish cargo ships – the Praca and the Prezydent Gottwald – which were detained by the Taiwanese authorities in 1953 and 1954, respectively. Based on the press narratives and supported by declassified government documents, the paper analyses the impact of the Cold War conflicts and divisions on the detention of Polish ships and its coverage by the Polish communist media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a multi-sited physical and virtual ethnography of Chinese migrant women's entrepreneurship in Taiwan, this paper illuminates the role of digital migrant entrepreneurship in the making of globalisation. In the digital age of gendered migrant entrepreneurship, it challenges the long-lasting dichotomy between 'bottom-up' and 'top-down' globalisation and contributes to the theoretical debate about migrant transnational entrepreneurship, elucidating how capitalism and globalisation can take multiple forms. Drawing on Chinese women's migratory biographies and the commercial geographies of the objects they trade between China and Taiwan, it shows how our global economic system is simultaneously forged by supply-chain capitalism and migrants' digitalised petit capitalistic practices. Chinese migrant workers firstly manufacture goods whilst working for multinational companies in China, then, after marriage-migration, they commercialise the products in Taiwan via WeChat. Findings illustrate the link between ICTs, migrant entrepreneurship, gendered social networks, and border transgressions in shaping a mutable globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new enterprise intelligentization framework, by making the transition from process transformation to artificial intelligence (AI) transformation. The novel transformation framework can be decomposed into the conceptual model of AI strategic planning, the procedural model, the operational model, and the analytics model. For leading-edge microchip production, a new AI transformation project regarding the reticle SMIF pod (RSP) transport system designed by a medium-sized semiconductor tool vendor in Taiwan is presented. The technical advantages, gained from the implementation of the presented AI transformation project, over the existing RSP systems are manifold. The throughput and yield rate significantly increase on a semiconductor-fabrication-plant basis. The clean room construction costs less by approximately 3 million dollars per FAB, mainly attributed to the redesigned automatic optical inspection flow. The proposed model-based framework proves to be a viable tool from the process transformation to the AI transformation in the semiconductor manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how COVID-19 advice is creatively delivered in a one-minute video produced by the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control in February 2022. It examines metaphors in verbal, visual, and multimodal modes, and illustrates how such metaphors interact with multimodal narrativity. Drawing on the insights of studies on multimodal metaphors, this paper seeks to identify which are the most pervasive metaphors or what dominant metaphor, if any, is used in the video. It finds that the metaphorical mappings between coping with the covid pandemic and handling olympic weightlifting are represented across modes and that the creative delivery of COVID-19 advice is woven from a warp of metaphors in various modes and a weft of narrativity across modes. Such metaphorical creativity is underpinned by the semiotic flow that features four interconnected configurations: moving between metaphorization, literalization, and re-metaphorization; somehow blurring the source-target boundary; expanding the range of functions that the multimodal representation can serve; and initiating a metaphorical thought from one or more contextual factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many forms of Intangible Culture Heritage (ICH) are fast disappearing. The Lantern Festival is an important part of Chinese tradition and a critical ICH of Taiwan. However, few young people attend ICH activities. Given the importance of ICH education, this study describes what participants learned after lantern exhibitions that combined Augmented Reality (AR), mobile websites, and Paper-based Exhibition Brochures. This study evaluated what a cohort of college students (n = 115) learned about ICH through experiments and questionnaires. The results show that the public understood ICH better through digital technology. All participants thought that applying AR to ICH was good for the public to gain more information on lantern culture, although it took a lot of time to learn the new technology. The results also encouraged the application of AR to engage in ICH education. Therefore, a large number of digital technologies that are popular among young people should be used as part of ICH education in order to improve their cultural awareness and learning motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper takes a descriptive-analytical method to examine the emerging relationship between Taiwan and exiled Tibetans. It identifies four key issues to underscore the historical ties, current challenges and prospects of Taiwan and exiled Tibetan relations. The study finds that Tibetan Buddhism has played an important role in strengthening relations, especially people-to-people connections, even though higher-level exchanges and engagement were often obstructed by factors such as the Chinese hegemony and the Kuomintang's contestation of sovereignty over Tibet. Therefore, the study argues that to establish a cohesive relationship, both sides should focus on non-political factors, such as religion, education and the promotion of democratic values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the importance of non-state actors in international relations is now widely acknowledged, formal state-to-state ties remain an essential measure of a state's strength in the international community. When traditional components of sovereignty are eroded, what options remain open to states seeking to forestall international isolation? Drawing on a case study of Taiwan, this paper explores the potential and the pitfalls of using paradiplomacy as a substitute for traditional diplomacy. I argue that Taiwan uses paradiplomacy for three primary purposes: as a 'hedge' against weakness in the central-level US-Taiwan relationship; as a tool for developing long-term relationships with rising