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

Epilogue: Democracy Unbound

Epilogue: Democracy Unbound War Tales After all the chapters detailing the effect of democracy on Taiwanese politics , this epilogue seeks to return to an unavoidable question—that is, how this young democracy with its successes and downsides is going to be significant to a possible notion of Chinese democracy in the PRC. To answer this question of great consequence, we have to first ponder a “war and peace” state of mind that has overwhelmingly disturbed local critics. War has never been too remote in postwar Taiwan. Taiwanese democracy made its global appeals when the PRC saber rattled this young nation’s different moves of transition, always threatening an imminent war. However , the noise of saber rattling stopped after the Kuomintang’s Ma Yingjeou succeeded the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian in May 2008 as president. This abrupt change and the attitudes of reconciliation have driven us to rethink Taiwanese politics in light of this suddenly formed atmosphere of peace. The recent state of peace has to be considered along with the war rhetorics of the entire past century including a sequence of those during the Cepo War,1 the first Sino-Japanese War (Jiawu War 甲午戰爭 or Nisshin Senso), the second Sino-Japanese War, the Wushe 霧社 War,2 the Pacific War, the 2/28 War, the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, the Cold War, and, most recently, the much-feared Independence War.3 These conflicts and subsequent peace appeals and negotiations that have involved China, Japan, the United States, and local tribes/administrations have fashioned the Taiwanese political landscape throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. 200 | DEMOCRACY ON TRIAL Perhaps not coincidentally, the two more critically acclaimed locally made films of 2008 were both related to war. Cape No. 7, a blockbuster, tells the story of a present-day cross-cultural love encounter that was ingeniously inspired by a similar cross-boundary romantic relationship sixty years before, when Taiwan was under Japanese colonialism. This colonial romance was torn apart when Japan lost the Pacific War. In its wake, the leading character, a Japanese schoolteacher, was sent back home, leaving his Taiwanese sweetheart behind. The déjà vu present-day romance begins when love letters written and mailed by this schoolteacher, but never received by his sweetheart, are accidentally found, opened, and read by a young postman who happens to encounter a Japanese lady in his small hometown in present-day southern Taiwan. The other well-liked movie is 1895, named after the year when Japanese colonizers arrived and became the new rulers after the Qing government in mainland China lost the first Sino-Japanese War and ceded Taiwan to Meiji Japan. The film, a historic epic, narrates how local Han Chinese settlers, with their indigenous friends, resisted the empire’s first takeover of the colony, struggling to protect their families, communities, and homeland and bravely fighting a war they could barely wage and were doomed to lose. War has tragically constituted modern Taiwanese history. A sequence of global geopolitical conflicts over more than a decade set the stage for postwar Taiwanese politics that was deeply implanted within a Cold War mentality. A best-selling writer, Long Ying-tai 龍應台, who also served as commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs under Ma Ying-jeou’s Taipei mayorship, recently published a book titled Dajiang dahai 1949 大 江大海 1949 (Big River, Big Sea: Untold Stories of 1949), which explores, in a humanist vein, war stories and the posttraumatic wounds these events have left on the population.4 Foucault’s Specter Michel Foucault understands war from a historical-political perspective in his Society Must Be Defended, whereby politics is war pursued “by other means.”5 Foucault digs into a several-centuries-old, rarely noticed historical-political discourse and seeks to demonstrate how this discourse EPILOGUE | 201 explicates that politics is basically “an order of battle,” turning Clausewitzian conventional wisdom, which sees war as a continuation of politics, upside down. Instead, this historical-political discourse “makes war the permanent basis of all the institutions of power.”6 [I]t was war that presided over the birth of states: not the ideal war imagined by the philosophers of the state of nature but real wars and actual battles; laws are born in the middle of expeditions, conquests, and burning cities; but war also continues to rage within the mechanisms of power—or, at least, to constitute the secret driving force of...