Twenty years ago, I interviewed an eminent Taiwanese historian who remarked of the historical narrative favoured by independence advocates: “They take out the word ‘China’ and replace it with ‘Taiwan’.” By this he meant that their framework for imagining Taiwanese nationhood was inherited from Chinese nationalism. The focus of identity might have changed, but its ideological and institutional underpinnings remained.
In his new book, the anthropologist Allen Chun draws much the same conclusion. Chun's central concern is the relationship between state formation, schooling and identity politics in contemporary Taiwan. As in his other work (notably Forget Chineseness, SUNY Press 2017), he is bracingly sceptical about shibboleths of Western social science. The primacy of culture as an explanatory variant, the sanctification of indigeneity, a reductionist obsession with Western hegemony: all come under pointed attack. He also tacitly questions the appropriateness to modern Asia of a Foucauldian analysis of “disciplinary regimes.” Rather than an “unconscious” process subtly mediated by discourse, consciousness of modern citizenship in East Asia has typically been shaped by very explicit, forceful and top-down programmes of political socialization (p. 2).
Chun thus recognizes significant commonalities in the role of schooling in state formation across East Asia, traceable crucially to the influence of imperial Japan upon all its neighbours, and of China (through the KMT) on Taiwan. But he emphatically rejects any notion of an “inherent Asian culture” (p. 6), seeing the orchestration of schooling by the state as a primarily political rather than cultural phenomenon. This “ongoing and systematic process of culturalizing and socializing,” associated with “a monolithic system of meritocratic achievement,” is directed ultimately towards enhancing centralized state control (p. 7).
The bulk of the book traces the unfolding of this process in postwar Taiwan. Chun relates how the KMT's New Life Movement was “revived and retooled” during the martial law era, with the regime “hardening” its approach to education to dispel the legacy of Japan's kominka movement (p. 57). “Three Principles Education” became the ideological core of the school curriculum, although its content evolved from a highly politicized nationalism, through a phase of “conservative traditionalism” to “scientific rationalism” under Chiang Ching-Kuo in the 1970s–1980s. During the 1960s, the Cultural Renaissance Movement, launched in response to Mao's Cultural Revolution, reflected a “heightened sense of culture” and a securitization of the national mindset. This calls to mind the celebration by Mao's successors today of “excellent Chinese traditional culture,” and associated calls to “cultural confidence.” But perhaps out of determination to “forget Chineseness,” Chun declines to draw parallels between the ideological proclivities of Chiang Kai-Shek and Xi Jinping.
Chun's analysis of political socialization focuses not just on formal curricular content but also on the rituals and routines that structured the academic year and the school day. He shows how teachers and schools operated within a tightly structured and rigidly hierarchical administrative structure, with discipline and control radiating outwards from the centre to the system's furthest reaches. The result was a highly regimented – or, as Chun aptly puts it, “militarized” – apparatus for disciplining the bodies as well as the minds of the ROC's Taiwanese citizens.
As Chun repeatedly emphasizes, that apparatus and its animating assumptions – concerning modern nationhood, the purposes of education, and its relationship with a meritocratic social order – remain substantially unaltered today. But the content of the identity that schools seek to impart has changed considerably, as Taiwan has democratized and indigenization has gathered momentum since the 1980s.
Both the KMT and DPP have contributed to this indigenizing process, although it has meant different things to those on different sides of Taiwan's ideological divide. A key turning point was marked by the introduction in 1997 of a “Knowing Taiwan” course for all middle schools. But while the KMT saw any sense of Taiwanese belonging as still subsidiary to an overarching “Chinese identity,” the DPP envisaged (and after 2000 enacted) a “Taiwan-centred” history (p. 235). Multiculturalism became a rallying call but assumed what Chun terms a “curiously solipsistic” form, concerned with indigeneity to the exclusion of immigrant minorities or other marginalized groups (though this has arguably become less true under the presidency of Tsai Ing-wen).
While eschewing comparisons with mainland China, Chun does compare Nationalist Taiwan with post-1997 Hong Kong and authoritarian Singapore. He finds striking parallels between contemporary Hong Kong and martial law-era Taiwan: in both societies, consciousness of local distinctiveness was sharpened by resistance to the “colonial” rule of mainlanders and their local stooges (p. 245). But Singapore's case is different. There, “disciplinary regulation has been fine tuned to a degree of efficiency unseen elsewhere,” so that “Gellner's argument that nationalism creates nations where they do not exist finds a fitting example” (p. 259). Comparing these three societies indicates that “shared affiliation with Chinese culture” explains nothing “of any real substance” (p. 261). Culture is important, but it is not an independent or all-determining explanatory variable; it is “impossible,” Chun stresses, “to view culture and society as analytically distinct” (pp. 261–262).
This fascinating book offers a powerful corrective to the lazy generalities about “hegemonic colonial Western modernity” that today dominate so much anthropological and educational scholarship. The “fog of identity” (p. 264), or an obsession with cultural authenticity, does not help explain how or why identity consciousness has been made and remade in a society like Taiwan. “There is in essence,” Chun stresses, “a need to deconstruct Orientalism on both ends” (p. 264). By this he seems to mean that we should reject both the condescending marginalization of non-Western experience and nativist claims (often associated with authoritarianism and fascism) of cultural incommensurability. It is unfortunate that Chun's sometimes convoluted prose too often casts a “fog” of its own. Nonetheless, his acute analysis of education and state formation in modern Taiwan means that those who stay the course will find their effort well rewarded.
