Cape No.7 and China-Taiwan relations

An editorial piece published this week in a newspaper in Australia.

Since August, the island of Taiwan has been in the grip of the movie phenomenon “Cape No.7”. It is a rare thing in any country, a locally-made film that has smashed box-office records, becoming not just the most successful local film of all time, but the second most successful film in Taiwan ever, after Titanic.

Taiwan was a colony of Japan from 1895 to 1945, when it was passed to the Chinese Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek, and Cape No.7 tells parallel love stories between the last days of colonial rule and the present day. In 1945, a young man is repatriated to Japan and writes love letters on the ship to the Taiwanese girl he is leaving behind. They are addressed in the old Japanese way to a place called Cape No.7 and are never delivered. Sixty years later, a young failed rock singer working as a postman is given the letters, and a chance at success and love with a Japanese woman who is promoting a rock music festival in his hometown.

Cape No.7 is a feel-good story of personal redemption, complete with rock concert finale and a public declaration of love by the hero, and perhaps Strictly Ballroom is the nearest Australian equivalent. However, rather than through family relationships, redemption is achieved by the narrative link to Taiwan’s Japanese past. Evoked with an intense nostalgia, the colonial love story offers the truth and virtue that allows the young man to find his way through his contemporary discontents.

The success of Cape No.7 and its representation of Taiwan’s colonial history comes during an improvement in Taiwan’s political relationship with China. In the legislative and presidential elections earlier this year, the Democratic Progressive Party suffered heavy election defeats to the KMT. The electorate was tired of the divisive identity politics of the former president Chen Shui-bian and the DPP had lost much of its moral authority through a series of corruption scandals. The KMT came back to power on a campaign to boost economic growth and repair China relations.

Many of the domestic economic promises of the KMT have proven to be very unrealistic, greatly exacerbated by the global economic crisis, and the popularity polls of the new president Ma Ying-jeou have fallen towards 25%.

On relations with China, however, the KMT government has pressed ahead with the support and encouragement of the Chinese side. Under a policy of “no independence, no unification and no military action”, as well as ingenious conceits such as the “1992 Consensus”, discussions between the Taiwanese and mainland China have reopened on fundamental issues such as trade and transport. After years of stalled negotiations, direct travel and freight links have been agreed and mainland Chinese tourists have been coming to Taiwan, albeit in small numbers.

The improvement in cross-straits relations has been very enthusiastically received by the international community, long frustrated with the brinkmanship of the previous DPP government and its willingness to confront China while relying on an assumption of US support.

Now, the symbolic gestures towards Taiwanese independence of the DPP have been replaced with symbolic, and some policy, actions far more accommodating towards China.

During the visit by the Chinese representative Chen Yunlin to Taipei in November for the new negotiations, events were carefully staged and words carefully framed to avoid any suggestion of Taiwan’s sovereign status. The visit overlapped with the very public arrests and detention of former president Chen Shui-bian and other senior DPP officials on corruption allegations, and last week President Ma reportedly ruled out a visit to Taiwan by the Dalai Lama in 2009.

Demonstrations were held in Taipei against the Chinese visit, with the largest attracting half a million people, and the police countered very hostile crowds with violence of a level not seen since the dark days of martial law in the late 1970s. A student movement has sprung up, the Wild Strawberries, who have been camped in the old Chiang Kai-shek Memorial square for several weeks.

However, the phenomenon of Cape No.7 is a reminder that some of the most important political changes are not seen on the streets. Since the lifting of martial law in Taiwan in 1987, a rich and profound process of history writing has been undertaken in politics, the media, academia and popular culture. Starting with the 2-28 Incident – the anti-Chinese Nationalist uprising of 1947 – and moving onto the Japanese colonial period and recently to the 1950s and 1960s, the Taiwanese have been recovering histories suppressed and erased during the period of authoritarian rule.

