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English Pages 250 [251] Year 2018
Reimagining Nation and Nationalism in Multicultural East Asia
Since the late 1980s, many East Asian countries have become more multicultural, a process marked by increased democracy and pluralism despite the continuing influence of nationalism, which has forced these countries in the region to re-envision their nations. Many such countries have had to reconsider their constitutional make-up, their terms of citizenship, and the ideal of social harmony. This has resulted in new immigration and border-control policies and the revisiting of laws regarding labor policies, sociopolitical discrimination, and socioeconomic welfare. This book explores new perspectives, concepts, and theories that are socially relevant, culturally suitable, and normatively attractive in the East Asia context. It not only outlines the particular experiences of nation, citizenship, and nationalism in East Asian countries but also places them within the wider theoretical context. The contributors look at how nationalism under the force of multiculturalism, or vice versa, affects East Asian societies including China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong differently. The key themes are: • • • • •
democracy and equality; Confucianism’s relationship with nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and multi culturalism; China’s use of its political institutions to initiate and sustain nationalism; the impact of globalization on nationalism in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan; the role of democracy in reinvigorating indigenous cultures in Taiwan.
Sungmoon Kim is Professor of Political Theory at the Department of Public Policy of the City University of Hong Kong. Hsin-Wen Lee is Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Delaware.
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Reimagining Nation and Nationalism in Multicultural East Asia Edited by Sungmoon Kim and Hsin-Wen Lee
First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Sungmoon Kim and Hsin wen Lee; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sungmoon Kim and Hsin-Wen Lee to be identified as the authors of the editorial matter, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 9781138896345 (hbk) ISBN: 9781315179216 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents
Notes on contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: nationalism in East Asia and East Asian multiculturalism
vii viii
1
S u N g M O O N K I M A N d H S I N - w e N L e e
PART I
Nationalism, democracy, and equality 1 Nationalism’s grip on democracy: good news and bad
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BERNARD YACK
2 In the name of equality: an examination of equality arguments for national self-government
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H S I N - w e N L e e
PART II
Confucianism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism 3 Nationalist Guo, cosmopolitan Tianxia? Possibility of world order based on Confucian relational ethics
57 59
S O R - H O O N T A N
4 Confucian nation? A perfectionist justification in a pluralist society SuNgMOON KIM
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Contents
PART III
State-initiated ethnic nationalism 5 A review of contemporary Chinese nationalism: theories, features, and facets
103 105
eRIC K. M. CHONg
6 From residency to citizenship: Chinese nationalism and changing criteria for political and legal interpretations of Hong Kong identity in the post-1997 era
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LOReTTA e. KIM
PART IV
Globalization, neoliberalism, and nationalism 7 Developmental multiculturalism and articulation of Korean nationalism in the age of diversity
141 143
N O R A H u I - J u N g K I M
8 On the black tide: a historical and politico-economic analysis of Taiwanese nationalism and the Sunflower movement
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R w e I - R e N w u
9 Japanese nationalism under globalization: toward an earthly universalism
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TAKAHIRO NAKAJIMA
PART V
Democracy and indigenous cultures in Taiwan
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10 Art-iculating the nation and its struggles: Pangcah as a case of indigenous movement in Taiwan
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S H u N - L I N g C H e N
11 Social justice and language policy in Taiwan
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ALAN PATTEN
Index
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Contributors
Shun-Ling Chen is an Assistant Research Professor at the Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Eric K. M. Chong is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Sciences, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Loretta E. Kim is an Assistant Professor of China Studies at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Nora Hui-Jung Kim is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Mary Washington, USA. Sungmoon Kim is a Professor of Political Theory at the Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Hsin-Wen Lee is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Delaware, USA. Takahiro Nakajima is Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo, Japan. Alan Patten is a Professor of Politics at Princeton University, USA. Sor-hoon Tan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Rwei-Ren Wu is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Taiwan History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Bernard Yack is Professor at the Department of Politics, Brandeis University, USA.
Acknowledgments
Several chapters in this volume were originally presented at the conference entitled “Reimaging Nation and Nationalism in Multicultural East Asia” held at the City university of Hong Kong in November 2014. The conference was fully funded by the Conference and Seminar Grant from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly exchange (grant Number: CS006P 13). The editors are grateful for the CCKF ’s generous support. The editors would also like to express their deepest gratitude to Philip J. Ivanhoe, director of the Center for east Asian and Comparative Philosophy (CeACOP) at the City University of Hong Kong for his initial encouragement of and full support for this book pro ect, without which this book would not have seen the light of day. Finally, the editors would like to thank Miss Ellen Yan, senior research associate at CeAOP, for her assistance in the course of organizing the conference as well as preparing this volume. This pro ect was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies grant funded by the Korean government (MeST) (AKS 2011AAA 2102).
Introduction Nationalism in East Asia and East Asian multiculturalism Sungmoon Kim and Hsin-Wen Lee
National identity and attachment to national culture have taken root even in this era of globalization. National sentiments find expression in multiple political spheres and sometimes cause troubles of various kinds, both domestically and across state borders. Some of these troubles are rooted in history; others are the inevitable side-effects of recent globalization. Nations in East Asia—China, Japan, and Korea in particular—have a complex history of disharmony, clash, and strategic cooperation. National groups inside today’s China—Han, Manchu, Mongol, Tibet, Uyghur, to name only a few—have a long history of mutual war and aggression. After World War II (WWII), in their effort to gather popular support, a number of Japanese political leaders paid visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, where the spirits of 14 Class A war criminals from WWII are honored with a distinguished resting place. This move always receives wide media coverage and results in raucous protests in former Japanese colonies, including China, South Korea, and Taiwan. In China, the Beijing government’s effort to bring economic prosperity to Xinjiang province has only exacerbated the ethnic conflict between Han Chinese and local Uyghur Muslims. Tibetans’ determination to pursue a free and autonomous Tibet has never waned and even at this very moment many Tibetans are risking their lives in their sometimes selfimmolating protest against the Chinese government. Yet, the seemingly unstoppable force of globalization is bringing to already dynamic East Asian national, international, and multinational politics an additional source of contentious politics. Under the staggering pressure of globalization, especially after the 1997 financial crisis, states in East Asia have opted for pick-and-choose policies, investing much of their national resources in the industries they deemed the most competitive in the global market. However, the other side of this maneuver has been the fundamental reconstruction of the business sector, resulting in the closing-down of many industries that are not globally competitive. The devastating impact of globalization is nowhere more visible or salient than in the labor market; today, tens and thousands of the young people, many of them college graduates, in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are being forced to make a choice of either staying in their home country and taking a job that they otherwise would not choose if they had any real choice or leaving home to find a better job. At the same time, however,
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resulting labor shortages in the so-called “3D industries”—industries that involve difficult, dirty, and dangerous works—are being filled by less-well-to-do citizens from Southeast Asia who are similarly looking for better, at least better paying, jobs in the societies of their more affluent neighbors. The increasing influx of the migrant workers from Southeast Asia in the past two decades has had a critical impact on the ethnic and cultural make-up of several countries in the East Asian region, creating new political circumstances of “multiculturalism” in quite a different sense than the term is understood in Europe and North America, where the political theory of multiculturalism originated. What makes the situation much more complicated is that, while ushering in a new politics of multiculturalism, globalization is simultaneously intensifying national sentiment as nations in the region feel threatened by external economic pressures, which sometimes require a radical transformation of the whole structure of the society. Eric Hobsbawm argues that nationalism is a contingent phenomenon in history—as it arose with important historical events such as industrialization and print journalism, it will eventually disappear.1 Anthony Smith, on the other hand, argues that nationalism is deeply rooted in the human need for collective faith and dignity and will endure as long as human nature remains the same.2 How should we understand nation and nationalism in today’s East Asia in its old and new multicultural contexts? Is nationalism a transient phenomenon that will be overcome eventually? Or will it remain, only to be transmogrified into a new version in engagement with new multicultural demands and societal conditions? New multicultural circumstances have forced the countries in the region, where the majority of citizens still subscribe to the myth of an ethno-culturally homogeneous nation, to re-envision their nation, rethink the constitutional make-up of their citizenship and the ideal of social harmony, and as a result come up with new immigration and border-control policies by revisiting their laws regarding labor policies, sociopolitical discrimination, and socioeconomic welfare. Nevertheless, contemporary theoretical analyses of the phenomena surrounding nationalism and multiculturalism, in all their forms, whether philosophical or empirical, are almost exclusively focused on cases based in Western cultures and societies; admittedly this has caused a deplorable gap between (Western) theory and (East Asian) practice of nationalism and multiculturalism, preventing East Asian peoples from making coherent sense of who they are or who they want to become as self-governing political communities, especially in critical conversation with their deeply held values and norms (such as Confucianism) in the era of globalization and in the face of the double forces of multiculturalism and nationalism, as both a reaction to and an incubator of the former.3 The primary aim of this volume is to address this ongoing neglect in studies of nationalism and multiculturalism and explore new perspectives, concepts, and theories that are socially relevant, culturally suitable, and normatively attractive in the East Asian context.4 This book will not only provide access to the particular experiences of nation, citizenship, and nationalism in East Asia countries
Introduction
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but also bring to bear philosophical concepts, approaches, and styles of reasoning about them that currently are not part of critical debates on the subject. Providing an opportunity to hear these distinct and different East Asian voices and opening up these conceptual and methodological resources to readers around the world will greatly advance the understanding and appreciation of nationalism in multicultural East Asia, which is increasingly democratic, pluralist, and globalizing.5 In addition, this book aims to achieve two other novel and important goals. First, in terms of approach, it will bring to bear a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach to the problems of nationalism and multiculturalism. Rather than privileging either philosophical or empirical studies, it brings together scholars working in various academic disciplines such as philosophy, political science, sociology, and history, and as a single project engages the topic from multidimensional and thus holistic perspectives. In this way, this book attempts to overcome academic parochialism—a tendency often found among scholars who use concepts and develop theories in ways only intelligible to those trained in their chosen academic discipline—which currently stands in the way of a more expanded understanding of the theory and practice of nationalism and multiculturalism. The second important feature of this volume is that by bringing scholars from a variety of East Asian countries (China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in particular) to the same forum, it attempts to go beyond a nationally bounded experience of nationalism and multiculturalism and promote an enlarged and comparatively informed understanding of these phenomena.6 Along with our primary goal of introducing East Asian voices and theories, these two strategies of intersecting between philosophical and empirical approaches and overcoming academic and national parochialism make this book original and distinctive in value. Our age is one in which people of different cultural backgrounds must inevitably live together in many different places. For the sake of justice and stability, a comprehensive re-examination of nationalism from the perspective of multiculturalism and vice versa is both urgent and necessary. Such an examination is especially incumbent in East Asia where a new politics of multiculturalism unfolds without superseding nationalism, often reformulating nationalism in a distinctive way. In this volume, the contributors consider the recent unfolding of nationalism in multicultural East Asia (or multiculturalism in nationalistic East Asia) and look at how nationalism under the force of multiculturalism, or vice versa, affects East Asian societies including China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong differently. The volume is organized into different parts along the following themes. Part I considers how nationalism is related to two important principles in contemporary political philosophy—democracy and equality. Part II considers how Confucianism, the most dominant political philosophical tradition and cultural system in East Asia, can come to terms with nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism in rapidly changing and increasingly pluralist East Asia. Part III examines how China has used political institutions to initiate as well as sustain
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various forms of nationalist projects in the mainland and in Hong Kong. Part IV examines how globalization has reinforced nationalist sentiments in the past two decades and given rise to unique modes of multiculturalism in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan in ways compatible with nationalism, creating what can be called “national multiculturalism” or “multiculturalist nationalism.” Finally, Part V considers how the development of democracy has helped to reinvigorate indigenous cultures and reshaped multicultural national identity in Taiwan and how multicultural language policy can be morally justified in Taiwan’s democratic context with a view to the value of equality.
Part I: nationalism, democracy, and equality In Part I, we begin by considering two general theoretical issues about nationalism. While the first essay by Bernard Yack examines how national sentiments affect democratic institutions, the second essay by Hsin-Wen Lee considers what equal treatment of national cultures means in multinational states. In Chapter 1 entitled “Nationalism’s grip on democracy: good news and bad,” Bernard Yack considers the complex relationship between nationalism and democracy. He begins by clarifying two conceptual issues involved in the earlier literature on nationalism. First, Yack suggests that we should understand nationalism not in terms of the Gellnerian thesis according to which the boundaries of the state and the nation should coincide, but as a weaker demand that “nations should have the final say, or sovereignty, over the organization of their political lives.” This revision allows nationalism to be expressed and recognized in different non-state institutions. Nationalism thus understood is not necessarily associated with the demand of state-building, but can be realized in other institutional arrangements that do not involve a sovereign state. The second revision is that we should understand nations not as cultural communities, but cultural heritage communities. While earlier essentialist accounts of the national culture are critically limited in explaining why cultural characteristics can change when the cultural community survives, Yack’s revisionist view can offer an account for this seeming puzzle by drawing attention to the important role of choice or agency in inheriting and reproducing our shared cultural heritages. After clarifying these conceptual issues, Yack considers the dynamic relationship between nationalism and democracy and reports some good as well as some bad news. The bad news is that nationalism and the morally problematic features commonly associated with it are not likely to disappear and the reason has to do with an essential feature of democratic institutions. Democracy is an institution which requires that legitimate political power be derived from popular support. Such an institutional arrangement makes it easier for majority cultural groups to have substantive political power and leaves minority groups in disadvantaged, vulnerable positions. Naturally, democratic institutions are inherently unstable in multinational states because minority groups tend to see majority groups as cultural imperialists while the majority group is likely to regard them as subversive forces.
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After reporting the bad news, Yack turns to the good news—nationalism, when properly balanced, can be moderate and even become a positive force in the service of political community that is intergenerational. Unlike many other forms of modern ideology, nationalism, in Yack’s view, is a partial ideology, which makes it relatively easy to combine with other ideologies—Confucianism, liberalism, Marxism, or even Fascism. Thus, although national sentiment still creates tensions and conflicts among groups, it is possible to moderate and contain its disruptive influences. In other words, nationalism need not be seen as disruptive in itself; it is always possible for it to be balanced by any ideology that prioritizes universal values such as justice and humanity. In Chapter 2 entitled “In the name of equality: an examination of equality arguments for national self-government,” Hsin-Wen Lee examines whether equal treatment of different national groups requires a multinational state to officially recognize the right of each to create its own autonomous government. The equality argument is based on the objection to the “benign neglect view” of cultural claims. Many believe that a liberal multinational state should treat citizens equally by giving them equal rights and resources regardless of their national membership. In this view, granting group-specific rights to any particular group of citizens would be unfair to members of other groups who do not enjoy these rights. To treat citizens equally, states must remain neutral among different cultures and avoid favoring any specific culture by giving it additional rights or resources. Citizens who wish to preserve their national cultures may do so by using the package of rights and resources given to them by the government. This view holds that the government should remain neutral among different national cultures by ignoring relevant demands or by not interfering with the cultural pursuits of citizens. This is why it is called the benign neglect view. However, some leading theorists of multiculturalism such as Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten argue that the benign neglect view is not really benign. According to them, this view ignores the fact that, in many multinational states, there is no background equality and thus even though rights and resources are evenly distributed among citizens, they are still not being treated as equals. Suppose that members of a majority culture and those of a minority culture receive equal rights and resources. Given that culture, language, and history of the majority group are typically recognized by public institutions, its members do not need to spend their resources on preserving their culture. This is not the case with minority cultures, however. As minority groups’ culture, language, and history are usually not recognized by public institutions, they are forced to spend a substantive part of their resources on the preservation of their cultures. Put differently, even if there may be formal equality in society, there still is de facto inequality between majority and minority groups. Both Kymlicka and Patten argue that the solution to this problem is, among other things, to give each national/cultural group the right to self-government. Lee examines both arguments in detail and concludes that the equality arguments are implausible. Although Kymlicka and Patten have diagnosed the
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problem of inequality in multinational states correctly, their prescriptions do not seem to solve the problem. The reason is, in Lee’s view, that the equality arguments for national self-government rely on the assumption that equal treatment of different national groups requires equal benefits, culminating in a group’s right to have its own autonomous government. However, this assumption rests on two problematic premises that (1) the state belongs only to the majority group but not to the minorities and (2) that a multinational state can never treat minority groups equally. Both premises are inherently anti-pluralistic. Central to Lee’s argument is the idea that equal treatment of different national cultures does not require that each be granted the right to self-government. She concludes by warning against the outdated model of the nationalist project which, intentionally or unwittingly, tries to preserve national cultures to the exclusion of nonmembers.
Part II: Confucianism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism For thousands of years, Confucianism has been the most dominant ethical and political tradition throughout East Asia and its cultural grip on the societies in the region, including China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, has not been completely lost, though significantly modified by modern—liberal, communist, or nationalist—values, institutions, and ways of life. Arguably, the daily lives of many East Asians are still deeply affected by Confucian values, ethics, ritual practices, and moral sentiments, if not by comprehensive Confucian philosophical doctrines or institutions. As a social practice and ethical system, Confucianism sees family relationship as the pivot of all kinds of human relationships and the family as the foundational site for moral selfcultivation. According to Confucianism, one’s ethical world begins from the family and extends to the whole world, called tianxia . In recent decades, however, globalization has radically reshaped the way we relate with others as well as the way we think about human relationships. Moreover, a new politics of multiculturalism in the East Asian region has given rise to skepticism regarding Confucianism’s modern relevance. Does Confucianism indeed have no room in modern pluralist, multicultural, and globalized (and globalizing) East Asia? In Part II, two authors discuss how Confucianism should be interpreted and understood in the globalized, pluralist, multicultural context of East Asia. While Sor-hoon Tan dispels the myth surrounding the Confucian concepts of guo 國 (commonly translated as “state”) and tianxia 天下 (commonly translated as “the world”) and explains how a reinterpretation of the Confucian texts would make it possible to derive strong cosmopolitan implications from Confucianism, Sungmoon Kim defends and describes how we may imagine a Confucian nation that is not only democratic but also compatible with the societal fact of pluralism. In Chapter 3 entitled “Nationalistic guo, cosmopolitan tianxia? Possibility of world order based on Confucian relational ethics,” Sor-hoon Tan explores a way to reinvent Confucian relational ethics into an alternative vision of cosmopolitanism by refuting both Confucian nationalism, which valorizes the special
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ethical value of the nation-state standing between family bonds and global ethical concern in terms of Confucian “graded” love, and Confucian cosmopolitanism of the version that treats everyone in the world in the same way. Tan begins her critique of the existing proposals of Confucian nationalism and Confucian cosmopolitanism, which apparently derive their philosophical inspirations from either of the two key ancient Confucian political entities, the guo and the tianxia. Notwithstanding some interesting structural affinities between the guo and the modern state and between the tianxia and the world, argues Tan, it is anachronistic to identify the former (guo and tianxia) directly with the latter (the modern state and the world) and advocate either Confucian nationalism or Confucian cosmopolitanism based on one’s reading of each entity’s relative moral significance in the Confucian tradition vis-à-vis the other. To do so is to gloss over the serious ethical meaning that Confucianism attaches to human association. More specifically, while admitting that certain characteristics of the guo, as politically organized and territorially based, “make it relevant to discuss partiality for fellow members/residents of one’s guo vis-à-vis those of other guo,” Tan argues that such partiality, working through collective identity, can hardly be justified by Confucian ethics, which actively “disapproves of conduct that benefits one’s state at the expense of [others].” Far from valorizing the boundaries that are central to the guo, whose historical origin is independent of Confucianism, Tan continues, Confucianism resists the “us versus them” mentality that territorial boundaries naturally ferment and instead encourages the people of otherwise conflicting states to see their problems from the perspective of ethical interdependence and resolve them in a morally edifying manner. In Tan’s view, this is the spirit in which Mencius advocated good government “reach[ing] out to all-under-heaven.” However, Tan does not join uncritically in the existing suggestions of Confucian cosmopolitanism by concentrating on the universalist ideal of the tianxia as opposed to the particularist vision of the guo. As Tan sees it, the problem with the dominant version of Confucian cosmopolitanism is that it often understands tianxia solely as a territorial and descriptive concept or category encompassing a multitude of territorially bounded states (guos) within it. This view, however, critically misses the ethical and normative dimension of the tianxia, at the heart of which lies the ruler’s care for the well-being of all people under heaven and his deepest concern with the order and peace of the whole world. In the end, Tan’s ambition is to take full advantage of the ethical vision of the Confucian tianxia ideal in a way that can be relevant to the modern, technologically advanced and heavily globalized, world and her strategy is to reformulate Confucian relational ethics on a global scale. That is, rather than being blindly attached to their national identity, argues Tan, individuals on the globe should form various kinds of personal relationships and associations across national boundaries and promote a myriad of interpersonal networks of interdependence. Tan’s renewed vision of Confucian cosmopolitanism differs significantly from its old form, in that it takes every ordinary man and woman, not the
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universal ruler with world-transformative virtue, as the key carriers of global interdependence. This is a twenty-first century way of realizing the Great Learning’s self-cultivation model of world peace and Tan is strongly convinced that it is this Confucian insight into the fundamentally ethical nature of political relationships that can transform modern politics of nationalism (and an abstract form of cosmopolitanism as its reaction) into morally edifying human association on a global scale. While Tan explores a new mode of cosmopolitanism from a Confucian relational-ethical perspective, Sungmoon Kim, inspired by Yack, turns to the aspect of Confucianism in contemporary East Asia as a shared cultural heritage and attempts to justify a “Confucian nation,” a civic form of nation grounded in Confucian public culture, from a perfectionist perspective. In Chapter 4 entitled “Confucian nation? A perfectionist justification in a pluralist society,” Kim, while taking the fact that East Asian people (especially Koreans, Taiwanese, and Japanese) are generally situated in nation-states as a starting point, wonders how Confucianism as a shared public culture can contribute to the formation and sustenance of a civic nation under the societal circumstances of value pluralism. Kim presents the Confucian nation as a non-liberal and Confucian-perfectionist alternative to the version of civic nation valorized in the nationalism literature, largely liberal and anti-perfectionist. In conceptualizing and justifying a Confucian nation under the fact of pluralism, which increasingly characterizes the societal condition in East Asia, Kim first distinguishes the “Confucian nation” from the (traditional) “Confucian people” by understanding the Confucianism affiliated with the former not only as significantly constrained by modern constitutional arrangements but also as only partially comprehensive (precisely because of such an institutional modification), which allows considerable room for the plurality of values within its overall Confucian cultural parameters. After pointing out the inevitably perfectionist nature of the civic nation (any civic nation, be it liberal or Confucian), Kim conceives of the Confucian nation as a national people who, internal diversity notwithstanding, share and cherish Confucian values and practices as their shared cultural heritage. More specifically, argues Kim, what imparts a distinctive civic character to a Confucian nation is a set of Confucian values and practices to which East Asians still adhere, such as (a constellation of certain cultural configurations of ) filial piety, respect for elders, ritual propriety, ancestor worship, and harmony within the family as well as Confucian moral sentiments which continue to influence the mode of the citizenry’s public reasoning. After illuminating the non-liberal character of the Confucian civic nation, Kim then articulates its Confucian perfectionist dimension from a constitutional perspective. Central to Kim’s argument in this part of his contribution is that under modern democratic constitutional arrangements, institutionally predicated on liberal rights and freedoms, Confucian public culture, the bulwark of Confucian citizenship-cum-nationhood, is incongruent with the polity’s selfconscious constitutional-perfectionist ambition to produce a liberal-democratic
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citizenship, but precisely because of this incongruence between public culture and formal institutions in a Confucian democracy the resulting mode of citizenship (and nationhood) is not so much a liberal citizenship but a Confuciandemocratic citizenship. Thus understood, Kim reminds us that the Confucian nation, despite being constrained by modern, largely liberal, constitutional apparatuses, can reproduce a characteristically (but not essentially or fully comprehensive) Confucian cultural way of life in a way consistent with democratic norms and principles. Still, this partially comprehensive Confucian public culture and way of living is not neutral with other competing cultural identities and moral values. And to this extent, argues Kim, the East Asians in question can be called a Confucian nation.
Part III: state-initiated ethnic nationalism In Part II, we have seen that Confucianism is not necessarily tied with consanguinitism, and its familialistic discourse does not necessarily undergird cultural or ethnic nationalism.7 Although the strong ethnic and cultural nature of Chinese nationalism is sometimes associated with Confucianism, such a form of nationalism is largely the political project initiated by the state. Consider the recent meeting between Xi Jinping, the President of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and Ma Ying-jeou, the (now former) President of the Republic of China (Taiwan) in Singapore (November 7, 2015) where the discourse of the family was fully taken advantage of. The meeting attracted worldwide attention because neither country had ever acknowledged the other as an independent state: China considers Taiwan (an island on which the Republic of China, founded by the Kuomintang (KMT), was relocated after the defeat in the struggle with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the mainland) a part of its territory while Taiwan, which has never been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, is still persisting in its independent statehood. No agreement was reached and no memorandum was signed during this event, however. It was as if, as covered by the Chinese and Taiwanese media, the meeting’s whole point was just to meet, like two long separated brothers who by accident just happen to meet again. President Xi said to President Ma, “We are brothers, connected by flesh, even if our bones were broken, we are a family whose blood is thicker than water.”8 “Blood is thicker than water” is an expression widely used by Chinese. It typically comes up in a context in which the speaker intends to remind her interlocutor of the duty that she (the interlocutor) owes to other family members or to other ethnic Chinese. Since family relationship is understood as the basis on which other relationships are developed in Chinese Confucian discourse and a unified Chinese nation is casually envisaged in terms of one family, it is not surprising that many Chinese nationalists, mostly on the mainland, rely on the family analogy in promoting their nationalist cause, even when societies considered “Chinese” such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore are distinct in many visible ways—geographically, politically, linguistically, and culturally.
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In this part, two authors investigate the state-initiated project of ethniccultural nationalism in mainland China and in Hong Kong. Eric Chong introduces some of the most important features of Chinese nationalism since WWII. Loretta Kim examines how racial membership has been playing increasingly important roles in Hong Kong since its handover to China. In both cases, racial and ethnic membership is found to loom large, making a significant impact on the society’s political discourse and public culture. In Chapter 5 entitled “A review of contemporary Chinese nationalism: theories, features and facets,” Eric K. M. Chong discusses historical unfolding and some recent expressions of Chinese nationalism. While Chinese nationalism has a complex origin, Chong identifies five factors as being most decisive. First, Chong draws attention to the widely held observation among sinologists that it was during the Opium War of 1840 that modern Chinese nationalism was first invoked and formulated. Prior to the Opium War, China was an empire composed of many different ethnic groups whose members did not possess a strong shared national identity as “Chinese.” Since the Opium War, however, China experienced a series of invasions and exploitations by Western imperialism and later by Japanese imperialism and it is the shared sense of suffering and humiliation during and after the war that drove the Chinese people to realize that they share a common destiny as a nation and owe to one another a duty of solidarity. Second, Chong argues that an essential feature of Chinese identity is the belief in a shared ancestral origin—the Yellow Emperor is considered the ancestor of all Chinese. This ethnic belief has two important implications. First, a legitimate ruler must be Chinese; non-Chinese cannot rule over China. According to some sinologists, this strong ethnocentrism led many Chinese to revisit their history. For instance, (ethnic) Chinese nationalists consider the Yuan dynasty, created by Mongols, and the Qing Dynasty, founded by Manchurians, illegitimate because the rulers of these dynasties were the descendants of barbaric non-Han groups, despite the fact that rulers in both Yuan and Qing dynasties adopted Han-style governance and actively embraced Chinese Confucian political and cultural institutions and practices.9 Second, because all Chinese are believed to have the same ancestral origin, they must belong to the same nation-state. Chinese rulers often speak of the “One China Principle,” reminding their audiences that the fundamental unity of all ethnic Chinese under one imperial system was the single greatest legitimating force throughout Chinese history. China’s strong desire to reunite with Taiwan is mainly motivated by this ethnic nationalist sentiment. Third, Chong shows that national symbols and heroes play significant roles in shaping and developing national sentiment. In China, the Great Wall, and more recently, Tiananmen Square are deemed the symbols of Chinese national spirit, which helps citizens cultivate a sense of loyalty to and unity with the statecum-nation. National heroes, including Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Chairman Mao, and Deng Xiaoping, are worshipped in state media as sacrosanct leaders of China, as model citizens who demonstrated great virtue and leadership during the
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turbulent moments of modern Chinese history. And the discourse of national heroism is still being reproduced in contemporary China, including the stories of Lin Hao and Lei Chunian, the youths who saved their peers in the midst of the Sichuan earthquake. Fourth, Chong points to China’s foreign relations as an important motivating factor for nationalism. Not only do Chinese leaders often publicly criticize Americans as hegemonists who conspire to infiltrate China with American (liberal) values and norms but, Chong notes, China’s dispute with Japan over territories and history textbooks also strengthens the nationalist sentiment among the public. Many young children in China are still encouraged in school to not forget the national shame and humiliation wrought by Japanese imperialism, epitomized in China’s unmitigated defeat in 1931. After noting several additional, more positive, elements that contribute to Chinese nationalism that is ethnic in nature, history-grounded, and stateinitiated, such as China’s remarkable recent economic growth and outstanding performance in international sports events, Chong finally turns to the ideational element in Chinese nationalism by discussing the Chinese government’s resistance to so-called “universal values” (e.g., democracy, individual liberty, and human rights), which it regards as “Western values” threatening China’s (Confucian) cultural identity and values. Hong Kong was ruled by the British colonial government between 1842 and 1997. After the retrocession in 1997, the PRC government’s policy towards Hong Kong has concentrated on economic development and social harmony; promoting a unified national identity between Hong Kong and the mainland was not the PRC government’s major concern at the time of handover. After all, the PRC government promised “fifty years without change” in spite of the burst of strong ethnic nationalism in the mainland and in the decade that followed, topics such as nationalism and ethnic identity were virtually invisible in Hong Kong’s public discourses. For a long time, therefore, what really mattered in Hong Kong society has been not so much nationally bounded citizenship as residency. In Chapter 6 entitled “From residency to citizenship: Chinese nationalism and changing criteria for political and legal interpretations of Hong Kong identity in the post-1997 era,” however, Loretta Kim argues that many notable changes are happening in Hong Kong’s collective identity as recent laws and public policies are generally geared toward protection and valorization of the ethnic Chinese. Kim considers this phenomenon from two perspectives—the eligibility of non-ethnic Chinese people for a Hong Kong passport and the retention of non-Chinese national judiciary officials. Kim begins her chapter by considering the concept of the “Hongkonger” (or more literally “Hong Kong person”) in public institutions. According to Kim, this term is used in different contexts to mean a variety of different things. Institution-wise, whether a person has Hong Kong citizenship matters less than whether she has a Hong Kong ID (HKID), which is associated with residency, not with citizenship. Legally speaking, anyone, regardless of her race or ethnicity, who has lived in Hong Kong for more than seven consecutive years is
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eligible to become a permanent resident. In Hong Kong, qualification for social welfare and other benefits is largely determined by one’s status as a resident, not by her citizenship. As far as Hong Kong’s public institutions are concerned, race or ethnicity plays no significant role. Although citizenship status and racial membership did not matter much in principle in the public life of Hong Kong, Chinese national identity has become crucial for determining whether a noncitizen is eligible for permanent residency and further citizenship. Most tellingly, being ethnically Chinese has become the most important criterion for determining one’s eligibility for a Hong Kong passport. Over the past decade, many mainland Chinese have successfully secured permanent resident status as well as a Hong Kong passport and they can now enjoy a number of social benefits originally intended for “Hongkongers” (i.e., HKID holders), but not for ethnic Chinese. On the other hand, it has become increasingly difficult for a non-ethnic Chinese person to acquire Hong Kong citizenship as one must renounce her original nationality to be eligible for it. Non-ethnic Chinese who have successfully undergone such a transition are mostly those who have businesses in Hong Kong. In contrast, the reality that confronts the large number of domestic workers from Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia is dramatically different: in order to work in Hong Kong, they have to waive their right to apply for the right of abode to which they are otherwise entitled after seven years. As such, Chinese ethnicity has become the most crucial factor in determining whether one is legally entitled to become a Hong Kong person. Kim then goes on to consider the case of non-Chinese national judiciary officials. During British colonial rule, many judges were sent by the colonial government to Hong Kong to serve in the judiciary, and based on the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration they could work in the judiciary system in Hong Kong until retirement. One of the ongoing public debates in Hong Kong since 1997 is whether foreign judges are qualified to serve in Hong Kong’s judiciary system, not only because, it is argued, they are not versed in Hong Kong Law but, perhaps more importantly, their love of “Hong Kong” (now ethnically redefined) or patriotism is suspicious. One non-local judicial official has suggested that many nonChinese officials feel obliged to prove their capacity and willingness to serve Hong Kong society by being overly productive and making concrete, visible contributions. A Chinese official would not need to do likewise, he adds. In conclusion, Kim criticizes the recent trend in Hong Kong immigration policy and suggests that, in order for Hong Kong to maintain her glorious status as an “international society” and continue to socially absorb diverse ethnic backgrounds, the Hong Kong government must do more to eliminate the impact of ethnicity and race in public institutions.
Part IV: globalization, neoliberalism, and nationalism Claims of national self-determination can be initiated either by the state or by the people. As Yack points out, not only stateless nations but also existing
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nation-states often feel insecure about the vitality of their local culture and are tempted to start nationalist projects in order to ensure its continued existence. In Part III, we have noted how the governments in mainland China and Hong Kong have implemented various nationalist policies and laws via public institutions. In Part IV, we see that nationalism is not merely pursued by ruling elites for nationalizing purposes; more frequently, it is the outcome of complex interactions between ruling elites preoccupied with economic development and their nation’s international competitiveness and people struggling to survive in the global competition. In recent decades, the development of neoliberalism and free market economy has brought about a globalized economic superstructure. This new global economic superstructure exerts a staggering influence over nation-states around the world and those in the East Asia region in particular, including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. For some, globalization means more opportunities and economic benefits; yet for others it creates poverty and more inequalities. The result is not necessarily an emergence of a cosmopolitan sprit among democratic societies as the most enthusiastic champions of globalization often chant (and note that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are all democratic societies!). Rather, as the three contributors in this part demonstrate, globalization often entails reinforcement of nationalist sentiments and nationalist multicultural policies. In Chapter 7 entitled “Developmental multiculturalism and articulation of Korean nationalism in the age of diversity,” Nora Kim insightfully points out that what lies behind South Korea’s impressive economic growth and achievement was a sense of insecurity and vulnerability as a nation, which is the product of South Korea’s unique history and geopolitical situation. Kim examines how the discourse of contemporary Korean nationalism has evolved along with the Korean nation-state’s desire to “develop.” Kim argues that in contemporary South Korea political leaders have consistently appealed to what she calls the “nationalism-cum-developmentalism” discourse in their efforts to enhance the nation’s competitiveness in the global market.10 Kim describes three main discourses over the past five decades in the following terms: “modernization” (kŭndaehwa 代化) under Park Chung Hee (1961–1978), “globalization” (segyehwa 世 化) under Kim Young Sam (1993–1998) and Kim Dae Jung (1998–2003), and “multiculturalism” (damunhwa 文化) under the Noh Moo Hyun (2003–2008) and Lee Myung Bak (2008–2013) administrations. According to Kim, Park Chung Hee began his modernization project in order to legitimize his coup and dictatorship. At the core of Park’s modernization project was an effort to rid South Korea of poverty and it faithfully followed the Western economic development model. Singularly concerned with the state’s control over wealth and economic growth, however, non-economic cultural values of the West such as respect for human rights or individual freedom were largely sidelined at this stage during which ethnic nationalism was actively pursued as a developmental strategy, backed by a variety of discriminatory policies.11 Although the modernization project resulted in the elimination of poverty and
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remarkable economic growth in South Korea, Kim characterizes this period as the inward-looking development of the South Korean nation-state. In contrast, during the globalization stage South Korean leaders adopted policies that were outward-looking largely for the same reason that prompted Park to opt for the modernization project. During this period, South Korea joined various international organizations in order to further drive the nationstate’s economic development under the ever-increasing pressure of globalization. After the Asian financial crisis in 1997 in particular, in its attempt to overcome the constraints imposed by the IMF bailout, South Korea was forced to embrace the neoliberal mode of economic reform by accepting the terms that the IMF imposed, including abandoning interventionist economic policies and opening up the domestic market. Lastly, Kim argues that what characterizes the most recent governments in Korea under Noh and Lee is the multicultural project as another mode of developmental nationalism. In this period, South Korea turned to look inward once again and pursued a policy that can incorporate cultural and ethnic diversity. As a result of neoliberal economic reforms, the Korean population has undergone significant changes in demography; as many citizens went out to find a job, the state has introduced migrant workers from Southeast Asia’s less affluent neighbors to cope with its labor shortage problems. What had been further threatening the Korean nation-state’s overall economic viability was the serious fertility crisis, which forced the state, upon a strong demand from the business sector, to make a drastic reform with regard to its population policy. It is in this milieu that various sorts of “multicultural policies,” focused on the embrace of ethnic others (i.e., migrant workers and foreign wives) and tolerance of cultural diversity, were introduced throughout the 2000s, all mainly in order to boost South Korea’s national competiveness in the global market. Hereafter, the ideal image of a South Korean citizen has become one who “has a global outlook, multicultural sensitivity, and the ability to get along with ethnic and cultural others.” As such, Kim concludes, developmentalism and nationalism have reinforced each other in every stage of South Korea’s modern evolution and “multiculturalism” in South Korea cannot be understood properly without considering this broader social and policy context. In Chapter 8 entitled “On the Black Tide: a historical and politico-economic analysis of Taiwanese nationalism and the Sunflower Movement,” Rwei-Ren Wu discusses in a succinct manner the complicated forces that combined to form Taiwanese nationalism. Wu argues that nationalism in today’s Taiwan is a form of civic nationalism as well as left-leaning nationalism. The formation of such a type of nationalism was driven not only by historical and political factors but also by economic ones. Wu begins by looking at the recent Sunflower Movement in Taiwan (太陽花學運) (March 18, 2014–April 10, 2014) and draws attention to some important features of this movement. The movement began spontaneously without taking organized forms, but it soon evolved into a coordinated effort by students and NGOs resisting a state-imposed economic arrangement—namely, the Service and Trade Agreement between Taiwan and China—which they
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deemed would have a far-reaching negative impact on the social-economic structure of the society. Some of the participants involved in this movement were concerned with formal injustice, while others were more interested in preserving Taiwan’s substantive political autonomy from the mainland. The first group argued that the process with which the Agreement had been ratified was undemocratic as it violated procedural justice by allowing the government to make important policy decisions without democratic supervision. The second group was worried that the Service and Trade Agreement would result in the de facto loss of political autonomy of the island; in their view, regardless of procedural injustice, the Agreement represented serious neoliberal intervention in Taiwan’s economic structure, likely to leave the island vulnerable to what Albert O. Hirschman calls “bloodless invasion.” In the Movement, the demand for self-determination was expressed in terms of objections to neoliberal economic structure. Wu suggests that the Sunflower Movement demonstrates important features of Taiwanese nationalism—anti-imperialism, anti-capitalism, democratic consolidation, and the emergence of the younger generation as active political agents. Wu also considers the diverse historical forces that have exerted manifold influences on the population of the island, such as its complicated history of immigration, colonial rule, democratic movement of the middle and the peasant classes. At the heart of Wu’s claim is that the formation of Taiwanese nationalism is different from typical nation-building projects. While most nationbuilding projects are initiated by the state, the formation of Taiwanese nationalism can be traced to multiple sources including diverse ethnic groups, social economic classes, and other various external economic and political forces. Summing up his observation, Wu concludes that “the origin of the [Taiwanese] nation-state was heterogeneous, external, and top-down, and yet its completion was autonomous, internal, and bottom-up. It was given a polity, but it also spawned a will of the society.” Then, in Chapter 9 entitled “Japanese nationalism in the age of globalization: towards an earthly universality,” Nakajima Takahiro critically examines three prevailing theories of Japanese nationalism, proposed by Kayano Toshihito, Ōsawa Masachi, and Nakajima Takeshi respectively, and argues that reaffirmation of nationalism must involve an endorsement of what he calls “earthly universalism,” which gives special normative emphasis to solidarity with citizens of other nations. Nakajima also, albeit briefly, explains how this ideal can be realized in a university jointly administered by East Asian nations. Nakajima begins by observing the recent revival of xenophobic nationalism among the youth in Japan. One theory, proposed by Kayano Toshihito, suggests that this phenomenon is the result of globalization—some young Japanese are suffering from poverty and disparity because they are not competitive in the global labor market. Though some liberals criticize such an attitude as unethical, they tend to ignore the citizens’ reasonable expectation that the state be the bulwark against untrammeled global capitalism, the frustration of which leads them to an even more radicalized form of nationalism. Kayano’s alternative is a secular nation-state similar to the liberal neutral state championed by Maruyama
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Masao. After revisiting recent Okinawan nationalism, however, Nakajima concludes that even though a liberal-neutral form of nationalism may help prevent hysteric nationalism, which is politically dangerous, it is critically limited in preventing poverty and inequality, the central role of the state. Moreover, liberal neutrality, requiring the state to refrain from adopting policies based on (in Rawlsian language) “comprehensive doctrines,” is unlikely to produce public policies that can move the hearts of citizens toward the good. The second theory considered by Nakajima is one suggested by Ōsawa Masachi. Ōsawa proposes a framework through which to make sense of the central feature of Japanese nationalism, namely, “ironic immersion.” According to Ōsawa, ironic immersion describes a situation in which “one does not ‘really believe’ in nationalism in terms of one’s consciousness, whereas one believes in it in one’s actual lived behavior,” and this best describes the Japanese leftists who uphold “multiculturalism” as politically correct universally against Japanese nationalism as a powerful symptom of Japanese particularity. Central to Ōsawa’s argument is a “mutually complicit relationship” between the left and the right, or between multiculturalism (as a universalist value in the post-WWII era) and nationalism, in which the former ferments the latter. According to Ōsawa, Leftist multiculturalism advocates tolerance for cultural diversity in univeralist terms and yet this universal call for cultural diversity undermines universality itself (i.e., the universal ideal of human rights), giving rise to its local, particularist reaction, namely Rightist nationalism. As such, multiculturalism (or universalism) and nationalism (or particularism) are two sides of the same coin, which Ōsawa agues are bound complementarily by a “transcendent third party,” or simply the Christian God or Jesus Christ. That is, two seemingly opposing forces of multiculturalism and nationalism are two inseparable, highly cohesive attributes of God, the ultimate being. In Nakajima’s view, however, Ōsawa’s theory ignores the open-ended process of universalization which militates against its particularist inversion, and is thus unable to make distinctions among the people (especially of the Right), between those who wish to chastise (a certain form of ) multiculturalism and those promoting xenophobic nationalism. The view Nakajima (the author of this chapter) finds most promising is one advanced by Nakajima Takeshi who proposes a more explicit form of religious nationalism. Drawing on Ōsawa’s framework but without subscribing to his deadlocked antinomy between multiculturalism and nationalism, Nakajima Takeshi suggests that religions can have what he calls “dual openings,” being open to the world as well as to what lies beyond. Nakajima Takahiro believes that this framework holds the key to the solution for Ōsawa’s possibly dangerous transcendentalism. In this third view, the local becomes open to others and other forms of universalism, seeking not a celestial form of universalism but an earthly one. After examining post-war Japanese and recent Chinese discourses regarding universalism and articulating the idea of “earthy universalism” with reference to Suzuki Daisetz, Nakajima concludes the chapter by describing briefly how earthly universalism can be concretely realized in a united association of national universities across East Asian countries.
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Part V: democracy and indigenous cultures in Taiwan After reviewing cases of majority nations in East Asia, this volume finally turns to the situation of minority indigenous groups in Taiwan. Settlers from southeast provinces of Fujian in China began to move to Taiwan during the sixteenth century. Prior to the inflow of Chinese settlers, the island was home for many different Austronesian-speaking tribes. However, the inflow of Chinese immigrants, the ensuing Japanese colonial domination, and the succeeding dictatorial rule caused serious damage to the indigenous communities in Taiwan, leaving many aboriginal communities in the plain area no choice but to become assimilated into the dominant culture for survival. Those who refused assimilation sought to hide out in high mountain areas and transformed themselves into what is now known as “mountain tribes.” Today, the indigenous population is greatly outnumbered by the Han-Chinese immigrants, constituting about 2 percent of the total population. Given the settlers’ cultural background and way of life, many Han-Chinese Taiwanese tend to regard the indigenous lifestyle as uncivilized at best and barbaric at worst, and their attitude toward the indigenous communities is generally condescending. For instance, in 2007, the mayor of Taipei City and the then-presidential-candidate, Ma Ying Jeou, met with the residents of the Sijhou tribe to discuss the government’s plan to relocate the tribe from an exposed riverbed to what it deemed to be a safer location. During the meeting, one female member of the tribe suggested that, instead of moving the residents from their current home, the government should build better concrete barriers on the river in order to protect them from the potential flood. Ma responded to this suggestion by saying, “If you come into the city, you are a Taipei citizen; I see you as a human being, I see you as a citizen, and I will educate you well.”12 Indigenous and nonindigenous alike, all attending the meeting found the presidential candidate’s openly patronizing attitude shockingly dismissive and condescending. Incidents like this happen quite often in Taiwan. Marginalized and misrepresented, the aborigines typically regard Han-Chinese as dishonest and untrustworthy. A long history of mutual distrust is one reason why the level of the indigenous people’s political participation is so low in Taiwan. In Chapter 10 entitled “Art-iculating the nation and its struggles—Pangcah as a case of indigenous movement in Taiwan,” Shun-ling Chen considers the indigenous movement in Taiwan. After describing the history of the indigenous movement in Taiwan briefly in the first part, Chen examines the case of the Pangcah nation in the second part and discusses how music and other sorts of artistic expression have helped both Pangcah and non-Pangcah to understand the nation’s unique culture. As of today, there are 16 officially recognized indigenous peoples in Taiwan. This categorization is the legacy of the registration system adopted by the Japanese colonial government (1895–1945). However, as Chen argues, the categorization is not only biased but also incomplete because the tribes are categorized according to their level of “civilization” judged by the colonial government.
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Even worse, in the existing government categorization some tribes, despite their cultural distinctiveness, are misidentified as having the same origin. Moreover, if an aborigine is not registered on the list, she is not formally recognized as aboriginal. After WWII, as soon as it seized power, the KMT government imposed Martial Law between 1949 and 1987, suppressing all sorts of political activism and social movements throughout the period. Initially the KMT government called the indigenous communities “mountain compatriots,” a title with strong sino-centric connotations. In the 1980s, however, Taiwanese society was drawn into the vortex of widespread anti-government protests and social movements. Indigenous activism grew in tandem with other kinds of social activism during this period, demanding official recognition of land rights, environmental justice, and name-rectification (from the Han-Chinese style names to their original ethnic names). Name-rectification was officially achieved when the Constitutional Amendment officially started to use the term “indigenous peoples” in 1994 during Lee Teng-hui’s term. In 2002, Chen Shui-bian (2000–2008) signed the Treaty of New Partnership with Indigenous Peoples, thereby making official recognition of the sovereignty of indigenous peoples, inherent in their cultural uniqueness and political autonomy. Despite the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) general effort to advocate indigenous rights, however, it is difficult to say that these measures have successfully provided effective protection for the well-being of indigenous cultures. There have been many occasions in which indigenous mayors work against the interests of the aborigines. And notwithstanding “overrepresentation” in the legislature, the minority representatives have always found it challenging to successfully push for the bills that are favorable for indigenous communities without the cooperation of the representatives from the majority Han community. In the second half of her contribution, Chen turns to how art, especially music, has made important contributions to the preservation of Pangcah culture, the largest indigenous nation in Taiwan. For a long time, indigenous artists rarely disclosed their minority identities for fear of possible discrimination. This tendency changed dramatically in the late 1990s with a rising social interest in indigenous cultures. According to Chen, the impact of music on multicultural awareness and national identity in general is twofold. Internally, music has helped today’s aborigines, especially the younger generation, foster their cultural self-identify, especially by learning and speaking their own language. For many decades, the youth in indigenous tribes have had to learn Mandarin Chinese to be able to find jobs outside their own tribes and this led to a rapid decline in the preservation of languages among the indigenous population. Music produced in native language has helped the children in tribal cultures to become interested in learning and using their native tongue and youth members to create organizations and networks, using music to introduce indigenous culture to mainstream society. Externally, music has offered a medium through which members of the Pangcah nation could introduce their culture to the non-Pangcahs. For instance, a popular Pangcah singer, Ayal Komod, has written
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a song about the protest against a hotel construction project at Meliwan, a project which blatantly violates environmental regulations. His song has effectively raised awareness regarding the preservation of indigenous land. Finally, in Chapter 11 entitled “Social justice and language policy in Taiwan,” Alan Patten turns to the problem of linguistic justice and discusses related issues in the Taiwanese context. By paying close attention to the way in which language policy can affect social justice, Patten considers two approaches to linguistic justice—instrumental and non-instrumental. According to Patten, the instrumental approach regards a language policy as having an instrumental value to some more important goods. One important theory in the instrumental approach holds that a monolingual policy should be promoted because of the important contributions it can make to a nation-building project. Patten considers some causal mechanisms that might support this hypothesis. First, a shared language prevents the social exclusion of non-speakers. Second, establishing a shared language in the political community helps equalize social-economic opportunities among citizens. Third, although sharing the same language is not a sufficient warrant for sharing the same national identity, linguistic difference is likely to undermine social solidarity. In Patten’s view, this theory is open to two objections. First, while monolingual policies might provide the goods considered above, the success of such a policy might come at a cost—fluency in the national lingua franca might undermine other minority languages. Second, although it is socially useful for citizens to share one national identity, it is not uncommon for people to have multiple national identities. Therefore, even though a shared national language might serve several social functions, it is not necessarily the best idea to impose a monolingual policy. Patten suggests that it might be more promising to promote national identity by supporting linguistic pluralism. Then, Patten turns to a non-instrumental approach or the “neutrality model.” According to this approach, language might itself be an object of concern in distributive justice in at least three ways. First, people have an interest in communicating with others. Second, people might have an interest in having access to certain cultural goods that are related to a particular linguistic group—e.g., musical and culinary goods. Third, people often have an interest in maintaining their self-identity. While the first type of interest, the communicative interest, can be served by any language, the latter two interests can be served only when the relevant language is well protected, which may or may not be the shared lingua franca. What, then, is a just way of distributing these interests? One way to do this is to find a language that is not any citizen’s first language and make it the national language. This is considered a fair way to distribute relevant goods because the burden is evenly shared by all citizens. The second way is to have a lingua franca, but also provide equal recognition to different minority languages in public institutions and spaces. This requires that the government officially recognize some of the first languages of its citizens.
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After analyzing the two approaches to linguistic justice, finally, Patten considers the case of Taiwan. He thinks that the decision to keep Mandarin as the official national language may be justified both by instrumental and noninstrumental considerations. However, Patten also acknowledges that, given the historical background, this decision might not be entirely justified. Mandarin was once the language spoken by a dominant minority immigrant group in Taiwan, and this raises doubts with regard to the legitimacy of the decision to make it the national language. Patten suggests that the second strategy which prescribes equal recognition to different languages is a better solution.
Notes 1 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780. 2 Smith, Nationalism. 3 As in many areas in political theory, the liberal-communitarian debate in political science has been highly instrumental to reshaping the philosophical discussion of nationalism. See generally Avineri and de-Shalit, Communitarianism and Individualism. In this debate, while communitarians draw attention to the important normative value of community goods (e.g., cultural heritages and national language) and argue for their public protection, liberals place a staggering emphasis on individual rights and personal goods as most normatively significant and thus do not pay much attention to communal goods as a normative inspiration of their political theory, although they do not deny certain moral significance of cultural attachments in constituting personal identity and good. For communitarian positions, see MacIntyre, After Virtue; Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice; Walzer, Spheres of Justice; Taylor, Sources of the Self; Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture; Bell, Communitarianism and Its Critics. For liberal positions, see Rawls, Political Liberalism; Levy, The Multiculturalism of Fear; Barry, Culture and Equality. In the 1990s, philosophers started to develop an interest in the normative questions related to nationalism, national partiality or patriotism, and multiculturalism and several important anthologies were produced as a result, including Gutmann, Multiculturalism; Couture et al., Rethinking Nationalism; McKim and McMahan, The Morality of Nationalism; and Moore, National Self-Determination and Secession. More recently, Karmis and Norman, so-called “second-wave” nationalists, published an anthology called Theories of Federalism: A Reader where the contributors explore the possibility of federalism among national groups. Overall, these old and new studies on nationalism focus exclusively on the Western/European understandings and experiences and do not pay attention to, let alone engage with, non-Western (especially East Asian) perspectives or experiences. 4 A few rare exceptions include Kymlikca and He, Multiculturalism in Asia; Iwabuchi et al., Multiculturalism in East Asia. 5 In aiming to highlight the East Asian experiences of nation, nationalism, and multiculturalism and draw implications from them for a new theory-building, however, this book in no way intends to reinforce “East” and “West” as reified and static conceptual categories that are starkly opposed to each other. In fact, its goal is to illuminate how concepts such as nation, nationalism, and multiculturalism, all of Western origin, are understood and socially appropriated (and reappropriated) under contemporary East Asia’s unique social, economic, and political circumstances in which nationbuilding, nationalization, globalization, and multiculturalism take place rather simultaneously than vying for social salience. Thus understood, the aim of this book is far more modest than the sort of the project whose ambition (in terms of methodology at least) lies in going beyond the so-called “artificially constructed opposition of East
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7 8 9
10 11 12
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and West.” This book does not integrate the contested categories of East and West; rather it engages with the social phenomena of nation, nationalism, and multiculturalism as well as the discourse on them in the East Asian societal context. We are grateful to a reviewer for pressing us to clarify this important question regarding this volume’s aim. For a seminar endeavor that tries to go beyond the East-West binary, see Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of Continents. This said, there are some important single-country based studies which approach nation and nationalism from a multicultural standpoint. See Gladney, Muslim Chinese; Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation; Lie, Multiethnic Japan; Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese?. The editors are grateful to a reviewer for drawing our attention to this important literature. For an argument that still approaches Confucianism in terms of consanguinity, see Liu, “Filiality versus Sociality and Individuality,” pp. 234–250. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/11981225/No-force-can-pull-usapart-Chinas-Xi-says-in-historic-China-Taiwan-summit.html, accessed June 28, 2016. Precisely from this viewpoint, Baogang He argues that it was not so much ethnicity and/or religion but “(Confucian) civilization” that distinguished the “Chinese” from the “barbarians” and that insofar as Mongol and Manchurian rulers adopted the Confucian way of governance and conducted themselves according to Confucian ethical norms and rituals, they were (and should be) considered “Chinese.” From this perspective, He attempts to offer practical prescriptions for dealing with minority questions in contemporary China. See He, “Confucianism versus Liberalism over Minority Rights,” pp. 103–123. Therefore, some scholars capture the unique feature of Korean democracy in terms of “developmental democracy.” See, for instance, Lee and Kim, “South Korea’s Developmental Democracy and Migrant Workers Policy,” pp. 428–455. On South Korean ethnic nationalism, see Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea. For a detailed discussion on the strong influence of ethnic nationalism on Park’s modernization project, see Kang, Contemporary Korean Political Thought and Park Chung-hee. Maggie Lu, “Ma comment sparks Aboriginal fury,” Taipei Times, December 26, 2007. www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2007/12/26/2003394156, accessed June 28, 2016.
References Avineri, Shlomo and de-Shalit, Avner (eds.). 1992. Communitarianism and Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barry, Brian. 2001. Culture and Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bell, Daniel A. 1993. Communitarianism and Its Critics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Melissa. 2004. Is Taiwan Chinese? The Impact of Culture, Power, and Migration on Changing Identities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Couture, Jocelyne, Nielsen, Kai, and Seymour, Michel (eds.). 1998. Rethinking Nationalism. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Gladney, Dru. 1996. Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Gutmann, Amy (ed.). 1992. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. He, Baogang. 2004. “Confucianism versus Liberalism over Minority Rights: A Critical Response to Will Kymlicka,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 31(1): 103–123.
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Hobsbawm, Eric. 1990. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iwabuchi, Koichi, Kim, Hyun Mee, and Hsia, Hsiao-Chuan (eds.). 2016. Multiculturalism in East Asia: A Transnational Exploration of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. London: Rowman and Littlefield International. Kang, Jung In. Forthcoming. Contemporary Korean Political Thought and Park Chunghee: From a Comparative Political Theory Perspective. London: Rowman and Littlefield International. Karmis, Dimitrios and Norman, Wayne. 2005. Theories of Federalism: A Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kymlicka, Will. 1989. Liberalism, Community, and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kymlikca, Will and He, Baogang (eds.). 2005. Multiculturalism in Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, Byoungha and Kim, Sungmoon. 2011. “South Korea’s Developmental Democracy and Migrant Workers Policy,” Pacific Focus 26(3): 428–455. Levy, Jacob T. 2000. The Multiculturalism of Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Martin W. and Wigen, Kären E. 1997. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lie, John. 2004. Multiethnic Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Liu, Qingping. 2003. “Filiality versus Sociality and Individuality: On Confucianism as ‘Consanguinitism’,” Philosophy East and West 53: 234–250. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. McKim, Robert and McMahan, Jeff. 1997. The Morality of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moore, Margaret (ed.). 1998. National Self-Determination and Secession. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mullaney, Thomas. 2011. Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Sandel, Michael J. 1982. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shin, Gi-Wook. 2006. Ethnic Nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Smith, Anthony D. 2001. Nationalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walzer, Michael, 1983. Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Blackwell.
Part I
Nationalism, democracy, and equality
1
Nationalism’s grip on democracy Good news and bad Bernard Yack
This chapter explores nationalism’s persistent grip on modern democratic politics. It has both good news and bad for those interested in defending cultural pluralism within modern democracies.1 The bad news is that I do not think that there is a good way now for modern democrats to escape not just nationalism, but the morally problematic forms of behavior associated with it. The triumph of popular sovereignty in the modern world seems closely connected to the spread of this new and immensely powerful form of communal loyalty. From the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of colonialism and the Soviet Empire, from the 1848 uprisings in Europe to the May 4th demonstrations in China, nationalism always seems to follow quickly in democracy’s wake. And every time that happens we act surprised. But it should not be so surprising. Democracy, at least as it is usually practiced in the modern political world, tends to politicize our attachment to the intergenerational communities that we call nations, while it nationalizes the way in which we imagine political community. It both intensifies and makes use of national loyalties. Many means have been proposed to sever this connection between democracy and morally problematic forms of nationalism: a purely political or “civic” form of nationalism (often described, more ethnocentrically, as “Western” nationalism); an apolitical or purely “cultural” form of nationalism; not to mention the various forms of cosmopolitanism put forward as models for our globalizing world. All such efforts founder, I believe, on our commitments to popular sovereignty as a principle of political legitimacy. Democrats, I conclude, need to come up with ways of taming or balancing the morally problematic features of nationalism, for they cannot escape them. That’s the bad news. The good news is that nationalism need not be nearly as dangerous or destructive a force as made out to be by most of its critics. The critics go wrong, I believe, because they rely on far too rigid and monolithic an understanding of community in general and of national community in particular. Nationalist sentiments create serious difficulties for democratic politics and cultural pluralism, but they are not incompatible with them. Unlike the vision of a purely civic or a purely cultural nation, the culturally pluralist—or even multiculturalist—nation is neither a myth nor an object of wishful thinking. It can be found in many corners of the modern world and seems to be
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spreading, even if our theoretical and conceptual language has not caught up with our political experience. This disjuncture between our political experience and our conceptual vocabulary is one of the reasons that led me to undertake, in Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community, a systematic revision of the basic concepts that we use to study nationalism. Two of these revisions figure especially prominently in what follows here. The first is my suggestion that we think of nationalism as the belief that nations should have the final say over the organization of their political lives, rather than, as in the most familiar definition of nationalism, the belief that the boundaries of nations and the boundaries of states must be brought into line with each other.2 A small difference, perhaps, but an important one, since it helps explain the powerful connection between nationalism and democracy. The second revision is my characterization of the nation as what I call a cultural heritage community, rather than as a cultural community.3 Another relatively small distinction, no doubt, but no less important, since it helps explain the flexibility and openness to cultural pluralism that I attribute to national loyalties.
The bad news I shall begin with the bad news: nationalism’s grip on democracy and the moral problems that creates for democratic politics in general, and for cultural pluralism, in particular. First, we need to be clear about what we mean by nationalism. For despite the tremendous variation in the ways in which we use the term, the conceptualization of nationalism has not inspired anywhere near as extensive or exhausting a debate as questions about what constitutes a nation. Most often, scholars simply stipulate a definition—usually as the ideology that demands that we match the boundaries of states to the boundaries of nations or cultural communities—that makes it easy to get at the particular objects of their research. But doing so inevitably leaves out much of importance to our understanding of nationalism. For example, when you define nationalism as the ideology that demands the matching of political and cultural boundaries, you find yourself in the odd position of denying that well-established nations that have pretty much completed this match, like China, France, or the United States, cannot act in nationalistic ways. For, under this definition, you must restrict nationalism to those who strive for national self-determination and deny nationalism’s presence among those who have actually achieved it, a restriction that seems false to our experience. Nationalism, I suggest, is better understood as drawing on a belief that nations should have the final say or sovereignty over the organization of their political lives, rather than as the more familiar principle demanding the congruence of national and political boundaries. In other words, I am suggesting that nationalists demand not just the matching of states and nations, but the direction of states by nations. From this perspective, nationalists are people who
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insist that a relatively old form of community, the nation, should have the final say over a relatively new form of political organization, the modern state. The spread of nationalism, so understood, leads to two kinds of conflict and instability. The first is the more familiar as it concerns adjustments, often quite violent, to political and cultural boundaries. One of the distinctive features of the modern state as a form of political organization is its demand that a singular hierarchical structure of authority be extended evenly throughout its territory up to clear and distinct borders that separate it from other such political organizations. National communities, by contrast, find themselves mixed up within or extending across these clear and distinct borders. Moreover, multiple nations often have strong ties to the same territory. So any effort to give nations control over the organization of their political lives in states is bound to stir up conflicts about who gets to set up states where and to control the particular territories to which they are attached. But the rise of nationalism leads to a second source of communal conflict and instability that has little to do with the adjustment of boundaries. Even after dispersed nations have been integrated and captive nations freed from the empires and larger nations that have swallowed them up, nationalism persists as a powerful force because of anxieties about the nation’s ability to effectively control its political affairs. Nations already lined up with well-established states, such as China, the USA or Nazi Germany, often express anxiety—even paranoia—about the way in which internal and external aliens undermine their ability to control their political affairs. Even in the most extreme cases, such as the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews or the Turks’ treatment of the Armenians, internal minorities are suspect not just because they are different, but because they threaten to subvert the nation’s sovereignty—a threat that seems especially fearful when minorities are connected to a large and seemingly powerful diaspora community. Moreover, well-established nations often view external states and communities not just as competitors or enemies, but as subverters of their right to control their own affairs. Consider in this regard forms of national self-assertion like the “Monroe Doctrine,” the claim by nineteenth-century American governments that European powers had no right to interfere in the political affairs of other states in the Western Hemisphere. Such assertions do not merely mark out national “spheres of influence.” They treat things that happen beyond the nation’s boundaries as threats to the nation’s control over its own political affairs, threats that have to be countered aggressively. In doing so, they make nationalist demands that can become very elastic, since a nation, after all, may never be completely sure of its control of its political affairs as long as its neighbors are free to plot against them—a point well illustrated by the foreign policy of Nazi Germany. Moreover, it is not only large and powerful nations whose nationalism is directed against external enemies and competitors. While large nations project their nationalist concerns outward in search of potential sources of subversion, small nations project them outward in response to the loss of control over their political lives entailed by living in close proximity to more powerful ones. For
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example, in Canada—my original home—nationalism expresses itself in two forms: the concerns of Francophone residents of Quebec about political and cultural boundaries; and the concerns of both Anglophones and Francophones about the way in which American politics and culture is undermining control of their own lives. The saying goes there that when you sleep with an elephant, you have to sleep very lightly, since you never know when it will turn over and squash you—a sentiment no doubt echoed by members of the many smaller nations that surround the periphery of China. Nationalism, in these circumstances, expresses itself in attentiveness, and often hypersensitivity, to threats to national autonomy, rather than in concerns about bringing political and cultural boundaries into line with each other. Once we recognize this feature of nationalism, it becomes much easier to understand why democracy so often seems to be the catalyst that turns a relatively old social force, national loyalty, into the powerful new social force that we call nationalism. Modern democratic movements rose as efforts to assert popular control over the apparatus of the modern state, to use the institutions of the modern state as a means of extending the people’s authority throughout a particular territory. But to think of the state as the people’s instrument, you must be able to imagine the people as separate from and prior to the state in some way. That way the people can establish the purpose, nature and direction of the state, rather than take its own character and identity from the actions of those who hold power within a state. But this image of the people as a corporate body separate from and prior to the state is something of an abstraction, something that we conjure up in our heads when we want to think of the state as our own creation, rather than the product of existing sentiments and social bonds. If you want to put some flesh on these bare bones, if you want to firm up the sense of a belonging to a people that seeks to make the state its creature rather than its master, you need to find some subjective sources of connection that would make individuals concerned with their shared fate—and be able to portray them as something prior to and separate from existing political ties. The nation, an intergenerational and relatively egalitarian form of community, is one of the most obvious places to look for these sources of connection. So when popular sovereignty is first asserted by the proto-democratic movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, it is claimed in the name of the English people, or the French or the Dutch people, i.e., in the name of groups of individuals who share an intergenerational cultural heritage. It is the French people—or nation, as the French would say4—that rose up to claim its rights in 1789, not the inhabitants of the territory governed by the French state. The rise of democracy did not remove the lid from a boiling cauldron of nationalist passions that had been stifled by the authorities of the ancien regime. But it tremendously enhanced the political significance of national loyalties, making them far more noticeable and valuable than they were before. As a result, democracy’s success in challenging and defeating rival principles of political legitimacy becomes one of the major means by which nationalism spreads in the modern world.
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And once this association between the nation and the democratic people becomes established, a certain degree of communal conflict and instability is inevitable. When the issue is who shall control the state, establishing terms of cooperation among different national communities within a single state becomes infinitely more difficult than when the problem is merely how to deal with the power of some distant ruler. Members of minority nations come to be seen then not only as different, but as potential subverters of the national will. And even if invited to join larger democratic states on relatively friendly terms, why should they accept this fate, just because the luck of the draw left them as minorities within larger states when demands for democracy began to be successful. John Stuart Mill might argue that no rational person would reject joining a large, progressive nation-state, like the United Kingdom or France, in order to “sulk on the rocks” of his Welsh, or Highland, or Basque, or Breton homeland.5 But, clearly, he was wrong—and not just because he underestimated the satisfaction that people take in sulking. Rather, it is a matter of perceived injustice. Modern democrats say that the state is the creation and servant of the people, not the other way round. They do not accept the inherited structures of authority associated with their states. Why should the inherited boundaries of states, no less the product of force, chance, and fraud, be any more sacred to them? The unwillingness of nations lucky enough to find themselves in control of existing states to reconsider inherited political boundaries seems unfair and self-serving to those less lucky. The former may cite the inconveniences that redrawing political boundaries inevitably create. But these inconveniences are almost always greater for established nation-states than for the members of nations without states. Ask the Kurds, if you need confirmation. And even if you think that modern democracies can be established without relying to some extent on the assertion of national loyalties—and I doubt that they can—they cannot undo what has already happened: the establishment of an international community of democratic nations. The association of popular control over the state with national sovereignty means that cultural minorities are bound to see cultural majorities as potential imperialists and cultural majorities are bound to see cultural minorities as potential subversives in democratic politics. Nationalism’s grip on modern democracy can be treated and moderated, but it is unlikely to be eliminated in the foreseeable future.
