Democracy (Made in Taiwan) argues that post-colonialism and
Confucianism met at the historical moment when democratization and
liberalization occurred in Taiwan. The familiar political science
standards take little note of either Confucianism or
postcolonialism. In fact, these standards are unbalanced, wishful,
and Washington-centric, and result in a misunderstanding of
Taiwan's performance. The liberal bias blinds international
observers to the hybrid characteristics embedded in Taiwan's
postcolonial history. Although this book is not about failing
states per se, its criticism of the standards of success alludes to
the problematic nature of the mainstream view of failing states. In
many aspects, Taiwan is a disguised failure, or even a fake, in the
sense that its democratization adopts a populist identity strategy
rather than a liberal one. In addition, its foreign policy
compliance to hegemonic leadership is characterized by anti-China
determination, instead of a realist approach involving the
calculation of power. Having said this, the book does not criticize
Taiwan for "failing" liberalism, in order to prevent the liberal
teleology from lingering on. Instead, Taiwan serves as an arena of
polemics on political science in this book. By rewriting domestic
liberalism and external realism into meanings unknown to the
hegemonic power, Democracy (Made in Taiwan) celebrates Taiwan's
postcolonial fluidity. Embedded in a kind of ontological anomaly
beyond the scope of mainstream political science, which takes for
granted the ontology informed by individualism in domestic politics
and statism in international relations, Taiwan's case appears
subversive not because of the subversive nature of postcoloniality,
but due to the inability of political science's liberalism to make
sense of postcoloniality. Through decoupling the idea of political
science from the entity known as Taiwan, this book attempts to
achieve two goals: to re-present Taiwan and to call for reflexive
political science.
General
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