boundary 2 45:3 (2018) DOI 10.1215/01903659-­6915629 © 2018 by Duke University Press
The Politics and Aesthetics of
Chinese Drama (Huajyu) in Taiwan
Fang-­chih Irene Yang
A new drama genre, Huajyu (Chinese Drama), emerged at the end
of 2011 that was touted as the flagship for Taiwan’s future drama production.
With the TV industry supporting and promoting the media hype, suddenly
Chinese Drama replaced idol drama1 as the “national drama” and
was considered best equipped to compete with Korean dramas. This essay
aims to investigate the conditions of possibilities that give rise to this cultural
form as well as the politics of its aesthetics.
Chinese Drama’s rise to visibility needs to be situated within the
dynamics of the interweaving of global, regional, and local forces, condensed
in the cultural-­economic concept of the “Chinese language market.”
As a product of global capital expansion through regionalization,
1. Idol drama is a genre that emerged in 2000, beginning with the hit Meteor Garden,
based on a script from Japanese comics. It is the product of Taiwanese localization
of Japan’s “trendy drama.” This genre is defined as having idols (beautiful actors and
actresses), urban romance, and placement ads. It is seen as having the capacity to generate
foreign revenue. Before the launch of Chinese Drama, San-­li station was the “kingdom
of idol drama,” as it produced the largest number of idol dramas in Taiwan.
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the Chinese language market helped to sustain the hegemony of “traditional
Chinese culture,” an invented tradition used to support the authoritarian
Kuomintang (KMT) regime, at the time when Taiwan was undergoing
democratization and decolonization. Chinese Drama, a new genre produced
for the Chinese language market (with China as the center), while
rhetorically legitimized through Taiwanese economic nationalism, has to
negotiate the divisions between Chineseness and Taiwaneseness aesthetically,
expressed through “traditional Chinese culture” and “Taiwanese
multicultural reality.” Using the first Chinese Drama production, Inborn Pair,
as an example, this essay argues that the aesthetic transaction narrates
Chinese traditional culture in ways that appeal to the imperialist gaze, while
multicultural reality is presented in ways that reproduce the ethnic hierarchy
and maintains the privileged status of Chineseness in Taiwan. The reprivileging
of Chineseness operates through the commodification of Taiwaneseness
as ethnicity, and thus as difference, in the age of globalization,
which works to the advantage of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and
the KMT’s goal for unification.
The first part of this essay discusses the notion of visibility through
the works of Rey Chow, Jacques Rancière, and Kara Keeling. The second
part employs the theoretical lens of the epistemic sense of visibility to
investigate the conditions of possibilities that give rise to Chinese Drama.
The third part looks into the aesthetics of Chinese Drama by first tracing
the historicity of hsiaochinghsin sentimentalism (a concept to be discussed
later), followed by an investigation of how traditional Chinese culture and
Taiwanese multicultural reality are narrated and negotiated. The essay concludes
with a discussion on the production and commodification of ethnicity
as difference.
The Politics of Visibility
In thinking about visibility, Rey Chow uses Gilles Deleuze to argue
for a methodology that takes into account not only the visible object but
also the invisible, the “forms of luminosity which are created by the light
itself and allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer”
(Deleuze 1988: 52, quoted in Chow 2007: 11). What is emphasized in
Rey Chow’s (and Deleuze’s) account is this: visibilities cannot not be confused
with an object or image or thing that is visible or perceptible. Visibilities
are “not defined by sight but are complexes of actions and passions,
actions and reactions, multisensorial complexes, which emerge into the
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Yang / Chinese Drama in Taiwan 151
light of day” (11). It is these complexes of “the epistemic sense of visibility”
or “a visibility of visibility” that Chow proposes to theorize as the conditions
of possibilities of complexes of passions, actions, and reactions. The concept
of visibility describes the “forms of luminosity” as “a visibility that is the
condition of possibility for what becomes visible, that may derive a certain
intelligibility from the latter but cannot be simply reduced to it. It is to this
other, epistemic sense of visibility—of visibility as the structuration of knowability”
(11).
If visibilities can be conceptualized as the conditions of possibilities
that define how we visualize the world, becoming visible becomes a project
of “discursive reconfiguration of the relations between center and margin”
(11). Participating in visibility is about engaging with changing power relations
(conditions of possibilities) that structure existing relations of visibility
and invisibility. This reading of visibility can be read in conjunction with Rancière’s
take on visibility.
Rancière uses the term the distribution of the sensible to describe
the relationship between aesthetics and art, police and politics, the visible
and the invisible. The distribution of the sensible is “the system of self-­
evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence
of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective
parts and positions within it” (Rancière 2004: 7). Visibilities, as what
constitutes the distribution of the sensible, are historically constituted and
shared within a community. Aesthetic practices are central to the shaping
of visibilities within a community in that it is “the system of a priori forms
determining what presents itself to sense experience” (8). Aesthetic practices
designate our place within a community and exclude others from the
standpoint of a community.
Images, in particular, televisual or cinematic images, are central to
aesthetic practices in the present due to the advances and spread of visual
technologies worldwide. The notion of aesthetics as a historically constituted
sense of visibility can be read in conjunction with Keeling’s notion of
the cinematic, borrowed from Deleuze. In Keeling’s formulation, the cinematic
(or in this case, the televisual) refers to “a conceptual framework
made perceptible or visible by the development of cinema [or television]. . . .
I employ the substantive the cinematic to designate a condition of existence,
or a reality, produced and reproduced by and within the regimes of
the image” (Keeling 2007: 3). The cinematic relies on clichés for its reproduction
of images as realities. Clichés are a type of common sense and
can be understood as “a common memory-­image directed onto a percep-
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tion prepared according to a common sensory-­motor schemata” (14). Clichés
allow us to see and make sense of reality in a particular way through
repeated invocations of memory-­image. As Keeling points out, “Clichés will
come to predominate perceptions under conditions wherein one’s set of
memory-­images is already a set of clichés or, speaking more broadly, when
that set consists of collective images, experiences, traditions, knowledges,
and so on, and when the bodily habituation that determines perception has
been made common through ‘affectivity’” (12).