Cape No.7 is an upbeat marker of how those distinctive histories have become a received part of an affirming popular Taiwanese national history. The symbolic politics invoked by the new KMT government will no doubt have satisfied the Chinese government, and that is an important development in cross-straits relations, but Cape No.7 suggests that Taiwanese value both the history writing that is possible in a democracy and also enjoy the uniqueness of the histories that they have recovered.

Unfortunately, Cape No.7 has been banned in mainland China, and the representative Chen Yunlin has been reported as describing the film as expressing the legacy of “colonial brainwashing” of the Taiwanese by Japan. The Chinese blogsphere, while always overheated, has offered ferocious vitriol and condemnation of the film and of Taiwanese attitudes to Japan generally.

The international community might be happy about the direction of the new Taiwanese government, but it might also remain mindful that long-term and peaceful rapprochement between China and Taiwan will ultimately require an acknowledgement of the plurality of history and needs a way to acknowledge of the legitimacy of Taiwan’s unique historical experience. The success of Cape No.7 is a sign of just how far China and Taiwan yet have to go.

Beijing Olympics torch relay

The rolling PR disaster that has been the global torch relay for the Beijing Olympics is in Australia at the moment for a run around the nation’s capital, Canberra. I had piece in the Canberra Times about it today.

When the Beijing Olympic torch relay runs through Canberra, it does so as an overloaded symbolic event, preempted by global news reporting in which protests and counter-protests have dominated the relay’s image-making.

The purpose of the relay, as suggested by the ACT Torch Relay Planning Committee, is to “cheer on our Australian heroes”. This is a perhaps optimistic but not unreasonable attempt to wrest the meaning of the torch back for an Australian audience. Yet it only adds even more to the weight of meanings that have burdened the torch since it was lit.

The lighting occurred in Greece with an invented ceremony. Through references to classical Greek civilization, it invoked the performance of an immutable historical tradition while actually looking like something out of a Ray Harryhausen movie.

From this implausible start, the torch relay has not functioned effectively as spectacle, like the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympic games that can dazzle and overwhelm their spectators. Instead, the effect has been to produce a symbolic event in which the symbolism is untethered by real history, and as such is free to be appropriated and disrupted by the prevailing politics that circulate around it.

Of course, as a single, unifying symbol, the Olympic torch should work well as an object whose multiple meanings can be juxtaposed and overlaid by governments, the Olympic organizers and and the rather forlorn and forgotten corporate sponsors to achieve a wide range of political, ideological and marketing effects. But in the era of 24 hour news and sophisticated global protest movements, those meanings have been harder to control than the promoters might have hoped.

For the Olympic organizers, athletes and relay runners, the torch has increasingly hopelessly tried to represent the Olympics, and while it is in Canberra, our “Australian heroes” and their participation in the games.

For the Tibet and human rights movements around the world, the Beijing Olympic torch has simply represented the Chinese state, and has become a legitimate object of political action on that basis. The sometimes violent protest actions around the torch relay over the last month have played out as an allegory of the real violence and struggles for power within China between the state and those who oppose it.

The actual Chinese state, meanwhile, has clearly hoped to achieve a conflation of itself with the Olympics through its global presentation of the torch, thus transubstantiating the meaning of both to signify an Olympian Chinese national triumph.

So the torch relay has been presented by China as a tracing across the globe of its ascendancy. As a symbol of power the torch is legitimized by being taken to the sites of power of the countries it visits – to Downing Street, the Arc de Triomphe, and in Australia to Canberra and past Parliament House and the Australian War Memorial.

In symbolizing power in this way, those who hold the torch have struggled to define its meaning on their own terms or in their own interests. Cheering on our Australian heroes cannot compete with China self-consciously signaling its return as a global superpower. This has produced the heated public debate and hand-wringing, including participant withdrawals and protest actions, that have characterized some of the relay legs. In others, it has only been the heavy hand of the host states that has prevented trouble.

