 OK, so welcome to our second Sender of Tower Studies seminar of today. I'm delighted to welcome back Professor Shelly Riga from Davidson College. Shelly's a regular visitor to Europe, but also to SOA. She was just here almost exactly a year ago for the World Congress. Shelly is probably one of the most influential writers on Taiwan politics. Many of us know her through her work, for example, Why Taiwan Matters, because of her book about the U.B. And today she's going to be talking about her first book, Politics in Taiwan, Voting for Democracy. Shelly did ask me, will anyone have read this book in the audience? Because, of course, this book came out in 1999. I'm glad to see quite a few people from my... Who's taking my Taiwan politics class? One, two, three, four, five. And actually quite a few people have been in my class a number of years ago. Charles must be ten years ago. Not quite. Jason is about four years ago. And Sara three years ago. So there's two from the current class. It's quite a mix. The topic today is part of a series of lectures that we've been doing on Taiwan studies revisited. So in other words, what we've been trying to get authors to do is to look back at their earlier work and look at how they view their work, maybe ten, five years after they were published. And we had a number of papers in the World Congress on this theme. And hopefully we'll eventually have a book on Taiwan studies revisited. Although, of course, it shows how I'm not listening to you because one of the early suggestions that Shelley gave me when I was still doing my PhD was whatever you do, don't do edited volume. But I'm finding it really difficult to kind of get out of this. And this Taiwan studies revisited is one that was really kind of almost imposed on me. I'm still trying to finish this... A number of you have heard this book on Taiwanese social movements, which I've been complaining about for two years. I was sending nagging emails this morning to my unreliable authors. But, okay. Let's give Shelley a big welcome back to us. All right. Well, thank you very much. It is really a pleasure to be here and to hear such a generous introduction from Dapheth, whom I think of as absolutely, you know, the leader in our field and to follow Nathan Batto, who is another person whose expertise and breadth of knowledge and methodological capabilities I would hope in a future life to be able to match these guys. So, you know, if I have some kind of position in the field, it's only by virtue of having got there early and being followed by some really fantastic people. And I also am thinking about how much I envy your opportunity to be here at a center for Taiwan studies and to be taught, first of all, by such excellent people and to have the opportunity to hear these lectures, you know, people from all over the world. Tomorrow it's Huang Changlin. You know, nobody ever comes to southern North Carolina in the USA to talk about Taiwan. So I'm kind of in heaven right now. I've been talking about Taiwan for the last four days and it's pretty fantastic. So I thought I would say a little something about kind of four issues tonight. And because many of you have some familiarity with this book, I don't want to talk too long. I really want mostly to have conversation and I'm standing up not because I'm giving a lecture or I have a PowerPoint or anything, but you could probably like roll the space bar up so it's not my picture. Although I look pretty young in that picture, so maybe I'm a little young. But I did want to just touch on these four things. First of all, just kind of technical issues related to this book. How the demands of publishing shaped the book that I actually ended up writing. And then secondly, some ruminations on history and how this book changes, rereading this book changes how I think about Taiwan politics today. Then some thoughts about change in Taiwan and then just a few things that I think of as unanswered questions from this book. And I hope that that's really one of the things that we will definitely talk about is what you all see as the sort of research program, research agenda in the present following on the kind of literature that we were producing in the late 1990s, early 2000s. So first of all, I would say it's, okay, Daphne, you've already told them that I gave you good advice once, which you didn't take. So now I give you some more good advice, which some of you might take, which is if you have to read your old work, have a cocktail first because it's really painful. And we hardly ever do it. And it's cringing, like page five, right? On page five, I get the date of the foundation of the Qing dynasty wrong. Lose my credibility with my readership from page five, by some dumb thing which I could have checked on Wikipedia except that this book was written before Wikipedia. That's how old it is. So we don't like to read our own old work because all we see are the flaws. And we don't like to read other people's old work because it seems like a waste of time. There's so much new stuff every day. I can't keep up, so why would I go back and read old things? But it is incredibly eye-opening to see how we revise history in light of the present or the more recent past. You know, I read this book and I reminded, oh yeah, the TSU came out of K&T. Oh yeah, Li Deng Wei wrote the National Unification Guidelines. Oh my gosh, in 2000, Chun Shui Bien was the pro-China candidate. So all of these things that seem so incredible today are actual historical facts which can be found in ancient tomes like this. I think the retrospect and especially this kind of compressed retrospection that we're doing in the 21st century when history is moving at such a rapid pace that if things are old, they're ontologically old. They're old in our knowing and being, but they're not very many years old. So it's strange, you know, it used to be that it took 100 years for there to be enough change accumulated for a historian to really digest it. Now, in just a short amount of time, we can get really confused and displaced from historical reality. So retrospect seems to kind of smooth history out and impose this linearity and consistency on the past that was not actually present. So things begin to look like they were part of a long-term plan as opposed to having been the product of, you know, so it's that sort of, yes, the trajectory is like this, but at the time all we see is the ups and downs. Only in looking backwards can we see the linear change. And I guess that's an incredibly trite point to make, especially at SOAS, which is full of serious people, many historians who well understand this, but to a political scientist who's like reading the newspaper every day, it seems like some kind of worthy statement to make. And I do think it's worth keeping in mind because what we are doing right now is making inferences about the future based on inferences we are making about the past without actually revisiting the past because we think we remember it because it was just a few years ago. And I'm thinking very specifically about Tsai Ing-wen. There are all of these things we think we know about Tsai Ing-wen and the smart people say, well, here's how we know how Tsai Ing-wen