Taiwan's Democratization Research Articles

THE POLITICS OF CRIME IN TAIWAN, HONG KONG AND MACAO

THE POLITICS OF CRIME IN TAIWAN, HONG KONG AND MACAO

Japan's Relations with China: Facing a Rising Power (review)

Reviewed by: Japan's Relations with China: Facing a Rising Power Ming Wan (bio) Japan's Relations with China: Facing a Rising Power. Edited by Lam Peng Er. Routledge, London, 2006. xiv, 242 pages. £65.00. Lam Peng Er's edited volume makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of Japan's relations with China and of East Asian international relations. The book is both narrower and broader in coverage than recent works on Sino-Japanese relations. It focuses only on the Japanese perspective without considering Chinese views (except in one chapter), but it includes chapters [End Page 161] discussing substate actors and the perspectives of Malaysia, Southeast Asia, and Russia.1 The book originated from a conference held in August 2002. Some chapters are not as up-to-date as others, but most of the analyses have held up well against the test of time. As a case in point, David Arase's chapter discusses Japan's decision to make a deep cut in yen loans to China in the 2002 fiscal year but not its subsequent decision, reached by the end of 2004, to phase out overseas development assistance (ODA) to China by 2008. But the reasons Arase cites for the reduction in ODA—Japan's concern about China's growing military capabilities and strategic intention, Japan's fiscal crisis, bureaucratic failure, a generational change, aid fatigue, China's own aid program, and worsening ties with China (pp. 93–95)—also apply to Tokyo's eventual decision to completely halt the yen loans. Arase is right that it is too late for Japan to use ODA as a policy tool to pressure China because China no longer depends on Japanese loans. Japan was able to end its loans to China without creating resentment in Beijing. In a joint press communiqué issued during Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to Japan in April 2007, the Japanese and Chinese governments agreed that Japanese yen loans to China, which will end in 2008, had made a positive contribution to Chinese economic development and Japan-China economic cooperation. Arase is also right that the noncontroversial ending does not necessarily bode well for the relationship because it simply means Japan will have to find other policy tools to use in pressuring China, such as expanding its own security capabilities (p. 103). One might add that whereas Japan can no longer use ODA to pressure China directly, it may still see value in using ODA as a means to strengthen relations with third countries to compete with China and to keep China in check. This explains, for example, why Japan has increased yen loans to India. Kokubun Ryo¯sei's chapter provides a lucid, balanced analysis of how Japan's relations with China have shifted from the stable framework established in the 1972 negotiations to normalize diplomatic relations to the current fluctuating state of affairs fraught with uncertainty and tension. He emphasizes the end of the cold war, greater economic interdependence between China and Japan, generational change, and Taiwan's democratization as crucial causal factors for Japan's changing relations with China. Kokubun does not focus on the management or mismanagement of the relationship. Rather, he suggests ways to improve it. By offering specific policy suggestions for cooperation (pp. 33–34), Kokubun demonstrates a tendency common among influential Japanese and Chinese thinkers on the bilateral relationship to often play dual roles of observers and participants. [End Page 162] The Lam volume came out before Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo¯'s visit to Beijing in October 2006. Thus, although a scholar's suggestions for cooperation seemed like wishful thinking when the book was published and relations were deteriorating, they look prescient now. The Japan-China relationship is more than an academic exercise. At some point, efforts have to be made to move beyond past views of who was wrong and right. In her chapter, Kamachi Noriko explains why people like Kokubun engaged in normative discussion rather than just being analytical. "For Ja-panese academics, the Chinese giant is much more than merely a research object to satisfy their intellectual curiosity" (p. 62). At the same time, Japanese scholars need to "keep a...

Religion and Democracy in Taiwan by Cheng-Tian Kuo (review)

