The Chinese University Press · identity”—a crisis indicating the DPP’s gradual slide ......

introduCtion

Taiwanese democracy hit a wall in 2006, as a perfect storm of a presiden-tial scandal was looming ahead in the seas of public opinions . A chain of exposés from the media implicated President Chen Shui-bian’s 陳水扁 aide and family in allegedly unlawful activities such as bribery and insider’s trading . Conspiracy stories, investigative reports, and tabloids were on the headlines for months, triggering a huge political typhoon never seen before . A presidential recall motion was proposed in the parliament for the first time in this young democracy . The vote did not pass, but, for the rest of his term, the besieged president struggled for his survival with a wrecked presidency amid an infuriated public .

What might have simply shown a personal moral collapse, howev-er, came to force a national soul search . In July 2006, scholars who had been close allies to the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party 民進黨), the president’s party, convened after months of political turmoil and public-ly demanded Chen to step down for a “moral crisis” his administration had inflicted on the national belief in a “democratic politics and Taiwan identity”—a crisis indicating the DPP’s gradual slide into what the party originally criticized its opponent about .1 Elsewhere, longtime critics of the DPP from the board of the radical academic journal Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan (台灣社會研究季刊) was reassured about their diagnostic warn-ing years ago that the new indigenous political force had already been developing into a group of nonbelieving chauvinists disregarding any principles but that of self-interests, which would make it an even worse creation while in power than the foregoing authoritarian Kuomintang 國

The Chinese University Press

2 | democracy on trial

民黨 .2 These strongly worded yet emotionally appealing statements moved the crisis to terrain where the entire purpose of decades of the democracy movement was at stake .

These melancholic and sarcastic critical feelings have to both be understood within as well as raise questions about a history of national search for democracy . From 2000, Chen Shui-bian’s presidential tenure had been widely believed to be a test case for this newborn democracy, and its alleged failure, therefore, put it on trial . For better or for worse, de-mocracy in Taiwan is never a direct application of any abstract theory, but rather a long process of (mis)representation and (mis)recognition, which consequently complicates the investigation of this book .

Democracy as a name was not totally a stranger even long before mar-tial law 戒嚴令 was lifted in 1987, the year literally seen as the beginning of the “democracy” era . In their long rule, Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 and his son Chiang Ching-kuo 蔣經國 saw democracy as a distinctive feature that would distinguish their government in Taiwan from that in red, and thus dictatorial, China .3 In almost every annual national day address in Taipei, the exiled generalissimo vowed to pursue democracy (zhuiqiu minzhu 追求民主), and his son, in the process of consolidating the party’s power base after the generalissimo’s demise, promised to jianshou minzhu zhenrong 堅守民主陣容 (hold on to the democratic outlook) . Despite their uses of democracy largely for show, the Chiangs’ senses of democracy indeed em-bodied a limited electoral political system mixed with a market-oriented planned economy, albeit under a mainlander-monopolized and corporat-ist central power tightly controlling the scope and scale of civil liberty .4

The transition from the Chiangs’ democratic outlook to the post–martial law democratization invoked a pervasive sense of urgency trying to come to terms with what had actually happened and would happen . This constant tension, often sparking contradictory ideas and emotions in the local politics, however, is largely overlooked among the studies of Tai-wan’s post–martial law development, in which democracy is simply seen as either a progress to a promised future worth defending yet easily break-ing or, by contrast, a betrayal to an unfinished radical plan, be it nationalist or postnationalist . Despite the difference, all these often contested grand narratives fail (or dare not) to notice a zigzagging and creeping analytical and emotional buildup, that is, changing worldviews and sentiments that


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at the same time have been constantly shaped by and penetrated into the immediacy of everyday practices .

This book is about testimonies mostly voiced from the world made up of social movement groups, local and ethnic collectives and given by their participants to respond to, reevaluate, and resolve around the “democ-racy” era . Democracy in these everyday practices on the ground is analyti-cally thought over as well as expressively struggled with among the gen-eral public now eager to stand out, to speak up, and to act, in other words, to participate . Characterized by this emerging culture of participation, a democratic life is seen in this book as a process in which the questions of self-exploration, self-evaluation, and self-realization on the part of its individual citizens are constantly posed in reference to ever-shifting axes of values and meanings; the post–martial law subjectivity has been in flux .

Therefore, what Samuel Huntington calls the third wave of democ-racy is perhaps never at the crossroads of its consolidation or collapse, tested for its will to defend the democratic core values and their carrier—an open society .5 Rather, democracy through the new millenium is better seen as something happening in the wrong place at the wrong time, when many of the essential values from the Western ideals and practices have been resisted, challenged, or simply deemed out of date globally, such as old-fashioned socialist and fancier post-Marxist critiques of liberalism and neoliberalism, postmodern abandoning of welfare states, more recent globalist attacks on the nation-state, and so on . In other words, rather than simply an imposition and abstraction, democratization toward the new millennium is an arena of border crossing and time-space-compressed idea flows and their crisscrossed effects, which are maybe best theorized by Arjun Appadurai as disjunctured transnational ideo-scapes .6

Before this book’s agenda of an ethnography of Taiwan democracy is set and the research begins, I first present what I call a prelife democracy—reminiscences of the evasive authoritarian past—to shed light on how an infant nation with imminent possibilities was delivered .

