Civility and Its Development

Civility and Its Development The Experiences of China and Taiwan David C. Schak Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.hku.hk © 2018 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8455-97-3 (Hardback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Paramount Printing Co. Ltd., Hong Kong, China Contents Preface vi 1. Introduction 1 2. Civility 11 3. Comparability of China and Taiwan 29 4. Civility in China 70 5. Civility in Taiwan 112 6. Discussion: What Social Conditions Are Needed for a Society to Develop Civility? 136 Glossary References Index About the Author 159 165 196 200 1 Introduction On May 18, 1963, an opinion piece appeared in the supplementary pages of the Central Daily News (Zhongyang Ribao), the official Kuomintang (KMT) newspaper. The author of the piece identified himself as Di Renhua, but he was in fact an American graduate student from Yale named Don Baron who was studying Chinese history and philosophy at National Taiwan University. Baron entitled the piece “Renqingwei yu Gongdexin” (The human touch and public morality). He wrote that renqingwei, i.e., treating others with consideration and generosity as befitting a warm relationship, was ubiquitous in Chinese society, but such treatment was limited to one’s own social circle. Strangers, by contrast, were ignored, and people gave no consideration to the effects of their actions on those outside their social circle. The human touch also clashed with the rule of law in society, hindering democratization and assisting corruption. Baron listed many obvious examples of the lack of public morality: not queuing and cutting in line, cheating on exams, nonstudents using a student’s bus pass, ignoring No Smoking signs, being self-centered and disregarding others, distorting the law to help one’s friends, turning a blind eye to what was going on around oneself and not regarding this as bad because one was inured to improper or illegal behavior. These sorts of actions, some of which were of limited significance in and of themselves, created serious problems such as a lack of public morality and knowledge of what is good and proper behavior. Given such patterns of behavior, Baron asked, how can people, in particular university students, the future leaders of the nation, be expected to obey the law and maintain public order? Taiwanese, he wrote, are selfish, envious and indifferent. Taiwan society is corrupt, “mocking the poor but not the prostitute.”1 Votes are bought at election times with packs of MSG and toothpaste; to find a job one needs to “go by the back door”; and there is a culture of bribing officials. If people do not act correctly in small matters, they certainly won’t do so in important ones, and this will inevitably harm the nation and the society (Jou 1996; Lin 1992). Baron’s critique was by no means exaggerated. Littering and spitting were commonplace. Smokers smoked wherever they liked, disregarding No Smoking signs 1. A common Chinese saying, xiao pin bu xiao chang. 2 Civility and Its Development and smoking’s effects on others. Students hid books they were reading in the library to “reserve” them for themselves, and some even cut out sections that they needed to read, depriving other students access to them. People failed to apologize for bumping into others in the public space, and crowds routinely walked by anyone who had slipped or fallen or had come off a bicycle or motorbike. Drivers drove with scant regard for pedestrians. Despite a well-publicized rule of pedestrian rightof-way in crosswalks, motorists frequently drove through them as if they were not there. Autos would exit from small alleyways across sidewalks into larger roads with no precautions to avoid pedestrians other than perhaps a blast of the horn. When I mentioned such behavior to locals, they simply accepted it, reasoning that cars were bigger than people, and therefore people had to yield to them; that’s the way drivers were, and nothing was going to change them. Car drivers, in fact, had to maintain a similar wariness around trucks and buses on highways. Shops, hawkers, and department stores routinely appropriated sections of the sidewalk to display goods. Construction sites were even worse, often blocking the entire walkway with equipment and forcing pedestrians to step out into the street. Motorcycle shops were the same,2 routinely taking up most of the footpath in front of their shops to expand their repair areas, leaving only a narrow passageway over grease-stained tiles littered with parts and tools. Another problem was the massive increase in small factories that, in the absence of zoning laws, could be located anywhere, even in residential areas. In the heady days of the early export-oriented industrialization period, the government urged people to “turn their front rooms into factories” (keting ji gongchang). In many cases this meant performing value-added work such as assembling Christmas tree lights, making sweaters on knitting machines, or gluing wigs on dolls’ heads. Some of these processes were unobjectionable, but others produced pollutants in the form of smoke, fumes, noise, or sawdust. Complaints to neighbors, factory owners, or the local authorities usually went unheeded.3 Hawkers were a more complex problem. Especially in downtown areas where pedestrian traffic was heavy, they regularly occupied half or more of the sidewalk, including those in pedestrian underpasses and on overpasses. In such areas, they were sometimes arrested, moved on, or frightened away by police, but elsewhere they were usually tolerated by the authorities as well as local merchants and residents and were, in fact, well patronized. Those who operated at night markets were even welcomed, night market shopping being a popular form of recreation in 2. Such shops were commonplace at the time because of the high motorcycle-to-population ratio. All these problems were made worse by the very high population density in Taiwan, especially in Taibei. 3. A woman reported that the occupant in the bottom story of the apartment block in which she lived made products on wood lathes, sending fine sawdust into the air that exacerbated her son’s asthma. Getting no satisfaction talking with the factory owner or local government officials, her architect husband got some construction workers to visit the factory owner to convince him to move elsewhere; in this case, one incivility resolved another. Introduction 3 Taiwan. Though hawking was illegal, the police did little to eliminate it, regarding it as a means of livelihood for the vendors. The lack of queuing was a manifestation of public space as a space without rules. This was especially true in train stations, shops, and bus stops. In post offices, which also functioned as savings banks, there were no queues. Patrons simply crowded around a service window and placed their letters or savings passbooks onto the counter, some putting theirs in front of those of others in order to be served first. Clerks paid little attention to whose turn it was, and because the idea of “first come, first served” had not been adopted, patrons were reluctant to complain. Queuing at bus stops was difficult because one could not know when their bus would arrive or exactly where it would stop. Buses did not run on a strict schedule but, for example, every four to six minutes, or every eight to ten minutes, and stops usually served more than one bus route. Thus, if a bus for one route was at the stop, an incoming bus would have to stop in front of or behind it, forcing passengers to run to where it was waiting. Crowding while boarding was common, especially by older men, anxious to get a seat for themselves, or by older women, many of whom would rush to a seat and then yield it to an adult son. Primary school students were taught that they should queue, but my son, who attended a Taibei primary school during one fieldwork period, said that they did so only if a teacher was there to supervise. In contrast to the KMT government’s 1934 New Life Movement while still governing China and its 1966 Cultural Renaissance Movement in Taiwan,4 Baron’s op-ed, given the strong approval implied by its appearance in the party/state paper, had an immediate effect. Within two days, the article had provoked a self-awareness campaign at National Taiwan University, whose president called on students “to engage in self-examination, build up a sense of public morality and carry out their responsibility to the nation” (Chen 1996). Other universities quickly followed suit, and two days after the publication of Baron’s op-ed, two university students, Chen Zhenguo and Xu Xitu, announced the formation of China Youth Self-Awareness Promotion Movement, a group dedicated to enhancing public morality and whose slogan was “we will not be judged by history as selfish or decadent.” The Movement attracted support from middle school and tertiary level students throughout Taiwan as well as a wide variety of citizens, and it set out to perform philanthropic services. Volunteers, wearing movement armbands, monitored bus stops and stoplight intersections to ensure orderly queues, prevent crossing against the light, direct traffic, and help the disabled cross safely. They observed theater entrances to ensure that patrons queued while buying tickets and entered the theaters in an orderly fashion, and they picked up rubbish left on the ground. The movement also sent cadres throughout Taiwan to speak at schools about the moral goals of the organization. The movement published a booklet listing violations of public morality. Those pertaining particularly to students included 4. Discussed in Chapter 3. 4 Civility and Its Development • • • • • • • • cheating on exams; nonstudents using a student’s bus pass; smoking where prohibited; breaking rules; allowing nonresidents to stay in student dorms; taking up a desk in the library when not using it; cutting out portions of library books or magazines; and not paying for stamps at the Taiwan University Post Office’s trial stamp dispenser. The booklet also listed examples of good public morality: • • • • • Bus drivers accelerating and braking smoothly Drivers obeying traffic rules Buying goods from shops that give receipts5 Shop clerks and bus attendants being polite and friendly to customers Bus passengers accompanying small children removing the children’s shoes and covering the seat with plastic bags to keep it clean • Cheerfully helping persons asking directions • Protecting public property (Yan 1972, 3; cited in Chen 2005, 17–18) Although the movement enjoyed some success, one of the organizers, Xu Xitu, also organized what he called the Unity Foundation, a group recruiting young people that aimed to unify Taiwan and China and was critical of both the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) governments. However, early in 1969, the movement was disbanded, and later that year five of its leaders, including Xu, were arrested, tried, sentenced to prison terms of up to fifteen years, and stripped of their civil liberties for an additional ten years (Lin 1992; Zijue Yundong).6 The trials took place in June. When I began my PhD thesis field research in September, I learned of the human touch–public morality dichotomy, which was a matter of public discourse, but not of the trials. Moreover, whatever success the movement might have had in changing people’s habits, I saw little effect of the public order that volunteers for the movement had tried to promote. Between 1969 and 1979 I spent a total of four and a half years in Taiwan during which I saw no effective efforts to promote public morality or evidence of its becoming more established. It was much the same in the two and a half years I spent there in the 1980s. Throughout these two decades, people continued to disregard the above-mentioned enjoinments to observe public morality. Occasional short-lived 5. The government introduced receipts (tongyi fapiao) in order to stop bargaining and cash transactions, the former to save time and be “modern,” the latter to facilitate tax collection. 