Abstract
In 2009, the Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation of Taiwan offered to build a new village for a group of Christian Aboriginal people whose settlement, Haocha in southern Taiwan, had been completely buried under a mudslide caused by a typhoon. The survivors, most of whom are the Rukai people, voted to decline the offer and proudly announced themselves to be the only people in the world to reject Tzu Chi's "charity bully." This chapter traces the processes by which the oxymoron “charity bully would come to make sense, ostensibly when religious and ethnic differences were highlighted in the offering and refusal of charity, while the state remained nearly invisible. I argue that charity may become uncharitable when its source, agent, and deliverer appear to contest or mock the sovereignty of the recipient. Inspired by Charles Piot’s (2010) observation of post-Cold War Togo as a “gray zone”—a zone beyond state control—I maintain that a double process of “graying” is underway. This is taking place in part of Taiwan in the field of post- catastrophe reconstruction, wherein the state outsources relief for its citizens to NGOs and self- effaces into the role of broker, and also for Taiwan as a nation- state with a limited amount of international recognition (by barely over twenty countries; Weller 2000).
The shift of sovereignty in Taiwan was toward a religious NGO rather than churches and secular NGOs as vehicles of governance, as Piot (2010) observes of the Pentecostal churches and NGOs in Togo. The governance that has given rise to certain forms of religious institutions under the state secularism is what I call a “regime of civic morality.” What is bullying about its charitable compassion is conveyed by means of the ideology and practice of civic morality.