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

Maintenance Cognitive Stimulation Therapy: An Economic Evaluation Within a Randomized Controlled Trial

Background Cognitive Stimulation Therapy (CST) is effective and cost-effective for people with mild-to-moderate dementia when delivered biweekly over 7 weeks. Aims To examine whether longer-term (maintenance) CST is cost-effective when added to usual care. Methods Cost-effectiveness analysis within multicenter, single-blind, pragmatic randomized controlled trial; subgroup analysis for people taking acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (ACHEIs). A total of 236 participants with mild-to-moderate dementia received CST for 7 weeks. They were randomized to either weekly maintenance CST added to usual care or usual care alone for 24 weeks. Results Although outcome gains were modest over 6 months, maintenance CST appeared cost-effective when looking at self-rated quality of life as primary outcome, and cognition (MMSE) and proxy-rated quality-adjusted life years as secondary outcomes. CST in combination with ACHEIs offered cost-effectiveness gains when outcome was measured as cognition. Conclusions Continuation of CST is likely to be cost-effective for people with mild-to-moderate dementia

Proceedings of Patient Reported Outcome Measure’s (PROMs) Conference Oxford 2017: Advances in Patient Reported Outcomes Research

A33-Effects of Out-of-Pocket (OOP) Payments and Financial Distress on Quality of Life (QoL) of People with Parkinson’s (PwP) and their Carer

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

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

The Geopolitics of Tourism: Mobility, Territory, and Protest in Taiwan and China

This dissertation analyzes outbound tourism from the People’s Republic of China to Taiwan to unpack the geopolitics of the state and the everyday, to theorize the mutual constitution of the tourist and the nation-state, and to explore the role of tourism in new forms of protest and resistance, including the 2014 Taiwan Sunflower and Hong Kong Umbrella Movements. It presents a theoretical argument that tourism should be viewed as a technology of state territorialization; that is, as a mode of social and spatial ordering that produces tourists and state territory as effects of power. Based on ethnographies of tourism practices and spaces of resistance conducted between 2012 and 2015 and supported by ethnographic content analysis, this dissertation explores the engagement of PRC tourists with Taiwanese hosts, political representations of Taiwan and China, the territorializing effects of tourism, the production of multiple sensations of stateness, and the ways that tourism is aggravating contradictions between the different territorialization programs of China and Taiwan. It demonstrates that tourism mobilities are entangled with shifting forms of sovereignty, territoriality, and bordering. This dissertation argues that embodied, everyday practices such as tourism cannot be divorced from state-scale geopolitics and that future research should pay closer attention to its unpredictable political instrumentalities and chaotic effects. In dialogue with both mobilities research and borders studies, it sheds light not only on the vivid particularities of the region but on the cultural politics and geopolitics of tourism in general

Booking engines as battlefields: contesting technology, travel, and territory in Taiwan and China

Travel booking engines can produce, resist, and destabilise popular and state-directed geopolitical representations of a world neatly divided into national and international space. Although they present as strictly functional technical platforms, booking engines obscure and omit what is contingent and contested in the production of a destination as a bordered national territory. Due to their embedding in the webs of political representation, these systems and their backers can become targets for economic boycotts, political threats, hacks, or other interventions when territorial designations are contested. Such interventions manifest as political performances aimed at multiple audiences, including tourists and travellers, as well as the businesses and political entities that facilitate or inhibit their circulation, with spillover effects into other domains of geopolitical representation. To empirically illustrate this argument, the paper analyzes the People’s Republic of China’s mostly successful efforts to coerce the international travel industry to relist destinations within Taiwan as belonging to China. By extending the notion of border performativity into the ‘code/spaces’ that span the online and offline worlds, it concludes that booking engines, like other forms of infrastructure that serve travellers and tourists, can produce popular geopolitical effects that exceed their own technical systems. Peering through these ruptures reveals the uneasy and unstable assemblages of travel infrastructure and territorial representation that regulate global mobility

Chinese Tourists in Taiwan: Tourism and State Territoriality

After years of travel bans and despite an ongoing dispute over sovereignty and territory, Chinese tourists have poured into Taiwan since 2008. In this thesis, I develop an argument, based on theories of governmentality and performativity, that treats borders and territories as dynamic processes rather than places. I use this theory first to argue that tourism should be treated as a technology of state territorialization in general, and then to analyze the spatial politics of tourism between China and Taiwan in particular. I apply this analytical framework to ethnographic data collected during fieldwork in tourist sites in Taiwan in summer 2012. I conclude that tourism is producing multiple sensations of stateness in Taiwan, and exacerbating contradictions between China and Taiwan\u27s programs of state territorialization