Ming-sho Ho's rich and stimulating book Working Class Formation in Taiwan, which brings alive the dynamics of everyday micro-politics in Taiwan from 1945 to 2012, represents a marriage between history and sociology: a fertile fusion that draws on the best practices and insights of both disciplines. Readers are treated to a vivid portrayal of everyday resistance by workers at two critical state-owned enterprises, the Taiwan Sugar Corporation (TSC) and the China Petroleum Corporation (CPC). Taiwan became the world's fourth-largest sugar producer after Japan systematically modernized the industry after 1900. By the 1930s, Japan had directed the establishment of forty-one sugar refineries scattered throughout Taiwan, with the result that the sugar industry's impact on everyday Taiwanese life was profound.
Petroleum refining did not begin until the late 1930s, when Japan moved into high gear transforming Taiwan into a forward base for fighting the Pacific War. The Kuomintang (KMT) then seized and nationalized both the sugar- and petroleum-refining industries in 1946, after which the party-state lavished petroleum with resources on the assumption that energy was a strategically critical sector. Sugar, meanwhile, remained an important, albeit slowly declining, Taiwanese industry for decades. The party-state-owned petroleum- and sugar-refining sectors can thus be regarded as pillars or commanding heights of a Taiwanese economy almost completely bereft, at least initially, of dynamic entrepreneurial independent capitalists: a function of the KMT's all-smothering political atavism, which also stifled the growth of a civil society until about 1980.
To the extent that a working class formed in Taiwan—whether for reasons specified in the social movement literature or otherwise—it would most likely have formed in the state-owned sector, because that is where the industrial workers were concentrated. Because Ho's objective is to correct what he perceives as overly simplified, overly general models of working class formation dominant in his discipline of sociology, studying the TSC and CPC workers was logical.
Activism stemming from the formation of coherent working-class consciousness was what Ho would have discovered if such powerfully influential scholars of social movements as E. P. Thompson (who mostly studied the United Kingdom) were right. But drawing on the insights of figures such as James C. Scott (arts of everyday resistance; hidden transcripts), Ho finds that the gradual and tortuous process of working class formation in Taiwan resulted not from a coherent, unified consciousness but instead from the myriad conflicts among workers, in micro-political struggles that played out over decades. The sources of the conflicts were typically sociological categories, and included ethnic background; propensity to accept (or seek) managerial co-optation, which antagonized less cooperative workers; and proclivity to accept the KMT's constantly propagated nationalist and political myths, which cynical workers found absurd.
The workers did seek to improve their personal lot by engaging in everyday forms of competitive resistance, including petty pilfering, laboring at a leisurely pace, secretly ridiculing the managers (or the entire KMT order), and moonlighting to make extra money. The structure—especially the impossibility of organizing autonomous unions—encouraged self-regarding small-scale resistance, but then the resistance itself aggravated divisions within the working class and so reproduced the structure.
Ho's nuanced framework and detailed research invite readers to think productively and creatively about not only Taiwan but also other cases. Ho himself makes illuminating reference to the People's Republic of China. Yet Ho's work also becomes a valuable contribution to studies of the history of Taiwan itself, because the imperative to test his model guides him toward the discovery of “new facts,” or facts not previously known to the scholarly world that nevertheless provide us with a more vivid and nuanced picture of the Taiwanese past and how it relates to the present.
In straddling the boundary between social science and history, drawing on the methods and insights of both, Ho does leave himself open to criticism—but not devastating criticism. Some historians might object that Ho's model is too constraining, in that while it does direct him toward the discovery of “new facts,” it also leads him to overlook other important and illustrative facts, whether new or old. Some social science purists, meanwhile, will argue that Ho's model is too loose even to count as a model. What he presents as a model is closer in form to a framework or a loose guide. The framework makes no specific propositions that could be tested on other cases, the purists might contend. It could be used to illuminate almost any other case, but such an excessively degree of generalizability implies the framework lacks substance.
Although not entirely without merit, such criticisms would, on balance, be unreasonable given the complexity of any research endeavor and Ho's willingness to discuss the tensions in his approach forthrightly and in detail. Ho's book is a marvelous piece of scholarship. Even its putative shortcomings stimulate productive debate. Working Class Formation in Taiwan should clearly be read by all specialists on Taiwan, but also by others with an interest in the dynamics of social and political change.
