Building civil society on rubble: Citizenship and the politics of culture in Taiwan

Civil society and its discontents

The democratic changes usually associated with the (re)formation of civil society in Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Southern Africa have generated much of interest in terms of theory-building and empirical analysis. When civil society is invoked in classic Western thinking, it signifies the utilitarian, contractual relationships characteristic of a bourgeois society independent from the state. This has been explicitly expounded in Habermas’s normative work on the public sphere. Habermas addresses the public sphere as an institutional space between the state and civil society, as a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed. According to Habermas, with the modern public sphere comes the idea that political society must be supervised and checked by something outside. It is a space of discussion which is self-consciously seen as being outside power (Habermas, 1989: 82–4). Indeed, scholarship on “civil society” has often urged us to inspect the degree to which citizens are “mature” or “liberal” enough to sustain a civil society, and hence a rational democracy. In contrast, Charles Taylor (1990) declares that relationships based purely upon economic self-interest are inherently unstable. Moreover, the basic elements of civil society can take different forms in different historical periods, according to Taylor. To which, Partha Chatterjee has responded, the civil society paradigm to which Taylor refers, burdened with its European orientation, should be reworked so as to “include within its purview processes of state–society interaction in non-European contexts” (1990: 119). What makes this grand narrative possible? Basing his argument upon a fresh reading of Hegel’s ideas on civil society, Chatterjee points out that the narrative of capital is the abstract and formal framework by which citizens are integrated into the state, and it is the hidden force making the discourse of civil society a generalized system. For Chatterjee, the civil society/state, private /public dichotomy is a “story of modernization,” in which liberal democracy is an illusion generated by Eurocentric culture under the force of the “violence of colonialism,” and thus not a figure toward which one can maintain objectivity in methodological terms.

In this way, the concept of civil society, the state, etc., seen as representative of modern society, plays a very different, even disastrous, role in Chatterjee’s postcolonial picture. Civil society is required in opposition to the state. It appears that the state has been implicated in the way civil society has been imagined. However, according to Philip Abrams (1988), it is precisely the constant misrepresentation of its power that has reified the modern state. In a similar vein, Michael Taussig states: “[F]or what the notion of State fetishism directs us to is the existence and reality of the political power of this fiction, its powerful insubstantiality” (1993: 219, emphasis original). While Abrams (1988), Mitchell (1991), Krohn-Hansen and Nustad (2005), and Taussig (1993) point to the reification of the state in social analysis, the suggestion that the distinction between state and society as we perceive it now has been constructed historically requires us to place it historically and provincially as well. An examination of the historical evolution of civil society would need attend to the dominant role of specific political institutions (colonialism in Chatterjee’s Indian context) and to the generally different socio-political grounds that may underscore diverse possibilities for civil society.

The bulk of anthropologically oriented literature focuses on a real sociology of civil society: civil society in specific modalities of articulating demands as well as organizing them, particularly in the Third World. Various institutions have been drawn into a highly generalized system called civil society. To be precise, more and more, emotions, cultural practices, and moral beliefs normally deemed to be irrational matters are caught up with a modernizing inspiration that is civil society (Chatterjee, 2004; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1999; Hann, 1996; Hann and Dunn, 1996; Navaro-Yashin, 2002; Rutherford, 2004; Verdery, 1996). At first sight, such claims may be taken as symptomatic of a growing inwardness and fragmentation in a society. But, on closer examination, they reveal the promise and ambiguity of the lived connections of liberal projects aiming to modernize society with popular understandings of institutions and status. For example, in examining the case of Romania in the post-socialist context, Verdery shows why the Romanian people turn to civil society after the 1990s; but, on the other hand, where “tradition” still vividly lives in a country, attaching subjects to the nation through national sentiments, the Romanian people realized their citizenship in a space more akin to domestic belonging than public reasoning (1996: 62–74). Navaro-Yashin makes an even stronger claim, in his work on public life in 1990s Turkey, that while anthropologists have directed their energies to writing ethnographies of alternative forms of public coalitions, they need to pay attention to the notion of, say, Turkish public culture as being entangled in series of multiple constructions of fantasy, structures of feeling, and unconscious attachments (2002: 2–6).

The case of contemporary Taiwan examined here is important in this regard. Thoughts, sentiments, and cultural imagination were all invoked to mobilize survivors in the wake of the earthquake to demand their citizenship rights. Ironically, and this is crucial, it is precisely in the milieu created by the techniques of the modern state that the cultural dimension of collectivity has taken on a certain symbolic ethos—that is, it is now said to revive “traditional” values and practices in the interest of integrating community. Put in a wider context, the Nationalist Party since 1949 has maintained a one-party sovereign and basically non-mobilized political structure. Social change advanced, however, and by the middle of the 1970s there was rapid economic growth (Gold, 1986: 110–11). In post-1980s Taiwan, where conflicts of ethnicity and questions of national identity, accompanied by the weakening of state guardianship, have emerged in the light of challenges to the state over its traditional authority as many groups have formed to face the hegemony of the state. The booming of the new oppositional movements was, therefore, largely a result of ethnic conflict and was precipitated by the need to establish new foundations of oppositional politics (Bosco, 1994b; Ngo, 1993). Concurrent with the era of radical change in the socio-political sphere, the emergence of civil society and civic organizations commenced a significant transition in the politics of culture. An array of reform forces and groups sought to liberate Taiwan, politically and culturally, from its inbred and oppressive servility to a new, sometimes radical condition across a wide range of social institutions such as media (Lii, 2004), schools (Gold, 1996), labor (Chu, 1997), consumer protection (Hsiao, 1990), environmental culture (Hsiao, 2006; Weller, 2006), gender equality (Chang, 1989) and even community (Lii, 2004). Recently, we have also witnessed religious organizations involved in civil action, mostly through charity work (Weller, 1999).

