A Look Inside: Taiwanese in a Time of Cross-Strait Crisis

Boston University Center for the Study of Asia Taiwan Forum

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Organized by the BU Center for the Study of Asia, and co-sponsored with the Harvard-Yenching Institute, BU’s Pardee School of Global Studies, Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, NEH Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities, Department of World Languages and Literatures, CAS Student Academic Life, CAS Diversity and Inclusion Office, and Department of Political Science (BU)

With tensions escalating in the Taiwan Strait, the Taiwanese people realize they are caught in a global geopolitical rivalry. Western media tends to focus on either Western or Chinese perspectives. How do Taiwanese feel about the situation? What debates emerge among local elites? How do ordinary people, like farmers and fishermen, perceive and respond to the evolving circumstances?

About the Speaker: Lung Yingtai is a writer, literary critic and public intellectual. Lung not only has a large number of devoted readers in her native Taiwan, but her works also have great influence in the Chinese-language world in Singapore, Malaysia, China, and North America. Lung entered public service as Taipei City Government’s first Minister of Culture in 1999 and served as Taiwan’s inaugural Minister of Culture from 2012-2014. She is author of more than two dozen books, including essays, fiction, reportage, and literary criticism. Her 1985 book, The Wild Fire, created a major cultural stir for its honest and introspective look at the social and political problems facing contemporary Taiwan society. Big River, Big Sea: Untold Stories of 1949, published in 2009, became a must-read in greater China despite that it has been banned in China. She was Hung Leung Hao Ling Distinguished Fellow in Humanities at the University of Hong Kong from 2015-2020.