State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle
Something rather more dense and technical. A critique of one of the best-known books in English on Taiwan, Thomas Gold's State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle. This book is paradigmatic for the study of Taiwan, and despite being twenty years old now, is still a key text. This critique locates even Gold's relatively dry political economics within the production national identity, and suggests that, against appearances, he is offering a radical historiography.


Thomas Gold’s State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle presents a specific and comprehensive historiography for the study of Taiwan on the basis of his particular form of political economics. Gold’s thesis is that Taiwan's post-war economic and social development is a product of the complex relationship, in his terms, a “bargain” between the Taiwanese public and the authoritarian state, whereby political freedom was exchanged for economic freedom.¹ He presents a critique of both the simple economistic explanations of Taiwan's development, as well as the Marxian dependency theories which were popular in the 1970s and early 1980s, both of which suffer from excessively deterministic methodologies. For Gold, economic explanations reduce Taiwanese development to merely the application of particular fiscal policies, and diminish the significance of a repressive state. Indeed, Gold is rightly critical of the tacit justification for authoritarianism under terms like “political stability”, which has been given as a precondition for economic growth by some economic theorizing, such as Ezra Vogel’s. Similarly, he is unconvinced by the arguments of dependency theory which explain economic development (or underdevelopment) in terms of a neo-colonial relationship between the “First World” and the “Third World”. Dependency theory, which prefigures much of the critiques of globalization two decades later, tends to efface the specificities of the Taiwanese experience and attenuate the local reasons for Taiwan's social and economic development, assuming that agency lies primarily with governments and businesses in the First World.²

For Gold, in the "bargin" between Taiwan's authoritarian state and the Taiwanese people, the KMT was determined to maintain its monopoly on power through political repression, but also understood its tenuous position and its ultimate dependency on the United States. Therefore, it accepted the need for opening avenues of social and economic power to the Taiwanese majority:

Stability through authoritarianism and a developmentalist state laid the foundation for Taiwan's growth, but also key was the mainlander party-state's grudging willingness to create a system that granted wide scope to succeed economically to a pragmatic people with ambitions and talent in that direction. Cronyism and corruption existed, but so did genuine opportunity.³

While the identity issue is not paramount for Gold in 1986, his historiography emphasizes particular events which have subsequently become established as key categories in Taiwanese political history in English. Firstly, he presents a detailed discussion of the 2-28 Incident, the massacre of as many as twenty thousand Taiwanese by the Nationalist administration in 1947. In doing so, he makes an important contribution to the establishment of 2-28 as a defining idea within Taiwan Studies. In the post-martial law period, when a historiography for Taiwan Studies has become much more secure, the importance of 2-28 is unproblematic. However, researching and writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s meant that Gold would have had no access to public materials on 2-28 within Taiwan itself, and very little academic discussion in English to work from. His three sources are the famous nationalist text by the Marxist historian Shi Ming, Taiwanren sibainian shi (Four Hundred Years of the History of the Taiwanese People)⁴, George Kerr's 1965 account Formosa Betrayed⁵, and Douglas Mendel's Politics of Formosan Nationalism⁶, from 1970.

Therefore, Gold's discussion of 2-28 is constructive of the Taiwan idea in the context of the contemporary development studies against which he was writing, as well as much of the academic work on Taiwan in English and Chinese, which, with the few exceptions such as Mendel and Kerr, had not dealt in detail with the 2-28 Incident up to that point. As noted above, economic deterministic theories were conservative and inattentive to social and political history, and dependency theory focused on the global operation of power. Similarly, Gold's English language sources, neither of which was less than sixteen years old at the time of publication, demonstrate how 2-28 was largely erased from the mainstream study of Taiwan by the 1970s and early 1980s outside of Taiwan at that time. Indeed, although Gold's sources are entirely legitimate, their paucity compared to the enormous amount of writing on 2-28 that has appeared subsequently says a great deal about the effectiveness with which the KMT had suppressed its record both within Taiwan and internationally.

For Gold, 2-28 is important to his argument because it explains the hostile relationship between the state and the society in Taiwan, and establishes the premise for why the KMT needed to strike the “bargain” that defines the post-war Taiwan miracle. Therefore, he positions 2-28 as a defining moment, one from which the complete post-war Taiwanese experience can be understood. Within a Taiwanese historiography, this is a significant elaboration of Mendel's location of 2-28 within Formosan nationalist ideology and Kerr’s personal interest in the events, as one of the few foreign eyewitnesses. For Gold, the effects of 2-28 were to critically undermine the legitimacy of Taiwan’s KMT government, and, crucial to his subsequent analysis, forestall the Taiwanese from political participation under KMT rule:

