This is a view of the building where I work. The College of Indigenous Studies at National Dong Hwa University, in Hualien, Taiwan.

And here is a picture of the view (on a more typically cloudy day) looking back, from the balcony near my office.

Most of the people who live on the East Coast of Taiwan reside in a narrow valley between the Coastal Mountain Range (top picture) and the larger Central Mountain Range (bottom picture). The valley starts in Hualien city, and continues down about about a hundred miles, to the next coastal city, Taitung. About thirty miles south is the village where I did my fieldwork. Apart from the great scenery and the chance to improve my Chinese, that is one of the main reasons I took this job. But it is now four years since I came here and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve made that thirty mile trip. That’s what I’d like to talk about in this post. I think the reasons give some insight into what life is like as an expat professor in Taiwan, what it means to teach near your field site, as well as some of the unique aspects of my current situation.

There are a number of reasons why I spend so little time at my old field site. One of them is that, as they say, “you can’t step in the same river twice.” It’s been a decade since I did my fieldwork, and the people I knew there have mostly moved on. I worked in an elementary school, and few people stay in the same place for more than four years. Some I’m still friends with. A teacher who teaches in the mountains south of Taipei, a baseball coach who is currently staying at my cousin’s house in Ohio has he studies for his Ph.D., and a few others I see now and then. But there are only a few people I know still living back in the village.

The other reason is that I’m busy. Taiwanese teachers typically have a 3-3 teaching load, as well as the usual advising and bureaucratic responsibilities. Since I arrived here I’ve developed over eleven new course syllabi – all of which I teach in Chinese. I mention this because it means I need to spend about four times as long preparing my courses as I would if I taught in English. The knowledge that almost all of my colleagues completed Ph.D.’s in Western Universities keeps me from making too much of my language situation. One get’s a lot more leeway teaching in a foreign language than one gets as a student, and I certainly couldn’t write a dissertation in Chinese, not to mention a term paper. Even now, for academic promotion, my colleagues are expected to publish and present papers in English whereas I can get by without having to write much Chinese at all.

The thing is, when I came they told me that I could teach in English because the government is trying to promote more English language classes. I tried it for a semester, but soon gave up. For one thing, less than a fifth of the students had sufficient English skills to follow me. Another reason is that we need at least ten students to get full credit for an undergraduate class. Although Taiwanese teachers get double credits for teaching in English – the same doesn’t apply to me as a foreigner, even though the problems I face are the same. But, over time, I’ve gotten better at it. The Ph.D. Cultural Theory course, which used to be the one class I did teach in English, I taught in Chinese (or Chinglish) this year. I still depend mostly on English language texts (giving my students translations when possible), but this semester was the first time I used a Chinese-only text in one of my classes, something I hope to slowly increase over time. [See this post I wrote some time back about the lack of texts in translation.]

But the biggest reason that I return to my field site so rarely has little to do with how busy I am teaching, and everything to do with how busy I am when I’m on break. Just at the time I got this job I was embarking on what turned out to be a four year project working on a documentary film in India. This has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done in my life, and I don’t regret it for an instant, but it does mean that when I do have a break I’m often jumping on board a plane to India (as, indeed, I’m doing again in about ten days time).

Despite everything I’ve said, I don’t mean to imply I haven’t been doing new research here in Taiwan. I have! About a year ago I started a series of posts on learning an endangered language and after that I interviewed some indigenous language teachers. While that work has been on hold over the past few months, I hope to take it up again as soon as we return from India. There is a paper I want to do on the subject and my New Year’s resolution is to get a first draft done by the end of the summer, and to turn it into a research proposal by the end of the year (when the National Science Council research deadline is).

Speaking of papers. Although it took me about three years to get into a schedule that works for me, I have lately also begun to figure out how to crank out those papers – something I need to do a lot more of if I’m going to pass the six year review required of all Taiwanese academics. Although there are the first inklings of a shift towards book-length manuscripts at some research institutions, here the focus is still on academic papers. A lot of credit is given for journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index which is annoying, since so many great anthropology journals aren’t listed there. My department has been supportive in giving me some credit for my online and multimedia work as well. I’m hopeful that the documentary film will be able to be included in my review.

