Chih-yu Shih

Confucianism with a Liberal Face: The Meaning of Democratic Politics in Postcolonial Taiwan

Neither cultural conversion to Western liberalism nor resort to local traditions such as Confucianism adequately deals with the hybrid nature of democratization in a postcolonial context. With its assortment of Chinese, Japanese, American, and Taiwanese hegemonic legacies, Taiwan offers a case in point. Its version of democratic politics operates across three contending normative domains: liberal political institutions, Confucian rationales for power, and Taiwanese nativist/nationalist sensibilities. Some may despair at this “distortion” of the (Western) liberal democratic ideal. We suggest, alternatively, that the contentious and unstable nature of liberal politics in Taiwan may render its polity more open-ended and organic, with simultaneous potential for both authoritarianism and democratization.

The West that is not in the West: identifying the self in Oriental modernity

This paper discusses the meaning of ‘the West’ in Chinese and Japanese political discourse. It argues that for Japanese and Chinese political thinkers, the West does not exist in the West. Rather, the West is sometimes at the periphery and, at other times, at the centre. For them, ‘the Chinese’ is about the epistemology of all-under-heaven. There is no such concept as ‘Other’ in this epistemology. As a result, modern Western thinkers depend on opposing the concrete, historical, yet backward Other to pretend to be universal, while Chinese and Japanese thinkers concentrate on self-rectification to compete for the best representative of ‘the Chinese’ in world politics. ‘The Chinese’ is no more than an epistemological frame that divides the world into the centre and the periphery. In modern times, the Japanese have accepted Japan as being at the periphery of world politics, while the West is at the centre. To practise self-rectification is to simulate the West. The West is therefore not the geographical West, but at the centre of Japanese selfhood. Self-knowledge produced through Othering and that through self-rectification are so different that the universal West could not make sense of the all-under-heaven way of conceptualizing the West.

The Decline of a Moral Regime China's Great Leap Forward in Retrospect

Chinese political culture has undergone profound changes since the Great Leap Forward (GLF) Campaign in 1958. The campaign extended the scope of the Chinese moral regime to its extreme. Ironically, the failure of the GLF destroyed the moral consensus in Chinese politics, undermined the myth of a supreme leadership, bred moral alienation in the masses, and more importantly, led to cadre corruption. This article sets out to examine the interaction between economic development strategy and political culture in China, constructs the logic of moral decline in that society, and documents the signs of the decline.

Constituting Taiwanese Statehood: the world timing of un-Chinese consciousness

This paper argues against the popular impression that the rise of Taiwans national consciousness is a result of democratization. Instead, it looks to the world timing of Taiwan becoming an independent reference point internationally for explanation of the changing identity in contemporary politics.

A postcolonial reading of the state question in China

The notion of sovereignty in China carries a postcolonial legacy. Earlier Chinese leaders adopted the notion of sovereignty to protect themselves from Western imperialist intrusion. However, not only was their performance as a sovereign state judged against a set of criteria already determined externally, but their sovereign sphere was also constructed too late to avoid the imperialist remnants within China which were established before Chinese could nominally strengthen their sovereign defense. As a result, with every Chinese assertion of their soverign status, there comes the internal reminder that it is subverted. The sense of anxiety and frustration thus created explains Chinas harsh policy toward Taiwan, a piece of land considered to be Chinese but now searching for independent statehood. Taiwan, once a Japanese colony and then an American Cold War base, has become a permanent reminder to the Chinese leaders of their unwanted historical shame.

Preaching Self-Responsibility: the Chinese style of global governance

The present study traces the cultural and political contexts within which Beijing considers global governance. They include: (1) Confucian dispositions toward non-interventionism and self-governance; (2) the socialist collectivist ethics that stress persuasion instead of unilateralism; (3) a lingering sense of inferiority arising from underdevelopment that harms self-confidence; and (4) the repugnant experiences with the United Nations (UN) and the United States that have dominated most international organizations since World War II. The consequential Chinese style of global governance is reactive rather than proactive, problem-solving rather than goal-driven, and attentive to obligation and reform more in other major countries than in failing states. That said, China could still assert global leadership by acting as a model of self-governance for other major countries and by intervening in failing states only through closed-door persuasion and exemplification as opposed to open sanctioning.