Good news So much for the bad news. Here is the good news. Although we seem stuck with nationalism and the problems it creates as long as we assert democratic principles of political legitimacy, nationalism is not nearly as monolithic or powerful force as it is ordinarily portrayed to be. In particular, it leaves much more room for moral and cultural pluralism than is generally recognized. Not that I am suggesting that democratic pluralists have access to some rational, civic, peaceful, and “Western” form of nationalism that corrects its morally problematic features. All forms of nationalism promote inter-communal conflict
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and suspicion; and they do so in ways that weaken ordinary moral restraints on the treatment of our competitors and enemies. Rather, I am suggesting that once we gain a clearer understanding of the moral psychology that sustains nationalism we will see that it leaves us much more space within which to balance and moderate its morally problematic features. To begin with, we need to remind ourselves that nationalism is a “partial” ideology. Compared to Marxism, liberalism and most other ideologies that have played a large role in modern politics, it guides us in a relatively small part of our moral and political lives. Nationalism tells us to value national loyalties and make the state the servant of the nation. No doubt, it encourages us to believe that things will be better overall for us when our nation gains control over its own state. But it tells us little about the content of that “better” life.6 For while nationalist principles tell us who should rule whom, they do not tell us how they should rule, i.e., what principles of justice and morality should guide us when we achieve national self-determination. That is one reason why nationalism combines so easily with so many different ideologies, from conservativism and liberalism to Marxism and Fascism. It needs to draw on these ideologies to fill in what nationalists cannot get from nationalism itself: a sense of what to do with the powers that they seek other than nurture and protect them from subversion by internal and external enemies. Since nationalists need to invoke other ideologies in order to pursue their agenda, they almost always have other moral and political commitments on which to draw if they seek to restrain nationalism’s more problematic features. One can, for example, be both a liberal and a nationalist, and seek to use the powers attained by national self-determination to enhance individual freedom and social diversity. Or one can be both a Confucian and a nationalist, and seek to promote greater social harmony and ethical responsibility in the use of power. Of course, not all marriages between nationalism and other ideologies are so benevolent. Nationalism mates just as easily with pernicious visions of justice, such as Hitler’s dreams of racial hierarchy. So these ideological combinations can just as easily enflame nationalism’s exclusive tendencies as tame and balance them. My point is merely that as a partial ideology nationalism always leaves space for those seeking to balance its more problematic features with other principles of justice and humanity. A second reason that nationalism is not nearly as monolithic and powerful force as it is usually made out to be are the diverse sources of communal loyalty upon which almost all of us can draw. No matter how much our democratic commitments may direct our attention to our national loyalties, these loyalties always compete with other communal loyalties in our lives, from the local and familial to the ideological and cosmopolitan. The most fanatical nationalist ideology may demand that we sacrifice everything for the good of the nation.7 But he does so precisely because he is confronted with the fact of communal pluralism. And while nationalists often speak as if the elimination of this plurality of loyalties is their goal, very few practice what they preach. For the person who would sacrifice the life of a friend, guest, family member, neighbor, co-religionist, or even stranger
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just to make things a little more convenient for one’s co-nationals would strike even most nationalists as something of a monster, as an inhuman being, precisely because he or she does not recognize the variety of ties that connect us to other human beings and makes their well-being a matter of some degree of concern to us. Human life, I am suggesting, is lived in a patchwork of overlapping and sometimes competing group loyalties. The unexpected and unprecedented political success of nationalism in mobilizing communal loyalty leads us, understandably, to focus our attention on it to the exclusion of other sources of communal loyalty. But that does not eliminate their influence on our behavior. The intensity of nationalist conflicts may create the impression that nationalists cannot stomach cultural difference or feel any connection or loyalty to those who do not share their cultural heritage. But that impression is an illusion. The Serb who says that he cannot stand “breathing the same air” as a Croat8 would probably have no objection to sharing a meal—let alone his air—with a Korean or a Dane. He might even invite these foreigners, individuals whose cultural distance from him dwarfs that of his Croat neighbor, into his home as a guest. For it is suspicion of the Croats as active or potential violators of his rights that inspires his hostility to them, not the minimal cultural distance that separates them. We need to work on taming and moderating the sense of grievance and injustice that feeds nationalist conflicts and one way of doing so is by calling on the sources of connection and communal loyalty that cut across national boundaries. The fact of communal pluralism supports recent efforts to develop more complex and sometimes multi-national forms of federalism in Western Europe and North America. There is nothing implausible about identifying oneself as both a Quebecois and a Canadian, as a Scot and a Briton, or a Catalan and a Spaniard. French, Breton, Celt, Aryan, European—the alternatives are finite and contingent, but always multiple, when taking stock of our communal loyalties. The never-ending activity of nation-building, with its none-too-gentle programs of cultural consolidation and integration, aims at eliminating or at least diminishing the threat that the diversity of cultural heritages poses to national ties. But an alternative, more pluralist approach has the advantage of going with, rather than against, the grain of our communal connections. Finally, and this may seem to be counter-intuitive, I believe that national community itself lends a certain degree of support to the promotion of cultural pluralism. In order to see why, we need to focus on an aspect of national community that most students of nationalism have missed. A nation, I suggest, is best understood as what I call a “cultural heritage” community, rather than more simply as a cultural community.9 A cultural community is a group of people who imagine themselves connected to each other as objects of mutual concern and loyalty by a shared set of cultural practices, such as the speaking of a particular language, the love of football, the celebration of a particular folk culture. A cultural heritage community, in contrast, is a group of people who imagine themselves connected to each other as objects of mutual concern and
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loyalty by a shared cultural inheritance, an inheritance that may include things like the speaking of a language or the love of folk culture. The key difference between them is that the members of cultural heritage communities need not practice or affirm any particular part of the package of cultural artifacts that they inherit. What binds them, instead, is the sense of mutual concern and loyalty inspired by their shared reception from previous generations of a unique, but inconsistent collection of cultural practices, memories, and artifacts. As a result, you do not need to speak Gaelic, or even like it, in order to be a member of the Irish nation; you need merely to imagine yourself connected by ties of special concern and loyalty to those with whom you share a cultural heritage that includes somewhere in past and present the speaking of Gaelic.10 Similarly, you do not need to practice Judaism, or even like it, in order to be a member of the Jewish nation (as opposed to a member of the Jewish religious community); you need merely imagine yourself connected by ties of social friendship to those who share the inheritance of cultural artifacts that reflect Jewish practice and history. Nor do you have to share Confucian beliefs, or even like them, in order to share membership in the Chinese nation; you need merely affirm your connection to others who, like you, share a cultural heritage that includes, among other things, a long history of Confucian teaching, ritual, and social practices. The May 4th demonstrators who rejected Confucianism as incompatible with the modern world were no less Chinese than current rediscoverers of the value of Confucian political morality. Nor was Liang Chi-Chao any less Chinese when he rejected Confucianism than when he changed his mind about its value in the building of a modern Chinese nation. What made them Chinese was the heritage of cultural memories and artifacts that they shared with others, not their willingness to believe in or practice any particular part of that heritage. A useful way of illustrating my understanding of nationhood, especially in a volume of essays on nationalism in East Asia, would be to apply it to the idea of a Confucian nation, a subject of Professor Moon’s contribution to this volume. As I see it, there are three ways of conceptualizing a Confucian nation, each with different implications for moral and political life. First of all, a Confucian nation could be thought of as a group of individuals bound by their attachment to Confucian ideals of ethical behavior and social order. In this sense, a Confucian nation could, in principle, be found anywhere in the world, since it consists of a national community guided by people who, for reasons of their own, have committed themselves to Confucian ideals. For what makes them a nation is their shared to commitments to a set of ideas, rather than their belonging to communities that were governed by such ideas at some point in the past. A second way of speaking of a Confucian nation would be appropriate only in those parts of the world where Confucian traditions have been influential for a long time, i.e., in East Asia. A Confucian nation, in this sense, is a group of individuals connected by a shared cultural heritage that includes long experience with Confucian ideals and institutions. Understood in this way, the members of a Confucian nation need be no more committed to the practice of Confucian
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ideals than the members of a Scandinavian nation are committed to emulating the virtues of the Vikings. They are connected by their common heritage, by sharing with each other the impact of a long history of Confucian ideals and institutions. Anti-Confucian activists, like the May 4th demonstrators, could be considered part of a Confucian nation understood in this way, since it is precisely the impact of their shared Confucian heritage that they were trying to address in their protests. Finally, a third way of speaking of a Confucian nation brings together the first two. In this sense a Confucian nation is a group of individuals a subset of whom urge their co-nationals to commit themselves to the Confucian beliefs and practices that they find in their shared cultural heritage. That, I suspect, is what most contemporary Confucians have in mind when they speak of a Confucian nation. But the failure to distinguish between cultural community and what I have called cultural heritage community leads them to downplay or even conceal the extent to which that they are selectively reconstructing their nation’s cultural heritage. Confucian nationalists of this sort will emphasize those parts of their cultural heritage most compatible with Confucianism and discount those most hostile to it. Just as liberal nationalists in the United States celebrate the ideals of Lincoln rather than the slave-holding south when talking about the American heritage, so Confucian nationalists will celebrate icons of social harmony and ethical responsibility rather than competition and self-reliance when speaking of their nation’s heritage. This last point highlights something important about nations that is usually ignored. Every nation is built upon a shared cultural heritage that is both unique and intrinsically pluralistic. A national heritage is unique because it is based on a singular line of succession, such that one cultural memory or artifact succeeded another in time and came to be combined with others in contingent and unrepeatable combinations. These unique lines of intergenerational inheritance thus accumulate diverse cultural beliefs and practices without any means for rendering them consistent or coherent. As a result, every nation can draw from its heritage a finite, but diverse and inconsistent set of sources of inspiration. The Chinese heritage, the cultural inheritance whose sharing allows people to identify with each other as members of a Chinese nation, is certainly Confucian; but it is also Legalist, and Taoist, and Maoist, and Buddhist, and much more. The French cultural heritage is both Catholic and secular, aristocratic and revolutionary—and much more. Membership in a national community does not demand a commitment to any particular cultural belief or practice. It demands a commitment to the people who share a particular heritage of inconsistent collection of beliefs and practices. And it is therefore compatible with a great diversity of ways of life and cultural expression. Of course, some people are bound to feel so strongly about a particular piece of their national heritage that they cannot imagine their nation without it. Such people often complain bitterly about the way in which their nation is “losing its soul” with the abandonment of its mother tongue or its ancestral constitution or its inherited religious beliefs and rituals.11 And they may be right. But nations often survive the loss of their “souls.” The Jewish people survived the loss of its
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homeland, its independence, and its religious center; the Irish people the loss or subordination of its mother tongue; the German people the collapse of Imperial, liberal democratic and Fascist regimes; and the Japanese people the divinization and de-divinization of its Emperor, among the many extraordinary transformations of character it has undergone in the last century and a half. As long as the members of succeeding generations continue to imagine themselves connected by their shared cultural heritage, the nation lives on, even if its members no longer employ the language or the laws or the rituals of their predecessors. It makes a tremendous difference to the character of life in a particular national community which elements of its heritage it celebrates. But the measure of a nation’s survival is its temporal continuity, not its fidelity to a particular way of life. In arguments about what part of the national heritage we should emphasize and affirm, those who invoke origins and the monumentalized ancestors associated with the origins often have a rhetorical advantage that lends plausibility to their claims that the nation’s existence depends on its continued commitment to a particular cultural belief or practice. That advantage is based on the sense that the character of nations is constituted by their beginnings. But that sense is an illusion. For while nations may have founders, mythical or real, they do not have constitutions that establish a basic structure or order upon which later generations build. The founders of nations may have ideas about the right way to order things, but what they establish is the beginning of a line of succession, rather than anything like a national constitution. And as that line of succession continues over the generations, their heirs add ever greater diversity and inconsistency to the cultural heritage that they bequeath to their successors. If I am right about this understanding of national community, then there is, as I have suggested, a surprising amount of room for cultural pluralism within the very idea of national community. First of all, nations demand respect for a shared collection of ways of life, rather than demand that we live in any particular way. Second, a national heritage can always be added to, so there is no a priori limit to the kind of cultural pluralism that a nation allows, a point demonstrated by the surprising and growing degree of multiculturalism that seems to be compatible with national community in places like France, the United States, and even Great Britain. So while our democratic commitments compel us to grapple with nationalism, we are left with a considerable array of moral resources with which to tame and balance the moral problems that it creates for us. Some social and political theorists have characterized nationalism as “the dark side of democracy,”12 democracy’s evil shadow, so to speak. I prefer to think of it as one of the abiding problems of democratic life. Like democracy’s other abiding problems, such as factionalism and populist demagoguery, it can be the source of new forms of violence and instability, but cannot be eliminated without eliminating democracy itself. It therefore challenges us to identify means of taming and balancing its negative effects, rather than look for ways of eliminating their cause. This chapter has pointed to some of the resources that we can draw on in trying to meet that challenge.
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Notes 1 This chapter draws on arguments presented at greater length in my recent book, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community. 2 Ibid., chap. 5. 3 Ibid., chap. 3. 4 As Tom Paine noted, “in America constitutions are established by the people. In France the word nation is used instead of the people; but in both cases, a constitution is a thing antecedent to the government.” See Paine, The Rights of Man, p. 213. 5 Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, chap. 15. 6 Contrary to the familiar complaint that nationalism inspires utopian dreams of a transformed existence in its “ruritanian independence.” See Hobsbawm, “Some Reflections on ‘The Break-up of Britain’,” pp. 3–23, at pp. 11–12; Beiner, “Introduction,” pp. 13–14. 7 Like the Irish nationalists who spurned W. B. Yeats, the greatest of Irish nationalist poets, because he would sacrifice a great deal for the Irish nation, but not everything. See Gilbert, Philosophy of Nationalism, p. 50, for an account of the affair. 8 Quoted in Semelin, Purify and Destroy, p. 29. 9 This understanding of national community is developed at length in Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community, chap. 3. 10 Like the early Irish nationalist leader, Daniel O’Connell, who “dismissed the Irish language robustly, as a drawback in the modern world.” See Foster, Modern Ireland, p. 300. 11 For example, see Samuel Huntington’s warning, in Who Are We?, p. xvii, about what will happen to America if it loses touch with the “Anglo-Protestant” cultural values that constitute its national character. 12 See especially Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy.
References Beiner, Ronald. 1998. “Introduction: Nationalism’s Challenge to Political Philosophy,” in Ronald Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Nationalism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1–20. Gilbert, Paul. 1998. Philosophy of Nationalism. Boulder: Westview Press. Foster, R. F. 1988. Modern Ireland. London: Penguin. Hobsbawm, Eric. 2004. “Some Reflections on ‘The Break-up of Britain’,” New Left Review 105: 3–23. Huntington, Samuel P. 2004. Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster. Mill, John Stuart. 1958. Considerations on Representative Government. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Mann, Michael. 2005. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Paine, Thomas. 1969. The Rights of Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Semelin, Jacques. 2009. Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press. Yack, Bernard. 2012. Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2
In the name of equality An examination of equality arguments for national self-government Hsin-Wen Lee
One of the rights frequently demanded by national communities is the right to self-government.1 Members of the same national group often wish to create their own sub-state autonomous government so that they can collectively manage their public affairs and be free from the interference of non-members. Quite a few philosophers sympathize with their cause and argue for different reasons that a national community has the right to govern itself.2 Prominent among those are Will Kymlicka and Alan Patten who argue that the equal treatment of different national cultures requires that each be granted the right to create its own sub-state government. Since both philosophers justify the right of national self-government by appealing to the value of equality, I label their arguments the equality arguments.3 In this chapter, I shall consider the merits and limits of the equality arguments. My examination will reveal that, although proponents of this argument correctly diagnose a serious social problem in many multination states, the solution they proposed is quite inadequate. The social problem is the fact that, due to their minority status, national groups consistently suffer from various forms of inequality. Both Kymlicka and Patten believe that a key solution to this problem is the right to national self-government. I argue that, for the equality argument to justify a group’s right to self-government, one must specify the kind of good that is being unevenly distributed among different national groups and prove that granting the right to self-government is the only way to equalize the distribution of this good. However, neither Kymlicka nor Patten explain adequately what this good is. In addition, a thorough reflection on the proposed solution shows that it is based on an unreasonable, anti-pluralistic assumption. Thus, even though we must treat different national communities equally, this does not entail that each group must be granted the right of self-government.
Background Before introducing the equality arguments, I shall briefly consider alternative arguments that national communities commonly make. There are many arguments a group can make to demand the right of self-government; equality is only one of them.4 Although I shall eventually refute the equality argument for
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national self-government, it does not mean that national communities do not have other ways to justify a similar demand. The strongest claim a group can make to demand the right to selfgovernment is likely to be based on some type of serious injustice. For instance, if the group was involuntarily incorporated into the current society by deception or colonization, then surely it has the right to reclaim its sovereignty and resist the existing government.5 Or, if a government imposes serious injustice on a national group, e.g., human rights violation or even genocide, then the state loses its legitimacy and the suffering group has a right to secede.6 The injusticebased argument applies to most aboriginal communities in the world, including those in America and Australia. However, such a claim is available only to indigenous communities suffering from forced inclusion or oppression. If a group becomes a part of the current society via voluntary immigration, then it seems that the injustice-based argument would not apply. For instance, the Francophone in Canada and various immigrant, polyethnic groups in the USA are nonindigenous. These groups do not, as a group, suffer from serious injustice. Can they also claim the right to self-government? An argument that non-indigenous communities can make is that it is desirable for a liberal government to formally recognize the right of secession, say, by allowing citizens the right to hold a referendum and decide whether they shall secede from the current state.7 There are constraints on the legal validity of such referendums. For instance, upon separation, the seceding group must repay the debt it owes to the government and distribute fairly the fruits of previous cooperation. Once relevant requirements are fulfilled, a group can follow the legally prescribed procedure and decide whether it shall become an independent political unit. I shall not consider the soundness of these arguments. I bring them up only to call the reader’s attention to an important feature of the equality argument. Notice that these two strategies for justifying a group’s right to selfgovernment—namely, by appealing to the claim based on injustice or a right to unilateral secession—do not appeal to the group’s status as a national community. For both theories, it is irrelevant whether members of the seceding group shared the same national language, history, and culture. So long as the requirements are fulfilled, the group may justifiably create its own government. However, for supporters of the equality argument, whether the group demanding the right of self-government is a nation or not is highly important. Only national communities, but not other types of communities, enjoy this right. Many philosophers advocate the right of national self-government. For them, it matters whether the group making the demand is a nation or not. There are several different arguments a philosopher can make to defend a nation’s right of self-government. For instance, some appeal to the intrinsic value of national identity and/or culture,8 others appeal to its instrumental value.9 Alternatively, without making claims regarding a nation’s rights, some philosophers argue that the ideal form of government is one in which the boundaries of the state
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coincide with that of a nation.10 The equality arguments considered in this chapter also emphasize a group’s status as a nation. It argues that minority nations are situated in socially disadvantaged positions and granting them the right to self-government is an important way to make up for their loss. Because the equality argument requires that each national group be granted the right to self-government, we must first understand what a national group is. For decades, philosophers and political theorists have tried to theorize national cultures.11 However, because different nations have different cultural characteristics, and the characteristics of the same nation may change over time, it is very difficult to offer a set of defining criteria for national communities.12 Fortunately, even though there are disputes regarding the defining feature of a nation, most people are able to recognize national cultures when they see one. Here, I cannot consider in detail all the features of a national community. It would suffice for us to note that most nations share the following features. (1) Objective features. A national community usually has an encompassing culture. This includes, but is not limited to, a shared language, history, certain traditions, customs, and practices. Avaishi Margalit and Joseph Raz point out that, unlike other types of cultures or identities, such as the gay community or the teen culture, a national culture is a pervasive one. It encompasses a wide range of activities and events in the lives of its members.13 Kymlicka suggests that it is a culture that “provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres.”14 Recently, Patten argues that a culture is “what people share when they have shared subjection to a common formative context.”15 Bernard Yack stresses that a nation shares cultural inheritance, not cultural practice.16 (2) Subjective features. Members of a national community usually identify themselves as such.17 Because national cultures are the sources of personal autonomy and identity, people often value their national culture and historical heritage. David Miller suggests that “national communities are constituted by belief [italic added]: nations exist when their members recognize one another as compatriots, and believe that they share characteristics of the relevant kind.”18 Benedict Anderson famously calls a national community an imagined community—the relationships between members are not personal but mostly imagined. (3) Historical homeland. Every national community has a homeland where, for generations, its members have resided and its culture developed. Without geographical proximity, an encompassing culture can hardly be formed and permeated in the public life of a community. Thus, nations are almost always territorially concentrated, and a national identity is always intimately connected to its historical homeland. The homeland also plays an important role in the development of both the subjective and objective features. This may be so even when members emigrate to a new society.19
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Examples of national communities include Japan, Vietnam, Tibet, the Kurds, and the Dutch-speaking Flemish community in Belgium. As the examples show, some national communities have their own states, others have their own autonomous governments, and still others do not form any kind of political community. Next, I will consider whether equal treatment of different nations requires that the last type of group be granted the right to self-government.
Kymlicka’s argument In Multicultural Citizenship, Kymlicka defends the right of a national community to establish a sub-state, autonomous government. This right, along with special representation and polyethnic rights, is included in a package of groupdifferentiated rights granted to national communities.20 Kymlicka’s justification for the right to self-government is a part of his larger project to justify the group-differentiated rights given to national communities. These rights are meant to protect the interests people have in national culture, membership, and identity. They are referred to as group-differentiated because, unlike those assigned to individual citizens, they are assigned to a group or members of the group.21 One can enjoy these rights only by virtue of being a member. Because Kymlicka‘s argument for the right to national self-government is derived from his argument for group-differentiated rights, to understand his argument for national self-government, we must understand his argument for groupdifferentiated rights first. There are three steps in the equality argument. First, Kymlicka explains why a national community is singled out. Because the right is group-differentiated according to national membership, Kymlicka must explain why national culture, membership, and identity are morally significant.22 Second, Kymlicka explains why the usual basic rights or civic liberties assigned to individuals are not enough to protect their group-specific interests. That is, he explains why individual rights are not enough and why national communities also need rights that are group-specific according to national membership. Lastly, Kymlicka explains why a national community should be granted the right to self-government. Here, due to limited space, I cannot consider Kymlicka’s argument for the moral value of national identity in detail. Very roughly, Kymlicka argues that national identity is important because it is the source of personal identity as well as individual autonomy.23 I shall assume that his argument successfully defends the value of national identity and move on to the next step. Clearly, if national identity was insignificant, we need not pay special attention to it, let alone give national communities the right to govern themselves. The question I am interested in is, assuming that national identity is morally important, does this justify the right of a national community to establish a sub-state government? While the first step explains why national identity matters, the second step explains why this particular type of group should be granted certain groupdifferentiated rights. This step explains why the relevant interests should be
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protected and recognized in institutional settings. Kymlicka’s argument for recognizing group-differentiated rights for a national community is composed of three different arguments: the value of cultural diversity (the diversity argument), the role of historical agreements (the history-based argument), and the equality argument.24 Among these three, the equality argument is the most important one in supporting a nation’s right to self-government. The reasons are as follows. First, the diversity argument appeals to interests the larger society has in cultural diversity. Cultural diversity is regarded as valuable because it allows members of the society to have more options. However, this argument cannot explain why a national community should be allowed to establish an autonomous government because this right would limit cultural diversity within the national community and constrain the options available to its own members. In addition, Kymlicka suggests that because this argument “appeals to the interests of the larger society, it cannot explain why minorities should be able to decide for themselves whether or how to maintain their culture.”25 Although cultural diversity is valuable, its value cannot explain why the larger society should limit its own freedom for the sake of cultural diversity. Thus, even though the diversity argument lends support to certain polyethnic rights, it hardly justifies a group’s right to govern itself. Second, Kymlicka’s history-based argument focuses on the role of contracts and agreements actually made between national communities and the current state governments. Kymlicka points out that these agreements have often been blatantly ignored or unilaterally suspended by the government.26 Presumably, a reasonable solution would be to honor the terms of these agreements. However, Kymlicka points out that many historical agreements are unfair or outdated. Thus, the value and status of these agreements are not clear. Consequently, we should not rely solely on historical agreements. We must also consider what the principle of equality would say about these agreements. Kymlicka thus suggests that historical agreements should be reinterpreted, and that when talking about group-differentiated rights, both the principle of equality and historical arguments ought to be taken into account. Because the diversity argument cannot justify a group’s right to selfgovernment and because historical agreements do not provide decisive guidance, Kymlicka’s argument for group-differentiated rights depends crucially on the equality argument. To show how members of a national community are treated unequally as a group, Kymlicka points out the problems ignored by the benign neglect view.27 The benign neglect view holds that, if individual citizens are given equal rights and resources, then the government should not give any national community any group-specific rights because such a policy would disrupt the equal distribution of social resources and give members of a national community an unfair advantage. We should ignore the cultural differences within a society. If a group wishes to preserve its national culture, its members should do so by using their own personal rights and resources.
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However, Kymlicka argues that the benign neglect view is not benign because it results in de facto inequality. [G]overnment decisions on languages, internal boundaries, public holidays, and state symbols unavoidably involve recognizing, accommodating, and supporting the needs and identities of particular ethnic and national groups. The state unavoidably promotes certain cultural identities, and thereby disadvantages others [italics added].28 While the benign neglect view suggests that equal rights and resources given to individual citizens are enough for liberal equality, Kymlicka shows us how members of a national minority are systematically treated unequally even when they enjoy the same rights and resources as everyone else. In other words, with regard to certain social institutions, policies, or affairs, it is impossible for a society to remain culturally neutral. In those cases, social institutions cannot avoid favoring one national group, often the majority group, over the others.29 As a result, those whose national identity is different from that of the majority are relegated to a disadvantageous position. They are often outvoted by the majority, their language and culture marginalized and in decline. To maintain their national culture, members of the minority group have to spend a part of their resources on the preservation of their culture. This is a cost that members of the majority do not have to bear; members of the majority culture can take for granted the recognition of their language and culture.30 Consequently, we have an important reason to redress the inequality that arises from national membership. Because one incurs this disadvantage as a result of her national membership, only members of the relevant communities suffer from this inequality. This is why the relevant rights are group-differentiated according to national membership. So far, the equality argument explains why, in addition to the equal rights granted to each citizen, equality requires that we recognize rights that are group-specific according to national membership. Kymlicka’s argument demonstrates clearly how members of a national community can suffer from inequality by virtue of their national membership. This provides a sound reason for redressing this particular inequality, which happens only to members of a minority group. Individual rights are not enough to offset this inequality; group-differentiated rights must be granted. After showing that national identity is important and that members of minority cultures suffer from unequal treatment, Kymlicka must explain why self-government right should be given to a national community. Margaret Moore suggests that, even if we can prove that a national community is unfairly treated, this fact does not by itself tell us how this inequality should be rectified.31 That is, even if we know that members of a national community suffer from inequality as a result of their membership, we do not yet know how we should redress this inequality or which institution should be set up to compensate
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for their loss.32 Why, then, should a national group be given the right to build an autonomous government? We can find a short discussion by Kymlicka on why the right to selfgovernment is justified. The main reason is that equality calls for equal benefits and opportunities for different national minorities. [W]e should aim at ensuring that all national groups have the opportunity to maintain themselves as a distinct culture, if they so choose. This ensures that that good of cultural membership is equally protected for the members of all national groups. In a democratic society, the majority nation will always have its language and societal culture supported, and will have the legislative power to protect its interests in culture-affecting decisions. The question is whether fairness requires that the same benefits and opportunities should be given to national minorities. The answer, I think, is clearly yes. Hence group-differentiated self-government rights compensate for unequal circumstances which put the members of the minority cultures at a systemic disadvantage in the cultural market-place, regardless of their personal choices in life.33 Therefore, to give members of a national community equal opportunity to protect their national culture and to give them benefits equal to those received by the majority, a national community should be given the right to selfgovernment. Does Kymlicka’s argument successfully justify the right of a national community to establish a sub-state government? Kymlicka’s argument successfully shows us how members of a national minority can suffer from systematic and structural inequality, even when they enjoy the same rights and resources as other citizens. As expected, the principle of equality requires that we redress these inequalities. Even so, it is not clear why this must be done by granting them the right to self-government. To redress these problems of inequality, other measures of compensation are available. For instance, if a national minority lacks substantive political power, they could be given the right to special representation in the legislature. Their language could be recognized in governmental institutions and taught at school. Additionally, because their cultures, traditions, and practices are in decline, they could be granted rights that protect these interests. A society could treat different national groups equally by officially recognizing all of their languages and cultures.34 For every disadvantage a national group faces, we can, in principle, find a corresponding compensation to redress that inequality. Why, then, must the right to self-government be granted? Allen Buchanan raises a similar objection. Whereas Kymlicka holds that a national community should be granted special representation, self-government, and polyethnic rights, Buchanan questions if it is necessary to grant all three: [E]ither “polyethnic rights” protect a culture well enough so that it can supply a meaningful context for choice for its members or they do not. If
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they do, then why do any cultural groups, including nations, need rights of self-government in addition? If “polyethnic” rights do not protect cultures well enough to provide a meaningful context for choice, then every cultural group must have self-government, and “polyethnic rights” are simply a waste of time.35 In any case, Kymlicka must explain what it is that the right to self-government can do but polyethnic rights cannot. Otherwise, if polyethnic rights provide sufficient protection for a national culture, it is not clear why a national community is also entitled to the right to self-government. It may make for a good policy, but it is hardly a right. Kymlicka can possibly respond to this challenge by making a distinction between two different types of goods that are unequally distributed among different national communities: those that can be redressed without the right to self-government, and those that cannot be redressed without this right. Whenever we say that there is inequality, we mean that there is some good that is not equally distributed among members of different groups. The unequal distribution of the goods of language, culture, and political power among different national communities can be redressed by granting a national community special representation and polyethnic rights. These rights are enough to ensure that the disadvantages a national group incurs are made up for and that the national group has equal rights and resources as the majority group. On the other hand, there is also a second type of good that is unequally distributed among different national communities. Inequality in this case cannot be redressed without the right to establish an autonomous government. To defend the right of a national community to self-government, Kymlicka must explain what this good is. The answer to this question is the key to justifying the right to self-government. What, then, is it? Unfortunately, Kymlicka does not clarify what this particular type of good is. Nonetheless, there are two clues that we can follow to figure out the answer. First, the answer can most likely be found if one analyzes what equal benefit, opportunity, or circumstance for different national communities entails.36 In the passage cited earlier, Kymlicka talks about equal “opportunity for all national groups to preserve their cultures,” “equal distribution of the good of cultural membership,” and “compensating for unequal circumstances.” However, he does not explain what equality in these areas means. Thus, it still is not clear how concerns for equality would entail the right of self-government. Nevertheless, there is a second clue we can follow, namely, the right that Kymlicka intends to argue for. Because the right Kymlicka intends to argue for, i.e., the right to self-government, is supposed to offset some benefit that the majority group enjoys while the minority group does not, we may reasonably infer that Kymlicka assumes that the majority group is enjoying the benefit of selfgovernment in some sense, and that the same benefit should also be granted to a national minority. It seems that this second clue provides a more straightforward explanation why the right to self-government is justified. It also explains
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better why special representation and polyethnic rights are not enough and why the right to self-government is also necessary. I am not sure if this is the explanation Kymlicka has in mind, but given the information available, it seems to be the best, though not the only, explanation. However, this explanation assumes that the state belongs to the majority national group but not the minority. Is this a plausible assumption? To answer this question, we must not only examine the institutional arrangement in society, but also investigate how these groups came to join the society. Depending on how the state came into existence, we may question whether the above assumption was plausible. If the state was formed as a result of unjust colonization or settlement, the government would indeed be regarded as belonging to the majority and the minority group has a right to renegotiate the terms of cooperation or even to create its own state. However, in such cases the injusticebased argument would suffice; it is not clear what role the equality argument plays. On the other hand, if the state was born as a result of voluntary cooperation among different national communities, it is not clear on what basis the state should be regarded as belonging to one group but not the others. Furthermore, in cases in which different communities agree to form a state, if the government officially recognizes the language, history, and culture of each national group and grants every group the right to proportional representation and/or veto power, it is not clear in what sense the state belongs to the majority but not the minority. It seems that Kymlicka’s argument assumes that there is something intrinsically bad about a multination state because no matter what the government does, it can never adequately recognize the national identity of a minority culture. Any multination state where one group is the dominant majority would necessarily be unfair for the minority group. Given that there are many multination states in which different national cultures are treated relatively equally, e.g., Switzerland and Belgium, this suggestion seems quite implausible. In addition, it seems to ascribe to multination states some kind of original sin that a multination state can never free itself from; such a suggestion is inherently antipluralistic. Second, assuming for the sake of argument that the state belonged to the majority group but not the minority, this assumption would entail not just the right of a national minority to establish a sub-state government, but perhaps also the right to build its own state. If equal recognition of national identity entails equal benefits and opportunities and the state belongs only to the majority, shouldn’t a national community be given the right to establish a sovereign state? This would give it even more substantive power over its own affairs and ensure that its members receive the same benefits and opportunities as members of the majority culture. It is not clear why we should stop at the right to sub-state government. The right to build a state can better approximate the ideal of equal treatment. Or, alternatively, Kymlicka could have drawn the conclusion that multination states should adopt a confederation system, such as the one in Switzerland, where each of the constituent national communities is treated equally, as each has its own government and is equally recognized at the
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state level. In any case, if equal recognition requires that each national community receive the same benefits, then Kymlicka must hold that any national group has the right to establish an independent state, or that a multination state must adopt a confederation system where each constituent national community has its own autonomous government. However, both conclusions are somewhat different from Kymlicka’s original proposal. Lastly, even if this theory of equal recognition can explain why the right to self-government is justified, it still needs an argument. That is, we still need an explanation why equal recognition of different national communities requires that each be given the right to self-government. Kymlicka’s argument is based on concerns for the disadvantages members of a group incur by virtue of their national membership. As long as a society can find ways to redress these disadvantages, these inequalities would seem to be rectified. However, the claim that equal treatment of different national communities requires that each has its own government is different from the claim that the group is treated unfairly and that this inequality needs to be redressed. The former claim is justified unless one can also prove that a state government embodies the recognition of the dominant majority culture, or that each state can recognize only one nation group. Otherwise, if the state government recognizes every national culture, how can one deny that the state is a multination state? In what sense can one claim that a national community is not properly recognized? The claim that a group has the right to establish a government entails more than a right to compensation. We need to know why we cannot recognize national identity in the usual political/ social institutions (such as language or cultural rights), but must also recognize it by granting the right to self-government. I am not sure how Kymlicka would response to my challenge. Although Kymlicka does not have an argument for the claim that equal recognition of national identity or culture requires that each national group be given the right to selfgovernment, Patten does consider one. I will discuss his argument in the next section. Next, I shall move on to my second critique of Kymlicka’s argument. It seems that the treatment Kymlicka prescribes for national and polyethnic groups leads to some difficulty.37 Since these group-differentiated rights are rooted in national identity and culture, all types of national communities— indigenous groups, national groups, and polyethnic groups—can enjoy these rights. Notice that although Kymlicka distinguishes between national minorities and polyethnic groups, he does not distinguish between indigenous and nonindigenous ones. In addition, because his argument for group-differentiated rights is mainly defined by national culture, the rights implied by his theory apply to all three types of communities. This lack of distinction leads to confusion in the distribution of rights. Chaim Gans points out that Kymlicka’s argument cannot explain how we can justify our differential treatment of national and polyethnic groups.38 While many believe that a national community should be granted the right to selfgovernment, not as many believe that a polyethnic group should enjoy the same right. However, in Kymlicka’s discussion, what is said of a national community,
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i.e., the importance of identity and the corresponding inequality, applies equally to a polyethnic group. Thus, if a national community should be granted the right to self-government because it suffers from certain disadvantages, then a polyethnic group, which suffers in a similar manner and sometimes to a greater extent, must equally be granted the right to self-government. In other words, what Kymlicka says applies equally to national and polyethnic groups. Thus, if his argument justifies the right to self-government for one group, it justifies the same right for the other. Kymlicka seems to be aware that his argument has such an implication; still, he does not see it as a problem. He believes that there is nothing inherently unjust about such arrangements.39 However, since immigrants voluntarily emigrate into the host society, their claim to self-government is greatly diminished.40 Also, they are usually too dispersed to form a government. Nevertheless, if a society were to grant polyethnic groups the right to self-government, there is nothing wrong. This response cannot be satisfactory. Gans suggests, “If the voluntary nature of immigration is a good enough reason to silence claims to self-government, why is it not sufficient grounds to also silence demands for polyethnic rights?”41 Kymlicka’s response would entail that polyethnic groups do not have any culture-based rights, either. This apparently is inconsistent with his original inspiration. Moreover, if polyethnic groups had rights to govern themselves, then settlement would be justified. This contradicts almost every liberal theory of land entitlement.42 There is also a good reason to question an immigrant group’s right to selfgovernment. In Moore’s historical argument, we find reasons why indigenous groups have rights of self-government—i.e., that the government fails to represent their interests and that they did not participate in the creation of the current society. However, in the case of non-indigenous groups, if their members voluntarily joined the society and if the government grants them special representation and polyethnic rights—on what basis could they demand the right to selfgovernment? Each part of the society has a legitimate expectation for the longterm cooperation of its constituent parts. Without any supporting historical claim, recognizing the right of any group to self-government will unjustifiably disrupt such expectation. Thus, Kymlicka’s response is not satisfactory. In the end, Kymlicka cannot say that a polyethnic group does not have the right to self-government, but must claim that this right is defeated or cannot be exercised for some reason. However, immigrant polyethnic groups do not have such a right at all. It is not that they have this right but somehow cannot exercise it. Rather, an immigrant group does not have the right to self-government. Thus, Kymlicka’s equality argument fails to account for the differential treatments of national and polyethnic groups.
Patten’s argument Patten’s argument for national self-government is based on the interest people have in having their identity recognized. He believes that the recognition of
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national identity is an important good, and that governmental institutions must actively regulate its distribution. An institution that supports the equal distribution of identity recognition would be preferable to one that does not. Because a multinational constitution,43 which is defined as one that officially recognizes the right to national self-government, is the best way to equalize the distribution of identity recognition, every state should adopt such a constitution.44 Before I explain Patten’s argument, I should first specify the kind of society to which his theory applies. His focus is on societies characterized by identity pluralism.45 One might associate such a society with a multination state, but this would be imprecise. Although a multination state is often also a society with identity pluralism (and vice versa), they are different. The former is defined mainly by the identification with a culture, while the latter by its political aspiration, which, in turn, is rooted in its identification with the culture. Identifying with a group means having certain dispositions and attitudes toward that group. For instance, members of a national group typically feel proud or ashamed of the conduct of other members, or of the achievements and failures of the group. Further, this identity involves a desire that the group “enjoy some significant degree of collective self-government as a group.”46 The focus on the desire for self-government is an important element that distinguishes Patten’s argument from that of Kymlicka’s. Patten further clarifies that a society is identity-pluralistic if a part of the citizens identify with the larger state, S, while the others identify with a sub-unit of the state, T.47 An example of an identity-pluralistic society is Northern Ireland: some citizens identify with the sub-unit of Northern Ireland, while the others identify with the larger state of the United Kingdom. On the other hand, a multinational society is not identity-pluralistic if its constituent national groups do not aspire to establish its own government. Singapore can be considered multinational (as it is composed of citizens with different national backgrounds) but not identity-pluralistic (as none of the constituent group aspires to establish its own government). Now that I have explained the kind of societies that Patten has in mind, I will go on to explain Patten’s argument. Patten suggests that, in an identitypluralistic society, the government must try to actively equalize the distribution of the good of recognition in political institutions. He does so by first explaining why the recognition of national identity is a good, and then why the distribution of this good must be governed by political institutions. First, the recognition of identity is a good because it would fulfill the identity-bearer’s aspiration for selfgovernment.48 The group may govern its affairs collectively and make decisions that better “reflect its beliefs about value, cultural priorities, traditions.”49 This would in turn promote the value of communal integrity, i.e., a “fit” between the values of the members and the policies that govern them.50 Thus, the recognition of national identity is a good. Still, even if the recognition of identity is a good, why should it be regulated by the government? Why not adopt a policy of non-interference? Patten explains that this is because, with regard to certain political arrangements, such as
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territorial boundaries or official holidays, the government cannot avoid making decisions that are more favorable to one group—it is not difficult to see how the way state boundaries are drawn would allow the majority more substantive political power/influence, and how political institutions almost always reflect the needs or preferences of the same majority group. This leads to de facto inequality— these political arrangements are in fact more favorable to one group and disadvantageous for the others. In such a society, the government can either adopt a policy of noninterference, or it can actively equalize the distribution of the relevant goods. The policy of non-interference would, in substance, amount to the recognition of the identity of the majority. Because certain political arrangements can hardly avoid favoring one group over the other, Patten believes that non-interference is unfair and active involvement is necessary. When it is impossible not to recognize at least one identity, then it seems reasonable to think that equal recognition of the different identities—as far as this is possible—becomes the response most in tune with the principle of equal respect.51 To redress the unequal distribution of identity-recognition, the government must be more proactive. Now that Patten establishes that the equal recognition of national identity requires active governmental regulation, the next step is to look for the institutional arrangement that would best promote equal recognition. Patten considers two possible options: the plebiscitary theory and his failure-of-recognition condition. He argues that his failure-of-recognition condition would provide a more equalized distribution of recognition than the plebiscitary theory. Patten believes that, in an identity-pluralistic society, the government should adopt a multinational constitution that recognizes the right of a national group to build its own sub-state government. Only when the government fails to recognize this right, that is, only when the failure-of-recognition condition is met, is the group justified in seceding unilaterally. Recognizing the right to self-government would allow the good of recognition to be distributed to those who identify with the group. “Their identity is recognized in the sense that political boundaries are drawn, and powers assigned, in such a way as to acknowledge the group as a group and give it a space in which to enjoy self-government.”52 However, if a state failed to recognize this right in its political institutions, then the state would fail to grant proper recognition to those who identify with the group. In that case, the group would be justified in establishing its own independent state, because its identity should be recognized and the original society has manifestly failed to accommodate its national identity. Patten suggests that, in this situation, the “failure-ofrecognition” condition is met because the state fails to properly recognize the national identity of the group. This would justify the right of the group to establish its own state.
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Many believe that the plebiscitary theory provides the best solution for the equal distribution of national identity. This theory holds that, so long as relevant conditions are met, members of a group have the right to vote in a referendum and decide if they should establish their own state.53 Having this right would put the group on a par with the dominant majority, as it is also granted the right to have a state in which it becomes the dominant majority, with its cultural preferences reflected in public institutions. However, Patten argues that the plebiscitary theory is not the best way to equalize the distribution of identity recognition. Without the “failure-ofrecognition” condition, simply allowing a group to vote in a referendum and decide if it wants to establish its own state would lead to a less equal distribution of national identity—assuming that most members of the sub-unit T voted for the independence of T (from the larger state S), this result would grant recognition only to those who identify with T but not those residents of T who identify with the larger state S. Once T became an independent state, the identity of those who identify with the larger state S would be completely suppressed. Thus, the plebiscitary theory would sanction an uneven distribution of identity recognition—it may lead to a situation in which only the identity of some (those who identify with the seceding group) is recognized, but the identity of others (those who identify with the larger state) is disregarded. On the other hand, Patten’s theory would not prioritize such an unequal distribution. According to Patten, we should prefer his failure-of-recognition condition to the plebiscite theory because his theory gives priority to an arrangement that provides a more equalized distribution of the good of recognition. It requires that a national group be given the right to sub-state selfgovernment first, and only when this right is denied is the group justified in demanding the right to secede. When T has the right to establish its own substate government, those who identify with T can express their identity through the sub-state government of T, and those who identify with S can express their identity via the state government of S. This arrangement is superior because “a distribution in which all get some of what they want should be regarded as superior to one in which a majority gets all of what they want while the minority get none.”54 Patten’s theory prioritizes an arrangement that grants recognition to both those who identify with T and those who identify with S. On the other hand, the plebiscitary theory completely ignores this arrangement. It gives recognition only to those who identify with T, or only those who identify with S. Therefore, Patten’s multination constitution allows the good of recognition to be more equally distributed. Does Patten’s argument successfully justify the right of a national group to sub-state self-government? Patten’s strategy involves showing that the good of recognition is in fact unevenly distributed among majority and minority groups, and that this fact by itself discredits policies of non-interference and justifies active governmental regulation. This argument is similar to Kymlicka’s in that both appeal to the de facto inequality that minority nations endured. In my discussion of Kymlicka’s argument, I explained that the equality argument justifies
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a right by appealing to the disadvantage a group receives as a result of its minority status. That is, this argument justifies a right (to compensation) by pointing out that one receives a lesser share of a particular good because of one’s national membership. Thus, were a person to justify the right to self-government by appealing to this argument, she must show that (1) there is a good that a minority group receives a lesser share of exactly because of its minority status, and (2) the lesser share can be made up for only by granting the right to selfgovernment to the minority group. In other words, if the point of the right is to equalize an unbalanced distribution of goods, one needs to explain which good it is that this right is supposed to help equalize. Thus, one crucial task in appealing to the equality argument is to identify the good in question. I argued earlier that because Kymlicka does not explain what this good is, his argument fails to justify the right of national self-government. Patten’s argument somewhat addresses this issue. Although he does not acknowledge the above methodological requirement, he does explicitly specify that his focus is not on recognition in the “common” or “cultural” sense, such as the recognition of the group’s language, history, or custom in governmental institutions.55 Rather, he is concerned with addressing the desire of the group to self-government. This straightforward focus on the aspiration to self-government allows Patten to focus his discussion on how a multination state should equally distribute this good, i.e., the aspiration to self-government. Does his argument successfully justify the right of minority nations to self-government? There are good reasons to think that it doesn’t. First, we have reason to question his conception of the good of recognition. Patten defines national identity as involving “attitudes and dispositions” toward a group, or a “propensity” to feel shame and pride for this group. 56 However, it is not clear why one should take these attitudes, dispositions, or propensities seriously. People may also have similar attitudes toward other types of groups, such as a political party. It is not clear why people’s attitudes, dispositions, or propensities toward a national group deserve special recognition in institutions. In any case, Patten needs to explain the moral significance of these dispositions. This is not the most serious problem in Patten’s theory. Many philosophers have tried to answer this question. Due to limited space, I will not go into depth on this issue. What matters the most, in Patten’s argument, is not why these attitudes and dispositions require special recognition, but why we must recognize a national group’s aspiration to self-government. Why should we be concerned with a national group’s aspiration to self-government? Why is this an issue that the government must address? Patten does try to answer this question. He discusses Buchanan’s challenge that political institutions should not arbitrarily single out some identity for special recognition when they can treat different identities in an unbiased way.57 This is when he points to the de facto inequality among majority and minority national groups. Patten agrees that political institutions should not arbitrarily recognize one identity and ignore the others. Nevertheless, he believes that we still have a good, non-arbitrary reason to do so in the case of national identity,
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i.e., the de facto inequality between the majority and the minority groups. The culture of the majority group is recognized by the state, but the culture of the minority group is not. Does this response explain why we must recognize a minority group by giving it the right to self-government? As I explained earlier, in order to justify this right to self-government by appealing to the equality argument, the most important question one must answer is what the good is that is being unevenly distributed among different groups. Patten’s answer seems to be the political aspiration to self-government. However, there is a good reason to question whether Patten answers the question satisfactorily. His answer assumes that the majority national group’s aspiration to self-government is achieved. As I explained in the last section, whether the assumption was plausible depends on how the state was established. Were the state a result of unjust colonization or settlement by the majority group, the minority group can of course renegotiate the terms of cooperation with the current state government. However, if the state was born as a result of fair cooperation among citizens, it is not clear on what basis the state should be considered the realization of the aspiration of self-government of one particular group. In addition, as I suggested earlier, if a state government recognizes the language, history, and culture of all the national groups in the state officially and gives each group special representation in the legislature to equalize political power and influence, in what sense should the state be understood as a nation state, but not a multination one? Patten’s response to Buchanan’s challenge would probably be that the way the state boundary is drawn has a different impact on different national groups. However, this does not answer Buchanan’s challenge: Buchanan can be understood as saying that the way the state boundary is drawn can have a different impact on various identity groups, not just national groups. It may also affect the aspiration of liberals and conservatives, people who have different religious beliefs, and even people who support different policies. Were the boundary drawn differently, the aspiration for gun-control would readily be recognized. Were the boundary drawn differently, the aspiration for abortion prohibition would be recognized. Were the boundary drawn differently, different people’s political aspirations would receive more recognition. Why should we evaluate its impact solely on members of different national groups? Why not also evaluate its impact on, say, liberals and conservatives? They have their political aspirations as well. It seems that Patten’s answer to the question “what is the good that is being redistributed to the minority group?” is not satisfactory. In addition, Patten’s strategy makes him vulnerable to the same objection raised against Kymlicka. The second problem in Patten’s argument is that, if the political aspiration to self-government of different national groups should be equally distributed, then recognizing this right would entail that immigrant polyethnic groups also have the same right. Patten’s conception of national identity is defined by people’s dispositions and attitudes toward a group. This possibly characterizes both
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the identity of a national group and a polyethnic one. As explained earlier, recognizing the right of a polyethnic group would amount to a sanction of settlement policies, which blatantly violates modern conceptions of land entitlement. Thus, Patten’s argument fails to justify the right of a national group to self-government. His argument shares the same problem with Kymlicka’s.
Conclusion In this chapter, I have examined Kymlicka and Patten’s equality arguments. I believe that they have correctly identified a social problem in many multination states, namely, the systematic inequality facing national minorities. Because this inequality affects only members of a national minority, to solve this problem, minority groups must be granted certain group-specific rights. In particular, they must be granted rights to those goods that they consistently receive a lesser share of due to their minority status. Nonetheless, I have also shown that the equal treatment of different national communities would not require that each be granted the right of selfgovernment. The only way to show that it would is to adopt the implausible assumption that a multination state can never treat a minority group fairly. This claim is implausible both in theory and practice. Therefore, at the end of this chapter, I must warn readers, especially proponents of liberal nationalism and multiculturalism, against this particularly dangerous implication of the equality arguments. Although the attempts to preserve national cultures are laudable and worthy, we must be careful not to revive the kind of narrow-minded, monistic nationalism in the past. Liberal multiculturalists must allow some space for real pluralism, where different national cultures may co-exist and thrive.
Notes 1 In the literature, “the right to self-government” is sometimes used to mean “the right to self-determination,” which refers to the right of a group to decide whether it should establish its own independent, sovereign state. Here, I use “the right to selfgovernment,” “the right to govern itself,” and “the right to build a sub-state government” interchangeably to mean the same right of a national community to create a sub-state, autonomous government. Although the discussion here bears some relation to the question of whether a nation has the right to create a sovereign state, due to the limited space, I will not consider this issue here. 2 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship; Patten, “Democratic Secession from a Multinational State,” pp. 558–586; Gans, The Limits of Nationalism; Moore, “An Historical Argument for Indigenous Self-Determination,” pp. 89–118; Seymour, “Secession as a Remedial Right,” pp. 395–423. 3 The right to special representation is the right of a national community to have special representation in the legislature. Polyethnic rights are rights that national groups have to practice their traditions and customs. An example is the exemption of motorcycle helmet rules for Sikhs in Canada (Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 26–33). Kymlicka uses the terms “group-differentiated right” and “group-specific right” interchangeably. In this chapter I follow his terminology.
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4 Buchanan, “Theories of Secession,” pp. 31–61; Norman, “The Ethics of Secession as the Regulation of Secessionist Politics,” pp. 34–61. 5 When I say that group-differentiated rights are assigned to a group or members of the group, some might understand it as suggesting the right-holder is the national group as a whole but not the individual members. However, this is not the case. Kymlicka suggests that, “What matters is not whether the right is collective (as opposed to individual), but that it is group-differentiated.… Whether these group-specific rights are attributed to individual Indians or Indian bands/tribes is, for critics, largely irrelevant.” In short, Kymlicka need not assume that the right-holder is the collective, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 45–48. 6 Buchanan, “What’s So Special about Nations?”; Brilmayor, “Secession and SelfDetermination,” pp. 177–202. 7 Beran, “In Defense of the Consent Theory of Political Obligation and Authority,” pp. 260–271; Gauthier, “Breaking Up,” pp. 357–372; Philpott, “A Defense of SelfDetermination,” pp. 352–385; Wellman, “In Defense of Secession and Political SelfDetermination,” pp. 142–171. 8 Margalit and Raz, “National Self-determination,” pp. 439–461; Miller, On Nationality; Nielsen, “Liberal Nationalism and Secession,” pp. 108–110; Tamir, Liberal Nationalism. 9 Miller, On Nationality; Seymour, “Secession as a Remedial Right,” pp. 395–423. 10 Caney, “Self-Government and Secession,” pp. 351–372; Moore, The Ethics of Nationalism. 11 Anderson, Imagined Communities; Beiner, Theorizing Nationalism; Geller, Nations and Nationalism; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780; Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship; Smith, National Identity; Patten, “Rethinking Culture,” pp. 735–749; Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community. 12 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 104. 13 Margalit and Raz, “National Self-Determination,” p. 444. 14 Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 76. 15 Patten, Rethinking Culture, p. 735. 16 Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community, p. 69. 17 Moore, The Ethics of Nationalism, pp. 9–14. 18 Miller, On Nationality, p. 22. 19 Kolers, “Attachment to Territory,” pp. 101–124; Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community, pp. 90–92. 20 There can be other types of group-differentiated rights. For instance, in some societies, women are given the right to have special representation in the legislature. Another example would be the right of senior citizens to certain social welfare. 21 Kymlicka makes a similar point in the book Liberalism, Community, and Culture. There, Kymlicka asks us to consider the circumstances of two boys with different national memberships. One boy is from the Anglophone community, which is the dominant majority group in Canada. The other is an Inuit boy, whose community is a minority and whose culture is in decline. Even if we give these two boys equal rights and resources, we can imagine that, to protect his culture from decline, the Inuit boy would have to spend more resources to save his culture, and this is a price that the Anglophone boy would not have to pay, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, p. 189. 22 Kymlicka (Multicultural Citizenship, p. 6) argues that it is legitimate, and indeed unavoidable, to supplement traditional human rights with minority rights. A comprehensive theory of justice in a multicultural state must include both universal rights, assigned to individuals regardless of group membership, and certain group-differentiated rights, or “special status” for minority cultures.
54 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31 32
33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57
H. Lee Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community, and Culture, p. 47; Multicultural Citizenship, p. 83. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 107–130. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 116. Ibid., pp. 107–108. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., pp. 108–115. Several philosophers argue that we cannot defend a particular institution merely by defending the intrinsic worth of an important value. Gans, The Limits of Nationalism, p. 41; Marmor, Law in the Age of Pluralism, pp. 233–234; Tamir, Liberal Nationalism, p. 168. Moore, “An Historical Argument for Indigenous Self-Determination,” p. 99. Or, a society can treat different national groups equally by recognizing none of their languages, as is the case in Singapore. In Singapore, to show equal concern for all the ethnic groups in the society—Chinese, Malay, and Indian—the official language is English, which is not the native language of any of the ethnic groups. The important holidays for each of the national communities are equally recognized. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 113 (italics added). Presumably, Kymlicka would not be bothered by this suggestion, as in his discussion of the right to self-government, he suggests that we should be more open to the option of secession, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 186. Buchanan, “What’s So Special about Nations?” p. 301. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 113. Kymlicka calls North American Indians and the Francophones national communities; he calls immigrant groups such as Chinese or Indians polyethnic groups, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 11–25. Gans, The Limits of Nationalism, pp. 48–49. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 95. Ibid., pp. 63, 95. Gans, The Limits of Nationalism, p. 61. Buchanan, “What’s So Special about Nations?” pp. 231–261. Patten, Rethinking Culture, p. 230. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 239. Ibid., p. 239 Ibid., p. 240. Ibid., p. 568. Ibid., p. 244. Ibid., pp. 571–572. Patten, “Democratic Secession,” p. 565. See note 7. Patten, “Democratic Secession,” p. 579. Ibid., pp. 565–566. Ibid., pp. 563–564. Buchanan, “What’s So Special About Nations?” p. 571.
References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Beiner, Ronald. 1999. Theorizing Nationalism. New York: State University of New York Press.
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Beran, Harry. 1977. “In Defense of the Consent Theory of Political Obligation and Authority,” Ethics 87(3): 260–271. Booth, W. James. 2013. “Maîtres Chez Nous: Some Questions about Culture and Continuity—A Response to Alan Patten’s ‘Rethinking Culture: The Social Lineage Account’,” American Political Science Review 107(4): 866–874. Brilmayor, Lee. 1991. “Secession and Self-Determination: A Territorialist Reinterpretation,” Yale Journal of International Law 16(1): 177–202. Buchanan, Allen. 1996. “What’s so Special about Nations?” in Jocelyne Couture, Kai Nielsen, and Michel Seymour (eds.), Rethinking Nationalism. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Buchanan, Allen. 1997. “Theories of Secession,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 26(1): 31–61. Buchanan, Allen. 2003 “The Making and Unmaking of Boundaries: What Liberalism Has to Say,” in A. Buchanan and M. Moore (eds.), States, Nations, and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries. New York: Cambridge University Press, 231–261. Caney, Simon. 1997. “Self-Government and Secession: The Case of Nations,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 5(4): 351–372. De Schutter, Helder and Ypi, Lea. 2012. “Language and Luck,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 11(4): 357–381. Gans, Chaim. 2003. The Limits of Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geller, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gauthier, David. 1990. “Breaking up: An Essay on Secession,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24(3): 357–372. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1994. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kolers, Avery. 2012. “Attachment to Territory: Status or Achievement?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 42(2): 101–124. Kymlicka, Will. 1989. Liberalism, Community, and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Margalit, Avaishi and Raz, Joseph. 1990. “National Self-determination,” The Journal of Philosophy 87(9): 439–461. Marmor, Andrei. 2007. Law in the Age of Pluralism. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, David. 1995. On Nationality. New York: Clarendon Press. Moore, Margaret. 2001. The Ethics of Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Moore, Margaret. 2003. “An Historical Argument for Indigenous Self-Determination,” in S. Macedo and A. Buchanan (eds.), Secession and Self-Determination, Nomos XLV, New York: New York University Press, 89–118. Nielsen, Kai. 1996. “Liberal Nationalism and Secession,” in Margaret Moore (ed.), National Self-Determination and Secession. New York: Oxford University Press, 108–110. Norman, Wayne. 1994. “Toward a Philosophy of Federalism,” in Judith Baker (ed.), Group Rights. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Norman, Wayne. 1998. “The Ethics of Secession as the Regulation of Secessionist Politics,” in Margaret Moore (ed.), National Self-Determination and Secession. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 34–61. Patten, Alan. 2002. “Democratic Secession from a Multinational State,” Ethics 112(3): 558–586.
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Patten, Alan. 2014. “Rethinking Culture: The Social Lineage Account,” in Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Philpott, Daniel. 1995. “A Defence of Self-Determination,” Ethics 105(2): 352–385. Seymour, Michel. 2007. “Secession as a Remedial Right,” Inquiry 50(4): 395–423. Smith, Anthony. 1993. National Identity. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press. Tamir, Yael. 1993. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tamir, Yael. 1999. “Against Collective Rights,” in Christian Joppke and Stepnen Lukes (eds.), Multicultural Questions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 159–177. Wellman, Christopher. 1995. “In Defense of Secession and Political Self-Determination,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 24(2): 142–171. Yack, Bernard. 2012. Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Part II
Confucianism, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism
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Nationalistic Guo, cosmopolitan Tianxia? Possibility of world order based on Confucian relational ethics1 Sor-hoon Tan
Nationalistic and cosmopolitan possibilities in Confucianism The revival of Confucianism has become entangled with cultural nationalism in the People’s Republic of China. Kang Xiaoguang describes contemporary Chinese cultural nationalism as a social movement with widespread popular support and a clear mission: the revival of Confucianism-centered Chinese traditional culture. Moreover, Chinese cultural nationalists believe that Confucianism exerts a positive influence on Chinese nationalism.2 Kang reports that participants in that movement are more interested in “exporting” culture peacefully, in pursuit of the “kingly way” and peaceful rise of China, compared to Chinese outside the movement who are more likely to favor superpower status for China and support aggressive geopolitics.3 Not all Chinese nationalists share this view. There is not one, but many nationalisms in China today, including popular nationalism, civic nationalism, state nationalism, pan-Chinese nationalism, liberal nationalism, besides cultural nationalism.4 This current convergence of cultural nationalism with Confucianism contrasts strongly with the early days of Chinese nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Confucian traditional culture was mostly seen as an obstacle to nationalism and the building of the modern Chinese nation-state. Arguing for the need of a “new citizenry” and public morality, Liang Qichao lamented, “Alas, we Chinese lack the concept of the nation. Inferior people care only about the prosperity of the individual and the family, while superior people airily deliberate philosophical truths, turning their backs on practical things.”5 Sharing a similar perspective, Sun Yat-sen whose “three people” doctrine included the people as a nation (minzu 民族) famously described the Chinese as “a sheet of loose sand (yipan sansha ).”6 This lack of nationalistic consciousness was often blamed on Confucian familistic influence in traditional Chinese society. Leaving aside the complication of the varied definitions of nationalism for the moment, to reconcile Confucianism and nationalism, one has to address two major kinds of opposing interpretations of Confucianism. The first claims that Confucianism is a familistic philosophy with concerns too parochial to accommodate loyalty to communities as large as nation-states, which some would
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argue are too large to even qualify as a community. Ample contemporary literature already exists to rebut this mistaken accusation of parochial familism: rather than confining its concerns to the family, Confucianism’s focus on the importance of family relationships in the cultivation of virtues offers a relatively more convincing ethics accounting for our human capacity to care for those who are not so closely related to ourselves. Liang Qichao’s attributing the narrow familism that undermines nationalism to “inferior people” indicates such familism is a failure of Confucian teachings rather than its realization. Family relations are the beginning but not the entirety of Confucian ethical life. Mencius (1.7) insists that everyone can extend appropriate treatment of the elderly and the young in one’s own family to other elderly and young people, and by cultivating oneself, the exemplary person ( junzi 子) “brings peace to ) the world.”7 The “Great Learning” chapter of the Record of Rites (Liji reinforces the political aspect of such Confucian “extension” of ethical concern by adding the intermediate human association of “the state ( guo ).” Those who wished to illuminate luminous virtue throughout the whole world would first govern their states; wishing to govern their states, they would first bring order to their families, wishing to bring order to their families, they would first cultivate their own persons…. It is only … when the person is cultivated that order is brought to the family; when order is brought to the family that the state is well-governed; when the state is well-governed that peace is brought to the world.8 Reading “bringing peace to the world” as a higher concern that transcends that for the state encourages a different kind of resistance to nationalism in the form of cosmopolitan interpretations of Confucianism. Confucian ethical concern for the world, that is for “all-under-heaven (tianxia 天下),” has strongly influenced Chinese culture at the level of ideals if not practice. Qian Mu identified a strong anti-nationalistic tendency in Chinese culture associated with this concept: “The Chinese often dissolve the concept of nation in the concept of humanity, and the concept of nation-state in the concept of all-under-heaven or the world.”9 Even those who promote Chinese nationalism at times see this influence in a positive light. Despite his belief that China needed to build a modern nationstate, Liang Qichao blamed the First World War on nationalism: “The underlying principle is the consolidation of forces within to withstand and defy those without, so that hatred for foreigners is the means of arousing patriotic feelings.”10 He viewed China’s different historical development—not organizing itself into a nation—as having both strengths and weaknesses. Rather than blind imitation of the West, he urged a reconsideration of “the nationalism of the Western World” and the contrasting “cosmopolitanism” characteristic of Chinese thought since ancient times. [T]he Chinese people have never considered national government as the highest form of social organization. Their political thinking has always been
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in terms of all mankind, with world peace as the final goal, and family and nation as transitional stages in the perfecting of the World Order.11 Liang’s belief that the Chinese tianxia ideal offers the world an antidote to the poison of nationalism has been revived in Zhao Tingyang’s much discussed work, Tianxia System, proposing an alternative to the current nation-states based international system by addressing problems of world politics from a tianxia perspective.12 Support for cosmopolitan interpretations of Confucianism may be found in the Analects, where Confucius travelled to various states to offer his advice on good government, and at one point even considered going to live among the yi tribes who were considered “crude” by people of the central states.13 Confucius’ travels show that while he started by trying to improve the government of his own home state of Lu, his ethical endeavor was not limited by exclusive concern for Lu, and his response to the remark about the crudeness of the yi tribes— “Were an exemplary person to live among them, what crudeness would there be?”—further emphasises that living ethically is not limited by attachment to any one locality or allegiance to a particular group or community. For a Confucian living ethically, the world is like a family. “Since exemplary persons ( junzi 子) are respectful and impeccable in their conduct, are deferential to others and observe ritual propriety (li ), everyone within the four seas is their brother.”14 These were the words of Confucius’ student, Zixia, consoling his fellow student, Sima Niu, who lamented having no brothers. According to one commentarial tradition, Sima Niu actually had brothers, one of whom was Huan Tui, who had threatened Confucius’ life,15 and Sima Niu was implicitly disowning his brother in Analects 12.5.16 It seems that bonds with those in the larger world forged by ethical extension not only complement but could even replace biological family ties. Some have identified a cosmopolitan tendency in the social ideal of “great unity (datong 大 )” in the Liji chapter on the “Evolution of Rites.” During the age of great unity, the great way was practiced, and the world was shared by all alike. The worthy and able were promoted to office and men practiced good faith and lived in affection. Therefore they did not regard only as parents their own parents, or as sons only their own sons.17 Qing dynasty reformer, Kang Youwei (1858–1927), titled his magnum opus, Book of Great Unity (Datong Shu 大 ), which offers a vision in which “there will be no states.… There will be no rulers.… There will be no husbands and wives.… There will be no family relationships.”18 When one recalls Mencius attacking Yang Zhu’s extreme self-preservation doctrine for denying rulers and Mozi’s doctrine of impartial love for denying fathers, and condemning their dismissal of these fundamental human relationships as “no different from the beasts,”19 one cannot help but think that Kang Youwei stretched the tension between the Liji’s “grand unity” ideal and Confucian partiality in the Analects
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and the Mencius so far that his utopian cosmopolitanism actually breaks with the earlier philosophy. I agree with Daniel Bell that the kind of cosmopolitanism that treats everyone in the world the same way is incompatible with Confucianism, in which our concern and love for others is necessarily “gradated,” strongest for those closest to us, and progressively weakening as we extend those concerns to others more distantly related to us.20 However, it would be too hasty to simply conclude from this that Confucianism is therefore incompatible with cosmopolitanism since, just as there are many kinds of nationalism, there are many kinds of cosmopolitanism. Robert Neville and P. J. Ivanhoe have offered recent conceptions of Confucian cosmopolitanism that remain faithful to the early Confucian teachings on ethical partiality and gradated concern.21 Bell argues for a Confucian nationalism where allegiance to the nationstate is intermediate between family bonds and global ethical concern in Confucian “gradated” love. He offers an alternative Chinese nationalism that challenges the most popular form of nationalism in China today, which feeds on historical grievances, resentment, and suspicion against other nation-states. He believes the cosmopolitan ideal, which must assume freedom from particularistic attachments, “radically inconsistent with key Confucian values.”22 It is doubtful if Zhao would reject Bell’s Confucian nationalism even if his tianxia system is not “nationalistic.” Other Chinese scholars view the cosmopolitan or world perspectives China needs today, associated with the revival of Confucianism, as compatible with nationalism.23 For Bell, when commitment to the nation clashes with the commitment to tianxia, the former should have priority and overrides the latter, citing the “Great Learning” passage cited above as evidence. However, the “priority” (xian ) in that passage pertains to the sequence of personal cultivation and ethical accomplishment in larger social contexts, it does not imply that the former has overriding importance, since it is due to one’s desire to “illuminate luminous virtue throughout tianxia” that one must first (xian ) cultivate oneself, order the family and govern well the state. This commitment to tianxia is the “way of great learning” that pursues the “highest good” (zhishan ), which can only be achieved by starting with personal cultivation, and progressing through intermediate stages of cultivating the relationships in the family and in the state, before reaching peace for tianxia. The language of this passage could give rise to an instrumental reading of the relationship between the earlier and later stages of the pursuit, but this should not be interpreted as depriving the former of inherent value. Personal cultivation, vis-à-vis the subsequent and larger accomplishments is both valued for itself, or for its benefit to self, but also for more than itself, as the way to order the family, and so on, and for its benefit to others. Governing the state well does not have priority in terms of ethical importance over “illuminating luminous virtue throughout tianxia” or peace for tianxia—instead personal cultivation, ordering the family and governing the state well are all important as constituents of the commitment to tianxia, which is concomitant to the pursuit of the highest good. If we take the priority to mean ethical importance, guo
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does not come first either, as personal cultivation and ordering the family take precedence. Thus interpreted, the “Great Learning” is incompatible with nationalism, which insists that the interests of the nation are the most important. In linking the commitment to tianxia with the pursuit of the highest good, Confucianism requires harmonizing all goods at various levels of human association, which guides its approach to all clashes of interest—whether within family, state, tianxia, or between them—this implies a more nuanced approach than simple priority of one set of concerns over another.24 The discussion so far assumes that we can equate tianxia with the world and guo with the nation-state in debating whether Confucianism—at least in some modernized form—is more nationalistic or cosmopolitan, or could reconcile nationalism and cosmopolitanism; this assumption requires closer scrutiny. This chapter will argue that, although the concepts of tianxia and guo in early Confucian texts have meanings and raise issues that are relevant to nationalism and cosmopolitanism, in some discussions they also render problematic the choice between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and any attempt at reconciling them in modernizing Confucianism, because Confucian understanding of human association in their ethical-political ideal is very different from that which drives the contest between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Nationalists believe that nations have value because national identity is an important group identity or the identity of its individual members, quite often both. Individualistic cosmopolitanism denies special importance to nationality in constituting individual identity; it considers common humanity the appropriate basis of individual identity. The most common way of reconciling nationalism and cosmopolitanism in contemporary Confucian discourse is to think of guo and tianxia as groups of different scope, the latter encompassing a multitude of the former, and Confucian “gradated love” as a matter of enlarging exclusive ethical concern from a smaller group of fellow nationals to an all-inclusive group of human beings or world citizens, with or without the latter also comprising of the smaller groups. I shall show that this misses some distinctive differences between Western political philosophy and Confucianism, and is not the only way for Confucians to intervene in that debate.
