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Relational Practices and the Marginalization of Law: Informal Financial Practices of Small Businesses in Taiwan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Jane Kaufman Winn
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Abstract

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This article looks at one component of Taiwan's development experience, the informal financing techniques used by small businesses, to clarify the interaction between the formal Republic of China (ROC) legal system and the network structure of Taiwanese society. The ROC legal system has supported the economic development process direcdy by regulating economic activity, and indirectly by facilitating the networks of relationships that also regulate economic activity. The relational structure of traditional, rural Chinese society has survived in a modified form in modern Taiwan, and this modern form selectively blends elements of the modern legal system, networks of relationships, and the enforcement services of organized crime. Ideas such as “legal centralism” and “legal pluralism” fail to capture the dynamic of the relationship between the ROC legal system and Taiwanese society, so the idea of “marginalization of law” is offered as a better description.

Type
Law and Relational Business Practices in Taiwan
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , 1994 , pp. 193 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

Funding for the research presented here was provided by the Harvard Club of the Republic of China, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pacific Cultural Foundation, and Southern Methodist University. Earlier drafts were presented at the East Asian Legal Studies Institute of Harvard Law School; University of Texas School of Law; the 1992 Association of Asian Studies Annual Meeting; the 1992 Law & Society Association Annual Meeting; a conference on culture and development at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan; a conference on Chinese law at the University of British Columbia; and a Workshop on Chinese Capitalism and the Globalization of the Law at the Institute for Legal Studies of the University of Wisconsin. An earlier version is being published in Rubinstein (1994); an edited version will appear in Chinese in Taiwan Shehui Yenjiu Jikan (Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies).

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