National Unification Council

This was supposed to be a newspaper column about the suspension of the National Unification Council in Taiwan, but for various reasons, I didn't get it written in time for it to be viable. The media have very short turn-around times. Still, one can hardly let 800 perfectly servicable words go to waste.

The recent decision by the Taiwanese government to suspend the National Unification Council has fed into the overheated atmosphere of Taiwanese politics. The opposition KMT has used the government’s actions as the pretext for an anti-government protest, and the ruling DPP has countered by bringing its own supporters on the street. In Taiwan’s sharply polarized politics, any actions on cross-straits relations are an opportunity to engage in party campaigning.

Internationally, the decision by Taiwan’s president Chen Shui-bian has been met with dismay and sharp criticism by analysts and commentators.

For the critics, the current Taiwanese government is engaged yet another act of recklessness, unilaterally shifting the status quo across the Taiwan Straits and pushing closer towards a declaration of independence for Taiwan. For foreign observers such behaviour is scarcely comprehensible. The Chinese threat to Taiwan is explicit and clear, while, in their view, the Chinese government seems willing to let Taiwan remain in its present ambiguous status as long as it does not cross the red line of de jure independence. The Taiwanese have effective independence anyway and the Chen administration seems bent on risking it all for little if any meaningful gain for Taiwan and the Taiwanese.

The Taiwanese government on the other hand has an array of arguments concerning it actions and rhetoric with respect to China. In the instance of the National Unification Council, the government says it was created by the now-opposition KMT in response to specific conditions of the democratic transition of the early 1990s, and is largely symbolic. This is true, although the Taiwan-China relationship is most often played out in the realm of symbols and rhetoric. The Taiwanese government also suggests that the NUC is an ineffective mechanism with which to begin a serious process of negotiated settlement. The Chinese government has preconditions upon negotiation which the Taiwanese claim make even starting negotiations difficult and the NUC can only be at best an anachronistic irrelevance to such a complex political process.

Most substantially, the Taiwanese argue that that far from being happy to allow Taiwan to be, China is relentless and aggressive in its diplomatic pressure and military threats. The Taiwanese government feels that as China builds its military forces against Taiwan and passes legislation such as the anti-succession law, it cannot simply stand by and do nothing as its status is eroded and it legitimacy is undermined. It has an ever-diminishing range of possible actions, both material and symbolic, with which it can respond, but respond it must when the pressure becomes too great.

Ironically, despite the attacks on Chen, China’s reaction seems to bear out the Taiwanese position. The Chinese have expressed indignation, but in the symbolic tit-for-tat across the straits, once the smoke cleared, there has seemed to be little substantive effect or impact. Even the US has engaged in largely tokenistic admonition of Taiwan and recognizes that the National Unification Council was not irrelevant to the real state of China-Taiwan relations.

The Chen government’s final argument on the National Unification Council is that its guidelines and actions have not been ratified by any public policy process, and therefore that the NUC cannot operate with any meaningful political legitimacy within a democratic polity.

It is this question, the issue of self-determination for the Taiwanese, which remains the great unspoken principle in cross-straits relations. There is a tacit assumption that unification is the only plausible long-term outcome, and it will come about as a natural progression in China’s economic and political development in the years to come. While China is currently undemocratic, its rapid economic development will in time lead to political liberalization which will make unification a positive step for the Taiwanese. Critics of the Taiwanese government say its actions only destabilize this trajectory and risk regional security.

However, such a view is an abrogation of a moral position towards Taiwanese democracy and Chinese authoritarianism. The criticisms of Taiwan’s limited and symbolic attempts to maintain its viability as an autonomous and democratic society assume that the Chinese government's political and military threats against Taiwan are somehow a legitimate response to the Taiwanese problem, and do not themselves represent an undermining of the status quo. The popular support in Taiwan itself for the status quo cannot be understood outside of the genuine fear in Taiwan of Chinese military action and a pragmatic belief in the importance of peace and security in the straits.

Whether China becomes democratic will not be the result of economic development, but of the courage and actions of Chinese democracy activists. Just as that activism deserves the support, tacit or explicit, of the international community, so to does the principle of self-determination in the case of Taiwan. Only with self-determination will a genuine long-term peace be secured across the Taiwan Straits.

Mayor Ma in London

I have started to get back into newspaper writing again in Australia. This piece is coming out this week, with any luck. I have gone for the high-ground with Ma Ying-jeou, setting aside the controversies of his comments and speeches here in London, and contrasting him to Australia’s position on China and Taiwan. Against my skepticism, he was undeniably quietly impressive in public, and seemed straighforward in private, too.

