Simulating territory: Booking engines as battlefields, and the rise and demise of 'Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan' as an imaginary regional formation
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
11:00 am to 12:30 pm
- Venue
- Main Building, SOAS University of London, 10 Thornhaugh St, London WC1H 0XG
- Room
- R301
About this event
This talk is about how PRC employs digital platforms and imaginary regional formations to assert territorial claims over Taiwan, while paradoxically intensifying support for self-determination in both Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The leadership of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has crafted several creative territorialisation strategies designed to consolidate the administrative control and extend the geopolitical influence of its ruling Chinese Communist Party.
This talk focuses on two such strategies: 1) The use of digital platforms and booking engines to claim Taiwan as a part of China, and 2) The establishment of an imaginary regional formation that spans Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan via a supposed suture to the “One Country, Two Systems” formulation of variegated sovereignty.
I propose that these strategies constitute novel geopolitical strategies of simulation in the service of territorial expansion. However, rather than accelerating the annexation of Taiwan, the intensification of the PRC's simulation corresponded with a spike in support for self-determination in both Taiwan and Hong Kong.
This case shows that by fabricating an imaginary regional formation, a state can facilitate the multiplication of different bordering schemes between and within territories it effectively administers, while at the same time press irredentist claims against a different and de facto independent state, with explosive outcomes. Peering through these formations and charting the ruptures between online and offline spaces reveals the instability and contingency of territory and mobility.
Registration
This event is open to public with no need for registration.
(Image via Luo Jin Hong on Unplash)
Meet the speaker
Dr Ian Rowen
Ian 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 earned his PhD in Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2016.
His work on culture, politics, and place-making has appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Annals of Tourism Research, Asian Anthropology, International Journal of Transitional Justice, The New York Times, the BBC Chinese, The Guardian and elsewhere. His book, One China, Many Taiwans: The Geopolitics of Cross-Strait Tourism was published by Cornell University Press in January 2023.
Fluent in Mandarin Chinese and proficient in Bahasa Indonesia, he is editor of Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror (Cambria Press, 2021) and lead translator of Tibetan Environmentalists in China: The King of Dzi (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