Book Reviews 155 masters as an important part of their direct spiritual heritage. Such claims may have more merit than one may think. STEPHEN ESKILDSEN, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Religion and Democracy in Taiwan CHENG-TIAN KUO. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008. x, 161 pages. ISBN 978-0-7914-7445-7. US$35.00 hardcover. Around the world religious beliefs and practices are shaping modern political processes in ways never dreamed of by secular modernization theorists, and these inconvenient facts are forcing revisions in core theories and methods of political science. Modern Taiwan is no exception. Taiwan’s vibrant religious landscape has provided the language and the concepts for bestowing or withholding legitimacy at various stages in its transition to democracy. Political discourse in Taiwan continues to be suffused with religious symbolism and some religious organizations have provided important resources for politicians seeking elections. For example, it is incumbent on politicians of all parties and all manner of religious affiliation to take part in Mazu 媽祖 parades, to have moral dialogues with prominent Buddhist leaders, and to attend Christian prayer breakfasts. This book on religion and democracy in Taiwan is an important and timely contribution not only to the study of politics in Taiwan but to comparative politics in general. Unlike other studies on this subject, this book combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Using historical records and personal interviews, the author gives an excellent overview of the religious scene in Taiwan. I know of no other work that gives such a comprehensive yet concise picture. The author organizes his account of each major religious group in Taiwan around that group’s “political theology” and “ecclesiology.” He wants to assess the extent to which such religious beliefs and values support democratic institutions and the influence they might have on contemporary partisan politics. He then presents statistical analyses of the partisan preferences among Taiwan’s major religious groups and their support for democratic values. His statistics show that Daoists and folk-religion believers tend to support the Democratic Progressive Party (民進黨; DPP) coalition (the “pan-green”) and Christians and Buddhists were divided between the DPP and the Kuomintang (國民黨; KMT) coalition (“pan-blue”). Among Christians, the Presbyterians were strong supporters of pan-green, as were members of the Buddhist Dharma Drum Mountain 法鼓山. Other Christians and Buddhists supported pan-blue, with a surprising level of support coming from the Buddhist Compassion Relief Association (commonly known as Ciji 慈濟). However, after controlling for socio-economic 156 Journal of Chinese Religions status and ethnicity, the statistical co-efficients that support most of these trends are rather low, indeed below the threshold of statistical significance. The numbers are suggestive of trends, but do not constitute solid evidence. As for support for democratic values and democratic behavior, Christians rank first, Buddhists second, Daoists third, and folk religious believers last. Within each of these broad groups, there are significant differences. For example, Presbyterians rank higher on support for democratic values (and also for the DPP) than other Christians; Buddha’s Light Mountain (Foguang shan 佛光山) and the Zhong Tai Temple (Zhongtai chansi 中台禪寺) rank higher than other Buddhist groups on support for democratic values. Again, however, the level of statistical significance for such conclusions is low. The author explains these trends in terms of the theologies and ecclesiologies that he has derived from his qualitative studies. Thus, the Calvinist theology and ecclesiology of the Presbyterian Church supports individualism and self-governance. Buddhist “theology” (a Christian concept applied inappropriately to Buddhist cosmology?) and “ecclesiology” engender communitarian identities and stress obedience in religious matters to monastic authorities—and therefore do not support a commitment to democracy. The same is true for Daoist and Confucian traditions and for folk religious beliefs. This explanation is a useful first attempt to suggest answers to suggestive statistical trends. It will provoke fruitful further thinking and debate. But there is obviously still a lot of theoretical and methodological work to be done before we can reach any adequate account of the influence of Taiwanese religion on Taiwanese politics. For one thing, as Kuo recognizes, there are empirical anomalies within his explanatory scheme. Some Buddhists score fairly high on his indicators of commitment to democracy. He...

Czeslaw Tubilewicz, Taiwan and Post-Communist Europe. Shopping for Allies

This book joins Chen Jie’s Foreign Policy of the New Taiwan: Pragmatic Diplomacy in Southeast Asia (Elgar, 2002) as a leading analysis of the foreign relations of democratic Taiwan . Tubilewicz’s book analyses Taiwan ’s relations with the European nations that had been Communist prior to 1990. Before then, the former dictatorial Kuomintang government had forbade any sort of relations, including trade, with its Communist “enemies,” thus providing a special challenge for a newly democratic Taiw...

The Greening of the Brass: Taiwan's Civil–Military Relations since 20001

Since the Democratic Progressive Party's stunning victory in the 2000 presidential election, Chen Shui-bian has accelerated the process of creating an officer corps without strong party inclination toward the KMT. What is the impact of Taiwan's democratization on its civil–military relations? What is the prospect of transitioning from a party-army to a “national army”? Will the DPP's zealous advocacy for Taiwan's independence be incompatible with the military's long-held belief in “China-centered” nationalism, straining relations between the military and the new administration? The analyses, implications, and conclusions of this study will shed light on the general role of the military in Taiwan's democratic transition and consolidation.

A Reasonable Balance of Law and Sentiment: Social Order in Democratic Taiwan from the Policeman's Point of View

Taiwan's political democratization has engendered a contradiction in its legal regime: consolidation of rule of law at the macro-institutional level is matched by the persistent marginalization of legal authority in ground-level social practices. This article uses an ethnographic study of neighborhood police to explore certain practical and structural elements involved in maintaining this contradictory sociopolitical order. I examine some of the processes through which state authority is invoked and applied to the policing of public space, focusing on the ideals of legitimacy that animate these processes. The argument of the article is that historical and cultural factors embodied in contemporary Taiwan's “idea of police”—exemplified in the trope of a balance between reason, law, and sentiment—are crucial to understanding how solidification of the rule of law within state institutions is kept within the boundaries of a social sensibility that does not take law as the last word.