Prelife Democracy

If authoritarianism is about forgetting and make-believe, democracy as its out-of-wedlock son is not only about remembering but also about re-



sisting,7 with one’s whole physical and mental strength, to remember in a simple-minded and single-voiced way . This section traces a short history of what I call prelife democracy—a past of political dissent that has been eradicated, forgotten, but now is striving to resurface . Taiwanese democra-cy, during its unfolding, evokes a hazy image of the past of political struggle under extreme situations . Only this past had been suppressed and hence almost disregarded, until political and social uprisings in the 1970s began to demand the right to remember and tell . However, things have been more complex than simply the truth revealed . Democracy after authoritarianism has been about both remembering and resisting remembering in a certain way . The telling of this past of prelife democracy is a battlefield .

The landing of the Kuomintang on Taiwan in 1945 immediately after World War II initiated the most recent phase of democracy’s prelife . But even now, the interpretations of this landing remain problematic and con-flicting . Some regard the landing as a symbol for the recovery of the na-tion’s inseparable territory and for the end of Japanese colonialism, while others see it as the beginning of another foreign occupation . No matter what position is taken, one thing that all agree on is that the takeover was nothing but smooth sailing . An economic, political, and social break-down was in sight only two years after the changing of hands . The new Chinese government led by Chen Yi 陳儀 appointed by Chiang Kai-shek soon turned into a corrupt regime adding insult to people’s injury which rapidly spread in a changing and delicate postwar geopolitics . In China, Mao Zedong’s people’s army was defeating Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces on many fronts, while the United States warily watched from the sidelines, pondering a postwar strategic restructuring .

More troubling than corruption was the fact that local islanders were discriminated against .8 A mechanism excluding locals from government posts and jobs was in the making .9 A violent confrontation occurred on February 28, 1947 . A police brutality case against a woman peddler selling “illegal” cigarettes on the streets led to islandwide upheaval . The February 28 Incident marked one of the darkest moments in Taiwanese history . Lai Tse-han 賴澤涵, who was appointed to lead an official investigative com-mittee in the early 1990s to uncover this long-buried historical case, de-scribes the incident as a “tragic beginning,” in which a large number of locals were massacred .10 A decade of “white terror” political repression


introduction | 5

followed in the incident’s aftermath in which thousands were either jailed or killed by the Kuomintang exile state (Republic of China, or ROC 中華民國) which retreated to Taiwan in 1949 when the Communists finally emerged victorious in the civil war in mainland China and established the People’s Republic of China (PRC 中華人民共和國) . The defeated Kuomin-tang’s ROC managed to hold on to only Taiwan and a couple of offshore islands, thanks to the eruption of the Korean War, after which the U .S . pol-icy of containment against communism’s spread was established . Taiwan became one of the main island bases of an American-led anticommunism front in the western Pacific .

More than six decades have passed since the February 28 Incident . Although many details regarding the occurrence and the aftermath are still hidden, after almost four decades of silence, the past two decades have witnessed a flare-up of interest in this event . Lai Tse-han’s book repre-sented an official acknowledgment under former President Lee Teng-hui 李登輝, a non-mainlander, who succeeded Chiang Ching-kuo in 1988 and, since then, enacted a policy of “nativization” (bentuhua 本土化), which deeply changed the balance of power within the Kuomintang .11 Elsewhere, scholars, freelance writers, and investigative journalists wrote about it in this new atmosphere of historical awareness . Historians such as Chang Yen-hsien 張炎憲, who later became the director of Academia Historica 國史館, the highest national history bureau, under the Chen Shui-bian 陳水扁 administration, led a fieldwork team joined by many graduate stu-dents in the early 1990s to uncover the incident on the local level .12 The historian Li Hsiao-feng 李筱峰 particularly focused on the disappearance of a generation of intellectuals due to the Kuomintang’s qingxiang 清鄉 (local cleansing) tactics in the wake of the incident .13 Lan Bozhou 藍博

洲, a freelance writer and reporter, sought to bring to light the left-wing victims and especially a concealed history of workers’ and farmers’ activ-ism, effectively expanding the public knowledge of the nature and impact of this incident .14

In the past decades of historical consciousness rising, it has become clearer that the incident and its aftermath show not just that there is a his-tory of barbarism, as Walter Benjamin warns in the European context .15

They also indicate that a prolonged human struggle could still pay off un-der an unthinkably difficult situation . In the late 1950s, die-hard political



dissidents regrouped and reenergized themselves and publicly challenged Kuomintang’s political dominance . Lei Chen 雷震 and Yin Hai-kuang 殷

海光 together with other liberal intellectuals, most of whom came from mainland China and had party connections, published articles in Free China 自由中國 magazine, severely and bluntly criticizing Chiang Kai-shek and his administration’s repressive politics and hypocrisy . Even more unpredictable was that these mainlanders-intellectuals somehow managed to make connections with native local politicians such as Guo Yuxin 郭雨新, Li Wanju 李萬居, and Wu Sanlian 吳三連 and planned to form a political party with a serious popular base .16 This union across ethnic boundaries finally put the Kuomintang on alert . Lei Chen was ar-rested and jailed in 1960 .

Delivering Democracy

A political renaissance took place in the early 1970s . There had emerged a new generation of intellectuals/professionals based in major universi-ties and cultural institutions (e .g ., magazines) in Taipei since Chiang Kai-shek’s demise in the early 1970s .17 They were young postwar baby boom-ers, highly politicized, and critical of the status quo . Elsewhere on the literary front in the mid-1970s, a nativist “homeland” movement (xiangtu wenxue yundong 鄉土文學運動) raised issues such as cultural autonomy, class inequality, and neoimperialism . With a strong nostalgia for an unat-tainable “culture,” this literary movement created numerous fictional ac-counts that exposed phases of social sufferings and tensions produced by the new policy of an export-oriented economy .

