By June Tsai
Over the past decade, Taiwan Studies has emerged as an institutionalized research field in Europe. Various centers and university programs employing contemporary perspectives have been established in countries such as France, Germany, the Netherlands and U.K., with rationales for studying Taiwan that differ from the Cold War, anti-communist approach developed earlier in the U.S.
This vibrant new scene has developed thanks to the efforts of a group of scholars interested in the democratization of Taiwan and the potential for Taiwan Studies to contribute to research in social sciences and the humanities. These researchers address the question of why Taiwan should be studied on its own, and not incorporated into China Studies or Sinology. One of the most active is Stephane Corcuff, associate professor at the University of Lyon in France.
“The relationship between Taiwan and China, and studies on them, is not one of mutual denial or inclusion, because there are many things about Taiwan that cannot be subsumed under China, which has, however, exercised all kinds of influence on the island,” Corcuff said in an interview with Taiwan Today May 8.
(Photo by June Tsai)
While Taiwan may appear to have occupied a marginal position in history vis-a-vis the mainland, both geopolitically and academically, Corcuff believes the relationship between the two is much more complicated and thought-provoking—and thus deserving of study.
“You could perhaps say the relation of Formosan aboriginals to the Han Chinese is marginal, but you cannot say Taiwan is marginal or peripheral to China,” he said. Nor can dependency theories or the notion of hegemony used in the study of politics and globalization fully apply to Taiwan in relation to historical China.
“In fact, from a historical point of view, the island has always had the means to influence the relationship with its bigger neighbor, making it asymmetrical but never entirely one-sided.”
For Corcuff, Taiwan’s situation deserves a different conception. He adapts the anthropological notion of liminality to understand Taiwan, in particular with regard to the island’s situation in relation to China.
In his latest book, “Neighbor of China: Taiwan’s Liminality,” written in Chinese and published in Taipei in February, Corcuff elaborates on how Taiwan’s history as a place close to yet separate from the mainland has contributed to what he calls its liminal position.
The term originally refers to an in-between period as an individual passes from one stage of life to another. Corcuff believes the concept, which he uses to refer to a spatial and temporal position as a geopolitical threshold, rather than a transitional period of time, helps highlight the significance of Taiwan as a contact zone between regions and cultures, and its potential as a model for the study of similar relations between major and minor states in geographical contiguity.
The smaller entity is not necessarily subject to the dictates of the larger. In the case of Taiwan and China, the mainland “cannot rely on sheer force against Taiwan, and to reach its goals, it has to offer suggestions, negotiate, compromise and wait.” This state of affair, he argues, reflects Taiwan’s liminality.
This perspective on Taiwan’s position in the world came out of 20 years of work by Corcuff.
Currently working with the Taipei Office of the French Research Center on Humanities and Social Sciences, Corcuff first came to Taiwan in 1992 as a university student, just a few years after martial law rule was lifted, opposition parties were legalized, and the island was experiencing the pains and passions of democratization.
“In those days, what we read in France about Taiwan all came from the perspective of the Kuomintang,” he said. Visiting the island, he found things were quite different from what was depicted in official accounts.
“I somehow felt a residue of the island’s colonial past, but was at the time unaware of how that past has left an issue of national identity,” he said.
He soon realized, however, that Taiwan would be the subject of his lifelong career. “I was curious why people of recent mainland origin—the “waishengren”—did not feel at home in Taiwan, some to the extent of hating it, even though they may have lived here for most of their lives.”
He moved to Taiwan in 1995 for doctoral research on Taiwan’s national identity, particularly the identity crisis facing waishengren.
He conducted field interviews, collected oral histories and probed the dilemma this group faced living in a society separated from their origins and the place to which they felt the most cultural proximity.
To better understand this liminal feeling, that of “being here but not here,” Corcuff examined Taiwan’s history back to the mid-1660s, when the first wave of Han Chinese immigration took place. He looked into the relations between Taiwan, nominally occupied by followers of Zheng Cheng-gong, or Koxinga, who identified with the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), and the Manchu empire on the mainland, as well as the Zheng government’s negotiated capitulation in 1683.
He believes this period to be the juncture when the island began to develop geopolitical significance in relation to the mainland. Successive mainland regimes—the Zhengs’ Dongning Kingdom, the governing institutions representing the Qing court (1644-1912), and the KMT government after 1945—all used Chinese culture to support a political project on Taiwan, and helped shape the identity of its society, he said.
But the island is more than a passive recipient of that culture. “The Taiwan Strait is sufficiently narrow for Taiwan to have taken in successive waves of Chinese culture … but also wide enough to have provoked an indigenization of that culture,” he wrote in a preliminary paper presented to the first World Congress of Taiwan Studies, held in Taipei late last month.
In his analysis, Taiwan’s geographical insularity has rendered it capable of becoming both a conservatory and a laboratory of Chinese culture.
Corcuff said that the conservatory provided cultural materials to work on and build against, but was never a perfect storage of that culture. In Taiwan, he said, “Chinese culture has been indigenized, hybridized and pluralized.”
Moreover, even though Chinese culture is the most important cultural matrix in Taiwan, it is not the first, nor the only one, Corcuff stressed. In addition, in contrast to the Zheng, Qing and earlier KMT regimes, the island today is a democracy with a modern, civic society, he said.
With these realities, Taiwan has come a long way from being a mere strategic object to a state having geopolitical leverage, with which it is able to exercise a “power of words” against self-centered China, he argued.
Although Taiwan’s situation may be unique, similar factors exist elsewhere in different combinations, enabling Taiwan studies to produce new concepts useful in the understanding of geopolitics in other parts of the world.
“The relations of Hindu Bali vis-a-vis Muslim Java, Okinawa vis-a-vis Japan, and Ireland vis-a-vis the United Kingdom are just a few examples,” he said. As in the Taiwan-China case, the more powerful entities in each of these pairings cannot simply impose its will without making concessions to the smaller one.
Taiwan’s liminality also implies that its people may have an informed but critical position toward China. “Which means Taiwan is a good place to understand China and a pivot space in the world in approaching the mainland,” Corcuff said, adding Taiwan is a topic on which China reveals its own understanding of history, nation and the world.
“If we consider Taiwan as a space of connectivity between East and West, between Chinese culture and other cultures, the concept of liminality can be expanded to describe Taiwan’s role in the world.”
Thus, the discursive and geopolitical power of Taiwan makes it an important subject of study, he said.
Indeed, Corcuff’s concept of Taiwan’s liminality was taken up by the North American Taiwan Studies Association to structure discussions at its 18th conference, scheduled for June 8-9 at Indiana University Bloomington in the U.S., titled “Taiwan: Gateway, Node, Liminal Space.”
The conceptualization of Taiwan according to Corcuff’s “historical geopolitics” is expected to call attention to the multidimensionality of Taiwan-China relations, which all too often has been simplified by stakeholders with a political agenda.
In the contemporary political arena, his argument may please neither the KMT and associated parties inclined to stress Taiwan’s affinity to Chinese culture nor the opposition Democratic Progressive Party and others who emphasize historical differences, Corcuff said.
This is because his approach reveals that, historically, Taiwan is not Chinese, but has been included into the modern Chinese nationalist program only relatively recently. On the other hand, Taiwan is not non-Chinese either, as it has incorporated mainland influences into its indigenized cultural resources over time.
“The relationship Taiwan has to China comprises elements of both cultural proximity and difference, with some factors that bring them together and others that drive them apart.” Denying either of these “contrary but concomitant movements” would not facilitate the understanding of Taiwan, he said.
(Courtesy of Academia Sinica)
(This article first appeared in Taiwan Today May 20, 2012.)
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