bourdieu_boy

This weekend I have been at St Antony's College, Oxford, for a post-election workshop on democracy in Taiwan. My brief was the media, and among the political scientists and Washington hard-heads, I did my usual gesture at epistemological critique. We enjoyed "High Table" in the cafeteria ... I mean, college dining hall, as well as St Antony's very own range of undrinkable wines and sherry. The event was successful and enjoyable and concluded with a very pleasant dinner at a local Italian with academic luminaries and a touch of political celebrity in the form of Bi-khim Hsiao, who was literally and metaphorically on the road to recovery after the unimaginable physical and emotional demands of the presidential election campaign.* I finished the event off British style with an arduous journey back to London through a range of transport failures that took hours.

Here is approximately what I had to say at the conference.



The importance of the media in democracies has long been recognized by essayists, activists and theorists, from Thomas Carlyle to Jurgen Habermas to Samuel Huntington.

The media is part of democratic process, delimiting the power of states and empowering citizens by functioning to produce civil society or the public sphere by mediating between the state and the public.

In Lipsett’s early work, the media are a function of modernization or more properly modernity, which is a pre-condition of democratization. - the theme of modernization or modernity is one which occurs again and again with respect to Taiwan, and even the title of this event - “consolidation” alludes to the temporality implicit in the notion of modernity.

Especially through Huntington, the media in Taiwan has been understood as part of a positivist explanatory mechanism of Taiwan’s democratization, what I have referred to an an equation of democratization, in which linguistic categories, like “media”, the “middle class”, the “economy” etc are lined up in logically causal relationships. So the emergence of a newspaper reading middle class in Taiwan through a booming economy in the post-WWII era is understood as a factor to have caused democratization.

In my own work I have been critical of this mode of social analysis. The objectification of socio-political life in this mode of political science implies a political and moral response to that life. Democracy was caused by the struggle by democracy activists, not objective social processes that do not demand a political engagement with that struggle by observers.

* (And, indeed, a political life and a life in politics.)

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The rolling PR disaster that has been the global torch relay for the Beijing Olympics is in Australia at the moment for a run around the nation’s capital, Canberra. I had piece in the Canberra Times about it today.


When the Beijing Olympic torch relay runs through Canberra, it does so as an overloaded symbolic event, preempted by global news reporting in which protests and counter-protests have dominated the relay’s image-making.

The purpose of the relay, as suggested by the ACT Torch Relay Planning Committee, is to “cheer on our Australian heroes”. This is a perhaps optimistic but not unreasonable attempt to wrest the meaning of the torch back for an Australian audience. Yet it only adds even more to the weight of meanings that have burdened the torch since it was lit.

The lighting occurred in Greece with an invented ceremony. Through references to classical Greek civilization, it invoked the performance of an immutable historical tradition while actually looking like something out of a Ray Harryhausen movie.

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The British press have offered up their reviews of Cloud Gate:

The left-wing Guardian

The right-wing, Murdoch-owned Times

The even more left-wing Independent

The right-wing Conservative Party favourite, Daily Telegraph

All broadly in agreement.


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An excerpt of of a performance by the Cloud Gate dance company from Taiwan, founded in 1973 by Lin Hwai-min, of one of Lin's most famous pieces, Moon Water. Video requires Quicktime 7.

Later this year I am returning to Australia after nearly seven years living among the British in Great Britain. In early 2002, not long after I arrived here, I went to Sadler's Wells to see Moon Water by Cloud Gate, the famous contemporary dance company from Taiwan. It was a memorable evening. Cloud Gate have been back to London more than once in the intervening years, and indeed, I was lucky enough to be invited to an after-performance reception for the company at the Barbican in 2005. But this week, Cloud Gate have returned to do an encore of Moon Water, and we saw it last night. The performance seemed more vivid and intense than the first time. It made more sense, and it seemed to offer bookends on this period living here.

The whole work is set to Bach's suites for solo cello and makes complex references to a number of movement styles, but especially tai chi and qi gong. At the end of the piece, the stage is flooded with water, which reflects the dancers' bodies and movements. It's amazing.

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Beijing Olympics torch relay in London. Video requires Quicktime 7. As is now known, the blue tracksuited guards are Chinese military police cadets. Apparently, the British police called them "Smurfs".

It was a day of a certain amount of drama over the torch relay in London on Sunday. Both Sky News and the BBC gave it non-stop tv coverage through the day and both were on the lookout for any moment of violence.