thinks because she worked for Li Donghui. She was an architect of Liang Guo Lun. Then if we go back and we look at what the Liang Guo Lun was when Li Donghui was asking people like Tsai Ing-wen to be the architects of it, we realize we have made a dangerous inference about who Tsai Ing-wen is based on what Li Donghui became long after Liang Guo Lun, long after the National Unification Guidelines and all these other things. So, if in fact Li Donghui was not a Taiwan independence fanatic all along, then what does it say about Tsai Ing-wen? How does that reshape our perceptions? And so, obviously, I'm mostly thinking about how Tsai Ing-wen is characterized in the mainland and the kind of very presentist characterization of her that is made routinely by PRC leaders and scholars. But I think we all can, or certainly maybe the rest of you all do a better job, but I need to watch out for that kind of thing. So, just to say that there's a lot of false memory syndrome in the study of Taiwan politics, we act as if there was a golden age of cross-strait relations back in the days when the KMT was in charge and everything was fine, and then people like Chen Shui-bian or DPP, they come in, they start with this Taiwan independence stuff, and the next thing you know, cross-strait relations is really bad. Well, if you were alive in Taiwan between 1949 and 1987, you know that is a complete nonsense. If there's a golden age of cross-strait relations, it's probably 2000 to 2012. But again, it's so easy to kind of fall into these narratives and to forget what really happened. And I think somehow, and maybe this was just because I've been reviewing this book for the purpose of this event, but I think our perspective in the late 90s is maybe a little bit less reductionist than what we're using now. And in this book, one of the things that I'm not cringing about is I find that it is surprisingly resistant to some of the binaries that have become really, really overwhelming in kind of ordinary discourse about Taiwan studies today. Very complexified in scholarly discourse, but very oversimplified in kind of ordinary and certainly political discourse. So binaries like independence versus unification actually did a pretty good job of deconstructing that in the book. I was kind of pleasantly surprised, honestly. And then the whole idea of national identity, you know, that if we take seriously what people were saying and doing, when they were saying and doing these things, then we can see that history was much less linear, much less sort of predetermined than looking backwards at it tends to make us believe. So that's just some thoughts about history. Some thoughts about these technical issues, you know, how the demands of publishing shape the book that you actually end up writing. So politics in Taiwan was trying to do several things. One thing it was trying to do, and this is very important, was trying to turn a dissertation into a book. And it was trying to turn a dissertation on clientelism in local elections in 1985 and 1989 into a book that anyone would actually want to read. And maybe today you could write a book on clientelism in local elections, but back in the late 1990s, I mean, I had advice from serious people. So how did I get it to be a person writing about Taiwan in the first place, right? I did some stuff in undergraduate that took me to Taiwan, and I had a great experience, and I really loved it. And actually, I wrote a senior thesis on the ROC policy toward Yuan Junmin. This was in 1984. So we didn't even have the word Yuan Junmin then. So that was sort of step one, but then I thought, well, okay, so if I go to graduate school, I'm going to study real China. So I get to graduate school, and I took a wonderful seminar from a wonderful scholar, Drew Gladney, on the politics of Islamic minorities in the mainland. And I said, this is what I want to do, because I've already been studying minorities in Taiwan. Now I can take this and I can do Islamic minorities in the mainland. And I was writing up my prospectus for this dissertation in the spring of 1989. So around June 5th, my advisor called me in and said, you know, that's a dissertation that's not happening. Not now, and we don't know when it will ever happen. That was a risky topic before June 4th, 1989. Now it is an impossible topic. So either you got to come up with something else, well, you got to come up with something else. So somebody said, and actually that somebody was another wonderful scholar and great person giving advice, which I did take. Stephen Haggard. And Stephen Haggard said, you know, Taiwan is on the radar for political scientists who are studying democratization. And you've already been there. You could go. You could do this. It would be a happy story. It would be fun to do. We would like to know. And you'd be out of here. Or you can hang around waiting for China to reopen. And it actually reopened really quickly, but we didn't think that in the spring of 1989. So that's how I end up in Taiwan, writing this dissertation on clientelism in local elections in 1985. Actually, not even. Just four Shenzhen elections in 1985 and 1989. So at that time, the strategy was get the book out and get a topic about real China and work on that. Because in 10 more years, no one's going to care about Taiwan. So I'm waiting for no one to care about Taiwan so that I can move on to my topic about real China. But I'm not optimistic that this is going to happen before my retirement. So I may turn out to be a lifer in the Taiwan field. So anyway, I got this dissertation on this totally narrow topic that totally nobody cares about. That I turn it into a book. And so a lot of what you read in here is this kind of odd mixture. And it's an odd mixture because there are chapters that are dissertation chapters about the minutiae of local politics in Taiwan. And then there are chapters that are trying to do the second thing, the second goal of this book, which was just to tell the story of Taiwan's democratization. Just to give you something that you could read that would get you from 1972-ish to 1996. The book starts with Li Deng Hui's election victory. And it actually goes a little bit longer in a kind of epilogue that covers in somewhat less detail the Li Deng Hui's presidency from 1996 to sometime in 1998 because the book came out in 1999. So clearly I stopped writing it well before that. Now, another recommendation. If you know anybody in the market for a book topic, this book for Korea, because I teach Korean politics and I have never found a book, a single authored book that is accessible to undergraduates that just tells the story of Korean democratization. So that's just a side note if you are in the market for a project. So okay, turn my dissertation into a book. Tell the story of Taiwan's democratization. And then of course, because it has to be political science, I have to explain Taiwan's democratization. I have to find some theory to drag into this great story. And in many ways, that's the least interesting part of the whole project is trying to find some theoretical perspective that can animate what is already a tremendously lively subject. And I didn't, at the time, think, and I think now even