More compelling again was the fact that some of these new reform-minded intellectuals and writers were further linked with local defiant po-litical leaders who had somehow avoided being entrapped in the Kuomin-tang’s patronage networks .18 Many had since participated in elections and managed to adapt themselves to mass politics . Particularly, the partial opening up of elections for the legislators in the Legislative Yuan (Lifa-yuan 立法院) and assemblymen in the National Assembly (Guomindahui 國民大會) in 1969 provided more space for the consolidation of this link up to the national level wherein unprecedented cross-regional alliances were made possible .19


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It might be an intriguing question as to what roles the elections had played in the formation of this new political alliance . Because the national elections were only partially opened, the competition actually had little to do with the shift of power, and, therefore, their political goals were very limited . However, in 1977, the elections indeed became so heated and threatening that the Kuomintang had to halt them in the name of a state of emergency .20 In 1979, all major political dissidents who had participated in elections were arrested and later prosecuted in the wake of an uprising in Kaohsiung on the Day of Human Rights (the Meilidao Incident 美麗島

事件) . At the time, given the Kuomintang’s tight control against any op-position political activities, the elections were more like a space in which this opposition alliance obtained a chance to talk to the general public through processes of an urban-rural exchange .21 A feminist scholar, Liu Yu-hsiu 劉毓秀, who is active in grassroots neighborhood organizing, told me in an interview that public speeches made by this alliance’s advocates during campaigns had long served as alternative sources for information not offered by the state-controlled news agencies .

The Meilidao Incident marked an intriguing turning point for this political opposition . Despite the repression, popular support continued to grow . The halted elections of 1978 were restarted two years later, and many high-profile members in the regenerated opposition were successfully elected . Amid the tense political atmosphere, this result surprised many observers . A more organized dangwai 黨外 (literally, “outside the party”) coalition started to materialize into a quasi-political party, based on the previous alliance with the involvement of a greater number of urban in-tellectuals/college graduates, defense lawyers in the political prosecution of 1979–1980, and the political prisoners’ family members, particularly wives . In addition, the flourishing of dangwai magazines further helped to create an imagined dissident community via various means of circula-tion, which were often at risk of the government censorship .

Reevaluating the dangwai movement may help shed light on Taiwan-ese democracy . The dangwai in the 1980s was more like a loosely knit and highly fractional amalgamation with agendas that sought to undermine the Kuomintang state domination . Linda Gail Arrigo, who has traced back the creation and development of the opposition DPP, suggests that the dan-gwai coalition was primarily composed of local political leaders in counties



and urban intellectuals/politicians who demanded the indigenization/ra-tionalization/democratization of the polity .22 This rising political force pri-marily addressed both the antagonism to the Kuomintang’s local patron-age/national blockade systems and the recently forged discontent among urban residents suffering from a legacy of skewed development .23

It is, therefore, very difficult to say exactly what particular interest and worldview the dangwai had attempted to represent . Several critics have ar-gued that the establishment of the DPP—a major legacy of the dangwai—in 1986 was a reflection of the interests of urban small business owners, most of whom were native Taiwanese with some sort of antagonistic eth-nic consciousness . Although this viewpoint is partially true, it falls short of noticing the complexity of the dangwai constituency, which, consider-ing dangwai popular mobilization, was indeed very diverse, ranging from urban sympathizers (including both petty business owners and workers) to local supporters within the networks of defiant politicians .24

This multiplicity strengthened the dangwai . However, it brought about internal conflicts and differentiations . In 1982, a women’s magazine called Women Awakening (Funu xinzhi 婦女新知, or Xinzhi)25 was found-ed . In 1984, a labor organization called the Taiwan Workers’ Supporting Group for Legal Aid (Taiwan laogong falu zhiyuanhui 台灣勞工法律支援

會, or Laozhi) was established . While these two organizations might have attracted little attention at the moment when they came into existence, their creation in fact represented the coming of new opposition politics that later made possible the emergence of urban social movement webs .26

In addition, dozens of spontaneous zili jiuji 自力救濟 (“self-help”) episodes that erupted in the mid-1980s across the island further complicated this new political process .

This new politics was about a fight for democracy over differentiated fronts, especially in the urban context . Li Yuan-chen 李元貞, a college pro-fessor and one of the founding leaders of Xinzhi, recalled fourteen years later that Xinzhi was created to voice women’s concerns over a gendered democracy movement .27 She mentioned that many political liberals were then conservative about or ignorant of gender issues . The only effort made by Lu Hsiu-lien 呂秀蓮, a political dissident active in the democracy move-ment in the 1970s and author of the influential book Xinnuxing zhuyi 新女性主義 (New Feminism),28 was unfortunately cut short by the Meilidao


introduction | 9

Incident, after which Lu was prosecuted and imprisoned . Xinzhi managed to accommodate a cluster of urban women professionals and intellectuals working together on keeping the movement alive .

