The Taiwan Affairs Office, the body nominally responsible for orchestrating and executing China’s Taiwan policy, recently announced the suspension of the cross-strait communication mechanism. It was established during President Ma’s tenure to help manage increasingly complex and multifaceted interactions between the two sides. A TAO spokesperson linked the suspension to Tsai’s failure to signal her recognition of the “1992 Consensus”.

Tsai’s acceptance of the “1992 Consensus” as a historical fact (without agreeing to its contents) and pledge to uphold the status quo in accordance with the ROC Constitution, has been insufficient to meet Beijing’s demands for her to demonstrate “sincerity”. Yet, while Tsai does not accept the “1992 Consensus”, neither does Beijing: It has never agreed to the “respective interpretations” qualifier to “one China”. However, Taiwanese leaders’, specifically President Ma, propensity to acknowledge “1992” has become Beijing’s bottom line proxy for acknowledging “One China”.

I would not go so far to say that Beijing has hereby declared a refusal to work with Taiwan under a DPP government, but it shows what Beijing’s tactic is going to be: A gradual turning of the screw, making it more difficult for Taiwan to manage the complex interactions between the two sides and perform its obligations of state. In recent days and months this has been exemplified by suspected Taiwanese criminals being deported to China from Kenya and most recently Cambodia, when the representations of the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs were simply ignored.

The timing of the decision is not accidental, coming during Tsai Ing-wen’s first overseas trip as President. While her visit to Central American allies is not out of the ordinary, she has been granted stopovers in the US on both outward and return journeys. And having previously made a good impression in the US, she has been granted a warm (though not ostentatious) welcome. It is typical of tit-for-tat Chinese tactics that a (moderate) opportunity for Tsai to appear on the international stage as a stateswoman would be accompanied by some kind of sanction.

This is not about “escalating tensions”; it is a tactical punishment and part of a drip by drip approach to circumscribing and complicating Tsai’s capacity to manage practical interactions between Taiwan and China. It is an inconvenience, but more symbolic than coup de grace at this point. But it is also a sign of things to come.

I have also commented on this issue for the NYT.

A visit to a Chinese city of any size—looking up at downtown billboards, flicking through a magazine, riding public transport, shopping at a mall, or even a convenience store—is to be in the presence of a Chinese celebrity endorsing a product, lifestyle or other symbols of “the good life”. In contemporary urban China, the image of a Chinese actor, singer, athlete or TV personality is never far away. Celebrity in China is big business, feeding off and nourishing the advertising-led business model that underpins the commercialized media system and large sections of the internet. It is also a powerful instrument in the Party-State’s discursive and symbolic repertoire, used to promote regime goals and solidify new governmentalities through signalling accepted modes of behaviour for mass emulation (Jeffreys, 2009). The instrumentalization of celebrity by Party, state and business actors is strategic, motivated and sustained by the “spiritual vacuum” created by the transition to a market socialist system and its associated societal dislocations and aspirations (Kipnis, 2001). Despite its ubiquity, there is an aura of frivolousness around celebrity culture that perhaps explains why “Chinese stars and stardom rarely receive sustained academic attention” (Farquhar and Zhang, 2010: 2). While the professional milieux that celebrities inhabit have long been recognized as sites of political and cultural power, negotiation and contestation, the contours and implications of celebrity in contemporary China have received little recognition within the broader China Studies field. However, as demonstrated by recent pioneering work, on which this article aims to build (Edmonds and Jeffreys, 2010; Farquhar and Zhang, 2010; Hood, 2016), in combination with related studies on popular culture and the media (Berry and Farquhar, 2006; Chow 2007; Curtin, 2007; Keane 2013; Latham, 2007; Link et al., 2002; Wang, 2008; Zhang, 2004; Zhu and Berry, 2009), celebrity in China plays an important signalling role with implications for regime stability, social integration and the pursuit of the “Chinese Dream” of national strength and prosperity.

