Introduction
Territorial borders in East Asia were settled in the last two
centuries on the bases of the treaties after several major wars.
These geographical and mathematical lines of division appear to
be self-manifest and stable, but persistent border disputes, and
the complex nationalist sentiments triggered thereby, reflect
the fact that these borders are exactly the unresolved political
problems leftover from the past. These national borders are by
no means solely determined by the sovereignty of
any single
State, but by different external political positions and
historical factors, both related to each of the neighbouring
parties involved in the conflict and to remote global forces.[1]
The fact that the border between two political entities is
oftentimes intervened by external forces creates even more
complex problems. The water border across the Taiwan Strait, for
example, as a demilitarized buffer zone in an analogous mode to
the DMZ, 38 degree parallel, between North Korea and South
Korea, is interposed not only by the two great powers of US and
USSR in the post war era, but also by US and PRC. The border
consciousness is further strengthened as markers of national
identities through domestic education and cultural policies to
the effect that these borders, besides the control of exit and
entry, function also as the checkpoint of inverted surveillance,
sanctioning the activities and even thoughts in the domestic
domain.
The internalized checkpoint, as the anchorage of identity and
distinction, operates as strategies of governance and seeks its
correlative markers through various forms of the visible,
including national identity cards, passports, resident
certificates, the birth places, the ancestral origins, the
partisan positions, even the gradations of vowel sounds and the
phonic variations between the dentilabial or the glottal sounds,
and so on. The internal border consciousness also exercises as
the mode of subjectification and could easily be observed in the
lingering Cold War mentality in the post Cold War era in East
Asia, not only in the obvious present-day tensions between North
Korea and South Korea, between China and Taiwan, between
mainland China and Hong Kong, but also within respective
domestic domains. The reproduction of the border consciousness
was reinforced by the political-juridical definition of bordered
sovereignty and its policies of cultural governmentality, and
such reproduction makes the reconciliation between the
antagonistic states of East Asia impossible.
The aim of this chapter is to problematize the concept of
political entities defined by the juridical positivist
international law, a positivistic translation of the
International Law according to the Jus Publicum Europaeum,
and to point out that this concept of political entities does
not match the on-going drastic mutations of societies formed
over the passage of history. I shall first discuss the DMZ
phenomena of the Korean case as well as the Taiwan case, and
illustrate how the interventions of external forces affected the
domestic security policy and constituted bordered Cold War
mentalities that still linger in today’s East Asian societies.
Secondly, I shall examine how the Taiwan Strait Crises in the
1950s were over-determined by local as well as global complex
instances, how these events were mainly the result of the
contest of power both over East Asia and globally between US and
PRC, and how these historical processes left lasting effects on
the antagonistic mentality of the general public in domestic
scenes that fended against one another as possible threat and
danger. Thirdly, I shall illustrate how the Cold War structure
and border consciousness still linger in East Asia in the
post-1989 Era by providing a case of the recent disputes in
Taiwan over the battle of the ‘language of Taiwan’ and the
‘language of China’. Through this case, we can see how the
internal strife mirrors and repeats the inversion of the
security border across the Taiwan Strait. Fourthly, I analyse
the paradox of the Taiwan question and question the positivistic
jurisprudence in view of the changed situation of the societies.
In order to theorize the Taiwan question, I propose to
re-think the concept of the nomos of the earth discussed
by Carl Schmitt in his important book The Nomos of the Earth.[2]
I suggest that we need to examine the role played by the
nomos of the earth, not as the land-taking and
space-inhabiting act or the multi-polar blocs suggested Schmitt,
but as the norms created through the economy and dispositif
of language policies in the public sphere to the extend that
language forms partitions, occupation, classifications and
exclusions. Language carries out the land-appropriation and
land-holding activities of the imperialist and the colonial
expansion through different levels of institutions. The building
of modern Nation States in East Asia in the nineteenth and the
twentieth centuries, though in reaction to the imperial
expansion as well as the Cold War bloc strategy, also exercised
this function of the statist appropriation and occupation of the
space through language policies and language education basing on
the juridical translation of the political border. The effect of
the Cold War structure is then deeply rooted as the regime of
the sensible, as discussed by Jacques Rancière
(Rancière
1994;
Rancière
2004),
shared by the members within the society and exercises its logic
of partition, separation and exclusion.[3]
As a conclusion, I propose to acquire a topological vision of
the state by constantly challenge and emancipate the boundaries
and partitions exercised by language so that the place can
welcome new comers as co-dwellers
to form the community.
Inverted and militarized DMZ: the case of South Korea
The incident of Song Du-yul (송두율),
as documented in The Border City II (Hong, 2009)
by Hong Hyung-sook (홍형숙),
made in 2009 and released in 2010, presented an exemplary case
of the bordered mentality of the post Cold War condition not
only in South Korea but also in East Asia in general. Song Du-yul,
a political philosopher teaching in Germany during his 37-year
exile, is a South Korean dissident figure. After he finished his
doctoral studies in 1972, supervised by Jürgen Habermas, Song
began to make his visits to North Korea, inspired by the idea of
Ostpolitik, ‘change through rapproachement’, that was emerging
in West Germany in 1970s, with the sense of mission that he
could serve as a bridge to help the mutual communication and
understanding between the two Koreas. From 1973 onward, Song
visited North Korea 18 times and joined the Workers’ Party of
Korea. He wrote articles on North Korea, and also organized
large-scale protests in 1980 in Berlin protesting against the
violent military suppression of the Gwangju Uprising. All these
activities made him a leading progressive figure of the
democratic movements in South Korea, but also a suspect of
treason for the government. Upon his return to Seoul in 2003, he
was soon detained by the National Intelligence Service,
interrogated and held in custody for 9 months, and finally
sentenced in 2004 as guilty of “public enemy and Espionage” for
having aided activities of the anti-state and pro-North Korea
organizations, and had to serve the penalty of a 7-years’
imprisonment. After his appeal, he obtained a five-year
suspension and then left for Germany to resume his teaching.
This charge was cancelled and he was sentenced as not
guilty in 2008.[4]
The documentary The Border City II acutely
grasped the turmoil and the tensely aroused sentiments among the
general public. The vehement resentment and suspicion triggered
by Song’s event, the indignant and self-righteous criticism, and
the sharp hostility against anything that is associated with the
colour ‘red’, flooded rapidly and overwhelmed the entire
society. The communist-phobia and the imperative of patriotism
as depicted by the director Hong Hyung-sook are as real as it
had been in the Cold War era. Song’s objection to give up his
German citizenship and his insistence to remain as a ‘border
citizen’ with bi-nationality, in this occasion, was even more
intolerable to them. The media presented him as the ‘greatest
spy’ in South Korea since the end of World War II. Whether it
was the conservative right wing or the progressive left, people
began to question his moral status due to the ambiguity of his
loyalty to South Korea. People from the conservative camps
boldly expressed their opinions, when interviewed in the
streets, that Song ‘should be treated with the highest penalty,
even death’ (The Border City II 2009). The
progressive camps, on the other hand, demanded Song to apologize
in public for his misconduct so that his case would not damage
the image of the progressive party in the coming election. None
of the human rights lawyers from the democratic camps,
furthermore, was willing to stand up to defend for him. The
camera captured the cruel and humiliating scene in which the
crowded reporters besieged the car, crawling upon the front
window, with non-stop flashlight on Song in the car.
South Korea had long ended the dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan (전두환) and begun its democratic system since 1990s. The June 15th
North-South Joint Declaration signed by the leaders of North
Korea and South Korea in 2000 also had agreed, among other
issues, to resolve the question of reunification independently
and through the joint efforts of the Korean people. Following
the example of the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989, the June 15th
North-South Joint Declaration in 2000 appeared to indicate a
relaxation of the hostility from both sides of the borders.
Numerous families were reunited after the 50-year separation due
to the result of the negotiations. On the Freedom Bridge, 38th
Parallel, that separates but also links the two sides of the DMZ
zone, hang countless colourful cloth strips written with
blessing words with nostalgic sentiments for the separated
families and friends on the other side.
The Korean Demilitarized Zone, DMZ, turns out to be a unique
aestheticization of the political will not merely of the two
Korean States, but also of the Cold War between US and
USSR-China.
