Taiwan’s Becoming Nation
Most children in the world grow up with concerns that excludes the legitimacy of their statehood. Yet this is not the case with Taiwanese children; most of us grew up knowing of the thousands of missiles lining the coast of the People’s Republic of China (henceforth PRC), aiming at us and ready to fire at a moment’s notice. This anxiety, however, is only a portion of fear Palestinian children experience, I often imagine. It is an apprehension and a waiting that reach no conclusion, a sentence without a period that continues to stretch infinitely into the void of time. Fundamental cognitive dissonance is bound to exist under the conditions of living and functioning in a de facto nation-state while the rest of the world tells you differently. In addition to coming from a family with the lineage of political persecution, I have had the privileges of going through the rite of passage that is Taiwanese student protest movements against further economic reliance upon the PRC in the 2010s. In intimate connection with my personal history, I cannot help but construct a line of inquiry within my scholarship that revolves around the notion of nation-building within the context of Taiwan, especially when statehood recognition seems so preposterously unattainable when it should not be. In the case of having a certain set of questions constantly stirring in one’s mind, one tends to see traces of it everywhere one looks. This is the case with my reading of Deleuze and Guattari, in particular in A Thousand Plateaus. I find myself unable to disentangle the concept of becoming the concept of nation-building, despite concrete conceptual differences that may oppose the two thoughts. Although this specific understanding does not match what Deleuze and Guattari think of for what they consider proper becoming, I nonetheless find this concept compelling in discussing the current geopolitical situation of Taiwan.
The amounting geopolitical pressures Taiwan faces in struggling to gain recognition around the world and internal divisions over the approaches for statehood recognition feels exactly like climbing a mountain slope in the shape of the asymptotic line. The goal is infinitely high so it may never be reached, despite the tangible trajectory leading there. Then there is the reconciling of never being able to reach there by framing an independence movement as a becoming. The wasp never truly becomes the orchid and the orchid never truly becomes the wasp; their becoming of each other is an entering into a relation that renders the wasp into a reproductive organ of the orchid and that renders the orchid into part of its digestive system. As Deleuze and Guattari writes in the case of becoming animal,
Becomings-animal are neither dreams not phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue here? For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating animal any more than the animal “really” becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. (A Thousand Plateaus 238)
They further elaborate, “Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, ‘appearing,’ ‘being,’ ‘equaling,’ or ‘producing.’” (239) Therefore, the topic at hand is not quite the literal becoming of Taiwan as a United-Nation-recognized state, as it is impossible given PRC’s main position on the UN Security Council and PRC’s explicit military threat. This is, instead, an exploration into the ways in which Taiwan, as a rhizome instead of a state entity, forms all sorts of machine by entering into relationships with all sorts of actions and discourses all for the unreachable goal of becoming nation-state.
I. Taiwan as a Rhizome
To argue this point, I must first address my position of treating Taiwan as a rhizome instead of a nation-state. In considering the topics at hand, I asked myself repeatedly, “What is becoming-nation-state? The people? The government? The history?” My conclusion is that none of the above suffices in encapsulating the notion of Taiwan. Instead, I propose Taiwan as a rhizome for the ensuing discussions.
