INTRODUCTION

Master Cheng Yen's Tzu Chi (Buddhist Compassion) appears to be the most successful experimentation in Socially Engaged Buddhism (SEB) not only because it is run by a woman in Taiwan, but also because it has further humanized and indigenized Taiwanese Buddhism. Tzu Chi manifests itself as Engaged Buddhism's response to globalization: it adapts its efforts to globalization and hence brings Buddhist symbols to the global arena. SEB refers to active involvement of Buddhists in society and its problems. Participants in this movement seek to implement and actualize the traditional Buddhist ideals of wisdom and compassion in the modern world. In other words, SEB applies these ideals to social issues of peace and justice, environmental degradation, human and animal rights, community building and the provision of care to those in need. Such an application has been carried out quite successfully by Sulak Sivaraksa in Thailand, Ariayratane in Sri Lanka, Thich Nhat Hanh in Vietnam and France and Master Cheng Yen in Taiwan.

The Buddhist Compassion Tzu Chi Foundation, (known in short as Tzu Chi) was founded by Master Cheng Yen in 1966. It is a voluntary, non-governmental, non-profit, non-sectarian, non-political lay Buddhist organization under monastic leadership. Instead of spending time on prayers, burning incense, or reading sutras, Master Cheng Yen exhorts her disciples, to ‘humanize Buddhism’ by ‘just doing it’. She claims that the Buddhism practiced and preached by her is the original form of Buddhism, which is simple and down-to-earth.

INTRODUCTION

Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan, is a towering example of national pride and an impressive example of Information Technology (IT). Built in an earthquake prone region, the world's tallest building, Taipei 101 is a remarkable proof of architectural brilliance and resilience. Home to some of the finest universities, world-class research centres, sciences parks and computer-related products, India, which is 92 times bigger than Taiwan, can forge strong links and partnerships particularly in the field of IT.

The statistics are impressive and speak for themselves. Taiwan is ranked first in Asia and fourth in the world in growth competitiveness. It will be only appropriate to describe Taiwan's current economic situation and outlook for 2007. Economic growth, foreign trade, domestic investment, industrial production and employment are some of the key parameters that have been taken into account to do the forecasting.

TAIWAN'S FORECAST

Like weather, country forecasts could most of the times go wrong. The Economist says the political scene will remain unstable during 2007–08 in Taiwan quoting internecine squabbles between the ruling Democratic Progressive party (DPP) and the opposition, Kuomintang (KMT). But the economic development this year will be one of ‘stable adjustment’, says Academia Sinica, Taiwan's leading research institute. According to their report, ‘Overall Outlook for Taiwan's Economy 2007’, revived domestic demand will help Taiwan's real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grow by 4.21 per cent this year.

INTRODUCTION

The current fashion of regionalism has brought about changes in preferential treatments leading to the enhancement of trade and investment. These occurrences have promoted international specialization of industrial production. For countries that are outside Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs), their industries could face rising production costs that could negatively affect their economies. Therefore, if they do not sign PTAs, they would risk diminishing their global competitiveness. Since the European Union (EU), the Americas have already reached a high level of regional integration, and Asia has also begun to pursue regionalism.

In the face of rising regionalism, India has continued to shift its economic and trade policies to focus on countries in the Asian bloc, such as increasing the linkages with China and strengthening ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) through the ‘Look East Policy’. The objective is to raise the level of India's investment and exports to countries within the Asian bloc. The rise of recent regionalism has placed Taiwan outside East Asian regionalism because of political reasons. To protect against the negative impact of being an outsider, Taiwan's businesses have promoted Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) instead of directly exporting from Taiwan, to maintain markets for their products.

Against this backdrop, this paper aims to explore Taiwan-India economic relations under regionalism. Specifically, how would India and Taiwan respond to the rise of regionalism in Asia? The ultimate objective of this paper is to find out the approaches that could be considered or employed to strengthen bilateral economic relations in the face of regionalism.

