Sponsoring Civil Society: State and Community Movement in Taiwan*

This article contributes to the growing literature on the synergic production of civil society in newly democratized countries. State sponsorship can be effective when clientelism, as a form of social dominance, continues to frustrate purposive organization from below. Three elements are necessary for this scenario. First, a group of reform‐minded officials must be able to pursue an independent agenda that deviates from local elites. Second, reformers have to create new institutional avenues to channel resources downward by bypassing local politicians. Lastly, civil society organizations must be capable of effectively responding to the initiatives from above. I use Taiwan’s community movement to understand the logic and consequences of sponsoring civil society. State endorsement is critical to legitimatize community organizations’ presence in local politics. With a detailed analysis of a local case, the Qiaodou community movement, I argue that state sponsorship is critical for the growth of civil society organizations. Sponsored movement activism maintains its political independence by leveraging the incoherence in bureaucratic division of labor, and its professional expertise offers an advantageous bargaining position when facing officials.     

The making and unmaking of a “transborder nation”: South Korea during and after the Cold War

The burgeoning literature on transborder membership, largely focused on the thickening relationship between emigration states in the South and the postwar labor migrant populations and their descendants in North America or Western Europe, has not paid due attention to the long-term macroregional transformations that shape transborder national membership politics or to the bureaucratic practices of the state that undergird transborder claims-making. By comparing contentious transborder national membership politics in South Korea during the Cold War and Post-Cold War eras, this article seeks to overcome these limitations. In both periods, the membership status of colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants in Japan and northeast China and their descendants was the focus of contestation. The distinctiveness of the case—involving both a sustained period of colonial rule and a period of belated and divided nation-state building interwoven with the Cold War—highlights the crucial importance of three factors: (1) the dynamically evolving macro-regional context, which has shaped transborder national membership politics in the region in distinctive ways; (2) the essentially political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation-building; and (3) the role of state registration and documentation practices in shaping the contours of transborder national membership politics in the long run. By incorporating Korea—and East Asia more broadly—into the comparative study of transborder nation-building, this article also lays the groundwork for future cross-regional comparative historical studies.

---

'Sites' of resistance: alternative websites and state-society relations

Much attention has been focused on Singapore's attempt to use information technology to build a knowledge-based economy. This paper examines the implications of the unintended consequences of the Internet in the restructuring of state and society relations in Singapore. We use the data on Singapore-based and Singapore-related websites to show (a) the diversity of positions expressed by civil society organizations, fringe groups and even mainstream segments of society; (b) the negotiation process between the state and civil society over various rights and how developments in cyber-space have implications for 'reality'; (c) how censorship and content regulation itself is a more complex multi-dimensional process such that while local politics is regulated, the multi-ethnic character of the resident population has led to greater religious tolerance such that religious groups banned in some countries have found a safe haven in Singapore and have used the city-state as a strategic Internet node.     

THE DETERMINANTS OF U.S. STATE ECONOMIC GROWTH: A LESS EXTREME BOUNDS ANALYSIS

This study investigates U.S. state economic growth from 1970 to 1999. I innovate on previous studies by developing a new approach for addressing "model uncertainty" issues associated with estimating growth equations. My approach borrows from the "extreme bounds analysis" approach of Leamer while also addressing concerns raised by Granger and Uhlig, Sala-i-Martin, and others that not all specifications are equally likely to be true. I then apply this approach to identify "robust" determinants of state economic growth. My analysis confirms the importance of productivity characteristics of the labor force and industrial composition of a state's economy. I also find that policy variables such as (1) size and structure of government and (2) taxation are robust and economically important determinants of state economic growth. ( JEL 040, 051, H10, H20, H30, H70, R11, R58, C51)     

A SENSE OF PLACE:

One of the classic questions in urban sociology is how social relations and solidarity are maintained in an urbanized, industrialized, bureaucratic society. The two pivotal research focuses have been the issues of (1) the persistence of territorially based affective ties and primary relations in an urban world and (2) the micro/macro links connecting community residents and the larger society. This article argues that social bonds and solidarity are now transformed from affective ties into more diffuse relationships as individuals purposively use the externally shared meanings of housing and community in American society to situate themselves, simultaneously locating themselves with others who share their values and preferences and asserting their social status and social identity to others.     

