Taiwan Today

The dizzying accumulation of China's material wealth, which has raised millions out of poverty and made China a force in global politics, has led to a pesky question: What does China have to offer to the world? To the more idealistically minded, the rise of a great nation should be attended by a concurrent growth of culture and religious thought, or perhaps new strains of political philosophy. In short, they argue that material wealth and power should coexist with the religious and humanist traditions and political liberties that remind us that we are not just economic units. So far, contemporary China has managed to embrace the worst excesses of 19th century capitalism, while suppressing religious and political desires and severing its people from their own traditions. While the achievements of ancient China are universally admired, just what does today's rising China have to add to the human story?

In a new book about religion in Taiwan, Richard Madsen, a professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego, finds an intriguing answer in Taiwan, an alternate Chinese society across the Taiwan Strait, and debunks some Western assumptions along the way. In Democracy's Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan, Madsen tells of a remarkable religious awakening that has reshaped Taiwanese society and gone largely unnoticed by Western academics. He relates this tale by examining the growth of four of Taiwan's most prominent religious organizations: the Tzu Chi Buddhist Compassion Relief Association, Buddha's Light Mountain and Dharma Drum Mountain, which are all Buddhist groups, and the Enacting Heaven Temple, or Hsing Tian Kong, a Taoist group.

It is understandable that many political scientists have shied away from tackling religion and its connection to a democratic Taiwan, choosing instead to address Taiwan's democracy through the lens of their own academic disciplines. Yet not to take note of Taiwan's religious revival and its influence on society is much like ignoring an elephant in the room. Tzu Chi, for example, is today a well-endowed nongovernmental organization, operating five hospitals and various schools, and organizing disaster relief at home and abroad. Its membership is four million strong, it receives about US$150 million a year in donations, and it has assets estimated in the billions of dollars, according to Madsen.

Tzu Chi members are easily spotted in Taiwan; they wear a simple uniform intended to create a sense of solidarity. The organization is most visible when disaster strikes. In the hours after a powerful earthquake struck Taiwan on September 21, 1999, Tzu Chi members, like members of other religious groups, sprung into action. They served meals, helped disseminate information via private radios (communications were knocked out in many places), and set to work building shelters for those left homeless. So deeply was the need for social action ingrained in the Tzu Chi community that relief was often performed spontaneously by members who were out of touch with organizers. It was a reflection on a grand scale of the simplicity and compassion of the group's founding principles and its call for social activism.

Cultural Values

Tzu Chi, like many of Taiwan's religious organizations today, requires its members to perform acts of service. Madsen notes that Buddhism as adopted in the West tends to emphasize individual spiritual cultivation. In Taiwan, religious groups encourage the exercise of their faith through communal action. In part, the difference is cultural. In the West, individual liberty is privileged, legally and philosophically. In Asia, even in nations that have adopted democratic politics and Western legal systems, greater emphasis has traditionally been placed on the good of society as a whole. To achieve the common good, people like former Singapore President Lee Kuan Yew have argued that government should retain a firm grip on its population. This has sparked a lively debate over whether or not "Asian values" (sometimes referred to as "Confucian values") are compatible with a modern democratic society.

Madsen dismisses this idea with some derision: "If one takes this point of view seriously, one would have to argue that, for Asian societies to successfully modernize, they must replace Confucian ways of thinking with Western liberal ones." What he takes issue with is the notion that only Western liberalism can cultivate civic virtue in a populace. His work is most convincing in illustrating the way in which traditional, hierarchal religious organizations--including all of those discussed in the book--have fostered a widespread movement of social action and cultivated civic virtue. Members of these sprawling religious movements, in other words, have achieved a much valued "Western" virtue in a particularly Asian manner, and by relying solely on local traditions and Asian cultural impulses.  

In the case of Cheng Yen, the Buddhist nun who founded Tzu Chi, Confucian respect for family is central to the efficacy of the organization's social activism. Tzu Chi not only acts as an extended family, but the metaphor stretches to encompass all of society and even all of humanity. This is the logic of traditional Confucian philosophy, but it is channeled into the cultivation of civic virtue and into activism that would be easily identifiable in liberal societies. "Cheng Yen's path toward promoting the liberal ideal of universal respect for the dignity of each individual, no matter what background or belief, is different from the classic Western liberal path," Madsen notes. Yet the jostling happy hordes of Tzu Chi activists are just as much a part of Taiwan's democratic society as their Western counterparts in their own various religious or nonreligious NGOs.

Impressive Debunking

This is an impressive debunking of the incompatibility of Asian values with liberal democracy, but Madsen goes further still. He claims that the expansion of religious movements in the 1980s "was not only encouraged by the early phases of transition to democracy, but it also helped to make that transition successful." Taiwan's religious renaissance, in other words, has facilitated democratic growth.

Taiwan abandoned martial law in 1987, and participation in religious and political groups has since expanded. Madsen rightly points out that decades of economic growth had created a large middle class, and many people, notably women, sought to participate in society at a more meaningful level. Madsen posits that religious groups aided democratization by providing a common purpose and a sense of community for people with different political views. He argues, for example, that supporters of the Kuomintang (KMT), which left China for Taiwan in 1949 and instituted martial law, mingled with supporters of opposition parties and those who held grievances against the KMT administration. In this sense, religious groups functioned as a mechanism for the creation of a shared national identity, both before martial law was lifted and afterwards in the heated political atmosphere of multiparty elections. One must ask, however, if this function was not on offer elsewhere. Schools, the workplace, nonreligious community organizations and military service (which is mandatory for young men in Taiwan) offer the same opportunities to rub elbows with people of a different political bent.

