‘The end of the common world’: COVID anxieties, bordered lives and democratic censorship in Taiwan

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper provides ethnographic sketches of the struggles of bordered lives – mainland spouses and their families, PRC students and overseas Taiwan – during the pandemic time when their rights to enter or return to overseas Taiwanese was denied as part of the preventive measures against COVID-19. By conducting interviews with mainland spouses from a distance and looking at the discussion of a Facebook group called ‘Overseas Taiwanese COVID-19 Self-Help Group’ as an archival site, we seek to understand and analyse the reasons why their right to enter or return was silenced, discredited, denied and attacked, and used these ethnographic sketches as the basis for explaining the emergence of democratic censorship, a paradox that sadly is part of the living reality in Taiwan. Furthermore, inspired by Michel Foucault’s discussion of raison d’etat as the rationale for the state’s, rather than people’s, survival, we situate democratic censorship in the context of tense China–Taiwan relations and call for the ‘de-Cold Warring’ (Chen 2010) of consciousness as the key to save democracy from the spectre of autocracy.