The Public Melancholia of Taiwan (part 2)

So Taiwan is stuck in this "melancholic interstitiality," a difficult social, political, economic, and cultural location to locate itself in.  One solution, then, is to find a different location to occupy.  In the previous post, I have described Club 51's proposal, which is to locate Taiwan squarely within the imperial auspices of the United States.  As Kuan-Hsing Chen notes briefly, though, one of Club 51's Achilles' heel is its seemingly glib understanding of such a location; Taiwan cannot easily relocate itself should it find its joining with the U.S.A. to be less than favorable.  Furthermore, one does not simply claim - like the Taiwanese taxi driver in the video - that s/he is Taiwanese American using his own categories and frame of reference.  There is a contradiction inherent within such a move.  On the one hand, the driver seeks to throw off the robe of Chinese imperialism, one that is encroaching upon Taiwanese culture and political life.  Yet, he uses the same imperial machinations to unilaterally declare his identity, despite the fact there are Taiwanese Americans in the United States.

Certainly, there are ways out of this, as Kuan-Hsing Chen suggests.  In his highly-recommended Asia As Method: Toward Deimperialization, Chen notes that postcolonial reason has the tendency to simply be essentially "Western-bashing," a position that is not only unhelpful, but fails to maintain a critical distance with the East.  Moving beyond postcolonialism, Chen suggests three steps to take.  First, former colonies need to undergo processes of decolonization.  Here, the idea is to slowly dismantle the hold that colonizers have on the imaginaries of the colonies.  One may wonder how that may be so.  Consider Singapore, for instance, which is a former British colony.  What does it mean to say that the United Kingdom continues to have a hold on the Singaporean imaginary?

One example concerns Great Britain remaining as the predominant "frame of reference." To put it crassly, this is the imaginary that asserts the primacy of British thought and practices.  Other East Asian principalities have similar frames of reference with regards to Japan or the United States, where whatever is Japanese or American is unquestionably better.  American education is better than Taiwanese education, never mind how one defines "better."  To graduate from Oxford University is better (how's it defined?  Who cares?) than the National University of Singapore (NUS).  To be sure, such frames of references are not merely critical-theoretical in nature.  They often factor into tastes and preferences, therefore affecting economics, psychology, sociology, etc.  An Oxford graduate, in economic parlance, more ably "signals" his or her intellectual and commercial abilities relative to an NUS graduate.  And this signal persists so long as the British remain the predominant frame of reference and its graduates remain economically successful in Singapore.  Something that is "made in Japan" will always be trusted as being of higher quality than something that is "made in China."  Here, we note that in the 1960s, "Made in Japan" was tantamount to declaring something inferior quality-wise (relative to, say, the United States).  The frame of reference, here, shifts as the American products fail to meet Japanese products in terms of quality, or Japanese products have been shown to meet American standards, thereby affecting the frame of reference with regards to product quality.  Chen's proposal for decolonization is termed "critical syncretism," which seeks to "multiply frames of reference."  In other words, qualities are not referenced as a singularity but in a plurality.  Academic brilliance is guaranteed and a rich source for future reflection not just at Brown University, but also at Beijing University; not just at Cambridge University, but also at Chulalongkorn University.  What decolonization does is to prevent one reference point from colonizing all reference points, making all other reference points illegitimate unless its trajectory passes through that one colonizing reference point.  This also compels former colonies not to repeat the mistakes of the colonizer.

Second, a dismantling of Cold War mentalities must happen, in what Chen awkwardly calls "de-Cold War."  It is perhaps better to consider it as a dismantling of mutual suspicion and othering, particularly as a result of Cold War mentalities.  The practical result of such a process is that one can conceive of a world where there does not have to be a strictly-delineated "good guy" and "bad guy."  In the Cold War, from the American frame of reference, the Soviet and her allies were the "bad guys,"and from the Soviet frame of reference, the capitalist Americans were the "evil ones."  Cold War mentalities thrive on essentialist binaries.  Let us consider a seemingly irrelevant example: (American) sports, where two teams play, each team commanding the rabid allegiance of tens of thousands of people.  Customarily, I suppose, one team bashes on the other.  "You suck!" "We rule!"  But why do "they" suck and "we" rule?  Because one assigns a valuation to the the allies of the opposing team based solely on their sports team affiliation and nothing else.  Wealth, class, color, IQ, or anything else does not matter; a Red Sox fan is as poor, stupid, loserly, and ridiculous as the Red Sox fan next to him/her.  Even if that Red Sox fan were President Barack Obama, to a Yankee, President Obama would be (reverently) poor, stupid, loserly, and ridiculous by his simple association as a Red Sox.  This is essentialist move, an innocuous one, perhaps, because of the fact that it is American sports.