In terms of the state–society relationship, those kinds of political action have been lauded as an autonomization of civil society, capable of dismantling the authoritarian state. Central to the current account of civil society is the emphasis on the active and conscious participation of the people. In other words, free individuals join in collective action and this contributes to the development of a private realm in which actors support each other. Perhaps with exception of Weller’s work (1999), in which he demonstrates the possibility of an alternate civility in Taiwan, which does not reproduce Western civil society, most analysts of the development of civil society in Taiwan champion the economic boom and the resulting birth of the middle class over the last three decades as the driving factor toward democratic changes, somewhat similar to what has been happening throughout Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe since the 1980s. In a typical remark on the evolution of civil society in Taiwan, Hsiao says, “civil society, especially social movements and advocate NGOs has played the dual role of facilitating and consolidating democracy in Taiwan between 1980 and, 2000” (2006: 226). In the translation of demands and wishes into the notions of citizen awareness, of embodied experiences into formal interest representation, civil society as an ideal is expected to inform civilians’ opposition to the state’s dominant discourse, its dominant rationality.

However, despite the teleological nature of current civil society discourse, there is a wide and understudied lifeworld in which people feel they can act on grounds not informed by civil society discourse. The realm of what people have called civil society in modern Taiwan is marked by many factors. Instead of responsible, rational, autonomous individuals freely engaging with politics, people participate in changing forms and sites of the political informed by such factors as collective morality and cohesion. I attempt to show that the post-earthquake community reconstruction advocacy in Dongshih is itself the result of the people making sense of their subjectivities as political agents as well as recipients of the government’s privileges, a result of at once a historical-cultural growth and a rational-ethical creation. In postcolonial societies such as Taiwan, while the state made efforts to consolidate its power through numerous modernizing projects, these actions resulted in various unintended consequences, creating “modern” social realms such as a virtual public sphere as well as a fledging modern legal system (see Chatterjee for Indian case, 2004). Precisely because state power in Taiwan is dispersed within a network of relationships, we must explore how the emergence and operation of civil groups come about in the context of complicated local formations rather than through fields autonomous from the state, such as commercial institutions, a free press, etc. The hybridity of the form in civil society as well as its specific contents—and divergences—configures the practical social world. Therefore, perhaps more essential than knowing that a democracy has a civil society, I argue, is the larger problem of why a society has mimicked the civil society model that, for Chatterjee, is rooted in Western hegemony. One has also to ask what forms of civil organizing are invoked in name of “civil society.”

Large-scale disaster often leads to large political and social change. Immediately after the earthquake there was an almost instantaneous solidarity, a consolidation of people that could not have happened before. That collective spirit existed as a civic resource. There was an unprecedented wave of an awakening of community-based power and volunteerism. A large number of people either joined the already existing charity organizations as the go-between channels to deliver their good deeds, or donated time to work with NGOs in assisting the rebuilding in the disaster areas directly. The international community poured out condolences and sent rescue workers to Taiwan to join the desperate search for survivors. Religious groups, meanwhile, such as the Tzu-Chi Buddhist Compassion Relief Foundation, the Fokuangshan Association and various Christian groups, had been among the first to mobilize hundreds of thousands of volunteers to help out in relief efforts (see An, 2009; Jang, 2005; Lin and Chen, 2004; You, 2004). Furthermore, various kinds of social activist organizations and NGOs cooperated with the quake-affected local residents and formed numerous community reconstruction teams. There were numerous kinds of newspapers or newsletters in the disaster areas, published and distributed by organizations as diverse as civil groups, charity groups, grassroots organizations, and both central and local governments. Newsletters were used for disseminating information and, more importantly, as a forum for discussion about future reconstruction, psychologically and politically.

