Understanding the causes that underlie Taiwan’s successful transition from political authoritarianism and poverty to democratic stability and relative prosperity is a daunting scholarly exercise. In The Vitality of Taiwan: Politics, Economics, Society and Culture, 12 scholars in the field of Taiwan studies have attempted just that. Editor Steve Tsang, a professor of contemporary Chinese studies and director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, notes that “Modern Taiwan has often been described in terms of a miracle.” While Taiwan’s economic development has indeed been described as miraculous, The Vitality of Taiwan ventures well beyond the country’s economic rise, addressing topics ranging from political democratization to Taiwan’s vibrancy in business, culture, the media and society. The authors address the historical and contemporary causes for Taiwan’s vitality, and also provide windows on the future by advocating reforms that might enhance Taiwan’s democracy, media and economic competitiveness.
The Vitality of Taiwan was spawned by an international workshop on Taiwan studies held in the United Kingdom at St. Anthony’s College, University of Oxford in June 2010. The volume is a multidisciplinary work, contains a welcome diversity of perspectives from several academic fields and has a useful introduction written by Tsang. The Vitality of Taiwan offers the insight of accomplished academic writers, but is accessible to any educated reader with an interest in the country. The concept of “vitality” is found throughout the chapters, a potent notion that expresses both Taiwan’s historical achievements and capacity for adapting to future challenges.
Taiwan’s transition from authoritarianism to the establishment of “the first Chinese democracy,” as Tsang notes, has been impressive. In view of that rise, the editor challenges those who doubt that democracy is suitable for Chinese peoples to “rethink and justify their assertion.”
In the chapter “The Resilience and Dynamism of Taiwan’s Democratic System,” Shelley Rigger, Brown Professor of East Asian Politics at Davidson College in North Carolina, gives an insightful overview of both the vitality and shortcomings of the country’s political sphere. Rigger finds that the system has succeeded reasonably well in the face of the threat from mainland China, protecting Taiwan from forced unification yet mitigating cross-strait tensions in a “middle-of-the-road strategy” that is encouraged by the pragmatic preferences of democratic majorities.
Likewise, Rigger credits the policies employed by the Republic of China (ROC) government for having nurtured the economy through land reform programs, preferences for certain industrial sectors and protection, but with an underlying respect for market forces. As Rigger notes, Taiwan’s democracy respects the rule of law, and, despite the seeming dominance of one political party in recent elections, the pragmatism of local voters ensures that the system remains competitive. Taiwan’s attachment to democratic institutions is reassuring, particularly given the instability found in many other recently democratized nations. Rigger observes, however, that Taiwan’s future success will be determined by the degree to which the political system remains energetic in dealing with both mainland China and challenges at home.
A scene from the hit 2008 film Cape No.7. Australian academic Mark Harrison writes that Taiwan’s cultural productions reflect the complexities of the country’s history and identity. (Photo courtesy of Ars Film Production)
In his chapter “Social Foundations of Political Vitality,” Hsin-huang Michael Hsiao (蕭新煌), a distinguished research fellow and director of the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s foremost research institution, concludes that the country’s political stability is deeply rooted in society. Hsiao traces the evolution of Taiwan’s democracy by examining the emergence of a vibrant, civically engaged middle class that gave rise to the creation of Taiwan’s earliest independent nongovernmental organization (NGO), the Consumers’ Foundation (CF), in 1980. As he writes, “the CF served as a catalyst that led to the setting up of other NGOs which reached out to many corners of society as they raised public consciousness of the need for social reform.” While Hsiao takes a negative view of what he sees as a recent tightening of governmental control in the political sphere, he finds that Taiwan’s development over the past generation has been impressive and that a progressive spirit of advocacy continues to underpin the country’s democracy.
Two chapters provide remarkable insight into the complex and fluid process of identity formation within Taiwan’s culture. Lin Pei-yin (林姵吟), a lecturer in Taiwan studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, offers an inspiring study titled “Literature’s Role in Breaching the Authoritarian Mindset.” By Lin’s account, Taiwanese authors were able to find “alternative voices” despite the parameters placed on freedom of expression during both Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) and martial law. The author surveys numerous examples of the inspired creativity exhibited by Taiwanese writers during their heroic resistance under authoritarian censorship. When martial law and censorship ended in Taiwan in 1987, the result was an unprecedented outpouring of vibrant written works, Lin writes.