Guo and nationalistic clashes Nationalism assumes that there are “peoples” or “nations”—usually understood as ethnic groups with common culture and possibly but not necessarily common descent—each of whom has a right to self-determination, and often also a right to sovereignty in their traditional homeland. It ascribes fundamental value to the nation and asserts the supremacy of the claims of the nation over other claims to individual allegiance. Historically it is associated with the emergence of a system of sovereign nation-states after the peace of Westphalia in 1648. Nevertheless, Chun-shu Chang describes the Shang and Zhou in ancient China as evolving from “tribe to nation to feudal state”; ancient Chinese polities were the equivalent of “nation” in the sense of a group with common descent, with
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How close to a modern nation-state must an ancient Chinese guo be, in order for us to reconstruct a Confucian nationalism to accommodate allegiance to the political community, which may be considered intermediate between the family and the world, in terms of size and intensity or closeness of relation to the individual person? I suggest it need not be exactly the same but only has to display the characteristics relevant to discussing partiality for fellow members/residents of one’s guo vis-à-vis those of other guo. In pre-Qin Chinese texts, guo apparently refers to people living in a territory with a ruler; as such it was some kind of political unit or community towards whom one might show partiality to different degrees. Moreover, they behaved like modern states in their wars with one another, and the need to address questions of government, both in terms of accumulation/acquisition of wealth and defence of the guo, as well as the relationship between the ruler or ruling class and the general population who resided therein. Archeologists and historians trace the emergence of the state in China to the late Longshan period (2600–2000 bce), during which thousands of square or rectangular walled cities were built of rammed earth. Each city under a ruler formed a guo, which is a “state” with capabilities to enforce the rulers’ commands, control resources, organise its population for collective endeavors (the building of the cities being a case in point), defend its territories, enter into alliances with other guo, or take over others’ territories by force. Over centuries, these states diminished in number and grew in size through wars and annexations. When King Wu defeated the last Shang ruler, there were still around 1,800 such guo.26 The Zhou tianxia comprised of many such states with nonabsolute sovereignty—supreme authority over most matters within their territories, but acknowledging the higher authority of the Zhou son-of-heaven in matters of ritual and war. The early Chinese political system is closely interwoven with the lineage system; rulers of cities and states were often related by kinship ties that determined political status, and alliances between previously unrelated rulers were often strengthened by marriage between members of two ruling families.27 While there is a wide gulf between the ruling class and the general population, it is not too far-fetched to surmise that among the latter there were also kinship and other community ties based on social interaction over a long period. From that perspective, one could consider each guo, while interacting with other guo, to be a distinctive entity, a specific territory within which families had resided, possibly for generations. It was a community with many members related by blood and marriage, as well as associative relationships. One would then have reasons to show partiality towards someone of the
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same guo relative to others from a different guo. But is such partiality justified as a Confucian ethical norm? Mencius’ (4A5) remark, “The empire (tianxia) has its basis in the state ( guo), the state in the family ( jia), the family in one’s own self,” can be interpreted as a statement about the workings of “gradated love” extending outwards in “concentric circles” of ever larger groups, with the smaller groups contained in the larger.28 Tianxia comprises of several guo, while each guo comprises of several jia, just as a jia comprises of several individual persons as members. The Mencius refers to jia comprising of a few, or eight, persons.29 While being part of a guo could give rise to group identity that grounds partiality towards the group, it should be noted that there are uses of guo in the early text that sets it apart from a nation-state. The difference between guo and jia in ancient China is not always as distinct as that between state and family today. Guo sometimes refer only to a city (usually the capital) and not the entire territory under a ruler.30 Rather than “family” in our current understanding, jia sometimes refers to territories under high officials and nobles who are below the feudal lords in rank.31 Despite a tentative difference in relative size, power, or wealth—Analects 5.8 and Mencius 1A1 mention “a jia of a hundred chariots” and “a guo of a thousand chariots”—both seem to be territorial concepts. Fung Yu-lan goes so far as to claim that what the ancient Chinese meant by guo is in fact jia.32 While both the Analects and the Mencius take for granted the existence of jia and guo in their world, and Mencius explicitly values attachment to “the state of one’s own father and mother” as he praises Confucius’ appropriate behaviour in “proceeding as slowly as possible” when leaving Lu in contrast to the speed with which he left other states.33 However, the significant fact is Confucius did leave Lu and attempted to improve the government of other states, when the government at home refused to accept his advice and behaved unethically. Moreover, Mencius (6B11) explicitly disapproves of conduct that benefits one’s state at the expense of neighbouring states. While guo and jia often serve as contexts for ethical and political discussion in the Analects and the Mencius, normative affirmation of jia and guo de-emphasizes their “group” nature, that is, the boundaries separating them from other groups, and is more concerned with social relationships in their specific contexts.34 I agree with Sin-yee Chan’s objection to Bell transferring the value ascribed to interpersonal relationships in Confucian ethics to nationalism, which ascribe value to the nation, because Confucian “gradated love” understands human association in relational terms while nationalism emphasises the group. 35 Confucius discusses the way to lead or govern the state in terms of how to relate to the people: “Carry out your official duties respectfully and live up to your words; be frugal in your expenditure and love your peers; and put the common people to work only at the proper time of the year”;36 “Effect order in the state through a combination of observing ritual propriety and deferring to others.”37 There is no justification of partiality for one’s state against another. When a ruler sets his sight on tianxia rather than merely governing his own
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guo, instead of conquering other states to expand his territory, he should aim to “win the hearts and minds of the common people throughout tianxia” by, among other things, “restoring states that have been destroyed.”38 When Confucius (Analects 16.1) points out that it is the responsibility of heads of clans and rulers of states to distribute wealth fairly among the people, promote harmony, and ensure that they feel secure (an ), one might think that concern with security implies awareness of external threats, which requires attention to boundaries and defence of one’s group against others. The discussion in Analects 16.1 about an impending attack on Zhuanyu by the Ji clan is explicitly concerned with inter-group rivalry and taking defensive action against potential threats. Confucius unequivocally disapproved of such behaviour. Rather than seeking security by keeping others away, or defending oneself against them, let alone carrying out pre-emptive strikes, the ethical approach is to reach out and establish ethical relationships that benefit all: “If distant populations are still not won over, they persuade them to join them through the cultivation of their refinement (wen 文) and excellence (de 德).”39 The boundaries of a state serve to circumscribe the extent of its ruler’s power and resources that he can control; they are lines of defence against aggressors. Group identity requires consciousness of boundaries that define and distinguish a group from others.40 Boundaries are important when groups engage in competitive behaviour in zero-sum games, such as fighting over land and resources, or limiting access to benefits. In such circumstances, it is important to distinguish friends and enemies, “us” versus “them,” and identification and loyalty become serious issues as it becomes necessary to choose sides. This does not mean that boundaries necessarily give rise to conflict and competition as cross border cooperation is always possible. In such cooperation, the boundaries become less important or are not emphasized; where they actually structure the cooperation, then there is a recognition of potential conflict and competition. Sometimes setting out the rules of cooperation, including respecting the existing boundaries when appropriate, is an important way to avoid conflict. For nationalists confronted with international competition or conflict, there can be only one choice, one’s own nation-state above others. We have no reason to think that Confucians would or should make the same choice. First of all, they would try to avoid such a choice by reconstructing the situation and adopting a perspective that shifts the focus away from conflict of material interests to ethical interdependence. Rulers of states Mencius visited were mostly interested only in winning the material interests game, focusing on concerns of li 利 (selfcentred gains/benefits) for the states they ruled, while Mencius tried to interest them in humaneness (ren) and appropriateness (yi) both in their relationships with their own people and in interacting with neighbouring states.41 Like Confucius, Mencius (2A5) also believes that good government is not confined by state boundaries but reaches out to all-under-heaven, attracts all kinds of people, from scholar-officials, traders, travellers, to farmers and ordinary people; “the people of neighbouring states look up to such a government as their father and mother,” so that it has “no match in tianxia” and one who practices it will
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become a true king. Such textual discussions may seem vague and even hopelessly idealistic for those looking for solutions to contemporary distributive problems where resources are scarce. By Confucian standards, much international competition today has more to do with the greed of the few in competing nations than the needs of the common people, and it is the latter that will guide any contemporary Confucian consideration of how to solve problems of inevitable competition in the face of scarcity.42 The rulers of the warring states period attempted to gain more power, land, and wealth through wars. Mencius condemned the acquisitive wars of his time.43 In wars to gain land, the dead fill the plains; in wars to gain cities, the dead fill the cities. This is known as showing the land the way to devour human flesh. Death is too light a punishment for such men.44 Among his harshest direct criticisms of rulers he conversed with are his comments on the wars they waged. How can it be right for you to kill the old and bind the young, destroy the ancestral temples and appropriate the valuable vessels? Even before this, the whole tianxia was afraid of the power of Qi. Now you double your territory without practicing humane government. This is to provoke the armies of all-under-heaven.45 Victories in acquisitive wars can only be temporary and inevitably provoke retaliation, if for no other reason than self-preservation on the part of threatened states (as the King of Qi found out). The only lasting victory, gaining the allegiance of all-under-heaven, is possible only if one turns away from political and armed struggle for land and wealth to the ethical conduct of humane government, caring for the welfare of all who fall under one’s influence. Wars are justified only if waged by the humane ruler as zheng , “punitive expeditions,” waged by one with ethical authority against those inferior in virtue who have treated their own people inhumanely.46 Such wars are not wars against the people and are therefore welcomed by the people living under vicious rulers. When he marched on the south, the northern barbarians complained; when he marched on the east, the western barbarians complained. They all said, “Why does he not come to us first?” The people longed for his coming as they longed for a rainbow in time of severe drought.47 Gaining tianxia through the kingly way is, for Mencius, a primarily ethical rather than merely political accomplishment. “There have been cases of inhumane persons gaining a state; but such persons have never gained tianxia.”48 Even though Confucian conception of good government is a process that begins with the state, its extension to tianxia is not about bringing a larger group
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under one’s political control. States can continue to exist as distinct territories under a Confucian sage ruler, but the boundaries between them change in significance, no longer barriers that structure struggles for power and wealth, or set up for defence. The emphasis shifts from groups, separated by different and often conflicting sets of interests, to interpersonal relationships, which traverse the group boundaries. Even though hard boundaries are very much present in Mencius’ world, with its “many guo, all equal in size and virtue, none being able to dominate others,” there seems little discussion of territorial boundaries because of the text’s ethical emphasis. As Joseph Chan notes, even though the neglect in the Chinese tradition may be due to territorial boundaries being clearly defined only in the nation-states era, the internal theoretical reason is that the concept of tianxia admits of no boundaries because the Chinese conception of political community “can be called ethical” and the importance of politics lies “in its promotion of the highest moral good in individual lives (ren), and its accompanying moral order, a harmonious order of social relationships.”49 We will evaluate this way of solving political problems, in particular problems of international conflict and xenophobic nationalism, with Confucian ethics in the next section by considering how the concept of tianxia might be reconstructed into a modern cosmopolitan ideal for our globalizing world.
Tianxia and the world Just as treating guo as equivalent to nation-states needs qualifying, it would be misleading to assume that tianxia refers to “the world,” meaning all lands inhabited or habitable by human beings as a biological species.50 More often than not, early Chinese texts use tianxia to refer to actual political rule which, even for legendary sage kings, extended over only a limited area and not literally the whole world. The concept gained prominence during the Western Zhou dynasty, whose political legitimacy was explicitly defended in terms of heaven (tian 天) mandating the sonof-heaven (tianzi 天子) to rule over all-under-heaven (tianxia天下).51 Chun-shu Chang estimated that the Zhou territory “extended west to east from eastern Kansu to Shantung by the seacoast and north to south from Hopei-Shansi-Shensi to Kiangsu-Anhui-Hupei-Szechwan.”52 This included a central region under the direct control of the Zhou King, and extensive peripheral regions with numerous single-clan or multi-clan guo and groups of diverse origins and cultures, each centered in a walled town or city, and acknowledged the authority of the Zhou King through a system of ritual obligations. When Mencius (1A6) discussed “settling tianxia through unity” with King Xiang of Liang, what they had in mind was unifying the states that had begun fighting among themselves due to the erosion of the authority of the “son of heaven,” the Zhou King.53 The Zhou ruled not over the whole world but a limited area, even if its boundaries were not clearly demarcated. When the state of Qin defeated the other states of the “Warring States” era, the First Emperor was said to “unify the world (bing tianxia 天下)”; while the transition from ruling a guo to ruling tianxia signifies more than a mere expansion of territory, he did not rule over the whole world.54
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Even within the limited horizon of ancient Chinese geography, there is no consensus in the texts or among contemporary scholars when it comes to the spatial scope of tianxia.55 Is the territory in question limited to the central region that was the Zhou King’s domain or the central kingdoms (zhongguo 中 ), the northern states along the Yellow river valley in the region traditionally known as the Central Plains (zhongyuan 中原), who during the Spring and Autumn period claimed to be the heirs of the Xia-Shang-Zhou, the huaxia (“glorious xia”) cultural traditions?56 Does it include also surrounding regions occupied by (in the eyes of the Xia-Shang-Zhou people) less civilized tribes, collectively referred to as yidi ? Most Chinese scholars agree with the view that tianxia for the Zhou refers to their entire “empire,” all who acknowledge their authority, even if in name only, “literally all the land under Heaven between the four seas.”57 Some passages in the Mencius imply that “all under heaven” is “within the Four Seas” and includes the lands of the yi and di.58 Equating tianxia with the world is problematic not just because the ancient Chinese had no knowledge of many parts of the earth now known to us. What was objectively a limited space ruled by the Zhou king was subjectively “the world” for the historical actors. If so, it would be relatively unobjectionable to take “allunder-heaven” to mean “the world” for us today insofar as it means “the world” as known to whoever uses the term, with variable geographical scope depending on the state of geographical knowledge of the time. The deeper trouble lies in the mixing of the descriptive and the normative in the uses of tianxia.59 The differences in what is and can be included and excluded in the concept often arise from important differences in conceptions of how the world is constituted by human associations, and their ethical and political implications, which raise questions that must be answered before we rush to interpret Mencius as recommending a world government with his “kingly way.” The Analects and Mencius use the term in both ethical and political discussions. Reading them today, “the world” seems a reasonable translation in the ethical discussions, as when the Analects discusses how to conduct oneself in relation to tianxia, with appropriateness (yi) (4.10) and humaneness (ren) (17.6), and how tianxia responds to li and ren (12.1). When Mencius (6A7) argues that everyone has heart-minds that are pleased by ethical “pattern and appropriateness” (liyi ) because “things of the same kind are all alike,” translating tianxia as “the world” fits the examples of various kinds of things “under-heaven.”60 If the “great man (da zhangfu 大 夫)” is an ethical exemplar, then the “great way” he practices surely is of the world rather than merely “the empire”? Similarly, the example set by the sage-king Shun “worthy of being handed down to posterity” should be “for the world.” When Mencius discusses liangzhi , “what one knows without having to reflect on it,” as nothing but extending humaneness, loving one’s parents, and appropriateness, respecting one’s brothers, to tianxia, translating tianxia as “the empire” reduces the scope of Confucian ethical extension.61 The descriptive meaning of limited territory fits discussions of political succession in terms of the giving or receiving of tianxia, and when we read
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references to historical rulers having, gaining, losing, or bringing order or peace to tianxia as actual political struggles for power and actual exercise of political authority.62 It is often difficult to determine conclusively the scope of tianxia in the text, whether it means “the world” with the potential for unlimited expansion in later readings or “empire,” the combined territories of states that had acknowledged the authority of the Zhou king, as it is often not easy to separate the descriptive and the normative. The term may mean “the world,” or a more limited political community, or both, in passages such as those discussing ethical conduct that wins the heart-mind of the people of tianxia;63 Confucius’ own mission arising from “tianxia” being without the way;64 whether the way prevails in tianxia depends on whether political actions are carried out with proper authority65 and has bearings on whether one should take up political office.66 Is Mencius offering a universal truth or prescription, or an empirical observation that may have limited validity when he argues that it is “tianxia’s common principle” that “those who rule are supported by those who are ruled”?67 The choice often depends on whether one emphasises the descriptive or the normative meaning. When historical rulers who brought order and peace to tianxia are held up as ethical models, descriptive and normative meanings are often combined.68 According to Mencius, ethical exemplars such as Yan Hui and legendary rulers, Yu and Ji, “follow the same way.… Yu looked upon himself as responsible for anyone under heaven who drowned. Ji looked upon himself as responsible for anyone under heaven who starved.”69 They would hardly deserve the accolade of sage-hood if their concern for people stops at some territorial boundary (tianxia = empire) instead of being universally inclusive (tianxia = world), especially given that Ji, the mythical ancestor of the Zhou people, ruled over a very small area compared to the Zhou territory after King Wu and the Duke of Zhou conquered the Shang and established the Zhou dynasty.70 The territories sagekings actually won and ruled were historically limited, but one could argue that the ethical models they present have wider, even universal application, so that were a sage-king to live today, the tianxia s/he cares about and could bring order to would be the whole world. While “tianxia” may vary in meaning in early Chinese texts, for Confucians, it became most significant as a concept of ideal order, in which ethics and politics are inseparable but often pull in different direction. To propose the tianxia ideal as an answer to the problems of our admittedly unsatisfactory international system is to imply that it could address international conflicts better than the current means at our disposal. Mencius’ view of how this worked for his exemplars of the humane “true king” is hardly convincing. A territory of a hundred li square is sufficient to enable its rule to become a true king. If Your Majesty [King Hui Liang] practices humane government towards the people … they can be made to inflict defeat on the strong armor and sharp weapons of Qin and Chu, armed with nothing but staves.… The humane person has no match.71
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Such advice seems disingenuous when he also acknowledged that victory is not guaranteed, as even virtuous rulers may be faced with the choice of abandoning their territory or defending it to the death, in the case of small states facing greedy and aggressive large states.72 Thus, the attempt to tame realpolitik of power struggle and violent conflicts among polities with ambitious and far from virtuous rulers was clearly problematic in Mencius time, and did not work in ancient China insofar as Qin’s unification of tianxia that ended the wars among the states was not a triumph of the kingly way. What reasons do we have to think the tianxia ideal would be more viable today? I sympathise with Daniel Bell’s dismissal of Zhao Tingyang’s proposal of “world government” as part of the tianxia ideal as impractical.73 But the more serious problem for Confucians is that, if attempted, such a government would almost certainly be established and sustained by force rather than virtue. Our modern understanding of government implies institutions with coercive power, and limiting that to “zheng ,” punishing states that do not meet the Confucian ethical standards, hardly sounds any more viable, nor is it likely to be universally acceptable. Will any state be able take on global leadership as the “true king”? Despite the glorification of sage-kings beginning their meteoric rise with only a small state, the chances are better if a large state adopts “humane government”—it must be large enough not to be afraid of its virtue being taken advantage of, or virtue being helpless in the face of superior military force. Will China be able to take on this role if it rises to superpower status? Not if Chinese nationalists continue to carry the emotional baggage of its past “humiliations”— regardless of actual strength, such emotional baggage will ensure China will never feel powerful and secure enough to also be humane and “serve small states.”74 Even without such emotional baggage, it is doubtful that any government will ever dare to take the risk of being humane in the way of the Confucian true king without very drastic change in people’s worldview and attitudes. The tianxia ideal might work better if, instead of a single state becoming the “world government,” a truly global organization with participation and legitimacy worldwide provides the leadership in solving problems beyond the abilities of national governments, or when a government commits acts against its own citizenry that results in deaths and suffering en masse. It might be something similar to humanitarian intervention under the control of the United Nations. Those who believe in such interventions recognise that they are very rarely warranted, but when they are, the military forces act on behalf of humanity.75 Others less sanguine about the workings of the United Nations might see in its track record another arena for superpower manoeuvrings and international realpolitik. Confucians are generally optimistic, and would be prepared to entertain the possibility of cooperation on a global scale, provided genuinely ethical leadership could be established. How to create new institutions or reform existing ones so that they would nurture and select such leaders is an even more monumental problem than any of the political problems confronting Confucians in the past. To reject the Confucian tianxia or kingly way ideal from the perspective of contemporary international realpolitik is, however, to miss the point of modern
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Confucian critiques of the current international system. What their critiques emphasize is the need for a change in perspective, in how we approach the problems—in Zhao’s words, it is not about making the current game fairer or better in some other way, but changing the game to a more “consensual game” that “is supposed to develop harmonious relations between all players and to maximize their common good, rather than to maximize the interests of individual players.”76 Sheng Hong explicates “tianxia as one family” in terms of a change in attitudes in relating to others: from treating others as competitors in zero-sum contests, which do not rule out violent means, even destruction of others, to precluding violent struggles, aiming at the preservation and flourishing of all, and being willing to sacrifice some good of one’s own for the welfare of others.77 Such critiques continue the Confucian tradition of attempting to end political struggles with relational ethics (although often they think of relation between nation-states rather than persons). Such an approach is unconvincing if viewed as taking the side of cosmopolitanism against nationalism; just as world government is impractical, it also seems quixotic to expect people to treat everyone in the world like a family member.
Confucian relational ethics and world order Confucianism is neither nationalistic nor cosmopolitan. The nationalism versus cosmopolitanism framework traps us between the Scylla of group identity and the Charybdis of individualistic denial of special ties to some above others. To understand better what Confucianism can offer to our globalizing world that is distinctive, I suggest we reverse the question and ask how the significant differences between early China and the world today, specifically the communication technology and various other factors that enable globalization, affect Confucian relational ethics. Certainly human relationships today, both possibilities and pitfalls, are very different from the times of Confucius and Mencius. At the very least, we can now remain in daily contact with someone on the other side of the globe, work together on projects that could have impact on many people all over the world, regardless of their nationalities. One need not be a sage-king to help a starving child in another country far away. Our lives are affected by the actions of people living thousands of miles away whom we have never met. Without the extensive study that the topic deserves, one could still safely conclude that the relational networks in which each human being is situated, which give meaning to life, both offer opportunities to and constrain action, have become much more complex in our globalizing world. Thinking in terms of concentric circles of family, state, and the world is just too simplistic. Families today can be international both in spatial distribution and nationalities of members. Friends abroad are not necessarily less close in terms of attachment compared to people who happen to live next door. Some of us have neighbours of varied nationalities. What are the implications of the new global relational networks for possible Confucian contribution to world order?
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From the perspective of Confucian relational ethics, the significant relationships are always those between persons, not between nation-states or other such groups, for the simple reason that groups do not have feelings other than the feelings of their members. Confucian relational ethics is based on basic human feelings that must be cultivated into ethical disposition that govern our actions toward others. This means that world order must begin, not with groups but with persons. This does not mean that groups are irrelevant. Formation of groups affects relational networks—it both extends and limits one’s relational networks. One becomes related to others in the same group both through direct interaction in group activities and identification with other members whom one might not have had direct contact. Some groups generate strong “us” versus “them” emotions (xenophobic nationalism is an example) that constrain growth of relational networks. Confucians would avoid this latter type of groups. The Confucian path towards a more peaceful world does not lie in abstractly extending how one acts towards one’s fellow nationals to citizens of other nation-states. It will take the strengthening of interdependence across national boundaries by building relationships embedded in ordinary people’s daily lives. Such relationships will not give special consideration to nationality but attend instead to the specific activities and the responsibilities they generate for various participants. Some of these relationships could be built through group membership—participating in transnational organizations with peaceful objectives, purposes that improve people’s lives in various ways—whether it is informal groups finding ways of dealing with climate change, or sharing information about healthy diets or DIY tips of various kinds, or support groups for people with common problems or interests—as well as formally organized NGOs with institutional capabilities to help people in many countries across the globe. The important thing is for membership to be more than remote identification, to involve interaction (whether face to face or via various new media) with people of different nationalities. Just as groups should be evaluated by the kinds of relationships they encourage among their members and between members or those outside the group, institutions—their objectives, procedures, and policies—should be evaluated by the same criterion, what kind of effects do they have for the relationship networks of those who work in them, have contact with them, or are affected by them. From that perspective, current international institutions are very much in need of reform. Encouraging the growth, in various contexts and at various levels, of transnational relational networks with Confucian ethical characteristics of ritual propriety, appropriateness, and humaneness, to replace or at least balance the hostilely competitive relationships that seem to be taking over people’s lives in global capitalism would be a step towards a more peaceful world.78 One should not think that this approach to world order based on Confucian relational ethics entitles us to any more optimism than promoting the world government of tianxia ideal or recommending the kingly way to the improve the international system. Full success would require “converting” everyone into a Confucian (based on a specific by no means universally accepted interpretation of the tradition). Some would say this is even less likely than transforming politicians and bureaucrats into true kings or humane global leaders. Its advantage
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lies in being an approach that everyone, from world leaders, CEOs of multinational corporations, to the ordinary woman or man in the street, if she or he is willing, can act on. In that respect it is very much in the spirit of Confucian emphasis on beginning with personal cultivation in one’s aspiration to change the world. Looking towards the results, both might seem equally frustrating, but at least with the Confucian relational ethics approach, one can act on it instead of waiting for some wise and virtuous world leaders to adopt one’s advice. There is also less risk of domination by some central global authority; instead the approach implies decentralization of both activities and power, and empowerment of ordinary people in activities of all kinds, not just political actions. Even if the desired result seems impossible, Confucians could do worse than follow Confucius’ example: keep trying even if you know it is in vain (zhiqi buke er weizhi 不 ).79
Notes 1 I thank P. J. Ivanhoe, Sungmoon Kim and Hsin-Wen Lee for their comments on earlier drafts, and the various participants who raised questions and gave feedback when I presented the first draft of the paper at the International Conference, “Reimaging Nation and Nationalism in East Asia,” at the City University of Hong Kong, November 29–30, 2014. Any errors or omissions remain my sole responsibility. 2 Kang, “Study of Contemporary Nationalist Movement in Mainland China”; Kang, Zhongguo Guilai. 3 See also Bell, “Are Confucianism and Nationalism Compatible?” p. 118. 4 For a critique of Confucian influence from a nationalist perspective, see Wang Xiaodong, “A Nationalist Critique of Cultural Conservatism.” Nor do those who advocate revival of Chinese traditional culture and the “peaceful rise of China” necessarily privilege Confucianism. For the idea of “huaxia” culture combining Confucian, Daoist, and Legalist philosophies, see Ye, Huaxia Zhuyi. There is a huge and growing literature on Chinese nationalism; some examples include Chong, “Chinese Nationalism Reconsidered—or, a Case for Historicizing the Study of Chinese Politics”; Yu, “Glorious Memories of Imperial China and the Rise of Chinese Populist Nationalism”; Niu, “Guojia Minzu Zhuyi Yu Wenhua Minzu Zhuyi De Shuangchong Jidang”; Tang and Darr, “Chinese Nationalism and Its Political and Social Origins”; Chen and Zheng, Rentong Yu Quanqiuhua; Li and Lin, “Dangdai Zhongguo Minzu Zhuyi”; Song, Minzu Zhuyi Zai Zhongguo De Shanbian; Jin, “Dui Zhongguo Minzu Zhuyi Zhengzhi Lunli De Duowei Jianshi; Zheng and Zou, Zhonggguo Jindaishi Shang De Minzuzhuyi; Wang, “Tanxun Zhongguo De Xin Shenfen; Lei, “Realpolitik Nationalism”; Guo, Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China; Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction; Gries, China’s New Nationalism; Yue, Qianliu. 5 Liang, Xinminshuo, p. 23; translated in Wm. Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano (eds.), Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 through the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 298. 6 Cf. P. J. Ivanhoe suggests the translation of “a plate of loose and scattered sand.” 7 Mencius 7B32; see also 4A11 (author’s translation based on Lau, Mencius). Note that Lau translates “tianxia” as “the Empire.” 8 Zhu, Sishu Zhangju Jizhu, pp. 3–4; translated in Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition: From Earliest Times to 1600, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 330–331. 9 Qian, Zhongguo Wenhuashi Daolun, p. 23.
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10 Liang Qichao, History of Chinese Political Thought During the Early Tsin Period, p. 7. 11 Ibid. 12 Zhao, Tianxia; Zhao Tingyang, “A Political World Philosophy in Terms of Allunder-Heaven,” pp. 5–18. See also Gan, Chonghui Wangdao; Xu, “Particular Culture or New Tianxia Idealism?” pp. 20–23. 13 Analects 9.14. Unless otherwise stated, citations from the Analects refer to Ames and Rosemont, The Analects of Confucius. 14 Analects 12.5. 15 Analects 7.23. 16 Cheng, Lunyu Jishi, vol. 3, pp. 829–830. Commentators refer to the mention of a Sima Niu who was brother to Huan Tui in the Zuo Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals (Duke Ai 14th year). See Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 5, p. 840. Yang Bojun disagrees that this is the same person as the Sima Niu in the Analects. See Yang, Chunqiu Zuozhuan Zhu, vol. 4, p. 1688. 17 Sun, Liji, vol. 2, p. 582; translated in de Bary and Bloom, Sources, vol. 1, p. 343. Cf. Bloom translates datong as “Grand Commonality.” 18 Thompson, The One World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-Wei, p. 72. 19 Mencius 3B9. 20 Bell, “War, Peace, and China’s Soft Power: A Confucian Approach,” p. 31. 21 Neville, “Dimensions of Contemporary Confucian Cosmopolitanism”; Ivanhoe, “Confucian Cosmopolitanism.” 22 Bell, “China’s Soft Power,” p. 31. 23 E.g., Xu, “Particular Culture or New Tianxia Idealism?” p. 22. 24 Stephen Angle’s response to Bell also argues for “harmony” and “balance” in approaching values and commitments, pointing out that, contrary to Bell’s interpretation, when family and public interests clash, it is not a simple matter of the former having priority over the latter. See Angle, “Confucian Nationalism and Mixed Polity,” pp. 113–114. See also Tan, Confucian Democracy, pp. 72–73. 25 Cf. Chun-shu Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Empire, pp. 13–14. The legends of the Shang and Zhou each descending from a semi-divine ancestor, Xie and Hou Ji respectively, is recorded in Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, pp. 41, 55. 26 Kwang-chih Chang, “The Rise of Kings and the Formation of City-States,” p. 128; Kwang-chih Chang, Art, Myth, and Ritual, pp. 26–27; Yang Kuan, Zhongguo Gudai Ducheng Zhidushi Yanjiu, chapters 2–5. Mencius 3B9 refers to “destroyed states numbering fifty” when the Duke of Zhou assisted King Wu defeat the Shang king. 27 Chang, “The Rise of Kings and the Formation of City-States,” p. 128; Kwang-chih Chang, Early Chinese Civilization, pp. 53–55. For varied studies of Zhou political system, see Zhang, Cong Xiehe Wangbang Dao Hainei Yitong, chapter 4; Wang Jian, Xizhou Zhengzhi Dili Jiegou Yanjiu; Zhao Boxiong, Zhoudai Guojia Xingtai Yanjiu. For an account reconstructed from a Chinese International Relations perspective, see Wang Rihua, Lishi zhuyi yu guoji guanxi lilun: xianqin zhongguo tixi yanjiu, chapter 2. Many Chinese scholars view the Zhou political system as an “early state” (e.g., Zhao, Zhoudai Guojia Xingtai Yanjiu, pp. 413–432). 28 See also Mencius 4A6: what is admired by noble families, is admired by the state, and admired by all-under-heaven, “Thus moral influence irresistibly fills to overflowing the whole empire within the Four Seas.” 29 Mencius 1A1; 1A7; 7A22. 30 Guo is synonymous with yi (town/city, contrasted with tian , farming fields) in Mencius 1B4; 2B10; 3A4; 4B33; 5B4; 5B7. In ancient China, the capital of a state often shared the same name as the state itself. See Chang, Early Chinese Civilization, p. 62. 31 Morohashi, Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, vol. 3, p. 1021. 32 Fung, Xinshilun, p. 68; Li, Zhongguo Gudai Sixiangshi, p. 14. Analects 16.1 applies the same ethical norm to guo and jia; 17.18 and 19.25 also treat bang (often
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43 44 45 46 47
48 49 50 51
52 53 54 55
S. H. Tan synonymous with guo) and jia in similar manner. See similar association of jia and guo in applying ethical norms and advice in Mencius 1A1; 1B9; 2A4; 3A4; 3B3; 4A8; and similar usages of jiabang 家 in Mencius 1A7. Mencius 5B1; also 7B17. Mencius seems to contradict himself in 6B6 when he described Confucius’ departure from Lu after the ruler’s failure to follow ritual norms: “He left the state without waiting to take off his ceremonial cap.” This resonates with Liang Shuming’s observation that Chinese society is based on relationships rather than on individuals or groups. See Liang Shuming, Liang Shuming Quanji, vol. 3, p. 94. Sin-yee Chan, “Are Confucianism and Nationalism Compatible?” p. 120. Analects 1.5. Analects 4.13; also 11.26. Analects 20.1. See also Analects 14.42: “It is by cultivating oneself that one brings peace and security to the people (anren 人/an baixing 百 ).” For differences between social and territorial boundaries—jurisdictional and property boundaries—and the contingent historical convergence of the two, see Miller and Hashmi, Boundaries and Justice. Mencius 1A1; 1A3; 1A5; 1A7; 1B3. This is not the place to provide a full-scale discussion of Confucian conceptions of justice, on national or global scale. My own view is that Confucian approach to distributive problems is needs-based. See Tan, “The Concept of Yi ( ) in the Mencius and Problems of Distributive Justice” and “Justice and Social Change.” Cf. Joseph Chan, “Is There a Confucian Perspective on Social Justice?”. Mencius 7B2. See also his condemnation of the “five hegemons” in 6B7 with the remark, “the son of heaven punishes (tao ) but does not attack ( fa ), while a feudal lord attacks but does not punish.” Mencius 4A14; see 6B9 for similar condemnation of those who would help rulers wage wars and make alliances to gain wealth and territories. Mencius 1B11; see also Mencius 7B1 condemnation of King Hui of Liang for being inhumane in “going to war for the sake of gaining territory.” Mencius 7B2. Mencius 1B11; see also 3B5; 7B4. On the account of Zhou victory, see the following statement of Sima Qian: “Even though Chow’s host was massive, none of them had the will to fight. They all desired that King Wu enter the capital promptly. Chow’s host all turned their weapons around the fought their way to the capital, opening the way for King Wu” (Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, p. 61). Mencius 7B13. Joseph Chan, “Territorial Boundaries and Confucianism,” p. 98. This is clearly not the only meaning of “the world.” We often use the English term (and its modern mandarin translation, shijie 世 ) in ambiguous ways. However, the concept of tianming was retrospectively applied to the transition from Xia to Shang (Mencius 2A3; 3B5), and the idea that political legitimacy depends on the ruler’s ethical merit might go back at least to the Shang. See Chang, Art, Myth, and Ritual, pp. 33–34. Chang, Rise of the Chinese Empire, p. 34. Lau translates “tianxia” as “the Empire” most of the time, and “the world” only in a few cases. Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, pp. 39, 44, 135. For discussion of Japanese Sinologists’ disagreement on this issue, see Watanabe, Ancient Chinese Monarchical Power and All-under-Heaven, pp. 9–15. Cf. Wang, Xizhou Zhengzhi Dili Jiegou Yanjiu, pp. 72–83; Zhao, Zhoudai Guojia Xingtai Yanjiu, chapter 1.
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56 Mencius 3A4; 3B9; 4B1; 5A5; 6B10 refer to “zhongguo 中 ” which Lau translates as “central kingdoms.” The meaning and reference of Zhongguo in the early texts is as contentious as that of tianxia; for a survey of the debate, see Wang, Lishi zhuyi yu guoji guanxi lilun, pp. 14–21. 57 Chang, Rise of the Chinese Empire, p. 293. Cf. Wang, Xizhou Zhengzhi Dili Jiegou Yanjiu, pp. 72–74. 58 For implied equivalence of “all-under-heaven” and “within the Four Seas,” see Mencius 2A6; 3B5; 4A6. Tang’s “gaining the trust of tianxia” is elaborated as “when he marched on the east, the western barbarians (xiyi 西 ) complained, and when he marched on the south, the northern barbarians (beidi ) complained” (Mencius 1B11). See also Mencius 7B4. 59 Regardless of whether this distinction is explicitly recognised by Confucius or Mencius, contemporary readers cannot avoid trying to disentangle the two or deliberately denying the distinction when interpreting the texts—both invoke the distinction and have different interpretive consequences. 60 Cf. Lau translates liyi as “reason and rightness.” Lau also translates the term as “the world” in other cases of “tianxia zhi x”: 2A2; 3B1; 4B26; 6A1. 61 Mencius 3B2; 4B28; 7A15. See also 4A11. Lau translates the term as “Empire” in these cases. 62 Mencius 1B3; 1B11; 2A1; 3A4; 3B5; 3B9; 4A3; 4A28; 5A1; 5A3–6; 6B9. 63 Analects 20.1. 64 Analects 3.24; 18.6. 65 Analects 16.2. 66 Analects 8.13. 67 Mencius 3A4; the same could be said of 2B2 (rank, age, and virtue as three “most exalted things”); 4A7 (about the states of affairs “when the way prevails” and when it does not). Cf. “three years mourning is the common practice of tianxia” (Analects 17.21)—as an empirical statement, it is unlikely that the yidi tribes practiced three years mourning, and according to Mencius 3A1, it was not even practiced by the rulers of the state of Lu; as a normative statement, it becomes a universal prescription that applies to “the world.” 68 Analects 8.18; 8.20; 12.22; 14.5; and Mencius 3A4; 3B9; 7A2.3. 69 Mencius 4B29. See also King Wen as exemplary ruler giving priority to caring for the “the most destitute people” in 1B5 and the sage’s “government that tolerated no suffering” in 4A1. 70 According to Sima Qian, the sage-king Shun enfeoffed Ji at Tai ( ); significant territorial expansion only occurred during the reign of King Wen. See Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, pp. 55–60; Chang, Rise of the Chinese Empire, pp. 23–32. 71 Mencius 1A5. See also Mencius 1A3; 1A7; 1B4; 1B5; 1B12; 2A3; 2A5; 3B5; 4A1; 4A7; 4A9; 7B4. 72 Mencius 1B15. 73 Bell, “China’s Soft Power,” p. 30. 74 Mencius 1B3. 75 I thank Philip Ivanhoe for pressing this point. Although skeptical of the UN model myself, I concede that one should not close off the possibility of positive global collective action entirely. 76 Zhao, “A Political World Philosophy,” p. 15. 77 Sheng, “Rujia De Waijiao Yuanze Ji Qi Dangdai Yiyi,” pp. 37–38. 78 This proposed relational ethics perspective of Confucian nationalism and cosmopolitanism does not imply that the Confucian tradition has no concern for group identity at all—an argument may be made that its valuation of wen is a concern with cultural identity that has group dimension, and the yixia distinction in the tradition could also be relevant to contemporary discussions of group identity. However that is a different topic for another day. 79 Analects 14.38.
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References Ames, Roger T. and Rosemont Jr., Henry. 1998. Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine. Angle, Stephen C. 2011. “Confucian Nationalism and Mixed Polity,” Beijing Cultural Review 5: 113–115. Bell, Daniel A. 2009. “War, Peace, and China’s Soft Power: A Confucian Approach,” Diogenes 221: 26–40. Bell, Daniel A. 2011. “Are Confucianism and Nationalism Compatible?” Beijing Cultural Review 3: 112–118. Chan, Joseph. 2001. “Territorial Boundaries and Confucianism,” in David Miller and Sohail H. Hashimi (eds.), Boundaries and Justice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 89–111. Chan, Joseph. 2009. “Is There a Confucian Perspective on Social Justice?” in Takashi Shogimen and Cary J. Nederman (eds.), Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 261–277. Chan, Sin-yee. 2011. “Are Confucianism and Nationalism Compatible?” Beijing Cultural Review 6: 118–121. Chang, Chun-shu. 2007. The Rise of the Chinese Empire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chang, Kwang-chih. 1976. Early Chinese Civilization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chang, Kwang-chih. 1983. Art, Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chang, Kwang-chih. 2005. “The Rise of Kings and the Formation of City-States,” in Sarah Allan (ed.), The Formation of Chinese Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 125–139. Chen, Yan and Zheng, Yushuo (eds.). 2012. Rentong Yu Quanqiuhua: Dangdai Zhongguo Minzu Zhuyi De Beilun : [Identity and Globalization: Paradox of Contemporary Chinese Nationalism]. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press. Cheng, Shude 程 . 1990. Lunyu Jishi [The Analects: Collected Interpretations], vol. 3. Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju. Chong, Ja Ian. 2014. “Chinese Nationalism Reconsidered—or, a Case for Historicizing the Study of Chinese Politics,” in Kate Xiao Zhou, Shelley Rigger, and Lynn T. White III (eds.), Democratization in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia? London & New York: Routledge, 217–231. De Bary, Wm. Theodore and Bloom, Irene (eds.). 1999. Sources of Chinese Tradition: From Earliest Times to 1600, vol. 1, 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. De Bary, Wm. Theodore and Lufrano, Richard (eds.). 2000. Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 through the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. Fung, Yu-lan 蘭. 1939. Xinshilun 新事 [New Discussions of Current Affairs]. Hong Kong: Commercial Press. Gan, Chunsong . 2012. Chonghui wangdao: Rujia yu shijie zhixu 回王道: 家 世 [Back to the Kingly Way: Confucianism and the World Order]. Shanghai: East China Normal University Press. Gries, Peter H. 2004. China’s New Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guo, Yingjie. 2004. Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China: The Search for National Identity under Reform. London & New York: RoutledgeCurzon.
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Zhao, Tingyang. 2009. “A Political World Philosophy in Terms of All-under-Heaven,” Diogenes 221: 5–18. Zheng, Dahua and Zou, Xiaozhan (eds.). 2007. Zhongguo jindaishi shang de minzuzhuyi 中 代 上的民族主 [Nationalism in Modern China]. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press. Zhu, Xi . 1983. Sishu zhangju jizhu 四 [Collected Commentaries on Chapters and Verses of the Four Books]. Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju.
4
Confucian nation? A perfectionist justification in a pluralist society1 Sungmoon Kim
In the past two decades, Confucian political philosophers have made important contributions to contemporary political theory by exploring the ideas of Confucian democracy and constitutionalism and articulating their proper institutional forms. Largely inspired by classical Confucianism, these scholars are convinced that Confucian philosophy, unadulterated by East Asia’s actual Confucian historical experiences, can provide an attractive political alternative to a Westernstyle liberal democracy. Indeed, the scholarly efforts to rejuvenate philosophical Confucianism in ways compatible with modern (fully or partially) democratic institutions and social conditions provide a timely pluralist corrective to the monistic global dissemination of liberal democracy. However, an important practical challenge remains—that is, how to make Confucianism relevant to ordinary East Asian citizens who have much objection to it. For most East Asians, Confucianism is still one of the greatest obstacles that prevented their nation from developing into a modern nation-state.2 Traditional Confucianism’s so-called “feudal” legacies such as patriarchy, patrimony, and androcentrism, make many citizens in the region, let alone progressives and feminists, repugnant to Confucianism and doubtful of its modern relevance. It is debatable whether this is due to Confucianism indeed blocking the region’s otherwise smooth modernization, or whether patriarchal, patrimonial, and androcentric elements are at the heart of Confucian philosophical thought and ethics,3 but it is hard to deny that Confucianism, as experienced and practiced by East Asians themselves, has long been implicated with such elements, prohibiting society from embracing gender equality and individual freedom as the public norm, until the West-led modernization took place. For contemporary Confucian political theory, therefore, the most pressing questions are: why should ordinary East Asian citizens, who are neither themselves Confucian any more in the traditional sense, nor whose polity is not Confucian in terms of its formal political institutions, care about Confucianism? And if there is indeed a reason that they should, how can Confucianism, required for that reason, be more directly relevant to them? In this chapter, I argue that in contemporary East Asia in which people are subscribing increasingly to diverse moral, philosophical, and religious doctrines as private individuals, Confucianism as a shared cultural heritage still has profound implications for their public
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life. Then I illuminate the public significance of Confucianism in contemporary East Asia from a nationalist standpoint. My central argument is twofold: (1) Confucianism as a shared cultural heritage enables the East Asian people to govern themselves as a Confucian nation, a uniquely East Asian mode of a civic nation that is neither liberal nor antiperfectionist; and (2) at the core of the Confucian nation is a Confucian public culture that provides East Asian citizens with an environment for collective self-government, thereby enabling a Confucian citizenship within the modern, mainly liberal, constitutional structure. This chapter consists of three main sections. After conceptualizing the idea of a Confucian nation with special attention to the fact of pluralism in East Asia, I then articulate its non-liberal civic character by critically engaging with the existing “ethnic versus civic” formula of the nation. Then, in the third section, I justify Confucian public culture as the culture of the Confucian nation from a perfectionist perspective with reference to John Rawls’s distinction between full and partial comprehensive doctrines.
Confucian nation: a new conceptualization The recent resurgence of Confucian political theory was in part motivated by the liberal presumption, most notably in Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the end of history, that with the collapse of real socialism human history has arrived at its final stage in which there is no more antithetical force to struggle with Westernstyle liberal democracy, thereby progressing it further. According to Fukuyama, liberal democracy signals the most enlightened state of mankind’s political development and there can thus be no other viable alternative to it.4 Advocates of Confucian democracy and constitutionalism in East Asia have advanced their political theories as a pluralist corrective to this sort of global liberal hegemony, by taking full advantage of liberalism’s internal commitment to pluralism: if respect of individual and associational plurality is an integral part of liberalism, how can such a commitment be reconciled with the ethical monism implied in the global hegemony of liberal democracy?5 Implicit in this challenge is the political conviction that East Asians (as Chinese, Koreans, or Taiwanese) are Confucians as a nation, if not as private individuals, and as a Confucian nation they have a distinctively Confucian public way of life. This political awareness was most salient in South Korea and Taiwan in the late 1990s and early 2000s, countries that otherwise had undergone a successful regime transition to (what many observers conceived to be) a liberal democracy. In these countries, citizens had previously taken to the streets in order to overthrow the authoritarian regime, but in their life-or-death political struggle they understood democracy largely as “the removal of the current evil” without having much public deliberation on what kind of democracy they would like to have. Interestingly, it was when liberal democratic institutions had been well consolidated a decade after democratization that both citizens and political scientists began to raise questions about the nature of democracy—whether their democracy should be modeled after a Western-style liberal democracy, whose
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background moral discourse and social practices were largely foreign to them, or could (and should) they build their own democracy in such a way as to correspond with their shared moral values and social practices which are characteristically Confucian, although they, especially ordinary citizens, rarely articulated their political ideas explicitly with reference to Confucianism?6 For the past decade or so, therefore, much of the public debate in East Asia’s new democracies has revolved around how to build a robust democratic regime without forfeiting Confucian values and practices that have long defined East Asians’ public life, or how to make sense of democratic principles and institutions in Confucian terms, so that they can be more socially relevant.7 In this case, the East Asian search for a more effective way of democratic self-government led citizens and public officials to revisit the value of Confucianism as the nation’s public culture. We will come back to the idea of Confucian public culture shortly. But first, what do we mean by the Confucian nation? Given the reality that no East Asian polity is politically predicated on Confucianism and no East Asian society has Confucianism as a state religion, on what ground can we call the Chinese, Korean, or Taiwanese people “a Confucian nation”? It would be incorrect to call the people in any particular contemporary East Asian country, though historically Confucian, a Confucian nation, if we mean by “a Confucian nation” that the people in question subscribe to Confucianism in a fully comprehensive sense. Fully comprehensive Confucianism refers to a version of Confucianism whose moral conception covers all recognized values and virtues within one precisely articulated system.8 Neo-Confucianism, which during the Chosŏn period (1392–1910) seamlessly weaved private and public lives of the Korean people into a coherent ethical, religious, and philosophical whole, is a case in point. The monistic character of Neo-Confucian cosmology, in which “everything from political virtue necessary for ruling ‘all under heaven’ to epistemology, or ‘the investigation of things,’ is laid out in a continuum,”9 enabled the Chosŏn people (especially the elite class who completely immersed themselves in the moral world created according to Neo-Confucian cosmology and ethics) to conduct a fully comprehensive Confucian life by driving them to sincerely (cheng ) participate in a mesmerizingly complex ethical system of Confucian rituals (li ) that were thought to manifest Heaven Principles (tianli )—all-encompassing moral principles which penetrate not only between Heaven and human beings and between all humans but also between humans and other non-human beings and even things in the universe—in a socially ordered fashion.10 When the (neo-)Confucianization of Korean society had been completed by the late eighteenth century, the Korean people were fully transformed into a Confucian people.11 The Confucian nation I construct here is qualitatively different from the Confucian people understood in this sense. While the Confucian people refers to a people whose private and public lives are tightly governed by Confucian philosophical doctrine and ethical precepts,12 the Confucian nation represents
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a particular East Asian people living in a modern nation state (or its equivalent in the case of Hong Kong) who subscribe to diverse comprehensive doctrines as private individuals and yet whose public—political as well as legal—life is strongly influenced by Confucian ethics, mores, and social practices. Whereas the Confucian people, fully committed to comprehensive Confucianism and elevating it as state ideology, find it difficult, if not impossible, to accommodate values that conflict with Confucian moral ideals and norms, a Confucian nation has no desire to politicize Confucianism, even though it permits public promotion of certain Confucian values and virtues within constitutional constraints, thereby maintaining its public identity as loosely Confucian. Sociologically speaking, the Confucian nation refers to a Confucian people which has successfully adapted to the modern political and societal conditions such as nation-state and value pluralism.13 Unlike the Confucian people in the traditional (neo-)Confucian world who saw themselves as belonging primarily to the Confucian moral and cultural universe called “all under heaven” (tianxia ),14 the Confucian nation understands itself primarily as Chinese/ Koreans/Taiwanese whose political identity (i.e., citizenship) and public life are nationally bounded. That being said, though Confucian nation as the East Asian version of “imagined community” accommodated to pluralism is distinguished from Confucian people from both sociological and philosophical standpoints, the two cannot be completely severed from each other as long as the Confucianism in each case is a sort of comprehensive doctrine in the Rawlsian sense which concerns a particular way of life.15 When East Asian people who are internally diverse promote certain Confucian values such as filial piety, respect for elders, and ritual propriety publicly by means of policy-making, legislation, or jurisprudence, they do not merely extrapolate such values from the particular way of life (i.e., the Confucian way of life), in which they are otherwise comprehensively imbedded, and apply them selectively to a modern democratic and pluralist way of life. Rather, what they do is reshape traditional, fully comprehensive, Confucianism (and the traditional way of living undergirded by it) into a mode of Confucianism that is suitable under modern social and political circumstances. In other words, when Confucian values are publicly embraced and promoted in contemporary East Asian societies, what takes place is not so much a selective adoption of traditional values but a series of complex adaptative processes in which traditional Confucian values are negotiated with modern societal and constitutional conditions, reshaping the citizenry’s public-cultural way of life. The Confucianism (and the Confucian way of life) thusly reshaped is qualitatively different from traditional comprehensive Confucianism, but is still grounded in a comprehensive doctrine, though in this case the Confucianism is only partially comprehensive because it has been significantly modified, and constrained, by modern constitutional arrangements, which allow considerable room for the plurality of values as well as a variety of civil freedoms, most notably freedoms of expression, thought, religion, and association.16
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Between civic and ethnic Seen in this way, the conventional conceptual distinction between civic nation and ethnic nation in the nationalism literature turns out to be severely limited in making sense of the idea of the Confucian nation discussed thus far. In the existing literature, civic nation is understood as “a community of equal, rightsbearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values.”17 Liah Greenfeld distinguishes civic and ethnic nationalism in the following way: [N]ationalism may be distinguished according to criteria of membership in the national collectivity, which may be either “civic,” that is, identical with citizenship, or “ethnic.” In the former case, nationality is at least in principle open and voluntaristic; it can and sometimes must be acquired. In the latter, it is believed to be inherent—one can neither acquire it if one does not have it, nor change it if one does; it has nothing to do with individual will, but constitutes a genetic characteristic. Individualistic nationalism cannot be but civic, but civic nationalism can also be collectivistic. More often, collectivistic nationalism takes on the form of ethnic particularism, while ethnic nationalism is necessarily collectivistic.18 Greenfeld’s “individualistic-collectivistic” or “voluntaristic-ascriptive” framework may have some explanatory force in illuminating the different modes of nation and nationalism that have been historically experienced by Western European countries (and their North American colonies) on the one side and their Eastern counterparts on the other.19 But even in the European context, the distinction is too sharp to be true. Finding this stark conceptual distinction “mythical,” Bernard Yack thus draws attention to the cultural elements deeply implicated in the idea of the civic nation and argues that real nations combine choice and cultural heritage. Yack demythicizes the dichotomy between choice and cultural heritage (and the attribution of each to a particular mode of nation—civic or ethnic) in the clearest terms. The myth of the civic nation is a myth of consent. It misrepresents the selective affirmation of inherited political principles and symbols as a shared choice about how best to govern ourselves.… In so doing, it transforms the nation’s intergenerational community into a voluntary association for the expression of shared political principles.… The myth of the ethnic nation, in contrast, is a myth of descent. It misrepresents the shared affirmation of some part of our shared cultural inheritance as a fact of birth. In doing so … it ignores the way in which even the assertion of our shared ancestry involves the selective affirmation of one part of our cultural heritage rather than another.20 In Yack’s view, the individualistic-collectivistic or the voluntaristic-ascriptive dichotomy to which many scholars of nation and nationalism subscribe only
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reveals liberal democratic theorists’ deeply biased attraction to a purely political and principled basis for mutual concern and solidarity, which makes them oblivious to the historical fact that political identities of Western liberal democratic nations such as French and American are also culturally inherited artifacts.21 The entrenched liberal antiperfectionist conviction that the liberal state, or any civil state for that matter, must distance itself from any value claims and act like a neutral umpire as to competing cultural and moral claims drives liberal theorists to mistakenly present the liberal nation as a value-neutral political identity and to understand the civic nation solely in liberal—individualistic and contractual— terms. But, as Yack rightly notes, “[s]tates cannot provide us with culture-free sites for the construction of political identity. Political identities, even when they center on states, are about, to a certain extent, to take on the form of inherited cultural artifacts.”22 I will come back to the question of antiperfectionism in the idea of the civic nation shortly. For now, let us continue our examination of how the conventional civic-ethnic distinction is unsuitable in making sense of the Confucian nation constructed in the preceding section. In the end, I argue that the practical and philosophical possibility of the Confucian nation requires us to approach the idea of the civic nation more generically, without implicating it with liberal assumptions. The idea of the civic nation in the existing literature is fundamentally liberal. Theorists of nation tend to present the civic nation as a voluntary association freely formed by individuals and they portray individuals comprising the civic nation as singularly committed to liberal political principles, being uncontaminated by any substantive moral doctrine or cultural identity. To use Rawlsian language, the civic nation is completely detached from comprehensive doctrines because it should be morally neutral to any competing cultural claims. The liberal advocates of the civic nation tend to present the ascriptive nature of ethnicity or the salience of cultural identity in the idea of the ethnic nation as the very source of evil, namely the dangers of ethnocentric politics. But a close look at their argument reveals that what troubles them most with regard to the ethnic nation is the political volatility that the community’s moral claims that express its cultural identity naturally (in their view) give rise to, because the ethical comprehensiveness of such claims makes them incommensurable with and exclusionary to other moral doctrines that give other nations distinctive cultural identities. Even staunch liberals do not go so far as to argue that ethnicity is in itself a political evil, as something that must be erased from society. Thus understood, what is potentially dangerous is not so much the ethnic nation as such but nationalism to which any nation—be it ethnic or civic according to our conventional typology—is susceptible under certain circumstances. Otherwise stated, it is the way in which the community’s cultural identity is expressed politically toward other national communities that worries (and should worry) the liberal champions of the civic nation.23 However, as Yack rightly notes, this otherwise justified vigilance toward nationalism cannot justify the idea of the civic nation as a political entity that is
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completely sanitized from comprehensive doctrines. Nor is it convincing that for a nation to be free from the dangers of nationalism, which is nothing more than ethnocentric politics often over a particular territory, it must be a liberal nation. Our idea of the Confucian nation challenges these two liberal and antiperfectionist presumptions. Let us tackle the liberal presumption first. As noted, the Confucian nation is a national people who, internal diversity notwithstanding, share and cherish Confucian values and practices as their shared cultural heritage. The Confucian nation has some similarity with the liberal civic nation in the sense that it accommodates the plurality of values and moderates traditional Confucianism’s full comprehensiveness, especially its patriarchal, patrimonial, and androcentric elements, by adapting it to modern constitutional principles and institutional arrangements, to which political equality (including gender equality) is central. That said, the Confucian nation differs significantly from the liberal civic nation because its civic character derives neither from the liberal cluster of individualism, choice, and voluntary association, nor from shared allegiance to constitutional principles which are often predicated on liberal values.24 What imparts its distinctive civic character to the Confucian nation is a set of Confucian values and practices to which East Asians still adhere, such as, but not limited to, filial piety, respect for elders, ritual propriety, harmony within the family, as well as Confucian moral sentiments that continue to influence the mode of the citizenry’s public reasoning. It is through these values and practices, however modified under modern pluralist societal conditions, that contemporary East Asians as a public maintain the intergenerational connection with their ancestors and it is by earnestly practicing these values, again in a way plausible under modern social circumstances, that they can worship their ancestors, which itself constitutes a key Confucian virtue. A Confucian nation’s self-understanding as an intergenerational ethical community alone does not exhaust its difference from the liberal nation. The Confucian values that the East Asian people promote as public values keep them substantively different from the liberal people as they continue to buttress relational civility and public norms. An example might be helpful here. Since the 1990s following South Korea’s democratization, there is no question that a South Korean citizen’s personal lifestyle has become massively similar to a Western (especially American) liberal lifestyle. Moreover, though very few Koreans declare Confucianism as their self-chosen value system, Koreans generally uphold filial piety as one of the most important human virtues, independently of their personal value systems and regardless of gender and age.25 What is interesting is that Koreans, especially young Koreans, cherish filial piety, not so much because of its doctrinal imperative as stipulated in religious Confucianism nor their interest in their parents’ property, but far more because of its excellent virtue in promoting harmony within the family as well as expressing the child’s sense of gratitude and moral responsibility toward the parents.26 This implies that while Koreans are increasingly individualistic in terms of personal value system and lifestyle on the one hand, they are still deeply relational on the other, as their family-oriented relational ethics continue to shape their social and
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political life.27 Most tellingly, a majority of Koreans still adhere to the traditional Confucian ideal of the state as a(n) (extended) family28 and many Koreans also believe that political leaders must be morally virtuous.29 It is important to note that this persistent influence of Confucian values in otherwise liberal and democratic Korea has very little to do with traditional and fully comprehensive Confucianism, whose social relevance is limited to only a small number of the population, including the members of the Confucian clan organizations. It is the Confucianism that has become the public culture in a pluralist society that is relevant to the general public in South Korea and it is this version of Confucianism that helps maintain Koreans (and other East Asian people) as a Confucian nation.30 If we agree that the essence of the “civic” character of the civic nation lies in its contribution to domestic order and international peace, the Confucian nation is civic without being liberal. Equally important, the civic character of the Confucian nation embraces the ethnic elements that constitute and maintain it as an intergenerational ethical community. Thus understood, Yack’s demythicization of the dichotomy between ethnic and civic nations makes perfect sense in the modern Confucian societal context. The ethnic nature of the Confucian nation is retained in the partial comprehensiveness of its Confucianism but the very partiality (or incompleteness) of Confucianism’s comprehensiveness allows the Confucian nation to accommodate domestic and international ethical pluralism, thus rendering it civic. But a set of difficult questions still remain: can the civic nation be tethered with a comprehensive doctrine, however partial it is? Can a nation be civic while being perfectionist, that is, without being neutral to competing moral and/or cultural claims? As long as the kernel of the conventional liberal notion of the civic nation consists of its antiperfectionist character or its direct opposition to the perfectionist elements of the ethnic nation, the philosophical plausibility of the idea of the Confucian nation cannot be fully established. I turn to this antiperfectionist challenge in the next section.
Confucian public culture Nation and nationalism are not merely philosophical concepts. Peoples and states occasionally enter into political conflict and war in order to build their own nation-states or to claim or protect the land they deem as culturally sacred. The consequences of such conflict and war are often catastrophic. But apart from its geopolitical significance, nation is also an important philosophical idea, without which it is impossible to conceptualize the people who struggle with other groups of people in the name of collective self-determination. If the people is a purely politically constituted entity as the social contract theory implies, where do the people come from in the first place, who claim the land, build the state, or is expelled from the state because of their distinct collective identity? That is, how can we make sense of the people who have a clear and coherent collective identity but lack their own territorial basis and have yet to build their own state? The idea of the nation enables us to come to terms with the
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community of the people in the state of nature who individually have a compelling reason to create an ordered society and civil government. In this sense, nation as an intergenerational community precedes the body politic. Once the people (i.e., the nation) create the body politic under which they can lead an ordered public life, the pre-political intergenerational community attains a new meaning under the polity’s overall constitutional structure. The constitution promulgates various rights and duties of the people, thereby transforming them into citizens, and establishes highest political principles under which citizens can develop a common political identity (i.e., citizenship). Put differently, through the constitutionalization of the nation, nationality, predicated on descent, and citizenship, focused on collective self-government, become inextricably intertwined.31 But exactly how does such intertwinement take place? Does this mean that nationality is now expressed in civic-political terms, that rituals and customs which previously governed the intergenerational community’s way of life are now codified into written law so that social relationships can become more formal and juridical? This could be a part of what is happening when the nation is constitutionalized. Certainly, it is true of East Asian countries whose modern nation-building historically coincided with the enactment of modern constitutionalism in which ritual-based customary laws were reconstituted in terms of legally enforceable rights and duties.32 However, during the process of constitutionalization, nationality is being more than gradually superseded by citizenship, providing the latter, otherwise a purely political concept, with an intergenerational commitment and social palpability. It redefines the very meaning of citizenship from the power that is shared and exercised in common among citizens of equal public standing into an organized power that maintains a political community of a particular public character over generations. The liberal nation whose intergenerational nature is often neglected in the existing literature is no exception. Though never formulating his political theory in terms of nation or nationality, John Rawls insinuates that the question of the nation as an intergenerational community is presupposed in his political liberalism, when he raises political liberalism’s fundamental question in this way: What is the most appropriate conception of justice for specifying the fair terms of social cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal, and as fully cooperating members of society over a complete life, from one generation to the next?33 Staunch antiperfectionist interpreters of Rawls’s political liberalism would point out that by “from one generation to the next” Rawls did not mean to introduce the intergenerational concern of the nation but to stress the crucial importance of political stability of a well-ordered society marked by the fact of pluralism.34 It is undeniable that Rawls was supremely concerned with the question of stability throughout his career, but it is evident that his concern with the
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constitutional reproduction of an intergenerational community is not merely a distraction from the question of stability when he says that the content of the political conception of justice, which regulates constitutional essentials and the basic structure, is expressed in terms of certain fundamental ideas seen as implicit in the public political culture of a democratic society.… Thus, justice as fairness starts from within a certain political tradition and takes as its fundamental idea that of society as a fair system of cooperation over time, from one generation to the next.35 What we can glean from Rawls’s statement is that even in the version of liberal political theory that purports to be purely political (hence not metaphysical or perfectionist), an intergenerational concern is unavoidably embroiled, which is now featured as the question of public culture in a constitutional regime. It is true that Rawls’s understanding of the public culture as embodying constitutional principles derives from his liberal antiperfectionism—that constitutional principles alone, imbedded in the polity’s tradition but not implicated with any comprehensive doctrine, ought to regulate the basic structure impartially and neutrally vis-à-vis controversial moral, religious, or philosophical doctrines. This antiperfectionist reading of Rawls, favored by many neutralist liberals, upholds a perfect congruence between public culture and constitutional principles and this perfect congruence can be conceivable only if we understand public culture and the constitution as co-original or that the public culture is profoundly shaped by the constitution. In such case(s), the most well-known of which is of course the USA, the political regime has a perfectionist interest in the formation of a particular type of national-cum-political citizenship (in the American case, a liberal-democratic citizenship) but it pursues and realizes its perfectionist ambition only through constitutional or civic means. The following statement by Stephen Macedo forcefully illuminates this constitutionalperfectionist reading of political liberalism. Liberal constitutional institutions have a more deeply constitutive role than the rule of law ideal signifies: they must shape or constitute all forms of diversity over the course of time, so that people are satisfied leading lives of bounded individual freedom.… Successful constitutional institutions must do more than help order the freedom of individuals prefabricated for life in a liberal political order: they must shape the way that people use their freedom, and mold people in a manner that helps ensure that liberal freedom is what they want. If a democratic constitutional regime is to thrive, it must constitute citizens willing to observe its limits and able to pursue its aspirations.36 Thus understood, in political liberalism (or civic liberalism), constitutional perfectionism, which is a purely political perfectionism concerned with the making
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and reproduction of a liberal-democratic citizenship, coexists with philosophical antiperfectionism. Again, this remarkable coexistence is only possible if a (more or less) perfect congruence between the public culture and constitutional principles is presupposed. Here the public culture’s connection with the nation’s intergenerational community, which makes citizenship culturally grounded in the citizenry’s habit of the heart, is massively overshadowed by the constitution’s overtly political project. From a Confucian standpoint, liberalism’s attempt to decouple its constitutional-political perfectionism, which is inevitable even in the most culturally neutral regime as long as it has a desire to make and reproduce a particular mode of citizenship that it favors, from its philosophical antiperfectionism, which prevents the liberal state from having any possible association with comprehensive doctrines, reveals one of the most troubling aspects of liberalism. Just like liberalism’s favored—yet “mythical” according to Yack—notion of the civic nation, its purely political notion of the public culture renders “culture” ethically hollow. Like the idea of the liberal civic nation, culture in a liberal constitutional regime is conceived without any meaningful reference to the national culture, which in reality has been reconstituted under democratic constitutionalism as the polity’s public culture that is only partially comprehensive, thus moderately perfectionist. Before the constitutionalization of the nation, people used to exist as an intergenerational community of a shared cultural heritage and it is only under the constitutional framework that they reinvent themselves into the public, exercising the right of collective self-government. Therefore, it is equally mythical to imagine the public culture as a pure embodiment of constitutional principles which are politically promulgated. Contra what Rawls says in Political Liberalism, in no case can the public culture (as the most politically relevant mode of national culture as I understand it here) be separated from the background culture in civil society.37 In the most profound sense, public culture is the culture of civil society, pluralism within civil society notwithstanding. The mythical nature in the liberal ideal of the perfect congruence between public culture and constitutional principles becomes even more evident if we turn to the relationship between them in the Confucian cultural context. The constitutionalization of the Confucian nation in a modern Confucian society often implies double, often tension ridden, perfectionist ambitions. On the one hand, the Confucian nation, especially during and after democratization, is under staggering social pressure to reform its constitutional structure after the Western, mainly liberal-democratic, model. The liberal constitutionalism, once adopted, then requires the Confucian nation to transform itself into a liberal public, whose public culture should accordingly embody liberal constitutional principles such as gender equality and individual freedom. As political scientists argue, the radical change in the constitutional structure is accompanied by behavioral and attitudinal changes at an individual level and these changes combine to make liberal democracy “the only game in town.”38 On the other hand, however, there is always a conscious and subconscious resistance against the liberal transformation from the Confucian nation. As a
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nation, the East Asian people continue to value and practice traditional Confucian values such as filial piety, respect for elders, ritual propriety, and harmony within the family in a manner appropriate under the modern societal conditions and within the constitutional constraints and promote such values publicly in a variety of ways—by means of public policy, legislation, public education, or jurisprudence.39 This continued public commitment to Confucian values not only permits the state to be Confucian perfectionist in its public decision making, but, more fundamentally, enables the polity’s constitutional jurisprudence to be Confucian perfectionist as well. The result is the coexistence of two perfectionist ambitions in a single constitutional framework: formal liberal constitutionalism on the one hand and informal Confucian constitutionalism on the other. And understandably the coexistence of two culturally distinct constitutional ambitions means certain ambiguity in the goal of jurisprudence as well as practical difficulty in producing a coherent public identity of citizenship. 40 How to produce a coherent public identity of citizenship under the circumstances of double constitutionalism is an important normative question but this subject is beyond the scope of this study. What is important in the present context is that, despite formal liberal constitutional changes in many East Asian countries (most notably Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan), the public culture there is less liberal and more Confucian in its character, and to this extent it embodies the intergenerational aspect of the Confucian nation in a way intelligible to ordinary citizens. From the formal liberal constitutional perspective, the Confucian public culture is incongruent with the polity’s constitutional ambition to produce a liberal-democratic citizenship; the Confucian public culture is nothing more than the background culture of civil society. From the standpoint of informal Confucian constitutionalism, however, the Confucian public culture directly serves its perfectionist goal, functioning as the seedbed for Confucian civic virtues and Confucian citizenship. Still, from the viewpoint of formal liberal constitutionalism, Confucian public culture maintains too intimate a connection with the background culture of civil society but this connection is far from a liability. Quite the contrary, the connection implies that the public culture in question is deeply imbedded in the citizenry’s habit of the heart41 and it mediates between individuals and civil society as well as between civil society and the (informal part of ) constitution.42 In familiar Rawlsian terms, the intimate connection between the public culture and the background culture conceived from the perspective of Confucian constitutionalism implies that the Confucianism in question is a comprehensive doctrine. But intimate connection does not imply that the Confucian public culture and the background Confucian culture are directly identical. While the background Confucian culture encompasses many different sorts of Confucianism, including fully comprehensive Confucianisms adhered to by traditionalist Confucians, the Confucian public culture is only partially comprehensive as it is socially conditioned by the fact of pluralism and politically modified by constitutional principles, most importantly gender equality.43 Earlier I argued that the Confucian nation is predicated on partially comprehensive Confucianism. The Confucian public culture’s
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partial comprehensiveness derives from this very nature of the Confucian nation because the Confucian public culture is, in other words, the culture of the Confucian nation. Seen in this way, the perfectionist nature of the Confucian nation is obvious. The Confucian nation, however constrained by modern, mainly liberal, constitutional arrangements, has a profound ambition to reproduce its cultural way of life and realizes this ambition by maintaining, developing, and sometimes revising the Confucian public culture, which is not neutral to other competing cultural identities and moral values. For some non-Western nationalists (not to mention Western neutralist liberals) who believe that for a nation to be civic it must be both liberal and antiperfectionist,44 my understanding of the Confucian nation as civic and morally, though partially, comprehensive, may sound counterintuitive, even alarming. However, there seems to be no other viable way for a Confucian nation (and any non-liberal nation for that matter) to retain its own unique cultural identity, while also constituting an individual member’s personal identity and rendering her choice socially meaningful,45 than to make its public culture non-neutrally committed to the nation’s cultural values and heritages, even when its formal constitutional structure is largely liberal.46 Liberals and liberal nationalists may wonder how a public culture that is nonneutrally committed to certain cultural values and heritages can accommodate abundantly diverse values in civil society and the moral disagreement that it inevitably gives rise to.47 But as David Miller suggests, the role of the state should not be to impose some preformed definition of national culture on people who may resist it, but to provide an environment in which the culture can develop spontaneously rather than being eroded by economically self-interested action on the part of particular individuals.48 More importantly, public culture as a national culture is not a cultural reification fixated on certain immutable values and identities. Rather, it is “a set of ideas about the character of the community” and to this extent it is “a product of political debate.”49 This is why I said earlier that the Confucian nation has (and should have) the profound ambition to develop and revise, as well as maintain, the Confucian public culture. In a pluralist society whose public culture is characteristically Confucian, individual citizens understand the moral content of Confucian values differently, though they may all generally cherish them. For example, Confucian citizens may generally agree to legislate the so-called filial piety law by virtue of their shared Confucian cultural heritages, but their interpretations as to what the core spirit of filial piety consists of or how best to make the people exercise the virtue could be vastly different. Similarly, Confucian citizens may agree that ritual propriety (li ) and harmony (he ) are important social norms that help to keep their social relationships meaningful and civil. But with regard to how these Confucian social norms should be balanced with various other constitutionally guaranteed civil freedoms, most notably freedoms of expression, speech, religion, and association,
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they may arrive at widely different, even conflicting, conclusions, and easily get embroiled in a serious moral debate. In cases of moral disagreement, citizens should strive to resolve their differences by deliberating the reasons underlying each person’s moral interpretation and by revising one’s own position when others’ moral reasoning appears to be more convincing. The point is that the Confucian public culture allows capacious space for moral disagreement of this sort while moderating otherwise unregulated social diversity. The public culture is a public phenomenon precisely in this sense. As Miller puts it, Any one individual may interpret it rightly or wrongly, and draw correct or incorrect conclusions about his obligations to compatriots as a result. Moreover, although the public culture is shaped by political debate, this does not mean that it is easily manipulable by political actors in the short term. It is often quite resilient.50 Still, it may be opposed that as long as the polity is comprehensively committed to Confucian values, however capacious the moral content of Confucianism could be, it is ineluctably oppressive to those who do not subscribe to Confucian public value, most notably to immigrants. This is a serious challenge. But the challenge assumes the existence of a genuinely neutral political framework by which diversity can be fully and equally accommodated. I do not know whether such a framework is ever possible, but, as Yack and Macedo powerfully show, even the liberal civic nation and liberal constitutionalism cannot be thought as the neutralist framework because liberalism, even political liberalism which is allegedly completely severed from any kind of comprehensive doctrine, is unavoidably perfectionist as many liberal theorists have demonstrated by critically engaging with Rawls’s work.51 If, as Macedo claims, liberal constitutionalism is a political project that is “deeply non-neutral with respect to normative diversity, a project that involves promoting—in the name of the public values associated with liberal democratic forms of social capital—some ways of life and making it harder to live others,”52 it is not only unfair but utterly unrealistic to demand the Confucian nation and its public culture be completely neutral with regard to other values and ways of living. Nonneutrality does not imply unfairness, however. What we can demand of the Confucian nation is that it be fair in integrating immigrants into the society’s mainstream political, economic, and educational institutions. At the same time, it is not an unreasonable social expectation that in the Confucian society, immigrants, as they voluntarily entered the society, should strive to intimate themselves with the social norms, mores, and practices that characterize the society as Confucian, even if they understand themselves primarily as Muslims, Christians, or Buddhists.