In a way, all of the actions reflected the public’s dissatisfaction and distrust of how the government handled the relief and reconstruction in the wake of the earthquake. For example, donations were quickly amassed to a total of roughly NT$37.5 billion in aid to charities and governments. A group of scholars mainly at Academia Sinica called for a coalition to monitor how charity groups and government would allocate the funds. Led by its president Lee Yuan-tseh, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, they convened the National Alliance for Post-quake Reconstruction. Thanks to the charismatic leadership of Lee, over 130 NGOs and 60 charities nationwide placed themselves under its supervision (Xie, 2001). It was perhaps the most outspoken and active civil organization on a national basis in terms of dealing with post-earthquake reconstruction. Gradually, it took on the task of connecting NGOs and provided a variety of services to the affected communities. The post-quake period has witnessed a boom of civic spirit and civic organizations. Charity groups and activist groups came forward as well, activating people inside and outside of the disaster areas, in opposition to the state’s reconstruction efforts on the one hand, and assembling together victims’ needs on the other. While we have seen the tremendous explosion of civil groups, religious charity groups and the National Alliance for Post-quake Reconstruction especially were mainly mobilized by the calls of their charismatic leaders. As Weller suggests regarding the character of religious and environmental associations in Taiwan specifically:

[W]hile some forms of association have been borrowed, the social ties on which they rest have clear Taiwanese and generally Chinese roots …. These ties may not have had earlier links to a concept of civil society or to a democratic political culture, but they can be mobilized. (1999: 140, emphasis added)

It remains to be seen whether such civil spirit can be transmitted into the endeavors, transforming the power relationship between the state and civil society. Instead, I will show in the following how the actors involved, victims and cultural workers alike, articulated their demands in a community-by-community mobilization that highlighted local cultural assets. The civil society question animating community participation addressed subsistence, recovery, and well-being, issues traditionally considered the duties of the paternalist state that, at the same time, informed people’s perception of their entitlement to organize and assemble.

Anthropologists of disaster have long argued that individual, group, and organizational responses to a disaster still cling to the previous social order. Disaster reveals the underlying social structure and, at the same time, may be able to facilitate changes, in conjunction with a variety of factors (Oliver-Smith, 1986, 1996; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, 1999). It is my aim here to examine the shifting discursive and institutional contours of community reconstruction in the wake of the 9/21 earthquake to understand how membership and identity were constructed and mobilized by various agents. The degree to which a community was successfully mobilized depended pretty much upon how the community membership and identity were delineated. “Community participation” hence became both a process for building a virtual civil society and the ideal to which people imagined civil society to aspire. Because much of the debate regarding community reconstruction focused on representations of the community, I analyze how key actors constructed those cultural assets representing the community. By analyzing how civil society arises in Taiwan, we are really examining the ways people articulate citizenship rights, community, survival as they construct a culturally constituted language resistant to both the universality claims made in the name of law and competition over local cultural representations. In doing so, we may be able to pick out the forces that drove victims to organize a “rational” civic action in opposition to the state, an effort that largely derived from their understanding of legal rights within their cultural contexts.

Village into political community

No longer than 1 km, Ben Street (, Ben means literally, “original”), an east–west route crossing downtown Dongshih, is the oldest street in the town. With the introduction of motor vehicles, commerce moved from the smaller roads, like Ben Street, to the wider thoroughfares. Records in the local archives show, and long-time residents have told me, that numerous taverns, inns, and even brothels operated along Ben Street 30 years ago when the lumber industry reached its zenith. All I saw in 1999, however, was old herbal medicine stores, ironworks, and jewelry and hardware stores. These provided services necessary to the current fruit-farming businesses around Dongshih. Ben Street as we see it today has changed with various phases of development and destruction. But nothing was more devastating than the deadly earthquake in 1999. The oldest buildings, made of mud and wood, were hit hardest and accounted for the most deaths. After the earthquake, even remodeled houses with brick walls and steep tile roofs no longer stood. Only a few three-storied modern cement houses remained, standing scattered and alone between large parcels of land piled with excavated dirt and wood.

Remaining residents were concerned about how they could continue their lives on this devastated street. They believed that the government would not be able to make a unified reconstruction plan work, given the diverse nature of the disaster-stricken areas. Only a design generated by the community itself would be feasible. Locals were not satisfied with the universal plan put forth by the Dongshih town hall, and they wanted to create a detailed redesign of the location and style of Ben Street and its housing. In their minds, Ben Street was a distinct totality and they wanted it rebuilt to reflect their common heritage and history. The question remained: how to do this? The Ben Street residents knew well that, from 1949 onwards, the ruling party had always maintained its power by the creation of weak local and regional governments, and by undermining loyalty to any institutions or groups other than those of the nation-state (see Cheng and Haggard, 1992). In Dongshih, as in other rural areas of Taiwan, this old and not particularly long street was nonetheless a tangled knot of political factionalism. The local world, dominated by factions, offered no incentives or channels by which residents could make their voices heard. Lacking a “legal” association, concerned residents could not apply for funds or put forward any designs. Hence organizing themselves, in whatever form that might take, was the first priority. Difficult though it was, a group of shop owners along the street managed to create the Ben Street Reconstruction Task Force (BSRTF hereafter) and from there made appeals to all the other residents. By attempting to get the whole community behind it, the BSRTF would become representative of community interests as well as those of individuals. The national and local governments would be obliged to respect what the residents proposed.