China has a long history of literary, musical and folk celebrity in the Imperial and Modern eras (McDermott, 2006), in addition to concerted efforts at creating “socialist stars” during the Mao era (Cheek, 1997). But the contemporary celebrity scene is a product of processes associated with the emergence of “market socialism”. Economic reforms and urbanization, increasingly widespread prosperity and the associated rise of consumerism, commercialization of the media and technological change, the growth of individualism and decline of collectivist ways of life have all contributed to the emergence of a celebrity culture that has imbued individuals with great wealth, visibility and influence within large fan bases. In addition to advancing a range of commercial interests, notably via advertising and endorsements (Hung, 2014; Wang, 2008), celebrities are increasingly involved in supporting social causes through philanthropy (Hood, 2015; Jeffreys, 2015a), advocacy and representation in formal political institutions (Jeffreys, 2015b), as activists and social critics (Strafella and Berg, 2015a; 2015b) and as leaders of online public opinion (Fu et al., 2015). With increasing internet penetration and the popularization of social media, celebrities have the capacity to connect directly, unfiltered and unmediated, with substantial audiences; the hundred or so entertainers we identify in this article as “major celebrities” (a sub sample of the celebrity population) have a combined following of around 2.5 billion people on Sina Weibo (新浪微博) alone. The ability to step outside their respective professional milieux is one factor that distinguishes celebrities from simply being well known figures such as members of the Politburo. Celebrity is a multidimensional quality, the sum of an individual’s product and packaging, personal attributes and life beyond the professional realm. We understand celebrity as analogous with the concepts of “brand identity” or “brand image” employed in marketing studies. A further feature that separates celebrity from well-knowness is the celebrity persona, i.e. “a crafted and consolidated public projection of the real person, built in part out of film roles and other public appearances” (Shingler 2012: 125). A review of the literature on “stars”, the sub-group at the apex of the celebrity hierarchy, highlights numerous attributes associated with this persona including glamour, beauty, sexuality, theatricality, charm, confidence, wealth and sophistication. The closest China has come to a celebrity politician to date was Bo Xilai, the former Chongqing Party Secretary now in jail.  The multi-dimensional celebrity persona, and the public interest it stimulates in off-stage lives, requires an academic focus on the workings of celebrity itself as a supplement to analysing the products (zuopin 作品) that celebrities create in their professional roles. The potential to connect with large numbers of ordinary people also marks the special status that celebrities have within China’s constrained socio-political ecology. The motivation for this paper is to further scholarly understanding of how celebrity operates in China and to bring this expression of popular culture into the broader conversation about contemporary Chinese politics and society. Full paper here.

In the reform era the class structure of Chinese society and the nature of class politics have changed as the source of Party legitimacy has moved from socialist ideology to economic performance under conditions of “market socialism” (the CCP is nowadays a ‘party in power’ rather than a ‘revolutionary party’). A new class of private entrepreneurs unknown under Mao emerged, empowered by their riches and gradually embraced by the Party. Workers and farmers, formerly the bedrock of the CCP regime, have been marginalised by the restructuring of agriculture and industry. Millions have lost their jobs, their access to social welfare and their sense of place in a society that increasingly values a nakedly neoliberal vision of modernization rooted in urbanization and consumption. Economic opportunities have enabled the re-emergence of the middle classes (or ‘middle income stratum’; 中产阶层 rather than 阶级). They have also created a floating population of migrant workers: a new urban underclass with a corresponding cohort of those ‘left behind’ in the hollowed out countryside.

