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This paper complicates the classic security dilemma by considering the notions of ontological security and relational deterrence. It studies how the ontological security dilemma has emerged between the US, China, and Taiwan from the relational perspective and how these spiral chains will further develop in the future. The paper incurs the literature on relational analysis to expound on how different ontological security concerns allude to relational deterrence between the three actors. Taiwan's separatism is more of a threat to China's relational self than to physical security because the separatist does not belong to any already agreed relationship. A geometric model and a few simulations yield three unconventional findings. 1) The less advantaged the US military is over China, the less likely armed unification will occur. 2) The US anti-Chinese tendency is irrelevant in determining the probability of armed unification. 3) What may escalate the spiral are China's anti-Taiwan independence and Taiwan's anti-unification. Case sensitivity indicates the ontological sensibilities of a security dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article tackles a conceptual topic of postcolonial feminism—self-feminization. Specifically, the article explores the femininity of Taiwanese professionals' bridging role between the head and branch offices of multinational firms in Taiwan, as well as between an allegedly universal ethos in science, market, and the globalization on the one hand and the humanist concerns for emotion, relation, and nuance on the other. The femininity of financial office as well as other local capacities demonstrates how they can improvise relationships for mutually estranging actors. Then, the article extends the discussion to allude to international relations, divided by an allegedly universal (usually conversional) and indigenous (usually resistant) force in terms of value, institution, relation, or identity. I use the local branch office qua the indigenous, the head office qua the universal, and the professionals who bridge between them as metaphors for China, the West or the global forces, and Taiwan, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disappearance of references to "Yadong," Asia's East or Asiatic East, as opposed to East Asia, in Taiwan's post-World War II (WWII) political history presaged the impracticality of decolonization in Taiwan. The Cold War, pertaining especially to the American intellectual intervention in the conceptualization of the world through the fault line of its containment policy, contributed greatly to the substitution of East Asia for Yadong. I argue that Yadong is a geocultural lens, while East Asia connotes strategic purposes of various kinds. The latter concept echoed the discourse of the "Great East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere," which colonial Japan relied on before and during WWII to justify colonialism as well as expansion. The familiar discourse of decolonization embedded in "strategic essentialism," i.e. deliberate use of some fundamentalism for the occasion of resistance, reproduces the colonizing/colonized binary. I re-theorize decolonization as a relational project. Empirically the intellectual demise of Yadong as a relational discourse accompanied the evolution of the Cold War. Yadong's disappearance indirectly testifies to the fate of decolonization in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues against the popular impression that the rise of Taiwan's national consciousness is a result of democratization. Instead, it looks to the world timing of Taiwan becoming an independent reference point internationally for explanation of the changing identity in contemporary politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines democratic politics in Taiwan, in a postcolonial context. Three domains that democratic politics operate in Taiwan; Examination of Confucianism's view of governance; Analysis of how political figures understand democratic politics; Outline of four approaches to democratization in Asia.