No one knew exactly what that the scheme would look like. It might involve a chief executive with a network of subcommittees to oversee various aspects of the project. Or perhaps some other structure would emerge, depending on what residents said they wanted. One thing was sure, however, the BSRTF would get its authority not from written rules, but rather from the ways it interacted with residents. In early December 1999, community reconstruction teams, quite apart from their moral appeal, gained legal status in community reconstruction when the central government officially recognized them under the “Principles for the 9/21 Earthquake Reconstruction.” The central government did an about-face from its usual policies by allowing bottom-up participation in the reconstruction, which meant giving locals a voice in shaping construction projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. By taking this step, the central government simplified the urban planning and urban renewal administration and operating procedures. The draft also provided “Reconstruction Funds” to communities to help maintain service centers and formulate reconstruction committees. OPEN IN VIEWER

From then on, the BSRTF was able to submit proposals to different government agencies for funds related to community reconstruction. With those funds coming in, the first step was to hire an architect, who would take charge of the renewal design. Like many community reconstruction teams in other quake-stricken areas where either academic or commercial architect firms were funded by public resources, the BSRTF engaged the Tan Architectural Firm in January 2000. Community participation and autonomy was to be rule of thumb for the planning process. And it is at this point that conflicts began to emerge. OPEN IN VIEWER

The Tan Architectural Firm and the BSRTF convened several meetings with residents, letting the local people have input. Many people expressed strong hopes that Ben Street, whose real estate values had gone down sharply before the quake, would emerge from the catastrophe in better shape. Building on historical resources seemed the best option because there was no way they could compete with businesses on the main streets. “We had many historical sites. Ben Street used to be the center of Dongshih and we wanted to focus on those sites,” one man said. Certain successful cases of revival of old streets in Taiwan and in Japan were raised as examples. Above all, the old stores such as herbal pharmacies, ironworks, jewelry, and hardware stores should be restored but with a new uniform outward appearance: “Hakka mixed with modern.” Accordingly, the redesigns of Ben Street included utility poles being placed underground, the addition of cultural facilities such as an exhibition hall, the renovation of the plazas in front of its temples, and a community center. Most importantly, several portions of the existing street were too narrow for ambulances and fire engines to get through. The major theme of the design was to expand the old and twisting 6 meter wide road to a straighter 8 meter wode one. People also called for a pedestrian area that would block local traffic from narrower Ben Street, diverting it to the adjacent streets at certain times, like holidays. The more easy tourists felt walking along Ben Street, the more they would enjoy the local charm, and this would mean more business. The ultimate goal, in other words, was to rebuild Ben Street by reviving business on a historical and cultural basis. This expression of ideas, though contradictory at times, was likely to have a strong influence on what would ultimately happen. By all accounts, the ideas residents expressed in these meetings were what they thought would be in their best interests—ideas that would not have surfaced in a state-designed plan.

On the other hand, participants plainly expressed their urgent wish to rebuild houses because having a house to live in was still the number one concern. They urged the Tan Architectural Firm and the BSRTF to complete as quickly as possible a design within which they could proceed with rebuilding their homes. Also, those who did not attend any of the gatherings might hold different opinions. I heard that a few residents expressed negative opinions at the reconstruction because they thought that Ben Street was itself a thing of past and there was no value in preserving it as it was. For them, this was an “opportunity” to renovate the old street. Since the earthquake had destroyed nearly everything on the ground, the residents could start from zero and incorporate radical ideas. They said that the government should take advantage of this “opportunity” by tearing down the whole street and creating a brand new, modern district. The debates over the eternal validity of things of the past, however, reflected an even deeper change in the source of political consciousness. By framing its cultural elements as an objective entity to be rebuilt, the BSRTF at the same time used the idea of culture to set political boundaries. The kind of boundedness that now defines Ben Street as a political group based on a claimed cultural similarity, pulled together its members to demand a community past as their right. Citizenship claims for the BSRTF as a political group were also an assertion of membership in a (re)constructed cultural group.

Tensions became manifest between private and collective interests. However, I think there is no such thing as collective interests sui generis. The “collective interests” of Ben Street is a narrative construction, a creation of the interplay of national and local forces. The BSRTF organized reconstruction specifically on a communitarian basis, bringing together local residents, and then protested as a group against the state’s authoritarian planning process, as well as the urban-centered view that endangered the agricultural community. The BSRTF claimed that the participatory approach was the first step toward autonomy as well as toward preservation of their own culture. “Rebuilding” the traditional way of life, including notably the re-integration of traditional cultural elements of the community into the reconstruction project, would generate local pride and could rejuvenate decaying businesses. The participatory approach was the principal—if not the only—way to achieve it. However, a major problem here is that it tended to be assumed that culture was a natural whole, rather than a network of relations that involved various agencies and forces. In fact, the discourse of culture in relation to rights emerges from the political relationships between social groups. The struggle for cultural representation in this case was also a struggle for rights, which always engages in restructuring social relations for the promotion of needs, desires, and interests. Here the contradiction was between the emphasis on the collective’s culture and residents’ concern with loans and development. The rebuilding process is as much a struggle over different ideas about the new Ben Street as it is conflicts of interest. In fact, the BSRTF’s appeal to culture in relation to rights did not provide a practical way to realize the rights residents thought they were entitled to. Since, for me, cultural autonomy as a collective interest in this case was a call rather than an accomplished fact, the period after the earthquake was obviously too short for the residents to develop a culture-based identity upon which a legal argument and justification could specifically be built. After all, only individual interests remained tangible and imminent.