6. Their sentences were reduced following President Chiang Kai-shek’s death in 1975. After the lifting of martial law in 1987 and the beginning of Taiwan’s democratization, the case was reopened, and the verdict was overturned. Introduction 5 government campaigns and primary school moral education courses that included civil comportment instructions were also ineffective. Then, in the early 1990s, Taiwan began to change. People not only became more polite, but the general level of concern was perceptibly higher. Smokers became more considerate of nonsmokers and nonsmoking venues. People queued, and they littered less. After a sustained campaign by the Taibei City Government to enforce traffic laws in the mid-1990s, driver behavior also improved. This does not mean that incivility did not occur; indeed, it did. But through the 1990s it decreased to the extent that civility became the norm, and incivility went from being so commonplace that it usually went unnoticed and unremarked upon to being generally unacceptable to the public and even attracted reprimands. These changes coincided with democratization and the cessation of government campaigns to promote public morality. In a previous paper (Schak 2009) I identified democratization as one of a number of factors that plausibly aided or hindered the development of public morality or, as I call it in this book, civility. I will further explore the relationship between these factors and the development of civility in the final chapter. This Book The purpose of this book is to better understand the social conditions needed to establish civility in a society. I do this by comparing Taiwan’s experience with efforts to develop civility in China, two societies that are similar in the most salient features—cultural heritage, a history of autocratic governance, ideas about significant others and strangers, the treatment of public space and public facilities, and, until a few decades ago, general values. Note that in the book “China” is formally the People’s Republic of China; “Taiwan” is formally the Republic of China. I will refer to them as China and Taiwan throughout the book for the sake of simplicity but, most important, because my reference to them is as societies. No political intent should be implied. Both Taiwan and China have run civilizing campaigns, as did the KMT government when it governed China before the victory of Mao Zedong and the CCP in 1949, and as did successive dynastic governments at least from the Ming Dynasty through the end of the imperial era. Ethnically, aside from the Malayo-Polynesian first peoples (about 2 percent of the population), the majority of the people in Taiwan are Han whose ancestors migrated from China. Those arriving before 1945 came mainly from Fujian and Guangdong Provinces and make up the Taiwanese. Those arriving after World War II came from all parts of China and are referred to as Mainlanders. Some quite noticeable cultural differences have arisen between the people in Taiwan and those in China since 1949, and especially since 1975, but the root causes of their historic incivility are the same in both societies. Moreover, from what I observed in my several visits and periods of residence in Taiwan beginning 6 Civility and Its Development in 1959 and in China beginning in 1983, the sorts of uncivil actions people engaged in and the kinds of behavioral changes the governments of each have enjoined their citizens to adopt are also the same. I will explicate these points in subsequent chapters. Developing civility is important for several reasons. In the eyes of the governments of the societies studied in this book, a civil population is a mark of a civilized nation, one whose peoples cannot be derided as coarse and uncultured as the Chinese were in the century preceding the Communist revolution. Anagnost reports that in the early 1920s China’s elites echoed these criticisms, condemning the “low quality” of the population, including what they regarded as their uncivil habits, as the root cause of China’s lagged development (1997, 77–79, 194). In a democratic society, where people have differences of opinion on sometimes sensitive social, political, or moral issues, civility means toleration of others’ views, agreement to disagree. A lack of civility, the demonization of those with whom one disagrees, can rend a society, weaken democracy, and give rise to conflict. Civility, in the sense of not littering, spitting, defacing public facilities or stealing public property, provides clean and hygienic public spaces and reduces the costs of maintaining public facilities, businesses frequented by the public such as shopping complexes, theaters, sporting venues, and public recreation areas. Civility by motor vehicle operators means safer roads and fewer frayed tempers. Finally, civility toward others makes life more pleasant and society more harmonious, an oft-stated goal in China. Civility A search on the subject of civility reveals hundreds of books, but other than the few that look at its development in the West or its practice in a particular country, the vast majority examine it in the United States or other modern Western societies. Moreover, most of these deal with the importance of civility in maintaining democracy or in a particular social or occupational realm, lament its decline, or prescribe sets of rules of civil behavior. To my knowledge, although some social scientists and political philosophers write about civility, none has defined it as an analytical tool, and few have applied it to a non-Western society. An exception is Weller’s excellent book comparing Taiwan and China. However, although titled Alternate Civilities, the book focuses on civil society rather than civility (Weller 1999a). Below I will briefly define civility for operational purposes and describe the sources of the data used in the book. By civility I refer to the behavior, and the attitudes which shape that behavior, that are referred to in Taiwan as gongdexin (public morality) and in China as wenming,7 which can be translated as civilized, civility or civilization, depending on 7. Both gongde and wenming were coined in Meiji Japan and borrowed by China late in the nineteenth century. Wenming is broader in meaning. In the phrase jiang wenming it means to emphasize civility. Gongde means “public morality” or “civility”; xin in gongdexin refers to an attitude or way of thinking. Introduction 7 the English context. At its most basic, civility refers to consideration of and respect for others, especially strangers, even in banal ways. This essentially means recognizing others as fellow beings with whom one shares humanness, assuming that, in general, they have no ill intent toward others, affording them a modicum of courtesy, and treating them in the spirit of the Confucian version of the Golden Rule, ji suo bu yu wu shi yu ren, do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. Civil treatment of others extends to the public space and to public facilities. Everyone is a stakeholder in the public space and public facilities, which exist for the use and enjoyment of all. Thus, any despoliation of either is an uncivil act in the same category as harm to another’s private property. Being civil toward strangers means avoiding collisions with others while walking in a public place or stepping on another’s toes on a crowded bus, and apologizing if either does occur. It means assisting someone who asks directions or who looks lost. It means queuing and letting people get out of an elevator or a subway car before trying to enter or board. It means aiding someone who appears to be in distress—as one would hope that others would do if one were in a similar situation. It could also mean returning a greeting or a smile when encountering a stranger while walking in a park. But it does not mean that one needs to put oneself in jeopardy, make great sacrifices for others, or go about looking for persons to greet or assist. The European origins of civility raise the question of whether examining civility in China or Taiwan is imposing Western notions of propriety on those societies. The answer is yes—but. Westerners in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely western Europeans, Americans, and Australians, were highly critical of the Chinese for all sorts of reasons, including their lack of hygiene and their appearance and behavior in public. However, since the KMT imposed the New Life Movement in the early 1930s, which reflected these criticisms (see Chapter 3), this imposition has been from Chinese governments themselves, largely independent of Western influence. And while one possible explanation is that the leaders of the once proud, but humbled since the Opium War, Chinese imposed rules of civility in order to bring the Chinese public up to a standard where they were beyond Western ridicule and thus no longer a cause of lost national face, it has been governments in the Republic of China in China up to 1949 and in Taiwan to 1988, and the Chinese government since 1980, that have imposed these standards. Moreover, there is nothing in the statements of any of these governments that even hints at seeing civility as a Western imposition. China’s government certainly went out of its way to eliminate any potential cause of ridicule before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, including eliminating Chinglish from signs, menus, and the like. In short, civility has now become as indigenized in China as tea drinking has in the West, and the behavior that I have singled out as indications of civility or incivility is the behavior that KMT governments in China and Taiwan and the CCP government in China themselves have, very publicly, tried to change. Thus, the comparisons of 8 Civility and Its Development civil behavior—civility—in Chapters 4 and 5 reflect the aims set forth in the civilitypromotion campaigns run by their respective governments. Data for this project come from a variety of sources: observations, conversations and interviews, secondary accounts, government documents and the use of quantitative data as indirect social indicators of civility. The observations I made and recorded were of those behaviors listed above that manifest the presence or absence of civility. In China and, before the 1990s in Taiwan, after which civility palpably began to increase there, I was more likely to observe negative examples than positive ones. This reflects the nature of observing civility in that breaches are much more conspicuous than compliance. Indeed, Chen Ruoshui observes that in Taiwan public morality is phrased negatively, in lists of “do nots” (2005, 19). My observations began when I first went to Taiwan in 1959 for a stay of about thirty months, though at this time they were very unsystematic, just the sort of things that someone from a different cultural background might observe when in a foreign society. I returned in 1969 to carry out field research for my PhD dissertation, which is when I heard about the public discourse on the lack of public morality in Taiwan, and although I did not focus on that as a research topic until many years later, it stayed in my mind, and I began to take note of civil and uncivil behavior. I continued to do this during the dozen years I spent in Taiwan over the next four decades. I spent most of that time in Taibei, but have also lived for various periods in Miaoli, Xinzhu (Hsinchu), Tainan, Hualian (Hualien), and Gaoxiong (Kaohsiung) in addition to short visits to many other places. Residence in these places varied, one month in Miaoli, fifteen months in Xinzhu, and several years in Taibei. My first visit to China was in 1983 when I spent a week in Guangzhou. I made regular visits from 1995 to 2000 to major cities and to the Pearl River Delta Region where I carried out a study of Taiwanese entrepreneurs. From 2009 to 2015 I made yearly visits in which I spent about six months each in Beijing and Xiamen, with shorter periods in Shanghai and several places each in Anhui, Guangxi, Jiangsu, Hubei, and Zhejiang. The relevant sorts of behavior I have observed in China are very similar to what I saw in Taiwan between 1960 and 1990. While traveling I had occasion to note behavior in rural areas and smaller towns, but most China observations were of behavior in the more cosmopolitan and well-off urban areas where the levels of civility, as well as levels of education and economic development, are higher than in areas further inland or in the countryside. It should be noted, however, that when I write that, for example, violations of no smoking rules are common in China, I am not making a blanket statement about all Chinese smokers, merely that it is common to see people smoking in restaurants and to smell smoke in public toilets, elevators, and other places where it is formally prohibited. The majority of Taiwan observations were in Taibei, but because of its much smaller size, its higher and more uniform level of education and income, and its more even level of economic development, the regional differences in civility are Introduction 9 fewer than in China. I have also had many conversations with local people and with foreigners who had spent periods of time living in Taiwan or China and mixing with locals, asking them whether they thought that what I observed was commonplace, whether they had had similar experiences, and how they interpreted or felt about those incidents. In addition, I gathered information from secondary sources: news reports, op-ed pieces and short essays, and from official sources such as civility campaign announcements. Regarding the latter, when official sources admonish people not to act in a particular way it is certain that such behavior is common and that the authorities regard such actions as undesirable and in need of correction. Furthermore, I have looked at various indirect indicators of the level of civility including levels of social trust, donations to charity, volunteerism, voluntary blood donations, and philanthropic activities, particularly those aimed at alleviating suffering or social disadvantage. I also analyzed four sets of primary school moral education textbooks, two each from Taiwan and China, one set used in the 1980s and another used in 2011, in order to learn the extent to which the two societies define civility in the same ways and regard the same behaviors as uncivil. Both Taiwan and China have undergone significant shifts in ideology since the establishment of the latter in 1949, and these ideological shifts are very evident in the texts. The early Taiwan set strongly reflects the New Life Movement, which was revived in 1966 in the Cultural Renaissance Movement (Zhonghua wenhua fuxing yundong). The 2011 set reflects a general humanist life perspective, advocating values, outlooks, and actions that would fit comfortably in a modern Western society. The early Chinese set contains elements of Marxism such as lessons on the valorization of labor and the gratitude all should show toward the products of workers’ toil by not wasting. The 2011 set reflects the changes brought about by economic development and urbanization in China, for example a lesson on consumer awareness and another on the need for worldwide environmental consciousness. However, despite the almost thirty years of rejecting traditional values under Mao, the civil behaviors taught in the 1988 edition of China texts did not differ from those in the 2011 set or in either of the Taiwan sets. The structure of the chapters is as follows: Chapter 2 analyzes civility, tracing its origins to Europe where, as states grew in size, rulers began demanding that lesser feudal lords and knights behave civilly when visiting court. This expected manner of deportment eventually spread to the rising bourgeoisie and to other commoners. It next explores how various scholars and authors have understood and used civility and what it means in the present study. It then examines and refutes the idea that notions of civility have existed in China since the time of the early Confucian philosophers. Finally, it looks at comments on the state of civility in late imperial and early twentieth-century China by prominent Chinese and foreign writers. 