Between law and community: An ethnographic study of state and governance in the reconstruction after the 9/21 earthquake in Dongshih, Taiwan (China)

The Taiwanese state found itself in a difficult position of articulating the ideas of regularity and normalcy in the reconstruction process after the devastating earthquake in central Taiwan on September 21, 1999. The earthquake was invested with moral imperatives because vast numbers of individuals experienced extreme suffering. In meeting the massive demands of reconstruction on an ad hoc basis, the limit of the government's responsibility for its citizens was put to test and, moreover, the law as universal rules were obscured. I argue that this problem had its roots in the character of the state and its introduction of law in Taiwan. From the very start, the law was intended to be more pragmatic, functional and instrumental than neutral and universal. It has been perceived as a strategy that collaborated with various kinds of convention-laden authority. Law then became a key battleground upon which different values compete.; I suggest an approach that proceeds from a historical analysis of certain formal codes to an analysis of the complexity of lived experience in Dongshih, the town for my fieldwork, in order to understand how the line between the legal and the illegal is constantly negotiated by the people in everyday life, especially in time of exigency. I have explored two families with jointly owned land in terms of their strategies for dealing with the legal puzzle. Each family adopted different strategies in the midst of the legal complexity. At the same time, I presented two grassroots-oriented reconstruction teams. Both of them felt that the government did not take into consideration the reconstruction of an entire community that was essential to the farming area. Their collective actions have advocated community interests as citizenship rights. What I want show in these cases is that it was the expectation and experience constituted by history and law that determined how the local people in using law as resources responded to the reconstruction muddle. An event like the 9/21 Earthquake stood out because they exemplified the indeterminacy of the social world where the complicated relations among state, political community, legal modernity and governing techniques meet.