Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

dictatorship in close formation with the
chaebol
(Korean corporations). In China, freedom takes the form of “reform and opening” (
gaige kaifang
) in the dismantling of the redistributive structures of the socialist system in favor of market institutions beginning in 1976. In Taiwan,
freedom
also refers to democratization beginning in the late 1980s, during which the KMT (Kuomintang) lost its monolithic governing power.
    15 . For one such experiment, see Carl Cassegard’s (2008) discussion of Kojin Karatani’s New Associationist Movement.

Chapter Two
    Miraculous Rebirth
    Making Global Places in Taiwan
    CHING-WEN HSU
    It was a hot summer afternoon in 2002. The shops in downtown Kaohsiung had just opened, and people were beginning to filter into the New Kujiang shopping district, but it would take another few hours for activity to pick up on the street. 1 Standing on the side of the road, Mr. Liao, a member of the Committee for Development in New Kujiang, took refuge from the heat in the cold air escaping from an air-conditioned shop. 2 Looking through a veil of smog, he voiced his concern about the trees: “They’re ugly. They look like those trees outside of the municipal cultural centers.” The man had wanted to see a different style of landscaping lining the streets to create a promenade that, he had hoped, would be “like the streets in Austria.” Instead, all he could see were short trees with upright branches, small leaves, and no flowers. To him, they were entirely too predictable and uninspiring—everything the shopping district in the largest urban center in southern Taiwan was not supposed to be. He had envisioned a New Kujiang that would be trendy and alive. In less than fifteen years after its emergence, New Kujiang had indeed become a popular shopping destination for young people in southern Taiwan. Nonetheless it had not quite developed the elegance that Mr. Liao had envisioned. Now he hoped that, if only New Kujiang could get the right kind of trees (and a little more help from the authorities), everything would work out as planned. As Mr. Liao imagined a shopping district simulating the streets of faraway countries, retailers from shops all around him burned spirit money to lure in real money and hoped that their prayers and offerings would reach the deities and ghosts they were intended for. 3 The old ritual may have looked out of place in the fashionable shopping district. However, on the streets where the smoke and smog were inseparable and the heat from the fires fused with the heat from the sun, ghosts and deities are in the service of the living, and the retailers’ wishes were as worldly and profit oriented as Mr. Liao’s plan for New Kujiang. Here, new visions and long-standing practices intersect, and imaginations and prayers frequently reach the world beyond to make earthly enterprises more profitable.
    First begun as a shopping center aimed at affluent consumers during the island’s burgeoning economy in the 1980s, New Kujiang was revitalized as a shopping district by a state-initiated “place-making” project in the late 1990s. Its emergence and metamorphosis reflect the economic transformation of the city of Kaohsiung as well as that of Taiwan over the years. As part of the national project to refashion the appearance of the island’s towns and cities, New Kujiang exemplifies the desire for Taiwan’s modern development and prosperity through urban planning and spatial reform. As an internationalized shopping district built in the image of Euro-American and Japanese shopping streets, it offers the possibility for its shoppers and merchants to imagine themselves as being a part of the larger world of upscale “quality” (
pinzhi
) places. However, subsumed under a narrative of national modernization and market success on a global scale, New Kujiang also provides the ground on which these visions are contested and where questions about Taiwan’s “internationalized” future are