6 Discussion What Social Conditions Are Needed for a Society to Develop Civility? In the last two chapters I have examined the state of civility in China and Taiwan, two societies with very similar cultural foundations and governance histories but, up to this point, quite different levels of civility. Taiwan friends with whom I have discussed this research recall, as I do, the lack of civility in Taiwan several decades ago and the changes that have taken place, but they assume that the evolution to a society with civility is natural. They feel that, just as China’s economic takeoff has succeeded, albeit three to four decades after Taiwan’s, its level of civility will also catch up with Taiwan’s in due time. However, while the pockets of civil behavior in China noted in Chapter 4 lend some credibility to that view, the scale of the problems that China will have to overcome and the differences in social formations and governance between it and Taiwan will make it much more difficult to achieve the level of civility that Taiwan has achieved. In this chapter I will first examine those problems: differences in size and population, level and quality of social and economic development, including education levels and egalitarianism, degree of social unity, differences in social organization and governance, and levels of trust. I will then test the facilitating and hindering factors presented in Chapter 2 that I posited would affect the development of civility to see if the evidence presented in Chapters 4 and 5 bears them out. I will conclude with a discussion of the links between civility and values, a society for itself, and the role of democratization in developing civility. There are several social or material characteristics that explain why it is more difficult for China to develop civility than it has been for Taiwan. First, China is 265 times larger in area and, in 2016, fifty-nine times larger in population. It has a much greater disparity in the levels of development and in the number and remoteness of difficult to reach settlements. Even in one of the earliest areas of Han civilization, Shaanxi Province, in the less fertile hilly areas families are dispersed, sometimes several kilometers apart. Taiwan, by contrast, is compact and largely urbanized; there are few rural settlements that are more than 50 kilometers from a city, and Eluanbi, at Taiwan’s southern tip, is less than 400 kilometers from the northern port of Jilong (Keelung). This means that communication and the spread of new ideas are more challenging in China than in Taiwan. Discussion 137 Han Chinese dominate in both societies, constituting 94 percent of the population in China and 98 percent in Taiwan. Moreover, in both, indigenous peoples or minority populations are in general less educated and poorer than the Han. However, in Taiwan they are more assimilated, and there are no serious, open conflicts between them and the Han. In fact, over the last two decades, Taiwan’s indigenous peoples have been regarded as a disadvantaged group that deserves protection, respect, and empathy by middle-class society. In China, aside from some of the larger groups living on the periphery such as Tibetans, Kazakhs, Uyghurs, and Mongols, there are smaller groups, especially in Guizhou and Yunnan, who live in difficult to access mountain areas. Moreover, particularly in the peripheral areas, there is some tension and resistance to assimilation. A major effect of government investment in these areas is that it finances projects that provide jobs for which Han are more qualified and thus encourages Han migration. This causes resentment among the minorities, which is in turn resented by Han in other parts of China who see only the amounts invested and regard the minorities as ungrateful. It also contributes to an increase in pejorative ethnic stereotypes and weakens any sense of an encompassing imagined community (see HRW 2017). Second, in economic and social development, Taiwan had a head start. Its economic development and industrialization began in the 1950s and was much less interrupted than China’s, which did not enjoy stable growth until the 1980s.1 Whereas the latter was governed by campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s and had a centrally planned economy, Taiwan’s KMT government eschewed disruptive social actions; even its largest, the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement, was largely aimed at culture, the arts, and school textbooks and had little effect on the economy or everyday society. This put Taiwan in a position to benefit from foreign investment and open American markets. By contrast, China endured a US boycott into the 1970s as well as the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and other turbulent campaigns. Education levels rose in Taiwan during its rapid development phase. The school leaving age was raised to completion of junior middle school in 1968, and many middle schools ran evening sessions, allowing students to work during the day to help support their families and continue their education in the evenings.2 Moreover, many private senior vocational middle schools opened up, creating opportunities for those unable to gain entry into the public system at that level.3 By 2007 Taiwan’s literacy rate reached 96 percent. Overall, throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, Taiwan also had a much higher exposure to advanced economies and 1. The two oil shocks in the 1970s were mere speed bumps compared to collectivization, the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. 2. This system, known as bangong bandu (half work, half study) was used extensively by lower income families and was especially helpful for young women whose families demanded that they go to work after finishing primary school, often to assist a brother in furthering his education. 3. There were few public senior middle schools in Taiwan, and entry was by a competitive exam. Thus, many had to attend private institutions if they wanted to complete secondary education. 138 Civility and Its Development societies, especially Japan and the United States, through the media, cultural products, study overseas, and personal contacts. As result of its development path, Taiwan achieved full employment by 1970, and by the mid-1980s industrial workers were turning down overtime work in order to spend more time following individual pursuits. It became one of the OECDdesignated first generation of newly industrialized countries, China, along with India and the Philippines, being named in the third generation. Taiwan achieved high-income country status by the 1990s. According to the IMF, in 2015, China’s GPD per capita in nominal US dollars was $8,280 while Taiwan’s was $22,083.4 Based on recent CIA World Factbook estimates of income distribution, China is substantially more unequal than Taiwan, their respective official Gini coefficients being 0.469 (2014) and 0.338 (2012), and their respective ratios of top tenth to bottom tenth of incomes are 21.8:1 and 6.1:1, the China figures representing urban incomes only (CIA n.d.). That said, there are domestic inequalities in each. In Taiwan, income from property and equity investments is very lightly taxed, and there is no tax at all on income from trusts. Under the Ma Ying-jeou government, the tax burden shifted significantly from the wealthy to middle-class salary earners (Chang 2012). In China, urban incomes are much higher than rural incomes, and there are also discrepancies among regions. China’s human development index (HDI) value reached 0.727 in 2014, ranking it ninetieth out of 188 countries (UNDP), but urban incomes are 3.2 times those of rural incomes. The top decile earns 9.2 times as much as the bottom decile in urban areas, 7.3 times more in rural regions. The per capita GDP of China’s wealthiest province is 9.9 times that of the poorest. The urban-rural income gap widened from 2.79:1 in 2000 to 3.33:1 in 2007, though it improved slightly in 2008 to 3.19:1 because of increased prices for farm goods. Provincial level HDI also varies widely, with Shanghai enjoying the highest HDI, 0.9111, and Tibet the lowest, 0.616 (Bertelsmann 2014).5 Third, there are differences in their respective levels of social unity. Taiwan’s ethnic mix initially made social unity difficult to achieve, especially during the KMT colonial period when the government used divide-and-rule tactics, but it is not nearly as complex as that of China. Ancestral place of origin, the basis of the earlier ethnic complexity, has become irrelevant to the younger generations, who have only known life in Taiwan. Thus, much of Taiwan’s 1950s–1960s complexity has been eroded as the new, Taiwan-born generations have replaced the old. Moreover, except for the very elderly, all speak Mandarin and, especially in the south, most also speak Hoklo. For the past two decades, a major aspect of Taiwanese social unity is the appreciation of living in a democracy. 4. These figures should be seen as indicative. Chinese GPD per capita figures from different agencies for the same year vary by around 10 percent. Moreover, several bodies that make such estimates do not have a separate figure for Taiwan, which could mean that they include it in Chinese figures or, more likely, they simply do not count it. 5. The UN does not list such data for Taiwan, nor is it included in listings for China. Discussion 139 In China, following the past two-plus decades of “patriotic education,”6 constant reminders of China’s economic and technological achievements, its securing of the Olympic Games, two World Expos and WTO membership, and warnings of enemies trying to “contain” China, cause it to split, or overthrow its government, the level of patriotic nationalism is probably higher than that in Taiwan, but China is less united as a society. It is far more ethnically and linguistically complex. Some of its minorities are relatively assimilated and integrated, but those on its periphery or in mountain areas are much less so. Linguistically, despite the central government’s promotion of Mandarin since 1955, a recent Ministry of Education report states that 400 million people, 30 percent of the population, cannot communicate in the national language (Reuters 2013c). Moreover, local languages have become more popular in music, films, and television programs (Roberts 2014). Government pressure in 2010 to require Cantonese-speaking Guangzhou to use Mandarin in TV broadcasts met with enough resistance that the government backed off, though it began to reapply pressure in 2014 (Sonmez 2014). Furthermore, despite the power of the central government, localism is still strong; some of the actions of regional governments indicate that local interests are more important to them than national interests. The nature of the two nationalisms also differs. Taiwan’s is essentially civic, mostly based on internal unity as Taiwanese. It was forged through struggles against an authoritarian government that had high levels of participation and even higher levels of sympathy for the cause among the population at large. Those demonstrating for this cause have shown strong desires to advance social justice and to maintain Taiwan’s hard-earned democracy, the latter desire strengthened by Chinese pressure, threats, and demands for unification. It is a nationalism founded on the democratic institutions that Taiwan has built up over the past three decades. In China’s case, on one hand, social unity is rooted in pride in China’s rise, its recovery from its “century of humiliation,” what it has achieved in terms of economic growth, and its rising presence in the world. On the other, it is based on cultural nationalism tropes—the “greatness of China,” its “5,000 years of history,” its “glorious culture,” and its people’s “shared blood” as “descendants of the Yellow and Yan emperors” (yan huang zisun)—which the government has increasingly promoted since the early 1990s. There are also jingoistic elements such as the recovery of what is claimed to be lost territory and opposition to the US and Japan, evil enemies who want to overthrow the government and break up China. Privilege and condescension toward persons from different ethnic groups, different social strata, or different parts of the country play a role in the social disunity in China. Some Shanghainese feel that they are more sophisticated than people from elsewhere, and many in Beijing, which has been the capital of China for most of the past eight centuries, have a sense of cultural superiority. Privilege is a factor in that 6. A patriotic education campaign began in the early 1990s in response to the Tiananmen Incident. 