INTRODUCTION

In the past 15 years, Taiwan has seen an influx of female immigrants through marriage from South East Asia and China. The enormous size and cultural diversity of the group has directly challenged both the society and the government. In a state which has not reviewed its Nationality Act for 70 years and had no Immigration Act before 2003, female immigrants have emerged to formulate their own voices and press their demands onto national debates.

This paper discusses the organizing efforts of female immigrants. We observe the emergence of social capital through trust building and networks among female immigrants. In the patterns of immigration policy changes, we observe the participation of female immigrants in national debates to re-demarcate the boundary of the private and the public.

FEMALE IMMIGRANTS IN TAIWAN

It was only in 1990 that the central government statistical data included the number of immigration spouses. There were 306,700 female immigrants in 2003, the majority being females, mostly from China and South East Asia. International marriages had increased significantly after 1998. In 1998, 16 per cent of the 145,976 Taiwanese registered marriages were with foreigners. The proportion doubled to reach 32 per cent in 2003.

In 2003, 28 per cent of the 171,483 marriages in Taiwan involved female immigrants. In other words, in every three newly married couples, there was one cross-cultural marriage.

INTRODUCTION

One of the biggest social transformations in Taiwan in the last 15 years is the change of the personal identity. Today's opinion poll revealed that people who identified themselves as: i) exclusively Taiwanese was about 60 per cent, ii) exclusively Chinese was about 5 per cent and iii) people who thought they were both Taiwanese and Chinese was about 35 per cent. In 1992, people who identified themselves as: i) exclusively Taiwanese was about 17 per cent, ii) exclusively Chinese was about 26 per cent and iii) people who thought they were both Taiwanese and Chinese was about 49 per cent. The change is certainly dramatic. Since this glacial change in personal-political identification happened during the period of Taiwan's democratization, many sociologists believe this is one of the many offspring of democratization.

This questionnaire sometimes makes cultural and national identity indistinguishable. Surveyees were asked if they were Taiwanese or Chinese. The third option was provided when asked by the surveyees.

DEMOCRATIZATION AND THE CHANGING IDENTITY

To understand the identity change and its relationship with democratization, one has to consider the political environment in Taiwan before democratization. Under Chiang Kai-Shek and Chiang Ching-Kuo's Kuomintang (KMT), ruling period from 1949 to 1988, anything resembling Taiwan was ruled as politically incorrect. The mandatory education system also indoctrinated the Chinese identity into the population.

INTRODUCTION

Taiwan lies close to the Mainland of China on the Tropic of Cancer in the western Pacific Ocean. Taiwan was named Isla Formosa by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. Taiwan has a rich historical background and a multifaceted culture because of a long history of residency of Taiwan's own indigenous people. Taiwan is home to 12 different tribes, southern Fujianese from early China, Hakka immigrants, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese and other recent immigrants from China. About 7000 years back, Austronesian ancestors of aborigines settled in Taiwan. They are the earliest known inhabitants of Taiwan.

During the fifteenth century, Chinese emigrants occupied the coastal areas. Numerous aboriginal tribes, entrepreneurs, pirates, traders, etc lived on the western side.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch came to Taiwan and defeated the Portuguese to capture ‘Macan’ to trade with China and Japan. They controlled and exploited the island. They built forts, conducted missionary activities, engaged in trade, produced various goods, etc. The Spanish came shortly after the Dutch and settled in the north to trade with China and Japan but they were driven out by the Dutch who in turn were expelled by supporters of the Ming emperors. In 1684, Taiwan was conquered by the Manchu and officially became part of China.

The French came and briefly planted their flag in the north in 1885. They signed a treaty with the Manchu Qing and left.

