3 World music, cultural heteroglossia and indigenous capital
Overlapping frequencies in the emergence of cosmopolitanism in Taiwan
This chapter attempts to investigate the various ramifications of cosmopolitanism for the emergence of new public spheres. The semantics of global culture, the economics of transnational capital and the pragmatics of local interest often overlap in discussions of the transnational public. The advent of transnationalism in its various institutional manifestations constitutes a real threat to the existence of prevailing hegemonies by undermining the power of the state to maintain homogenous, standard communities. To what extent does the openness of the media contribute to a democratised space? To what extent do syncretism and indigenisation per se contribute to a multiplicity of cultural voices? In the case of Taiwan, it is important to note that, not unlike the process of democratisation, which was largely engineered from the top down, the introduction of cosmopolitan influences has taken place within the ongoing trend of indigenisation. The compatibility of one to the other must be carefully explained. In this regard, the recent introduction of Western pop culture in the form of world music can be seen as an unusual example of discontinuity and collusion between cosmopolitan and indigenising trends that may have ramifications for future study.
Displacement or dissonance: cultural cosmologies in globalised space
In recent years, various writers have accentuated the effects of globalisation upon changing ethnoscapes, newly emerging public spheres and incipient crises of cultural identity. Appadurai (1990) has noted the constant tension between cultural homogenisation and cultural heterogenisation engendered by increasing globalisation but at the same time pointed out significant disjunctures between ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes. The flow of people, images, technology, capital and ideologies characteristic of the late capitalist cultural economy has in effect created a web of complex relationships that underlie the operation of culture industries, national identities and expressive lifestyles. Different societies are characterised by different kinds of flows and disjunctures.
Yet despite the recent current of attention paid to globalisation, one should recognise that the kind of disjunctures so characteristic of Lash and Urry's (1987) ‘disorganized capitalism’ merely begs the question of what precisely is meant by globalisation or in what sense different kinds of processes may be involved. By understanding globalisation as both a process of material flows and a basis for meaningful localisation, one can then begin to see how different societies receive global flows while at the same time accommodating them within given socio-political and cultural-ideological frameworks. Perhaps more than just a diversity of flows and disjunctures, it is equally important to understand how such diversity in cultural response is a function of different modes of accommodation or negotiation.
Patterson's (1994) lucid analysis of the origins of reggae in the complex interactions of global culture and the formation of the American cosmos represents a good case of how multiple flows (rather than the single threat of a homogenising cultural ‘imperialism’) have contributed to the invention of new cultural forms. In essence, instead of a single global system, Patterson argues that there are many cosmopolises that overlap spatially over a single terrain, each marked by distinct processes of cultural accommodation and strategies of positionality.
Apart from the physical effects or functional disjunctures brought about by globalisation (incorporation of the local within the global), transnationalism (the blurring of mutual boundaries between traditionally discrete entities), decentring (shifts in power balance between core and periphery) and time-space compression (dissolution of physical time and distance through media technology), it is equally important to emphasise the perceptual mechanisms in a local context of culture that serve to interpret, negotiate and synthesise these external material processes. Thus, in the context of Taiwan, it is apparent that while society has been subject to processes that are engendered by a new phase of transnational globalism brought about by disorganised capitalism and postmodern technologies, these changes take place with reference to existing cultural norms and social relationships as well as in the context of already evolving political practices and economic hierarchies.
In this regard, the notion of overlapping cosmologies is an appropriate metaphor for characterising the emergence of new communities and cultures, for they not only contribute to the advent of new public spheres, but they do so, more importantly, by competing with existing communities and challenging prevailing notions of the public. In this chapter, I shall be concerned with mapping out the contours of such communities primarily in light of their expressive and discursive content. The nature and functions of these expressive and discursive communities should moreover ultimately reflect upon the perceptual mechanisms that serve as the vehicle for creating and reconstituting newly emerging cultural values, while outlining the possibility of resistance to and co-optation of accepted norms.