The name, whether it be the Republic of China (henceforth ROC) or Taiwan or Formosa, is but a thin membrane that contains notions that are much broader than simply “a nation-state.” It is not simply material like the people (indigenous, Han, migrant laborers from Indonesia and the Philippines, etc.) and the industries (semi-conductors, cellphone parts, laptops, tea leaves, etc.) It is also not simply abstract like the government (Democratic Progressive Party) and political parties (Kuomintang, Taiwan People’s Party, New Power Party). It is the island (tropical, marine, deposits of coal, limestone, marble), the oceans surrounding it (the East China Sea, the Philippine Sea, the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait), the notion that mentioning it in public means direct confrontation against PRC’s authority (from model UN competitions[1] to videogames[2]), the diasporic immigrant communities around the world (the U.S., Canada, Malaysia, Singapore, etc.), The Orphan of Asia[3], the Sunflower Student Movement protests, a bridge in the highway system of Taipei named McArthur, our history of colonization and occupation by the Ching Dynasty, the Dutch, the Portuguese, Japan, Kuomintang… Indeed, it is no arborescent structure in which roots may be traced and apparatuses concentrated with power may be delineated. Its messy and decentralized direct democratic system is one of the defining characteristics that marks it a rhizome. As Deleuze and Guattari speaks of rhizomic characteristics as,
[T]he rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states. What is at question in the rhizome is a relation to sexuality–but also to the animal, the vegetal, the world, politics, the book, things natural and artificial–that is totally different from the arborescent relation: all manner of “becomings.” (21)
Thus, the question to be asked (the line of inquiry as the line of flight?) lies in the relation of the rhizome to various becomings. If the aforementioned laundry list are all lines of flights that crosses all sorts of planes of consistency embedded in the Taiwan strata, then nationhood and sovereignty must be included as well. In the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari who writes with dispersed but complementary thematic foci, I intend to explore the relations between Taiwan and becomings-nation through various topics such as embracing progressive politics and speaking in minor language.
II. Embracing Progressive Politics
Deleuze and Guattari speaks of becoming as an act of moving with a certain velocity: "Becoming is to emit particles that take on certain relations of movement and rest because they enter a particular zone of proximity. Or, it is to emit particles that enter that zone because they take on those relations." (273) In the case of Taiwan, in recent years it has been charging ahead and speeding up in terms of its politics. The particles here are not only the individuals but also the thought being disseminated in the public, the thought that Taiwanese people must be “better” than the PRC. “Better” in this instance is not a relativistic moral judgement, but a desire to differentiate Taiwanese identity away from PRC identity through the demonstration of embracing progressive politics without developing into the brand of PRC neoliberalism.
While this is undoubtedly twisting one’s limbs in order to fit the U.S. and Eurocentric righteousness in leftist progressivism, Taiwan’s geopolitical dispositions enable this development with a certain degree of naturalness. Looking at the postwar economic history of Taiwan, its development can be argued as reactionary to that of the PRC. The Nationalist government of ROC (Kuomintang or KMT) retreated to Taiwan after losing the Chinese Civil War to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), just in time to take over the Imperial Japan occupation. In terms of fiscal strategies, then, it follows logically that the Nationalists have no intention of cultivating a socialist economy. Instead, the then-authoritarian KMT leadership decided to confiscate much vacant land and property left by the Japanese upon their retreat. Using this new found wealth and the literal treasures they brought over from China, KMT compounded its wealth to such a degree that it became one of the wealthiest political party in the world and certainly the wealthiest in all of Asia.[4] The means to attaining such goal in the latter half of the 20th century mean a methodology that combines authoritarianism and capitalism, which ironically is also the model PRC adopted since the modernization process began under the hands of Deng Xiaoping.
As the average income of the people of Taiwan grew, so came with rising standard of living. Since 1949, Taiwan slowly but surely began progressing from an agricultural society into a manufacturing powerhouse well into the 1990s, and at the same time began adapting its industries to carter to the high-tech sector, producing global corporates like Foxconn, Asus, HTC, and more. This adaptation of Western economic development model has proved fruitful in Taiwan. During this rise to the global stage, the newly risen Taiwanese bourgeoisie began to send their children out into the world to study as international students. Many returned from Japan, the U.S., Europe, and other locations to bring back intellectual thoughts that include counterculture activism that were burgeoning around the world.