The DMZ, 250 kilometres (160 miles) long, approximately 4 km
(2.5 mi) wide, is the terrain on which the law of armistice
agreement was enforced since 1953, upon the closure of the
Korean War. Though it is named the ‘Demilitarized Zone’, it is
in fact highly militarized, stationed and patrolled not only by
the two Korean military forces, but also supported by US
military forces on one side of the border, and
USSR and PRC
military forces on the other side. The Armistice Agreement in
1953 specified clearly what sorts of weapons and how many
military personnel are allowed in the DMZ. Even though the North
and the South Koreas agreed to withdraw their troops from the
central front line, later it was discovered that there were four
incursive secret underground tunnels crossing the DMZ dug by
North Korea, the last one discovered in 1990.
Intensely guarded from both sides, with the zone between the
Northern Limit Line and the Southern Limit Line, the DMZ serves
exactly as the buffer zone controlled by various forces and thus
an ‘object’ of international politics, as discussed by Carl
Schmitt in the case of Germany as a ‘demilitarized zone’ in
1925, though in different historical contexts (Ulmen 2003: 12).
Even though each side acknowledges the demilitarization of the
‘border’, the tense hostility and aggressiveness nevertheless
traversed under the calm surface. The aggressive act did not
only come from the North, but also from the South; moreover, it
was not only expressed by the spokesmen representing the
governments, but also and above all expressed in daily life
experience with different degree of subtle variations among the
general publics. As a buffer zone, the DMZ guards not only
against the external threats and attacks, but also against
internal instability, and therefore serves as an inward-directed
security line penetrating domestic sectors of local societies.
Song Du-yul’s case ignited the violent but self-justified hatred
among the civilians of the democratic society of the South
Korea. The Cold War mentality was maintained and re-discharged
in different displaced forms with psychological barricades in
different corners of the society. Song deliberately returned to
South Korea to test whether this society could free itself from
the rigidity of opposition and accept him, after all the years
of democratic practice. But in the end he had to face the open
trial not only at the court under the National Security Act, but
also by the entire population basing on the regime of the
sensible, that is, their shared common moral feelings, political
judgment, distribution of aesthetic tastes, partition of the
rightful places in the society, and so on. The ‘border city’ in
which Song insisted in inhabiting, a zone of ambiguity that
blurred the demarcation of the two states, is too foreign to the
citizens of the South Korea to come to terms with.
Intervened and over-determined border: Taiwan Strait Crises in
1950s
An analogous case also took place in Taiwan. Lin Yifu
(林毅夫),
who gave up his graduate studies and joined the army as a
captain in the ROC Army in Taiwan and was reputed as a patriotic
student in the newspaper at that time, ‘defected’ to Mainland
China in 1979, by swimming from Quemoy (also
know as Kinmen, Jinmen
金門)
to the near by island Xiamen of the Fujian Province.
[5] It was the year when the normalization
between PRC and US was established, and PRC and ROC announced
the agreement to cease the bombardment across the Taiwan Strait.[6]
Lin later finished his doctoral studies at the University of
Chicago in US, returned to China and became a leading economist,
served as consultant to major international organizations,
senior vice president of the World Bank and was elected a
Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2010.[7]
But, more than two decades after the lifting of the martial law
since 1987 and the opening of the communication across the
Taiwan Strait, with the current massive population of Taiwanese
merchants inhabiting in different cities in China, with over
1,500,000 people and
1295 million US dollars investment in the year of 2013,
Lin was still denied his re-entry into Taiwan by the ROC
government, not even to participate his father’s funeral, due to
the fact that the charge of desertion was still in effect. In a
recent statement announced by the vice Minister of National
Defense of ROC on the 17th of April, 2011, applying
‘the criminal law of the armed forces’, a law instituted in 1940
during the Sino-Japan war, Lin’s case was still identified as
‘the hindrance of military service’ and shall be punished by
either death penalty, life imprisonment or a sentence of at
least 10 years in jail. The announcement also stressed that
there’s ‘no expiry date of the prosecution’ in Lin’s case
(Kastner 2011). In January 13, 2014,
the Prosecutor’s Office of Martial Court of the Ministry of
Military Defense still announced the routine warrant of the
order for arrest for Lin at all police offices, airports and
ports.[8]
The Taiwan Strait, a water border between PRC and ROC, is not
only a highly militarized but also a highly politicized zone;
more specifically, it has been used as the manoeuvring field
between PRC and US. The distance between the island and the
mainland ranges from 130 KM to 400 KM, with Quemoy located
approximately 10 KM distance from Xiamen. When we now look back
into the historical conjunctures
of the two Taiwan Strait Crises in the 1950s, we realize that
these events cannot be described as merely the continuation of
the civil war between KMT and
CPC
that ended in 1949. The political conditions of the Taiwan
Strait Crises were complex and over-determined, and have to be
examined in the global context, especially through
the strategic balance of power between US and PRC. Loy Henderson, US Foreign Service officer and diplomat stationed in
India, had already remarked that, after the second World War,
the US international policies had become global in its nature.
Truman’s military disposition throughout the world was
carefully planned. Taiwan’s location is crucial in the traffic
routes between Japan and South East Asia, including Philippine
and Okinawa. Washington had decided to control Taiwan so that
communist China would not take it as a springboard to extend the
power of the communist camp (Chang 1990: 70-80). Various recent
studies also have pointed out that what US and PRC were
contending during the 1950s was the power over East Asia, and
Taiwan happened to be the leverage of this power play between
these two greater forces (Chang 1990; Garver 1997: 1-8,
112-147; Tucker 2005: 190).
In the first Taiwan Strait Crisis from 1954 to 1955, Taiwan
was obviously utilized by Mao Zedong to hold back US’s expanding
control over East Asia. Starting from the beginning of the
Korean War, the 7th Fleece of US Navy officially
positioned itself in Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. The 7th
Fleet also moved its force to the Taiwan Strait on the 26th
of June in 1950 to prevent PRC’s military ‘liberation’ of ROC in
the confusion of the war. In addition, US started to seek
alliance through the SEATO during 1953 and 1954. The
Sino-American Mutual Defence Treaty, signed in 1954 between US
and ROC, indicated the agreement that ROC maintains the
legitimacy as the sole government of the whole of Mainland China
and that US will aid and provide military support protecting
ROC, including Taiwan and Pescadores, against the invasion of
the communist China.
The intention of US to expand its military power over East
Asia irritated Mao Zedong. Right after the ceasefire agreement
on the DMZ and the closure of the Korean War signed at the
Geneva Conference in July 1954, Mao Zedong sent a telegram to
Zhou Enlai, stating the decision to ‘liberate Taiwan’ in order
to put an end to the military intervention of US in the East
Asian regions. The
People’s Liberation Army of PRC started to bombard Quemoy on
September 3, 1954, and
the
tension was heightened to the point that there was a real threat
of nuclear attack from US against PRC. The crisis was released
at the Bandung Conference held in 1955 when Zhou Enlai declared
that PRC sought only peace and had no intention to start a war
against US, and expressed the willingness to discuss with US
concerning the relaxation of the tension in the area of Taiwan.
The
Sino (PRC)-US Ambassadorial Talks began in 1955, first at Geneva
and later in Warsaw, and lasted for 136 times till Kissinger’s visits in 1971, opened the path for the normalization
of US-PRC relations.
The
second Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958 proved once again that the
status of Quemoy, as well as Taiwan, was used as the testing
field and as object of manoeuvre concerning the US-PRC contest
of power over East Asia. Early studies on the 1958 Taiwan
Strait Crisis by American scholars tend to suggest that Chiang
Kai-shek successfully maneuverer the situation to involve
Washington in a military confrontation with communist China, so
that the KMT government can take the advantage of the enlarged
scale of the battle to recover the mainland. According to these
studies, Chiang Kai-shek was the one who made use of the subtle
tension between US and PRC and controlled the key of the
conflict to the extent that his diplomatic tactics far surpassed
Mao Zedong. Chiang Kai-shek was the only winner in that event,
while US was the total looser (Tsou 1959: 14-18, 23-24, 46;
Eliades 1993: 345-346, 365; Soman 1994: 374-376, 378-398; Tucker
1994: 51-52; Taylor 2009). Other studies, however, suggested
that US remained ambiguous in its policies toward the Taiwan
question from the beginning of the 1950s. Even though US and ROC
signed the Sino-American Mutual Defence Treaty in December 1954,
following the Southeast Asia Collective Defence Treaties signed
in September 1954, as a preventive and anti-communist act to
contain the Chinese communist powers, claimed by US as the
‘common threat’, from spreading over East Asian areas,
Eisenhower and Dulles never promised to fight for ROC government
if there was a real war (Chang 1990: 121, 136-145; Garver 1997:
112-114; Tucker 2005; 53-54). Recent studies based upon the
release of Chiang Kai-shek’s diary also testified that Chiang
Kai-shek was not at all in control of the situation and was very
frustrated by the changing policies of the White House, from
Truman to Eisenhower, concerning the Taiwan Strait question.