Aesthetics, as “the system of a priori forms determining what
presents itself to sense experience,” is about the production and reproduction
of commonsense images, and, thus, they define our place within a
community. Politics, however, is about making common sense intelligible,
hence subverting our place made natural and perceptible by this visual
regime. “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about
it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the
properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (Rancière 2004: 8). In
other words, politics is about intervention into the relationship between the
visible and the invisible, the center and the margin. It is about asking “how
vision is structured, and . . . how difference is established, how it operates,
how and in what ways it constitutes subjects who see and speak in the
world” (Hammonds 1994; quoted in Keeling 2007: 11). The politics of (aesthetic)
visibility is about the politics of subject constitution.
This essay approaches the recent visibility of Chinese Drama
through the two aspects of visibility that Chow, Rancière, and Keeling explicate:
the epistemic sense of visibility and the aesthetic sense of visibility.
The epistemic sense of visibility allows us to investigate the conditions of
possibilities, in particular, the intertwining forces of globalization, regionalization,
and localization, that give rise to the visibility of this new genre. The
aesthetic sense of visibility enables us to look into the historicity of commonsense
images—that is, the shared experiences, collective images, traditions,
and knowledge that constitute “the cinematic” (or the televisual),
which gives us a place within a community. In thinking about the politics
of visibility through aesthetic practices, this essay dives into the history
of aesthetic forms in Chinese Drama in order to highlight the visibility of
“national” aesthetics as not only historically constituted but constituted
through struggles over power and dominance. The purpose of this essay is
to engage in politics, defined in Rancière’s term as disturbing the existing
distribution of the sensible by making clear the power relationships involved
in our commonsense images. In doing so, this essay wishes to disturb and
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Yang / Chinese Drama in Taiwan 153
subvert the dominance of Chineseness (hua, or zhonghuaxing) in cultural
productions in Taiwan.
The Epistemic Sense of Visibility as Conditions of Possibilities
Global Greater China Discourse and the Chinese Language Market
The birth of the Chinese Drama genre and its legitimacy is predicated
on the commonsense notion of “the Chinese language market” and,
thus, is touted as the drama genre best equipped to create competition
between the Chinese Wave (Hualiu) and the Korean Wave. The Chinese
language market (huayu shichang) has regulated most cultural production
since its emergence in the early 1990s and has become a hegemonic concept
guiding Taiwan’s cultural policies since the 2000s. This section investigates
the conditions of possibilities that gave rise to the emergence as
well as the dominance of the Chinese language market, including the rise
of China and globalization, technological change, and democratic/ethnic
struggles.
First, as David Shambaugh points out, one of the new realities characterizing
the post–­cold war world map was the emergence of “Greater
China,” a concept that subsumes three distinct but related political, economic,
and cultural processes (Shambaugh 1993; Harding 1993). The globalization
of the world economies and the opening up of China in the late
1970s marked a significant chapter in the formation of this “region.” The most
common theme about Greater China was the economic integration of the
transnational Chinese community. It was first referenced in the June 1979
issue of a Taiwanese journal, Changqiao (Long Bridge), which advocated
the creation of a “Chinese Common Market” that would link Taiwan, Hong
Kong, Macao, Singapore, and China (Harding 1993). Economic integration
is said to be facilitated by the cultural ties among these Chinese societies,
which share “common culture, a common language, family ties and ancestral
roots,” and all these make it “easier for Chinese to do business with one
another than to engage in commercial relations with foreigners” (Harding
1993: 665). Politically, both Taiwan and China’s governments were deeply
involved in promoting and guiding the commercial ties among their economies
for different reasons. For China, economic interaction was viewed as a
way of facilitating the eventual political reunification of China; for Taiwan, it
was a way to earn money and forestall independence (Harding 1993).
Second, the cultural and economic integration of Greater China
gave rise to the Chinese language market, which was also made possible
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by technological changes. The term came about in 1992, when China successfully
launched a satellite (Asia Satellite No. 1) and sold one of its channels
to Hong Kong to set up Star Chinese Channel. The establishment of
this satellite TV station was hailed as the beginning of “a brand new era
with sight and sound” in that it not only had the potential to “eliminate geographic
obstacles and penetrate national sovereignties” but also created a
“Chinese global village,” a community formed through “watching the same
television together” by “the Chinese, who belong to different nationals (sovereignties).”
In this utopian imagination about Greater China, “the Chinese
language programs would occupy a significant position in Asia,” displacing
or replacing the centrality of American, European, and Japanese programs
(Ku et al. 1992: 40).
Star Chinese Channel’s mission was to create a future Chinese community
by “devoting itself to cultivate a demand for Chinese programs to all
the Chinese in the pan-­Asian area and gather all the best Chinese programs
for the Chinese in Asia” (41). However, the reality of political restrictions
and linguistic differences within the “Chinese” community posed a
great challenge to these multinational corporations’ dreams of integration.
The strategy to eliminate these obstacles was to avoid politics and focus
on entertainment. As Chen Chi-­yeh, the general manager of Video Land
(Weilai) TV and the Chinese Satellite TV in Taiwan, said at the time, “There
is no need to give it too much social and cultural responsibility. Satellite TV
should develop according to human nature and needs. . . . The programs
will be based on everyday life entertainment” (42). In this multinational corporation’s
expansionist dream, Taiwan was positioned as “the stepping
stone to China’s market” (Wu and Ku 1994: 18) as well as “the production
center for Chinese language programs in the world in the future” due to its
“capital, techniques, and talents” (Ku et al. 1992: 45).
Third, this globalization through regionalization discourse on Greater
China “from above” was adopted in Taiwan as a strategy for struggles over
ethnic dominance in television production at a time when Taiwan underwent
democratization. Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Taiwan
embarked on the twin processes of democratization and neoliberal globalization,
while at the same time, it began a new stage of opening up to
China. In media policy terms, this meant the lifting of Mandarin-­only language
restrictions (in 1993) to allow for Tâi-­gí2 production, media deregula-
2. In Taiwan, a significant part of the struggle over democracy takes place in the domain
of language. Tâi-­gí, also known as Taiyu in Mandarin or Taiwanese or Minnanhua, was
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Yang / Chinese Drama in Taiwan 155
tion (the establishment of the fourth network [FTV], and the legalization of
cable TV in 1994), and the beginning of television coproduction with China.
Before that, television was part of the ideological state apparatus for the
KMT party state, and the television industry was structured according to
“patron-­client dependency,” with capitalists conforming to the KMT’s ideological
demand in return for having a share in the industry. This industrial
structure allowed the KMT Mainlander elite to control TV production.
