Post-Developmental State with the “Therapeutic” Turn: The Case of Taiwan. CANCELLED

The East Asian developmental states fell for decades due to global economic restructuring and their respective contradictions and dilemmas. Political exploration of post-developmental scenarios remains ongoing. In Taiwan, this exploration could be termed as “therapeutic turn” in three respects. First, the development of “welfare state”, as shown in the implementation of National Health Insurance, wherein population health became a new ideology of legitimation. Second, health industry in its inclusive sense has been targeted as a promising techno-economic paradigm, along with the descending information and communication industry, for a new mode of growth. Third, there is a ‘managerialistic-developmental’ creation of national system of innovation for promotion of the targeted industries. However, policy paradigm characteristic of marketization of healthcare system, profitization of health promotion on the one hand, and intensifying workfare regime on the other, contribution to a disjuncture among current mode of growth, regulatory regime and accumulation strategy, which turning to a more far-reaching organic crisis. Writing from regulation approach, this paper argues that why the ‘welfare turn’ is in fact a political project and illustrate how the therapeutic turn of Taiwanese post-developmental state runs into crisis.