One thing I’ve had to cut back on is conferences. It is just too costly and too time consuming to attend too many conferences from here. The school and the National Science Council do give faculty some support, but as much as I’d like to go to more conferences, I need to spend that precious time working on getting those papers out. I think, in general, this is true for junior faculty no matter where you are – but the distance (and jet lag) makes it even more true. To the extent possible, I have been trying to attend regional conferences, which can often be an exciting way to explore the region and (of course) network.

So, that’s why I don’t spend much time in my field site. But I’m learning a lot just by living and working here. For one thing, about half the students in our college are Taiwanese Aborigines, which is quite remarkable when you think that less than two percent of Taiwanese are Aborigines. Being a good teacher and advisor means learning from my students, which means being a good ethnographer. (Hopefully I can write some of that down in another blog post sometime.) Whether it is student term papers on indigenous issues, or problems advisees are facing at home, I’m picking up a lot about indigenous life by osmosis.

Below is video of a graduation day ceremony featuring cultural traditions from many of the different indigenous communities represented at our university:

In a way, I feel like I am now, a decade after I finished up my dissertation field work, finally ready to begin the task I started at that time. I feel that my first four years teaching here have given me a very special kind of training. And the learning process has made being a junior faculty member that much more exciting than it might have been otherwise. So even though I rarely go back to my old field site, it has still been a fantastic learning experience for me. Even though there may be limited opportunities for Ph.D.s to get academic appointments within the US, with the increasing globalization of higher education there are more and more opportunities abroad. I hope that this post might help others decide if doing so is right for them.

Reading Panaj Mishra’s NYRB article about Burma, “The Revolt of the Monks,” I was reminded of the KMT’s adventures in Burma, a remarkable episode in the inglorious history of Taiwan’s ruling party. After several pages discussing the brutal suppression of last year’s protest by Burma’s monks, Mishra turns to the political-economic foundation of military rule:

But the larger explanation of its strength and longevity lies in a much-ignored fact: that Burma has been in a state of uninterrupted civil war since independence in 1948, with dozens of ethnic-minority insurgent groups, which operate in or control between one quarter and one third of the country, ranged against a Burman-dominated state.

It is in the context of discussing the history of this prolonged civil war that he briefly mentions the story of the KMT in Burma. Curious to know more I turned to Google, and found this excellent chapter from McCoy’s 1972 book, The politics of heroin in Southeast Asia:

The precipitous collapse of the Nationalist Chinese (Kuomintang, or KMT) government in 1949 convinced the Truman administration that it had to stem “the southward flow of communism” into Southeast Asia. In 1950 the Defense Department extended military aid to the French in Indochina. In that same year, the CIA began regrouping those remnants of the defeated Kuomintang army in the Burmese Shan States for a projected invasion of southern China. Although the KMT army was to fail in its military operations, it succeeded in monopolizing and expanding the Shan States’ opium trade.

… With CIA support, the KMT remained in Burma until 1961, when a Burmese army offensive drove them into Laos and Thailand. By this time, however, the Kuomintang had already used their control over the tribal populations to expand Shan State opium production by almost 1,000 percent-from less than 40 tons after World War 11 to an estimated three hundred to four hundred tons by 1962. From bases in northern Thailand the KMT have continued to send huge mule caravans into the Shan States to bring out the opium harvest. Today [1972], over twenty years after the CIA first began supporting KMT troops in the Golden Triangle region, these KMT caravans control almost a third of the world’s total illicit opium supply and have a growing share of Southeast Asia’s thriving heroin business.

When the KMT were driven out of the Shan state the trade was taken over by warlord Khun Sa (pictured above), whose death last year was noted by Mutant Frog’s Roy Berman. Berman also linked to to this Taipei Times article about the plight of “‘stateless’ descendants of former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops.”

Further information: Wikipedia, China History Forum, Time Magazine.