As democratization challenged the hegemony of Mandarin and the KMT
monopoly over the industry, a new genre, Hsiangtu (rural and earthly)
Drama,3 produced by FTV, emerged, featuring “everyday life in Taiwan,” in
particular, that of mother- and daughter-­in-­law relationships. As this genre
used Tâi-­gí as its primary language and was immensely popular among
women, the Mainlander elites in the entertainment industry felt threatened
and used the global Greater China discourse to denigrate Hsiangtu Drama
(Yang 2015).
In this discourse, the Mainlander producers and directors constructed
Hsiangtu Drama for “elementary school level audiences,” and
as such it was too local and too small-­minded to reach international audiences.
The chief manager of Chinese Television System (CTS), in an internal
policy meeting, stated, “Media business should aim at more trendy
topics and international markets, not to serve elementary-­school level audiences”
(Chen 1997: 12). Those “new shows which have begun to move
forward to seriously consider the Chinese language market” (12) are celedesignated
as a dialect and banned during the KMT authoritarian regime. However, as
many linguists assert, the difference between a language and a dialect is ideological and
political, not linguistic (Klöter 2009). I use the term Tâi-­gí for several reasons. First, it is
a language of resistance/decolonization against the KMT’s privileging of Mandarin. Second,
the term marks the boundary between China and Taiwan as well as other regional
dialects (as opposed to the use of Hokkien in that Tâi-­gí is much influenced by Japanese).
Third, some people call Tâi-­gí Taiwanese, but this term might obscure other languages,
such as Hakka. The use of Tâi-­gí or Taiyu acknowledges the multilinguistic environment
in Taiwan and does not claim dominance. Taiyu, however, is a Mandarin term; hence, I
choose to use Tâi-­gí as it is pronounced as such in Tâi-­gí.
3. Hsiangtu Drama, literally translated as “rural and earthly drama,” features Tâi-­gí as
its primary language. However, since the 2000s, the term Bentu Drama has replaced
Hsiangtu Drama because it is seen as less derogatory. Both refer to serial TV dramas
that feature Tâi-­gí as the primary language, even though the content and format have
evolved to adapt to the changing times. Since the 2000s, Bentu Drama has become more
“modern,” in the sense that it deals with love and power struggles in the family, the business
world, and in politics, while Hsiangtu Drama refers to those dealing primarily with
mother- and daughter-­in-­law relationships.
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156 boundary 2 / August 2018
brated as having the vision to leave Taiwan’s small, local audience behind
and develop international markets.
Since the 2000s, the Chinese language market has gained hegemony
due to two factors. First, the entanglement of neoliberalization and
democratization has led to democratization without the corresponding transitional
justice in Taiwan. In the TV industry, the dominance of the KMT
Waisheng/Mainlander elites was never addressed or reformed and was
complicated by the privatization of the industry, which led to the penetration
of China’s influences through capital investment, with these elites playing
a major role in this process. Media industries that promoted pro-­China
agendas were financially supported by the Chinese state, leading to the
formation of a new patron-­client dependency between pro-­China capitalists
and the Chinese state (Hut 2013). Second, with the regime’s loss in 2000,
the KMT officially took up the strategy of “Allying with Communist China
to Fight against the Pro-­Independence DPP Party” (liangong zhi taidu) in
2006. The support of China in winning presidential elections in 2008 and
2012 meant that a significant part of the KMT’s agenda was to promote
economic and cultural integration with China, resulting in the revisibility of
“traditional Chinese culture” in education and media.
Culture played an important role in this process. The Chinese state,
the KMT state, and cross-­strait capitalists promulgated a cultural-­economic
concept of the “Chinese language market” for political purposes. In this
discourse, what bound China and Taiwan is Chinese culture: “Taiwan’s
strength is its Chinese culture with Taiwanese characteristics. It is its best
niche in the world” due to its more sophisticated and advanced media
industry (Ma 2010). Proponents of this view in Taiwan were mostly Mainlanders
who occupied significant positions in the creative industries in Taiwan
(such as Wang Wei-­chong) and political positions (such as Long Ying-­tai,
the minister of culture in Taiwan) (Yang 2015). As a discourse of power, the
concept of the Chinese language market gained hegemony and laid the
groundwork for the articulation of the “Chinese Wave.”
The Birth of the “Chinese Wave” and Chinese Drama
If the Greater China and Chinese language market are discourses of
globalization via regionalization that aim to cross national borders, the Chinese
Wave is the product of the internal contradictions of global capitalism
in that it is predicated on economic nationalism (Harvey 2005). However,
what is ironic about the term Chinese Wave is that it is embedded in the
politics of imperialist gaze, which, in turn, is taken as the self-­identity of the
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Yang / Chinese Drama in Taiwan 157
colonized. It was first coined by the Japanese, who viewed its ex-­colony’s
television drama Meteor Garden through the lens of nostalgia. Through
nostalgia, Taiwan was positioned in the past as “unsophisticated, naïve,
innocent, backward,” while the Japanese fans saw themselves as living in
the present modern time. The popularity of Meteor Garden was constructed
by the Japanese as the beginning of the Chinese Wave (Hualiu), which had
the potential to compete with the Korean Wave (Chou 2012).
The term Hualiu was taken up by Taiwan’s media industry as a placeholder
for the desire for capital through regional expansion, even though
the term Chinese (zhonghua or hua) stimulated different debates and interpretations
due to Taiwan’s conflicts over national identities. The initial claim
of Tai-­liu (Taiwan wave) over Hualiu by the pro-­independence newspaper
Liberty Times soon gave way to “Chinese Wave” as the Chinese Language
market gained authority. However, there are two interpretations of the Hua/
Chinese, based on two different economic nationalisms. The first interpretation
is promoted primarily by the Mainlander elites in Taiwan and cultural
producers from China, with the institutional support of the Taipei City
government under Hao, Long-­bin’s administration.4 In this discourse, culture
is the instrument for political unification, but this is legitimized through
economics. What is promoted is “cultural consensus” (wenhua gongshi),5
which can be achieved through coproduction, with an emphasis on traditional
Chinese culture, as it is the shared consensus and heritage across
the strait. Central to this discourse is the notion that market is power, and
China’s market is the foundation of the Chinese Wave. The Taiwanese are
best equipped to work with the Chinese through coproduction in developing
creative industries, not only because they share with the Chinese the same
culture/language and blood/race (tongwen tongzhong) but also because
they are creative (Chen and Shao 2014).
