Lin Hsien-tang and resistance and adaptation in 20th century Taiwan

This thesis examines Lin Hsien-tang's life story that interprets one part of Taiwan's past and its history. Like a characteristic of area studies where the object‚ÄövÑvp of analysis was unstable as Taiwan,‚ÄövÑvp the thesis intersects with a range of scholarly fields: Taiwan Studies, Chinese Studies, history, life-writing, political sociology, sociology of education. The thesis uses Lin's story as a touchstone to tell the complexity of Taiwan's story. Lin Hsien-tang (1881-1956) was a socially responsible Taiwanese elite whose life traversed the Qing, Japanese and then Nationalist rule. The thesis highlights Lin's story through specific events in his life to illuminate Taiwan's changing circumstances across different periods. The thesis offered a detailed examination of Lin's politico-social and cultural life in a chronological order. Each chapter was fundamentally important in representing Lin's personal development across different periods of his life as well as Taiwan's story during these different authorities. Grounding on Lin Hsien-tang and Taiwan's stories, Michel De Certeau's notions of strategy of domination‚ÄövÑvp and tactics of resistance‚ÄövÑvp are introduced to offer an analytical mechanism to map out the conflicts, tension and cooperation between ethnicities, governments, countries, ideologies, and generations. It attempts to be attentive to Lin's political, social and cultural experience, and then to explore the evolving issues from which knowledge about Lin Hsien-tang and the broader of Taiwan has been produced.