more that the whole sort of transitology, you know, trying to explain democratization is not all that helpful. Because democratization, it seems, is so complex and has so many different causal elements, some of which are present in many cases, but none of which are sort of the necessary and sufficient cases for democratization everywhere. So I wasn't really sure how helpful this would be, but I found a theory that I thought could add something to the Taiwan story and that could sort of organize the Taiwan story while acknowledging how complicated democratization is. And leaving room for sort of structural, individual, social, economic, developmental variables. And so elections become a kind of intervening variable or mechanism through which all of these other things can manifest toward a more democratic political system. So it's not a full-on theory. It's more an explanation that leans or glances back toward grand theories of democratization. And Navy says less about why Taiwan democratized than about, less about why it democratized and more about how it democratized or why this particular way of democratization is what we saw in Taiwan. Another observation about the sort of technical side of the book is that it's totally qualitative. It's based on field research and secondary sources. The field research is from the dissertation. The secondary sources tell the rest of the story, right? Occasionally somebody would tell me something that I could put in another chapter that wasn't about SNTV. Here's another thing I really regret about this, but why the hell didn't I use SNTV? What is with SVMM? Who advised me to use an acronym that no one else ever used before or since? Luckily I can't remember, so I can't blame anyone. And what I think about that now is it's not like the studies that we read about Taiwan elections today. Very few studies of Taiwan elections today use this kind of completely qualitative approach. And I am, you know, I am as much an admirer of science as the next sort of math-phobic pretender. But I have to wonder, what are we missing by not doing this kind of work more? You know, how do we know what question we didn't ask if we're always asking the same questions because we're using surveys? And I know that that oversimplifies surveys a lot. And I know that there are a lot of people who are struggling in very creative ways with how to kind of dredge out the new topics that require measurement. But, you know, I think that is a virtue, if you will, of a qualitative study is that it misses different things, maybe, than a quantitative study would miss. And it raises the question then, looking back at it from the methodological perspective of how much remains the same, but is not visible to us because we're not looking for those things anymore. And I know that there are people who are looking for things, but I think we see a lot of, we might see more continuity if we kept using a multi-methodological approach. The third topic I wanted to say a little bit about is just change in Taiwan. Another thing that I think you really, I feel very strongly looking back at this book is the just unbelievable pace of change. And my friends in Taiwan, so often they're so frustrated. You're like, why haven't we got whatever the goal is yet? But when you step in from outside, you know, every year, a couple of times every year, every year or two, you just say, wow, I can't believe how fast this process is moving. So politics in Taiwan came out in 1999, and it basically ends with the election, or the re-election, if you will, but really the election for the first time of Lee Dong-hui in 1996. The second book came out two years later in 2001, and it's about Chen Shui-bian. It starts with the election of Chen Shui-bian. So they both start with an election night rally, four years apart. The books only come out two years apart, but what an incredible transformation of Taiwan. In politics in Taiwan, you do not see the DPP coming to power. And again, more advice. So who had the idea to write a book about DPP? Who gets credit for having this idea? Who gets credit for this idea? A guy at a foundation who called me up and he said, we want to fund some research on Taiwan. This is like a conservative foundation in the U.S., and they're interested in Taiwan because it's anti-communist. So we want to fund some research on Taiwan. Had he got any ideas for projects and said, oh, yeah, I want to do this, I want to do this, I want to do that? Great ideas, definitely write up some proposals for those. But just, you know, at the same time, think about this. So that's when you know, and here's the advice. That's how you know that that's what he's going to fund, is the thing he's about to say right now, is the one that the money is for. And he said, what about the DPP? We're, and this is about 1990, it had to be 1996 because I took leave in 1999, in the fall of 1999. This is 1996, 1997. We are very interested in the DPP. We want to know what's coming. We want to know what their ideas are, what their plans are, what their prospects are, who the people are that we should be watching. So, you know, if you think you might want to do something like that. So this foundation had the idea to study the DPP. And the DPP book came out first as a website for journalists who are going to cover the 2000 election. And then, so again, won the 2000 election, and the publishers call me up, you know, Lynn Reiner herself calls me up saying, can we publish your book? So, again, take advice from people. They're trying to help you. So, you know, that's just incredible change. And I think that we can see this change in a number of places. You know, just reading politics in Taiwan, the areas of change that really strike me are the massive changes in institutions from even the late 1990s to the present. SMTV, aka SVMM. SMTV produced a whole cottage industry of scholarship explaining what are the political consequences of this institutional choice. So when Taiwan got rid of SMTV, I was kind of wistful, you know? I definitely, the book suggests that you should get rid of it if you want, like, big boy politics. But I thought, I liked all that stuff, you know? I like that Gary Cox going into detail about... So now, but now we can write about what are the consequences of getting rid of SMTV and what are the consequences of the new system and all that stuff. So institutions have changed. Politics have changed so much. The DPP is mainstream and beyond mainstream. Right now, it's the ruling party for real. So the whole time that Chen Zhui-bian is in power, you're having to explain to people, it's the ruling party but it's not really the ruling party because it doesn't control the legislature and, you know, it's just complicated. The title of that book should have been From Opposition to Sort of Power and Back Again. But now we're back and this time they really are in power and that's really amazing, you know? It's such a short time. Another thing that has changed enormously are kind of norms and expectations. You know, what people would tolerate when you read the report about public opinion on issues like tolerance for authoritarianism or single-party government. Party image, we were talking about