Populism in Taiwan: Rethinking the Neo-liberalism–Populism Nexus

Abstract

Contemporary scholarship on populism, albeit involving divergent approaches and polarised diagnoses of populism’s political impacts, commonly attributes the recent populist surge to the peril of neo-liberal encroachment. However, such a neo-liberal–populist proposition encounters discrepant experiences when applied in non-Western contexts, including in East Asia. To recalibrate the conceptual framework, this article employs Gramsci-inspired scholarship on hegemony and populism – the notion of “the integral state” and non-reductionist class politics in particular – and utilises Taiwan as a case to expound upon the entanglement of democratisation, neo-liberalisation, and various forms of populist politics. Situating the post-2000 surge of multiple popular movements in Taiwan’s hegemonic restructuring since the 1980s, this article identifies a course of bifurcated development between “liberal populism of the bourgeois hegemony” and the “neo-liberal populism of the multitude” that embodies various ways in which neo-liberalism intersects with populist politics. Highlighting the constant boundary-redrawing of the integral state and its associated class politics along the hegemonic restructuring processes, Taiwan’s case exemplifies a critical approach to rethinking the over-determined relations between populism and neo-liberalism for other East Asian states and beyond.

Key words:

• East Asia
• hegemony
• neo-liberalism
• integral state
• populism
• Taiwan

Acknowledgements

Many people supported me in the completion of this article. I am particularly grateful to Dr Jim Glassman for providing insightful comments on an earlier draft. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who undoubtedly improved the quality of this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The populism literature encompasses various approaches from ideational, political, discursive, to historical. There is also ongoing debate between those arguing for a “minimum definition” which seeks to define populism with a number of essential criteria (that is, anti-establishment, anti-intellectual, authoritarianism, and so on) for operational purposes and an approach which advocates retaining the term’s “meaningful ambiguity” to account for historical plurality. While acknowledging the contested terrain of this literature, it is beyond the scope of this article to engage in the debate. Discussions on the different theoretical underpinnings for populism literature can be found in the work by Anselmi (2017), De la Torre (2018), Kaltwasser et al. (2017), Moffitt (2016), and Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017).

2 Liberal and critical scholars agree on the causal relationship between neo-liberalism and populism and yet diverge on its implications to democracy. While the former view populism as a threat to (liberal) democracy, the latter conceive neo-liberalism as the real threat to democracy.

3 It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a complete review of the populism literature on East Asia. Instead, this article will focus on dialogue with the research addressing the dynamics between political-economic factors and populism.

4 Of course, using the West as an analytical term can over-generalise varied experiences.

5 According to Chang (2009), it is populism that predominantly defines the Taiwanese people’s perception of democracy, with 60% of the population endorsing populist democracy and only 20% embracing liberal democracy.

6 Populist democracy also prevails in Southeast Asia such as Thailand and the Philippines which demonstrate ongoing struggles between radical populism and authoritarian populism.

7 This article does not suggest that populism in Taiwan can only be studied from these four incidents. Nor is it intended to covey a holistic study on the various forms of populism in Taiwan.

8 See the policy statement by the Small and Medium Enterprise Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs, reproduced at: https://www.mac.gov.tw/News_Content.aspx?n=57C834CE11740872&sms=8E0A247A631E0960&s=F02F4F9F0FC40CA4.

9 The outbreak of mass protests in Hong Kong against the extradition law imposed by Beijing in 2019 is commonly seen as a reason for the failure of the KMT in 2020.

10 The data are available at: https://statview.coa.gov.tw/aqsys_on/index.html.

11 These data are from the Tourism Statistics Database of the Taiwanese government available online at: https://stat.taiwan.net.tw/statistics/year/inbound/residence.