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

5. Democracy as Dream: Ethnicity and the Politics of Recognition

Democracy as Dream: Ethnicity and the Politics of Recognition Ethnicity (zuqun 族群) is Janus-faced in Taiwan’s postwar politics. The first face presents an image of love and hate. During the long period of martial law, ethnicity was nonterminology, and its closest similitude, zu 族, was mentioned only when the great and loving nation needed and summoned its thankful constituent family members. However, this forbidden acknowledgment of difference, if not ethnicity, at the same time planted a seed of wayward dissatisfaction. The notions of “mainlanders” (waishengren, Han Chinese who arrived with the Kuomintang after 1945) and “in-province” natives (benshengren, Han Chinese whose ancestors arrived in the earlier years) have sprouted forth, fashioning the so-called provincial complex (shengji qingjie 省籍情結) question and as a consequence demolishing the well-designed mythology of national blissfulness and cultural harmony.1 Representations of both groups in popular and clandestine discussions have for decades been stereotyped, filled with misunderstanding, fear, and hostility. Many of them were hatched in the early years immediately after the Second World War when the Kuomintang had just retreated to the island and an exile authoritarian political regime was in the making. For example, in stories by the writer Pai Hsien-yung 白先勇, who most famously talked about postwar mainland immigrants in Taipei (including the powerful and rich as well as the deprived and poor), benshengren were basically invisible, except in a few episodes in which lower-class benshengren women were portrayed as sexually hyperactive and hence dangerously destructive to the expatriate men and families. A passage in his famous “Glory’s by Blossom Bridge,” first released in 1970, reads,| ONE | TWO | THREE | FOUR | FIVE | SIX | SEVEN | 118 | DEMOCRACY ON TRIAL “Whenever Spring Maid delivered Mr. Lu his laundry in no time flat she’d be worming her way into his room,” Mrs. Ku continued. “I knew right off that the Taiwanese trollop was up to no good. And then one afternoon when I was passing by Mr. Lu’s window I heard all kinds of groaning and moaning. I thought he’d had some kind of accident, so I stood on tiptoe and peeked inside between his curtains. Ptuh!” Mrs. Ku spat on the ground as bad as she could. “There they were, the pair of them, stark naked in broad daylight! That damn piece was riding on top of Mr. Lu, her hair flying all over the place. She looked just like a lioness. To run into a thing like this, now you tell me, BossLady , isn’t that just my luck!”2 The character of Spring Maid, working for a waishengren family, embodies a projection of the desire and fear of postwar authoritarianism that nurtured this politics of binary representations of waishengren and benshengren . Looking for a foundation of this representational seduction, but still trapped in a polarizing reflection, George Kerr, a diplomat from the United States, observed various anecdotes of the clash between “Chinese” (or waishengren) and “Formosans” (that is, benshengren) in those postwar years. As I went around the Island, I notice the tension rising, and reports of strikes due to the Formosans being replaced by mainland Chinese became fairly common. On October 10th in the Takao factory of the Taiwan Steel Manufacturing Company all the workers, comprising 960 men, went on strike as a result of trouble with the police. The workers objected to Chinese being put over them and capable Formosans being replaced.3 Critics, albeit having very different political philosophies, all believe that the formation of these provincial imageries and their corresponding political and social effects shaped postwar politics. Chao Kang and Chao Mau-kuei, two sociologists who are archrivals, separately introduced parallel theories on this politics.4 Both notice a mechanism in place that systematically discriminated against benshengren from participation in the politico-administrative arenas, yet both also observe that in the sphere of economy/society, this dichotomy was more complicatedly characterized. Civil society throughout the martial law times, to a certain extent, was DEMOCRACY AS DREAM | 119 still a space of contestation. Therein, provincial complexes, which social theorists were just beginning to understand, crisscrossed the networks of political control and dived into the ocean of social unconscious, where the complication of this cultural psychology was not immediately perceptible, but eventually effective.5 Beneath these contested representations of provincial dichotomy lies the second and darker face of ethnicity, which this chapter will deal with. This second and alternative ethnicity discourse emerged as...