The second discourse shares with the first discourse the neoliberal
notion of culture as economic resource and China as the primary market
for the Chinese Wave. But what is different is that it does not claim unifica-
4. This discourse is promoted by the Taiwan Cultural and Creative Industry Association,
which aims to “create a platform for the creative industries to work toward mutual benefits”
between Taiwan and China. One of the founders is Li Yong-­ping, ex-­vice mayor of
Taipei City. The aim of this association is to provide policy advice for the government.
Accessed January 20, 2015. http://tccanet.org.tw/tcca-­intro.html.
5. The concept of cultural consensus is promoted by Shao Yu-­ming, a Mainlander elite
who served as the director for the Information Bureau during the authoritarian regime. He
is now the general manager in charge of the National Public Television station.
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158 boundary 2 / August 2018
tion but operates through Taiwanese economic nationalism, even though
this “Taiwaneseness” is conflated with “Chineseness” as a result of the
KMT’s Chinese nation-­building. In this discourse, Taiwan’s competitiveness
in developing creative industries lies in its unique cultural heritage:
multiculturalism centered in Chineseness and Chinese language. “Taiwan
has multicultural elements. Its culture is influenced by Japan, Holland, and
America but the primary cultural gene is Chinese culture DNA. Chinese
culture is recreated in Taiwan” (Wu and Hung 2003: 133). “Taiwan’s sensitivity
to Chinese language is leading the trend, it is better than HK and Singapore.”
As such, “for Mainland China, Taiwan is a model student of Western
culture, for the West, Taiwan is the spokesperson for Chinese culture”
(133). The histories of colonization or domination are rewritten in a way that
is emptied of exploitation, struggle, injustice, and the shedding of sweat
and blood, but filled with the halo of “multiculturalism,” which then gets
turned into economic competitiveness. This “Taiwanese” economic nationalism
expressed through cultural production aims to compete not only with
the Chinese but also the Japanese and, in particular, the Koreans (Yi 2014).
The central figure in articulating the Chinese Wave dream and
putting it into practice is Chang Rong-­hua, San-­li TV station’s manager,
who embraces the second discourse. Chang launched a “Chinese Wave
project” in 2011, aiming to use Chinese Drama to create the Chinese Wave:
“San-­li hopes to use Chinese Drama to trigger the Chinese Wave cultural
phenomenon and export Taiwan’s culture and lifestyle in order to position
Taiwan in the lead. Faced with the large number of Korean dramas which
make up the core of the Korean Wave worldwide, Chang said, you need
quantity in order to make trends, you can’t just have quality, quantity matters”
(Cheng 2012: 9).
However, to make the Chinese Wave in the context of Taiwan means
to shed oneself of one’s mother tongue and culture. As the Mainlander
elites won the battle in hegemonizing the Greater China discourse through
the neoliberal rhetoric of “internationalization,” Chang had to denounce
his ethnic origin in order to reach the privileged signifier of Chineseness,
now cloaked as the Chinese language market. According to the interview
in Business Weekly, Chang established the San-­li TV station in 2004 and
used “restaurant shows”6 to gain a foothold in the TV industry. “Moving
6. “Restaurant shows” (Chanting shows) refers to a genre of live variety shows performed
in restaurants. With the invention of video technology, San-­li station also distributes this
genre in VCD format. The shows aired on television from 1985 to the 1990s. This genre is
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Yang / Chinese Drama in Taiwan 159
to Taipei and meeting those elites from the political and business world,
Chang realized the ‘vulgarity’ of his shows.” Moreover, “for a country bumpkin
like Chang Rong-­hua, to make San-­li into the mainstream is like eating
French food for the first time. He takes a peek at other people for proper
table manners and imitates them. Of course, he will receive contemptuous
looks from them.” To eradicate the stigma and improve his status, he
canceled these shows in order to establish San-­li as the “Kingdom of idol
dramas,” a drama genre that features Mandarin and is a better-­quality production
than Hsiangtu Drama because of its ability to reach the overseas
market (Lin 2010). The second move was to “upgrade” idol drama production
to Chinese Drama production. This was considered to be “making
progress for the station.” However, as the aim of Chinese Drama was to
reach China’s market, Chang had to cancel a popular political talk show
(dahuasinwen) that was critical of the KMT and the CCP; the Chinese state
considered such criticism the main obstacle in reaching China (Sun 2012).
In mapping out the conditions of possibilities that make Chinese
Drama visible in this particular historical conjuncture, I emphasize how
the global(ization) discourse of Greater China is appropriated locally for
domination. If the Greater China discourse, as Harding states, subsumes
political, economic, and cultural dimensions, what this mapping illustrates
is how these three dimensions intertwine with each other to privilege the
already powerful. Economically, the integration of Greater China is centered
in China, and this allows China to be constructed as a big market,
hence the desirability of the Chinese language market. Politically, this discourse
is used to forestall independence and suppress democratization
and even to hinder political dissents in Taiwan. Culturally, through the neoliberal
rhetoric of culture as economic resource, traditional Chinese culture
becomes an asset in developing the Chinese language market as it is
constructed to be shared by all Chinese. However, traditional Chinese culture
has been used as a tool for domination in the KMT’s Chinese nation-­
building since its occupation in Taiwan. The KMT Mainlander elites have
used traditional Chinese culture to create divisions within the nation by
asserting its superiority over Taiwanese languages and cultures through
the implementation of policies and the control of the culture industries. The
birth of Chinese Drama is implicated in these political-­economic and cultural
processes. If the mainstream narrative of producing Chinese Drama
known for its vulgarity, not only because of its use of Tâi-­gí as the primary language but
also its dirty jokes.
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160 boundary 2 / August 2018
is constructed as “progress,” this “moving up” to Chineseness is entangled
in the divisive politics of cultural hierarchy formed through inclusion, exclusion,
and marginalization, but masked under the rubric of Taiwanese economic
nationalism.
Visibility as Aesthetics
How does Chinese Drama, a product of the cultural economy, which
operates through Taiwanese economic nationalism but aspires to Chineseness,
reconcile with the incompatibility of Taiwaneseness and Chineseness
in the context of Taiwan? I argue that it is through aesthetics that the
unequal division between Chineseness and Taiwaneseness is reconciled
and made natural and national. This section uses Inborn Pair (2012), the
first Chinese Drama, as a primary example of this genre, to investigate how
hsiaochinghsin sentimentalism (to be discussed later), as “a historically
constituted regime of perception and intelligibility,” comes to be defined as
the “national” aesthetic and how this aesthetic relies on the employment of
commonsense “Tai” (Taiwanese) images to produce and reproduce a hierarchical
social reality that privileges Chineseness.
