Governing the Taiwanese countryside: Guanxi,power and agency

Over the past two decades, bottom-up rural development has become the prevailing approach in Taiwan. The rise of community-based projects for Foucauldian thinkers should be understood as new ways of thinking about governing social life, in which political authorities create ‘active’ rural citizens through the deployment of political technologies. Foucault's emphasis on the intimate association between power and knowledge has been taken further by actor-network theory (ANT) authors. However, ANT tells more empirical stories about the dissemination of power and the assemblage of actors. Although ANT has been readily employed in the studies of social sciences, it has been subject to severe criticism; on the one side, the death of man, on the other, the demiurgic. Echoing these comments, this paper argues that the process of translation is far more complicated than ANT authors have proposed. In the Chinese context, social interactions rely heavily on the social interaction model known as guanxi. With reference to an anthropological participant observation I conducted in a Taiwanese rural community, this paper demonstrates that guanxi practice functions as a mechanism for coping with political collective action.