ABSTRACT
In 1994, after a New Year’s trip to Southeast Asia, Lee Teng-hui, president of Taiwan, announced his Nanchin (Southern Advance) policy. According to this policy, the government should encourage Taiwanese industries to expand their commerce and influence to Southeast Asia. This chapter focuses on the discourse of modernity that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s among the Taiwanese intelligentsia, when the first confrontations with Japan and China caused a number of intellectual conflicts. These conflicts were often manifested in the contradictory images of the “new woman” and in discussions fu-nü chieh-fang (women’s liberation). The chapter proposes that there were at least two crucial factors enabling the emergence of the modern period: first, the chance for the intellectuals to become immersed in the modern atmosphere of Japanese education, and, second, the blurring of racial boundaries between the Japanese colonizers and the people they colonized.
