Taiwan in Dynamic Transition

Nation Building and Democratization

Ryan Dunch, Ashley Esarey, Ryan Dunch, Ashley Esarey

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780295746814
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Following a remarkable transition from authoritarian rule to robust democracy, Taiwan has grown into a prosperous but widely unrecognized nation-state for which no uncontested sovereign space exists. Increasingly vigorous assertions of Taiwanese identity expose the fragility of relationships between the United States and other great powers that assume Taiwan will eventually unite with China. Perhaps because of their precarious international position, the Taiwanese have embraced cosmopolitan culture and democratic institutions. The 2014 Sunflower Movement thrust Taiwan's politics into the global media spotlight, as did the resounding electoral victory of the once-illegal Democratic Progressive Party in 2016. Taiwan in Dynamic Transition provides an up-to-date assessment of contemporary Taiwan, highlighting Taiwan's emergent nationhood and its significance for world politics. Taiwan's path has important implications for broader themes and preoccupations in contemporary thought, such as consideration of why political transitions in the aftermath of the Arab Spring have sputtered or failed while Taiwan has evolved into a stable and prosperous democratic society. Taiwan serves as a test case for nation and state building, the formation of national identity, and the emergence of democratic norms in real time.

DEMOCRATIZATION

CHAPTER 3

NEIGHBORHOOD POLITICS IN TAIPEI

Democracy at the Most Local Level

BENJAMIN L. READ

The “nine-in-one” elections held throughout the Republic of China on November 29, 2014, put local politics in the spotlight in historic fashion. Never before had elections for nine different offices been held concurrently throughout Taiwan.¹ Previously, local elections had been carried out in a piecemeal fashion and on a staggered schedule. This time, candidates for local offices—from village heads to big-city mayors—campaigned for their seats all at once, just as candidates for the presidency and legislature had in 2012. Local and national elections would henceforth alternate every two years in a regular cycle intended to avoid voter fatigue.

As returns came in, attention focused on the striking outcomes in the twenty-two races for city mayor and county magistrate positions. The fact that sixteen of those executive posts went to candidates of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) or independents was seen as a great defeat for the Nationalist Party and a rebuke to the Ma Ying-jeou administration. Indeed, with Nationalist Party mayoral candidates losing in such previously Blue-leaning cities as Taoyuan, Hsinchu, and Taichung, and in the capital itself, no one could miss this loud message.² Premier Jiang Yi-huah resigned immediately, and Ma soon stepped down as party chairman.

The most prominent and visible of the races thus generated as clear a signal as one could imagine coming from local elections. This reinforced the tendency to interpret Taiwan’s local elections primarily as a barometer of public opinion on national issues—as a referendum on the incumbent administration and a straw in the wind for the next presidential elections. While understandable (and in this case accurate, as the DPP indeed won the presidency and a Legislative Yuan majority in 2016), this unidimensional interpretation obscures other aspects of the Republic of China’s rich and complex political system.

This chapter inverts the usual top-level focus by delving into the arena of politics found at the very bottom of the 2014 ballots: the 5,795 neighborhood positions that were up for grabs.³ This lowliest of strata is worthy of attention because neighborhood politics reflects and illuminates important aspects of Taiwan’s democratic system. In some ways, it constitutes its own sphere of political contestation within local communities, illustrating how democratic processes have taken root at an intimate, face-to-face level of society. In this respect, it provides an important complement, as well as counterpoint, to narratives of political change that focus on core central institutions. Heavily structured by state institutions, neighborhood politics is also connected in various ways to politicians occupying higher offices in the city (city council, mayor) and to Taiwan’s two primary political parties more generally. These connections help give the system vitality but also constrain and inflect it.⁴

Taiwan’s form of neighborhood politics is also quite distinctive in regional perspective and in comparison with city governance as practiced in other democracies around the world. In the liberal democratic states of North America and Europe, politics in this domain generally takes the form of non-governmental neighborhood associations, which can be robust and well-organized in some places, weak or non-existent in others. In some cases, community representatives might sit on a citywide board or assembly. Like in other states of East and Southeast Asia, in Taiwan, neighborhoods are not left to communities to organize just as they please; rather, they are given a formal structure that in many ways constitutes an extension of city government.⁵ But Taiwan also contrasts with, for instance, South Korea and Indonesia, in that leadership at the neighborhood level is generated through highly institutionalized and competitive elections. This topic, therefore, showcases part of what makes Taiwanese politics unique. As we contemplate the processes through which the people of Taiwan have developed a particular political subjectivity and come to think of themselves as a self-governing community or even nation, we must take account of distinctive local practices as well as macro-level change.