The class issue was another major battlefield . As early as the mid-1970s, a small but intellectually vital group named Xiachao 夏潮 (China Tide) had published a leftist magazine by which many opposition political activists were enlightened on socialist thoughts . According to Arrigo, at that time there was a general alignment of liberal ideology with Taiwanese nationalism, as well as radical ideology with Chinese nationalism .29 The rising of the new-generation proindependence leftist Xinchaoliu 新潮流

(New Tide) group complicated this ideological terrain of division . Work-ing mostly for dangwai electoral politicians as assistants or magazine edi-tors in the first place, Xinchaoliu members gathered into a quasi-Leninist organization in 1983 and began, with considerable discipline, practicing their political theories .

In 1984, two far-reaching debates burst forth within the political oppo-sition . First, some Xinchaoliu members had actively participated in theo-rizing Taiwan independence movement which had long been downplayed by pro-China Xiachao intellectuals as bourgeois nationalism, Xinchaoliu relocated it into a cross-class consciousness-raising struggle against the Kuomintang’s domination as well as the PRC’s desire for annexation .30

Second, this debate about Taiwanese consciousness was accompanied by another related internal conflict between the Xinchaoliu and the main-stream electoral alliance . Nicknamed “the chicken-rabbit question” (jitu wenti 雞兔問題), the conflict was about the limitation of electoral politics that, according to Chiu Yi-jen, a major leader of Xinchaoliu, benefited only individual politicians (rabbits) who had accumulated personal re-sources but done little for an organized sustainable democracy movement . For Xinchaoliu members, real dangwai activists (chickens) were supposed to have explicit political standpoints and be devoted to grouping the mass-es into meaningful and democratic activities and organizations .31

Developing as a party within a party,32 Xinchaoliu had vehemently intervened in search of a new way of reaching and organizing the mass-es . A number of social organizations were accordingly created .33 Among them was the labor organization Laozhi, founded on May 1, 1984, with the involvement of Xinchaoliu activists who somehow believed that class



struggle was the primary social contradiction .34 Chiu Yi-jen 邱義仁, who later became President Chen Shui-bian’s indispensable advisor, was then elected as the first director . Instead of explicitly advocating the labor movement, Laozhi stayed low-key and offered only legal aid to workers in its early years, mostly because martial law was still in effect and workers’ strikes and mass mobilization were strictly banned . However, a relatively progressive labor act was unexpectedly passed in the Legislative Yuan on July 19, 1984, under pressure from the United States . Help-seeking letters about legal matters from workers flooded in .35 Up to 1987, the year when martial law was lifted, Laozhi had had ten working-class members out of sixty-two and had built up its first local branch on the outskirts of Taipei, where many factories and workshops were located, according to its 1987 annual report .

I turn my attention in what follows to some relatively spontaneous social protests occurring in much greater numbers around 1987 (primarily 1985 through 1989) . Usually called zili jiuji, these protests further differ-entiated and pluralized the terrain of social struggle .36 One survey found that there were more than one thousand protest cases throughout the is-land in 1987 alone .37 The zili jiuji, largely involving disputes such as life-threatening pollution crises, the conflicts of interests in workplaces, and marginalized people demanding citizenship, apparently showed things that were more uncertain, contingent, and unpredictable . Despite the fact that most of the cases happened as a result of structural inconsistency and inequality, they usually required very specific processes of collective iden-tity formation and ad hoc solutions .

I personally witnessed one of these protests . In 1987, I was a college senior and worked for a campus newspaper . A zili jiuji event erupted in a neighborhood named Shuiyuanli 水源里 close to campus . Residents en-dangered by an illegal toxic waste dumping blocked the front gate of the involved factory and demanded a solution . I was sent to cover the inci-dent . I recalled that, the first time I was there, I discovered a totally dif-ferent world from the quiet picturesque university campus . It was around midnight with the full moon hanging high in the sky . I took a half-hour walk along a thin curved route with oil tanks sitting on the side . The first sight was shocking . Residents were camped out all around the fac-tory gate . Slogans brushed in black characters on white cloth reflected the


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moonlight and imprinted themselves immediately in my mind . Residents slept . I stood still, wondering where I was . I walked back to the university half an hour later, silently, without any direct contact with strangers .

The coverage was eventually successful; so was that particular zili jiuji mobilization . The next day, I returned to the scene and readily began thorough “investigative journalism .” I talked to those senior participants camping twenty-four hours a day outside the factory . I interviewed the middle-aged leader, Chang Ching-po 張清波, who worked for a computer company as a marketing manager . I followed people to the courtroom and attended, thanks to my college newspaper reporter identity, the negotia-tion meetings joined by resident/factory representatives, chemistry ex-perts from my university, local city councilors, and government officials . I even attempted to become buddy-buddy with a guy who was apparently a special agent from the government’s Bureau of Investigation to monitor the event . My report was published in the newspaper two weeks later and soon stirred up the quiet campus life . Influenced by the coverage, a group of students created a supporting task force in order to mobilize resources for the Shuiyuanli residents . Chang was invited to campus . The factory was finally forced to close two years later after a lengthy battle by the com-munity residents .