Class politics were one of the defining characteristics of PRC history in the 20th Century. In the transition to market socialism ushered in by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms many class based terms have disappeared from the official lexicon, but class remains an analytically and substantively important way of approaching Chinese society. New types of class relations between the party and the people and horizontally between different groups are having a fundamental effect on Chinese society. Classification of the population was one of the first steps taken to establish the new regime, and by the early 1950s everyone in China was assigned a class from a granular list of 62 descriptors. People were assigned a class origin (阶级成分) determined by their activities in the three years immediately prior to 1949, and class background (家庭出生) based on their father’s occupation at time of birth. These two pieces of information, a socio-economic position and a political inclination implied by behaviour, were included on peoples’ household registration documents and went a long way to determining one’s fate during successive campaigns against landlords, industrialists, intellectuals, the bourgeoisie, rightists, capitalists and the like, which came to head in the Cultural Revolution. Class consciousness was ideological, political and operationalized through designations that for very large numbers of Chinese people and their offspring were a matter of life and death. People identified as ‘reds’ (peasants, workers, revolutionary soldiers) could do well (to the extent that anyone prospered under Mao), whereas coming from a ‘black’ background (capitalists, landlords, nationalists) was an invitation to be ‘criticized’ and worse during recurrent bouts of ‘class struggle’. By the end of 1956, the means of production were largely socialized. The countryside was arranged in collectives, urban enterprises were under state control and the effective negation of private property culminated during the Great Leap Forward. But that didn’t mean the end of class struggle.

When Mao appealed to the “bourgeoisie” within the Party, ostensibly soliciting feedback from academics, journalists and other intellectuals, he was shocked by the level of criticism and quickly launched the Anti-Rightist campaign to purge them. The pernicious threat of the “bourgeoisie” coloured much of Mao’s subsequent rule. When he identified four major classes (two exploiting, two labouring), he set the quota for class enemies (imperialists, bureaucrat capitalists, Rightists et al) at 5% of the population. Class struggle was central to Mao’s modus operandi, and was often underpinned by strategic thinking to further his own goals vis-à-vis political opponents in the top echelon of the Party leadership. The abandonment of Mao’s Great Leap and Deng Xiaoping’s role in re-introducing the material incentives that led to increases in production and recovery in the devastated countryside planted the seed for his subsequent purge (having been identified as a Capitalist Roader). Party leaders who did not accept Mao’s vision or otherwise incurred the Chairman’s displeasure were labelled class enemies. By the launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mao’s power struggles led him to directly appeal to the masses to attack those in the Party supposedly taking the ‘capitalist road’.

After Mao’s death, ‘black’ class labels were removed and the judgement on Mao contained in the 1981 “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China” came with an attempt to smooth class relations. To wit, workers and intellectuals were said to belong to the same heterogeneous class; the possibility of class conflict under socialism was denied; and it was claimed that ‘the bourgeoisie’ couldn’t possibly exist within the Party. But as Deng’s reforms started to deliver results, and some sectors ‘got rich before others’, these simplifications came under stress, from the obvious advantages that Party cadres (and later their children, the despised富二代) were beginning to enjoy and the exclusion of the large number of private and would-be entrepreneurs. The Party’s response (with a blip around 1989 and accelerating after 1992) was to encourage the development of the middle classes (or strata)—and to embrace private entrepreneurs. This was the major symbol of the changing emphasis of economic activity over class relations, finessed post-hoc by Jiang Zemin’s notion of the Three Represents (the Party represents advanced social and productive forces, advanced culture and the interests of the overwhelming majority).

A middle class society is an aspiration for China. China’s modernization, the major pre-occupation for successive regimes since the mid-19^th Century, has come to be tied to the development of a certain conception of the “middle class lifestyle” embodied by people who possess certain characteristics, behaviours and norms, many of them tied up with consumption and urbanization. Those who don’t fit the norm—typically migrants—are cajoled to become “civilized” (文明) or ostracized for their inferior “quality” (素质). The modernizing narrative is ubiquitous and to “be modern” is tied to the other pillar propping up the CCP regime, nationalism, via the “Chinese Dream” of prosperity and power. Certain types of economic behaviour—notably consumption—have been reified as acts of patriotism (notwithstanding the recent anti-corruption campaign against excessive consumption among party officials). Much is expected of the Chinese middle classes (by the Party as much as Chinese businesses and multinationals), and much is being provided for their benefit. The middle classes are seen as a force for “stability” (the regime’s major pre-occupation in the reform era), and the engine for upgrading China’s economic model, particularly via consumption (viz the expansion of higher education, tourism, online shopping, home buying, the automobile market etc.) When the middle classes are unhappy, governments listen: compare the fate of urban home-owner’s protests and demonstrations against chemical factory construction in well-off urban areas with those of dispossessed farmers or unpaid workers.

