“Three Kingdoms, One Answering Machine”: Taiwanese Christian Women’s Transpacific Political Activism and the Imagination of Democratic Futures during the 1970s and 1980s

This paper examines Taiwanese Christian women’s transpacific political activism through the case of Elieen Yiyi Chang, who founded the Voice of Taiwan, a New York-based broadcast network, in 1977. Analyzing recordings of three broadcasts and the three kingdoms ideology of Chang, I argue that Chang fused political reporting with Christian moral conviction and that, although she was not in Taiwan during the democratic movement, her influence on democratization was not constrained by her physical location. Instead, the fact that she was in the United States empowered her to conduct transpacific Christian activism without the Kuomintang government’s direct interference and to freely reflect her Christian faith alongside her Taiwanese identity. Centering a Taiwanese Christian woman’s leadership within Cold War transpacific activism, this paper challenges the predominant assumption of Christian women being passive in political activism and demonstrates how Taiwanese Christian women contribute to imagining alternative political futures beyond East Asian settings.