Two years ago, at the conclusion of a trip to Shanghai, I was on my way to Hongqiao airport when I passed a road sign that symbolized prosperity and modernization. I saw an enormous signboard arching across the wide road. Just a few large characters were written above -- "
This English is worth translating back into Chinese because it has another layer of meaning that the original Chinese lacks. The English sentence literally means, "development is the argument that can't be refuted." But all arguments are supposed to be refutable. An argument that can't be refuted isn't an argument; it is dogma. I discuss this bilingual slogan not out of an interest in translation, but rather because this example can serve as a prelude to discussion about the topic of development and freedom.
"Irrefutability" doesn't mean that counter-arguments don't exist. It means they aren't permitted, and this spirit of not permitting counter-arguments symbolizes the loss of civil rights and the lack of basic freedoms in China's society. The control of public debate and the closure of avenues to participation in public-policy making also symbolize a policy-making system that only emphasizes development and doesn't take freedom seriously. This policy-making system tells people that the policies from above can only be correct.
No wonder T. H. Huxley, in his essay The Coming of Age of `The Origin of Species,' said, "it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions." As long as "the hard principle of development" is a superstition that can't be refuted (of course, we shouldn't forget that the "hard principle" of linking up with world markets was once considered imperialist heresy), development that lacks freedom won't be viable in the long term.
"Without basic freedoms, what is the point of develop-ment?" This is the basic question asked by the 1998 Nobel laureate in economics, Amartya Sen, in his book Development as Freedom, which was based on a series of lectures he gave at the World Bank. His primary argument in this book is that the expansion of freedom should be viewed both as the primary end and the principal means of development. He says, "Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency." This is altogether a new way of evaluating development.
Sen goes on to say, "Focusing on human freedoms contrasts with narrower views of development, such as identifying development with the growth of gross national product, or with the rise in personal incomes." If we took freedom as the goal of development when evaluating development results and making development policy, Sen believes, many societies would enjoy better development, and even more importantly, more people would benefit from the outcomes of development.
From Sen's point of view, freedom can be measured as the presence of the following societal arrangements: political freedoms (in the form of elections, political parties, public discussion forums and a free press), social opportunities (in the form of education and health care), and economic opportunities (in the form of economic security, the freedom to work, trade and consume).
Shifting the focus back from Hongqiao airport to Taiwan, the nation's focus has recently been centered on the meetings of the cross-party Economic Development Advisory Conference. This is supposed to be a public apparatus that deals with development issues. Examining the agendas and statements of those attending, we can see that the thinking patterns of the political, academic and business representatives regarding economic development are still mired in fantasies about the economic growth rate -- regardless of whether one is speaking of the goal or tools of development.
A development path designed in its narrowest sense has brought Taiwan a number of serious "development problems" such as the growing disparity of wealth, the powerlessness of workers to take collective action, continued pollution of the environment, and the gap between mobile capital and relatively immobile workers. These problems seem to have disappeared entirely from the scope of discussion in these meetings. As a result, we see nothing but the entertaining of capitalist points of view.
For example, to solve the problem of rising unemployment, conference members have fixed their eyes on amending the Labor Standards Law (勞基法) to downscale the protection of workers. They have not thought about how to further build Taiwan's development by raising the competitiveness of the great majority of workers who have no way to leave.
Robert Reich, who served as US secretary of labor for one term under Bill Clinton's admin-istration, responded to the unemployment problem in the late 1980s and early 1990s during the worst recession to hit the country since World War II. The idea he raised was that the interests of the US lay in attracting investment from around the world with the high quality of US workers. He argued that the interests of the country shouldn't be focused on winning over those businesses that would leave as soon as there was relative advantage in another country.
His famous statement was, "Who is us? The answer lies in the only aspect of a national economy that is relatively immobile internationally: the American work force, the American people. The real economic challenge facing the US in the years ahead -- and every other nation -- is to increase the potential value of what its citizens can add to the global economy, by enhancing their skills and capacities and by improving their means of linking those skills and capacities to the world market."
Reich's view corresponds to what Sen regards as the goal of development, that is, to safeguard and expand individual capacities to act.
The real crisis faced by Taiwan today probably isn't the fading of "collective social consciousness" as some have suggested (many people use this term to refer to Taiwanese identity). The crisis stems from the fact that the nation's political and economic elite has failed to see that the aim of development should be to enhance the well-being of the vast majority of people, and that we should not just fix our eyes on increasing the wealth of society. And this great majority of people, regardless of their views about unification or independence, constitute and will continue to constitute the national economy. The source of their collective social consciousness isn't necessarily just unification or independence ideology. The non-ideological source of people's identity is their affiliation with a society which provides opportunities of all sorts, political freedom and economic security. And only this kind of social identity will serve the people of Taiwan in the long term. Otherwise, even if Taiwan really becomes an independent country, the quality and content of the society may not be anything worth anticipating eagerly.
The civic consciousness formed by Taiwan's progress in freedom and democracy during the last 10 years is the real fruit of development that can serve as a basis for competing with China to win people's hearts.
How will Taiwan ensure that its citizens identify with their society in these respects? The best way is by continuing to develop social conditions for freedom and democracy and forming public-policy making processes with greater popular participation -- for example, establishing a wider framework for development so that the problems faced by more social classes can be taken into consideration as a whole. These are the areas where Taiwan still has advantages relative to Chinese society, which operates on the logic of development being an "irrefutable argument."
Tseng Yen-fen is an associate professor in the department of sociology at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Ethan Harkness
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