Chiang Kai-shek even declined the proposal to attack the
mainland suggested by General Sun Li-ren and criticized his
reliance on the US as unpractical and dangerous (Chang 2011:
633-658).
By
1957, US had rapidly strengthened the military forces of ROC
government, including the Martin
MGM-1 Matador, with W5 fission warhead, at the
Taichung Ching-Chuan-Kang
Airport that was reopened and expended in 1954, basing on the
Sino-American Mutual Defence Treaty. Chiang Kai-shek had moved
one-third of the military forces to the offshore islands,
including Quemoy, Penghu and Matsu. Mao Zedong announced
his decision to bombard Quemoy on the opening day of the
Beidaihe meeting, the extended meeting of the CCP Politburo, on
August 17, 1958. According to Mao Zedong’s address to the people
in Taiwan, this shelling was ‘an act of punishment’ to check
back US’s ambition over East Asia (Ye 1988: 678-680).
But, the act to bombard Quemoy involved more complicated
factors.
1958 was the year when the situation in Middle East became
intense. The Hashemite Monarch of Iraq was overthrown by the
pro-Soviet Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party on July 14, 1958, and the
US and British troops quickly moved into Iraq on July 15, 1958,
to support the Hashemite government (Shen 2007: 85-86). Upon the
intervention of the US and British armies that moved into
Lebanon and Jordan, Mao Zedong announced the decision to shell
Quemoy in order to show PRC’s support to the Arabian people’s
war in the Middle East by holding the US’s military forces in
the Far East (Chen 2001: 185-186; Shen 2007: 649-656). Mao’s
reason for the shelling in the name of the Middle East
brotherhood, however, could not stand as the single motive
because, before his declaration of bombardment, UK and US had
recognized the new government and begun to withdraw their
military forces from Jordan and Lebanon. Chen Jian therefore
stated that, ‘by that time, the tension in the Middle East had
already been greatly reduced’, and that since early August,
Washington and London had both ‘had begun to withdraw their
troops from Lebanon and Jordan.’ There was no longer the need to
detain the US forces. ‘As a result, Mao’s original rationale to
shell Quemoy—‘to support the people in the Middle East’—was no
longer a valid justification for the decision’ (Chen 2001:
172,181). Chen Jian further suggested, “the logical
interpretation … can only be that [Mao] was driven by domestic
political considerations’ (Chen 2001:
181). Later that year on September 8, 1958, Mao said:
To
whose benefit is the tense situation of Taiwan? … Now our
country is entirely mobilized. If there were thirty to forty
millions people on the streets protesting in the event of the
Middle East, now we can three hundred millions mobilized so that
they can get some education and training. It would be good for
the unification of the different democratic parties. Different
parties can share the common goal. The resentment and unhappy
experience from the past caused by the criticism could then be
dispersed (Ye 1988: 416).
Mao
was referring to the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1957 in which
the ‘rightists’ inside the CPC suffered from severe persecuted.
Mao’s initiation of the Great Leap Forward as the next step for
the ‘uninterrupted revolution’ in 1958 indicated his intention
to move away from the ideological and political fronts fought in
1957 and head toward the next revolution to catch up with
USSR
(Chen 2001: 204).
Yitzhak Shichor, a professor of political science and Asian
studies at the University of Haifa and the Hebrew University
Jerusalem, suggested a different aspect involved in the Taiwan
Strait Crisis in 1958. Shichor pointed out that even though
China criticized the imperial ambition of UK and US during the
event of Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, China never
really meant to get militarily involved in the Middle East.
China’s strategy was to gain more alliance from the Arabic
nations and, from the total isolation from 1950 to1955, China
gradually gained the recognition by seven countries from Middle
East, including Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria and
Sudan after the Bandung Conference in 1955. As to the 1958
Taiwan Strait Crisis, Yitzhak Shichor suggested that the
shelling of Quemoy was in fact an indication of the increasing
friction between Beijing and Moscow (Shichor 1979: 89-96).
The
changing situation in the Middle East in the 1950s testified the
turnover of the greater power from UK and France to the hands of
USSR and US. PRC in late 1950s was on the one hand beginning to
alienate from USSR after Nikita
Khrushchev’s secret speech in
1956,
at the 20th Party Congress, denouncing Stalin’s
purges,
and on the other hand still working on the balance of power to
contain US’s expansion and to hold its military stations it
established in Taiwan, Lebanon and other places all over the
world. Mao said on September 5, 1958 that the Taiwan question is
a strategy of ‘noose’ (jiao-suo-zheng-ce
絞索政策):
‘the neck of US was hung in the iron noose controlled by China.
… Where there is a US military base, there is a noose that hung
itself up. … The US made the noose, hang itself up and throw the
end of the noose to China so that we can hold it’ (Mao 1999:
407, 413; Ye 1988: 407; 413).
Considering the historical conjunctures in the global scene,
Taiwan Strait Crises in the 1950s were symptomatic. Determined
by various conditions, including the contest of power of PRC and
US over East Asia as well as over Middle East, the domestic
frictions caused by the Anti-Rightist movement in 1957, the
competition and growing alienation between PRC and USSR, all
made the site of Taiwan Strait a field of power play, while the
reinforced border caused by the two crises left indelible marks
on the communities located on both sides of the Strait.
Chen Jian observed that though the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis
successfully mobilized the people, China paid a great price for
it, including the worsened relation between Beijing and Moscow,
the increased tension between China and US, the three-year
famine and the unnatural death of two to three million people
that
resulted from the Great Leap Forward started
in 1958. The ‘uninterrupted revolution’ eventually ‘led
to a greater disaster on the path toward Cultural Revolution’
(Chen 2001: 204). Moreover, McCarthyism became an internalized
and displaced regime of the sensible in communist China, but
functioned in a reversed form. All relations or traces
associated with US or Taiwan are viewed as dangerous and
classified as ‘rightist’ or ‘capitalist’. Intellectuals were
crudely persecuted under the classification. The ‘class
contradiction’ in the era of the Cold War divide took its shape
that was determined by its opposite. The State holds its
dominant position by fixing its internal ‘enemy’ in order to
stabilize its central power structure.
Taiwan on the other hand had become a typical example of the
anti-communist camp, or communist-phobic state, shaped by US.
Consequently McCarthyism functioned more effectively in Taiwan
under the state of emergence, through
executing
the
Martial Law and the Garrison Command. The Publishing Act in
Taiwan, for example, which was established by the KMT Nanjing
Government in 1930, went through two major revisions, the first
in 1952 and the second in 1958, was one excuse to arrest people
whose thoughts and behaviours were suspicious, and to put them
in jail in the name of national security. There were numerous
cases of intellectuals, publishers and reading groups members
being accused, arrested, imprisoned or executed. Cases of murder
or execution, under the crime of conspiracy or alliance with
communist rebellious members or spies, amounted up to 4000-5000
people. More than 8000 people were kept life-imprisonment. The
popular saying expressed the state of mind of that time: ‘There
is a little “jingzong” [office of the Garrison Command]
in the heart of everyone.’ The internalized border checkpoint
functions not only against other people but also against
oneself. The result of the Cold War Divide was that the history
of the first half of the twentieth century, especially the parts
associated with the Chinese leftist movement and the socialist
revolution, were effaced from the history textbooks and from the
memories of the people in Taiwan.
Post-1989 Cold War structure and border consciousness
As Étienne
Balibar pointed out, the erasure of old borders or strategic
‘blocs’ in recent decades after the disintegration of the Soviet
Union does not prevent the emerging multiplications of borders
in the heart of civic space that serve as collective and
fetishist limit lines, separating identities and controlling
population. Balibar suggested that these displaced forms of
borders are actually remnants of historical records from the
foundation of the modern nation-state.
The proposal of European citizenship and Euro bloc in
fact introduced the global capitalist monopoly into local
economic system while at the same time revived the border
politics implied in the definition of citizenship that is
nationalistic in nature (Balibar 2004: 110).
