President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) inaugural address outlined a complete list of reformist aims under five rubrics: transforming the nation’s economic structure; improving the social security net; addressing new issues of social fairness and justice; improving regional peace and stability and cross-strait relations; and fulfilling Taiwan’s duty as a “citizen of the world” by taking up key diplomatic and global issues.
Such concerns are not surprising from the new president as leader of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and they allowed Tsai to itemize a range of policy issues to be addressed in the next few years.
The more explicit of these include immediate initiatives to improve youth employment and incomes, development of a “New Southbound Policy” intended to reduce the commercial weight of trade and investment links with China, nomination of five industries for high-tech refurbishment through innovation, a more general improvement of labor productivity, and reforms of pensions and social welfare.
Tsai missed some opportunities to render such wish-list aims into more integrated planning.
For example, under the heading of environmental improvements appear such items as better land-use planning and balanced regional development, a perfect place to relate economic policy to Aboriginal welfare and culture issues and to show a degree of joined-up tactical thinking. Such opportunities have not been taken. Yet as I state below, the whole issue of Aboriginal policy must be placed in a bigger political economy framework if Tsai’s main agenda is to make policy sense in the longer run.
The major ingredients of “identity politics” were the less visible components within the composition of the address. Yet they might be the most important in setting a political framework for the policy package as it develops.
Tsai, from the outset, emphasized that the new phase of Taiwanese politics would center upon “the defense of our freedom and democracy as a way of life.”
The basis for this is the recent history of the nation, wherein “each and every one of us participated in this journey,” emphasizing the profound power in this particular corner of East Asia of “blossoming democratic institutions” and “the peaceful electoral process.”
Within the 3,655 words that Tsai allowed herself, there is a clever juxtaposition of the list of explicit aims or intentions with a more implicit indication of a future stance on matters of national identity, clearly meant as an indicator for China and other foreign observers. With its obvious implications, the address uses the word “Taiwan” 45 times, and refers to the Republic of China only five times, in each case as a proper compound noun, for example, Republic of China Constitution.
In her use of the term “country” for Taiwan (24 times), Tsai associates frequent use of “this country” with the notion of a “better country” infused with democracy.
The terms “democracy” and “democratic” are used 20 times in the address, and alongside use of associated terms such as “citizen” (10 times) and “international” (five times, with “international community” used twice), cleverly impressing upon the listener or reader the identity of Taiwan as an independent nation defined by democracy and democratic institutions, inclusiveness among all citizens, fairness and successful economic growth and commercial relations within a firmly international context.
Thus, even though Tsai also emphasizes the nation’s problems of youth unemployment, educational rigidity, growing disparities of income and wealth, an aging population, environmental pollution and loss of trust in the judicial system, she does so within a context of identity politics that points toward ultimate success in development potential, internationalism and openness to new ideas and technologies, a spirit of adventure and a willingness to sacrifice the misadventures of the recent past for the potential of the near future.
However, of even greater significance, the address makes it clear that the issue of national identity is now to involve a dual emphasis and interrelationship of policies toward Aborigines and policies toward China.
Rather than indigenous affairs being an ad hoc and marginal feature of social or cultural policy, it is to move center stage, as Tsai’s key notions of “the entire nation” and fairness require that policy should better monitor and improve the social and economic relations between Aborigines and a majority Chinese population.
Policy toward Aborigines can no longer be presumed as cultural protection of outsiders who are within Taiwan. Aboriginal policy must now be central to a political economy that has a firm identity, and it can only be a political bonus that Aboriginal ethnicity cannot be defined in any way as Chinese in origin.
Again, the “Straits question,” or relations with China, can no longer be seen as purely mechanistic, economic or political, but deeply embedded culturally in the developing crisis of identity among Taiwanese of many backgrounds, ethnic or otherwise. It can no longer be dismissed in artificial appeals to “the concensus” or other spurious formulae designed to hide abiding contradictions.
Rather than confrontational on either front — Aborigines or Chinese — Tsai and the DPP might do well to separate the genuine nuances from the clear contradictions in both these policy areas and develop clear public trajectories regarding both. Against this background, it might then be possible to settle down to a democratic regime that is mature enough to actually address in specific policy the many other worthy aims of her inaugural address.
This means that Tsai must surely need to face the tensions that might arise with her central notion of forgetting or reinventing the past.
She said the new sweep requires that “from here on out, history will no longer divide Taiwan. Instead it will propel Taiwan forward… The two governing parties across the [Taiwan] Strait must set aside the baggage of history and engage in positive dialogue for the benefit of people on both sides.”
Analyzing this statement, one might conclude that Tsai’s new identity politics involves dramatic reviewing of emotional histories on possibly the three major elements of Taiwanese political culture: The historical relations between pre-1949 Taiwanese and Chinese who arrived with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), and the associated long period wherein Chinese institutions and people were favored within the justice and redistributive systems; the historical relations between China and Taiwan since at least 1949, but ones that were incubated and nurtured long before then; and the historical relations between all Taiwanese who arrived from China from the 17th century and Aborigines who in small numbers flourished on the island long before that time.
There is nothing less than profound among any of these three historical issues, ones that act mundanely and daily throughout the political life of the nation.
If Tsai can mobilize her own party and the goodwill of all others to really address these elements and develop policy packages to ensure progressive change over the next four to eight years, then she and her governments would replace all previous Taiwanese governments as the most innovative and important since written records began.
Ian Inkster is a professorial research associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS, University of London and editor of the international journal History of Technology.
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