The global, the local, and the Chinese: vying cultures in Taiwan

Abstract

The global, Taiwan’s and Chinese cultures have been vying for support from people in today’s Taiwan. This paper attempts to evaluate the glocalization hypothesis by way of an explanation. Using recent data collected in 2018 by the Taiwan Social Change Survey, it is found that acceptance of Chinese culture is high, despite the political tension across the Taiwan Strait. In contrast, global culture is least well received. Regression estimation of the influence of global exposure (measured by border crossing, transnational networking and consumption of foreign food) on support for the three cultures provides only weak supporting evidence. In contrast, ethnic origin plays a key role when it comes to accepting Taiwanese or Chinese culture.

Acknowledgement

The Survey Research Data Archive, Academia Sinica is responsible for the data distribution. The author appreciates the aforementioned institutes’ assistance in providing the data. The views expressed herein are the author’s own.

Notes

1 In the original questionnaire there is another item about Taiwan’s culture which is not used in the analysis: “Every person in Taiwan should understand its own culture in the first place.” The responses to this question are highly skewed toward positive agreement (over 95%), which appears to express a normative acceptance of the local culture, rather than revealing support or preference for Taiwan’s local culture versus the increasing influences of the cultures from outside. Moreover, its absolute value of correlations on average is low at 0.07. I therefore decided not to include this item in the following analysis.

2 Income is measured in New Taiwan Dollar (NTD). The current exchange rate is approximately 30 NTD for one US dollar.

3 The wage earners might be more supportive to China as many businesses are involved with trade with China. I checked whether the possibility is existent on these dependent indicators and found the excluded group has a slightly higher average score only on favoring the global culture (the magnitude of the difference is 0.33, t = 4.57, p<.001). The overall differences are thus minor and have little implications for the patterns of multivariate association among variables.

4 TSCS also solicited responses to these questions in a survey in 2014. I also checked the pattern of acceptance of the cultures and obtained similar results. The 2014 survey unfortunately did not include global exposure measures, which prevents the testing of the glocal hypothesis.

5 The aboriginals, who constitute approximately 2.5% of the Taiwan population, are in fact comprised of as many as sixteen people groups.

6 The original question is “In which country or region do you think Taiwan enterprises should invest in the first place?” There are seven response categories, including China; Hong Kong and Macao; Japan; South Korea; Southeast Asia; Europe and the US; and others. I designed a binary variable (China = 1, otherwise = 0) for logistic estimation.

Additional information

Funding

Data analyzed in this paper were collected by the research project “2018 Taiwan Social Change Survey (Round 7, Year 4): Culture and Globalization” sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Notes on contributors

Ming-Chang Tsai

Ming-Chang Tsai is a Research Fellow and Deputy Director of Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, CHSS, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. He is President of the International Society for Quality of Life Studies, and was former president of Taiwanese Sociological Association and President of Research Committee of Social Indicators (RC55) of the International Sociological Association. His current research project focuses on comparative global connectivities in East Asia. His articles have appeared in China Quarterly, Comparative Sociology, Globalizations, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Sociological Research Online. His recent books include Global Exposure in East Asia (Routledge, 2015) and Family, Work and Wellbeing in Asia (coeditor, Springer, 2017). ([email protected])