In the late 1970s, students and young professionals began a movement against the then-authoritarian KMT government and its ruthless martial law that reigned a total 38 years from 1949 to 1987. This period of time is referred to as White Terror, as it began in 1947 with a string of massacre of an estimate up to 28,000 Taiwanese people, now called the February 28th Incident.[5] Growing up in an air of suppression without the freedom of speech and assembly have caused a pervasive societal paranoia that is further highlighted upon cultural comparison when the young students left Taiwan to study elsewhere. From the Kaohsiung Incident in 1979, Wild Lily student movement in 1990, Wild Strawberries movement in 2009, Sunflower student movement in 2014, each protest concretely creates results that lead to freedom of speech, full democracy, peaceful transitioning of power, lesser economic and political dependency on PRC, and a regime so progressive that Asia has never seen the likes of it before.
In 2020, Taiwan is proud of speak of its thriving democracy. With direct elections following the Sunflower student movement in 2014 that led to the 2016 election of Tsai Ing-Wen, a woman president of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) who did not come from a political dynasty, chooses to live with two cats instead of being married, and pushes through the legalization of same-sex marriage despite a majority opposition as shown in a 2018 referendum.[6] In 2016, Tsai appointed Audrey Tang, a programmer-hacker, a minister in the Executive Yuan. Tang is the first transgender woman to become a member of the top executive cabinet.[7] In 2020, Taiwan yet again elected Tsai, choosing the progressive candidate instead of KMT’s traditionally conservative and pro-PRC candidate. These are not isolated instances and individuals who happened to be chosen; people like Tsai and Tang are representative of the shifting and rapidly progressing values of modern Taiwan.
Another example of the Taiwanese government’s progressive platform is the recent movement to push Taiwanese multiculturalism to include the more recent immigrants from the Philippines, Indonesia, and other Southeast Asian countries who came mostly as immigrant laborers of the care industry. Along with our already robust inclusion of indigenous histories and languages in the education program, the government is actively developing programs and infrastructures that serve these underprivileged and often discriminated communities. All these come at the same time as reports from PRC of the existence of concentration camps where to the Uyghur community are being disappeared. As opposed to the PRC Chinese nationalist policy that proclaims, they are “all one China and one Chinese people” despite having more than 200 minority cultures and languages, Taiwan intends to celebrate its diversity and cultural pluralism. The words of Deleuze and Guattari comes to mind again, “How can we conceive of a peopling, a propagation, a becoming that is without filiation or hereditary production? A multiplicity without the unity of an ancestor? […] We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredity…” (241) Whereas Taiwan welcomes its robust blossoming communities of new immigrants and indigenous cultures without the need to cling to a nationalist and racist narrative of one race, the CCP tells the people of PRC they must be linked both genetically and structurally. This expansive definition of “the Chinese race” thus also include Taiwan, and this is where autonomy and sovereignty conflict snowballs, both in the narrative and in the politics.
Taiwan looks at how individuals live their lives under the CCP rule in PRC, and often chooses to embark on the exact opposite path. As PRC transitions its model of economy from corrupted Communism into the rapidly expanding authoritarian-socialist modeling wedding hypercapitalism and neoliberalism, Taiwan looks inward at its own wealth gap and consequently fostered a leftist tendency from the conservative and rightwing KMT rule that had a stronghold in Taiwan even in the decades following the end of White Terror. But of course, an entire society of 23 million citizens will not result in such clean, almost Hegelian dialectical opposition. As I have argued before, Taiwan is nothing but a rhizome. It is an economic machine that have connects itself to the PRC and the rest of the world where industries everywhere fiscally depend upon the manufacturing chain of PRC, like Little Hans to the streets outside of his home. Then there is the war machine, of which connects Taiwan, the U.S., PRC, and various other international military institutions together through the weapon and information trade. As much as I sing praises of the student protest movements that steered Taiwan away from further CCP influence and control, there also exists a smaller but vocal opposition such as the Chinese Unification Promotion Party who wants nothing but annexation of Taiwan to become a PRC territory.
