Eric D. de Roulet
Eric D. de Roulet is an interdisciplinary Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia and was an English lecturer at Dongbei University of Finance and Economics (DUFE) in northeastern China. Eric primarily researches 20th and 21st century trans-pacific migration, especially in the contexts of China and Taiwan. He has been a fellow with the National Bureau for Asian Research (2021-22) and a Liu Scholar with UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (2023).
University of British Columbia
Session
Amid persecution of dissidents and stagnant political reforms in early Republican China, Lin Yutang lamented at how “the good men, in all countries, have abstained from politics,” recounting the isolation and defeatism of reformist intellectuals from K’ang Yuwei to Lu Hsun and Hu Shih (Lin 1935). Yet it is worth reconsidering to what extent these intellectuals viewed (or reframed) their political exiles, self-imposed or otherwise, as (dis)empowering them in their political advocacy and related intellectual pursuits.
Applying concepts of subjectivity (Rodriguez & Schwenken 2013; Kara 2016) and “agency in mobility” (Tran & Vu 2018; Xu 2021) from the migration studies literature, this study undertakes a critical review of literature and a thematic analysis of primary texts (scholars’ personal correspondence, essays, and fiction) to investigate the experiences of Chinese scholars-in-exile in Japan and Taiwan in the early Republican context. This study aims to broaden the range of scholars’ experiences represented in the mainstream literature and yield a nuanced image of how prominent scholars’ writings influenced their contemporaries’ understanding of their own experiences of exile and agency. This study also develops and complicates extant definitions of forced versus voluntary migration in migration theory (see Erdal & Oeppen 2018; Hunkler et al. 2022).