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Publikace detail

Aging and Nation Building in Taiwan

Autoři: Horálek Adam

Rok: 2018

Druh publikace: ostatní - článek ve sborníku

Strana od-do: 217-230

Tituly:

Jazyk	Název	Abstrakt	Klíčová slova
eng	Aging and Nation Building in Taiwan	Taiwan has one of the fastest growing elderly population in the world. Not only Taiwan’s population is getting older in general, but thanks to the high life expectancy its super-old population is on extreme rise. Only between last two censuses in 2000 and 2010, the total population of those over 80 years of age has doubled. Current political leadership must deal with the essential and massive demographic change and starting in 2018, Taiwan is facing ten-year retirement age prolongation process and in 2026 the new official retirement age will be at 65 years. Dealing with rapid aging is nothing new, especially in Far East region (Japan, South Korea), however, in Taiwan the process is also encountered with unique identity formation. Taiwan is probably the only place where society is experiencing nation formation and aged-population creation at the same time. Most of developed countries worldwide, which deal with aging population, have passed the period of nation and nation-state formation a long time ago, like in Europe, China, Japan, or South Korea. Those countries currently struggling for their new national identity are mostly in their developing stage for which is characteristic that the population is very juvenile. Therefore, Taiwan represents a globally unique and unprecedented societal development. Both, national and aging question have become major political issues and therefore they are inevitably intertwined. In this paper, I argue that as the political discourse in Taiwan regarding national identity can be divided into pro-independent and pro-unification (or status-quo) mainstreams, also the approach to the aging and that the visions of welfare state policy are dependent on this dichotomy of two major parties – KMT and DPP.	Taiwan; aging; nation building; DPP; KMT; social policy