political stars; and as a performative strategy for asserting Taiwan's statehood by showing others that it acts like a state. While paradiplomacy enables Taiwan to strengthen ties to US policymakers, these efforts have become increasingly complicated as mainland Chinese influence on local US politics increases. This paper thus sheds light on paradiplomacy in the US-Taiwan relationship, but also on the ways in which American federalism can complicate US foreign policy toward East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Taiwan's New Southbound Policy (NSP-T) from a soft power conceptual perspective. It traces the origins of the NSP-T before the Tsai Ing-wen administration came into power in 2016 and then discusses the NSP-T's subsequent implementation. Through an overview of the earlier 'Go South Policy' (GSP) during the administrations of Lee Teng-hui, Chen Shui-bian and Ma Ying-jeou (1994–2016), this paper finds that soft power was not institutionalised in the policy despite it being a prevalent concept, and repeatedly propagated by successive Taiwanese presidents for their foreign policy goals. Soft power is now outlined as the 'overarching link' connecting Taiwan and the NSP-T countries for the attainment of the former's three strategic aims ─ identifying a new direction and driving force for a new stage of Taiwan's economic development, redefining Taiwan's important role in regional development and creating future value for Taiwan's engagements in the region. This article seeks to extrapolate how soft power contributes to the achievement of the three policy visions in Southeast Asia. Through assessments of NSP-T cooperation programmes and strategies in its six sectors of medical care, agriculture, manufacturing, tourism, education and civil society, an analytical model is introduced to explain Taiwan's soft power projection in Southeast Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kinmen, located in Taiwan's remote border area, has become increasingly embedded in the global economy by opening its border for trade and tourism with China. Previous rural youth studies mainly focus on decisions and experiences of migration while neglecting the experiences of those who stay in their hometown. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the experiences and subjectivities of young people who stay in the periphery for adulthood transitions. Based on our ethnographic data gathered in Kinmen, it shows how the enlarged employment with the new markets supported by Chinese tourists bring hope for the youth. At the same time, our findings explore how the highly dependent tourism economy and the overdependence on a single source of tourists bring them worry and uncertainty. Analyses of the paper highlight spatial elements in the economic, cultural and political processes of structuring young people's lives and subjectivities under globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coming out videos have become an increasingly popular genre on social media among queer youths and YouTube celebrities, and a few most popular ones have generated tens of millions of views combined that have also caught wide public attention from traditional mass media. This paper considers and compares two (sets of) coming out videos on YouTube from the Rhodes brothers in the United States and the Huang brothers in Taiwan that both became landmark social media and mass media events. It questions the normative narrative of coming out and the uneven flows of youth cultures and celebrity cultures online, where the visibility of certain social groups has masked the invisibility of other marginalized people. The critique extends to the "YouTube celebrity economy" and video-based female queer fandom, as well as the parents' responses and reactions to their children's coming out that have been recorded on video—an important part of coming out that is often overlooked in queer studies and youth studies. This paper offers a unique lens that connects online stardom and fandom to parental responses to coming out, shedding further light on global youth cultures, YouTube economy and queer celebrities, and parent-youth relations in Asia and America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Taiwan, where relations with China define the major political cleavage, voters have distinct preferences on the issue of independence. Do Taiwanese favor a symbolic or pragmatic approach to the Taiwan independence issue? What are the factors that account for their political preferences? We identify two types of voters, symbolic and pragmatic, according to whether their preferences on independence are conditional or unconditional on China's potential counter actions. Specifically, symbolic voters have unconditional preferences on independence, while pragmatic voters are more agreeable to independence under more favorable conditions. Using multiple wave data from the Taiwan National Security Surveys (TNSS 2002–2022), we investigate the individual- and macro-level factors and find that gender, age, education level, ethnicity, partisan strength, and economic growth rate shape the types of voters in Taiwan. This paper contributes to the study of political attitudes in Taiwan, and have important implications on the regional stability in East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides ethnographic sketches of the struggles of bordered lives – mainland spouses and their families, PRC students and overseas Taiwan – during the pandemic time when their rights to enter or return to overseas Taiwanese was denied as part of the preventive measures against COVID-19. By conducting interviews with mainland spouses from a distance and looking at the discussion of a Facebook group called 'Overseas Taiwanese COVID-19 Self-Help Group' as an archival site, we seek to understand and analyse the reasons why their right to enter or return was silenced, discredited, denied and attacked, and used these ethnographic sketches as the basis for explaining the emergence of democratic censorship, a paradox that sadly is part of the living reality in Taiwan. Furthermore, inspired by Michel Foucault's discussion of raison d'etat as the rationale for the state's, rather than people's, survival, we situate democratic censorship in the context of tense China–Taiwan relations and call for the 'de-Cold Warring' (Chen 2010) of consciousness as the key to save democracy from the spectre of autocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The