When Duke political scientist, Professor Tianjian Shi sadly passed away late in 2010, he left behind a manuscript already accepted by Cambridge University Press. Through the efforts of the series editor, Andy Nathan, with help from reviewers Dorothy Solinger and Doh Chull Shin, that manuscript has been finalized and brought to publication. It is a fittingly ambitious and accomplished bequest to the fields of comparative politics and China Studies, to which Professor Shi contributed so much. Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rigorous (there are 32 pages of appendices), this book will provoke great interest—and, as all ambitious books should—much contention and avenues for further research.

Shi argues that since many social scientists assume that people are instrumentally rational to varying degrees, when they find that similar social-structures in different cultural contexts produce different outcomes, they tend to explain it in terms of variance in access to information, for instance through censorship and control of the media. Thus when people in China are observed to have a relatively high degree of trust in government, particularly central government, this finding has often been attributed to the effects of an authoritarian information regime that reduces access to the information needed to make ‘rational’ decisions. Shi rejects this interpretation and instead advances a sophisticated yet forceful case for ‘bringing culture back in’. Specifically, he argues that rationality is culturally embedded, and that a culturally defined normative rationality shapes people’s choices in social and political life.

The crux of Shi’s thesis is that rather than a universal, materialist concept of reality, individual interest calculations are based on ‘socially shared ideas about acceptable and expected behaviour’ (p.2). To counter the charge that culture is not an independent cause of behaviours but rather an effect or proxy for structural or institutional factors, Shi invokes the case of China and Taiwan, two societies that share elements of Confucian cultural heritage, but which have developed very different political structures and institutions. Shi argues that the momentous processes of modernization in China and democratization in Taiwan did not cause significant cultural shifts in these societies. Indeed he cites survey data to the effect that these changes reinforced peoples’ commitment to traditional cultural norms, which in turn are associated with greater trust in government, a lower likelihood of confronting the regime and an inclination to define democracy as government by benevolent guardians. Given the resilience, flourishing even, of the CCP and KMT under these changing conditions, it is an interesting argument. Full review in China Quarterly here.

In the western imagination China has long been something ‘exotic’, a tendency that preceded the earliest contact and was reinforced by the (usually tall) tales of early travellers. This exoticism takes many forms and has given rise to many stereotypes, sometimes ‘positive’ (for instance in the recurring European taste for Chinoiserie) but mostly ‘negative’, such as the racist ‘Yellow Peril’ discourse (see my review of Fu Manchu and Sinophobia). Sometimes the ‘exotic’ construction encompasses admiration for ‘China’s difference’ (notably China’s, mainly imagined, ‘mysticism’), but more often than not it has signified contempt, with difference equating to ‘inferiority’.

With Jonathan Spence, Colin Mackerras is a leading western authority on China’s place in the western imagination. His Western Images of China (Oxford University Press, 1989) is a classic in the field and among other contributions, convincingly demonstrate how ‘our’ image of China says as much about ‘us’ as it does about ‘them’.

Mackerras’ latest book is concerned with western (predominantly American) ‘perceptions’ of China since 1949. How does the west (again mainly the US) ‘perceive China’ on a variety of issues (politics, foreign relations, economics, human rights, democratization, Tibet etc.) over time? Or more accurately given the book’s approach, how do some ‘representative’ western media (like Time magazine) and various western political and intellectual ‘elites’ frame China? This is a big question, requiring the systematic study of a wide corpus of empirical material, which is available in increasingly massive abundance. It is also an important question. On one level, the priming of mass attitudes toward China can have a significant effect on the experience of individual Chinese (often for the worse). At the other end of the spectrum, popular attitudes toward China can also influence foreign policy. For instance, all else being equal, a public that has been primed by years of negative and hostile coverage of China would be more likely to vote for a candidate who takes a hard-line on the country. Chinese leaders clearly care about how China is perceived around the world—otherwise they wouldn’t have launched their concerted effort (‘soft power push’, ‘charm offensive’) to try to balance critical western media narratives about China’s rise. Full review in China Quarterly here.