140 Civility and Its Development the hukou (population registration) assigns people, usually based on their mother’s birthplace, to a particular place of residence. The main distinction is between rural and urban, but the assignment is for a specific location (e.g., a Beijing hukou, which is prized in China). One’s hukou determines what sorts of rights, privileges, and benefits one is entitled to. Mooted reforms in the hukou system will take years to implement and will still exclude the majority of rural–urban migrants. Two recent issues demonstrate the desire of the privileged to hang on to their advantages. One has to do with the crowded roads and frequent traffic jams in Beijing and the measures the government is taking to alleviate them: limiting monthly additions to the number of vehicles, reducing the number of cars by restricting the number of Beijing registrations through a lottery system; or rationing the roads by prohibiting vehicles according to the last digit of their license plate number on particular days or, on very busy occasions, allowing only vehicles with even- or odd-numbered plates. This has resulted in displays of Beijing nativism, with Beijing residents blaming traffic congestion on vehicles with non-Beijing license plates and demanding that they be banned from using Beijing’s roads. A professor suggested changing this to a simple, user pays system as a way to reduce road use, a 20 yuan road-user fee such as those charged in Singapore and London. Furious netizens reacted to his recommendation by uploading his photo enclosed in a black frame such as those used at funerals to portray the recently deceased (Chublic 2016). The other issue is access to higher education. Those wanting a place in university take a national meritocratic exam called the gaokao. However, locations that have universities receive a higher quota of admissions than places without. Thus, students from Beijing and Shanghai, which both have many universities, have a better chance of gaining a place than those from outside. This discriminates against students from poorer areas or populous provinces, such as Shandong and Henan, that have few universities. Government efforts to make the system fairer have met with loud protests from parents of students living in university-rich locations and who see those universities as belonging to their particular areas rather than to the nation as a whole (Hernández 2016a). Another factor in disunity, one that is more individual or us versus them, is the competition for scarce goods. China remains perennially overpopulated. It was especially so after the peace and stability during the first half of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) that allowed the population to exceed carrying capacity. Gold sees this competition expressed in the deplorable state of public morality and civic consciousness in China. The cutthroat competition for a seat on a bus, the anarchic manner of operating vehicles, the increase in the crime rate, and the notoriously indifferent-to-surly service in stores are examples of how people relate to one another in impersonal or anonymous situations. (1985, 665) Discussion 141 This competition also helps explain the attitudes presented in Chapter 4—striving to be first, fear of suffering a loss, and benefiting at others’ expense—which are products of the zero-sum view of relationships with outsiders that lies behind some of the uncivil person-to-person behavior found in Chinese society. Queuing is stressed in Chinese moral education textbooks, but parents urge their offspring to strive to be first from a young age in order to get more attention from teachers.7 In George Foster’s model of the “Image of Limited Good,” an individual cannot be seen to possess or compete for scarce goods because, given the strong desire for equality among villagers, it would make others envious and invite undesirable consequences (Foster 1965). However, there are no such fears in China, where, in fact, it would be abnormal not to be competitive; not being so would guarantee that one would suffer both a material loss and a loss of face as one would lose out to others. Better still is to strive to benefit at others’ expense. This high level of competitiveness, in combination with authoritarian governance, also explains the absence of a sense of justice. I mentioned above the special supply system in China that provides officials with organic foods and allows them to avoid the heavy metals, harmful chemicals, and adulterated substances in the foods that ordinary people consume. When I have asked whether people object to this system on the grounds of justice and fairness, I am told that they do not, that justice and fairness are not part of their society, that people’s reaction is, instead, to look for ways to become one of those who enjoy the safer goods. Steven Mosher illustrates this attitude through an incident in the market town in which he did field research in the early 1980s. There was a multistory restaurant in the town. It was public, but only the cadres had access to the top floor, where they disappeared late every morning for a long and, it was strongly suspected by the ordinary townsfolk, sumptuous lunch at public expense. This behavior breached the notion of egalitarianism, and it embittered the townspeople, not because the privilege the cadres enjoyed was unfair—it was—but because of envy, that it was the cadres and not the envious townsfolk—them, not us/me—who were privileged (Mosher 1983). In China’s authoritarian society, there is no way to seek redress for such wrongs. Complaining about injustice is useless and may even be dangerous, so endeavoring to become one of the privileged is a logical pursuit. The competitiveness in Chinese society and the indifference to fairness or social justice also engenders in some a disregard of others. In the early 1980s some local food producers in Fujian began to produce fake medicines that they then, by giving kickbacks to purchasing agents, sold to hospitals. The state acted only a few years ago, when these companies became a competitive risk to state-owned pharmaceutical factories (Yan 2011, 57). Since that time a number of other food or product scandals have come to light, but what is worrying is the callousness displayed toward their fellow citizens by the perpetrators. Yan cites an interview with workers in a 7. Some parents, wanting their child not to miss out, do their part by bribing the teachers to give their child a front row seat (Levin 2012). 142 Civility and Its Development factory manufacturing a colloidal food additive from old shoe leather. Their reply to a CCTV journalist, who asked if they were aware that the additive would contaminate foods to which it was added, was indifferent. Knowing about the additives, they avoided them; what happens to strangers was not of their concern (Yan 2011, 58). Yan also cites a township government head who, when asked whether he knew that locals were producing counterfeit goods, replied that, to him, “the highest morality under heaven is to let my poor hometown become rich” (Yan 2011, 60). It is sentiments such as these that lead some scholars to conclude that China is experiencing a moral crisis (Ci 1994; Wang 2002). Fourth is differences in governance. The CCP and the colonial-era KMT share structural similarities, both being Leninist parties; the CCP was organized by Comintern agent Mikhail Borodin, who also helped reorganize the KMT. However, a crucial difference between the two parties was the KMT’s commitment through its official ideology, the “Three Principles of the People” (San Min Zhuyi), to phase in popular democracy following a period of tutelage. The CCP, by contrast, was committed only to democratic centralism. The KMT government made little progress toward introducing democracy during its governance of China, though it did adopt a constitution and hold National Assembly and Legislative Yuan elections between 1947 and 1948, just before losing the civil war and fleeing to Taiwan. However, it began to hold elections in Taiwan not long after taking control there; village, township, city council and Provincial Assembly polls by 1951; and National Assembly and Legislative Yuan supplementary elections from 1969. Although fiscal and political authority remained firmly in the hands of the central government executive branch, elections for members of lower-level assemblies provided a forum where legislators could debate the government and voice criticisms.8 As related in Chapter 5, Taiwan’s democratization was preceded by a period of gradually increased toleration of an opposition and de facto looser social control. As citizens protested successfully against environmental pollution, they became empowered to pursue other causes. With Taiwan’s democratization over the decade following the formal registration of the DPP, “ownership” of government moved from an authoritarian political class to the citizenry. This was particularly significant in that the KMT government had come from outside Taiwan and imposed itself on the locals, mistreating them, suppressing their language, disparaging their customs, and discriminating against them in several areas of public employment. The weakening, then fall, of the authoritarian KMT government, the succession of a Taiwanese, Lee Teng-hui, to the presidency in 1988, and his dismantling of the Mainlander KMT establishment over the next several years, increased people’s sense of identity with Taiwan as a society rather than with their kin, village, or personal network. 8. US pressure was also a factor because of ROC dependency on US aid and diplomatic support. Discussion 143 In China, by contrast, the arrest of five feminists in 2015 for protesting against sexual harassment of women on public transport, something the government also opposes, attests to citizen participation being unwelcome. The government there owns governing, and the citizenry is not to interfere in any way with its social management unless it is specifically invited to do so, such as by participating in government-sponsored campaigns, or is expressly allowed to do so by the terms of an officially permitted grassroots organization. These differences are reflected in how China and the KMT have governed. Both governments undertook land reform in the early 1950s, but the impact on local social organization was far less destabilizing in Taiwan than in China. During China’s land reform, the government dismantled lineages, which had traditionally been the de facto village governance structures, confiscating their property and destroying their genealogies. It also banned temple worship, and it substituted its own control mechanisms by socializing the means of production and putting its cadres in control. Three decades later, when it decollectivized agriculture, it greatly reduced its level of local control, leaving a power vacuum that adversely affected village governance (Liu 2000; Madsen 1984). From the 1950s to the 1980s the Chinese government sought to substitute socialist morality for traditional morality—that is, to replace loyalty to family and kin with loyalty to the collective, the party, and the state—and to replace relations based on friendship, which it regarded as particularistic, with relations based on comradeship, which it saw as universalistic (Vogel 1965; Gold 1985). But when it discarded class struggle as part of Reform and Opening Up (gaige kaifang), though it still paid lip service to these reforms, it essentially abandoned them, not only leaving a moral-ethical vacuum but also switching to a market economy with its attendant atomization and promotion of sauve qui peut (Ci 2009, 2014; He 2015a, 2015b). In Taiwan, by contrast, the government created a rural sector of small landowners who engaged in family farming and left kinship and village structures intact. It confiscated land from landlords, but it compensated them with shares in government corporations, turning their focus toward the urban industrial economy. It made superficial but generally ineffective efforts to reduce participation in folk religion, but it did not interfere in ancestor worship and, in fact, strongly reinforced the importance of family and kinship in its public actions. Both the KMT and the Chinese governments employed policies of state corporatism. Key organizations were directly linked to the government, and any bodies that were not directly associated with it were controlled by requiring them to affiliate with official bodies in their general area of service. Moreover, both disallowed organizational duplication, thus forbidding rival organizations dealing with the same issue. However, this control loosened in Taiwan in the 1980s and was rescinded with revisions to the Civil Associations Law in 1989. Government control of society loosened in China during the 1980s, but tightened up after Tiananmen and has intensified further since Xi Jinping assumed the presidency. 