One Formula, Two Experiences: political divergence of Hong Kong and Macao since retrocession

Since the return of Hong Kong's sovereignty to the People's Republic of China, the territory's political development has diverged from that of Macao. The poverty of leadership, state–society confrontations, deinstitutionalization and Beijing's explicit intervention have marked Hong Kong's political development from 1997 to 2004. Since April 2004, the Hong Kong governing style has converged with that of Macao in terms of its pragmatism. Although Macao's political development is characterized by leadership finesse, state–society partnership and institutionalization, its relatively weak civil society and lack of democratic reforms are by no means an attractive ‘one country, two systems’ model to Taiwan; nor does Hong Kong's ‘one country, two systems’ appeal to the Republic of China. Yet, the political corruption and chaos that punctuate Taiwan's democracy have failed to have any positive demonstration effect on Hong Kong and Macao. While the models of Hong Kong and Macao are bound to diverge from that of Taiwan, political development in the two Chinese Special Administrative Regions is gradually converging.

Classing Ethnicity. Class, Ethnicity, and the Mass Politics of Taiwan's Democratic Transition

Although Taiwan is widely regarded as one of the purest examples of middle-class-driven democratization, this article suggests that the conventional accent on the middle class is misplaced. Instead, the true heroes in the struggle for democracy were the island's working classes, although proper recognition of this fact requires an empirically derived understanding of class that looks beyond formal labor politics. Although the author does not dispute the importance of ethnicity in Taiwanese politics, the findings clearly indicate that ethnic identity was in itself a class issue, as the island's working classes were the most deeply attached to a nativist Taiwanese identity, while members of the middle classes were far more successfully assimilated into the elite “national” culture. The Taiwanese experience thus provides a reminder that many political phenomena apparently framed in ethnic, sectarian terms are in fact undergirded by essentially class-based grievances.

The Effect of Confucian Values on Support for Democracy and Human Rights in Taiwan

Recent years have seen a great deal of interest in the extent to which ”Asian values,” or Confucian ideology, inhibit a country's acceptance of liberal-democratic values. Much of that research, however, focused on the experience of nondemocratic states, concentrated on theory rather than empirical analysis, was written before the complete democratization of Taiwan, and/or created a pan-Confucian-values index instead of estimating the effects of the main components of Confucianism (family loyalty, social hierarchies, and social harmony) individually. In this article, we review theoretical arguments for why Confucian values would decrease public support for democratization, women’s rights, and freedom of speech. We then use OLS and Logit to estimate models of data from the Taiwan subsamples of the 1995 World Values Study and the 2001 East Asia Barometer. Our results indicate that adherence to Confucian values did not consistently undermine public support for liberal democracy in 1995 and even increased support for some liberal-democratic values in 2001. Our findings thus disconfirm previous empirical research on this question. The article concludes by discussing how Confucian and liberal-democratic values might reinforce rather than undermine each other.

Identity, Sovereignty, and Economic Penetration: Beijing's responses to offshore Chinese democracies

Investigating how the PRC responds to democratization in Taiwan and Hong Kong, this paper argues that the Chinese Communist leadership has mainly developed three strategies in managing the complicated crises, including Beijing's own legitimacy crisis and the integration crisis of the Chinese nation, caused by the rise of offshore Chinese democracies. These strategies are: identity politics, sovereignty politics, and economic penetration. With ‘identity politics’, Beijing identifies ‘identification with the Communist leadership’ as the sole Chinese national identification, and utilizes the nationalistic passions of mainland and even overseas Chinese people against democrats in Taiwan and Hong Kong, by labeling the latter as ‘separatists’ or ‘national traitors’. Further, Beijing defines ‘sovereignty’ in a way in which the ‘central’ government monopolizes all possessions of the nation, and excludes ‘people's sovereignty’ from the politics of national reunification or the ‘one country, two systems’ model actualization. While appealing to both ‘soft power’ based in ‘patriotic nationalism’ and ‘hard power’ embedded in national sovereignty, however, the Chinese regime also mobilizes business resources and opportunities provided by China's growing economic power and China's dominance in Greater Chian economic integration for its political purposes of curbing offshore Chinese democracies.