FOCAC VI kicks off in Jo’burg tomorrow, Dec 4. I have put together a partial bibliography of academic work on the China-Africa engagement published in the last decade. Access the piece here.

Elections are important symbolic events that have acted as milestones, points of contestation and concession throughout the course of Taiwan’s political development in the last three decades. Since democratization processes began in earnest in the mid-1980s, and even before that in limited local elections during one party rule, most elections have been strongly contested by political parties and candidates, with the campaigns and results keenly felt by their supporters. Elections, and the campaigns that precede them, are an impressive and inescapable feature of Taiwanese democracy at the national and local level. Following reforms in the 2000s to simplify an unnecessarily complicated system, all elected officials now serve four-year terms. Since 2012 elections for national office (President/Vice President and the Legislative Yuan) are held concurrently. Reflecting further streamlining, multiple local elections (mayors and councilors at the municipal, county, and township levels) are also now held concurrently at the midpoint between national elections. Local elections were held in late November 2014, with national elections to be held in 2016. Direct national level elections for the entire Legislative Yuan and the presidency were held for the first time in 1992 and 1996 respectively, and constitute major milestones in Taiwan’s democratization journey. Contemporary Taiwan has a competitive, multi-party political system in which two major parties, the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), are preeminent. The media environment is highly developed, relatively liberal and provides a substantial amount of political coverage. Taiwan enjoys a dynamic election culture sometimes resembling “democratic festivals” (Fell 2011: 56). This chapter will first provide an overview of elections as Taiwan progressed from one party rule to liberal democracy. Second, it will review the voluminous literature on various aspects of elections in Taiwan. Then it will provide a summary of the issues and results of presidential, legislative and local elections. The chapter will next address the issue of vote buying, before concluding with an assessment of the freedom and fairness of Taiwan’s elections. Read full paper here.

In a surprising—indeed, extraordinary—development in cross-Strait relations, Chinese President Xi Jinping will meet with his counterpart from Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, in Singapore on Saturday. According to an announcement by the Presidential Office in Taiwan, the two leaders will not sign any agreements, issue any joint statements or hold a joint press conference. The statement adds that the agenda and purpose of the meeting is yet to be settled. Although Singapore is acting as middleman, as it has in the past, it was surely initiated by the Chinese side—which has plenty of motivation these days to seek Taiwan’s attention.

President Ma has made no secret of his longstanding desire to meet with his PRC counterpart, but he does not have the power to call President Xi to an ad hoc meeting. The delay in releasing the agenda suggests that it was hastily arranged. Presumably, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council and Ministry of Foreign Affairs are scrambling to find the best way to finesse the issue of Ma’s status: since the PRC does not countenance any actions that could be construed as endorsing the existence of “two Chinas,” Ma will not be attending as the eleventh President of the Republic of China, his official title. Any diminution or perceived acceptance of slight will not go down well with a Taiwanese public that has long since turned against the outgoing Ma’s two-term embrace of China, a stance many say was to Taiwan’s detriment. Continue reading at The National Interest.

Mass environmental protests continue to gain strength in China. Within the last couple of months thousands of people in different parts of the country have vocally, and in some cases violently, railed against polluting chemical plants, waste incinerator projects and coal-fired power plant expansions.

New incidents are reported every week through Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. The most recent large-scale incident saw more than a thousand people take to the streets in the suburbs of the northern industrial city of Tianjin claiming that pollution from a nearby steel plant was carcinogenic. Just days earlier thousands of residents in Wuchuan, a city in southern Guangdong, marched on government offices to oppose plans to build a waste incinerator near their homes.

These waves of protest are unique in that they are uniting China’s working and middle classes under a common grievance. Party leaders fret about political stability and potential challenges to the regime; pollution is one of their greatest concerns. But the Chinese government is failing to address the underlying cause of this discontent – an entrenched public distrust of officialdom – and, in the long term, is risking the possible ‘joining up’ of environmental protests into a widespread movement.