But more important, seeing their elite and its successors systematically hunted down and murdered by the mainlanders traumatized the Taiwanese to the point that the phrase “politics is dangerous” became a watchword etched into their collective unconsciousness. Political activity became associated with a violent end. As they had been after the brutal Japanese military takeover fifty years earlier, the reconquered Taiwanese again became leaderless, atomized, quiescent and apolitical. It was learned behavior, not a cultural trait.⁷

Gold’s writing about 2-28 accords with what has become the received interpretation of Taiwanese history in English. His conclusion to State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle goes on to establish the main events that began the transition from authoritarianism to democracy in the 1970s. He identifies the Chungli Incident in November 1977 as the formative moment in modern Taiwanese politics. This occurred around the election for Taoyuan County magistrate, which was contested by the flamboyant opposition or dangwai activist Hsu Hsin-liang. He won the election but the government refused to ratify the result. A riot ensued in which a police station was destroyed and Hsu was subsequently confirmed as the winner. For Gold, the Chungli Incident redefined modern Taiwanese politics for two reasons. Firstly, it exposed the myth of Taiwan as an economically-driven but politically apathetic society, a notion that was to form the core of the idea of “Asian Values”, and secondly that it signalled the end of the political bargain between the KMT and the population which Gold argues drove Taiwanese economic success.⁸

The Chungli Incident is the first of a series of political and cultural moments of opposition in which Gold anticipates the end of the state-society bargain. The others he discusses are the nativist literature movement in the late 1970s, the Kaohsiung Incident in December 1979, the subsequent murders of members of Lin Yi-hsiung’s family in February 1980 and Henry Liu in 1984, and the probable murder of Chen Wen-cheng in 1981.⁹

Gold’s argument is prescient in that its logic predicts the political changes to come in Taiwan in the late 1980s and 1990s. The growing political activism of Taiwanese society, as marked by these events, signalled that economic freedom by itself was insufficient for the Taiwanese. Although Gold was writing while Taiwan was still under martial law, the events he highlights have subsequently been interpreted as those which marked the beginning of the process of democratization.¹⁰.

Gold’s emphasis on the importance of the Chungli Incident shows that his economic periodization essentially remains grounded in a political one. Furthermore it is one in which violence, whether by the state or by the people, implicitly inscribes or periodizes Taiwanese history. From 2-28 to the Chungli and Kaohsiung Incidents, violence represents the most extreme form of political contestation, when symbols of state power, such as the police station in Chungli were destroyed, or (much more frequently) activists who had been resisting the state were imprisoned or killed. Non-violent political events, such as the establishment of opposition journals and their attendant political groups in the 1970s, are for Gold, positioned within historical trajectories with violence as their ultimate conclusion:

A Chungli type incident was inevitable as Taiwan’s dynamic social forces, desirous of political participation and a say in the nation’s destiny, continued to clash with an ossified political regime. Where and when it erupted was not important. It signalled, for the first time, that the people’s wishes would have to be actively considered in future political and economic policy making.¹¹

Gold’s implicit privileging of violence as the author of Taiwanese history is a trace of the rich vein of the Marxist critique of modernity. Hannah Arendt writes:

Only the modern age’s conviction that man can know only what he makes, that his allegedly higher capacities depend upon making and that he therefore is primarily homo faber and not an animal rationale, brought forth the much older implications of violence inherent in all interpretations of the realm of human affairs as a sphere of making.¹²

Although it is awkward to introduce as dense and powerful a writer as Arendt into a discourse on a limited area of scholarship like Taiwanese history, the link with Marxism is not a frivolous one. Marking Taiwanese history with violence produces what is essentially a radical historiography, albeit one that disguises and dilutes itself with the language of scholarly objectivity and exhaustive lists of economic and social statistics.

In the first instance, Gold’s history is radical because it recovers the importance of state violence, both literal in 2-28 and other acts of repression, and ideological, in the reinvention of Taiwan as Free China by the KMT. As Gold himself recognizes, prevailing accounts of the “miracle economy” of Taiwan had been conservative in their effacement of the repressive state and of social injustice. By accounting for the violent state, Gold is writing Taiwanese history against the state and its interests. In the example of 2-28, one could argue that he is writing a counter-hegemonic history, challenging the event’s erasure by the KMT both within Taiwan and outside of it.

Gold was certainly not the first western scholar to recognize or write about Taiwanese history in a way that at least acknowledged the importance of social conflict. And his text is hardly a Marxist critique of the capitalist oppression of the Taiwanese. Nevertheless, even in the 1990s, his historical emphasis could be contrasted with conservative histories of Taiwan, ones which wrote in accordance with the interests of the state. Ezra Vogel’s well-known but very problematic book, The Four Little Dragons, which was published in 1991 subsequent to Gold’s, makes only a passing reference to the 2-28 Incident, and presents apologia for KMT oppression:

The Kuomintang did not initially win the hearts and minds of many local Taiwanese, but conversely, it was not under any obligation to local interest groups. Humanitarians at home and abroad criticize the way Taiwan achieved its unity, but it remains true that Taiwan’s unity, though achieved by objectionable methods, gave modernizing bureaucrats more room to manoeuvre in promoting industrialization and gave capitalists confidence in the security of their investments in Taiwan’s industry.¹³