this earlier with Nathan, you know, the ideas that people in Taiwan held toward political topics were very different in the 1990s than they are today but also, you know, these changes have been really marked. And then finally, and this was where I got in under the wire, the quantity and quality of available scholarship on many issues. So you read this book and you think this is not very well-sourced. Like there's this section on the Japanese colonial era like politics in Taiwan and the Japanese colonial era and it's got like three sources. And people could look at that now and say, seriously, why didn't you do any research? And the answer is that's what there was in 1991, 1992, 93 when I was writing that. You know, there wasn't... historians hadn't really done their thing yet and, you know, I could have known like it was known that the Qing Dynasty didn't start in 1664 but a lot of the other stuff that we know now was really not excavated yet. So the quality and quantity of scholarship that's available on so many issues would have made for, I would say, a very different book in, you know, today from what I was able to put together in the late 90s. Things that we know have changed in Taiwan. Party identification. Like people have it now. Still, I think a plurality would say no preference for either party or... but, you know, there's a lot more party identification than there used to be and there's much more clear understanding of what parties stand for. And even people now today know when parties are making something up. You know, when they're changing their positions that people can recognize it. So these party images are more real and durable and less manipulable than they were back in the 90s. I think also national identity makes a lot more sense to talk about national identity in the 2000s than in the 1990s. And one of the reasons was just in the 90s survey research was so new and the environment, the sort of authoritarian environment was still so recent that people were in a different mindset about how to answer a question like that. But also people were still, you know, living in an era of sort of hegemonic narratives about history that made it hard for them to answer questions about national identity without reference to their education or the sort of norms of the society. So that's pretty interesting to me. And I also, looking back here, it's so interesting. It turns out that at first the KMT got all the credit for democratization in Taiwan. And remember, you know, Lee Dong Kui was Mr. Democracy. And at first democratization really strengthened the KMT for two reasons. One, they got credit for it and that was intentional. Mr. Democracy was doing that on purpose but also because democratization helped to indigenize KMT, right? And that was really in some ways at its peak and I think that's why in this book I can fail to see the KMT's successful management of democratization eventually falling apart because at this moment in the late 1990s they own democratization. Lee Dong Kui is the man. But that didn't last. You know, the divergent goals and interests within the KMT eventually led most recently, right? Just within the last couple years to break up and implosion and now we look at the KMT and think, wow. But it is very interesting to be reminded how much strength the KMT could command in elections, not so very long ago that, you know, they really, they had the system down. So I think, you know, that really recommends now moving to the unanswered questions. You know, we really need to understand the arc of the KMT since 2000. What happened that caused the KMT to, you know, chew bun tu hua, right? And lose its ability to be the, not only just lose its ability to be the sort of the architect of democratization, but even to lose its ability to be creditable as a democratic force in Taiwan. I fear that that's kind of how it feels at the moment to a lot of people and that's a huge, huge change. So that's one area of study. I also think, you know, how voting has changed. We have such sophisticated models now that can link demographic and ideological variables to electoral outcomes, but have those, and this is really a question, have those ways of understanding voting come at the expense of the organizational factors in voting? Are we still paying attention, in other words, to the ground game that different parties have and parties within, within factions? Do we know how reform has changed behavior relative to all of the other drivers? You know, so I'm thinking institutional reform, electoral reform, how has that changed behavior relative to all the other drivers that are changing behavior? We don't know. And while, as a political scientist, with this emphasis on scientists, I am definitely a lightweight, I still want to say, you know, one thing qualitative research does for us is it gives us ideas for what to look at next. And after all these years of studying national identity, what will we do when there's no longer variation on that variable? If you look at certain demographic groups in Taiwan, there is basically uniform attachment to Taiwanese identity. So I'm thinking about young people. So that can't be an explanatory variable because there is not enough variation. So what are you going to do with that? How do we move past the sort of paradigm that we've been living within for the last 15 to 20 years? So maybe the qualitative method that's used here has some value in helping us move in that direction. And I feel like, just my final point, the impetus for that kind of work will come out of an interdisciplinary program like this one. Your training to look at things holistically will enable you to ask questions that are not necessarily already packaged for your analytical attention. And we may be in need of that pretty soon. So that's what I wanted to say, and I hope I've not gone on too long anyway. You can have some conversation. Thanks for that, Shelley. I completely agree with your point on the way that the publication market has changed. For both of us, our first book was kind of a PhD transition, but my one was much a more direct transition. I think I spent maybe three weeks doing the transition between the two. I mean, I did have to change. Maybe I had to add an updated chapter. I had to cut some of those section headings. But I think three weeks, it says something about how it was possible to have a very kind of, probably in 2004 you could have published your original dissertation. And Shelley kind of gives us a sense of that in one of her essays on the state of the field on Taiwan politics. And one of the things that comes out of that, we often look at that in the first week of our courses, the way there's been such an expansion of the number of publications on Taiwan in a range of fields. Now, one of the things I've been asking people on this revisited theme to think about was the reviews. What were the reviews like when your book first came out? And we often find this, we often can be quite kind of sensitive to these reviews. But I actually think a lot of those reviews, critical reviews of my first book at the time were actually right when I really looked at them now. How are your reviews? So here's how much of a chicken I