safety of terminal operations is the foundation of international commercial port operations. One of the main safety issues in the ports is that operators often fail to comply with safety codes. The existing literature has shown that the safety climate, safety self-efficacy, and safety compliance each play an important role in a company's safety management, and this paper seeks to establish a safety compliance model in the maritime context. In particular, the research introduces the concept of non-compliance cost and explores the relationships between safety compliance and the non-compliance cost, the safety climate and safety self-efficacy. The researchers conducted an empirical study at container terminals in Taiwan, and applied the Hierarchical Linear Model to analyze the empirical data. The results of this study reveal that an organization's safety climate, non-compliance cost and the employees' safety self-efficacy positively affect worker safety compliance. Among these factors, the non-compliance cost has a mediating effect that mediates the relationship between the safety climate and safety compliance, although the non-compliance cost does not mediate the relationship between the employees' safety self-efficacy and safety compliance. Based on these findings, this article discusses the theoretical and practical implications for safety management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral thinking and communication are critical competencies for confronting social dilemmas in a challenging world. We examined these moral competencies in 70 college students and graduates from Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Participants were assessed through semi-structured written interviews, Facebook group discussions, and a questionnaire. In this paper, we describe the similarities and differences across cultural groupings in (1) the social issues of greatest importance to the participants; (2) the factors influencing their approaches to thinking about social issues and communicating with others; and (3) the characteristics of their moral functioning in terms of moral awareness, moral judgment, moral discourse, and moral decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates Republic of China Navy (ROCN) 'defection mutinies' during the Chinese Civil War where mutineers seized ROCN vessels and defected to the Chinese Communists. Examining the memoirs of defection mutiny ringleaders and participants, this paper postulates the determinant that enabled ROCN defection mutinies was Chinese Communist covert action that capitalised on ROCN internal conflicts, weakened the collective action problem's effect on pre-empting mutinies and provided the necessary support to conspirators that led to defection mutinies based on Communist preferences. This research contributes to the military studies sub-field by exposing the intersection between covert action and wartime military unrest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the development and challenges of 'cultural equality' and cultural policy in Taiwan. On 10 May 2019 Taiwan's Legislative Yuan passed the 'Cultural Fundamental Act' provides comprehensive system design and policy tools for cultural equality. We use the two-preceding cultural-disadvantage cases roughly show that it is difficult to implement cultural equality in Taiwan on three levels: (1) Inability to tolerate differences due to social discrimination, which prevents children of special ethnic groups or people with disabilities to develop their subject identity. (2) Current obstacles and difficulties in cultural participation, such as lack of time, inconvenient transportation, lack of information sources, unfriendly space design, etc. (3) Support and construction of an inclusive culture: Empower children and people with disabilities to hone their artistic and cultural skills, encourage their creation, and inspire more works to be produced. Finally, this paper proposes some suggestions for cultural policy in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though an individual's right to legal identity has been internationally codified, in certain instances, the legal identity and associated documents may lack widespread international recognition. This is the case in aspirant (de facto) states such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria. This paper argues that certain legal identities become liminal due to the nonrecognition of the conferring authority, and/or the associated legal identity documents. The recognition of legal identity documents can change based on where a person is located (territorial jurisdiction), the administrative authority issuing the documents, and the authority assessing the legitimacy of the conferred legal identity documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a nine-city cell phone survey in 2019, this paper systematically examines which groups showed stronger support for armed unification with Taiwan and what factors and mechanisms might contribute to their support. The bivariate analysis shows the politically, economically, and socially privileged groups and those with stronger national pride and more understanding of Taiwan were more pro-armed unification, while residents of the two coastal cities, Xiamen and Guangzhou, were less supportive. Further analysis indicates education and unfavorable view of the Taiwanese government were the two most powerful factors contributing to the support. Possible contributing mechanisms might include both top-down mechanisms, such as political indoctrination and propaganda, and bottom-up ones, such as the respondents' interest and identity considerations influenced by their city's proximity to Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates how parliamentary efforts to represent the interests of female electorates influence the legislators' re-election chances. Taiwan is chosen as the case study and, for empirical analysis, I utilise an original bill co-sponsorship dataset that consists of roughly 400,000 cosponsors for all bills submitted between 1992 and 2016. The findings, based on regression analyses, show that making more legislative effort on women's issues – by prioritising them over other issues – results in electoral losses, and this negative effect is more pronounced among female legislators. The paper contributes to the gender politics literature by theorising and testing a hitherto underexplored relationship between two representational processes: how the substantive representation women by female legislators affects their descriptive representation. It also contributes to legislative and electoral studies by demonstrating that legislators' policy-vote trade-offs are policy-sensitive and gendered, thus calling for a more nuanced approach to be taken in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The globalisation of food and agricultural trade has brought issues of food safety and biosecurity to the centre of geopolitical research. This paper explores the relationship between food risks and sovereignty practices, a topic that has received relatively scant attention in the scholarship. Going beyond conventional conceptualisations of sovereignty as an external-legal notion that is delimited to the realm of 'high politics' in international relations, this paper points to how it is also expressed and negotiated in quotidian practices of food import and consumption, and how this has contributed to the politicisation of food safety. Focusing on the case of Taiwan, a de facto island state with contested sovereignty status, and comparing the food safety discourses that arose during the outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease and African Swine Fever, we argue that food risks provide opportunities for social and political actors to participate in the everyday construction of sovereignty. While the Taiwanese government's handling of the Mad Cow Disease shows it to be ultimately constrained by the geopolitical reality of fragile sovereignty, the outbreak of African Swine Fever enabled it to legitimise the securitisation of borders and bolster its legitimacy by staging collective defensive actions against perceived external risks. By drawing attention to how sovereignty is produced and performed through practice, this paper further advances recent discussions of sovereignty as a dynamic, social process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the trends and challenges of Taiwanese studies in Japan, focusing on political history. The first section reviews Taiwanese studies in Japan in recent years, with a focus on political research. The second section discusses the issues to be worked on for this discipline's future, especially pertaining to the discussion on "external" and "internal" legitimacy for the postwar Republic of China (ROC) government in Taiwan. The third section examines ways to comprehend the changes in the ROC's status in Taiwanese politics and society after the political transformation began in the 1970s. Taiwanese studies in Japan have long emphasized revealing the characteristics of Taiwanese society and history. Although such an attitude is still quite important, this paper highlights that knowing how to value the "Chineseness" of the ROC government in Taiwan is also an important subject. Further examination of the link between international and internal politics in Taiwan will be one of the most important subjects for future Taiwanese studies in Japan on politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Travel booking engines can produce, resist, and destabilise popular and state-directed geopolitical representations of a world neatly divided into national and international space. Although they present as strictly functional technical platforms, booking engines obscure and omit what is contingent and contested in the production of a destination as a bordered national territory. Due to their embedding in the webs of political representation, these systems and their backers can become targets for economic boycotts, political threats, hacks, or other interventions when territorial designations are contested. Such interventions manifest as political performances aimed at multiple audiences, including tourists and travellers, as well as the businesses and political entities that facilitate or inhibit their circulation, with spillover effects into other domains of geopolitical representation. To empirically illustrate this argument, the paper analyzes the People's Republic of China's mostly successful efforts to coerce the international travel industry to relist destinations within Taiwan as belonging to China. By extending the notion of border performativity into the 'code/spaces' that span the online and offline worlds, it concludes that booking engines, like other forms of infrastructure that serve travellers and tourists, can produce popular geopolitical effects that exceed their own technical systems. Peering through these ruptures reveals the uneasy and unstable assemblages of travel infrastructure and territorial representation that regulate global mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Third regionalism explains the liberalization of trade centered around the Asia-Pacific region in the 21st century. Under regionalism, domestic agricultural markets that formerly enjoyed national food-security policies have loosened. This caused traditional domestic farmers' organizations to become more regionally interconnected, forming a food sovereignty movement under the auspices of La Via Campesina. Localized food-production chains are promoted to mitigate the impact of regionalism on the Asia-Pacific agricultural sector. The Taiwan Rural Front (TRF) joined La Via Campesina and the food sovereignty movement in the 2010s. During the process of adopting regionalism, Taiwanese agricultural trade and technologies were protected by public agencies and state-owned enterprises. This context differs from that of Southeast Asia, where the food sovereignty movement has thrived. Therefore, the following question is raised: Why was it possible for the food sovereignty movement to originate in Taiwan? This paper describes the developmental characteristics of Taiwan's food-security governance mechanism as a state-guided corporate food regime amid third regionalism. Further, the TRF does not advocate for localized food-production chains. Due to the formation of a state-guided corporate food regime, the food sovereignty movement has become connected with farmland protection movements that set the Taiwanese sovereignty movement apart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the adoption of Western neoliberalism in Taiwan's higher education (HE) governance as a hybridisation process in which the influences of political democratisation, social liberalisation and Chinese cultural traditions intersect with contemporary Western norms and values. The paper draws on data from interviews with senior