The Politics and Aesthetics of Chinese Drama (Huajyu) in Taiwan

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 CCP and the KMT’s goal for unification.