The case in East Asia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union
in 1989, though different from the situation in Europe, is
analogous in various ways. In East Asia, the communication and
the peace talk across the Taiwan Strait after the lifting of the
martial law in Taiwan, or the end of the Cold War, likewise,
does not suggest that the peace relation is really established.
On the surface, the rapid growth of economic development in
China in the 1990s and the commercial exchange across the Taiwan
Strait, with huge increases in the business population in
several big cities in China, seemed to depict a prospect of
liberalist market and a harmonious collaboration on various
fronts. But, the introduction of global capitalist monopoly
created drastic change in Chinese societies, not only widening
the gap between the rich and the poor, but also causing the
irremediable friction between camps of the neo-liberalist
intellectuals and the socialist intellectuals. Moreover,
underneath the surface of economic growth and commercial
exchange, nationalist sentiments were increased through the
exposure of encounters. Taiwan in the 1990s appeared to be much
more economically developed than Mainland China, while in 2000s
the conditions seemed to have changed to the opposite. The
nostalgia for the homeland cherished by those people who either
immigrated to Taiwan in 1949 along with KMT government, or by
the younger generations who held the cultural history as their
own heritage, was soon shattered by the disillusionment at the
sights of the people and the long-gone hometowns that they
observed in early 1990s. The contrast between the two worlds on
the two sides of the Strait intensified the conflicting and
defensive mechanism on both sides for various reasons.
The 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis in which PRC issued a series
of missile tests to warn against President Lee Teng-hui’s policy
of Taiwan independence and to intimidate the run-up of the 1996
presidential election was one key moment that created severe
antagonist feelings among Taiwanese people against PRC. The
Anti-Secession Law (反分裂國家法)[9]
– passed by the third conference of the 10th National
People’s Congress of the PRC and ratified on March 14, 2005 –
was another incident that ignited once again the tension over
the Taiwan Strait. As a whole, the Anti-Secession Law claims to
promote the people-to-people contact as well as scientific,
economic and cultural exchanges between PRC and ROC. But this
law also prepared the ground for suppression through military
force due to the fact that in the 8th Article it
clearly states that the PRC State can use ‘non-peaceful action’
if Taiwan declares independence so that the possibility for
‘peaceful unification is lost’. In order to arrive at this
preventative measure, the presumption behind the text is that:
first, Taiwan is part of the territory of China and the current
Taiwan question is a question left unresolved from the civil war
of the 1940s; second, ‘safeguarding China’s sovereignty and
territorial integrity’ is the common obligation of all Chinese
people, including the ‘Taiwan compatriots’; third, the Taiwan
question is China’s ‘internal affair’ and subject to ‘no
interference by any outside forces.’ The Anti-Secession Law also
specifies that, when the event occurs,
the
State Council and the Central Military Commission can ‘decide on
and execute the non-peaceful means and other necessary measures’
before they report to the Standing Committee of the National
People's Congress (Lieberthal 2005; Zakaria 2005). This
Anti-Secession Law also is reinforced through the expansion of
the Second Artillery Force of the Chinese People’s Liberation
Army (PLA) and the enhancement of the ballistic missile
infrastructure opposite Taiwan in the following years (see
Stokes 2011).
Taiwan certainly does not agree with the PRC’s territorial
inclusion and the Anti-Secession Law reminded people’s
resentment against the gigantic and threatening power from
China. The claim of national sovereignty, however, is by no
means a settled issue and in fact creates heated polemical
debates within Taiwan. The proponents of Taiwan nativist
independent movement radically challenged the legitimacy of
Chiang Kai-shek’s ROC government that moved from Mainland China
to Taiwan in 1949. They claimed that the history of Taiwan is
entirely separate from that of Chinese culture and, defined
according to the locale of Taiwan, its written history extends
only for 400 years, paradoxically starting from Zheng
Chenggong’s settlement in Taiwan as a gesture of rejection of
the Qing government and as the continuation of the previous Ming
Dynasty that was overthrown by the Qing government. The ROC
government, the one succeeded from the 1911 revolution that
overturned the Qing Dynasty, is criticized by the Taiwanese
nativists as a foreign regime, exiled from China, intruding and
colonizing Taiwan as what the preceding colonial governments had
done, from the Dutch, the Portugal, the Qing, to the Japanese
governments. The
Democratic Progressive Party ratified a document concerning the
‘Resolution of Taiwan’s Future’ in its eighth annual national
assembly on May 7-8, 1999 in Kaohsiung, declaring that the
independence of Taiwan began in 1996, the year when the first
popular presidential election in Taiwan was held.[10]
Huang Kun-hui, the current chair of Taiwan Solidarity Union,
also criticized the ROC constitution as a phantom constitution,
a constitution drafted in Chiang Kai-shek’s era, that still
considers Mainland China as part of ROC’s territory and
sovereignty.[11]
The old anti-communist position or communist-phobia attitude
resumed and displaced by today’s anti-China discourse upheld by
the Democratic Progressive Party.
The sharp disputes and language battle in Taiwan in 2011
concerning the use of Romanization to replace Chinese characters
demonstrated another typical example of the inverted and
internalized security line that marks different territories and
separates different loyalties. Huang Chun-Ming, a well-known
Taiwanese novelist of the elder generation who was crowned as
the representative of local Taiwanese writers because of his use
of Taiwanese dialects in his depictions of down-to-earth and
marginalized personage from small villages, complained in a
conference on Taiwanese Literature about the translation of his
works by the Taiyuwen promoters through Romanization that
changed his work entirely.[12]
While he was delivering his presentation,
Chiung Wi-vun, an advocator for the Taiyuwen movement and
a professor from the Department of Taiwanese Language and
Literature of Cheng Gong University located in Tainan, stopped
Huang’s presentation and criticized him as ‘shameless’ because
he was using ‘the language of China’ instead of ‘the language of
Taiwan’, so-called Taiyuwen. The reasoning behind the
Taiyuwen movement is that the ‘majority’ of Taiwanese people
use Taiwanhua in their daily lives, and therefore it
should be the national language and the written script should
reflect the phonic pattern and syntax of the spoken language
through transliteration with Latin Romanization.[13]
Chiung Wi-vun Taiffalo (2005), as one of the chief proponents of
POJ, along with people from the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan,
insisted on replacing Han characters with POJ as Taiwanese
national language. He argued that the marginalized regions of
the Chinese Empire, such as Vietnam, Korea and Japan,
respectively gained their independent national identity through
de-sinolization, i.e., abandoning the use of Han characters and
replacing them with Romanization, and therefore Taiwan should
follow suit too (Wi-yun 2005: 1-25 and 88-142). He even stressed
that the first Taiwanese literature, instead of the ones written
in Chinese language in late nineteen century, was the ones
written in POJ (Wi-yun 2005: 35-36).
The use of transliteration to render indigenous dialects or
vernacular Taiwanhua with Latin alphabets dated back in
the 17th century when the Dutch people first
colonized Formosa (Taiwan) and used the transliterated version
of the Bible to educate the indigenous people.[14]
The system of Pe̍h-ōe-jī (白話字
POJ), the Romanization of the vernacular language, was later
developed in the second half of the 19th century by
the missionaries from the Presbyterian churches in southern Min
province, first in Xiamen (Amoy) and then in Taiwan.[15]
The Scottish missionary Thomas Barclay started the publication
of Tainan Church News (Tâi-oân-hú-siâⁿ Kàu-hōe-pò)
in 1885 using POJ, the first printed newspaper in Taiwan.[16]
The KMT government banned the use of all dialects in 1969 in the
wave of Chinese Cultural Renaissance in order to serve as a
counter-force against the Cultural Revolution started in PRC.