It is, however, the overwhelming momentum that pushed postwar Taiwan into its place right now that I want to address. Deleuze and Guattari writes,
Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what one is becoming, and through which one becomes. (272)
Indeed, it is through this lens that I see Taiwan as an entity, a rhizome, and a becoming-nation. With the speed which Taiwan reacts and tackles its sociopolitical issues, its becoming-nation is evident. No, it is not a nation, but its becoming-nation is real and concrete. The progressive policies ensure civil rights for minoritarian peoples and its militaristic tendencies holds down the societal anxiety of being a contested state. Its student protest movements facilitate exchanges and ideologies so direct with the government that many of our officials and elected representatives come from various student movements of their time. We elect activists. Almost in a caricature of what a progressive nation should look like in Asia, as the single Mandarin-speaking democracy, Taiwan’s becoming-nation is much more effective and functional than nations around it.
Finally, democracy as a system operates with concrete and material effects in Taiwan. Its nature is that of a multiplicitous one, much like how the democratic process is supposed to be, messy and chaotic precisely because everyone has a voice that could be unifying, opposing, or otherwise in all variations. As Deleuze and Guattari write,
"[B]ecoming and multiplicity are the same thing. A multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature." (249)
This could very well be an interpretation of the idea of democracy and multiculturalism. It is not divisible in the sense of Apartheid of South African and the drawing of Palestinian territories into only the West Bank and Gaza. Its dimensions of rights and freedom cannot be lost or changed without the democratic nature be changed.
III. Speaking in Minor Language
In “What Is a Minor Literature” by Deleuze and Guattari, they describe Prague German as used by Kafka in his writing as “a deterrirorialized language, appropriate for strange and minor uses. (This can be compared in another context to what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language.)” (“What Is a Minor Literature?” 56) In A Thousand Plateaus, they also speak of minor language again:
Two conjoined tendencies in so-called minor languages have often been noted: an impoverishment, a shedding of syntactical and lexical forms; but simultaneously a strange proliferation of shifting effects, a taste for overload and paraphrase. This applies to German of Prague, Black English, and Québecois. (A Thousand Plateaus 104)
I would add onto the list Taiwanese Mandarin. It is a language brought to Taiwan by those whose ancestry came from the pre-CCP China. The Manchu language have morphed over the years and enjoyed the height of concentrated power as the official language of the Qing Dynasty. As centuries past and geopolitical formations shift in the area, the meandering nature of language allowed the local variation that is Taiwanese Mandarin to prosper. Although the state of ROC only made this version of Mandarin official in 1945, its presence on Taiwan have long preceded the rule just as Han presence have long preceded the KMT retreat. As history progresses, the usages and functions of the language have evolved to match even closer to how Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize minor language as a concept that outlines a power dynamic: “Minor languages do not exist in themselves: they exist only in relation to a major language and are also invests of that language for the purpose of making it minor.” (105) Taiwanese Mandarin is a distinct version of Mandarin that sounds clearly different from the CCP-dictated “Standard” Chinese, which is a variation of the Beijing dialect. The investment in making it minor, in this case, is a collective deliberate decision that comes from the need to differentiate oneself away from the PRC state. From the Bopomofo pronunciation system, the substantial incorporation of Taiwanese Hokkien dialect, Japanese phrases from colonial time, and Japanese etymology of Chinese characters, Taiwanese Mandarin stands apart from the PRC state language defiantly.
During the KMT authoritarian era under the rule of Chiang Kai-shek, the more commonly spoken Taiwanese Hokkien, Japanese, Hakka dialect, and indigenous languages were all banned in order to create a unified state under the same Chinese nationalism the CCP now purports through the implementation of an official version of Mandarin that sounds intentionally close to the PRC Mandarin. Deleuze and Guattari see this kind of linguistic control clearly as well: “The unity of language is fundamentally political. There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language that at times advances along a broad front, and at times swoops down on diverse centers simultaneously.” (101) This means that during a specific time and in a smaller geographical border, the official version of Mandarin spoken in Taiwan was actually the major language.
