The Gaps and Excesses of Transitional Justice in Taiwan—A Response to Caldwell

Ernest Caldwell’s legal history of transitional justice in Taiwan provides scholars a great service by periodizing and clearly summarizing key moments for the formulation and passage of relevant legislation. In so doing, however, it frames ongoing and perhaps ultimately unresolvable struggles over the meaning of history and the possibility of redress for past injustices as “gaps” within “Taiwan’s transitional justice experience,” belying a seemingly ahistorical conceptualization of transitional justice. The language of “gaps” suggests that transitional justice is a practice with a clearly defined and universally-accepted template, toolkit, and timeline, such that there is a commonly-understood set of criteria by which one could objectively evaluate success or completion. In fact, scholars have convincingly shown transitional justice to be constituted by an extraordinarily malleable, diverse, open-ended, and often vaguely-defined set of legal and extra-legal instruments, discourses, and practices that are conducted by a variety of actors and in pursuit of an often-divergent variety of political projects. This brief argument is based less on the official actions of the Transitional Justice Commission itself, than on a widely-circulated unofficial statement signed by members of the Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Committee (Indigenous Justice Committee), which was established by a presidential directive. This statement was issued as response to a speech by China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who asserted that Taiwanese and Chinese people share cultural and blood ties, and that Taiwan belongs to China. Taiwan’s indigenous signees public letter began “Mr. Xi Jinping, you do not know us, so you do not know Taiwan.” My rejoinder here echoes this letter by suggesting that one cannot know about transitional justice in Taiwan without knowing more both about Taiwan’s relationship with China and its simultaneous imbrication and contradiction with indigenous identity and sovereignty

Mapping the disease-specific LupusQoL to the SF-6D

Purpose To derive a mapping algorithm to predict SF-6D utility scores from the non-preference-based LupusQoL and test the performance of the developed algorithm on a separate independent validation data set. Method LupusQoL and SF-6D data were collected from 320 patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) attending routine rheumatology outpatient appointments at seven centres in the UK. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression was used to estimate models of increasing complexity in order to predict individuals’ SF-6D utility scores from their responses to the LupusQoL questionnaire. Model performance was judged on predictive ability through the size and pattern of prediction errors generated. The performance of the selected model was externally validated on an independent data set containing 113 female SLE patients who had again completed both the LupusQoL and SF-36 questionnaires. Results Four of the eight LupusQoL domains (physical health, pain, emotional health, and fatigue) were selected as dependent variables in the final model. Overall model fit was good, with R2 0.7219, MAE 0.0557, and RMSE 0.0706 when applied to the estimation data set, and R2 0.7431, MAE 0.0528, and RMSE 0.0663 when applied to the validation sample. Conclusion This study provides a method by which health state utility values can be estimated from patient responses to the non-preference-based LupusQoL, generalisable beyond the data set upon which it was estimated. Despite concerns over the use of OLS to develop mapping algorithms, we find this method to be suitable in this case due to the normality of the SF-6D data

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Capitalist Surrealism of Chinese Burning Man

Burning Man, the prototypical transformational event culture, has been described as “a guerrilla war against alienated spectacle and the commodification of the collective imagination.” At the same time, it has spawned spectacular efforts at the commodification of experience that span the United States, China, and Taiwan. This article follows these transnational flows and considers the circulation and contradictions of capital through a globalizing economy of event cultures. Based on the author’s long-term role as a Burning Man artist and regional event representative, the article provides a comprehensive history of Burning Man’s varied manifestations, transformations, and hybridizations in China and Taiwan. These include authorized events and art installations produced by participants who aim to adhere to the principle of Decommodification espoused by the San Francisco-based nonprofit Burning Man Project, as well as unauthorized commercial copycats, some of which have been financially backed by the Chinese Communist Party, that have sent major art pieces to the main event in the US and attempted to launch ambitious projects in the Gobi Desert. Tracing these connections offers a weirdly scenic vantage point for examining the global collision and recreation of cultural, financial, and political desire. Reflecting on the productive tension between creativity and commodification, the article concludes that Burning Man’s consolidation as a transnational symbol of cultural capital points to an ideological and social convergence between the United States and China, offering a counterpoint to the resumption of Cold War rhetoric that has highlighted a hostile turn in their geopolitical relationship. In so doing, it proffers a surreal, if not utopic alternative to the aesthetic of “capitalist realism” oft said to characterize the contemporary era

Tourism as a territorial strategy in the South China Sea

The chapter first situates and provides a brief political history of China’s general outbound tourism policies and practices before turning to the South China Sea. It pays particular attention to the territorial claims implicit in new Chinese passport designs and the establishment of the Sansha City administrative region, which covers much of the South China Sea. This is followed with a qualitative analysis of state official announcements and destination marketing materials from both private and state-owned Chinese travel agencies, as well as online how-to guides and blogs. The analysis explores the territorial implications of representations of South China Sea destinations as not only new sites for leisure, but for the performance and training of a patriotic Chinese citizenry.Accepted versio

Crafting the Taiwan model for COVID-19 : an exceptional state in pandemic territory

Taiwan was the first country to anticipate the threat of COVID-19, to send a medical team to investigate the initial outbreak in China, and to implement a comprehensive and successful public health response that avoided repeated infections or catastrophic lockdowns. Counter-intuitively, Taiwan’s success was achieved in part due to its exclusion from international bodies such as the World Health Organization, which led it to adopt a highly vigilant approach to health threats, especially those that emerge in China, whose irredentist claims impinge on Taiwan’s participation in the international community and constitute an existential military threat. Taiwan’s response to COVID-19 was recast by its diplomatic representatives into “The Taiwan Model”, a formulation used to pursue increased international recognition and participation.Published versio