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Allen Chun is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan. He is the author of Unstructuring Chinese Society: The Fictions of Colonial Practice and the Changing Realities of 'Land' in the New Territories of Hong Kong (Harwood Academic Press, 2000) and articles in numerous journals. He has most recently edited a special issue in Cultural Studies 14(3-4) entitled (Post)Colonialism and Its Discontents as well as a special issue in Communal/Plural: Journal of Transnational & Crosscultural Studies 9(1) on The Postnation, or Violence and the Norm His thematic interests cover the fields of socio-cultural theory, historical anthropology, cultural sociology of the state as well as colonial and post-colonial societies. He has done research in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.

The difference between ˇ§nativisticˇ¨ scholars engaged in Chinese studies in Taiwan and their diasporic counterparts in Western academia, who are viewed as postcolonial intellectuals, is as much a function of incompatible mindsets as one of different institutional imperatives that drives research and teaching. Scholars working in a native intellectual setting cannot claim to be driven by the same value-free goals characteristic of ˇ§the ivory towerˇ¨ precisely because of the moral pressure to respond to social relevance in much the same way that Western scholars are also prone to pressures to conform to ˇ§political correctnessˇ¨. In many instances, the social standards that uphold values such as racial and gender equality override objective scholarly ones. The provincial coziness of Chinese studies scholars in native academia vis-à-vis their sinological colleagues throughout the world is on the other hand a function of the fact that it is their world. For the same reason, there would be little or no inclination for American Studies specialists in the U.S. to study the discipline in Europe or the Third World, much less identify globally with all Americanists. While this does not directly imply that native scholars in East Asian studies in the West are ipso facto Westernized vis-à-vis their homeland counterparts, it nonetheless raises a more salient issue regarding the ramifications of knowledge production and consumption. Subaltern studies, for example, may have meanings and ramifications in an Indian context that are different and incompatible from the way it is appropriated in the West.

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