Topic：Taiwan’s Military Dependent Villages: The Rise, Spread, and Demise of Cold War Geopolitical Enclaves
This essay explores the development of so-called Military Dependent Villages (MDVs) in Taiwan from 1949 to the present. MDVs were built for married military personnel and their families following the Kuomintang’s retreat to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War. As walled spaces dotted throughout Taiwan, MDVs were residential spaces for exiled military members steeped in the Kuomintang’s anti-Communist mission but who were never able to reclaim the Republic of China’s original territory. The temporary-turned-permanent presence of MDVs in Taiwan reflects accommodation with new sovereign territory and attendant postwar social transformations. By evaluating the sites through the lens of their spatiality – their morphological variety, their geographical distribution, their aesthetic elements, and waves of upgrades and reforms – this paper sheds light on the household-level experiences of great-power politics in East Asia during the Cold War and beyond.
Lecturer：Max D. Woodworth (Associate Professor of Geography at The Ohio State University)
Max D. Woodworth is Associate Professor of Geography at The Ohio State University. His work is at the intersections of cultural, urban, and energy geographies. He is currently the Director of the Institute for Chinese Studies at Ohio State.
