From Social Visibility to Political Invisibility: The School in Nationalist Taiwan as Fulcrum for an Evolving World Ethos

The transition from authoritarianism to democracy has been a powerful impetus in research about Taiwan since the 1990s. Taiwan offered profound social, political, and cultural changes over that period for political science, cultural studies, anthropology and many other disciplines to explain and describe. The narrative of change has been, ultimately, modernity, and a wide range of scholarship has sought to account for the many ways Taiwan became modern in the twentieth century.This narrative has given an impetus to scholarship, but it also locates scholarly work about Taiwan in a moral and political teleology, implicitly or explicitly describing a society becoming freer, more just, more open or more prosperous. In the 1990s and 2000s, that teleology was historical, created by Taiwan's experience of authoritarianism, but more recently, as that experience has retreated into memory, China has offered a territorialized counterpoint to Taiwan's development, especially with the threatening politics of the Xi era.Allen Chun's From Social Visibility to Political Invisibility: The School in Nationalist Taiwan as Fulcrum for an Evolving World Ethos sits in an interesting location within those scholarly and political teleologies. Its subject is school education and it draws on fieldwork conducted in 1991–92 at the beginning of Taiwan's formal institutional democratization. As a result, the book captures an education system at the inflection point between the KMT's Republic of China nation-building project on Taiwan and democratization and “Taiwanisation.” The work should be an inspiration for any academic with substantial amounts of material from decades past who might have feared it was past its scholarly use-by date.But the subject matter of early 1990s education also gives the book an interesting epistemological instability. It is not a work of social history, firmly locating its material in a past that Taiwan has moved on from, but an account of a system that foregrounds an anthropological and social theoretical approach, with much of its material implicitly, and even explicitly, in the present tense.The substance of the book is a very detailed account of the life of Peiyang Middle School in Hsinchu. The book describes the school at the institutional level, including its architectural geography, its sociopolitical practices in the classroom and administration, down to the level of individual staff members, and the temporal patterns of the days and teaching years that are so intrinsic to education.The key argument of the book is that these dimensions of the institutional life of the school express the normative power of the ROC state in Taiwan. The school is a key site of state power and so expresses its distinctive ideological, social, and moral concerns.For Taiwan, this is a rich theme, and Chun explores how the school mobilizes the ROC's nation-building project that began with its founding in 1912. The legacy of the New Life Movement is central, with its emphasis on moral education, and Chun shows how the school system was used to create new Chinese national subjects in Taiwan whose individual moral rectitude was a means for the state to signify the moral strength of the Republic. Chun reaches back further, too, in arguments about the legacy of the imperial state and its Confucian moral cosmology that informed its Republican successor, albeit imbued with a sense of urgency in the face of China's domestic and international travails in the twentieth century. There is detailed material on the Republican KMT party-state system and its ideology, and how they translated into education policy, institutions, and the curriculum.Chun's book is a reminder of the potency of the vocabulary of sociological, anthropological, and social theory. Upon its entry into what was once called “area studies” in the 1970s and 1980s, it has enabled an acute understanding of power, especially state power, and the way it shapes institutions, social practices, and subjectivities.Social theory, which here includes a long list of theorists from Elias to Foucault, Geertz, and numerous others, can also become inert when it becomes an end in itself, however. The power of the concepts and their authors can take precedence over the material of analysis when their application is more about the structures of power in the globalized institutions of knowledge production than being attentive to the lives over whom theory speaks. In Chun's book, the subject of Taiwanese schools in the early 1990s is so distinctive in time and place, and so interesting, those lives cannot but resist the grand generalization of largely Euro-American social theories that emerged in their own institutional contexts.This tension becomes most visible in the chapter on the postauthoritarian era and the Taiwanization of the school system and curriculum. Chun's account of the policy process and public debate from the mid-1990s around what became the textbook series Knowing Taiwan is valuable and necessary. However, coming after the detailed fieldwork, and acknowledging the realities of academic labor and employment over long careers, one cannot but wish Chun had been able to track how the new policies were implemented in the school in Hsinchu through the decade of change.Instead, Chun steps back to a broader analysis of identity and multiculturalism in Taiwan in the democracy era, presented with a skeptical tone. Rather than seeing the Knowing Taiwan curriculum reform as a realization of the opportunities of democracy to give voice to an authentic Taiwanese subjectivity free from an authoritarian nation-building, Chun sees continuity with immanence of state-building in education and a pragmatic response to Taiwan's increasingly marginal position in the international system.Intellectual contrariness should never be taken lightly in the era of the corporate university, and Chun's critique is substantive, but he might have done more to recognize the place of education reforms in a state that was itself being subject to a form of democratic moral education.Indeed, the conclusion of From Social Visibility to Political Invisibility alludes to that possibility, but Chun emphasizes the enduring presence of the Republic of China state on Taiwan and suggests, in the vocabulary of cultural and social anthropological theory, a broader critique of the state itself in Taiwan's liminal situation. Chun's argues that this represents a failure of the promise of Taiwan's democratic state-building in the international system, but without an account of Xi-era China in the world, and in the absence of an analysis of Taiwanese government foreign policy, this seems churlish.There is a great deal to recommend From Social Visibility to Political Invisibility: The School in Nationalist Taiwan as Fulcrum for an Evolving World Ethos, including its empirical data and its commitment to a substantive theorization of Taiwan. At the same time, it represents a certain moment in time both for Taiwan and for the globalized academy that found an audience around the world for cultural and social theory. That world is, however, changing, and a new era of great power competition and conflict is emerging with Taiwan at its center in Asia. It is hard to escape the thought that new modalities of academic inquiry are needed to respond to this new order.