The overburdening of the torch with meaning has made Chinese indignation at its uneasy reception around the world somewhat disingenuous. The Chinese organizers have not helped themselves, either, with the deployment of Chinese state paramilitary cadets as “torch attendants”. Their cheery blue tracksuits have taken on a rather sinister quality and they have presented the world’s media with striking, but exactly the wrong, images. In London especially, the behaviour of these young men in front of 10 Downing Street showed a gratuitous disregard for the significance of their location, hinting by their unthinking presence at its centre of government at a symbolic violation of the very national sovereignty of the United Kingdom.

The Australian prime minister, whose own symbolic antennae are nothing if not sensitive, ruled out the presence of the torch attendants in the Australian leg, although the results of that remain to be seen. However, since the early protests in London, international Chinese communities not officially connected to the Chinese government have been mobilizing to support the torch as it travels around the world.

In this political movement, the meaning of the torch has become the “sacred flame of the motherland”, leaving behind any bounded connection to the Olympic games in a general sense. It has come to represent China as an historical and civilizational meaning, woven into the century-long narrative of China’s struggle to define a post-imperial modern national identity, with a symbolism possibly beyond even the control of the Chinese government. In the rhetoric of this new movement one can hear echoes of Chinese nationalist movements going back through the Diaoyutai Islands protests of the 1970s, the May Fourth movement in the 1920s and even the 1905 Anti-American boycott.

In Australia, Chinese students have been traveling to Canberra for the relay out of a fervent sense of duty and pride. Their nationalism may leave many Australians uncomfortable, although our own can be equally humourless and forceful.

Any person who chooses to identify him or herself as Chinese has much to be proud of in this Olympic year. The historical achievements of China’s magnificent civilization have immeasurably enriched the human experience, while its current economic and social transformations are offering an extraordinary release of creative potential for the world. But for no good reason for a country in which all its citizens have access to some level of education and lots of media, China remains resolutely undemocratic, with a government that ultimately has no limits to the means it can use to maintain its power.

Australians are right to think about China’s future, and the Beijing Olympic torch relay in Canberra will highlight those concerns in our national discourse. But symbolically weighed down as much as it is, a stylishly-decorated aluminium torch being taken around Canberra will never be able to express the richness and complexity of a relationship with China that is and needs to be fully cultivated in scholarship, politics, the economy, culture and a shared social life.

 

Hsieh Chang-ting’s campaign headquarters, Kaohsiung

Hsieh Chang-ting’s campaign headquarters, Kaohsiung. Video requires Quicktime 7.

On Saturday, Taiwan votes in its presidential election. The result is as ever unpredictable, although Ma Ying-jeou remains the front-runner. At the campaign office of the DPP candidate Hsieh Chang-ting, preparations for the final huge rallies onm Friday night are in full swing. Here volunteers prepare the ubiquitous party flags for rally-goers.

On Radio

ABC Australia radio program on Taiwan:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/rearvision/stories/2008/2189619.htm

This Saturday March 22 is the Taiwanese presidential election. ABC Radio National’s “Rear Vision” program is covering Taiwan this week, and I was interviewed for it last Monday at the ABC studios in Portland Place in London. Overall, the interviewer was well informed, but the references in the introduction to the program to an upcoming “independence referendum”, which of course it isn’t, show how far the media has to go before it understands the Taiwanese situation. The referenda, two of them, are on UN membership, not independence, and we know that because if it was “independence” there would be Chinese missiles instead of water raining down outside the window of the Far Eastern Shangri-la in Taipei right now.

The likely election result has seemed to be favouring the KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou, but some bad behaviour by KMT legislators and the situation in Tibet might have given the DPP some momentum in the last couple of days. It is going to be an intense week.

Taipei

It has been a very long time since an update. There have been some life-changing personal and professional interventions over the last several months.

Meanwhile, I am currently in Taipei for the Legislative elections this coming Saturday. Here is a view from where we are staying, featuring Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building rising more than half a kilometre above the city.

What’s in a name? A lot if it happens to be Taiwan

Here is a newspaper commentary I had published this week in Australia.