Conclusion In this chapter, I made a conceptual distinction between Confucian people, immersed in a fully comprehensive traditional Confucian way of life, and
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Confucian nation, the historically Confucian people who have successfully adapted to modern constitutionalism and thereby transformed themselves into free and equal citizens. One of my central arguments has been that notwithstanding this crucial conceptual distinction, Confucian nation as a philosophical concept maintains a loose connection with traditional fully comprehensive Confucianism, rendering it as only partially comprehensive. I have also argued that the partial comprehensiveness of the Confucian nation is reinforced by its institutional adaptation to modern constitutionalism as well as its social accommodation of value pluralism. This way, I have shown, we can conceptualize a unique mode of civic nation in the East Asian Confucian cultural context that is neither liberal nor antiperfectionist. As such, the main purpose of this chapter was to offer a philosophical justification of a certain non-liberal mode of civic nation that is socially relevant in East Asian societies whose public culture remains characteristically Confucian. Given the justificatory nature of this chapter, therefore, one may point out some caveats with regard to the empiricality of the concept of Confucian nation that I have constructed. First, my concept of Confucian nation, admittedly, does not specify by way of comparison how culturally distinctive the Confucian nation is vis-à-vis other types of civic nation, including liberal nation, and what sort of political agency is distinctive to it. These are important practical questions and the satisfactory answer for them would require a full examination of each East Asian society’s distinctive Confucian cultural characteristics and their contingent interactions with that society’s unique geopolitical reality, which goes beyond the scope of this study. The present chapter has a much more modest aim and it has attempted only to justify a generic mode of Confucian nation that would make sense in East Asia’s modern pluralist societal context by constructing it in a way normatively distinct from the generic civic mode of liberal nation, characterized by a perfect congruence between (liberal) public culture and (liberal) constitutionalism. Accordingly, my guiding concern in this chapter has been to justify a non-liberal civic nation in historically Confucian East Asian societies where (Confucian) public culture is largely incongruent with their Westmodeled, more or less liberal, constitutional arrangements. Second, one may also raise a question about the sociological premise underlying my philosophical justification of Confucian nation, that the public culture of contemporary East Asian societies is still characteristically Confucian. The Korean case, as I discussed earlier, importantly attests to this observation and recent empirical findings culled from statistical data broadly reinforce the similar observation in other East Asian countries.53 That said, suppose that East Asians have become thoroughly westernized and there is no qualitative difference between their public culture and typical Western liberal public culture. Would the philosophical reconstruction and justification of the normative concept of Confucian nation still be relevant for East Asian citizens? My answer is yes, because it offers an alternative “regulative ideal,” against the backdrop of which they can both articulate and evaluate a new mode of their nationality and national citizenship that can help reconnect them to their traditional Confucian
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values and way of life without forfeiting modern social and political arrangements that they have painfully adopted and adapted to.54 Thus understood, even though this chapter does not engage with important geopolitical questions commonly associated with the questions of nation and nationalism and begins with contingent sociological observations, it can serve its philosophical purpose as far as it provides such an alternative regulative ideal. The empirical findings to support the Confucian public character of East Asian societies only make our philosophical exploration of Confucian nation as a regulative ideal even more socially relevant.
Notes 1 I would like to thank Bernard Yack, Jungmin Seo, and Philip J. Ivanhoe for their comments on the earlier version of the paper presented at a conference called “Reimaging Nation and Nationalism in Multicultral East Asia,” held at City University of Hong Kong in November 2014. This research is supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2011-AAA-2102). 2 For a powerful historical account attesting to this problem, see Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. 3 For a helpful discussion about these issues, see the following: Tu, Confucian Transitions in East Asian Modernity; Bell and Hahm, Confucianism for the Modern World; Li, The Sage and the Second Sex. 4 Fukuyama, “The End of History?” pp. 3–18. 5 See for instance, Bell, East Meets West; Hahm, Yugyo, Chabonjuŭu, Minjujuŭi. 6 In South Korea, for instance, a group of Western-educated social scientists spearheaded a new intellectual movement called “Traditional and Modernity” (chŏntongkwa hyŏndae) for the revival of Confucianism in the service of Korean-style capitalism and democracy. For a critical analysis of this movement’s core argument, see Cha, “Myth and Reality in the Discourse of Confucian Capitalism in Korea”; Kim, “Beyond a Disciplinary Society.” 7 A series of court decisions in South Korea during roughly the same period regarding traditional Confucian social practices that were seemingly at odds with democratic constitutional principles (such as gender equality) clearly show that Koreans have made tremendous progress in this effort. See Chaihark Hahm, “Negotiating Confucian Civility through Constitutional Discourse”; Hee-Kang Kim, “Locating Feminism beyond Gender and Culture.” 8 For a distinction between fully comprehensive and partially comprehensive doctrines, see Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 13. By partial comprehensive Confucianism I mean a version of Confucianism whose moral conception comprises a number of, but by no means all, nonpolitical values and virtues, and that is rather loosely articulated as a moral doctrine. I come back to this distinction in greater detail later. 9 Chaibong Hahm, “Postmodernism in the Post-Confucian Context,” at p. 35. For a detailed explanation about the monistic character of Neo-Confucianism (of the version compiled by Zhu Xi [1130–1200]), see Maruyama, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, pp. 19–32. 10 Concepts like li , li , cheng are central elements of Neo-Confucian metaphysics that weave metaphysics and ethics as well as ethics and politics into a seamless whole. 11 Deuchler, The Confucian Transformation of Korea. 12 Of course, whether or not the Confucian people as defined here reflects the actual East Asian reality is open for debate. For instance, even after the Confucianization of Korea in the late Chosŏn period, which was more thorough than what happened in any other Confucian states including China, popular religion (including Buddhism) coexisted,
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often in tension, with official Neo-Confucianism. On this, see Walraven, “Popular Religion in a Confucianized Society.” However, it is undeniable that Confucian social norms and ethical precepts, which do not conceptually differentiate the public and the private, deeply penetrated into every nook and corner of Korean society, driving the lower classes to emulate the Confucian, ritually ordered, social lives of the elite class. 13 Hahm, “The Ironies of Confucianism.” 14 See Chan, “Territorial Boundaries and Confucianism.” This does not mean that the traditional Confucian people had no sense of national identity. For an illuminating discussion about the tension between the particularity of Korean national identity and the universality of Confucian culturalism, see Han, “Kija Worship in the Koryŏ and Early Yi Dynasties,” at pp. 368–366. 15 According to Rawls, a moral conception is comprehensive when it includes conceptions of what is of value in human life, and ideals of personal character, as well as ideals of friendship and of familial and associational relationships, and much else that is to inform our conduct, and in the limit to our life as a whole. (Political Liberalism, p. 13) 16 For a detailed philosophical articulation of this new mode of Confucianism, see Sungmoon Kim, Public Reason Confucianism. 17 Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, pp. 7–8. 18 Greenfeld, Nationalism, p. 11. 19 Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism; Plamenatz, “Two Types of Nationalism”; Smith, National Identity. 20 Yack, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community, p. 30. 21 Ibid., p. 27. Also see Smith, Stories of Peoplehood. 22 Yack, Nationalismand the Moral Psychology of Community, p. 28. 23 Identifying ethnicity as a manifestation of intergenerational community, which is how he defines nation as well, Yack submits that “the desire to distinguish it from nationality reflects the same interest in distinguishing intergenerational inheritance and political principles that we saw in the dichotomy between ethnic and civic nations” (ibid., p. 94). 24 For the latter approach to the liberal civic nation, so-called “constitutional patriotism,” see Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity”; Werner-Müller, Constitutional Patriotism. 25 According to a 2005 survey, 86 percent of South Koreans agreed that supporting parents is the adult son’s (and daughter’s) responsibility and duty and 95 percent agreed that living with the parents is helpful for moral development of the son’s/ daughter’s own children. Also, 85 percent responded that filial piety reinforces harmony among family members (Joongang Daily February 11, 2005, quoted from Duk-Kyun Kim, “Yugyochŏk Kachokjuŭi, Haech’ein’ga Pogwŏn’in’ga,” at p. 112). 26 Bae and Park, “Taehaksengŭi hyoedaehan inshikkwaa kachokgach’igwane yŏnghyang’ŭl mich’inŭn pyŏnin,” at pp. 278–279. 27 See Alford, Think No Evil; Choi, Han’gugin shimnihak. 28 Park and Shin, “Do Asian Values Deter Popular Support for Democracy in South Korea?” 29 Shin, Confucianism and Democratization in East Asia, p. 120. 30 In maintaining contemporary Koreans as the Confucian nation, various kinds of traditional Confucian stories about filial sons and daughters, self-sacrificing parents and grandparents, cooperating brothers and sisters, and virtuous public officials, play an immensely important socializing role. When Koreans tell such stories to their own children, which were told by their parents and grandparents when they were young, they are, often unwittingly, inviting their ancestors, their children, and themselves to one, intergenerational, moral community—what Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities)
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calls the “imagined community”, although Anderson does not sufficiently stress the importance of intergenerational elements of the national community. For an inextricable intertwinement between nationality and citizenship in modern states, see Miller, Citizenship and National Identity. East Asia’s modern constitutionalism should be distinguished from Confucian, ritualbased, constitutionalism that long governed the public life in the region. For Confucian constitutionalism, see Chaihark Hahm, “Ritual and Constitutionalism.” Rawls, Political Liberalism, p. 3 (emphasis added). See Quong, Liberalism without Perfection; Barry, “John Rawls and the Search for Stability.” Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 13–14. Macedo, Diversity and Distrust, p. 15. For Rawls’s stark dichotomy between the public culture and the background culture, see Political Liberalism, p. 215, and Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” at pp. 133–134. Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, p. 5. For characteristically Confucian public policies and legal practices in East Asian countries, see Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy, pp. 246–251; Ho, “Traditional Confucian Values and Western Legal Framework.” For a Confucian style public education, see Bell, China’s New Confucianism, pp. 107–127. And for Confucian jurisprudence, see Hahm, “Negotiating Confucian Civility.” I discuss this problem in great detail in Kim, Public Reason Confucianism, chap. 3. For an illuminating discussion of the habit of the heart in the American context, see Bellah, Habits of the Heart. For an important connection between civil society and the constitution, see Macedo, “The Constitution, Civic Virtue, and Civil Society”; Shils, The Virtue of Civility. On this point, see Kim, Public Reason Confucianism, chap. 4. See Tamir, Liberal Nationalism. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, p. 76. In this regard, it is worth noting that recently the Constitutional Court of Korea expounded that “law inevitably shares a certain common ground with morality and, at the bottom of our legal consciousness, individualism derived from modern Western ideals exists side by side with Confucian ethics centered on community and blood relations” (Korean Constitutional Court, 2008Hŏn-Ba56, February 24, 2011). This challenge is most powerfully raised by Michael Oakeshott, with his famous distinction between civil association and enterprise (or purposive) association, see his On Human Conduct. Miller, On Nationality, p. 88. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 69. See Callan, Creating Citizens, p. 12; Dagger, Civic Virtues, pp. 181–192; Galston, Liberal Purposes, p. 148; Mulhall and Swift, “Rawls and Communitarianism.” Macedo, “Constitution, Civic Virtue, and Civil Society,” p. 1593. Also see Barber, A Place for Us, pp. 52–54; Gutmann, Democratic Education, pp. 258–263. Chang et al., “Confucianism and Democratic Values in Three Chinese Societies”; Shin, Confucianism and Democratization. Also see Kim, Public Reason Confucianism, pp. 244–245.
References Alford, C. Fred. 1999. Think No Evil: Korean Values in the Age of Globalization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
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Bae, Mun-jo and Park, Se-jeong. 2013. “Taehaksengŭi hyoedaehan inshikkwaa kachokgach’igwane yŏnghyang’ŭl mich’inŭn pyŏnin” [Consciousness of filial piety and family values among college students], Journal of the Korean Contents Association 13(5): 275–285. Barber, Benjamin R. 1998. A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong. New York: Hill and Wang. Barry, Brian. 1995. “John Rawls and the Search for Stability,” Ethics 105(4): 874–915. Bell, Daniel A. 2000. East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bell, Daniel A. 2006. Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bell, Daniel A. 2008. China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bell, Daniel A. and Hahm, Chaibong (eds.). 2003. Confucianism for the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bellah, Robert N. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Callan, Eamonn. 1997. Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cha, Seong Hwan. 2003. Myth and Reality in the Discourse of Confucian Capitalism in Korea, Asian Survey 43(3): 485–506. Chan, Joseph. 2008. “Territorial Boundaries and Confucianism,” in Daniel A. Bell (ed.), Confucian Political Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chang, Yu-Tzung, Chu, Yun-han, and Tsai, Frank. 2005. “Confucianism and Democratic Values in Three Chinese Societies,” Issues and Studies 41(4): 1–33. Choi, Sang Chin. 2000. Han’gugin Shimnihak [The Psychology of the Korean People]. Seoul: Chung Ang University Press. Dagger, Richard. 1997. Civic Virtues: Rights, Citizenship, and Republican Liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Deuchler, Martina. 1992. The Confucian Transformation of Korea: A Study of Society and Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?” The National Interest 16: 3–18. Galston, William A. 1991. Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenfeld, Liah. 1992. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gutmann, Amy. 1999. Democratic Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1995. “Citizenship and National Identity: Some Reflections on the Future of Europe,” in Ronald Beiner (ed.), Theorizing Citizenship. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hahm, Chaibong. 2000. Yugyo, Chabonjuŭu, Minjujuŭi [Confucianism, Capitalism, Democracy]. Seoul: Chŏntong-kwa Hyŏndae. Hahm, Chaibong. 2001. “Postmodernism in the Post-Confucian Context: Epistemological and Political Considerations,” Human Studies 24(1/2): 29–44. Hahm, Chaibong. 2004. “The Ironies of Confucianism,” Journal of Democracy 15(3): 93–107. Hahm, Chaihark. 2004. “Negotiating Confucian Civility through Constitutional Discourse,” in C. Hahm and D. A. Bell (eds.), The Politics of Affective Relations: East Asia and Beyond. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 277–308.
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Hahm, Chaihark. 2009. “Ritual and Constitutionalism: Disputing the Ruler’s Legitimacy in a Confucian Polity,” American Journal of Comparative Law 57(1): 135–203. Han, Young-woo. 1985. “Kija Worship in the Koryŏ and early Yi Dynasties: A Cultural Symbol in the Relationship between Korea and China,” in W. Theodore de Bary and JaHyun K. Haboush (eds.), The Rise of Neo-Confucianism in Korea. New York: Columbia University Press. Ho, Lusina. 2003. “Traditional Confucian Values and Western Legal Framework: The Law of Succession,” in Daniel A. Bell and Chaibong Hahm (eds.), Confucianism for the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ignatieff, Michael. 1995. Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. New York: Noonday. Kim, Duk-kyun. 2005. “Yugyochŏk kachokjuŭi, haech’ein’ga pogwŏn’in’ga” [Confucian family principles, deconstruction or restoration], The Journal of Confucian Thought and Culture 23: 109–134. Kim, Hee-Kang. 2015. “Locating Feminism beyond Gender and Culture: A Case of the Family-Head System in South Korea,” in Sungmoon Kim (ed.), Confucianism, Law, and Democracy in Contemporary Korea. London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 81–103. Kim, Sungmoon. 2016. Public Reason Confucianism: Democratic Perfectionism and Constitutionalism in East Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kim, Sungmoon. 2016. “Beyond a Disciplinary Society: Reimagining Confucian Democracy in South Korea,” in Confucianism, a Habit of the Heart: Bellah, Civil Religion, and East Asia. Albany: State University of New York Press, 113–138. Kohn, Hans. 1951. The Idea of Nationalism. New York: Macmillan. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levenson, Joseph R. 1968. Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Li, Chenyang (ed.). 2000. The Sage and the Second Sex: Confucianism, Ethics, and Gender. Chicago: Open Court. Linz, Juan J. and Stepan, Alfred. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Macedo, Stephen. 2000. Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Macedo, Stephen. 2001. “The Constitution, Civic Virtue, and Civil Society: Social Capital as Substantive Morality,” Fordham Law Review 69(5): 1573–1593. Maruyama, Maruyama. 1974. Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, trans. Mikiso Hane. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press. Miller, David. 1995. On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, David. 2000. Citizenship and National Identity. Cambridge: Polity. Mulhall, Stephen and Swift, Adam. 2003. “Rawls and Communitarianism,” in Samuel Freeman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Rawls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oakeshott, Michael. 1975. On Human Conduct. Oxford: Clarendon. Park, Chong-Min and Shin, Doh Chull. 2006. “Do Asian Values Deter Popular Support for Democracy in South Korea?” Asian Survey 46(3): 341–361. Plamenatz, John P. 1976. “Two Types of Nationalism,” in Eugene Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea. London: Edward Arnold. Quong, Jonathan. 2011. Liberalism without Perfection. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Rawls, John. 1999. “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” in The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shils, Edward. 1997. The Virtue of Civility: Selected Essays on Liberalism, Tradition, and Civil Society. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Shin, Doh Chull. 2012. Confucianism and Democratization in East Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Anthony D. 1991. National Identity. New York: Penguin. Smith, Rogers M. 2003. Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tamir, Yael. 1993. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tu, Wei-ming (ed.). 1996. Confucian Transitions in East Asian Modernity: Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and Four Mini-Dragons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walraven, Boudewijin. 1999. “Popular Religion in a Confucianized Society,” in JaHyun K. Haboush and Martina Deuchler (eds.), Culture and State in Late Chosŏn Korea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Werner-Müller, Jan. 2007. Constitutional Patriotism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Yack, Bernard. 2012. Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Part III
State-initiated ethnic nationalism
5
A review of contemporary Chinese nationalism Theories, features, and facets Eric K. M. Chong
Despite the shadow cast over the state by global cultural, economic, and political processes, there is a growing consensus in both the sociological and the political science literatures that state institutions still matter a great deal, and that the territorial dimension of political and economic processes remains everpresent in the West as well as elsewhere around the world.1 Nation and its nationalistic exemplification of Nationalism thus command much interest from scholars.2 Chinese nationalism, indeed, is an ambiguous reality whose existence cannot be denied,3 although the government of People’s Republic of China generally denies, while occasionally defending, the existence of nationalism within China.4 Under Mao’s leadership in the 1960s and 1970s, nationalism was one of the core sources of loyalty to the state, although engaging in Chinese Communist revolution caught more attention nationwide.5 With the fading-out of Maoist ideology in the past two decades, a vacuum in commitment to public goals has become obvious among the Chinese people, driving Chinese newspapers to call the current situation of China a “crisis of faith.” In this milieu, nationalism has loomed large as the bedrock of political beliefs widely shared by the Chinese people.6 In the age of reform, the rise of nationalism largely coincides with China’s rapid economic growth, modernization of the military with an increasing budget, growing anti-West sentiment, and interventionism in foreign relations.7 Since the late 1990s, Chinese nationalism has grown intense, as best evidenced in a series of cases: demonstrations against the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, criticisms about the EP3 Hainan Island mid-air plane collision incident in April 2001, the denunciation of the Japanese Prime Minister’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, criticisms of Taiwanese leaders from Lee Teng-hui to Chen Shui-bian over national unification and the principle of ‘One China’, and intimidations on any of Taiwan’s inclinations towards independence. Chinese nationalism is also pronounced in the ambition of the recent decade of making China a great economic and military power in the hope of surpassing the United States as the greatest power in the world. By the end of the 1990s, with massive domestic economic development, Beijing gradually placed greater emphasis on non-material interests that had been defined by historical memory, which includes national dignity, face, and respect
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from other countries. Such non-material interests have become equally, or even more, important than China’s material interests such as trade, security, and territory.8 In today’s China, nationalism seems to be the most widely shared value both in society and in the Chinese Communist government. In fact, the Chinese government has repeatedly appealed to nationalism with the aim of strengthening its hand in dealing with its foreign partners and also of preventing any “peaceful evolution” of the regime towards democracy.9 But what are the contents of contemporary Chinese nationalism? To what extent has Chinese nationalism been shaped over the decades by the contemporary Chinese state? How have Chinese governments in the past decades since the creation of the modern Chinese state made use of nationalism in achieving the national goals and realizing national dreams? This chapter does not attempt to engage in the question as to what the possible Chinese approach would be regarding a new form of nationalism, which seems to require discovering nationalism in China rather than in the West and understanding the internal dynamics of Chinese nationalism as opposed to nationalism as perceived by the West.10 Instead, it examines Chinese nationalism with special attention to several key features and argues that the Chinese Communist regime has taken advantage of the discourse(s) of nationalism in order to extort and mobilize the Chinese people, thereby achieving national dreams and goals. The chapter also shows that the Chinese Communist regime has used nationalism as one of the guiding ideologies in dealing with issues such as national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and international relations, especially with Japan and the USA. The chapter consists of two sectios—the first on the origins of Chinese nationalism and the second on the different features of Chinese nationalism as exemplified in contemporary Chinese society. It is hoped that through this analysis, we can understand more clearly the contemporary unfolding of nationalism in China.
The origins of modern Chinese nationalism Every modern society, to a certain extent, is an “imagined” one.11 A nation is animated not only by a sense of togetherness but also by a belief in a common destiny supported by an overarching identity. Members of a nation are typically seen to exhibit solidarity that overwhelms connections with outsiders.12 In the West, “subjective” nationalism, as a feeling and a movement, was a phenomenon scarcely older than modern Chinese nationalism as it was brought about chiefly through the consolidation of the territories, a drawing of new borders, and changes in ideologies during the eighteenth century.13 However, like many other non-Western societies that did not have the characteristics peculiar to the old European nations such as France and England that were bought together by clear and specific racial origins (hence, could be called as ethnic or “objective” nationalism), the idea of nationalism (minzuzhuyi) was introduced to China in the nineteenth century, including the idea of race.14 The modern Chinese nation therefore was constituted as, using Benedict Anderson’s
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classic formulation, an “imagined community.”15 Of course, there some scholars who claim that Chinese nationalism is not so much a product of twentiethcentury modernization as a much older social phenomenon, harking back to 3,000 to 5,000 years ago as some key elements of Chinese identity are found to have existed in the ancient period.16 However, it is hard to deny that modern Chinese nationalism emerged in the course of reacting to the shock of the forced contact with the West, the Opium War of 1840 in particular.17 Before this historic turning-point, China was much more an empire than a nation-state, that is, a civilization or culture dominated by one dominant race, the Han. Before the Western impact in the nineteenth century, China was hardly a society brought together by a national project, lacking modern citizenship. The sinologists have contrasted this sort of old “culturalism” with modern nationalism after 1840.18 In fact, despite earlier contacts with the outside world, especially with Russia, it is the Opium War that truly transformed the Chinese Empire into a modern state, and China into a nation, thus confirming the famous modernization theory of nation and nationalism advanced by scholars such as Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, highlighting the decisive role played by the state in constructing nation and nationalism.19 The following sections will analyze some features and facets of Chinese nationalism as exemplified in the modern Chinese social and political contexts.
The use of ethnic symbols and myths Anthony D. Smith draws attention to the importance of ethnic symbols, myths, and memories in the ethno-nationalist project of purifying culture and people. Smith singles out the cultural and social exclusion that the purification project entails as vital for the empirical examination of the internal others perceived as the enemy.20 In imperial China, Sima Qian, the first “official” historian of ancient China, set the tone for subsequent Chinese writers and official chroniclers in writing about the origin of the Chinese.21 He “imagined” the founding myth of the Yellow Emperor who allegedly had existed 2,000 years ago from his time, reigning over the middle and upper reaches of the Yellow River in northern China. In paying attention to the Yellow Emperor, Sima Qian implicitly vindicated Chinese ethnic homogeneity by claiming that all Chinese were supposedly descended from him.22 The Yellow Emperor myth also provided political legitimacy to the imperial rulers. What is worth mentioning as well is the so-called “middle kingdom syndrome” that is found in the Chinese nationalistic discourse. For a long time, there has been an idea that China is the cultural and political center of the region, although there was no “Asia” during the imperial period.23 Therefore, so-called “barbarians” or ethnic minorities living in the borderlands of central imperial China were thought to be inferior and this sense of ethnic superiority was constantly resorted to in legitimating their subordination to the rule of the center. The central kingdom syndrome added much pride to the Chinese people throughout premodern history.
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In modern China, the Great Wall and Tiananmen Square are the two most salient symbols of Chinses nationalism. Throughout history, the Han Chinese have always lived inside the Great Wall and thus kept those peripheral ethnic minorities at bay as outsiders. The Tiananmen Square symbolizes the successful establishment of the People’s Republic of China as it was the place where the proclamation of the foundation of the new republic was made. In addition to them, the Monument to the People’s Heroes and the Great Hall of the People are also regarded as members the Ten Great Buildings in China that were constructed during 1958 and 1959 in order to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
Loyalty and unity to the state In political speeches, top Communist party leaders have been pushing the need to strengthen patriotism as a leading priority. One example is the speech in 1994 by the Party Secretary Jiang Zemin to the National Propaganda Work Conference, emphasizing the need to strength the spirit of patriotism. Jiang told the whole nation that the spirit of patriotism is the first among different priorities and that the party should “grasp with both hands” to deal more effectively with ideological works.24 Apart from being patriotic, there was also one common supposition that ran through the writings on Chinese history by Chinese scholars, namely the fundamental unity. Under the idea of national unity, there grew a dominant narrative that Chinese rulers commissioned themselves—that all “civilized” people or all “Chinese” should live together under the same system, and this was the orthodoxy that assured the continuity and legitimacy of the imperial system in the past.25 As Schwartz puts it, “In traditional China, history took the place of religion. To be more precise, historical mindedness—a scrupulous, textually anchored attachment to the communal past—became a sacred commitment over time.”26 Jenner also concurred that [n]owhere has the homogenizing effect been more successful than in creating the impression that the Han Chinese are a single ethnic group.… Historical myth-making has so far been remarkably effective not just in inventing a single Han Chinese ethnicity but also—and this is a far bigger triumph—in winning acceptance of it.27
Portraying national heroes Chinese nationalism usually centers on creating and portraying a national hero. Whether it is the national father of Dr. Sun Yat-sen who led the revolution and overthrew the Imperial Qing dynasty in 1911 and established the Republic of China, or the new China charismatic leader of Chairman Mao Zedong, or the pragmatic and reform-minded leader Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese national hero is commonly portrayed as paramount, supreme, and patriotic. Corresponding
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with the long-held Chinese tradition that authority usually comes from top down,28 once the Chinese Communist Party took the power in 1949, “its leader became sacrosanct and above all the rest of mankind, not only the object of a cult of veneration but also the acknowledged superior of everyone in the organization.”29 This unique position of Mao in people’s minds made it possible for him to manipulate the whole party and do practically anything that he wanted to during his reign. The mass-line approach also supplemented Mao’s benevolent despotism with great effectiveness. Mao wanted to use the mass-line approach so that the party could elicit and respond to peasants’ concerns and local decisions did not have to always depend on some bureaucrats still soaked in the autocratic legacy from ancient times.30 Deng’s image was promoted among the Chinese through the government’s promotion of his works and books just as in the case of Mao in the 1960s. Also, Deng’s ideas were promoted as China’s new “ideology.” This kind of promotion of an ideology profoundly influenced the people as to what to think and what not.31 In modern China, national heroes were “created” and sanctified by the state’s effort to keep up national spirits. One example is Lin Hao, who was recognized as a young ten-year-old hero when he saved his two classmates from the rubble during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. The child’s bravery deeply impressed the whole Chinese nation. It was reported that Lin, the “hall monitor” in his school, encouraged his fellow students to sing songs to motivate their spirits until the rescuers were in place. Later on, Lin became a national hero and a famous singer, and he founded the Lin Hao Charity. As a national hero, Lin could even walk along with China’s NBA superstar Yao Ming to lead the Chinese delegation at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.32 In 2009, Lin was selected as one of the “double hundred” figures and became the youngest person to earn the honor of being named among the “People Who Moved China” ever since the founding of New China.33 Another young national hero was also “created” following from the 2008 earthquake. Lei Chunian, a former Sichuan schoolboy, was portrayed as a hero for having saved the pupils during the earthquake.34 It was reported that Lei sensed the shocks of the approaching earthquake in advance and escaped to the playground, only to find that just a few classmates had been able to come out from the building. He returned to the classroom and led seven classmates to safety before the building collapsed completely. Lei was named a Teenage Earthquake Rescue Hero and selected as a torchbearer for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. In summing up, the new China has been “creating” and rewarding national heroes with a high profile in front of the whole nation. The Chinese government is strongly inclined to incorporate ordinary heroes into its nationalism discourse.
Against foreign invasions and maintaining territorial integrity Nationalism is also invoked to resist any attempts of foreign invasions, verbal or physical, as found in the writings of nationalist theorists seeking to defend the
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Chinese sovereignty against external threats. In Chinese history, foreign invasions of China reminded the Han people of the differences between them and outsiders, even though some of the imperial dynasties such as Yuan (founded by Mongols) and Qing (founded by Manchurians) adopted Chinese customs of rule to legitimize their authority. Although the last imperial dynasty of Manchu Qing ruled with great prosperity that China had ever known and lasted for 250 years, there remained among the Han “lingering undercurrents of resentment over alien rule.”35 This sort of sense of resentment reflected a change in popular and official attitudes, which was intensified because of the increasing clashes between China and the West during the later Qing period, although as Dikötter argues, racial stereotyping of roles had already begun under the Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century when Chinese officials and then Chinese scholars were forced into more intense interaction with the West.36 Chinese nationalism at the turn of twentieth century was aroused by imperialist aggression and this experience required strong national unity in selfdefense.37 In the 1920s, Mao used nationalistic discourses to expel foreign imperialists and to re-establish Chinese territorial integrity.38 This expulsive nationalism, indeed, emphasizes the importance of dignity and equality necessary in putting the Chinese nation on a par with other nations. The historical discourse of dignity and equality enabled the Communist party to seize power39 and it still motivates Chinese students to take to the streets to engage in mass demonstrations against the United States and Japan when occasions arise. Actually, the language of Chinese nationalism of this kind focused on dignity and equality is older than the discourses of socialism and Leninist anti-imperialism, with workers and students both speaking this common language.40 Indeed, during the anti-Japanese war, more than 900 Chinese cities were occupied by the Japanese and residents of those cities are still struggling with tragic memories caused by the war.41 Not surprisingly, the painful memory of the past is easily invoked at any time by a mere remark by a politician, the release of a new movie, or the publication of a new history book, in particular of a history textbook, giving rise to controversies throughout the country.42 The anti-Japanese war and the bitter wartime memories left many sensitive historical symbols to both China and Japan, and these symbols are occasionally “reactivated,” deliberately or unintentionally, creating major tensions between two countries.43 In this regard, it is worth mentioning one significant incident in the Japanese education system. On April 5, 2005, the Japanese Education Ministry approved a new junior high-school history textbook which triggered critics from several Asian countries, including China and South Korea, to charge that it minimized Japan’s culpability for its wartime crimes. The textbook was said to provide a distorted and self-serving account of Japan’s colonial and wartime activities, describing, for example, its invasion of the Korean Peninsula as an unopposed annexation necessary for Japan’s security.44 Four days later, 10,000 to 20,000 Chinese demonstrators marched toward the Japanese Embassy in Beijing and threw stones at it, to be followed by another 20,000 demonstrators marching in two cities in southern Guangdong Province and
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attacking a Japanese department store in Shenzhen on the next day (BBC 2005). In all similar anti-Japanese demonstrations, Chinese demonstrators chanted slogans and burned Japanese flags, and carried banners and slogans reading “Japan Must Apologize to China,” “Never Forget National Humiliations,” or “Boycott Japanese Goods” (CNN 2005). These protests were the largest anti-Japanese demonstrations in China since the two countries normalized their diplomatic relations in 1972 and the United States destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the conflict in Kosovo in 1999.45 In the 1980s, the Chinese Communist government’s perception that there was a danger of foreign plots against China was found in its frequent mentioning by top Chinese leaders of “the American hegemonists” who attempted to infiltrate, sabotage, or encircle China. The leadership was preoccupied with the so-called “US threat” to the extent that there was a saying at the time that the United States regarded China as its main adversary.46 In order to deal with this threat, the Chinese State Council passed in mid-1993 a law called the National Security Act that defines “hostile groups” and lists activities that would be severely punished including “distorting facts, expressing opinions that would endanger national security, instigating disputes between national groups, and illegally meeting with foreigners.” The government and the press continued to employ the propaganda of the “hostile forces.” It even blamed hostile foreign forces for the failed bid of the Olympic Games in 2000. People were arrested on claims that they made contacts with foreigners (including foreign reporters) and passed to them the secrets of the bidding for the Olympic Game. Foreign magazines were also banned and the Voice of America was jammed. Satellite dishes receiving foreign television programmes were also confiscated.47 The hoped-for reunification of Taiwan with Communist China is also linked to the long struggle of the Chinese against foreign imperialist pressure.48 The aforementioned “middle kingdom” syndrome also propels Beijing’s determination to bring Taiwan back to the motherland. Many Chinese believe in the ideal of the middle kingdom. They believe that Taiwan’s current separation from the mainland was due first to Japanese imperialism and then to American intervention in the Chinese civil war after the Second World War. Under a deep-rooted nationalistic feeling, Communist China is pressured to fight any Taiwanese effort to become fully independent.49 Therefore, reunification with Taiwan figures much in Chinese nationalistic projects, especially after Taiwan improved commercial—though not political—relations with China.50 In recent years, China has been locked in wave after wave of rows over wartime and territorial disputes with Japan, once calling Japanese Prime Minster Abe an “unwelcome person” when he made a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine in 2013, a place that commemorates, among others, Japan’s war heroes, including some war criminals. Tensions have eased since the leaders’ meeting in November 2014.51 However, as a gesture revealing the persistent grudges, several Japanese lawmakers visited the shrine in April, prompting a rebuke from the Beijing authorities. “In this sensitive year, Japanese politicians should adhere to correct historical views and do more to promote reconciliation and mutual trust
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with Asian neighbors, and not the opposite,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said.52 The guard on any intentions or memories that are related to foreign invasions will surely be on alert by the Chinese government.
Remembering national humiliation National humiliation refers to century-long humiliations suffered by the Chinese in the face of foreign aggressions, which are traced back to the foreign imperial aggressions during the late Qing period throughout the early half of the twentieth century. It is also deeply entangled with the Japanese invasions of Manchuria on September 19, 1931 that led to the subsequent destruction and colonization of virtually all the major cities in the North Eastern province. The theme of national humiliations has been recaptured from time to time to motivate the Chinese people to remember the national humiliations suffered by the whole nation in the hope that the Chinese people can guard against any foreign imperialist intention. Wang argues that when an incident is perceived as an act of bullying and humiliation, because the central myth and legitimacy of the government are highly dependent upon maintaining China’s “national face” it becomes natural and understandable that the government needs to be tough.53 The past of national humiliation is taught in schools throughout China and thus is passed down to the next generation. Moreover, the general public is constantly reminded of national humiliations by means of various kinds of mass memorial events. In many modern societies, history education or civic education on related subjects is commonly used by the authorities to shape a national identity and cultivate a sense of patriotic loyalty among the citizens in mediation of a particular version of the national history and the national myth.54 A deliberate misrepresentation of history, with glorification of the state and the nation, is also commonly used for such purposes.55 In Chinese education, students are casually encouraged that as a patriotic Chinese youth, they should not only be loyal to the Chinese state and political leaders such as Mao but also remember the various dates of national humiliations (say, the dates of foreign invasions) as a way to understand national history. Therefore, in China, large-scale official patriotic memorial events are frequently organized to mobilize students’ participation in swearing to protect their country and singing patriotic songs. The year of 2015 marked the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. China held a full military parade for the commemoration in September 2015.56 It could be seen how China projected itself after attaining huge economic achievements after the humiliating invasions several decades ago. In those mass war memorial events, important political figures are usually present to deliver speeches and statements to re-encourage the whole nation to continue to struggle against foreign imperialism. China has also established various museums, monuments, and historical sites for educating the public about the
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war with the Japanese, as well as about the national heroes who fought against the opium trade. The Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance against Japanese Aggression is the most comprehensive museum in China with regard to the Sino-Japanese War and it is frequently the site for organized school visits, the Chinese Communist Youths, and overseas visitors. It has also been holding exhibitions outside China for several years. Indeed, young citizens in China today hear many stories about the war from various sources, including their grandparents.57 With all sorts and rounds of reminders, the Chinese government is determined to help the people remember national humiliations generation after generation. It is only against this backdrop that we can understand why, more than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, the ghosts of war still haunt Chinese-Japanese relations. The enmity from the past remains alive.58
Building up a national self-regard and national dignity Another, though related, key theme is a strong sense of national self-regard, which is a sense of being proud as Chinese. This usually means to be proud of being a Chinese in whatever achievements. Indeed, the Chinese have garnered significant achievements in recent decades, especially after the reconfirmation of the open-door policy by the late leader Deng Xiaoping. Chinese sportsmen and athletes have reversed the image of China as the sick man of East Asia by winning numerous medals in international sports and athletic games, while Chinese aerospace technology has stunned the world by successfully firing men into outer space. The rapid economic progress and sheer size of the Chinese economy have, needless to say, dwarfed the many doubters after the crackdown on the June 4 pro-democracy student movement in 1989. China was at a time of international economic disengagement following the crackdown, and there was a fear that China might turn back from the reform. However, Deng had steered China to keep walking towards economic reform, laying the foundation of economic prosperity that the world is now witnessing. The economic achievements, indeed, do not just serve the purpose of China’s economic autonomy in the globalized world, but, more importantly, help to build a wealthy Chinese nation that can make every Chinese citizen feel proud. The economic achievement has successfully appealed to many Chinese people, including aspiring youths (though it remains to be seen whether future promises can also be delivered), thus taking the criticisms from human rights defenders and losers in land reclamation away from the eyes of the general public. On the other hand, sports, and the Olympics in particular, show how nationalism and internationalism come together in China as Chinese participation and interest in internal sports games and festivals are largely motivated by nationalism. An important point to note is that by importing sports from the West and taking part in world sports competitions, China has engaged itself in the world community.59 Xu argues that a consideration of sports brings a much larger segment of the population—rich and poor, educated and less educated—into the story. Seen in this light, it can be said that
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The importance of achievements in sports towards Chinese nationalism was further accentuated in the 2008 Olympic Games where sports was understood in the minds of Chinese political leaders to be a political endeavor rather than just a personal leisure pursuit, and this shows that China entered the twenty-first century with a new campaign to determine its national identity and advance its position in the international arena. Thus, sports in China can be a lens through which one can learn about how the Chinese perceive themselves as well as their interactions with the world. Another key feature is an emphasis on the struggle for national dignity. Fitzgerald argues for a need to appreciate the salience of national dignity in China’s modern history, which is not as obvious as it might appear.61 Furthermore, Schwartz argues that over the past century during which modern China was born, China engaged in a quest for “wealth and power,” thereby restoring and building up national dignity leaving the nickname of the “sick man of East Asia” in the past.62 Rehabilitated national dignity also demonstrates that China has embraced a “fighting spirit” and it indeed has been instrumental to building and maintaining relationships with the outside world,63 thus accounting for the Chinese enthusiasm for the Olympics and Western sports. It also resembled the “fighting spirit” found in Japanese cultural borrowing in the wake of the Meiji Restoration. In short, by using sports and physical education to overcome national shame and support national renewal,64 the struggle for national dignity seems to have helped achieve the Chinese national goals of saving the nation in the wartime and strengthening the race in peacetime.
Facing the trauma Trauma is also invoked to motivate the people to be strong and united. Given China’s vast geographical area, it is hardly surprising that natural disasters such as earthquakes happen occasionally. While the Chinese believe that crisis brings about both danger and opportunity, they also have a particular view of the disasters and traumas in the sense that they can be used as a validation of “chosenness.”65 Chinese people feel that since they have suffered so much in the recent century, there must be some meaning to this suffering and a positive and glorious future may be at hand in the future. Johan Galtung suggests that for the Chinese, traumas are expected in the future, with a mixture of fear and lustful anticipation of self-fulfilling prophecies coming true.66 Therefore, rescue works following natural disasters are usually treated as political engineering in which rescue personnel are significantly mobilized from the party, the military, or the
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government in general. Chinese political leaders are usually found giving instructions to rescue works, which reinforces the view that high officials in the central government respond swiftly to local disasters. When mobilizing rescue campaigns, Chinese people are told to be strong and united in facing such disasters. They are also assured that by showing a collective force under the leadership of the Communist Party, they can overcome any natural disaster. For instance, in the recent anniversaries of the Siquan earthquakes, official memorial events were held, reminding the general public of the critical importance of the unified efforts and national spirit in fighting against the disasters. On May 12, 2012, the fourth anniversary of the 8.0-magnitude earthquake that hit China’s southwest Sichuan province in 2008 and cost the lives of more than 80,000 people, more than 10,000 military and civilian personnel participated in a four-hour exercise held in Chengdu and other cities in the Sichuan province in a simulation training in post-quake rescue and relief works. Vice Premier Hui said that the exercise was successful and impressive and that it showed that Chinese people had been instilled with knowledge and skills for disaster prevention and reduction.67 The next section will discuss the working and implications of Chinese nationalism on the governance of the current Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The author will focus on some major issues but they are by no means exhaustive.
Current CCP governance in light of Chinese nationalism: issues of territorial sovereignty, foreign relations, human rights, and universal values debate The Chinese Communist Party was created under Mao’s leadership as a nationalist party concerned with the Chinese nation.68 Since the implementation of the open-door and reform policy, the Chinese Communist government has driven economic development not only for the sake of political legitimacy but also to realize the national dream. As Peter Gries points out, the ruling legitimacy of the current Chinese political leaders is highly dependent upon successful performance on the international stage.69 Clearly, the Communist Party finds it helpful to the regime to take advantage of the nationalist sentiment among the general populace. Together with economic success, therefore, nationalism makes a significant contribution to bolstering national pride.70 Since the current Chinese political leader, Xi Jinping, assumed power, he has been further promoting a dream—the so-called China dream—of revitalizing the paramount Chinese nation. In leading China towards this national dream, he has tightened up the crackdown on corruption while putting military, administrative, and party powers under his full control. Under this authoritarian governance, virtually all efforts are being made for economic development, ideological control, surveillance or even arrest of political dissidents and prorights activists. Even more moderate political activists and intellectuals are under tight governmental control. In foreign relations, with a dream of building up a strong and nationalistic China, Xi has adopted a tough stance on diplomatic as
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well as territorial controversies. In this regard, one can say that Xi is a believer in neo-authoritarianism and nationalism. Here arises a challenging question: what would be the possible impact of the combination of neo-authoritarianism and nationalism in Xi’s political thought on the prospect of China’s democratization and social and economic reform? Differently put, what would its impact look like in relation to democracy and freedom once dreamed of but cracked down on during the June 4 students’ movement in 1989? On the international front, the legitimacy of China’s current rulers is also seen to be highly dependent upon successful performance on the international stage. Chinese political leaders tend to regard it as their responsibility to maintain China’s national mianzi (face) when dealing with other nations.71 At the same time, Chinese leaders have made it explicit that their guiding aim is to pursue China’s national interests.72 Therefore, as for foreign policies in relation to the United States, the capitalist superpower, and Japan, the past enemy, Chinese leaders have been extremely cautious in avoiding any mistake that might defile China’s international image and national pride. Regarding this issue, there is one good recent example. In the midst of the territorial disputes between China and Japan, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe were apparently in tension with each other when they met in Beijing in November 2014. In the Asia-Africa Summit held about six months later, however, in an attempt to vindicate the image of China as a responsible international partner, Xi suggested in his meeting with Abe that by putting aside their mutual suspicion, the two Asian economic powerhouses should seek to repair their relationship damaged by territorial disputes in the East China Sea and still suffering from the bitter wartime legacy. Xi even went as far as to say that the two nations “would not become threat to each other.”73 In terms of its relation with the United States, China has been entangled with many challenging issues concerning security, economics, environment, human rights, and the Taiwan and Tibet questions. Though China’s rising global economic, political, and military power is notable in recent internal politics, it is still undeniable that the United States, though facing many challenges “still exert[s] broad leadership reflecting its superpower status.”74 Three scenarios may come up under this situation: cooperation, antagonism, or some other path. But it seems that balancing conflicting interests leading to positive equilibrium with continued differences will possibly be the main theme in Sino-American relations.75 After all, since the 1990s, various scenarios of “China threats” and “containing China” have come up in the West as a response to the rise of Chinese nationalism.76 These scenarios were based upon the Western perception of Chinese nationalism, focused on its (potential) aggressiveness, that is, whether it will pose a regional security challenge. However, this Western perception has in turn created strong nationalistic reactions from China. Most tellingly, issues relating to Asia-Pacific security issues as well as those concerning Taiwan, Tibet, and human rights more generally have ignited nationalistic sentiments on the part of the Chinese authorities. Moreover, with its supreme concern with national sovereignty and the “One China” principle, Beijing has shown strong dissatisfaction with the way the
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United States handles the Taiwan and Tibet issues. Speaking of Taiwan, in fact, one of the Communist China’s most emotionally charged disputes has been with Taiwan, from Lee Teng-hui to Chen Shui-bian, in which Chinese nationalism was implicated in a complex manner with the question of territorial integrity and national sovereignty.77 After all, Copper argues that Taiwan’s very rapid and successful democratization suggests that Taiwan should be independent and separate from China, while increasingly important economic links between Taiwan and China indicate the opposite.78 This observation shows, albeit implicitly, the crucial role that nationalism can play in the China-Taiwan relationship. Chinese military moves and construction of islands in the South China Sea since 2014 have been regarded by the United States as an unfriendly move, likely to cause regional instability. However, the Chinese side maintained that their actions in the South China Sea were fully justified in light of China’s territorial sovereignty and demanded that the United States should reduce their navy and air force activities in the region.79 When it comes to the question of human rights, the Chinese government draws attention to the fact that China has made significant progress in this area as well since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, especially in terms of “the right of development” with rising economic power and living standards. The United States had once used trade privilege, such as MFN status, as leverage in dealing with the human rights problems in China, but this effort was ineffective due to China’s increasing political influences in the UN as well as its attraction to and influence on the US business community.80 The Asia-West dialogue on human rights has also been a debate mainly between China and the West (in particular the United States and the United Nations Human Rights Council). Responding to the United States which makes occasional comments on China’s human rights records, China has banned talk of “universal values” and “civic rights” in tertiary institutions starting from 2013. Instead, it has actively embraced talk of the uniqueness of Asian values and the particularistic conception of human rights since the Bangkok declaration of human rights in 1993. Admittedly, the idea of “universal values,” or pushi jiazhi ( ), which includes values such as democracy, freedom, and human rights, has become the subject of hot debate between China and the West as well as in China’s national politics.81 Jiang Yihua, a senior scholar at Fudan University, argues for meeting Western challenges by bolstering Chinese culture with nationalism; he justifies this argument on the basis that the West never really supported the nations of Asia when they struggled to enter the West-led international order, economic, political, and cultural. Jiang regards any mention of universal values as nothing more than an attempt to continue the past imperialist project on the part of the West. Having barely escaped from the West’s cultural hegemony, argues Jiang, China should not accept Western values as they stand.82 Many Chinese scholars started off the universal values debate in 2008 after the Sichuan earthquake that killed around 80,000 people. Ten days after the earthquake, a liberal newspaper in the southern province of Guangdong,
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Southern Weekend, published an editorial that praised the government’s swift response. It said that the government had “honoured its commitments to its own people and to the whole world with respect to universal values.” That single mention of the term was enough to enrage hardliners, however. A flurry of commentaries appeared in Beijing newspapers as well as on conservative websites, attacking the idea of universal values, calling it a Western plot to undermine party rule. Conservatives feared that embracing universal values would imply acknowledging the superiority of the Western political systems.83 In September 2008, after the Beijing Olympic Games, which was under the intense foreign watchful eyes from the world,84 the Chinese Communist party’s own mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, published a signed article accusing the supporters of universal values of trying to Westernize China and turn it into a laissez-faire economy that would no longer uphold “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The debate became more intensified in December 2008 when hundreds of liberal intellectuals and dissidents joined together as Charter 08 and signed a manifesto in support of universal values. They said that China was faced with a choice between maintaining its authoritarian system and “recognizing universal values, joining the mainstream of civilization and setting up a democracy.” This was too extreme a step for the party leadership to take, even for the Charter 08. In sum, the present Communist party leadership is suspicious of the “universal values” argument with regard to its governance and political system, regarding the discourse as posing a challenge to its nationalistic discourse.
Conclusion Chinese nationalism was appealed to in an effort to save the whole nation and even the Han race in times of war during the early twentieth century. When the People’s Republic of China was established, the communist road campaigns were aided by a national self-regard that was geared towards rebuilding a strong and healthy China amid the ups and downs of relations with the communist USSR and in the face of the ideological conflict with the USA-led Western world. Entering the open-door and reform era since the late 1970s, the leadership in Beijing became more pragmatic under Deng Xiaoping and nationalism was used to motivate the whole nation to build up its economy and to push forward national dignity with greatly improved living standards. Entering the 1990s and 2000s, nationalism became inextricably involved in China’s encounters with the world over issues involving national sovereignty, territorial integrity, foreign relations, human rights, and the universal values debate. As the world is now well into the new millennium, it would be reasonable to expect that nationalism will continue to play a significant force both in domestic governance and foreign affairs, as long as it helps China build up national identity with self-esteem in the international arena. Of course, it remains to be seen how successful nationalism will turn out in making China a peaceful and engaged partner in a globalized world. We may, however, get an important insight into the prospect of China’s national identity in the future when we look back on what happened during the last century.
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Notes 1 Béland and Lecours, Nationalism and Social Policy. 2 Unger Chinese Nationalism; Ferdinand, “Ethnosymbolism in China and Taiwan”; Fitzgerald, “Nationalism, Democracy, and Dignity.” 3 Cabestan, “The Many Facets of Chinese Nationalism.” 4 Xi, “Patriotism vs. Nationalism.” 5 Unger, Chinese Nationalism. 6 Ibid. 7 Zheng, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China. 8 Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation. 9 Cabestan “The Many Facets of Chinese Nationalism.” 10 Zheng, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China. 11 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 12 Béland and Lecours, Nationalism and Social Policy. 13 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780. 14 Cabestan, “The Many Facets of Chinese Nationalism.” 15 Anderson, Imagined Communities. 16 Ferdinand, “Ethnosymbolism in China and Taiwan.” 17 Cabestan, “The Many Facets of Chinese Nationalism.” 18 Harrison, Modern Chinese Nationalism. 19 Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Hobsbawm Nations and Nationalism since 1780. 20 Smith, Ethnic Nationalism and the Plight of Minorities, pp. 191–196. 21 Ferdinand, “Ethnosymbolism in China and Taiwan.” 22 Ibid. 23 Xu, Olympic Dreams. 24 Copper and Lee, Coping with a Bad Global Image. 25 Ferdinand, “Ethnosymbolism in China and Taiwan.” 26 Schwartz, “No Solace from Lethe,” pp. 76–77. 27 Jenner, The Tyranny of History, pp. 4–5. 28 Fairbank The Great Chinese Revolution. 29 Ibid., p. 318. 30 Ibid. 31 Copper and Lee, Coping with a Bad Global Image. 32 China Daily, May 29, 2015 33 People’s Daily Online, April 20, 2011. 34 South China Morning Post, November 4, 2014. 35 Ferdinand, “Ethnosymbolism in China and Taiwan,” p. 237. 36 Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, p. 34. 37 Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution. 38 Ferdinand, “Ethnosymbolism in China and Taiwan.” 39 Fitzgerald, “Nationalism, Democracy, and Dignity in Twentieth-Century China.” 40 Ibid. 41 Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation. 42 Barnard, Language, Ideology and Japanese History Textbooks; Hein and Selden, “The Lessons of War, Global Power, and Social Change.” 43 Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation. 44 Cunningham, “Japan’s Revisionist History.” 45 Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation. 46 Copper and Lee, Coping with a Bad Global Image. 47 Ibid. 48 Xu, Olympic Dreams. 49 Ibid. 50 Copper, Taiwan.
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South China Morning Post, April 22, 2015. Ibid. Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation, p. 189. Vickers, In Search of an Identity. Kymlicka, “Education for Citizenship.” South China Morning Post, April 22, 2015. Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation. Ibid. Xu, Olympic Dreams. Ibid., pp. 3–4. Fitzgerald, “Nationalism, Democracy, and Dignity in Twentieth-Century China.” Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power. Xu, Olympic Dreams. Ibid. Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation. Galtung, “The Construction of National Identities.” The China Times, May 12, 2012. Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution. Gries, China’s New Nationalism. Unger, Chinese Nationalism. Gries, Face Nationalism. Wang, Never Forget National Humiliation. South China Morning Post, April 22, 2015. Sutter, U.S.–Chinese Relations, p. 1. Ibid. Zheng, Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China. Ferdinand, “Ethnosymbolism in China and Taiwan.” Copper, Taiwan. Mingpao, June 12, 2015. Copper and Lee, Coping with a Bad Global Image. The Economist, September 30, 2010. Fewsmith, China since Tiananmen. The Economist, September 30, 2010. Xu, Olympic Dreams.
References Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London; New York: Verso. Barnard, Christopher. 2003. Language, Ideology and Japanese History Textbooks. London: Routledge Curzon. Béland, Daniel and Lecours, Andŕe. 2008. Nationalism and Social Policy: The Politics of Territorial Solidarity. New York: Oxford University Press. BBC. 2015. “China’s Anti-Japan Rallies Spread,” April 10, 2015, accessed May 15, 2015, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4429809.stm. Cabestan, Jean-Pierre. 2005. “The Many Facets of Chinese Nationalism,” China Perspectives, 59 (May–June), accessed May 29, 2015, available at http://chinaperspectives.revues. org/2793. China Daily. 2015. “Lin Hao Hero’s Starring Role,” May 29, 2015, accessed May 29, 2015, available at www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2009-05/12/content_7765767.htm. The China Times. 2015. “Hui Liangyu: Prepare for More Severe Natural Disasters,” May 12, 2012, accessed May 29, 2015, available at www.thechinatimes.com/online/2012/ 05/3425.html.
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CNN. 2015. “Japan Seeks China Talks on Riots,” April 16, 2005, accessed May 29, 2015, available at www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/04/16/china.japan.ap/ index.html. Copper, John Franklin. 2012. Taiwan: Nation-State or Province? (6th ed.) Boulder: Westview Press. Copper, John Franklin and Lee, Tai Ling. 1997. Coping with a Bad Global Image. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Cunningham, Phillip J. 2005. “Japan’s Revisionist History,” Los Angeles Times, April 11, 2005. Dikötter, Frank. 1992. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. London: Hurst. The Economist. “The Debate over Universal Values,” September 30, 2010, accessed May 29, 2015, available at www.economist.com/node/17150224. Fairbank, John King. The Great Chinese Revolution 1800–1985. New York: Harper Perennial. Ferdinand, Peter. 2007. “Ethnosymbolism in China and Taiwan,” in Athena S. Leoussi and Steven Grosby (eds.), Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 233–247. Fewsmith, Joseph. 2001. China since Tiananmen: The Politics of Transition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, John. 2006. “Nationalism, Democracy, and Dignity in Twentieth-Century China,” in Sechin Y. S. Chien and John Fitzgerald (eds.), The Dignity of Nations: Equality, Competition, and Honor in East Asian Nationalism. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 93–114. Galtung, Johan. 2001. “The Construction of National Identities for Cosmic Drama: Chosenness-Myths-Trauma (CMT) Syndromes and Cultural Pathologies,” in S. P. Udayakumar (ed.), Handcuffed to History. Westport. CT: Praeger, 61–81. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gries, Peter Hays. 1999. “Face Nationalism: Power and Passion in Chinese AntiForeignism.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. Gries, Peter Hays. 2004. China’s New Nationalism: Pride, Politics, and Diplomacy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harrison, James. 1969. Modern Chinese Nationalism. New York: Hunter College of the City of New York, Research Institute of Modern Asia. Hein, Laura and Seldon, Mark. 2000. “The Lessons of War, Global Power, and Social Change,” in Laura Hein and Mark Selden (eds.), Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 3–52. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1992. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenner, William J. F. 1992. The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China’s Crisis. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane. Kymlicka, Will. 2001. “Education for citizenship,” in Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 291–316. Lau, Mim. 2014. “Sichuan Earthquake Hero Lei Chunian Stands Trial for Fraud,” South China Morning Post, November 4, 2014, accessed May 29, 2015, available at www. scmp.com/news/china/article/1631456/sichuan- earthquake-hero- lei-chunianstands-trial-fraud. Mingpao. 2015. “Fan Changlong Urges the United States to Reduce Military Activities in the South China Sea,” June 12, 2015, accessed June 13, 2015, available at http:// news.mingpao.com/ins.
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Ng, Teddy. 2015. “China’s Xi Jinping, Japan’s Shinzo Abe Call for Better Ties,” South China Morning Post, April 22, 2015, accessed June 10, 2015, available at www.scmp. com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/1773232/china-japans-leaders-meetsummit. People’s Daily Online. 2015. “Little Hero Lin Hao Gives back to Society,” April 20, 2011, accessed May 29, 2015, available at http://en.people.cn/90001/98649/ 7356107.html. Schwartz, Benjamin. 1964. In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Schwartz, Vera. 1991. “No Solace from Lethe: History, Memory and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century China,” in Tu Wei-ming (ed.), The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese. Stanford: Stanford University Pres, 64–87. Smith, Anthony D. 1994. “Ethnic Nationalism and the Plight of Minorities,” Journal of Refugee Studies 7(2/3): 186–198. Sutter, Robert. 2013. U.S.–Chinese Relations: Perilous Past, Pragmatic Present. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. Unger, Johnathan (ed.). 1996. Chinese Nationalism. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Vickers, Edward. 2005. In Search of an Identity. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Wang, Zheng. 2012. Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations. New York: Columbia University Press. Xi, Mi. 1996. “Patriotism vs. Nationalism,” China Daily, October 10. Xu, Guoqi. 2008. Olympic Dreams: China and Sports 1895–2008. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zheng, Yongnian. 1999. Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernization and International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6
From residency to citizenship Chinese nationalism and changing criteria for political and legal interpretations of Hong Kong identity in the post-1997 era Loretta E. Kim
The correlation of nationality and ethnicity in Hong Kong is a topic that deserves both academic and popular interest, but has been relatively confined to certain debates, in part because it is a factor that vexes the already complex legal and political structures that the region has been compelled to adopt and adapt to actual conditions since the region’s transition from being a British colony to a special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) occurred in 1997.1 Part of the paradox that nationality simultaneously matters as a social and cultural characteristic but is largely brushed aside in Hong Kong politics is due to the ever-evolving identity of both the city and its inhabitants as a collective entity. Hong Kong has long been known as an “international city,” meaning that it has a highly developed economy with large reserves of wealth, top-rate medical facilities, prestigious educational institutions, and other amenities that attract people from all around the globe to visit and live for varying periods of time. The international facet of the city’s identity also manifests in labels, which can be considered blessings or burdens, such as being where “East Meets West” (questionable because both “East” and “West” are geographically ambiguous terms), “Gateway to Asia” (as if the continent had a door), and, according to anthropologist Gordon Mathews, the “Center of the World,” which can be understood as both the city epitomizing China “the Middle Country” or being a global epicenter in and of itself.2 Residents of Hong Kong are similarly endowed with great freedom to define themselves but, depending on various criteria, are subject to particular constraints in social interaction and legal identification. The popular term Heunggong yan (Mandarin: Xianggang ren, translatable into English as “Hongkonger”/”Hong Kong person”) has referred mainly to people born in Hong Kong and those who claim affinity with the city through long-term residence after migrating from other places as children or adults.3 In the past decade, being a “Hong Kong person” has taken on political and legal connotations for some individuals who claim the label because they espouse greater autonomy for the city, such as choosing the Chief Executive (Xianggang xingzheng zhangguan , known for short as teshou ) by universal suffrage (puxuan ), or even recognition as a sovereign state. Being a “Hong Kong
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person” also has contradictory meanings when describing social identity. In some contexts, it is very inclusive, applying to people of diverse nationality (guoji ), ethnicity (minzu ), and ancestry (zuji , as defined by number of generations living in Hong Kong). In others, it is exclusive, used to differentiate who is “local” (the Anglicized adjective Punti, Mandarin: bendi ) or a “native” (tuzhumin ) against “mainlanders” (daluren , or more politely, neidiren ) and/or non-Chinese (waiguoren or pejoratively but sometimes neutrally, gweilo, which would be guilao in Mandarin, for non-Asians). The malleability of being a “Hong Kong person,” whether self-defined or labeled by others, stems partially from the loose parameters of legal identity. Instead of separate lines for “citizens” and “foreigners,” as in most air and sea ports, the Hong Kong International Airport sorts incoming passengers by “Hong Kong Resident” (Xianggang jumin ) and “Visitor” categories.4 The critical difference is whether or not an individual holds a Hong Kong identification card (HKID, Xianggang shenfenzheng ).5 Permanent and nonpermanent Hong Kong residents, except for foreign domestic helpers and student visa holders, can use the E-channels that verify a person’s identity by scanning his or her HKID and fingerprints, whereas visitors must queue for manual inspection of their travel documents. Citizenship only becomes important when an E-channel machine cannot confirm a user’s identity. The person must then show his or her passport to the supervising official. Only then is it clear whether the individual in question is a citizen of Hong Kong or another country. Ethnicity is even less prominent than citizenship as a legal and political marker in Hong Kong because it plays no real part in most administrative matters. Unlike the identity cards issued to Chinese citizens in other areas of the PRC besides Macau, which indicate which of 56 officially recognized ethnic groups the bearers belong to, HKIDs do not designate ethnic identities. The Basic Law, formulated as the essential directive of governance for Hong Kong from 1985 to 1989 and promulgated in 1990, does not contain any particular clauses addressing the ethnic backgrounds or status of ethnic groups. As will be discussed in greater detail later in the chapter, residency is the prime basis for exercising individual rights in Hong Kong. A full section of the Basic Law stipulates the privileges of legal residents. The Law also addresses the special position of “Chinese citizens,” who are eligible to enjoy certain political rights such as serving in the legislative council (LegCo), but whether reading either the Chinese or English versions of the Basic Law, there are no absolute stipulations that one must be “ethnically Chinese” in order to be a PRC citizen. Although PRC citizenship is generally acquired by birth, the existence of numerous ethnic populations (comprising 8.4 percent of the total population as of the most recent national census in 2010, but which is 111,966,349 people) upholds the concept of the Chinese nation (Zhonghua minzu ) as being poly-ethnic rather than mono-ethnic. Nevertheless, since the late 1990s, preceding and following the official retrocession of Hong Kong from the rule of Great Britain to the PRC in 1997,
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national identity, and with it, correlation of ethnicity and citizenship, in Hong Kong has been undergoing an intensive period of redefinition as a political and social marker, with attendant economic and cultural implications. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government has played a prominent role in this process, preparing and enacting legislation prohibiting discrimination based on race, which encompasses traits of ethnicity, and promoting equal opportunities in education and employment for persons of diverse backgrounds. In doing so, government bodies have set new expectations regarding the integration of various socially and culturally defined populations into Hong Kong’s economy and society. The 2008 Race Discrimination Ordinance (RDO) is one outcome of legal and social debates that have moved “Hong Kong identity” beyond dichotomous colonial and post-colonial interpretations of who belongs in Hong Kong based on residency.6 As evident in the unique categorization of people entering Hong Kong and the meaningful emphasis on residency rather than citizenship in the Basic Law described above, legal status is the most complex and controversial element of Hong Kong identity, due to the region’s unique political position in the PRC. However, more abstract and even more intangible are the praxis of certain social and cultural norms that have set Chinese residents of Hong Kong apart from their co-ethnics in the PRC before and after the retrocession. Although public forums and scholarship have focused more on identity politics as a matter of individuals choosing to be either “Hongkongese” or “Chinese,” with some allowance for a person to espouse both identities, no firm conclusions have been reached about either identity’s absolute definition, much less the broad spectrum of intermediate identities that are varying hybrids of both categories. Less controversial but also less explored are the circumstances of Hong Kong residents who are not ethnic Chinese but may acknowledge either or both of the “Hongkongese” and “Chinese” identities. The relative parity of residency and citizenship as legal markers of Hong Kong identity can be attributed to not only the gradual transition that the PRC central government promised to the Hong Kong body politic through the “50 years without change” (wu shi nian bu bian ) policy but also to the as-yet sustained efforts of the HKSAR government to prioritize economic growth and social harmony over nationalism and other forms of political homogenization. In contrast to the British colonial government’s perpetuation of de facto segregation through occupational specialization and lack of explicit measures to engender a poly-ethnic, multi-cultural Hong Kong identity inclusive of all or most sub-populations, the HKSAR government has pursued the strategy of “social absorbency” in order to maintain political and economic coherence.7 Rather than distinguishing particular minority populations from a defined majority and treating them as groups requiring different social and cultural administration, the HKSAR state apparatus places prime emphasis on benefiting all Hong Kong residents, therefore rendering minorities, including ethnic groups that are distinguishable by physical appearance and/or cultural practice, to be functionally “invisible.” The scope of policies that the HKSAR government has enacted in
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this regard spans racial and ethnic identification through population censuses, education and social welfare programs for particular cultural minority groups, conflict management as related to inter-group relations, and the allocation of government material and human resources for racial and cultural affairs.8 Past scholarship on identity in Hong Kong has similarly treated issues of identity and group membership primarily as topics of social interest, rather than of political and legal significance.9 The presence of multiple Han sub-ethnic groups in Hong Kong, as defined by place of origin in Mainland China, is a major topic of anthropological research but has also been disassociated with political status and identity.10 In 1996, representing the National Unity (Minzu tuanjie) journal, the PRC’s principal publication on propaganda regarding ethnic minorities, Chen Jiarong has argued that ethnic pluralism is an ambiguous and therefore benign concept in Hong Kong because diversity is predominantly limited to ethnic Chinese sub-groups, such as persons from Guangdong and Fujian provinces, the Hakka (Kejia ), and boat people (Tanka; Dan jia ).11 Yet Chen acknowledged the presence of many ethnic minorities (shaoshu minzu ) in Hong Kong, as per the mainland definition, such as Dai (Dai zu ) dancers who established a young folk dance group, a Mongol (Menggu zu ) piano instructor, and Hui (Hui zu ) retail entrepreneurs.12 Aside from this emphasis on Hong Kong as an immigrant society consisting of multiple Chinese sub-ethnic groups, scholars have concentrated on two other population categories, distinguished by their political and social status. Works on the Eurasian sub-population have focused on how they negotiated membership in both “European” and “Chinese” spheres, and how they were either accepted as “Chinese” or “Hongkongese” or migrated to their European or North American ancestors’ countries of origin.13 People of non-European or American background, including transient populations from South-East Asia such as domestic workers, and ethnic groups from South Asia and the Middle East, some of which have been present in Hong Kong for over a century, have been treated as distinctly foreign and temporary residents, even if they live and work in Hong Kong for substantial periods, if not the entirety, of their lives.14 Most research on Middle Eastern and South Asian populations in particular has concentrated on their social problems and long-standing marginal status with comparatively limited investigation of the politically and economically successful members of these communities such as the Kadoorie and Harilela families.15 The prevalent attitude both within academic circles and in Hong Kong society at large is that national identity in particular is a negligible trait because it is “obvious,” in that the primary political, economic, and cultural actors are overwhelmingly ethnic Chinese.16 On the other end of the philosophical spectrum, yet strikingly similar in explaining the dearth of focused studies, is the belief that national identity in Hong Kong is too complicated by the region’s changing political status, the use of residency rather than citizenship as a civic identity marker, and the substantial presence of non-permanent populations. Racism as a product and lingering vestige of British colonial rule is furthermore cited as having a muting and potentially distorting effect on national identity,
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although racially or ethnically motivated conflicts have not been considered as severe public problems.17 Moreover, that the governments of Hong Kong have not pursued definitive ethnic categorization and largely allowed residents to label themselves has further detracted from comprehensive and objective scrutiny of Hong Kong people’s national identities after the official transition from British to Chinese rule in 1997.18 Reviewing the first decade of HKSAR history, Sonny Lo concluded that strategies of promoting closer economic and social ties between the PRC mainland and Hong Kong have fostered an organic and gradual alignment of local political interests with Beijing’s broad agenda for the region.19 The existence of a “Hong Kong identity” and the rule of law have maintained Hong Kong’s hallmark characteristic of pluralism, principally defined as the manifestation and public expression of diverse political opinions. This chapter will argue that as Hong Kong eventually becomes a normalized region of the PRC rather than a colonial or special administrative city-state as it was and currently is, citizenship will become more prominent as a political trait of “Hong Kong people” and that benefits associated with residency will have to be reconsidered. This phenomenon is already apparent in two issues that the Hong Kong government and society have deliberated in the past decade: (1) non-ethnic Chinese persons’ eligibility for Hong Kong passports and (2) retention of non-Chinese national judiciary officials. The following section will introduce views of who “belongs” in Hong Kong, presenting both official and popular criteria for who is a “Hong Kong person.” This section will set the background for disputes over whether non-ethnic Chinese persons can become PRC citizens, which is manifest in the approval or denial of applications for Hong Kong passports. Then the chapter will examine criticisms of non-Chinese nationals adjudicating in Hong Kong courts. The fourth and final substantive section will highlight ramifications of the preceding two topics and the implications thereof for the future.