Probing the multiplicity of these social protests and their impacts helps to demonstrate the complexity of democratization . Some protests were very politicized, well allied with the political opposition . Others were more limited, stressing, for example, the rights to live and the survival of communities rather than abstract principles, as the leader Chang in Shui-yuanli had told me with a tone of determination . During those years before the abolition of martial law, these zili jiuji cases were likely the most unex-pected matters that had caught the Kuomintang state off guard . Unlike the more organized dangwai movement often portrayed by the state-controlled television news as violent, subversive, or conspiratorial and thus relatively limited in appeal, the zili jiuji earned more prevailing sympathy in society . Even in the Kuomintang-dominated legislature, its lawmakers were ac-cusing the administration of being unaware of and unsympathetic toward the people’s suffering . It was actually unprecedented, which in some sense gave out signals of the deterioration of the governance, whereas it was still unclear how much and in what way the zili jiuji had contributed to the



Kuomintang’s decision not to crack down on democracy .The zili jiuji may be highly important for researchers to get to know

some still unexplored aspects of the processes of democratization because of (not in spite of) this multiplicity . Normally the zili jiuji was merely con-sidered part of the transitory phenomena that ended when the society ma-tured into a full-fledged democracy in which institutionalized appealing processes and better-funded social movement organizations eventually superseded it . This is partially true, yet fails to hit the other end of what had been happening in the past decades . In the 1990s, the symbolic legacy of the zili jiuji helped to resist the professionalization and bureaucratiza-tion in social movements, balancing the trend of specialization with more grassroots imagining of social struggles .38 The place-based identity often involved in many zili jiuji cases in the 1980s was kept alive in a form of the community revitalization movement, which was probably the most em-braced form of social mobilization in the new century, albeit controversial at the same time .39

In short, the zili jiuji undoubtedly illuminated a history of other-ness in the processes of democratization, a history that was often veiled . Even dangwai-related historiography could not avoid downplaying it as an ephemeral and subordinated phenomenon, or as belonging to a long-passed radical time that existed only in the realm of memory now . How-ever, by looking back genealogically, the zili jiuji might have contributed as much as the dangwai to the democratization . Later in the new century, while the dangwai-turned-DPP was entrapped and paralyzed in institu-tional politics, the zili jiuji-inspired social activism was still vigorously in search of their goals of justice, equity, and dignified ways of life .

An Anthropology of Democracy in Postauthoritarian Taiwan

Although 2000 seemed to witness a public joyfulness of democracy when the Kuomintang was finally gone, the end of the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian’s presidency in 2008 began a time of skepticism . Chen Shui-bian’s eight-year problematic tenure nearly wore out all of the simple optimism toward democracy . Democratic life has turned into moments of self-questioning . As the expectation recedes, the mood of melancholy dominates . Unlike the repression of sadness in the previous authoritarian time, democrat-


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ic melancholy evokes a feeling of sorrow and powerlessness, this time around, for no apparent explanation .

This sense of inaction has given rise to political nostalgia . The two de-cades of democracy is seen by the returned Kuomintang as a lost time—a deviation from its reign of prosperity before the end of the 1980s .40 Ironi-cally, the DPP also plays a part in the making of this industry of oblivion . The post-2008 embarrassment has made the party wish to be remem-bered merely as an avant-garde activist force in the 1980s when everything seemed simple and genuine and no political trade-offs or corruption had intervened . Entrapped in these manufactured images of the past, the two major forces choose not to notice the present day, or the contemporary, as a long-term result of various, often conflicting, political agendas .

Counteracting this mainstream political amnesia, this book is dedi-cated to what Julia Paley has called an anthropology of democracy—an en-quiry bringing to the study of democracy “an examination of local mean-ings, circulating discourses, multiple contestations, and changing forms of power .”41 Paley’s Marketing Democracy is a particularly useful example for this book of appraising democracy from social activists’ points of view . 42 Her ethnography of a health social group offers a multidimensional frame-work to examine Chile’s unique trajectory of democracy, analyzing social movements as an arbitrator in the regime of new governmentality which the democratization has brought about . In addition, various ethnographic studies of protest and resistance in the past decades have provided a very distinct contribution to this anthropology of democracy, examining every-day details of political transformation and the micro-politics of protest .43

Political scientists and historians have also noticed the effects of so-cial movements and collective action on the development of democracy as ideas and practices . Cultural historian Michael Denning points out that the modern use of “democracy” actually earned its definition when social movements were invented in the eighteenth century .44 In a different con-text, political scientist Robert Dahl argues that the regeneration of democ-racy in the eighteenth century was largely thanks to the creation of local assemblies in several areas of Europe in which “free men could participate in governing .”45

A new trend of American scholarship since the early 1990s has noted this feature of free involvement in public life in postauthoritarian Taiwan,



opening up a space in which Taiwan was not simply studied for its eco-nomic success or as a surrogate for traditional Chinese culture inacces-sible to Western scholars,46 to whom mainland China’s door remained closed .47 Three collections best represent this new scholarship . Tun-jen Cheng and Stephan Haggard’s edited volume addresses political changes in this historic time of transformation .48 Murray Rubinstein’s edited book The Other Taiwan: 1945 to the Present kicks off the innovative analytic angle of an alternative politics, depicting Taiwan as “a place where specific sets of organizations, interest groups, religious bodies, and representatives of specific ethnicities speak, with ever stronger voices, to the problems and the possibilities created by the very processes of economic, social, politi-cal and spiritual/cultural transformation .”49 Almost published at the same time, Stevan Harrell and Chun-chieh Huang’s edited volume delves deeply into this new democracy’s everyday politics and consciousness making at the individual level .50

Several monographs dig more deeply into specific topics addressed in these three volumes . Alan Wachman examines Taiwan’s democratiza-tion and its complicated relationship with the national identity problem .51

