Book launch: 'Green Party Taiwan: The First Thirty Years'
Key information
- Date
- Time
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5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- TBC
- Event type
- Launch
About this event
The Centre of Taiwan Studies is delighted to welcome Professor Dafydd Fell and Yan-han Wang for a book talk marking thirty years of Green Party politics and alternative politics in Taiwan, moderated by Professor Cheng Ling-Fang.
Founded on 25 January 1996, the Green Party Taiwan shares six core values with Green parties around the world: ecological wisdom, social justice, participatory democracy, non-violence, sustainability and respect for diversity. Over the last three decades, the party has focused on environmental, gender, labour and disadvantaged-group issues, while also actively building alliances with environmental and other social movements.
Marking the Green Party Taiwan’s thirtieth anniversary in 2026, this new book traces the party’s first three decades and the many periods of reorganisation, challenge and renewal it has experienced. It follows successive generations of social movement activists, young people and citizen campaigners who have worked through the Green Party to challenge Taiwan’s established political system and pursue their political ideals, often with very limited resources.
This book talk will consider what the Green Party’s thirty-year history reveals about the possibilities and challenges of alternative politics in Taiwan. Looking beyond the familiar Blue, Green and White political camps, it will explore how a form of values-based politics closely connected to grassroots social movements has attempted to take root in Taiwan while remaining part of a wider global Green movement.
Image credit: Tintinburgh via Unsplash.
About the speakers
Dafydd Fell is Professor in Comparative Politics with special reference to Taiwan at SOAS, University of London, where he also serves as Director of the Centre of Taiwan Studies and Director of the NSTC Taiwan Studies Project at SOAS. His research focuses on Taiwanese politics, political parties, elections, social movements, and democratisation. Alongside his academic publications, including Party Politics in Taiwan, Government and Politics in Taiwan, Taiwan’s Green Parties, and The Twilight Years of Taiwan’s Sugar Railways, he has played a leading role in building Taiwan Studies as a field in the UK and Europe through teaching, public events, book series editing, and institutional development.
Yan-Han Wang is a PhD candidate in Politics and International Studies at SOAS University of London and holds a Taiwanese government scholarship for overseas study. She worked for a healthcare reform NGO and serves on the executive board of the Taiwan Sex Industry and Workers’ Rights Association. A contributing author to this book, she has held roles with Green Party Taiwan, including co-convenor, secretary-general, spokesperson and city council candidate, most of them voluntary. Her publications examine movement-party strategies, gender equality and #MeToo politics in Taiwan. Her recent research explores power relations between the state and sex workers’ rights advocates, centring marginalised people’s autonomy.
Cheng Ling-Fang is Research Associate at the SOAS Centre of Taiwan Studies and former Director of the Institute of Gender Studies at Kaohsiung Medical University. Her research specialises in gender and sociology, gender and science and technology studies, and gender and work. She holds a PhD from the University of Essex and an MPhil from the University of Leeds.
