Women’s Labour, Kinship, and Economic Changes in Jinmen in the Era of Authoritarian Rule
This article uses the life stories of three women in Jinmen to demonstrate women’s economic agency in bettering the livelihood of their families in circumstances largely shaped by Cold War geopolitics and the authoritarian state’s military strategies. It argues that women’s devotion of their labour and earnings to their families was part of the reproductive processes of the kinship system, but also important to their building of social reputation and emotional ties with their loved ones. Moreover, the state’s campaign to protect traditional Chinese culture, framed within bipolar politics, supported the ideological reproduction of women’s primary roles being in the domestic sphere. While the lives of Jinmen civilians were significantly distorted in the Cold War era, their experiences of economic improvement and a certain stability in their ways of life – revolving around kinship – account for the ambivalence they now feel towards the period of authoritarian rule.
Quelle: https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/jcca/article/view/1178
Learning to Drink Sorghum Liquor: Taste and Consumption in Military Front-Line Jinmen, Taiwan
This article asks why sorghum liquor, once a drink choice representing the taste of a dominant class, became a token of Jinmen identity among the islands’ dominated local population. Being a Cold War battlefield, war-stricken Jinmen became a symbol of the Kuomintang government’s determination to recover mainland China. Military authoritarianism transformed Jinmen’s society in countless ways, including consumer fashions. The mass production of sorghum liquor began in 1953, with the military promoting its taste and establishing consumption of the liquor as part of a masculine ethos. This inspired mimicry among local consumers. Sorghum liquor became a local “traditional drink,” and a signifier for an identity that revolved around its consumption. This development arose from local consumers seizing on their limited freedom by making this consumption choice and making it their own under military authoritarian rule. Consumption and taste thus gave new meanings to local identity and community subjectivity.
Quelle: https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/jcca/article/view/1177
Authoritarianism in the Living Room: Everyday Disciplines, Senses, and Morality in Taiwan’s Military Villages
With the nationalist government – Kuomintang (KMT) – retreating from mainland China in 1949, some 600,000 military personnel relocated to Taiwan. The military seized former Japanese colonial properties and built its own settlements, establishing temporary military dependents’ villages called juancun (眷村). When the prospect of counter-attacking the mainland vanished, the KMT had to face the reality of settling permanently in Taiwan. How, then, did the KMT’s authoritarian power enter the everyday lives of its own support group? In this article I will focus on the coercive elements of KMT authoritarianism, which permeated these military villages in Taiwan. I will look at the coercive mechanisms through the analytical lens of Foucauldian discipline. I argue that disciplinary techniques such as surveillance, disciplining of the body and the senses, as well as the creation of morality regimes played an important role in the cooptation of village residents into KMT authoritarianism by normalising and naturalising it.
Quelle: https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/jcca/article/view/1176
The Wartime Regime and the Development of Public Diet in Taiwan (1947–1950s)
The Nationalist Party retreated to Taiwan in 1949 after its defeat in the Chinese Civil War. Faced with a population explosion, economic recession, and a serious shortage of resources, the Nationalist government retained the “wartime regime” instituted during the civil war, while strengthening control of key foods – which significantly affected people’s daily life, and notably diet. This article argues that the purpose of implementing the wartime regime was not only to stabilise livelihoods, particularly to secure basic living conditions for a large number of soldiers and government employees; it also helped the Nationalist Party consolidate its authoritarian rule and establish a firm grip on national resources, facilitating national defence and economic development. The stringent control measures of the wartime regime caused, however, a gross imbalance between staple and subsidiary foods in the diet of local people, leading to consumption of excessive amounts of starchy staple foods and widening the gap between the diets of farmers and non-farmers.
Quelle: https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/jcca/article/view/1175
Puppets, Compatriots, and Souls in Heaven: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Chiang Kai-shek’s Early Wartime Rhetoric
The study adopts a critical discourse analysis approach to Chiang Kai-shek’s (CKS) internal nationalist propaganda and authoritarian discourse practices, investigating his New Year and National Day speeches in the 1950s. Authoritarian characteristics are evident in strategies such as legitimation, reification, or myth-making, in the antagonist categorisation of Self versus Other, in Self-glorification and the idolisation of the dead, in the hegemonic creation of commonality and unity, and in the metaphorical conceptualisation of reality. Patterns of idolising the dead serve to impose and legitimise CKS’s worldview among his citizens. Another pattern is CKS’s invention of imaginary compatriots within the “enslaved China” waiting for the best time to overthrow the “bandits’” rule. Reference to these imaginary agents indirectly presents to his audience a false but better impression of the Self, and a dimmer view of the communist bandits. A third pattern is CKS’s metaphorical use of language, such as references to communist China as a puppet regime of Russia.
Quelle: https://journals.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/jcca/article/view/1174