For residents, it became a choice over whether the township-led design or the BSRTF-initiated design would be more suitable to their individual interests. Conflicts that had long been buried also came up in this process: the BSRTF and other activist groups versus the town hall and its attendant factions, and residents versus residents. Hence the struggle between private and collective interests was also one between local powers. Unfortunately, it became clear that residents’ concept of collective interest only meant what most suited their own individual interests. This kind of communitarianism in reality masked the pursuit of particular interests under the juridical category of rights. It did not, in the end, successfully construct a collective interest that helped residents pursue a collective cultural rights-based citizenship.

The phantom of participation

Since the 1990s, the central government initiated a broadly organized framework of policies under the term of Shequ Zongti Yingzao (), or integrated community building. The meaning of Shequ Zongti Yingzao, according to the Council for Cultural Affairs, the ministry chiefly in charge of the framework, put simply, lies in rebuilding community culture. Policy after policy proclaims the need to rebuild identification with local communities, given the relentless march of urbanization in Taiwan since the post-war period, drawing a stream of rural people to the cities. Traditional industries die away and local cultures and historical relics are forgotten, while the sense of dislocation has come full circle, as urban people see themselves as rootless and restless. The way to rebuild identification with communities is to gather all citizens to participate in and speak out about public affairs, to show concern for their surroundings and cultural features. By doing so, it is claimed, a sense of community will be cultivated as community members become active citizens. Shequ Zongti Yingzao is designed to cultivate the civic concept and awareness of culture starting from the face-to-face community, when cultural civic rights are proposed, after political civic rights and economic civic rights have been established in Taiwan. Many community-based organizations have blossomed, as in Lu’s (2002) description that Taiwan has entered the era of shequ (, community). The term shequ has become a synonym for the formation of community self-governance organizations, while “community development associations”, “culture and education foundations”, and “local history clubs” are established to meet the popular sentiments of the people of Taiwan beginning in the 1990s.

It is fair to say that the BSRTF employed culture as both a rallying tool and a goal. As a tool, the idea of culture as a common way of life easily persuaded them to come together to voice their desires and increased residents’ awareness of their legal rights. As a goal, culture could be identified with citizenship rights in the sense that it asserts group identity and regional autonomy. Cultural citizenship rights is an unsettled state in which the past, the present, and the future all feed into collective interests, and hence it is not a given but rather a terrain of disputes. The idea that cultural recognition is vital for a group to be counted a distinct member in a modern state has received much attention in recent decades. As many authors have pointed out, such is the case in contemporary Britain (Amin, 2005; Fortier, 2010), while in Argentina (Grugel, 2005), people organize and demand the right to occupy a space and a time culturally informed by their own tradition.

The core members of BSRTF, along with several voluntary workers, myself included, were working on the process of organization as we reached out and talked to residents household by household. We wanted to find out what their current problems were regarding reconstruction and, more importantly, what their visions of their future home on Ben Street would be. The BSRTF was able to compile and sort out this information and make it available to the public. It decided to publish a community newsletter, a common tool in community-building movements, called Jiu-Jie-Luo (, literally, “old street”). It was designed to be a forum for sharing ideas about the rebuilding. It was also a way for residents to be aware of the efforts of the BSRTF. But feedback from the residents was sparse. Jiu-Jie-Luo in the end was more like a newspaper disseminating information than a communication channel for eliciting resident input.

Talking with residents along the street was far more interesting. There I ran into housewives, the elderly, and teenagers, and one could hear opinions that would not have been aired at public gatherings, whose attendees were exclusively family heads, namely, middle-aged men. Asked what they thought of Ben Street, in the past as well as in the future, these responses touched on most aspects of the would-be reconstruction project. Some said that the government should take lead in reconstruction. They did not trust the NGOs. Some complained that the government’s efforts did not really meet the victims’ needs, and yet they still preferred top-down approach. Some liked the bold new ideas for building an entirely new and better Ben Street, though they knew this would take longer to conceive and accomplish. Others just wanted to rebuild it as it was, and as soon as possible.

Of course, part of the purpose of talking with people was to assure them that reconstruction assistance was on the way. The BSRTF asked residents to be patient and to defer rebuilding their homes until the redesign of Ben Street was completed. What was left of commerce on Ben Street would quickly die if individual residents rushed to rebuild without thinking as to their effect on the whole. The revival of this old street would be possible, according to the BSRTF, only when its historic stores were carefully and holistically (re)designed. A new Ben Street would build upon its special features and its precious legacy, that is, as a microcosm of Dongshih’s development history. Thus far, this was a “moralist” appeal and a general exchange of views on the reconstruction.