STATUS POLITICS AND THE POLITICAL AGENDA OF THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT

Status politics has been used by scholars to explain social protest movements, particularly those that have been right-wing in orientation. In recent years, some scholars have placed the Christian Right within the context of status politics, while others have suggested it is erroneous to do so. This article examines the applicability of status politics to the Chrisitan Right from the perspective of the political agenda the movement has pushed in the Congress. The argument is that status politics fails to explain adequately the moral, nonsymbolic, and "offensive" dimensions of the Christian Right.     

State making and state terror

Conclusion The interesting question, therefore, is this: why have we seldom heard about the destabilizing consequences of Central government policy in the pre-1949 Chinese countryside? Surely one reason has to do with the fact that the well-known models put forth by Western historians to comprehend modern Chinese history and politics by and large left out the interest of the Central government. Up until the time Theda Skocpol published States and Social Revolutions there were, generally speaking, three such models. In the first of these models, the Central government was said to have been a state blown apart by military separatism. Advocates of a second model acknowledged that Chiang Kai-shek led the Central government to defeat most of the aristocratic warlord armies of the 1927–30 period, but nonetheless portrayed the center as lacking the bureaucratic machinery necessary to penetrate the vast rural interior and halt the devolution of state power. According to Philip Kuhn, William Wei, and Philip C. C. Huang, this devolutionary process played into the hands of entrenched local elites who were against state building, or who, as Prasenjit Duara has brilliantly shown, acted as brokers to alter Central government claims in order to serve their own interests. Yet a third model was sketched out in the insightful historical studies of Lloyd E. Eastman. According to Eastman, the Republican center was real enough, but the plans of its policymakers to create economic wealth and expand their controls over rural society were confounded by factional infighting and cut short by the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.To be sure, each of the preceding models has enriched our understanding of the relation of the Republican polity to rural society within a given time frame and in a given place. William Wei's study, which shows that Chiang Kai-shek's Central government was more or less compelled to compromise with local strongmen in order to pacify Jiangxi province in the mid-1930s, is but one convincing example of the warlord devolution of state power thesis. Thus Wei strikes a familiar Skocpolian note — that of a Republican state permeated by rival social interests — when he concludes that the inescapable irony of it all was that by restoring the rural elite to power, the Guomindang had actually undermined its long-sought goal of placing the countryside fully under Central government control.By way of contrast, the formation of collective protest among the peasant salt producers of North China cannot be explained by merely evoking one of the well-established models of the Republican polity. That the Central government and its political interest is missing in most scholarly accounts of the coming of the Chinese Revolution is not surprising, for as Bruce Cumings wisely has pointed out, scholars of agrarian political systems have not developed a sufficient understanding of what prompts rural people to rebel largely because they seldom know what the politics of particular state structures are. I suspect that the precepts of the past, in combination with the current preoccupations with social history, have blinded us to the larger questions about the Republican state and its role in inciting rural disorder. Yet by following Tilly, and by exploring the macrohistory of the Republican state, we can see that there was a Central government, and that Chiang Kai-shek, T. V. Song, H. H. Kong, and other state makers made up the core of a ruling national clique bent on developing a political economy that would serve its own political interest. Having grasped this piece of the puzzle, we are in a better position to comprehend the political origins of collective protest in the countryside. Clearly, the Chiang Kai-shek center did have a major interest in salt revenue, and just as clearly the grievances and gatherings of the country people were linked to the revenue demands of the reconditioned gabelle. The emergence of popular collective action thus can be explained by the fact that China's country people could not adapt their lives to the Central government attempt to establish a political economy based on state monopoly and state-organized violence.Clearly, also, the Central government under Chiang Kai-shek did attempt to build its own state apparatus - its army, police forces, and bureaucracy — by developing new sources of revenue. By detailing the Republican state interest in taxing, or taking over, trade in rural products such as timber, salt, and coal we can begin to explore the process whereby the center reached deep into the countryside, and thereby advance our understanding of the progress made by the state in imposing its claims in the face of competition from provincial warlord regimes, county level actors, and village society. Few if any of the authors of the well-established models of the Republican polity have in fact looked systematically at the Central government quest for one specific type of revenue, or traced the development and extension of state revenue machinery within a given region, province, or county - let alone a village - over the long duree of modern Chinese history. My challenge to Skocpol, and the literature upon which her thesis is based, rests on just such a research strategy, that is, on evidence that the Central government was expanding its control over salt trade and over revenue from salt taxes in the North China interior during the Nationalist decade, 1927–37. By surveying the politics of salt, we have seen that the Central government Ministry of Finance was making some measure of progress in overcoming warlord controls, overriding the objections of local elites, and obliterating the structures of everyday peasant resistance.What does all of this suggest about the weakness of the Nanjing Central government? When Central government fiscal policy is placed firmly in the context of evolving state power, the Chiang Kai-shek center appears less anemic than is usually assumed - at least in this one issue area. To make this case, we need not deny that a condition of multiple sovereignty persisted in Republican China, or that Chiang Kaishek's Republic was not fully effective in its attempted expansion. But neither should we neglect the fact that the Chiang Kai-shek center was attempting to build a state in China, and that its state strengthening policies misfired and triggered collective protest. Such ill-conceived policies, along with the popular resistance to police efforts to enforce them, combined to place a major constraint on the state-building experiment.Thus, the fiscal claims of the Republican Central government itself combined with microlevel factors to produce this particular episode of collective protest. Gabelle-based income was one of the main pillars of Central government revenue from Yuan Shikai to Chiang Kai-shek. The center's attempt to transform China's long-established system of salt tax collection into a big profitable business was of course undertaken to pay off war indemnities and foreign debts and to underwrite state development. The problem was that progress in this sphere came at the expense of thousands upon thousands of village dwellers who shared an interest in the old earth salt economies of inland China. Understandably, the revved-up revenue collection machinery of the Central government's Salt Bureau - specifically the efforts of its tax police to seize the earth salt produced in peasant villages, which historically had been opposed to the official monopoly - drew the country people into confrontations and clashes with the agents of the state. Hence at the heart of this little known story is the resistance of China's salt land villages to a system of bureaucratic police controls supportive of the expansion of central state power. Of course for a more searchingly nuanced and complex explanation, we could factor in warlord politics, local elite inputs, and the factional intrigues of the Chiang Kaishek clique, but the important point is that the problem facing the country people was systemic, that is, the state-making process itself.Finally, the spirit of this episode of collective protest was not anti-capitalist. Rather, China's country people turned to collective action in order to preserve their longstanding rights to produce for the free market. The struggles of the peasant salt makers thus underscore the prevalence of the deeply structured market forces of which G. William Skinner has written, and remind us that rural protest sometimes took the form of a broad popular statement against state market controls. At the lower rungs of the rural marketing hierarchy, the peasant salt producers joined other pro-market groups, including local merchants and lower gentry, to prevent the Central government police from subordinating their communities to the state drive for revenue. Whether the Republican state was on the verge of winning this war on the popular market before World War II remains to be seen. But one point is clear: Central government interference in the popular market prerogatives produced a cast of angry characters who gained experience in organizing collective actions that transcended village politics, and their actions attracted the attention of Chinese Communist Party cadres who also were suffering from the repression of the protostate.     