What constitutes Chineseness in aesthetic terms? Chang Ron-­hua,
the founder of Chinese Drama, invoked a historically constituted commonsense
cultural hierarchy to identify and differentiate Chinese Drama. The
family, according to him, is the defining feature of Chinese Drama, as distinguished
from Bentu (native) Drama but on a par with Korean drama, except
that the “everyday life culture” in Taiwan is different from that in Korea. For
Chang, the family is the site where everyday life is enacted, and at the core
of the family is love, both romantic love and familial love. Love differentiates
Chinese Drama from Bentu Drama as it is “positive, warm, and aspiring and
thus, suitable for family viewing,” and Taiwanese audiences “need to adapt
to this new mode” (You 2012). Chang notes that both Chinese Drama and
Korean drama are about family matters, but what distinguishes Chinese
Drama is Taiwanese food and lifestyle, and he has made it his mission to
export this “Taiwaneseness” (Yi 2012; You 2012).
In this discourse, there is a slippage between Taiwaneseness and
Chineseness. On the one hand, Chineseness is to be distinguished from
Taiwaneseness or bentu (the native), which connotes vulgarity historically,
as a result of KMT rule. On the other hand, Chineseness is seen as Taiwaneseness
through food, which can be made for pleasure and profit. Moreover,
what Chang does here is to identify a particular kind of Chineseness
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Yang / Chinese Drama in Taiwan 161
that is constructed as unique to Taiwan—the hsiaochinghsin aesthetic—
with an emphasis on positive, warm, and aspiring feelings. This is, I will
argue, a particular kind of “Chinese sentimentalism in Taiwan.”
In discussing “Chinese” sentimentalism, Chow traces two theorizations
of sentimentalism: European and Anglo-­American feminist thought.
The first conceptualizes sentimentalism in temporal terms—that is, sentimentalism
is about the irreversibility of temporal differentiation or the passing
of time. It is a nostalgia and sentimental feeling toward nature—“the
condition of simple and sensuous wholeness”—toward that which has
been destroyed in modernity. Anglo-­American feminist thought, on the
other hand, sees sentimentalism as a form of power struggle in that socially
marginalized groups, in particular, women, find empowerment through cultural
forms (women’s genres) that are themselves being marginalized but
at the same time deal with women’s experiences of subordination. Through
an explication of the two kinds of sentimentalism, Chow argues that sentimentalism
should be rethought as a “discursive constellation, . . . one that
traverses affect, time, identity, and social mores, and whose contours tend
to shift and morph under different cultural circumstances and likely with different
genres, forms, and media” (Chow 2007: 17).
This move allows Chow to appropriate Western sentimentalism to
describe Chinese sentimentalism, wenqing zhuyi, with an emphasis on
warmth and moderation, and, hence, it can be read as “a mode of endurance,
. . . whose contours tend to remain fuzzy rather than sharply delineated
and whose effects may easily be apprehended as (a prevailing) tone”
(18). The family is central to the imagination about sentimentalism, as the
family marks the boundary between interiority and exteriority; it is through
the construction of the inside as a refuge away from the outside challenges
that the family becomes the embodiment of imagination about desire, emotion,
and belonging. “The sentimental is ultimately about being accommodating,
and being accommodated, about the delineation and elaboration of
a comfortable/homely interiority, replete with the implications of exclusion
that such delineation and elaboration by necessity entail” (19).
In mapping the specific content of “Chinese” sentimentality, Chow
includes filiality, domesticity (the preparation, consumption, and sharing
and/or offering of food), poverty (the condition of economic deprivation
and social powerlessness), childhood and old age, the sight or knowledge
of the exertion of physical labor, togetherness and separation, a preference
for familial/social harmony and reconciliation, and self-­restraint and
self-­sacrifice (qualities that are essential to group unity). Despite Chow’s
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162 boundary 2 / August 2018
emphasis on the open-­endedness of “Chineseness” as a way to repudiate
the centrality of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and validate the
claims to Chineseness from various diasporic Chinese in different locations
(24), this mapping, in using the term Chinese, should be seen as a discursive
event to define the aesthetics of (pan-­)Chineseness as the aesthetic
objects chosen cross the boundaries of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
What distinguishes Chinese Drama in Taiwan from this pan-­Chinese
aesthetic or sentimentalism is hsiaochinghsin, a tone that emphasizes happiness
and lightness as opposed to the heaviness of Chinese sentimentalism
(poverty, exertion of physical labor, and so on). Hsiaochinghsin is the
embodiment of Chineseness in Taiwaneseness and has therefore become
constructed as the national aesthetic in the discourse on Chinese Drama.
Hsiaochinghsin refers to both “small-­budget production” as well as “everyday
life” associated with triviality and lightness, dressed up as a kind of
warm, positive “lifestyle.” Hsiaochinghsin, I argue, in the rhetoric on the Chinese
Wave and Chinese Drama, is involved in the double gaze of “imperialist
nostalgia,” to use Renato Rosaldo’s term, as well as in the contemporary
cultural strategies of commodification of differences for social control.
In terms of imperialist nostalgia, as I pointed out earlier, the concept of the
Chinese Wave was first discovered by the Japanese who, through television
drama, saw its ex-­colony as embodying nature and backwardness,
in this case, simplicity and innocence. Taiwan was placed in the projected,
imaginary temporal past, which signified plenitude, a past that had been
destroyed by modernization in Japan and could now be found in Taiwan.
With the rise of China and the predominance of Chinese language market
discourse, hsiaochinghsin was constructed to address the demands of
white-­collar workers in China, as they now had to face the effects of modernization,
and hence their longing for a premodern simplicity: “Taiwan’s
pursuit of the hsiaochinghsin lifestyle also satisfies the rise of a massive
number of white-­collar Chinese. On the one hand, it heals the pressures of
competition that are experienced by them; on the other hand, it offers them
a sense of comfort and quietness in life in the age of information overflow”
(Huang and Yen 2013).
