Democratization and the formation of a robust civil society are the defining elements of Taiwan’s past 30 years.
The nation’s experience of nearly four decades under martial law provided the juggernaut of political determination by its nascent civil society in the late 1980s and early 1990s to open up dialogue on sensitive topics such as the rights of sexual minorities.
The emergence of sociopolitical space for tongzhi (同志) rights, in particular, was unthinkable during authoritarian rule.
First coined in Hong Kong, the term tongzhi began circulating in Taiwan in the early 1990s as the preferred Sinophone term for something akin to LGBT in English.
In her book Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture, Fran Martin said: “It would not be an exaggeration to say that the 1990s marked a radical shift in the way sexuality was thought and spoken about in Taiwan, suggesting the stirrings of a new, public sexual culture unprecedented not only in Taiwan but in any of the Chinese societies of the Asia-Pacific region.”
Despite this opening up, there was also hostile backlash, presaging what would become more consolidated opposition to greater tongzhi visibility in the following two decades, Martin said.
Academic Josephine Ho (何春蕤) said that Taiwan’s “first ever antigay march ... organized by conservative Christian groups to openly denounce homosexuality as an abomination of God” was held in October 2009.
Spearheaded by a group calling itself the Family Guardian Coalition, Taiwan witnessed the emergence of a network of well-funded “family values” groups determined to sabotage the legalization of same-sex marriage.
In November 2013, an estimated 200,000 people marched in front of the Presidential Office Building in opposition to a proposed same-sex marriage bill.
This movement went into overdrive after the Council of Grand Justices’ Constitutional Interpretation No. 748 was announced on May 24, 2017, saying that prohibiting same-sex couples from the right to marry violated their constitutional rights.
After the 1987 lifting of martial law, the tongzhi “awakening” of the 1990s and amplified opposition during the past decade, the Legislative Yuan’s decision in May to legalize a form of same-sex marriage (as imperfect as it still may be) might go down in history as a watershed moment for tongzhi rights.
Ripple effects are being felt across Asia. Most notably, equal rights activists in Japan and Thailand have already been encouraged by Taiwan’s leadership on this issue.
However, on Wednesday last week, Beijing decided to publicly preempt any anticipatory sentiment for similar progress in China.
At a news conference, Zang Tiewei (臧鐵偉), spokesman for the Chinese National People’s Congress’ legal affairs commission, emphatically declared that Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “lawmakers” would continue to limit marriage to men and women, noting that “this rule suits our country’s national condition and historical and cultural traditions.”
This so-called “national condition” the CCP continues to impose on China is a far cry from the conditions of Taiwan’s democratic nation building.
Moreover, last week’s attempt to distance China from Taiwan is rather curious when one recalls that just a few months ago the People’s Daily, a mouthpiece for the CCP, posted on Twitter — which, ironically, is blocked within China — that “Local lawmakers in #Taiwan, China, have legalized same-sex marriage in a first for Asia, according to local media reports.”
The CCP’s attempt to take credit for the global praise heaped on Taiwan’s same-sex marriage legislation is all part of Beijing’s strategy to control international perception of Taiwan.
Such kowtowing was further evidenced in a UN Women’s Facebook post on Aug. 4 containing a graphic of countries that have legalized same-sex marriage: Taiwan was included as a “province of China.”
This post was not only an affront to Taiwan’s sovereignty, but also parroted Beijing’s rhetoric that Taiwan belongs to the People’s Republic of China.
After being blasted with more than 18,000 comments from angry netizens, the post was finally taken down.
However, the graphic reappeared on the UN’s Twitter account a week later on Aug. 11.
Fed up with such revisionism, Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) tweeted back “@UN screws up again! #Taiwan isn’t a province of #China.”
In an article published earlier this month in the British Journal of Sociology, Hong Kong sociologist Travis Kong (江紹褀) explores “the intersection between sexual and cultural/ national identities” among 18 to 28-year-old gay men in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China.
In this study, Kong delineates very distinct forms of “civic-political activism” that have emerged as a result of different political systems in these three Sinophone contexts.
Sifting through his nuanced analysis, one key takeaway from Kong’s research is the stark contrast between Taiwanese tongzhi connecting their “sexual identity with their pride in their national identity” as Taiwanese (not a “province of China”) versus the tongzhi he interviewed in Shanghai.
“All of the Shanghai interviewees identified as Chinese — both nationally and ethnically— but few were proud of being Chinese. Although they generally applauded China’s economic success over the past few decades, they recognized the country’s increasingly stark economic inequalities, particularly between the rural and urban populations. What they were most ashamed of was the deprivation of political and human rights, freedom of speech in particular, by the one-party authoritarian regime,” he wrote.
Clearly not all Chinese are on board with their “national condition.”
In her book Why Taiwan Matters, Shelley Rigger, a professor at Davidson College, argued that “a substantial majority of the people in Taiwan support the existence of Taiwan as a separate state, a group that includes both those who seek de jure independence and those who want the status quo.”
Rigger concluded that this desire to perpetuate Taiwan’s political “status quo” of contested sovereignty is functionally “very much equal to a desire for independence.”
The marketplace of Taiwanese public opinion is resoundingly clear on this topic.
Resigning ourselves to the CCP narrative that Taiwan’s “arrested autonomy” — Juno Salazar Parrenas’ concept of a state of “permanently deferred independence resembling the deferred promises and hopes of decolonization that have yet to materialize” — must ultimately be “resolved” on their terms exhibits a failure to imagine alternative or even queer political futures for this “island of resilience.”
To “queer” is to undo normalized categories, whether they be social, sexual or even political, and, through the prism of tongzhi progress, untethers Taiwan from China.
Might Taiwan’s embrace of democracy and respect for human rights — as a radical people-centered form of “warm” power — offer a way to decolonize its own “inevitable” extinction at the hands of its neo-imperial neighbor?
This warm power, Alan Hao Yang (楊昊) and Jeremy Chiang (江懷哲) wrote in a statement last year, is at the core of “the agenda of democratic Taiwan’s new global outreach.”
Let us recall the words of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) at the Yushan Forum in Taipei last year: “Taiwan can help Asia, and Asia can help Taiwan.”
Asia’s tongzhi community — in China most acutely — sure hopes that these words continue to be true.
Adam Dedman is a doctoral student in cultural studies at the University of Melbourne researching transnational LGBT tourism and migration to Taiwan.
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