Week 1: Taipei Time
Week 1: Taipei Time
In Taiwan for this weekend's forthcoming election
I’ve been in Taiwan the past few days. My first visit to the country – with a firm acknowledgement that it is its own country. They are holding elections here on Saturday for both the president and the legislature, and I’ve been lucky enough to secure a press pass. This week will involve attending a number of press conference for the international media – which I suspect and hope will be conducted in English, as my Mandarin is non-existent – as well as gaining access to the media room on Saturday night as the election results come in.
Over the weekend I’ve been hanging out with a couple of friends of mine and getting their sense of Taiwan’s political situation. Both are highly educated women in their 30s who are deeply suspicious of the Chinese Communist Party, understand its authoritarian psychology well, and are aware of what has happened to Hong Kong and wish to prevent this from happening to Taiwan. Seeing the DPP as the best party to achieve this.
These women see themselves as Taiwanese and view China as a foreign country, and a threatening one at that. But more than threatening, they see the CCP’s obsession with Taiwan as weird and stalker-ish. Like a man who refuses to accept no.
There is a distinct generational divide in Taiwan though. Older generations have more of a pan-Chinese identity, and while they may also be suspicious of the CCP, they do have a sense of the people within the People’s Republic as being their brethren. This is understandable, as it has only been 70-odd years since many families had fled China.
On a less political note, but of equal importance, I’ve been loving getting around via the Taipei Metro, which has a mix of underground and elevated rail lines. The system is extensive and efficient, and makes moving around the city incredibly easy. A few days before I left Melbourne I needed to get across to the west of the city and having to wait 20 minutes for a train at Flinders Street was frankly embarrassing. I have a deep love for cities that take train travel seriously.
And, although I’ve only been here a few days, I’m developing deep love for Taiwan. I suspect after another week – and with all the election activities – this will only grow. I just hope China doesn’t throw too big a tantrum at the election result that may make it difficult to get home.
This Week’s Reading
Overcoming the Flawed Binary of Taiwanese Politics
Grant Wyeth – A Bridge Adjusting To The Water
“Describing the DPP as “pro-independence” is to subscribe to the official fiction that Taiwan isn’t already an independent country. Having never controlled Taiwan, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cannot issue so much as a parking fine in Taipei, and the Taiwanese state has all the functions of other states from issuing currency and passports, to its own police forces and military. It relies on Beijing for nothing.
The DPP is a party that simply recognises the truth of Taiwan’s existence. Of course, like most of us, it has decided to tip-toe around the CCP’s feelings and not “declare” this reality, but the party operates in a manner that takes this independence as a given. The party also insists that the Taiwanese people have a distinct identity and culture that makes it a nation, as well as a state. And that central to this identity has become its vibrant democracy, as well as civic ideas that expand inclusion to those not from the Han majority.
The KMT has a far more complex relationship to Taiwan’s status. Having governed China from the territory now controlled by the CCP from 1912-1949 as the Republic of China (Taiwan’s official name), it has greater emotional ties to this territory and to the idea of pan-Chinese nationalism. Yet having fought a civil war against the CCP, the implication that the party wishes to submit Taiwan to the CCP’s authority is an odd one. The party clearly states its opposition to communism in its charter, and rejects the “one country two systems” framework that has been disastrous for Hong Kong.”
The Greatest Book on Nationalism Keeps Being Misread
Daniel Polansky – Foreign Policy
“Due to a combination of the title’s pithiness and its well-established place on college syllabi, few works of social science have been so widely misunderstood. It is in that rarified genre of books more written about than read (officially known as the “Fukuyama Club”). For many readers appear to have taken the title literally, supposing that he treated nations as somehow fictional. His actual thesis, however, was more subtle. or Anderson, nationalism is imagined rather than imaginary — though too many readers only noted the first part.
He recognises, in other words, that nations are historical creations rather than natural expressions of some authentic pre-political identity, but he does not assume this invalidates them. Thus (to take examples with particular contemporary relevance), Zionism is both a late 19th-century invention and a reality for Israeli citizens. Palestinian nationalism is both a derivation of a larger modern movement of Arab nationalism and the source of a recognisable collective identity. Nagorno-Karabakh acquired new (and mutually exclusive) significance for both Azerbaijanis and Armenians during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, without thereby being any less consequential. All of these and more are real and meaningful, even when their historical claims are convenient.”
Pratap Bhanu Mehta – Foreign Policy
“The crisis in democracy is in part a crisis in nationalism, which today seems to revolve around four issues: how nations define membership; how they popularize a version of historical memory; how they locate a sovereign identity; and how they contend with the forces of globalisation. In each of these, nationalism and liberalism are often in tension. Democracies tend to navigate this tension rather than resolve it. Yet, around the world, nationalism is slowly strangling liberalism—a trend that could accelerate in a damaging way this year. As more citizens cast their ballots in 2024 than in any other year in the history of the world, they will be voting not only for a particular leader or party but for the very future of their civil liberties.
As a political style, national populism thrives not so much by finding enemies of the people but enemies of the nation, who are often measured by certain taboos. Almost all modern populists—from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Modi, Orban, and Trump—draw the distinction between people and elites not in terms of class but in terms of who authentically represents the nation. Who gets benchmarked as the true nationalist? The cultural contempt for the elite gets its strength not just from the fact that they are elites but that they can be represented as elites who are no longer part of the nation, as it were. This kind of rhetoric increasingly sees difference as seditious rather than merely a disagreement.”
Defending The Year Of Democracy
Kat Duffy & Katie Harbath – Foreign Affairs
“This year, over 80 national elections are scheduled to take place, directly affecting an estimated 4.2 billion people—52 percent of the globe’s population—in the largest election cycle the world will see until 2048. In addition to the U.S. presidential election, voters will go to the polls in the European Union, India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and dozens of other countries. Collectively, the stakes are high. The candidates that win will have a chance to shape not only domestic policy but also global issues including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and Internet governance.
This year’s elections are important for reasons that go beyond their scale. They will be subject to a perfect storm of heightened threats and weakened defences. Commercial decisions made by technology companies, the reach of global digital platforms, the complexity of the environments in which these platforms operate, the rise of generative AI tools, the growth of foreign influence operations, and the emergence of partisan domestic investigations in the United States have converged to supercharge threats to elections worldwide.”
Being in Taiwan it is only appropriate that I provide some local music this week. This is Math(s) Rock band Elephant Gym.