This month, Ma Ying-jeou, the Mayor of Taipei and recently elected chairman of the Taiwan’s opposition party the KMT, has been in London on a high-profile European tour. Ma is his party’s likely candidate for the 2008 Taiwanese presidential election, and his trip can be seen as preparing the ground for his campaign to hold the top job.

He is making a similar trip to his predecessor’s in 1999, when the previous Mayor of Taipei, Chen Shui-bian, came to London for a series of events which tilted at his own successful run at the presidency in 2000. Chen outlined a set of centrist policies which echoed with the Blairite “Third Way” and positioned his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as a viable alternative to the then-ruling KMT.

The politics of inalienability

A conference paper presented in Canberra a while ago. It's a little underworked, but makes some useful points.

For an issue very much in the public eye, China’s claim for Taiwan has attracted surprisingly little serious attention from scholars. There are notable exceptions, of course, but for an issue which has occupied news headlines every few months since the mid-90s, the quality of writing on it in English is often shallow. A few reasons can be tentatively suggested for this: the obvious discipline for dealing with the question, international relations, applies an assumption of the state-as-actor which does not have sufficient sophistication in historical and social analysis to apprehend the issue meaningfully. International relations produces trite cliches such as "the Chinese government has played the nationalist card" or "Chinese leaders have historically always been concerned with maintaining the unity of the empire", and then moves on to discussions of 'missile capability' of 'air superiority'. The other academic discipline which should be attentive, Chinese Studies has, I suggest, a strategic blind-spot over the area of the ideologies of present-day Chinese nationhood. Again, there are stunning exceptions to this at the highest levels in the field, but even those, such as Fitzgerald’s "Awakening China" are more concerned with the history of Chinese nationhood, rather than the details of its present-day practice. Among those of us who deal with contemporary China, there is, for political and intellectual reasons, a reluctance to delve too deeply into the constituent ideologies of the object of your study.

One China

Another older opinion piece for an Australian newspaper, prior to last year's presidential election in Taiwan. Again, this makes the argument that – realistically, objectively – without democracy in China, unification with Taiwan would be a disaster.

With the Taiwanese presidential election only four months away, the incumbent Chen Shuibian, of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has been ratcheting up the rhetoric against mainland China. In order to draw the issue of cross-straits relations into the election campaign, he has proposed a referendum in conjunction with the election for the Taiwanese to vote on whether China should remove the nearly 500 missiles aimed at them from the mainland.

Missiles and Meteor Garden

A conference paper from earlier this year at the University of Leeds. I was trying to at least start to approach the question of how China and Taiwan can be ready to go to war while culture and people flow cheerfully and unencumbered across the straits. It was nominally an International Relations in East Asia conference, but I don't do IR, so I made more of a cultural studies "intervention" in some of the IR approaches to China-Taiwan relations. There are forms of IR that are really interesting, but when it comes to Taiwan and China, work is dominated by the driest of the dry, the "missile counters", who add up the missiles and jet fighters and pronounce upon the state of crisis of the week. They're men (and only rarely women) in suits who seem to get off on on military hardware. Mention Derrida and their eyes glaze over. Mention a Sukhoi SU30MKK with a Tikhonravov N011M multimode radar and these people start to salivate.

I showed some clips of the TV series Meteor Garden in the presentation as an example of transnationalism. It's a kind of Taiwanese Beverly Hills 90210. Except more anarchic.

Since the mid-1990s, political tension between China and Taiwan has returned as a serious global political and military issue. It is a designated “hotspot”, or “flashpoint”, in international relations, following China’s live missile tests during Taiwan’s first presidential elections in 1996.

Since then, the issue has ebbed and flowed around various political events in China and Taiwan. Subsequent presidential elections in Taiwan have triggered sabre-rattling from China, and plans for constitutional reform, name-changing of state institutions and so forth in Taiwan have kept China-Taiwan relations very tense. Just this week, the passing of the anti-succession law by the PRC’s National People’s Congress has meant a significant deterioration in relations.

At the same time, however, commercial and cultural exchanges between China and Taiwan have never been greater. Bilateral trade in 2004 was US$70 billion, which represented a 34.2 percent increase from 2003. The total number of Taiwanese visiting the mainland in 2004 was 3.7 million, a 35 percent increase from 2003, and it is estimated that at least 300,000 Taiwanese are living and working on the mainland.

In the field of culture, Taiwanese popular culture flows freely to the mainland. Popular music, television and cinema have found large audiences, in particular among China’s teenage and youth demographic.

The question, therefore, is how can these two seemingly incompatible flows be reconciled – political and military tension, including the threat of military attack, with the apparently untroubled flow of people, capital and cultural commodities across the straits.

