this is really long, part 1: stuck outside of xinzhu with the taipei blues again

The other day we were shuffling home through rush hour traffic, exhausted and a little ancy. Well, they were exhausted and I was a little ancy. They were exhausted because we’d just been to an all-day meeting about cross-regional government cooperation, a project initiated by one of my best friends, who used to work at the city government and then left for a bigger, better job just when this was getting underway, leaving it to a much less enthusiastic, much more easily overwhelmed co-worker to handle the minutiae and our very idealistic-in-principle boss to take the credit and the blame. I was ancy because I was supposed to go out with a friend that night, and I’d just been to an all-day meeting and was badly in need of some beer. The cross-regional cooperation plan has been gradually gathering little puffs of steam, but it’s a touchy topic, for reasons that include state structure and party politics.

There are two major levels of state organization here: the “central,” or national government; and the “local” or, literally, “place,” which means the city and county governments. City governments come in two kinds, though nothing in their name reflects this: some are within the administrative boundaries of a county (such as Yonghe and Zhonghe, which lie just outside of Taipei and are connected to it now by subway, and which we whities sometimes refer to as “suburbs” but which are actually cities in their own right). Others, like Taipei, are independent administrative units. Typically you’ll have an X City government and an X County government, where the County government covers the smaller cities (and villages and so on) surrounding the city. You cannot possibly be interested in this fact. Yet I am telling it to you, because I know it.

One problem with getting any kind of cross-local government cooperation is that lines of control, accountability, and communication seem to be structured as a series of binary relations between each local government and the central level. There are no lines running between local governments (in fact according to my boss the real achievement of this meeting was simply to gather all these representatives from these different local governments in one room -- something he says has never happened before -- and to lianluo ganqing, to build up their affective or sentimental relations). This may be how it is everywhere (I know nothing about government structure anywhere outside of Taipei, of course, making my observations slightly … useless), but in any event it seems like a sensible way to set things up if you are a single-rule, constitution-suspending, Leninisty party like the martial-law era KMT; and actually no less sensible if you are the colonizing empire, like the Japanese from whom the KMT inherited a lot of the country’s administrative structure (how much did they inherit? ask me in about five months).

Another problem with the cooperation plan is that, although most of these governments are currently controlled by the KMT (that is, the mayor or county head is KMT), two of them, including a pretty key one, are DPP. As a representative from one of these reported at the meeting: “We’re happy to be here and we thank you for inviting us. We are interested to see your presentation; however, political concerns make it impossible for us to comment on it now or to give any assurances of our participation. We will convey the contents to our superiors.” My boss, who has a gift for heartfelt spontaneous appeals to the good of the nation which seem to get a pretty positive response from people who don’t work with him closely, sighed. “High-level politicians have given us a rich abundance of political concerns. But if we simple administrators are forced to act on the basis of these political concerns, well, the nation really has no hope.”[i] The guy seemed moved, at least in the sense that after the meeting he spent a long time talking to my boss about the difficulties of cooperating across party lines and his own frustrations with the situation.

One common distinction that city administrators make here is between 人治 renzhi, rule-by-a-person, and 法治 fazhi, rule-by-law. It’s usually used to (at least implicitly) contrast martial law rule (when power was held by individuals who were to varying extents above the laws) and democratized rule (when power is held by individuals who implement the laws, which are above them). Here’s an instance of its use. A famous public university whose leadership is elected by the government proposed a huge construction plan that included moving and building around a Japanese-era building. Just as construction was about to start, one relevant city bureau suddenly rescinded its approval and demanded that the old building not be touched. The university stood to lose a lot of money; and the university head stood to look foolish in the upcoming university head selections. A member of the university team appealed to the head of the opposing bureau to give them some leeway on the grounds that “we are all administrators here, we are all civil servants.”

The bureau head erupted into a diatribe about not knowing what that could possibly mean, implying that the university was inducing him to corruption, and insisting that we are no longer living in the days of rule-by-person but are now in the era of rule-by-law, and the law says that this plan must be rejected. What everyone in the room knew was that the bureau had already done all its normal research on the plan and had approved it without even mentioning the old building when it was contacted by a famous professor with a lot of political connections and, possibly, a dissatisfaction with the current university director. At which point the bureau sprung into action and, without proposing an alternative plan, revoked the approval. When I asked a person familiar with the case (but involved in neither organization) about the bureau head's statement that “this is the law and there’s nothing I can do about,” he snorted: “What the hell does that mean? A bureau head doesn’t have the power to get things done? What the hell does that mean? If he doesn’t have the power, who does?” In other words, my feeling is that rule-by-law is most often invoked by people who need to justify their own clearly rule-by-person conduct. Which is not a surprise.

I bring this up in the context of inter-regional and inter-party cooperation just because, from hearsay and complaint and impression more than actual experience, I have this feeling that Taiwanese politics today is a system of elected rule-by-person. Unlike under martial law, when a set of unelected people determined both the laws and the ways in which they would be above them, now it is the populace at large who elects the people who determine both the laws and the ways in which they will be above them. Which makes me wonder why so many people use free and fair elections, and peaceful handovers of power to opposition parties, as the benchmarks for democracy. Elections are not a problem; what happens in between the elections is the interesting question.

[i] A note on the status of labeling something as “political” or a “political concern,” drawn from a footnote to a paper I wrote last spring: Jeff Martin has pointed out that the long-term equivalence (under martial law) of popular political participation with factional self-interest has contributed to a generally negative evaluation of politics itself. This leads to a rhetorical stance that I always found a little puzzling before Jeff explained this to me, in which things that seem to me to be primarily, inescapably, essential political -- like elections or legislative processes -- are only labeled “political” at the point when someone wants to express exasperation with or mistrust of them. Why the same thing seems to be going on in American politics currently is beyond me.