Cultural syncretism and discursive heteroglossia would seem to be products of the transnational experience, or just phenomena whose intensity and diversity have been amplified by the increasing penetration of cosmopolitan influences and global networks. In contrast to, for example, the ethnic nationalist sentiment cultivated during Taiwan's early postwar era, such syncretism and heteroglossia are to a large degree dependent on the deregulation of the cultural sphere by the state, as well as the deconstruction of dualistic notions of cultural homogeneity embodied in dominant ideologies and discourses. In other words, far from being spontaneous events, this increasing trend towards cultural diversity and discursive decentring is attributable both to processes of structural devolution at the top and indigenous movements at the bottom. This is a process of negotiation that constantly opposes interlocking interests. Therefore, one must ask, how do representational aspects of culture interface with their institutional embodiment? How is the multiplicity of discourse a product of transnational regimes, and what are its political effects?
Without exploring the entire range of countercultural and counterdiscursive phenomena that have appeared in Taiwan since the lifting of martial law, I wish to focus here on an unusual example of transnational media to assess in what sense it may be possible to generalise about the functional disjunctures brought about by transnationalism per se. To this end, it is necessary to look first of all at the expressive and discursive features themselves to see how both meanings and intentions are a function of their institutional embeddedness; then, second, show how such ‘cultures’ engender new forms of community. The example raised here is ICRT (International Community Radio Taipei), the sole English-language radio station in Taiwan. It has played an important role in spawning a new cosmopolitan popular youth culture in recent decades, and thus represents a prominent and obvious example of one form of transnational media. While it is not wholly representative of the changing nature of Taiwan's popular culture, the role that ICRT has played in disseminating Western language culture cannot be underestimated. However, the sociological background for its cultural authority in this regard must be seen in the light of its privileged origins as a state-sponsored medium. The contradictions that underlie the nature of its transformation to a commercial enterprise ironically mirror the same contradictions indicative of democratisation and indigenisation processes occurring throughout society as a whole. Moreover, the transnational nature of its medium can be contrasted to other transnational enterprises in ways that have important ramifications for changing notions of identity and community.
Syncretism and indigenisation in the devolution of the state apparatus: the case of ICRT
Rob Wilson (personal communication) likes to characterise Taipei as being ‘perpetually under construction’. As he once put it, ‘Taiwan barrages the senses as a dynamic and wacko mixture of the traditional and modern, postmodern and primitive, high tech and agrarian residual, which in contemporary Pacific Rim guise, means the expressive synergy of the global meeting the local, incarnating what we have theorised as the unstable global-local dialectic’, or simply ‘glocal’, as Daniels and Daniels (1994) phrased it. Unlike Wallerstein's so-called modern world-system, perhaps the local counts even more as the ground of creation and invention. In this regard, ICRT has consciously epitomised the paradigm of ‘think globally, act locally’ with its own motto ‘here's your chance to think globally, while you tune in locally to ICRT and find out what's really hot on a global scale’.1
The cosmopolitan ethos that ICRT has forcefully cast upon popular youth culture in Taiwan invites comparison with analogous developments in Hong Kong in the 1970s, which gave rise to a mass media culture that was a hybrid combination of East and West. The kind of cultural syncretism projected by ICRT is easily reflected in the increasing biculturalism and bilingualism of its programmes and its ardent localism despite its exceptional legal status as a foreign-language station. Many of the expatriate disc jockeys are long-time Taiwan residents who vary in their degree of Chinese fluency but who converse with a predominantly Taiwanese listenership as one local to another; there is no self/other ethnic distinction here. The international news coverage is deliberately culture-neutral in perspective, while its local coverage is consistently portrayed from a Taiwan-centred point of view, despite its obvious status as a foreign-language station. The overt cultural syncretism is both an attempt to make accessible to the foreign listener things and events usually of interest only to Chinese listeners and to bridge the linguistic gap with the Chinese listener by increasingly making bilingualism a standard feature. In practice, however, the distinction between audiences becomes blurred, especially when programme hosts routinely switch from English to Chinese and back again. At other times, the syncretism drowns out the very distinctions between native and foreign.