Although Wachman mostly works on political elites’ philosophies, this nationalist question has had extended grassroots impacts that have im-plicated a highly emotional search for and a heated politics of bentu 本土 (nativism) .52 Teresa Wright’s The Perils of Protest works on a historic college students’ “direct action” from a comparative perspective .53 Farris, Lee, and Rubinstein’s edited volume Women in the New Taiwan seeks to make sense of a cultural nuance of democracy, trying to locate women’s liberation under East Asian modernity .54 Shelley Rigger offers the most recent multilayered account of the importance of Taiwanese political and sociocultural change to the area and the world .55

Robert Weller and Richard Madsen are the most important scholars for the project on an ethnography of Taiwanese democracy, both seeking to challenge and renew the concept of civil society in its Western context . Weller addresses people’s rising power amid transforming community life full of cultural sensibilities and creativities, seeking to negotiate formal/informal and involuntary/voluntary forms of civil association .56 He is the first scholar who has paid heed to the concept of locality and its role in Tai-wanese political development, which this book particularly delves into .57


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Richard Madsen’s witness of Democracy’s dharma in the widespread com-passion of Taiwan’s Buddhist devotees is stimulating on account that he also looks for an activist vista .58 Counteracting a mainstream skepticism about “the capacity of religion to play a positive public role in the build-ing of modern, liberal democratic institutions,” Madsen’s book shows how civil and progressive forms of religion grow . Religious groups such as Tzu Chi 慈濟, Buddha’s Light Mountain 佛光山, and Dharma Drum Mountain 法鼓山, to many scholars’ amazement, help not only to form a civil society but also to demonstrate an open-ended consciousness revival that holds out “positive hopes for the building of a free world order .”59

This theoretical interest in collective actions and social organizing in a democratic Taiwan among North American scholars has had local inter-locutors . Scholars in sociology at National Taiwan University work on social movements over labor, gender, and environmental issues, locating them as new central players in the formation of a highly differentiated civil society . Influenced by the pioneering works of Hsiao Hsin-huang and Chang Mau-kuei on the grassroots protests and social movements in the 1980s, Fan Yun

范雲, Ho Ming-sho 何明修, and Liu Hwa-jen 劉華真 pay attention to direct forces in the making and how they have been brought forth, developed, and organized along the social fault lines of gender, class, and nature/human throughout the past two decades .60 Ho Ming-sho, who has published inten-sively in Chinese and English on Taiwan’s labor and environmental move-ments, in his book titled Luse minzhu 綠色民主(Green Democracy), points out that Taiwan’s political democracy needs to be furthered into the phase in which the contradiction between capitalism and environmentalism could and would be addressed . His book indicates that this contradiction can be imagined to be resolved only when activists and scholars begin to under-stand the complexities of the highly diversified civil society in Taiwan .61 Ho’s colleagues Lin Kuo-ming 林國明 and Chen Dong-sheng 陳東升 have been involved in an NGO-centered deliberative democracy initiative that is intended to enhance this understanding by design and to present regu-lar occasions for a face-to-face conversation, discussion, and debate among scholars, activists, and average citizens in an inclusive manner .62

Sociologists and anthropologists at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu focus on cultural explanations of this social organization . The concept of culture is approached in different ways . C . Julia Huang in Na-



tional Tsing Hua University has recently published a book concerning a religious group Tzu Chi, using the Buddhist “three bodies” terminology to examine how charismatic Master Cheng Yen has led this faith-oriented organization into a powerful NGO capable of implementing a global mis-sion .63 Lii Ding-tzann 李丁讚 and his student-colleague Lin Wen-yuan 林文源 at National Tsing Hua University seek to understand cultural origins of self-help antipollution movements in the 1980s, drawing on a symbolic interpretation of the victimized bodies in pollution incidents .64 Discover-ing that a notion of locality was prevailing in these incidents in particular and in collective actions in general, Lii Ding-tzann and his other colleague Wu Jie-min 吳介民 and their students have followed a community-based mobilization in Hsinchu for years, diving into a sea of emotional ex-pressivity and connectivity that they comprehend as a prerequisite for a Habermasian public to surface .65

The anthropologists at National Chiao Tung University, also in Hsin-chu, where I teach, get serious with the notions of place and locality in the processes of democratization . Scrutinizing a critical sense of place and place-based mobilizations, my colleague Lu Hsin-yi and I reflect on the strategic significance of a form of shequ 社區 (community) revival that has been in operation across the island since the mid-1990s . As a transla-tion of the English term community in the first place, shequ has developed into a concept (as well as a practice) that emphasizes locality, heterogene-ity, and spatiality . Often cited as a state of empowerment, senses of shequ reveal a very particular representation of place . I have written articles in English and Chinese about neighborhood organizing and local politics in a Taipei neighborhood where residents mobilized themselves to save a park from demolition in 1995 .66 Lu Hsin-yi’s book is a comparison of two small towns that had struggled to attract visitors for revitalization in this new politics of locality and ecotourism . We also work closely with schol-ars in the Institute of Anthropology at Chi Nan International University in Puli in central Taiwan, where a killer earthquake in 1999 destroyed the town and villages in its vicinity .67 Jung Shao-wu, a legal anthropologist there and our long-distance ally, has worked on towns and villages in this area, examining the borderland between legality and locality where com-munities have strived to rebuild from the rubble .68