Perceptions of belonging in Hong Kong Nationalism as an abstract concept and an element of identity is difficult to define in Hong Kong. Yet, as the qualifications for obtaining a Hong Kong passport and opposition to non-Chinese nationals serving as judges will show, specifically Chinese nationalism has become a more salient feature in Hong Kong public life during the past 15 years. On the surface, Hong Kong is a relatively homogenous and unproblematic national space. Although it is a special region in the PRC not only because of its distinct political status and common-law legal system, it is an indisputable part of that country. The overwhelming majority of Hong Kong residents claim to be ethnic Chinese based on ancestry and therefore qualify to be recognized officially as Chinese nationals. The remainder of Hong Kong’s population, as mentioned in the introduction, consists of persons who may earn the rights accorded to residents on fixed-term visas or to permanent residents who have the right of abode in Hong Kong indefinitely. These persons, who “belong” to Hong Kong insofar as they are working or dependent on either a legal
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permanent or fixed-term resident, are considered to be legally foreign because they do not possess Chinese nationality. Looking beyond this fundamental rubric of distinguishing who is and is not Chinese based on legal paperwork, ideas of who is a Hong Kong person differ greatly. First, Hong Kong is an exceptional area of the PRC because it is exempt from the regulations providing special economic assistance and social rights to certain ethnic minorities. No reference to race or ethnicity is made on Hong Kong identity cards, and no sub-populations are explicitly recognized as minorities, like other Chinese-majority societies, such as the 55 non-Han groups in the PRC mainland or the “original inhabitants” (yuan zhu min ) in the Republic of China (ROC). Even in contrast to Singapore, which is comparable in population size and governance, Hong Kong does not have governmentmandated ethnic integration policies in force, such as for housing and education.20 Therefore, “Chinese” is in some ways less ambiguous because it is not strictly associated with being a member of the Han majority ethnic group, but also more vague because persons who would be obviously still part of the polyethnic Chinese nation in mainland China could either be considered as foreigners or be entirely invisible minorities in Hong Kong.21 Conceptions of Chinese and Hong Kong identities, and variances between them, are furthermore complicated by the ambiguous delineation of “majority” and “minority” populations in Hong Kong. In a 2001 survey carried out by Wong Ka-ying and Wan Po-san, indicators of social difference, including those regarding race and ethnicity, ran a broad gamut.22 When asked which groups had “lifestyles or ideologies different from the average Hong Kong citizen,” the most common answers included “Indian-Pakistani” and “Filipino,” but also “Chaozhou,” “Hakka,” “New Territories indigenous populations and walled city residents,” and “new immigrants from mainland China.” Within this range, it is observable that “difference” could be construed in terms of national origin, regional origin, and even groups with substantial historical presence in Hong Kong such as the Hakka. More thought provoking is that 59.4 percent of respondents could not identify anyone specifically who would fit the question criteria. The same categories appeared as the leading answers for another inquiry about what populations had a below-average living standard, but the isolated responses were diverse as well, such as “mainland Chinese from remote places,” “Guangxi (province) people,” “Middle Eastern people,” and “Guangdong fourtowns people (Guangdong si yi ren ).”23 Moreover, as with the previous topic, 60 percent of respondents could not answer this question. A third example of ambiguity about national and local identity from this survey is the question about which people have less political influence than the “average Hong Kong person”: 78.6 percent of respondents did not give any answer, and unlike the other two questions, in which at least eight groups stood out as major answers, only four emerged for this question, “Filipino,” “Hakka,” “Indian-Pakistani people,” and “new immigrants from mainland China.”24 Perceptions of discrimination also reflect equivocal attitudes about race and equality. In another 2001 general survey, over 90 percent of local respondents
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accepted the presence of foreign female domestic helpers in Hong Kong, but over 70 percent of such domestic helpers answered that they had encountered racial and ethnic prejudice. These comprehensive results, published in the Ta Kung Pao (Da Gong Bao ) newspaper, were interpreted as matters of cultural and religious differences rather than overt intentions of discrimination against non-Chinese persons.25 Half of the interviewed domestic helpers explained that a newcomer needed about two years of living in Hong Kong to acclimate and to minimize misunderstandings. The report did warn that although many Hong Kong households treat domestic helpers with respect and gratitude, about 10 percent of the respondents admitted to practicing violence against their own domestic helper employees. Although citizenship and ethnicity have not been high-profile political and social topics, compared to other communal traits such as gender or occupation, non-governmental organizations have sustained a continual dialogue about such identity markers in the Hong Kong context. Some organizations, such as Oxfam, have focused on raising awareness of racial and ethnic diversity by sponsoring cultural celebrations and by publishing testimonials of non-native residents about their personal experiences of integrating into Hong Kong society.26 Among more action-oriented groups is Hong Kong Unison (Rongle hui ), founded in 2001 as a non-governmental organization that provides legal and social services for ethnic minority populations, most of whom are non-Chinese nationals.27
Being “Chinese” and Hong Kong citizenship A particular point of legal contention that Unison and other non-governmental bodies have pursued since 1997 is which residents of Hong Kong who are not ethnic Chinese may become Hong Kong citizens. The term “Hong Kong citizen” is an amalgamation of the official identity ascribed to all PRC nationals, including those in the mainland, Hong Kong, and Macau, and the special status of persons who are recognized as “native” to Hong Kong. Being a Hong Kong citizen entitles an individual to travel with a HKSAR-issued passport and carries the indefinite privilege of right of abode in Hong Kong, since one must be a permanent resident in order to be a citizen. Many mainland Chinese and, to a lesser degree, Macau Chinese, seek Hong Kong citizenship so that they may live, work, and invest in Hong Kong without the constraints imposed on non-Hong Kong citizens and because they can travel more freely without obtaining visas.28 As with general impressions of Hong Kong’s political and social landscape as a principally “Chinese place,” conditions for Hong Kong citizenship are straightforward as presented in official decrees. An individual must satisfy the criteria for being a Hong Kong permanent resident which are stated in a chapter of the Basic Law on the “fundamental rights and duties of the residents” (jumin de jiben quanli he yiwu ). Permanent residents and, for the most part, non-permanent residents, enjoy rights such as freedoms of movement and marriage, as well as equality before the law.29 Basic delineation of
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eligibility criteria for the Hong Kong passport is also in the Basic Law but the most essential trait, that a passport holder be a Chinese national with a Hong Kong permanent resident identity card, has been subject to interpretation because of inherent implications about Chinese heritage.30 Being Chinese and therefore fit to be a Hong Kong citizen is clear-cut for the majority of persons in Hong Kong who want to claim Chinese (Hong Kong) nationality. A child born in Hong Kong gains the right through affidavit of their heritage if one or both parents are already Hong Kong citizens. Adults who are ethnic Chinese may apply for Hong Kong citizenship if they have satisfied the requirement of living in Hong Kong for seven years continuously in good legal standing and are prepared to renounce all other citizenship rights, including the household registration affiliation (hukou ) which is the basis of many economic and social privileges in mainland China. Proof of Chinese ethnicity, often described as “blood lineage” (xuetong ), may take the forms of state-issued paperwork from Mainland China or the ROC, or non-official documents such as genealogies (jiapu ) that originate in historical Mainland China. Persons who are not ethnic Chinese, however, face a different set of hurdles to obtain Hong Kong citizenship. Some notable individuals, such as Allen Zeman and Paul Zimmerman, have petitioned smoothly and successfully to become citizens. Allan Zeman renounced his Canadian citizenship in 2008 to do so, and like all other Hong Kong citizens, must travel to mainland China with a “home return permit” (huixiang zheng ) although he does not have an actual ancestral hometown or province to which the permit is supposed to facilitate returns. His decades-long residence in Hong Kong, as well as prominent position as businessman and investor in the city, are factors that seem to justify his personal and legal decision to change citizenships.31 Similarly, Paul Zimmerman, born in the Netherlands, gave up his original citizenship to run for public office in Hong Kong. He currently represents the Southern District of Hong Kong Island as a district councillor. Like Allan Zeman, Zimmerman’s petition to become a Hong Kong citizen in 2012 was justified by his long-term residence in the region during which he obtained a Master’s degree from the University of Hong Kong and established a company.32 Among less prominent individuals, the results of citizenship applications have hinged upon various factors, among which lacking a substantial tie to China (in the form of blood relations) has been grounds for rejection. Many cases that have been highly publicized in the Hong Kong local media suggest that certain ethnic groups are more disadvantaged than others in seeking citizenship.33 Other factors being comparable, naturalization applications from citizens of North American and Western European countries are more likely to be accepted than those from Asian and African states. Even persons who have lived in Hong Kong for substantial periods of their lives, especially those born in the region, and without conventional grounds for rejection such as criminal records are rejected without transparent explanation by the Immigration Department. The plight of Gurinder Kaur, wife of Gill Mohindepaul Singh (Kiu Bobo/Qiao Baobao ), a well-known entertainer and celebrity of Indian descent, is one
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such example that drew attention to implications that race and ethnicity are unofficial filters of discrimination in the naturalization process. Ms. Kaur, who was born in India, lived in Hong Kong for 22 years before applying for Hong Kong citizenship in 2011. Her application was denied for unspecified reasons. Her husband, who was born in Hong Kong and became a British citizen before 1997, criticized the HKSAR government for discriminating against his wife on the basis of her national origin. He left the Hong Kong entertainment industry in 2012 to join his family in Scotland but returned in the following year.34 These cases of persons who are exceptional because of their prominence and visibility in Hong Kong society do not connote absolute benchmarks of Chinese nationality, and by extension, Chinese nationalism, in Hong Kong. South Asians have obtained Hong Kong citizenship, including a woman born in Hong Kong to Pakistani parents who became the pioneer example of naturalization for persons of non-Chinese heritage in 2002, and Maggie Cheung, born to a Pakistani mother, who was adopted and raised by Hong Kong Chinese parents.35 The Immigration Department keeps most records of naturalization applications confidential but in some court deliberations, such as for Azan Aziz Marwah, who became a naturalized Hong Kong citizen in 2003, traces of subjectivity in interpreting citizenship law when dealing with applicants whose parents are not Chinese nationals are apparent.36 While exercising such flexibility may be considered to be the customary prerogative of any state in determining its citizenry, scholarly and public commentaries have debated to what degree “Chinese nationalism,” which implies certain racial and ethnic characteristics, justifies the denial of Hong Kong citizenship who would not enhance the PRC’s economic and social prestige.37
Non-Chinese nationals as judiciary officials Bearing less significance to private individuals but with profound consequences for popular understanding of Chinese nationalism in Hong Kong is the presence of judicial officials who are not PRC/Hong Kong citizens. These persons, who were appointed during British colonial rule, were permitted to continue serving after 1997 until retirement, resignation, or death under the terms of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration.38 The last non-Chinese national Chief Justice, Denys Roberts, served in Hong Kong for 26 years. He was appointed as chief justice in 1979, and died in 2013 after his retirement and return to Great Britain.39 Most other judges who are not Chinese nationals are also now retired but some have retained their roles, fuelling debates about who is fit to interpret and uphold Hong Kong law. The phenomenon of foreign nationals serving as legal authorities is certainly unusual when Hong Kong is compared with other states. The basis for judges to maintain non-Chinese nationality is also divergent from the fundamental requirement that executive and legislative officials be Hong Kong citizens. At the center of many criticisms of non-Chinese judiciary officials, and responding support for these persons, is whether they possess sufficient knowledge and
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“understanding” (renshi ) of Hong Kong law. Also wrapped up in the question of competence is whether non-Chinese judges can be faithful defenders of Chinese law while lacking the natural incentives of promoting Chinese nationalism and patriotism towards the PRC. Evaluations of whether non-Chinese nationals should be permitted to serve in the Hong Kong judiciary run a wide gamut. Some commentators have focused on “loving the country” (ai guo ), or patriotism, as a nonnegotiable trait for not only judges but all officials in Hong Kong, from the chief executive at the top of the governmental hierarchy downwards.40 Others have expressed more explicit skepticism about the legitimacy of non-Chinese national judges’ tenures, and that these individuals’ powers suggest that Hong Kong is overstepping its bounds as a special administrative region, possibly into the realm of unsanctioned independence.41 Defenders of the status quo, including the Hong Kong Bar Association, have conversely affirmed that nationality is neither an advantage nor impediment to developing adequate comprehension of the Basic Law and Hong Kong legal procedures. When Elsie Leung (Leung Oi-sie/Liang Aishi ), the first HKSAR Secretary of Justice (1997–2005) and current chairman of the Law Reform Commission, criticized non-Chinese national judges for not understanding (Chinese) national sovereignty, media commentators censured her for overstating a trivial situation and erroneously conflating nationalism with legal aptitude.42 Ongoing debates in academic and public circles about this issue bring out larger questions of whether Hong Kong has been genuinely incorporated into the PRC via the practice of law and whether the remaining non-Chinese nationals in the Hong Kong judiciary can continue to serve or must resign or retire to clear the proverbial slate. As might be expected, mainland legal scholars such as Cheng Jie , associate professor of law at Tsinghua University, have advocated the removal of these individuals,43 whereas liberal members of the legal profession in Hong Kong, such as Audrey Eu (Eu Yuet-mee/Yu Ruowei ) argue that the PRC central government should not interfere in how Hong Kong legal practices are carried out, including the appraisal of judges’ qualifications.44 Nationalism thinly veiled in the rhetoric of legal ability has yet to become widely accepted within the HKSAR government and the Hong Kong legal arena in particular as an imperative to dismiss non-Chinese national judges. The proof of these individuals’ expertise has thus far lain in their judgments, and many retired non-Chinese judges are still respected for their dedication to the rule of law in Hong Kong. One of the best-known former judiciary officials, Kemal Bokhary (Bauu Zigam/Bao Zhijin ), who served as a Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal until he reached the mandatory retirement age of 65 in 2012, has addressed the quandary of nationalism and legal service obliquely in two collections of personal meditations about law, The Law is a Crocodile (2013) and Crocodile at Law (2014), both published by a press in Hong Kong specializing in legal texts.45 In these books, which are illustrated with cartoons, Bokhary reveals his pro-democratic attitudes, praising fellow barristers such as Martin Lee (Lee Chu Ming/Li Zhuming ) for sustaining
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the Hong Kong Bar’s “devotion to democracy and the rule of law,”46 and more explicitly, “We await full democracy as we have been awaiting it for a long time—hopefully not in vain.”47 Although the books are intended for a general audience, Bokhary cites legal cases such as Koo Sze Yiu v. Chief Executive of the HKSAR (2006) 9 HKCFAR 441 in his one-page descriptions of subjects,48 and Suen Toi Lee v. Yau Yee Ping (2001) 4 HKCFAR 474, citing paragraphs 28–34.49 He also demonstrates that he is a normal Hong Kong person, enjoying the privilege of using public transportation granted to individuals over the age of 65 years for the reduced rate of 2 Hong Kong dollars per ride.50 Bokhary’s longevity as a legal professional in Hong Kong may dispel criticisms that he, as a non-Chinese national, should not have presided over courts, but his writings suggest that he is aware that he must still prove he belongs to and in Hong Kong.
Conclusion Whether official and popular perspectives that people who are not Chinese by nationality are Hong Kong persons or not depends in part on the political and social status of these persons, including how they are defined. The Hong Kong Yearbook (Xianggang nianbao ), published annually since 1997, reveals some stable categories for classifying the region’s sub-population, and some room for change.51 For nationality, the Yearbook has consistently measured the numbers of Australian, British, Canadian, Filipino, Indonesian, Japanese Malaysian, Nepali, Pakistani, Thai, and US citizens. Religion also remains a critical factor. The government keeps track of the number of Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and Sikh populations. In the most recent population census, conducted in 2011, ethnic minorities as a whole made up 6.4 percent of the total population.52 The vast majority, 98.7 percent, were recorded as Usual Residents (changzhu jumin ), and the remainder as Mobile Residents (liudong jumin ). The total number, 451,183 persons, reflects a 31.2 percent increase since the last major census in 2001, when 343,950 individuals were classified as ethnic minorities. The census tracked demographic characteristics such as marital status, gender, birthplace, linguistic ability, and length of residence in Hong Kong.53 Ethnic minority participation in education and the labour force, as well as living arrangements and household composition, were also recorded in absolute and comparative terms with the ethnic minority. As international economic conditions change and the number of nonChinese residents in Hong Kong is projected to increase, discrimination based on nationality may take on different connotations. Although the colonial legacy based on a hierarchy that placed Caucasians over Asians continues to influence the social dynamics of Hong Kong, the notion of Caucasians being a negligible minority or mainly temporary sojourners may change. In an episode of the television news show The Pearl Report entitled “Euro Exodus,” producer Sebastian Chau explored the growing number of British and European residents in Hong Kong. The French community alone has grown to 15,000 members, with a projected 1,000 persons to join every year in the future. Some of the British and
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Europeans are coming in positions of economic and social advantage, such as expatriate executives, political representatives, and entrepreneurs, but many are now coming to Hong Kong in order to seek employment in the service sector or start small businesses. The Pearl Report, a local TV news magazine, pointed out that if they become permanent residents, these persons have some political influence as participants in local elections.54 However, it remains to be seen whether they will be assimilated into Hong Kong society as genuine “Hong Kong people,” especially if they do not gain the language skills to interact with the majority population or familiarity with customs widely acknowledged as being “local ways.” The government and courts may also face new challenges if some of these persons want to change their nationalities and become Hong Kong citizens. The status of long-term residents in Hong Kong who are not entitled to legal and political benefits may also prove to test the exceptions built into current laws. On March 25, 2013, the Court of Final Appeal affirmed the HKSAR government’s position in the matter of two Filipino domestic helpers who lobbied for permanent residency.55 The Court’s decision rested on the premise that domestic helpers belong to the category of foreign workers that consent to work in Hong Kong without the privilege of obtaining permanent residency, that confers the rights of abode and voting in local elections, after seven years of legal employment.56 As such, they had explicitly waived their eligibility to seek that right and could not demand it retroactively. The Court’s decision was met with criticism that domestic helpers could only be employed under such conditions because of their national origin and racial-ethnic traits, since other types of foreign workers, such as the predominantly Caucasian professionals from Europe and North America, may apply for permanent residency. Some proponents for allowing domestic helpers to become permanent residents have called for the abolition of both the existing caveat that bars them from attaining that status and reconsidering similar limitations on other types of foreign workers based on the principles codified in the RDO.57 Tropes of Hong Kong as an “international city,” “junction between East and West,” and “Asia’s world city” generate attractive and lucrative images that the region’s government, tourism industry, and commercial enterprises of all sizes have been enthusiastic to engender and to promote.58 Co-existence of dissimilar populations does not, however, guarantee that pluralism is a political, economic, or social advantage. As British colonial administrators learned throughout the process of occupying the island and gaining control over the Kowloon peninsula, political and legal supremacy had limited currency for those entitled to them, and that as physically visible as colonists were, they had to accommodate the greater society in which they lived. Throughout the colonial history of Hong Kong, as the ratio of British to non-British tipped increasingly in favour of the latter, such concessions were not simply made to meet pragmatic ends but became part of the theoretical ethos that co-governance was the only viable means of sustaining the British presence. As the racial and political identities of the majority population converged in the 1997 Retrocession, the new HKSAR
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government has worked to extinguish the remnants of institutionalized discrimination within the colonial system while preserving the ostensibly beneficial aspects of the semi-democratic legacy developed in the last two decades as a British dependent territory. It has furthermore dealt with the herculean endeavor of introducing the PRC’s sanctioned version of Chinese nationalism in localized terms that is palatable to many Hong Kong residents but objectionable to a non-negligible number. The next step in the challenge of legislating nationalism, so that all Hong Kong residents have equitable political, economic, and social opportunities irrespective of nationality, will require more collective soul-searching that the HKSAR government alone cannot perform. All populations, whether the numerical majority or minorities, will have to determine whether equality pertains to them rather than continuing to operate on long-standing assumptions of hierarchy, priority, and marginalization based on nationality. Creating a social and cultural environment in which nationality is a manageable factor demands compromise and recognition of limitations. If Hong Kong is to become more like other major Chinese cities of comparable size and socioeconomic development, then non-Chinese nationals will have to develop ways proactively in order to participate in work, education, and other public arenas. Otherwise, if Hong Kong wants to preserve its reputation as a hybrid space that acculturates persons of diverse racial and national origins, a realistically “socially absorbent” community in practice, then the majority must continue to accommodate and foster the productive existence of groups with differing national traits. Future public consultations and legislative debates may at least determine which road will be the one that Hong Kong travels upon and to some degree affect conceptions of nationalism and nationality in the rest of China as the demographic composition of the country changes.
Notes 1 Recent works on ethnicity in Hong Kong with select references to nationalism include O’Connor, Islam in Hong Kong: Muslims and Everyday Life in China’s World City; Erni and Yuk-ming Leung, Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong; Ting and Lo, Fei Wo zulei: Zhanqian Xianggang de waiji zuqun (Not of my kind: foreign groups in pre-World War II Hong Kong). 2 Mathews, Ghetto at the Center of the World. 3 This paper uses pinyin for the Romanization of Chinese terms simply to aid reading comprehension for readers throughout the world who are interested in China Studies. The author acknowledges that Cantonese is the principal Chinese language of Hong Kong and the use of pinyin instead of jyutping is not to express any views about Hong Kong’s political or legal status. The author also expressly disavows any personal bias in favor of Mandarin Chinese (putonghua 通話). 4 Thanks are due to Nora Hui-Jung Kim for the information that India’s airports also do not follow customary immigration processing arrangements, distinguishing between “officials” and “non-officials” rather than by citizenship. 5 The Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) English-language website erroneously advises “Hong Kong citizens” rather than “Hong Kong residents” to prepare their Hong Kong Identity Cards for inspection. See Hong Kong International Airport, “Arrivals Procedures.”
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6 LegCo (Legislative Council of Hong Kong), Race Discrimination Ordinance, Cap. 602. 7 Montenero, Beyond the Notion of Race. 8 The author recognizes that “race” and “ethnicity” are not synonymous, as proven by countless theoretical analyses and empirical cases, but conforming to the HKSAR government’s preference for “race” rather than “ethnicity,” the remainder of the chapter will utilize “race” as a blanket term for both concepts, with the caveat that both governmental and social bodies acknowledge the differences between them. 9 Wong Ka-ying, Xianggangren de zuqun rentong yu minzu rentong. 10 Lin, “Transnationalism and the Geography of (sub)Ethnicity in Hong Kong.” 11 Chen, “Wo suo renwei de Xianggang minzu wenti.” 12 Ethnic minorities in the PRC share the trait of not being ethnic Han (fei Hanzu 族). Persons claiming Han ethnicity comprise over 92 percent of the PRC’s total population. 13 Lee, Being Eurasian. 14 Constable, “At Home but Not at Home”; Kwok, “Multiple Modernities, Cultural Migration and Interaction.” 15 The Kadoories are a Jewish family from Baghdad, and the Harilelas are from Sindh, a province of present-day Pakistan. Both families are known for their commercial success and large-scale social contributions. See Haller, “Place and Ethnicity in Two Merchant Diasporas” and Plüss, “Globalizing Ethnicity with Multi-local Identifications.” 16 Confirmation by lived experience informs many scholars of Hong Kong ethnicity who are based in Hong Kong. Therefore the observation that the majority of Hong Kong’s population is both self-identified and externally identified as Chinese has yet to be confirmed through formal affirmations in publications but nevertheless passes muster by common sense and quantitative appraisal. 17 Chan, “The Legacy of the British Administration”; Fung, “Legacy to Loathe.” 18 The Basic Law, which has been the core legal canon of Hong Kong since its approval on 4 April 1990 by the PRC Seventh National People’s Congress, ensures the rights of persons in the HKSAR, including freedoms of assembly, religion, and intellectual activity. However, it does not regulate matters of status beyond citizenship and residency, such as determined by characteristics like gender, race, or religion. 19 Lo, “The Mainlandization and Recolonization of Hong Kong.” 20 Chen Qiaoyan, “Xinjiapo renmin xingdong dang de zhongzu ronghe zhengce ji qishi.” Macau, the PRC’s other special administrative region, also does not have special institutions or policies based on ethnicity or race. 21 Ethnic groups with physiological traits that are significantly different from those conventionally attributed to ethnic Han people, such as Uighurs and Russians, may be mistaken for being non-Chinese even though they hold PRC identification cards and passports, and are therefore legally Chinese nationals. 22 Wong and Wan, “Xianggang de zuqun renting,” p. 447. 23 Wong and Wan, “Xianggang de zuqun rentong zhuangkuang,” p. 448. The “four towns” customarily refer to Xinhui, Taishan, Kaiping, and Enping, now all countylevel cities within Jiangmen prefecture of Guangdong province. 24 Wong and Wan, “Xianggang de zuqun rentong zhuangkuang,” p. 449. 25 Luk, “Gang ren bing bu qishi waiji nüyong.” 26 Oxfam Hong Kong, “Ren se, bu ru renshi.” 27 Hong Kong Unison, “Hong Kong Unison.” 28 According to the Arton passport index, Hong Kong passport holders may enter and remain in 136 countries for varying periods of time without visas, compared to 74 with a Mainland China passport and 106 with a Macau passport. See Arton Capital, “Passport Index.” 29 See Consultative Committee for the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, The Basic Law of the Hong Kong
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39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56
57 58
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Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China and Related Documents, 7–10 in Chinese/146–150 in English. See Basic Law, part XIV of Annex 1, 129–130 in Chinese/272–273 in English. China Briefing, “Allan Zeman Gives up Canadian Nationality for Chinese”; Alan Gallindoss, “Allan Zeman’s Heart is in Hong Kong.” Paul Zimmerman became a full-time resident of Hong Kong in 1984. See “About Paul Zimmerman.” See Tsao, “The SAR Passport Row”; Jiang, “More Hong Kong Expats Seeking Chinese Citizenship, Minorities Left Out in the Cold.” See “Gill Mohinderpaul Singh.” About Maggie Cheung, see “Clear, Consistent Policy on Naturalisation Needed.” See “Azan Aziz Marwah vs. Director of Immigration and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Passports Appeal Board”; HKSAR Secretary for Security, Mr. Lai Tung-kwok, “LCQ2: Applications for Naturalisation as Chinese Nationals.” Law and Lee, “The Myth of Multiculturalism in ‘Asia’s World City’.” The relevant clause is “Chinese and foreign nationals previously working in the public and police services in the government departments of Hong Kong may remain in employment.” See “Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong.” See “Sir Denys Roberts.” See Cha and Zhao, “Cong zhengzhe aiguo shi jiben zhengzhi lunli.” See Pingjing zhi xin, “Xianggang sifa duli dao faguan dou keyi bushi Zhongguoren le.” See “Liang Aishi pi Yang faguan bushu jiben fa”; Ai, “Waiji faguan ‘aiguo lun’ de yihuo.” See Cheng, “The Story of a New Policy.” See “Audrey Eu.” Bokhary is a Hong Kong permanent resident and British citizen. Note that Bokhary’s Chinese name is generally not Romanized, so I have included the standard Jyutping and Pinyin Romanized versions for reference only. Bokhary, Crocodile at Law, p. 2. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 5, on “Suspension” of a law or executive action based on unconstitutionality. Ibid., p. 99, on “Justice Administered by Village Elders.” Ibid., p. 12. See Hong Kong Yearbook (Xianggang nianbao). Census and Statistics Department, Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, “2011 Population Census Thematic Report: Ethnic Minorities (ChineseEnglish bilingual edition),” p. 7. 2011 Population Census Thematic Report, pp. 31–46. See Chau, “Euro Exodus.” See Chiu, “Hong Kong’s Top Court Rejects Domestic Helpers’ Appeal for Permanent Residency.” Although Article 24 of the Hong Kong Basic Law that delineates the criteria for permanent residency in the HKSAR does not explicitly exclude persons of certain racial and ethnic groups, foreign domestic helpers are deemed ineligible because they are not considered to be “ordinary residents” of the region. See Mok, “Foreign Domestic Helpers in Hong Kong”; Lai, “The Present of Forgetting.” “Asia’s world city” in particular is a theme of the Hong Kong government’s campaigns to attract business and leisure travellers to Hong Kong. See “Brand Hong Kong.”
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References “About Paul Zimmerman,” accessed September 9, 2014. www.paulzimmerman.hk/ about-contact.html. Ai Li. 2014. “Waiji faguan ‘aiguo lun’ de yihuo [Doubts about the patriotism argument regarding foreign judges],” Hong Kong Economic Journal, July 29, 2014, A13. Arton Capital. “Passport Index.” Accessed April, 20, 2015. www.passportindex.org/ index.php. “Audrey Eu,” accessed October 19, 2014, www.audreyeu.hk/category/%E6%96%87%E7 %AB%A0%E8%AC%9B%E8%BE%AD/page/59. “Azan Aziz Marwah vs. Director of Immigration and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Passports Appeal Board.” HCAL 38/2008. December 9, 2008. Bokhary, Kemal. 2014. Crocodile at Law. Hong Kong: Sweet & Maxwell. Bokhary, Kemal. 2013. The Law is a Crocodile. Hong Kong: Sweet & Maxwell. Brand Hong Kong. “Brand Hong Kong.” Accessed December 18, 2012. www.brandhk. gov.hk/en/#. Census and Statistics Department, Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. 2012. 2011 Population Census Thematic Report: Ethnic Minorities (ChineseEnglish bilingual edition). Hong Kong: Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government. Cha, Wenye and Zhao, Bo. 2014. “Cong zhengzhe aiguo shi jiben zhengzhi lunli [Officials’ patriotism is a basic tenet of governance],” Zhejiang ribao, August 28, 2014, 6. Chan, Ming K. 1997. “The Legacy of the British Administration of Hong Kong: A View from Hong Kong,” The China Quarterly 151: 553–592. Chau, Sebastian. 2012. “Euro Exodus,” The Pearl Report. Hong Kong: Television Broadcasts, January 16. Chen Jiarong. 1996. “Wo suo renwei de Xianggang minzu wenti [My understanding of the Hong Kong ethnic question],” Minzu tuanjie 28(8): 32–33. Chen Qiaoyan. 2009. “Xinjiapo renmin xingdong dang de zhongzu ronghe zhengce ji qishi [The ethnic integration policy and inspiration of the Singaporean People’s Action Party],” Journal of Chongqing Institute of Socialism 9(6): 58–60. Cheng Jie. 2009. “The Story of a New Policy,” Hong Kong Journal 15 (Fall 2009). Accessed December 5, 2014, http://web.archive.org/web/20120107011853/www. hkjournal.org/archive/2009_fall/1.htm. China Briefing. 2008. “Allan Zeman Gives up Canadian Nationality for Chinese.” November 3, 2008. Accessed April 30, 2014. www.china-briefing.com/news/2008/11/03/ allan-zeman-gives-up-canadian-nationality-for-chinese.html. Chiu, Austin. “Hong Kong’s Top Court Rejects Domestic Helpers’ Appeal for Permanent Residency,” South China Morning Post, March 25, 2013. Accessed March 26, 2013. www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1199312/hong-kongs-top-court-rejectsdomestic-helpers-appeal-permanent. “Clear, Consistent Policy on Naturalisation Needed.” South China Morning Post, November 25, 2012. Accessed January 8, 2015. www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/ article/1090039/clear-consistent-policy-naturalisation-needed. Constable, Nicole. 1999. “At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns,” Cultural Anthropology 14(2): 203–228. Consultative Committee for the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. 2007. The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China and Related Documents. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing.
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Erni, John Nguyet and Leung, Lisa Yuk-ming. 2014. Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Fung, Victor Keung. 2013. “Legacy to Loathe,” South China Morning Post, June 4. Gallindoss, Alan. 2013. “Allan Zeman’s Heart is in Hong Kong,” Jewish Business News, July 7. Accessed May 17, 2014. http://jewishbusinessnews.com/2013/ 07/07/allan-zemansheart-is-in-hong-kong. “Gill Mohinderpaul Singh.” Time Out, November 20, 2012. Accessed January 16, 2014. www.timeout.com.hk/big-smog/features/54549/gill-mohinderpaul-singh.html. Haller, Dieter. 2003. “Place and Ethnicity in Two Merchant Diasporas: A Comparison of Sindhis and Jews in Gibraltar,” Global Networks 3(1): 75–96. HKSAR (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government). 1997–2012. Hong Kong Yearbook (Xianggang nianbao). Accessed September 27, 2013. www.yearbook. gov.hk. HKSAR Secretary for Security, Mr. Lai Tung-kwok. 2014. “LCQ2: Applications for Naturalisation as Chinese Nationals.” December 12, 2012. Accessed May 30, 2014. www. info.gov.hk/gia/general/201212/12/P201212120342.htm. Hong Kong International Airport. “Arrivals Procedures.” Accessed December 31, 2014. www.hongkongairport.com/eng/passenger/arrival/t1/arrivals_procedures.html. Hong Kong Unison. “Hong Kong Unison.” Accessed September 6, 2013. www.unison. org/hk. Jiang, Sijia. 2014. “More Hong Kong Expats Seeking Chinese Citizenship, Minorities Left Out in the Cold,” South China Morning Post, May 30, 2014. Accessed June 8, 2014. www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1521247/more-expats-seek-chinese-citizenshipminorities-left-out-cold?page=all. “Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong.” 1984. Accessed December 20, 2014. www.legislation.gov.hk/ blis_ind.nsf/CurEngOrd/034B10AF5D3058DB482575EE000EDB9F?OpenDocument. Kwok, Siu-tong. 2006. “Multiple Modernities, Cultural Migration and Interaction: The Cross-cultural Experience of Hong Kong Indians,” In Wang Rongzu (ed.), Minzu rentong yu wenhua jiaorong [Ethnic identity and cultural fusion]. Jiayi xian Minxiong xiang: Zhongzheng daxue Taiwan renwen yanjiu zhongxin. Lai, Ming-yan. 2011. “The Present of Forgetting: Diasporic Identity and Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong,” Social Identities 17(4), pp. 565–585. Law, Kam-Yee and Lee, Kim-Ming. 2012. “The Myth of Multiculturalism in ‘Asia’s World City’: Incomprehensive Policies for Ethnic Minorities in Hong Kong,” Journal of Asian Public Policy 5(1): 117–134. Lee, Vicky. 2004. Being Eurasian: Memories across Racial Divides. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press. LegCo (Legislative Council of Hong Kong). 2008. Race Discrimination Ordinance. Cap. 602. Hong Kong: Government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. “Liang Aishi pi Yang faguan bushu jiben fa [Elsie Leung criticizes Western judges for not being familiar with the Basic Law].” 2012. Oriental Daily, November 10, 2012, A31. Lin, G. C. S. 2002. “Transnationalism and the Geography of (Sub)Ethnicity in Hong Kong,” Urban Geography 23(1): 57–84. Lo, Sonny. 2007. “The Mainlandization and Recolonization of Hong Kong: A Triumph of Convergence over Divergence with Mainland China,” in Joseph Y. S. Cheng (ed.), The Hong Kong Administrative Region in its First Decade. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press.
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Luk, Yau. 2001. “Gang ren bing bu qishi waiji nüyong [Hong Kong people do not discriminate against foreign female workers],” Ta Kung Pao (Da Gong Bao), January 30, 2001. Mathews, Gordon. 2011. Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mok, Ronald. 2008. “Foreign Domestic Helpers in Hong Kong: Towards Equality of Rights,” Queensland Law Student Review 1(2): 102–116. Montenero, J. M. 2006. Beyond the Notion of Race: An In-depth Analysis on the Motivational Causes and Effects of Racial Behaviourism. Victoria, British Columbia: Trafford Publishing. O’Connor, Paul. 2012. Islam in Hong Kong: Muslims and Everyday Life in China’s World City. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Oxfam Hong Kong. 2005. “Ren se, bu ru renshi [Recognizing colour is less significant than getting to know people],” Mo Kung 3(4): 8–11. Pingjing zhi xin. 2014 “Xianggang sifa duli dao faguan dou keyi bushi Zhongguoren le [The Hong Kong judiciary is so independent that judiciary officials can even be nonChinese].” July 26, 2014. Accessed February 5, 2015. http://m.tiexue.net/touch/ thread_8220749_1.html. Plüss, Caroline. 2005. “Globalizing Ethnicity with Multi-local Identifications: The Parsee, Indian Muslim and Sephardic Trade Diasporas in Hong Kong,” in Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Gelina Harlaftis, and Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou (eds.), Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Four Centuries of History. London: Berg Publishers. “Sir Denys Roberts.” 2013. Telegraph, June 2, 2013. Accessed November 15, 2014. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/law-obituaries/10094594/Sir-Denys-Roberts. html. Ting, Joseph Sun Pao and Lo, Shuk Ying. 2014. Fei Wo zulei: Zhanqian Xianggang de waiji zuqun [Not of my kind: foreign groups in pre-World War II Hong Kong]. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing. Tsao, Chip. 2013. “The SAR Passport Row,” HK Magazine, January 10, 2013. Accessed November 26, 2014. http://hk-magazine.com/city-living/column/sar-passport-row. Wong, Ka-ying. 1996. Xianggangren de zuqun rentong yu minzu rentong [Racial and ethnic identities of Hong Kongers]. Shatin, Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of AsiaPacific Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Wong, Ka-ying and Wan, Po-san. 2001. “Xianggang de zuqun rentong zhuangkuang: yige tantaoxing de yanjiu [The condition of Hong Kong group identity: exploratory research],” in Lau Siu-kai (ed.), Shehui zhuanxing yu wenhua bianmao: Huaren shehui de bijiao [Social Transformation and Cultural Change in Chinese Societies]. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Part IV
Globalization, neoliberalism, and nationalism
7
Developmental multiculturalism and articulation of Korean nationalism in the age of diversity Nora Hui-Jung Kim
Belief in ethnic homogeneity is one of the key features that characterize South Korea (hereafter Korea). Many Koreans believe in Tan’gun, mythic founder of their line, and that their cultural, ethnic, and linguistic “purity” and “distinctiveness” date from time immemorial. Ethnic nationalism was first articulated by Korean intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an effort to build a modern nation that could resist the colonial power of Japan and Western countries.1 Since then, ethnic nationalism has been a central feature of Korean nation-building, from the anti-colonial independence movement, the Korean War and anti-communist sentiment, intensive industrialization drive, pro-democracy/pro-labor movement (often referred to as the Minjung movement),2 and to the cheering crowd that covered Seoul city hall square during the 2002 World Cup soccer matches.3 Ethnic nationalism, belief in ethnic homogeneity in particular, still remains widespread in Korea. In August 2003, for example, Lee Yu-chin, a Korean actress who has been popular in part thanks to her Western-style appearance (tall and long-limbed, with big, round-shaped eyes, a sharp nose bridge, and pale skin tone), held a press conference to confess that she was not a “pure” Korean, because her father was a white soldier. She cried in shame during the entire press conference. There had been rumors, but she had denied the allegations for fear of being ostracized. Certainly, part of the shame came from having lied, but the fact that her “coming out” received nationwide media attention is indicative of how strong and deep-rooted myths of ethnic homogeneity are in Korea. Given the strong tradition of homogeneity, it surprised many when references to multiculturalism (damunhwa) appeared starting in late 2005. For example, the number of news articles containing the word “multicultural” increased rapidly. While there were only 235 total entries for the ten years from 1990 to 1999, the number increased to 15,317 in 2005, 19,233 in 2006, 27,894 in 2007, and 36,778 in 2008.4 After hitting a peak in 2008, the frequency declined slightly in the following years but the word has become a frequent descriptor of contemporary Korea.5 Major newspapers, whether politically inclined to the left or the right, have published editorials and opinion columns announcing the advent of a multicultural society. Newspaper editors have urged the Korean government and
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the Korean people to change both social structure and mindset to accommodate increasing ethno-cultural diversity. They argue that the transition to a multicultural and multiethnic society is not only inevitable but also can be beneficial if managed well. The sudden increase in the reference to multiculturalism, or what I call the multicultural explosion in Korea, is puzzling given the strong ethnic nationalism in Korea. I suggest addressing this puzzle by revisiting the relationship between nationalism and developmentalism.
The nexus between nationalism and developmentalism Nationalism in Korea often appeared “in the form of developmentalism”6 and “the crucial underpinning of South Korean state nationalism was the celebration of GNP growth.”7 For some scholars, it is Korean nationalism that contributed to Korea’s developmental success. Countering the conventional argument that attributed Korea’s economic success to Confucian ethics, Shin, for example, argues that what transformed the Confucian ethic from a hindrance to promoter of capitalism was its linkage to nationalism. The Park regime was able to create a developmental ethic among Koreans by skillfully fusing the Confucian respect for hierarchy, harmony, and loyalty to authority with the nationalist slogan of “modernization of the fatherland.”8 However, nationalism leading to developmentalism accounts for only one side of the relationship between nationalism and developmentalism. This onesided explanation relies on conceptualizing the Korean nation as a group and nationalism as a collective sentiment based on the group-ness. Rather than treating the Korean nation as an entity, either an object or a subject of development, I treat the nation as a category of practice,9 especially the category of developmental practice. Developmentalism is nationalistic insofar as the ultimate unit of measuring and ranking development is the nation-state. Then, there are the dual facets of the development-nationalism nexus; nationalism promotes development but at the same time nationalism is (re)produced by developmental practices. To see more clearly how nationalism is reproduced through developmental practices, it is important to note that the flip side of developmentalism is feelings of insecurity and of vulnerability. In the case of Korea, the insecurity is rooted in the trauma of being colonized by Japan; failing to develop would result in falling victim to colonialism again. Another source of vulnerability is Korea’s self-understanding as a nation-state in the middle, constantly challenged both by the less-developed Global South and by the more-developed Global North; failing to develop would result in giving away Korea’s current position to rapidly growing economies like China or India. Reflecting and reproducing the sense of insecurity and vulnerability, “development” has been one of the most important imperatives of the Korean state across different administrations.
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For Park Chung Hee (r. 1963–1979), it was Modernization of Fatherland (Jokuk gundaehwa), for Kim Young Sam (r. 1993–1998), it was Globalization or Internationalization of Korea (Segyehwa), for Kim Dae-Jung (r. 1998–2003), it was Better Korea, for Noh Mu-Hyun (r. 2003–2008), it was Becoming the Center of Northeast Asia (Donbuka jungsim gukga), and finally for Lee Myung Bak (r. 2008–2013), it was Upgrading Korea (Gukyeok Jego). Although expressed in different ways by people on both ends of the political spectrum, all are manifestations of the sense of vulnerability as a middle country and a desire to move toward the core of the world stage. As such, what was pursued by various administrations was not merely economic development; rather it was development of the Korean nation or “development” itself. The sense of vulnerability fuels and strengthens Korean nationalism and vice versa. As Nadia Kim aptly notices, Koreans’ nationalistic attitude and national pride are the flip side of “their position not on top but in the (invisible) middle of the racialized, gendered global economic order” and a reflection of “Koreans’ obsession with racial/national ranking.”10 In this sense, Korean nationalism is in part an outcome of institutionalized developmental practices. Understanding this dual relationship between nationalism and developmentalism opens up new areas of inquiry on how changes in developmental practices lead to changes in the way the nation is imagined and articulated. The multicultural explosion in Korea demonstrates that even ethnic or cultural diversity may be promoted in the course of pursuing new sets of developmental practices. In addition, what looks like a puzzle at first glance makes more sense when we consider this dual nature of the nationalism-development nexus. Strong ethnic nationalism and the newly introduced multiculturalism are not antithetical to each other. Rather, they share the core instrumental value of supporting development. The recent multicultural explosion and corresponding changes in nationality and citizenship laws indicate that the most important, and unchanged, criterion of membership in the Korean nation has been whether or not and to what extent one can contribute to Korea’s development. Developmentalismcum-nationalism has proven to have significant mobilizing capability in the past. However, ethnic homogeneity lost its developmental utility in the age of neoliberal global competition and what is needed now is cosmopolitan and multicultural sensitivity.11 In Korea, it is once again developmentalism-cum-nationalism that enabled a relatively smooth transition from unquestioning acceptance of the myths of ethnic homogeneity to accepting multicultural reality in Korea.
Three forms of nationalism-cum-developmentalism: modernization, globalization, and multiculturalism I examine three forms of nationalism-cum-developmentalism in Korean state discourses: kŭndaehwa (modernization) under Park Chung Hee, segyehaw (globalization) under Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung, and damunhwa (multiculturalism) under the Noh Moo Hyun and Lee Myung Bak administrations. All three discourses share the same state-initiated push to induce national
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development and improve Korea’s position in the global hierarchy of nationstates. I retain the Korean terms to indicate the specifically Korean way of modernizing, globalizing, and becoming multicultural. While the three state discourses share a developmental impulse, they vary in the meaning they give to “development.” During the kŭndaehwa period, “development” largely meant economic development, while during the segyehaw era, it meant improving Korea’s national image to match its improved economic status. While the segyehaw project prepared Koreans to work outside of Korea, the damunhwa project aimed to prepare them to live with ethnic diversity on their peninsula. In this sense, one may refer to segeyhwa as outward-looking globalization and to damunhwa as inward-looking globalization. What remains constant among the three state discourses is the sense of vulnerability and crisis; Korea is in a vulnerable position, and more development is the only solution to get through the crisis to a more secure status. This sense of vulnerability is based on a hierarchical understanding of the global order, where “development” assumes sacred value as the only thing keeping Korea from slipping down the ladder. The shifting meaning of development reflects changes in Korea’s position in the system of international migration, from being a country of emigration to a country of immigration, and in the global economic hierarchy, from being an underdeveloped country to a developed country. Changes in the meaning and focus of “development” are accompanied by modifications of previous developmental strategies. Korea adopted (and sometimes was forced to adopt) new sets of developmental strategies as it moved from the bottom to the middle of the global order and as the world economic and political conditions changed. The comparison of the three state discourses of kŭndaehwa (modernization), segyehaw (globalization), and damunhwa (multiculturalism) will reveal how pursuing new developmental strategies lead to a re-articulation of Korean nationalism and national identity. The “ideal” Korean man/woman and the boundaries of Korean national membership have been redefined in the course of pursuing new developmental strategies.
Kŭndaehwa (modernization) under Park Chung Hee Industrialization, economic development, and the Western Other Korea’s famous economic growth started in the 1960s and lasted through the 1980s. Park Chung Hee’s (r. 1961–1978) export-oriented industrialization developmental policies are often credited with such impressive growth.12 At the end of the Korean War in 1953, Korea was a poor, underdeveloped country; the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was just $41.5 billion per year, and per capita GDP was $70 in 1954. Park Chung Hee seized political power in May 1961 and promised economic growth and elimination of absolute poverty, in part as a means to legitimize his coup.13 Park distinguished himself from his predecessors by his promotion of developmentalism and by his pursuit of export-oriented developmental policies. In 1962, Park launched the
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first five-year economic plan, with an emphasis on building infrastructure. The second five-year economic plan, started in 1967, marked the beginning of export-oriented development, with a focus on labor-intensive light industry. By the time Korea reached the beginning of the third five-year plan (1972–1976), its focus had shifted to heavy-chemical industries, and by the end of that period, per capita GDP reached $824, from $104 in 1962. Celebrating this achievement, Park claimed that “In the 1960’s Korea changed from a premodern, underdeveloped society to a modern, productive, constantly growing society.”14 Park Chung Hee envisioned development along the lines of Western developmental economics, which emerged during the 1950s. Park believed that modernization or kŭndaehwa was an inevitable path for Korea to take. Park’s developmental discourse envisioned a world of nation-states that were in fierce competition with one another and were ranked hierarchically. His rhetoric of “modernization” and “catch-up” suggests that the kŭndaehwa discourse accepted Korea’s low status in the hierarchy of nation-states and the West’s position at the top. Western countries, having already successfully modernized, functioned as a reference group, whose superior aspects, Park insisted, “Koreans must accept, assimilate, and digest.”15 The Economic Planning Board, the government branch in charge of the five-year economic plans, was staffed by USeducated economists,16 and implemented Park’s vision of development and modernization into economic development policies. While Park accepted the higher status of the West and the need to emulate the West, he also emphasized the differences between the West and Korea, especially in terms of culture and values, in order to reject liberal democracy and to justify his dictatorship. After seizing power in a military coup in 1961, Park rationalized his actions by arguing that “[t]he Military Revolution is not the destruction of democracy in Korea. Rather it is a way of saving it; it is a surgical operation intended to excise a malignant social, political and economic tumor.”17 Park defended his authoritarian regime as “the inevitable condition for the achievement of rapid industrialization in a ‘less-developed’ country like Korea.”18 One of Park’s ardent supporters gives a similar opinion when he says Western democracy is “the logic and values of decent people whose stomachs are full” and Korean democracy is “the logic and values of hungry people who cannot afford to act decently most of the time.”19 However, as we will see shortly, in the segyehwa (globalization) and damunhwa (multiculturalism) discourses, Western values and norms are accepted and promoted, rather than rejected, in the name of national development and survival. This change in developmental practices, from rejecting (certain) Western values and norms during the kŭndaehwa drive, to actively accepting and conforming to Western norms during segyehwa and damunhwa, is a result of Korea’s changing position in the global order. As Korea repositions itself from the bottom to the middle and aspires to be a top country, conforming to Western norms has become an important component of developmental strategies.
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Ethnic nationalism as a developmental strategy Park Chung Hee’s kŭndaehwa discourse relied on exclusive and discriminatory nationalism and marginalized certain groups such as ethnic Chinese residents (hwagyo) and mixed-raced Koreans (honhyul). Ethnic Chinese have settled in Korea for more than a century and most ethnic Chinese residents are third- or fourth-generation immigrants. Mixed-race Koreans have existed in Korea for at least four decades without being acknowledged as legitimate members of the nation.20 The myth of ethnic homogeneity or ethnic nationalism was invoked to justify discriminatory policies against these two groups. The government’s main policy regarding them was international adoption and emigration. Many Amerasians left Korea after 1982, when the USA passed H.R. 4007, the Amerasian Paternity Recognition Act that allowed immigration of Asian children who were born between 1950 and 1982 and fathered by a US citizen. It was estimated that the number of Amerasians remaining in Korea reached about 30,000 in the 1970s but dropped to around 2,000 in the 1990s. Similarly, beginning in the mid-1960s, many ethnic Chinese left Korea and migrated to other countries.21 Indeed, approximately 20,000 of 40,000 ethnic Chinese in Korea emigrated during this period.22 There are only about 20,000 ethnic Chinese currently living in Korea. But to fully understand the underlying motivations of the discriminatory policies against ethnic Chinese and mixed-race Koreans, the developmental impulse should be taken into consideration. After 35 years of colonization under Japanese imperialism (1910–1945), followed by the three-year-long Korean War (1950–1953), the Korean economy was decimated. In contrast, ethnic Chinese residents in Korea continued to accumulate wealth, mainly through trade. Indeed, ethnic Chinese trading accounted for 82 percent of the total imports to Korea in 1964 and 53 percent in 1948. For the newly independent, resource-poor Korean state, the capital possessed by the ethnic Chinese was a serious threat to sovereignty. Park Chung Hee took control of the economic resources of Chinese residents by implementing repressive and discriminatory policies that specifically targeted foreigners residing in Korea. With regard to mixed-race Koreans, it should be noted that one of the key components of Park’s kŭndaehwa policies was population control. Accepting the developmental economics canon of that period, Park believed population control was one of the first steps towards economic development. His kŭndaehwa included strong antinatalist policies. Further, the government encouraged emigration of Korean workers and international adoption of orphans even if they were “pure” ethnic Koreans. In 1962, the government announced the Emigration Control Act to facilitate labor exports. From 1960 to 1979, more than 52,000 orphans were adopted abroad. Therefore, policies conducive to emigration of ethnic Chinese residents and mixed-race Koreans should be understood as one component of the overall population control policies, which were designed not simply to maintain ethnic homogeneity of the Korean population but also to achieve economic development.
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Segyehwa (globalization) under Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung Globalization as outward-looking development The kŭndaehwa strategy led to significant economic development. As Lie summarized: In considering South Korea from the Korean War to the 1988 Olympics, the crucial transformations are clear enough: from poor to rich, unschooled to overschooled, rural to urban, and farmers to factory and office workers. In the immediate post-Korean War period, most South Koreans were poor. By the 1990s, South Korean per capita GNP was approaching those of poorer OECD countries.23 The segyehwa drive of the Kim Young Sam administration (r. 1993–1998) reflected both a sense of pride and a sense of vulnerability. The sense of pride stemmed from the fact that Korea had achieved impressive economic development; Korea achieved the “miracle on Han river” and successfully hosted the 1988 Olympiad. Driven by the heightened sense of national pride and awareness of the international community, Korea launched a new national image, “that of a vibrant, competent, and efficient modern state.”24 Creating a new Korean national image vis-à-vis the international community constituted one of the key components of Kim Young Sam’s segyehwa drive. However, the sense of pride was inherently tied to a sense of vulnerability. While the sense of pride was based on Korea’s economic success, the sense of vulnerability was based on the perception that economic development was not sufficient to transform Korea into a truly enlightened and civilized country. Korea would also need to actively pursue symbolic development. Thus, segyehwa pursued not only economic but also political, social, and cultural enhancements.25 One of the first projects of Kim Young Sam’s segyehwa strategy was seeking membership in international organizations, including the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Indeed, Kim Young Sam promised Koreans that during his tenure as President, Korea would achieve a per capita GNP of $10,000, high enough to seek membership in the OECD. To the Kim Young Sam administration, membership in the OECD symbolized opening the door to the club of developed countries. Joining the OECD meant that Korea needed to abide by norms and standards set by other members of the organization. Gender equality was one of the international standards the Kim Young Sam administration adopted under the name of segyehwa, amending the nationality law in 1997 so that children could inherit Korean citizenship through their mothers. Prior to the 1997 amendment, Korean law only acknowledged paternal lineage, and Korean women who married non-Korean men automatically lost their Korean citizenship. The amendment was proposed to conform to international gender equality standards.
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As such, segyehwa became a 1990s version of kŭndaehwa—the ultimate goal was to increase the national standing of Korea. It is not surprising to find that segyehwa rhetoric resembles Park Chung Hee’s kŭndaehwa rhetoric in phrases like “national modernization” and “creation of an advanced nation.”26 But with segyehwa, adopting international norms became an important developmental strategy while with kŭndaehwa, Western values were rejected for the sake of economic development. Kŭndaehwa and segyehwa are also similar in terms of the diagnosis of the Korean situation as a position of crisis and vulnerability. Recall that Park saw the world as a place in which nation-states compete against one another and envisioned kŭndaehwa as a strategy to survive such fierce competition. Kim Young Sam promoted a similar sense of vulnerability and crisis. At the Seattle summit conference of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in November 1993, Kim Young Sam declared the beginning of his segyehwa drive, with which Korea “should prepare for the coming 21st century, an era of unlimited competition, by planning survival strategy of internationalization equipped with the supreme competitiveness in the whole world.”27 In the following year, Kim Young Sam explained his rationale for pursuing segyehwa: Globalization is the shortcut which will lead us to building a first-class country in the 21st century. This is why I revealed my plan for globalization and the government has concentrated all of its energy in forging ahead with it. It is aimed at realizing globalization in all sectors—politics, foreign affairs, economy, society, education, culture and sports. To this end, it is necessary to enhance our viewpoints, way of thinking, system and practices to the world class level.… We have no choice other than this.28 As indicated in his speeches, Kim Young Sam saw the age of globalization as an age of crisis, turbulence, and endless competition, and segyehwa as a strategy “to increase national competitiveness in a rapidly globalizing, unstable world.”29 With the diagnosis of the current status as a crisis and further development as the only solution to handle the crisis, segyehwa became “no longer a matter of choice but one of necessity—globalization or perish!”30 The sense of crisis and vulnerability justified top-down state interventions. In fact, another resemblance between kŭndaehwa and segyehwa is that both were state-initiated projects. Kim Young Sam set up the Globalization Promotion Committee (Segyehwa ch‘ujin wiwŏnhoe) and called for all aspects of national life to move toward globalization.31 The sense of crisis and vulnerability also enabled mass-mobilization of individuals, families, and the public in the segyehwa drive. It was widely believed that globalization must be achieved not only by corporations and the government, but also by individuals and families.32 Segyehwa and kŭndaehwa are similar in that both are state-initiated, top-down developmental projects. In addition, both segyehwa and kŭndaehwa reflect social Darwinian thinking, with the goal of improving or maintaining national competitiveness. It is not surprising that Kim Young Sam’s “instrumentalist approach to
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globalization was not dissimilar from the strategies of Park [Chung Hee] in his pursuit of modernization.”33 However, segyehwa is different from kŭndaehwa in its types of development and specific developmental practices pursued. If kŭndaehwa was an inward-looking developmental project, Kim Young Sam’s segyehwa drive was made up of “outward-looking attempts to project South Korea as a ‘global’ nation.”34 Kŭndaehwa focused almost entirely on economic development and industrialization, and Western norms and values that allegedly posed obstacles (e.g., liberal democracy) were rejected. In contrast, the segyehwa drive put more emphasis on “social development” and accepted international norms in order to achieve similar “quality of life in the [Korean] society in comparison with other middle-income countries, as well as more-affluent Western ones.”35 It is important to note that the differences between segyehwa and kŭndaehwa were rooted in Korea’s changing position from the bottom to middle of the global hierarchy. On the one hand, segyehwa was an expression of national pride that with successful economic development, Korea had now become “a nation mature enough to talk about the global economy and global culture beyond national territory.”36 That is, when Korea was a bottom country, developmental strategies focused on problems within Korean territory, especially the problem of extreme poverty. Segyehwa denotes a set of developmental strategies to complete the transition from bottom to middle of the hierarchy, by bringing Korea’s political, cultural, and social development to the level of bottom or even top countries. On the other hand, segyehwa was an inevitable choice for Korea in the context of changing world and domestic economic conditions. Exportation was one of the main developmental strategies of kŭndaehwa. However, with the end of the Cold War, the USA, the largest importer of Korean products, started to view Korea less as an important military ally who deserved a special trade treaty and more as a competitor with an overly interventionist government.37 Other countries also demanded Korea liberalize trade policies and domestic markets, and by joining the OECD, the Kim Young Sam administration committed itself to the adoption of neoliberal policies. Furthermore, with Korean workers’ real wage increase, Korean products were rapidly losing their relative advantage against low-cost competitors in the globalizing economy. Against this background, modification of the previous developmental state model of economic policies was inevitable. In this sense, the segyehwa drive was a response to everincreasing pressure to open Korea’s market to global competitors.38 The financial crisis and “ethnic” nationalism as a developmental strategy While Kim Young Sam’s segyehwa project was a celebration of economic success and an expression of national pride, it was a prelude to a serious national crisis at the end of his term as President. In 1997, Korea was hit hard by the series of Asian financial crises, and ended up requesting a bailout package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As a condition for bailout, the IMF demanded comprehensive structural adjustments of the Korean economy, including opening up financial markets for foreign investment, increased flexibility of labor markets,
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minimizing government interventions and regulations, and reducing government’s public budget.39 In this sense, the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis was a critical point at which the Korean government started to abandon the previous developmental state model and more fully embrace, if sometimes unwillingly, neoliberalism.40 The financial crisis undermined Koreans’ sense of confidence and increased the sense of vulnerability and crisis, leading to the election of the opposition candidate as President for the first time in Korean history. The newly elected Kim Dae Jung (r. 1998–2003) adopted a new set of developmental strategies to overcome the economic crisis. However, Kim Dae Jung’s new plan did not negate Kim Young Sam’s segyehwa drive. Rather, Kim Dae Jung embraced the overall direction of segyehwa and pursued a route that could be described as neoliberal economic reform.41 A noticeable difference between the Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung administrations is found in policies towards overseas Koreans. The Kim Young Sam administration enacted the Overseas Korean Foundation Act (OKFA). The act was based on the idea that taking care of overseas Korean was an obligation of Korea as an advanced country. Every overseas Korean, regardless of their country of residency, was eligible for OKFA. In contrast, Kim Dae Jung adopted an instrumental approach to overseas Koreans, focusing on enticing overseas Koreans’ resources to help the Korean economy recover from the post-IMF crisis. To this end, Kim Dae Jung administration introduced the Overseas Koreans Act in 1997 (OKA). With the introduction of OKA, overseas Koreans enjoyed de facto dual citizenship. The assumption underlying OKA was that ethnic Koreans, out of their ethnic and national loyalties, would be more willing to invest in crisis-hit Korea.42 In this sense, the new developmental practices still relied on the same nationalistic sentiment. Only this time, the call for nationalism extended beyond the Korean peninsula to reach out to overseas Koreans. In addition to being deterritorialized and transnational, the “ethnic” nationalism under Kim Dae Jung also exhibited the developmental impulse. Despite the name, not all overseas Koreans were eligible. As the main goal of OKA was to entice resources-rich overseas Koreans, the Act excluded overseas Koreans in China and former Soviet Union countries. The OKA represents the first explicit “postdevelopmental state strategy” adopted by the Korean government.43 OKA, even if it rhetorically relies on “ethnic” nationalism, applies neoliberal market logic to the overseas Korean population, segmenting them into those who live in the Global North and Global South and offering citizenship-like entitlement only to those who reside in the Global North.
Damunhwa (multiculturalism) under Noh Moo Hyun and Lee Myung-Bak Multiculturalism as inward-looking development Kim Dae Jung’s successors, Noh Moo Hyun (r. 2003–2008) and Lee Myung Bak (r. 2008–2013), both embraced the overall direction of globalization and
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the principles of neoliberalism. Both the Noh and Lee administrations promoted the slogan of “Global Korea” and urged Koreans to globalize,44 citing the 2009 KOF Globalization Index of the Swiss Economic Institute. According to the Index, South Korea ranked fifty-ninth among 208 countries, standing eightyseventh in “economic globalization,” thirty-seventh in “political globalization,” and seventy-eighth in “social globalization.” For the Noh and Lee administrations, “moving up these league ladders is seen as a measure of success.”45 In this sense, multiculturalism (damunhwa) is an added component of, rather than a replacement for, the ongoing segyehwa discourse. If doing segyehwa means looking outward, especially towards the Western Others, doing damunhwa is globalizing internally, addressing the issue of how to deal with diversity within Korean territory. Although references to damunhwa among civil society members began increasing in 2005, it did not become a regular part of government discourse until 2006, when Hines Ward, a wide receiver for the Pittsburg Steelers, visited Korea. Ward’s status had changed from “ethnic other” to “global talent” and his global talent status now trumped his “impure” ethnic background. The case of Hines Ward is indicative of the Korean government’s damunhwa policies: tolerance and cultural diversity are encouraged to the extent that they increase Korea’s global position. Around the time of Ward’s visit to Korea in 2006, references to damunhwa became much more common among elected politicians and government bureaucrats. For example, on June 8, 2006, Chun Jeong Bae, the former Minister of Justice, opened a public forum on immigration policy reform by stating that discrimination against foreigners and mixed-race Koreans “is the problem that we as a society have to address in order for Korea to become a healthy advanced multicultural society.”46 At another forum on a similar topic a month later, Myungduk Gang, then the Chief of the Immigration Bureau, acknowledged that “the current Korean immigration policies fail to meet human rights standards or demands created by the advent of multicultural society.” He further explained that the goal of the forum was to “reform the current immigration laws by learning and adopting from those of advanced countries and international standards.”47 The Korean Center for Migrant Workers, funded by the Ministry of Employment and Economics, provides education, training, and other services to migrant workers. The mission statement of the Center explains that by providing such services, the Support Center can “not only prevent ruining Korea’s reputation, but can also improve Korea’s image.”48 The Committee for Multicultural Families Support, housed in the Prime Minister’s Office, states that the rationale for Multicultural Family Support Policies is “to improve Korea’s class (gugkyeok) and to successfully incorporate immigrants.”49 As shown in these various examples, the pursuit of damunhwa is considered a means to improve Korea’s reputation. As was the case with Kim Young Sam’s segyehwa discourse, improving Korea’s image in the international community is one of the important reasons behind Korea’s promotion of multiculturalism and tolerance. Indeed, the discriminatory treatment of ethnic minorities has been a
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source of international criticism of Korea. For example, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination published a report in August 2007, concluding that the principle of the “pure-blooded,” based on the Republic of Korea’s pride in the nation’s ethnic homogeneity, has resulted in various forms of discrimination, largely invisible and not illegal, against socalled “mixed-bloods” in all areas of life including employment, marriage, housing, education, and interpersonal relationships.50 The First Basic Plan for Foreigner Policies does not fail to mention the UN’s recommendations as one of the primary justifications of foreigner policy reform.51 The fertility crisis and “multicultural” nationalism as a developmental strategy As we have seen in Park Chung Hee’s modernization of fatherland and Kim Young Sam’s globalization drive, domestic economic conditions have shaped Korea’s developmental strategies. Similarly, the multicultural explosion is in part triggered by the need to modify economic developmental practices to meet the changing economic and demographic conditions at the domestic level. One of the most significant changes is what I call a fertility crisis. Korea is experiencing the twofold problem of an aging population and below-replacement fertility rate. Indeed, the decline in the total fertility rate (TFR), from 4.53 in 1970 to 1.67 in 1980, 1.47 in 2000, and 1.08 in 2005, remains the most rapid decrease in world history. It is important to note that the state-initiated economic development project came packaged with gendered antinatalist policies from the 1970s through the 1990s. Like the economic development policies, antinatalist policies were very successful. The Korea National Statistical Office now makes daunting projections: the total population size will hit its apex in 2020 and will start to decrease after that. The number of fertile women is decreasing and the pool of women at fertile ages with spouses is shrinking at an even greater rate. The ratio of working-age population (age 15 to 64) to non-working age population will decline from the current 8 : 1 to 8 : 4 or 8 : 5 by 2020. Facing this fertility crisis, the Korean government has to address the issue of ensuring the biological reproduction of the Korean nation and of continuing to pursue national growth. In May 2005, the Korean government announced the Act on Aging and Low-Birth Rates. The act aims “to maintain proper population composition and to improve its quality in view of maintaining the state’s growth (Article 2)” and stipulates that “the state and regional governments shall analyze the proper size of the population for the growth of the state/the region, and shall implement appropriate population policies on the basis of reasoned prediction on population change (Article 7).”52 The following September, a Presidential Committee on Aging Society and Population Policy (Koryŏnghwa taech‘aek wiwŏnhoe) was organized based on the act. The (perceived and real) fertility crisis explains the selective and exclusionary nature of Korean damunhwa. That is, the major target population of Korean damunhwa is not migrant workers, but foreign brides who can ease the fertility crisis. In fact, the
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same Presidential Committee on Aging Society and Population Policy proposed the 2006 Act on Social Integration of Mixed-Race Koreans and Immigrants and the Act on Marriage Migrant Integration, which provided blueprints of various damunhwa policies. In the context of a globalizing economy and below-replacement level fertility rate, managing migration flows and immigrant incorporation has become the Korean state’s “core strategy of national growth.”53 Foreign brides are expected to contribute to Korea’s development by raising a future labor force with cosmopolitan and multicultural sensibilities. The following quote illustrates the ways in which damunhwa is depicted as a developmental advantage: The increasing number of international marriages and children of such unions has been easing the burden of one of the most serious social problems in Korea—low birth rates. The number of children in rural areas is expected to rise thanks to international marriages. Many branch schools in small rural areas were on the verge of being closed, but many of them are experiencing revitalization. Again, thanks to international marriages. However, the children of multicultural families formed by international marriages need our moral support and social incorporation policies are necessary so that they truly become treasures of this land.54 The argument here is not that the Korean government promotes brideimporting as a solution for the declining population. Rather, the argument addresses the timing of the multicultural explosion: in the absence of the fertility crisis, the Korean government might never have become involved in foreign bride incorporation. Similarly, incorporation policies might not have included foreign brides if they did not provide solutions to ease the fertility crisis. In this sense, the inclusion of foreign brides as the major target of Korean damunhwa elucidates the developmental nature of Korean damunhwa: ethnic diversity is tolerated or celebrated in proportion to its contribution to Korea’s national development. The Korean government considers the “quality and quantity of the population” as a key factor for national survival and national growth in the age of global competition.55 To manage the “quality and quantity of the population” ideal for national development, the Korean government tries simultaneously to attract global talents and to incorporate foreign brides and their children. To attract global talents, the Korean government offers easy access to Korean citizenship, arguing that “[doing so] is necessary because of the increasing gap between the number of high-skilled Koreans giving up Korean citizenship to work aboard and the number of high-skilled foreigners coming to Korea.”56 One of the major pillars of Korean damunhwa is incorporating foreign brides and their children, or the “multicultural population.” The state provides programs to teach foreign brides to become successful mothers and to assist migrant children in surviving the competitive Korean educational system. These are the key components of developmental practices in the damunhwa era.
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Developmental multiculturalism and a new Korean nationalism How does pursuing new a set of developmental practices lead to an articulation of new national identity? It is important to note that another important pillar of Korean damunhwa concerns non-immigrant Korean citizens (or nonmulticultural population).57 The Korean government identities ethnic Koreans’ obsession with purity of blood as one of the significant challenges that face immigrants (both foreign brides and global talents) in Korea. Koreans have to acquire multicultural sensitivity and tolerance, if Korea intends to maximize the benefits and minimize social costs from accepting immigrants and to transform Korea into a mature multicultural society. Various government entities, such as the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and the Ministry of Education are engaged in the effort to reculturalize ethnic Koreans by distributing campaign posters, by airing TV commercials, by cooperating with UNESCO international education programs, and by hosting and sponsoring multicultural events and programs. The 2012 budget for “improving Koreans’ multicultural awareness” for each Ministry is 0.3, 1.59, 1.4 billion Korean won respectively. Ethnic Koreans are now encouraged to get rid of their obsession with and pride in ethnic homogeneity and to embrace non-Korean immigrants as members of Korean society. The ideal Korean citizen in “the age of global competition” and declining population size is different from the kind of ideal citizen envisioned in the kŭndaehwa discourse. The ideal citizen now has a global outlook, multicultural sensitivities, and the ability to get along with ethnic and cultural Others. The imperative to reshape individual citizens’ consciousness is justified on several grounds—all related to the development of Korean nation. First, accepting immigrants is an evitable consequence of Korea’s economic development; Korea is following a “natural” developmental transition from a country of emigration to a country of immigration. Second, values of tolerance and respect for human rights are qualities of developed Western countries. Thus, Koreans becoming more culturally tolerant would mean “improvement” of Koreans’ civic attitudes and Korea’s cultural development matching up with its economic development. Finally, the current global economy demands a diversity and vitality introduced by immigrants for national competitiveness. For Korea to enhance its national competitiveness, therefore, Korea needs to accept immigrants, and Koreans need to transform themselves into cosmopolitan, multicultural selves. The multicultural explosion in Korea demonstrates how pursuing a new set of developmental strategies leads to modification of the way the Korean nation is imagined.
Conclusion I have compared and contrasted the Korean government damunhwa discourse with two other preceding state discourses in modern/contemporary Korea:
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modernization of the fatherland (kŭndaehwa) under the Park Chung Hee regime, and globalization/internationalization (segyehwa) under the Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung administrations. I argued that the common theme of these three state discourses over a span of more than 50 years is developmentalism. All three discourses envision the world of nation-states ranked hierarchically both economically (e.g., per capita GNP) and symbolically (e.g., moral leadership). All three state discourses promise to try to achieve Korea’s higher position within the hierarchy. However, the relative emphasis on the types of development pursued and the specifics of developmental strategies vary. Park Chung Hee’s kŭndaehwa focused on economic development, while Kim Young Sam’s segyehwa put more emphasis on increasing Korea’s images. I argued that the shifting focus on the types of development reflected Korea’s changing position from the bottom to the middle of the global economic order. Three developmental strategies relied on and reproduced different types of nationalism. Kŭndaehwa relied on exclusive ethnic nationalism and segyehwa on deterritorized selective ethnic nationalism. The pursuit of a new set of developmental practices in the multicultural era leads to yet another articulation of Korean national identity. The multicultural explosion in Korea signals the declining significance of ethnic homogeneity and increasing significance of developmental utility as national membership criteria. The three state discourses share two important features in common. First, all three discourses characterize the status of the Korean nation as in crisis and try to invoke a “crisis mentality” among Koreans.58 The crisis mentality enhances the sense of vulnerability and justifies restless pursuit of development. The sense of crisis also justifies state intervention in planning and managing national development. This leads to the second common feature of modernization, globalization, and multiculturalism: the state continues to play the major role, reflecting and reproducing the legacies of developmental state. In this sense, the state continues to play an important role in the articulation of Korean nationalism.