The BSRTF easily obtained consent from most residents to authorize its working with the Tan Architectural Firm to draw up a blueprint for Ben Street, so as to improve on the universal plan the town hall had designed. There was subtle recognition, even among cynical opponents, that something was taking place, maybe not quite enough to alter the status quo, but perhaps enough to compel the township administration to consider the stance the community had taken. Meanwhile, one member of BSRTF was invited to join the Town Reconstruction Committee, appointed by Dongshih town hall. Officially his job would be to provide information as to what steps the BSRTF had taken. Unofficially, he would monitor the extent to which local factions had sneaked their interests into the reconstruction process. The next phase for the BSRTF was to go back to interviewing residents and to do the analytical work necessary such as (re)surveying cadastral maps and compiling basic resident information such as who wanted what. All of this was to determine what Ben Street could and should provide to support business. In an open and democratic procedure, residents were able to suggest variations and offer their most creative ideas with respect to how retail, residential and cultural space were to be allocated. In the final analysis, as the leader of the BSRTF once claimed, it is the process, not the result, that benefits from public participation. The broad vision for rebuilding Ben Street seemed to be winning over conservative sentiment.

The first draft design by the Tan Architectural Firm was released in March 2000, thereby initiating a long process of debate and refinement. The results indicated the weight given to input from residents. They included multiple open areas, retail stores and residences, along with an expanded roadway. The design also called for a pedestrian walkway roughly along the northern edge of Ben Street. Many residents were, however, surprised that the design specified several mandates that limited the possibilities for their own property. The Tan Architectural Firm replied that for urban planning, certain legal obligations had to be met, such as the height and mass of commercial buildings, the width, the color, the materials, and the signage of the stores, and the size and location of a parking lot.

A bigger problem was how to expand the street to a width of 8 meters. Residents initially agreed, out of fairness, that the northern and southern edges of the street would be set back 1 meter each to make room for the planned expansion. But since Ben Street runs along a small hill, the foundations of houses along its southern edge actually penetrate the steep slope. And the road is not straight, so with some portions of the houses on the south side pushed back 1 meter from the construction line of the road, their foundations would be 1 meter thinner and the structures looked as if they were hanging in the air. Naturally, those residents were not happy because they felt that their property was pushed back too much, so they would not be able to build a house big enough to accommodate the members of their family. An old woman, agitated, picked up a long red rope, and stretched it from the construction line to the proposed base-line of her house, screaming, “What kind of construction is this?” The set-back of residential buildings from the street produced the strongest emotions. To expand and straighten the road, some residents would have to alienate some portion of their land to make room, while others would have to buy tracts of land on which the road was not to be built. Apart from the tedious legal paperwork necessary for title changes, residents whose property was affected by the design would have to find a way to accommodate to changes in property values, which in the end seemed to be the most crucial and difficult issue to resolve. To make matters worse, one owner refused to participate in the collective design from the very beginning and chose to build in his own way instead. Therefore, the design proposed to make a detour around this owner’s land, and the neighbor living directly opposite that parcel would then have to sacrifice more ground.

People complained that the design left many questions unanswered. Among them, of course, was the condemnation and acquisition of property to build the public road. Since many real estate analysts estimated that the land value had dropped significantly, there was no agreed-upon point, before or after the earthquake, from which to calculate the property value. Residents did not want to shoulder additional costs because they already had a huge financial burden in the rebuilding of their houses. Obviously, it was not enough to pursue “fairness.” Settling the matter was an issue of real interests, involving private property and personal situations. As a forum in which residents exchanged opinions, the BSRTF looked very carefully to see whether it would be possible to reconcile private rights and the new street as a public place of which residents would be proud. But it was still up to the residents, the actual landowners, to negotiate with one another.

With negotiations proceeding persistently but slowly, the BSRTF continued to organize various kinds of activities to bring together not only residents of the southern-edge portion, but of the whole of Ben Street. They held “soft” events, such as theater shows, inviting the residents to visit other communities which had been successful with community building, youth camps, communal plum brewing, etc. These activities were made possible via several program plans submitted by the BSRTF and sponsored by government agencies. They were assumed to contribute to the residents’ affective ties with and knowledge of Ben Street. The BSRTF also wanted to try, through these public events, to advance community solidarity, which could eventually help reconcile conflicts over individuals’ rights.

In May 2000, 41 residents appealed to the township, apparently impatient at waiting for the street design to be finished. They wanted to withdraw their earlier consent to join in the street design program. The BSRTF tried to explain to them, in vain, that the delay was largely due to the town hall’s failure to complete its own reconstruction plans. There was little they could do under the law except press the town hall to move faster. The BSRTF repeatedly emphasized that the street redesign program was the only way to solve the problem of the decaying commerce of the old street and asked people to stay on. Divisions grew bitter nevertheless. Both sides scolded each other at public gatherings and the meetings were halted altogether in the end. Moreover, there were whispers among residents that the BSRTF received money and it did not use for community affairs. Some thought that the money belonged to the community “collectively.” The BSRTF had to make it clear, in responding, that the funds were granted for specific purposes, such as publishing Jiu-Jie-Luo, the newsletter, and thus they were unable to allocate funding for other purposes. Mutual trust gradually withered away.

At the same time, the major reason the town reconstruction plan had not been completed on time was assumed to be conflicts of interests among local political factions. Each faction sought to influence the rebuilding of the streets—some of the most valuable land in town—and, more broadly, the structure and methods of the town economy. When a scandal broke, this assumption was borne out. The township executive was abducted and then released by three men in April 2000. His family had paid a huge ransom and did not want to notify the police. But the police learned of the crime from unknown sources and arrested the suspects afterwards. According to the police report, the suspects confessed that they believed that the township executive put money in his own pocket that was supposed to go toward reconstruction. This scandal was widely publicized, although the township executive angrily denied it, and was another blow to the faith of the people of Taiwan nationwide—suffering and tragedy had not changed the way factionalism ran things on the local level. The enthusiasm and moral imperatives that had helped support people in the disaster areas in the aftermath of the catastrophe had evaporated. Normalcy in the end took over. The old system was back in place.