The Strategic Logic of Taiwanization

n Taiwan, since the early 1990s, Taiwanese identity has rapidly supplanted Chinese identity. This has pushed all the main political parties to adopt policies favorable to the new identity, and brought the Democratic Progres sive Party to power. Rising Taiwanese identity has also affected military strategies. It has accelerated the cross-strait arms race by alarm ing Beijing, which in turn has led to an offset ting buildup in Taiwan. It has also strengthened Taiwan's will to retain her independence and, thereby, led to newer, more unconventional defense strategies. One such policy is to enhance the ideological legitimacy of Tai wanese nationalism in the United States and Japan. Another policy is to embrace economic integration with China-a development hitherto seen as threatening. A third policy is to deter a Chinese attack by credibly committing Taiwan and its allies to a more dogged fight to preserve Taiwanese independence, even under condi tions where such a fight seems hopeless. Finally, a strong Taiwanese identity makes it more likely that China's increasing conventional military predominance will ultimately call forth a Tai wanese nuclear deterrent. National identity and political development: A distinctly Taiwanese national identity unfolded rapidly following Taiwan's democratization in the late 1980s. This process can be seen in many areas of Taiwan's culture and politics. Consider the changes over time in the familiar polls asking if people identify themselves as Taiwanese, Chi nese, or both. From 1992 to 2004, those that con sider themselves to be only Taiwanese rose from 17.3 percent in 1992, to around 25 percent in the mid-1990s, to around 40 percent from 1999 to the present; whereas those that self-identify exclusively as Chinese fell from about 26 per cent in the early 1.990s, to around 20 percent in the mid-1990s, to a bit over 10 percent in late 2001, to 6.3 percent in June 2004.1 Since the early 1990s, there has been a corre ponding decline in the fortunes of Taiwan's tra itional rul g party, the Kuomintang (KMT). The KMT, which continued to rule Taiwan after being driven f m the mainland in 1949, long presided over an authoritarian regime commit ted to eunification with China under a noncom

Religious Organizations and Democratization: Case Studies from Contemporary Asia

Preface 1. Introduction: The Roles of Religious Organizations in Asian Democratization, Tun-jen Cheng and Deborah A. Brown 2. The Falun Gong: Religious and Political Implications, Julia Ching 3. "Buddhism for the Human Realm" and Taiwanese Democracy, Andre Laliberte 4. New Karma: Buddhism and Democratization in Thailand, David Ambuel 5. The Presbyterian Church in the Formation of Taiwan's Democratic Society, 1945-2004, Murray A. Rubinstein 6. Christian Churches and Democratization in South Korea, Hyug Baeg Im 7. The Limits of Conservative Church Reformism in the Democratic Philippines, Coeli M. Barry 8. Hong Kong's Catholic Church and the Challenge of Democratization in the SAR, Deborah A. Brown 9. Islam and Democratic Transition in Indonesia, Greg Barton 10. Democracy, the "Islamic State," and Embedded Realities in Malaysia, Patricia Martinez 11. The Soka Gakkai's Critical Role in the Rapidly Changing World of Postwar Japanese Politics, Daniel A. Metraux About the Editors and Contributors Index

Taiwan's Overseas Opposition Movement and Grassroots Diplomacy in the United States: the case of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs

This article examines the advocacy of overseas Taiwanese, particularly those in the United States, and their influence on US foreign policy and subsequently upon democratization in Taiwan. It concentrates particularly on the work of a Taiwanese non-governmental, non-profit advocacy group in the US—the Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA). This article first composes an organizational history of FAPA by investigating the questions and processes of why and how FAPA was formed at the local level in the US. Further, it analyzes how the organization mobilized its relatively modest local resources in the US through grassroots diplomacy to promote Taiwan's visibility in the US, to influence the US government on Taiwan-related issues, and to attempt to impact upon Taiwan's democratization. Through the presentation of FAPA's organizational history, this article ultimately tries to answer the question of whether a non-governmental organization such as FAPA and its grassroots diplomacy has had an impact on US foreign policy and Taiwan's democratization. Besides adding to the existing scholarly literature on the causes of Taiwan's democratization, this study on the formation and effectiveness of FAPA seeks to contribute to studies on NGOs' or non-state actors' grassroots diplomacy and lobbying efforts on governmental policies. Because FAPA functioned as an important diplomatic channel for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Taiwan's first opposition party in the post-World War II era, before it matured into a fully-developed national opposition party in the 1990s and consequently unseated the Kuomintang (KMT) in 2000, this article is also an examination of an opposition movement's informal diplomacy.