Seen on the surface and in the present, the local in ICRT's syncretic culture is without doubt a ground of creation and invention, but the process itself might be seen as the synthetic tension at many levels between the semantic elements of its cosmopolitanism and the changing institutional status of ICRT from quasi-state apparatus to non-profit organisation to commercial station. What can be viewed as the evolving stages of its musical and pop culture must then be viewed not simply as a result of increasing cosmopolitan influences but equally importantly as an ongoing process by which its institutional disposition has accommodated changes in semantic terms. I would even say that no matter how creative and inventive this local ground may be, these indigenising trends have, in my opinion, tended to follow the socio-political flow of things rather than the other way around.
ICRT officially began broadcasting on 16 April 1979.2 It succeeded the American Armed Forces Network (AFNT) as the only sanctioned English-language radio station in Taiwan. The AFNT was operated by the American military from 25 December 1957 until the termination of diplomatic relations and the departure of American troops. Largely due to lobbying by the American Chamber of Commerce and support by then-President Chiang Ching-kuo, ICRT was eventually able to take over from AFNT without any break in transmission, using the same facilities and occupying land which was leased by the Defence Ministry to the US military. The Taipei International Community Cultural Foundation (TICCF) was founded to oversee ICRT, and its board of trustees was made up of ten prominent figures from the government and business community, typically half being Chinese and the other half American. The nature of intercultural cooperation was such that it was beneficial for the board to have good relations with the government; thus it is not surprising to see that it has tended to be conservative in its general outlook.
At the time of its official creation, ICRT was a reluctant state enterprise whose survival depended upon a combination of indirect subsidies and corporate contributions. The radio equipment belonged to the US Defense Department but due to the unusual circumstances was sold to the Government Information Office (GIO, the agency that oversees all news agencies in Taiwan) for $1. The land continued to be leased to the station by the Defence Ministry, and grants from central government combined with private donations made up the rest of the operating expenses. Moreover, ICRT was legally a non-profit organisation, which meant that there were severe restrictions on advertising. Any profit was supposed to be spent on charity and community service. The staff associated with the station in the early days tended to be made up of untrained expatriates living in Taiwan. Up until 1983, it could hardly have been called a professionally run organisation. It generally lacked a distinctive style, except for its English-language programming; this in combination with the above institutional factors accounted for its perceived status as a non-profit, service organisation catering largely to the expatriate community and a minority of English-educated Chinese listeners. A 1979 survey showed that ICRT's audience was 65 per cent foreign and 35 per cent Chinese, with people tuning in mostly for news, classical music and easy listening.
A trend towards commercialisation began in 1983 with the hiring of Craig Quick, a seasoned broadcaster from Hawaii, who initially became ICRT's outside consultant, then de facto general manager. Many of the changes were simply organisational and were aimed at transforming an amateurish operation into a professional money-making enterprise. Up until this time the government was subsidising the station through grants by the GIO to cover yearly operating losses; thus it was particularly eager to make it commercially viable. The station was overhauled and divided into separate news, programming, marketing and other departments. New transmitters were bought to replace ageing equipment, and both AM and FM programmes were restructured to incorporate more live programmes on a 24-hour basis. Perhaps most importantly, professional DJs and newscasters were imported on expatriate contracts, mostly from Hawaii, in order to revamp the entire operation. The changes that took place during this period significantly reshaped for the first time the content and style of ICRT vis-à-vis other stations.
ICRT had always been one of the few stations in Taiwan to have 24-hour programming, but from 1984 it became the first to extend live programming after midnight and into the early hours. This was a time when martial law curfews still outlawed discos (which went underground) and all-night teahouses (which became nonetheless a popular meeting place for artists and dissidents). The importing of expatriate professionals transformed ICRT from a generally ‘Western’ radio station catering to diverse musical tastes from classical to modern into a genuinely pop-rock music station that tended to promote an underlying American cultural lifestyle. The increasingly commercial orientation of the station was accelerated by a concession by the GIO to allow ICRT to sell advertising, despite its non-profit status, not to exceed initially three minutes per hour. In name, however, sponsors were not buying commercial time; they were giving commercial grants, as though in the form of a donation. It was clear that the content of musical programming, with its pop-rock orientation, was aimed at a more youthful mass audience rather than predominantly English-speaking expatriates and native elites. In this regard, ICRT was not the only station playing Western pop music but it was the first to establish a consistently pop-rock image whose overall cultural style was distinctively moulded by its various ‘radio personalities’ (to take the current term literally). Most local stations at this time were still slotting various kinds of music as though to cover the whole field and without invoking any special aura or being motivated by commercially competitive goals. In 1985, when ICRT began to become commercially viable, grants from the GIO stopped, and the profits from broadcasting operations enabled the station to expand its community service activities.