In the first instance, to propose a reconciliation of these two apparently contradictory features of cross-straits relations is to appeal to the possibility of determining the “true” state of relations between China and Taiwan. A critique of notions of truth in international relations is not difficult, and in the case of China and Taiwan, the appeal to the true state of cross-straits relations at any one time can be understood as an act of narrativization. The attempts to weigh up their different aspects and to produce some measurement of their status as positive or negative is to hope inscribe a trajectory or teleology of their development. Implicit in each individual instances or moments is a temporal potential in which they represent “improvement” or “deterioration”. (… e.g. the anti-succession law=deterioration) This is clearly a dominant theme in the analysis of cross-straits relations. In particular, the subtext is always the possibility of military conflict. Therefore, to ask whether cultural links can ameliorate political tensions is to hope that the trajectory of deterioration is more stable or positive than the on-going crises would suggest.

The issue of narrativizing cross-straits relations locates this paper within the concerns of a particular mode of international relations, which can be labelled realism. This is an approach which attempts to create objective empirical theories in the mode of science order to produce predictive capability for foreign policies. In the instance of China-Taiwan relations, this is necessarily the likelihood of a military conflict, which remains the policy focus of the international community.

Not being a practitioner of international relations, I will side-step the military conflict issue, but flag its concerns as a marker of a privileging regime within IR, in other words, if a China Taiwan war is the subtext of much of the scholarly and policy debates on the cross-straits problem, then this indicates a discursive structure in which a particular problematic is dominant.

To understand the contradictions between cultural flow and political tension, I would first like to suggest that the attempt to construct a coherent and singular narrative of cross-straits relations is an impossible undertaking, and only makes sense within a limited set of assumptions about the discursive structure of cross-straits relations.

Here lies a starting point for dealing with the problem. There is an epistemological disjuncture between the two realms. That is, they operate as two distinct regimes of knowledge about the relationship between China and Taiwan. Both culture and the politico-military can coexist because, apart from both expressing a relationship between the two sides of the straits, they operate from a different basis in knowledge about China and Taiwan.

The first place one can look for this is in scholarship itself. Different disciplines can look for quite different epistemological categories across territorial boundaries.

In the case of international relations, in its “realist” mode, it looks for factors and events like military build-ups, elections in Taiwan or, for example, the anti-succession law, the planned changes in the ROC constitution, or the rise of Taiwanese identity to create coherent and self-contained narrative of China-Taiwan relations. Studying arrays of these factors and events produces scholarly knowledge about the likelihood of a military conflict.

A typical analysis of cross-straits relations is Gary Klintworth’s “From Flashpoint to One China”, in which he starts by laying out an array of policy statements by Chinese and Taiwanese political and military figures, to produce a sense of the policy thinking with the two governments. He then tracks through various events: the Nationalists loss in the civil war in 1949, changes in US-China relations through the 1970s, the 1996 missile crisis, the election of DDP president Chen Shui-bian in 2000, etc. He goes on to discuss the military hardware situation and likely politico-military scenarios of a China-Taiwan conflict, before suggesting a route to a negotiated settlement.

Klintworth’s paper is striking for its complete failure to mention the very strong commercial and cultural links between China and Taiwan, but within its epistemological boundaries, it forms a coherent and logical argument.

In symmetry with and opposition to an IR approach, cultural and media studies pays no attention to matters of politics or the military. Its scholarly categories and methodologies to not include analysis of the policy statements of government leaders or the levels of armaments of each side.

Instead a cultural analysis might use terms like “transnationalism” or “hybridity”, “consumer culture”. Rather than theorizing the likelihood of military conflict, a cultural analysis of China-Taiwan relations might explicitly seek out examples of mobility and migration and describe what happens to culture when it flows from one location to another. It might draw upon notions of the post-modern, so that far from being a variable in an equation of a China-Taiwan war, culture is understood as a product of a floating signifier, accessible to constant reimagining and offering an array of moments from which an individual, Chinese or Taiwanese, might constitute themselves at any time.

The Marxian-inflected work of Simon During, for example, has explored the material conditions of the production of globalized and transnational culture in the case of film. He has described the alignment of global financing and distribution and the production of a certain kind of violent action spectacle as a globally-accessible cultural product by Hollywood, which remains the central node of global cinema. He is specifically interested in the way cultural flow has produced a kind of global culture, a common set of references which are meaningful for almost anyone.

Rey Chow, in contrast, has developed an understanding of cultural movement as a form of translation, in which cultural forms are remade like a translated language in each location. For Chow, it becomes possible to understand culture as a continual moment of social translation , thus bridging the divide between cultures while also appealing to their incommensurable pluralism.

The two regimes of knowledge, the politico-military and the socio-cultural, coexist because, on the surface at least, they do not cross over. While it makes sense for International Relations to construct a narrative trajectory of China-Taiwan relations as “improving” or “deteriorating”, such a narrative is meaningless for cultural analysis. It simply makes no sense to discuss the cultural relationship between China and Taiwan as “improving” or not.

Therefore, in the first instance, I would like to propose that the different epistemologies, or ways of knowing China-Taiwan relations which can be identified in scholarship can also be evidenced in the “real” production of knowledge about politics and the military on the one hand and culture on the other, by political and military leaders on the one hand and cultural consumers on the other.

I have suggested that the project of producing some overarching narrative of the state of cross-straits relations is a unviable, and this fits with the notion that the different dimensions of cross-straits relations are epistemologically incompatible. However, I would like to go further and suggest that, of course, it is not that simple.

The following is an example of a cultural product which made the transition across the straits to illustrate how different modes of understanding do, inevitably, come into conflict.

[... Meteor Garden]

In this tv program, one can find an excellent example of precisely the kinds of issues of cultural transnationalism which cultural and media studies have developed so fruitfully. Meteor Garden is actually based on a Japanese manga, and in its transit to Taiwanese television has taken on a glossy commercialism with which manga in not generally associated. In particular, although the TV program keeps some of the look and style of manga, it loses the violence and broader dystopic vision of modern social life which characterizes a lot of manga.

When the program crossed the straits to China, it became hugely successful. This suggests exactly the opportunities for cultural flow which a positive interpretation of , for example, a cultural studies methodological category like transnationalism might hope is possible across the straits. Rather than cultural identity being simply the product of, for example, competing state-sponsored nationalist ideologies, the free flow of cultural commodities between China and Taiwan presents contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese with the chance to assemble personal, perhaps hybridized, transnational identities from a bricolage of cultural moments. Instead of being exclusively Chinese or Taiwanese, one can be both, or neither. Just as a Taiwanese TV program based on a Japanese manga became popular in China, so to has numerous forms of Western, popular culture.

Such a positive reading of popular culture is, of course, open to critique from many directions. In particular, as During has elaborated, transnational and global culture necessarily follows patterns of transnational and global capital. Therefore, while Chinese people may be free to choose cultural identities from Taiwan, or Japan via Taiwan or the United States they are doing so as consumers of identity, in a commodified cultural world in which the political implications of those choices are effaced.

This is borne out by the particular history of Meteor Garden in China, namely that it was banned by the Chinese government. Not for any explicit anti-government message, but for a general disposition towards authority figures – teachers and parents – which is quite anathema to the broadly conservative social attitudes promoted by the Chinese state.

The intervention of the state in transnational Chinese popular culture suggests that however epistemologically distinct cultural knowledge and politico-military knowledge of China and Taiwan might be, there are nevertheless in structured power relationship. Specifically, the politico-military exercise of power by the state is, however we might hope it is not, pre-eminent over cultural power. That is, although we might hope that cultural flow across the straits via television, film and music might provide a bridge for common identity formations and cultural undertsandings, if states – and men in suits – choose to be in conflict, and to even go to war, then popular culture is powerless to stop them.

Buddhism versus Natural Gas

One of my earlier newspaper columns. It's ultimately just too pat, but then the newspaper column is a very limited form.

Senator Bob Brown’s vocal support for the Dalai Lama on his Australian tour, and Prime Minister John Howard’s attempt to negotiate a $28bn gas contract with China represent the two poles of foreign policy debate in Australia. On one side, righteous indignation, on the other, hard-nosed realism. It is a familiar pattern, played out for twenty five years in our relations with Indonesia and East Timor.

Taiwan Tension

A newspaper commentary of mine, published in Australia, following the 2004 Taiwanese presidential election and shortly before the end of the Athens Olympic Games.

All of the newspaper commentaries I write are a conscious and deliberate attempt to appropriate the dry, macho language of foreign affairs analysis and turn around their conservative political assumptions to make a different kind of argument about Australia and its relations with China and Taiwan. I am trying to retain the viability of the notion of the “national interest” as the analytical category which drives policy-makers, but elaborate it to suggest that it can include a moral position. Effective or not, it’s a conscious political strategy.

The months since the re-election of Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian have seen a rise in tensions across the Taiwan Straits. The softer line which the Chinese government had adopted during Chen’s previous term has been seen to fail with the election result, and there has been a noticible shift in policy and much stronger rhetoric coming out of China.