From "Asia's East" to "East Asia": Aborted Decolonization of Taiwan in the Cold-War Discourse

The disappearance of references to "Yadong," Asia's East or Asiatic East, as opposed to East Asia, in Taiwan's post-World War II (WWII) political history presaged the impracticality of decolonization in Taiwan. The Cold War, pertaining especially to the American intellectual intervention in the conceptualization of the world through the fault line of its containment policy, contributed greatly to the substitution of East Asia for Yadong. I argue that Yadong is a geocultural lens, while East Asia connotes strategic purposes of various kinds. The latter concept echoed the discourse of the "Great East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere," which colonial Japan relied on before and during WWII to justify colonialism as well as expansion. The familiar discourse of decolonization embedded in "strategic essentialism," i.e. deliberate use of some fundamentalism for the occasion of resistance, reproduces the colonizing/colonized binary. I re-theorize decolonization as a relational project. Empirically the intellectual demise of Yadong as a relational discourse accompanied the evolution of the Cold War. Yadong's disappearance indirectly testifies to the fate of decolonization in Taiwan.