From Social Visibility to Political Invisibility: The School in Nationalist Taiwan as a Fulcrum for an Evolving World Ethos by Allen Chun (review)

Reviewed by: From Social Visibility to Political Invisibility: The School in Nationalist Taiwan as a Fulcrum for an Evolving World Ethos by Allen Chun Fang Yu Hu Allen Chun. From Social Visibility to Political Invisibility: The School in Nationalist Taiwan as a Fulcrum for an Evolving World Ethos. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. 291 pp. Hardcover (129. 99), softcover (forthcoming), or e-book. An ethnographical research report on a Taiwanese middle school, Allen Chun's From Social Visibility to Political Invisibility asserts that a school is an important state institution for the creation of nation-states in East Asia (2). Instead of using Clifford Geertz's "thick description" to critically interpret social and cultural structures, Allen Chun adopts "cultural geography" to emphasize culture as "a space or series of spaces" to analyze social space and routines that created a Chinese cultural identity (10). Chun's book traces the transformation of the Chinese Nationalist government's failed New Life movement for moral regulation in mainland China in the 1930s into a successful Sinicization program centered on Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People (三民主義 sanmin zhuyi) in Taiwan from 1945 to the 1980s (49, 61). The author argues that anchoring moral education in the institution of school was a key to Nationalist success in Taiwan (49). Although Sinicization declined eventually, its nationalizing purpose nonetheless influenced the emergence of a Taiwanese identity (228). Chapters 2 and 3 provide the political context in postwar Taiwan to argue that school was an ideal site to culturalize, socialize, and militarize people into following moral discipline, which formed the basis of a Chinese citizenship. From 1945 to 1967, the Nationalist government used the school, the family, the workplace, and the military to nationalize Taiwan in order to propagate a continuous historical narrative that relied on invented traditions of a common spoken and written language, and it used classical texts and objects to create a shared Chinese identity across all ethnic groups. From 1967 to 1977, the government began a "cultural renaissance movement" (文化復興運動 wenhua fuxing yundong) in schools with initiatives from local governments, party cadres, military officials, teacher-officials (教官 jiaoguan), and teachers. In the process, Sun's Three Principles evolved from a political ideology during the Cold War era into a moral ideology rooted in traditional and Confucian values to survive in post-1980s Taiwan. The book asserts that school normalizes the socialization and culturalization of moral behaviors in everyday routines in creating Chinese citizens in order to consolidate the political power of the nation-state. Chapters 4 and 5 center on a middle school in Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 1991–1992, to show the usefulness of school as a state institution. Chapter 4 focuses on the school and classroom space and on scheduled routines as an embodiment of a politicized education. It discusses bureaucratization and institutionalized hierarchy to highlight the culturalizing and militarizing characteristics of Sinicization in creating moral Chinese citizens. Chapter 5 examines the school calendar and extracurricular activities as means to integrate and discipline students. The author maintains that the success of school lies in its outreach to End Page E-3 family and other social groups through contests, meetings, and cultural events to create a uniform Chinese-ness. Chapters 6 and 7 contextualize the decline of the Sinicization program in Taiwan as the political situation changed. Arguing against a popular interpretation that an emergent Taiwanese identity depoliticized the Nationalists' Sinicization program, Chun contends that it was the official promotion of local events in the 1970s, after the expulsion of the Republic of China (ROC) from the United Nations, that created the conditions for this new identity. He argues that indigenization and the new educational curriculum of "knowing Taiwan" (認識臺灣 renshi Taiwan) in the 1990s displaced Sinicization and created a new national identity that replaced the Chinese one, both Sinicization and indigenization being ethnonationalist. He insists that moral education was depoliticized and deculturalized to focus on individuals living in a democracy based on the rule of law. The book briefly compares identity formation in Singapore and Taiwan to argue that Chinese cultural affinity cannot explain identity formation, since the economy formed Singaporean identity while ethnicity and education mattered in Taiwan. This work engages with. . .