The government’s search for a solution is likely to prove fruitless; its only option appears to be maintaining social unrest at a manageable and local level. For these environmental protests are striking at the heart of the Chinese governance model of ‘adaptive authoritarianism’ and exposing its limitations. The Party’s strategy in dealing with major environmental disputes that bring together local communities across all ages and classes has often been one of short-term appeasement. But when governments are known to make ad-hoc concessions to quell disorder it encourages further episodes of contention.

The anger of protestors, each fighting their own local causes, was vindicated in April when an explosion at a chemical factory producing paraxylene (commonly called PX, and used to produce polyester and plastics) in Zhangzhou, Fujian province, required the attention of the Chinese army’s anti-chemical warfare unit and the evacuation of 30,000 people. Continue reading at Forbes Asia here.

Taiwan is one of a number of democracies that began their transition around the same time; sometimes referred to in Huntington’s terminology as ‘Third Wave’ democracies. Taiwan’s experience of democracy has rendered it an increasingly common subject of comparative research, further aided by participation in a number of cross national data collection projects. One of the most popular areas of comparative research is popular attitudes towards democracy. Chu et al 2008 compares attitudes in Taiwan to seven other East Asian countries, not all of them democracies, using the East Asian Barometer survey collections which are based in Taiwan. South Korea and Taiwan share a number of features in common; Confucian cultural heritage, a former developmental state, similarly timed economic miracles and transitions to democracy etc. As such they are frequently compared. Diamond and Shin 2014 (my review) is the most recent example of comparative research on various aspects of the two cases’ experience of democracy, now entering the “maturing” phase, in terms of the economy, foreign relations and politics.

Kim 2000 provides a comparison of Taiwan and Korea’s experience of democratization and environmentalism. Although environmentalism and democratization co-evolved in both cases, the environmental movements developed in very distinct ways. Tsai 2009 examines the two polities’ political development and the relationship between democratization and corruption. Political cultural and institutional arrangements in Taiwan and Korea have produced substantially different levels of corruption. Wong 2004 compares the connections between the two democratization paths on social policymaking and outcomes in the area of health and welfare. Another common topic of comparison is the KMT as a “dominant party”. Like the KMT in Taiwan, former hegemonic parties in Mexico and Japan also survived the transition to democratic competition only to weaken later on, as Solinger 2001 examines. But written just after the KMT lost the presidency in 2000, it does not prefigure the KMT’s resurgence since 2008. As a former Japanese colony with numerous aspects of the political system inherited from the former colonizers, comparisons between Taiwan and Japan are also common. Lin 2006 examines the two polities’ reform trajectories, while Grofman et al 1999 compare the nature and effects of the SNTV electoral system on party and voting behaviour.

Taiwan is a predominantly Chinese cultural context where the political and developmental trajectories are distinct from those in China. As such, there has been much interest in what Taiwan’s democratization might mean for China. Tsang and Tien 1999 collects a number of perspectives on the implications of Taiwan’s successful transition to democracy for mainland China, where economic reform and remarkable economic growth has not, as yet, been accompanied by political liberalization. Gilley and Diamond 2008 approach the issue from a slightly different starting point, looking first at developments in China and comparing them to what has previously gone on in Taiwan. Dickson 1997 presents a detailed comparative analysis of the authoritarian KMT and CCP with a view to identifying similarities and differences in the reform trajectories of each.

Scholars are not alone in their interest in Taiwanese elections, which have been closely monitored by various interested parties in China. Han 2007 investigates how Chinese media report on “presidential” elections in Taiwan. Authorities in China have long been keen observers of political developments in Taiwan; this article provides an empirical study of how Taiwan’s experience is framed in state and commercial media in China. Diamond and Myers 2001 present a range of different assessments on the prospects for political reform in China, with reference to developments in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Focusing on individual attitudes, rather than the KMT and CCP, Shi 2001 compares a range of cultural values and political attitudes among Taiwanese and mainland Chinese citizens. Shi’s empirical investigation based on survey data collected in the early 1990s, compares the effects and implications of culture on political trust in two polities with cultural similarities but different political systems. Full bibliography here.