In his chapter titled “The Impact of Film and the Performing Arts on Life in Taiwan,” Mark Harrison, senior lecturer, coordinator of the Chinese Program and deputy head of the School of Asian Languages and Studies at the University of Tasmania, Australia, traces important cultural expressions that are representative of Taiwan’s vitality in cinema and theater. As Harrison explains, political discourse has often failed at expressing the complexities of the country’s history and identity, an area in which Taiwanese cultural productions have sometimes been more articulate. Harrison considers the production of King Lear by Wu Hsing-kuo’s (吳興國) Contemporary Legend Theatre (first performed in 2001) and the hit film Cape No. 7 (2008) by director Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖) to be examples of how domestic artists “actively and freely choose the material of history and culture to remake and create new culture in works that represent the Taiwanese people as a meaningful identity formation.”
Qian Sarah Gong, a lecturer in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, and Gary D. Rawnsley, a professor of international communications at the UK’s University of Leeds, provide a chapter titled “The Media and the Vitality of Democratic Taiwan.” The authors give an account of journalism’s role in developing and nourishing democratic politics, describing both the amazing proliferation and diversification of the media since the end of martial law and the problems endemic to the realm of contemporary Taiwanese political reporting.
In interviews with political journalists, Gong and Rawnsley find unquestioned support for the media’s role in democracy, writing that “political communications are more transparent, inclusive and accountable than at any time in the past, and the media have emerged as influential political actors in their own right.” The authors also observe that both journalists and politicians rank freedom of speech as a substantive achievement of Taiwan’s democratic reform.
King Lear, first performed by Taiwan’s Contemporary Legend Theatre in 2001, provides an example of how local artists “remake and create new culture,” Harrison writes.(Photo courtesy of Contemporary Legend Theatre)
Watchdog Duty
At the same time, Gong and Rawnsley point out that concerns about invasion of privacy, hyper-partisanship and paparazzi-style news reporting have replaced the fear of censorship in today’s democratic and market-driven media era. As any viewer of Taiwanese cable television knows, the proliferation of 24-hour news channels (seven for a nation of 23 million!) has encouraged sensational, tabloid-style reporting designed to attract viewers, a trend that has accelerated in the era of declining advertising revenues. Gong and Rawnsley write that most politicians believe that “the media are not fulfilling their democratic responsibility as watchdog on politicians for the benefit of democracy or their audiences (citizens), but for media proprietors and political interests.”
In his chapter “Cross-Strait Tensions and Taiwan’s Economic Vitality,” Scott L. Kastner examines Taiwan’s economic vitality and prospects in light of tensions between the ROC and mainland China. Kastner, an associate professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland in the United States, finds that Taiwan thrived because and in spite of tensions with mainland China during the 1950s and 1960s. While the strained cross-strait relationship impeded private investment, official US aid helped make up the shortfall. Before the 1980s, bans on economic connections with mainland China hardly mattered, given that country’s backward, autarkic economy at the time. More recently, the effects of cross-strait tensions on Taiwan’s economy have become harder to gauge, Kastner writes. In the 1990s, government officials, concerned about growing mainland China-bound investment, promoted the Southward Policy to encourage investment in Southeast Asia. That strategy yielded mixed results, and Taiwanese firms and investors continued to keep their eye on mainland China. Despite such policies and continuing restrictions on trade, by 2003 the other side of the Taiwan Strait had become Taiwan’s largest trading partner.
Kastner explains that the most important negative consequence of cross-strait tensions could be the difficulty of signing free trade agreements (FTAs) with other countries, a factor that might endanger Taiwan’s economic vitality. He predicts, however, that the signing of the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement between Taiwan and mainland China in 2010 could facilitate similar pacts with other nations in East Asia, but that at the time of writing it was still too soon to judge the results of that agreement. In fact, Taiwan signed an economic cooperation agreement with New Zealand in July this year.