university administrators and education ministry officials to delineate the resistance to the competitive ethos embedded in neoliberalism and the retention of state presence and intervention in university governance, highlighting Taiwan's historical, socio-political and cultural contexts. This account exemplifies how various historical, sociopolitical and cultural factors influence Taiwan's HE governance and how Western norms and values are absorbed, questioned and resisted during the hybridisation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the Steinbergist Classification and the theory of territorial political economy, this paper aims to interpret the social constructions of the ocean by modern Taiwan's near-shore, near-sea, and deep-sea fisheries and to demonstrate a thesis that the social construction of the ocean can influence the related material organisation of society and the geographical condition of the ocean. Overfishing and declining fishery production were the problems caused by the fisheries' constructions of the ocean, affecting Taiwan's material organisation of the fishing industries and the geographical condition of the ocean. Additionally, the fishing industries between 1949 and 2016 were critical for the marine-related economy of Taiwan. Interpreting and classifying the fisheries' constructions of the ocean will illuminate and register the core experiences. This paper suggests that near-shore fishery constructed the ocean in accordance with the Indian Ocean Model; near-sea fishery initially followed the same path until, in the 1980s and 1990s, it absorbed elements of the Seldenian Variation; and deep-sea fishery constructed the ocean in consistence with the Indian Ocean Model but had incorporated elements of the Seldenian Variation by the late 1970s and early 1980s. Moreover, deep-sea fishery then also assimilated elements of the Grotian Variation in the mid-2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike the queer formations resulting from racialised organising especially those in the Global North, this paper demonstrates the ways in which language, especially Chinese, is often a more functional identity marker than race or ethnicity in the community lives of LGBT Malaysians. This is evident in how queer advocacy groups are publicised as language-specific entities, calling themselves 'Chinese-speaking', 'English-speaking', or 'Malay-speaking', in urban cities such as Kuala Lumpur. One might see this use of language as a proxy of an existing racial configuration (the state-endorsed categories of Malay, Chinese, Indian, and Other), simply accommodating participants' linguistic preferences. However, my findings suggest the opposite is true. Drawing on interviews with Chinese-speaking queer Malaysian activists in Malaysia and Taiwan, this paper argues for the significance of Chinese in pushing forward their agendas in the illiberal setting locally and in mobilising LGBT Malaysians across the Chinese-speaking world. In doing so, it works towards an articulation of queer Sinophone Malaysia, highlighting the multiple trajectories of queer development locally as well as Malaysia's place in the global circuit of queer cultural formations. Methodologically, it overcomes the humanities bias of Sinophone research by demonstrating how qualitative methods can effectively capture the present localisation of Chinese languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media are found to be racialized in framing immigration. Yet, little is known about how the media across regions are gendered in their framings of immigration as economic and cultural issues. Drawing from a representative sample of newspapers in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the U.K., and the U.S., this paper conducts a framing analysis of over 1,700 news articles to examine the media's gendering of the economic and cultural consequences of immigration. This paper shows that the media identify migrant men at a higher rate than women when framing immigration as an economic issue and that the media identify migrant women at a higher rate when framing immigration as a cultural issue. However, the findings also suggest that the media do so subtly—the gender of immigrants is rarely revealed but implicitly suggested via stereotypes and cues. This paper provides empirical evidence supporting feminist theory and fills a gap in current literature by adding the intersectional dimensions taking gender and migrant status into account. It offers insight into how the media discursively construct migrant men and women are to illustrate the gendered division of their impact on the economy and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the construction and practice of the purposes of teacher education in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) and Taiwan. The paper begins with a brief overview of contemporary issues underlying the education system in both countries. It then investigates the underlying assumption of student achievement before moving on to reconceptualise the purposes of education, and consequently, teacher education with the aims of remedying existing social and cultural gaps in both societies, as well as laying the path for a more diverse society for all. Underpinned within a social constructivist paradigm, the qualitative study explores how teacher education can, and needs to be, more equitable and responsive to the learning outcomes of students – in terms of diversity and difference – in Aotearoa NZ and Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise in women's labor force participation is fundamentally changing the nature and intensity of domestic labor and increasing concerns about the prospects for fertility, particularly in gender-inegalitarian societies. To keep pace with these changes, the gender revolution perspective argues that increasing men's involvement in the family will reduce burdens on women and facilitate fertility recuperation. This paper investigates the effect of labor sharing on fertility. Using ten waves of data from the Taiwanese Panel Study of Family Dynamics (8,863 couple-wave observations, 1,969 couples), latent class analysis was first used to define a division of labor typology, and mixed-effects models were subsequently estimated to investigate the associations between the division of labor arrangements and fertility behavior. Although the male-breadwinner model prevailed as the most conducive to childbearing, there is an urgent