Indeed, in his own interviews with Tzu Chi members, Madsen discovers that they viewed the process the other way around--the growth of religious groups did not lead to democracy, but was the result of democratization. "From their point of view," he writes, "Tzu Chi was a product of Taiwan's newly found democratic freedom--a self-governing voluntary association, one of tens of thousands of such associations that came into existence after the end of martial law."

Madsen concedes that political liberalization aided the growth of Taiwan's religious movements, but his central argument is that these groups also assisted in the development of democracy and helped make it a success. It is a question of causation, and Madsen's answer is puzzling. "One can make a persuasive argument," he writes, "that without their important contributions, Taiwan's troubles would have been much worse." This is shaky ground. It might be true, but it would be nearly impossible to prove. It is akin to using the result as the argument--because things are not worse, religion must have made them better. It calls to mind a celebrated defense by the barb-tongued comic novelist Evelyn Waugh. After savaging a fellow guest at a dinner party, another guest turned to Waugh and asked him how he could be so rude and claim to be a practicing Catholic. "You have no idea," Waugh replied, "how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being."

Accommodating the Modern

If Madsen fails to make the case that Taiwan's religious movements spurred democracy, he certainly does illustrate the democratization of Taiwan's religious movements. To the Western eye, the Buddhist and Taoist religious organizations of Taiwan might appear exotic and somewhat esoteric. By examining the history of these groups, Madsen demonstrates that they have adapted quite well to modern Taiwanese society by shedding ritual and doctrinal strictness.

Religion in Taiwan appears to the Westerner as remarkably fluid, mixing Confucian tradition with Buddhist and Taoist practice. It largely eschews the exclusivity of the great monotheistic religions that came from the Middle East. Yet, no less so than Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the religions of Taiwan have struggled to remain relevant by grappling with modernity. Cheng Yen, Tzu Chi's founder, traveled a rebellious path in the formation of the organization and abandoned much of the rigidity of Buddhism to form a loosely based society that encourages humanist activism. Madsen quotes one Tzu Chi member who explained that Cheng Yen "doesn't like to talk with scholars." Her mission lies with the people and the group's relevance with society, not the parry and thrust of Buddhist theological discourse.

Participation in these movements is often as easy as visiting a temple or volunteering for an outreach practice. In this way, the busy citizens of Taiwan can choose to practice their faith in a flexible manner. Hsing Yun, master of Buddha's Light Mountain, a large Buddhist organization centered on a temple complex near the southern city of Kaohsiung, encourages people to take what they want from the religion. He compares the temple to "a department store that sells many things." People can stop by to reenergize their faith "like a gas station."

His playful irreverence hints at one of the most profound and characteristic aspects of religious life on Taiwan--accommodation. People are not only free to decide what religion to follow, but the religious groups themselves accommodate the different needs and different levels of devotion of members. It is notable that Tzu Chi, which comes into contact with so many nonmembers through its outreach programs, does not proselytize, and even nonbelievers are welcome to participate in its community programs. This flexibility shows a remarkable confidence and allows modern Taiwanese to blend religion into their lives as they see fit.

The Buddhist Work Ethic

While religious groups have evolved to accommodate modern practitioners, they have also learned to live in a world of material wealth. The growing affluence of Taiwan has left people with both the time and the money to contribute to society, as well as the desire to find fulfillment outside the commercial arena, leading middle class and well-to-do Taiwanese to flock to religious organizations. The rather high-handed Max Weber, a German political economist, famously argued that Protestant nations prospered because of the connection between their religion and their commercial enterprises. According to Weber, Protestants were commanded by their faith not to be idle, yet they were embarrassed by the riches their labor produced in a capitalist system. The solution was to pour the profits back into their industries. This assuaged their guilt over profits and expanded industry, leading of course to more profits and more growth. According to Weber, the Protestant work ethic fuelled capitalism.

While singing the praises of Protestantism and its relationship to capitalism, Weber was singularly gloomy about China, which he viewed as being locked in a feudal state, partly as a result of Confucian values. Weber's theories did much to fix in the Western imagination the notion that Asian societies were static, and that their repressive feudalism could only be cast off by the spread of Christianity and the abandonment of Confucian traditions. 

Madsen makes a good argument that traditional religious practices and Confucian virtues are no less compatible with capitalism than with liberal democracy. Indeed, he illustrates that Taiwanese religious practitioners behave much the same as Weber's Protestants. Prosperity in Taiwan results from hard work and self-discipline no less than in the West. And middle class guilt over excess profits also prompts an outpouring of capital in other directions, either back into business or to organizations such as Tzu Chi. Religious affiliation therefore bolsters the foundations of the state in a particularly Asian manner, relying on local traditions and displaying a society as successfully modern as many Western countries.

Madsen approaches the remarkable growth of religion in Taiwan with an enthusiasm for humanist traditions often lacking in political science studies, and he illustrates that while modern China's contribution to global culture is still an open question, Taiwan offers a unique alternative in the search for meaning in the modern world.

Copyright © 2008 by Robert Green