Notes 1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea. Koo, Korean Workers. Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea. I used the news article search engine service provided by the Korean Press Foundation (www.kinds.or.kr). This search engine’s database includes 181 newspapers, both national and local. I counted all the news articles regardless of where and how many times the word “multicultural” appears in an article. Around 14,600 in 2009, 19,300 in 2010, 20,000 in 2011, 18,000 in 2012, and 20,700 in 2013. Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, p. 13. Lie, Han Unbound, p. 147. Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, pp. 13–14 (italics added). Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed. Nadia Y. Kim, Imperial Citizens, p. 84. Mitchell, “Educating the National Citizen in Neoliberal Times,” pp. 387–403; Ong, Flexible Citizenship.
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Lie, Han Unbound. Hyung-A Kim, Korea’s Development under Park Chung-Hee. Cited in Lie, Han Unbound, p. 43. Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, p. 105. Kim, Korea’s Development under Park Chung-Hee, p. 209. Chung Hee Park. Our Nation’s Path, p. 189. Moon, “Cultural Politics of Remembering Park Chung Hee,” pp. 1–31. Ibid, p. 20. Most mixed-race births in Korea during this period involved a Korean woman and an American soldier, and they are referred to as Amerasians. Hyeon-Ok Park and Jung-Dong Park, A Study on Korean Haiqua. Na, The Education of Ethnic Identity as Hua-Qiao (Overseas Chinese) in Korea. Lie, Han Unbound, p. 159. Chae-Jin Lee, “South Korean Foreign Relations Face the Globalization Challenges,” pp. 170–195. Samuel S. Kim, “Korea and Globalization (Segyehwa),” at p. 3. Seoungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea, p. 126. Cited in Myung Koo Kang, “Discourse politics toward neo-liberal globalization,” pp. 443–456. Cited in Kim, “Korea and Globalization,” p. 1 (italics added). Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, p. 213. Kim, “Korea and Globalization,” p. 2. Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, p. 212. Kang, “Discourse politics toward neo-liberal globalization.” Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, p. 213. Yoon S. Choi, “Beyond the Han River Miracle.” Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea. Kwang-Yeong Shin, “The discourse of crisis and the crisis of discourse.” C. S. Eliot Kang, “Segyehwa Reform of the South Korean Developmental State.” Ibid. Younghan Cho, “The National Crisis and De/reconstructing Nationalism in South Korea during the IMF Intervention.” Hee-yeon Cho, “The Structure of the South Korean Developmental Regime and Its Transformation”; Sangjoon Kim, “Globalisation and Individuals”; Lim, “The Transformation of the Developmental State and Economic Reform in Korea.” Samuel S. Kim, “Korea and Globalization,” p. 3. Chulwoo Lee, “South Korea.” According to Aihwa Ong, neoliberal postdevelopmentalism is characterized by “a strategy of graduated sovereignty” with which the state segments people or space into differentiated groups or zones with each of the segments subject to a different mix of disciplinary technologies. See Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception and Flexible Citizenship. The logics of differential management of a segmented population are neoliberal ones: [E]ducated and self-propulsive individuals claim citizenship-like entitlements and benefits, even at the expense of territorialized citizens. Expatriate talents constitute a form of movable entitlement without formal citizenship. Citizens who are deemed too complacent or lacking in neoliberal potential may be treated as lessworthy subjects. Low-skilled citizens and migrants become exceptions to neoliberal mechanisms and are constructed as excludable populations in transit, shuttled in and out of zones of growth. (Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, p. 16)
44 Kalinowski and Cho, “Korea’s Search for a Global Role between Hard Economic Interests and Soft Power.”
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45 Lee and Hewision, “Introduction.” 46 Statement made at a seminar on immigration policy reform. June 8, 2006 (italics added). 47 Statement made at a public forum on Immigration Control Act revision, July 12, 2006 (italics added). 48 www.migrantok.org. 49 www.mogef.go.kr/korea/view/policyGuide/policyGuide06_04_02.jsp, accessed October 14, 2014. 50 UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination [CERD], Concluding observations of the CERD, August 2007. CERD/C/KOR/CO/14, www2.ohchr.org/ english/bodies/cerd/docs/CERD.C.KOR.CO.1.pdf, accessed October 14, 2014. 51 Presidential Committee on Foreign Policy, Republic of Korea, The First Basic Plan for Foreigner Policies 2008–2012. 52 www.law.go.kr/lsEfInfoP.do?lsiSeq=152037#, accessed October 14, 2014. 53 Presidential Committee on Foreign Policy, The First Basic Plan for Foreigner Policies 2008–2012, p. 1. 54 “We Must Embrace ‘Multicultural Families’,” Hongseong Newspaper, June 15, 2007. 55 Presidential Committee on Foreign Policy, The First Basic Plan for Foreigner Policies, 2008–2012, p. 1. 56 “Dual Citizenship under Consideration,” Ministry of Justice News Brief (cited in Kyŏnghyangsinmun, October 26, 2007). 57 Jungsoon Choi, “Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society.” 58 Kwang-Yeong Shin, “The Discourse of Crisis and the Crisis of Discourse.”
References Brubaker, Rogers. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Cho, Hee-yeon. 2000. “The Structure of the South Korean Developmental Regime and Its Transformation: Statist Mobilization and Authoritarian Integration in the Anticommunist Regimentation,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1(3): 409–426. Cho, Younghan. 2008. “The National Crisis and De/reconstructing Nationalism in South Korea during the IMF Intervention,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 9(1): 82–96. Choi, Jungsoon. 2010. “Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society: The Case of South Korea,” The Social Studies 101: 174–178. Choi, Yoon S. 2009. “Beyond the Han River Miracle: Soccer, Soap Operas, Stem Cells, and Sanitation.” Ph.D. Dissertation Thesis. Department of Anthropology. University of California–Irvine. Kalinowski, Thomas, and Cho, Hekyung. 2012. “Korea’s Search for a Global Role between Hard Economic Interests and Soft Power,” European Journal of Development Research 24: 242–260. Kang, C. S. Eliot. 2000. “Segyehwa Reform of the South Korean Developmental State,” in Samuel S. Kim (ed.), Korea’s Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 76–125. Kang, Myung Koo. 2000. “Discourse Politics toward Neo-Liberal Globalization,” InterAsia Cultural Studies 1(3): 443–456. Kim, Hyung-A. 2004. Korea’s Development under Park Chung-Hee: Rapid Industrialization, 1961–79. New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Kim, Nadia Y. 2008. Imperial Citizens. Koreans and Race from Seoul to LA. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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Kim, Samuel S. 2000. “Korea and Globalization (Segyehwa): A Framework for Analysis,” in Samuel S. Kim (ed.), Korea’s Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–28. Kim, Sangjoon. 2010. “Globalisation and Individuals: The Political Economy of South Korea’s Education Expansion,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 40(2): 309–328. Koo, Hagen. 2001. Korean Workers. The Culture and Politics of Class Formation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lee, Chae-Jin. 2000. “South Korean Foreign Relations Face the Globalization Challenges,” in Samuel S. Kim (ed.), Korea’s Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 170–195. Lee, Chulwoo. 2010. “South Korea: The Transformation of Citizenship and the StateNation Nexus,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 40(2): 230–251. Lee, Sook Jong, and Hewision, Kevin. 2010. “Introduction: South Korea and the Antinomies of Neo-Liberal Globalisation,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 40(2): 181–187. Lie, John. 1998. Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lim, Haeran. 2010. “The Transformation of the Developmental State and Economic Reform in Korea,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 40(2): 188–210. Micthell, Katharyne. 2003. “Educating the National Citizen in Neoliberal Times: From the Multicultural Self to the Strategic Cosmopolitan,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28(3): 387–403. Moon, Seungsook. 2005. Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Moon, Seungsook. 2009. “Cultural Politics of Remembering Park Chung Hee,” AsiaPacific Journal 19 (2009): 1–31. Na, Yeo-hoon. 2007. “The Education of Ethnic Identity as Hua-Qiao (Overseas Chinese) in Korea.” MA Thesis. Seoul: Seoul National University of Education [in Korean]. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logistics of Transnationality. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Park, Chung Hee. 1966. Our Nation’s Path: Ideology of Social Reconstruction. Seoul: West Gate. Park, Hyeon-Ok, and Park, Jung-Dong. 2003. A Study on Korean Haiqua: Their SocioEconomic Status. Incheon, South Korea: Incheon Development Institute. Presidential Committee on Foreign Policy, Republic of Korea. 2007. The First Basic Plan for Foreigner Policies, 2008–2012. www.immigration.go.kr/doc_html/attach/imm/f2 010//20100611097906_1_%BF%DC%B1%B9%C0%CE%C1%A4%C3%A5%B1%E2%B A%BB%B0%E8%C8%B9%5B%C8%A8%C6%E4%C0%CC%C1%F6%B0%D4%C0%E7%5 D%5B1%5D.new.pdf.files/PDFBook.html [in Korean]. Shin, Gi-Wook. 2006. Ethnic Nationalism in Korea. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Shin, Kwang-Yeong. 2010. “The Discourse of Crisis and the Crisis of Discourse,” InterAsia Cultural Studies 1(3): 427–442.
8
On the black tide A historical and politico-economic analysis of Taiwanese nationalism and the Sunflower Movement Rwei-Ren Wu The Black Tide, setting off angry waves, bumping and flooding, shaking the Universe! … Let the giant waves of the Black Tide rage around the Globe, Cleansing Man of his egoism. (Yang Hua, The Black Tide, 1927)
The political movement of Taiwan may well be called a national movement to begin with. Judging from the history of [Taiwan’s] national development, this is by no means a far-fetched proposition. (Lien Wen-ching, The History of Taiwan’s Political Movement, 1988[1954–1955])
1 The historical character of the March 18 Movement (Sunflower Movement) The movement against the Service and Trade Agreement between Taiwan and China that broke out on March 18, 2014, signified the maturity of Taiwan’s nation-state formation as well as the emergence of a new wave of left-wing politics within the framework of this nation-state—or put differently, a shifting to the left of the social basis of Taiwanese nationalism. It demonstrated simultaneously the complex and interrelated features of anti-imperialism (vs China), anti-capitalism, democratic consolidation and deepening, and the formation of the younger generations as political subject. As an emblem of the maturity of Taiwanese nation-state and the local form of the movement against neoliberal globalization, the March 18 Movement (commonly known as the Sunflower Movement) has at the same time global, national, class, and generational implications. Only by examining the historical context within which Taiwanese nation-state and capitalism came into being during the past one and a half centuries can we grasp correctly the deep historical character of this movement.
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2 On the formation of state and capitalism in Taiwan Up until the end of Qing rule (1683–1895), Taiwan had been governed by an archaic form of agrarian bureaucratic state of which the reach of state power and its penetration into the society was limited. Its economy during this period was characterized by an early form of commercial capitalism. The formation of a modern state and the development of industrial capitalism did not begin until Japanese rule (1895–1945), and did not reach their maturity under Kuomintang (KMT) rule. On the one hand, this dual process formed a part of the latter stage of the global historical movement of the formation of modern nation-state and capitalism, and therefore inevitably shared some of its universal characteristics. On the other hand, however, it also demonstrated certain local particularities born of Taiwan’s unique geopolitical position. Particularities The unique geopolitical position of Taiwan as a common periphery of multiple centers or an interface between plural powers deeply shaped the trajectory of the formation of nation-state and capitalism in Taiwan and gave the process a uniquely Taiwanese character. Caught between empires, Taiwan has for several hundred years been an object to be struggled for and to be annexed, incorporated and assimilated by various and competing imperial centers in Northeast Asia (Qing empire, Japanese empire, and the KMT under USA hegemony), and thus may well be described as a fragment of/f empires. As a result, the formation of nationstate and capitalism in Taiwan was deeply shaped by external factors.1 The experience of Taiwan’s nation-state formation is characterized by the following two sets of binary opposition: the discontinuity of political history vs the continuity of social history, and the discontinuity of regimes vs the accumulation of institutions.2 The first binary opposition signifies the continuous integration of an immigrant society despite the frequent change of regimes imposed from without, whereas the second binary opposition signifies the political integration brought about by the institutional inheritance, accumulation, and development between the successive regimes from without. On the whole, the two binary oppositions illustrate the protracted, late-mature, incomplete, and unstable character of Taiwan’s nation-state formation. The formation of Taiwanese capitalism, on the other hand, is characteristic of its dependent character and étatisme.3
3 Peripheral nationalism and the uneven development of capitalism Elaborating on Ernest Gellner’s classical thesis of industrialization and nationalism,4 Tom Nairn argued in his “Scotland and Europe” that the emergence of
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nationalism in the periphery was an outcome of the uneven and combined development of global capitalism.5 The time difference of capitalistic industrialization created a dual geographical structure of center (advanced region) and periphery (backward region) in which the center dominated, exploited, and thus hampered the development of the periphery with its superior political and economic forces. This was the imperialism of the center against the periphery. Constrained by the condition of underdevelopment, the new bourgeoisie of the periphery had no choice but to mobilize the masses of the native society, in the name of the people, to resist the imperialism of the center and to protect their own interests; however, to mobilize the masses they had to embark on populist and nativist cultural mobilization—that is, to invoke the nation. Such was the origin of nationalism in the periphery. Like the waves of capitalist industrialization, the peripheral nationalism triggered by the uneven development of capitalism also spread in waves from Central, Eastern, Southern and Northern Europe, to Ireland at the Celtic fringe, and then to Japan and other parts of the world, creating a concentric trajectory of political geography. Nationalism of the periphery was no doubt a form of what Arrighi, Hopkins, and Wallerstein called antisystemic movements.6
4 The uneven development of capitalism and Taiwanese nationalism Nairn’s argument of peripheral nationalism provides a macro- and dynamic framework for understanding the rise, development and formation of Taiwanese nationalism and nation-state that took place in the narrow crevice between multiple empires. Based on the trajectory of the political geography of capitalism’s combined and uneven development depicted above, we are able to divide the process of the formation of modern Taiwan into three stages of capitalist/ imperialist domination: (1) the colonial rule of Japan’s formal empire (the age of classical imperialism); (2) the domination of the informal empire or imperium of the USA during the Cold War era; (3) the post-Cold War new liberal hegemony of the USA; (4) the age of new imperialism since the rise of China in the 2000s. Originating in the period of classical imperialism, nationalism and nation-state formation in Taiwan underwent the molding of the Cold War and post-Cold War neoliberalism, the process of being subordinated to China, and eventually revealed their contemporary form in the March 18 Movement.
5 Japanese colonial rule (age of classical imperialism) Modern Japanese nationalism appeared in the 1860s first as a typical antiimperial peripheral nationalism, but it was soon transformed into a defensive expansionism. The renowned liberal economic historian Yanaihara Tadao
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pointed out clearly in his Formosa under Imperialism that since Japanese capitalism was still at an underdeveloped stage, Japan’s acquisition of Taiwan after its victory in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895 “should be regarded as characteristic of a premature imperialism which initiated the age of imperialism by means of political and military actions, or as an imperialist practice by an nonimperialist country.”7 After the war Japan formally joined the camp of classical imperialism of the late nineteenth century.8 The first wave of Taiwanese nationalism that arose in the 1920s should be seen as an indirect reaction to classical imperialism by way of opposition to the late-coming Japanese imperialism.
6 The rise of Taiwanese nationalism in the 1920s, manifested in the publication of The Taiwan Youth (1920), the founding of the Taiwan Cultural Association (1921), and the beginning of the Movement for the Establishment of Taiwan Parliament (METP, 1923), was by and large the political consequence of the institutional discrimination of the former half of the Japanese colonial rule (which the author has conceptualized as differential incorporation), the social integration of Taiwan, and the influence of ideas of national self-determination that spread all over the colonial world during World War I.9 The leadership of this wave of nationalist movement came mainly from what historian Wakabayashi Masahiro called “Taiwanese indigenous landowning bourgeoisie.”10 Lien Wenching, a leading theorist and activist of the first-generation left-wing movement in colonial Taiwan, pointed out in the manuscript of his History of Taiwan’s Political Movement, published posthumously in 1983, that “Taiwan Cultural Association was represented by a few progressive elements of the bourgeoisie, with progressive new intellectuals at its center … workers and peasants were yet to participate in it,” and the METP was “a movement by the Taiwanese national bourgeoisie in the name of the Taiwanese nation” which, in spite of its limitation as a movement led by the bourgeoisie, “unconsciously united all the actions with a view to opposing the Japanese imperialism,” thereby “awaking the national consciousness of the Taiwanese people.”11 A left-wing social movement in colonial Taiwan did not arise until about 1925, and mainly in the form of a peasant movement. This was the first wave of left-wing Taiwanese nationalism that appeared in the history of Taiwan. The rise of this Taiwanese left-wing movement with sugar-cane farmers at its core was a reaction to Japan’s sugar-manufacturing capitalism on the part of the much exploited Taiwanese sugar-cane farmers, of whom the expectation for a better life was triggered by the dramatic rising benefits enjoyed by their rice-farming counterparts at the time. The left-right division of the Taiwanese nationalist movement during 1926–1927 partially reflected, aside from the ideological influence of both the Japanese and global socialist movements, the structural competing relationship between sugar industry and rice industry in Taiwan under the Japanese colonial rule. The indigenous landowning classes which benefited from rice exportation to the metropole after WWI began to ally with
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Japanese rice exporters due to common economic interests. As a result, the cross-national rice industry inevitably came into conflict with the sugar industry monopolized by Japanese capital within which a structure of national antagonism between the exploiting Japanese capital and the exploited Taiwanese farmers remained intact.12 In his “Taiwan under the Colonial Policies: The Sorrow of a Weak and Small Nation,” written in 1926, Yamakawa Hitoshi, founder of Japan’s non-communistic Worker-Farmer school of Marxism (rōnōha), interpreted the coexisting cross-national alliance within the rice industry and national antagonism within the sugar industry as a manifestation of “class differentiation within the Taiwanese nation.” Based on this analysis, Lien Wen-ching, a disciple of Yamakawa who played a crucial part in the left-right division of the nationalist movement, later interpreted the cross-national alliance within the rice industry as illustrating “the incorporation of the new bourgeoisie of the Taiwanese nation into the Japanese capitalism.”13
7 KMT Rule under the US hegemony during the Cold War, 1950–1989 (age of American informal empire) After the Korean War, the USA actively helped Japan with its reconstruction project so that it could recover the leading role in the East Asian economy out of the strategic concerns for containing communism and protecting capitalism. In the meanwhile, the USA defined Taiwan and South Korea as the periphery or hinterland of the Japanese economy. On the one hand, the USA created and armed the two new states, and then deployed them as defensive forces at the Northeast Asian front of the Cold War. On the other hand, it also aided and guided the economic development of the two states so that they could be reintegrated economically with the former Japanese metropole, thereby rebuilding to a certain degree the structure of Japan’s prewar formal empire. Thus a three-tier structure of center (USA)—semiperiphery (Japan)—periphery (Taiwan and South Korea) was formed in Northeast Asia. Within this structure of informal empire that allowed upward mobility, Japan gradually moved up the ladder in the 1970s and began to compete with the USA for the position of (economic) center in the 1980s, which nearly led to a situation of dual centers. In the meanwhile, Taiwan and South Korea also moved up to the semiperiphery, with Southeast Asia gradually integrated into the periphery. Despite their spectacular upward mobility, however, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea were still highly dependent on the USA geopolitically and militarily.14 Seen from the perspective of state formation, one of the most important consequences of the US informal empire during the Cold War era for Taiwan was to have created a pattern of nation-state formation that may well be termed “indigenization of émigré regime.” After the end of the Korean War, the USA practically created a territorial state coterminous with Taiwan (and its offshore islands of the Pescadores, Kinmen, and Matsu). Huang Shao-heng, a Taiwanese
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economic historian, pointed out incisively that in Taiwan both the structure of a national economy and that of capitalism in one country in a real sense did not come into being until the 1950s, when the newly created state finally formed the first well-defined set of national boundaries in Taiwanese history.15 And yet, in its early period of formation the territorial state in Taiwan was still characteristic of a colonial social structure where ethnic cleavage overlapped with class division. It was not until the 1960s, when the USA-guided policy change from import substitution to export-oriented development brought about the rise of native Taiwanese middle classes and when numerous lower-ranking Mainlander veterans were discharged and fell to the bottom of the social ladder, that ethnicity and class began to cut across each other, leading to a gradual transformation of Taiwan’s social structure.16 On the one hand, the rise of native Taiwanese middle classes not only resulted in their demand for political power (in the name of democracy) but also triggered a new wave of ethnic political mobilization and Taiwanese nationalism. On the other hand, the cutting across between ethnicity and class signified that Taiwanese society was beginning to shed its colonial character and entering a new phase of integration and amalgamation. The two processes of ethnic mobilization in politics and ethnic amalgamation in society both contradicted and intertwined with each other, bringing about a period of highly complex and unstable realignment and bitter conflicts in national identities in Taiwanese politics since mid-1970s. It was not until after three decades, when the process of democratization, with its integrative mechanism of participation, and the process of the indigenization of newer Mainlander immigrants who came to the island after 1949 gradually resolved the conflicts of national identities that Taiwanese politics finally became more stabilized. By and large, the wave of Taiwanese nationalism that arose in the late period of the Cold War, and which embodied in the democratic movement of the 1970s and 1980s on whose basis the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was formed, was an outcome of the process through which Taiwan moved up to the semiperiphery of the capitalist world system, i.e., the process of being coopted by the center. This was in sharp contrast to the antisystemic character of the first wave peripheral nationalism that arose in the age of classical imperialism as a reaction against the center.
8 Post-Cold War US neoliberal hegemony, 1990–2004 This was a period when President Lee Teng-hui pursued a line of passive revolution and pragmatic nationalism. By coopting first the more liberal wing of the Mainlander elite of the ancien régime and then the radical democratic/ nationalist force represented by the DPP, Lee was able to proceed with a reformist project of democratization that realized political Taiwanization within the framework of the sovereign Republic of China, limited the scope of transitional justice to the compensation of victims, and eventually consolidated an
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eclectic national identity of the Republic of China on Taiwan. To conclude his project of democratization and nation-building, Lee went on to declare unofficially the independence of Taiwan in an interview with a German journalist in 1999 where he proclaimed that Taiwan–China relationship was a “special stateto-state relationship.”17 As regards economic strategy, Lee adopted a line of economic nationalism and mercantilism to counter the powerful magnetic pull from the ever expanding Chinese economy. He first restructured the state-business relation in the name of liberalization and created a new clientele of big capitalists which he sought to transform into, so to speak, the national bourgeoisie of the Republic of China on Taiwan. Then he declared a conservative policy of “overcoming impetuosity and exercising patience” that restricted investment in China so as to prevent Taiwan’s capital flow into China. Meantime he tried to direct the expansion of Taiwanese capital to Southeast Asia instead of China through the “Southward policy.” In addition to controlling the direction of Taiwanese capital expansion, furthermore, Lee also hoped to turn the logic of globalization against China by constraining and disciplining its actions through the multilateral frameworks of APEC and WTO. Roughly at the time when Lee was carrying on with his passive revolution, Hsu Hsin-liang, then chairperson of the DPP, published Rising People (1995) in his quest for the presidency, in which he strongly argued for a line of “marching westward daringly to manage and govern China.”18 His was in fact an ambitious vision of liberal imperialism that, by adapting to the neoliberal logic, sought to coopt and reorganize the Taiwanese capitalists already fleeing to China despite Lee’s restriction into a force of state-guided capital expansion that would eventually result in Taiwan’s domination of China. Chen Shui-bian, the leader of the DPP who succeeded Lee as president during 2000–2008 had also tried to regulate capital outflow to China to no avail, mainly due to the drastically declining state capacity of his minority regime. Like Lee, Chen too tried to create his own business clientele and national bourgeoisie by forming the National Policy Advisory Group whose members included eminent pro-DPP capitalists such as Nita Ying of the Continental Group and Chang Jung-fa of the Evergreen Group. On the whole, an eclectic form of Taiwanese nationalism that synthesized the state form of ROC and the territory of Taiwan was gradually emerging during this period of fervent democratization and indigenization as the dominant ideology of Taiwanese politics. More importantly, we should not forget that three key contenders of Taiwanese politics of this period, Lee Teng-hui, Hsu Hsinliang, and Chen Shui-bian, had all tried one way or the other to harness the neoliberal logic to reconstruct the class base of Taiwanese nationalism and thus to merge the capital with the nascent Taiwanese nation-state. Thanks to these policies of nationalist appropriation of the neoliberal logic, therefore, we inevitably witnessed an explicit shift toward the right of the social basis of Taiwanese nationalism during this period.
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9 Rise of China and the age of new imperialism, 2005– The rise of China after it became a member of WTO in early 2000s resulted largely from the strategic failure of the USA who sought to discipline and domesticate China by integrating the country into the neoliberal global economic order during the 1990s when Cold War was coming to an end. In the meantime, the national power of the USA was on an evident decline after the war in Iraq became a quagmire and the global financial crisis broke out in 2008. In the report Global Trend 2030, published by the National Intelligence Council in 2012, the US government officially admitted that it was losing its global hegemony and international politics was likely to transform in the foreseeable future into a multipolar system where plural regional hegemons struggled for supremacy.19 The report also predicted that China would successfully challenge the American hegemony in East Asia and thus rebuild a new regional “Chinese World Order.” The optimistic neoliberal order of the post-Cold War era was quietly giving way to a classical situation of realpolitik in which power players struggled for spheres of influence by engaging in complex games of alliance and conflict. From the viewpoint of a geopolitical small state, a new wave of imperialism has no doubt arrived on the world stage. The arrival of a new age of imperialism provided the background against which the Chinese state power began to expand aggressively into Taiwan in recent years. Since 2000, a structure of trade dependence of Taiwan on China has been steadily formed, and China began to use this leverage to discipline Taiwanese businessmen who invested in China, hoping to transform them into local agents of political annexation. On March 14, 2005, the Chinese government passed and promulgated the Anti-secession Law. On March 26, Hsu Wenlung, the founder and president of the ABS resin giant Chimei Group who famously urged Lee Teng-hui several times in public in the 1990s to declare Taiwanese independence, resigned from the presidency and issued “Thoughts on Retirement,” where he proclaimed that “both Taiwan and Mainland belonged to one China,” and that “we don’t do Taiwanese independence.” And thus the Taiwanese national bourgeoisie which made an appearance so brief in the 1990s that we barely caught a glimpse of its passing beauty disintegrated and metamorphosed into comprador capital, i.e., into a part of what political scientist Wu Jieh-min called the “Cross-Strait Political Business Group.”20 In the 2008 presidential election, the nativist DPP regime collapsed in a disastrous defeat. The Taiwanese nationalist project to resist China by harnessing the neoliberal logic to domesticate or ally with the capital during the last two decades proved to be a total failure. In contrast, the successor Ma Ying-jeou regime of the KMT founded its social basis upon the newly formed Taiwanese comprador capital. When the Chinese emissary Chen Yunlin came to Taiwan in November 2008 he was heartily welcomed by all the seven major local business organizations. In the same year, the adamantly pro-China Want Want Group
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began its plan to merge local cable TV system and the popular One Media Group with a view to shaping Taiwanese public opinion. On the eve of the 2012 presidential election, the core members of Taiwan’s big capitalist class such as Terry Gou of the Foxconn Group, Chang Yung-fa of the Evergreen Group, Wang Wen-yuan of the Formosa Plastics Group, Douglas Hsu of the Far Eastern Group, Samuel Yin of the Ruentex Group, John Hsuan of UMC, and Cher Wang of HTC came forward publicly and in unison to declare their support for Ma Ying-jeou and his line of “1992 consensus” that recognized both Taiwan and Mainland as belonging to one China. With the support of the local comprador capitalist class, Ma signed a series of agreements with China, including ECFA (2010) and the Agreement of Service and Trade (2013), thereby further institutionalizing and deepening Taiwan’s dependence on China. China’s united front strategy of “besieging politics with business and facilitating unification with economics” that sought to appropriate in reverse the neoliberal logic to incorporate, buy off, and discipline both capital and state of Taiwan had achieved substantial success. In as early as 1945, the great political economist Albert O. Hirschman made a thorough analysis in his classic of dependence theory, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, of the “new Machiavellianism” with which the big states penetrated and dominated the politics of small states by means of trade dependence. In his own incisive words: Economic warfare can take the place of bombardment, economic pressure that of saber rattling. It can indeed be shown that even if war could be eliminated, foreign trade would lead to relationships of dependency and influence between nations.21 In the 1930s, Nazi Germany first created trade dependence of some neighboring states in Eastern and Southern Europe such as Bulgaria on Germany, and went on to use this structure of dependence as a leverage to coerce and dominate these states. This was perhaps one of the most classical examples of how big states turned trade into an instrument of state power. China’s practice of using trade dependence to achieve its geopolitical aim of territorial annexation by creating local agents to help penetrate and intervene in Taiwanese politics constitutes a contemporary example of what Hirschman called the bloodless invasion. This form of economic aggression with a view to territorial expansion is a local variation of China’s neocolonial practice in recent years in Asia, Africa, and Latin America where it exported capital, plundered resources, and expanded market in the name of trade. Therefore, one may well consider China’s economic invasion of Taiwan as part and parcel of its ongoing global expansion with free trade imperialism.22 Ecuador provides another example of China’s free-trade imperialism today. By giving loans with glaringly high interest rates to the anti-US Ecuadorian government mired in financial difficulties, and with poor labor protection and industrial safety and low environmental standards, the state-owned PetroChina
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and Sinopec have thus far managed to pump about 25 percent of the total daily crude oil production of the country. The two Chinese companies have also locked up close to 90 percent of the country’s oil exports to guarantee the payment of loans. As Alberto Acosta, the former minister of energy of Ecuador commented: “The problem is we are trying to replace American imperialism with Chinese imperialism.”23 It seems that under the dual siege of capital and empire Taiwan had become a bird in the cage with no way out. No sooner than it was born in the crevice between empires, the nascent nation-state was confronted with crises of subordination and disintegration. The reality looked so dire that even John Mearsheimer, the realist sage long arguing for the existence of structural conflict between USA and China, had openly to lament that it was time to “Say Goodbye to Taiwan!”24
10 The counterattack of the “losers” And yet the nascent Taiwanese nation-state did not and has not disintegrated. Starting with the Wild Strawberry Student Movement triggered by the coming of the Chinese Black Ships of Chen Yunlin in 2008, the joint invasion of capital and empire gave rise to waves after waves of resistance from civil society during the subsequent six years, of which the accumulated momentum broke out all at once in the demonstrations that lasted throughout the spring of discontent of 2014—first in the Sunflower Movement in March, followed immediately by the Anti-Nuclear Movement in April. The spectacular movements of the spring of 2014, as a result, not only successfully stopped the ratification of the Service and Trade Agreement and the construction of the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant but also brought about the crushing defeat of the ruling KMT in the general elections in November that year, thereby generating tremendous political momentum that fatally paralyzed the pro-China Ma regime on the one hand and substantially consolidated the pro-independence DPP’s position as a quasiruling party on the other. By the end of 2014, Taiwan’s political landscape was completely changed. Geopolitically, the movements of 2014 spring not only postponed China’s agenda of annexing Taiwan but also exercised a subtle influence on the East Asian situation. This wave of activism to resist the invasion of capital and empire and demand self-determination for the Taiwanese people from Taiwan’s civil society was clearly characteristic of a civic nationalism, and the social basis of this civic nationalism also shifted substantially from bourgeoisie of the previous period toward the left end of the political spectrum. We can explain the rise of this wave of civic and leftleaning Taiwanese nationalism by examining three systematic factors: the former two concern the contemporary form of the uneven development of capitalism as suggested by Nairn, i.e., neoliberal globalization, and the third factor concerns the trajectory of Taiwan’s particular nation-state formation.
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Nation-state and democracy The first systematic factor is the contradiction inherent in neoliberal globalization. In his The Globalization Paradox that has quickly become a classical critique of globalization since its publication in 2011, the Harvard economist Dani Rodrik pointed out that globalization created a fundamental political trilemma of the world economy: we cannot pursue democracy, national self-determination, and economic globalization simultaneously.25 To continue pursuing globalization, we will have to abandon nation-state and democracy. To maintain and deepen democracy, we will have to choose between nation-state and global economic integration. To keep nation-state and self-determination, we must choose between the deepening of democracy and the deepening of globalization. However, globalization and the deepening of democracy are incompatible, for the tremendous diversity and pluralism make democratic governance on a global scale practically impossible. In other words, we will be left with an undemocratic form of nation-state if we choose globalization. Thus Rodrik made clear his stance: [D]emocracy and national determination should trump hyper-globalization. Democracies have the right to protect their social arrangements, and when this right clashes with the requirements of the global economy, it is the latter that should give away.26 The kind of globalization that the Ma regime and his cross-strait political business group had been seeking to impose on Taiwan, that is, to enter the world economy by way of economic integration with China, was prone to induce in Taiwan nationalist opposition based on a “China vs Taiwan” dichotomy, since the extremely undemocratic nature of its monopolistic structure and the explicit territorial ambition of China towards Taiwan were fundamentally incompatible with the democratic institutions of Taiwan as a nationstate. Therefore, this wave of civic nationalism, mostly clearly manifested in the Sunflower Movement, can be seen as a local, Taiwanese form of the global movement against neoliberalism. Class The second systematic factor is also related to capitalist globalization. As the famous metaphor coined by economist Joseph Stiglitz indicates, globalization of capital has hastened the pace of wealth concentration and created ever growing inequality within nations, thereby bringing about an extreme pattern of class differentiation of “99 percent poor vs 1 percent rich.” If the trilemma inherent in globalization is prone to induce local resistance in the form of nationalism, the “99 percent vs 1 percent” kind of class structure provides a social basis consisting mainly of the victims of globalization, i.e., the middle and lower strata of the population, for the local nationalist resistance.
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Society The third systematic or structural factor is the social autonomy born of the unique pattern of nation-state formation in Taiwan. The formation of the Taiwanese nation-state during the past two centuries is the outcome of three intertwining macro historical-sociological processes: the social integration and indigenization of immigrant groups arriving at different points of time from different places, the institutional inheritance and accumulation between successive regimes from without, and the democratization of the past 30 years. Social integration and indigenization created the matrix of a Taiwanese nation, whereas the institutional inheritance and accumulation created the institutional form of a sovereign state. It was democratization that eventually connected the society and the state by integrating and strengthening the national identity among the people through the mechanism of participation, and created a highly vibrant and autonomous civil society with a widely held consensus of progressive nativism. In other words, the formation of nation-state in Taiwan did not follow the classical path of “state makes society”; rather, it was the bottom-up pattern of identity formation during the 30 years of democratization that deeply shaped the character of Taiwanese nation-state and embedded in it a salient societal autonomy.27 The societal autonomy and agency explained why the unarmed Taiwanese civil society could rise up and actively take over the burden of resistance and self-defense at a time when the historically formed national community and state institutions were being eroded by the cross-strait political business group, and when the progressive/nationalist political elite in the conventional sense, i.e., the DPP, had lost its legitimacy and Taiwan was seemingly facing the crisis of national ruin.
11 The formation of a native left-wing political symbol The Black Current or Black Tide (Kuroshio) is a part of the North Pacific Ocean Gyre. It begins as the north branch of the North Equatorial Current, and flows northeastward past the island of Taiwan, Ryukyu Islands, the east coast of the Japanese Archipelago, and merges with the Oyashio Current into the North Pacific Current, eventually connecting the whole trans-Pacific region of the northern hemisphere with its perpetual circulation. Clean with little reflection of sunshine, the water of the current appears dark, from which came the name Black Tide. With high water temperature and current speed, the Black Tide transmits the tremendous thermal energy it carries from the tropics to the polar zone, thereby balancing the climates of North and South and making the areas surrounding its trajectory a zone with biological richness. Many fishing grounds can also found in the Black Tide zone, since it is a transmission belt for the migratory fish. It is also a transmission belt of cultures, or a road of the sea (kaijo no michi) as the Japanese folklorist Yanagita Kunio called it, that links all the islands that the Tide flows by from south to north into a common cultural zone.
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A child of the Black Tide, the island of Taiwan spawned lives, unfolded history, connected with other regions, and went on to become an island of the world. For Taiwan, the Black Tide symbolizes purification, life, and connection. The color black has been a symbol of opposition against power or anarchism in the tradition of modern political radicalism. In the political and intellectual history of Taiwan, however, black has been one of the core symbols of the prewar left-wing movement. The Taiwan Black Youth Federation established in 1926 was the first to raise the black flag in its fight for freedom and resistance to power, capital, and state.28 In 1927, the young poet Yang Hua, a participant in the early socialist movement, wrote in his prison cell a series of poems later collected under the title The Black Tide where he vehemently critiqued capitalism and imperialism and dreamed of letting “the giant waves of the Black Tide rage around the Globe, Cleansing Man of his egoism.”29 This was the first artistic attempt in Taiwan’s intellectual history to give the geographical phenomenon of the Black Tide a definite left-wing political and aesthetical connotation. After 80 years of suppression, forgetting and historical twists and turns, the native antipower symbol of the color black reappeared in the Wild Strawberry student movement in 2008, and then went on to become one of the major color symbols for the struggle of Taiwanese civil society against capital, empire, and state violence during the subsequent years. On March 31, 2014, when a gigantic black tide formed by half a million citizens emerged onto and devoured the streets of Taipei in response to the persistent summon of contemporary black youths of Taiwan, and when the tremendous thermal energy of the warm current accumulated through long years of squeezing by the opposing earth plates finally broke out, a political symbol signifying Taiwan’s native leftwing tradition was born.
12 Black tide and the dialectics of Taiwanese nation-state formation The emergence of the young black tide indeed signified the maturing of Taiwan’s nation-state formation at the present stage, and yet it also planted a seed of self-negation in itself. What the black tide embodies is a will to liberation on the part of Taiwanese society that aspires to freedom, equality, identity, and connection with the world. It quests for a solidarity characteristic of civic nationalism, but it also contains in itself seeds of division and transgression such as ethnic, class, and other emergent identities, as well as an anarchistic impulse embodied by the historically formed societal autonomy. If the new Taiwanese nation-state cannot realize society’s will to liberation, if it should distort and suppress this will, a new wave of black tide will rise, seeking to break off the confines of preexistent political forms and boundaries and searching again for newer political forms and boundaries that promise liberation. This is the dialectics deduced out of Taiwan’s nation-state formation experience of the past few
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hundred years: the origin of the nation-state was heterogeneous, external, and top-down, and yet its completion was autonomous, internal, and bottom-up. It was given a polity, but it also spawned a will of the society. Let us listen closely to the black tide.
13 “As long as it is a new fire, it can revive the burnt ashes.” Yang Hua, The Black Tide
Notes 1 Wu, “Fragments of/f Empires.” 2 Wu, “Chongceng tuzhuhua de lishi yishi” and “Nation-State Formation at the Interface: The Case of Taiwan.” 3 Amsden, “Taiwan’s Economic History”; Cummings, “The Origins and Development of the Northeast Asian Political Economy: Industrial Sectors, Product Cycles, and Political Consequences.” 4 Gellner proposed his famous argument of nationalism and industrialization in 1964 and in his later work published in 1983 he further elaborated the original argument. See respectively Gellner, Thought and Change and Nations and Nationalism. 5 Nairn “Scotland and Europe.” 6 Arrighi et al., Anti-System Movements. 7 Yanaihara, Teikokushugika no Taiwan, p. 10. 8 Hannah Arendt defined the imperialism that arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century as the first stage of the bourgeois political rule instead of the final stage of capitalist development. Based on this formulation David Harvey defined this period (1870–1945) as the age of bourgeois imperialism. See Harvey, The New Imperialism, pp. 42–49. 9 Differential incorporation is a concept this author employs to describe the pattern of early imperial expansion and territorial incorporation of the prewar Japanese empire. For a detailed analysis of this concept and how this pattern of incorporation caused the rise of Taiwanese nationalism, see Wu, “The Formosan Ideology,” chap. 2. 10 Wakabayshi, “Sōtokufu seiji to Taiwan dochaku jinushi shisan kaikyū.” 11 Lien, Taiwan zheng zhi yun dong shi, pp. 60–61, 87. Lien’s manuscript was written during 1954–1955, but was not edited and published by historians ChangYen-hsien and Ang Kaim until 33 years later. 12 Ka, Mi tang xiang ke. 13 Lien, “Taiwan ni okeru nihon shokumin seisaku no jittai ,” at pp. 80–82. 14 Cummings, “The Origins and Development of the Northeast Asian Political Economy.” 15 Huang, Taiwan jingji shi zhong de Taiwan zongdu fu, pp. 26–27. 16 Gates, “Ethnicity and Social Class.” 17 Wu, “Toward a Pragmatic Nationalism: Democratization and Taiwan’s Passive Revolution.” 18 Hsu, Xin xing minzu. 19 Political scientist Ian Bremmer called this multipolar system a “G-Zero world,” arguing that when the international political system cannot form the leading core under the condition of extreme power dispersion, the previous idea of G-7 or G-20, which refers to the group of advanced industrialized countries, has lost its meaning. See Bremmer, Every Nation for Itself. 20 Tsou, “Xing qi zhuan fang—Wu jiemin.”
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21 Hirschman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade, p. 15. I would like to express my gratitude to professor Wu Jieh-min, a good friend since my college days, who kindly directed my attention to Hirschman’s work on trade dependence. 22 Gallagher and Robinson, “The Imperialism of the Free Trade.” 23 Krauss and Bradsher, “China’s Global Ambitions, with Loans and Strings Attached.” 24 Mearsheimer, “Say Goodbye to Taiwan.” 25 Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox. 26 Ibid., pp. xviii–xix. 27 For a discussion on how democratization and civil society deeply shaped the Taiwanese state, see Wu, “Shakai undō, minshu shugi no sai teichaku, kokka tōgō.” 28 Japan Black Youth Federation, the parent organization of Taiwan Black Youth Federation, gave the following interpretation of the color black: “[T]he black flag is the symbol of freedom.… The black youth loves freedom, refuses to give in to power, and hates the rich.” See “Kokushoku Seinen.” 29 Yang Hua, “Hei chao ji.”
References Amsden, Alice H. 1979. “Taiwan’s Economic History: A Case of Etatisme and a Challenge to Dependency Theory,” Modern China 5(3): 341–379. Arrighi, Giovanni, Hopkins, Terrence K., and Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1989. Antisystemic Movements. London: Verso. Bremmer, Ian. 2012. Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World. New York: Portfolio. Cardenal, Juan Pablo and Araújo, Heribert. 2013. Zhongguo qiao qiao zhanling quanshijie 中國 領全世 [China’s Silent Army: The Pioneers, Traders, Fixers and Workers Who Are Remaking the World in Beijing’s Image], ed. & trans. Tan Jia-yu. Teipei: 聯 經出 公 . Cummings, Bruce. 1984. “The Origins and Development of the Northeast Asian Political Economy: Industrial Sectors, Product Cycles, and Political Consequences,” International Organization 38(1): 1–40. Gallagher, John and Ronald Robinson. 1953. “The Imperialism of the Free Trade,” The Economic History Review 6(1): 1–15. Gates, Hill. 1981. “Ethnicity and Social Class,” in Emily M. Ahern and Hill Gates (eds.), The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 241–281. Gellner, Ernest. 1964. Thought and Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gellner, Ernest.1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reprint 2005. Hirschman, Albert O. 1945. National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hsu, Hsin-liang 許 . 1995. Xin xing minzu 新 民族. Taipei: Yuan-liu. Huang, Shao-heng. 黃 . 2010. Taiwan jingji shi zhong de Taiwan zongdu fu: shizheng quan xian, jingjixue yu shiliao 灣經濟 中的 灣總 府:施政權 、經濟學 與 [The Taiwan Government-General in Taiwan’s Economic History: Powers of Policy Implementation, Economics, and Historical Materials]. Taipei: Yuan-liu. Ka, Chih-ming 明. 2003. Mi tang xiang ke: riben zhimin zhuyi xia Taiwan de fazhan yu congshu米 : 本 民主 下 灣的發展與 [The Contradictory relationship between rice and sugar: development and dependency in colonial Taiwan, 1895–1945]. Taipei: Socio Publishing.
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“Kokushoku Seinen 年 [The Black Youth].” Kokushoku Seinen 年 2 (May 5, 1926) (editorial). Krauss, Clifford and Bradsher, Keith. 2015. “China’s Global Ambitions, With Loans and Strings Attached,” New York Times. Accessed July 29, 2015. http://nyti. ms/1MoUBLM. Lien, Wen-ching (Ren, Onkyo) . 1975. “Taiwan ni okeru nihon shokumin seisaku no jittai 台 本 民政策 [The Reality of the Japanese Colonial Policy in Taiwan ],” Shi-en 35(2): 61–83. Lien, Wen-ching . 1988. Taiwan zheng zhi yun dong shi 灣政治運動 [The History of Taiwan’s Political Movement]. Taipei: Daoxiang. Mearsheimer, John J. 2014. “Say Goodbye to Taiwan,” National Interest March– April. Accessed June 4, 2014. http://nationalinterest.org/print/article/saygoodbye-taiwan-9931. Nairn, Tom. 1974. “Scotland and Europe,” New Left Review I/83 (January/February): 57–82. National Intelligence Council. 2012. Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds. www.dni. gov/index.php/about/organization/global-trends-2030. Rodrik, Dani. 2011. The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy. New York: Norton. Stiglitz, Joseph. 2011. “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair (May). Accessed March 24, 2015. www.vanityfair.com/news/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105. Tsou, Ching-Wen 景 . 2014. “Xing qi zhuan fang—Wu jiemin: kua haixia zheng shang jituan zheng zhang kong zhe ge guojia 吳 民 正 這 國家 [Weekly Interview—Wu, Jieh-min: Cross-Strait Political-Business Group is Controlling This Country],” Ziyu shibao 自由時報 (January 6). Accessed March 30, 2014. http://news.ltn.com.tw/news/politics/paper/744402. Wakabayshi, Masahiro 林正 . 1983. “Sōtokufu seiji to Taiwan dochaku jinushi shisan kaikyū—Kōritsu Taichū chūgakko setsuritsu mondai, 1912–1915 [ 政治 台 土 地主資 公立台中中 立 題,一九一二 一九一 年],” Ajia Kenkyū 研究 [Asian Studies] 39(4): 1–41. Wu, Rwei-Ren. 吳 . 2002. “Toward a Pragmatic Nationalism: Democratization and Taiwan’s Passive Revolution,” in Stephane Corcuff (ed.), Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and the Search of a New Taiwan. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 196–218. Wu, Rwei-Ren. 2003. “The Formosan Ideology: Oriental Colonialism and the Rise of Taiwanese Nationalism, 1895–1945.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Wu, Rwei-Ren. 2009. “Chongceng tuzhuhua de lishi yishi: rishi houqi huang deshi yu dao tian jin er de Wenxueshi lunshu zhi chubu bijiao fenxi 土 化的 意識: 治後 黃得時與島 二的文學 論 之 比 分析 [Historical Consciousness of Multilayered Indigenization: A Preliminary Comparative Analysis of the Literary History Discourses of Huang Te-shih and Shimada Kinji],” Taiwanshi yanjiu 台灣 研究 [Taiwan Historical Research] 16(3): 133–163. Wu, Rwei-Ren. 2012. “Shakai undō, minshu shugi no sai teichaku, kokka tōgō—shimin shakai to Gendai Taiwan ni okeru shiminteki nashonarizumu no saikōchiku (2008–2010 nen) 社 運動、民主主 再定 、 家統 – 市民社 代台 市民的 再構 (2008–2010年) [Social Movements, Democratic Reconsolidation, and State Integration: Civil Society and the Restructuring of Civic Nationalism in Contemporary Taiwan, 2008–2010],” in Numazaki Ichirō 一 and Satō
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Yukihito 人 (eds.), Kōsaku suru Taiwan shakai 台灣社會 [Taiwan Society in its Complexities]. Chiba: JETRO, 311–366. Wu, Rwei-Ren. 2013. “Nation-State Formation at the Interface: The Case of Taiwan,” Paper presented at the International Conference on Taiwan in Dynamic Transition, May 24–26, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Wu, Rwei-Ren. 2014. “Fragments of/f Empires: The Peripheral Formation of Taiwanese Nationalism,” In Shyu-tu Lee and Jack F. Williams (eds.), Taiwan’s Struggle: Voices of the Taiwanese. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 27–33. Yanaihara, Tadao 原 . 1988[1929]. Teikokushugika no Taiwan 主 下 台 [Taiwan under Imperialism]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Yang, Hua 華. 1927. “Hei chao ji [The Black Tide],” Taiwan xin wenxue 灣 新文學 [New Taiwanese Literature] 2(2): 66–70.
9
Japanese nationalism under globalization Toward an earthly universalism Takahiro Nakajima
Reaffirming nationalism? Today, Japan is in the midst of reaffirming nationalism. Beginning in the latter half of the 1990s, in a situation that has been described as the “rightwing drift of the young” or the “conservative shift,” a type of nationalism built upon “selfconfidence in one’s own country” has become pervasive. Such extreme forms of nationalism are simply “hate speech” (expressions of discriminatory hatred), which cannot be described as anything other than racism. Among such extreme expressions of nationalism, The Association of Citizens against Special Privileges for Korean Residents (Zainichi tokken wo yurusanai shimin no kai, abbr. Zaitokukai), launched in 2007, took aim at Korean Residents (Zainichi) in Japan, criticizing as improper their acquisition of special economic and social privileges and carried out hate speech propaganda rallies on the streets of Shin-ōkubō in Tokyo, Tsuruhashi in Osaka, and elsewhere.1 In October 2013, the Kyoto District Court ruled in favor of both the prohibition of and reparations for propaganda rallies held by this group in the vicinity of the First Korean Elementary School of Kyoto located in Kyoto Minami Ward; the Osaka High Court’s decision to uphold the lower court’s ruling may remain fresh in many people’s minds. What, though, are the origins of such xenophobic nationalism in Japan? One reason proffered is globalization. A version of this story goes as follows. Within the system of global capitalism, young Japanese who lack adequate skills or who have not received an adequately high level of education have been put in competition with Koreans and Chinese and ultimately find themselves falling into low wage and unstable jobs (non-regular employment). These young people become impoverished and are unable to start a family; they become part of the “losing team” (makegumi) and thereby lose their sense of self-respect. According to this story, these young people turn to xenophobic nationalism as compensation for the loss of their self-respect. Yet there are several difficulties with this story, the greatest difficulty being that xenophobic nationalism does not serve to restore their lost self-respect, nor does it serve to alleviate disparities. The crucial point here is that the global capitalist system reallocated wealth that had been monopolistically controlled by a
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group of corporations and individuals and brought about the impartial distribution of wealth both internationally and domestically. The issue of xenophobic nationalism becomes obfuscated if it is understood as having no ill effects on international cooperation and is instead seen as a domestic phenomenon striking the weak. In particular, the way governmental policies strive toward an impartial and appropriate redistribution of wealth differ dramatically from the inflated advocacy of nationalism. Be that as it may, though the tone of recent arguments that reaffirm nationalism do not directly affirm xenophobic nationalism, they still actively affirm the view that the state is a bulwark against global capitalism. From the 1980s to the 1990s, this phenomenon emerged as a reaction to widely touted critiques of nationalism and postmodern statements about transcending the nation-state, rather than being aimed at modernism and the universalism embodied within modernism. To state it in another way, the internationalist perspective (the good-will manifested by the people of one’s country), which stresses bonds with the citizens of other nations has gradually been weakening. However, I want first to emphasize that I am not suggesting we should forget the dark sides of modernism and internationalism. Rather, I want to draw attention to the fact that the reaffirmation of nationalism can easily turn in the direction of xenophobia when it is divorced from the possibility of what can be called the “earthly universalism” that is part of modernism and internationalism. Even if responsibility for the systematic opposition to the social disparities and poverty wrought by global capitalism lies with the social unit known as the nation-state, I believe it will prove meaningless or even counterproductive without the core and crucial condition of international unity.
Reaffirming nationalism In recent years, many theories of nationalism have been published in Japan, and the overarching tendency to reaffirm nationalism has been most explicit and evident. Among such theorists, Kayano Toshihito has developed a powerful line of argument, the main thrust of which is as follows. As a result of global capitalism, the labor market also has become globalized, and as a consequence, Japanese youth have suffered disparity and poverty, which in turn generates a tendency toward xenophobic nationalism; this creates the need for a competing “nationalism that wards off hysterical nationalism.” As many people are faced with stiffer competition from laborers from neighboring countries, it is necessary to protect the domestic labor market, within the globalizing labor market, in order to mitigate both domestic disparity and social exclusivity. In other words, under these conditions it is difficult not to obey the imperatives of nationalism, which state that nations should take responsibility for the livelihood of their citizenry by distinguishing and protecting the domestic labor market from foreign competitors. The following main thesis of this analysis is as follows. In order to ward off
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T. Nakajima nationalistic hysteria, a different form of nationalism must be established as an alternative. Simply unilaterally denying nationalism cannot eliminate the dangers of nationalism.2
In this piece, Kayano repeatedly censures “liberal intellectuals who espouse antinationalism.”3 His view is that while liberal intellectuals criticize nationalism for “ethical reasons” such as the “oppression of alterity,” this preference for the ethical over the political totally omits any “analysis of the social and political power that nationalism holds,” and in turn “creates the conditions for nationalism to become radicalized.”4 What alternative form of nationalism does Kayano have in mind? In concrete terms, we must change the very character of nationalism by eliminating the national economic and social policies that create the social conditions which reinvigorate nationalism as a scheme of identity.5 This is a somewhat oblique answer. Similarly, in the conclusion, he notes the necessity for “national economic policy that protects the domestic economy.”6 Nevertheless, it is clear what bothers Kayano. This is the fact that the political issues of disparity and poverty are traced to moral issues; this constitutes internal meddling (i.e., meddling with people’s hearts and minds), which conversely serves to encourage fanatical nationalism. Thus, for this reason, many have no choice but to use the nation, and particularly the nation-state, as an external apparatus for violence. If the phenomenon of “a nation-free society” is truly possible, then the brute domination that is so despised by [leftist] proponents in the humanities may cease to exist, but in its place the pressure for homogeneity will become stronger. Under such conditions, each member of society would have to scrutinize one another, seeing to what extent they place faith in the same doctrines and ideologies. This path is so closed off that it almost cannot avoid becoming a kind of religious community within which there is a completely homogenized faith. […] Rather than having to face internal pressure to homogenize [all of one’s ideas and thoughts], it is greatly preferable to institute behavioral guidelines based upon laws, which are not concerned with internal states. We have to think about why modern nations, which exercise a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, have advocated the separation of church and state and why the interference of political authority in thought and religious belief has diminished.7 In the end, Kayano calls for the reaffirmation of nation-states built upon the principles of modern secularism as well as the nationalism that such nation-states embody. This does not differ greatly from liberalist views such as that of Maruyama Masao.8
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The position of Okinawa However, when modern nationalism is applied to the case of Japan, it relies upon naïve assumptions about who “we” “Japanese” (Nihonjin) are.9 Immediately preceding the quote above, Kayano criticized Kawamitsu Shin’ichi’s The Ryukyu Republic Social Constitution, Article C. The greatest point of contention raised by Kayano is that Kawamitsu’s “constitution, in a society that has abolished the nation,”10 seemed to be attempting to control even the “interiority of people’s hearts.”11 In other words, while repeatedly referring to “liberal intellectuals who espouse anti-nationalism,” Kayano appears to avoid Kawamitsu’s argument, but in the end he does not discuss the national economic and social policies needed to solve the structure of disparity and poverty in Okinawa, which has brought about the “Okinawan Independence Movement” and “Okinawan Nationalism.”12 Furthermore, in regard to Arakawa Akira’s Okinawa: Tōgō to hangyaku, which advocates “patriotism that does not presume the existence of a nation,” Kayano notes that such patriotism is “easily mistaken for anti-nationalist ideology”13 and advances the following criticism: However, regardless of whether it is patriotism or nationalism, there is no way the state would disappear. No matter how strongly one might emphasize the “self-autonomy” of local societies based on the love of one’s hometown (aikyōshin), if this means “self-autonomy” under the aegis of the state, it cannot allow the freedom to engage in acts of physical violence in defiance of legal authority. To the contrary, if such “self-autonomy” gains independence from the nation, it would inevitably become the governing body of another nation. In such a case the patriotism based on the love of one’s hometown (aikyōshin) would become nationalism.14 Here Kayano avoids the issue of Okinawa’s patriotism by seeing it as simply a matter of the feelings of love for one’s hometown; however, he does not suggest any policies that might resolve the problem of how Japanese nationalism, as a form of state violence, forces Okinawa to conform to a framework of disparity and poverty. Kayano’s argument, which cannot avoid positioning Okinawa within the framework of “anti-nationalism,” shows that the so-called alternative form of nationalism in truth is not an alternative form: Within the nation-state, sovereignty is exercised through the use of a shared language and conversely the exercise of this sovereignty is what preserves the use of this shared language. Thus, we must carefully think about the extent to which the “form” of this link between language and sovereignty offers a fixed and unalterable framework.15 The “form” of a nation-state called Japan, which has the “fixed and unalterable framework” of a “shared language,” is discussed here, but one cannot help but
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ask how this “form” generates disparity and poverty for Okinawa. When applied to the case of Okinawa, Kayano’s “nationalism which wards off nationalistic hysteria” cannot avoid bringing about the exact opposite effect. The important point is that whether one reaffirms nationalism or not, it must be carefully analyzed, as it is a mechanism deeply connected to one’s interiority or heart-mind. In other words, the problem of a “religious community” based upon one’s interiority or heart-mind, which Kayano absolutely eschews and avoids, is the key to critically understanding the problem of nationalism under globalization and for conceiving an alternative form of nationalism.
From the denial of universalism to the endorsement of particularism: multiculturalism and nationalism Ōsawa Masachi attempts to explain the characteristic feature of Japanese nationalism under globalization as “ironic immersion.” Ironic immersion denotes the unique antagonistic relationship between one’s consciousness and one’s (objective) behavior. On the level of consciousness, one feels an ironic distance from the object (one does not really believe). However, when judged from the standpoint of behavior, it is as if one has become immersed within the object (in actual practice one believes). Multicultural society is being established through people’s ironic immersion.16 If we describe nationalism in these terms, “ironic immersion” refers to the paradoxical condition that one does not “really believe” in nationalism in terms of one’s consciousness, whereas one believes in it in one’s actual lived behavior. Ōsawa describes this as “Stalin under the Stalin regime,” or in other words the juxtaposition of Stalin—who did not believe in the Stalinist system—with Stalin who in his actual behavior conducted himself as if he completely believed in it. The “ironic” aspect and the “immersion” aspect constitute an intimate, mutually dependent relationship. However, from time to time there are moments when an individual must accept both of these facets at the same time. For example, Stalin under Stalinism himself was an example. Today, proponents of conservatism and nationalism offer additional examples. Thus, after undergoing the relativization of different points of view characteristic of multiculturalism, they become immersed within nationalism and rightist ideology.17 There is real irony within Ōsawa’s argument itself, but the question he poses and the answer he offers are clear. In other words, his question is why, despite the widespread acceptance of the harsh criticism levied against nationalism by “leftist multiculturalism,” is there such widespread support for “nationalism and rightist ideology.” Ōsawa’s answer is that multiculturalism brews nationalism.
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“The mutually complicit relationship between leftist multiculturalism and the conservative shift or rightist drift” is the reason for Japanese nationalism today.18 Ōsawa’s argument assumes that since “leftist multiculturalism” advocates tolerance for cultural diversity, it inevitably relativizes modern enlightenment “universalism” and thereby makes it impossible. This is because “supporters of conservatism and nationalism” are committed to regarding “universal ideals,” like “human rights,” as deceitful hypocrisies and endorse respect for the “local, unique ideologies” of different expressions of nationalism.19 The rejection of the universal leads to the support of the particular. However, is this really the case?
The mutually complicit and mutually antagonistic relationship between the Left and the Right Ōsawa lays out another argument concerning nationalism. Contemporary Japanese society, in the [60-year post-war] period, seems to be experiencing difficulty finding a transcendent third-party that can grant it the approval it seeks. If one seeks for such in the past, i.e., before the “sixty years” [of the postwar period], one becomes a member of the Right; conversely, [if one seeks for it] in the future, i.e., after the “sixty years” [of the post war period], one becomes a member of the Left.20 Here, Ōsawa’s interest lies in the nationalism that is caught up with the “Yasukuni problem.” Why do Japanese Prime Ministers and Cabinet Members choose to pay their respects at the Yasukuni Shrine despite knowing this will provoke China and Korea? In response, many often suggest the explanation that it is a matter of personal faith or a domestic issue; in actuality, though, there may be several issues involved. Ōsawa considers this issue to be one of self-affirmation or self-approval for the Japanese people after the war. To protect and affirm their contemporary identity and significance, the Right appeals to the dead. Moreover, they do not appeal to just the ordinary dead; they must be those who “died for the nation, or those who died for the emperor.”21 Holding onto specific hopes and aspirations, they “intentionally endeavored to transform society”; even though their actions brought about bad states of affairs, we cannot betray their hopes and aspirations per se.22 Here Stalin’s regime is again referenced alongside “Western progressive intellectuals.” “Western progressive intellectuals” were by no means ignorant of the horrific situation under Stalin’s regime. However, the reason “they praised the dark truths of the Soviet Union” is because “they wanted to see it as the embodiment of the dreams of the many millions of laborers who had lived since the 19th century.”23 In other words, if one were to belittle the Soviet Union or to criticize it, it would feel as if one were betraying the many laborers throughout history
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Here Ōsawa also hints at the “mutually complicit relationship” between the Right and the Left. As an analytical framework, this has a wide range of applications. Yet whether it is “the multiculturalism of the Left” or the “Western progressive intellectuals” who lauded the Stalinist regime, is it really so easy for them to abandon universalism and drift toward an endorsement of particularism? There is something Ōsawa overlooks, whether by chance or design, which is the process of universalization, or universalism as a process, which seems to serve as the foundation for their ideas. To help us think about this further, let us scrutinize Ōsawa’s assertion that if one seeks for the “transcendent third-party perspective” “in the future, i.e., after the ‘sixty years’ [of the postwar period], one can become a member of the Left.” Directly before this quote he argues as follows: A “final judgment” is something we can pursue, even in a literal sense. In particular, it is not something packed in along with the dead in the past but instead something we can directly anticipate in the realm of a transcendent savior waiting for us in the boundless future. Actually, this is precisely, what the anti-Yasukuni Left wing wants to achieve. Under such circumstances, both history and our “present” will be judged not by an agreed upon standard of the “good” safeguarded by the dead, but by the judgment of a savior located at the end of history—in other words, the judgment of “universal justice.”25 Here the “anti-Yasukuni Left wing” is set up in a way that makes it impossible for it to cooperate with Right wing nationalism. There are different groups within the Left and these might be divided into those who relativize universalism and those who hold it as immutable. If one proceeds in this way, then the Right can also be divided among those who have “undergone the relativization of different points of view characteristic of multiculturalism” and those who represent xenophobia.
The unity of universalism and particularism: the introduction of Jesus Christ However, surprisingly, Ōsawa attempts to consistently advance this train of thought. No matter what, he must uphold the complicit relationship between the Left and the Right. Most communities universally maintain explicit behavioral norms while at the same time maintaining implicit and blasphemous (anti-)norms that categorically deny the former. […] The relationship between the Left’s advocacy of political correctness and the conservatives’ pretense of its evilness is
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analogous to the relationship between the explicit norms and implicit (anti-)norms that can be seen in all communities with high levels of cohesiveness. […] An implicit (anti-)norm is nothing more than the complement that is produced by the explicit norm when the latter surpasses its own limits.26 What seems clear in this passage is that the complicit relationship that Ōsawa posits between the Left and the Right (their “complementarity”) is a result of his presuming the existence of a community with “high levels of cohesiveness.” Several examples are mentioned in the full text of the abbreviated segment, such as the military, the Nazi SS, the Catholic Church, and a school class. However, there is some inversion here. The debate over nationalism revolves around the type of cohesiveness that should be implemented within the nation, or whether such cohesion should be implemented at all; one cannot work on the assumption that there already is a community with “high levels of cohesiveness.” If this is correct, then the policy solution to the “deadlock” between the Left and the Right that Ōsawa suggests is based upon the hidden and furtive merger of universalism (on the part of the Left) and particularism (on the part of the Right). Furthermore, his argument takes on a religious tinge. Is overcoming the deadlock formed by this opposition—the opposition between an omnipotent God and a limited God—possible to gain a third party perspective? This deadlock stems from the fact that God is seen as the absolute good, and as inerrant. If a way to escape this deadlock existed, wouldn’t it be that God himself (the third party perspective) is evil, that God is capable of evil, and as a result God is fallible? Such proposals are by no means unusual. The implications of the idea that God was a human male—in other words Jesus Christ—who was defiled by human hardships and failures, is in line with this argument. To consider God as equivalent to the third party perspective, as having the capacity for evil, is to historicize this possibility and throw it into the vortex of history.27 The one who connects universalism and particularism—in other words, Jesus Christ—becomes the ideal of salvation. This ideal implies that universality can also be construed as evil, which relativizes “universal justice” while at the same time tying the particularities of history to universality, and solidifying the (anti-) norm of nationalism.
The possibilities and dangers of religious nationalism This religious solution, which resolves the undesirable amalgamation of the universalism and the particularism surrounding nationalism while at the same time placating the demands of both universalism and particularism by connecting them through the figure of Jesus Christ, is both attractive and dangerous. We can describe this in terms of the possibilities and dangers of modern religious nationalism.
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Nakajima Takeshi advocates a framework that shields the recent Hindu nationalist movement from modern secularist criticism; in doing so he notes that Ōsawa’s theory of nationalism “clearly denotes the construction of religious nationalism” and states that “religious nationalism constitutes neither a backlash nor an opposition to modernism, but rather furnishes an inherent characteristic of the modern nation as well as nationalism.”28 Religious nationalism itself is inherent to nationalism, and religion is an “important segment that supports the base” of nationalism.29 Furthermore, he introduces two distinctions within religious nationalism. Existing religions that embrace two types of openness—being open to the world (being open to others and to other religions) and being open to what lies beyond (being open to transcendent truth) become consolidated with modern nationalism as ideologies that unify nations; this clearly demarcates “religion as the source of identity politics” and establishes a guiding principle for national values. In the construction of modern states, their accompanying religions, which pursue a modern form of nationalism aimed at unifying the nation, become useful resources for differentiating between others (foreign countries) and ourselves (our country) and, setting aside things like fascism, which attempts to universalize and spread distinctive religious values through violent expansionism, represent value systems that are inwardly focused and closed to both others and the world. Religions that teach “many roads to one truth” cannot serve as religious resources for nationalism.30 In other words, there are those who use religion as a source for internally closed-off forms of nationalism, while there are also religions that are based upon the aforementioned dual orientations of being open to the world and to what is beyond. Recently, many in the religious revivalist movement fall into the first camp, while the latter scenario is considered a possibility for postcolonial Hindu nationalism. The important point is that even though Nakajima uses Ōsawa’s framework, he also suggests the possibility of religions that are formed around the dual openings, as he describes them, being open to the world and to the beyond, which are absent from Ōsawa’s “religious” solution. Ōsawa and Nakajima both point out that the Kyoto School of Philosophy sought such a “religious” unity between universalism and particularism, but instead ended up exacerbating nationalism and ultimately descending into ultra-nationalism.31 However, it seems that Ōsawa’s solution may not succeed in avoiding the pitfalls suffered by the Kyoto School of Philosophy. In contrast, I believe Nakajima’s idea of “being open to the world (being open to others and to other religions) and being open to what lies beyond (being open to transcendent truth)” hints at the possibility of other ways to unify universalism and particularism. One such way is to understand universalism as a process without abandoning the demands for a “transcendent truth,” or in other words, to consider
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universalization to be a process that provides one with the tools to carry out an ongoing, critical examination of universalism. Another is that as particularism opens itself up to the existence of “others” and “other religions,” it frees itself from the inward-facing and isolationist ideology of the local (localism). Furthermore, as both these possibilities are fulfilled, a third emerges: that as the local becomes open to others and other forms of universalization, it seeks not a celestial universalism but an earthly one.
Universalism and nationalism in Takeuchi Yoshimi In order to think of this earthly universalism, I would like to go back to a previous discourse on universalism and nationalism in Japan that is represented in Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910–1977), who was generally known as a translator of Chinese literature, as represented by Lu Xun (1881–1936). However, he has often been criticized as “nationalistic,” because he always mentioned the “independence of the country” and “patriotism” if allowed the opportunity. In what sense was Takeuchi a “nationalist?” To consider this question, let us look at his essay “Modernism and the Problem of Nation” (September 1951). Takeuchi said that “it is necessary to wash out a stain with one’s own hands” in order to interrupt history.32 In other words, he argued that the Japanese as a “bloodstained nation” should face the fact that their nationalism culminated in ultra-nationalism and confront it for themselves not depending on others, and pay for it: From one point of view, the mentality of avoiding a confrontation with nationalism illustrates the lack of consciousness of responsibility for the war; in other words, the lack of conscience. The lack of conscience is based on the lack of courage. Because people do not want to be hurt, they try to forget a bloodstained nation, and hesitate to cry out that I am Japanese. However, forgetting can never purify the blood.33 Takeuchi’s standpoint as a “nationalist” is clear. It is nothing but the “lack of consciousness of responsibility for the war,” the “lack of conscience,” and the “lack of courage” that make the Japanese “[avoid] the confrontation with nationalism.” “Nationalism” is necessary in order to take responsibility for themselves, and also for a minimum of their “morality.” Such “nationalism” and “morality” are indispensable for a “literary revolution” and revolution in general. Nonetheless, Takeuchi was not a nationalist in a simplified way. We can find a clue of his nationalism in the postscript of Legacy of Disobedience: “I would like to propose that Japan as a state should also make provision for dissolution of the state. Otherwise, people would not have patriotism.”34 This is a passage in the last section titled “On eschatology.” We can understand here that “patriotism” in Takeuchi is, so to speak, an intellectual emotion that emerges by supposing an “Eschaton/End” of an association, a state, or a civilization as a group of people. It could not be a natural emotion or an emotion comprehended “naturalistically.”