imperative to improve gender equality in domestic labor given the growing trend of dual-earner families. The results highlight the importance of considering couples' paid and unpaid labor in relation to each other and suggest that gendered divisions of domestic labor have different implications on fertility depending on employment arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating expectant mothers' pregnancy in Taiwan, this paper examines prenatal ultrasound as an ongoing invention of its users in general and pregnant women in particular. Instead of being passive consumers, pregnant women actively invent and reconfigure prenatal ultrasound using flexible interpretation and strategic reinscription. There is an inevitably ambivalent technological experience of prenatal ultrasound across cultures. Whereas pregnant women are pleased and reassured to see their babies 'on the screen,' my analysis shows that, prenatal ultrasound as a passive diagnostic tool that cannot offer active treatment, and the fact that prenatal ultrasound helps to make up morality surrounding pregnancy, constitutes the main source of mothers-to-be's negative technological experiences of prenatal ultrasound. Whereas prenatal ultrasound has been regarded as an indispensable and authoritative method of keeping users informed, adopting a hybrid approach, pregnant women still actively refer to local knowledge to understand their pregnancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The installation of—and the debates surrounding—all-gender toilets (AGTs) are growing worldwide, but few empirical studies exist regarding the attitudes and behaviors of prospective AGT users. This paper fills the research gap by using a multi-methods approach to investigate how prospective users perceive and use AGTs at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan. Through a survey of 729 university students and a two-week-long on-site observation, the study provides substantive evidence regarding AGTs users. The survey shows that the majority of both male and female respondents endorsed and would actually use AGTs. The presumed opposition to AGTs by mainstream users might have been overestimated. On average, only 9.23% of the respondents disagreed with the installation of AGTs, and only 7.37% never used the AGT next to their classroom. Female students were less likely to endorse and to use AGTs, and were more concerned about privacy, safety and hygiene issues in AGTs. On the other hand, some women would endorse the installation of AGTs even if they don't personally use them. Societies may be able to accommodate these diverse users by allowing for the coexistence of all-gender and gender-segregated toilets. This research contributes to existing gender and toilet literature by providing a cross-examined assessment of prospective respondents' attitudes and behaviors vis-à-vis the AGTs in an actual AGT setting instead of a hypothetical scenario. We encourage future research to target a more diversified pool of respondents to explore the myriad factors associated with mainstream users' attitudes toward and use of AGTs. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2021.1987198. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While race in TESOL has gained traction in recent years, less research has focused on Asian American teachers working in Asian contexts, not to mention Chinese adoptees from the US working as English teachers in Asia. Drawing from our larger study on the work narratives of Asian Americans teaching English in Taiwan, this paper examines how Chinese adoptees negotiate their linguistic and cultural competencies and identities in Taiwan. We uncover the various forms of emotional labor that they experienced. Similar to other Asian American teachers, they also grappled with notions of authenticity and legitimacy in the ELT field in Taiwan. However, teaching in Taiwan provided Chinese adoptees with the opportunity to negotiate the roots and routes of transnational adoptee identities and simultaneously deploy their adoptee identities as pedagogical tools for teaching about racial and family diversity, which complicates and extends research on racial identities as pedagogy in ELT. It is inevitable that their racial identity and transracial family makeup are invoked, and they are confronted to take action on it. The process can be laborious, yet teaching students about diversity through these adoptees' own vantage points also constitutes their professional identity as a competent teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A measure concerning family management of children with chronic conditions is needed to identify the relationship between family management and family and child outcomes. This study aimed to use cognitive interviews to apply the Family Management Measure (FaMM) to Taiwanese families with children who have chronic conditions. When using a measure from other cultures, cultural adaption should be considered besides the language translation from foreign language to first language. Conducting a cognitive interviewing study is an efficient way to examine semantic equivalence and culture applicability of a measure. Our study involved cognitive interviews with 28 caregivers to develop the Family Management Measure Taiwanese Version (FaMM-TW). Through cognitive interviews, three types of problems in the initial translation version were identified. Four items were modified due to semantic problems. One language expression and three items with colloquial and idiomatic problems were rephrased. One item was revised for cultural and experiential reasons. Each modified item in the translated version was culturally adapted, but the key concepts in the original measure were still reserved. This paper shed light on the application of cognitive interviews to cross-culturally adapt the FaMM for Taiwanese participants with different family types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the notion of state security inform national approaches to managing cross-border in-migration in the increasingly interconnected but volatile Northeast Asian region? This paper explores this question by focusing on the intermestic politics of labor importation. Specifically, it theorizes the multidimensionality and multifunctionality of security fears that inform Japan's and Taiwan's approaches to the admission of low-skilled foreign workers. The paper proposes a comprehensive conceptual framework that explicates these