Expressing Emotions in a Colonial Text: Huang Fengzi’s Taiwan no shōjo (A Young Girl of Taiwan)

Written by Anne Sokolsky.​ This article examines Taiwan no shōjo (1944), a collection of essays by Taiwanese writer Huang Fengzi, arguing that its emotional language reveals the complexities of colonial identity under Japanese rule. Through an analysis of competing voices and affective expressions, it explores how emotions, power, and cultural belonging shaped both the text and its colonial context.

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Feeling Taiwan: Emotions, Knowledge, and the Politics of Everyday Life 

Written by Po-Han Lee, Alvaro Martinez-Lacabe, and Yu-chin Tseng.​​ This special issue, featuring the co-editors and authors of the recently published edited volume, Feeling Taiwan, explores how emotions shape Taiwan’s politics, history, and everyday life. Drawing on six case studies, it examines how feelings are not separate from knowledge but fundamental to understanding identity, social change, and lived experience, while inviting broader audiences to engage with Taiwan through emotion.

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Teaching Maritime Culture and History in Eastern Taiwan

Written by Eric Siu-kei Cheng. This article explores how maritime education in Taitung turns Taiwan’s eastern coastline into a living classroom. Drawing on fieldwork, community collaboration, fisheries, food education, and Green Island’s White Terror heritage, the author shows how students engage with environmental sustainability, Indigenous knowledge, local livelihoods, cultural preservation, and democratic memory through the ocean.

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China’s Maritime Pressure Spans Sea and Screen: Taiwan Needs a Regional Evidence Network

Written by Ming-hui Tang. This article analyses how Beijing combines maritime patrols, AI-generated propaganda, and legal framing to create an illusion of administrative control around Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines. To counter this strategy of jurisdictional enclosure, it argues that Taiwan must leverage its strategic position to build a public regional evidence network with its neighbours. By standardising real-time data verification, authenticating media, and clarifying international law, Taiwan can convert individual incidents into collective security.

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Islands as Breathing Infrastructures: Why Are More Visitors Making Livelihoods More Difficult in Today’s Kinmen?

Written by Chengyu Yang. This essay examines how Kinmen’s surge in cross-strait transit passengers strains local livelihoods and infrastructure without delivering proportional economic benefits. As a passage between Taiwan proper and mainland China, Kinmen acts as a “breathing infrastructure”, a delicate sea-air system easily desynchronised by weather disruptions. Consequently, high passenger volumes exhaust finite transport resources, fuelling tensions between stranded travellers and residents who depend on those same domestic flights for daily life.

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Staying Afloat in the Wave of Zero-Fees Policies: Agreement on Reciprocal Trade and its Impact on the Taiwanese Fishing Industry – Part II

Written by Shao-Yun Chang, Vanny El Rahman, and Beatrice Zani. This article (part 2) continues to illustrate how the US-Taiwan Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) and its mandatory “zero-fee” recruitment policies impact Taiwan’s fishing industry. While designed to protect foreign migrant workers from predatory debt bondage, the policy places heavy financial strain on small-scale vessel owners already facing declining yields and rising costs.

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