Populism in Taiwan: Rethinking the Neo-liberalism-Populism Nexus/ Szu-Yun Hsu

Contemporary scholarship on populism, albeit involving divergent approaches and polarised diagnoses of populism’s political impacts, commonly attributes the recent populist surge to the peril of neo-liberal encroachment. However, such a neo-liberal–populist proposition encounters discrepant experiences when applied in non-Western contexts, including in East Asia. To recalibrate the conceptual framework, this article employs Gramsci-inspired scholarship on hegemony and populism – the notion of “the integral state” and non-reductionist class politics in particular – and utilises Taiwan as a case to expound upon the entanglement of democratisation, neo-liberalisation, and various forms of populist politics. Situating the post-2000 surge of multiple popular movements in Taiwan’s hegemonic restructuring since the 1980s, this article identifies a course of bifurcated development between “liberal populism of the bourgeois hegemony” and the “neo-liberal populism of the multitude” that embodies various ways in which neo-liberalism intersects with populist politics. Highlighting the constant boundary-redrawing of the integral state and its associated class politics along the hegemonic restructuring processes, Taiwan’s case exemplifies a critical approach to rethinking the over-determined relations between populism and neo-liberalism for other East Asian states and beyond.

POPULISM, NEO-LIBERAL, POLITIC, MULTITUDE