Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (24 page)

During my tenure at CYUT, I have regularly taught two courses in which I discuss elements of this book with students. I ask them the same question. Undergraduates and graduate students have never failed to provide the correct answer, often in unison. Students find my wonder astounding. Why are we so disconnected? Every answer to this question is either a value associated with traditional Chinese cultural life or one promoted by the state. As such, the question appears entirely Kafkaesque to me. The difference lies with the fact that I have not climbed the same educational ladder.

One might think that the Democratic Progress Party would have dismantled this imperative after its defeat of the KMT in the 2000 presidential election, when Chen Shui-bian took office.
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Although the DPP has transformed consciousness of Taiwan’s cultural and political identity, the imperative “to build society” (
jianli shehui
) remains the universally recognized correct answer to this question of values. The pressures on Taiwan continue to give urgency to the answer to this question. The imperative to build society in a state not recognized by the United Nations as a sovereign nation apparently does not hinder the imperative to build a sense of national consciousness; rather Taiwan’s uncertain status intensifies such a project. The keenly felt imperative remains in keeping with the dictates of neoliberalism, insofar as neoliberalism operates with scant regard to nation-states—but it does prefer disciplined populations.

States compete for investments to the point of weakening their own power. This has happened in Taiwan, and the new
Taiwanese
nationalism provides only a limited ground of resistance. Although the DPP government found political support through appeals to a Taiwanese consciousness, the
long-term
economic benefits of this position in the face of massive global pressure appear insufficient to turn it from following the KMT in this regard. As a result, state industries, from telecommunications to banking, have been systematically opened to international investment, and once-secure lifelong middle-class jobs in these sectors, which had served to support state structures during the postwar era, are being jettisoned. With little hope of turning their educations into state employment, young Taiwanese speak of themselves as part of an M-society (imagine the “M” representing the bipolar income distribution chart of a neoliberal economy).
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Still, the values of State Neo-Confucianism persist in many social institutions. They persist, moreover and more importantly, not only in allegiance to an ambiguous state but in a variety of group behavioral patterns that can be viewed only from the standpoint of neoliberalism as useful though quaintly anachronistic.

I call these values State Neo-Confucianism due to a mechanism of transmission and discipline associated with the Civil Examination of Imperial China. Beginning with the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), Neo-Confucian interpretations of Confucian teachings, which sought to incorporate popular Taoist and Buddhist ideas, determined much of the ruling class via the civil exam until 1905. After the Republican (Nationalist) revolution in 1911 and the consolidation of national power by the KMT in 1927, education became increasingly oriented toward producing modern subjects, specifically through the sciences and national indoctrination. The model of the universal exam, however, did not disappear with the revolution. It became a sign and device linking an imagined Chinese past to an equally anticipated future (Strauss 1994). An entire branch of the government was established at the time, devoted to testing for government jobs, school entrances, and licenses. The values expressed and reinforced by this system find popular expression in the benign, fatherly figure of Confucius, who can be seen, for example, in statues presiding at the gates of public libraries or school courtyards throughout Taiwan.

As this value system evolved into its contemporary form, heavy emphasis has been given to group consciousness. Stereotypes of East Asians as group oriented are as common as those that claim Westerners are individualistic; but this dichotomy can easily mislead. Conformity as a condition of the American corporate matrix is well known.
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As currently practiced at CYUT, group orientation is a product of state programs to discipline people into becoming citizens who act in collectivities distinct from their families, clans,
and
villages. With a lock on forms of solidarity, all collectivities considered threatening to the Nationalist regime, such as labor unions, were severely repressed from 1945 until the 1990s (Chu 2001: 21–86).

One state-sponsored organization that prospered under state support is called the China Youth National Salvation Corps (known as The China Youth Anti-Communist National Salvation Corps since its founding on Taiwan in 1952 until the 1990s). This group is important to the culture of CYUT because the chairman of the Board of Directors was a one-time president of the corps, and many of the initial and current top administrators, including the founding and current presidents, were linked to the chairman and school via this organization. Its original aims were to prepare boys for mandatory military service, but later it became a Boy Scout–like service organization that seeks to harness youthful exuberance in service to the state.

According to one senior business department professor, the China Youth Corps provided an early business model for the school. In all my meetings with the first president of CYUT, he emphasized that he was most proud of the fact that CYUT was clean and free of major infighting. While the latter statement is misleading, the school was and remains one of the tidiest universities in Taiwan (no small selling point in 1994 when the average state school toilet reeked of urine and dust, thanks to the neglect of career state employees). At CYUT, however, this problem has been solved Boy Scout style: First-year students are required to clean the school as part of a labor education program. Monday through Friday at 7 a.m., they are out with brooms, mops, and cleaning fluids. This activity is part of a larger campus culture that moves from loathed service activities to hand-clapping fun in all school competitions, which are run regularly. Students singing in unison or posing together for photographs are images that sell well to parents who were brought up in a State Neo-Confucian educational environment. Moreover, schooled in such a system, many faculty members remain busy attending and supporting student functions. They receive no substantial official credit toward promotion and merit evaluations by participating in such activities, but they do get some service credit, opportunities to extend their campus networks, some recognition for themselves should their students win a prize, and personal enjoyment, expressed in terms of a shared feeling that comes with working with excited youngsters.