am. I honestly couldn't tell you. I'm not sure anybody reviewed this book actually. Has anybody ever read a review of this book? There must be loads. Yeah, you know I never went back and looked for that. I was like, on to the next thing. I was writing about the DPP. Look, I mean, nowadays actually getting journals to review books on Taiwan is a little bit more challenging because there are just so many more. I think it would have been quite different. I suppose another question that I'm a bit curious about is how did your methods change after the first book? Because once you get into academic life it's much more difficult to do that kind of in-depth field work. I wonder how you found this. Yeah, that's a serious issue for anyone who's specializing in a country not her own where you don't live. So this book was the product of one full year of field research in Taiwan, plus a lot more than three weeks of other stuff. But I was in Taiwan from January to December of 1991 and that's where the dissertation research came from. So that was a very leisurely process actually. The first person I met who opened every door, the only reason any of this is here is thanks to Chen Zhu. And I got to meet Chen Zhu because I hadn't connected with someone from the Human Rights Watch in the U.S. because at this time Taiwan's still kind of on the margin. So I went to see Human Rights Watch and they said, is there anything I can do for you? Is there information that I could gather for you while I'm there? And they said, go see the Taiwan Association for Human Rights and see how they are. And I don't think that they ever imagined I would do anything for them. I think they knew what they were doing for me when they made that recommendation. But it was on their invitation that I was able to secure a meeting with Chen Zhu. And I was a member of her tribe immediately. She was so generous with her dinners and hanging out at their office with young Taiwanese social movement activists. But also she introduced me to everybody, all the DPP candidates that I needed to study who were the DPP candidates from the 1985 and 89 Xian Shidang elections in Taipei County, Xinzhu County, Tainan County, and Gao Xiong County. So all those people, the doors just pop open when... And at that time I was so ignorant. I didn't even know why they were all so willing to do anything for me because I came with Chen Zhu's endorsement. Now of course I realize, oh my gosh, she was their martyr, their hero, their most, you know, the most beloved person. But I was just like wandering around, banging into things for a year. But over the course of it, I managed to collect enough information to do this. But at that time I could do things like Li Zongfan was the DPP candidate in Tainan, Xin, in 1985. And people from his office would say things like, get on the train at, get on the two o'clock train, you know, that you go on to Tainan. And there's a guy going to pick you up there. And he's going to show you around for a while, me some people. So like I would pack a bag for a lot of days and just go down, get off the train. It wasn't hard to know which one was me. So somebody pulls up and the window on the passenger side goes down, the head comes out. Are you Dr. Shelley? So then we would get in the car and just go around. This happened in Tainan, Xin, and also Xinzhu. And they, I mean, I didn't know where I was sleeping. I didn't know where I was eating. I didn't know who the next person was that I was going to talk to. I didn't know who was driving. And where we were going. But every single one of those people was so generous and hospitable. And so this is how, you know, this is, I guess, what snowballing is in, you know, research methods. What it really means is don't be afraid to get in the car with a complete time. And spend the night at his house. That's what you're doing. That's what you're doing. It's totally fine. So I got a lot of information that way. And the other thing that I have to say that I really admired about those people was they took me to KMT as well as DPP. So the thing that really made my dissertation work was the discovery of this political strategy called Tiawaka. And I never heard of Tiawaka. I never heard of Zhuanzhao. Probably I'm reading newspapers. In that big newspaper room in the central library. And I see some phrase and I look it up and it doesn't make sense. So I just go right over it. Zhuanzhao. Zhuanzhao. Okay. I don't need this. I can get the gist of this article. But I was sitting, it was with a guy from the Jiobuotuan in, like, A'Lian, Xian, in Gaoxiong, Xian. Or A'Lian, A'Lian, Xian. And he's going on and on and on. We're speaking in Mandarin, but he keeps saying Tiawaka, Tiawaka. I'm probably going to say that. Could you, what is Tiawaka? And then him and the DPP guy who took me there both got this look like, uh-oh. Somebody told her the secret code. Now she knows. Now she knows. So then everywhere I went, I stopped asking all these sort of superficial questions and I said, and then I'm like, all right, talk to me about Tiawaka. And as soon as I had the magic word, then they just had to talk about that a lot. So that takes time. That requires having the leisure to be wrong, to be slow, to go back again and again and again. And once you have a job teaching in the United States or in the UK, it's really hard to do that ever again. And it changes your research method so you become much more reliant on, well, you know, quantitative information that you can access from anywhere and mess with in your desktop. But for me more, it has, because that's never going to be me, I'm never going to be Nathan Beto. Messing with data in my desktop, and that's a good thing. You don't want me too close to data. But what it really changed for me was my choice of topics and the research topics that I can pursue. So the DPP was also heavily based on field research, but that was because that foundation happened to give me a grant at a time when I could extricate myself and they gave me enough money to buy myself out of teaching for a semester. So I went to Taiwan, but then that project, I only had a summer. So I had to be, I had to get it right the first time. I had to have a schedule. I had to go from place to place to place to place to place. So I got a research assistant, Jesse Lan, and he went with me to make sure that I didn't miss anything and he helped me out a lot. Like he said, do you notice how they all, so this is interviewing mostly senior DPP figures, do you notice how they all change their body language when you ask about generational turnover? And I said, no, actually. I'm so desperate to take notes and understand and like make sure that I've written down what I didn't understand so I can ask you later that I did not notice that their body language changes. And he said they hate that question. They don't think they're going to understand that question. They don't think they're old. They're not in their own mind. They're not the senior generation. So I was already with that project depending on other kinds of resources that adjust myself to get it done efficiently enough. And then why Taiwan matters is that is the product of every interaction I have ever had, every question