New Left Review: Interview with Taiwan Leftists

I was surfing the net today and stumbled across this interview from 2004 with several local leftists, including the renowned director Hou Hsiao-hsien (City of Sadness) that is by turns predictable:

No guesswork was needed to anticipate that ethnic conflict would be whipped up again this time. It happened in each previous election, so we had a lot of experience of this. Chen Shui-bian, running for re-election as president, was at quite some disadvantage when the campaign started, and he supposedly represents the Minnan, the largest ethnic group in Taiwan. It could only benefit him if the issue of ethnicity became a major election topic, so it could be expected he would make a lot of play of it.

....insightful....

Why do the Hakka communities in Taiwan vote solidly Blue?

Tang: They don't—rather, they vote solidly against Chen.

Chu: Exactly: it's the other way around. They refuse to vote Green.

...naive....

But if we try to imagine a better future, I would say that if a Taiwanese government could truly resolve all ethnic questions, reconciling Fujianese, Hakka, mainlander, aboriginal Taiwanese and the new immigrants, through real equality and inter-marriage, then it would no doubt be capable of handling the question of Taiwan's position in the Chinese-speaking world and Taiwan's role in Asia. Of course, such a notion remains an ideal.

...idealistic....

I am on the Left, but I wouldn't emphasize this issue. For a long time, one of the principles distinguishing Left and Right has been their attitude to the nation-state. The Right typically aims at founding one, while the Left has rarely put its energy into that. How and why a national identity is constructed are issues worth serious attention. They are not to be casually dismissed. In Taiwan, we need sympathetic analysis of the historical and political causes of the emergence of its modern nationalism. But we also need to remember how often, in the history of developing countries, building a nation-state has come to a bad end. If there were no more ethnic conflicts inside Taiwan, what I would look forward to is a tomorrow in which we can go beyond the idea of nation-state, towards a cross-border world.

...surprising....

Tang: No, that would be misleading. There is no censorship as such, but recent years have seen an unofficial tendency towards a kind of selection, driven by the politically correct slogans of localization and de-Sinicization. This has become a very serious pressure, especially in academic and literary life, where it is now more acute than official censorship might be. In Taiwan's universities, dissertations, funds and promotions are all controlled by the ruling party. A recent survey reported that some 80–90 per cent of doctoral and master's theses in the humanities and social sciences now concentrate on the study of Taiwan. The result is that the atmosphere has become quite tense in academic institutions, more so than in society at large. The dpp has now been in power for four years, and has put a lot of effort into bringing this area of life under its influence.

....pithy....

Nationalism is a variant of Rousseau's civil religion. As a religion, it does not encourage you to think. It only asks you to believe. It is essentially the opposite of the principle of literature and the arts.

....absurd....

Viewed from this perspective, the dpp is in some ways more worrisome than the kmt. For the corruption of the kmt was relatively confined within the 'political' sphere in a more restricted sense. The party did not concern itself overmuch with the economic, cultural or educational spheres. The dpp, however, wants to meddle in all these realms to serve its political ends.

....and prophetic....

For today's Taiwan is very indifferent towards other people's experience. Besides, when any nationalism emerges, it usually defines itself as unlike anything else—other people's experience is not the same as ours, we have our own national conditions, and our own unique path. Other experiences are irrelevant. But if we look around us, we can see that Taiwan is not that unique. Much that has happened and is still happening here was lived through by others elsewhere. This is why we are so worried about the rise of an anti-intellectual, populist nationalism in this island, and have a duty to warn of the dangers it ignores, in rejecting so much of the real experience of human history and the opportunity to avoid repeating its disasters.

A very interesting read. I think it shows all the strengths of the Left -- its insight and its idealism -- and weaknesses -- its elitism and cynicism, and the hopelessness of political ideals that, because they refuse to commit to a positive and attainable program, simply end up cycling through one critique after another. For progressive middle-of-the-roaders like myself, the Left is a source of insight, but it will never be a source of energy.

[Taiwan] [DPP] [KMT] [Taiwan Independence]