Some authors seem to have been born to write certain books; this sophisticated and soulful history and analysis of the social movements that have shaped Taiwan's democratization almost had to be penned by Chuang. An anthropologist who has participated in and studied this process since 1987, the year marking the beginning of Taiwan's “democratic era,” Chuang brings a quarter-century's worth of authentic reflection to this volume, which should stand as one of the definitive works in this field.
Chuang suggests that we start with an idea of “prelife democracy,” the body of memories of dissent and sunken hopes that resurfaces as actual democratization begins to thrive. If somewhat teleological, this is an evocative formation that does help situate the importance of the elderly President Chiang Kai-shek's half-serious ritual vows to “pursue democracy” in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These words were meant to provide a distinction between an economically rising Republic of China and the chaotic and later dreary suppression of late Maoism, much more than to describe any multiparty trends in Taiwan. But, as Chuang writes, “the echo of the microphoned promise … drifted through eventually” (p. 71). There was something to these claims, then, after all, even if it was not what the Generalissimo could have imagined, and Chuang thus places the liberating marches of the 1980s into much more full ideological and philosophical context. As this example suggests, Chuang moves comfortably between national-level politics and street- and meeting-level choices and articulations. Lee Teng-hui's assumption of the presidency in 1988 had a distinct effect on the ways that nation, nationalism, locality, community, Chineseness, and Taiwaneseness could now be understood. At the same moment, Taiwan's deepening political isolation also had real effects on the ways that social movement organizations were formed and theorized: women's groups could not attend the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, for example, although Taiwan aboriginal groups are able to join the UN Forum on Indigenous Issues, since nationality is not a consideration there.
Chuang's Part II: “Identity and Ethnicity” is where his own organizing experiences and scholarly analysis come together to shine. The questions of local (bentu) Taiwanese identity and indigeneity receive thoughtful treatment here as Chuang works to rescue them from the predictable traps of nativism and essentialism. Rather, he shows how activists worked, literally in theory and in practice, to reclaim these spaces for self-reflexive critique and a position “yearning for reconnection to land(scape), people(hood), ethnicity, his(hers)tory, and community” (p. 107). Chuang cites specific calls by intellectuals and labor and community groups to show just how progressive bentu identity could be—a far cry from the ham-fisted nativism that clogged so much of Taiwan's “green” politics since the 1990s. Even more impressively, this movement was agile enough to use notions of local community to graft a deep and systematic social welfare agenda onto the longstanding Kuomintang structures of welfare capitalism built long ago to guarantee a productive labor force, military, and civil service. Chuang thus sees activist democracy transforming state maneuvers at legitimacy into programs of “communitarian welfare” (fuli shequhua, p. 113) that rivaled systems of northern Europe.
Ethnic identity also receives its recuperation here, in the case of 1980s–90s Hakka and aborigine movements becoming a site for “a multiplicity of expressions” (p. 119) and the rediscovery of community and morality. Chuang works to uncover the “promises” that coexist with the “annihilations” that we know haunt this category (p. 125). He uses the work of Werner Sollors and the debates between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth in order to define a “generative theorization of ethnicity,” an ethnicity that can serve as a “moment of moral articulation, justification, and decision” (pp. 136, 135). Ethnicity is with us, Chuang concludes, and these cases in Taiwan serve as his proof of how ethnic consciousness ultimately succeeds when it supports critical multicultural values.
The book's final section provides a similar treatment of locality, showing how advocacy of place also need not be limited to reactionary politics but instead can provide a groundedness and a natural sense of heterogeneity. Chuang's distinction between boom-era ideas of the difang “local” as unpolished and backward and the shequ “community” that was well-managed for the purposes of capitalist development is an especially nice touch, as is his study of 1990s street watch organizations as guardians of community and familiarity and against urban alienation.
And even Chuang's epilogue is prescient; his ruminations on the current “problem of sovereignty” (p. 202) and his fear that new PRC regional and global influence “puts an end to Taiwanese democracy as it once was” (p. 206) were borne out just this spring. Taiwan's Sunflower Student Movement was directed precisely against the agents of capital and “reunification” who find democratic procedures so easy to ignore. But Chuang's own money is on democracy and activism from below; this nicely argued volume makes his pronouncement believable.
