On behalf of Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and its National Security Task Force the Hoover Institution held a Taiwan Roundtable Discussion On Cold War / Martial Law Formations of Taiwanese America on Monday, May 13, 2024 from 2-3:30 p.m. PT in Stauffer Auditorium.
This event features Wendy Cheng, Professor of American Studies and core faculty in the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at Scripps College. She is the author of Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (University of Washington Press, 2023) and The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012).
This event features Wendy Cheng, Professor of American Studies and core faculty in the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at Scripps College. She is the author of Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (University of Washington Press, 2023) and The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012).
From the 1960s to 1980s, more than a hundred thousand Taiwanese students migrated to the US for graduate study in science, technology, engineering, and medicine fields as part of the special Cold War relationship between the US and the authoritarian Kuomintang (KMT) government in Taiwan. This same time period overlapped with a 38-year period of martial law in Taiwan, during which the KMT surveilled and terrorized Taiwanese nationals not only in Taiwan but also in the U.S., Japan, and other locations around the world. In the U.S., this occurred with the full knowledge and tacit permission of the US state.
With information drawn from extensive interviews and archival research, we'll discuss how Taiwanese students were politicized and organized themselves on U.S. university campuses under these dual conditions of selective Cold War migration and martial law, and how their politics were more heterogeneous and far-reaching than how they are typically remembered today.
With information drawn from extensive interviews and archival research, we'll discuss how Taiwanese students were politicized and organized themselves on U.S. university campuses under these dual conditions of selective Cold War migration and martial law, and how their politics were more heterogeneous and far-reaching than how they are typically remembered today.
My opening remarks are below:
Before I turn the microphone over to Prof. Cheng. I’d also like to offer a couple observations about this topic.
I have been wishing for a long time that someone would write this book. The field of Taiwan studies has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few years, but the issue of spying and harassment of Taiwanese students in the United States has been almost invisible in English-language scholarship and quite sensitive among Taiwanese communities.
These episodes deserve a lot more attention.
First, the Taiwanese overseas student experience has deep historical significance for American academia. As Prof. Cheng documents in the book, there are dozens of campuses with documented cases of spying. Stanford is among them. Let me reiterate that. This university had agents of a foreign power reporting on the political attitudes and activities of students, with real consequences not just for themselves but their families and friends back home. It’s important that people here be aware of this history and the chilling effect it had on academic freedom for these communities.
Now, Taiwan has come a long way since that time, a development that is worth celebrating. But it is still wrestling with the legacies of the authoritarian era. And in the search for transitional justice, one of the most important and powerful acts is truth telling. In this book, Wendy tells difficult truths – about the long reach of the martial-law-era regime in Taiwan, about U.S. government complicity or indifference, and about the struggles over Taiwan’s status on American campuses – struggles that have mostly been forgotten after Taiwan democratized and a new wave of students from the PRC changed the locus of contention.
Second, the debate over academic freedom and foreign coercion has obvious contemporary relevance. American universities are once again confronting questions about transnational repression, or “sharp power,” “foreign influence operations,” or whatever other terms we might use to describe this phenomenon, especially but not only from the authoritarian People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the current debates over academic freedom that are roiling many university campuses around the country, we are in danger of missing a crucial distinction: the curtailing of speech, academic inquiry, and political organizing on university campuses via the covert, coercive acts of a foreign government are a gross violation of that fundamental freedom. As Prof. Cheng documents, American universities did not respond well in previous decades to this coercive activity when it was directed against students from Taiwan. It should be our hope that they do a better job in the current environment, now that students from other countries face similar threats.
With that, I will turn the mic over to Wendy Cheng. Thank you.
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