With fewer civil resources to rely on, only the government was left to help the survivors, for better or worse. The street design program had been finalized and submitted to the town hall in mid-September 2000. The Tan Architectural Firm held a last meeting to demonstrate and explain the design in November 2000, when its contract expired. The fate of the program was now in the hands of the town hall, and there was no sign that construction would get going any time soon.

One could say that the Taiwanese—or the residents in Ben Street for that matter—have learned nothing from the disaster, neither cooperation nor humanity. The sudden emergence of a collective optimism—the belief in a bright future—gave way almost as suddenly to routine normative systems, the most powerful of which remains the the local factional one. One can also criticize the BSRTF for not engaging “real” community participation. The BSRTF wanted input from residents and regarded its task primarily as coordinating input into the plan. It is sometimes hard to discern, however, whether the agreed-upon idea was based on a deliberate negotiation process among the residents or whether it was accepted by the residents simply because it was articulated by the BSRTF. Involving communities in the planning might work well on paper, but, in the final analysis, the only major achievement the BSRTF can lay claim to was in the sector of community services: the dissemination of information, and matching needy residents with donor agencies. A history of relationships between the state and the local level in Taiwan may be useful for understanding the obstacles that stood in the way of the efforts like those of the BSRTF in Dongshih.

Since 1949, the defeated Nationalist Party (KuoMingTang [KMT] in Mandarin), withdrew to Taiwan, along with its legal system. In reacting to internal and external crises, the shaky and precarious KMT maintained one-party sovereignty and a basically reactive political structure under martial law until 1989. Moreover, because most of the KMT’s ruling elite were Mainlanders, they had to use patronage and to cooperate with local elites to advance their interests. “To govern, the KMT needed a compliant local elite” (Bosco, 1994a: 136). A strong state in Taiwan controlling national resources incorporated locally based clientelism. Local factions formed around territorial and kinship networks, and were led by several strong families. Because they controlled many of their region’s resources, they were in a position to bargain with the ruling party for favors such as official posts and business privileges. Faction leaders then used these as rewards for their members and consequently their influence snowballed locally. In a given region, however, there might be several factions in competition. This allowed the KMT plenty of room to maneuver. Local factionalism was thus a product of the state’s strategy of engaging with powerful local networks. When specific policies, often based upon technocrats’ adoption of foreign projects, were carried out at the local level, local factions usually came into play, pulling in their network of contacts and various resources without which the national policies would simply have remained good intentions. The legitimacy of the state, in this regard, does not come from the formal structure of the legal system. Rather, it comes from its ability to diffuse policies across society and collaborate with conventional local authorities. In fact, this two-tiered system—strong state and active local factions—has been the defining reality that structures people’s lived experiences and expectations.

The history of state–society relations in Taiwan has clear consequences for the meaning and role of the political subjectivity specific to civil society. As the status of the individual is understood to be not the result of class struggle but an indication of the nation-state’s modernizing, the acquisition and expansion of the individual’s rights increasingly becomes something given by the state, something that is a job for the state. The state, in turn, has to carry out the various paternalist tasks and it will always be evaluated on how well it responds to the demands of its subjects.

During the last 20 years, democratization and indigenization in Taiwan have become major forces that have reshaped the nation’s political and social structure. An appeal to mass participation has consequently been proposed to be both a process and a goal for democracy and legitimacy (see Cheng and Haggard, 1992; Chun, 1994; Gold, 1986; Lii, 2004). Oppressed people are organized in many social movements to claim rights granted by national law. As an understanding of rights has become the foundation for new entitlements in Taiwan, the claims and agendas for legal reform, basic rights, and civil liberty are actually campaigns emphasizing more of a role for the state, if not direct intervention. It can be said that the long-term experience people have had with the state has primarily (re)defined people’s notion of rights.

To the extent that the BSRTF appealed to the right to culture as an alternate strategy for reconstruction, it provided a space within which the cultural imagination of Ben Street negotiated with the state’s imagination of community.

