We live at a time of angry social polarization when civility in many parts of the world seems to be on the decline. David Schak offers timely food for thought by showing us how Taiwan has developed a public culture of civility even though China, which shares much the same traditional culture, has not. He defines civility in terms of

Although the Confucian tradition certainly provides a moral basis for civility, the public sphere in most Sinophone countries has not been very civil, at least in the modern era. Lu Xun, among many Chinese critics, wrote scathingly about the narrowmindedness, selfishness and indifference his compatriots showed to one another. In the New Life Movement of the 1930s, the Nationalist government pushed citizens to discipline themselves to clean up public spaces and to act respectfully toward one another, and in the contemporary PRC, the government calls on people to learn from Lei Fang and to practise Confucian virtues – but public spaces continue to be dirty, traffic chaotic, social interactions toward strangers rude, and indifference to the weak and vulnerable is widespread. These are not just the judgments of condescending outsiders, but the anguished contentions of many Chinese citizens themselves. An example was the outpouring of critique over Little Yueyue, the two-year-old girl who was hit by a truck in Foshan in 2011 and lay dying while 18 people walked passed her. Schak cites this example along with many others, and adds his own observations of uncivil behaviour gathered through a long career of extensive travel and research in China.

His main research, however, has been in Taiwan where he arrived in 1969 to begin work on his PhD dissertation. He recalls similar levels of incivility from that period and through careful archival work provides examples of public criticism of it. But from the early 1990s, he says, “civility began to take hold in Taiwan.” Today, he argues, Taiwanese traffic has become more orderly, public spaces cleaner, and overall social interaction more polite, even toward strangers. Based on my own experience, I think that he sometimes draws too sharp a contrast between contemporary China and Taiwan. After the outpouring of criticism of egregious examples like the Little Yueyue case, there seems to have been improvements in public behaviour. In my experience, the orderliness of public spaces in a city like Shanghai is now comparable to those in New York. Meanwhile Taiwan is not free of dirty alleyways and rude people. Nonetheless, visitors from China to Taiwan are commonly impressed that: “The elbowing and pushing so prevalent in mainland China's cities is conspicuous by its absence. In Taiwan, the young yield to the elderly on public transport, while the rich apologize after having accidentally trampled on the have-not's foot” (p. 116, citing Jens Kastner “Taiwan shocks China's independent tourists,” Asia Times, 6 July 2011).

What accounts for the emergent difference in civility between China and Taiwan? It is not because of a difference in government promotion of civility, nor of formal education. Schak examines the public school textbooks of both societies and finds no significant difference in how they promote the norms of civility. The crucial difference, he argues, comes from the social and historical experience of the two societies. Han Chinese Confucian culture, he says, has supported “society in itself” (p. 10), strong natural communities based on kinship and residential propinquity. The larger society is a congeries of such local communities, but the constituent communities have difficulties in extending their moral norms toward strangers. Until fairly recently, Taiwan was like that, but within the last generation it has become a “society for itself” (p. 10), a larger society whose diverse members see themselves as sharing a common cause and a common identity. This was developed through a widespread struggle to reject the authoritarianism of the old Nationalist government and to resist the threat to autonomy posed by the PRC government. (Thus, most people in Taiwan today refer to the colossus on the other side of the straits not as “mainland China” but simply as “China” to distinguish it from the society and culture that the people of Taiwan are themselves creating. Schak respects this way of naming the two societies, an appellation that would not find favour with the leaders of the PRC.) Both Taiwan and China exhibit a kind of nationalism, but for Taiwan it is a “civic nationalism,” forged from the ground up by an active citizenry, which can call the government to account, whereas for China it is an authoritarian nationalism, propagated from the top down to legitimize a paternalistic Communist Party.

These different histories have helped to develop different levels of civic culture. The Taiwan development came as the Island was making its transition to democracy, but Schak argues that democracy itself was not sufficient. Rather, the development of civility has been a necessary condition for making the democratic transition stable.

The lessons of the Taiwan experience go well beyond the concerns of area specialists. But civility can decline as well as rise, and it might be worthwhile to further analyse how, in a world of increasing social inequality and new media, formal democratic institutions may come to undermine civility and themselves may need to be reformed if the civic spirit is to thrive.