Taiwan's Civil Society and the Blue-Green Deadlock, 1986-2007

A talk by Wu Jieh-min in the Taiwan Studies Lecture Series

Thursday, January 24, 2008
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Taiwan joined the “Third Wave” of democratization and has established itself as a western-style electoral democracy over the last two decades. But the country is caught in an unproductive ethnic dispute and the so-called “Blue-Green partisan strife.” In this lecture, the speaker will approach this problem from the perspective of the development of civil society: What are the origins of ethnic politics in society? How has political power struggle spread over to the civil society? How has the “China factor” affected the domestic political arena? Is there any alternative to the Green-Blue deadlock?

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Wu Jieh-min (Ph.D. in Political Science, Columbia University) was an An Wang post-doctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research during 1998-9, has been teaching at the Institute of Sociology, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. He co-founded the Center for Contemporary China at NTHU and served as director during 2005-7. He is currently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar in the Department of Sociology, UCLA. He has published articles in the Journal of Contemporary China, Issues and Studies, and Taiwanese Sociology (in Chinese), among others. His research interests include Chinese migrants and citizenship and Taiwan’s social movements and civil society.