What I learned when I was a child is that with the homemakers’ buying power to negotiate better environmental practices by farmers and so on, we gradually learned how to assemble, how to coordinate, how to—because it’s a co-op—run elections, and so on, still within an autocratic regime. But when Taiwan democratized in ‘96, when we had our first votes, already many of those charities, many spiritual associations, had more legitimacy than even the newly legitimate democratic government. And therefore, we’ve had a very strong ethos of working in the social sector to prototype small-d democracy, democratic change in the social sector through co-ops, through social entrepreneurship, before it gets translated into the practice of politics.

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