After the lifting of the martial law and the turnover of the
government from the mainland-centered ideology to the
nativist-oriented ideology in the 1990s, POJ education was
promoted again, especially by representative figures from the
Presbyterian Church.[17]
The paradox in the nativist POJ movement lies in the fact that
so-called taiwanhua or taiyuwen, ‘Taiwan
language’, is also named as southern Min dialect, the language
used in the southern area of the Fujian province where most
early Taiwanese settlers immigrated from, starting from around
mid-seventeenth century, when Zheng Zhilong and his son Zheng
Chenggong recovered Taiwan from the Dutch colonial government.[18]
The problem with the Romanization of the Taiwanhua is
that the northern and the southern speakers of Minnanhua
(Taiwanhua) dialectics have different pronunciations and
it requires different phonic markers for the orthography of
these different pronunciation systems. Moreover, the languages
spoken in Taiwan, besides Taiwanhua and Mandarin
(Beijinghua), also include Hakha language and aboriginal
languages, such as Amis, Atayal, Paiwan, Bunun, Rukai, Puyuma,
Tsou, Saysiat, Tao Yami, Thao, Kavalan, Taroko, Sakizaya and
Seediq.[19]
In addition to the above listed living languages used in Taiwan,
there are 12 more aboriginal tribes and their languages that
have not been officially recognized. There are more and more new
immigrant workers from different parts of the world and settled
in Taiwan as inhabitants. There is also the large population who
used Japanese language in their early life during the Japanese
colonial period, who were banned the use of Japanese in public
after 1950s, and are still using it in their daily life and in
their gatherings with old friends.[20]
To transliterate with Romanization the different phonic system
of these diverse spoken languages and to fulfil the function of
communication would be a nearly impossible task.
The irony in the POJ project is also manifest in the fact that
the task of Romanization was originally a practice by the
colonial government with the purpose to educate and to transmit
Christian doctrines as well as Western knowledge to the natives
in Taiwan. The
Peh-oe-ji proponents renounced the long tradition of the written
Han character and labelled the act to turn to the Latin
alphabets as ‘de-colonization’ while paradoxically subsuming its
own position to the Christianization project of the British
Empire.
But, the real stake of this issue is that, while relying on the
phonic system, the proponents for the Romanization of Taiwanese
as national language not only do not count people with different
phonic patterns but also sacrifices the multi-faceted dimension
of the Chinese characters, its semantic associations, cultural
allusions and the intertextuality of the written characters that
have undergone a long history of mutations, capable of being
super-inscribed, re-formulated, re-translated, usurped, and
created, that is, to transgress all sorts of borders through the
play of language. To claim national sovereignty basing on the
visibility of the phonetic territory of the language is to
fixate in an imaginary and fetishist mode onto the sound pattern
that was in fact over-determined by historical conditions, to
deny the co-existence of complex variations that are present in
the contemporary languages, and to reduce the complex
combination of the pictographic, phonetic and semantic
components of the Chinese characters to its phonetic façade,
with no semantic cross-references. The battlefield along the
borderline separating ‘the language of Taiwan’ against ‘the
language of China’ testifies once again the inverted security
mechanism and the displaced form of border politics.
Taiwan question: a juridical case of the international law?
Arguing on the positivistic legal level of the international
law, challenging the validity of the ROC government’s de jure
sovereignty over Taiwan, Chen Lung-Chu and W. M. Reisman once
suggested in 1967 that the Cairo Declaration was merely a
non-binding ‘press release’, that neither Cairo Declaration nor
the Potsdam Declaration could make disposition of the legal
title of Taiwan or effect a transfer of that legal title to the
Republic of China, and therefore neither ROC government nor PRC
government has sovereignty over Taiwan. This declaration was not
in the official treaty archives of either the United States or
Japan, and should not be considered as a treaty by the involved
parties.[21]
A
more instructive case was a 1959 court case, Cheng Fu Sheng
v. Rogers, in the United States in which the question
whether ‘Formosa is part of China’ was raised.[22]
The case concerns whether an alien, natives and citizen of
China, should be deported to Formosa instead of the mainland of
China. The statement made by the course clearly indicated that,
since the sovereign, de jure or de facto, of a
territory, is not a judicial, but a political, question, the
court insisted that this question should be decided by the
executive and legislative departments of the Government. In the
case report, the attitude of the US State Department obviously
put the status quo of Taiwan into question because ‘the
sovereignty of Formosa has not been transferred to China’ and
hence it was just ‘a territory or an area occupied and
administered by the Government of the Republic of China, but is
not officially recognized as being a part of the Republic of
China’.
Viewed in the light of the US court statement that
differentiates the act of Japan’s renunciation of the right to
Taiwan from the transferability of Taiwan’s sovereignty to the
Republic of China, we come to understand the problematic aspect
of the positivistic juridical dimension of the international law
that is exposed by the case of Taiwan. The shifting of the US’s
recognition from ROC to PRC in the 1970s, followed by other
countries, and the cancellation of ROC’s status as membership of
UN, one of the founding members, all testified the arbitrariness
of the juridical political status defined by international law.
Here, we face the entangled questions of the sovereign state of
Taiwan and the concept of border as defined by the constitution
in relation to the international law. The dilemma that the ROC
government has faced is the fact that, in the constitution
instituted in 1912 and modified basing on various treaties, ROC
national sovereignty covers the entire geographical territory
that was settled prior to 1949, and does not recognize the Outer
Mongolia’s independence that was signed in the Sino-Soviet
Treaty and later recognized by PRC. Even though the constitution
has undergone several revisions and supplementations in
different historical moments, especially after the lifting of
the martial law, the core of the constitution, that is, the
claim of its national territorial sovereignty, is not to be
altered. The result is that the map of ROC presents an illusory
and fictional space, frozen in time, which does not exist in
contemporary world. ROC
government could not bring itself to revise the territorial
scope, that is, the sovereignty over Taiwan, Penhu, Quemoy and
Mazu, to adapt to current reality because, in that case, it
means renouncing the ‘One China’ legacy by claiming independence
from China, and hence would invite the military threat from the
PRC government.
The
constitution on which the State is established turns out to be
the law that constrains the mutations of the State. The State is
bound by the law and cannot re-adjust itself to the currently
altered and still changing states, constitutive population and
international relations. Under these constituted conditions, the
people of the State also lost their popular sovereignty and
their constituting capacity concerning the community of its
entirety. What makes the Taiwan question even more peculiar is
the fact that the sovereignty that has been claimed by the ROC
government is put into question because of the switch of
international recognition of the one-China representation from
ROC to PRC in the 1970s. The Republic of China, even though a
founding member of the United Nations, lost its seat at the
United Nations Security Council since 1971. The Republic of
China thus becomes an unrecognized and unrepresented political
entity on the stage of world politics (see Lee 2010; Wang 2009;
and Zhao 2007).
The
stake in the Taiwan Question therefore is manifold. First, the
shifting of the recognition from ROC to PRC on the level of
international law indicates a change of balance of political and
economic forces in the international arena, and not the de
facto relations between political entities or political
societies. Second, the switching of recognition between nations
on the de jure level from one to the other would
literally make the un-recognized political entity into an
unsubstantial state denied on the de facto level. The
residents of the unrecognized political entity turn out to be
invisible and uncounted on the world stage, difficult to cross
the borders, and not being able to participate on equal terms
the international or intergovernmental organizations, such as
World Health Organization and the rest.
Third, the single representation of one nation-state makes the
peaceful evolution and creation of a new form of community
impossible. It seems that we cannot conceive a new form of
nation-state or a different mode of social state except the one
that is defined by the positivistic international law or the one
settled by wars or revolutions. Fourth, the logic of the United
Nations and the international law operate clearly on the
consensual regime and the majority votes among the nations of
greater powers could easily neglect the voice of the
unrepresented minor communities. Taiwan, a de-substantialized
political entity, then has become a point d'appui of the
lever between the two great forces, US versus China. In order to
keep the balance, Taiwan has to remain its status quo.
Finally, the demilitarized border along the Taiwan Strait, with
its heavily politicized ideological boundaries on various
levels, has been inverted as its people’s mental fortresses,
loaded with historical remnants leftover from the Japanese
colonial history, the Sino-Japan war, Chinese civil war between
the communist party and the nationalist party, the ethnic
frictions caused by the 2-28 incident, and the communist-phobia
rooted in the Cold War era. Enhanced by the political and
cultural policies of each succeeding government, such as the
erasure of the language used by the majority population of the
preceding government and privileging the language of the current
majority population as its ‘national language’, the bordered
mentality then becomes a living factor in the daily life
experience.[23]
Re-assessing Schmitt’s concept of Nomos
How to re-think and formulate a ‘of the state’, how to radically
recast ‘the relations between people and sovereignty,
citizenship and community’, and how to invent ‘new institutions
for the public sphere’ and to ‘democratize the border’, as
suggested by Balibar
(Balibar 2002b: 79-85; 2004: 108-110, 111-114)? To democratize
the border, to my mind, means to face the question of the
historical formations of the institutions of the border, to
challenge its legitimation and naturalization, to examine the
logic and the effect of the formation, to open it up to a
topological vision of the state participated by each and every
one within the community, and to emancipate the discriminatory
function of the borders formed by language in all aspects. The
juridical and positivistic borders cannot reflect the de
facto social relations or conflicts of the inhabitants in
any social space that have developed and changed through the
passage of time. To relocate the question of nomos and
the processes of land-appropriation, wall-establishment and
ruler-institution, to the question of the constituted as well as
the constitutive power of language, could force us to face the
multilateral aspects of the issue from a different perspective.
