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In May 2017, Taiwan's legislature passed the Indigenous Languages Development Act (ILDA), which came into effect in June of that year. This paper traces the process and context that have led to the act's adoption, and provides an overview of its symbolic and substantive content. In doing so, this paper draws attention to the importance of contextual factors in the act's adoption. The ILDA had been in the works since the early 2000s, and it is only through a piecemeal approach to Indigenous legislation that it came into being. Its ultimate adoption was enabled by a conjuncture of social and political developments, most directly the election of the Democratic Progressive Party in 2016, after a campaign that emphasised issues of transitional justice, decolonisation and reconciliation. The momentum toward these trends has also been influenced by Taiwan's fragile political status. In fact, Taiwan's limited international recognition has incentivised the use of minority rights initiatives, together with the conduct of cultural diplomacy with the country's diplomatic and trade partners sharing Austronesian heritage, as sovereignty-building and soft power projection tools.

This paper looks into failed attempts by the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) minority government (2000-2008) to alter Taiwan's Mandarin-dominated language regime by drafting law proposals recognizing the languages of all Taiwanese ethnic groups as equal national languages. This paper argues that the failure to enact language regime change in Taiwan can best be explained by the logic of the Taiwanese party system, which incentivized mainstream parties to play down their antagonistic Hoklo-Taiwanese and Mainland-Chinese ethnocultural cores to vie for electoral support from Hakka and Aboriginal ethnic minorities. This party logic, compounded by the DPP's minority position in the legislature, had two implications for language policy-making in Taiwan. First, the electoral incentive for the DPP to de-radicalize its pro-Taiwan identity platform pushed the party to resort to covert ways of showing commitment to its radical faction, such as appointing language revivalists to ethnolinguistic committees. This resulted in a shift in focus from "de jure" language regime change to a reliance on bureaucratic channels in language policy-making. Second, the same political dynamics have discouraged parties from appealing to ethnonationalist rhetoric, prompting them to express their antagonistic ideologies of Taiwanese and Chinese nationalism through typically liberal conceptions of language rights. Appeals to linguistic human rights, however, may not have constituted a strong enough justification for substantial changes in language policy. By appealing to the political and cultural status quo, the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuo Min Tang or KMT) has had the upper hand in the debates.

After nearly half a century of authoritarianism characterized by Chinese nationalism and Mandarin promotion, democratization in 1990s Taiwan was accompanied by a Taiwanization movement featuring calls for the revitalization of local languages and the promotion of linguistic equality. To that end, the government began planning for local language education, and, starting in 2001, children have had to attend one weekly hour of mandatory local language education. This curriculum, which is often referred to as "mother tongue education" in Taiwan, has been criticized as being of little value for language acquisition and transmission. Squeezed between Mandarin - the language of instruction, public affairs and increasingly language of home--and English--the international language--the so-called Taiwanese mother tongues are increasingly being learned, taught and used as second languages. Based on a review of secondary sources, public document analysis and interviews with Taiwanese public officials and language revivalists, this paper offers an overview of local language education policy and planning in Taiwan, with a special focus on the respective influences of democratization, human rights promotion and identity politics.

In May 2017, Taiwan's legislature passed the Indigenous Languages Development Act (ILDA), which came into effect in June of that year. This paper traces the process and context that have led to the act's adoption, and provides an overview of its symbolic and substantive content. In doing so, this paper draws attention to the importance of contextual factors in the act's adoption. The ILDA had been in the works since the early 2000s, and it is only through a piecemeal approach to Indigenous legislation that it came into being. Its ultimate adoption was enabled by a conjuncture of social and political developments, most directly the election of the Democratic Progressive Party in 2016, after a campaign that emphasised issues of transitional justice, decolonisation and reconciliation. The momentum toward these trends has also been influenced by Taiwan's fragile political status. In fact, Taiwan's limited international recognition has incentivised the use of minority rights initiatives, together with the conduct of cultural diplomacy with the country's diplomatic and trade partners sharing Austronesian heritage, as sovereignty-building and soft power projection tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the study of cultural citizenship by laying the foundations for a concept of culture regime. Depicting culture as a malleable concept that encompasses both particularistic and universalistic elements, the paper emphasizes the potential of the concept of culture regime to bridge those of citizenship, language and ethnicity regime. While presenting narrow conceptions of culture as ethnic identity as a defensible compromise in the context of comparative empirical research, the paper discusses how the study of culture regimes could integrate broader approaches to culture by incorporating other forms of cultural claims and identities that go beyond ethnic traits. In doing so, the paper aims to promote an inter-disciplinary dialogue on cultural citizenship, arguing that some of the differences in cross-disciplinary approaches to culture owe to methodological rather than ontological considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the study of cultural citizenship by laying the foundations for a concept of culture regime. Depicting culture as a malleable concept that encompasses both particularistic and universalistic elements, the paper emphasizes the potential of the concept of culture regime to bridge those of citizenship, language and ethnicity regime. While presenting narrow conceptions of culture as ethnic identity as a defensible compromise in the context of comparative empirical research, the paper discusses how the study of culture regimes could integrate broader approaches to culture by incorporating other forms of cultural claims and identities that go beyond ethnic traits. In doing so, the paper aims to promote an inter-disciplinary dialogue on cultural citizenship, arguing that some of the differences in cross-disciplinary approaches to culture owe to methodological rather than ontological considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks into the determinants of cultural recognition in ethnically diverse democracies that are divided on national identity, arguing that political parties’ cultural ideologies are not entirely predetermined by their national identity position. It posits that, rather than just a tool for national identity building, cultural recognition in such societies is also a way for parties to show commitment to their ethnic electorate. In this sense, the ethnic segmentation of the party system provides political elites with a context of choice from which to formulate their stance on cultural recognition. The paper argues that, far from being divisive, national identity politics can have a strong influence in establishing consensus on national culture. Moreover, it suggests that looking at national identity and recognition politics from the perspective of electoral incentives can help us understand why culture regimes can appear to be unfair to some groups, yet remain legitimate politically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the confusing Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong in 2014. The revolution showed anguish and impatience of the younger generations in Hong Kong about lack of democratization as promised by China to the region. A reconciliation of the divergent perspectives of Hong Kong and China will be complex from what the younger generations suggest.