Activism as a vocation: Social movements in urban Taiwan (China)

This dissertation studies social movements in urban Taiwan. Ranging from well-structured organizations to loosely-knit collective protests, many grassroots organizings in post-martial law Taiwan envisioned the change of society in terms of a variety of socio-cultural imaginations—some utopian, while others firmly grounded in either political and economic analyses or cultural criticism. To a certain extent, the achievements of these efforts diversified and problematized the process of democratization in post-martial Taiwanese society. I examine the changing mode of mobilization connected with these collective actions. I find that the processes in which people mobilized, organized and involved themselves engaged a wide array of motivations, meanings, opportunities, and limitations. A study of this array in very mundane practices of organizing and mobilizing is a vehicle for charting the specificity of Taiwanese social movements in the 1990s.; This dissertation examines social movements from different angles and through ethnography, the product of my 18 months of research in Taiwan in 1997–98. By studying protests, social movement organizations and individual experiences, I document various moments of collective action as a result of long-term social struggle for survival, citizenship, and historicity. I mainly focus on urban social movement organizations and neighborhood associations, which began to emerge on the public scene in the 1980s and flourished in the 1990s, placing them within a culture of protest in the making.; The making of this culture of protest clusters around a series of issues, which I contend are key to understanding social movements' role in the process of democratization: (1) The growing obviousness of a gap between the social movement sector and the formal political arena and a professionalization of social movements that reflected the trend of many organizations to seek independence even as they gained more institutional permanence. (2) A re-networking of social movement organizations, political groups, and individuals in urban space: Multi-dimensional social movement webs were in the making. (3) The involvement of new kinds of people in this new world of social activism: Membership and issue-oriented association, trade unionism, and community-based identity were perhaps the three most significant new forms of social grouping breaking from the corporatism and clientelism of the Kuomintang's rule.