At the end of last year, the presidency of Taiwan’s Chen Shui-bian seemed in terminal crisis. He, and his wife, were assailed by an attempted impeachment over alleged corruption, a somewhat dubious mass protest movement was launched against him, and he had record lows in public support. However, better than expected results in city mayoral elections in December gave impetus to his presidency and his Democratic Progressive Party government. This year, appealing to his base, Chen has pressed forward on his agenda of social and cultural nation-building in the name of Taiwan. Chen made a recent statement about national goals, including Taiwan’s independent sovereignty, and backed up with the usual assurance to the international community that such statements were merely reiterating the facts of Taiwan’s current status, not a change of the so-called “status quo”.

As part of this program, the Taiwanese government is pursuing a campaign to rename numerous state-controlled institutions. In 1949, when the Chinese Nationalists lost the Chinese civil war against the Communists and relocated the national government of the Republic of China to Taipei, they brought with them a host of the Republic’s state cultural, industrial and administrative organizations. These were maintained as a part of their forty year claim to be China’s legitimate government. The current government is removing these references to the Nationalists’ party-state and their legacy of nation-building on Taiwan in the name of China.

So China Post has been renamed Taiwan Post; the state China Petrochemical Company is now CPC, Taiwan; even the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial, the grand square and monument to Taiwan’s former military strongman in central Taipei, has been renamed the Taiwan Democracy Memorial.

The naming issue is a cause of unease and a degree of confusion for the international community. The sharp response by the US State Department to the recent Taiwanese moves was modulated more by the Chinese reaction than a coherent position on the importance or otherwise of naming. Western governments generally have seemed to regard names as a rather eccentric preoccupation of the Chinese and Taiwanese, lying merely on the surface of their real regional geo-politics. The Chinese and Taiwanese, however,steeped in the intellectual heritage of Confucianism and its understanding of socio-political knowledge, have long understood the way names, and language generally, are the basis of politics and social structure. Naming defines the boundaries of power. In this, Confucius was something of a post-modernist, and two and a half thousand years later Western social theory has caught up in the work of writers such as Jacques Derrida.

The renaming program is just the most recent aspect in a campaign of post-authoritarian reckoning which has been going on in different forms for twenty years in Taiwan. The government is deploying the instruments of the state to redraw the boundaries of the island’s identity and history so that it is known as specifically Taiwanese. In so doing it consolidates the very basis of Taiwan’s political sovereignty.

The Taiwan that is being renamed by the government as “Taiwan” incorporates a distinctive island history. The received international shorthand for Taiwan’s history is to say that it “split from the mainland in 1949 at the end of the Chinese civil war”, but this is a very contingent and politicized reading. In Taiwan, a counter-narrative has been established over many decades which understands its history as a continuous narrative of its fraught location on the overlapping boundaries of the European, Manchu, Japanese and Chinese states which have ruled over it for four hundred years. Taiwan has an indigenous people who are Pacific islanders; its first modern government was a Dutch colonial administration in the 17th century, before being governed by the Manchu Qing dynasty until it became a colony of Japan in 1895. Taiwan was passed to the Chinese Republic in 1945 as part of an Allied agreement, and in 1947, the Taiwanese launched an uprising against Chinese Nationalist rule, which was brutally crushed. It was only then in 1949 that the national government of the Republic relocated to Taipei.

China has observed Taiwan’s renaming of its identity and history with frustration and sometimes anger. But it has learned that belligerence serves only to define Taiwan’s identity as Taiwanese all the more sharply, and so in recent years the public statements of the Chinese government have become more circumspect and ritualized. Despite China’s ascendancy as a global power, without direct control over the island it is limited to either military action or intervention in proscribed parts of the international community, especially those where the Taiwanese government also operates. In that arena China has been aggressive and uncompromising, shutting down any and all international space for the island to operate as “Taiwan”.