Last year I wrote a post about Taiwan’s National Health Insurance program, having found a thoughtful article about the costs and benefits of Taiwan’s system. Now it seems that Taiwan’s system is getting even more attention, this time from a new PBS TV series: “Sick Around the World.” (All episodes of Frontline are available for free online viewing via the website!) Jonathan Cohn reviews the show and talks about health care in Taiwan:

The most interesting case study is probably Taiwan. A few years ago, when Taiwan decided to revamp its health care system, it studied other countries to determine which system might work best. Its conclusion? A single-payer system–one in which the government insures everybody directly–made the most sense.

Virtually alone among health care commentators in the U.S.–a category that includes me–Paul Krugman has been touting Taiwan for a while. The film makes it easy to see why. Today, the people of Taiwan have guaranteed access to health care–and, according to the film, it’s very good health care. There are no chronic waiting lists, like you find in Britain, and the care is very advanced. Among other things, Taiwan is among the world leaders in establishing electronic medical records–an innovation that should significantly improve care by keeping doctors and nurses better informed about patient histories and, no less important, avoiding potentially dangerous drug interactions.

Reid and Palfreman note, rightly, that the Taiwanese system isn’t as foreign as it seems: We actually have a similar program here in the U.S.–for the elderly. It’s called Medicare.

Now, over the past six months I’ve gotten to know Taiwan’s health care system better than I would have liked (don’t worry – everyone’s OK), and I have a pretty good sense of the good and the bad. The good is that one can go see any specialist just by showing up at the hospital and registering for an appointment. Its dirt cheap and you can see as many doctors and specialists as you like until you find something that works. The doctors are willing to do endless amounts of tests, and they dispense medicine generously (OK, that’s actually one of the bad things – but sometimes plenty of cheap meds is a plus). I’d say that the hospitals and doctors are all well trained and highly professional – even out here in the countryside.

On the other hand doctors here seem to see way too many patients in a day – far too many to give each one the time and care they need. Also, doctors rarely seem to talk to each other across specialties, and there is no framework for hospitals to share patient records unless you get the file out yourself and bring it to the other hospital. Doctors are used to assuming authority and don’t like being questioned and discourage second opinions. But when I think about these problems I don’t think they are unique to Taiwan. I think they are general problems with modern medicine – and don’t reflect on the benefits which come from having a single-payer system.

I have a relative who is a doctor in the US. He had a Taiwanese patient with leukemia. He told her to go home to Taiwan because he felt she would get better treatment there than in the US. She did, and she got better. I don’t know the facts of the case, but I’m sure the costs in Taiwan were quite manageable. I’ve paid no more than a couple of hundred dollars here for procedures which in the US would have cost thousands.

I’ve heard a lot of people from Canada, England, and Taiwan complain about their health care systems, and criticize those who paint too rosy a picture. Sure, but I think they grossly underestimate just how much worse the US is. Even if we are generous and assume that the systems are roughly comparable, Americans pay nearly twice as much as these other countries for care which is certainly no better, and possibly much worse. Few of the people who have said such things to me have actually watched Sicko. If you haven’t, I recommend that you do.

UPDATE: There was also this report on NPR:

To satisfy the patients in Taiwan, there’s no gatekeeper who controls access to specialists and no waiting lines.

If you woke up in Taiwan with shoulder pain, for example, Chang says that you would be able to see an orthopedic specialist the same morning, no recommendation from a general practitioner required.

“Our people don’t like the idea of gatekeepers. They want to decide by themselves,” Chang says.

Don’t Forget Your Smart Card

By consolidating so much — one government plan that covers everybody — Taiwan achieves remarkable efficiency.

Everybody here has to have a smart card to go to the doctor. The doctor puts it in a reader and the patient’s history and medications all show up on the screen. The bill goes directly to the government insurance office and is paid automatically.

So Taiwan has the lowest administrative costs in world: less than 2 percent.

If you ask most people, democracy is synonymous with elections. But, strangely enough, few people who live in electoral democracies feel that elections result in a government which truly responds to their concerns. At its best, electoral politics seems to solve the problem of succession which plagued previous forms of government. Although it is not unusual for violence to break out during elections in many parts of the world, my sense is that even the most procedurally flawed elections in a one-party state make for more peaceful transitions between rulers. By this standard a bloodless military coup is actually slightly better than a violent election, so we’re placing the bar pretty low.

