The Potentials and Occlusions of Zhonghua Minguo/Taiwan: In Search of a Left Nationalism in the Tsai Ing-wen Era

Abstract

Tsai Ing-wen has consistently referred to the nation that she governs as 中華民國台灣 (The Republic of China Taiwan), the term representing a major rhetorical feature of her administration. Breaking from the exclusively Taiwan-centered discourse which traditionally defined DPP politics, Tsai has seemingly created an entirely new name for the state she governs. This article examines both the discursive potentials, but also the occlusions, of this newly coined neologism. It argues that the term is defined by a lack of materialist critique, in which essential questions regarding labor exploitation and private property regimes remain unaddressed. While Tsai has successfully combined the ROC’s old Cold War raison d'etre (Chinese humanism as anti-Communism) with the Taiwanese independence movement’s desire for global recognition through the nation-state form, what has been lost is any real commitment to a politics of working-class empowerment, which is reflected in the Tsai administration’s abandonment of progressive labor law reform in 2018, as well as increasing trade liberalization policies with the US introduced in 2020. Returning to the roots of Taiwanese socialist discourse, this article will examine the possibility that “ROC-Taiwan” as a political project could still have a socialist future, despite its markedly capitalist past and present.

Keywords

• roc-taiwan
• tsai ing-wen
• taiwanese socialism
• materialist critique
• loyalism
• nativism
• xie xuehong
• yang rur-bin