However, as effective as China has been in the areas available to it, in the wider field of global commerce, media and civil society, China is actually losing the fight over naming Taiwan. For the first time, on its 60th anniversary in February, the 1947 uprising was widely reported in the international media, even if much of that reporting failed to understand its significance. That Taiwan is a centre of the global computer industry is also widely known. More fundamentally, since the name Formosa fell into disuse in the 1960s, it has been common sense that the name Taiwan refers to an island in the northern Pacific and China to a great nation on the mainland of Asia. No one who says they are visiting “China” then travels to Taipei. As Confucius would have understood perfectly clearly,the Chinese government’s goal of the accession of Taiwan means overcoming the power of language itself.

In Taipei again

Back in Taipei again last week for a three day conference on Taiwanese cultural and social life, “workshopping” chapters for a forthcoming book project. Discussions continued at Cafe Odeon near NTU until 2am, fuelled by 9% strength Belgian beer.

I flew the Taiwanese EVA Air, the airline of the Evergreen shipping company, whose slogan is the disconcerting imperative phrase, “Just relax”.

It occured to me that air travel, the actual experience in the air, is a metaphor for modernity. The aircraft suspends us in time, freeing us from our existing social relations and allowing us to unmake our identity with hundreds of strangers all going on the same journey. It feels liberating, a brief sense of weightlessness, to be taken out of our lives and to have no life other than in that perpetual present in the air. But at the same time, aircraft are totally regulated social spaces, with the safety instructions and the mealtimes – giving us the illusion of choice – and the flight attendants who we misrecognize as offering service, when they are really there to control our behaviour. And, of course, aircraft are literally classed, and we know and are made to know our place in the aircraft’s social hierarchy. Most of all, aircraft are alienating like modern life. The aircraft is designed to conceal how it operates, to cover up behind plastic panels and secret doors and curtains all of the social, political and technological mechanisms which make it possible to travel at 900km/h.

Research Fellowship in Oakland Studies

Last Friday, on the way to UC Santa Cruz for the North American Taiwan Studies Association conference, I stopped in Oakland, California to stay with an old friend I knew from Taiwan in the 1990s. On Saturday, I began a new career as a researcher in Oakland Studies.

I went to a “ball game”. The Oakland Athletics baseball team were playing the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Oakland stadium is a late-brutalist concrete monstrosity set among derelict industrial estates, railway lines and freeways south of San Francisco. Yet inside it still managed to feel festive, filled with 19,000 Oakland Athletics fans, or “A’s fans”, and the impossible California sunshine.

The rhythm of baseball is not unlike the rhythm of cricket. Not much happens, and what does happen is fundamentally just a way of structuring the rich social activity in the stands. People eat, drink, come and go, watch the game, watch each other, and argue about many things, only some of which include baseball, with the flow of their discourse shaped by the events on the field. The A’s fans sometimes break into a ritual chant, “Let’s Go Oak-land”, and at the end of the seventh innings, everyone stands to sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”. People in bright blue shirts walk up and down selling ice-cream and “snow cones” and “sodas”, calling out their wares like medieval smiths.

Around the stands are a range of kiosks offering hot food, alcohol and A’s merchandise. I bought a cap in the dark green and yellow A’s colours for about the cost of something nice from Paul Smith. We ate what was referred to as a “Big Chili Cheese Dog”, which turned out to be a colossal open hotdog covered with kidney beans, chili sauce and grated cheese – again, for about the cost of a main at a nicer restaurant in San Francisco an hour up the freeway. It was surely most disgusting thing ever intentionally produced for human consumption. We drank Pepsi, because Coke are not an A’s sponsor, and sadly missed the opportunity for a $50 voucher for “auto parts” from a local retailer, which was offered in a competition during the game.

For many innings, pitchers would pitch and batters would bat, cycling through the players three at a time. Occasionally a ball would fly high into the stands, and everyone would reach up to catch it. Despite all the pitching and hitting, no-one seemed to get any points, but even I could see that Oakland’s fielding was woeful, and after an otherwise incomprehensible sequence of events in the seventh innings, the Diamondbacks were 6 runs to Oakland’s 0. With a brief and inadequate comeback, at the “bottom of the ninth” Oakland were slammed 7 to 2.

