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Both the flags of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China’s (ROC) have the colour red; however, red represents different meanings on both flags. The colour red on the ROC flag represents “fraternite” originated from the French Revolution. The colour red on the PRC flag is from the flag of The Soviet Union, which the colour red is originally the colour of the flag of La Commune de Paris. There have been many incidents involving the desecration, burning or damaging of the national flag of the Republic of China (ROC, 中華民國) over the years. In Taiwan, some people think that the ROC has ceased to exist since 1949, and that the ROC can no longer represent Taiwan and the KMT (the Nationalist Party, Kuomintang) is controlled by the PRC. They use flag desecration as a means to attack one China policy and the PRC. In this paper, I will explore the reason why the ROC national flag has been targeted in Taiwan, and question whether or not damaging the flag is really a meaningful and successful way to attack both the ROC and the PRC. Furthermore, I will explain how protesters attack the PRC by attacking the ROC flag by way of a discussion of the colour code of both national flags. In addition, I will discuss the meaning of the red on both flags, and I will also explain why an attack on the ROC flag, based on the colour of the ROC and PRC flags, is not a successful way to attack the PRC.

People expect that the truth can be revealed in a trial and the decision then is made based on the truth. However, such expectation is a fantasy because the truth has disappeared since the moment when an incident occurred. What are left about this incident are merely fragments (witnesses and evidences) that need further interpretations. Interpretations are open to possibilities; possibilities mean different stories. That is to say: there is no truth (or there are many truths) but stories; truth actually does not matter in law. Law is asked to re-construct the truth logically, based on facts, and without being affected by what outside the law, and then a fair and just legal decision can be made. The idea of storytelling, from the perspective of literature—literary narrative, on the other end is opposite to legal narrative that: a story does not need to be true or real; a story can be as bizarre as it can get as long as it is explainable and acceptable when the story comes to law. In a Japanese drama “Legal High 2” a black widow spider woman is accused of murdering her fiancée and his daughter. Since this woman is the only suspect and has been involved in many marriage fraudulent cases, the prosecutor proves that she is the murder based on the motivation and evidences found (the poison she bought from internet) in the crime scene. However, the defense attorney for getting this woman acquitted tells a story absolutely different from the prosecutor’s based on the same evidences. Therefore, in this present paper I am going to discuss that: how literary narrative and legal narrative in a law drama create both legit but opposite stories that challenges the idea that law and its language is a tool used to pursue the truth based on logics and facts. And, I will compare the similarity and the difference between literary narrative and legal narrative, from the both sides of legal theory and literary theory about language, to examine the idea of “truth” in law and in literature about law.

Robert van Gulik translated the detective stories of Judge Dee (Dee Gong An), however, he did not translate everything in the original text. He omitted some parts and rewrote them to suit the appet ...

Japan was supposed to obey the law during the second world war. However, the Nanjing Massacre still happened. Hirohito, the Japanese emperor, deliberately avoided mentioning the International Treaties in the imperial rescript of the Great East Asia War in 1937. The Nanking Massacre was carried out according to the Japanese army’s interpretation of the imperial rescript. Such a legal interpretation was rooted in the idea that Japan had to educate the Chinese and transform China by killing its people in order to pursue a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere led by Japan. In the film Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (1995), we can see both a justification of and an opposition to killing. In this paper I am going to show how the imperial rescript is used to justify this mass killing is and how opposing arguments are used to show its cruelty and absurdity, which is taken as a means to achieve a greater good.

Ronald Dworkin offered the legal theory which is known as a “chain enterprise”. According to this theory, throughout history, judges have, collectively, created a “law” that was designed to fulfil a specific purpose. Those judges can be seen as co-authors who, together, develop a chain-story. As such they not only create freely but also are constrained by the story made by authors, in this case judges, who have come before them. The law created by Chinese traditional judges is another case: compared with the judges mentioned by Ronald Dworkin, they have relatively narrower parameters of discretion in which they may implement a legal sentence. The limited amount of discretion available to an individual judge is due to the way in which, traditionally, the legal framework has been designed. The fact that traditional Chinese law was first conceived of as a penal code leaves little room for a judge to subjectively interpret a statute. Furthermore, because law is representative of the authority of the government, i.e. the emperor, any misinterpretation will be considered as a challenge to the supreme power. Conversely, while judges are bound by restrictive parameters with regard to the interpretation of the law, a Chinese litigation master (Songshi) who wishes to receive a favorable outcome for his client must be willing to challenge a judge’s narrow interpretation of the law. Conversely, while judges are bound by restrictive parameters with regard to the interpretation of the law, aSongshiwho wishes to receive a favorable outcome for his client must be willing to challenge a judge’s narrow interpretation of the law. According to Stanley Fish’s articles that question Ronald Dworkin and Owen Fiss’ ideas about law, Fish construes that, since law is made of language, law is open to interpretations that cannot be constrained by any rules or any particular legal purposes. Stanley Fish’s idea can also be applied to the analysis of the stories ofSongshiin traditional Chinese literature. The legal opinions ofSongshiin traditional Chinese literature can be regarded as an unexpected event that calls for revision of the standardized concept of law propagated in legal stories. Although they are not welcome, neither by the officials and nor by society, their existence is still a phenomenon representing another version of justice different from the standardized concept of justice and can be seen as a de-structural power to the government. Hence, in this present paper the language and strategy applied bySongshiin Chinese legal stories will be analysed to see how they refute legal judgments and challenge the standardized concept of justice.

Remembering does not mean reproducing, or duplicating time, but re-structuring time, restructuring a story and building up a new identity through words. The process of memorizing (remembering) and a structuring process (recollecting the pieces) are both linked to the idea of “re-membering”. In both novels, we find this re-membering process at the very heart of the writing process. The re-membering process is a part of the cultural memory. Maurice Halbwachs insisted on the reference frame for a collective memory (Halbwachs, 1925, p. 124). The collective memory depends on the social group who defines it, the family, the religion or another collective entity (Sabourin, 1997, p. 141). Here, the re-membering process is an attempt to structure a traumatic migration experience. In this cultural memory, we would like to use the concept of Castoriadis, the imaginary signification (Castoriadis, 1975). Castoriadis was himself a Greek émigré that came to France after the Second World War (Jollivet, Premat, Rosengren, 2011, p. 14). He developed a theory in 1975 based on the definition of imaginary significations. A culture is defined by a pattern of imaginary significations that means a set of representations / intentions / affects (Castoriadis, 1975, p. 433). These significations make sense for a culture as they create values symbols and representations that cannot be explained. In the re-membering process, Awumey and Thúy catch some experiences and try to relate them to some imaginary significations. At the same time, the migration creates a conflict of representations that makes difficult to recreate a coherent world.