I have ever asked, every person I have ever met in Taiwan since the first time I went, which was in 1982. So that's really more like, less like research, although of course you have to look a lot of things up and more like putting together everything you know and that's not permissible in scholarly work. So that's a book for general readers because that's where you can tell stories that don't have any theory that might not even all the time be exactly true the way you said you'd like to remember that. But I am pretty sure about that night in Hualien in 1982 when all those little kids were sleeping on the marble coffee tables of that house, which again, you know, I didn't know who those people were, why we were sleeping there, who those kids were, they were sleeping on the marble coffee tops, but they make coffee tables, but they make it into the book too because it's all that color. So that's the kind of stuff that I can do now, but more and more and more I have to do policy related work because that's what people will pay me to go to Taiwan to do is something that is somehow policy relevant and that's sort of sweeping together a lot of things. So it's changed my method to be a grown-up tied to a job. Tied to a job was bad enough, but tied to two little kids is actually great because they're pretty flexible and they went with me for a semester in Taiwan and a semester in China when my children were four and eight years old and they went to local school and they were good sports, but still it makes it much more difficult. So that opportunity for that massive amount of soaking and poking was a one-time thing, I think. Okay, go ahead. Hello. Hello. Thank you for your speech. That was very fascinating and I am a PhD student of General Studies here and in light of your speech I would like to ask actually during your research on Taiwan would you find anything that particular elements that are really different from the elements you could find in the West that could actually reconfigure the whole theory of democracy? That's my first question and actually I can tell that from your study basically you are addressing the conceptualization of democracy with merely reference to voting and election but of course it was really it is a key element in democracy but now after 20, 30 years of democracy I would say Taiwan now the problems in relation to democracy is not just about election but more about how we can actually have informed electorate informed citizens who are able to discuss multiple public issues with intelligence and with tolerance of different opinions and I want to see your opinions on it. That's one of the reasons why I think the democratization literature is kind of useful but limited and limited in time because it really was focused on the installation of an electoral system that is pretty open but it really doesn't if you think about the people who drove that literature they really were not very interested in those deeper questions about they might say something like Honeyton talks about the media needs to be reasonably free but what does that mean? What if the media is too free? I turn on my TV and there are 700 channels and that's how many channels there are on my TV which is why I don't watch TV because I can't find anything to watch on 700 channels but I watch something that's not edifying that's not informative that's not educational that does not improve me so it's free but it's not really helping democracy and in the United States right now obviously we're so we're in so much trouble because we haven't paid attention to the quality of our democracy and what we also haven't paid attention to is the way that the economic system does or does not support democracy and the way that decisions you make about how your democracy is going to work interact with economic factors to give you a better or a worse democracy so I think in some ways Taiwan is in a better position because you are or there that democracy is young enough to not have already decided that everything is perfect the way it is whereas in the United States if you say look the way we are financing our elections is destroying our democracy oh you're just anti-American you know what's wrong with that so you know in some ways I think that what we know is that democracy is a really is a moving target and another person that I can't praise highly enough or maybe I can but I probably won't is Ed Friedman Ed Friedman is a really smart guy and he is constantly saying things that I can't forget and one of them he said to me was I was talking about democratic consolidation you know like I read a book so now I'm talking and he said democracy is never consolidated what's that mean? Democracy is always in peril always in process in progress always in flux you know you don't reach the emerald city and then everything is fine for all eternity and I think that's a really helpful corrective and so you know like how does my how do these thoughts reconfigure my understanding of democracy well they make me a whole lot more respectful of the complexity and the fragility of democratic institutions and life in a democracy Thank you very much it's fascinating especially when you when you start the talk actually compare you're more or less looking back at the book and compare or examining what's not probably not good enough or sometimes actually it's good in the long run you can tell what's good about it but then you made some comments about the current situation you said currently you can see some sort of binary discourses and certain kind of false memory syndrome can you elaborate a little bit on that and the whether it's really to do with your your opinion on this so-called quality of democracy whether that's the case Well the false memory syndrome that comes through to me most when I think about Lido Koi because and you know this is a room full of people who actually know something about Taiwan so you're not as susceptible to the false memory syndrome as most of the people I deal with but most of the people I deal with are honestly who care about Taiwan who like ask me to talk to them about Taiwan they're mostly China specialists and actually a lot of them are in China I have a lot of interaction now with the China the Taiwan studies community in Shanghai and also Xiamen and a little bit in Beijing and US government officials and all of these people would tell you that Lido Koi has been a title funza since the day he was born that he's a Japanese to his core and that he's been plotting to destroy the KMT all his life and I just think I don't buy that I mean I just don't buy that I'm also old enough now to know that I have changed my own mind and I think you know most people become more conservative as they get older I think Lido Koi became less conservative I think he became frustrated and I think he saw his interest and then he began to have some vision but I don't think he started out as a title funza working to undermine the KMT and bring down the ROC and destroy cross-strait relations so for example the two-state theory now we look back on it and we say this is the beginning of the end of the golden age of cross-strait relations that in 1987 Taiwanese start going to the mainland and