144 Civility and Its Development Fifth is the differential levels of trust in China and Taiwan. As stated in Chapter 2, most villagers traveled little historically and had limited social networks. Thus, trust was limited to one’s kin and fellow villagers, and strangers were regarded with suspicion. The advent of the Chinese government in the 1950s brought about a good deal of mobility in urban areas, but this did not change radically in the countryside until the 1980s reforms, when villagers were allowed to go to urban areas and coastal regions to find work. Both increased contacts between strangers, though migrants continued to be suspicious of them. Surveys of migrant workers, for example, show that they mainly trust people back home and fellow workers from their home areas9 (Zhang 2011; Liu and Liu 2012). In surveys in which general respondents are asked if they trust strangers, no more than 30 percent answer that they do (Wang and Liu 2002), although if respondents are given a third choice, “trust,” “don’t trust,” and “not sure” or “depends,” the level of distrust drops from around 70 percent to 35 percent (SCCR 2013). If respondents are asked not whether they trust strangers but whether “most people can be trusted,” in most surveys over half answer that they can (see, e.g., Inglehart et al. 2010, 139). Aside from distrust of others, there is much else to be wary of. Peng Siqing a Peking University, Guanghua School of Management, professor of marketing, lists the following: • Shoddy products ranging from consumer items and services to large construction projects such as the Chongqing pedestrian bridge, Hangzhou’s shoddy dike, and the many “bean curd dregs” buildings that have harmed the nation and brought calamity to the people. • Promotion of products and services, extending to manufacturers and retailers, that makes people feel that others are interested only in profits and causes them to be distrustful of strangers. • Acquaintances, friends and kin who utilize the lax regulatory system in China that makes it easy for pyramid retailing businesses to take advantage of others. When friends and kin fall out, it is often over business. • Officials and law enforcement personnel, who are often in collusion with counterfeiters; “in many places, ‘striking against fraud (dajia)’ becomes ‘fraudulent striking (jia da).’” • The legal system has many laws against fraud, counterfeit and the like, but there are also too many loopholes and too much lax enforcement. • Old values have been replaced by new ones that justify self-seeking behavior, and expressing support for the old values is viewed as cynical. (2003) High survey trust scores for governments in China can be deceptive. A 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer survey asked citizens in twenty-three countries, “How much do you trust government to do what is right?” Its results put the Chinese 9. In my 1990s research on Taiwanese-run factories in the Pearl River Delta Region I found that migrant workers stuck very closely to those from their home areas. Discussion 145 government, with an 88 percent positive score, on top, but this finding was met with strong criticism. Peking University scholar of government, Peng Zhenhuai, averred that the finding did not accurately reflect the general views of most Chinese, stating, “The fact is nowadays most Chinese feel distrustful, anxious and deprived” (Zhang and Ji 2011). Articles in the Global Times, China’s most nationalistic newspaper, state that corruption, mistreatment of citizens, the lack of efficiency and credibility, and media distortions have eroded trust in government (2011; Wu 2009; Zhang and Ji 2011). An illustration is the salt panic that hit China in the wake of the Fukushima catastrophe in Japan. Citizens, believing that iodine prevents cancer from radiation, demonstrated their distrust in government by rushing out to buy (iodized) salt despite announcements on state TV that doing so was useless (Global Voices 2011). There is little evidence that much has changed over the past several years, but thanks to Weibo and other internet forums, citizens are more aware and more sophisticated. They have expressed their anger over the Wenzhou train crash and the clumsy attempt to cover it up and the shoddily built school buildings that collapsed in the Wenchuan earthquake, killing tens of thousands of schoolchildren. There are also reports of myriad grassroots protests caused mainly by poor-quality governance, workers not being paid, the SARS cover-up and the Henan blood scandal, extremely heavy air pollution, all sorts of food contamination and food frauds, and the sale of improperly stored vaccines. Trust as a research focus has not attracted much attention from scholars in Taiwan. I have found no dedicated discussions of it, and where it is included in surveys, it is only one among many topics on which opinion is sought. Questions on trust are frequently included in the annual social change surveys carried out by the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, but they constitute a small proportion of the questions. For example, in the 2003 survey, there were three related questions. See Table 6.1 on p. 146. A civil society research project asked about trust in two surveys with samples from China and the United States as well as Taiwan with the results shown in Table 6.2 on p. 146. The only long-term, systematic project on trust in Taiwan came from the organization established by Li Kwoh-ting. In 1991 he called on socially prominent individuals to create the Society to Promote Group-Self Ethics (SEA) in order to promote the “sixth human relationship” and increase mutual trust, assistance and benefit. In 2001 the society began to undertake large-scale telephone surveys sampling Taiwan residents twenty and older to assess the level of social trust.10 Survey results are shown in Table 6.3 (see p. 147). Table 6.3 shows that trust in “most people” increased steadily from 34.1 percent in 2001 to 64.5 percent in 2013. The survey also found that trust levels were positively correlated with level of education, 46.1 percent of those with a primary school education or less believing most people to be trustworthy, rising to 77.7 percent 10. Sample sizes range from 1,067 to 1,092. The society states that it is representative regarding sex, place of residence, age, and education level. 146 Civility and Its Development Table 6.1 Do you feel that most people . . . (%)* Agree Can be trusted? Will take advantage of you if they get the chance? Are happy to help others? Disagree Indifferent Face-to- Telephone face Face-toface Telephone Face-toface Telephone 32.4 15.6 36.2 14.5 27.2 59.9 19.0 55.6 40.1 24.3 44.8 29.8 49.6 43.0 18.5 19.1 31.8 37.9 * This survey was administered to both a face-to-face and a telephone sample. Source: Chang and Fu (2004, 243). Table 6.2 How many can be trusted* Place Taiwan China United States Almost all can be trusted (%) Most can be trusted (%) 2004 2007 2004 2007 8.33 7.00 16.07 11.30 6.92 n/a 67.02 74.73 64.83 69.49 78.29 n/a * Data cited were collected in the thematic research project, “Social Capital: Its Origins and Consequences” (Grant No.: AS-94-TP-CO2). The project was conducted by the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, with pilot funding by the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica. The principal investigators are Lin Nan, Fu Yang-chih, and Chen Chih-jou. I thank Chen Chih-jou for sharing these data with me. Readers may note that the total “trust” figure is higher for China than for Taiwan; this is true for all such surveys that I have seen. of those with tertiary education. The survey also found that 58.8 percent felt that “most people are well-intentioned and willing to help others” while 33.8 percent believed that they “cared only for themselves” (SEA 2013). Using a scale from 1 to 5, strong trust to strong distrust with the midpoint 3 denoting no feeling one way or the other, Table 6.4 shows that trust in the family scored highest, above 4.73 in all surveys. Doctors were the next highest, followed by primary and secondary school teachers, neighbors, and basic-level civil servants. In sixth place was “most people” (i.e., strangers), rising from 2.80 in the 2001 survey Discussion 147 Table 6.3 “In general do you trust or distrust most people?” (%)* Trust Don’t trust 2001 2002 2004 2006 2008 2013 34.1 47.3 38.1 44.8 50.6 34.7 60.3 27.0 60.5 27.9 64.5 26.7 * A survey was carried out in 2011 but was scored differently, so the results are not comparable. Source: SEA (2013). Table 6.4 Levels of trust* 2013 2008 2006 2004 2002 2001 Family Doctors Primary/secondary teachers Neighbors Basic-level public servants Most people in society Enterprise managers Police Lawyers The president Judges Reporters Financial managers Real estate brokers Legislators 4.75 4.05 4.03 3.82 3.55 3.47 3.12 3.07 2.90 2.57 2.50 2.48 2.48 2.39 2.32 4.78 4.10 3.95 3.90 – 3.39 3.06 2.97 2.99 3.01 2.88 2.36 – – 2.24 4.79 4.09 4.08 – – 3.44 3.22 2.93 2.95 2.73 3.06 2.32 – – 2.12 4.79 3.98 3.95 3.88 3.49 3.18 3.00 3.08 – 3.25 3.23 2.59 – – 2.25 4.73 3.77 3.78 3.70 3.13 2.84 2.94 2.96 – 3.01 2.85 2.59 – – 2.21 4.77 3.78 3.76 3.62 – 2.80 2.52 2.93 2.84 3.51 3.05 – – – 2.29 Government officials 2.27 2.49 2.45 2.64 2.28 2.63 * Dash (–) indicates that participants were not asked about that category in that survey. Source: SEA 2013. to 3.47 in 2013. Trust in institutions and those who run them make up the bottom of the list. Of particular relevance to civility are the levels of trust of neighbors and of “most people in society.” As noted above, trust of strangers has risen with each survey; six in ten believe that strangers are well intentioned (shanyi) and that most people are willing to help others (SEA 2013; see also Peng 2013). 148 Civility and Its Development Factors That Facilitate or Hinder the Development of Civility In Chapter 2, I set out a number conditions that I intuitively thought would facilitate or hinder the development of people-to-people civility or civility toward the public space. What follows is a discussion of how I see their explanatory power in the light of the research results above. I proposed that the following four conditions would have a positive effect on social civility: • People show concern for others. • People are generally content with life and are optimistic toward the future. • Government is not oppressive; it generally meets citizen needs and is seen as striving to be efficient, responsive, honest, fair, and competent. • There is a culture of obedience to road rules and acting courteously toward other drivers. That people showing concern for others, treating them civilly, will enhance civil behavior is most likely correct. Before the 1990s in Taiwan people turned their heads and walked past strangers who had fallen down. One reason was that if a Good Samaritan took such a person to a hospital, he or she could be held responsible to pay for the person’s care. Another reason was that people simply avoided situations that did not directly involve them. A third, based on the embarrassed grins on people’s faces when confronting such a situation, is that they simply did not know what they should do. The rise in popularity of socially engaged Buddhism and its emphasis on philanthropy and compassion and the public effort behind the building of Ciji’s first hospital helped raise public consciousness about the needs of others. The revision of the Civil Associations Law (minjian tuanti fa) in 1989, abandoning state corporatism, sparked off the formation of all sorts of grassroots organizations, including many dedicated to helping the disadvantaged. From the 1990s, candidates for public office began including “love” for people and society among their qualifications for office. In 2014 I saw several ads in subways informing passengers about NGOs whose purpose was to help those with various kinds of problems. Taiwan is also more than self-sufficient in blood donations. For a variety of reasons Chinese citizens are less inclined to show concern. First, the party/state monopolized the philanthropy