(2016) The KMT responds to loss. Trauma management and mimetic distortion (Blog / China Policy Institute)

China Perspectives

Journal of Asian Studies, 2015

Comprehensive, eyewitness account of the 24-day student and civil occupation of Taiwan's Legislative Yuan. The occupation, which began as a protest against the botched near- passage of a services trade deal with China, went on to spawn the biggest pro-democracy protest rally in the island’s history, reframe popular discourse about Taiwan’s political and social trajectory, precipitate the midterm electoral defeat of the ruling KMT party, and prefigure unprecedented protest in nearby Hong Kong.

China Policy Institute Blog, 2014

In spring 2005, villagers in Dongyang County, Zhejiang were unhappy. For four years they had been complaining about pollution emitted by 13 factories located in the Zhuxi Chemical Park, but nothing had been done. So they set up a tent encampment to block delivery of supplies to the factories. At first, they employed restrained tactics, including going about daily life in the tents, badgering cadres sent to demobilize them, and kowtowing. After a harsh repression produced hundreds of injuries and left dozens of damaged vehicles and other evidence of police action strewn about, the tent-sitters switched to more aggressive tactics, including denouncing local leaders, carrying out mock funerals, interrogating factory owners and ransacking the homes of ‘traitors’. The authorities’ ill-considered and poorly-timed repression led to tactical escalation, helped draw thousands of people to the scene, and ultimately resulted in the chemical park being closed. This episode speaks to the ‘dissent–repression nexus’ and suggests that repression can be counterproductive when it encourages protesters to ratchet up their tactics and a ‘protest spectacle’ ensues. In today’s China, striking displays and theatrical performances, especially in the wake of a crackdown, can attract an audience, bring in financial support and create a carnival-like atmosphere in which popular acclaim, the breakdown of social order and the inversion of power hierarchies grants protesters leverage and induces the authorities to make concessions.

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), 2019

Reportage literature has been relatively marginalized in Taiwanese literary history because of the genre’s revolutionary origin and socialist associations. However, this does not preclude Taiwan from having its own reportage history. This article analyzes different editions of Lan Bozhou’s “Song of the Covered Wagon” (1988, 1991 2016), a story about an underground communist who was executed during the White Terror. It first attends to the peculiar phenomenon where “Song of the Covered Wagon” has often been canonized as fiction, rather than reportage, since its first publication in 1988. Instead of showcasing that the text is nonfictional, Chen calls into question the very distinction between truth and fictionality in reportage. In the immediate postauthoritarian years, Lan resorted to postmodernist techniques and the style of moderation to articulate the tragic fate that befell communist activists during the White Terror. These unconventional reportage styles testify to the rupture in Taiwanese leftist literary tradition. The author then analyzes the diverged development of reportage literature across the Taiwan Strait. While proponents in 1930s China stressed timely intervention, Lan’s historical reportage works are “untimely” since by the time he undertook reportage investigation, the possibility to “intervene” in current affairs had long been precluded. In conclusion, the author argues that a close analysis of “Song of the Covered Wagon” helps us rethink the distinction between fact and fiction, heroism and intervention, and Chinese reportage at large.

This article uses images of policing produced in the context of Taiwan’s Sun- flower Movement to explore the place of police in democracy. I distinguish five different ways the police–society relationship came to be represented over the course of this movement. I argue that these images of police were performative: they had real effects on the trajectory of the event. To understand these effects, I use a theoretical framework which links the rise of internet technologies to a shift in the cultural dimension of state formation. From this perspective, the driving force of Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement appears as a symbolic disjunc- ture between two contradictory ideals of democracy. On the one hand is a radical ideal, in which a constituent power is founded directly in the meaningful processes of public will formation. On the other hand is a liberal ideal, in which the relative autonomy of a constituted state is necessary to protect civil order against political chaos. The police are situated at a point of material contradic- tion between these radical and liberal imaginaries. To the degree that police powers are based on the rule of law, they are founded in the liberal ideal, which makes them vulnerable to the “imagefare” tactics of radical-democratic social movements.

This article investigates how a collective memory of trauma was produced in the course of commemorating the 2-28 Incident in the context of the 2004 election campaign, and how this memory production led to the parallel formation of a Taiwanese national identity. The 2-28 Hand-in-Hand Rally was designed to remember the 2-28 Incident as an historical trauma in order to be forgotten. The remembering of the 2-28 Incident must be regarded as a constructive process as opposed to a retrieval process. The memory of the 2-28 Incident was selectively constituted in favor of sovereign power.

Boundary 2, 2018

This essay examines the recent crisis of democracy in Taiwan. The Sunflower Movement and its enduring dynamism since mid-March 2014 have successfully mobilized Taiwanese voters to rethink an urgent situation with regard to their perceived democratic way of life in the shadow of a "PRC (People's Republic of China) factor." Critics of this nationwide project for a democratic reevaluation often focus on economic, political, and military features of offshore and domestic episodes regarding cross-strait trade, financial takeovers, political maneuvers, and military threats. What has been missing from the discussion is the "cultural" warfare that is being waged by both sides across the Strait. This cultural warfare is about a new mode of social protest. The Sunflower Movement has revealed that a generation of young, frank-talking critics has been born into this now not-so-young democracy.

2021

Under the current Xi administration, China has marked the 13 th of December as the national public Memorial Day for the Nanjing massacres victims. The reaffirmation of this historical trauma under Xi continues the official narrative of national humiliation to rejuvenation established in the 1990s’ patriotic education. Simultaneously, there has been widespread state-promoted campaign of “positivity”, with frequent announcements that China has entered “a new era”. This article traces the representations of the Nanjing Massacre in different “contact zones” to reveal how certain negative emotions associated with the trauma are deliberately activated to serve the instrumental purposes in China’s contemporary governance. It shows the party-state’s time-tested strategy of encouraging the public to internalize the positive feelings of living in a great new era through comparison with past misery. It also demonstrates the extension of the party-state’s disciplinary power to the public’s affe...

2008

During the White Terror Era in Taiwan, there were only two significant public uprisings that can be considered as disturbances to the reign of the Kuomintang. This article scrutinizes the much neglected theoretical question on Taiwan: how does the Kuomintang dominate the Taiwanese society for more than 50 years without any major coup or revolution attempts? What are the mechanisms of control exercised by the KMT after its retreat from China? This article argues that the theories of discipline, punishment and domination in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Timothy Mitchell’s Colonizing Egypt serve as good elucidation to this important theoretical question and concludes that the success of the KMT domination in Taiwan was due to the party’s capabilities to achieve the kinds of changes in society through coercion, education, restructuring the society and creating of a new “identity” and character for the Taiwanese.