I’ve been reading Michael Turton’s incisive and caustic pro-Taiwan (anti-China?) blog since 2011 and have always admired his encyclopedic knowledge of Taiwan’s history and political scene. It’s clear that he is outrageously biased in favour of Taiwanese independence and against the PRC, the ROC the CCP and the KMT, but once you’ve understood and accepted that, his blog  probably provides the most thorough and accessible gateway to politics in Taiwan and the island’s relations with the rest of China ;-).

On 18^th March, though, I was doing an early morning surf through my regular sites when I came across his piece on a recent Economist article on Taiwan that included this comment:

You'd think that a western and democratic neoliberal paper would support the neoliberal democracy party that is allied to the west and opposed to China, but instead the paper supports a quasi-Leninist party that socialized most of the economy, ran an authoritarian one-party state, and is allied to China.

For some reason, my hackles went straight up and I dashed off a comment, spilling my coffee in the process:

Interesting discourse there, Michael.Do you mean 'neoliberal' as in the Chicago Boys/Thatcher/Reganomics sense of the word and 'socialized'as that Palin/Tea Party/Cruz/Paul-esque elision and trope that craftily lodges the word next to 'socialist' in the mind of the reader? You could, after all, have said that the KMT ran a 'corporatist' or 'statist' system like the old US-backed military regimes in Latin America, but you highlighted the quasi-Leninist (it was in fact fully Leninist in internal structure) nature of the KMT. My understanding of the DPP's platform is that it claims to be social-democratic and progressive rather than neoliberal - think Euro centre/soft-left.“

Michael responded with a cryptic “That’s what they claim to be…”

Discourse. Whether you define it in terms of postmodern French philosophy, Marxist critical linguistics, a particular style of writing or simply political talk and spin, the words and grammatical structures that you choose send a loaded message that negotiates the boundaries of power , hegemony, solidarity and resistance and they do this implicitly and explicitly, consciously and subconsciously. Discourse also relies on the writer and the reader sharing and engaging with a whole host of background context to read between the lines and interpret the text. Most of the time we get it wrong.

I was pretty conscious of the discourse that I was creating here – it was an aggrieved and slightly prissy response to what I saw as an Americanized discourse that sought to frame Taiwan independence in the context of Western liberal democratic norms that see liberal democracy as the zero or nul starting point from which to measure the legitimacy of all other political systems and ideologies.  Democratic Taiwan good – Evil Chinese Dicktaydurs bad. I was also irritated by what I saw as the tired old trick, beloved of conservative politicians in the US, of misusing the verb ‘to socialize’ along with the adjective 'social' in a way that lodges it next to ‘socialist’ in the reader’s mind (social programs, socialized health care). The result of this in the US is that 'social' and ‘socialized’ have become shorthand to refer to the slippery liberal slope that runs from taxes through big government to Communism and everything that threatens the free world. So much so that this has become the prototypical meaning of the word 'socialized' in the US. Call the KMT nasty fascists, corporatists, statists, but don’t call them socialists. They were and are no such thing.

…which brings me to the issue of the word ‘neoliberal’.  Liberalism is another slippery concept that causes no end of bother. What is it that connects classical liberals, neoliberals, Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, liberal interventionists, Joseph Nye, wishy-washy liberals, the liberal media conspiracy, Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Party, the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party, the UK Liberal Democrats and the people that Sarah Palin routinely denounces as liberals? I’m told that at some point around the First World War the term liberal in its non-academic, popular political sense shifted in the US and the UK, but not in continental Europe, Latin America, Russia and so on. At the end of the 1970s, a neoliberal reaction to the social democratic consensus that had typified British society after 1945 sought to get back to the core ideology of classical liberalism. Margaret Thatcher was its public face and the rest is history.

The Economist certainly supports a hegemonic economic neoliberalism based on free markets and the Washington Consensus (there, I’ve gone and discursively nailed my colours to the mast), but I’m not sure the DPP does. A quick glance at the Wikipedia page for the DPP indicates that the party espouses civic nationalism and has policies that are centre-left and socially liberal as opposed to neoliberal. In this sense, then, the DPP might be seen as being similar to the Scottish nationalists in terms of their policies and positions on the political spectrum.

Last night I watched a UK election debate on the TV here in London and thought about the DPP as I listened to Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party and Leanne Wood of Plaid Cymru espouse policies that were far to the left of the Labour Party (but were not actually that left-wing in historical terms). I then thought of Irish nationalist parties like Fianna Fail and Fine Gael and wondered what the factors were that might decide how, when and why emancipatory nationalist parties shift from left to right economically. Is actual independence and control of a sovereign state the catalyst for this shift? Perhaps that’s something for another post.