I find it much more useful to think about democracy in terms of institutions. Separation of powers has been an important part of democracy since the early Greek City-States, and was a central feature of the Roman Republic. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have been doing their best to undo this founding principle of democracy for some time. They object to any congressional oversight of the executive branch, and have appointed Supreme Court judges who believe in a strong executive. We all know the endless stream of abuses which have taken place under the Bush White House, many of them posing serious threats to civil liberties. And yet, somehow, the basic building blocks of US democracy remain intact – barely. (True, we are setting the bar pretty low here when we point out that there aren’t black-booted brown shirts patrolling our streets, but still…)

These thoughts occur to me as Taiwan slips back towards one-party rule less than a decade after the DPP first gained control of the presidency. During that time numerous reform measures which would have strengthened Taiwanese democracy were repeatedly defeated in the KMT controlled legislature. It is unclear whether any of these will move forward now that the KMT’s position is secure, although the KMT’s anti-corruption rhetoric during the past election will likely result in at least some minimal reforms.

I find myself reflecting upon my experience working within Taiwanese institutions. At college meetings, every speaker prefaces their comments by mimetically recreating the institutional hierarchy: “Dean, Department Chair, Colleagues, Everyone: Hello.” But those with real power are not at the meeting: the school administration and the Ministry of Education. Every decision is made at the top and trickles its way down the ladder, so our meetings are primarily reactive. Nothing we say or do can really influence the decisions which have already been made on top. And those at top are not particularly interested in hearing our views.

Now, to be fair, this isn’t that different from how institutions work in the US. What is different, however, is that some institutions, at least, have a history of struggle which has resulted in faculty assemblies, teacher unions, and even, in some places, graduate student unions. While these organizations don’t rightly represent a “separation of powers” at the institutional level, they do act as a countervailing force which dampens the tendency for power to concentrate at the administrative center over time. I have not seen any signs of such organizations during my brief experience working in Taiwanese academia.

Another observation is that Taiwanese separation of powers differs in one important respect from that in the United States. The Examination Yuan 考試院, which overseas the testing of civil servants, is one of the five branches of government. Wikipedia compares it to “the European Personnel Selection Office of the European Union or the Office of Personnel Management of the United States of America” but its stature as one of the five pillars of government seems unique (at least with comparison to the US). Scott Sommers has remarked upon these differences as well:

In the occupational selection of modern Western nations, I believe it is occupational practitioners themselves who construct the tests based on their personal ideas about what practitioner knowledge should be. In Asia, it is quite different. In Taiwan, for example, a great deal of the testing and examination that goes on is controlled through a centralized government organization called the Examination Yuan. While the Examination Yuan utilizes highly qualified representatives of the various organizations their tests select for, it is clearly distinct in its functions from the the various occupational groups and their interests.

At the end of that article Scott suggested that “expanded democracy places testing in the hands of occupational practitioners.” I don’t know whether there is truly a general trend in this direction, but this is the kind of thing I have come to think about when I think about democracy in Taiwan. I don’t think this kind of institutional reform can happen from the top down, but so far I see very few signs of Taiwanese professionals seeking to make their institutions more democratic. At my university there is some discussion about allowing Assistant Professors to have a vote in the faculty hiring process – but it isn’t even clear whether current rules allow us to make such changes…

Schee posted a link to this article on the new voting system which so affected the Taiwanese legislative elections. (See my last post on this.)

Several countries now mix proportional representation with voting for individual candidates, as Taiwan now does. However, it turns out there are two different models for how the mixing works: the one-vote model Additional Member System (AMS) [UPDATE: See comments below for further clarification.] used in Germany, and the parallel model used in Japan. Not unsurprisingly, considering their close historical relationship, Taiwan has copied the Japanese system. Here is some background on the differences, courtesy of a 2004 BA thesis [link to PDF download] by Joe Michael Sasanuma:

The multimember district electoral system was replaced with a new system on March 4, 1994. The Japanese call the new system heiritsu sei, or the parallel system, because it mixes the single member district (SMD) system and the proportional representation (PR) system, which has become a popular electoral system in recent years…

