Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has put the party’s 10-year policy guidelines at the center of her presidential campaign. Tsai is Taiwan’s first female presidential candidate and one expects the platform to reflect a woman’s perspective on the issues it seeks to address.
This is not to say that the female and the male approaches are entirely mutually exclusive or that the two stand in opposition to one another. Rather, it is to say that a woman can bring a fresh perspective to the discourse, with a woman’s concerns, experience and standpoint, and a willingness to put these into practice. For example, a female politician can approach the prevailing male monopoly on a range of issues that touch upon matters of state-to-state war and peace — from national security, national defense and military affairs, to diplomacy and national sovereignty — from a more emotionally engaged, more altruistic and softer stance than her male counterparts.
In addition, female politicians tend to be more concerned with matters above and beyond the aforementioned so-called high-level political issues, extending their focus to include lower-level political matters, such as economic development, social movements and environmental protection.
In particular, the mainstream discourse on national development, seen from the perhaps typically male perspective of economic rationalism, tends to ignore women’s activity in the private sphere — including unpaid labor, such as bringing up a family and taking care of the home — and the contributions such activity makes to society as a whole. Furthermore, in terms of the economic division of labor under globalization, capitalists have come to rely on cheap female labor as their preferred strategy to drive costs down, often disregarding the working conditions and workplace safety of female workers.
Female politicians are more likely to be sensitive to such issues and indeed have a duty and a responsibility to address them.
Taiwan’s female politicians might also be able to approach two major issues from a wider perspective: There is the cross-strait issue and the deconstruction of the myth of the centrality of the state, breaking down the distinctions between international and domestic, the public and private spheres, and the state and the market. The public needs to be made aware that there are more solutions to the cross-strait issue than the purely pragmatic and that this approach can be replaced by ideals such as social justice, human rights and humanistic concerns, using a bottom-up rather than top-down approach.
There is also the question of how to approach the inherent tensions between globalization and localization, initially with an exploration of the underlying social inequalities — of gender, class and ethnicity — behind economic growth and how those inequalities can be addressed within the context of the globalized market to ensure that the economic benefits are more fairly distributed.
In terms of globalization, a woman’s perspective can bring back an identification with the local, a return to local values, promoting the implementation of globalized ideas in local areas to reinvigorate local economies, protect local ecologies and ensure sustainable development.
Whether seeking a fresh definition of cross-strait relations or a new way to approach globalization, we have great expectations of the potential of Taiwan’s first female presidential candidate.
Lee Cheng-hung is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at National Sun Yat-sen University. Yu Chia-che is an assistant professor at Cheng Shiu University.
Translated by Paul Cooper
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry