King Lear

It’s been a very long time since any updates, not for want of material, but for want of time. A couple of weeks ago I was at St Antony’s College Oxford to present a paper in a Taiwan Studies workshop. I spoke about Chiang Kaishek, King Lear, Cape No.7 and the crisis of representation. Here is an excerpt. And an excerpt from the performance I am writing about is here .

One exemplary instance of contemporary Taiwanese culture is produced by the celebrated Taiwanese actor Wu Hsing-kuo 吳興國, who has since the 1980s developed a global reputation for his ambitious interpretations of Shakespeare through his own theatre company the Contemporary Legend Theatre. He began in 1986 with a version of Macbeth that transposed the play to an imperial Chinese setting. In 2001, he presented a radical version of King Lear, which he has performed throughout the 2000s, most recently in 2009 at the Ten Days On The Island international arts festival in Australia.1

Wu premise is to use the theatrical forms of Peking opera as a medium in which to read Shakespeare’s plays. However, he goes further as an artist and transforms King Lear into one-actor piece of performance art, taking on nine of the characters himself: Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cordelia, Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund, the Fool and the Earl of Kent. At one level, it is a demonstration of theatrical virtuosity. He performs the roles of multiple characters from the play by relying on both his personal skills as a an actor as well as the formalism of Peking opera to present the roles in a lucid and involving theatrical experience. Its works in part through the aura of the virtuoso, in which the audience is allowed to suspend disbelief and experience a particular form of rarefied spectacle.

In his version of King Lear, Wu’s approach to Shakespeare is highly stylized and interpretative, as he adapts the themes and relationships from the play, rather than specific scenes, beginning with the character of Lear is his state of madness. He also appears as himself in moments in which he explores his own identity and his relationship to the tragic characters in the play and his life as an actor.

Wu Hsing-kuo is classically trained in Peking opera, and parallel to his adaptation of Shakespeare, his performance adapts and refracts the imposing conventions of that form. He plays with the archetypes of Peking opera, such as the 老生 “old man” or the 武生 “young warrior” or 青衣 roles of women, to transform the representation of the play’s analogous characters through the different performance motifs. The result is a layered and stylized piece that is accessible and entertaining while allowing an informed audience to explore Shakespeare’s characterization through Wu’s self-conscious deployment of the richness and formalized features of Peking opera.2

Dramatically, Wu’s project is to distil an essence from Shakespeare and recreate that essence in an entirely different cultural mode, so as to offer an audience new insights and a fresh understanding of Shakespeare’s work. If one were to offer a critique of Wu’s King Lear, it might be his failure to grasp the centrality of language in Shakespeare. The wordplays, meters and turns of phrase that characterize Shakespeare’s plays and poetry and his capacity to draw intense and complex characterizations and plots from stage dialogue are a key dimension of what has made him the foundational writer in the English language. Even in its Chinese, Wu’s text is relatively straightforward. Instead, his apprehension of Shakespeare is largely through the performative body, using the esoteric and overdrawn physical performance styles of Peking opera as his dramatic language rather than its textual possibilities, and he focusses on the interior life of characters and their inter-relationships rather than any of the social and political themes in the play. For Wu, his work aims to exteriorize the psycho-analytic interior of the characters through the body and its physical possibilities in performance.

In a broader theoretical sense, Wu’s Lear is a form of trans-cultural performance practice. He takes the two radically different canonical forms of Shakespeare and Peking opera and by bringing them together problematizes their position as bounded within civilizational or national cultures. Each is deconstructed by the encounter with the other, and through the acts of interpretation and translation, he decanonizes both forms, allowing a play and a performance orthopraxis steeped in history to be rethought as innovative or even radical and transgressive. Shakespeare, celebrated and beatified the the greatest English writer and writer in English, is taken apart and reworked through a recondite form of culture from a Chinese classical civilizational tradition. Peking opera, representing high late-imperial culture, is similarly transformed through its appropriation of an alternative, even oppositional, Western literary tradition. One might also note how in the context of global culture and performing King Lear outside of Taiwan, Wu is presenting a doubled translation from Shakespeare to Peking opera and back again into the Angophone performance world, so that western cultural tradition becomes mediated by classical Chinese culture and transformed into a contemporary global high culture. 3

However, Wu is not only deconstructing cultural traditions. In reworking King Lear through Peking opera, he is drawing out from them an appeal to a universal human experience, insisting that even as rarefied or esoteric artistic forms, Shakespeare and Peking opera are both capable of reaching across cultural divides and expressing universal human concerns. The humanism of the performance is accentuated in Wu’s personal intrusions on stage, breaking the barrier between actor and audience so as to include both in a shared experience of subjectivity. As a result, Wu’s appeal to the universalizing humanistic values of both Shakespeare and Peking opera re-canonizes them as cultural objects that transcend the boundaries that valorize them. They are not merely great within their respective cultural traditions, they are great across all human cultures and history. This is a bold move, as most global or transnational culture is popular and commercial, such as cinema or pop music, and Wu is appealing to nothing less than a form of “great” or “high” global culture.

In this context of global or transnational culture, Wu’s focus on embodied performance makes sense as a more fruitful technique for cultural translation, functioning visibly and viscerally as site of meaning that can make sense across cultural boundaries. The body becomes the most viable form of expression that can remain comprehensible across multiple translation acts across civilizational boundaries.

In the narrower context of Taiwan’s contemporary culture, however, such a deep engagement with a classical Chinese cultural form has an unavoidable politics. That Wu’s King Lear can be identified as “Chinese” is to position his work as inauthentic in the context of Taiwanese nationalism and the localist cultural movements that have driven much cultural expression in Taiwan since the 1970s. Peking opera is necessarily hegemonic, positioning its local equivalent of Taiwanese opera as a provincial subset of the imperial form, and marginalizing other traditional popular culture such as music and puppet theatre. This hegemony might be an intrinsic and unavoidable part of Wu’s project. His King Lear is, in a sociological sense, legitimized by the symbolic capital of Peking opera, which draws upon centuries of imperial history and active valorization by the KMT government on Taiwan. To engage with as dominant a cultural figure as Shakespeare from outside of the Western or Anglosphere might need an equally compelling interlocutor for the dialogue to be meaningful.

Therefore, a simple reading of Wu Kuo-hsing’s King Lear might be to link it to the same “crisis of representation” that could be said to shape the language of politics in Taiwan today: Peking opera is Chinese, and its presence on Taiwan expresses the failure of Taiwanese culture to define a uniquely and specifically “Taiwanese” cultural language as it continues to constrain the possibilities of Taiwanese culture. In terms of symbolic capital, perhaps one could so far as to say that high culture in Taiwan, such as theatre, might need to be Chinese culture to be legitimized.

However, this is a very crude reading of Wu’s work, equating his version of King Lear with Chinese culture, and indeed equating it with Peking opera, when in fact it is a richer and more complex form of transnational culture. The transformations of Peking opera effected by Wu are too profound for his work to be understood as simply a version of Peking opera transplanted to Taiwan.

Wu’s King Lear is self-reflexive and self-conscious, and ultimately ungrounded by its Chinese classical tradition. It deliberately and explicitly breaks the boundaries of Peking opera as a form of performance and takes on with a demonstrable confidence the most canonized writer in the English language. In other words, Wu Kuo-hsing is deliberately taking the cultural legacy of China on Taiwan, a pre-Republican legacy, and using to develop a transnational cultural form. What is being culturally represented in King Lear is not “China”, but a cultural legacy transformed in ways that might only be possible in Taiwan. Indeed, symbolically, in the third scene in his Lear, Wu wipes the opera make-up from his face, and explores in vernacular Chinese his own subjective relationship to aspects of Lear’s isolated and troubled character with which he identifies and with the difficulty of maintaining a life as a performer. He symbolically wipes the mask of Chinese high culture from his face and speaks outside of it in a very different linguistic register.

