Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) by Unknown Page B

modernization but also on the political tension between the two. The Beijing government sees Taiwan as a renegade province of China and never ceases to block Taiwan from participating in international organizations. As the two sides become more and more closely linked economically, the desire to claim a non-Chinese Taiwan becomes intensified. In postindustrial Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s integration into the global market and its growing economic connection to China are experienced through a rising unemployment rate. Even though vending is still active on the streets in New Kujiang and transnational labels are opening shops in the area, small businesses are feeling the pressure from the real and imagined economic plight of Taiwan as its industries move offshore. China remains both a threat and an opportunity. Some in New Kujiang pin their hopes on the Chinese tourists who might or might not buy from them. Some, like Eddie, see China as a potential market and look for chances to explore it. Some, like Sam, prefer to align Taiwan with Japan and other advanced countries and purposefully refuse to acknowledge any possible connection with China. And some, like Ming, turn inward to look for a cosmopolitan Taiwanese identity through which to reach outward to the world. Routed through their different experiences with the transnational flows of commodities, images, and ideas in New Kujiang, the international future in Taiwan’s national project becomes refracted and reworked to envision different futures that somehow remain enmeshed in the key words of global connectivity and market success.
    Conclusion
    A decade after the Datong Department Store fire, the surrounding commercial area has reinvented itself as a stage for youthful fashion display. Here, former residential streets have been transformed into showcases of goods and images. Across the road from the recently reopened Datong, a park long associated with the Formosa Incident has been renamed Central Park and renovated with wide walkways and outdoor cafes. 21 A subway system began operating in 2009, and the grand subway station in Central Park has become a new tourist attraction. With its sunny weather, glittering lights, wide roads, geometric street patterns, and revitalized shopping streets, Kaohsiung now attracts Taiwanese filmmakers as a generic modern city where urban characters play out their stories. New Kujiang’s eclectic hybrid of a night market and a pedestrian mall allows it to double both as a traditional site and a cosmopolitan backdrop under the camera.
    In this international place engineered for consumption, it is possible to dream of being a part of a world beyond Taiwan—the quality shopping districts of advanced countries; the fashion centers of Japan, America, and Europe; and the transnational hip-hop community. Moreover, the constant search to connect with the world stems from the endeavor to refashion Taiwan into a desired site for consumption and investment in the global network of capitalism. The obsession with everything international in Taiwan underscores the difficulty of a nonnation that seeks its place in the global community of nation-states. Economic participation becomes the strategy to pursue international legitimacy and way of bypassing the impossible bind between China and Taiwan. As Taiwan remains floating in political uncertainty and as neoliberalism induces nations, places, and local actors to become entrepreneurs of themselves in search of marketable values, New Kujiang and the island’s past, present, and future are constantly remade and renegotiated in the hope of finding a place in the world.
    Notes
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    Parts of this chapter appeared in
City and Society
22(2): 286–308, under the title “‘Making Streets’: Planned Space and Unplanned Business in New Kujiang, Taiwan.” They are reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological Association from
City & Society
, Volume 22, Issue 2, excerpts from pp. 286–308,