Comparability of China and Taiwan
This chapter argues that comparing Taiwan and China as a way to understand what conditions are necessary for a society to develop civility yields valid results. They share a cultural heritage, were under the same government until 1895 and were governed by similarly authoritarian governments for much of the period since up to 1990. It refutes the erstwhile claim that Taiwan was tainted by its period as a Japanese colony and therefore not really Chinese. It then recounts the various campaigns employed by the Kuomintang government in China from the 1920s to 1949 and in Taiwan from 1945 to 2000 and by the Chinese Communist Party from 1949 to the present in China, especially since Reform and Opening Up. It then shows, through an examination of moral education textbooks from each, that despite the paroxysms in China under Mao, they have very similar ideas about what constitutes civility.