Finally, those works addressing the cultural emergents not easily rec-


introduction | 17

ognized and defined in the first place have been pressing the limits of the social and cultural approaches of democracy . Queer and sexuality studies began in the mid-1990s . Tension immediately mounted between this new field and conventional gender studies over the issue of the legalization of sex work . Ho Chuen-juei led the sexuality camp, claiming that some women scholars’ opposition to legalization proved that the discipline of gender studies was hypocritical and conservative .69 On another front, im-migration issues grab scholars’ and public attention in the 2000s, showing a hidden world of exception . Hsia Hsiao-chuan’s 夏曉鵑 book introduced this subject matter, explaining a global/local structure that has made pos-sible this transnational ethnoscape .70 Lan Pei-chia’s well-received book analyzes how guest workers from Southeast Asia have struggled in a state of semislavery .71 Tak-wing Ngo and Hong-zen Wang’s edited volume shows a more recent sociological intervention in this concern with a poli-tics of cultural difference and recognition, a concern that this book very much shares .72

The Structure of the Book

Despite the notion of a great transformation, the scholarship of an alter-native Taiwan demonstrates that there have been contradictions in every step of the way to democracy . For one thing, more and more critics believe that social and economic equality have to be addressed, an issue largely ignored in the struggle for political democracy . There is an increasing anxiety about the relationship between democratization and industrial-ization in the context of an intensifying global economy . Taiwan’s main-stream political leaders often depicted democracy as inseparable from the promotion of the market economy . In many respects, the democratization was implicated in the making of this ideology about market and freedom .

These senses of hesitation brought into focus and reconsideration concepts that had been crucial to democracy in a moral sense . This book examines, either locally or globally, three pivotal ones: sovereignty, iden-tity, and locality . Zhuquan 主權 (sovereignty) appeared in Chinese in a relatively recent historical period, but the simple mention of it in many circumstances of Taiwan’s politics has been sensitive or even explosive . In classic political theory, sovereignty is defined as specifying “the rightful



basis for acting on behalf of the political community and for representing it in a manner which is authoritative and accountable .”73 Against their pre-decessors who were mostly focused on the crafts to be a king—an embodi-ment of sovereignty—liberal thinkers in the past four centuries made this authority a popular one, at least, in theory . This revolutionary idea at the time made possible and practical a system of representation of the people’s will .74 Under the extended influence of this philosophy of liberty and de-mocracy, during the long martial law period in postwar Taiwan, zhuquan was a sensitively difficult issue on two fronts . The exiled Kuomintang still claimed sovereignty over all of China, which made it a necessity that the displaced rulers had to be very sophisticated to justify this belief with a whole new invention of Chinese culture and tradition “on the road .”75 The Kuomintang’s proclaimed “democratic” rule in Taiwan needed to be ex-cused as to how the power was, or at least was going to be, authorized and agreed on by the people, so a constitutional democracy, even if not effec-tive then, would be on the sight .

Before the recent progress of critical cultural and political theory that challenges the state sovereignty’s absoluteness in postmodern times,76 the omnipresence of zhuquan has already been dubious in Taiwan during an ongoing state of emergency . The democratic transition in the 1990s was particularly volatile with the concepts of the nation, culture, and state power all turning questionably unstable, in which the recognition of the Kuomintang’s sovereignty from outside was diminishing and the chal-lenges toward its domestic power base were materializing from within . Scholars often characterize the nation building in the 1990s as a delayed indigenous nationalism trying to catch up with the postwar “new states .”77

However, this delay has to be carefully reconsidered because over time the ideas of indigenity and nationality have dramatically changed .

Dealing with this question of sovereignty in postauthoritarian Tai-wan, part I addresses state and civil society in Gramscian terms . Chapter 1 argues that this dislocation of culture and history in a crisis of sovereignty made democratization in the 1990s a “passive revolution” in which various political and social forces struggled for leadership but none achieved to-talistic hegemony . Used by Antonio Gramsci to interpret a transformation without a genuine change of social relations in the Italian Risorgimento, the concept of “passive revolution” demonstrates “equilibrium of forces”


introduction | 19

in a particular conjuncture in which neither of these forces can dominate . This concept is useful in accounting for the process of democratization that introduced and set up a representative political system in the name of a new nation .

The formation of “popular sovereignty” within a new constitutional framework in 1990s Taiwan in no time morphed into controversy on the social front . As mentioned above, there were socially and morally minded voices from the newly established world of social movements that chal-lenged this liberal realization of civil liberty and political rights . The mak-ing of social movement webs in urban Taiwan, mostly in Taipei, presented a social force with a morally alternative democracy on its agenda . Chapter 2 particularly examines how this social force’s effectiveness and account-ability sprouted and its different parts were organized and coordinated, so it could perform on par with political and economic interests .

Chapter 2 addresses the organizing question in terms of what many scholars have called the professionalization of social movements .78 Since the early 1990s, the world of activism in Taiwan has become much more complex than many activists had initially thought . Changes, for example, in the repertoire of action, organizing strategies, mobilizing structure, and political processes have brought the practices of social movements to an unprecedented level of complexity, subtlety, and intensity . More and more people are involved in varying forms of activism in a fashion that allows more sophisticatedly coordinated and crafted actions . Given this new technology of activism, social movements in a changing historical situation have played a major part and adapted to a struggle over power and identity, thanks to a relaxed political system of representation and bourgeoning discontent toward this system’s pitfalls .