relationships and argues that Northeast Asian labor importation regimes were formed at the intersection of a threefold logic of state security. Whereas economic security acted as an enabling (inclusionary) factor in both Japan and Taiwan and motivated the acceptance of foreign workers, internal security in Japan and external security in Taiwan acted as constraining (exclusionary) factors, which directly and distinctively conditioned the resulting policies. Moreover, ever since their inception in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the divergent policy regimes have been interlocked in these economic-internal and economic-external dynamics of state security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) of Taiwan and Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) of Korea are among the most acknowledged public research institutes in East Asia. This paper applies the evolutionary perspective for a comparative case study, emphasizing the path dependence with the innovation system context. Also, this paper elucidates the factors that configured the dynamics of ITRI and KIST in populating spin-offs and advancing biotechnology, respectively. It sheds new light on what particular organizational structures and routines would posit functionality in propagating certain activities and outcomes. The case of ITRI implies a strong mechanistic push in its organization to expedite its research activities and spin-offs. Meanwhile, KIST is endowed with patient capital and instituted service seniority in its career ladder, thus enabling it to develop science-based technologies and to evolve into a university-like institute. The structures and routines of the two PRIs are profound and productive in advancing their respective desired research agendas. However, their instituted routines might limit their pursuit of other kinds of growth ventures. This paper shows a depiction of organizational career ladders and spin-off mechanisms, which provides a useful guide for a government aspiring to construct similar structures and routines for certain outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, some hotels have introduced a new service model called contactless service. This paper unpacks this new hospitality landscape through a random sample of 510 valid responses collected at a smart hotel in Taiwan in June 2020 and discusses the emergent insights through Multiple Linear Regression (MLR). The findings revealed that (1) Sense experience (SE), feel experience (FE), and relate experience (RE) were all positively impacting information sharing (IS); (2) Sense experience (SE) and feel experience (FE) positively affected satisfaction (CS). The positive adjustment of the relationship between the sense experience (SE) and the related experience (RE) for information sharing (IS) is regulated by the outbreak event disruption (ED). Intelligence operation (IO) is a significant mediating effect among five-sense experiences, customer satisfaction, and information sharing. This paper analyzes empirical data and provides insights that illuminate the nuances of customer experiences with contactless hospitality service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Project-based learning is among the most common learning approaches aimed at conveying professional standards and best practices to students in programming courses. However, team projects commonly impose problems related to responsibility sharing, such as low effort or inequality in contributions. This paper presents a collaborative programming assessment system featuring a code quality assessment function with specific metrics to measure individual contributions. Student engagement data is used to detect nonconformities in collaboration using a learning analytical approach. Latent profile analysis was used to detect four theoretical team profiles differentiated by team effort (2 levels) and within-team collaboration (2 levels). We demonstrated the efficacy of assessing code to evaluate team dynamics and student behaviour, wherein efforts to resolve coding style failures can be used as a proxy by which to estimate the taskwork awareness of team members. Submission data from 146 students in 41 web-programming projects revealed four behavioural patterns that could potentially hinder the effective functioning of programming teams: free-riding, social loafing, the bystander effect, and lone wolves. We also demonstrated the applicability of automated programming assessment systems to the monitoring of learning progress, thereby facilitating timely interventions to correct difficulties at the team level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the Japanese and Taiwanese dancers who—in the 1940s and under the auspices of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation—performed for the Japanese army on the frontlines of combat as a visiting entertainment troupe of comfort (Imon-dan). Imon-dan performers, unlike Ian-fu (comfort women), were professional artists even before the war. During the Sino–Japanese War, the Ministry of the Army deployed entertainment troupes of comfort who were professional performers to entertain soldiers stationed in the Japanese occupation area. Such troupes included Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese dancers because wartime Japan occupied Taiwan and Korea. This paper tracks one route to Burma in 1941 using new information from several people and a video recording. Consequently, the Japanese government used the Imon-dan in this instance to promote Japan's support for Burma's independence. These encounters resulted in modern dancers interacting with Taiwan and Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The overlapping symptoms of schizophrenia and dissociation have been increasingly recognized. This paper explains why it is reasonable to expect that there would be a substantial subgroup of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) who suffer from pathological dissociation. Objective: As little is known about the prevalence of dissociative disorders and symptoms among patients with SSDs, we investigated the prevalence of dissociative disorders and symptoms among patients with SSDs. Method: We used both self-report measures and structured interviews to examine dissociative disorders and symptoms in a randomly recruited sample of inpatients with a clinical diagnosis of SSDs in Taiwan (N = 100). Results: Over 60% of participants exhibited pathological dissociation, and 