Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2018. viii, 199 pp. (Table.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-988-8455-97-3.
This ambitious book sets out to compare the historical trajectory of civility in Taiwan and China and explain the sociopolitical conditions that facilitate civility. David C. Schak shares anthropological fieldwork experiences fortified with stories from newspapers, friends, and students to assess rudeness and recklessness in both places. He defines civility as “the behavior, and the attitudes which shape that behavior, that are referred to in Taiwan as gongdexin [公德心] (public morality) and in China as wenming [文明], which can be translated as civilized, civility, or civilization” (6), and concentrates on “being civil toward strangers” (7) in public spaces. Although he considers values and argues that “civility depends on the nature of peoples’ links to others” (17), Schak insists he is not discussing civil society (16). But how are such social links not civil society or cosmopolitanism? (See Robert P. Weller, Alternate Civilities, Boulder: Westview Press, 1999; K.A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, New York: W.W. Norton, 2006; and Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Schak’s introductory chapter frames the book with a 1963 Taiwan government-approved newspaper op-ed (written by an American) about rudeness to strangers and overexploited commons. This framework raises three recurring issues: public-space comportment, Western influence, and government attempts to civilize public behaviour. Chapter 2 suggests that codes of civil public behaviour originated in the European Renaissance and were embraced by Chinese reformers around 1900. Although Schak identifies philanthropy as an indicator of civility (17, 97–101, 113–115), his search for a “Chinese tradition of civility” (19–26) does not include premodern Chinese philanthropy (Joanna Handlin Smith, “Benevolent Societies: The Reshaping of Charity During the Late Ming and Early Ch’ing,” Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 2 [1987]; Caroline Reeves, “Lost in Translation: Local Relief Provision and Historiographical Imperialism,” New Global Studies 12, no. 2 [2018]). Nor is there discussion of the vast literature spawned by Greg Hardin’s 1968 Science article, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”
Chapter 3 argues for the comparability of Taiwan and China based on shared Han cultural heritage and Leninist political heritage. Schak’s examination of civilizing campaigns by the Nationalist and Communist Party-states and two sets of primary-school textbooks is some of the best material in the book. Schak effectively documents that these governments’ conceptualizations of civility are consonant with his public-space etiquette definition. The examples, however, are not really comparable. First, the three “Taiwan” campaigns occurred in 1934 Republican China, 1966 martial-law Taiwan, and 1990s democratic Taiwan. Although the same authoritarian Nationalist Party-state ruled 1934 China and 1966 Taiwan, the populations and political contexts differed fundamentally. Moreover, a Democratic Progressive Party mayor created the 1990’s Taipei campaigns. Second, the textbooks come from 1970 Taiwan, 1988 China, 2002–2009 China, and 2011 Taiwan (60–61). Although these periods all enjoyed economic expansion, their political contexts varied significantly—respectively showing suppression, liberalization, suppression, and democracy. Third, although the majority of Taiwan’s late twentieth century population had ancestors originating from China, ancestry does not determine culture, and culture and identity often diverge for political reasons (Melissa Brown, Is Taiwan Chinese? Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). For example, Schak dismisses Japanese influences on Taiwanese public comportment, focusing on World War II-era assimilation campaigns (31), but he does not consider public sanitation measures, such as cleaning market stalls and not spitting, that Japanese authorities imposed as early as 1905 (Hui-yu Caroline Ts’ai, Taiwan in Japan’s Empire Building, London: Routledge, 2008, 108–113; Melissa Brown, “Changing Authentic Identities: Evidence from Taiwan and China,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society 16 [2010]).
Chapters 4 and 5 examine present-day (2010–2017) civility. The China chapter presents rich anecdotal material about ugly tourists, “bad Samaritans,” reckless drivers, bus scrums, littering, and limited philanthropy interspersed with fraud, corruption, and inequalities. Schak convincingly documents government concerns about tourist behaviour abroad (70–73), fears of aiding strangers (75–76, 78), and princelings’ attempts to get away with murder (106–110). But without some kind of frequency data—even as loose an estimate as the number of newspaper stories in one monthlong period in different parts of China—we cannot tell how widespread these incivilities are or where they primarily occur. Moreover, Schak’s references to uncouth countryfolk reinforce rationales of China’s urban-rural apartheid system (102) without adequate evidence. For example, we are informed that “many of China’s newly rich tourists are from rural areas” (71) in the midst of ugly-tourist accounts that identify the culprits only as Chinese, not as rural Chinese. The Taiwan chapter briefly relates examples of public comportment and philanthropy, then argues that civility developed during the 1970s–1990s with modernization, industrialization, Taiwanese identity, and democratization. Again, we have no frequency data, so was incivility as rife in small towns modernized under Japanese rule as Schak persuasively shows for 1960’s mainlander-dominated Taipei?
The final chapter considers how economic insecurity and discrimination affect civility (15). Here, at last, Schak discusses the White Terror executions in martial-law Taiwan as well as China’s environmental protests (150), size and ethnolinguistic variation (136, 137, 139), gender inequality (143), and Tian’anmen massacre (152). Only civil-society values warrant Schak’s emphasis on trust (144–147) and becoming a “society for itself,” essentially a cosmopolitan development of polity and public (154–157). He concludes, “civility and liberal democracy … are dependent on the same set of values”; thus, “while I cannot say that democracy is necessarily (sic), intuitively I find it difficult to believe that civility would develop at a society-wide level in an authoritarian regime” (158). But Schak underestimates the authoritarian potential to achieve compliant comportment—for example, via China’s electronic-surveillance-based social credit system.
Schak’s book provides thought-provoking material that is a must-read for scholars considering civility and cosmopolitanism in Taiwan and China. Its importance lies in the empirically grounded questions it raises, rather than any facile solutions.
Melissa J. Brown
Harvard-Yenching Institute, Cambridge, USA