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T. Nakajima What is a state aimed at its dissolution? One of my fancies is that we divide Japan into a few parts, and have each of them build a state based on its plan. This is an experimental idea that seeks an autonomous division, not a heteronomous one as in Korea or Germany. I think this is better than conducting a uniform and irreparable experiment using power on a nationwide scale.35
Takeuchi proposed that Japan divide itself into a few parts on its own, and that each part “build a state.” Thus, for him, a state is not an “eternal continuation” or something “natural.” It is something to be constructed and it has its own beginning and end. Moreover, its construction is not a naturalistic one either; rather, it follows a “law” abstracted from experiences by a reformed scholarship. To put it in a reverse way, a state that does not have such a scholarship or does not follow such a “law” is not a state. People who gather there cannot be called a “nation.” It might have been too much to say that unless national literature is established, Japan will be ruined; but I rather think it is not an exaggeration. I think the Japanese nation is now ruined. In the future, it has a possibility of being reborn, but I think the status quo is the ruination of the country.36 For Takeuchi, a scholarship that makes an experience an experience and abstracts a “law” from experience is first and foremost “national literature.” But in postwar Japan, such “national literature” had not emerged. This means that a moral subjectivity had not been established by radically transforming itself, and that it could not give itself its own beginning and end. Therefore, it is inevitable to say that the “Japanese nation is ruined” and the “status quo is the ruination of the country.” How about his universalism? In his well-known article “Asia as Method” (1961), Takeuchi thought of universalism as follows: Rather the East must re-embrace the West, it must change the West itself in order to realize the latter’s outstanding cultural values on a greater scale. Such a rollback of culture or values would create universality. The East must change the West in order to further elevate those universal values that the West produced. This is the main problem facing East-West relations today, and it is at once a political and cultural issue. The Japanese must grasp this idea as well. When this rollback takes place, we must have our own cultural values. And yet perhaps these values do not already exist, in substantive form. Rather I suspect that they are possible as method, that is to say, as the process of the subject’s self-formation. This I have called “Asia as method,” and yet it is impossible to definitively state what this might mean.37 The universalism Takeuchi thought of was neither one given by the West nor one which was opposed to the West. It would have to be a trans-universalism in
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which the East participates by transforming the East and the West simultaneously. Universalism is always in a process of transformation—a process of becoming better. In this respect, Takeuchi did not refer to a “substantive form” to support this trans-universalism. Rather it must be realized through a “method,” i.e., the “process of the subject’s self-formation.” If we can say that the “subject’s selfformation” is the subject’s self-transformation, the universalism from East Asia does not presuppose a kind of substantive contents of East Asia, but it requests a highly methodological intervention into the process of self-formation/ self-transformation of the East and the West at the same time.
Universalism and nationalism in China today Takeuchi’s universalism in “Asia as Method” finds an echo in current discourses in China. By referring to the Chinese Dream, which would be later taken up by the Chinese government, Zhao Tingyang speaks of the “dream of modernization” that China chose in this way: “It is only possible for modernized China to resist against and escape from Western hegemony. That is to say, if we succeed to change China into the West, we can resist against the West and become China again.”38 Zhao does not simply advocate an alternative modernity, but tries to let China contribute to the coming universalism. He criticizes the “local characteristics” of Chinese culture in the following way: If China cannot develop the system of concepts, discourses, and knowledge that are universalizable in the world, there does not exist Chinese spirit having a universal meaning. In other words, the foundation of Chinese spirit must be the universalizable system of thought and it should not be satisfied with Chinese culture with local characteristics. “Culture” is only a local knowledge. That is why discourses like “Chinese culture” or “Culture China” are ones that provide a flippant self-satisfaction. We cannot regard them as Chinese dream. Chinese dream comes true when it embodies the world-ness.39 How can the “Chinese dream” embody universalism going beyond local “culture” and “develop the system of concepts, discourses, and knowledge that are universalizable in the world?” To this question, Zhao proposes “China as methodology” in a manner that is similar to Takeuchi’s “Asia as Method.” He states: The flexible faces of China indicate exactly the very nature of China, which is the China as methodology or the methodological China. If I am right, as [far as] China is concerned, its methodological existence means the essence of China more than its values, in other words, how it explains more than what it is, that is, Chinese methodology speaks Chineseness more than Chinese values. I take it a key point to understand China.40
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An evaluation of “Chinese values” is not the point at issue, because these values belong to “culture.” When Zhao advocates “China as methodology,” it “never stuck to any concept, doctrine, belief or ideology as it were,” and “refuses the fundamentalism in any belief.”41 However, even if he can take some distance from the discourses advocating “Chinese values,” Zhao’s “China as methodology” seems to face the trap of ultimately re-affirming the status quo, when it turns out to be too flexible. In this regard, it recalls the “opportunism” that Tosaka Jun (1900–1945) criticized in the prewar Japanese situation.42 It is worth noting that Takeuchi inherited Tosaka’s criticism against Japanese opportunism toward nationalism and tried to find a method of self-restraint through China as the other. Zhao introduces the concept of “Tianxia” (all-under-heaven) as a concrete example of Chinese universality.43 It is effective as the world concept that is simultaneously Chinese and universal. Still, there are some criticisms of Zhao’s introduction of Tianxia. Among them,44 I would like to pick up Xu Jilin’s thought. In the journal Xintianxia Zhuyi [New Theory of All-under-heaven] edited by Xu Jilin and Liu Qing, Chong Ming explores the notion of “self-restraint universalism.”45 I suppose that this idea is one that reaches beyond the limitations of Chinese universality. By following Chong’s idea, Xu tries to constitute “shared universalism” as follows: The new theory of all-under-heaven is a twofold overcoming of the traditional theory of all-under-heaven and the nation state. On the one hand, it overcomes the centrality of the traditional theory of all-under-heaven and keeps its characteristics of universalism. On the other hand, it overcomes the narrowminded standpoint of self-interest supremacy doctrine of the nation state and strikes a balance between particularism and universalism, by introducing the principle of equal sovereignty among nation states. The authenticity and sovereignty of the nation state is not absolute, but limited to some degree from the outside. This limitation is the principle of universal civilization of the new theory of all-under-heaven. De-centralization and de-hierarchization are just negative aspects of the new theory of all-under-heaven. Concerning its positive aspects, this theory tries to constitute a new sort of universality of allunder-heaven, that is, “shared universality.”46 The “shared universality” Xu explores is based upon a self-critical reflection and recognition of the others as the singular. It aims for “a twofold overcoming of the traditional theory of all-under-heaven and the nation state” by refusing transcendence such as God or Heaven, and the expansion of the nation state, including the form of empire. From the perspective of political institutions, “shared universalism” leads to an “East Asian community sharing a common destiny” instead of any form of China-centered Empire. Xu’s idea is decisively influenced by a dialogue with the Korean historian Baik Young-seo, who emphasizes the importance of the
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“peripheral perspective.” Baik pays attention to concrete otherness in the “peripheral perspective” and thinks of “communicative universalism” against any type of hegemonic universality lacking “peripheral perspective.”47 His criticism is applied to Xu’s idea as well. Without an effort to find communicative universal elements in the periphery such as Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and minority areas, Xu’s endeavor to renew the theory of all-under-heaven would be meaningless or become a re-affirmation of the status quo.48 Xu replies to Baik’s criticism and restates his idea as follows: The East Asian community sharing a common destiny needs a soul, that is, a new universal value to be created. That soul must be institutionalized or incarnated in a body. The construction of East Asian community is not only that of an association beyond nation states by relying on associations among states, but also that of “Civil East Asia” in which the intellectuals and citizens in East Asia communicate each by each. Unlike an association of states, “Civil East Asia” can go beyond the barriers of the nation state, and several versions of centralization or hierarchy. It possesses natural equality and becomes a deep and thick social soil of new universal value in East Asia.49 “Civil East Asia” is neither an empire nor an association of states, but a place in which the “intellectuals and citizens in East Asia communicate each by each.” If it is realized someday, we could imagine an “East Asian community sharing a common destiny.” However, what is the “soul” of that coming community? Let us recall that the current discourse of the “Chinese Dream” also needs “spirit.” What is the difference between “soul” and “spirit”? In other words, how can we think of the difference methodologically?
Spirituality and earthly universalism In 1944 during the Second World War, Suzuki Daisetz (1870–1966) published Japanese Spirituality in order to think of the difference between the “Japanese spirit” that overwhelmed Japanese society as a national ideology, and “Japanese spirituality” that could be open and linked to other cultures and societies. He described “Japanese spirituality” as follows: One can understand that because of this, spirituality has universality and is not limited to any particular people or nation. To the extent the Chinese, Europeans, Americans, or Japanese possess spirituality, they are similar. Following the awakening of spirituality, however, they each have their respective differences in the patterns or forms in which the phenomena of seishin’s activity manifest themselves.50 The “Japanese spirituality” Suzuki tried to find was not a Japanized one. Rather, it had to be a universal spirituality that emerged via Japanese experience. The modern notion of “spirituality” could be traced back to Swami Vivekananda
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(1863–1902), Indian Hindu monk, who attended the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893. When Vivekananda discussed this notion in the Parliament, Shaku Sōen (1860–1919) probably heard it. Suzuki subsequently translated Shaku’s own talk into English. In this fashion, the notion came into Suzuki afterwards.51 Here, we can find the circulation of a translated and transformed notion of “spirituality.” The “spirituality” Suzuki tried to differentiate from “spirit” was not defined as a heavenly but rather as an earthly universalism. He stated: Religious consciousness with regard to heaven, quite simply, will not be brought forth by heaven alone. When heaven descends to earth, man can feel it in his hands; he has knowledge of heaven’s warmth because he can actually touch it. The potential in cultivated land derives from heaven’s light falling to earth. For this reason, religion bears its greatest authenticity when it appears among peasants and farmers who live and work on the soil.52 Spirituality may appear to be a faint and shadowy concept, but there is nothing more deeply rooted in the earth, for spirituality is life itself. The depth of the earth is bottomless. Things that soar in the firmament, and things that descend from the sky, are wonderful, but are nonetheless external and do not come from within one’s own life. The earth and the self are one. The roots of the earth are the roots of one’s own existence. The earth is oneself.53 As a modern intellectual, Suzuki knew the power of Christianity that had a notion of heavenly “transcendence,” but he tried to find an earthly universalism in Buddhism. Needless to say, Heidegger also spoke of “earth” at the core of his philosophy. What type of difference do we find between Heideggerian philosophy and Suzuki’s earthly universality? In my sense, the earthly universality Suzuki articulated never appropriated Japanese “Spirit” [Geist] as some essence of Japan, but it opened up a trans-universal aspect, even in “Japanese spirit.”
Conclusion Turning back to the topic of nationalism in Japan today, if the desired form of nationalism were to be established, it must possess the characteristics of universalization as a process, and it must be open to multiple others and different types of nationalism. Needless to say, this excludes xenophobic nationalism. However, we must keep in mind that it only shares a resemblance in form to the nationalism of Ōsawa’s Jesus Christ or the “place (basho) or nothingness (mu)” spoken of by disciples of the Kyoto School of Philosophy. How, though, is it different? Nationalism that aspires to earthly universalism prioritizes solidarity with the citizens of other nations and peoples. From the modern to contemporary period, it seems that Japanese nationalism has not been able to completely overcome what Nakajima describes as a
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“fascist-like violent expansionism that attempts to universalize and spread distinctive religious values through” or “a value system that is inward focused and closed to both others and the world.” In other words, it has fallen either into Japan as Jesus Christ, Japan as “place” or “nothingness,” or into xenophobic nationalism. Yet is it truly feasible, today, to have a form of nationalism that prioritizes solidarity with the citizens of other nations and peoples while seeking earthly universalism? It must be a self-critical and trans-universal nationalism which Takeuchi and Suzuki imagined in their own way. That would be a nationalism based upon a state aimed at its dissolution or spiritualized state. However, such a new form of nationalism has never been realized, while we are confronting a phenomenon of xenophobic nationalism in Japan as well as everywhere in this globalized world. I believe we had better have a new image of association instead of inwardfacing and isolationist nationalism. In this respect, I would like to introduce consideration of the “university” as one such possibility. I raise the topic of the university under globalization as a way to implement a systematic multi-national resistance against the disparity and poverty that have resulted from global capitalism. In short, what I envision is a university jointly administered by each and every nation in East Asia. Such a joint East-Asian university itself would constitute a form of resistance. The institution I propose would not be established as an external part of current national universities; rather, it would be built as a united association of national universities. Furthermore, such a university would not be formed from scratch; rather, it would take shape through the real practice of international solidarity between national universities.54 A university as a place or site of earthly universalism; this hints at another direction for the reaffirmation of nationalism under globalization, one that inclines neither toward xenophobia nor toward narrow-minded religious nationalism. As I have mentioned, there are many different types of discourses on universality in the East and the West. It is worth lending our attention to the way or the method by which universality is expressed. Without that critical awareness of methodology, discourses on universality easily fall into the trap of the reappropriation of others.
Notes 1 Cf. Zainichi tokken wo yurusanai shimin no kai, homepage www.zaitokukai.info (accessed on October 12, 2014). 2 Kayano, Nashonarizumu wa aku nanoka, pp. 38–39. 3 Ibid., p. 43. 4 Ibid., pp. 42–43. 5 Ibid., p. 45. 6 Ibid., p. 210. 7 Ibid., pp. 113–114.
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8 For example, Maruyama Masao states the following concerning Carl Schmidt’s ein neutraler Staat: A comparison with European nationalism will lead us to the crux of the matter. As Carl Schmidt has pointed out, an outstanding characteristic of the modern European State lies in its being ein neutraler Staat. That is to say, the State adopts a neutral position on internal values, such as the problem of what truth and justice are; it leaves the choice and judgment of all values of this sort to special socialgroups (for instance, to the Church) or to the conscience of the individual. The real basis of national sovereignty is a purely “formal” legal structure, divorced from all questions of internal value. Thus a compromise was effected between the rulers and the ruled—a compromise based on distinguishing between form and content, between external matters and internal matters, between the public and the private domains. Questions of thought, belief, and morality were deemed to be private matters and, as such, were guaranteed their subjective, “internal” quality; meanwhile, state power was steadily absorbed into an “external” legal system, which was of a technical nature. (Maruyama , Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, p. 3) 9 While Kayano’s treatment of Okinawa is addressed later in the text, Maruyama Masao also attempted to reaffirm Japanese nationalism but did not take Okinawa into account. See Maruyama, Maruyama Masao shū, p. 106. 10 Kayano, Nashonarizumu wa aku nanoka, p. 98. 11 Ibid., p. 107. 12 In addition to Kawamitsu Shin’ichi’s The Ryūkyū Republic Social Constitution, Article C, see also Matsushima, Ryūkyū dokuritsu heno michi; The Ryūkyū Nation Independence Comprehensive Research Conference (www.acsils.org/gaiyou); and The Executive Committee, Okinawa dokuritsu no kanōsei wo meguru gekironkai. 13 Kayano, Nashonarizumu wa aku nanoka, p. 90. 14 Ibid., p. 93. 15 Ibid., p. 178. 16 Ōsawa, Kindai nihon no nashonarizumu, pp. 211–212. 17 Ibid., p. 213. 18 Ibid., p. 209. 19 Ibid., pp. 214–215. 20 Ibid., p. 134. 21 Ibid., p. 126. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 122. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., pp. 133–134. 26 Ibid., pp. 216–217. 27 Ibid., pp. 144–145. 28 Nakajima, Nashonarizumu to shūkyō, p. 59. 29 Ibid., p. 59. 30 Ibid., pp. 60–61. 31 Ibid., p. 61; Ōsawa, Kindai nihon no nashonarizumu, pp. 101–106. 32 Takeuchi, Takeuchi Yoshimi zenshū, vol. 7, p. 37. 33 Ibid., p. 36 34 Takeuchi, Takeuchi Yoshimi zenshū, vol. 9, p. 294. 35 Ibid., p. 386. 36 Ibid., p. 418. 37 Takeuchi, What is Modernity? p. 165 (emphases in original and translation slightly modified). 38 Zhao, “Meiguomeng, Ouzhoumeng he Zhongguomeng.”
Japanese nationalism under globalization 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54
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Ibid. Zhao, “The China Dream in Question,” p. 8. Ibid. Tosaka, Shisō to fūzoku, p. 305. Zhao, “The China Dream in Question,” p. 13. Cf. Callahan, “Tianxia, Empire, and the World,” p. 102. Chong, “Minzu guojia, tianxia yu pubianzhuyi,” p. 50. Xu, “Xintianxiazhuyi yu zhonguode neiwai zhixu,” p. 8. Baik, Kyōsei heno michi to kakushin genba, pp. 1–10. Ibid., pp. 10–13. Xu, “Xintianxiazhuyi yu zhonguode neiwai zhixu,” p. 24. Suzuki, Japanese Spirituality, p. 17. Kamata, Shūkyō to reisei, p. 371. Suzuki, Japanese Spirituality, p. 42. Ibid., p. 43. For a concrete example of this in action, see “University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy,” http://utcp.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp.
References Arakawa, Akira 新 明. 2000. Okinawa: Tōgō to hangyaku 統 反 [Okinawa: Integration and Insurrection]. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. Baik, Young-seo . 2016. Kyōsei heno michi to kakushin genba: Jissenkadai toshiteno higashiajia 生 道 核心 場 題 東 [The Path toward Co-existence and Core Site: East Asia as Practical Agenda]. Tokyo: Hosei University Press. Callahan, William. 2011. “Tianxia, Empire, and the World: Chinese Vision of World Order for the Twenty-First Century,” in William Callahan and Elena Barabantseva (eds.), China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign Policy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chong, Ming 明. 2015. “Minzu Guojia, Tianxia yu Pubianzhuyi 民族 家、天下 主义 [Nation State, All-under-Heaven, and Universalism],” in Xu Jilin and Liu Qing (eds.), Xintianxia Zhuyi [The New Tianxia-ism]. Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe. Executive Committee. 1997. Okinawa dokuritsu no kanōsei wo meguru gekironkai 「 立 能性 論 」 行委員 [Polemics Surrounding the Feasibility of Okinawan Independence]. Kyoto: Shisuikai Shuppan. Kamata, Tōji 東二 1995. Shūkyō to reisei 性 [Religion and Spirituality]. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shuppan. Kayano, Toshihito 人. 2011. Nashonarizumu wa aku nanoka [Is Nationalism Evil?]. Tokyo: NHK Shuppan. Maruyama, Masao. 1963. Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, trans. Ivan Morris. New York: Oxford University Press. Maruyama, Masao 山 男. 2003. Maruyama Masao shū 山 男 [The Maruyama Masao Compilation], vol. 3. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Matsushima, Yasukatsu 島 . 2012. Ryūkyū dokuritsu heno michi: Shokuminchishugi ni aragau Ryūkyū nashonarizumu 球 立 道 民地主 抗 球 [The Path towards Ryūkyū Independence: Ryūkyū Nationalism which Resists Colonialism]. Kyoto: Hōritsu bunkasha. Nakajima, Takeshi 中島 . 2014. Nashonarizumu to shūkyō [Nationalism and Religion]. Tokyo: Bungeishunjūsha.
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Ōsawa, Masachi 大 真 . 2011. Kindai nihon no nashonarizumu 代 本 [Modern Japanese Nationalism]. Tokyo: Kodansha. Suzuki, Daisetz. 1972 [1944]. Japanese Spirituality, trans. Norman Waddell. Tokyo: Yushodo. Takeuchi, Yoshimi 竹 . 1981. Takeuchi Yoshimi zenshū 竹 全 [Complete works of Yoshimi Takeuchi], 17 vols. Tokyo: Chikuma shobō. Takeuchi, Yoshimi. 2005. What is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, ed. and trans. Richard Calichman. New York: Columbia University Press. Tosaka, Jun . 2001. Shisō to fūzoku 想 風俗 [Thoughts and Customs]. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Xu, Jilin 许纪林. 2015. “Xintianxiazhuyi yu Zhonguode neiwai zhixu 新天下主义 中 的 [A New Theory of All-under-Heaven and Chinese Inner and Outer Order],” in Xu Jilin and Liu Qing (eds.), Xintianxia Zhuyi [The New Tianxia-ism]. Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin Chubanshe. Zhao, Tingyang 赵 . 2006. “Meiguomeng, Ouzhoumeng he Zhongguomeng 美 , 中 [American Dream, European Dream, and Chinese Dream],” Kuawenheduihua 文化对话 18. Accessed October 7, 2016, www.aisixiang.com/ data/9764.html. Zhao, Tingyang. 2013. The China Dream in Question, Harvard-Yenching Institute Working Paper Series. Boston: Harvard Yenching Institute.
Part V
Democracy and indigenous cultures in Taiwan
10 Art-iculating the nation and its struggles Pangcah as a case of an indigenous movement in Taiwan Shun-ling Chen Taiwan is a settler country. Settlers of Han-Chinese origin began to arrive from the Fu-Jian area from the sixteenth century, and the latest wave came with the Kuo-Ming Tang (KMT, the Chinese Nationalist Party) after it lost the civil war to the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. Indigenous peoples in Taiwan are Austronesian-speaking peoples with varying cultural practices, physical traits, and socio-political structures.1 In the census, only about 2 percent of the total population is indigenous, divided into 16 indigenous nations of various sizes.2 These are the indigenous persons and groups with official status. There are also people who are of indigenous descent but without status.3 The official status of indigenous persons is the legacy of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). Since 1903, the Governor-General Office of Taiwan (GGO) used a separate register system for indigenous households and individuals, and further divided them into two categories—plain and mountain. Indigenous persons with official status today are the descendants of those who were on these registries. The KMT Government used the term shan-di-tong-bao (山地同 胞 mountain compatriots), intending to emphasize a stronger Chinese identity.4 The term yuan zhu min (原住民 indigenous people) was only formally adopted in the 1990s. The 1998 Constitutional Amendment adopted the term yuanzhu-min-zhu (原住民族 indigenous nations), noting that the government should respect the collective will of each indigenous nation.5 Despite these transitions in the language and legal concepts, the indigenous administration as laid down by the GGO continues to make an impact on modern day indigenous peoples administratively, economically, and politically.
Indigenous movements: the birth, the processes, and the political gains The KMT Government put Taiwan under martial law in 1947 for the subsequent four decades. Social movements were largely suppressed during the authoritarian rule. The indigenous movement began in the urban areas in the early 1980s. In 1983, indigenous students at National Taiwan University launched an underground newspaper called Mountain Greenery (Gao Shan Qing 高山青).6 The inaugurating editorial addressed the devastating situation facing
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the indigenous peoples by saying, “Our compatriots float on the sea, are buried in mines, are trampled in dark streets.” Indigenous persons were socially discriminated against and economically marginalized. They often did the most dangerous, dirty, and low-paying jobs. Human trafficking was also a pressing issue. In 1984, activists of various indigenous nations formed the Alliance for Taiwan Aborigines (ATA). In 1986, ATA shifted a gear from social service organization to advocacy group, paying close attention to issues such as solving economic hardship and social problems of the indigenous population with a view to addressing indigeneity and associated rights claims. The activists chose the term yuan zhu min, or indigenous people, to give them a collective identity. The concept of “aboriginal” or “indigenous” also anchored the movement as a struggle against the settler state and society. After martial law was lifted in 1987, ATA led a series of protests addressing land rights, environmental injustice,7 and name-rectification—a campaign to officially replace the term “mountain compatriots” with yuan zhu min.8 The lifting of martial law opened up an era of political transformation, accompanied by burgeoning social movements. At the same time, Taiwan was gradually freed from a political structure that was designed to represent the entire (pre-1949) China.9 Originally, in order to claim a legitimate (despite already lost) control over mainland China, parliament members, elected prior to KMT’s retreat to Taiwan and representing different Chinese provinces (of the mainland), was granted an indefinite term. Until the first general parliamentary election in 1992, local Taiwanese and indigenous peoples had been largely underrepresented. In 1994, the two municipal cities, Taipei and Kaohsiung, held direct mayoral elections for the first time. The KMT candidate lost Taipei, the capital city, to the opposition party, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).10 In 1996, the first Presidential election was held under the threat of missiles on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. The Constitution was amended several times in the course of the 1990s to pave the way for these major political changes.11 It was high time for a new Taiwanese identity to form, and indigenous peoples played a role in defining an identity that is distinctively Taiwanese.12 In the 1992 Constitutional Amendment, indigenous people were mentioned in the Constitution for the first time. But instead of using the term “indigenous peoples,” the Amendments referred to them as the “mountain compatriots,” denying their indigeneity claims. Together with women, the disabled, and the inhabitants of offshore islands, the 1992 Amendment regarded the “mountain compatriots” as the less privileged who are in need of special government assistance or protection. Although the 1992 Amendments did not respond to ATA’s name-rectification campaign, the wheel soon began to turn. In 1994, President Teng-Hui Lee first used the term yuan zhu min when he inaugurated the Ma-Jia Park featuring indigenous cultures. The 1994 Constitutional Amendment officially replaced the term “mountain compatriot” with yuan zhu min. After Lee became the first democratically elected president in 1996, he established the first agency in the central government to oversee indigenous affairs. The 1998 Constitutional Amendment further adopted the term yuan zhu min
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zu (indigenous nations), declaring that the government should ensure indigenous peoples’ position and their political participation, according to the collective identity of each nation. In 1999, former DPP Taipei mayor Shui-Bian Chen was the party’s candidate for the second presidential election. Together with representatives from indigenous nations, he signed the “Treaty of New Partnership with Indigenous Peoples.” The language of the Treaty was progressive, or even radical. Major clauses of the Treaty included acknowledging indigenous peoples’ inherent sovereignty and promoting indigenous peoples’ self-governance.13 The treaty signing was the result of a campaign organized by indigenous activists seeking to advance their rights claims. They approached all candidates, but Chen was the only one who agreed to sign. Chen eventually won the election in 2000 and became the first non-KMT president in the history of Taiwan. In 2002, Chen, as the president, reaffirmed the Treaty with representatives of indigenous nations to give the document a higher legal status.14 President Chen appointed Yohani Ishahavut, a pastor of the Presbyterian Church who was once jailed for leading a land rights struggle, to join his government and to chair the Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) in the central government.15 CIP began drafting an indigenous self-government bill. The indigenous claim to self-government proved to be highly contentious. Since CIP concluded the first bill in 2002, there have been more bills on self-governance.16 Yet none has moved far enough in the legislative process. In 2005, the Legislative Yuan enacted the Indigenous Basic Law. Through this law, the government acknowledged indigenous nations’ right to land and natural resources (Article 20), as well as the government’s responsibility to respect the indigenous nation’s will, to ensure the equal status and autonomy of each nation, and to implement indigenous self-governance (Article 5).17 Until 2005, it might have seemed that indigenous activists had made impressive political gains after two decades of rights campaigns. The Basic Law requires all laws conflicting with it to be rewritten within three years of its enactment. Nevertheless, this requirement does not have teeth, and many of the rights specified in the Basic Law remain mere lip service. After KMT retook power in 2008, the pan-indigenous activists have found it harder and harder to further indigenous rights. During his campaign, President Ying-Jeou Ma had listed selfgovernance as one of his indigenous policies and proposed to trial selfgovernance regions. Yet, the Ma government soon began to advocate self-governance without actual control over land and finance.18 In 2011, when Ma was running for his second term of presidency, he openly commented that it would be impossible to fully implement the Basic Law.19 There have not been any trial projects for indigenous self-governance as of 2016. Although the pan-Indigenous rights campaigns entered an era of standstill, if not regression, the language of self-governance and the emphasis on the collective rights of a nation have encouraged efforts in indigenous nation-building. For example, as a continuation of the name-rectification campaign, several indigenous nations that were mistakenly classified by anthropologists during the
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Japanese colonization as subgroups of another nation gained independent status. The number of officially recognized nations grew from nine to 16.20 Several indigenous nations, including Tsou, Atayal, Truku, and Tao, have convened their own national assemblies. To be sure, the claim to self-governance was not the only reason why indigenous communities began to address community-specific or nation-specific issues. Rather, such development is natural considering the differences between the nations in terms of language, culture, social structure, and history of interaction with other nations.
Plains vs. mountain: the GGO legacy and its contemporary impact As described above, since the 1990s, the term “mountain compatriot” that places a stronger emphasis on the imagined Chinese identity and an assimilation policy has been replaced by the term “indigenous nations,” which suggests stronger collective claims to self-governance and indigenous rights. Nevertheless, most indigenous policies are still directed at individual indigenous persons than indigenous nations. For those indigenous nations that were mistakenly categorized by the Japanese anthropologists, the name-rectification movement allowed them to gain independent status. However, the recategorization did not give indigenous nations the power to admit members who had not already had indigenous status, nor did it confer other collective indigenous claims such as land control and self-governance. Even now, for an indigenous nation obtaining an independent status only means getting an extra seat on the CIP and its municipal counterparts. What is more significant politically and administratively is the distinction between “plains indigenous” and “mountain indigenous.” Back in the Japanese colonial time, the GGO separated indigenous population into these two categories, and designated the area inhabited by the mountain indigenous people as the mountain special administrative region. The plains indigenous people are scattered on the eastern coastal plains and valleys, an area the GGO planned to populate with Japanese settlers.21 The mountain indigenous people had a feisty reputation and resided in the mountainous areas where state control was sparse and less effective. The GGO broke into the region with military forces and later ruled it with police power. To utilize the forestry resources, as well as to govern communities in remote regions more effectively, the GGO turned most of the mountain areas into government land and designated “the reserved land” for mountain indigenous communities. The GGO conducted separate censuses in the mountain and plains regions. Today there are “mountain indigenous persons” and “plains indigenous persons,” and the basis for such differentiation is the household registration of their ancestors introduced under the Japanese colonial government.22 As the differentiation between “mountain” and “plains” was about the location, environment, and the level of integration with Chinese Taiwanese, many indigenous nations were divided into two administrative regions.
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Plains indigenous peoples do not have reserved land and are more likely to become wage laborers in cities, factories, mines, or on fishing boats. Administratively, the indigenous areas are divided into 25 plains xiang (鄉, the lowest administrative unit with direct elections) and 30 mountain xiang. The mayor of the xiang (xiang zhang 鄉長) is democratically elected. Mountain xiangs do have residents of various origins, including non-indigenous people. Nevertheless, the head of the mountain xiang has to be a mountain indigenous person. There is no equivalent requirement for plains xiangs (Local Government Act, Article 57). In national politics, there are parliamentary seats reserved for indigenous representatives, but it was not a constitutional guarantee until 1992.23 Normal electorates are geographically defined areas whose voters are residents with household registration in the area. However, based on their legal identity, indigenous persons either belong to the “mountain” or “plains” electorate, no matter where they actually reside. Indigenous persons can only vote or run for parliamentary members in their respective electorates.
From pan-indigenous movement to nation-specific campaigns: Pangcah as an example In this section, I use the Pangcah people as an example to reflect the political gains of the pan-indigenous movement and then turn to nation-specific campaigns. According to the census roll in October 2015, there are 202,973 people registered as Pangcah, more than twice the number of Paiwan, the second largest group. The Pangcah villages are mostly on the east coast of Taiwan, in Hualien and Taitung Counties. “Pangcah” literally means “human-being.” Pangcah are also known as Amis, a term the Puyuma people use to refer to Pangcah (as people from the north) and is also commonly used by Pangcah communities in Taitung. Pangcah land rights and disputes The land rights movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s urged the government to turn a small number of the government-owned lands into indigenous reserved lands. Nevertheless, this slight achievement hardly solved the land issue faced by Pangcah and other plains indigenous persons. The earlier Pangcahspecific land rights case involves Karowa (a Pangcah community in Hualien) and the Taiwan Sugar Corporation. According to Karowa elders, the Japanese forced them to leave their land after armed conflicts. The Japanese turned the area into a sugarcane field, overseen by a kyasia (“corporation” in Japanese, 鹽水港製糖 株式會社鹽糖會社). Members of the Karowa community scattered to nearby areas to find new farmlands. Many of their male members were drafted to help cultivate what used to be formerly Karowa land, to guard the kyasia farm against boars, and to build railroads or other colonial infrastructures. After 1949, Japanese-owned properties and businesses were turned over to the new government, and the government-owned Taiwan Sugar Corporation (TaiSugar)
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became the new owner of the Karowa land. In the 1980s, TaiSugar found sugar production unprofitable and began a new business in land development projects. In 2002, after sugar production was discontinued, the factory was repurposed for tourism.24 Anaw Lo’oh Pacidal, a Karowa descendent, has been working on oral history and archival work since the 1980s.25 It was not until 2001 that Anaw began to convene meetings with former Karowa residents and initiated their land claims.26 In 2002, in order to further indigenous self-governance as DDP’s policy goal, CIP contracted geographers and several indigenous communities to do the community mapping, which would help to identify traditional territories of the indigenous nations. Karowa participated in the project, yet the results did little to advance their land claim. Neither did the enactment of Basic Law in 2005 help. Against the will of the Karowa Pangcah, TaiSugar leased the Karowa land to the Bureau of Forestry, and it became a part of the recreational park in 2011. Nevertheless, the process did enable the once scattered Karowa community to form a new collective identity. The Karowa Pangcah also allied with other Pangcah activists and sympathetic NGOs.27 Tourism and development projects have affected not only Karowa but also other Pangcah communities. After the KMT returned to power in 2008, the Taiwanese government began to strengthen the ties with China, in part by introducing Chinese tour groups to the Taiwanese tourism market. Initially the policy was limited to a small number of travel agencies in China, but the number has gradually increased. In 2011, the daily quota of Chinese tourists with organized tours rose to 4,000 persons. In 2012, the Taiwanese government began to permit Chinese tourists to enter without joining organized tours. The numbers of both group tourists and individual tourists from China have continued to rise in the following years.28 The eastern part of Taiwan has attracted domestic and international tourists with its scenic Pacific coast, rock formations, and indigenous cultures. Compared to the western plains, eastern Taiwan is also less populated and with a lower level of business investment. With an increasing flood of tourists, many were eyeing the tourism resources and opportunities in Hualien and Taitung. Beginning in 2010, the Parliament started debating the bills regarding the development of eastern Taiwan. The KMT version contained controversial articles that would ease the sale of the government-owned land in the area— many of which used to belong to indigenous traditional territories. The KMT bill was criticized for profiting big developers and hoteliers, as well as for violating the principle of the Indigenous Basic Law, which acknowledges the indigenous peoples’ right to land and to participate in related decisions.29 The bill was finally passed in 2011 without such controversial articles. The “Hualien and Taitung Region Development Act” allocated a 40-billion NTD fund over ten years, with the promotion of tourism listed prominently as one project goal. The Hualien and Taitung Counties competed for the fund with different grant proposals. Although the Act nominally supports sustainable development and improvement of the indigenous peoples’ life, these development
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projects—amphitheaters, cable car, car racing range—either treated the indigenous culture as the objects or simply left them out of the picture.30 The Act did mention the improvement of the indigenous people’s living condition, but it strongly suggested “tourism with an indigenous character” as a way to improve the economy of the indigenous communities. The implementation plans saw indigenous communities as tourism resources—the objects to be imagined and consumed by tourists.31 Nearby Pangcah communities continued to protest against these projects. In late 2010, an art studio in Makudaay (港口部落) in Hualien received a letter from the National Property Administration notifying them that the studio is on national property and requiring them to tear down the construction and return the land. The letter sent a shockwave through the Makudaay community, as the land has belonged to the owner’s family for generations.32 Due to an error of local government staff in Feng-Bin Xiang long ago, a number of land registration documents went missing. The error was the reason why a number of the Pangcah-owned lands in the Makudaay community became government properties, and subsequently transferred to the East Coast National Scenic Area (EC-NSA) Headquarters. In 1997, after an extended protest, the Feng-Bin Xiang government finally admitted the error. In 2011, however, the EC-NSA revealed a plan to turn the respective area into a multi-function park and met with protest by the Makudaay community. In response, the EC-NSA said that they could not hand over any land unless the xiang government first provided proof that the error was their own. The then Feng-Bin Xiang mayor refused to take responsibility for the former staff and declined to provide any assistance. The Makudaay community protested against the xiang government and placed roadblocks on the way onto their traditional land.33 Kawlo Iyun, then a journalist at the Taiwan Indigenous Television,34 contacted a few other Pangcah persons and decided to view the issue as part of the broader land claim rather than a single case. As a result, several Pangcah communities formed the “Pangcah Guard Alliance” (阿美族守護聯盟) to address the various land right issues they had faced, from urban settlements to traditional land. Aside from the above-mentioned communities, Makudaay and Karowa, other communities also joined forces. For example, the Fulafulak community (莿桐部落) initiated a fight against a hotel project on their traditional territory, Meliwan (美麗灣), and against the Taitung County Government that permitted the construction permit despite the failure of the environment assessment. Also, various urban Pangcah settlements joined forces; unable to afford a high rent in the city, these settlements were often founded on the exposed river bed and were constantly removed by the government for violating construction and conservation codes.35 Around the same time these protests were taking place, the KMT government also prepared a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Republic of China.36 The Pangcah Guard Alliance questioned the meaning of this celebration, noting that for Pancah the past 100 years were a century of suffering under different colonial regimes. On January 28, 2011, the Pangcah activists gathered
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in front of the Presidential Office and held a vigil. Calling it “the Pangcah 100 years of Land Battle,” the activists demanded that the government apologize to the Pangcah, return their traditional territory to them, and sign a selfgovernance treaty with them. Unlike the previous pan-indigenous land rights movements, this round of land rights movement was Pangcah-driven and focused on Pangcah land issues.37
Pangcah in local and national politics As mentioned earlier, the mayor of a mountain xiang had to be a mountain indigenous person, but in plains xiangs, non-indigenous persons could also run for a mayor position. Nevertheless, non-indigenous people in either mountain or plains areas have been better mobilized in the modern political system and have had significant influence on local elections. In mountain areas, mayoral candidates are unlikely to win without the support of non-indigenous residents. In plains areas, non-indigenous candidates often outrun their indigenous competitors in the mayoral election. In Feng-Bin Xiang, for example, even with 80 percent of residents being Pangcah, the first Pangcah mayor only appeared in 2005 and was regarded as reflecting a rising awareness of the Pangcah identity.38 Nevertheless, having a Pangcah mayor does not guarantee a local administration that is more sympathetic to indigenous rights claims. In the dispute between the Makudaay community and Feng-Bin Xiang, it was a Pangcah mayor who was unwilling to assist the land claim. Although the Makudaay members possessed a copy of the letter from 1997 in which the xiang government admitted its error, the Pangcah mayor refused to take responsibility for the former staff and to provide another official letter for the EC-NSA to start any land-returning procedure.39 In terms of national politics, currently, among the 113 seats in the parliament, six are indigenous seats (5.3 percent). To be sure, compared to its populations (2 percent), one can say that the indigenous peoples are overrepresented in the parliament.40 Nevertheless, the overrepresentation does not necessarily mean that indigenous issues would receive higher attention in parliament.41 Although former President Chen promised a representative for each nation when signing and reconfirming the New Partnership Treaty, he was unable to realize it. As mentioned, indigenous voters are divided into two parliamentary electorates according to their legal identity, the mountain and the plains. The election of the indigenous representatives uses the multi-member district system, with three candidates with the highest votes in each electorate entering parliament. As the indigenous nations vary a lot in size, the election system is advantageous to larger nations. Pangcah is the largest group among Taiwan indigenous peoples—about three quarters of plains indigenous people are the Pangcah. Moreover, since 99.45 percent of its members are plains indigenous people, the Pangcah have the absolute majority in the plains electorate. Since 1980, all but one past plains
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indigenous seats have been taken by the Pangcah candidates. Compared to smaller nations, the Pangcah might have less to complain about regarding their access to the parliament. Nevertheless, indigenous representatives, either plains or mountain, have been more dependent on the support of the KMT than on their own people.42 As indigenous people can only vote for the indigenous representatives, no matter where they reside, either indigenous electorate geographically covers the whole country. This makes both electorate service and campaigning difficult and expensive. Compared to the KMT, the DPP has implemented more progressive proposals in relation to indigenous policies. For example, the DPP had an indigenous activist, Bayan Dalu, serving as a party representative for two terms in the parliament from 1995 to 2001; a non-indigenous DPP parliament member was instrumental in the Reform of the Name Act that permitted indigenous people to use their traditional names as official names; former President Chen was the only candidate in the 2000 presidential election who was willing to sign the New Partnership Treaty. Nevertheless, the more resourceful KMT could afford to have constant presence and services in the indigenous regions, allowing it to earn positive impression from the voters. Overall, in both indigenous electorates, only very few candidates were able to get into parliament without KMT support. A few indigenous activists have run for parliament: in earlier years often as independents, but since the late 1990s some have been nominated by the DPP, partly due to their past experience working with the DPP in the democratization movement. However, DPP did not always prioritize indigenous rights claims and they could always support non-activist candidates for strategic reasons.43 Since the indigenous population is only a small percentage of the whole population, neither the KMT or DDP is likely to support very strong indigenous positions when it comes to fundamental issues like land rights, selfgovernance, or the proposal to have one representative for each nation in the parliament. Hence, an essential problem is whether indigenous candidates can participate effectively without the support of either major party.44 Prior to the 2008 election, indigenous activists who ran for parliament claimed their fame during the pan-indigenous movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2011, Mayaw Biho, a younger generation activist from the Pangcah community, decided to run for parliament as an independent candidate. He started his career as a documentary maker in late 1990s, when indigenous activism had already achieved some early results. His filmography covers a variety of indigenous issues, from land rights to naming rights, and is not exclusively about Pangcah. Although his 2012 campaign was unsuccessful, he still resembles the newer wave of the indigenous activists’ participation in national politics. In 2015 he ran for parliament for a second time with the campaign slogan “Be Our Own Boss.” Although he ran as an independent candidate again, he received a joint endorsement from the smaller progressive parties.45 These smaller parties also competed to nominate Kawlo Iyun, a Pangcah journalist-turned-activist who has been vocal in land rights, as a party representative, and the newly formed New Power Party successfully wooed her by putting her on the top of its party list.46
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Back in 1995, Bayan Dalu did not have the opportunity to work with opposition parties other than the DDP, and other differences in political environments might also make the two situations incomparable. Aside from being an activist, another reason Kawlo was sought after by the parties could have to do with her campaign to be Hualien county councillor in 2014 as an independent candidate. Despite losing the race, she garnered enough support to pose a real threat to the incumbents and the KMT nominees.47 While these individual campaigns would be unable to change the electoral structure that disadvantages smaller parties, at least the new wave of the indigenous activist-candidates are in stronger positions in party politics to speak for their peoples.
Art as part of the activism and as a persuasion strategy One major obstacle for the indigenous movement is the small size of the population. Even with a slight overrepresentation in parliament, indigenous bills cannot be passed without enough support from the non-indigenous parliament members. The separation of the indigenous electorates from the normal electorates makes it systematically difficult for the non-indigenous parliament members to support progressive proposals regarding indigenous rights. This is especially so for those representing the electorates which geographically contain the indigenous xiangs. Coupled with institutionalized discrimination, the indigenous culturati have found it an important task to reverse the mainstream understanding of the indigenous peoples. Via different channels, they tell stories of the contemporary indigenous peoples. Below I will focus on music, one field in which Pangcah members are most active, with a short introduction to explain the role music has played in the indigenous movement. Music has been an important part of the Taiwan indigenous movement since its early days. Kimbo (a.k.a. Hu, De-Fu 胡德夫), ATA’s founding president, was an active member of the Taiwan folk revival movement that began in the 1970s. The folk revival called for people to sing “our own” songs instead of English songs. At a gathering, although Kimbo could only remember half of the Puyuma song which his father used to sing when Kimbo was young, the song excited his fellow friends so much that he described the song as his “identity card.” Kimbo started to learn other indigenous songs, and to write his own.48 Hoping that the indigenous peoples’ voices could be heard, he got involved in social movements after a serious coal mine accident in 1984—many victims were Pangcah miners.49 Seeing the suffering of fellow indigenous people, his song addressed the precarious situation they were facing—human trafficking, landlessness, and the continuous drifting from one low-paid and dangerous job to another. Due to censorship at the time, these songs could not enter the mainstream media, and were only circulated privately among a small group of the people. Nevertheless, these were powerful songs and helped introduce to a small and relatively privileged audience a reality they had never experienced.50 Although indigenous nations differ in culture and language, with 90 percent of the indigenous population being Christian, indigenous activists often found
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the church songs an effective way to cheer the crowd at protest scenes. Another reason that church songs have played an important role in protests could be the leadership of the Presbyterian Church in the indigenous movement. Many of the early activists were students at the Presbyterian theological colleges and seminaries. Prayers and hymns came as a natural method to support them spiritually during the hardship. New songs were also written for the movement. These protest songs generally have easily memorizable lyrics and melody, intended for energizing the sympathetic crowd at the protest scene instead of illustrating the indigenous peoples’ experiences to the general public. Indigenous music elements have also worked into the mainstream music market. In 1996, Difang (a.k.a. Kuo, Ying-Nan, 郭英男), a Pangcah elder in his eighties, was surprised to hear his own voice on TV. It turned out that a popular Western dance song used an extensive and mildly manipulated sample of Difang’s and his wife’s chanting. He was proud of his voice being heard globally, but upset that the song did not mention him and his nation. The incident later developed into one of the most famous lawsuits the indigenous people brought against the Western music industry.51 Many other indigenous people shared Difang’s pride, and many non-indigenous Taiwanese began to recognize the beauty of the indigenous culture. In the same year, A-Mei, a Puyuma singer who would soon become a long-lasting superstar in the mandopop market, released her very first album. In earlier days, indigenous singers and their agencies often disguised their identity to prevent the stigma from impacting their careers. A-Mei and her producer received immediate success despite doing the opposite—blending indigenous elements into pop music and announcing her indigenous identity. Soon enough there grew an appetite for indigenous elements in pop music. Nevertheless, indigenous singers did not seem to have much influence on the marketing plan. In several cases, labels advertised the indigenous identity of their singers but the music style did not differ from the mainstream products.52 Indigenous singers found more room for alternative styles working with indie music labels. Indigenous Voice Company (IVC, 原音社), a loosely organized group of urban indigenous people, released an album that sought to document how indigenous people feel when interacting with modern cities and civilizations—the difficulties they experienced and homesickness. The album ends with a protest song written by one of its members. Several IVC members were also activists or affiliated with the Presbyterian Church. Unlike Kimbo’s songs that were censored during the martial law era, IVC were able to spread their voice, even though to a rather small and targeted indie music audience.53 In recent years, several indigenous singers were unwilling to be pigeonholed in a specific music genre or style and rebelled against the role they were assigned as exotic subsidiaries to the mainstream market. Rather, they intended to express a modern indigeneity, accompanied by its own harmony and conflicts, and to change the mainstream itself by asserting a new style. Most notably, in 2010, Suming Rupi (舒米恩・魯碧) opened a new page of contemporary indigenous music with his eponymous album. Suming is the first-ever non-traditional
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indigenous music album containing only songs with Pangcah lyrics and aiming at the mainstream audience. Suming blended together traditional Pangcah, techno and hip pop elements, attempting to crossover into the mainstream pop music in Taiwan.54 Like other indigenous albums, Suming illustrates various feelings of young indigenous men who lead a life between the modern and the traditional. His music is often cheerful, sometimes playful. Even when dealing with the usual theme of an urban indigenous person’s homesickness, the songs in Suming address more hopes and the promises to come home. The songs are easy to listen to, may appeal to those who never had any idea of the indigenous issues. In fact, it reached a broader audience than many indie indigenous songs. Suming is also one of the singers in an indie band, Totem, which has been active since 2002 and released two successful albums with an indie music label. Although Suming has had good relations with the label and already has a small following as a member of Totem, it was not an easy thing to persuade his label to release an all-Pangcah album. Suming reckoned, since there is a market for French songs in Taiwan where few can speak French, there could also be a market for songs with Pangcah lyrics. The quality of his music finally convinced his producer. Suming ended up gaining both market success and major music awards, both indie and mainstream. According to Suming, he began these musical experiments with the hope that the younger people in his village, A’tolan, would listen to songs sung in the mother tongue, instead of Koreanpop, which has gained popularity in Taiwan in recent years. He also organized concerts to raise funds for young people in A’tolan to receive traditional education in summer camps. The youth education formed the groundwork for other community-oriented projects. Since 2013, he began to organize the “Amis Music Fest” (AMF ) in A’tolan. The idea was to allow the community to have a better control of the local economy and to ensure the tourism in the area really benefits the community. The tourism bureau of both central and local governments have been promoting indigenous traditional festivals as a tourist attraction, but the influx of tourists during festival time has caused disturbance and sometimes led to conflicts. During the traditional festivals, villagers were tied up with their ceremony-related obligations and thus unable to spare manpower to service the tourists. As a result, the tourists often ended up buying crafts and food from non-indigenous vendors. The AMF was an attempt to carve out an occasion for tourists to have a taste of the traditional culture in an environment designed and controlled by the locals. The AMF started with a ceremony to raise the AMF flag, with elders leading prayers and giving blessings. The ceremonial elements both reminded the visitors of their entering into the A’tolan territory and allowed for an imagination of experiencing something authentic and traditional. AMF featured a craft and food market with local vendors, a musical program starring A’tolan residents, and DIY activities, giving the tourists a variety of ways to appreciate the culture and interact intimately with the locals.55 Suming continues to dream of branding “Amis/Pangcah” as something fashionable and cool, and turning people into its fans, just as there are people who so deeply and willingly immerse themselves in Japanese and Korean pop
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cultures. As an avid promoter of his culture, Suming often talks about the intention and goals of these efforts and projects, how he as a contemporary indigenous musician strategically uses music as a tool to reverse the mainstream society’s past prejudice against his people.56 In particular, Suming shows a genuine affection for his own community, upon which he builds a strong sense of self-confidence.57 He regards both self-appreciation and self-confidence as the key to earn other people’s affection and respect. To be sure, Suming is not the only Pangcah singer trying to redefine modern indigenous music. Ado Kaiting Pacidal is another singer-songwriter who insisted on using only Pangcah lyrics in her songs.58 Both Suming and Ado articulate their identity with their Pangcah as a nation and with their home village. In Sacred Mountain (Sheng shan 聖山), Ado calls the younger generations to look at Cilangansan, the holy mountain wherein life originated according to Pangcah mythology. Suming’s Amis also urges the younger generations to remember the ancestral efforts and to carry on their tradition. In Kapah, Suming asks the young men (Kapah) of A’tolan to take pride in all the good qualities and skills a Pangcah man should possess. In Fata’an, Ado sings about her own community, its history, tradition, and the pride of the young Fata’an members. In recent years, several indigenous singers who have claimed their fame as mandopop singers working with mainstream labels, such as A-Mei and A-Yue, have adopted their indigenous names, respectively Amit and Ayal Komod, and incorporated more indigenous concepts into their music.59 Music continues to play an important role in the new wave of indigenous activism—many protests mentioned in the previous section were organized in the form of concerts. Many Pangcah singers—Suming, Ado, and Ayal Komod— are regular participants in the land rights movements. Ado, together with Kawlo Iyun, was one of the founding members of the Pangcah Guard Alliance and was instrumental in contacting and inviting the musicians to join the vigil and the concert in front of the presidential office in 2011. Protest songs now also take a softer turn. Instead of directly used as a cheering tool at protest scenes, speaking to fellow protesters, new songs are written to persuade potential sympathizers. For example, Ayal’s Don’t Cry, Little Girl tells the land struggle against Meliwan in the form of a lullaby.60 Suming, whose home village is right next to Meliwan, wrote another protest song but disguised as a love song—Don’t say you love me too easily on the land of A’tolan. Both Ayal and Suming have a strong nonindigenous following, both consciously use their music as a tool to communicate their struggles to their mainstream audience, who may come across these songs accidentally and perhaps grow sympathetic to the indigenous rights issues after learning the issues.61 All three singers are among the dozens of the indigenous artists who campaigned for Mayaw Biho in both the 2011 and 2015 elections. Music is but one cultural area which Pangcah members have actively cultivated and where they have begun to see positive results. Yosifu (優席夫), a Pangcah artist, works toward a similar goal in the field of fine arts and fashion.62 Lekal Sumi, together with Cheng Yu-Chieh (鄭有傑), a non-indigenous
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director, directed a feature film Wawa no Cidal (太陽的孩子, literal translation: Children of the Sun, a.k.a Panay). The film tells a story about the eager developers in Hualien, the economic hardship of the indigenous people and the pressure to sell land, the indigenous xiang mayor who was unsympathetic to the needs of the local community, the xiang bureau’s error causing the indigenous people to lose their land, and the development projects seeking to bypass the environment evaluation procedures. The story was roughly based on Lekal’s mother, who revitalized the rice fields that were deserted as people gradually moved to the city, but weaved in several scenes from the earlier mentioned Pangcah land disputes. In fact, Lekal had made a documentary about the rice field revitalization in 2013, but many people were able to learn about the documentary after watching the adapted feature film that came out later. The film not only brings out powerful messages but has been well received by the mainstream audience in Taiwan. It was also invited to various international festivals.63
Conclusion In the past three decades, Taiwan indigenous activism has gone through several stages. Begun as a minor branch of the fledgling social movement in the 1980s, it transformed into a pan-indigenous movement, which largely converged with the democratization movement. Indigenous activists were able to advance certain rights claims, and institutionalized their political gains through legislation. Nevertheless, the legislative approach has its limit. First, in certain indigenous rights claims—in particular self-governance, land rights, more fundamental political reform (one representative for each nation in the parliament)—the underlying conflicts with political allies are real and significant. More radical bills are unlikely to receive enough support from non-indigenous parliament members. Second, even if indigenous rights were written into law, since the implementation often relies on the nonindigenous officials and judges, it would not help as much if the mainstream public lacks appreciation of the indigenous cultures and continues to imagine the indigenous peoples as inferior. Third, non-indigenous parliament members may lack a necessary understanding of the indigenous issues, unable to fully support the indigenous claims due to the electoral structure, or may overreact to issues that should be resolved within each indigenous nation or between related nations. Indigenous activism succeeded in bringing indigenous self-government as an issue to the table, even though there are many pushbacks and there is a recognized delay in the legislative process. Several nations, including Atayal, Bunun, Seediq, Tsou, and Truku, had organized their national assemblies to show the will and capacity to self-govern. These are nations with all or most of their members being mountain indigenous persons, already residing in the mountain xiangs where mayors have to be from a mountain indigenous community. As a plains indigenous people, the Pangcah faces more obstacles in self-government claims. The Pangcah people are more geographically dispersed, have more difficult land disputes, and the plains xiang mayors can be and often are non-indigenous persons even in areas where the absolute majority of the
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residents are the Pangcah. As the largest indigenous nation and with its concentration in the plains electorate, the Pangcah has had a clear advantage over other indigenous peoples in the parliamentary election system. However, such an advantage does not mean very much if we take into an account the overall population and parliamentary structure, the flawed design of the indigenous electorates, and the KMT’s influence in indigenous elections. Old school protests and the strategic collaboration with non-indigenous politicians remain important parts of indigenous activism. Nevertheless, these campaigns target a rather small group of the people who might already be sympathetic or who have their own strategic reasons to take part. Moreover, the kind of stigma that is associated with indigenous peoples does not dissolve easily. Indigenous activists have long included music as an important part of their campaign. Some of them entered the indie music market and used music as a way to communicate with a broader audience. These songs are often with Chinese lyrics, addressing predicaments that are common to indigenous people in the urban areas. In recent years, indigenous singers have focused more on their own language and culture. A group of younger Pangcah artists-activists intentionally use popular art as a way to reach out to non-indigenous audience. Their songs may be audience-pleasers, which help them to spread their articulation of their culture, their struggle, their homeland, and their identity. Compared to the older generation indigenous activists, these artists-activists have been able to reach out to a more general public, introduce to them both Pangcah-specific struggles and general indigenous issues, and open up new opportunities for indigenous activism at large.
Notes 1 Stainton, “The Politics of Taiwan Aboriginal Origins.” 2 See Council of Indigenous Peoples, 2015 Tai min xian shi yuan zhu min zu ren kou an xing bie zu bie. As of October 2015, the total population of indigenous peoples is 545,657. The largest three are Pangcah (a.k.a Amis), with 202,973 people, Paiwan, with 97,449 people, and Atayal, with 86,845 people. The smallest are Kanakanavu, with 251 people, Saaruwa, with 277 people, and Thao, with 746 people. 3 Hsieh, Collective Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 4 Huang, “Emergence and Legal Treatment of ‘Flatland Aboriginals’ under Japanese Rule (1895–1937).” 5 Huang, “Taiwan yuanzhuminzu yun dong de guo hui lu xian.” 6 Simon, “Paths to Autonomy.” 7 Since 1982, nuclear waste has been stored on Orchid Island, home to the Tao nation, without their consent. 8 Huang, Taiwan yuanzhuminzu yun dong de guo hui lu xian; Simon, “Paths to Autonomy”; Williams, “From the Streets to the Villages.” 9 Pre-1949 China Included provinces that no longer existed in the People’s Republic of China, or territories that had become an independent country, e.g., Outer Mongolia, which is now the Republic of Mongolia. 10 The Democratic Progressive Party was founded in 1986, the last year of martial law. 11 The first constitutional reform in 1991 allowed for a legislature and national assembly representing only Taiwan, the Pescadores Islands, Kinmen and Matsu—territories
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where the Republic of China on Taiwan has effective control. The second constitutional reform in 1992 made way for the direct elections for president as well as municipal mayors. The Constitution went through six amendments in the decade. Chang, “Taiwan de zheng zhi zhuan xing yu zheng zhi de zu qun hua guo cheng.” Other issues addressed by the Treaty include: land rights (signing land treaties with indigenous nations; returning traditional territories to indigenous peoples); natural resources (allowing traditional uses and promoting independent development), language (rectifying tribal names and the names of traditional landmark); political rights (each indigenous nation should have its own congressional seat). Shi Zheng Feng, “Min jin dang zhi zheng ba nian zu qun zheng ce hui gu yu zhan wang.” The Presbyterian Church has played an important role in the democratization process, as well as the indigenous movement. Several other indigenous activists also became IPC members. Yohani was also a DPP nominee for parliamentary election in 1998. Chen, “Yuanzhuminzu yun dong zhong quanli fa zhi hua jin lu de kun ju jian lun jian gou zhong de Taiwan yuanzhuminzu zi zhi.” Shi, “Min jin dang zhi zheng ba nian.” Ibid. IPACT, “Mayingjiu fou ding yuanzhuminzu ji ben fa.” The nine nations are: Atayal, Saysiat, Tsou, Bunun, Amis (Pangcah), Tao, Puyuma, Paiwan, and Rukai. The nations later recognized are: Thao (2001), Kavalan (2002), Truku (2004), Sakizaya (2007), Sediq (2008), Hla’arua (2014) and Kanakanavu (2014). Note that recognizing a new nation does not involve granting status to individuals who were not indigenous persons. Huang, “Ta zhe zhi xiang.” Huang, “Yuan zhu min chuan tong ling yu quan?” The first indigenous parliamentary seat was introduced by legislation in the 1972 election, with only one seat for the entire indigenous population. The 1980 parliamentary election divided the indigenous population into two electorates—mountain and plains. The 1980 election was the first with plains indigenous persons running for the parliament. Huang, “Ta zhe zhi xiang.” Huang, “Yuan zhu min chuan tong ling yu quan?” Huang, “Ta zhe zhi xiang.” Huang, “Yuan zhu min chuan tong ling yu quan?” The number of Chinese tour groups has decreased since Ing-Wen Tsai, representing the DPP, became the president of Taiwan in 2016. It is unclear whether this development would ease the land struggles indigenous peoples have faced in the past few years. (Taiwan Tourism Bureau, Lu ke lai Tai Guan guang da shi ji.) Wu, “Shei de dong bu fa zhan tiao li?” Huang, “Hua dong si bai yi.” Wu, “Tudi de zhengzhi le wu de guanguang hua.” Liu, “Ameizu nu hou de min guo yi bai nian.” Jing, “Gong yi wei yao hui.” Taiwan Indigenous Television (TITV) is a public channel which focuses on indigenous issues. TITV was stipulated by the 1998 Education Act for Indigenous Peoples. Jing, “Gong yi wei yao hui.” Liu, “Ameizu nu hou.” Jing, “Gong yi wei yao hui.” Fawl, “Min zu yi shi gao xuan chu yuan min ping yuan xiang zhang.” Lu, “Gang kou bu luo xi lie yi guan di pi qiu dian ran yuan min nu huo”; Tu, “Gang kou kun tu di kang zheng shi jian.” When the parliament had 225 seats (1998–2008), there were also eight indigenous seats (3.55 percent).
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41 For the 1992 election, there were six indigenous seats among the total of 161 seats, there was a slight overrepresentation (3.73 percent) of indigenous peoples. For the 1995 election, there were six indigenous seats among the total of 164 seats, there was also a slight overrepresentation (3.66 percent) of indigenous peoples. 42 Haisul, “Li wei xuan ju yuanzhumin.” 43 Chen, “Yuanzhuminzu yun dong.” 44 Haisul, “Li wei xuan ju yuanzhumin”; Kuo, “Research of Indigenous Peoples’ Vote System and Self-government Agenda in Taiwan.” 45 These smaller parties are: the Green Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the New Power Party. The Green Party has a slightly older history. The other two were both formed in 2015. These three parties are often collectively called “the third power” (the first and second being the KMT and DDP). See Lin, “Zai zhan ping di yuan zhu min li wei.” 46 Mayaw Biho was not elected in 2016, but his votes nearly doubled from his previous campaign in 2012. The New Power Party earned enough party votes to send the top three people on its party list, including Iyun Kawlo, into parliament. 47 Lin and Yan, “Qiang shi dai li liang le se lü dang yi yuan wang hao yu zhi qian.” 48 Lu, “Hu de fu”; Lee, “Ara Kimbo Sings the Indigenous Blues.” 49 Lu, “Hu de fu.” 50 Ma, “Yi ge zao fan.” 51 Guy, “Trafficking in Taiwan Aboriginal Voices”; Taylor, “A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery”; Chen, “Collaborative Authorship.” 52 Hsu, “Hongleamei zhi hou?” 53 Chen, “Huang wu de xin ling kuang keng you da ka nao de xuan xiao.” 54 Futuru, “Kapah (Young Men): Alternative Cultural Activism in Taiwan.” 55 The Amis Music Festival was held in 2013, 2014, and 2016. The fourth is scheduled in 2017. 56 Mata Taiwan, “Shumien tan yinyue xia xiang luerdao yinyuejie xiang baxi jianianhua”; Lai, “Bu kao cai tuan bu wei qu zi ji de bu luo fa zhan doulan amis zong dong yuan.” 57 Jiang, “Shumien meng xiang da zhong cheng wei ha Mei zu.” 58 Ado recounted the story of how labels rejected her proposal of an all-Pangcah album on the assumption that only the Pangcah-speaking population would purchase such an album. See Mata Taiwan, “Aluo tan yinyue shang women dou ceng jue de muyu hen luowu dan wei you ta cai neng zhengming wo shi shei.” 59 Hsu, “Hongleamei zhi hou?”; Yu, “Yong bao tudi zui zhen cheng de hui gui.” 60 Yu, “Yong bao tudi zui zhen cheng de hui gui.” 61 Lai, “Jin qu jiang gong bu ru wei fan he shou hu dong hai an she hui ii ti ge qu fen shang bang.” 62 Ter, “Internationally-Acclaimed Artist Yosifu Raises Awareness of Environmental Concerns through His Series of Earthy Abstract Paintings.” 63 Jufri, “Taiwanese Film ‘Panay’ to Open SGIFF 2015.”
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A3VVjpxcJ:www.newtaiwan.com.tw/bulletinview.jsp%3Fbulletinid%3D11903+&cd=86 &hl=zh-TW&ct=clnk&gl=tw&client=firefox-b. Chen, Shun Ling 陳舜伶. 2002. “Yuanzhuminzu yun dong zhong quanli fa zhi hua jin lu de kun ju jian lun jian gou zhong de taiwan yuanzhuminzu zi zhi 原住民族運動中「權 利法制化」進路的困局—兼論建構中的台灣原住民自治 [Legalizing Indigenous Rights? The Dilemma of Taiwan Indigenous Rights Activism and the “Right to Self-government” under Construction].” Master’s Thesis. National Taiwan University, Taiwan. Chen, Shun Ling 陳舜伶. 2011. “Collaborative Authorship: From Folklore to the Wikiblog,” Journal of Law, Technology and Policy 1: 131–167. Council of Indigenous Peoples 行政院原住民族委員會. 2015. 2015 Tai Min Xian Shi Yuan Zhu Min Zu Ren Kou An Xing Bie Zu Bie 台閩縣市原住民族人口—按性別族別 (2015) [Indigenous Population in Taiwan and Fujian by Gender and Tribe]. Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www.apc.gov.tw/portal/docDetail.html?CID=940F95797 65AC6A0&DID=0C3331F0EBD318C2662453D7F7DB734C. Fawl, Abas Bahao. 2009. “Min zu yi shi gao xuan chu yuan min ping yuan xiang zhang 民族意識高 選出原民平原鄉長 [With Strong Nationalism, An Indigenous Mayor Won the Race in a Plain Electorate],” TiTV 原住民電視台 (December 3). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www.tipp.org.tw/news_article.asp?N_ID=15992. Futuru, C. L. Tsai. 2010. “Kapah (Young Men): Alternative Cultural Activism in Taiwan, Savage Minds.” (August 4). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from http://savageminds. org/2010/08/04/kapah-young-men. Guy, Nancy. 2002. “Trafficking in Taiwan Aboriginal Voices,” In Sjoerd R. Jaarsma (ed.), Handle with Care: Ownership and Control of Ethnographic Materials. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 195–209. Haisul, Palalavi 海樹兒犮剌拉菲. 2008. “Li wei xuan ju yuanzhumin can xuan ren de bei jing fen xi (1972–2008) 立委選舉原住民參選人的背景分析 (1972–2008) [An Analysis of Indigenous Candidates for Congressional Elections (1972–2008)],” Journal of the Taiwan Indigenous Studies 台灣原住民論叢 4: 161–190. Haisul, Palalavi. 2010. Yuanzhumin can xuan li fa wei yuan zhi yan jiu yi jiu qi er er ling ling si nian (1972–2004) 原住民參選立法委員之研究 (1972–2004年) [Indigenous Peoples Running for the Congress (1972–2004)]. Taipei: Academia Historica. Hsieh, Jolan. 2010. Collective Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Identity-Based Movement of Plain Indigenous in Taiwan. New York: Routledge. Hsu, Hui-Chien 許蕙千. 2009. “Hongleamei zhi hou? Taiwan yuanzhumin tongsuyinyue de shengchanchangyufenxi 紅了阿妹之後?台灣原住民通俗音樂的生產場域分析 [After the Success of A-Mei? A Field Analysis of Cultural Production on Aboriginal Popular Music in Taiwan].” M.A. Thesis. National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Huang, Fei Yue 黃斐悅. 2013. “Hua dong si bai yi, wu rang feng bin shan hai ju chang cheng wei meiliwan di er! 花東四百億,勿讓豐濱山海劇場成為美麗灣第二! [40 Billion for Hua-Dong, Don’t Turn the Shan-Hai Amphitheatre in Feng-Bin into a Second Meliwan!],” Citizen of the Earth, Taiwan 地球公民基金會 (July 5). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www.cet-taiwan.org/node/1706. Huang, Lin-Hua 黃玲華. 2004. “Taiwan yuanzhuminzu yun dong de guo hui lu xian 台 灣原住民族運動的國會路線 [The Parliamentary Approach in Taiwan Indigenous Activism].” M.A. Thesis. National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Huang, Wei-Ling. 2012. “Emergence and Legal Treatment of ‘Flatland Aboriginals’ under Japanese Rule (1895–1937),” Taiwan Historical Research 19(2): 99–150. Huang, Ya Hong 黃雅鴻. 2003. “Ta zhe zhi xiang cong kong jian ba quan lun shu tan karowa yuanzhumin de liu li yu zhu ti xing yun dong 他者之鄉:從空間霸權論述談
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Karowa原住民的流離與主體性運動 [The Other’s Home: Spatial Hegemony: Karowa’s Homelessness and Identity Movement].” M.A. Thesis. National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan. Huang, Ya Hong 黃雅鴻. 2012. “Yuan zhu min chuan tong ling yu quan? Guo jia de ling yu quan chuan tong? Yi chang dui hua de qi shi 原住民傳統領域權?國家的領域權傳統?: 一場對話的啟示 [Indigenous Rights to Traditionally Territory vs. State Territory: Insights from a Conversation],” Cultural Studies Monthly 文化研究月報 132: 69–87. IPACT (Indigenous Peoples Action Coalition of Taiwan, 台灣原住民族部落行動聯盟). 2011. “Mayingjiu fou ding yuanzhuminzu ji ben fa yuanzhumin yao qiu san tian nei geng zheng dao qian fou ze fa dong dao Ma 馬英九否定原住民族基本法 原住民要求 三天內更正道歉 否則發動倒馬 [Ma Ying-Jeou Denies Indigenous Basic Law. Indigenous Peoples Demand Ma to Apologize in Three Days, or Will Mobilize to Remove Ma from the Post].” Press Release 新聞稿 (December 19). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from https://zh-tw.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=29229617414118 5&id=209753362395467. Jiang, Jia-huang 江家華. 2015. “Shumien meng xiang da zhong cheng wei ha Mei zu 舒 米恩:夢想大眾成為哈「美」族 [Sumingen: Dream to Turn Everyone into Amis Fans].” Initium Media [端傳媒] (December 10). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from https://theinitium.com/article/20151210-taiwan-movie-original-song-suming-rupi. Jing, Yang Rui 荊暘睿. 2012. “Gong yi wei yao hui kang zheng bu ting xie hui gu 2011 nian ameizu de tudi zheng yi yu xing dong 公益未要回,抗爭不停歇:回顧2011年阿 美族的土地爭議與行動 [Continued Protest until Justice Is Restored: A Review of Pangcah’s Land Disputes and Actions].” Kulaowang苦勞網 (April 30). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www.coolloud.org.tw/node/68169. Jufri, Zaki. 2015. “Taiwanese film ‘Panay’ to open SGIFF 2015,” Insing.com. (September 23). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www.insing.com/feature/taiwanesefilm-panay-to-open-sgiff-2015/id-a5793101. Kuo, Ray H. J. 2004. “Research of Indigenous Peoples’ Vote System and Self-government Agenda in Taiwan,” N.T.N.U. Political Science Review 政治學學報 2: 71–95. Lai, Pin Yu 賴品瑀. 2013. “Bu kao cai tuan bu wei qu zi ji de bu luo fa zhan doulan amis zong dong yuan 不靠財團、不委屈自己的部落發展 都蘭Amis總動員 [A Tribal Village Seeks Development Without Depending on Business Conglomerates and Compromising Itself, The A’tolan Amis Mobilizes].” Taiwan Environmental Information Center 環境資 訊中心電子報 (May 1). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from http://e-info.org.tw/ node/85517. Lai, Pin Yu 賴品瑀. 2013. “Jin qu jiang gong bu ru wei fan he shou hu dong hai an she hui ii ti ge qu fen shang bang 金曲獎公布入圍反核、守護東海岸社會議題歌曲紛上榜 [Songs about No-Nuke and Protecting the East Coast among the Golden Melody Awards Nominees].” Taiwan Environmental Information Center 環境資訊中心電子報 (May 22). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from http://e-info.org.tw/node/85996. Lee, Maggie. 2015. “Film Review: ‘Panay’,” Variety (November 23). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from https://variety.com/2015/film/asia/panay-review-1201645349. Lee, Vito. 2012. “Ara Kimbo Sings the Indigenous Blues,” trans. David Smith. Taiwan Panorama 台灣光華雜誌 37(4): 96–103. Liberty Times 自由時報. 2014. “Hua lian xian xian yi yuan kai piao jie guo 花蓮縣議員 開票結果 [The Hualien County Parliamentary Election Results].” (November 30). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from http://election.ltn.com.tw/2014/candidate. php?rtype=2&no=1425.