Mapping Strategic Engagements: WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS AND THE STATE

Abstract

Given that all women's movements share a unique relationship to the State – their exclusion from political power, often legally and occasionally constitutionally underpinned, has this exclusion shaped women's movements' strategies, which have had as their general goal women's political inclusion? Some similarities are evident across types of women's movements and across nations. In this article, I discuss the ‘strategic dilemmas’ that women's movements are likely to face, and I attempt to identify the range of strategic responses employed by feminist movements. I begin with a definitional distinction between women's movements and feminist movements, followed by a discussion of women's relationship to the State. I identify similarities across feminist movements in four strategic dimensions: (1) movement autonomy vs state involvement; (2) insider vs outsider positioning; (3) separatist vs coalitional stances; and (4) discursive and influence-seeking politics. These strategic dimensions shape different opportunities for women's movements across different state configurations, offering openings for some types of women's movements that may be unrecognized or unexploited by others. The article concludes with speculations concerning women's movements' strategic action in the context of state reconfiguration.     

FAMILY LIFE AND AMERICAN POLITICS: THE "MARRIAGE GAP" RECONSIDERED

In recent years, several writers have identified marital statusas a potentially important line of political cleavage, observingthat singles are more likely to vote Democratic than marriedvoters are. Changes in both the structure of American familiesand in the salience of "family politics" in the policy arenasuggest increased attention to the political consequences ofmarital status and family life-style. This paper contributesto advancing theory concerning the relationship between familylife and politics, and empirically evaluating several competinghypotheses concerning the so-called marriage gap in the 1972through 1988 presidential elections.     