they start to have some relationship and then in 92 they send the old guys out to talk to each other and they reach a consensus and everything was fine until Lido Koi had to say you know, two-state theory and then everything flew apart as Lido Koi's fault that we had that the good progress in cross-strait relations was going on and that of course helps with this completely dishonest reification of the 92 consensus something happened I'm totally in agreement with Lido with Tsai Ing-wen something happened in 92 and we have those guys to have their conversation but the mythology around it that has been spun up since and also the labeling of it with a kind of mantra this is a fetish 92 consensus is a fetish that is shared by KMT and CCP and allows them to do things and then to say well you can't do this with us but our fetish which actually makes it sound a lot more fun but if we go back to the late 1980s what we see is I could find it but I won't in this book, Jason Hu saying in 1991 we decided to acknowledge the existence of the PRC to end the civil war to start talking to the other side to get this thing going and what was our platform and this is not Jason Hu talking anymore so what was the platform the platform was ROC is gonna go talk to PRC and so they're expecting they're hoping that they can have this dialogue which will break the chains of no recognition no contact no interaction military confrontation both sides spending so much to militarize this relationship hoping that PRC will see the opportunity that's being put forward for them and it's the PRC that says you know, no if you call yourself a state that everything is off this is Li Donghui saying Taiwan is a state and it's not part of China and it will negotiate with China to have direct links or something I think it's Li Donghui looking for a way to get something going and that has been completely erased in the sort of normal discourse about cross-strait relations and so the 92 consensus can be this kind of fetish if we empty out what we should know about what it really meant at the time and how it's entirely possible that Li Donghui thought of Li Anguolun as a kind of embodiment of Joe Argon's shirt or you know kind of trying to state it a little bit more clearly then again maybe Li Donghui was a Taidu fundser from the day he was born and all the time a big conspiracy to separate Taiwan from China the thing is we will never know because when he gave the Chinese the opportunity to solve this problem through the National Unification Guidelines which remember the National Unification Guidelines are a Li Donghui product the PRC brushed him away and said we can't talk to you anymore so that's the point at which the PRC cast its fate Taiwan will go off in its own direction and because we refuse this offer then you know we're gonna wake up in 30 years time and say whoa this national identity thing has put us in a real bind so it's stuff like that that I look back on and I say wow how far we have how ingrained these assumptions have become about what these people were doing that just are ahistorical can I carry on? you've got a question at the back and then we'll come back to you just to reconnect to your answer with the question of the gender studies student what I think she was referring to was within new democratic spheres the issue is not the democracy itself but those issues of participation and those issues of enfranchisement which are continually being renewed contested and challenged what your answer revealed is that this is essentially an unending quest it's not a situation we arrive at but it isn't the real issue isn't so much democracy as it's being sold and as it's being bought and as it's being introduced but how we actually challenge the institutions which underpin democratic forms because you mentioned in the states that you can't mention anything about those institutions until somebody tells you how un-American you are the same is true in the UK I mean you probably don't know this but there was recently an exhibition in the Barbican in which it was purportedly depicting in slavery and they imported a white South African curator to enclose black people as an art exhibition of course the black population objected to this and they demonstrated on the streets and eventually the Barbican had to back down and close the exhibition down before it was even issued and one of the reasons that they cited was that there was a threat to public well-being and welfare but they were concerned about freedom of speech I mean how could we understand freedom of speech in the black community when this country and the US and other countries were actually supporting a apartheid and so we now import a apartheid personnel to do the same thing as art and yet we understand this in democratic forms so for me the real problem is not so much how we import or export democracy but how we actually check and balance our institutions because our institutions are never democratic in England we have never elected a government since the war with a majority of the people every government we've had in England in the post-war period has been elected by a minority of the voting public you know would people in Taiwan or China understand this they would make that you know with a lot of democracy yeah yeah it's it is a process I think that's that's your key insight and we I think one of the things that has been sort of controversial in the study of democratization of Taiwan which like it seems dumb that it was controversial at one time although there are people still having this fight is what was what was Zhang Jinghua's role in Taiwan's democratization did Zhang Jinghua give permission did he drive the boat was he the impetus was he an obstacle and if you say you know I think Zhang Jinghua made some good decisions then certain people will oh you know not allowed to say anything good about Zhang Jinghua but what has often been missing from the sort of the modernization theory direction kinds of democratization transitology literature from the top-down individual you know what Zhang Jinghua did one thing that had to fight hard to get back into this narrative is the social movements and in particular and I think because the social movements in Taiwan were also political movements and there they were so disciplined at one time someone asked me to review Lu Xioliang's autobiography and I thought oh really I'm gonna have to review Lu Xioliang's autobiography but I thought yeah I guess I I guess I should because a lot of times more advice for budding scholars you do you accept the request to review a book or an article because it's something you need to read that you wouldn't read otherwise I am so glad I read Lu Xioliang's autobiography because it's really interesting and it's really fun and one of the things that she says in there is basically there were a lot of sexist men in the democratic movement and I was a feminist a feminist activist that was my primary objective and you know what I did I swallowed my frustration and I worked with those guys because I wanted to win and that is a cool reminder and how many different interests were swallowed in order to pursue this primary goal so another thing that I like in