Written by Sheng-mei Ma. This is Part II of the article. Through a close reading of the Chinese TV series Reset, the article argues that its recurring time loops, terrorism, and symbolic imagery allegorise authoritarian violence, historical repetition, and state repression in the People’s Republic of China, which ultimately frames Taiwan as the regime’s imagined final object of political and territorial consumption.
Written by Sheng-mei Ma. This is Part I of the article. Through a close reading of the Chinese TV series Reset, the article argues that its recurring time loops, terrorism, and symbolic imagery allegorise authoritarian violence, historical repetition, and state repression in the People’s Republic of China, which ultimately frames Taiwan as the regime’s imagined final object of political and territorial consumption.
Written by Chikara Yanome Toda. Geographically distant but democratically aligned, Taiwan and Mexico both navigate the complex challenge of indigenous political representation. While Taiwan uses identity-based, nationwide reserved seats, Mexico relies on territorial districts requiring community recognition. This article explores how Taiwan’s stable national presence and Mexico’s localised accountability offer vital, cross-regional lessons for modernising minority representation in both democracies.
Taiwan is too often reduced to a geopolitical abstraction, but this essay reads the island as a body — one that carries the trauma of colonisation, the 228 massacre, and the White Terror in its very flesh. Through memorials, indigenous counter-mapping, and the Mazu pilgrimage, Taiwan heals by inscribing its wounds back onto the map: re-membering, in the flesh, as another name for healing
Written by Hong Jiang. Taiwan’s renowned Alishan high-mountain tea sector faces critical environmental and market challenges after nearly five decades of growth. This article explores how local farmers are actively cultivating a sustainable future. By embracing nature-based farming, prioritizing quality over quantity, and integrating tea art with tourism, these producers are building a vibrant “cultural economy” of nature, culture, and care to safeguard their livelihoods and heritage.
Written by Junhong Ma. This article follows the journey of Jinxuan, Taiwan’s celebrated tea cultivar, tracing how it acquires new names, meanings, and sensory identities across Taiwan and beyond. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with historical inquiry, it shows how cultivars circulate through agricultural science, markets, translation, and taste, revealing tea as a living assemblage shaped by plants, people, technologies, and transnational cultural exchanges.