Robin M. Williams Lecture, 1994: Taking society seriously

Civil society provides essential balance to the rising power of national states and market economies. Particularly in the United States, however, the economy and state are squeezing civil society, with negative consequences. One result is that market rationality supplants other moralities, with attendant changes in social practices. Examples are offered from education, health care, and federal tax policy. All three legs of the metaphorical social tripod of civil society, economy, and the state need to be strong. Institutions of civil society sustain individuals and societies, but require structural and cultural support if they are to complement and counterbalance the logic and practices of economy and state.This paper was presented as the First Annual Robin M. Williams, Jr., Lecture at the University of Delaware, February 24, 1994; the Eastern Sociological Society annual meeting, Baltimore, Maryland, March 19, 1994; and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, North Carolina, March 28, 1994.     

Asian student migration to Australia

"This paper presents an overview of Asian student migration to Australia, together with an analysis of political and educational aspects of the overseas student programme. It focuses on some significant consequences of this flow for Australia. The characteristics of key student groups are contrasted to provide some perspective of the diversity of historical and cultural backgrounds, with the source countries of Malaysia, Indonesia and PRC [China] selected as case studies. Since the issue of PRC students in Australia has attracted considerable public attention and policy consideration, particular focus is placed on their experience." (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)     

中东大规模动荡与我国的外交应对

中东剧变一年多以来,阿拉伯国家蒙受巨大冲击,引起了所有中东国家乃至国际社会的高度关注,而这首先与中东的重要位置有关.这次变局几乎波及所有阿拉伯国家,民众诉求涉及政治、经济、社会诸多方面.问题是长年积累下来的,2011年的动荡应是这种情绪的大爆发,虽会推动社会前进,但代价却是巨大的.叙利亚问题前景仍不明朗,目前只维持了脆弱的和平.中国以“不干涉内政”原则和“劝和促谈”的方针应对这次大动荡是正确的、主动的,不管外界有多少反对声音和暂时的不理解,都应坚定不移地走下去.     

The state and the development of an information society: Greek policy and experience

The paper looks into the dynamics of information society policy and its implementation in the Greek context. It argues that information society development is a contested process, influenced by pre‐existing state, economy and society relations. Based on this, it looks into the different aspects of the idiosyncratic path which the evolution of the Greek information society has followed, particularly after 2000. Using Bob Jessop's strategic‐relational approach (SRA) to the state as an analytical framework and drawing on a number of in‐depth interviews with relevant political actors, it provides insights into policy implementation by examining: the public management of information technology projects, how such projects were received in bureaucratic structures and practices, as well as the relationship between the state and the information and communication technology (ICT) sector in public procurement processes. The emphasis is on the period 2000–2008, during which a major operational programme on the information society in Greece was put into effect. The paper also touches upon the post‐2008 experience, suggesting that information society developments might include dynamics operating independently and even in contradiction to the state agenda.     

Why Do Entrepreneurs Enter Politics? Evidence from China

This article examines the determinants of the entrepreneur's political participation by employing a unique matched firm-institution data set from China. We find that the likelihood of an entrepreneur's participation can be explained by the underdevelopment of markets and market-supporting institutions. According to our estimates, the probability of entering politics decreases by 8–20% from the mean when the institutional indices improve by one standard deviation. Our findings support the view that the institutional environment shapes the private entrepreneur's motivation to participate in politics; they also provide an example of how private entrepreneurs respond to state/market failure in developing and transition countries. (JEL G1, H00, O10, P2, P3 )     

Houellebecq,or, the Carnival of Spite

Despite their significance in social reality and in fiction, ressentiment and especially spite are surprisingly under‐researched topics. As the repressed other of the contemporary post‐political society, they often combine political impotence and enjoyment in passivity, two experiences that are closely related to the increasing transformation of the “city” into the state of nature, of politics to bio‐politics (or post‐politics) and of the “social” into the simulacra (the society of spectacle). The article discusses ressentiment and spite in Houellebecq's fiction, by taking point of departure in the way he depicts the contemporary society, combining this with a discussion of his artistic position and the affective economy of ressentiment and spite in his work. Finally it asks whether it is possible to imagine a sociality, a “city,” without spite.     