I want to argue that there is a structure in place that maintains the gap between the “intention” and “practice” of community participation. There is a specific political and social context that shifts the meaning of certain key words, such as “community” and “rights.” No one can clearly point to what community consciousness and formation really is. It appears to be a fundamental democratic principle that even the state would like to embrace. Confronted with the counter-legitimacy that grassroots democracy may imply, the state actually worked with communities, and so proved to be more active and grassroots-democratic than expected. This system was designed as closely as possible to the workings of direct democracy. As I showed above, the state promoted grassroots participation as the number one principle of reconstruction, but it also discreetly awarded to the town hall key status as the fundamental unit of community participation. It declared that community reconstruction was based upon community participation, but at the same time reassured the town hall that it had the final say in formulating the town plan, which in practice sustained the status quo of local factions. It is not surprising that the central government considered the town hall to be its grassroots unit, since its executive is elected from among the local population. This makes it difficult for critics to argue that the state did not take into consideration the people’s voice. Opposition between state and society becomes ambiguous, even muddy, with the government now open to people’s participation. Here we see that while there has been no formal change in the structure of the state, its power has nonetheless been augmented by its new ability to call upon broader participation and to adapt itself to actual situations. One unintended consequence of this objectification of tradition as a basis for group mobilization is displaying elements of culture that are easily commodified, namely, that are more visible for tourists. Commentators in Taiwan have already warned that the homogenization of the sense of place and of memory would, in the course of time, enhance class and economic differences due to inescapable commodification forces (e.g. Ho, 2010; Hwang et al, 2010; Yang, 2007).

On the other hand, the irony is, since local community groups were funded by the state, they were inevitably compelled to play by its rules. Residents came to perceive the community groups as government agencies. Both the state and the BSRTF used the same participatory rhetoric, and for residents who had long been led by governmental planning, the BSRTF was viewed not as a mechanism facilitating autonomy but as a medium through which the government resources could be disseminated. I think that it is for this reason that residents were initially willing to participate in the street design program, which they perceived as an alternate means to get their homes rebuilt.

In places such as Dongshih, where the idea of a voluntary participation required of equal, interested individuals is very much unknown, a specific political consciousness was built upon the residents’ moral consciousness. Bound by traditional ties of familiarity and territory, the abstract notion of political involvement becomes indistinguishable from moral obligation. The point to be noted is that a political subjectivity lacking cultural appeal does not establish membership in an organization such as the BSRTF. For early modern political thinkers, the driving forces behind the organization of individuals in groups were similar to the logic that derived from the rise of self-regulating markets. Yet, it is not immediately apparent why such a dehistoricized and decontextualized idea should be successful in explaining participants’ engagement with the pursuit of individual interests. To initiate organization, rather, potential members must see in participation a moral good, apart from economic motivation. A political organization demands no less than the emergence of a new kind of morality, a public culture of its own, which (re)creates a certain symbolic universe to deal with the social reality. Symbolic and cultural stakes inform the consciousness of the subject and at the same time achieve new meanings in political practice. The formation and operation of civil society, in this view, is unthinkable without the appeal of “cultural” values. Whether civil society could serve as the prelude to political innovation in a fledgling democracy has to be examined in relation to its history of socio-cultural production (see Hann and Dunn, 1996).

Local history and practices obviously played a large role in empowering people. It is also worth noting that resorting to the legal system in the context of local customs was one of the possibilities culturally available to the collective actors in Dongshih. For the survivors of Ben Street, however, justice could not be achieved by equality before the law. Still, actions taken and not taken were part of the permanent process of locals’ sense of justice in relation to the law. Activists created their own notion of justice and made this notion the basis of their activism. The fact is that in rural areas like Dongshih individuals live in a web of conventionally and socially constructed relations that have not yet been absorbed into more atomistic individual-oriented legal relations. What drove victims to construct their rights claims largely derived from their understanding of legal rights within their cultural context.

Conclusion: of rights, culture, and power

Self-governance and economic empowerment were major themes in the reconstruction efforts in the aftermath of the earthquake. It was the claim of the BSRTF that collective action was the only way alternatives to the legal structures already in place could be realized. But residents disagreed over just what their community’s reconstruction should look like. Political, aesthetic, and commercial interests were all involved in these efforts. One other thing should nevertheless be noted: the view of culture and tradition represented in the Ben Street reconstruction teams was assumed to be a natural given inherited from the past, rather than a product of the network of relations that involved various agencies and forces. The issue here is of course not just about how people invent and redefine tradition with regard to their own interests, but more about the conditions that make possible the interplay between tradition and rights claims. Survivors’ negotiations with the legal system, as well as with their traditions, revealed a complex and dynamic relationship between law, politics, and local culture. All of this was embedded in changing and variable norms, and in historically constituted governing techniques.

What I have tried to show is that the BSRTF, along with the residents of Ben Street, managed to open a space in which their determination of collective needs was democratized, and they were able to call for new terms by which to state their rights under legitimate law. Although with the introduction of law the state seeks to delimit the individual’s equality and rights, all kinds of compromise and calculation by the state in implementing laws, in addition to the persistence of local organizations, result in a discourse of rights that is inherently contradictory and hybrid in Taiwan. This complex mix of technique and rights informs the logic of most of collective action in Taiwan. The self-help organization to guide community reconstruction in Ben Street in the wake of the earthquake was no exception. We must consider how, as Das et al. (2001: 26) have noted, “the diverse configurations within which the institutional and the experiential, the public and the private, the spectacular and the quotidian come together to define the realm of politics.” Therefore, how villagers make and remake themselves citizens through socio-political organization depends mainly on whether or not the language of abstract citizenship rights can be translated into quotidian practices that culturally make sense to them. A close look at the case of Ben Street in Dongshih enriches arguments about the conditions that make possible the bourgeois public sphere and about the development of fledgling civil society in Taiwan in particular.