Democracy on Trial: Social Movements and Cultural Politics in Postauthoritarian Taiwan

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Taiwanese democracy hit a wall in 2006, as a perfect storm of a presidential scandal was looming ahead in the seas of public opinions. A chain of exposés from the media implicated President Chen Shui-bian’s 陳水扁 aide and family in allegedly unlawful activities such as bribery and insider’s trading. Conspiracy stories, investigative reports, and tabloids were on the headlines for months, triggering a huge political typhoon never seen before. A presidential recall motion was proposed in the parliament for the first time in this young democracy. The vote did not pass, but, for the rest of his term, the besieged president struggled for his survival with a wrecked presidency amid an infuriated public. What might have simply shown a personal moral collapse, however , came to force a national soul search. In July 2006, scholars who had been close allies to the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party 民進黨), the president’s party, convened after months of political turmoil and publicly demanded Chen to step down for a “moral crisis” his administration had inflicted on the national belief in a “democratic politics and Taiwan identity”—a crisis indicating the DPP’s gradual slide into what the party originally criticized its opponent about.1 Elsewhere, longtime critics of the DPP from the board of the radical academic journal Taiwan shehui yanjiu jikan (台灣社會研究季刊) was reassured about their diagnostic warning years ago that the new indigenous political force had already been developing into a group of nonbelieving chauvinists disregarding any principles but that of self-interests, which would make it an even worse creation while in power than the foregoing authoritarian Kuomintang 國 2 | DEMOCRACY ON TRIAL 民黨.2 These strongly worded yet emotionally appealing statements moved the crisis to terrain where the entire purpose of decades of the democracy movement was at stake. These melancholic and sarcastic critical feelings have to both be understood within as well as raise questions about a history of national search for democracy. From 2000, Chen Shui-bian’s presidential tenure had been widely believed to be a test case for this newborn democracy, and its alleged failure, therefore, put it on trial. For better or for worse, democracy in Taiwan is never a direct application of any abstract theory, but rather a long process of (mis)representation and (mis)recognition, which consequently complicates the investigation of this book. Democracy as a name was not totally a stranger even long before martial law 戒嚴令 was lifted in 1987, the year literally seen as the beginning of the “democracy” era. In their long rule, Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 and his son Chiang Ching-kuo 蔣經國 saw democracy as a distinctive feature that would distinguish their government in Taiwan from that in red, and thus dictatorial, China.3 In almost every annual national day address in Taipei, the exiled generalissimo vowed to pursue democracy (zhuiqiu minzhu 追 求民主), and his son, in the process of consolidating the party’s power base after the generalissimo’s demise, promised to jianshou minzhu zhenrong 堅守民主陣容 (hold on to the democratic outlook). Despite their uses of democracy largely for show, the Chiangs’ senses of democracy indeed embodied a limited electoral political system mixed with a market-oriented planned economy, albeit under a mainlander-monopolized and corporatist central power tightly controlling the scope and scale of civil liberty.4 The transition from the Chiangs’ democratic outlook to the post– martial law democratization invoked a pervasive sense of urgency trying to come to terms with what had actually happened and would happen. This constant tension, often sparking contradictory ideas and emotions in the local politics, however, is largely overlooked among the studies of Taiwan ’s post–martial law development, in which democracy is simply seen as either a progress to a promised future worth defending yet easily breaking or, by contrast, a betrayal to an unfinished radical plan, be it nationalist or postnationalist. Despite the difference, all these often contested grand narratives fail (or dare not) to notice a zigzagging and creeping analytical and emotional buildup, that is, changing worldviews and sentiments that INTRODUCTION | 3 at the same time have been constantly shaped by and penetrated into the immediacy of everyday practices. This book is about testimonies mostly voiced from the world made up of social movement groups, local and ethnic collectives and given by their participants to respond to, reevaluate, and resolve around the “democracy ” era. Democracy in these everyday practices on the ground is analytically thought over as well...