Community, policing, and justice in modern Taiwan

Abstract

Criminal justice is a site in which one of the fundamental paradoxes of liberal democracy - police power mandated by the ideal of self-determination - must be practically resolved. This paper uses the Taiwanese institution of the neighborhood substation as a site through which to explore the historically developed palimpsest of institutional arrangements by which democratic Taiwan deals with this predicament. Taiwan's police substations have served as a crucial interface between the legitimate force of state authority and the organic solidarities of civil society since they were established at the close of the nineteenth century. Their operations have embodied the various ideas of justice that structured government-community interaction throughout the sequence of modern political development that begins under Japanese colonization and moves through Chinese Nationalist party-state control into the liberal democratic regime which presently governs the island. In this paper, I use benchmarks for liberal-democratic policing as a framework for organizing a retrospective account of substation operations in Taiwan, describing the comparative diversity of values evidenced in the structure of police-community relationships that have obtained in Taiwan under these three political regimes. By focusing on historical continuities in the ground-level administration of justice, I expose certain cultural qualities of the police power which serve to secure the state in the routines of everyday life. As a case study of one of the processes by which democratic institutions grow localized roots, this paper is intended as a contribution to comparative studies of criminal justice and to the understanding of Taiwan's democratization.