Beginning in 1984, news coverage also changed significantly from reporting almost exclusively international news to offering a more equal balance of local and international news. The hiring of foreign reporters fluent in Chinese, along with an increasingly specialised division of labour among news staff, was supplemented by a growing number of English-language news programmes on local issues like the law, the environment and politics. Perhaps unlike musical programming, which aimed at diffusing Western pop culture among an undifferentiated resident population, the increasingly radical character of news programming reflected an increasing interest in local affairs that dared at the same time to offer a critical outsider's perspective on things. The fact that these programmes were being broadcast in a foreign language made them generally more immune from the direct control of the GIO, in the sense that Marxist literature in a foreign language would tend to pass customs more easily than anything of PRC origin, but it eventually got to a point where interviews with political dissidents and controversial figures overstepped the mark, forcing the GIO, through the station manager, who was usually a political appointee reporting directly to the board, to clamp down. In 1992, in a ‘financial’ restructuring, three reporters in the news division well known to have Taiwanese sympathies were laid off, and the head of the news division was transferred to marketing.3 The fact that ideological tension between a conservative management on the one hand, which represented official interests in the bureaucracy like the GIO and the Party, and reporters on the other hand, who derived a different view of news by being ‘on the street’, continued even while the policy of liberalisation was well underway meant that ICRT was not just your typical expatriate station; its nature and operation were not just the product of diffusion and adaptation.4 ICRT's special status as a foreign-language station, in theory non-profit but in practice commercial, guided on the one hand at an operational level by expatriates but controlled on the other hand at a policy level by a management intent on maintaining the official line, indicates that its nature and possibilities of being were always the product of negotiation between different vested interests.
The trend toward indigenisation did not really appear until the early 1990s, and this was combined with a move away from ICRT's predominantly American flavour to a gradually more internationalist orientation. These trends were predicated by a gradual shift in the composition of its audience or a gradual change in the perception of its intended audience. The discovery that its audience was increasingly made up of local Taiwanese rather than foreigners and that its average listeners were teenage youths rather than an undifferentiated public came with the hiring of a charismatic DJ named Patrick Steele, a young black Haitian who had been living in Taiwan and working in a local club. Without having any prior radio experience, in 1986 he was hired to work the midnight shift, a typically sleepy time of day. As time went on, the disproportionate amount of fan mail generated by him clearly demonstrated that he was one of the most popular DJs and revealed certain facts about ICRT's listenership. First of all, he was one of the few DJs who was able to speak any Chinese and, second, his show apparently tapped into a large population of late night students who either deliberately wanted to listen to English-language programmes or ended up listening to ICRT because it happened to be the only live music programme on after midnight. By receiving calls from listeners and talking in Chinese to other youths on all manner of subjects concerning personal life and activities, he also helped to reveal the popularity of talk shows and call-in programmes, which eventually became a popular fixture on other stations in later years. Despite the success of this particular show during the late 1980s, the growing realisation that a large proportion of listeners happened to be Taiwanese youths did not alter the image of ICRT as an American pop-rock music station. At the time, I would say that it underscored its Americanness even more emphatically in a Taiwanese context. The hiring of Chinese-speaking foreigners like Samantha K as well as Asian faces like Suzy Wonder and Sally Yeh was in my opinion an explicit attempt to make Western pop-rock more accommodating to local listeners. This corresponded with new shows such as The Taiwan Top 20 and Intercultural Music City, which were broadcast in English and tended to cater more to foreigners with no access to local music than to local teenyboppers hooked on Western music. In short, there is a sense here of intercultural exchange, but this was predicated on serving different constituents with different needs rather than invoking a single cosmopolitan ethos, and thus should not be confused with the local-globalism and bilingualism seen in the early 1990s.