The protests were almost all on the Tibet issue but there were a couple of elisions. One was that there seemed to be large numbers of people out in explicit support of China, but these were largely ignored by the media coverage, and secondly was the occasionally crass but rather hopeless sponsorship of the event by Samsung.

Ultimately, one can see how the symbolism of the torch was being messily and confusingly fought over. British Olympians and relay participants were trying to position the torch as representative of the Olympics while the protesters were treating the torch as simply representing the Chinese state.

Meanwhile, the actual Chinese state is clearly hoping to achieve a conflation of itself with the Olympics through its global deployment of the single unifying symbol of the torch, thus transubstantiating the meaning of both. It conspicuously failed to do so in London.

The photo-op by British PM Gordon Brown seemed to express these doubled meanings. At No.10 Downing St. he stood smiling next to the athlete holding the torch but pointedly refused to hold it himself. He seemed to be judging his proximity to the torch as some measure of his association with its different symbolic meanings.

The media went for a simple morality tale of power versus the powerless, in this case allegorically represented by the torch and the protesters, playing out on London streets the real violence and struggle for power within China. The pro-China supporters didn't really fit into this narrative, and poor Samsung and their mobile phones had no chance in such a symbolically overloaded event.


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Democratic Progressive Party Super Sunday Rally, Taipei, 16 March. Video requires Quicktime 7.

The "Trojan Horse" at this rally (0:21) was an elaborate visual pun on policy and personalities in the election campaign. It expresses a critique of a KMT policy for a free trade agreement between China and Taiwan, a so-called "one China market", as a "trojan horse" undermining Taiwanese sovereignty. And the surname of the KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou also means "horse". Ma, horse, trojan horse, free trade agreement, giant wooden horse on wheels to be pushed around the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.


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The main Democratic Progressive Party rally for Hsieh Chang-ting's presidential campaign in Taipei, March 21. Video requires Quicktime 7.

It's hard not to get caught up in the drama of these events, and the DPP are the masters of political theatre, but the voters made their choice loud and clear.



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Hsieh Chang-ting's campaign headquarters, Kaohsiung. Video requires Quicktime 7.

On Saturday, Taiwan votes in its presidential election, and a group of us are here from European academic institutions. The result is as ever unpredictable, although the KMT's Ma Ying-jeou remains the front-runner. On Thursday afternoon, at the campaign office of the DPP candidate Hsieh Chang-ting, preparations for the final huge rallies on Friday night are in full swing. Here volunteers prepare the ubiquitous party flags for rally-goers.


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Next Saturday March 22 is the Taiwanese presidential election. ABC Radio National's "Rear Vision" program is covering Taiwan this week, and I was interviewed for it last Monday at the ABC studios in Portland Place in London. Overall, the interviewer was well informed, but the references in the introduction to an "independence referendum" show how far the media has to go before it understands the Taiwanese situation.

The likely election result seemed to be favouring the KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou, but some bad behaviour by KMT legislators and the situation in Tibet might have given the DPP a sniff in the last couple of days. It is going to be an intense week.

A link to the program on ABC RN is here:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/rearvision/stories/2008/2189619.htm


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I stopped in Hong Kong on my way to Taipei yesterday to take up a long-standing offer to have a local's view of the city. Hong Kong is a place I have been to more times that I can remember but somewhere I never feel I have had a chance to get to know.




Hong Kong island from the Star Ferry terminal. Duh.





The People's Bookshop coffeeshop in Causeway Bay. Maoist kitch/po-mo cool, Hong Kong style. The Little Red Book is actually the menu.





The New Territories.




The new MTR line that runs to the New Territories. Makes just about every other subway system in the world look 19th century.


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I am back in Taipei for the Taiwanese presidential election next Saturday, staying at the Far Eastern Shangri-la on Tunhua S Rd again. I like the way the Far Eastern puts those moist towels you use to freshen up with in the passenger seat glove compartment of the BMW 735 they send to pick you up from the airport.


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We made the news... kind of.

A note about an event some of us were involved in just last night at the School of Oriental and African Studies about the legislative and presidential elections in Taiwan.

http://tw.news.yahoo.com/article/url/d/a/080228/5/ub5j.html


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A montage of video from the January 2008 Legislative elections in Taiwan. Video requires Quicktime 7.