This imperialist gaze gets turned inward and constructed as national
(Taiwanese) competitiveness in the age of globalization. The historicity of
“nationalizing” this hsiaochinghsin aesthetic as common sense in Taiwan is
a process of sinicization, a process of mythmaking, to use Roland Barthes’s
term, in the sense that Chineseness, with the support of institutional and
military power, comes to occupy the signifier of Taiwaneseness while at the
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Yang / Chinese Drama in Taiwan 163
same time, it empties out its original meaning by a process of exclusion and
devaluation. A brief foray into the historicity of the hsiaochinghsin aesthetic
is necessary in order to address the politics of Chinese Drama.
The hsiaochinghsin aesthetic, characterized by small-­budget production
as well as an emphasis on positive, warm, and aspiring feelings in
content, can be traced to the “healthy realism” of the early 1960s (which
was transformed into a “healthy variety” in 1968) and was later taken up
by the New Wave in Taiwanese cinema in the 1980s. The genre of healthy
realism, invented by Gong Hung from Central Motion Picture, is the ideological
product that aims to support the KMT’s project of Chinese nation-­
building in Taiwan. The “healthy” in healthy realism is defined as adherence
to “the government’s political purpose in illustrating the bright nature of
human being in all cultural works. Realism is used to appeal to the market
and consumer taste. . . . Healthy realism revolves around neighborhood,
family, familial ethics and relationships” (Lee 1997: 122). Huang further
illustrates the concept of healthy realism as the triumph of good over evil in
family matters: “More forgiveness will bring us more peace and happiness
in our society. Gong Hung makes it the primary mission of healthy realism
to guide people to inspire to do good. . . . Healthy realism is characterized
by bentuhua and hsiangtuhua [nativization, meaning the use of the contemporary
background for plot purposes] and is most suitable to carry out
the film industry’s propaganda mission in promoting the Provincial Government’s
bentuhua policy” (Huang 2011).
The government’s demand for “healthy realism” was also written into
television policies when television became the predominant mode of family
entertainment in the 1970s. In 1976, the Information Bureau implemented
the first Broadcasting Law, which declared that the mission of television
was to promote Chinese culture, ethics, and tradition. When translated into
policy terms by way of restrictions on drama content, traditional Chinese
culture meant: no more than one quarter of the content could describe the
dark side of life; there could be no depiction of the triumph of the villain over
the hero or of ethnic/racial tensions; no negative portrayal of the rich or the
upper class as immoral or as using their power to exploit people; no positive
portrayal of the lower class or ordinary people as possessing a better sense
of justice; no description of antifamily values and no negative portrayal of
military or government officials; and no depiction of people as possessing
super powers (Chiang 1979: 67–68).
The migration of healthy realism from film to television not only
reflected the government’s demand for social control; it was also the result
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164 boundary 2 / August 2018
of the migration of talent from film to TV, which was also implicated in language
policies and politics. On the one hand, scriptwriters and producers
brought the healthy variety genre to television, making healthy variety
the predominant mode of the women’s genre in the prime-­time slot. One
example is Chiong Yao, whose literary works were adapted into healthy
variety genre films in the 1960s and 1970s, and later to television, transforming
into prime-­time productions in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other
hand, the promotion of healthy realism in the film industry also marked
the dominance of Mandarin films and the decline of Tâi-­gí films (the previous
mainstream, as Tâi-­gí was the language spoken by the majority of
the population) in the 1960s (Lee 1997). Many Tâi-­gí–­speaking actors and
actresses moved to television in the 1970s, but, unlike the Mainlander producers
such as Chiong Yao, who monopolized prime-­time productions,
these entertainers could only appear in marginalized slots with limited
broadcasting time or minor/clown characters because of their bad Mandarin.
This is further reinforced by the language policies that decreed “dialect
programs should not exceed 16 percent of all programs” in 1972; “a
gradual reduction of dialect programs each year” in 1976, and “each network
was allowed to broadcast Tâi‑gí/Minnanyu programs for no more than
one hour each day” in 1979 as part of the project of promoting traditional
Chinese culture (Yang 2015).
The tracing of this history of hsiaochinghsin as “national” sentimentalism
expressed through aesthetics aims to bring about the politics of
“nationalism”: how Tâi-­gí cultural production is marginalized, excluded, and
devalued in order for Chineseness (the embodiment of traditional Chinese
culture) to become the privileged signifier in Taiwan. This Chineseness,
cloaked in the name of traditional Chinese culture, turned itself inward
through the imperialist nostalgic gaze dressed as global capital/Chinese
language market, is narrated as Taiwan’s comparative advantage, and thus
becomes the ground for Taiwan’s economic nationalism. Hsiaochinghsin
sentimentalism functions ideologically to solve the contradictions and divisions
within the nation while simultaneously engaging in a power struggle
that privileges Chineseness, a concept promoted both by the PRC and the
KMT Ma regime.
Chinese Drama has to reconcile the imperialist nostalgia for an innocent
and simple past and the Taiwanese present reality. Its strategy is to
use “traditional Chinese culture” to satisfy the imperialist gaze and contemporary
Taiwanese multiculturalism for Taiwanese audiences—an official
discourse on Taiwanese identity during the Democratic Progressive Party
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Yang / Chinese Drama in Taiwan 165
(DPP) regime from 2000 to 2008. In Inborn Pair, “traditional Chinese culture”
is manifested in three ways. First, the old practice of “betrothal when
still in the womb by parents of both parties” is the primary motive that drives
the plot. The young couple, despite their dislike of each other, is forced to
fake their marriage because the male protagonist’s grandmother fakes a
terminal illness and wishes to see them married before her death—a promise
she made to her benefactor years ago when the young couple were
both still in the womb. This old marriage practice is meant to convey that
love is destiny, an idea also supported by folk religion. The couple first
meet in a temple when each of their elderly grandparents takes them to
the temple to pray for marriage. The plotting of these “premodern” cultural
practices means that the couple will get married first (before sex), to be followed
by the conventional formula of romance and courtship—love lost and
gained, obstacles conquered, and final union guaranteed.
Second, the notion of filial piety is emphasized, as is the
traditional/“premodern” big family. The female protagonist, Yu-­jie, marries
into Wei-­hsiang’s family, and within this family, the focus is on a hierarchy
based on age, generation, and gender, with filial piety and obedience functioning
as rules of conduct. For example, the grandmother is the matriarch
and has absolute power over everyone. Out of filial piety, the couple is
forced to fake not only marriage but also pregnancy. Moreover, rather than
promote the nuclear family popular today, the family featured here is multigenerational,
consisting of three and even four generations. This allows the
show to bring in more complicated family interactions, such as featuring
two more couples’ love lives as subplots (in this case, the male protagonist’s
brother and sister).
