Dr. Joyce C.H. Liu 劉紀蕙

Joyce C.H. Liu, Professor Emerita, currently serves as the Director of the International Center for Cultural Studies at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. Her research focuses on geopolitics, biopolitics, border politics, internal coloniality, unequal citizens, and epistemic/artistic decolonization. She coordinates interdisciplinary and trans-national joint research projects: Conflict, Justice, and Decolonization: Critical Studies of Inter-Asian Societies (MOE SPROUT 1.0, 2018-2022), Conflict, Justice, and Decolonization: Asia in Transition in the 21st Century (MOE SPROUT 2.0, 2023-2027), “Migration, Logistics, and Unequal Citizens in the Global Context” (2019-2022), CHCI-Mellon Foundation, and “Transit Asia Research Network” (TARN) (2023-2027). Dr. Liu received the 2020 MOST Outstanding Research Award, reflecting her lifetime achievements.

Dr. Liu is the author of seven books: 心態史拓撲學：如何面對當代？如何理解歷史？(The Topology of the History of Mentalities: How to Face the Contemporary? How to Comprehend the History?, 2023), 一分為二：現代中國政治思想的哲學考掘學 (One Divides into Two: Philosophical Archaeology of Modern Chinese Political Thought, 2020), 心之拓樸：1895事件後的倫理重構 (The Topology of Psyche: The Post-1895 Reconfiguration of Ethics (2011), 心的變異：現代性的精神形式 (The Perverted Heart: The Psychic Forms of Modernity, 2004), 孤兒女神負面書寫－文化符號的徵狀式閱讀 (Orphan, Goddess, and the Writing of the Negative: The Performance of Our Symptoms, 2000), and more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, in Chinese and English. She has also edited 19 volumes of academic books, including East-Asian Marxisms and their Trajectories (Routledge 2017), European- East Asian Borders in Translation (Routledge 2014), Biopolitics, Ethics and Subjectivation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011).

Over the years, Dr. Liu has conducted 34 research projects, organized 28 domestic and international conferences, and supervised 28 Ph.D. Dissertations, 58 MA theses. Her students are from Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Palestine, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and others.

Research Project

A Critical Genealogy of the Logistics of the Forced Migratory Labor in the Asian Mediterranean Sea

“Taiwanese Sold by Taiwanese—Escape from the Scam Industrial Park. A confession of a Human Trafficking Victim” (August 10, 2022), a recent report by the independent Taiwanese media, The Reporter, exposed the stories of Taiwanese people trapped by human- smuggling groups in Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone, Cambodia.  Sihanoukville is a port city famous for its role as a gateway to international sea trade, casinos, and organized crimes. Today it is one of the major cities in China’s One Belt One Road Initiative, and more than 80,000 Chinese live in this city. Chinese entrepreneurs run the organized scam industries with Cambodian elites, assisted by Taiwanese gangs to recruit people.  According to Al Jazeera’s documentary on July 15, 2022, “Forced to Scam: Cambodia’s Cyber Slaves,” the smuggled victims have to work 15 hours a day on a cryptocurrency romance scam or a cryptocurrency investment scam. The victims are from China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thai, Vietnam, and Burma. The criminal enterprises of the Global Scam operations involve massive corruption of high-level officials, both the Cambodian elites and the Chinese entrepreneurs. The sites of the cyber scam enterprises scatter around various places, from the port cities to Phnom Penh and the northern borders of Myanmar, Vietnam, and China.

This project intends to trace the genealogy of the sea route of forced migration that links Northeast and Southeast Asia through the Asian Mediterranean Sea. The core research question is about the nature of forced labor’s institutionalized logistics that persist throughout histories. My argument is that the logistics that facilitate the flow of forced migrant labor date back to the feudal tribute system over thousands of years, from the pre-modern era to the 21st century. The institution and technology of the logistics went through a long history of metamorphosis, but the nature of the mediating institution remains unchanged. Pig is the term used for the coolies in the 19th and 20th centuries, through cheating or kidnapping poor people in the rural villages, the labor force that cost nothing, operated by the broker system to ship the indentured laborers to Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. The pig of the 21st century serves different kinds of labor but is still in the same mode of slavery, with torture and unaccounted death. Port cities turn out to be the chokepoints for the supply chain for the commodities, including crude labor force, through the water route.  The objective of this study is to propose a perspective of critical legal study that challenges the persistence of the legalized institutions that legitimate and rationalize the extraction of labor and ignore the fundamental equality of all human lives.

Recent Publication