The trend toward local-globalism, which was in a strict sense a strategy of cultural syncretism or an attempt to indigenise if not creolise cosmopolitan influences, was concurrent with and inseparable from several significant external variables, namely Chiang Ching-kuo's policy of ethnic indigenisation qua democratisation qua liberalisation, the increasing commercialisation of ICRT's operations and the trend in Western pop-rock music cultures towards multiculturalism and globalism, as epitomised by International Hit Radio's (IHR) world pop chart. The success of ICRT to support itself financially led the GIO to increase ICRT's commercial time to five minutes per hour in 1990, then nine minutes per hour in 1992, which was the legal maximum for commercial stations. This was allowed in exchange for an agreement to expand daily cultural programming by two hours. The Youth Nightline show, hosted by David Wang, was one cultural programme that emerged from this increased ‘commercialisation’. David Wang is an amazing example of a local youth who learned his English almost entirely from listening to ICRT. Youth Nightline was a late-night talk show in which he would interview guests, both Chinese and foreign, on topics ranging from Taiwanese pop music to current social issues. Interviews would ideally be conducted in English, even when talking to Chinese-speaking guests, but in cases where dialogues and call-in questions were in Chinese, he would summarise the gist of Chinese remarks in English and vice versa. Youth Nightline quickly became one of the most popular shows on ICRT's roster of programmes, and this was followed by a similar bilingual programme entitled Today's Woman, hosted by Natalie So. The success of such shows demonstrated the importance of capturing the Taiwanese audience. A survey in 1994 showed that 96 per cent of ICRT's listeners were Taiwanese and the remainder foreign, perhaps the exact opposite of the situation when the station began. Although ICRT never deviated from its core of playing Western pop-rock music, during the early 1990s one could sense a trend toward the increasing incorporation of Chinese pop songs and the tendency of long-time expatriate DJs to occasionally speak Chinese on the air or to accommodate call-in listeners who could not speak English at all. Chinese pop songs were aired, not in special programmes like Taiwan Top 20, but as part of the routine programming, averaging about five minutes per hour. This conscious policy was dictated not only by an increased focus on indigenisation but also by trends in Western pop-rock stations to play proportionately more ethnic and non- English popular music within its normal programming. A more explicit movement towards indigenisation was organisational in nature. When it was established, ICRT was controlled by a board in theory half made up of Chinese interests and half of expatriate interests. In the course of its operation, however, the director of the board, Koo Lien-sung, gradually managed to bring into the board Chinese business and government magnates to replace increasingly smaller numbers of expatriate board members. This development is significant only in light of current efforts to fully commercialise ICRT, which in its 15-year existence as a non-profit organisation cannot be understood apart from the devolution of the state-party apparatus to a more explicitly commercial operation.5
While it is clear that on the surface of things ICRT has undergone a gradual process of commercialisation that brought about the importation of cosmopolitan trends — especially in its most recent trend towards cultural syncretism — such commercialisation was made possible only with the collusion of state interests. The current crisis over the future of the station fought out at the corporate bureaucratic level with regard to the meaning of indigenisation and cosmopolitanism reflects the inherent tension between a Chinese-dominated board with ties to government and business interests on the one hand and expatriates responsible for the production of cultural meaning at the operational level on the other. In 1993 the ICRT Board was notified by the government that it must give up its facilities on military land which had been leased to AFNT, then to ICRT. This included its studios on Yangmingshan and its transmitters in northern and central Taiwan. This was not an action directed specifically to ICRT but was part of the inevitable devolution of the monolithic state apparatus, that is to say, a process of democratisation, indigenisation and liberalisation that brought about in the long run the various legal and institutional consequences.6
In practical terms, the station had to find new sites in order to resolve the impending legal crisis surrounding its occupation of military land. Not being able to find appropriate alternative sites for its facilities, the American Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with predominantly expatriate interests petitioned Lien Chan, the premier, to have the land transferred to the National Property Bureau, which in turn would have the authority to lease the land to private concerns. This met with no reply from the premier. In the meantime, Koo Lien-sung, the board's director, in conjunction with other board members and their private commercial interests, arranged to apply for a new commercial licence operating on a different frequency. To maintain continuity with the present station (in the sense of the more things change, the more they stay the same), he proposed calling ICRT International Cultural Radio Taiwan instead of International Community Radio Taipei. The old ICRT would then give up its old facilities in favour of the new one, which would at the same time complete its transformation into a commercial radio station.7 The group that submitted the application was a separate organisational entity from the current board members of ICRT, but in government circles it was openly recognised that they were all the same people. Either way, the board stood to win from the reorganisation, because the impending sale of existing facilities would bring over NT$100 million to the foundation (TICCF), and this could be used to significantly expand its charitable activities.8 The facilities would still need to be moved to new sites, but this would be a problem for the new commercial owner.