International Relations of Post-Hybridity: Dangers and Potentials in Non-Synthetic Cycles

Abstract The term hybridity is losing its critical potential in the study of globalization, both because no one is not hybrid anymore and because awareness of hybridity might encourage violence. Whereas hybridity initially appeared as either cosmopolitanism or post-coloniality, it has however turned into a subversive celebration of unavailing indoctrination of any orthodoxy or canon. It is also the evidence of sited subjectivity or agency, whose unique genealogy cannot be entirely subsumed by simulating the sanctioned orthodox. This paper instead advocates the emergence of post-hybridity, which is different from hybridity in its assumption of multilayeredness, memory, reconnection, and, most importantly, non-synthetic and yet cyclical historiography. It uses the example of Hong Kong, where both dialectical and cyclical modes of existence are central, to clarify post-hybridity. The paper is primarily a pedagogical reminder of, and a remedy to, the problem of the term hybridity for the teachers and students of International Relations.

A research note on workers' culture in China

Abstract This article reports a part of the field research carried out in Shanghai in 1991, dealing with workers culture. Specifically, it examines the factorys role in shaping the workers sense of future and meaningful life. In this particular aspect, factory identity among workers appears to be very weak, while those whose factory identity is strongest tend to be cadres and party members. This article argues that such lack of factory identity partially explains why lifetime employment yields such dramatically divergent results in China and Japan. Finally, this article looks into the notion of activism vs passivism and confirms, with qualification, previous studies on authority in the Chinese work place.

Introduction to Asian Ethnicity’s special issue on ethnicities, governance, and human rights

Taking cue from, but not delimiting to, the last and burgeoning strand of multiculturalism, this special issue seeks to draw particular attention to three interrelated phenomena of ethnicities, governance, and human rights in Asia. Although these three topics have often been discussed in political science and sociology journals, rarely have they been examined in one setting. Moreover, these three issues tend to be subsumed under the broad descriptions of post-colonialism, nationalism, state-building, and development; they are largely incorporated into monograms on justice, democracy, rights, the state, culture, and equality. That is, despite their importance, the three themes have not been brought together. This special issue of Asian Ethnicity attempts to remedy that shortcoming. It goes without saying that some articles emphasize more on one topic than the others. But all were written explicitly with the objective of addressing this problematic: if not in accordance with internationally recognized human rights principles and standards, 6 what alternative modes of governance might be appropriate for meeting the challenges, answering the claims of Asia’s ethnicities? The concept, and the phenomenon, of ethnicity emerged to the forefront of scholarly inquiry during the historical process of decolonization in Asia and Africa. As this term was circulated by sociologists and social scientists of the 1960s in service of the anticolonial and anti-racist discourse of that period, ‘ethnicity’ referred to ‘the positive feelings of belonging to a cultural group’. 7 But as experienced by different people in another setting, the allure and attraction of ethnicity appeared to be mostly unfounded. The honorific sense of the word provided illusions of social bonding more than suggestions of communal refuge for those seeking solace. Then in the 1960s as today in the new millennium, for Asian Americans whose pan-, intra-, and inter-Asian ‘ethnicity’ encompasses a set of several distinctive values, identities, and cultures, and each proud of its

Positioning China Watching: Is it Just Hong Kong?

This article divides China watching by the two dimensions of position and purpose. By position, the article asks if a narrator looks at China from an external or an internal perspective. By purpose, it asks if the narrative is to critically provide an evaluative perspective, to objectively represent an authentic China, or to practically discuss a life and identity strategy of Chinese people. Specifically, the complex sensibilities towards China among Taiwanese migrant scholars reify the genuine and yet often-unnoticed agency required to proceed with writing on China. With initially both the Chinese Civil War and later pro-independence politics in Taiwan poisoning relationships with China, the politically divided Taiwanese scholars enter a different environment in Hong Kong, which urges neither total confrontation nor complete loyalty in approaching China. How the Hong Kong circumstances have impacted upon the choices of these Taiwanese intellectuals in their presentation of the subject matter of China, in comparison with their other colleagues in Hong Kong, is the primary goal of the following discussion.