Last month a group of us from Europe were in Taiwan for the legislative elections. The dramatic wins by the opposition KMT stunned the Democratic Progressive Party, but for reasons that have been widely canvassed, the results leave the presidential election in March open and uncertain. The video has footage from the DPP rally in Longshan, then the KMT rally in Sanchong, with both events occasionally bordering on the comic, then at a school in southern Taipei of actual vote counting. At that point, they were counting the two referenda held simultaneously with the legislature vote. Overall, the mood in Taiwan is depressed and negative, with deep dissatisfaction towards both sides of politics from the electorate and profound mistrust and animosity between the two main parties. Yet, to watch the practice of democracy in a classroom with the volunteer vote counters, who were local teachers, was rather moving.

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It has been a very long time since an update. There have been some life-changing personal and professional interventions over the last several months.

Meanwhile, I am currently in Taipei for the Legislative elections this coming Saturday. Here is a view from where we are staying, featuring Taipei 101, the world's tallest building rising more than half a kilometre above the city.

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I have a project on television news reportage of China that over the last month has captured a large amount of the coverage of the protests and crackdown in Burma. It has been difficult to see the coverage dry up just as the Burmese government's action became most severe. The news media is critical to the viability of global campaigns like that fighting for change in Burma, and the news media clearly know this, but the mechanisms of daily and 24 hour news and its ultimate goal of delivering the news as a product, is adverse to its own political possibilities. By way of a response, I have started uploading all the material I have on Burma in chronological order to a video sharing website. It forms a kind of account of the protests and their suppression. The website is here and all the material should be online over the next week or two.

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Except for the reference to Taiwan and China being "rivals", a reasonable BBC report on the recent military parade for the Double Ten national day on Taiwan. Reasonable in the context of the last report on the BBC about "Taiwan" that was actually about Thailand, but they got the names confused. Insert Futurama reference here: Kif sighing with the BBC as Zap Brannigan. As for the parade itself, it revives an old classic from the theatre of state power as the current administration presses forward to the presidential elections next year and the nationalist extravaganza which will be the Beijing Olympic Games. At the same time, with cross-straits trade exceeding US$100bn last year and more Taiwanese than ever travelling to the mainland, the military chest-beating neatly highlights the complexity and countervailing modalities of Taiwan's relationship to China. I touched upon those a while ago in a conference paper, here. Video requires Quicktime 7.

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Having been to this in Leiden this week and having had an eventful time, it was hard to cope with this and even harder to accept this. With all due respect to the Argentinians, it leaves only the Springboks to fend off the North and return the World Cup to civilization in the South.

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Taipei First Girls' Senior High School Honour Guard and Drum Corps performing at this year's Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Video requires Quicktime 7.

The Edinburgh Military Tattoo began in 1950 as a kind of last hurrah for Empire, rebranded after WWII as the British Commonwealth. Nowadays it seems a curious spectacle, ripe for "reading", if one is so inclined, the history of British colonialism and its cheerful reimagining as colourful nostalgia. It's hardly a small event, though, with more than two hundred thousand tickets selling out in January for the three weeks of performances in August each year, and it is surely the world's number one showcase for all things marching. So hats off to the Taipei First Girls' Senior High School for their invitation to perform. It would be really interesting to know the history of their performance styles, as it looks like a rather riotous amalgam of Japanese imperial, Chinese republican, and US military/high school culture. And whatever one thinks of the KMT (e.g. not a lot), it's very nice, too, to see the flag of the Republic on display on their shoulders at an international event.

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I have been in Melbourne at my alma mater, Monash University, for a series of events over the last couple of weeks. It included me giving an updated presentation of the BBC China Week seminar from the project I started in 2005. The BBC's China Week is the gift that keeps on giving. Back then I edited a montage of the BBC's version of China, which I have uploaded here. Requires Quicktime 7.

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I have a desktop project to archive television news reportage on China in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics. It started with the work I did on the "China Week" on the BBC in 2005. See here and here. The best reportage on China in the UK comes from Channel 4, whose correspondent Lindsey Hilsum produces work which really crosses the boundaries of journalism, documentary and scholarship. This is one of her most interesting recent reports, on the Aids activist Hu Jia and his wife, "dissident blogger", Zeng Jinyan. They are at once courageous and phlegmatic, in that way so characteristic of young campaigners in China today. Their experiences, but not their personal styles, reminded me of the remarkable account of house arrest in the late 1960s by the Taiwanese democracy and independence activist Peng Ming-min, who describes exactly the same kind of somewhat absurd harassment by the state as Hilsum's report shows. She also does something which the BBC hasn't learned to do, which is keep stories local. The BBC always frames its China reporting within a broader attempt to elaborate the meaning of "China" itself, and inevitably falls on its face. The clip requires Quicktime 7.

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