The crisis brought about by the actual commercialisation of ICRT in regard to current trends in programming has more to do with the different ways in which expatriates involved in content production and the predominantly Chinese members of the board understand the nature of indigenisation and cultural syncretism. While there has been a gradual trend toward bilingualism and biculturalism in musical programming to the point of being syncretic if not creole in nature, this can be viewed as a function of various trends and perspectives. The multicultural and transnational face emerging in world pop music culture can be seen as contributing to a gradual infusion of local language and culture into the routine programme content. Concurrent with this trend is the obvious recognition of a predominantly local audience and the need to accommodate their listening interests. However, from the perspective of expatriate producers, the cultural authenticity of the programming content has always been the prime prerogative in the promotion of that culture. The number of local youths listening to the radio primarily because it is a foreign-language station is testament to its attraction in this regard. This has been a natural consequence of the increasing cultural cosmopolitanism brought about by democratisation and increased cultural contact. From the perspective of the predominantly Chinese controlling interests at the board level and beyond, the success of ICRT in recent years has been seen as a result of its ability through bilingualism and biculturalism to attract increasing numbers of local listeners. The foreign element of its musical culture has tended to be taken for granted as a secondary element of its success. When news of ICRT's reorganisation by local business elements broke, there were unfounded but natural rumours among certain elements of the press that this would signal an increase in Chinese-language programmes to the point where ICRT would become truly multicultural and essentially bilingual in nature. While there is no firm indication that the trend toward unconscious syncretism or conscious bilingualism will continue beyond what it is at present, there is on the other hand a real fear among many expatriates that with the corporate reorganisation their authority to define the programming content, and hence shape the message with particular meanings, will be subordinated to policies dictated from above, rather like the ‘autonomy’ of Hong Kong after 1997. In short, the determining element of ‘glocalism’ in ICRT's future is not its inherent disorganisation and spontaneity, as might be reflected in the general process of globalisation, but its ongoing manipulation by entrenched institutional interests. Far from having disappeared, the collusion of the state in the indigenisation process is a continuing feature of Taiwan's media practices. The state has simply changed its form and tactics like a chameleon changes colour.
The sociological consequences of transnationalising culture
The point of the present chapter was not really to examine the breadth and depth of transnational media in Taiwan but rather to show that the penetrations of technology and capital cannot be adequately understood without examining the local context of meaning within which these functional disjunctures are located. The possibilities and manipulations of meaning reflect back upon the parameters defined by the nature of the medium itself as well as the underlying strategies of diverse institutional interests whose authority or business it is to define and produce meaning. The pragmatic (representational plus perceptual) dimensions of media have serious implications for an emerging public insofar as they create communities of discourse that have definite boundaries and rules of sociability.
If transnationalism, by virtue of its borderlessness and lack of hegemonic core, challenges modern forms of communal boundedness and dominant ideology, then it is clear that there is not just a single public sphere but many; there is no one cultural cosmology, but many overlapping ones; there is not just one mode of communicability but a whole plethora, rational as well as irrational.
The unfolding of democracy in Taiwan is a curious development in its own right (see Chun 1994). Rather than being a natural dismantling of an autocratic system, as though under threat of global pressure and with the sudden recognition of human rights, the devolution of the state-party apparatus in Taiwan has largely been an orchestrated process from the top down whose ultimate aim is to transform the structure of existing power in ways that are routinised, sublimated and self-regulating. Democracy in this regard becomes a mode of legitimation that has the effect of obscuring or deflecting the machinations of power rather than eliminating them altogether. Ethnic indigenisation and economic liberalisation must be seen in this light as factors that collude to create new institutional forms of hegemony.