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Lin, Yi Xian 林怡嫺. 2015. “Zai zhan ping di yuan zhu min li wei, mayaw biho su qiu zuo zi ji de zhu ren 再戰平地原住民,馬躍比吼訴求「做自己的主人」[Running Again for Plain Indigenous Congressional Representative, Mayaw Biho Claims ‘Be Our Own Boss’].” The Third Media [第三媒體] (November 26). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from http://3media.tw/index.php/2015/11/26/new-mayaw. Lin, Wei Feng 林瑋豐 and Yan, Zhen Kai 顏振凱. 2015. “Qiang shi dai li liang le se lü dang yi yuan wang hao yu zhi qian 嗆時代力量「垃圾」 綠黨議員王浩宇致歉 [Green Party Representative Wang, Hao-Yu Apologizes for Calling the New Power Party ‘Garbage’].” Storm.mg 風傳媒 (October 31). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www.storm.mg/article/72809. Liu, Mei Yu 劉美妤. 2010. “Ameizu nu hou de min guo yi bai nian—tan di san bo huan wo tu di yun dong pangcah shou hu lian meng zhi cheng li 阿美族怒吼的民國一百 年—談第三波還我土地運動「Pangcah守護聯盟」之成立 [Pangcah Roars as ROC Celebrates Centennial: The Third Land Rights Movement and The Founding of ‘Pangcah Guard Alliance’].” Pots Weekly 破周報 (November 25). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from https://web.archive.org/web/20140719180951/http://pots.tw/ node/6814 (archived version at archive.org). Lu, Tien Fu 盧天福. 2011. “Gang kou bu luo xi lie yi guan di pi qiu dian ran yuan min nu huo 港口部落系列1—官踢土地皮球點燃原民怒火 [Makudaay Series 1: Indigenous People Get Angry as the Authorities Pass the Buck to Each Other].” Peopo Citizen Journalism [Peopo公民新聞] (December 22). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www.peopo.org/news/89341; www.peopo.org/news/102772. Lu, Zhi Fang 盧智芳. 2011. “Hu De Fu: sheng ming shi zhe yang ge jiu zhe yang xie 胡 德夫:生命是這樣,歌就這樣寫 [Hu, De-Fu: This Is Our Life, So This Is How I Write My Songs].” Cheers magazine Cheers雜誌 90 (August). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www.cheers.com.tw/article/article.action?id=5022726&page=3. Ma, Shi Fang 馬世芳. 2015. “Yi ge zao fan: guan kui Taiwan yi yi ge qu 以歌造反:管窺 台灣「異議歌曲」[Revolting with Songs: A Glimpse of Taiwan Protest Songs],” in Luo Jun Quan 羅俊全 (ed.), Zao in fan tu: Zhan hou Taiwan sheng xiang wen hua de tan suo 造音翻土:戰後台灣聲響文化的探索 [Altering Nativism: Sound Cultures in Post War Taiwan]. Taipei: Yuanjuwenhua, 122–129. Mata Taiwan. 2013. “Shumien tan yinyue xia xiang luerdao yinyuejie xiang baxi jianianhua … zhe jiu shi wo yao de doulan yinyue lüxing 舒米恩談音樂(下):像鹿兒島音樂 節、像巴西嘉年華…這就是我要的都蘭音樂旅行! [Suming on Music (Part 2): Like Good Neighbors Jamboree in Kagoshima, Like Carnival in Brazil, This Is the A’tolan Music Tourism I Want].” (December 4). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www. pure-taiwan.info/2013/12/suming-interview-part2. Mata Taiwan. 2014. “Aluo tan yinyue shang women dou ceng jue de muyu hen luowu dan wei you ta cai neng zhengming wo shi shei 阿洛談音樂(上):我們都曾覺得母 語很落伍;但唯有他才能證明我是誰! [Ado on Music (Part 1): We’ve All Thought the Mother-Tongue to be Outmoded, Yet Only It Can Prove Who I Am].” (January 16). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www.pure-taiwan.info/2014/01/16/interviewof-ado-part-1. Munro, Kelsey. 2016. “China Turns Off Tourism Tap in Taiwan,” The Sydney Morning Herald (October 15). Retrieved from www.smh.com.au/world/china-turns-offtourism-tap-in-taiwan-20161013-gs1g70.html. Shi, Zheng Feng 施正鋒. 2013. “Min jin dang zhi zheng ba nian zu qun zheng ce hui gu yu zhan wang 民進黨執政八年族群政策回顧與展望 [Eight Years of DPP Government’s Ethnic Policies: Review and Outlook],” Journal of the Taiwan Indigenous Studies 台灣原住民研究論叢 14: 85–120.
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Shi, Zheng Feng 施正鋒. 2014. Taiwan yuanhumin zu zizhi de lujing 台灣原住民族自治 的路徑 [Roadmap for Pursuing Indigenous Self-Governance in Taiwan],” Journal of the Taiwan Indigenous Studies 台灣原住民研究論叢 4: 189–206. Retrieved from http://faculty.ndhu.edu.tw/~cfshih/journal-articles/201412.pdf. Simon, Scott. 2007. “Paths to Autonomy: Aboriginality and the Nation in Taiwan,” in Carsten Storm and Mark Harrison (eds.), The Margins of Becoming: Identity and Culture in Taiwan. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 221–240. Stainton, Michael. 2007. “The Politics of Taiwan Aboriginal Origins,” in Murray A. Rubinstein (ed.), Taiwan: A New History. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 27–44. Taiwan Tourism Bureau 台灣觀光局. 2015. Lu Ke Lai Tai Guan Guang Da Shi Ji 陸客 來台灣觀光大事紀 [Chronicle: Chinese Mainlander Tourists to Taiwan]. Retrieved December 25, 2015, from http://admin.taiwan.net.tw/upload/contentFile/201510/ %E9%99%B8%E5%AE%A2%E4%BE%86%E8%87%BA%E8%A7%80%E5%85%89%E5%A4 %A7%E4%BA%8B%E7%B4%80.doc. Taylor, Timothy. 2003. “A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery: Transnational Music Sampling and Enigma’s ‘Return to Innocence’,” in René T. A. Lysloff and Leslie C. Gay Jr. Middletown (eds.), Music and Technoculture. Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 64–92. Ter, Dana. 2014. “Internationally-Acclaimed Artist Yosifu Raises Awareness of Environmental Concerns through His Series of Earthy Abstract Paintings,” Taipei Times (August 3). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/ archives/2014/08/03/2003596530. Tsai, C. L. Futuru. 2010. “Kapah (Young Men): Alternative Cultural Activism in Taiwan.” Savegeminds.org (August 4). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from https:// savageminds.org/2010/08/04/kapah-young-men. Tu, Ya Meng 杜雅蒙. 2012. “Gang kou kun tu di kang zheng shi jian 港口村土地抗爭事 件 [The Makudaay Land Dispute].” PTS Neews Network PNN 公視新聞議題中心 (February 15). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from http://pnn.pts.org.tw/main/201 2/02/15/%E3%80%90%E9%83%A8%E8%90%BD%E5%AE%A2%E5%A0%B1%E5%88% B0%E3%80%91%E6%B8%AF%E5%8F%A3%E6%9D%91%E5%9C%9F%E5%9C%B0%E6 %8A%97%E7%88%AD%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6. Williams, Scott. 2006. “From the Streets to the Villages: The Indigenous People’s Movement Turns 20.” Taiwan Panorama 台灣光華雜誌. Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www.taiwanpanorama.com/en/show_issue.php?id=200639503006E.TXT&table =2&cur_page=2&distype=. Wu, Si Feng 吳思鋒. 2011. “Shei de dong bu fa zhan tiao li 誰的東部發展條例 [The East Regional Development Act for Whom?].” erenlai.com e人賴雜誌 (May 30). Retrieved December 25, 2015, www.erenlai.com/tw/home/item/4576-2014-02-16-10-15-07. html. Wu, Si Feng 吳思鋒. 2015. “Tudi de zhengzhi le wu de guanguang hua—yi ji buluo jingji de que xi hualian xian zhengfu de shan hai ju chang men 土地的政治,樂舞的觀 光化,以及部落經濟的缺席—花蓮縣政府的山海劇們 [Politics of Land, Tourismization of Indigenous Dance, and the Absence of Tribal Economy: The Hualien County’s Shang-Hai Theatres].” Biao Yan Yi Shu Ping Lun Tai1 表演藝術評論台. Retrieved December 25, 2015, from http://pareviews.ncafroc.org.tw/?p=17593. Yan, Lin Yu 顏麟宇. 2015. “Yuanzhuminzu yao zuo ziji de zhu ren mayao bihou mian dui yangguang yin ying cai hui dao women de shen hou 原住民族要做自己的主人 馬 躍.比吼:面對陽光,陰影才會到我們的身後 [Indigenous Peoples Must Be Their
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Own Boss Mayaw Biho: Shadows Will Only Be Behind Us When We Face the Sun].” Storm.mg 風傳媒 (December 14). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from www.storm. mg/article/75906. Yu, Nian Zhu 余念竹. 2014. “Yong bao tudi zui zhen cheng de hui gui 擁抱土地最真誠 的回歸 [Embracing the Land, the Truest Return].” CastNet [喀報] (October 18). Retrieved December 25, 2015, from http://castnet.nctu.edu.tw/castnet/article/7188? issueID=529.
11 Social justice and language policy in Taiwan Alan Patten
Taiwan is a linguistically diverse country with a history of debates about language policy. Mandarin Chinese currently serves as the lingua franca for most Taiwanese people, with more than 95 percent of all Taiwanese citizens considering themselves to be proficient in Mandarin. Mandarin is also the first language, or “mother tongue,” of a number of Taiwanese, but it is far from being the most prevalent first language. That distinction belongs to the Min-Nan language, which is sometimes referred to as Taiwanese and is spoken by approximately 75 percent of the population. Another 10 percent speak Hakka, and a small number of people (less than 2 percent of the population) speak indigenous languages of Austronesian origin.1 Since 1945, Mandarin has been employed as the principal language of public institutions. From 1945 until the 1980s, it was promoted very aggressively by government policy. Mandarin was taught in schools, used in government offices and other public institutions, and privileged in the broadcast media. At times, other languages have been actively discouraged, but since the 1980s there has been greater toleration of them and some willingness to consider their use by public institutions. In recent years, there have been several proposals to officially raise the public status of languages other than Mandarin.2 How should citizens and officials think about these proposals? Should Mandarin continue to be the sole official language of Taiwanese public institutions? Or should Taiwan elevate Taiwanese, and perhaps one or more minority language, to official status alongside Mandarin? My aim in this chapter is to comment on this question from the standpoint of political theory. Since my perspective is very much that of an outsider to Taiwanese society, and since the right policy choice depends in any case on various empirical factors, I won’t push very hard on a specific policy recommendation. My focus will be on using the tools of political theory to clarify what is at stake. In the process, I hope to show that those tools, while developed in the context of North American and European debates concerning language policy, are also pertinent in the Taiwanese context.
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Political philosophy and language policy Political philosophers have tended to neglect debates over language policy, although this has started to change in recent years.3 Language policy choices are actually connected with some of the most fundamental questions in politics. These include: How to encourage the formation of a single political community in which citizens feel a sense of connection and solidarity with one another? How to facilitate democratic participation and deliberation? How to promote conditions in which all citizens can enjoy equal opportunities? And how, and how far, to respect and make space for individuals and communities who want to pursue their own commitments and enjoy and express their own attachments in their own ways? Depending on how these general questions of political philosophy are answered, various implications for language policy follow immediately or under particular empirical conditions. Broadly speaking, it is useful to distinguish two competing principles of language policy. The nation-building principle calls on public institutions to privilege a common language to be shared by all citizens of the political community. This is the language to be used in government offices, by public officials, and in the courts, military and in public media. It is the language of public education and is expected to be the language used by major economic actors in conducting their business (in financial markets, large department stores, on the factory floor of big corporations, and so on). The nation-building principle can be pursued in a more or less liberal fashion. A liberal principle of nation-building is tolerant of non-public uses of other languages and offers assistance and accommodation to people who are still learning the common language. The alternative to nation-building is the principle of plural language recognition (or pluralism for short). Emphasizing the idea of language rights, the pluralism principle calls for public institutions to create spaces and structures in which several different languages can be used. There might still be a societywide lingua franca that all are encouraged to learn. But public institutions are designed and operated to promote and to accommodate the use of languages other than the lingua franca as well. The pluralism principle can be framed in stronger or weaker forms depending on how much deference is paid to the distinct goal of creating a common public language. In its purest form, minority language recognition calls for rigorous equality in the recognition of different languages spoken by citizens, even if this means that no lingua franca is established. Weaker versions seek to balance the values associated with minority language recognition and those associated with having a lingua franca by offering some spaces and structures to citizens whose first language is not the lingua franca while still privileging the lingua franca in some respects. Both approaches to language policy can appeal to ideas of social or distributive justice to justify their principles. The nation-building approach emphasizes the instrumental importance of language for distributive justice. From this perspective, although language policies and patterns of language use are not themselves a matter of distributive concern, these or other linguistic facts may be
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consequential for the distribution of that which does matter for justice. The pluralist approach, by contrast, attaches at least some non-instrumental importance to language. From this point of view, part of what makes a distribution just is that it appropriately attends to the interests that people have in the use, the success, and/or the treatment of their first languages.
The instrumental approach An instrumental account of linguistic justice brackets the question of whether language is itself an object of distributive concern. It posits a languageindependent conception of social justice, and then explores the ways in which language diversity might help or hinder the realization of justice so conceived. There are a variety of different causal mechanisms that might link language and justice in this instrumental fashion. Some are broadly supportive of the nationbuilding principle. Others support, or at least are consistent with, the pluralist principle. The pro-nation-building mechanisms include the following: 1
2
3
Social exclusion. In a country like Taiwan, with a dominant lingua franca, a person would be at a serious disadvantage if he or she were not relatively fluent in Mandarin. Insofar as justice frowns upon such disadvantages, there is a justice-related reason to ensure that knowledge of Mandarin is universal. Policies that privilege Mandarin in public institutions are an effective means of advancing that goal. Integration. Language difference sometimes overlaps with, and seriously complicates, socio-economic difference. Where linguistic difference coincides with low socio-economic status, there is justice-based reason to avoid creating linguistically separate public institutions and practices. Insisting on a single language of public usage promotes the integration of all citizens into a single framework of socio-economic opportunity. National identity. In various ways, it is good for a society when all of its members share a common sense of identity—a sense of being a unified community or people who have strong obligations of social solidarity to one another. All else being equal, democracy should function better and people should be more willing to shoulder burdens on one another’s behalf when there is a strong sense of common identity. Linguistic differences can impair the formation of such an identity, while the existence of a single common national language can encourage it.
Each of these causal mechanisms supports the hypothesis that there is an instrumental relationship between a nation-building approach to language policy— one that privileges a single common national language—and the realization of social justice. There are instrumental considerations that pull in the opposite direction, however. Consider the following:
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A. Patten Bilingualism. The social exclusion and national identity mechanisms are premised in part on the idea that there is a trade-off between fluency in the national lingua franca and public use and recognition of other languages. But of course personal bilingualism is a very common trait throughout the world. It is possible that a society could have a widely accepted lingua franca and still manage to give a place in public institutions to other languages. Ethno-linguistic identity. Just as people can speak multiple languages, they are also capable of having multiple identity attachments. A person could think of herself as both Taiwanese and as a member of a particular ethno-linguistic group. So, as with the point about bilingualism, there isn’t necessarily a contradiction between promoting a strong sense of national identity and recognizing languages other than the national lingua franca. In fact, a person’s sense of national identity might be strengthened by the assurance that the national framework recognizes and protects his or her particular ethnolinguistic identity. And national identity might be weakened by a widespread belief that it is in conflict with particular ethno-linguistic identities.
As this brief (and incomplete) list of causal factors indicates, the instrumental relationship between language policy and social justice is very complicated. There are different causal mechanisms and they can pull in different directions depending on specific empirical features of the society in question. It is certainly tempting to think that, on instrumental grounds at least, the nation-building project of promoting a national lingua franca ought to be the main concern of language policy makers. But three important qualifications need to be noted. First, while privileging a single lingua franca might advance important interests in equal opportunity and national identity, such an approach may not be the least burdensome means of advancing those interests. The interests may be adequately secured through a policy that extends language rights to languages other than the lingua franca (that is, through pluralism). Second, the nationbuilding policy may actually be counter-productive from the standpoint of realizing the interests in question. As was just noted, it might be more promising to construct a national identity around linguistic pluralism. The third point that needs acknowledging is that instrumental considerations may not exhaust the relationship between justice and language policy. There may be non-instrumental aspects of the relationship that matter too. It is to this question that I want to turn now. We shall see that there is indeed a noninstrumental dimension to linguistic justice and that once this dimension is appreciated any preference for nation-building needs further qualification.
A non-instrumental framework: the neutrality model How might language be considered an object of distributive concern in its own right?4 To begin with, we need to distinguish several different interests that people have with respect to language policy. One such interest is an interest in
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communication. If public institutions operate in a language that a person cannot understand or speak, then he or she is excluded and disadvantaged in a variety of significant ways. I set this interest aside, however, because I assume that, in a society such as Taiwan, this communicative interest is adequately served by use of the lingua franca Mandarin. If there is a justice-based reason for extending language rights to other languages, it is not grounded in the communicative interest. A second interest that does seem relevant for assessing language rights claims is the interest that people have in being able to access the particular options that they value. It is not unusual for people who belong to the same linguistic community to share preferences for particular options, practices, styles, and so on. Of course, co-linguists won’t all share the same preferences, but the frequency with which certain preferences are held may be much greater within a linguistic group than outside of it. Think of the way that musical and culinary tastes tend to cluster around particular language communities. In general, people with preferences that are distinctive of their linguistic community have a good reason to care about the ongoing success of that community. The options they care about are more likely to remain available if their language community survives and flourishes than if its members assimilate into another language group. A third interest that seems relevant might be called the “identity” interest. Many people care about their first language—that is, the language that they learned and used as young children. They self-identify with the (local) community of speakers of the language. They are proud of the language and of the cultural achievements that have been expressed through it. They take pleasure in using the language and encountering others who are willing to use it. They hope that their (local) language community will survive and flourish into the indefinite future. In some contexts, they feel respected and affirmed when others address them in their language and denigrated when others use a different language. To say that a person has an identity interest is to say that she has an interest in the accommodation of some or all of these preferences and attitudes. And if she does have such an interest, it will clearly not be served by assimilation into some other language (e.g., the lingua franca). A person who identifies with her own language will be satisfied only by the success or respectful treatment of that language. Now the mere fact that people care about their language—either for the options it keeps open, or because of its identity significance—is not sufficient to justify the claim that language matters non-instrumentally to justice. People care about all sorts of things: the car they drive; the clothes they wear; the home they live in; the company they keep; and so on. Theorists of justice would not normally single out the make of the car a person drives as an object of distributive concern just because it is something that some people happen to value. The bridge between the second and third interests and justice is provided by the idea of state neutrality. Just because the options a person cares about are unavailable does not by itself imply any injustice to that person. Nor need there be an injustice whenever public institutions fail to accommodate some aspect of
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a person’s or a group’s identity. But people do have a complaint of injustice when public institutions treat the things that they care about non-neutrally— that is, when they impose more burdens on, or extend fewer benefits to, the pursuit of their conceptions of the good life than they do to the conceptions that matter to other people. When the state is non-neutral in these ways, it fails to give its citizens a fair opportunity to realize their conception of the good life. So to recap: individuals have option- and identity-based interests in the public use of their first languages. And they have a claim of justice that these interests be treated neutrally by public institutions. But what does neutral treatment imply for language policy? Two main answers are worth comparing. According to the first, the state treats the linguistic preferences of its citizens neutrally by siding with none of them. A language is selected for public use that is not anyone’s first language, and then none of the languages that are first languages are given any rights to public use. This is roughly the idea behind the recurrent proposal to use a made-up language like Esperanto in European or even global institutions. Since Esperanto is nobody’s first language, it is said to be equally inconvenient for everyone. People can continue to use their first language in private contexts, but nobody enjoys the advantage of having their first language adopted for official usage. The other possible answer is the neutrality requires that the state provide evenhanded, positive support to each of the first languages spoken by its citizens. This is the form of neutrality that is realized when public parks are equipped with a variety of different sporting and recreational facilities, depending on the different preferences and needs of members of the community. The idea is not to treat all fairly by giving nobody what they want, but to treat each fairly by giving each a fair share of resources and support customized to their particular preferences and needs. In the area of language policy, this approach means extending equal positive recognition to the various first languages spoken by citizens. Such recognition makes it possible to receive government services in one’s first language, to send one’s children to school in that language, and to participate in public institutions in that language. I won’t try to argue it here but I have explained elsewhere why I think that equal recognition has to be understood in a pro-rated way: the resources that are devoted to a particular language appropriately depends on the number of speakers of that language and the preferences of those speakers.5
Language justice and Taiwan In Taiwan, the pre-eminence of Mandarin has been justified on both instrumental and non-instrumental grounds of justice. Instrumentally, the argument is that the privileging of a single dominant language connects all citizens together into a single structure of social and economic opportunity, and binds them together with a single national identity. My comments were meant to suggest that these are respectable considerations, but not necessarily decisive ones. It
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may be that these goals could still be achieved in Taiwan under a policy that recognized some language rights for languages other than Mandarin. The preeminence of Mandarin might be defended on non-instrumental grounds of justice through an argument that Mandarin is a neutral solution to the society’s linguistic diversity. At the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945 there were very few people in Taiwan who would consider Mandarin to be their first language. Mandarin may have seemed like a neutral, “outside” language— friendlier than Japanese—around which to organize communication on the island. By contrast, an attempt to elevate Taiwanese to the national language would certainly not have seemed neutral towards speakers of the smaller language groups. Even now a proposal to elevate Taiwanese to official language status, alongside Mandarin, provokes opposition from speakers of Hakka and of indigenous languages. On the other hand, many would question the “neutrality” of Mandarin in the Taiwanese context. The adoption of Mandarin as the language of state in the late 1940s coincided with a large immigration of Mandarin-speakers from the mainland, especially in the aftermath of the Communist takeover on the mainland in 1949. It is often suggested that this Mandarin minority proceeded to act like a traditional ethnic group, hoarding opportunities and privileges within the group, and excluding and marginalizing members of other groups. From this perspective, Mandarin doesn’t seem like a neutral language choice after all. Even if knowledge of Mandarin became nearly universal in Taiwan, the language was associated with a particular dominant group in Taiwanese society and its use as a language of state was aligned with the interests and identity of members of this group. To properly realize neutrality, on this second view, then would require the second principle described earlier—in which an attempt is made to positively and evenhandedly extend some official support and recognition to each of the first languages present on the island.
Further observations on language justice in the Taiwanese context As an outsider to Taiwan, and certainly not a specialist about Taiwanese society or history, I won’t try to say which of these interpretations of linguistic neutrality is more justifiable. It does seem to me that any conclusions about what justice requires non-instrumentally with respect to language policy in the Taiwanese context depends on grappling with this issue. My main aim in this chapter has been to describe a framework for thinking about what justice implies for language policy. The framework has both instrumental and non-instrumental components. Within each of these components, specific empirical issues are highlighted that are salient to thinking about particular cases. I’ve been illustrating many of the theoretical points with reference to the Taiwanese case, but have avoided pronouncing on what, in the end, linguistic justice requires in Taiwan. This depends on a much deeper understanding of relevant empirical and historical matters than I am able to offer here.
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Let me conclude by considering three possible challenges that might be offered against the analysis I’ve been proposing. Each of them objects that the analysis has left out something crucial to the Taiwanese context. One general worry about the kind of analysis offered here is that it makes little reference to democracy. For the past quarter century, Taiwan has enjoyed a successful electoral democracy. Presumably, the right way to make decisions about language policy is, at least in part, through democratic institutions—that is, through institutions that facilitate deliberation, contestation, voting, representation, accountability, and so on. An a priori framework such as I sketched above might seem more aligned with an elitist determination of language policy. But this objection misunderstands the relationship between political theory and democracy. The two enterprises should not be seen as competing with one another. The task of political theory is to clarify and criticize the concepts and moral principles that are used in debate and deliberation by both elites and democratic actors. Of course, it is for the political actors, and not the theorists, to actually decide. But theorists can contribute to deliberation through clarification, criticism, and the articulation of principles and ideals. The second challenge is more specific to discussing these theoretical questions in the Taiwanese—indeed the East Asian—context. The theoretical framework I’ve been sketching relies in places on concepts that may strike some as characteristic of Anglo-American liberal political theory. The framework refers to language rights and it relies at a critical point on a notion of state neutrality. To some critics, including some who associate themselves with Confucian political morality, the notion of rights reveals an individualistic, antagonistic, even egoist streak in liberalism. And the appeal to neutrality seems to conflict with claims made by Confucians among others that there are better and worse ways of living a human life, and with the claim that a good state should not be indifferent to which of these paths is chosen by its citizens. There are obviously some large and complicated issues here, and I can’t do justice to them in this brief discussion. Despite its terminology, I do not believe that my argument is dependent on objectionable notions of rights or neutrality. I do use the term “language rights” to refer to a particular kind of language policy with which I have some sympathy. But “rights” as I understand them needn’t be individual, nor need they be established within a framework of law that allows individuals to press their own concerns against the needs of the community. To talk of rights in this context is mainly to indicate that individuals have moral claims that are weighty enough that others should normally find a way to accommodate them. This might be done through an adversarial, American-style system of legal rights, but it might also be accomplished through wise and just public policy. Likewise, for the purposes of this chapter, I have a fairly modest understanding of neutrality. Neutrality need not be understood as the opposite of perfectionism (the doctrine that the state should promote the good life for its citizens). It’s enough for my argument that the state should be neutral towards—meaning, should treat fairly—the worthwhile conceptions of the good
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that are pursued by its citizens. How the state should treat inferior conceptions of the good is a further and I think more complicated question. This response might still not go far enough for some perfectionist (e.g., neoConfucian) critics of liberal neutrality. The non-instrumental view of linguistic justice appealed to the idea that people care about their linguistic communities and suggested that neutral policies are fair ways of helping people obtain the goods that they care about. But this idea that people have an interest in or a claim to obtain the things that they care about seems to make exactly the mistake that perfectionists object to. It does not distinguish between the things that people have good reason to care about and the things that they do not. For all I have said, attachment to one’s ethno-linguistic group may belong in the second category: it may be one of those atavistic vestiges of the pre-modern world that is best regarded as worthless in the context of the contemporary nation-state. However, even if the general perfectionist point is accepted, I do not think ethno-linguistic attachment should be rejected as worthless. One reason for this is likely to have considerable appeal in a Confucian context. Ethno-linguistic communities are often crucial settings for the enjoyment of intra-family, intergenerational relationships. Young people can view themselves as part of a lineage with their parents and grandparents, and can show respect and gratitude to their elders, by learning the language of the older generations and making an effort to experience the present-day incarnation of the family’s culture. While I do not insist that this is something that every individual has a duty to do, it strikes me as a worthwhile and non-atavistic reason for valuing one’s attachment to a particular ethno-linguistic community. Finally, it might be objected that I have overlooked the “elephant in the room” when discussing language policy in Taiwan—namely, the island’s present and future relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Indeed, I think it fair to say that the attitudes of many Taiwanese people concerning language policy are shaped by their views about Taiwan’s existential situation. For those who favor eventual reunification, a Mandarin-first or even Mandarin-only policy would prepare the Taiwanese people for full and successful participation in a unified China. For supporters of an independent Taiwanese state, the public use of languages other than Mandarin accentuates Taiwan’s distinctiveness and strengthens the formation of a separate Taiwanese identity that would make it difficult for the island ever to be absorbed into the PRC. I certainly do not mean to ignore or downplay these macro-political considerations. But I mention them only now because I think the opposite temptation—to reduce the language question down to the existential political one—is even more alluring. Such a reduction would, in my opinion, be a mistake. For one thing, some claims about the political question depend on claims about the linguistic problem. This or that political solution is favored because it is seen as more just from a linguistic perspective (in either the instrumental or noninstrumental sense). This way of thinking about Taiwan’s political situation obviously presupposes some kind of account of linguistic justice, one that isn’t
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itself reducible to calculations concerning Taiwan’s political future. Even where claims about the political question do not depend on claims about the language question, considerations of linguistic justice may still exert some independent relevance to all-things-considered judgments about Taiwan’s political future. Linguistic justice (again in either the instrumental or non-instrumental variants) may be a constraint on particular political solutions and strategies. This possibility again makes linguistic justice a topic worth considering in its own right and at least somewhat separately from the national existential questions that preoccupy Taiwanese political life.
Notes 1 For an overview of Taiwan’s linguistic situation, see the Government of Taiwan’s Republic of China Yearbook (2010), chapter 2, accessed on March 26, 2017 from https://web.archive.org/web/20110820220526/www.gio.gov.tw/taiwanwebsite/5-gp/yearbook. 2 See Dupré, “Mandarin State Tradition and Language Regime Change in Taiwan.” 3 Kymlicka and Patten, Language Rights and Political Theory, is a collection of essays by political philosophers about the normative issues surrounding language policy and language rights. Other treatments of this topic include: Green, “Are Language Rights Fundamental?”; Kymlicka Multicultural Citizenship and Politics in the Vernacular; Réaume, “The Constitutional Protection of Language,” “The Group Right to Linguistic Security,” and “Official-Language Rights”; Carens, Culture, Citizenship, and Community; Van Parijs, “Must Europe Be Belgian?” and Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World; Patten “Political Theory and Language Policy,” “Liberal Neutrality and Language Policy,” “Survey Article,” and Equal Recognition; De Schutter and Ypi “Language and Luck.” 4 I draw in this section on Patten, Equal Recognition, chap. 6. 5 Patten, Equal Recognition, p. 162.
References Carens, Joseph. 2000. Culture, Citizenship, and Community: A Contextual Exploration of Justice as Evenhandedness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Schutter, Helder and Ypi, Lea. 2012. “Language and Luck,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 11(4): 357–381. Dupré, Jean-François. 2015. “Mandarin State Tradition and Language Regime Change in Taiwan,” in Selma K. Sonntag and Linda Cardinal (eds.), State Traditions and Language Regimes. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Green, Leslie. 1987. “Are Language Rights Fundamental?” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 25(4): 639–669. Kymlicka, Will. 1995. Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, Will. 2001. Politics in the Vernacular. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, Will and Patten, Alan. 2003. Language Rights and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Patten, Alan. 2001. “Political Theory and Language Policy,” Political Theory 29(5): 683–707. Patten, Alan. 2003. “Liberal Neutrality and Language Policy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 31(4): 356–386.
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Patten, Alan. 2009. “Survey Article: The Justification of Minority Language Rights,” Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (1): 102–128. Patten, Alan. 2014. Equal Recognition: The Moral Foundations of Minority Rights. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Réaume, Denise. 1991. “The Constitutional Protection of Language: Survival or Security?” in David Schneiderman (ed.), Language and the State: The Law and Politics of Identity. Cowansville: Éditions Yvon Blais, 37–57. Réaume, Denise. 1994. “The Group Right to Linguistic Security: Whose Right, What Duties?” in Judith Baker (ed.), Group Rights. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 118–141. Réaume, Denise. 2000. “Official-Language Rights: Intrinsic Value and the Protection of Difference,” in Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman (eds.), Citizenship in Diverse Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 245–272. Van Parijs, Philippe. 2000. “Must Europe Be Belgian? On Democratic Citizenship in Multilingual Polities,” in Catriona McKinnon and Ian Hampsher-Monk (eds.), The Demands of Citizenship. London: Continuum, 232–256. Van Parijs, Philippe. 2011. Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Index
Alliance for Taiwan Aborigines (ATA) 200, 208 Amis see Pangcah Anderson, B. 38, 53n11, 98n30, 106–7, 119n11, 119n15 Angle, S.C. 75n24 anti-Japanese: demonstrations 111; war 110 anti-nationalism 180–1 anti-nationalist ideology 181 Anti-Nuclear Movement 170 Arrighi, G. 163, 174n6 Baik, Young-seo 190–1, 195n47 Barry, B. 20n3, 99n34 BBC 111 Beiner, R. 35n6, 53n11 Bell, D.A. 20n3, 62, 65, 71, 74n3, 75n20, 75n22, 75n24, 77n73, 97n3, 97n5, 99n39 black tide 14, 161, 172–4 boat people 126 Bokhary, K. 132–3, 137n45 Brand Hong Kong 137n58 Bremmer, I. 174n19 Britain/Great Britain 34, 124, 131, 137n38; Break-up 35n6 British Administration 136n17; citizen 131, 137n45; colonial administrators 134; colonial government 11–12, 125; colonial rule 126–7, 131; colony 123; dependent territory 135; residents in Hong Kong 133–4; Sino-British Joint Declaration 12, 131 Buchanan, A. 42, 50–1, 53n4, 53n6, 54n35 Census and Statistics Department 137n52 Chan, J. 68, 76n42, 76n49, 98n14
Chang, C. 63, 68, 75n25, 76n52, 77n57, 77n70 Chang, Jung-fa 167, 169 Chang, K. 75n26, 75n27, 75n30, 76n51 Chen, Jiarong 126, 136n11 Chen, Shui-bian 18, 105, 117, 167, 201, 206–7, 214n16, 215n43, 215n51, 215n53 Chen, Yunlin 168, 170 Cheng, J. 132, 137n43 China 1, 3, 6, 26–7; contemporary 21n9; exploitations by Western imperialism 10; foreign relations 11; One China Principle 10, 105, 116; president 9; Service and Trade Agreement with Taiwan 14–15, 161, 170; superpower status 59, 71, 116; see also mainland China, People’s Republic of China (PRC), Republic of China (ROC) Chinese Communist: government 106, 111, 115; Party (CCP) 9, 109, 115, 118, 199; regime 106; revolution 105; Youths 113 Chinese nationalism 11, 60; alternative 62; contemporary 10, 106; ethnic and cultural nature 9; grown intense 105; in Hong Kong public life 127, 131–2; implications on governance of CCP 115; importance of achievements in sports 114; influence of Confucianism 59; internal dynamics 106; language of 110; literature on 74n4; modern 10, 106–7; portraying a national hero 108; PRC-sanctioned version 135; Taiwan disputes 117; in times of war 118; Western perception of 116 Chong, E.K.M. 10–11 Chong, J.I. 74n4 Chong, M. 190, 195n45
Index CNN 111 Cold War 151, 163, 165–6, 168; see also post-Cold War colonial rule 15; British 12, 126, 131; Japanese 163–4, 199 Confucian: public culture 83; relational ethics 6–7, 72–4; values 88 Confucian nation 6, 9, 33, 84–7; accommodates pluralism 89; civic character 89; constitutionalization of 92; contemporary Koreans 98n30; generic mode of 96; integration of immigrants 95; intergenerational aspect 93; justifying 8; members 32; partial comprehensiveness 93, 96; perfectionist nature 94; philosophical justification 96; socially relevant 97 Confucianism 2–3, 5–7, 9, 21n7, 21n9, 63, 72, 74n4, 98n14, 98n16; compatible with 33; comprehensive 84–5, 89, 93, 96; in contemporary East Asia 8, 83; cosmopolitan interpretations of 60–1; incompatible with 62; influence on Chinese nationalism 59; Korean self-chosen value system 88; moral content of 95; Neo-Confucianism 84, 97n9, 98n12; opposing interpretations of 59; partial comprehensive 93, 97n8; rejected 32; religious 88; revival of 59, 62, 97n6; shared cultural heritage 82–3; traditional 82, 88; version of 84, 89, 97n8 Constitutional Amendment: 1992 200; 1994 200; 1998 18, 199–201 Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) 201–2, 204, 213n2 Cummings, B. 174n3, 174n14 damunhwa (Korean multiculturalism) 13, 143, 145–7, 152–6; see also multiculturalism de Bary, W.T. 74n5, 74n8, 75n17 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) 207–8, 215n45; policy goal 204 diaspora 136n15; community 27 Difang (Kuo, Ying-Nan) 209 Dikötter, F. 110 disparity 15, 179–82, 193 earthquake 114; Sichuan 11, 109, 115, 117 East Asia 1–3, 13, 189, 191, 193; American hegemony challenged 168; Chinese economic progress 113–14;
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Confucianism 6, 8, 32, 82–3, 98n29; majority nations 17; nationalism 32; pluralism 83; South-East transient populations 126 East Asian 1–3, 228; citizens 82–3, 96; community 190–1; Confucianism 84, 93, 96; Confucian cultural context 96; Confucian public policies 99n39; economy 165; experiences 20n3, 20n5; modernity 97n3; modern nationbuilding 90; nations 15; people 8, 83, 85, 88–9, 93; reality 97n12; region 6; situation 170; societal context 21n5; societies 84–5, 96–7; Southeast domestic workers 12; united association of national universities 16 East Asians 6, 8–9, 82–4, 88, 96 East Coast National Scenic Area (EC-NSA) 205–6; Headquarters 205 education 150; 1998 Act for Indigenous Peoples 214n34; Chinese 112; discrimination 154; equal opportunities in 125; ethnic minority participation 133, 135; Hong Kong 128; Japanese 110, 178; Korean Ministry of 156; programs for cultural minority groups 126; provided by Korean Center for Migrant Workers 153; sports and physical 114; UNESCO international programs 156; youth 210 education, public 93; Confucian style 99n39; language of 222 educational 38, 95; Hong Kong institutions 123; Korean system 155 equality 3, 43, 135, 173; arguments 5–6, 36–41, 44, 46, 49–52; before the law 129; calls for equal benefits 42; equivocal attitudes 128; gender 82, 88, 92–3, 97n7, 149, 156; importance of dignity and 110; liberal 41; natural 191; political 88; principle of 40, 42; in recognition of different languages 222; value of 4, 36 ethnic nationalism 9, 11, 86, 143, 145, 152; as developmental strategy 13, 148, 151; exclusive 157; in Korea 144; selective 157; South Korean 21n11 first languages 19, 225; adopted for official usage 226; interests of people in use, success, treatment of 223; not the lingua franca 222; public use of 226; of Taiwanese 221, 227 Fitzgerald, J. 114
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form of nationalism 9, 171; alternative 180–2; apolitical or cultural 25; desired 192; liberal-neutral 16; modern 186; more radicalized 15; new 106, 193; political or civic 25; popular 62; prioritizes solidarity with citizens of other nations 193; Western 29 Fukuyama, F. 83, 97n4 Fung, Y.-l. 65, 75n32 Gans, Ch. 45–6, 52n2, 54n30, 54n38, 54n41 Gellner, E. 107, 174n4 Governor-General Office of Taiwan (GGO) 199, 202 Green Party 215n45 Greenfeld, L. 86, 98n18 Gries, P.H. 74n4, 115, 120n69, 120n71 guo (state) 6–7, 60, 62–6, 68, 75n30, 75n32, 132, 213n5, 213n8, 214n12, 214n32 Gutmann, A. 20n3, 99n5 Hahm, Chaibong 97n3, 97n5, 97n9, 98n13 Hahm, Chaihark 97n7, 99n32, 99n39 Han Chinese 1, 17–18, 108, 199; ethnic group 128, 136n12; immigrants 17; people 110, 136n21; origin 199; race 107, 118; style governance 10; subethnic groups 126; Taiwanese 17 Han river 149, 158n34 Harvey, D. 174n8 He, B. 20n4, 21n9 Hirschman, A.O. 15, 169, 175n21 Hobsbawm, E. 2, 20n1, 35n6, 53n11, 107, 119n13, 119n19 Hong Kong 3–4, 6, 9–11, 85, 191; born in 123, 130–1; Census and Statistics Department 137n52; citizens 128–31, 134, 135n5; citizenship 11–12, 124–5, 129–31; Consultative Committee 136n29; court 127, 137n55; employment 134; ethnic minorities in 126; ethnicity in 123, 135n1, 136n10, 136n16; foreign domestic helpers 137n57; foreign groups in 135n1; identity 11, 125–8; identification card (HKID) 11, 124, 128, 135n5; International Airport (HKIA) 124, 135n5; invisible minorities in 128; judiciary 12, 132; language of 135n3; law 12, 131–2; mainlandization 136n19; politics 123; society 11–12,
126, 129, 131, 134; Unison 129, 136n27; Yearbook 133 Hong Kong Bar 132–3; Association 132 Hong Kong Basic Law (Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China) 125, 129–30, 132, 136n18, 137n30, 137n56; Consultative Committee for the Basic Law 136n29; Hong Kong Chinese 125, 127; expats seeking citizenship 137n33; nationalism in 131 Hong Kong government 12–13, 127, 137n58; campaigns 137n58; employees 137n38 Hong Kong passport 136n28; eligibility for 11–12, 127, 130 Hong Kong residents 123–5, 127, 129, 135, 135n5, 137n32, 137n45; Chinese 125, 127; legal, privileges of 124; living in 129–31; residence in 130, 133; right of abode in 127, 129 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) 127, 133, 136n18, 137n56; Chief Executive 133; criteria for permanent residency 137n56; government 125, 131–2, 134–5, 136n8, 137n52; passport 129; Passports Appeal Board 137n36; Secretary of Justice 132; Secretary for Security 137n36; see also Hong Kong Basic Law Hongkonger (Hong Kong person) 11–12, 123–4, 127–8, 133–4 Hsu, Hsin-liang 167, 174n18 Huang, S. 165, 174n15 indigenous 199, 201–2; activism 18, 207, 211–13; activists 207–8, 212–13, 214n15; affairs 200; artists 18, 211; Basic Law 201, 204; bills 208; claims 202, 212; communities 17–18, 202; community mapping 204; forced inclusion or oppression 37; identity 209; languages 221, 227; lifestyle 17; mayors 18; minorities 45; mountain 202, 212; policies 207; representatives 203, 206–7; Taiwan Television (TITV) 205, 214n34; traditional festivals 210; viewed as tourism resources 205; xiang 208; xiang mayor 212; young men 210; youth 18 indigenous cultures 17, 200, 204–5, 209; lack of appreciation for 212; and language 208; reinvigorated 4; protection for 18
Index indigenous electorate 207–8, 213; elections 213; mayoral elections 206; parliamentary seats 206–7, 214n23, 214n40, 215n41; voters 206 indigenous groups 45; minority 17; rights of self-government 46 indigenous land 19; areas 203; loss of 212; nations land treaties 214n13; owning 164; regions 207; reserved 202–3; rights 201; rights movements 206; struggles 213n28, 214n28; traditional territories 204 indigenous movements in Taiwan 17, 199; leadership of Presbyterian Church 209, 214n15; pan-indigenous 203, 207, 212; role of music 208 indigenous music 209, 211; album 210; singers 209, 211, 213; songs 208, 210 indigenous nations 18, 199, 212; congressional seat 214n13; convened national assemblies 202; mistaken classification 201–2; Pangcah 213; parliamentary representation 206; political participation 200–1 indigenous peoples 199–200, 202–3, 206, 212–13; Council of (CIP) 201; economic hardship 212; Education Act 1998 213n2, 214n34; folk music revival 208–9; improvement of living conditions 204–5; mainstream understanding of 208; officially recognized in Taiwan 17–18; political participation low 17; promoting selfgovernance 201; representation in parliament 206–7, 215n41; stigmatised 213; Taiwan Indigenous Television (TITV) 214n34; traditional names used 207; Treaty of New Partnership with 18, 201; underrepresented 200; urban 209, 213; see also IPACT, mountain indigenous, Pangcah, plains indigenous indigenous persons: discriminated against 200; mountain or plains 202–3, 206, 212, 214n23; with official status 199; policies directed at 202; urban 210 indigenous population 199, 207, 213n2; culture and language differences 208; decline in preservation of languages 18; economic hardship and social problems 200; Japanese colonial rule 17, 202; New Territories 128; parliamentary representation 214n23 indigenous rights 201, 211; advocacy 18; claims 202, 206–7, 212; progressive proposals 208
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Indigenous Voice Company (IVC) 209 indigenous self-determination 52n2, 54n31; self-governance 201, 204; selfgovernment 212; self-government bill 201 inequalities 13; redress 42, 45 inequality 16, 41, 48; affecting minority national groups 36; facing national minorities 52; between majority and minority groups 5, 50–1; of minority nations 49; in multinational states 6; within nations 171; in polyethnic groups 46; redress 41–3, 45 IPACT (Indigenous Peoples Action Coalition of Taiwan) 214n19 Ivanhoe, P.J. 62, 74n6, 75n21, 77n75 Japan 1, 3–4, 6, 13, 39, 93, 106, 110, 116, 188; acquisition of Taiwan 164; Black Youth Federation 175n28; China’s dispute with 11; colonial power 143; colonial rule of empire 163; colonial and wartime activities 110; colonization of Korea 144; development of capitalism 163; prewar formal empire 165; security 110; sugar-manufacturing capitalism 164; territorial disputes 111; upward mobility 165; USA assistance with reconstruction 165; war heroes 111; Worker-Farmer school of Marxism 165 Japan, colonial 1, 202; domination 17; government 17, 202; rule 163–4, 199 Japanese 111, 181, 187; anthropologists 202; Archipelago 172; capitalism 164–5; Chinese-Japanese relations 113; citizens in Hong Kong 133; cultural borrowing 114; economy 165; Education Ministry 110; education system 110; Embassy in Beijing 110; folklorist 172; forced Pangcah to leave their land 203; imperialism 10–11, 111, 148, 164; invasion of Manchuria 112; leftists 16; monopoly of sugar industry 165; nation ruined 188; occupation 110, 227; owned properties 203; particularity 16; people 8, 34, 183; political leaders 1; pop culture 210–11; post-war discourse 16; prewar situation 190; Prime Minster 105, 111, 116, 183; rule 162, 213n4; settlers 202; SinoJapanese War 113, 164; Sinologists 76n55; socialist movement 164; society 183, 191; spirituality 191–2; war against 113–14; youth poverty 15, 178–9
236
Index
Japanese empire 162; prewar 174n9 Japanese nationalism 15, 181, 183, 187, 192, 194n9; form of state violence 181; ironic immersion 16, 182; modern 163; opportunism toward 190; reaffirming 178; xenophobic 15, 178–9, 193 jia 65,75n32 Jiang, S. 137n33 Jiang, Y. 117 Jiang, Zemin 108 justification 8, 39; of foreigner policy reform 154; of partiality 65; philosophical 96 Kang, Xiaoguang 59, 74n2 Kang, Youwei 61 Kayano, T. 15, 179–82, 194n9 Kim, Duk-Kyun 98n25 Kim, Dae-Jung 13, 145, 149, 152, 157 Kim, Hee-Kang 97n7 Kim, Hyung-A 158n13, 158n16 Kim, Loretta 10–12 Kim, Nadia 145, 157n10 Kim, Nora 13–14, 135n4 Kim, Samuel S. 158n25, 158n28, 158n30, 158n41 Kim, Sangjoon 158n40 Kim, Sungmoon 6, 8–9, 21n10, 97n6, 98n16, 99n40, 99n43, 99n54 Kim, Young Sam 13, 145, 149–52, 157 King Wu 64, 70, 75n26, 76n47 Korea 1, 3, 150, 153, 183, 188; accepting immigrants 156; Confucian capitalism 97n6; Confucianization 97n12; Confucian values 89; Constitutional Court 99n46; crisis 152, 154; development 145; developmental strategies 146; economic development 149, 151; ethnic Chinese residents 148; ethnic homogeneity 143; ethnic nationalism 144; IMF bailout package 151; Japanese invasion 110; joining the OECD 149; liberalizing trade policies 151; Military Revolution 147; multiculturalism 144–5, 156–7; National Statistical Office 154; new national image 149; poor and underdeveloped 146; recent governments 14 Korean 31, 96, 150; actress 143; citizens 14, 156; Constitutional Court 99n46; damunhwa 154–6; democracy 21n10, 147; economy 148, 151–2; educational system 155; First Elementary School of
Kyoto 178; government 143, 152, 154–6; historian 190; immigration policies 153; national identity 98n14, 157; national image 149; national membership boundaries 146; Overseas Foundation Act (OKFA) 152; peninsula invaded 110; people 84, 144; pop culture 210–11; population 14, 148; post-War period 149; products 151; residents 178; revival of Confucianism 97n6; society 98n12, 156; state 144–5, 148, 155; territory 151, 153; War 143, 146, 148–9, 165; women 149, 158n20; workers 148, 151 Korean Center for Migrant Workers 153 Korean citizenship 149, 155; inherited through mother 149 Korean nation 144–5, 154, 156–7; building 143; state 13–14 Korean nationalism 156–7; contemporary 13; contribution to developmental success 144; ethnic 143; institutionalized developmental practices 145; re-articulation of 146 Koreans 8, 83, 85, 88–9, 97n7, 98n30, 143–7, 149, 157, 178; ethnic 148, 152, 156; mixed-raced 148, 153, 155; mixed-race births 158n20; overseas 152, 155; Overseas Koreans Act 1997 (OKA) 152; working outside of Korea 146 kundaehwa (modernization) 13, 145–51, 156–7 Kuo, Ying-Nan 209 Kuomintang/Kuo-Ming Tang (KMT, the Chinese Nationalist Party) 9, 168, 207, 215n45; bill 204; defeat 170, 200; government 18, 199, 205; influence in indigenous elections 213; nominees 208; non-KMT president 201; returned to power 201, 204; retreat to Taiwan 200; rule 162, 165 Kymlicka, W. 5, 30n3, 36, 38–47, 49–52, 52n2, 52n3, 53n5, 53n11, 53n12, 53n14, 53n21, 53n22, 54n23, 54n24, 54n33, 54n34, 54n36, 54n37, 54n39, 99n45, 120n55, 230n3 Lai, Pin Yu 215n56, 215n61 land(s) 68–9, 155; claims 89, 204–6; control 201–2; cultivated 192; development projects 204; forced to leave 203; government-owned 203–4; indigenous 19; issues 203, 206; fatherland modernization 144–5, 154,
Index 157; fighting over 66–7; hinterland 165; indigenous landowning 164; Karowa 203–4; landlessness 208; Pangcah 206; Pangcah disputes 212; Pangcah-owned 205; pressure to sell 212; reclamation 113; registration documents missing 205, 212; reserved 202–3; returning 205–6; struggles 211, 214n28; theory of entitlement 46, 52; traditional 205; traditional landmarks 214n13 land rights 207, 214n13; claims 212; indigenous 204; issues 205; movements 203, 206, 211; official recognition 18; Pangcah 203; pan-indigenous 206; protests addressing 200; struggle 201 language 5, 26, 202, 208, 230; addressed by the Treaty 201, 214n13; Cantonese 135n3; of Chinese nationalism 110; common 110, 222; communities 225; dismissed 35n10; diversity 223; English website 135n5; government decisions on 41; indigenous 213, 221, 227; justice 226–7; majority nation 42; Mandarin 221; marginalized 41; MinNan (Taiwanese) 221; minority 19, 221–2; national 19–20, 20n3, 37, 223, 227; native 18, 54n32; no longer used 34; official 54n32, 221; of older generations 229; pluralism 222; preservation of indigenous 18; progressive 201; protected 19; of public usage 223, 226, 229; recognition of 41–2, 44–5, 50–1, 54n32, 222, 224; respectful treatment 225; rights 222, 224–5, 227–8, 230n3; of selfgovernance 201; shared 19, 31–2, 38, 181; skills 134; spoken by dominant minority group 20; of state 227; transitions in 199; unequal distribution 43; used in government offices 222; see also first languages, national language language policy/policies 221–2, 230n3; elitist determination of 228; equal recognition 20; makers 224; multicultural 4; nation-building approach to 223; neutral treatment 226; positive recognition 226; relationship with social justice 224, 227; in Taiwan 19, 221, 229 Lau, D.C. 74n7, 76n53, 77n60, 77n61 Lee Teng-hui 105, 117, 166–8, 200 LegCo (Legislative Council of Hong Kong) 124, 136n6
237
Lei, Chunian 11, 108 Li, B. 74n4 Liang, Chi-Chao 32 Liang, Q. 59–60, 74n5, 75n10 Liang, S. 76n34 liberal neutral: form of nationalism 16; state 15 liberal neutrality 16, 229, 230n3 Lie, J. 21n6, 149, 157n7, 158n12, 158n14, 158n23 Lien, Wen-ching 161, 164–5, 174n11, 174n13 Lin, G.C.S. 136n10 Lin Hao 11, 109 Liu, Q. 21n7, 190, 214n32, 214n36 Lo, S. 127, 136n19 Ma Ying Jeou 9, 17, 21n12, 168–71, 201, 215n50 Macedo, S. 91, 95, 99n36, 99n42, 99n52 mainland China 4, 9, 130, 168–9, 200; definition of ethnic minorities 126; economic and social privileges 130; ethnic-cultural nationalism 10; ethnic nationalism 11; government nationalist policies 13; immigrants from 128; immigration of Mandarin-speakers from 227; legal scholars 132; national identity 11; Nationalist Movement 74n2; passport 136n28; place of origin 126; poly-ethnic Chinese nation 128; PRC 127–8; PRC nationals 129; Taiwan political autonomy 15, 111; travel to 130 mainland Chinese 129; permanent resident status 12; nationalists 9 mainlander 124, 166 mainlandization of Hong Kong 136n19 Mandarin Chinese 18, 76n50, 123–4, 135n3, 221, 227; justified on grounds of justice 226; lingua franca 225; official national language 20; policy 229; privileged in public institutions 223 March 18 Movement 161, 163; see also Sunflower Movement Margalit, A. 38, 53n8, 53n13 Maruyama, M. 15–16, 97n9, 180, 194n8, 194n9 Mata Taiwan 215n56, 215n58 Mathews, G. 123, 135n2 Mearsheimer, J.J. 170, 175n24 migrant workers 154; Korean Center for 153; from Southeast Asia 2, 14; South Korea’s policy 21n10
238
Index
military 112, 114–15, 185; actions 164; ally 151; Chinese 117; coup 147; forces 71, 202; language 222; modernization 105; power 105, 115–16; Revolution 147 Mill, J.S. 29, 35n5 Miller, D. 38, 53n8, 53n9, 53n18, 76n40, 94–5, 99n31, 99n48 Ministry of Gender Equality and Family 156 Moore, M. 20n3, 41, 46, 52n2, 53n10, 53n17, 54n31 mountain compatriots 18, 199–200, 202 mountain indigenous 202–3, 206, 212 Movement for the Establishment of Taiwan Parliament (METP) 164 multiculturalism (damunhwa) 2–5, 20n3, 20n5, 52, 143–7, 152–3, 157; developmental 13, 156; increasing 34; leftist 16, 182–4; new politics of 2–3, 6; in South Korea 14 music 17, 208; Amis Music Fest (AMF) 210, 215n55; impact on multicultural awareness and national identity 18; indie 209–10, 213; indigenous 211; indigenous album 210; indigenous elements 209; pop 209–10; Western industry 209 musical: experiments 210; goods 19; program 210; tastes 225 musicians 211 Nairn, T. 162, 170, 174n5 Nakajima, T. 1516, 186, 192 National Intelligence Council 168 national language 20n3, 227; official 20; shared 19, 37; single common 223 national self-government 39, 46; equality arguments for 5–6, 36–7; right to 36–7, 39, 47, 50 nationalism 3–5, 12, 20n3, 20n5, 21n6, 25, 34, 35n6, 63, 87, 89, 97, 107, 125, 127, 132, 193; avoiding a confrontation with 187; bolstering Chinese culture 117; bolstering national pride 115; call to overseas Koreans 152; in Canada 28; in China 62, 106, 113, 189; civic 14, 59, 86, 170–1, 173; combined with neo-authoritarianism 116; Confucian 6–7, 62, 64, 75n24, 77n78, 144; conservative shift in 178; contest with cosmopolitanism 63, 72; cultural 59, 74n4; dangers of 88, 180; denying 180; developmental 14; discourse(s) 106,
109; in East Asia 2–3, 32; economic 167; emphasises the group 65; ethniccultural 10; European 194n8; exclusive and discriminatory 148; expressions of 183; expulsive 110; fanatical 180; grip on democracy 4, 25–6, 29; in Hong Kong 135n1; hysterical 179, 182; and industrialization 162, 174n4; inflated advocacy of 179; ironic immersion 182; isolationist 193; in Japan 192; leftleaning 14; legislating 135; liberal 52, 53n8, 59; literature 8, 86; as local resistance 171; monistic 52; morally problematic features of 25, 30; motivating factor 11, 113, 118; multicultural 154; and multiculturalism 182; objective 106; Okinawan 16, 181; opportunism toward 190; as partial ideology 30; peripheral 162–3, 166; persists as powerful force 27; poison of 61; political 9; political success 31; popular form of 62; postcolonial Hindu 186; practice of 2–3; pragmatic 166, 174n17; presence denied 26; problematic features restrained 30; reaffirmation of 193; reaffirming 178–9, 182; reaffirm Japanese 194n9; reimaging 74n1, 97n1; relationship with developmentalism 13, 144–5; religious 16, 185–6, 193; right wing 16, 184; rise of 27, 105; role in China-Taiwan relationship 117; significant in domestic governance and foreign affairs 118; spread of 27–8; state 59, 144; subjective 106; trans-universal 193; types of 157; ultra 186–7; undermined by familism 60; and universalism 187, 189; Western 25, 29, 60; see also Chinese nationalism, ethnic nationalism, form of nationalism, South Korean nationalism, xenophobic nationalism nationalist 187; CCP party 115; cause 9; concerns 27; conflicts 31; critique of Confucian influence 74n4; demands 27; fanatical ideology 30; Irish leader 35n10; Irish poet 35n7; local resistance 171; modern values 6; passions 28; policies 167; policies and laws 13; political elite 172; principles 30; radical DDP force 166; significance of Confucianism 83; slogan 144; Taiwan opposition 171; theorists 109; see also Kuomingtang (KMT/Chinese Nationalist Party)
Index nationalist movement 164–5; Contemporary 74n2; Hindu 186 nationalist projects 4, 6, 13; of purifying culture 107; Taiwanese 168 nationalists 26, 30–1, 63, 66; Chinese 9–10, 59, 71; Confucian 33; Irish 35n7; liberal 33, 94; non-Western 94; secondwave 20n3 nationalist sentiments 4, 11, 13, 25, 115; ethnic 10 Nazi Germany 27, 169; Nazi SS 185 neoliberalism 12–13, 152–3; global movement against 171; post-Cold War 163 Neville, R.C. 62, 75n21 New Power Party 207, 215n45, 215n46 Nienhauser, W.H. 75n25, 76n47, 76n54, 77n70 Niu, Sima 61, 75n16 non-Han groups 10, 128 non-Pangcah 17–18 Norman, W. 20n3, 53n4 Ōsawa, M. 15–16, 182–6, 192 Oakeshott, M. 99n47 Okinawan Independence Movement 181 Ong, A. 158n43 Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 149, 151 Paine, T. 35n4 Pangcah 17; activists 204–5, 207; allPangcah album 210, 215n58; artist 211; artists-activists 213; candidates 207; communities 203–5, 207; culture 18; elder 209; Guard Alliance 205, 211; indigenous people 206, 213n2; Karowa 204; lyrics 210–11; mayor 206; miners 208; music 208, 210; nation 214n20; people 203, 212; singer 18, 211; urban settlements 205 Pangcah lands 205; disputes 212; issues 203, 206 Park Chong-Min 98n28 Park Chung Hee 13–14, 21n11, 144–8, 150–1, 154, 157, 158n13 particularism 16, 184, 187, 190; endorsement of 182, 184; ethnic 86; merger with universalism 185–6 Patten, A. 5, 19–20, 36, 38, 45–52, 52n2, 53n11, 53n15, 54n43, 54n52, 54n54, 230n3, 230n4, 230n5 People’s Republic of China (PRC) 9, 59, 213n9; citizens 124, 127; establishment
239
of 108, 117–18; ethnic minorities 136n12; government 11, 105, 132; identification cards 136n21; mainland 127–8; nationals 129; prestige 131; relations with Taiwan 229; retrocession of Hong Kong 123, 125–8, 132, 136n29, 137n38; sanctioned version of Chinese nationalism 135; Seventh National People’s Congress 136n18; special administrative region (Macau) 136n20 perfectionist 91, 95; ambitions 91–3; Confucian 8, 93; critics of liberal neutrality 229; elements of the ethnic nation 89; justification 8; nature of Confucian nation 94; perspective 83 pinyin 135n3 plains indigenous 202–3, 206, 212, 214n23 pluralism 6, 52, 92, 171; advantage 134; commitment to 83; communal 30–1; cultural 25–6, 29, 31, 34; in East Asia 83, 85; ethical 89; ethnic 126; fact of 6, 8, 83, 90, 93; Hong Kong characteristic of 127; identity 47; linguistic 19, 222, 224; principle 222; value 8, 85, 96 pluralist 82; approach 31, 223; corrective to global liberal hegemony 83; culturally 25; East Asia 3, 6; principle 223; societal conditions 88, 96; society 8, 89, 94; way of life 85 post-Cold War 168; neoliberalism 163, 166 poverty 13, 15–16, 146, 151, 179–82, 193 Presidential Committee on Foreign Policy, Republic of Korea 159n51, 159n53, 159n55 Qian, M. 60, 74n9 Qian, Sima 76n47, 77n70, 107 Race Discrimination Ordinance (RDO) 125, 134, 136n6 Rawls, J. 16, 20n3, 83, 85, 87, 90–3, 95, 97n8, 98n15, 99n33, 99n34, 99n35, 99n37, 99n51 Reform of the Name Act 207 right of self-government 5–6, 36, 52n1, 54n34; demanded 36–7; equality argument 40; equality entails 43; granting 36, 38–9, 42, 45–6, 50, 52; immigrant group 46; justified 39–40, 42–3, 45–6, 50–1; national community entitled 43; nation’s 37; necessary 44; polyethnic groups 46; recognition of 48
240
Index
Republic of China (ROC) 9, 128, 130, 205, 214n11; national identity 167; sovereign 166; Yearbook 230n1 Roberts, Denys 131 Rodrik, D. 171, 175n25 school 109, 149; class 185; First Korean Elementary 178; in first language 226; Japanese history textbook 110; Japanese Worker-Farmer school of Marxism 165; Korean rural areas 155; Kyoto School of Philosophy 186, 192; Mandarin taught in 221; minority language 42; old protests 213; past of national humiliation taught 11, 112; visits to Museum of the War 113 segyehwa (globalization) 13, 145, 147, 149–53, 157 self-government 41, 43, 47; agenda in Taiwan 215n44; aspiration for 50–1; claim diminished 46; collective 83, 90, 92; democratic 84; desire for 50; group rights 46; indigenous claim 201, 212; minority nations rights 50–1; rights 41–3; space to enjoy 48; sub-state 49 settlers 17, 199–200; Japanese 202 Seymour, M. 52n2, 53n9 Sheng, H. 72, 77n77 Shin, D.C. 98n28, 98n29, 99n53, 144 Shin, G.-W. 21n11, 144, 157n1, 157n3, 157n6, 157n8, 158n15, 158n29, 158n31, 158n33 Shin, K.-Y. 158n36, 159n58 Shi Zheng Feng 214n14, 214n17 singer(s) 109; indie band 210; indigenous 209, 211, 213; mandopop 211; Pangcah 18, 211; Puyuma 209; songwriter 211 Sino-British Joint Declaration 1984 12, 131 Sino-Japanese War 113, 164 Smith, A.D. 2, 20n2, 53n11, 98n19, 107, 119n20 Smith, R.M. 98n21 Social Democratic Party 215n45 song(s) 19, 109; Chinese lyrics 213; church 209; French 210; indie 210; indigenous 208, 210; Kimbo’s censored 209; mother tongue 210; Pangcah lyrics 210–11; patriotic 112; protest 209, 211; Puyuma 208; singer-songwriter 211 South China Sea 117 South Korea 1, 3–4, 6, 13–14, 21n10,
149, 165; Confucianism 89, 93, 97n6, 97n7; democracy 98n28; democratization 88; de/reconstructing nationalism 158n39; developmental regime 158n40; ethnic homogeneity 143; ethnic nationalism 21n11; IMF intervention 14, 158n39; Japanese wartime crimes 110; nationalism 158n37; political awareness 83; projection as global nation 151, 153; supporting parents 98n25 South Korean: citizen 14, 88; developmental regime 158n40; development of nation-state 14; ethnic nationalism 21n11; foreign relations 158n24; leaders 14; per capita GNP 149 South Korean nationalism 144; ethnic 21n11; de/reconstructing 158n39 South Koreans 98n25, 149 Southeast Asia 2, 165, 167 Southeast Asian countries 12 Stiglitz, Joseph 171 Sun, Yat-sen 10, 59, 108 Sunflower Movement 14–15, 161, 170–1 Suzuki, D. 16, 191–3 Taiwan 1, 3–4, 6, 9–10, 13–14, 19–20, 83, 116, 165–6, 173, 191, 223; ATA 200; constitutional reform 213n11; cultural activism 215n54; eastern 204; economic invasion of 169; electoral democracy 228; folk revival movement 208; formation of state and capitalism 162; Governor-General Office (GGO) 199; Japan’s acquisition of 164; liberal constitutional changes 93; martial law 199; Movement for the Establishment of Parliament (METP) 164; nation-state 163, 172; pop music 210; president 201, 214n28; reunification of 111; society 225; territory of 167; trafficking voices 215n51 Taiwan Black Youth Federation 173, 175n28 Taiwan Cultural Association 164 Taiwan economic links with China 117; economic integration with China 170–1; Service and Trade Agreement with China 14–15, 161, 170 Taiwan independence 167; selfgovernment agenda 215n44; trade independence 168 Taiwan indigenous movement 17–18,
Index 208; activism 212; peoples 17, 199, 206; Television (TITV) 205, 214n34; see also Pangcah, Sunflower Movement Taiwan language: all-Pangcah album 215n58; linguistic diversity 221; linguistic justice 226–7; policy 229, 230n2 Taiwan sugar industry and rice industry 164; farmers exploited 165; Sugar Corporation 203 Taiwan Tourism Bureau 214n28 Taiwanese 19, 224, 228; capitalism 162; capitalists 167; Chinese 202; citizens 221; effort for independence 111; government 204; Han-Chinese 17; identity 200, 229; independence 168; indigenous landowning bourgeoisie 164; language 221, 227; leaders criticized 105; left-wing movement 164; media 9; middle classes 166; movement against neoliberalism 171; nation 164–5; nation-state 15, 161, 167, 170, 172–3; nationalist project 168; nonindigenous 209; people 8, 83–4, 164, 170, 200, 221, 229; political identity 85; political life 230; politics 166–7, 169; public opinion 169; society 18, 166, 172–3, 221, 227; state 175n27; tourism market 204 Taiwanese nationalism 14–15, 174n9; civic and left-leaning 170; class base of 167; development of 163; first wave of 164; new wave of 166; social basis of 161, 167; see also Sunflower Movement Takeuchi, Y. 187–90, 193 Tamir, Y. 53n8, 54n30, 99n44 Tan, Sor-hoon 6–8, 75n24, 76n42 Tiananmen Square 10, 108 tianxia 6–7, 61, 65–6, 74n7, 76n53, 77n56, 77n58, 77n67, 85; commitment to 62–3; common principle 70; concept of 68, 190; Confucian 7, 71; Confucian ethical concern 60; kingly way 67, 71; ideal 7, 61, 70–1, 73; idealism 75n12, 75n23; as one family 72; scope of 69–70; Zhao 190; Zhou 64, 69 Toshihito, Kayano 15, 179 Tsou, Ching-Wen 174n20 Tsou indigenous nation 202, 212, 214n20 United States (USA) 26–7, 33–4, 37, 91, 105–6, 110–11, 116–17, 148, 151,
241
162–3, 165–6, 168, 170; ideological conflict 118 universalism 16, 183–4, 188; communicative 191; denial of 182; earthly 15, 179, 187, 191–3; from East Asia 189; merger with particularism 185–6; shared 190; transuniversalism 188–9 Walraven, B. 98n12 Wang, Jian 75n27, 76n55, 77n57 Wang Rihua 75n27, 77n56 Wang Wen-yuan 169 Wang, Z. 112, 119n8 Wong, K. 128, 136n9, 136n23 world order 6, 61, 72–3; new regional Chinese 168 World War I (First World War: WWI) 60, 164 World War II (WWII) 1, 10, 18; postWWII era 16; pre-World War II Hong Kong 135n1 Wu, Jieh-min 168 Wu, Rwei-Ren 14–15, 174n2, 174n9, 174n17, 175n27 xenophobia 179, 184, 193 xenophobic nationalism 15–16, 68, 73, 178–9, 192–3 xiang (administrative unit) 203, 206, 215n56, 215n57; bureau’s error 212; government 205–6; indigenous 208; mayor 212 Xu, G. 113, 119n23 Xu, J. 75n12, 75n23, 190–1, 195n46 Yack, B. 4–5, 8, 12, 35n9, 38, 53n11, 53n16, 53n19, 86–7, 89, 92, 95, 98n20, 98n22, 98n23 Yanaihara, T. 163–4, 174n7 Yang, B. 75n16 Yang, Hua 161, 173–4, 175n29 Yang, K. 75n26 Yang, Z. 61 yuan zhu min (indigenous people) 128, 199–200, 215n45 yuan zhu min zu (indigenous nations) 200–1, 213n2 Zeman, Allen 130, 137n31 Zhao, B. 75n27, 76n55 Zhao Tingyang 61–2, 71, 75n12, 77n76 Zimmerman, Paul 130, 137n32