From the Sunflower Movement to national referendums to indigenous rights, participatory budgeting and the recall of former Kaohsiung mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), active and vibrant civil participation has continuously made an impact on the government’s policies in the past decade.
In political science terms, this is called “deliberative democracy,” where political decisions are made according to fair and informed discussions between the stakeholders involved. It doesn’t always work as it should, but at least it gives citizens an opportunity to engage in policymaking beyond just participating in elections.
Author Fan Mei-fang (范玫芳), professor at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University and researcher at National Taiwan University’s Risk Society and Policy Research Center (風險社會與政策研究中心), offers much insight into the multifaceted and complex development of deliberative democracy in Taiwan, showing how the country can serve as a model for such governance. As one of the few free and open societies in Asia, the nation is indeed quite a unique case, and more countries should learn about how its vibrant civil society actually gets to make a difference.
However, the book is filled with political theory and academic terms, and the prose is quite dry and impersonal even in the qualitative sections. It will mostly appeal to democracy scholars or those with a deep interest in Taiwan.
For those who decide to tackle the text, however, it is very thorough and systematic and does a good job explaining the various mechanisms and platforms that deliberative democracy manifests in Taiwan and its significance toward creating a more equal and open society. Fan provides an elucidating overview of a topic that most people otherwise hear about through individual events or academic specializations, though the reader must already be well-versed in Taiwanese politics and recent history.
Fan appears to be quite active in the field. She has worked on the nation’s nuclear waste issue for more than a decade, and helped conduct a citizen conference on the issue in 2010. She is also on the steering committee of various deliberative forums such as the national electronic identification cards (eID) open policy workshop as well as the Taipei City participatory budgeting government-academia alliance. She has worked with public budgeting district offices and helped train graduate students to serve as facilitators in resident assemblies.
Fan spent five months in 2018 at the Center for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra in Australia, and the book draws significantly from the work of the institute’s lead professor, John Dryzek.
Dryzek writes in the foreword that “it is rare indeed that anyone takes on a whole country in deliberative system terms,” adding that to his knowledge, Fan’s work is the “first book-length treatment that interprets the whole political system of a country as a potentially deliberative system.”
While some of Taiwan’s innovations are drawn from the West, others, such as the Citizen Congress Watch, are original innovations that the nation should get more recognition for.
“There is much that the world can and should learn from Taiwan when it comes to deliberative democratic possibilities,” Dryzek writes.
These possibilities emerge and take shape in myriad ways, starting from the consensus conferences on national health insurance in 2002 to digital democracy, which the current government has embraced. The common thread is that people’s voices are heard and actually considered, and the government is held more accountable for their actions and pushed toward institutional reform and transformation.
The first part of the book provides a comprehensive overview of the common themes and development of deliberative democracy in Taiwan, while the second part closely examines three case studies where civic engagement made a difference: the nuclear waste storage issue, the Asia Cement Corp (亞洲水泥) versus indigenous land rights controversy and the Taipei City Government’s active participatory budgeting initiative.
Throughout the book, Fan delves into complex interactions between various groups that go beyond the simple citizen participation. Deliberative efforts are made on multiple levels in varying scales in these case studies, and it’s not an easy task to contextualize and summarize them in a meaningful way. Fan is able to do this and that’s what makes the book worth a look.
Although Fan points out various flaws and problems, one can’t help but feel that the book still paints quite a rosy picture of the nation’s political process. Taiwan’s achievements in its democracy and open society should be lauded, but things are far from perfect and it would have been interesting to see more criticism in areas where the government isn’t doing well.
Also, the book focuses on the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) or third party efforts, noting that deliberative democracy declined when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) took power in 2008 (although they still had to rely on it).
This reviewer would be curious to learn more about this shift and how to install safeguards to prevent such a drop from happening again.
In the next few months tough decisions will need to be made by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and their pan-blue allies in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It will reveal just how real their alliance is with actual power at stake. Party founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) faced these tough questions, which we explored in part one of this series, “Ko Wen-je, the KMT’s prickly ally,” (Aug. 16, page 12). Ko was open to cooperation, but on his terms. He openly fretted about being “swallowed up” by the KMT, and was keenly aware of the experience of the People’s First Party
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
Standing on top of a small mountain, Kim Seung-ho gazes out over an expanse of paddy fields glowing in their autumn gold, the ripening grains swaying gently in the wind. In the distance, North Korea stretches beyond the horizon. “It’s so peaceful,” says the director of the DMZ Ecology Research Institute. “Over there, it used to be an artillery range, but since they stopped firing, the nature has become so beautiful.” The land before him is the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, a strip of land that runs across the Korean peninsula, dividing North and South Korea roughly along the 38th parallel north. This