Exiled in the City:

Belonging, Loss, and the Politics of Urban Relocation in a Taipei Military Village

My doctoral dissertation at SOAS, University of London (2019), which since then I have turned into a book manuscript titled Exiled in the City: Belonging, loss, and the politics of urban relocation in a Taipei military village, investigated what happens to an exiled population when a political project fails.

I examine this question in the context of the failed patronage between the Nationalist government of China led by the Kuomintang (KMT) and its’ army veterans in Taiwan by focusing on their relocation out of a so called ‘military dependents’ village’. These were settlements built by the KMT in 1949 to house its military and their family.

In the book, I take the parallel of two displacements, political exile first and urban relocation after, to examine first the impact of the failed Kuomintang national project of retaking mainland China, and the later social project of rehousing its veterans. Taking these villages and their relocation as the material symbol of a failed state project, in the book I argue that it takes a whole lifespan for the veterans to remake a life after the national project fails and integration happen only gradually with the next generations. The book is based on 18 months of intensive ethnographic fieldwork and residence in one of these last living villages, Zhongxin Village in Taipei.

This project was supported with funding from SOAS with a Doctoral Scholarship, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation with a Dissertation Fellowship, the European Center for Contemporary Studies of Taiwan at the University of Tübingen with a Resident Fellowship, and the European Association of Taiwan Studies with a library grant.