Wu, therefore, is offering a wholly self-reflexive engagement with the theatrical tradition with which he is working. He then goes further, taking an ungrounded and free approach to the performance of Peking opera to embrace not that tradition but Western tradition in the form of a canonical piece of English theatre. In other words, the logic of renewal or revitalization to which Chiang Kai-shek appealed in 1950s or the notion of “saving” Taiwan in the 2000s, is unravelled in Wu’s art. Renewal of classical Chinese culture means appropriating it from a position of mastery and re-deploying it knowingly in ways that enable cultural innovation, and especially cultural translation. Wu stands between both Chinese and Western traditions uses them to deliver a high cultural “mash-up”. The temporality of greatness-crisis-revitalization-and greatness again is rendered politically meaningless when the renewal is actually an act of creative translation that deconstructs the very boundaries of Chinese culture upon which Chiang and subsequent bearers of Chinese nationalist ideology rely.

1. “Lier zai ci (Lear is here),” DVD, Wu hsing-kuo, Contemporary Legend Theatre, (Tianxia 2005).

2. for a detailed description of Wu Hsing-kuo’s interpretation of King Lear, see Li Ruru, “‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ / ‘Lear’s shadow’: A Taiwanese Actor’s Personal Response to King Lear,” Shakespeare Quarterly; Summer 2006; Vol. 57, No.2, p. 195-241.

3. ibid., 196.

Another book chapter

I have another chapter in a new book that just came out with HKU Press. The chapter is “How to Speak About Oneself: Theory and identity in Taiwan. Book blurb as follows.

What difference does a region make? Are the new regional cultures of Northeast Asia the product of individuals fighting to overcome national trade barriers, or are they driven by governments promoting national interests in new ways? Are they the result of economic pursuits alone, or do cultural and political forces play a role? Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia takes a Cultural Studies approach to the cultural industries in Northeast Asia. The volume opens with an innovative section considering the discipline itself as a kind of cultural industry, highlighting the challenges and possibilities that arise from the context of Northeast Asia. Other essays on specific cultural industries and their products range in coverage from labor in the Korean animation industry to anti-Korean manga in Japan, the emergence of an East Asian brandscape, Chinese consumption of Japanese animation, the Asian regional strategy of the Pusan International Film Festival, and more.

“The publication of Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia marks one of the first efforts to address the emergent shape and shaping of a distinctive Northeast Asian cultural sphere in our time and surely represents the best portrayal of the complex tapestry embracing the plural forces of nation, market and cultural industries that is currently constituting this new configuration. From ‘Cool Japan,’ regional ‘brandscapes’ to hybrid forms of animation, politicized cartoons, and regional pop music, these essays explore how cultural studies has expanded its disciplinary vocation to meet the demands of a cultural zone different from the usual suspects and expanded its reach to examine policy and the cultural industries implicated in figuring and producing this new cultural unity. Above all else, the collection authoritatively demonstrates the continuing tension between envisioning a Northeast Asian cultural imaginary as a displacement of older historical grievances capable of exceeding the nation and the more difficult labor of realizing political and economic cooperation among the region’s nations to actualize a new history.” – Harry Harootunian, New York University

“This timely and erudite intellectual interrogation of regionalism offers a potent counter-discourse to challenge nation-state boundaries and problematize the binary model of globalism/localism. There is no comparable book on the market.” – Ming-bao Yue, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Chris Berry is Professor of Film and Television Studies in the Department of Media and Communication at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Nicola Liscutin is Head of the Japanese Department and Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Jonathan D. Mackintosh is Lecturer in Japanese Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Mini Dragons – Taiwan (1991)

This is the Taiwan episode from a 1991 Australian documentary series about the four little dragons, or Asian tigers. Like all documentaries, it says as much about the maker as the subject. In this instance it expresses Australia’s uncertain reorientation towards Asia and the appeal of, and anxiety caused by, the success of the Asian economies at a time when Australia’s was painfully restructuring along neo-liberal lines. It also says a lot about Taiwan, and although there are some simplifications, it gets the major issues pretty right, and offers some interesting images of the politics of the period. And in the last year many of those issues seemed to have returned to beset Taiwanese political and social life.
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Parts 1, 2 and 3

http://mharrison.wordpress.com/2005/11/24/the-little-dragons/

Book chapter

I have a chapter in a new book that just came out with Routledge. Blurb as follows.

This inter-disciplinary volume of essays opens new points of departure for thinking about how Taiwan has been studied and represented in the past, for reflecting on the current state of ‘Taiwan Studies’, and for thinking about how Taiwan might be re-configured in the future.

