lectures

Constructing Taiwan: Place, Power, and Identity Politics — Dr Bi-Yu Chang’s Retirement Lecture

SOAS

November 12

SOAS Main Building

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Join us in celebrating Dr Bi-Yu Chang’s retirement with a reflective lecture tracing her two-decade journey through the cultural politics, spatial identities, and shifting meanings of belonging in Taiwan.

The Centre of Taiwan Studies is honoured to celebrate Dr Bi-yu Chang’s retirement with her lecture Constructing Taiwan: Place, Power, and Identity Politics, marking her decades of pioneering contribution to the study of Taiwan’s cultural politics and identity.

This lecture is a reflection on Bi-Yu's research journey, exploring identity politics in Taiwan as a dynamic and contested process shaped through culture, education, and power. Over the past two decades, Bi-Yu's work has traced how identity is never fixed, but continually constructed, reshaped, and resisted. Case studies ranging from political theatre to educational reform, from place-making to nation-building and nation-branding, reveal that identity in Taiwan has always been a contested ‘space’—not simply a binary of being Taiwanese or Chinese. Each site of identity competition reveals not only open struggles but also the more implicit hand of the state, embedded in mechanisms of knowledge construction, value-building, and the shaping of social norms. 

This lecture will follow four interconnected strands of this inquiry: cultural politics and identity; knowledge and power; state spatiality and belonging; and generational gaps of identity. These strands represent not only different facets of Taiwan’s identity politics, but also the stages of Bi-Yu's own intellectual journey—beginning with cultural policy and political theatre, expanding into education and space, and culminating in the politics of generational difference and gender. 

By situating these strands within the wider trajectory of Taiwan’s democratisation and global positioning, the lecture highlights that the study of Taiwanese identity is not a matter of right or wrong, nor a search for an ultimate Taiwaneseness. Instead, it is best understood as an ongoing process of contestation—one in which power operates both visibly and implicitly, shaping how belonging is imagined and reimagined over time.