Carl Schmitt’s social-economic as well as etymological analysis
of the word Nomos and its inherent links with
nehmen
and Nahme have already pinpointed the ‘brutal
imperialism’ and ‘atavistic criminality’ of land taking and land
holding procedures of the nomos of the earth.[24]
The history of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries in
East Asia is a long process of the transformation of the new
order that seizes the dominant power of the region. Schmitt also
pointed out that Japan was recognized as a Great Power after its
victories first in the Sino-Japanese war in 1894 and then in the
Russo-Japanese war in 1904-1905. The war of Eight-Nation
Alliance against China in 1900 further settled the
redistribution of the Great Powers
in the age of the imperialist expansion that changed the
border of the Western Hemisphere. The
Monroe Doctrine in 1823 was a strategy that practiced the
imperialist power that dominated other countries in South
America. But, at the end of the nineteenth century, a new form
of American Großraum (great space) that extended over the
‘free
sea’
replaced the model of the Monroe Doctrine and demanded
East Asia to follow the policy of ‘open door’ in the name of
liberal economics (Schmitt 2003: 191, 283, 292). The re-mapping
of the geographical borders in East Asia throughout the
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries reflected exactly the
rise of the new world and the replacement of the order of the
earth with the jurisprudence of the international law.
The
change of the juridical status of Taiwan on the world stage had
proved to be the result of the alterations of the world order
and had affected the national identity and the collective
sentiments of the people on the island during the past century.
The visible and ideological qualities of the border have acted
upon the shaping of the people’s perception and feelings. The
demarcations of the hierarchical power strata, furthermore,
legitimize the constitution of the State and the consensus of
the feelings of the people, though the hierarchical stratum
actually arbitrarily and oppressively differentiates the other
parts of the people in the same society.
The
language battle took place on the island proves again the
‘fence-word’ function of the nomos discussed by Schmitt.
Nomos implies the meaning of nemein, i.e., to
divide and to pasture, and therefore is the ‘immediate form in
which the political and social order of a people becomes
spatially visible’ (Schmitt 2003: 70). Examined through the
course of semantic mutations, the word nomos has
undergone changes in its more than three-thousand-year history,
and the shifting of meaning, from nemein [to appropriate,
to take, to seize], teilen [to divide], verteilen
[to distribute] as well as weiden [to pasture], indicate
the change from the nomadic society to the industrial age, and
then to the imperial era. Even though the linguistic
associations between nomos and these variations might
have been forgotten through the course of the phonetic,
morphological and semantic changes in history, etymological
study shows that these separate words shares the same root
Nahme and indicated the changes that took place in the
history of legal, economic and social order, from the pasturing,
to migration, colonization, and conquest, that is, a history of
land-appropriation.[25]
As
a ‘fence-word’, it is ‘not the abolition of war, but rather its
bracketing’, and thus the core problem of every legal order
(Schmitt 2003: 74). Based on the enclosure in the spatial sense,
the nomos can also be described with its ritual and
sacred orientation, and the multiplication of nomos
basing on this single divine nomos. A tribe or a people
become settled by the nomos and the measurement through
which the land is divided and distributed. With the tendency of
power to visibility and publicity, nomos is at the same
time linked to archy, from the source, and to cracy,
power through superior force and occupation. Schmitt
deliberately distinguishes the positivistic legal system, ‘the
mere enactment of acts in line with the ought’, from the
‘spatially concrete, constitutive act of order and orientation’
(Schmitt 2003: 78).
This original act then is the act of nomos. All
subsequent developments are either results of or expansions on
this act or else redistributions – either a continuation on the
same basis or a disintegration of and departure from the
constitutive act of the spatial order established by
land-appropriation, the founding of cities, or colonization (Schmitt
2003: 78). The renewal of the constitutive processes and ‘new
spatial divisions, new enclosures, and new spatial orders of the
earth’ are actualized through the introduction of new nomos
(Schmitt 2003: 79).
What would be the ‘new nomos’ that could be expected
today? Schmitt at the middle of the twentieth century, after
the second world war, suggested in the conclusion of his book
three possibilities: the first is the victory of one of the
dualism of East and West that ends up as the ‘world’s sole
sovereign’, the second is to retain the balance structure of the
previous nomos, and the third is the balance of the
combination of several independent blocs (Schmitt 2003:
354-355). Looking at the present situation, the equilibrium
balance between hegemonic structures or the homogeneity within
each independent bloc appears to be not only unlikely but also
unrealistic. The end of the Cold War between the two blocs in
the post-1989 era introduced the global world order of the
capitalist market while the displaced forms of border politics
still function locally, bringing up previous frictions to the
surface in various substituted forms. The deep-rooted and long
lasting effects of the border consciousness established through
the translation of the international law into local juridical
institutions and ideological frameworks that enacted autonomous
reproduction of the inverted bordered partitions with endless
repetition.
The
nomos in fact serves not only as the figure of land
appropriation and rule setting, but also as the core limit point
that constitutes the fundamental subjective position. As Freud
explained and Bataille elaborated, this core limit point of
separation and exclusion, serves as the mechanism of
introjection/ incorporation and repulsion/exclusion, and
differentiates external objects as good or bad, in the name of
moral, aesthetic as well as political judgment (Bataille 1993:
147-159; 1997: 313-320; Freud 2001: 136-140). This core limit
point of separation and exclusion leads us to the question of
the
fundamental
sovereign act that sets the order of the management of life
discussed by Agamben. For Agamben, the fixation of separation
concerns the conceptual operation of the law that is inscribed
into logos and consequently severs and negates the rest.
Every separation contains or preserves within itself a religious
core on which the exercise of the law is based upon,
either it is the law that
rules the ownership of property and taxation, stipulates civic
and military service, controls entrance and exit, or reinforces
cultural and education policies, that is, all kinds of
management of life (Agamben 1998: 131; 2009: 103; 2011:
17-20, 50).
Language, then, is the mediation that exercises the operation of
the separation. The fixation of the partition and the cut takes
different forms according to the social and political conditions
of historical moments. The concept of the cut, for example, the
coupure de sujet in Lacan, the coupe d’essence in
Althusser, the regime of cut and the effet de cisaille
(shearing effect) in Badiou, the
écart
and the part des sans-part in Rancière,
all involve the ideational operation of separation activated
through language.[26]Agamben’s inquiries into the logic of inclusion and
exclusion, separation and exception, the gap between phones
versus logos, and biopolitical fractures among people, all point
to the dispositive of language and the legitimization of History
that effaces all pre-histories. In Agamben’s studies, the regime
and the disposition of power through language made the community
a commensurate one. Religion exercised the first power of
separation. To profane means to challenge the line of separation
and to restore life that is not separated from its form, a life
in which ‘the single ways, acts, and processes of living are
never simply facts but always and above all
possibilities of life, always and above all power’ (Agamben
2007: 75).
Phonic markers, as discussed previously, would be the obvious
found objects that serve as the border that cope with the
pre-given conceptual frameset and differentiate the they-group
from the we-group. The visibility of the phonetic features then
turns out to be the qualities or attributes for the community to
‘count’ its members.[27]
The battlefield over language territory and the adherence to the
barricades clearly demonstrates the single loyalty to the single
camp located at one historical moment, reinforced by the lately
formed ideology or local power struggles in the last instance,
while renouncing and negating the voice of other participants
with different phonetic patterns. This negation matters not in
terms of the severing of the historical lineage but more
significantly in terms of the denial of the latent presence of
other inhabitants who do not share the same pronunciation
patterns.