But no-one seemed to care that much. Everyone shrugged and shook their heads and laughed and got up and went out. It was so great.

Gloss

Here is a brief "gloss" on the previous text.

“Positivism”, which can, in certain ways, be understood as a belief in the possibility of objective social knowledge, carries a political and moral position towards social life. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in positivist theories about democratization, of which Taiwan has been the exemplar. The argument, from Lipsett via Huntington and many others, runs, basically, that high rates of economic growth “cause” the emergence of a middle class which “causes” democratization.

This argument is being applied to China today, to suggest that its economic growth will necessarily lead to political reform. With its booming economy, democracy is “inevitable” in China.

To describe democratization using the rhetoric of objective political science, as if it is some sort of natural process is, by that very objectification, to absolve oneself from making a political and moral response to the subjective struggle of individuals and groups for their freedoms.

If democracy comes to China it will be the result of decades of courageous struggle and sacrifice by China’s democracy activists, who will give up everything, including their lives, for the political rights and freedoms of the Chinese people.

Shanghai and Augé

The anthropologist Marc Augé describes what he calls “non-places” – airports, freeways, ATMs, malls. One does not stop and stay in a non-place. One can only traverse it with a kind of ceaseless sameness of the movement of people. Non-places are places transformed through excess, offering the insatiable spectacle of technology and architectural scale. But with that very scale they annul the possibility of accumulating individual subjectivities, relationships and knowledge, the things that make a place have a sense of place: “a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.”

A montage of moments of urban public life in Taipei

Watch the Video

There is something of a crisis of confidence in Taiwan at the moment. The economic and political developments of the 1990s have given way to disillusionment with the paralysis of the political process and dissatisfaction with the rather more ordinary rates of economic growth. China is the key factor. On one hand, China's military and political strength directly threaten Taiwan, while in contradistinction, as Taiwanese individuals and businesses relocate to mainland China to enjoy its boom, it is undermining the decades-long Taiwanese national project. The struggle and excitement of creating a new nation is ebbing away as Taiwanese follow the money across the straits. For Taiwan's post-colonial nation-builders, this is a source of sadness and disappointment in their fellow Taiwanese.

Yet, Taiwan's situation can be seen in context. China's boom is distorting politics throughout the region, and indeed the world. Japan is a good example. When the Chinese economy crunches, as it surely will post-Beijing Olympics, the global avarice and apologetics directed towards China will come in for some much-needed correction. This will be as strong in Taiwan as anywhere.

And despite the pessimism, Taiwan's cultural and urban life is flourishing as never before. Contemporary art, film, theatre, and design are, for those who take the time to look, quite simply some of the most interesting and innovative in the world right now. Observers seem to marvel over a million shoddy $40 DVD players shipping out of Shenzhen, when they might be intrigued about a country which produces tvs like this.

Taiwan is beset by the general ignorance of the rest of the world. “China” or “Japan” conjure strong opinions and impressions, while “Taiwan” invokes blank stares and perplexed indifference from one's fellow Westerners. The dynamism and complexity of Taiwan and its cultural and political life, invested with such self-awareness and meaning by Taiwanese people, is folded into the vulnerability and tenuousness of “Taiwan” itself as a viable identity. This dialectic makes Taiwan more intellectually, emotionally, and morally compelling than ever.

VT Art Salon

A member of the bar staff of VT Art Salon, who called herself Little Rabbit (Xiao Tu), shows off just one of her tattoos.

VT Art Salon, B1, No.45-47 Yitong Jie, off Nanjing Dong Lu, Taipei.

A new basement bar and art space. Post-brutalist urban style, bare concrete, spotlights, mirrors, and comfy modern couches. The work that caught my eye was a rotoscope view of busy Ximending. Projected onto a wall, the image panned around 360 degrees, seemingly a frozen still, ala Matrix “bullet time”, until a person or a clock or car would move, moving ahead in time from the rest of the image for a few seconds. A very complex effect, generated with Flash, apparently. Tuesday night was Absolut night, our party making short work of a bottle, with vodka shots all round.