Deploying weapons of the weak in civil society: political culture in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

• Date: 22 June 2006
• Author: Lo, Ming-cheng M.,Bettinger, Christopher P.,Fan, Yun
• Published date: 22 June 2006
• Author: Lo, Ming-cheng M.

Introduction

AT THE CLOSE OF THE 20TH CENTURY, HONG KONG AND TAIWAN HELD THE FIRST national democratic elections in their history. In both settings, a long and complicated set of global maneuvers by more powerful states kept democracy from emerging and threatened to delegitimate local identities. The reality of this past colonization and current, informal imperialism has until very recently discouraged, or even censored, political discourses informed by robust civic engagement. The slow, limited, but often successful efforts at institutionalizing democracy in these contexts are thus remarkable; neither the current situation nor the legacy of political disempowerment has proved strong enough to dissuade civic engagement. Our article, however, focuses not on the history of how such institutions were built, but on cultural legacies. How do histories of colonialism and resistance, if at all, shape the political-cultural repertoire of a society after institutional markers of democracy are more or less in place? Our article takes up this question as a point of entree into exploring how civil-political discourse is manifested in places deeply divided by historical and present power differentials.

We begin with a review of the literature on civil society, explaining why the question posed above is crucial and how it has been inadequately addressed. We suggest that to develop a richer understanding of the historical continuity and cultural creativity of the groups that have only recently been included in civil society, it is important to examine how their cultural legacy, developed under conditions of oppression, is transformed in the civic moment and informs their new civil speech. To develop theoretical tools for such inquiries, we take up W.E.B. DuBois' ideas about double consciousness and veils, as well as James Scott's description of "weapons of the weak," and elaborate on their relevance in the context of civil society. Because of the nature of our inquiry, we use as our data rich, multivalent expressions in the form of political cartoons.

By exploring public political engagement in Hong Kong and Taiwan during their first democratic elections, we broaden our understanding of how civil society, at least that sector engaged with the state, develops despite these legacies. Yet to explain what we wish to accomplish requires us to attempt to bring a coherent understanding to the notion of civil society. We describe civil society as: (1) a network of autonomous associations in the space outside the state and the family, and (2) a culture of civility that informs individuals' participation in these associations (Hall, 1995; Bryant, 1995; Giner, 1995). In addition to a set of institutional arrangements that guarantee the freedom and autonomy of the associational sphere, civil society must include a culture replete with a means of expression that makes activities in the associational sphere "civil."

Civility informs associational activities across sectors of civil society, but different sectors can develop drastically different political orientations and potential. Some sectors, such as social movements and political campaigns, are explicitly politicized; others may accommodate an apolitical or reactionary associational life. Thus, civil society should be conceptualized as "something more complex than Putnam's social capital, Tocqueville's voluntary associations, or Habermas' public sphere" (Ryan, 2001: 242). Political discussion among civic groups about public interests or state actions--something we could broadly describe as "political engagement"--constitutes the small segment of the civil realm in which our interests lie.

We must keep in mind that this complexity of civil society manifests in its cultural richness as well as its diversity. Civility is not only a cultural condition enabling contractual behavior, but also deep cultural play bridging considerable social barriers (Lichterman, 2005). Cultural diversity in civil society does not always foster consensus, but civil discourses may encourage cultural imagination for how to engage with tensions that in terms of material interests alone threaten to disallow civil cooperation. Thus art, which we find essential to social change ranging from rebellion to revolution, is equally important to civil society, albeit in a different role. Art's ability to express the shared, yet contentious, understandings of objects and actions makes it the vehicle of social movements and social conflict. Nascent civil societies need art to capture recent tensions so that associational participation is possible without being conceptualized as a foolishly naive act of faith.

Civil society scholars share this conceptual schema, but empirical analyses have largely been limited to Western states, political discourse, and artistic expression. The scholars who have developed our general understanding of interaction between state and civil society--Tocqueville, Habermas, Bobbio, Cohen and Arato, Putnam, and so forth--examine Western European and North American cases. All of these authors limit their claim to appropriate states, but the limits of their attention may have generated a collective "failure of imagination" in this field. We seem to lack the theoretical means to formulate good questions about the processes and mechanisms through which "uncivil" non-Western societies arrive at the gates of civil society. Thus, debate about non-Western cases of civil society tends to center on conceptual categorization (e.g., does colonial Taiwan have a civil society?) rather than on cultural and historical processes (e.g., what distinct cultural sources facilitated the development of civil society in colonial Taiwan?).

Chris Hann (1996) characterizes this quality of civil society scholarship as a debate between universalist and relativist positions. For universalists, such as John A. Hall, Adam Seligman, and Ernest Gellner, "the only candidate for this core definition [of civil society] is the liberal-individualist understanding that has emerged in the modern west.... In the other camp are the relativists--basically, those who recognize that other societies have organized their social and political life in terms of different, often incommensurable ideals" (Hann, 1996: 17-18). In their worthy effort to defend conceptual clarity, universalists risk abandoning inquiry into the diverse cultural origins and processes that cultivate emergent, fragile civil societies in adverse environments. Relativists have documented diverse historical roots and forms of civil societies, sometimes at the expense of clear illustrations of how these cases are conceptualized as civil societies per se. The middle ground between the two positions has been difficult to obtain.

One emerging direction of inquiry incorporates greater sensitivity to historical specificity without abandoning cross-cultural understanding of the conditions of civil society. This line of argument acknowledges that the history of rational individualism provides an important context for the development of most cases of civil society that we know, but that this historical context constitutes just one of many contexts in which civil society can emerge. Zaret (1996) demonstrates through careful historical work that the Western model of the public sphere has its own particularistic roots. Lo and Bettinger (2001) and Lo and Otis (2003) trace how distinct cultures of civility developed in Japan and China, which share the functional features of rational individualism without sharing its content. Khilnani (2001) identifies three conditions that facilitate the development of civil society without presupposing that the final product can only be found in the context of liberal democracy: a shared conceptual category for dealing with one another, a type of self open to discursive persuasion and deliberation, and an institutional dispersal of social power. Collectively, these recent efforts show that understanding the historicity of civil society is crucial for achieving both a more rigorous definition of the concept and more meaningful comparisons of its various empirical manifestations.

Our collective "failure of imagination" is complicated by the centrality of institutional frames to these inquiries. Although civil society scholars do not believe in crude structural causation, the institutional focus of these inquiries often leaves cultural aspects underdeveloped (Jacobs and Smith, 1997; Somers, 1995). Thus, important questions about culture are often insufficiently examined, particularly in terms of how different "kinds of discourses [are] staged in the public spheres of civil society" and of their varying social outcomes (Jacobs and Smith, 1997: 61). The field has begun to develop a more nuanced understanding of the culture of civil society by identifying its symbolic codes and narratives (e.g., Alexander and Smith, 1993), documenting contextual effects on the cultural construction of such codes and narratives (e.g., Jacobs, 1996), theorizing the roles of specific discursive genres in facilitating the articulation of political cultures (e.g., Jacobs and Smith, 1997), and so forth. These efforts conceptualize the culture of a given civil society as a "structured, socially established consciousness" (Alexander, 1992: 290) and proceed to identify its diverse cultural expressions. Again, the presupposition of civil society as an established category with relatively stable boundaries precludes questions about how an "uncivil consciousness" would develop into a civil one.

Delimiting our imagination of how civil society emerges and develops leaves the literature weak in terms of addressing colonial legacies. The civil society literature lacks sufficient theoretical thinking about the various cultural legacies that colonized, newly decolonized, or otherwise historically disempowered societies draw upon in their struggles to establish a civic tradition of...