Similarly, group activities have been made subservient to the state. Teachers employed soon after the school’s founding have told me of regular all-
school
national flag-raising ceremonies, during which the former president would exhort students to protect their sexual chastity, for example. As times and governments have changed and, perhaps more important, as the size of the student body has grown, the requirements have eased, and the flag ceremonies have been trimmed to one per semester per department. Teachers need not attend, but students dutifully and dangerously race on their motorcycles to school at the very last moment—the terrible early hour of 7 a.m. for senior students—to listen with feigned interest to speeches by departmental leaders. I have quizzed students afterward, and it seems that the thing they remember most clearly is the breakfast they bought in a rush on the way. Yet, despite the disinterest held by students toward the rituals of State Neo-Confucianism, these rituals persist, and students continue in their quiescent acceptance of their importance. As Slavoj Žižek (for example, 1994: 14) often remarks, completion of ritual is more important than belief itself—a theoretical point supported by the unquestioning, if indifferent, traditionalism qua nationalism of most students.

The highest values of this system are conformity to group norms, harmony of social relations, and respect for the face of superiors. Traditionalists and technocrats alike believe that these values are on the wane (Sun 1994: 106). While they may be fading from public allegiance, they persist as a default sensibility in everyday practice. To conform is to act harmoniously in the group and to recognize the power, measured as face (
mianzi
), of the leader. Leaders, in turn, are expected to act benevolently toward their underlings and do everything possible to insure the conditions of harmonious social relations. For the proponents of this system of values, traditional Chinese life is a highly dignified routine of mutual recognition and support (Tu 1985, 1995). At its best, the system gives rise to institutional structures in which hierarchy is keenly felt despite the fact that differences in wages or salaries may not be all that large.
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However, the utopia of service, harmony, and respect shows its unseemly side in cynicism, factions, and corruption.
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Because dissent is not encouraged, power blocks quickly form; because discussion of issues might lead to a leader’s loss of face, rumor mongering and backstabbing become necessary parts of any sophisticated person’s political toolkit. Because leaders depend on the dispensation of favors to maintain their groups, corruption and cronyism remain common.
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Enlightenment
Values or the Democratic-Consumerist Nation

A rival but symbiotic system of values has been in place since the earliest moments of modern national consciousness and nation-state formation in turn-of-the-twentieth-century China. In the wake of China’s monumental May 4th Movement in 1919, in which students took to the streets to protest colonialism and promote reform in China, Chen Duxiu of the New Culture Movement gave democracy and science the nicknames Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science. Expressing the yearning of the times, he asserted, “Only these two gentlemen can save China from the political, moral, academic, and intellectual darkness in which it finds itself” (E. Gu 2001: 589). As a matter of national cultural survival, science and democracy became stated aims of Nationalist education and policy. Science was given first place; whereas democracy, understood in terms of national father Sun Yat-Sen’s “Three Principles of the People,” was set to emerge after a period of tutelage.

After the so-called retreat of the KMT government to Taiwan, following its defeat in the civil war in 1949, research in the social sciences and humanities were quietly but effectively policed. This was possible because most local intellectuals were killed or imprisoned following the February 28 incident in 1947 (Kerr 1965) and because the default sensibility of State Neo-Confucianism was considered sufficient for the establishment of a public morality necessary for economic growth (Wilson 1970). Simultaneous with revolts against nationalist literatures and cultures in the West (as expressed in the emerging field of cultural studies), Taiwanese intellectuals began to question the national cultural ideology. In 1973, members of the philosophy department of National Taiwan University were fired for dissent, and later in the 1970s authors who published realistic works of fiction and literary criticism that reflected the transformations of Taiwanese society, a literary movement referred to as “nativist literature” (
xiangtu wenxue
), were severely criticized although not entirely repressed. However, with the death in 1988 of President Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek who had served as the head of Taiwan’s secret police in the 1950s, a new independence swept through the humanities and social sciences. State policy dictated that the promised posttutelage democracy had arrived, and change followed. In the 1960s, owning a copy of Marx would have likely landed one in jail; in the early 1990s, the leading national university in Taichung at which I taught had no shortage of Marxist books on its library shelves. The
university
was released from the national, anticommunist, and Cold War project of the KMT, just as the KMT began to divest from institutions that maintained its power.

What is more, during the 1990s researchers returned to Taiwan with advanced degrees from universities in the United States and elsewhere. The returnees in many cases disturbed the practices of faculty at the national universities where they found jobs. National schools were not as highly traditionalized as CYUT, but the model of affective student–teacher ties held sway. Moreover, many teachers at the state schools considered themselves entitled to live a relaxed life of scholarly repose; thus, most faculty were not interested in (and often were not trained to handle) the demands of research. The conflict that emerged was clearly between those who valued research as defined by leading research institutions and those who valued teaching as defined by locally accepted practice.

While working at one of the national schools during the mid-1990s, I witnessed three women become objects of some resentment from traditional faculty. They had returned from top programs in the United States, and they took an aggressive approach to research—winning grants, attending international conferences, and publishing. The tensions were exacerbated by the fact that the women were conducting cultural and feminist research, which tacitly put traditional models of state–citizen and teacher–student relations into further question. The tensions persist to this day, especially in humanities departments. It finds islandwide political expression in resistance to MOE regulations from humanities- and social science–oriented national schools that have seen their rankings tumble as a result of the new standards (104 Education Information Web, 2007).

Many faculty members at CYUT continue to act out the idealized teacher role; others seek promotion through research. While the politics can be intense, graduate students find themselves in a state of confusion. Should they stay close to the friendly teachers with whom they are familiar or risk the pains of intellectual discovery with demanding research-oriented faculty, who promise nothing less than the reconstruction of their finely inculcated worldviews?