TAIWAN’S NEIGHBORHOODS

Taiwan’s neighborhoods, called li, are official components of the geography of urban administration.⁶ Delineated by precisely defined boundaries, in large cities they are subordinate to the district offices (qu gongsuo). The Local Government Act stipulates that each li is to have an office (li bangongchu), led by a warden (lizhang), who is elected by the residents to one or more four-year terms of office. As of late 2016, there were more than three times as many urban li as there were rural villages (cun) in Taiwan.⁷ Details of policies concerning neighborhoods and their leaders are left for city governments to formulate, although they appear to be broadly similar around the island. The neighborhoods are subdivided into small blocks or clusters of households called lin.⁸ These small pieces of territory also have leaders, linzhang, whom we might call block captains. Each block captain is hand-picked by the incumbent warden.

Wardens occupy a curious and complex position within their neighborhoods and within the fabric of state-society linkages. Their role has origins in the bao-jia (or hokō) system that Japanese administrators implemented starting early in the colonial era and that the Nationalist Party employed on the mainland, a system that can be traced back to the Qing and earlier dynasties.⁹ Wardens are designated as “unsalaried” (wuji zhi) and are quite distinct from civil servants. They are not government officials nor do they see themselves as such. Still, they receive subsidies that amount to a modest salary, and they often put in hours comparable to full-time employment.¹⁰ The li offices—whether set up in the warden’s home or in a separate building—are furnished and equipped by the city. The wardens ostensibly fall under the command and supervision (zhihui jiandu) of mayors and district chiefs. In practice, in the democratic Taiwan of today, they are hardly the underlings of the urban hierarchy. Once elected, they can only be removed from their positions prior to the end of their term if they commit a serious crime. Rather than merely taking orders from above, they can question or push back against directives or policies from the city or the district. In part, they pursue their own agendas, which can include encouraging or resisting development plans or lobbying the city for infrastructure improvements. Still, they are expected to help the city government and its agencies and the police with a wide range of administrative tasks, including such duties as verifying the welfare eligibility of poor households and facilitating the conscription of draft-eligible young men. They work together with a neighborhood administrator (li ganshi), a full-time civil servant who, in Taipei, is assigned wholly to one li and spends about half the workday there.¹¹ Neighborhoods in Taiwan are thus deeply integrated with state institutions in many respects.

Taipei’s twelve districts boasted a total of 456 neighborhoods as of 2014. On average, each li there contains 5,891 people, or 2,252 households.¹² Neighborhood boundaries are periodically adjusted so that none gets too far out of proportion to others in terms of population. They vary substantially, however, in terms of the area they encompass. The li in the city’s central districts, built on level ground (such as Zhongshan or Daan) are relatively small in area, often just a tenth or a fifth of a square kilometer, and rectangular or polygonal in shape. In these cases, the neighborhood’s boundaries are defined by major streets. In peripheral zones such as Beitou, Neihu, and the southeast portion of Wenshan, li contain large swathes of the sparsely populated mountainsides that surround the basin in which Taipei nestles. In such places, a single neighborhood can comprise as many as sixteen square kilometers.

A li is small enough, then, that quite a few of its residents are acquainted with one another and encounter one another in daily life, whether at local businesses, on the streets, at parks, or in parent groups connected to nearby schools. For many in Taipei, these officially defined geographic units have real meaning and relevance. In a 2006 telephone survey (see note 4), for example, more than 91 percent of respondents were able to tell the interviewer the name of their li. Nearly 58 percent could correctly state all or part of the name of their neighborhood warden.

On average, each of Taipei’s li is subdivided into about twenty-one lin. The city had a total of 9,533 such micro-units as of the end of 2012. The lin boundaries, too, are precisely defined by the city’s Civil Affairs Bureau. An average block captain is responsible for 287 people, or 109 households. While li are known by names, lin are designated only by numbers. Block captains’ duties are light—for instance, they are sometimes asked to distribute fliers from the city explaining a new policy—and ordinary residents might only occasionally encounter them acting in their official capacity.

The li/lin system can be thought of as the core of neighborhood organizational activity, but many other groups are active at this level as well. Community development associations (shequ fazhan xiehui, CDA) are one important category. With their name inspired by the rising prominence of “community” in international discourse, these emerged in the early 1990s in an effort to create local organiza...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Romanization
• Chronology
• Introduction: Taiwan’s National Experience in Comparative Perspective
• Overview: Democratization and Nation Building in Taiwan
• Nation Building
• Democratization
• Suggested Discussion Questions for Reader Seminars
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index