Vogel is a true conservative. He imagines a concordance between the actions of state and the interests of the people. Indeed, for Vogel, not merely did the state act in the people’s interests, but when it was demonstrably acting in its own interests by repressing opposition to it, he argues that this was to the ultimate benefit of Taiwan, by benefiting its capitalists. Vogel’s comment is built on the Weberian foundations of ideas of modernity and the rational state, but adds a questionable political dimension by implying that a rationalized, or disinterested state and a state without legitimacy are equivalent. This is a highly teleological justification of the oppression and lack of legitimacy of the KMT by locating them implicitly within a distorted version of Weber’s anti-Marxist view of modernity.¹⁴ Vogel suggests that a disinterested state was one of the reasons for Taiwan’s spectacular economic development, but by conflating the KMT’s lack of legitimacy with disinterest, make a political case for the justification of the KMT’s oppressive rule. Gold, in contrast, recovers 2-28 and other periods of repression and protest and brings a “history from below” into mainstream western scholarship on Taiwan.

In addition to a historiography, in giving violence a specific role within Taiwanese politics, Gold situates violence at one end of a continuum of political action in Taiwan’s post-war history. It represents the most extreme form of political action in Taiwan, and one that marks moments of transition: “Chungli represents the culmination of one historical stage in the interaction of these two strains and the beginning of a new one.”¹⁵ This view has Marxian overtones, and embeds his study with some powerful, although unstated, assumptions about the significance of violence in history. Drawing again on Arendt, it suggests that violence is the expression of a particularly modern subjectivity in Taiwan, in which the Taiwanese are the homo faber to whom Arendt referred. For Gold, the political transition of the 1980s required “violence as the only means for ‘making’ it”¹⁶ .

Thus, the Chungli Incident for Gold was not a failure of organized politics, or an eruption of violence on the part of an unthinking mob that indicated a breakdown of social order. Rather it was the apex of political action. For Gold, societal violence against the state was ultimately progressive: it had signalled the failure of the state’s attempt to separate economic from political power, and expressed the will of the Taiwanese people to operate as fully developed national citizens, economically and politically, “a say in the nation’s destiny.”¹⁷ Again Gold’s view can be contrasted with Vogel’s, for whom violence can only be a disruption in the operation of capitalism and the rationalized state, and as such adverse to its interests. “Political stability”, that is the absence of political activism and political violence, gave “modernizing bureaucrats more room to manoeuvre in promoting industrialization and gave capitalists confidence in the security of their investments.”

It is easy to overplay these arguments, but the different dimensions of Gold’s work all point to a realignment of historiography in a way that begins to produce notions of a distinct Taiwanese nationhood. A “history from below”, a counter-hegemonic history, modernity, the progressiveness of political action, especially violence, against the state, and the realization of fully-developed national subjects draw towards the construction of “Taiwan” as a coherent and fully developed national idea. It is this aspect of State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle that gives it its paradigmatic status in Taiwan Studies. Gold marks Taiwanese history with particular events and with a clear trajectory, and writes in opposition to a political force which worked to deny the realization of the Taiwanese idea. State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle is not a nationalist text in that Gold does not claim a political position or to speak from a privileged position of authenticity as a Taiwanese national; he writes in the language of objectivist, positivist political science and political economics which, in keeping with its methodological approach, does not connect his own writing process with the production of Taiwan as a discourse. However, Gold is writing a specifically Taiwanese history which incorporates ideas about national subjectivity and marks out events which are formative of Taiwanese nationhood.

1. Thomas B. Gold, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1986), 90.

2. ibid.

3. ibid., 125.

4. Shi Ming, Taiwanren sibainian shi (Four Hundred Years of the History of the Taiwanese People) (San Jose: Paradise Culture Associates, 1980).

5. George Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1965).</p>

6. Douglas Mendel, Politics of Formosan Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).

7. ibid., 52.

8. ibid., 129-131.

9. ibid., 117-120.

10 T'ien Hung-mao, “Taiwan's Evolution Towards Democracy: An historical perspective,” Taiwan: beyond the economic miracle, Denis Fred Simon and Michael Y. M. Kao (eds.) (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 3-24.

11. Gold, 129-130.

12. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 228. One might also note with respect to the previous quotation that Gold’s phrase “dynamic social forces” echoes a vulgar Hegelian/Marxist notion of social change through the dialectical movement of the contradictions of capitalism.

13. Ezra F. Vogel, The Four Little Dragons (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 18.

14. see Derek Sayer , Capitalism and Modernity: An excursus on Marx and Weber (London: Routledge, 1991), 109.

15. Gold, 3.

16. Arendt, The Human Condition, 228.

17. Gold, 130.