INTRODUCTION

Humanism has been defined as the faith in the supreme value of self-perfectibility of human personality. However, it broadly indicates shifting focus from supernaturalism to naturalism, from transcendental to the existing, from absolute reality to the living reality. Buddhism is the practice of peaceful and compassionate humanity. It is a religion of compassion, humanity and egalitarianism. Among world religions, probably Buddhism has the greatest humanistic claim. In Buddhism, humanism is that attitude of mind, which attaches primary importance to human beings.

The term Humanistic Buddhism (HB) was first coined by Venerable Tai Xu and adopted by Master Hsing Yun. Its primary goal is to lead to the Bodhisattva practice, i.e. to be an energetic, enlightened and endearing person who strives to help sentient beings liberate themselves. HB is the practical interpretation of theoretical Buddhism and focuses on issues of the world, caring for the living, benefiting others and universal salvation and application of wisdom that has been realized so far.

The Fo Guang Shan (Buddha Light Mountain) Buddhist Order, which was founded by the Master Hsing Yun, is dedicated to the development of HB. His leadership turned the idea of HB into the universal movement.

THE CONCEPT OF HUMANISM

Humanism has been defined in various ways. It is a contemporary belief calling itself religious but substituting faith in man for faith in god. Similarly, humanism is also explained as the faith in the supreme value of self-perfectibility of human personality.

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to explain the rise, character and trajectory of radicalism in the United States during ‘the long nineteen sixties’ and to comment on its significance to some of today's related issues. For comparative purposes, I will also refer to nineteen sixties radicalism in Britain. My already smouldering interest in American radicalism was ignited in 1968 when as a student I attended the ‘alternative’ democratic convention in Chicago, if ‘attended’ is the right word to describe the heavily policed gatherings of assorted radicals in the parks and streets outside the official Convention Hall. Since then I have made three research visits to the United States when I interviewed several activists and accessed a wide literature. More recently I interviewed ten British men and women (five of each) who were at a minimum sympathetic to the radical mood of the period (for a fuller description of my research base see O'Donnell 2008; and 2010 forthcoming). If 1968 was the height of sixties radicalism, its decline was also becoming apparent and I will treat 1968 as an approximate turning point.

Nineteen sixties radicalism in the United States was extremely diverse and was expressed in intermingling political and cultural ‘streams’. Accordingly, I will use the capitalised term ‘Movement’ to refer to the phenomenon as a whole. In so far as it is appropriate to separate the two streams, I use the term ‘New Left’ to refer to the various political groups of the Movement and the term ‘counterculture’ to refer to those who aspired to a radical and in some cases adopted an ‘alternative’ lifestyle.

Introduction

As one of the greatest sociologists and social philosophers of the latter part of the twentieth century, Jürgen Habermas's interactions with, and theorising of the problems confronted by the sixties student movement are of both major historical and contemporary significance. Other chapters in this book (McDonald chapter 2; O'Donnell chapter 6, Cranfield chapter 7) describe the movements for protest and greater freedom of expression amongst the student generations in Europe and North America. More specific to inter-generational conflict in Germany was the awakening of the baby boomer generation to the country's National Socialist past. The Wirtschaftwunder had provided the country with a great deal of new found confidence in the decades since the Second World War, but with the Adolf Eichmann trial of 1961 and the Auschwitz trials of 1963–65, as well as explorations of collective moral culpability emerging in theatre and literature, prosperity alone was an unsatisfactory basis for national confidence amongst a new generation who had reached the age of political consciousness. With their awakening, they developed a barely concealed anger with their elders’ misdeeds and considered their ‘no questions asked’ attitude not as a matter of discretion which allowed the resumption of everyday life, but as a complacent desire to forget, which could lead to the return of fascism. The sixties student movement became the highly politicised focus and catalyst for the radical expression of these sentiments.

