Abstract
Abstract The situation generated by the pandemic has meant the acceleration of the ongoing hegemonic clash between the United States and China, as well as the intensification of the anti-China narrative and a deplorable wave of Sinophobia throughout the world. In this context, Taiwan has become a strategic hot spot for the development of the rhetoric of the enemy. This study analyses some of the direct consequences of the ensuing friend/foe discourses in the Taiwanese milieu. In the context of a new Cold War, certain groups of power and their media apparatuses have embarked into a race to discursively distance the country as quickly as possible from the despised global enemy, not to be dragged down by the proximity and commonalities shared with China. Moreover, social polarization within Taiwan and contempt for the internal “enemies” pose an added challenge both for the maintenance of liberal democracy and the preservation of peace and self-government on the island. These outcomes are facilitated by underlying populist and nationalist processes of identity construction and hegemonic struggle: distinct discourses re-articulating the Taiwanese identity as an underdog people and a victimized nation.
Highlights
The situation generated by the pandemic has meant the acceleration of the ongoing hegemonic clash between the United States and China, as well as the intensification of the anti-China narrative and a deplorable wave of Sinophobia throughout the world
150 Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado once-monopolistic Chinese identity at the same time that the Taiwanese identity surged resting on sociocultural elements – democracy and human rights, in a context certainly influenced by the Cold War between communism and capitalism – rather than ethnic ones, steadily evolving as the naturalized political imaginary in the island
This process has been gradually redirected by the hegemonic struggle between the two main political parties on the island, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), heir to the dictatorship and, in the present, more prone to rapprochement with China; and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), with an unambiguous pro-independence stance and pursuing closer ties to the United States (US)
Summary
150 Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado once-monopolistic Chinese identity at the same time that the Taiwanese identity surged resting on sociocultural elements – democracy and human rights, in a context certainly influenced by the Cold War between communism and capitalism – rather than ethnic ones, steadily evolving as the naturalized political imaginary in the island (see Chen, “Taiwan’s identity;” Chun, “Democracy;” Lin). Taiwanese identity is being discursively transformed through its articulation along novel dimensions that involve a clear antagonism against a proverbial enemy, embodied in a particular interpretation (construction of meaning) of the multifarious notion of Chineseness (see Chun, “Fuck Chineseness”) In this vein, it is argued that what it means to identify as Taiwanese is being discursively redefined from a previous understanding of it as the sharing of some socio-cultural elements – like support for democracy and human rights – to an understanding of the present conjuncture as a struggle between friend and enemy in Schmittian terms. The emotional investment that aggregates citizens of the ROC around this novel Taiwanese subjectivity is not so much what positive elements they have in common but the fundamental negativity that jeopardizes their very identity This antagonized “Other” is discursively articulated around the referents of the Chinese Communist Party (CPP) – China as a power bloc – and the Chinese nation as a whole. These media, their news, and journalists – both foreigners and local Taiwanese – have to be observed as part of the anti-China propaganda machinery related to the hegemonic struggle to fix meaning in regards to the Cross-Strait conflict
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