Contested Citizenship in East Asia: Developmental Politics, National Unity, and Globalization by Kyung-Sup Chang & Bryan S. Turner

Author:Kyung-Sup Chang & Bryan S. Turner [Chang, Kyung-Sup & Turner, Bryan S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Civics & Citizenship, Globalization, Social Science, General
ISBN: 9780415594462
Google: alrFSAAACAAJ
Goodreads: 8392520
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-12-13T00:00:00+00:00

8 Conclusion

Nationalist politics is often thought to have a negative relationship with the global capitalism. This study shows that nationalist politics between countries can sometimes become opportunities for transnational business people to expand their businesses and accumulate capital by taking advantage of preferential economic and political treatment from governments that compete for economic growth and work for nationalistic integration. Transnational business people together with politicians and bureaucrats who promote economic growth and/or nationalism emerge as a part of the TCC. This chapter also shows that differences and disjunctures in the technique, logic, and culture of governance between an authoritarian regime and a democratic regime become social and political opportunities for transnational business people to justify discrimination, promote neoliberalism, and generate social inequality across national borders. By selectively praising Chinese authoritarian style of efficiency in making economic development, Taiwanese business people criticize the exercising of citizen’s rights and the democratic system in Taiwan. Also, by selectively celebrating the idea and practice of freedom protected by the democratic system in Taiwan – in contrast to the strict ideological control in China – Taiwanese business people justify their cultural politics of discrimination in everyday associations with the Chinese. The rising Chinese economic power and the influence of a TCC in promoting the type of bureaucratic efficiency, economic growth, and cultural politics of discrimination without taking the development of civil society and social equality into account, severely challenge democracy and social justice across borders.

The transnational status of the cross-Strait Taiwanese business elite in China leads to their preferential and privileged positions in corporate, political, and sociocultural contexts. Amid the global (or inter-state) competition to attract investments, the position transnational business elite finds itself in is not unusual, but in the complicated dynamics of cross-Strait nationalistic politics it is strongly accentuated. By contrast, the transnational status of workers and grassroots migrants usually leads to positions of disadvantage, discrimination, and exploitation in factories, farms, local communities, and national polities. This contrast between business elite and labor/grassroots in the transnational political economic processes seems to constitute a critical component of global neoliberal capitalism, and the economically driven and politically manipulated cross-Strait interactions present an interesting, yet paradoxical, instance of such global neoliberalism.

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