Diverting our consideration of the nomos of the earth
from the juridical and positivistic dimension to that of the
activities of language and examining how the same logic of
land-appropriation and land-redistribution took place through
language would allow us to analyse how it functions also as the
archy
of the
formation of subject with national identity and the law
of internal partition among the people. The Cold-War barricade
reproduces itself through the practice of language, and creates
new rationale to reinforce and strengthen the border. We have
observed the conceptual policing operation of the language
policies in Taiwan during the Japanese colonial period in the
first half of the 20th century, the white terror under the
martial law from 1950 to 1987, and the nativist fundamentalist
movement in the 1990s. It is a history of the
empirical-juridical translations of the international law to be
effectuated in local sphere. Each time the nomos of the
sphere was established first of all through the stabilization of
language policies, and the lasting effect of the language
policies is the formation of the subjective identification that
would re-emerge in the following generations with or without the
continuation of the government. It is necessary to examine what
ideological and symbolic violence that language can conduct
through border demarcations in language.
Conclusion: proposal for a topological vision of the state
This chapter has examined the question of border consciousness
that involves the process of double translation: one the first
level, it is an empirical translation of the juridical
international law that is transposed horizontally and inwardly
onto the domestic domain and imposed as the anchorage of the
formation of subject and that of the national identity; on the
second level, it is the subjective translation of the internal
border consciousness outwardly onto the external society,
differentiating domestic enemies according to the logic of
partition and exclusion. The transference function of the
internal limit point, a border line codified by external
symbolic order, translates and extend the subjective position by
locating any target object that is visible in the grid of
measurement as the external features of borders, operating in
the logic of phobic structure. We therefore should seriously
face the question of how to question the border consciousness
constructed by language. We also need to think how to formulate
a ‘new conception of the state,’ as suggested by Balibar, how to
radically recast ‘the relations between people and sovereignty,
citizenship and community,’ and to ‘democratize the institution
of the border’, through a constant act of the emancipation of
language.
I
would like to suggest that, in order to radically re-think the
question of the state and to democratize the border, we need to
face the question of the historicity of the border effectuated
through the imperialist language policies, to challenge its
legitimation and naturalization that concealed and excluded
minor voices in the same communities, to acknowledge its
arbitrariness formulated through language, and to open it up to
the process of intellectual intervention so that the
discriminatory function of the borders in all aspects can be
challenged and that ‘borders’ can serve as the sites of debates
and passage of communication. The main argument of this chapter
then is, unless we undertake rigorous analyses and unravel the
constituting forces behind various language and ideological
borders within the domestic domain and in the global context, we
would not be able to disentangle the repetitive defensive
impulses that seek in different forms to solidify the
demarcating line in the name of the State. This question is all
the more pertinent in view of rising tensions over critical
border sites in East-Asia today between Japan and China – caused
by the disputes over Sankaku Islands – as well as the alarm of
nuclear threat roused by North Korea. These moments of tension
would intensify border consciousness not only between different
governments, but more so within the domestic domains. In order
to recast the relation between people and sovereignty, to
conceptualize a different vision of the state, we need to
constantly confront the polarizations of ideological borders and
to open up a new dimension of localization that could make space
for the uncounted people and to allow the suppressed histories
to re-emerge.
By
questioning the forms of inverted borders, over-determined by
different forces in the name of the juridical laws, reinforced
through language policy and political regimes, and manipulated
by different forms of government in Taiwan, we see more clearly
the reasons why such internal borders are in fact derivatives
and substitutions of constructed borders through language that
attract collective sentiments or separate people on the basis of
habitus and self-interest. The act of land-occupation and
rule-establishment exercised in language, justified by the
national identities, already demonstrates how the society is
divided, segregated, suppressing and even persecuting the
un-counted parts, sans-part as discussed by Rancière,
among the members of the society. The shifting of national
identities of the people in Taiwan every fifty years further
testified the arbitrariness of such identity. Each construction
of identity not only involves statist measures and rules, but
also violent, exclusive and oppressive techniques of
governmentality.
What the POJ project engaged with was to deny the mutation of
the phonetic patterns from ancient time to the present time and
the diverse phonetic patterns that were used by the people
co-habiting in Taiwan by fetishizing ‘the Taiwanese language’
based on one fixated point of historical moment. To acknowledge
the mutation of phonetic patterns does not mean to trace back to
the origin at one point; on the contrary, the acknowledgement of
the mutation actually de-links the single origin while embraces
the re-translation, re-formulation and re-inscribing of the
language through countless variations of phonetic combinations
through migrations over a long passage of time.
We could consider what Zhang Taiyan (章太炎)
formulated as guojia (nation-state
國家)
in 1908, when he was facing the formation of the nation-state at
the turn of the twentieth century. According to Zhang, guojia
should be conceived as the ‘riverbed’ (hechuang
河床),
serving as ‘the place of emptiness’ (kongchu
空處)
that allowed the river to pass by daily. The subjectum (主體)
of the nation was merely a ‘void’ and ‘non-being’ (Zhang 1985:
463), and the guojia was only a dynamic composition, as
the movement of the constitution of the textile woven by warp
and woof (經緯相交，此為組織).
In this sense, the composition of the nation was viewed not as
fixed substance, but as constant re-composition. Zhang also
stressed that the love for the nation (愛國心)
was not to love the fixated present state (所愛者亦非現在之正有),
but to love the composition (組合)
and the ‘not yet germinated’ that is to come in the future (渴望其未萌芽者)
(Zhang 1985: 463; see also Liu 2013).
On
this view, language could also be conceived in its broadest
sense, that is, besides its function of imprisonment, we also
see emancipation. Language is the common sphere to inhabit,
pasture, harvest, and to combat, assimilate, transgress,
translate and recreate. Taiwan, an island with people cohabiting
and intermingling for several centuries, imbricated with diverse
strands of historical processes and cultural components, has
emerged today as a new form of community and as a political
body. This political body has incorporated, as with new organs
and new capacities, not only the already complex multi-ethnic
origins of the Chinese people, but also the various indigenous
tribes, the Dutch, Spanish and Japanese colonial cultural
experiences, and the currently increasing mixture of population
with migrants from South East Asia and other parts of the world.
Having no official international recognition, the various modes
of participation developed by Taiwan with international
organizations such as IOC (International
Olympic Committee),
APEC, WTO, WHA (World Health Assembly),
WHO (World Health Organization)
and the Egmont Group, under different names, though mostly
merely as an observer, has presented Taiwan as a viably flexible
political entity.[28]
The fact that Taiwan cannot participate in most world
organizations on an equal standing, being deprived of the rights
to obtain access to resources from the global communities, such
as medical support, has demonstrated the drawbacks of the
juridical positivistic aspect of the United Nations. But, the
non-governmental and non-official rapports between Taiwan and
other countries, nevertheless, can be carried on in various
non-nationalistic forms, be it cultural, economic, technological
or humanitarian exchanges.
More importantly, the question of Taiwan can take us to face
an alternative mode of thinking: the possibility of a
topological vision of a political society not to be conceived of
as a nation-state-based entity defined by the inter-‘nation’-al
law, but as a political community in a topological mode that is
constantly undergoing re-composition. The concept of the state,
or guojia, then could be conceived not in terms of its
military force, its juridical definition of border, or its
representational status according to the international law, but
as a form of government that both allows people to participate
and re-constitute the State through language activities on the
domestic level, and serves as the intermediary organization of
the state that helps negotiate and communicate with foreign
countries in terms of the exchanges of information,
technologies, commerce, cultures. The de-linking and
re-translational act of language is the only possible position
for us to expose and to critique the violence of border
constructed by pre-given rules and codes of language and to
re-shape the community in a different mode, a community that
allows the act of re-translational passage from the uncounted,
suppressed and the invisible corner to the common space of the
society, a community that welcomes new encounters and constantly
opens up new paths for new capacities.
[1] Macclesfield
Bank, Paracel Islands, Scarborough Shoal, Spratly
Islands and Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu Tai) are well-known
and constantly mentioned examples of territorial
disputes related to PRC and ROC, not to mention the long
list of other examples involved with different countries
in East Asia, such as Japan-Russia, India-China,
South
Korea-Japan, China-South Korea, China-South Tibet, and
so on.
[2] Carl Schmitt
had excellently discussed the concept of ‘the nomos
of the earth’ in his book The Nomos of the
Earth: in the International Lao of the Jus Publicum
Europaeum. My intention is to re-think the nomos
of the earth hinted by Schmitt at the end of the book.
[3] Jacques
Rancière used the term “partage du sensible”, to explain
the commonly shared senses of belonging and partitions,
that is, to be included, partitioned or excluded by the
community. See La mésentente: Politique et
philosophie, or The Politics of Aesthetics: The
Distribution of the Sensible.