Throughout democratization and into the democratic era, questions around national identity, Taiwan’s current and future status, and relations with China have been an inescapable and highly contested feature of the political landscape. Indeed, as the sophisticated study by Wachman 1994 shows, national identity and nationalist themes evolved or co-evolved as the major cleavage in Taiwanese society as democratization processes expanded and deepened with democratization. Another good starting point for investigating the complexities of national identity, particularly in terms of individual understandings, is the collection of Corcuff 2002. This edited volume provides some very strong contributions primarily employing an historical and sociological approach.

Brown 2004 demonstrates the fluidity and constructed nature of identity, even when it is built on supposedly more “solid” foundations such as ethnicity. The study is based on meticulous ethnographic case studies and historical data analysis focusing on the place of indigenous peoples and the competing constructions of their identity in various time periods. Like Brown, Philips 2003 demonstrates how contemporary conflicts over identity are rooted in processes that began much earlier, in Philips’ case during the five year period between the end of Japanese colonialism and the establishment of the KMT regime on Taiwan. This is an important historical study covering the crucial, and often overlooked, period between the end of the Pacific war and the relocation of the KMT regime in Taiwan. China’s claim to Taiwan is rooted in historical arguments, but as Hughes 1997 demonstrates, it is also fluid and subject to interpretations and constructions that are mutable across time.

Jacobs and Liu 2007 is a close study of Lee Teng-hui’s thinking on Taiwanese subjectivity and expressions of Taiwan consciousness. It focuses on the significant role of the former President in the emergence of Taiwanese nationalism and provides a careful account of the complexities of Lee’s legacy as President. In many ways, Lee established the possibility for Chen Shui-bian to pursue his Taiwan nationalism project, which is well covered by Cabestan 2005. The sophisticated analysis developed in Lynch 2004 suggests that Chen had embarked on an attempt to effectively re-imagine the Taiwanese nation.

While Chen’s “nation-building” effort was often interpreted as indicating “Taiwan independence”, the empirical analysis of thousands of Chen’s speeches by Sullivan and Lowe 2010 shows that Chen frequently avoided references to sovereignty in favour of “non-threatening” expressions of Taiwan identity. This article provides a systematic analysis of Chen’s presidential discourse on various themes of Taiwanese nationalism, and argues that interpretations of Chen’s independence seeking were overblown. Furthermore, Chen’s position on Taiwan’s status was actually less far removed from his opponents in the KMT than one might imagine. Indeed, Schubert 2004 argues that the DPP and KMT positions on sovereignty and national status converged through the 1990s essentially coalescing around Lee Teng-hui’s notions about ROC sovereignty. The KMT’s tilt towards China is picked up by some of the chapters in Cabestan and DeLisle 2014.

While much of the literature on national identity in Taiwan reasonably focuses on the national level, local politics have a significant influence on governance and political culture in particular. Chao 1992 looks at the continuities and evolution in local politics before and after democratization began. One of things that Chao notes is the tension between the local and national level. This tension is examined explicitly in an earlier paper, Lerman 1977, which compares the central government elites with their notions of upholding ‘true’ Chinese culture and reminiscence to Confucian gentry, and their earthier local government counterparts. This pioneering article on the conflicting political cultures of KMT elites and local politicians sets the scene for further work on the emergence of the local, i.e. Taiwanese, opposition movement.

The interactions between and among local and national factions are further analysed in Chen 1995, a dense study of the role of political factions in the post-war, authoritarian and democratization periods. Interest, class and sub-ethnic based divisions at the local level, which would emerge with greater force during the later democratization period, were also manifest in the limited elections that were held almost continuously since the 1950s. Chao and Myers 2000 examine the role of these electoral contests as a ‘pressure valve’ that allowed people with grievances against the ruling party to let off steam. They also helped the KMT channel resources to supporters, a key element of local elections. Bibliography here.