Research Focus Group Talk: One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism

In his talk, Ian Rowen will highlight how Chinese tourism split Taiwan into “Two Taiwans”—one portrayed as part of China for Chinese tour groups, and the other experienced as the everyday reality of local residents and independent travelers. He will also examine how this dynamic intensified conflicts between business, civil society, and government entities with differing stakes in maintaining a PRC-focused tourism industry, ultimately contributing to a more diverse civic nationalism in Taiwan. Rowen’s book One China, Many Taiwans explores how tourism, used by the PRC as a political tool to influence Taiwan, heightened tensions between the two governments, deepened divisions within Taiwanese society, and increased public support for national self-determination.

Rowen is Associate Professor in the Department of Taiwan Culture, Languages, and Literature at National Taiwan Normal University. He previously served as Assistant Professor of Sociology, Geography and Urban Planning at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Fudan University (China) and Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany), a postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica (Taiwan), and a Fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Agile Governance. His research has been supported with a Fulbright Fellowship and multiple US National Science Foundation grants.

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Interdisciplinary Sinophone Studies Research Focus Group and UCSB’s Center for Taiwan Studies