[4]
Song was the only
person from South Korea who attended Kim Il-sung’s
funeral in 1994. See Macintyre (2003).
[5]
In a letter to his
family, Lin Yi-fu explained the reason for his
defection: ‘based on my cultural, historical, political,
economic and military understanding, it is my belief
that returning to the motherland is a historical
inevitability; it is also the optimal choice’ (Lin
1980).
[6] The bombardment
was arranged by PRC and ROC to operate only at odd days
of the month, with shells containing propaganda
leaflets, a mutual practice that continued for 21 years
since the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, the 823
Artillery Bombardment in 1958.
[7] Lin received
his Masters’ degree in economics from Beijing University
in 1982, and his PhD in Economics from the University of
Chicago in 1986.
[10] Lyu Xiulian,
former vice president, together with Democratic
Progressive Party, Taiwan Solidarity Union and 30 other
local societies, moved to make the election day of 1996
as the date for the independent day of national
sovereignty.
[11] This criticism
was a response made on the 17th of June,
1911, against President Ma Ying-jiu’s recent praise of
Chiang Kai-shek’s contribution in establishing of the
ROC Constitution (Taiwan Solidarity Union 2011).
[12] It is a
conference on the celebration of one-hundred-years of
the history of Taiwanese Novel, organized by the Bureau
of Culture, that took place in National Museum of Taiwan
Literature, Tainan, May 21-24, 2011.
[13] The proposal
to appropriate Han characters to transliterate Taiwanese
vernacular language also emerge in early Twentieth
century during the Japanese colonial periods, just as
similar practices of vernacular literatures that were
experimented throughout histories. Early in 1929, the
debates on whether writers should use Taiwanhua
as the written language, instead of classical Chinese
language, occupied the intellectuals’ mind for quite
some time. After
various attempts, they came to an understanding of the
fact that Han character was an inevitable vehicle for
the communication on the common ground. See Chen (2008).
[14] See Wikipedia
" Sinckan Manuscripts." Online. Available HTTP: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinckan_Manuscripts>
(accessed 6 July 2011). William Campbell’s (1871-1918)
study in the book Formosa under the Dutch shows
that the Dutch missionary established the schools to
educate and Christianizing the natives, and they
received over five thousand adults into the membership
of the Reformed Church (cited in Chiung 2005). Also,
according to Murakami Naojirō’s
（村上直次郎 1868-1966）study
of the Sinckan Manuscripts (1931), the
researchers have located 141 items of manuscripts
written with the Romanization of the Siraya native
language (cited in Chiung 2005). Sinckan is now the city
of Tainan.
[15] Walter Henry
Medhurst developed the system of Pe̍h-ōe-jī, under the
influence of Robert Morrison’s Romanization of Mandarin
Chinese. Medhurst’s Dictionary of the Hok-këèn
Dialect of the Chinese Language, According to the
Reading and Colloquial Idioms (1832), was the first
reference book that indicates the differences in
intonation between Mandarin and southern Min dialect
(Medgurst 1823).
[16] Except for the
period of the Pacific War from 1942-1945, the Romanized
POJ version of the Tainan Church News continued
its circulation until 1969.
[17] The
Presbyterian Church plays a significant role in the
political field in Taiwan. Because of its deep
involvement with politics in Taiwan, its pro-independent
movement, its advocacy for POJ movement, and close
affiliation with political figures, including former
precedents Li Denghui and Chen Shuibian, the
Presbyterian Church in Taiwan has been viewed as the
fundamentalist activists of the Taiwan Independent
Movement. See the official website of Presbyterian
Church in Taiwan: <http://www.pct.org.tw>
and Wikipedia ‘Pe̍h-ōe-jī’
<accessed
6 July 2011). a, >1Lin Yi-fu, though the bibliographic
entry here is Linlised.eference needs to be identified
by 2013a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB>
(accessed 6 July 2011).
[18] Zheng Zhilong
was a very successful Chinese merchant from Fujian
province in the 17th century. He was also a
pirate and an admiral of the Ming Empire at the same
time and married a Japanese woman and gave birth to
Zheng Chenggong who later defeated the Dutch colonial
government and took over Taiwan. Zheng Zhilong lager
defected to the Manchus who overthrew the Ming Empire
and established the Qing Empire. The Qing government
later executed Zheng Zhilong because of his son’s
continued resistance against the Qing regime. See Tonio
Andrade (2004; 2011).
[19] According to
the language usage distribution report in 2006 by the
government, there are 26 languages in Taiwan.
[20] According to
the statistics, there were 29% of Taiwanese people who
could speak Japanese in 1939, while in 1941 it grew up
to 51%.
[21] The Cairo
Declaration signed by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston
Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek in November 27, 1943,
stated clearly that the Allies are resolved to bring
military pressure against Japan until it surrenders
unconditionally and that Japan shall return Taiwan,
Penghu, and Manchuria to the Republic of China. The
Cairo Declaration was later cited in the Potsdam
Declaration and had its legal effect through Japanese
Instrument of Surrender signed by Rikichi Andō, the
governor-general of Taiwan, in October 25, 1945 in
Taipei, and Japan’s right to Taiwan was handed over to
ROC, represented by Chen Yi, the general of ROC military
force. Lung-Chu Chen and Harold D. Lasswell (1967),
however, argued against the above account and suggested
that Taiwan’s legal status has not been decided yet. See
also Yi-shen Chen (2010).
[23] Over the past
century, there were several major language policy
changes that took place in Taiwan. During the fifty
years of Japanese colonial rule, from 1895-1945, the
cultural and language education was so effective that
the Japanese speaking population among Taiwanese were
increased up to more than 50% in 1940s. The Japanese
Colonial government banned the section for Chinese
characters on the newspapers. After the termination of
Japanese colonial rule in 1945, the KMT regime of the
Republic of China took over Taiwan and began to
‘re-Sinicize’ and ‘de-Japanize’ Taiwan. After putting
down the riot caused by the 228 Incident in 1947, the
KMT declared a ‘State of Emergency,' imposed martial law
(1949–1987), prohibit the use of Japanese in newspapers
and magazines, and banned Japanese music and movies. The
use of Taiwanese dialect in public was also banned in
1960s and further intensified the ethnic hierarchical
partitions. The turnover of the government from KMT to
DPP in the 1990s made way for the nativist and
nationalist promotion of the Taiwanese language. Lee
Teng-hui
李登輝,
president during 1988–2000, encouraged universities to
reduce the number of courses related to China or even
abolish them. Chen Shui-bian
陳水扁,
president from 2000–2008, stressed that Taiwan
subjectivity should draw on local geography, history and
life experience, and that the objectives of textbooks
should be free of Chinese consciousness.
[24] Schmitt
explicitly reminds us: ‘It is not safe, even today, only
to remember that nehmen and Nahme comprise
a substantive problem, and not to mention that they also
mean brutal imperialism, atavistic criminality, and a
sadistic opposition to progress’ (Schmitt 2003: 346).
[25] The three
levels of meaning of the Greek verb nemein refer
to, first, to take or to appropriate [Gr.
nehmen], second, to divide or distribute [Gr.
teilen], that is what we generally called law, and
third, to pasturage [Gr. Weiden], that is, to
pasture, to run a household, to use and to produce
(Schmitt 2003: 324-330).
[26] For Lacan’s
coupure de sujet,
la coupure du désir,
la function de la coupure, see Lacan
(1978: 29, 188, 215); for
Althusser’s coupe d’essence,
see Althusser (2009: 98); for Badiou’s regime of the
cut, see Badiou (2009b: 8-12, 32-6); for effet de
cisaille, see Badiou (2009a: 479); for horlieu
(outplace), see Badiou (2009b: 8-12, 32-6); for
Rancière’s écart
and the part des sans-part in
La mésentente
see Rancière (1995: 20-31, 71-2).
[27] Jacques
Rancière discussed the count of the parts as the logic
of the police, or the State, and question of the
miscount and the-parts-with-no-part, sants-part,
in his important book La mésentente: Politique
et philosophie (1995).
[28] The names were
applied in order to avoid a dilemma at international
occasions, including Chinese Taipei, Republic of China,
Taiwan, or ‘Taiwan, Penghu, Quemoy and Matsu Customs
Territory’, and so on.
Joyce C. H. Liu