For deepening the exploration of the evolving civil society, chapter 3 examines a history of political enthusiasm that has made possible the making of a “talking” public . In Taiwan, democracy has brought new ingredients to the meaning of citizenship, experienced as a way of life . Chapter 3 addresses a new phenomenon in which free yet compulsive political expressions have been redefining civil society . It argues that by understanding this everyday eagerness to talk politics, social movements are able to transform themselves into multipurpose social forces capable of adjusting themselves to counteract problems emanating from the com-



plexities and multiplicities of daily life .Part II addresses the identity and ethnicity question in Taiwan . Na-

tionalist politics in Taiwan was long-lived and Janus faced . As shown in chapter 1, a version of a national-popular-nativist movement helped the formation of “popular sovereignty .” Nevertheless, in the past decade, schol-ars have been debating whether this politics regarding the national future transformed itself into a state nationalism that served the interests of of-ficial state building .79 Moreover, the increasing Chinese influence lately has been dramatizing this development . This nationalist controversy brings me to watching identity politics closely in part II . Rentong 認同—the Chinese translation of identity—might have been the most explosive terminology in the post–martial law period . Clifford Geertz once described primordial attachments in search of a collective self as always accompanying the desire for an effective government among “new states .”80 Although this primodi-alism of ethnicity has been severely criticized, the mythology of national-ism after Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking book Imagined Communi-ties remains a terrain of contestation .81 Anderson was actually personally involved in Taiwan nationalist debates . Since the early 1990s, scholars in academia have debated Benedict’s theorization of nationalism and its local appropriations in the middle of an emerging politics of bentu indigenous identity aimed at ending the Kuomintang’s political and cultural domina-tion . Chao Kang 趙剛 at Tonghai University accused several heavyweight sociologists of systematically misrepresenting Anderson in the service of a (Taiwanese) nationalist agenda .82 The accusation initiated an extended academic feud between sociologists and “cultural studies” people . In 2004, amid a cease-fire, Anderson visited Taiwan and showed sympathy toward Taiwan independence appeal, citing his Scottish experiences .

Despite the uncertainty and ambivalence, this book argues that the politics of bentu identity was a process of reconnecting people to culture . Resisting essentialism yet exploring sense of relationship, this identity politics crosscut different forms of social struggle . This sense of connec-tivity also directed me to examine the meaning of well-being in post–mar-tial law Taiwan . Identity politics urged people to rethink not just who they are but also what they are . Especially, criticism of democracy has brought varying social issues to the foreground of political struggle after decades of antiauthoritarianism, largely in response to a changing economic and


introduction | 21

social condition in which existing safety networks had been washed away . Indeed, Taiwanese society was going through a dramatic economic and demographic transformation that made the implementation of a universal safety net much more urgent than ever before . Chapter 4 therefore probes a debate regarding welfare that had implicated social movement organi-zations, and sees the welfare demand as a moral politics and as a space overdetermined by a changing global economy, nationalism, and politics of protest .

Chapter 5 investigates the darker sides of democracy, addressing a new ethnic politics in which democracy is seen as a space for unortho-dox, innovative imaginations to come to light . This creation of ethnicity as imagined alterity moves democracy to the phase of what Charles Taylor calls the “politics of recognition .”83 This chapter documents two ethnic struggles for recognition in Taiwan . One is about an aboriginal Pangcah 邦再 tribe whose tribalism uncovered a long-buried case whose exposure was explosively disconcerting . The other is about what I call a Hakka 客家

radicalism, whose recent formation showed the heterogeneity of the Han Chinese identity . Recognition, this chapter shows, was a process of daily reinvented acknowledgments of a shadowed tradition in the middle of unrecognizable cultural confrontations .

To look at local effects of democracy, part III investigates a trend of place-based mobilization, a pervasive and continuing demand for the care of place among urban neighborhoods . In the context of postauthoritar-ian Taiwan, this changing mode of mobilization about the complexity of the life-world has gained strength, as many people have come to believe that local needs and differences have been ignored and devastated in the course of a universalistic plan for modernization . Neighborhood mobi-lizations in Taipei have had a huge impact on the broader social move-ment field since the mid-1990s . At first glance, these mobilizations were basically responding to both worsening urban and regional problems and a feeling of loss of control over time and space, representing self-help groupings grounded in a sense of community . “Communities” were claimed and remade in the courses of those actions . Chapter 6 examines an urban neighborhood—Yongkang—in Taipei and its residents’ efforts to bring the community together .

Further investigating the long-term micro-effects of democracy in



the Yongkang neighborhood, chapter 7 examines the daily trivialities of an emerging lifestyle . A defense of living space by Taipei residents embod-ied in collective actions of various kinds over the past decade has brought about the urge to explore, and this exploration evokes walking as a form of lifestyle . Walking, as de Certeau suggests, has an “enunciative function .”84

This chapter studies those daily nosy explorations into space, which open up both physiological and cognitive possibilities .

I conclude this book by returning to a national concern with the past of war and with the recent talks about peace across the Strait after Kuomintang’s Ma Ying-jeou 馬英九 gained presidency in 2008 . An appeal to cross-Strait peace deeply rooted in an impending free trade framework has been President Ma’s major “mainland” (dalu 大陸) policy concern, which however has raised fierce public debate . I problematize this imag-ining of war and peace in conjunction with the discursive, military, and economic formation of a Chinese sovereignty . With this rising supremacy, forefronts have reached the interior of Taiwan politics . The democratic multiplicities become the last line of defense and the only hope for peace .


The Chinese University Press · identity”—a crisis indicating the DPP’s gradual slide ......

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