As the study of Taiwan shifts from being a provincial back-water of sinology to an area in its own (albeit not sovereign) right, a combination of established and up and coming scholars working in the field of East Asian studies offer a re-reading and re-writing of culture in Taiwan. They show that sustained critical analysis of contemporary Taiwan using issues such as trauma, memory, history, tradition, modernity, post-modernity provides a useful point of departure for thinking through similar problematics and issues elsewhere in the world.

Re-writing Culture in Taiwan is a multidisciplinary book with its own distinctive collective voice which will appeal to anyone interested in Taiwan. With chapters on nationalism, anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, religion and museum studies, the breadth of ground covered is truly comprehensive.

Cape No.7 Trailer

A trailer for Cape No.7, with a rough English translation.
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Australian Taiwan Studies Network

Something I have been working on now I have returned home Australia.

The Australian Taiwan Studies Network is a long-overdue attempt from Australia to bring together academics doing research about the island of Taiwan. It is based around a “wiki”, a closed interactive website. It is in its early days, but features internet generated content, such as news feeds, a forum, events calendar, and daily images of Taiwan. The Australian Taiwan Studies Network is based in Australia but open to scholars everywhere. The website requires registration and an “application” to join the network. Those interested can find it at:

http://atsn.wikidot.com

The role of the media in Taiwan’s democratic consolidation

This weekend I have been at St Antony’s College, Oxford, for a post-election workshop on democracy in Taiwan. My brief was the media, and among the political scientists and Washington hard-heads, I did my usual gesture at epistemological critique. We enjoyed “High Table” in the cafeteria … I mean, college dining hall, as well as St Antony’s very own range of undrinkable wines and sherry. The event was successful and enjoyable and concluded with a very pleasant dinner at a local Italian with academic luminaries and the sparkle of political celebrity in the form of Bi-khim Hsiao, “Taiwan’s Natasha Stott-Despoja“, who was literally and metaphorically on the road to recovery after the unimaginable physical and emotional demands of the presidential election campaign.* I finished the event off British style with an arduous journey back to London through a range of transport failures that took hours.

Here is approximately what I had to say at the conference.

The importance of the media in democracies has long been recognized by essayists, activists and theorists, from Thomas Carlyle to Jurgen Habermas to Samuel Huntington.

The media is part of democratic process, delimiting the power of states and empowering citizens by functioning to produce civil society or the public sphere by mediating between the state and the public.

In Lipsett’s early work, the media are a function of modernization or more properly modernity, which is a pre-condition of democratization – the theme of modernization or modernity is one which occurs again and again with respect to Taiwan, and even the title of this event – “consolidation” alludes to the temporality implicit in the notion of modernity.

Especially through Huntington, the media in Taiwan has been understood as part of a positivist explanatory mechanism of Taiwan’s democratization, what I have referred to an an equation of democratization, in which linguistic categories, like “media”, the “middle class”, the “economy” etc are lined up in logically causal relationships. So the emergence of a newspaper reading middle class in Taiwan through a booming economy in the post-WWII era is understood as a factor to have caused democratization.

In my own work I have been critical of this mode of social analysis. The objectification of socio-political life in this mode of political science implies a political and moral response to that life. Democracy was caused by the struggle by democracy activists, not objective social processes that do not demand a political engagement with that struggle by observers.

In the context of Taiwan, these views about the media present powerful and I would suggest over-determining narratives of Taiwan’s history, especially valorizing the date of 1949 and the start of the so-called “Taiwanese economic miracle” or the Tiger or Little Dragon narrative.

So when we talk about the role of the media in democracy in Taiwan we can be encoding some very strong narratives of history and history-writing which carry certain assumptions about the structure of Taiwan’s history, and the issues of who writes it and why.

These views about democratization and its causes, the role of the media, and the kinds of narratives and epistemologies that are the foundation of these ideas, have come in for some sustained criticism in recent years and it might be fair to say that the simple links between media, literacy, modernity, modernization, development and democracy are largely unsustainable nowadays.

In the last five to ten years, Taiwan’s transformation has come to be understood as very much over the whole 20th century, not merely over the post-WWII decades, in narratives which incorporate the different aspects of modernization under Japan and in the late Qing. Therefore, the links between media, literacy, economic development and so forth are harder to sustain.