In most countries that have adopted the mixed system, like Germany, the single member district tier affects the distribution of the seats among the parties in only the most unusual circumstances; the SMDs are designed mainly to give voters a specific representative that they can identify as their own. The Japanese system is called “parallel” because, unlike the German system, there is almost no connection between the single member district tier and the PR tier in how the seats are distributed; the party’s sum is determined by the number of seats it wins in the SMDs plus the number of seats won in the PR. Voters are given two votes, one for the SMDs to vote for their preferred candidate, and the other for the PR tier to vote for their preferred party. The candidates on the PR tier are elected based on the number of PR votes—not SMD votes—that the party receives. Indeed, it is quite a bit of irony that when it was normal to give voters multiple votes, as in a multimember district, Japan only gave one, and now when it is normal only to give one vote, as in the mixed system, Japan gives voters two.

Taiwanese blogger Ivanusto supported mixed SMD and PR voting, but argues that the decision to copy Japanese model was a mistake.

First, he looks at the results of the proportional vote. Parties with less than 5% of the vote are excluded, so although the initial round was 51% for the KMT, 31% for the DPP and 12% other, because no other party got more than 5% the final round came to 58% KMT, 42% DPP. There are a total of 113 seats in the new legislature, 73 single-member districts, 34 at-large seats chosen according to the proportion of the vote each party receives on the second ballot, and 6 seats set aside for the indigenous community. That means that the 34 seats are divided up according to the 58-42 ratio, giving the DPP 14 at-large seats in addition to the 13 single-member districts they won. Similarly, the KMT won 20 at-large seats and 61 single-member districts. (A couple of small parties getting a few seats here and there. See the chart above, where the SMDs are in orange and the PR in blue, with the totals in the pie chart.)

Now, in the German system, the total number of seats for each party would first be decided by the proportional vote rather than apportioned out according to a second ballot. That means that out of 113 seats, 42% (the percentage the DPP got) would be 47 seats. And the KMT’s 58% would have gotten them 66 seats. So, the KMT would only have received an additional 5 at-large seats, not 20 as happened yesterday. And the DPP would have been given 34 at-large seats, for a total of 47.

Ivanusto goes on to discuss some of the particularities of the German system, such as the occasional necessity to add additional seats, or the choice to vote for a person or a party (instead of having to vote for both), etc. Now, voting systems is complicated stuff, and I’m biased for not wanting to see any one party have total control, but from what I can understand it seems to me that the German model better represents the will of the voters than the Japanese system the Taiwanese chose to use instead.

Almost every single American newspaper ran stories about the Taiwanese election attributing the DPP’s defeat to “broad disenchantment among Taiwan’s 23 million inhabitants over the combative pro-independence campaign that has been the centerpiece of Chen’s two four-year terms as president.” I don’t know what motivated the average Taiwanese voter to support the KMT’s sweeping victory, but as best as I can tell, a major reason for the victory was the DPP’s lack of an effective strategy in the face of sweeping changes to the electoral system.

Shelley Rigger summarized the changes in the Wall Street Journal before the election:

The reform cuts the size of the legislature in half, to 113 seats from 225, and replaces the island’s 29 cumbersome multimember districts with a two-track system. This system combines representatives from 73 single-member districts (representing about 300,000 people each) and 34 seats chosen by a party-list system; each voter will tick both a candidate for his district and a party preference. Six seats are set aside for the island’s small indigenous population.

Rigger already anticipated that these changes would favor the KMT, “as the single-member plurality rules have driven third-party and independent candidates out of the race” and because “the KMT is the plurality choice in most electoral districts.” Indeed, that seems to be what happened:

“The [single-district, two-vote] system is really hurting the DPP,” Jim Lee (李筱峰), a political commentator and professor at National Taipei University of Education’s Graduate School of Taiwan Culture, said in a telephone interview.

“The KMT has built up a very strong local network and it’s therefore easier for it to use that network and grab votes in the new districts,” Lee said.

“If we look at past elections, we can see that KMT candidates usually ranked No. 1 and DPP candidates ranked No. 2 in districts where multiple seats were elected,” he said.

“Now, as only one candidate is elected, some of the former No. 2 DPP candidates will just be dropped,” Lee said.

Given that such results could have been, and indeed were anticipated, the DPP should have acted accordingly by seeking to build up the grass roots support needed by an opposition party. Instead they seem to have acted more like the ruling party they never were. Although Michael Turton shows that the DPP “actually raised its vote total by 140,000 votes over 2004,” it seems that low voter turnout, especially among young people, hurt them where it counts. Although the article doesn’t actually provide hard numbers to support this conclusion, I don’t think there is any doubt that Taiwanese voters are disenchanted with the political process in general and the DPP in particular.

Apart from corruption scandals, which are certainly a big part of the story, the DPP lacks a vision for Taiwan. As I’ve written here numerous times, besides identity politics, the DPP have done nothing to truly distinguish themselves from the KMT. Part of this is because for the past eight years the KMT dominated legislature has blocked most of the DPP sponsored legislation. But it is also because somewhere along the line the DPP stopped being the party of social justice, the environment, etc. All the things that they stood for in the 90s. Although artists, academics and intellectuals are a small part of the electorate, I know that many of my friends and colleagues used to be ardent DPP supporters, but voted for the Green Party this time around. Unfortunately, third parties suffered even worse in this election, which is likely to ensure the DPP’s place as number two in a two party system.

UPDATE: The voter turnout was “less than 57 percent — the lowest for legislative elections since 1972″ according to the Taipei Times.

Over at Pinyin.info Mark Swofford notices a new trend of inserting “ING” at the end of Chinese verbs. When I twittered about this, Zonble pointed me to the above song by MayDay, the title of which is 戀愛ing (Lianai – ING), meaning “loving” or “romancing.” Interestingly, if you listen to the song they don’t pronounce it the way I thought they would. Instead of saying “ing” as in English, they spell out the letters. I suppose that reflects the derivation of this practice from the written form in online chatrooms and the like.

UPDATE: Also see this 1994 study on the “Assimilation of Roman letters into the Chinese writing system.”

This Japanese Era water and ink drawing of the Su-hua highway (which links Hualien with the North of Taiwan) was found on The Gerald Warner Taiwan Image Collection.

This is a very complex picture (by Cooloud). Taiwan’s President and Vice-President were prisoners in this building during the White Terror. On Human Rights Day they announced its conversion into a Human Rights Memorial. However, at the same time, “not far from the ceremony, the police were forcefully breaking up a [peaceful] demonstration held by citizens protesting on the LeSheng Leprosy Institute issue.”

I don’t have too many good pictures of Big Ears (the black dog) because when she was around the dogs were usually moving too fast for me to capture on film. Either they were running, or they were wrestling and all I photographed was a big ball of fur with black and brown paws sticking out.

Big Ears was Juno’s best friend. Now she’s dead. The community placed a dog trap in our housing complex and Big Ears went into it. The rules say all dogs in the community must be kept on a leash and any dog that goes in the trap gets taken away.

We first noticed Big Ears about a year ago. At the end of the semester some students must have left her behind when they moved away. A lot of dogs end up stray that way, but this dog was so sweet tempered that she was adopted by our neighbor who fed her and took care of her. Along with Happy (the white dog) and Spot (not pictured) these three abandoned dogs are cared for by our neighbor. She doesn’t exactly “own” them, but she makes sure they are fed, and if something happens she’ll take them to the vet. Otherwise they live like street dogs.

At first we were nervous about letting Juno associate with such riff-raff, but over time we discovered that they played very nicely together. When we took Juno out for a walk they would follow us to the field. Dogs need other dogs to play with and only Big Ears could really tire Juno out. Playing fetch with me just isn’t the same. Nor could Happy or Spot keep up with Juno. Big Ears was a perfect match. We’ll miss her …

UPDATE: Here’s another pic:

UPDATE: Turns out I was lied to. Or perhaps the guard I spoke to didn’t know the full story. But I was assured by the woman who previously cared for Big Ears that she was adopted by a student. She said they told people she was put to sleep because neighbors were complaining about the dog. I don’t really see how this makes any sense, but if its true I’m glad to know she’s OK.