In the first decades of KMT rule, the public were uniformly educated that one day the ROC government will retake China and liberate their brethren from CCP. Even in the ROC constitution today, a section still dictates that ROC have the right to the land of China, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet. It all seems preposterous now. Yet the ROC constitution cannot be changed easily under PRC military threat which states that should Taiwan make any move closer to independence, in this case changing its ROC constitution to renounce China/Inner Mongolia/Tibet as contested territory and consequently establishes itself as a country with no connection to PRC, there will be swift and severe military consequences. It is in this paradoxical territory contestation that Taiwan’s becoming-nation through the subsequent unreserved embracing of democracy, the Mandarin Taiwan uses had metamorphosized from the major language of KMT Mandarin into the minor language of Taiwanese Mandarin (against PRC Mandarin).
To analyze this of metamorphosis, I consider how Mandarin functions the same way Deleuze and Guattari describe how English functions: “For if a language such as British English or American English is major on a world scale, it is necessarily worked upon by all the minorities of the world, using very diverse procedures of variation.” (102) In the process of democratization, transitioning of power from KMT to DPP, and an active effort of uplifting minority voices, the said scale shifts. The structural changes of how Taiwanese Mandarin came to be is also indicative of how much change Taiwan had experienced in the past seven decades both internally and on global relational level. Of course, the rise of PRC for the past quarter century have everything to do with this shift as well. From a nonthreatening power that was willing to coexist with KMT’s Taiwan, sharing the double claims over the same territories, PRC has transformed itself into an economic and military powerhouse that has expansionist plans which not only includes the annexation of Taiwan but also imperialist colonization of Africa through the Belt and Road Initiative.[8] PRC Mandarin and Simplified Chinese, now taught as standard for “Chinese” at universities courses all around the world, have reached a level similarly to British English or American English as the dominant form of a certain broader linguistic category. It thus subjects all the other variations of languages within the same linguistic category as minor languages.
How the concept of minor language and becoming comes together, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, is how a relationship between two entities entails becoming: “Minor languages are characterized not by overload and poverty in relation to a standard or major language, but by a sobriety and variation that are like a minor treatment of the standard language, a becoming-minor of the major language. The problem is not the distinction between major and minor language; it is one of a becoming.” (104) In imprinting this structural upon Taiwanese geopolitical circumstances, an interesting synthetical result happens: not only is there the becoming-nation of Taiwan, connecting to this nation-state-machine is the becoming-Taiwan of PRC.
IV. Conclusion
Just like how decades ago the rising Taiwanese bourgeoisie have sent its children into the world, right now is the PRC’s turn. With more international students from the PRC in the rest of the world than ever, thanks to the education-industrial complex, the exchanges of ideas are bound to flow into PRC causing certain trends to follow. Although PRC faces the challenges of an authoritarian rule that is ever tightening its grip as Xi Jinping rids term limits for himself, implement further widespread and rootdeep surveillance-censorship, and persecuting more and more Uighur people for their religious belief, there is hope for the democratization of PRC. Just as those under KMT rule in the 1950s did not allow themselves the imagination of a free and democratic state, perhaps many in the PRC cannot see the possibilities lying ahead of them.
Taiwan is not a model for the PRC to follow, much like how the wasp is no model for the orchid to follow, or how the minor literature is not toward which the major literature aspires. A becoming is something more than a process or a pathway: "An example: Do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into composition with something else in such a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they enter." (274) When I first begin considering the idea of becoming, I had trouble fathoming what would a human's becoming-dog look like outside of the werewolf and the wearing-shoes-on-hands example. Now I see how it bursts with potential for changes like new formations or disruptions of the nation-state. By entering into a mutually beneficial military-industrial relationship through the weapons trade, indebting and strong-arming other nation-states into the providing strategic warm water ports as satellite territories, or infringing on the autonomy and sovereignty of self-ruling nation-states, I see paths of the sort of revolutionary change Deleuze speak of when he asserts that revolution is the way that paves the path to change, and change is to change the set of problems one encounter, thus always for the better.