The difficulty of generalising about transnational media in Taiwan has to do with the way in which some sectors of the media are regulated and others are not. During the era of martial law, all forms of media had been heavily regulated and censored. Japanese-language publications and books printed in simplified Chinese were prohibited; even non-local Chinese newspapers had to be left on the plane. Needless to say, TV and radio were heavily controlled, and anything sympathetic to mainland China was censored, expunged or banned. The policy of and trend towards democracy eventually did away with legal bans to a point where it is fair to say that there are no explicit restrictions on media content and competition between individual producers is allowed. Satellite cable TV had at one time more than 80 stations catering to every conceivable audience and taste, including not only the usual movie, sports, news, MTV, cultural edification, product demonstration and political affairs channels but also video games, live spirit mediums and various degrees of pornography (one late-night sex-education programme I saw featured half-naked couples and was hosted by a male transvestite). Similarly, the explosive growth of internet bulletin boards and new media technologies have stymied the abilities of the government to initiate legislation to regulate them. In this regard, the plight of ICRT may appear perhaps to be exceptional insofar as it has had to straddle the ambivalent borderline of being both non-profit and commercial, but it is important to note that the ‘free’ competition that has taken place has usually been between large commercial interests that, because of prior collusion with the state, have been able to take advantage of the divestiture of state enterprises on the one hand and small independent entrepreneurs on the other. Within such a fractured market, communicability becomes an important issue. Under what conditions does democracy in the media lead to rational communication and an enlightened public sphere; to what extent does it lead to increased alienation into niche communities that, by virtue of their self-centredness, resist social solidarity in any sense?
The attractions and distractions of transnational media have created a web of entanglements in both technological and sociological senses. The pragmatic effects on cultural form may not be evident from simply reading the semantics of world music, but it is necessary to ascertain precisely what is accommodating what.
Notes
1 Their hourly jingle begins with: ‘broadcasting around the globe on the World Wide Web of the Internet from the Republic of China on Taiwan and at 100.1 and 100.7 FM … International Community Radio Taipei … ICRT, Taiwan’.
2 On the occasion of ICRT's founding, the GIO issued the following terse official statement:
The Government Information Office announced that to strengthen the living environment of foreign investors in Taiwan, maintain the spiritual food for foreigners in Taiwan and offer services to tourists, the government has agreed that the American Chamber of Commerce in Taipei initiates the Taipei International Community Radio, a corporate body, to succeed the American Forces Network Taiwan in broadcasting programmes in English.
3 These reporters later filed legal action against ICRT for unlawful dismissal but eventually lost their cases in court.
4 The official brochure commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of ICRT's founding described the independent nature of the more critical news programmes by saying that they ‘at times tested the limits of broadcast journalism during the 1980s and played an important role in opening up journalistic expression in Taiwan’.
5 Two vestiges of government patronage exist, despite ICRT's status as a non-profit organisation. First are its ties to the government through the board and its station manager; the second is its control by the GIO. I was surprised to find a picture of the current President Lee Teng-hui hanging in the office of ICRT's operations manager, even after city government offices had introduced a policy of removing them.
6 This process of institutional devolution took place in other sectors of the state. Around that same time I was living in faculty housing at the National Tsinghua University. The houses themselves were originally occupied by the US air force during their stay in Taiwan. We then discovered that the land had actually belonged to the Bank of Taiwan all this time and had been loaned to the university (being part of the same government apparatus) on a rent-free basis. The bank then began to negotiate with the university to have the land leased at market value or sold outright. Eventually rent was charged with gradual yearly increases that in time approached a rate that was deemed preferential (well below market value).
7 The legal controversy over this attempted move can be explained as follows. ICRT is supposed to be a non-profit organisation where board members serve as non-salaried consultants who are not supposed to have commercial interests in the station. In the end, it was the charitable members of the board who eventually conspired to buy up the station, largely for their own commercial interests.
8 The emergence of seemingly non-governmental organisations directly from what were state organisations mirrors the inherent conflict of interest between, and the ambiguity of, the public and private interests described here. A perfect example is the CCK Foundation, a non-profit organisation headed by Y. Y. Li, a well-known academic who serves the foundation full-time despite drawing a salary from Academia Sinica.