sector from 1954 until the 1980s, condemning grassroots or religious charities as having nefarious intentions and announcing that looking after people was a government/party responsibility. Second, since resuming a role as a contributor to philanthropy the public has been generous in times of national or local emergencies such as the 1991 floods in eastern China, the Wenchuan and Yushu earthquakes, the 2012 Beijing flash flood and the 2015 Tianjin explosion. However, the 2011 China Red Cross and Henan Soong Ching Ling Foundation scandals shook people’s faith in government-linked charities, which are still the mainstream philanthropic organizations. Third, government Discussion 149 wariness of grassroots organizations and their lack of transparency has hampered the growth of civil society and grassroots philanthropy. Fourth, there has been no phenomenon comparable to the rise of Taiwan’s socially engaged Buddhism; some Taiwan Buddhist groups, including Ciji, are allowed to carry out relief work in China but not to recruit or accept members. Nonetheless, popular responses to disasters and to persons in need, and the internet outrages in response to reports of cruelty to animals are an encouraging sign of the potential for Chinese citizens to be charitable and caring. There is indirect evidence supporting a positive link between contentment and optimism with civility. It is generally agreed on both sides of the Taiwan Straits that the Taiwanese are manifestly more civil than are those in China, and according to the World Happiness Report, they are also a good deal happier. In 2016 Taiwan ranked 35th with a score of 6.379 (out of 10), China ranked 83rd with a score of 5.245. Both scores are up slightly from 2015 (Helliwell, Huang, and Wang 2016). An efficient, responsive, honest, and fair government will certainly have a positive, though perhaps indirect, effect on its citizens’ moods and attitudes, and, indeed, the perception of government corruption forms a part of the World Happiness Index. Having such a government should logically predispose people to being more civil, though I have no direct evidence of this. As the effect of government on civility figures in more than one of the factors I am examining, I will discuss it further below. The 17 million cases of road rage recorded in China in 2015 (Yu 2015) indicate that encountering discourteous or dangerous driving or pedestrian behavior probably does affect drivers’ moods and their behavior toward other road users. How it might affect their behavior after they leave their cars is another question. No roadrage figures are available for Taiwan, but driver behavior there improved greatly from the mid-1990s. I also proposed four conditions that should have a positive effect on civil behavior in the public space: • people no longer being willing to sacrifice the natural or built environment for economic growth; • the provision of public places that people enjoy visiting such as parks, malls, nature reserves, scenic drives, mountain trails and beaches; • public education campaigns not to litter, waste bins on streets, and enforcement of anti-littering/defacing regulations; and • something like a “no broken windows” policy to keep public space clean and in good repair. People no longer being willing to sacrifice the natural or built environment for economic growth, even if only for their own comfort or convenience, is a sign that they are becoming environmentally conscious. As shown in Chapter 5, campaigns against environmental degradation were the first popular movements in 150 Civility and Its Development Taiwan, and these have continued, the latest example being demonstrations against a nuclear power plant in a northern Taiwan area known to be geologically unstable. Environmental activism in China is more recent, but it has had some impact. In 2007 tens of thousands of Xiamen residents successfully protested against the installation of a paraxylene (PX) plant. It was instead installed in nearby Zhangzhou, and Xiamen residents must have thanked their good fortune when, in April 2015, there was an explosion at the plant—the second in two years (BBC 2015)! In 2001 Dalian residents forced the closure of a PX plant after a dyke protecting it broke. In 2014, protesters in Maoming demonstrated against a PX plant and were joined by sister demonstrations in Shenzhen and Guangzhou (Economist 2014b). Protests have also occurred in China over waste incinerator projects and coal-fired power plants, e.g., in Shanghai, Lubu and Wuchuan, and netizens have decried the foul air in Beijing and other cities, especially since the “airpocalypse”11 (Wainwright 2014; Gan 2016). It may have been easier for those engaged in Taiwan’s 1980s protests, as they were generally residents of small population centers and protesting against small businesses. Those in China have targeted large companies backed by the state or at least by local government. However, the concern about polluted air, soil, and water in China has not yet extended to a general consciousness against littering. Sidewalks are swept in many cities every morning, but the litter in bushes at the side is ignored, and more litter accumulates in the public space during the day. There are scenic spots in China, but they are trashed during holidays when many tourists visit them. Thus, having nice places to visit is not enough. People also need to be environmentally conscious and publically minded. The same can be said for environmental tidiness campaigns and “no broken windows” policies. Whereas dilapidation invites vandalism in some Western countries, it is much less common in China or Taiwan because, I was told, the density of population makes it much harder to get away with. Sweeping the streets early every morning can be seen as a “no broken windows” effort, and civilizing messages from the government are ubiquitous, probably so much so that they lose their impact. Placing rubbish bins at moderate distances on the sidewalks should make it easier for people to dispose of trash properly, but they will do so only if they are environmentally aware. Finally, I proposed four conditions that were likely to hinder the development of civility: • Society is a police state with domestic informers. • People feel threatened, especially physically, by crime. • There are ethnic or religious rifts in society creating out-groups “undeserving” of civil treatment. 11. The English nickname for the very severe air pollution in Beijing in 2014. Discussion 151 • Society or government is seen as unjust and unfair; democracy, while not a “necessary” condition, may be important in this regard. That the first three of these conditions hinder civility is self-evident. Living in a police state in which there are informers who spy on others destroys mutual trust, without which people will not be civil to strangers. They will, instead, turn inward, revealing only a facade to others, trusting only a small number of intimates and avoiding interactions with persons they do not know (Vogel 1965, 46; Kleinman 2006, 80; 2011, 5–7). Taiwan experienced this from 1949 until 1987 during the martial law / White Terror period. Some 140,000 people are said to have disappeared or been executed or jailed. This condition was also common during the Cultural Revolution in China when people were instructed to inform on friends and family and had to at least be seen to comply in order not to fall under suspicion themselves (Dikötter 2016). At present, such a level of government surveillance is generally restricted to persons who do something to arouse security-agency suspicions. Trust, and hence civil treatment of others, will also diminish if people feel physically threatened by strangers (see Helliwell et al. 2015, 6). However, this seems not to be a serious problem in either Taiwan or China. Ten years ago people in Taiwan, particularly women, would complain that the social order was bad, but when I them asked if they were afraid to walk alone on the street at night, none said that they were, and they seemed surprised at the question. I have also been told that cities in China are safe for women, though the countryside is less so. However, in China, confrontations of any kind, even over something as banal as queue-jumping, smoking, or littering, can result in violence.12 Civility will also be limited if there are out-groups or other rifts in society. As shown in Chapter 5, there was condescension toward Taiwanese by Mainlanders in Taiwan for the first several decades of KMT rule, though this has diminished because the KMT no longer has a monopoly on government, and Mainlander identity is no longer salient to the younger generations. However, there are many social cleavages in China. In Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, there were even conflicts between youths from the hutong13 and those from the residential compounds of higher civilian and military officials (Dikötter 2016). As noted, during Mao’s time, the Chinese government attempted to overcome the particularism in Chinese society by advocating universalistic comradeship, but despite this, most relationships were based on a zero-sum game mentality, with competition between those of different place of origin, residence area, work unit, or the like. Even within the party, members formed networks of “good ol’ boys (laohaoren), to engage in corruption” (Gold 1985, 664). 12. As explained to me, if A accidentally steps on B’s foot and apologizes, that will be the end of the matter. If, however, A does not apologize and B calls attention to A’s act, A may feel a loss of face and react with curses or even with blows. Asking a person not to smoke or litter can provoke a similar reaction. 13. The hutong were the residential areas of the ordinary people. 152 Civility and Its Development As for perceptions of government as fair, there are certainly incidents of even violent protest resulting from actions by government agents regarded as highhanded. Demonstrations over selling off lands in Wukan, for example, produced strident clashes with authorities (Economy 2012; Wong 2016). In Hubei crowds clashed with police after the body of a hotel chef was found outside the gate. Police said he left a suicide note, but the crowds did not believe them and suspected them of being in cahoots with hotel personnel who were said to be dealing drugs (Xie 2009). In Wenzhou people rioted and beat five urban managers to unconsciousness after witnessing them use a hammer to beat to death a man who was taking pictures of them beating a female street vendor. Several months before in Xiamen a man poured sulfuric acid over eighteen urban managers who were attempting to demolish his home (Stevens 2014). However, I have no evidence that government repression has a general effect on people’s moods, in particular that someone upset by government actions would treat others uncivilly because of it. Only a small minority of persons, such as human rights activists or the politically committed, are affected in their everyday lives by government actions. Most pay little attention to what governments do unless they are directly affected. Moreover, in China, despite news of civil liberty restrictions or arrests of human rights lawyers and activists, it seems clear that most Chinese, on balance, have a positive overall impression of their government based on improvements to their material conditions and their pride in China’s many accomplishments since the 1980s and its place in the world. Whatever its faults, the present Chinese government has performed far better than any previous Chinese government. People are aware of government failings—for example, the Wenzhou train crash (Brannigan 2011), the recent vaccine scandal (Wang and Burkitt 2016), or the privileges officials arrogate to themselves, and although many will vent their anger on social media, they feel powerless to engage in more forceful efforts to seek justice or fairness. In fact, realizing that they can do nothing to change the system, they shift their interests to becoming part of it. However, it is possible that the Chinese government, through its repression of demonstrations in 1989, may have affected civility. According to Stein Ringen, those demonstrations were widespread, in perhaps one hundred or more cities, not just in Beijing. Moreover, they were genuinely popular, not only with student supporters but also with workers, officials, soldiers, and journalists. Because of the economic reforms and the generally more liberal atmosphere in the 1980s, “Young people thought they had a future in an increasingly open society.” Aside from those killed in the crackdown, “what was killed . . . was hope itself . . . The effects have been lasting and can be seen in the nihilistic materialism, moral corruption, cynicism, disaffection and confusion of identity that are now prevalent in Chinese culture and social life” (2016, 4). Such feelings and outlooks are not conducive toward civil behavior but instead feed directly into the moral crisis that many say now plagues China. Discussion 153 Since democratization in Taiwan, people have been willing and able to protest in their quest to influence government action, e.g., the Wild Lily