Politics of Partisanship: Party-State Mobilization and Ritualism

Abstract

The early postwar era was a period of many ironies for Taiwanese workers. Without a socialist revolution, nationalization transformed Japanese conglomerate employees into state workers, who came to bear the full brunt of ethnic domination. Precisely when their revolutionary activism declined due to the government’s repression, workers experienced a top-down process of Leninist penetration that enabled the party-state to exert total control over their daily lives. Partisanship, or one’s willingness to comply with the KMT’s ideological goals publicly, emerged as a new cleavage imposed upon a working class already divided by ethnicity. With the installation of the party-state in the factory, party cadres came to share power with technocratic managers. Loyalists were rewarded with material benefits for their KMT membership and collaboration in counterinsurgent control. The White Terror reign deprived nonconformists of practically any possibility of organized dissent, and hence they had to put on an outwardly submissive attitude to disguise their disagreement—a particular form of everyday resistance I analyze as ritualism. Basically, it was a defensive strategy to survive the regime’s intensified security control as well as its insatiable extraction of loyalty.