54% had a dissociative disorder according to structured interview data; three participants met the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for dissociative identity disorder. The concurrent validity of pathological dissociation in this sample was similar to that of depression among patients with schizophrenia reported in the literature. Participants with a dissociative disorder were more likely to report high-betrayal traumas and meet DSM-5 criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder; they also reported more psychotic symptoms than those without a dissociative disorder. Conclusions: This was one of very few studies that used structured interviews to examine pathological dissociation in patients with SSDs. The results indicate that pathological dissociation in SSDs is not uncommon. Clinical assessment should include measures of dissociation to facilitate early identification. Patients with dissociative disorders are often diagnosed with a psychotic disorder. Our study found that unrecognized dissociation is common in a sample of Taiwan inpatients with schizophrenia. Patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders should be screened for dissociation. Trauma and dissociation are not rare among inpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorders in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper relies on the cultural semiotics of Lotman which we bring to bear on political theory in order to develop a methodological framework that we have referred to as "political semiotics" in our previous work during the past decade. In our first section, we synthesize the core categories of the Essex school (Laclau, Mouffe, and others) of political analysis and the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics. In the next section, we move further to putting forth a concrete methodological framework for analyzing social/political reality by relating theories of power, governance, and democracy to the Jakobsonian model of communication. We call this method "political form analysis". The guiding idea of the latter is that it is not the content (i. e. substance) of communication, but rather the form (hierarchical relations of the aspects of communication) is the crucial focus of political analysis. In the final section, we illustrate our approach by explaining the constitution of the COVID-19 crisis and their governance in Taiwan. The country has had enormous success in containing the crisis during its first waves, but has also been surprisingly unsuccessful in the third phase (starting in the spring of 2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this increasingly globalized and uncertain market, the hotel industry is facing tremendous competitive pressure. To develop a competitive advantage, hotels may adopt an innovative branding strategy. The application of brand experience to marketing practice has drawn much attention from the hotel industry. Marketing management recognizes that understanding brand experience is critical for developing goods and services. Studies have examined the relationship between brand experience and brand loyalty, but it remains unclear how hotel guests' brand positioning affects this relationship. The purpose of this paper is threefold: (1) to examine the effects of different hotel brand experience on brand loyalty, (2) to assess the impact of brand positioning on brand loyalty, and (3) to identify the mediating effect of brand positioning on the relationship between hotel brand experience and brand loyalty. This study offers essential insights into the effects of hotel brand experience. It examines the mediating role of brand positioning on the relationship between brand experience and brand loyalty in the context of Taiwan upscale hotels. In practice, it implies that upscale hotels should consider additional information about hotel brand experience when making strategic marketing decisions. A thorough understanding of the hotel brand experience helps hotel managers create a road map for future development and management. Hotels capable of addressing customer brand experience set themselves in a competitive position in the marketplace and can create successful and differentiated brand positioning and brand loyalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on how immigrant activists interact with the host state in socio-political spheres where they exercise their citizenship. Located in Taiwan's New Southbound Policy (NSP), this paper adopts the concept of 'act of citizenship' to analyse Vietnamese activists' interactions with the NSP. This paper finds that the NSP appropriated immigrant women's motherhood and family relationships in order to boost tourism and facilitate Southeast Asian language acquisition in the short term and to enhance Taiwan's relationship with Southeast Asia in the long run. In response, immigrant activists utilised the NSP to build their own capacity and to realise their acts of empowerment, compassion and contestation in the family and public domains. They not only improved individuals' wellbeing but also made the Taiwanese state accountable for gender bias and inequality. These findings offer a much needed gender perspective into immigrant activists' dialectical relationship with the migration state of Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The agricultural industry has been identified as one of the most hazardous industries in developed countries. The main purpose of this paper was to conduct a comprehensive analysis of agricultural accidents (or injuries) in Taiwan during the period of 2009 to 2018. The occupational accident rates (per 1,000 farmers employed) in Taiwan's agricultural industry showed a decreasing trend over the past decade from 1,486 in 2009 to 1,053 in 2018. This trend could be attributed to the joint-cooperation efforts of the industrial, official, academic, and non-profit parties under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) revised in 2013. Although the occupational accident, disability, and other injury rates in all non-agriculture industries were higher than those in the agricultural industry during this period, the fatality rates in the agricultural industry were higher than those in all industries. Finally, some inter-ministerial measures on occupational safety and health issues in the agricultural industry for preventing agricultural accidents or injuries were recommended in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]