Missiles and Meteor Garden

Since then, the issue has ebbed and flowed around various political events in China and Taiwan. Subsequent presidential elections in Taiwan have triggered sabre-rattling from China, and plans for constitutional reform, name-changing of state institutions and so forth in Taiwan have kept China-Taiwan relations very tense. Just this week, the passing of the anti-succession law by the PRC’s National People’s Congress has meant a significant deterioration in relations.

At the same time, however, commercial and cultural exchanges between China and Taiwan have never been greater. Bilateral trade in 2004 was US$70 billion, which represented a 34.2 percent increase from 2003. The total number of Taiwanese visiting the mainland in 2004 was 3.7 million, a 35 percent increase from 2003, and it is estimated that at least 300,000 Taiwanese are living and working on the mainland.

In the field of culture, Taiwanese popular culture flows freely to the mainland. Popular music, television and cinema have found large audiences, in particular among China’s teenage and youth demographic.

The question, therefore, is how can these two seemingly incompatible flows be reconciled – political and military tension, including the threat of military attack, with the apparently untroubled flow of people, capital and cultural commodities across the straits.

In the first instance, to propose a reconciliation of these two apparently contradictory features of cross-straits relations is to appeal to the possibility of determining the “true” state of relations between China and Taiwan. A critique of notions of truth in international relations is not difficult, and in the case of China and Taiwan, the appeal to the true state of cross-straits relations at any one time can be understood as an act of narrativization. The attempts to weigh up their different aspects and to produce some measurement of their status as positive or negative is to hope inscribe a trajectory or teleology of their development. Implicit in each individual instances or moments is a temporal potential in which they represent “improvement” or “deterioration”. (… e.g. the anti-succession law=deterioration) This is clearly a dominant theme in the analysis of cross-straits relations. In particular, the subtext is always the possibility of military conflict. Therefore, to ask whether cultural links can ameliorate political tensions is to hope that the trajectory of deterioration is more stable or positive than the on-going crises would suggest.

The issue of narrativizing cross-straits relations locates this paper within the concerns of a particular mode of international relations, which can be labelled realism. This is an approach which attempts to create objective empirical theories in the mode of science order to produce predictive capability for foreign policies. In the instance of China-Taiwan relations, this is necessarily the likelihood of a military conflict, which remains the policy focus of the international community.

Not being a practitioner of international relations, I will side-step the military conflict issue, but flag its concerns as a marker of a privileging regime within IR, in other words, if a China Taiwan war is the subtext of much of the scholarly and policy debates on the cross-straits problem, then this indicates a discursive structure in which a particular problematic is dominant.

To understand the contradictions between cultural flow and political tension, I would first like to suggest that the attempt to construct a coherent and singular narrative of cross-straits relations is an impossible undertaking, and only makes sense within a limited set of assumptions about the discursive structure of cross-straits relations.

Here lies a starting point for dealing with the problem. There is an epistemological disjuncture between the two realms. That is, they operate as two distinct regimes of knowledge about the relationship between China and Taiwan. Both culture and the politico-military can coexist because, apart from both expressing a relationship between the two sides of the straits, they operate from a different basis in knowledge about China and Taiwan.

The first place one can look for this is in scholarship itself. Different disciplines can look for quite different epistemological categories across territorial boundaries.

In the case of international relations, in its “realist” mode, it looks for factors and events like military build-ups, elections in Taiwan or, for example, the anti-succession law, the planned changes in the ROC constitution, or the rise of Taiwanese identity to create coherent and self-contained narrative of China-Taiwan relations. Studying arrays of these factors and events produces scholarly knowledge about the likelihood of a military conflict.

A typical analysis of cross-straits relations is Gary Klintworth’s “From Flashpoint to One China”, in which he starts by laying out an array of policy statements by Chinese and Taiwanese political and military figures, to produce a sense of the policy thinking with the two governments. He then tracks through various events: the Nationalists loss in the civil war in 1949, changes in US-China relations through the 1970s, the 1996 missile crisis, the election of DDP president Chen Shui-bian in 2000, etc. He goes on to discuss the military hardware situation and likely politico-military scenarios of a China-Taiwan conflict, before suggesting a route to a negotiated settlement.