But international politics and economics is not sports!  Consider the case of waishengren and benshengren in Taiwan.  The easiest (and most incorrect) characterization of both is that the former is born outside of Taiwan (waisheng = from an outside province) and the latter (bensheng = indigenous to the province) is born inside.  The waisheng peoples are essentialized as co-opting with anti-Taiwan interests, particularly with Communist China.  Likewise, the bensheng peoples are essentialized as simplistic, brusque, and easy to manipulate.  In the advent of the Taiwan indigenization movement a few years ago, I noticed Taiwanese being spoken more outside of Taiwan.  At the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, where I saw this happen among a group of teenage schoolboys, my mom (a waishengren) noted, "ever since the indigenization movement began, the level of courtesy has gone down."  But these are essentialist positions.  Consider the broadness of both waishengren and benshengren.  There are those born in the United States who, in adopting the descriptor "Taiwanese-American," willingly identify themselves as benshengren.  I, born in Taiwan, remain waisheng because - and this is key - I am far removed from the culture of Taiwan.  Yes, I am born in Taiwan - a "son of Taiwan," even! - but whatever is "Taiwanese culture" eludes me still to this very day.  The disagreements between the two main political parties of Taiwan, each broadly allied with the waisheng (Kuomintang) and bensheng (Democratic Progressive Party), are deep and are the source of active pugilism in the Taiwanese Parliament.  And, at the end of the day, both are not closer to answering the main question: what does it mean to be Taiwanese in the context of historical and geopolitical/economic movements?  De-Cold War allows for the possibility of many avenues of identity.

Third, former Imperial powers need to undergo practices of deimperialization.  This step is possibly the most important because without this, decolonization and de-Cold War cannot occur.

Consider the Internal Security Act of Singapore, which can be invoked to detain Singaporeans suspected generally of being a threat to internal security.  In the United Kingdom, such laws do not exist; indeed, it was promulgated in the British Empires of Malaysia and Singapore in 1948 in an effort to combat communism and guerrilla insurgents.  But after independence, Singapore maintained the Act, which it utilized to root out political opponents, and those suspected of being disturbers of the peace (broadly interpreted, of course.)  Britain, of course, could not respond because the law did not originate in Singapore.  Thus, a Catch-22 results in which a poorly-constructed law, which could be used to further interests external to internal security, remains enforced in Singapore but yet is unquestioned by Britain because it was the author of the law.

Deimperialization requires the former colonizer to reflect on its colonial effects on the colony and understand its new relationship to the former colony.  Perhaps the most potent example of imperialization (thus, illustrating the need for deimperialization) is Americanism.  Critiques of Americanism is not new to theology.  Princeton ethicist Nancy Duff, for instance, has warned of Americanism as being a "false image," one that is contextually addressed in the Second Commandment.  But what is Americanism, really?  For Chen, a central component of Americanism is the "desire for America," an "Americaphilia."  This is the problem with Club 51 - that by simply joining with America (and disaffiliating when America becomes no longer desirable), Taiwan can assure its own security and prestige.  Thus, Club 51 supported American policies, however contradictory they were ideologically with the aims of the Club.  Taiwan, as Chen himself admits, is not merely Americaphilic, but Koreaphilic and Japanophilic. But in its quest to be "philic" to all, Taiwan has not answered the central question of what it means to be "Taiwanphilic."  That is, perhaps, the question of Taiwanese identity remains an open question.

All seems alright, except that Kuan-Hsing Chen never quite specifically laid out how exactly deimperialization should happen.  This is not too surprising, perhaps - after all, to prescribe something renders an idea perhaps too easily concrete, lending the idea to unfair critiques from those who do not wish to reflect on the idea behind the prescription.  More importantly, for our reflection, theological reflection over the problem of American Empire needs to reflect not just on the decolonial aspects (i.e. how can Taiwan achieve full sovereignty without American or Chinese intervention - or lack thereof), the de-Cold War aspects (i.e. how can Taiwan see China anew and vice versa), but also on the deimperial aspects.  As I endeavor to unpack, the church can fulfill its theological role as "salt and light" by being a key facilitator in the deimperialization process.