My Wild Lily: a self‐criticism from a participant in the March 1990 student movement1

The ‘Wild Lily’ student sit‐in in March 1990 was often praised in the later political transformation process as a crucial moment when the ‘pure and innocent’ students facilitated democratization in Taiwan. From the perspective of a participant in the protest, the author argues that the sit‐in was actually a failure of the ‘popular democratic’ wing of Taiwan's student movement in the 1980s, which championed a more radical vision of democracy. The idea of ‘popular democracy’ was an anti‐elitist ideology arising from critiques on the elite‐led political reform movement. However, due to its historical constraint, practices along this line were unable to alter the bourgeois democratic character of 1980s' democratization process in Taiwan.

National Identity and Democratization in Taiwan

Taiwan is undergoing both a process of nation building and a phase of democratic consolidation, and the experience of divided government at the national level together with Taiwan’s unresolved relationship with China have further complicated matters. The end result of these developments will, therefore, have enormous political consequences both for the island, as well as for the peace and stability of eastern Asia. This special issue aims to examine two separate, but closely related, issues: the effects of an emerging national identity in Taiwan and the consequences of the island’s rapid democratization. This introduction summarizes the key arguments of this collection of articles.

Re-Making the Developmental State in Taiwan: The Challenges of Biotechnology

Taiwan has embarked on a new post-industrial or post-manufacturing industrial trajectory, targeting specifically biotechnology and the bio-business sector. Technological innovation has become the key imperative in Taiwan’s continued economic transformation. This transition invites a rethinking of the East Asian developmental state model and in particular the state’s role in leading knowledge-intensive industrial development. The article first offers a framework of analysis for the post-industrial developmental state, followed by an overview of the emerging biotechnology sector in Taiwan. The bulk of the article examines different political, economic and social challenges faced by the developmentally oriented state. The concluding section discusses how the interventionist state has begun to adapt in post-industrial and democratic Taiwan.

Terminating Taiwan's Fourth Nuclear Power Plant under the Chen Shui‐bian Administration

AbstractThis article integrates the termination literature with the Punctuated‐Equilibrium (P‐E) model of policy change into a broader framework of policy termination to examine the Chen Shui‐bian administration's abrupt decision to terminate Taiwan's fourth nuclear power plant (FNPP) as well as to explore the evolution of agenda‐setting for the FNPP's termination over a decade. The termination of the FNPP may be viewed as a result of interactions among the nuclear policy image, the institutional venue, and the political or policy strategy over time, as indicated in the integrated framework. Nevertheless, changing nuclear policy image is not sufficient to automatically change the institutional venue in the process of Taiwan's transition from an authoritarian regime to a pluralist political system. Before venue shopping for policy termination, antinuclear activists had to ally with the Democratic Progressive Party to struggle for opening up Taiwan's political institutions along with Taiwan's democratization. On the other hand, as a consequence of Taiwan's recent democratization, antinuclear activists were unsuccessful in terminating the FNPP in the absence of sufficient political resources, notwithstanding a major venue change from the Kuomintang (KMT) government to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government under President Chen's leadership. Furthermore, besides domestic venues, international institutions also appear to be important to the creation and maintenance of the nuclear policy system, as well as to the dramatic reversal of the Chen administration's termination decision in this case.

Book Review: Chen Jian-Ren, Liberal Democratization in Taiwan: A Historical Analysis (in Japanese)

Book Review: Chen Jian-Ren, <i>Liberal Democratization in Taiwan: A Historical Analysis</i> (in Japanese)

Taiwan's Identity Challenge

Taiwan's geo-strategic position and its domestic political development have been in conflict throughout its modern, post-Chinese civil war history. Taiwan's geo-strategic position, defined by its oppositional relationship to China, has ensured that Taiwan and the cross-strait relations have remained a global flash point for close to 60 years. For the first 40 years, Taiwan's goal to reclaim China has underpinned the authoritarian Kuomintang party-state and its domestic program of enforced Sinification. Since the end of the Cold War, Taiwan's democratization has fundamentally changed Taiwan's political identity and unleashed an irreversible nation-building process. Taiwan's nation-building is moving the country away from reunification with a rising China. Unfortunately, this decision compromises its already vulnerable geo-strategic position and external support.

Understanding Taiwan Independence and Its Policy Implications

Taiwan's democratization has placed Taiwan independence as one of the most important issues for its domestic politics and for the security balance in the Taiwan Strait. Surveys have been conducted regularly to track shifts in Taiwanese public sentiment on this issue. This article presents a new measure of the Taiwan independence issue and shows how voters' preferences can be influenced.