Introduction

This book began by contrasting polarised interpretations of the longer term impact of sixties radicalism. One cluster sees cultural, social and political rebellion as ephemeral, politically inconsequential or absorbed into the mainstream. Others see legacies and practices from sixties radicalism as established and still influential in contemporary radical protest. This divergence is illustrated by the views of two Americans: Noam Chomsky (2009) and Gerard DeGroot (2008). On the BBC world news programme Hardtalk (November 3 2009) Chomsky consistently attributed what he sees as an increase in freedom of expression in American public life to the long-term impact of the radical actions of the nineteen sixties and particularly emphasised the role of young people. He cited the protests against the Iraq War as subject to less harassment than the anti-Vietnam War protests. A life-long ‘sceptic’ of the corrupting effects of power, Chomsky upholds protest as a continuous part of democratic life – a view once expressed even more forcefully by Thomas Jefferson in the phrase ‘God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without … a rebellion’ (quoted in Rosen 1969, 2). But is it possible to maintain such a perception of protest as process, a necessary and continuous part of a free society in an age when the great meta-narratives of the left are said by some to be ‘exhausted’ (Bell, 1988; Lyotard, 1984)?

Despite some intemperate commentary the substance of Gerard DeGroot's recent critique of the radical sixties nevertheless typifies the negative pole of assessment.

1968: Writing and Event

As the highpoint of sixties radicalism, 1968 was a year of action. This was certainly true for London's Institute of Contemporary Arts which moved that year from its small premises in Dover Street to its current grander location on the Mall. However, Roland Barthes comments that, ‘every national shock produces a sudden flowering of written commentary’ (1968, 149) and 1968 was also a year of prolific written documentation. The immediacy of 1968's historicization not only reveals its importance, but also its compromises and failures, as writers struggled to make sense of its disparate aims and ideological absences. America may have had some of the most famous chroniclers of that generation in the form of Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and Paul Goodman (Sayres 1984, 217–219), but the UK also had its own acute observers such as Jeff Nuttall (1968), Australian born Richard Neville (1971) and Michael Kustow (1975). The confusion and frustration, as well as excitement, felt in these writers' voices may well have been a consequence of the newness of many of the movements that comprised the late 1960s.

Sayres sees Norman Mailer's alienation as stemming from his being left outside by ‘women writers, blacks, gays, third world authors [who] presumed to speak for themselves about struggles he was barely privy to’ (Sayres 1984, 218–219). However, in Britain in 1968, these movements were very much still emergent (although, far from non-existent, as attested by the activities of Anti- University (Elzy 1969) and Birmingham's Centre for Cultural Studies under the new direction of Stuart Hall).

Introduction

In 1968 on the completion of ten years of autocratic rule, Pakistan's first military dictator, General Ayub Khan decided to celebrate ‘the decade of development’. The Ayub regime had achieved the fastest economic growth in Pakistan's history and was lauded in the West as a dynamic model for Third World capitalism. Despite this, inequality and the percentage of the population living below the poverty line had increased. Wealth was concentrated in few hands and the country's twenty-two richest families controlled approximately 90 percent of the assets of financial institutions. In 1968 disillusioned students, workers and peasants, as well as members of the military and the professions mounted public protests against the dictator.

At the start of 1968 the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan appeared as one of the most stable regimes of the time. His confidence could be judged from the fact that he arrested the country's most popular political leader Shaikh Mujeeb-ur-Rehman (later founder of Bangladesh), with twenty-eight civil servants, politicians and members of the armed forces on charges of being implicated in an Indian government supported conspiracy to separate the province of East Pakistan from the rest of the country. Ayub had posed as the country's saviour and in 1968, the tenth year of his presidency, he advised his close associates to begin a one-year celebration labeling it the ‘Decade of Development’. The achievements of the military dictatorship would be highlighted through the government-controlled media. Meanwhile resistance against the regime was gathering momentum (Dobell 1969).

Introduction

There is an influential historical consensus that 1960s radicalism in Britain had no significant or lasting impact on the social and political order. In this view, the longer-term effects of the ideas and movements, often associated with the climactic year of 1968, have been confined to popular culture, lifestyles and inter-personal relations. It is said that political institutions remained unperturbed and almost unaffected by the intellectual and ideological ferment occurring in the arts, media, universities, street politics and youth cultures. From this historical-empiricist perspective the significance of '68 in Britain was apolitical and confined to the personal and cultural sphere (Marwick 1998, 15–20; Sandbrook 2007, 543–5). Proponents of a revolution in society ended up changing little but their own life styles.

The present analysis examines sixties radicalism in Britain –and potentially more widely – as the fusion of counter-cultural and radical political ideas and movements that came together in the late 1960s to challenge the ruling socio-political order. It will critique ‘culturalist’ interpretations of this radical upsurge – as confined principally to life styles and sub-cultural institutions – on two grounds. Firstly, that the critical feature of the cultural upheavals of the high 60s, acknowledged by virtually all commentators, was not the immediate establishment of distinct and operational values.

Introduction

Two major discourses of change in the 1960s, student revolt and black consciousness, were introduced to South Africa primarily through, literature, music, and individual agency. The knowledge transfer helped to define and transform resistance to apartheid from liberal expressions and values to ideologically informed New Left activism. The impact of this shift and the forms it took had highly significant long term outcomes for South Africa, but the perception of South Africa as an isolated place disconnected from early forms of globalization has become a self reflective trope and the significance of links with global changes are not recognized.

In this chapter I will not examine the links between black consciousness (BC) and developments in the USA. There are intimate connections between BC and Anglophone students, but it is rather, the narrative of the shifts, influences and changes represented by the events of 1968 and their impact on mainly Anglophone students on which this chapter focuses. It will look particularly at the linkages between radical ideas and movements in Europe and North America and the role of radicalized white students in assisting black workers struggles against the apartheid regime. Academically the transition from liberal to class based historiography was to have a profound impact on students and future leaders in the post 1994 South African government.

Introduction

The title of this collection may prompt two types of reaction. For some, it is inappropriate to talk about the resurgence of phenomena that have become established and ‘mainstream’. Personal freedoms in sexual relations, artistic expression and ongoing campaigns for equal rights have all become institutionalised in the past 40 years. However for other readers, familiar with the extravagant mission of the counter-culture and the shrivelling of revolutionary – or pseudo-revolutionary – politicking, the ‘spirit of the 60s’ may be thought of as beyond resuscitation. As one seasoned political journalist recently opined: ‘1968 was not a beginning – it was humanity's last rage against the dying of the light, the last, great street festival before darkness closed in.’ (Wilby 2008) Or, as a music expert wrote of the cultural upsurge of the period, it is ‘our former way of life, far away from us on the other side of the sun-flooded chasm of the Sixties’ (MacDonald 1995, 34).

The contributions in this book however demonstrate that continuity and ‘resurgence’, exceeding the liberalisation of personal freedoms, exist in two key respects: as spaces and as active legacies. Resurgence is possible because the radical movements of the sixties opened up a series of previously non-existent, or only embryonic, social spaces (Touraine 2004, 225).

It began with a memo. Its original title (‘Some Thoughts in Response to Dottie's Thoughts on a Women's Liberation Movement’) suggests the spirit in which it was written. Carol Hanisch, a community organiser for the Southern Conference Educational Fund, was responding to a memo by another staff member. Like so many other activists in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the New Left, this colleague did not view the fledgling women's liberation movement as truly political. Dottie Zellner had been particularly scathing about the new vogue for consciousness-raising, which she dismissed as therapy.

Carol Hanisch was (in addition to being a civil rights activist) a member of New York Radical Women, credited with bringing consciousness-raising techniques into second wave feminism. The group was itself a response to what we would now view as a quite shocking array of sexist attitudes and practices that had, until then, gone unchallenged in radical circles. Early attempts to extend the logic of liberation to women had met with widespread derision, with opposition coming not just from men but women: