| dc.description.abstract | Poverty is one of the oldest stories in human history of inequality, and the contrast between the rich and the poor has never disappeared in any country. However, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Taiwanese media began to treat poverty as stunning news, as if a new discovery has been made. From the ominous interpellation “You are the new working poor” to the imminent arrival of “M-shape Society”, the poor and poverty in recent media representations are markedly different from the notion of poverty as we had known it.
In the present thesis, I will examine the social meaning and class implication in these representations through analyzing selected media texts. I would like to discuss the way in which they contribute to the manufacture of poverty in Taiwan during the 2000s, including the manner in which pauperization of the middle class, the myth of consumerism, and the moral construction of the poor work together to create a reality that seemingly smoothes over the growing distance and contradiction between classes while keeping the poverty problem in the private realm instead of the public sphere.
Chapter 2, “The Changing approach to poverty: a historical review”, will show how poverty has been constructed as a social problem in political and academic domains since the KMT regime took over Taiwan in 1949, and moreover, why the poor gradually became invisible under the prevailing discourse of Taiwan’s “economic miracle”. This chapter will help explain why poverty has never been merely an economic problem nor an objective fact. In chapter 3, “The media construction of the poor in Taiwan”, I will analyze three significant new faces of the contemporary poor through selected media texts, including newspaper reports, features in popular magazines, and television commercials which mainly appeared after 2001, the watershed of “discovering” poverty in Taiwan society. In chapter 4, “Theoretical reflections on poverty”, I will take examples of “rediscovery of poverty” in the United States and Britain in the 1960s to review some underlying poverty theories which could shed some light on readings of the Taiwanese poverty phenomenon. And in the final chapter, I will attempt to present my own perspective on the construction of poverty in contemporary Taiwan.
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