this book is that I don't say that the opposition movement was an independence movement I say they were pushing for democracy and ethnic justice they wanted fairness for Taiwanese people independence, national identity all those things came later but the real driver in the first instance was freedom and justice and participation so I think a lot of that a lot of the energy that was in social movements kind of got channeled into the democratic movement but now what we see when we look at Taiwan today is we see these movements resurging every time when it feels like the political class has kind of lost its connection to the society the society comes roaring back to demand that connection so right now something that a lot of people want to read about in fact, even in the US government is that a new power party because they see the new power party as possibly the next big thing in Taiwan and emerging out of these social movements so I think that it is really important not to be so focused on elite politics and elections and all that stuff that we wait till it's too late to see this big crack in coming up under the boat you know to turn us over I just want to the reason why Taiwan matters sort of you draw all your decades of experience into this book very personal at some point and I wonder whether you can elaborate a little bit about this you would describing Taiwan's identity crisis as a kind of negotiation between China's inside and China's outside can you elaborate a bit more on that why they come from yeah so you know the meaning of China has changed so much and this is one of the one of the conundrums facing survey researchers and we were talking about this the other day you know we had this survey question it's been on surveys for a really long time all you Taiwanese Chinese are both and you have to keep asking that you have to keep watching that question because it's indicative of something and you also have to keep exploring what does it in fact indicate and I think one of the things that changes the way that question is received and the meaning that that question and its answers have one of the things that changes that over time is the changing definition of China so I don't know did the social change survey have a question like that in the 80s probably not in the 90s right how far do your series go back for Taiwanese Chinese are both okay so maybe 1992 in 1992 the discourse of ROC is ubiquitous in Taiwan still right in 1991 some young kids got in trouble for going up to Japan to meet with Shumi I remember that because they came back and they got arrested in Taipei meanwhile by the end of that year Wufi was planting flags down the middle of Zhongxiao Donglu and this guy who was part of the plot to assassinate Zhang Jinguo in New York was giving speeches so it changed very fast but still the discourse of ROC was ubiquitous in Taiwan everyone who was answering that question had come through an ROC education and so when you ask them are you Chinese, Taiwanese or both we know that ROC is inflecting their answers if you ask that question today people are not answering am I ROC or Taiwanese they're answering seriously if I'm Sam Chinese does that make sense have I ever been born in China did I grow up in China have I ever lived in China why would I call myself Chinese why because the PRC has defined itself as the only China in the world so from an external perspective it makes no sense for people from Taiwan to call themselves Chinese because the PRC is China and from an internal perspective there's no longer this kind of oh I don't know what should I say how should I answer this question because on the one hand I'm from Taiwan and there's another but on the other hand I'm ROC and you know shouldn't we now people just say yeah Taiwan they're over it and I think that's not that's some kind of change of identity but it's also the ability to manifest something that's been there maybe much longer but also it's just what is China it used to be that Taiwan was China to itself and now today Taiwan is not China to itself it's paid lip service to the ROC but no one really struggles with that or maybe some people do but most people don't mind you I think he's really actually very clear he's Chinese and what is China ROC one of the things that come out in your talk was change and the kind of scale of change so if you could actually go back and back in time would you change much in the way you handled the the book page 5 embarrassing mistakes I would fix but I would probably end up making other ones it's a little bit scattered it feels uneven in some ways it feels a little lumpy to me like maybe I would not say so much about the SVMM system or maybe a little bit less about electoral mobilization I think it would be maybe a better book if I had decided is this a book about voting behavior or is this a book about the story of Taiwan's democratic transition I want to go back to Buse question though I said quite everything because another dimension of China inside and China outside is that the first so the ROC was the original China against which Taiwanese activists were positioning themselves and so they imagined that if they could do something about ROC then they could have their freedom and the the ROC the KMT the Weishengen domination this was the sort of package of things that they needed to overturn in order to be free so that was what China was even in the 90s I remember we asked Taiwanese friends what do you think is going to be different if you get your independence and they would say things like if we get independence then the KMT will have no reason to be an authoritarian ruling party because we won't be trying to do unification anymore and so they will have to step aside and let Taiwanese govern Taiwanese and so there's a period in the book where the issue is self-determination that's when the DPP is pushing so they were really focused on the KMT and the way that the KMT was blocking Taiwan from reaching its destiny so I always think of it as like a prisoner you're in your cell and you dig out from your cell and so the DPP the opposition movement digging they finally get out and the KMT is no longer insisting on a single party authoritarian government the KMT is no longer insisting on unification as the primary destiny of the Taiwan people so they pop up into the sunlight and there's another fence on the other side outside of the obstacles of the KMT, the ROC the Wai Shan Ren is the PRC and that is a much more formidable opponent right so that's the China outside so first it's the China inside and that animates one kind of movement that movement I think totally succeeded Taiwan became Taiwanized democratized and can make room for these social movements and all of the stuff but you're still in prison because the next phase cannot happen until you do something about the PRC and it turns out that changing KMT's mind was way easier than changing CCP's mind so that's really in that chapter the China inside is Batman and the China outside is the PRC in that case then I think we can continue our discussions over some sandwiches and wine it's quite rare that we have sandwiches so enjoy this special treat let's thank Shelly and Nathan one more time