Klintworth’s paper is striking for its complete failure to mention the very strong commercial and cultural links between China and Taiwan, but within its epistemological boundaries, it forms a coherent and logical argument.

In symmetry with and opposition to an IR approach, cultural and media studies pays no attention to matters of politics or the military. Its scholarly categories and methodologies to not include analysis of the policy statements of government leaders or the levels of armaments of each side.

Instead a cultural analysis might use terms like “transnationalism” or “hybridity”, “consumer culture”. Rather than theorizing the likelihood of military conflict, a cultural analysis of China-Taiwan relations might explicitly seek out examples of mobility and migration and describe what happens to culture when it flows from one location to another. It might draw upon notions of the post-modern, so that far from being a variable in an equation of a China-Taiwan war, culture is understood as a product of a floating signifier, accessible to constant reimagining and offering an array of moments from which an individual, Chinese or Taiwanese, might constitute themselves at any time.

The Marxian-inflected work of Simon During, for example, has explored the material conditions of the production of globalized and transnational culture in the case of film. He has described the alignment of global financing and distribution and the production of a certain kind of violent action spectacle as a globally-accessible cultural product by Hollywood, which remains the central node of global cinema. He is specifically interested in the way cultural flow has produced a kind of global culture, a common set of references which are meaningful for almost anyone.

Rey Chow, in contrast, has developed an understanding of cultural movement as a form of translation, in which cultural forms are remade like a translated language in each location. For Chow, it becomes possible to understand culture as a continual moment of social translation , thus bridging the divide between cultures while also appealing to their incommensurable pluralism.

The two regimes of knowledge, the politico-military and the socio-cultural, coexist because, on the surface at least, they do not cross over. While it makes sense for International Relations to construct a narrative trajectory of China-Taiwan relations as “improving” or “deteriorating”, such a narrative is meaningless for cultural analysis. It simply makes no sense to discuss the cultural relationship between China and Taiwan as “improving” or not.

Therefore, in the first instance, I would like to propose that the different epistemologies, or ways of knowing China-Taiwan relations which can be identified in scholarship can also be evidenced in the “real” production of knowledge about politics and the military on the one hand and culture on the other, by political and military leaders on the one hand and cultural consumers on the other.

I have suggested that the project of producing some overarching narrative of the state of cross-straits relations is a unviable, and this fits with the notion that the different dimensions of cross-straits relations are epistemologically incompatible. However, I would like to go further and suggest that, of course, it is not that simple.

The following is an example of a cultural product which made the transition across the straits to illustrate how different modes of understanding do, inevitably, come into conflict.

[... Meteor Garden]

In this tv program, one can find an excellent example of precisely the kinds of issues of cultural transnationalism which cultural and media studies have developed so fruitfully. Meteor Garden is actually based on a Japanese manga, and in its transit to Taiwanese television has taken on a glossy commercialism with which manga in not generally associated. In particular, although the TV program keeps some of the look and style of manga, it loses the violence and broader dystopic vision of modern social life which characterizes a lot of manga.

When the program crossed the straits to China, it became hugely successful. This suggests exactly the opportunities for cultural flow which a positive interpretation of , for example, a cultural studies methodological category like transnationalism might hope is possible across the straits. Rather than cultural identity being simply the product of, for example, competing state-sponsored nationalist ideologies, the free flow of cultural commodities between China and Taiwan presents contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese with the chance to assemble personal, perhaps hybridized, transnational identities from a bricolage of cultural moments. Instead of being exclusively Chinese or Taiwanese, one can be both, or neither. Just as a Taiwanese TV program based on a Japanese manga became popular in China, so to has numerous forms of Western, popular culture.

Such a positive reading of popular culture is, of course, open to critique from many directions. In particular, as During has elaborated, transnational and global culture necessarily follows patterns of transnational and global capital. Therefore, while Chinese people may be free to choose cultural identities from Taiwan, or Japan via Taiwan or the United States they are doing so as consumers of identity, in a commodified cultural world in which the political implications of those choices are effaced.

This is borne out by the particular history of Meteor Garden in China, namely that it was banned by the Chinese government. Not for any explicit anti-government message, but for a general disposition towards authority figures – teachers and parents – which is quite anathema to the broadly conservative social attitudes promoted by the Chinese state.