Post/Colonial Geography, Post/Cold War Complication: Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong as a Liminal Island Chain.

This essay engages in border studies by articulating a "liminal island chain," linking Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as a frontier of democracy in the rise of a new Cold War. Tracing the theoretical evolution from boundary to border and bordering in the recent scholarship, it aims to counter the island chain idea in international relations theory with an indigenous settler colonial perspective on the one hand, and to approach democracy as a political rhetoric deployed in Taiwan's and Hong Kong's anti-China protests since 2014 that constructed a biometric, emotional, and civilizational border against China on the other. By taking the Protect Diaoyutai (Baodiao) Movement of the early 1970s that linked Okinawa with Taiwan and Hong Kong as a critical conjuncture of Cold War bordering, the essay adopts a cultural studies approach to consider the implications of multiple bordering in East Asia as congealed in the social movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan, then and now, to offer an analysis of the unfolding of the new Cold War. By conceptualizing Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong as unwieldly liminal island chain as produced by post/colonial geography and shaped by post/Cold War entanglements, the essay hopes to unveil how multiple bordering is at work in East Asia, and to usher in a trans-local imagination of the democracy to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]