Pre-reading

8.20 a.m.

My thesis is still too vague for my liking: Taiwan and China - Cross-Strait Relations - identity - realist-constructivism - policy elites' authentic views - discourse analysis. I have to bring this all together in a purposeful, punchy exciting whole. Something like 'Who, When and Where is Taiwan? A Realist-Constructivist Approach to Chinese Policy Elites' Views of Taiwan Identity'.

'Who, When and Where is Taiwan? A Realist-Constructivist Approach to Chinese Policy Elites' Views on Taiwan(ese) Identity'
Official statements on the legal and political status of Taiwan adopt a linguistic game that is carefully crafted to display a level of strategic ambiguity and there is a wealth of research on what these documents say about the main actors' strategic intents. However, diplomatic documents have little to say about the authentic views of the policy elites behind them. Taiwan's history as a colonial and Cold War pawn of power politics among Japan, China and the US, Taiwan's rise as an Asian Tiger economy, the dramatic rapprochement between the US and the PRC, the UN's expulsion of the ROC administration and recognition of the PRC as the sole representative of China, followed by the apparently unstoppable economic and military rise of the PRC have led IR scholars to define Cross-Strait relations from a classical or neo-realist angle (Foot, 1997, Wachman, 2008), stressing the fact that diplomatic and legal realities preclude any form of formal independence for Taiwan separate from China. This de jure reality, however, does not explain the de facto sovereign status of Taiwan (nor, indeed, the anomalous and ironic constitutional claim by the ROC on Taiwan that it is the government of the whole of China); nor does it explain why, in the face of such an overwhelming PRC threat, there is such a vociferous self-determination movement in Taiwan that rejoices in a Taiwan identity that differs from the Chinese one claimed by both the PRC and the ROC and which is the product of the island's experience of colonialism and migration. So a realist approach can only get us so far. The 'so what?' prompted by realist analyses led to a more constructivist approach to explaining realities accross the Taiwan Straits, an approach that stresses the role of the social, and phenomena like nationalism and identity, rather than simply the exercise of hard power in IR. Constructivism in turn, however, has been criticised as being flaky and unfocused and in turn prompting a 'so what?' response to what is seen as a postmodern 'anything goes' approach. In the first decade of this century, some IR scholars have suggested a hybrid approach that marries constructivism and realism in an attempt to show that, while social realities are indeed constructed, there is a real world out there that functions through agency and politics. Jackson (2004) and Barkin (2003, 2010), for instance, argue that there is room for a constructivism that is realist. This research project will argue that it is policy elites who are the agents who construct the social, but that their authentic opinions are masked by the ambiguity of the diplomatic texts they produce.

This research, therefore, will use a realist constructivist approach to identify how PRC, ROC and Taiwan independence-oriented policy elites view Taiwanese identity. In an ideal world, scholars would be able to identify the authentic views of policy elites on both sides of the Taiwan Straits through a discourse and textual analysis of the transcripts of semi-diplomatic Cross-Strait dialogue between the PRC and Taiwan, but these are confidential. It seems, then, that the best way of identifying these views is through an analysis of the unscripted comments of policy elites outside of official statements and that these are best located in memoirs and unscripted statements to journalists and through questionnaires and interviews.


Right. I now need to read up on discourse analysis.