Movement mentioned above). More recently, in 2014, in what has been called the Sunflower Movement, young people occupied the Legislative Yuan for twenty-three days to protest against a proposed trade agreement between Taiwan and China. The government refused to reveal details of the pact and attempted to ram it through the legislature without due consideration of each clause. The protesters argued that the agreement would allow China to dominate Taiwan economically and would destroy many jobs. In fact, satisfaction with the government greatly decreased after 2012 because of perceptions that it was too China-friendly, President Ma Ying-jeou’s popularity plummeting to 9.2 percent at one point (C. Wang 2013), but popular ire was taken out on the government itself, not on random members of the public. Values and Civility Inglehart and Welzel argue that sustainable democracy becomes possible when a sufficient proportion of the citizenry hold what they call self-expression values (2005). They do not specify what the proportion of persons holding self-expression values might be (Inglehart, personal communication),14 but judging from the data in the book’s tables, it appears to be around one-third. They contrast postindustrial, self-expression values with what they label survival values, which are found in industrial societies. In such societies, manufacturing is the driver of the economy, and people are primarily concerned with increasing their level of material wellbeing. Industrial society values include rationalism, as opposed to supernatural belief; secularization, as opposed to ecclesiastical authority; bureaucratization; collective discipline; group conformity; and state authority. Self-expression values become increasingly prevalent when a country reaches a postindustrial stage of development in which high-level services provided by welleducated workers come to constitute a significant proportion of economic activities. The expansion of high-level service industries creates societies in which there are increases in both the complexity of the division of labor and material security. These bring an increase in people pursuing individual interests and desiring to fulfill them. Although they may still want to raise their level of material well-being, they reach a point at which the marginal utility of an additional increment of income no longer outweighs that of spending the increment of time needed to earn it doing something that makes them happy, something that they want to do for the pleasure of it, for self-fulfillment. Moreover, based on the findings of the World Values Surveys,15 wanting to fulfill themselves, they respect the rights of others to do likewise, which 14. In an email exchange in late September 2012, Professor Inglehart wrote that he had not set a specific percentage. 15. Professor Inglehart played a leading role in extending the World Values Surveys to a greater number of societies. 154 Civility and Its Development creates the tolerance of those with different ideas that makes sustainable democracy possible. Religion, rather than declining as it does in industrial societies, changes in the direction of individual spirituality. Heightened material well-being also increases empathy and toleration of interpersonal differences, thus strengthening acceptance of gender, racial, religious, and sexual orientation equality. A postindustrial economy also brings about a rise in the welfare state, which decreases dependence on the family and facilitates increased individualism and diversity in people’s interests. Risk perceptions tend to be of longterm perils that threaten humanity as a whole, such as global warming, rather than the sorts of threats to the individual that those with survival values feel (Inglehart and Welzel 2005, 1–45). Although Inglehart and Welzel focus on democracy rather than civility, the characteristics they identify that make democracy possible and sustainable—tolerance, concern for, and consideration of others, including unseen others—are precisely the same characteristics that are the foundation of civility. They write, The shift from survival values to self-expression values is linked with a rising sense of existential security and human autonomy, which produces a humanistic culture of tolerance and trust, where people place a relatively high value on individual freedom and self-expression and have activist political orientations. (2005, 56) These changes, together with the awareness of others that they create, also encourage a mindset that makes civility a logical way to behave: treat others as one would like to be treated by them. And recognizing others—strangers—as consociates creates a sense of a public that includes everyone and a public space that belongs to all. One can thus argue that a critical mass of people holding self-expression values creates the fertile soil needed to germinate and nurture civility in a society. Inglehart and Welzel write that, based on World Value Survey results in China, were its levels of growth to be maintained (which they were), they expected that it would democratize fairly soon (2005, 42). This has proved overly optimistic. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, 71 percent of Chinese respondents regard themselves as “struggling,” 17 percent as “suffering,” and only 12 percent as “thriving” (Chin 2012). Moreover, Inglehart and Welzel state, “The timing and pace of measurable change in a society is not necessarily correlated with change in values, especially if there are legal or structural barriers to such changes” (2005, 39). Although some in China display the kinds of behavior associated with self-fulfillment values, that barrier exists in the Chinese Communist Party’s desire for a monopoly of power and control over everything. Society for Itself As stated above, a society for itself is one in which being a member is, in some contexts, an important part of people’s identities, in which they feel linked to others Discussion 155 on the basis of also being members, and in which they recognize an affective bond with their compatriots. It stands in contrast to the mode of social organization that existed historically in Chinese society or in Taiwan before the 1990s. There, persons of significance were limited to insiders, those within the boundary of Fei’s concentric-circles model. Others simply existed; at best, they were inconsequential; at worst, they were a potential source of danger. Moreover, by definition, all such groups of insiders were in competition with each other, creating a zero-sum mentality in that anything one did for a member of another kinship group was a potential loss for one’s own. There was no reason to extend civil treatment to those outside one’s own social circle and every reason not to. Such societies lack a polity and a public. A polity requires that the citizens who have reached the age of majority are able to participate in public affairs. Some would go so far as to say that such participation is everyone’s civic duty because it gives every individual a stake in how society is managed. Polity is linked to public, and according to Alexander, In the minds of most democratic theorists, it seems, the notion of the public points to the existence of an actual group, to actual deliberations, and to an actual place. According to the concrete notion of the public, members of a closely-knit polity meet with one another in the same physical environment, vigorously debating the events that affect their lives. (2006, 71) In present-day societies, rather than discussions in the same physical environment, such as the agora or the coffee house, the meeting of the public mostly takes place virtually and symbolically, through op-eds, letters to the editor, commentaries in various publications, blogs, satire, talk-back radio, internet bulletin boards, social media, documentaries, demonstrations, communication with those in executive and legislative bodies who represent citizens, voting, participation in civil society, public-opinion surveys, and focus groups, including those commissioned by private entities such as political parties. In 1950 neither a public nor a polity existed for most people in Taiwan because, although it was a modern state, as a society it consisted of myriad small communities in which people interacted primarily with those from within their own areas. Communities of Taiwanese were mostly geographically based in villages and neighborhoods. Communities of Mainlanders were rooted in what part of China they came from, what dialect they spoke, and, for some, in what government department, bureau, office, or military unit the breadwinner worked in. Han Taiwanese were conscious that they were Taiwanese, Hoklo, or Hakka, but except for a small number, mainly intellectuals, subjectively they were much more members of their communities than Taiwanese. They could act on their Taiwanese identity through language or folk practices, but asserting it politically was perilous. For Mainlanders, Taiwan was nothing more than a place of temporary refuge from the Communists, the more temporary the better, and the government did all it could to encourage 156 Civility and Its Development that feeling through its ubiquitous propaganda about recovering the mainland, through creating dependent’s villages to house the families of military personnel, and through making “native place” a part of one’s official identity. Because it fit into the government’s mainland recovery mission, Mainlanders were free to express their subcultural identity. As explained in Chapter 5, over the next four decades, these microcommunities blended into a Taiwanese society that encompassed the clear majority of persons living there. Rural–urban migration and compulsory military service pulled people out of their communities and exposed them to the wider society. The 1970s nativist literature movement raised the issue of Taiwanese identity and hence Taiwan consciousness, and the formation of a political opposition meant that voters had a choice. In the 1980s self-help protests demonstrated that issues facing one community were shared by those in other villages and communities. The growth of socially engaged Buddhism and the construction of the first Ciji hospital stimulated participation in society as a whole. And the retreat of authoritarianism generated further pressure on the regime and triggered the formal process of democratization with the first fully democratic election of all legislators held in 1991. Taiwan thus became a society for itself. It has a polity and a public. Its citizens are able to participate in political life and civil society. At a minimum, they can vote in free elections, and their vote determines who will represent them and who will preside. It has a public because, if they so desire, citizens can participate or vent their opinions without fear of reprisal. The Taiwan public, like that in many Western countries, is a symbolic public; it has people who deliberate on politics through talk-back TV and radio, letters to the editor, public opinion surveys, and focus groups, and it also has a robust civil society. Opinion polling also shows that a strong bond of social unity exists in Taiwan based on the democratic way of life its people have struggled to achieve and their desire to maintain it (McLean-Dreyfus and Varrall 2015; Sullivan 2014). China, rather than constituting a society for itself, is still largely made up of groups of insiders who generally lack concern for the greater public. As mentioned, one does see genuine manifestations of concern during times of emergency, but philanthropic donations are most noticeable at times of disaster. In everyday life drivers compete to be first. People are more likely to queue, but rushing for seats on subways is still common, while yielding them to others is much less so. Feelings of unity are mainly aroused by government media fanning the flames of circle-thewagons nationalism to ward off alleged threats of foreign enemies who allegedly want to break up China. China has no physical venues and no symbolic venues at which a public can meet other than internet bulletin boards, which are increasingly heavily censored.16 While these web forums do afford a place for critical and satirical comments, 16. Young savvy Chinese tell me that the censors are not nearly as effective as the government would like them to be and that for those who know how to look for it, there is plenty of information available. Discussion 157 they are too restrictive for sober discussions. A very tight lid is kept on the Party’s “private household,” making it almost impossible to see what is hidden inside. As Richard McGregor states, the party headquarters building is not even marked as such (2010). As for a symbolic public, the media are controlled; on public TV or radio there are no talk shows, and op-ed columns and other opinion outlets must have party approval. On the odd occasion that something contrary slips through, there are repercussions. Moreover, government tries to control web communication through the so-called fifty-centers, persons supposedly paid half a yuan for each post they write to try to steer discussions away from criticism and