Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (23 page)

14
. Here Heejin referred to South Korean state’s long-standing ideological commitment to egalitarian education—especially the “high-school equalization policy.” Her assertion echoed some neoliberal arguments that South Korea’s recent educational turn is not a thoroughly neoliberal one because it has sustained equalization policies (D. Lee 2004: 39–40).

15
. In informal on-line rankings of South Korean colleges and universities, Myŏngji University appears most often in the upper quadrant of schools; “second-tier” then would be more accurate.

16
. See Borovoy (2004) for a fascinating discussion of college clubs as a mark of university status in Japan. More broadly, she takes college clubs as a key element of elite “college socialization” that prepares students for elite corporate work and social life. She both considers what it means that students at a provincial “low-level” college participate in clubs at significantly lower rates (30 percent) because many of them are commuter students as well discussing differences in the “easy come, easy go” way in which they participate in the clubs.

17
. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out that it is not the story of forsaken or unattainable true love that is distinctive here but rather that Min’s was a global tale.

18
. Since July 2005, public servants work only five days, from Mondays to Fridays.

19
. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer who pushed us to think about the implication of our findings and argument for collective alliance.

Chapter
Five

Smile Chaoyang

Education and Culture in Neoliberal Taiwan

NICKOLA PAZDERIC

Perhaps there are few better indicators of the scope of Margaret Thatcher’s maxim “there is no alternative” to neoliberal globalization than the appropriation of Stuart Hall’s critique of neoliberal economics to illustrate the imperative for educational reform in Taiwan. Hall’s characterization of the new workplace and social environment as a “Brave New World” was adopted in a PowerPoint review of Taiwan’s education goals presented by education professor Wang Hui-lan to an international conference on Globalization and Education Reform at Seoul National University in 2005.

Wang juxtaposes the quoted phrase with a Government Information Office (GIO) image of gleeful children supporting a globe—an image originally used to portray Taiwan favorably to the world in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS scare. Its use in this instance is unobjectionable insofar as it accords entirely with the impression that the government of Taiwan seeks to convey to the world. Hall’s description of neoliberal economic life, which is drawn from the short-lived but influential anti-Thatcher journal,
Marxism Today
, follows as part of Professor Wang’s presentation:

A shift of the new information technologies; more flexible, decentralised forms of labour processes and work organisation; decline of the old manufacturing base and the growth of the “sunrise” computer-based industries; the hiving-off or contracting-out of functions and services; a greater emphasis on choice and
product
differentiation, on marketing, packaging and design, on the “targeting” of consumers by lifestyle, taste and culture rather than by the Registrar General’s categories of social class. (Hall 1988: 24, cited in H. Wang 2005)

Cultural critics should yet recognize Wang’s substitution of
ought
for
is
. But, ironies aside, Taiwanese know the score. Situated in an export-driven, high-tech economy and aware that the neoliberal program outlined and criticized by Hall is fast becoming a universal expectation, people act as if there is no choice. The use of the image indicates, moreover, that Taiwan’s so-called e-generation is slated to become the smiling standard bearers of the brave new world.

The transformation to a neoliberal economy began in Taiwan in the mid-1980s as a result of policy decisions at the highest levels of government. Under pressure from the United States to reduce its trade surplus and from local elites who were keen to profit by the privatization of state firms, Taiwan changed its postwar economic course (Tsai 2001). The postwar transformation of Taiwan into one of the world’s leading economies had depended on manufacturing and restricted consumption, enforced by import restrictions (Gold 1986: 67–73), which subverted the pretenses of conventional postwar trade practices (Chomsky 1998: 360). However, by the mid-1990s, the Chinese Nationalist party (KMT), which ruled the island after 1945, began to sell shares of state-controlled industries. As a consequence, imports, mandated by American trade agreements and World Trade Organization (WTO) conventions, flooded the island. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which formed in the late 1980s as an outlawed political organization with a populist social agenda, took control of the government via presidential elections in 2000 and moved even further in this direction to serve the interests of its own financial and industrial elites.

The transformation has reached into every sphere of the economy, including education. The proposals that had been made for educational reforms during and after the democratic transition of the late 1980s, which ranged from humanistic education to ecological based programs (for example, Humanistic Education Foundation, 2007) have now been superseded by educational policies to promote the increased quality, autonomy, self-discipline, and technological sophistication of the island-economy’s work force (Kao 2003; Mok and Lee 2001; Mok 2000, 2003). These buzzwords signal the disciplining of the labor force for the challenges of a global economy. However, the
urgency
of the transformation stems from Taiwan’s precarious geopolitical position. For the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan is a renegade province, and its recovery is deemed a national destiny. For the United States, Taiwan remains a client-state base from which to project U.S. power in East Asia. Despite their bitter political struggle over Taiwan’s national culture identity, both Chinese (KMT) and Taiwanese (DPP) nationalists tacitly agree that, in this unenviable position, the society appears to have but one hope to secure continued de facto independent political survival: ensure that its work force is a first-rate, high-quality knowledge machine, capable of seizing every niche, probing every market, and undercutting every competitor.

The pressurizing effects of this orientation have fundamentally shaped my former place of employment, Chaoyang University of Technology (CYUT) in central Taiwan. Since I began teaching there in 2001, I observed how the power of neoliberalism’s dictates is felt in every sector of university life. CYUT provides a telling case study because its emergence and development are inseparable from the neoliberal educational reforms themselves. With over 13,000 students and 350 full-time faculty in 2006, CYUT first opened its doors in 1994, which was the same year that the Ministry of Education (MOE) adopted the principles of the neoliberal program. As I will show in greater detail, CYUT has thrived under these conditions to become by prevailing conventional measures a successful example of the private sector’s capacity to establish and sustain a higher education institution.

