During the parliamentary election in the UK last year, an old doctor friend stood as a candidate for the small Green Party. I noticed on Facebook that he was planning a meeting in a room that seated 90 people, and “hoped that every seat would be filled.” I immediately wrote to him saying that what he should be doing was staging a rally with thousands of supporters bused in, banners handed out, bands playing, a pop group for the young, and him in a green suit lit by a green spotlight. He carried on with his cozy little meeting, however, and on election day came next to last, gaining some 2 percent of the vote. The difference between his electoral style and the one I was proposing was of course that I, unlike him, had experienced Taiwanese politics.
And indeed the title of this book, Politicized Society, refers to the author’s perception when first arriving of the deeply passionate nature of Taiwanese political life. Whereas in Europe, including in his native Scandinavia, enthusiasm for politics had noticeably waned, in Taiwan it was at a fever-pitch.
The fundamental pro-Taiwan and pro-China dichotomy was only the start of it. He observed many other areas of dispute, including in Tainan where Mattlin concentrated his researches. But the dedication was everywhere extraordinary. Where else in the world could there be organized a hand-in-hand chain of people stretching the length of the country, 486km, as was done in 2004?
This is an unexpected work, coming as it does from a Finnish author, and published by Denmark’s Nordic Institute of Asian Studies. Mikael Mattlin, a fluent Chinese-speaker, describes how he flew to Taiwan in order to do research for a Master’s thesis at the University of Helsinki, then expanded what he’d experienced into a PhD, and finally making it into this book.
The subject was initially how, in the first decade of this century, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) managed to perpetuate its power and influence under the old one-party system into the nation’s democratic era.
Even after the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) surprise victory in the 2000 presidential election, the KMT continued to have a disproportionate hold on power. It exercised this through its numerical superiority in the legislature, vote-buying, co-opting local elites with political favors and perks, maintaining traditional loyalties throughout much of the military and security services and giving public servants material benefits such as pensions, to name a few.
All these were in the power of the KMT to bestow, and they stood at the time in the way of the establishment of a true level playing-field in Taiwanese politics.
But Politicized Society contains a great deal more than this. In fact, it is in many ways a detailed political history of Taiwan over the eight years of the Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) presidency. Mattlin doesn’t say how long he spent in Taiwan, but he was clearly here for the presidential elections of 2000, 2004 and 2008, all of which he describes in some detail.
One of the most extraordinary things to strike this reviewer was how often the Taipei Times is cited. I counted 80 citations in all, stretching from the earliest days of the newspaper. My conclusion is that he must have scrutinized every single issue. No other publication gets anything approaching the same amount of attention.
It wouldn’t be true to say that his is a partisan approach. It is the case, though, that the alleged misdeeds for which Chen was eventually imprisoned get scant coverage, and that even the incident when he and Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) were victims of an endlessly debated apparent assassination attempt the day before the 2004 presidential election is treated only as evidence of the theatrical nature of Taiwanese political life.
But Mattlin isn’t one for rhetorical flourishes or excessive local color. This is essentially a sober and statistically supported account of the ins and outs of Taiwanese political life, written primarily for the benefit of outsiders and, needless to say, his fellow academics.
Even so, some topics stand out. The saga of the continuation or abandonment of the construction of the nation’s fourth nuclear power station makes, for example, gripping reading. So do the maneuverings in the legislature, where the KMT found it so easy to block any part of the ruling DPP’s program. It’s difficult now to recall that during the eight years of Chen’s presidency the DPP plus its allies didn’t command a majority there for a single day.
Many details stick in the mind, such as Mattlin’s reference to the state of cross-strait relations as “the ambiguous status quo,” his insistence on the high cost of electioneering (he estimates NT$100 million is needed for a seat in the legislature), and the existence of a tradition of “scholar-officials” (academics who go into politics) that can be traced back to imperial times in China. At one point he states that Taiwan’s is “possibly the most educated cabinet in the world.”
Also very interesting is his citing of the case of DPP legislator Lin I-hsiung (林義雄) whose “mother and twin daughters were killed in 1980, probably by security personnel, on the politically sensitive date of 28 February.” Nevertheless, he insists that serious political violence in Taiwan is rare, unlike Thailand, the Philippines or India.
It’s impossible to do justice to everything Mattlin covers in this book, to the “watermelon effect,” whereby opportunistic candidates switch parties, especially in the lower levels of government, to the culture of referendums held in conjunction with legislative and presidential elections, or to Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) “subtly undermining” the KMT’s hold on power during the last years of his presidency.
This is all in all an optimistic book, not least perhaps in its assertion that Taiwan’s political development may be “the best empirical looking glass we have into the political future of the People’s Republic of China.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby