Guarding the nation against the market: The rise and fall of Taiwan's 'No Haste, Be Patient' policy, 1996-2001.

摘要

Taiwan's "No Haste, Be Patient" (NHBP) policy, which set strict restrictions on business investments in the mainland between the mid-1990s and early 2000s, is interpreted here as the Taiwanese government's response to a major external change: China's economic rise. Employing an analytical framework that emphasizes the role of domestic politics in mediating the impact of external forces upon a state's behaviour, this dissertation argues that the NHBP policy was part of Taiwan's nation-building project. As such, the policy was adopted to slow down the growing socioeconomic cross-Strait contacts that Taiwan nationalists feared might eventually help China to unify the island. Capitalizing on sub-ethnic politics and exchanges of interests, President Lee Teng-hui was able to build up a political base that supported his regime and the NHBP policy. However, this coalition building strategy also created corruption and internal division, which contributed to the KMT's defeat in Taiwan's 2000 presidential election. The new DPP (the Democratic Progressive Party) government was weak and vulnerable in the face of mounting internal and external pressures. Less than two years after coming to power, the DPP made a tactical retreat and replaced the NHBP policy with less restrictive measures.By establishing a link between economic policy and national identity, this dissertation hopes to bridge the study of political economy and the study of nationalism to further enhance our understanding of contemporary Taiwan.In my discussion of the NHBP policy, I rely on the insights of the "second-image-reversed" writers in international relations literature. They posit that there is a chain of causality in which the impact of international forces is mediated through domestic political developments as shaped by history. This theoretical framework brings the significance of the Taiwanese national identity issue into focus by highlighting the important role played by ideas and idea management in domestic politics. Finally, this conceptual framework places the NHBP policy in a wider socio-political context, where nationalism and state-society relations interacted with one another in the process of policy formulation and implementation.