I present a two-part thesis. First, although the values of neoliberalism are fundamental (indeed, the bottom line) to the development of the school, they operate within as they transform two conflicting and preexisting value systems. The emic designations of these preexisting systems are “traditional” (
chuantong
) and “Western” (
xifang
), whereas neoliberal values are referred to as “globalization” (
quanqiuhua
). I call these systems, for reasons I give in the following discussion, State Neo-Confucianism, Enlightenment, and Neo-liberal Globalization, respectively. Each of these value systems incites, reinforces, and collides with the behaviors and attitudes of the other two in ways that are not very well understood by those who labor within their messy coexistence. The schema I present will, therefore, illustrate the local instantiation of neoliberalism’s transformations.

The State Neo-Confucian value system is central to the formation of an East Asian identity structure, often glossed as “Asian values.” It is cosmological insofar as it places the individual within an assured set of relationships and
behavioral
structures that in no way place the individual in a predicament of autonomy. While considered traditional, it functions as a
modern
adaptation of regional and local value systems. First in China and later in Taiwan, the Chinese Nationalist government has used mass-education techniques of standardized and printed curricula to educate the population to value the state above local factions and family (Wilson 1970). The modern nation-state became the embodiment of the cosmological hierarchy. That the State Neo-Confucian value system persists in the neoliberal environment is testament to its institutionalization in various school practices (Chun 2007), its inculcation in the minds of every Taiwanese schooled after Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), its successful cooptation of preexisting local cultural patterns, and its utilitarian adaptation to the new bottom line.
1
CYUT also promotes a general Enlightenment system. This system finds its rationale in the utopian hope that universities will serve to liberate humans from drudgery and suffering through the application of reason to the problems of humanity (Aronowitz 2004; Borgmann 1984: 89; Readings 1996). Its stronghold is in the faculty trained at recognized universities in the United States, Europe, Japan, or Taiwan, and its strongest support comes from the Ministry of Education (MOE). The Enlightenment ideal assumes a prominent place in campus life, yet its position lies in tension with neoliberal and neo-Confucianist projects.
2

Much of this chapter will be concerned with how these value systems influence daily life. But there remains a second part to my thesis, and it accounts for the title of this chapter. At CYUT, the appearance of happiness has become an induced discipline and produced commodity. Students and faculty alike are enjoined by administrative message to smile and say hello with posters, fliers, and quasi-scientific questionnaires. The most vivid of these are full-color posters placed at key entrances around campus, depicting faculty and administrators in the act of smiling and saying hello as an incitement to those so enjoined to reciprocate in kind.

This orientation has its advantages for an admittedly third-rate school (
sanliu xuexiao
), which is where Chaoyang fits in the local hierarchy of educational institutions. In Taiwan, public universities are the oldest and most highly funded, and they are the schools of choice for the children of Taiwan’s professional classes. CYUT is a private tertiary-level institution in the technical track system. For the most part, students have found themselves in this track through their failure to gain high marks in the highly competitive Taiwanese examination system. Via informal interviews with students and
administrators,
I have come to understand that this emphasis on happiness is what sells CYUT to parents; it markets CYUT graduates to employers as a happy and compliant bunch, and it takes the pressure off students who have generally not shown high levels of academic performance.

The importance of positive energy, in the form of happiness-assuring “universal love,” to subjective experience in Taiwan has taken on religious dimensions in some circles, as in the cultivation of
heqi
practices, a cultlike technology of the self that I have explored elsewhere (Pazderic 2004). In the United States, as well, one need only look to the most popular class at a supposedly first-rate school for an example of how happiness functions. Harvard University’s Psych 1504, “Positive Psychology,” is a course that explores happiness, self-esteem, empathy, friendship, love, achievement, creativity, music, spirituality, and humor; it leaves students after “the 90-minute-long class cheering and smiling” (Goldberg 2006). Although the yearning for happiness is no doubt genuine and, in fact, may be considered a realization of the Enlightenment hope, the campaign for smiles at CYUT suggests that the happiness most valued by Hall’s brave new world is a form of embodied value in a world order that demands docile and cooperative (but not critical) knowledge workers to fill the lower ranks of corporations and businesses in need of the new competencies that define “human capital” in the global economy.
3
The preexisting state Neo-Confucianism and Enlightenment value systems have now become subordinated in service to these ends. This is the gist of the second part of my argument.

State Neo-Confucianism

In 1970, Richard W. Wilson published
Learning to be Chinese: The Political Socialization of Children in Taiwan
. During the Cold War, when mainland China was in the throes of a convulsive cultural revolution, many Western scholars received funding to seek out and analyze patterns of cultural life, including ancestor worship, family cohabitation structures, and market networks, in the hinterlands of Taiwan. The political purpose of this research is clear insofar as it served to support the Chinese Nationalist claim to be the legitimate, though temporarily exiled, government of China—a claim that fit nicely into the American Cold War anticommunist program. Wilson pursued the more politically troubling question of what children were
learning
during their mandatory elementary school educations. How were Chinese consciousness and behaviors incited, reinforced, and, for all intents and purposes, produced in a population that had only recently been taught to become Japanese?
4
Writing about the production of “large group unity,” Wilson took note:

There is a multiple-choice question in a review section on citizenship training where the children are asked: “The responsibility of young people is to (1) read books conscientiously, (2) exercise the body, (3) build society, (4) establish the family.” . . . As the principal of the city school informed me, only (3) can be the right answer. (1970: 47)