Furthermore, the links between media and democracy in these forms of analysis incorporate too many normative definitions of what a “media” is (and indeed a democracy). The Habermassian ideal of the media as a public sphere of rational argumentation and critical discussion in the context of Taiwan becomes a powerful (and unsustainable) value judgement of the state of Taiwan society and the development of the Taiwanese as a people.

But these norms do take us forward into the criticisms of the Taiwanese media that have beset its democratic transition especially in the Chen era.

The key question is whether there is something “wrong” with the Taiwanese media which is preventing the full realization of democracy in Taiwan.

There are many ways we can come at these issues:

In the first instance, are the issues of the “rightness” or “wrongness” of Taiwan’s media.

Criticisms of Taiwan’s media are often around the question of biases or politicization and also its sensationalism – its lack of objectivity.

The Taiwanese media has been criticized for being wholly partisan, especially in the deeply divisive Chen era. The major newspapers are all identified as blue or green and their reporting has been accused of aligning with the political interests associated with each side. So the reporting of the so-called corruption scandals involving Chen Shui-bian and his wife, or the visit by Lien Chan to China to meet Hu Jintao in 2005, have been characterized by a split between the Blue and Green sides of the media that covers these stories very differently.

In this way, rather than reporting information and facts in an objective way, the Taiwanese media are understood as being either political actors themselves or functioning as mouthpieces for the Blues and Greens.

In that context, some of the features of Taiwan’s media can be understood as a failure of democratization and a failure of modernity. So the limits and failings of the Taiwanese media are part of a deeply self-critical socio-political discourse in Taiwan. These are predicated on certain assumptions about the way a media “should” be, which is found in an idealized West, which itself suggests a kind of Taiwan-centric alterity. The Taiwanese “other” themselves.

The problem of the bias or politicization, and also of sensationalism, of Taiwan’s news media assumes that there is a normative standard for democratic media in which the reporting is unbiased or more true, or expresses a greater commitment to truth and objectivity than Taiwan’s media.

This notion is at the heart of the notion of an idealized public sphere, one of “rational argumentation and critical discussion”.

This ideal media is the so-called Fourth Estate, which functions to freely criticize the sites of power – government and business – in order to protect or empower the people against the misuse of power. The media should be objective, reporting facts without bias or partisanship or emotion or in the interests of power.

Therefore, the Taiwanese are unable to draw “objective” apolitical knowledge from their media about their social, political and economic circumstances. They are unable to be rational and modern.

And perhaps, given the intense commercialization of media, one could argue that they do not want to be rational, but are driven by desire, emotion, a pursuit of sensation, rather than rational analysis.

This idealized understanding of the media can and indeed has been subjected to a wide-ranging critique in Western media studies over decades. It can be argued that the media produces ideology around notions like capitalism, patriarchy, ethnicity, etc. In Taiwan, the deep contestation of its politics simply makes the bias visible.

One could argue that in Taiwan it is simply that the divisiveness of the media makes the biases and politicization visible, whereas in more unified media we simply do not notice the biases.

The ideal media also functions on the basis of a crude notion of objective truth that has also been opened up for critique through post-structuralism and the linking of notions of truth with language, knowledge and power.

Furthermore, the norms of disinterested news media suggest a valorization of a certain kind of politics – rational, instrumental, objective, non-ideological, which might be hard to sustain as a credible basis for real politics, especially in Taiwan, where the very nature of the key political problems are in the realm of ideology i.e. the identity issue. An appeal to objective and disinterested media would produce an inadequate media for Taiwan’s political circumstances.

Therefore, the notion that Taiwan’s media fails to live up to an ideal, and that therefore its democracy is wanting can be argued against when the media has long been understood not to adhere to its own ideals.

Nevertheless, the well-known frustration that the Taiwanese electorate have for their media does point to a real issue, one that suggests a challenge to the legitimacy of Taiwan’s democratic system.

One way to explore what precisely the problem is is through the notion of the media as a mechanism for self-representation in Taiwan, as a mechanism through which the Taiwanese know themselves as Taiwanese.

We can recognize that the media are only one site of power within Taiwan and suggest disconnections between socio-political knowledge and politics – disconnections between how people know about themselves and their politics and whether and how that knowledge is expressed in the media.

Therefore, in a media in which notions of truth or meaningful representation are hard to sustain, the Taiwanese suffer from what, in other work of mine, I have referred to as Taiwan’s crisis of representation. The structural problems of the Taiwanese media make it hard to the Taiwanese to know themselves in it.

A dimension to this is the prevalence of opinion over reporting. The political talk-shows and opinion columns suggest a very politically-aware electorate but one in which the public sphere generated by the media, supposedly a site of rational and instrumental debate about the nation’s issues, has become instead a confused discursive space in which the truth of any assertion is impossible to determine because of the competing claims on legitimacy over knowledge.

For example, political opinion is expressed as objective opinion, and legitimized by academic credentials. There is a complex contestation going on in Taiwan over the legitimization of knowledge.

Another dimension might be the intense commercialization of Taiwan’s media, in which sensationalism becomes the currency of media truths, or similarly the ownership of Taiwan’s media, so that views and information conveyed by certain media is undermined by its links to political and state institutions.

Again, it has to be said that this might not be unique to Taiwan. The rise of cable news in the US shows a similar drift towards news as commentary and a failure to be able to determine what the truth might look like when it is presented in the media. Indeed, it has been said the the comedy news programs, such as The Daily Show, are where a kind of truth can now be found.

Another aspect might be the currency of “rumours”, which are extra-media forms of social and political knowledge, operating in parallel to the news media, and ones which are hard to quantify, control, and are operating without much in the way of institutional regulation, or legitimizing practices, unlike other sites of socio-political knowledge like academia, politics, the media.

In Taiwan this means layers of social and political meaning in which tacit knowledge emerges to fill the gaps left by public knowledge in the media.

This points to a certain form continuity between the martial law and democratic periods: the best example is the exhortations to fight communism and recover the mainland that featured as ritual acts of subjection before the power of the KMT party-state under martial law.

So there is a crisis of representation in the media which is what drives the level of anxiety that the Taiwanese have towards politics and civil society, but that crisis does not express and enact authoritarianism as it did in the martial law period.

The media is perhaps just as politicized, but is now pluralistic and deregulated, and yet still fails to represent a Taiwanese social life with which the Taiwanese people can identify.

The current state of the media suggests that the transformation of Taiwan is indeed profound and complete, but that the media continues to exhibit a different kind of representational crisis. The Taiwanese do not know themselves in their own media as a coherent national people and this creates an on-going sense of disquiet and unease about their politics.

 

雲門舞集 – 水月

An excerpt of a performance by the Cloud Gate dance company from Taiwan, founded in 1973 by Lin Hwai-min, of one of Lin’s most famous pieces, Moon Water. Video requires Quicktime 7.

This week Cloud Gate are performing Moon Water in London at Sadler’s Wells. The whole work is set to Bach’s suites for solo cello and makes complex references to a number of movement styles, but especially tai chi and qi gong. At the end of the piece, the stage is flooded with water, which reflects the dancers’ bodies and movements. It’s amazing.

Reviews are here:

The left-wing Guardian

The right-wing, Murdoch-owned Times

The even more left-wing Independent

The right-wing Conservative Party favourite, Daily Telegraph

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.

Democracy

A montage of video from the January 2008 Legislative elections in Taiwan. Video requires Quicktime 7.    

Last month a group of us from Europe were in Taiwan for the legislative elections. The dramatic wins by the opposition KMT stunned the Democratic Progressive Party, but for reasons that have been widely canvassed, the results leave the presidential election in March open and uncertain. The video has footage from the DPP rally in Longshan, then the KMT rally in Sanchong, with both events occasionally bordering on the comic, then at a school in southern Taipei of actual vote counting. At that point, they were counting the two referenda held simultaneously with the legislature vote. Overall, the mood in Taiwan is depressed and negative, with deep dissatisfaction towards both sides of politics from the electorate and profound mistrust and animosity between the two main parties. Yet, to watch the practice of democracy in a classroom with the volunteer vote counters, who were local teachers, was rather moving.

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.