Taiwan's COVID-19 Experience

This book explores and develops the ongoing conversation about how Taiwan navigated through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Emphasizing the themes of governance and governmentality, it moves the foci of the discussion from COVID policies to the social and political orders undergirding the statecraft of pandemic management. Furthermore, it analyzes how the pandemic fostered a historical moment at which new forms of governance and governmentality were beginning to take root. It also situates Taiwan’s precarious nationhood in its global context, thereby challenging a prevalent methodological nationalism – the assumption that the nation is a natural unit of analysis whose borders are more or less unquestioned – and contributing to decolonizing Western theories with perspectives from the Global South.

Presenting rich original materials on the legal and public debates, individual reflections, and grassroots campaigns during COVID, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of Taiwan’s governance and social health policy, as well as medical anthropology and sociology.

Author Biography

Ming-Cheng M. Lo is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis, USA. Lo’s research addresses the cultures of democracy in East Asia, as well as the sense-making processes regarding illnesses, disasters, and cultural traumas.

Yu-Yueh Tsai is Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, working in the fields of medical sociology, science, technology, and society (STS), and race and ethnicity studies.

Michael Shiyung Liu is Distinguish Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Professor of History affiliated to the Asian Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh, USA. His research interests include Japanese colonial medicine, East Asian environmental history, and modern history of public health in East Asia.