I believe my interpretation or ways of thinking about Taiwan and PRC have now proved to be further than simply in the category of nation-state. Deleuze and Guattari’s description of becoming-animal,
"There is an entire politics of becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family not of religion nor of the State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions, groups all the more secret for being extrinsic, in other words, anomic." (247)
The oppression of minoritarian states like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, and the Uighur lands of Xinjiang, and further control of its own people may be exactly what PRC need in order to liberate its own people from the rule of CCP. The image of a pressure cooker on the brink of explosion comes to mind. Such diligently destructive work by the state apparatus have thus far have elicit nothing but doubt from its own people. While state-apologists will always exist, the stability with which CCP grips its population may not be as reliable as it appears. Working against the interests of its own authority and without the willingness to enter into relations with other amorphous entities because it knows such connection is bound to change its own rhizomic nature, the PRC is already plugged into the internationalization-machine. It is the following changes that I look forward to as not only a Taiwanese person but also as a friend with free-thinking individuals from PRC who voice a desire for democracy and freedom had they only have access to them. Should I be accused of being overly naïve when it comes to analyzing the issues of PRC and democracy, I will not concede. I argue that in fact it is my multifaceted understandings of how PRC functions in the world, not only in relation to Taiwan but also in relation to the rest of the world that I may come to this conclusion. The recent massive expansions PRC has undertaken have been and will continue to enclose on spaces that are narrow and crowded to begin with, like Hong Kong as seen in the recent strings of 2019 to 2020 protests against the implementation of the Fugitive Offenders amendment bill. Returning to the idea of minor and major literature, Deleuze and Guattari note, “The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is political. […] Minor literature is completely different [from major literature]; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it.” (“What Is a Minor Literature?” 56) These spaces, like Taiwan and Hong Kong, are rhizomes within themselves that are constantly going through changes of their own becomings. Taiwan’s becoming-nation is the velocity with which it vibrates, and PRC’s undeniable connection to Taiwan (although motivated by its brand of fascist expansionism) will only lead to a future of changed circumstances and questions. How these conflicts will be dealt with and answered by PRC’s own people remains to be seen.
[1] See the case at Harvard University. Link: https://www.businessinsider.com/chinese-students-kicked-out-of-harvard-model-un-for-taiwan-debate-2015-2
[2] See “Taiwan #1” incidents. Link: https://newbloommag.net/2015/12/11/taiwan-no-1-gamers/
[3] An autobiographical novel written by Wu Chuo-liu in 1945, as Japanese colonization was ending in Taiwan. It is also subsequently turned into a song with the same title by Taiwanese artist Lo Ta-yu.
[4] “Taiwan’s Kuomintang: On the Brink.” The Economist. 6 Dec 2001. Web. Accessed 8 May 2020. https://www.economist.com/asia/2001/12/06/on-the-brink
[5] Rubinstein, Murray A. (2007). Taiwan: A New History. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe. p. 302.
[6] Aspinwall, Nick. “Taiwan’s gay marriage law victory not an obvious win for its President.” The Interpreter, Lowy Institute. 30 May 2019. Web. Accessed 8 May 2020. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/taiwan-s-gay-marriage-law-victory-not-obvious-win-its-president
[7] Chung, Jake. “PROFILE: Audrey Tang: 100% made in Taiwan.” Taipei Times. 26 Aug. 2016. Web. Accessed 8 May 2020. http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2016/08/28/2003654031
[8] Kleven, Anthony. “Belt and Road: colonialism with Chinese characteristics.” The Interpreter, Lowy Institute. 6 May 2019. Web. Accessed 10 May 2020. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/belt-and-road-colonialism-chinese-characteristics
Bibliography
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1987, Minneapolis.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure. Minuit, 1975, Paris. Translated by Dana Polan as Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. University of Minnesota Press, 1986, Minneapolis. pp. 56–60.