Gunter Schubert, a professor of Greater China studies in the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies at Eberhard Karls University Tüebingen in Germany, and Keng Shu (耿曙), an associate professor in the School of Public Economics and Administration at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in mainland China, collaborate on the chapter “Taishang as a Factor Shaping Taiwan’s Domestic Politics.” Taishang is a Mandarin term for Taiwanese businesspeople operating in mainland China. Schubert and Keng find the Taishang generally supportive of the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) due to the previous Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration’s efforts to discourage doing business with mainland China. For their part, mainland Chinese officials have tried to encourage the Taishang to remain engaged in Taiwan’s democracy, even holding rallies and arranging for discounted airfares as incentives for them to return home for elections, presumably to vote for the KMT, according to the authors.
Despite the role of the Taishang in revolutionizing Taiwan’s economy and relations with mainland China, Schubert and Keng find that a number of factors—including internal fragmentation among members of the group, media pluralism and Taiwan’s extreme political partisanship—mitigate the Taishang’s ability to influence Taiwanese politics. Given the economic clout of the Taishang, however, the authors believe that the group may be able to build lobbying networks in the future, particularly if Taiwan’s economy is perceived to be growing alongside mainland China’s.
In his chapter on “Social Networks as a Source of Economic Vitality,” Chen Dung-sheng (陳東升), a professor in the Department of Sociology at Taipei’s National Taiwan University, finds that local, transnational and multinational personal connections have helped Taiwan’s economic development, especially in the high-tech fields that have defined the country’s competitiveness in recent decades. Small and medium-sized export-oriented companies have long relied on connections, particularly family relations, for credit, production collaboration, staff and startup capital for their businesses.
In a chapter on Taiwan’s media, two UK academics hail the industry’s role in nourishing democracy, but warn of the dangers of sensational reporting. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)
Expanding Networks
While kinship and proximity are important factors behind Taiwanese business success, neither distance nor national boundaries has deterred the creation of sophisticated business networks. Chen analyzes the transnational connections formed among the large number of Taiwanese who studied at universities in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than being a unidirectional “brain drain,” this diaspora of Taiwan’s best and brightest created revolutionary networks of talented, educated professionals who helped introduce American technology and knowhow to Taiwan’s developing high-tech industries. More vitally, the knowledge gained by those in the United States helped reform Taiwan’s overall economy. Chen also observes that the expansion of such networks to include Europe and Japan in recent years has made a similar contribution to the vitality of the economy.
The Vitality of Taiwan strikes a timely, encouraging note given the nation’s recent self-questioning in the face of economic challenges and political strife, particularly as the latter has occurred just one generation after the momentous changes that brought about democracy. The greatest strength of The Vitality of Taiwan may well be the volume’s hesitancy in attributing the country’s ability to thrive to any one source, as the book’s multifaceted explanations perhaps better reflect the creativity, freedom and pluralism of Taiwan’s society. As citizens of a sometimes boisterous and always complex nation, Taiwanese people know that there is no easy explanation for the dynamism of their homeland.
The Vitality of Taiwan also provides welcome confirmation of the wellbeing of the field of Taiwan studies. The volume is part of the Nottingham China Policy Institute Series published by Palgrave Macmillan and received the support of the new Taiwan Studies Programme of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham. With the attention of top scholars and growing scholarly resources, Taiwan is assuming its rightful place in Western academia.
Still, like any thoughtful work that addresses a range of subjects, The Vitality of Taiwan raises issues worthy of further reflection. In the chapters dedicated to culture, for example, it is not apparent whether Taiwan’s cultural vibrancy promotes its vitality or is indicative of the underlying health of society. The volume might also have examined the country’s diplomacy—which has been relatively successful in the face of tremendous odds—and looked at how the alliance with the United States has contributed to Taiwan’s historic and continued vitality. Meanwhile, other issues that will impact Taiwan’s vitality go unaddressed, particularly the demographic challenges associated with a severely diminished birthrate and growing elderly population.
The strong suit of The Vitality of Taiwan is its ability to put current worries into a broader perspective by showing that the country has overcome difficult challenges many times in the past. The volume helps illuminate the strengths that have met such challenges and pinpoints the sources of dynamism that are likely to brighten the future. A timely, readable, and informative work, The Vitality of Taiwan deserves the attention of those interested in the nation’s miraculous rise and its capacity to continue thriving.
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Joseph Eaton is an associate professor of history at National Chengchi University in Taipei.
Copyright © 2013 by Joseph Eaton