Third, a “traditional” gender order is guaranteed through the ideological
closure of a happy ending. Despite all the obstacles, the show ends
happily. Happiness is about the attainment of “family”—marriage and
children. The three couples not only stay married (after divorces, but the
women remarry the same men), but all give birth to sons and daughters.
And women, despite their initial ambitions, all give up their careers and
become full-­time mothers.
The discourse on multiculturalism as Taiwan’s present unique reality
is also incorporated into Inborn Pair, but this multiculturalism, mediated
through hsiaochinghsin sentimentalism, serves to affirm the privilege of
Chineseness. First, as stated previously, the mission of Chinese Drama is
to sell Taiwan’s lifestyle, represented through food culture. In Inborn Pair,
the grandmother is allowed to eat only healthy, though bland, food because
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166 boundary 2 / August 2018
of her fake cancer. But she desires Taiwanese snacks so much that she
sneaks out for a good meal and is later caught misbehaving. In addition,
the show emphasizes how love is expressed through food—the female protagonist’s
mother makes chicken soup for her because she misses her,
as she now has to live in her in-­law’s house. As a sign of reconciliation,
the daughter-­in-­law helps the mother-­in-­law cook. And so on and so forth.
Multiculturalism is defined in terms of food, which is symbolic of familial
love and warmth. This feeling of sentimentalism about food is made to generate
profit, which is in accordance with Taiwan’s official policy to promote
food tourism. According to the Tourism Bureau, Taiwan’s culinary culture
is composed not only of “foreign food from all over the world” and Taiwanese
snacks but also “fine authentic cuisine from all the different regions of
China” (Taiwan Tourism Bureau 2015a). And Chinese cuisine, with its constructed
glory through “traditional Chinese culture,” is again positioned as
the center among a variety of food cultures: “Chinese cuisine goes back to
ancient times and achieves its present level of excellence through the accumulation
of thousands of years of practical knowledge and experiences in
cookery” (Taiwan Tourism Bureau 2015b).
Multicultural reality is also narrated through plot arrangement and
the employment of historically constituted commonsense images. Chinese
Drama, like its predecessor, idol drama, follows the convention of the Cinderella
love formula. In Inborn Pair, the female protagonist, following the
generic convention, must come from an “ordinary” family and speak good
Mandarin to de-­ethnicize herself so as to ensure that the audience identifies
with but does not laugh at her. The ethnicized “Taiwanese” mother,
played by Yang Li-­yin, is essential to the female protagonist’s family, along
with a sidekick grandfather (played by Chen Bo-­cheng), a minor figure who
is associated with the mother and the female protagonist. The male protagonist,
in addition to being handsome and tender, must come from a
good family, ethnically marked as Waishengren/Mainlander. The father of
the male protagonist in Inborn Pair is the owner of a big corporation (an
amusement park), and the mother is an elegant, well-­educated, but spoiled
housewife, played by Yang Chie-­mei. The hsiaochinghsin sentimentalism
is expressed via the commonsense image of the Taiwanese mother figure
and her sidekicks, with an emphasis on their Tâi-­gí–­accented Mandarin
and their physical vulgarity.
These commonsense images are historically constituted and, I
argue, are the legacies of KMT semicolonialism in Taiwan, which aimed
to construct the superiority of Chinese culture and the inferiority of Tai-
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Yang / Chinese Drama in Taiwan 167
wanese culture. First, the ethnically marked male sidekicks can be argued
as representing resistance to the state’s imperative of healthy and positive
principles (Lee 1997). In the 1970s, when healthy realism/variety was
at its peak, Hsu Buliao, a Tâi-­gí comedian, was the embodiment of “vulgarity”
because of his emphasis on physicality and his jokes about “out-­
of-­placeness”—meaning those who do not follow social norms. This vulgar
Tai figure can be traced to Wangge Liuge You Taiwan (Brother Wang
and Brother Liu Tour Taiwan), a Chaplin-­influenced Taiwanese film. In the
film, both the skinny and the fat protagonists speak Tâi-­gí and are uneducated.
They won the lottery and now travel around Taiwan; hence, the
film is about the imagination of the Republic of China (ROC) nation. It is
about the country bumpkins’ (the Taiwanese) encountering modernity (Taipei)
and the Other (indigenous people). What makes the film funny is the
actors’ physical clumsiness, their sincerity, their simplicity, and their backwardness
when they meet civilized people, the urbanites in Taipei and the
wealthy of the modern city. Their slapstick comedy style constitutes the
vulgarity of Tai-­ness. Through repeated productions and reproductions of
these images, which make up our sense of reality, these images become
common sense and a signature of Chinese Drama. Chen Po-­cheng, a constant
figure in Chinese Drama and its predecessor, idol drama, plays such
a character. In Inborn Pair, he is the grandfather of the female protagonist
and is sincere, nice, but uneducated and unsophisticated (sometimes
stupid). In the idol drama My Queen (Loser Dog Queen), he plays a temple
guard who is in pursuit of the female protagonist’s mother. In this role, he is
superstitious, and dances and dresses in ways that are tawdry and vulgar
so as to arouse laughter. These are the Tai characters, as opposed to the
middle-, or upper-­middle-class Waisheng fathers, who are doctors, lawyers,
professors, or owners of multinational corporations—professions that command
respect in Taiwanese society.
Lin Mei-­Hsiu and Yang Li-­yin are the embodiment of Tai mothers in
Chinese Drama. They are portrayed as simple, unsophisticated, optimistic,
sometimes stupid, but always loving and caring toward their children. Yang
plays the mother of the female protagonist in Inborn Pair and Mommy’s
Boyfriends. In Inborn Pair, her love for her daughter exceeds her rationality
so that sometimes she gets into fights with her son-­in-­law’s mother. Her
love toward her daughter is shown in a direct and simple way. In Mommy’s
Boyfriends, the mother raises her children by herself and is very forgiving,
but sometimes also stupid enough to make big mistakes. In My Queen,
the mother, played by Lin Mei-­hsiu, sells sweet potatoes (the metaphor for
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168 boundary 2 / August 2018
Taiwan). She is obese and has hemorrhoids, which cause her to act in a
physically exaggerated manner. These images contrast with the Waisheng
mothers, who are “princess” figures: elegant, educated, and cultured but
need to be pampered and taken care of (as in Inborn Pair and Mommy’s
Boyfriends).