toward what is more favorable ground for the government. There are public opinion surveys, but most are officially commissioned and the results remain in-house; those done for genuine scholarly purposes have to get political approval, which limits the questions that can be asked. Although there are “wildcat” demonstrations by people such as workers disgruntled because they have not been paid, demonstrations are illegal unless at least covertly sanctioned by the authorities, such as those targeting Japan from time to time. It is difficult to form a civil society group. To the extent they are approved, they are closely watched and regulated. It is challenging to see how a case could be made that a public exists in China, given that actual groups, deliberations, and places are subject to stringent limitations. Democracy and Civility As a final question, in earlier research on civility in Taiwan I found that Taiwanese began to behave civilly at the same time that Taiwan was undergoing democratization, giving rise to the questions of what kind of relationship there might be between the two and whether a link might be causal. Over the period that I have been visiting China (1983 to the present) it has not democratized, but civil behavior has improved. Thus, democracy cannot be a necessary condition. Moreover, the unlikelihood that civility is widespread in India or South Africa indicates that democracy alone is not sufficient. Furthermore, while there are some who are directly and personally affected by particular policies or actions of officials, this study finds no evidence that democracy or the quality of governance affect how people in general treat random others. In Taiwan’s case, democratization may have facilitated the advent of civil behavior, but prior events and phenomena appear more directly related. First, the struggle to force an authoritarian government to democratize and remove the stigma it had imposed on the Taiwanese identity of the great majority of the population created a common bond among the citizenry, turning strangers into compatriots. That struggle also involved events that linked members of small communities with Taiwan society as a whole. Second, the spread of socially engaged Buddhism, with its emphasis on universalism, service, and compassion affected many in Taiwan, including those who formed civil society organizations that served disadvantaged 158 Civility and Its Development groups and ordinary citizens who supported them by donating and volunteering. The message of compassion was sufficiently forceful that persons seeking office had to lay claim to it during their campaigns. It is circumstantial, though highly plausible, that these, combined with the civility education that students received in primary school but felt were meaningless at the time, and the attacks on incivility by critics such as Lung Ying-tai, became salient to people as the new, democratic society emerged. Thus, rather than a causal relationship, the link between civility and liberal democracy is, as I argued above, that both are dependent on the same set of values. Those values shape people’s worldviews, making them tolerant and considerate of their fellow citizens. I have also pointed out that successful government efforts to improve aspects of civility in Taiwan were made by then Taibei mayor Chen Shuibian, who did so because, as the first Taibei mayor elected rather than appointed in close to thirty years, he felt he had to have accomplishments in his first term if he were to have a chance to be reelected for a second. A democratic system of government, one in which people periodically choose who will and who will not govern them, can thus be an incentive to improve conditions that foster civility. However, while I cannot say that democracy is necessarily, intuitively I find it difficult to believe that civility would develop at a society-wide level in an authoritarian regime. While some such regimes can boast solid accomplishments, China being a prime example, the regime’s insecurity betrays leadership doubts about the extent to which citizens accept their legitimacy, and that leads to their taking repressive measures, whether this means disappearances, arrests of critics on spurious or loosely defined charges such as “picking quarrels to provoke trouble,” or merely restricting access to information. Moreover, the overriding concern by authoritarian regimes is to stay in power, China again being a prime example (Dai 2009). It is also questionable whether civility is a priority of authoritarian regimes. An important motivation for the NLM was to change the behavior of the masses so that foreigners would no longer regard Chinese as uncivilized and the desire to discipline them in order to make China strong. That of the Five Stresses and Four Beauties was to repair the damage to the social fabric wrought by the Cultural Revolution and the chaotic, everyone-for-themselves previous thirty years of class struggle. However, both also aimed to strengthen dedication to the regime itself, as have subsequent Chinese civilizing campaigns. In none of these was civil behavior itself the primary goal. In fact, one might question the extent to which authoritarian regimes are willing to commit resources to developing civility as well as whether it is in their power to do so, remembering that civility is the product of a change in values and worldview. There are areas where governments can further this process, such as enforcing no-smoking laws or more strictly enforcing road rules, but measures to eliminate such actions as spitting or littering are far more difficult. Convincing everyone to be considerate toward strangers is harder still. Index Allito, Guy, 20 Almond, Gabriel, and Sidney Verba, 19 Anderson, Benedict, 16 be civilized (jiang wenming), 54–60 Becker, Marvin, 13 Beijing Playboys (jingcheng sishao) 108–9 blood donations, 100, 114 bogus products, 58, 105–6 Brother Watch, 110 Caldwell, Mark, 14 Calhoun, Cheshire, 13, 14 Carter, Stephen, 14 Chang, Hao, 26–27 Chen Ruoshui, 8, 22, 24, 25–26, 27, 128 Chen Shui-bian, 40–41, 112, 158 Chen Wen-cheng, 126 Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK), 40, 61, 124, 125, 126, 130–31 Chiang Kai-shek, 36, 37, 38, 39, 124 China-Taiwan differences and similarities, 5, 10, 29–30, 34–36, chapter 3, 136–47; divergence, 30–31, 33–36; ethnic makeup, 30; history, 30; socioeconomic development, 30, 33–35, 121–22, 137–38; teaching civility in, 60–69 China Youth Self-Awareness Promotion Movement, 3 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 7 Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement, 3, 9, 39–40 civility, vii, chapter 2; and civil society, 6; and democratization 5; development in Europe, 7, 9, 11–14; and court behavior 11–13; and democracy, 153–54, 157–58; and government, vii, 7, 18, 40–41; and public space, 7; and self-expression values 153–54; and tourism, 18; and trust, 17, 18, 144–48; and values, 153–54; Chinese acceptance of, 7; conditions facilitating, 17–18, 148–50; conditions hindering, 18–19, 150–53; defined, 4, 6–7, 8, 13–17, 55–56, 57; civility in dynastic China, 11, 19–20, 21–24, 25–26 civility, Taiwan and China compared 115–16, 117 civility in China, 10, improvements in, 73, 111; structural and social impediments, 136–47 civility in Taiwan, 1–5, 6, 10, 17, 35, 39–42, 117, 118; as seen by Chinese, 116–17; by foreigners, 115–16; by Taiwanese, 115; at present, 112–14, 117–35; development of, 121–35; in the past 4–5, 17, 117; political events, 124–26 civilizing campaigns, 10, 36; China, 10, 42–60; ROC/Taiwan, 10, 36–30, 40–42. See also specific campaigns cixu geju (differential modes of association), 21 condescension, 88, 101–2 Confucian “Golden Rule,” 7 Confucius, Confucianism, 20, 95 considering others, 65–67, 113 Index Cultural Renaissance Movement, 3, 39–40, 137 customer service, 57–58, 88–89 Davetian, Benet, 12, 13 democracy/democratization, 34, 130, 157–58 Democrat Progressive Party (DPP), 112, 130 Deng Xiaoping, 46 Deng Yujiao, 110–11 Dirlik, Arif, 37, 38, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51 disregarding rules, 64, 65, 94–96 disturbing others, 64, 65, 84–86; by children, 84–85n20–21 Don Baron (Di Renhua), 1, 3 Dongcheng be civilized campaign, 56–60 dynastic China, 19, 19–20 Elias, Norbert, 11, 12, 13, 14 environment, 63–64, 149–50 Erasmus, 12 Erbaugh, Mary S., 48 face (mianzi), 7 February 28 Incident, 33 Fei Xiaotong, 21 five polite phrases, 48 five stresses, four beauties, three fervent loves, 45–48, 95, 158 Formosa/Meilidao incident, 124, 125 Fukuzawa Yūkichi, 24, 27 Gold, Thomas, 34 gongdexin. See public morality good Samaritan actions, 23, 74–78; cheat good Samaritans, 75–76, 78 governance, China, 142–43, 148–49, 152, 158; Taiwan, 33–34, 117–18, 119–20, 123–26, 130, 137, 142–43, 149, 153 guiju (rules) vs limao (manners), 19–20 Habermas, Jürgen 16 Hakka, 17, 30, 118, 130, 131, 155 Hall, John A., 11, 13, 19 Han, in Taiwan 30, 137, 155 197 Harrell, Stevan, 35 hawkers, 2–3 helping others, 65, 88–89 Hessler, Peter, 27, 80 Hoklo, 17, 30, 118, 130, 155 Hsiao, Hsin-huang Michael, 128, 129 Hsiao, Kung-chuan, 20, 21 Hu Bin, 106–7 identity, 124, 132–35 ignoring rules, 73, 82, 94–96 incivility in Taiwan, vi, 1–2, 114–15, 129 inequality, China, 101–4, 106, 138, 140–42; Taiwan, 138 Inglehart, Ronald and Christian Welzel, 153–54 in-group, out-group, 18–19 Jacobs, J. Bruce, 125 Japan and Taiwan, 30–32, 117; assimilation of Taiwanese, 31–32; kōminka, 31, Nipponization, 31–32, 33 jiang wenming (be civilized) 54–55 jinzi, 20 Jones, Susan Mann, 24 Keane, John, 12, 13 Kesler, Charles R., 15 Kim, Sungmoon, 20 Kipnis, Andrew, 49, 51 Lee Teng-hui, 131, 142 Lei Feng, learning from, 42–45, 46, 60, 75n5 Levenson, Joseph, 26 li (ceremonious behavior/etiquette), 19–20, 95 Liang Qichao, 17, 24, 128 Li Kwoh-ting, 128, 145; sixth relationship, 128, 145 Lin, Qinghong (Delia), 50, 51 Lin Yutang, 23 Li Qiming, 107 Li Tianyi, 108 littering, 5, 18, 61–62, 63, 91–94 Little Yueyue, 74, 75, 76, 78 Liu, Henry, 126 198 Lung Ying-tai, 129–30, 158 Lu Xun, 27 Mainlanders, 5, 17, 33, 118–19, 131; attitudes toward Taiwan/Taiwanese, 119 Mao Zedong, 5, 29, 124 Margalit, Avishai, 15 Marxism, 9 McGregor, Joan, 15 methodology and data sources, vii, 4, 5–6, 8–9, 112 Mount, Ferdinand, 14 Murthy, Sheela, 46, 47, 48, 51 New Life Movement, 3, 7, 9, 37–39, 95, 158 noise, 66, 85–86 Orwin, Clifford, 15 pa chikui, 80 Peng Yu, 75, 75n5–7, 76 philanthropy, 97–101, 113–14, 122–23, 131–32; government role in, 97, 99–100, scandals, 98–99 Phillips, Steven, 33 Pinker, Stephen, 11, 12, 18 privileged vs. the rest 101–10, 139–40 public (gong), 16, 24–28 public morality (gongdexin), vi, 1, 6; lack of in Taiwan, 1–3, 4. See also civility public space and facilities, 25–28, 61–63, 94 public transport behavior, 90–91, 113 Purves, Bill, 27 quality (suzhi) 49–51 queuing, 3, 5, 7, 17, 64, 89–90, 113 religion and civility, 13–14, 113, 122–23, 131, 157–58 renqingwei (the human touch), vi, 1 resentment toward the rich and powerful, 104–5, 106, 109 road behavior, vi, 2, 5, 17–18, 40, 70, 79–82, 112–13, 128, 149 Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, 15, 17, 18 Index Schonsheck, Jonathan, 15 Shils, Edward, 14–15, 17, 19 Smith, Arthur, 25 Smith, Douglas, 16 smoking, vi, 1–2, 5, 8, 70, 86–88, 113, 115 social movements, 127–31; consumer, 127; environmental, 127–28 social unity/nationalism, 138–42, 151, 155–57 society for itself, 10, 16, 120, 154–57; Taiwan’s transformation to, 121–35, 155–56 special supply (tegong), 106 spitting, 62, 112, 115 Spülbeck, Susanne, 18 strangers, 1, 7, 27, 64, 74–84; assist in distress, 76–78; ignore, 2, 64, 74–75; interactions with, 7, 18, 82–84, 88 suzhi (human quality), 45, 49–51 Sun Yat-sen, 17, 36–37 Taiwan nativist literature movement (xiangtu wenxue), 39, 123–24 Taiwanese, 5, 33; ethnic makeup, 29–30; identity, 132–33, 133–35 Taiwanese-Mainlander relationship, 33, 119–20 teaching civility, 9, 10, 29, 60–69, 136–47 toilet behavior, 70, 71, 73 tourists/tourism, 18, 70–73, 93, 95, 116–17 trust, 18, 144–47, 151 Tuan, Yi-fu, 11, 19 uncivil, 82–84 Uncle House, 110 urban managers (chengguan), 74, 152 violence, 11, 74, 86–87, 90–91, 152 Vogel, Ezra, 18 volunteering, 63, 113–14; in disasters, 78 Walzer, Michael, 14, 15 Washington, George, 14 Welcome National Day (Dongcheng campaign), 56–59 Welcome the Olympics, 55–56 Index Weller, Robert, 6, 131 wenming, 6–7, 45, 55 Whyte, Martin King, 103–4 Wilkenson, Richard, and Kate Pickett, vii Wilson, Richard, 22 Wu, Haixia, 27 xiangyue (village compact), 20–21 Xiao Heba Village campaign, 52–54 Xu Xitu, 3, 4 199 Yan, Yunxiang, 35 Yang, Guobin, and Craig Calhoun, 16 Yao Jiaxin, 107–8 zhan pianyi (benefiting at others’ expense), 71, 75, 94 zhengqian konghou (wanting to be first), 80, 83 zijiren (insiders), 17 About the Author David Schak is currently an adjunct associate professor in the Department of International Business and Asian Studies at Griffith University, Australia. He earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 and was an associate professor of Asian studies at Griffith University before his retirement. He is the author of A Chinese Beggars’ Den: Poverty and Mobility in an Underclass Community and coeditor of Civil Society in Asia.