Social Conservatism, New Republicans, and the 1980 Election

Using data from the 1980 National Election Study, we examinethe claims (1) that those voters who shifted to Ronald Reaganin 1980 ("New Republicans") were drawn disproportionately fromthe lower to middle strata of the population: (2) that theywere social conservatives motivated by issues like abortionand ERA: and (3) that they were more religious and alienatedfrom the federal government than average. Our results stronglysuggest that all of these assertions are false and thus questionthe emergence of a "neopopulist" or "Middle American Radical"political constituency on the right wing of American politics.Our findings also have implications for prominent theories aboutconservative political movements and about the changing natureof party politics in a postindustrial society.     

伊盟、伊合与中国中东人文外交

伊斯兰世界联盟与伊斯兰合作组织是泛伊斯兰主义制度化的产物,伊盟主要通过朝觐平台间接对伊斯兰国家政治施与影响,伊合则通过推进议题的方式直接对伊斯兰国家政治产生影响;我国历来重视发展与这些泛伊斯兰国际组织的友好关系,并取得了宝贵历史经验与良好的成效;在明确我国与泛伊斯兰国际组织开展人文交流与合作的资源优势、基本目标及其实现途径的基础上,探索我国对中东国家开展“全方位、多层次、宽领域”人文外交的应对之策,旨在进一步提升我国对中东伊斯兰国家的人文外交能力.     

SHIFTING ARRANGEMENTS: INDO-TRINIDADIAN WOMEN,GLOBALIZATION, AND THE RESTRUCTURING OF FAMILY LIFE

This article focuses on the changing relationships between East-Indian daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law in a developing society: Trinidad, West Indies. Changes in how families are structured are seen as active responses to processes of globalization. While these changes have provided younger women with opportunities to resist older arrangements, their responses have in turn created new problems that remain unresolved. I argue that these families' experiences of change are linked to complex relations that include increased access to education, changes in the village economy, and global media penetration, all of which are part of broader processes of modernization and globalization. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork as well as census data and economic, educational, and demographic changes since World War II.     

Settler colonial power and the American Indian sovereignty movement: forms of domination, strategies of transformation

The article extends the multi-institutional model of power and change through an analysis of the American Indian Sovereignty Movement. Drawing upon cultural models of the state, and articulating institutionalist conceptions of political opportunities and resources, the analysis demonstrates that this framework can be applied to challenges addressing the state as well as nonstate fields. The rational-legal diminishment of tribal rights, bureaucratic paternalism, commonsense views of tribes as racial/ethnic minorities, and the binary construction of American and Indian as oppositional identities diminished the appeal of "contentious" political action. Instead, to establish tribes' status as sovereign nations, tribal leaders aggressively enacted infrastructural power, transposed favorable legal rulings across social fields to legitimize sovereignty discourses, and promoted a pragmatic coexistence with state and local governments. Identifying the United States as a settler colonial society, the study suggests that a decolonizing framework is more apt than racial/ethnicity approaches in conceptualizing the struggle of American Indians.     

GLOBALIZATION: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE WITHIN THE SPACE ECONOMY OF LATE CAPITALISM

This article analyses the process of globalization from the perspective of a 'political economy of space' where the interactions of the processes of capitalist accumulation within contexts of geographic and social space has profound shaping effects upon the nature of politics, economics and society more generally. The argument will show that contemporary globalization has two dimensions: outward into geographic space, and inward into culture and society. The focus then moves to culture and information technology within the space economy of late capitalism and argues that a crisis of finite geographic space has led to the deepening of the commodificationary processes of capitalist accumulation into the 'identity-spaces' of culture and society. For hugely popular 'cyber-gurus' such as Howard Rheingold and Myron W . Krueger, the development of information technologies such as the Internet-derived 'virtual communities' are spaces where new forms of democracy and 'being' can emerge. This article argues that 'cyberspace' and 'virtual communities' are deeply dystopic and alienated spaces, and cyber-Utopian dreams of other, possible worlds made virtual through information technology are at best naive, when it is realised that the information revolution that evolved from the processes of a particular type of globalization, has conceived and developed technologies with primarily profit, productivity, surveillance labour-saving and escapism in mind.