These commonsense images have been discursively constructed
to demonstrate the superiority of Chinese culture and hence Waishengren
over Taiwanese culture and Tâi‑gí–­speaking people. This is the “double
vision of the white [in this case, Chinese] eyes through which they are seen,”
which Stuart Hall refers to when critiquing the colonizers’ representations
of the Other (Hall 1995: 22): the simultaneous glorification and demonization
of the Other. On the one hand, there is an emphasis on simplicity,
purity, innocence; on the other hand, such simplicity descends into ignorance,
stupidity, and vulgarity. This historically constituted “image reality”
is now constructed as the essence of Taiwaneseness and has become Taiwan’s
comparative advantage in the Chinese language market:
Minnan culture is one of the reasons why the Chinese like Taiwanese
dramas (in particular, the role of the mother). . . . We can use Minnan
culture to express Taiwaneseness because Taiwan’s culture comes
from Minnan and Minnan culture is rooted in Taiwan. . . . Her most
impressive characteristics are optimism and simplicity, which give
the audiences time to breathe and even laugh. . . . They have nothing
to worry about except their children; they have naturally become
optimistic and simple. . . . What characterizes Minnan women is
their ability to endure hardships and their domesticity. . . . Minnan
women’s natural inclination toward domesticity won’t be changed
because of their social status or educational level. Taking up domestic
responsibility is in their bones. (Yuan 2014)
In this narrative, the ethnic difference constructed to legitimize the authoritarian
KMT regime before democratization is now incorporated into the
Greater China narrative by linking Taiwan’s cultural origin to China, while
positioning China as the de-­ethnicized center. But this time, the process of
ethnicization is made to conform to the ideological imperative of the CCP
and the KMT elites for unification in the name of Taiwan’s comparative
advantage. Chang Rong-­hua’s promotion of Chinese Drama through Taiwanese
economic nationalism, by way of the ethnicization and commodification
of the figure of “Minnan woman,” works to legitimize the political purposes
of the CCP and KMT elites.
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Yang / Chinese Drama in Taiwan 169
Conclusion
This essay approaches the emergence and ascendancy of the Chinese
Drama genre through two ways of conceptualizing visibility: the epistemic
sense of visibility, and visibility as aesthetics. The first perspective
situates Chinese Drama within the dynamics of the intertwining of global,
regional, and local forces. The globalization via regionalization discourse of
Greater China paved the way for the emergence and dominance of the Chinese
language market, facilitated by technological changes, which came to
regulate the field of cultural production in Taiwan. Supported by global capital,
this discourse was used to engage in ethnic dominance by Mainlander
elites in the TV industry when they faced the threat of democratization in
the early 1990s. With the changes in Taiwan’s politics, an alliance between
CCP and the KMT elites was formed, and the Chinese language market
became the economic and cultural tool for their promotion of unification
since the 2000s. The hegemony of Chinese language brought about the
reprivileging of “traditional Chinese culture.”
The birth of the Chinese Wave and Chinese Drama is implicated in
these layers of struggles. On the one hand, there is the political struggle
over national identities through ethnicization; on the other hand, national
identities have to reconcile with the hegemony of the neoliberal ascendancy
of culture as economic resource. The Chinese Wave, therefore, is
constructed through either Taiwanese economic nationalism or Chinese
nationalism. Chinese Drama is produced and promoted as a form of Taiwanese
economic nationalism; however, the hegemony of the Chinese language
market makes it imperative for Chinese Drama to reconcile Chineseness
with Taiwanessness, as it is made in Taiwan but targets China’s
market.
Aesthetically, this battle is waged on two levels, conjoined by hsiao‑
chinghsin sentimentalism: traditional Chinese culture for China’s market
and Taiwan’s present multicultural reality. Hsiaochinghsin sentimentalism
is essential in buttressing the KMT’s semicolonial ruling in that it is involved
in the process of ethnicization in Taiwan by upholding the superiority of Chinese
culture and marginalizing and devaluing Tâi-­gí cultural productions.
However, this colonizing sentimentalism is made into Taiwan’s “national”
aesthetics via the double gaze of “imperialist nostalgia” in the age of globalization/regionalization—first
by Japanese fans and later by China’s white-­
collar workers. But this turning inward is made possible by a desire for Taiwanese
economic nationalism, in particular, to compete with the Korean
Wave.
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170 boundary 2 / August 2018
Chinese Drama embodies this national sentimentalism through a
focus on the family, in which traditional Chinese culture and Taiwanese
multicultural reality are negotiated. On the one hand, traditional Chinese
culture narrated for the Chinese language market includes outdated marriage
practices, filial piety, family hierarchy, and patriarchal gender norms.
These are meant to satisfy the demand for nostalgia for imagined, premodern
“good old days”—a simple social/familial order. On the other hand, food
and ethnicity come to signify Taiwan’s multicultural reality. However, this
multicultural reality as the dominant discourse on Taiwanese nationalism
is appropriated in ways that recenter the privileged status of Chineseness
constructed by the KMT regime.
Cultural critic bell hooks describes the commodification of contemporary
multiculturalism through the metaphor of food: “ethnicity becomes
spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white
culture” (hooks 2006: 366). In Chinese Drama, not only is Chinese food
constructed as the epitome of Taiwanese food; Taiwanese ethnicity, constructed
according to commonsense images, is essentialized and minoritized.
In the discourse of the Chinese language market, Taiwanessness as
ethnicity, as difference, is now the economic resource for profit-­making.
While operating through the rhetoric of Taiwanese economic nationalism,
this essentialization and minoritization feeds into the narrative of Chinese
nation-­building, both on the side of the CCP and the KMT. In Hal Foster’s
words, “Difference is thus used productively . . . difference is often fabricated
in the interests of social control as well as of commodity innovation”
(Foster 1985: 167; hooks 2006: 369). The production and reproduction of
commonsense images to construct ethnicity as difference, first by the KMT
and then by the CCP with the aid of global capital, poses threats to Taiwan’s
decolonization project, as this perspective always takes Chineseness
as the de-­ethnicized center and ethnicities as different.
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