Popular culture in China has been tracked by scholars long before the advent of popular culture studies as a discipline, a fact which Marc Moskowitz notes in his virtuoso introduction to Popular Culture in Taiwan. Despite this assertion, his own earlier co-edited collection, and the impressive bibliography in this volume, Moskovitz bemoans the difficulty of creating “a cohesive social science course on Chinese or Taiwan popular culture – there just isn't enough written on the subject” (p. 1).
Such a paradox arises from the contested arena of what is considered “Chinese popular culture” today. This is not simply a matter of defining “Chinese” beyond geographical boundaries, or untangling the cultural strands already flowing in, across and out of China itself, but of reading the ambivalently transnational situation of Taiwan within overlapping spheres of local, national, regional and cosmopolitan identity. Understanding Taiwan as “Chinese” (or not) is achieved through tackling the issue of viewing the Chinese diaspora as a centred periphery (p. 7).
Moskowitz persuasively anchors Taiwanese cultural industries as local entities unto themselves, beyond their relationships to politico-economic flows. At the same time, he acknowledges and then subverts several familiar tropes: Japanese colonization and the resulting anti- and pro-Japanese waves of nostalgia; the influence of the Kuomintang (KMT); ambivalent cultural borrowings from America and the imagined West. He states: “localised popular culture in Taiwan is in many ways a merging of Chinese, Japanese, American, and indigenous cultures, and is therefore a form of hybridity that arose long before the term became popular. … The transnational character of Taiwan's popular culture is one of the more important ways that it distinguishes itself from mainland China. Paradoxically, then, it is precisely Taiwan's transnational hybrid character that helps to define it as a distinctive local space” (p.7).
An arsenal of scholars has been recruited in support of this fundamental thesis. While the ethnographies are always fascinating and individual chapters reveal striking insights, not all slot cleanly into Moskowitz's framework. One suspects this is due to the differing agendas of the separate research projects (some are specific case studies, while others are teasers for larger monographs), as well as the uneven nature of cultural flows within Taiwan's fast-changing societies. As an unavoidable consequence, some observations in this book look slightly dated.
Andrew Morris's historical interpretation of little-league baseball in Taiwan as the site of politicking by the KMT, vis-à-vis articulations of pro-Japanese or anti-American aspirations, is masterful and sweeping (chapter two). He recounts the victories and losses which paved the way for the national pathos, shame and nostalgia that now surround the sport. One could have read more on why the little-league stars failed to make it to the big-league, or repeat their 1970s successes today, but this information is available elsewhere.
In chapter three, Krista van Fleit Hang compares, in the arena of Chinese literature, Taiwan's nativist xiangtu realist movement and China's May 4th-inspired writers. She concludes that the situation of the left-leaning writers in vastly different political contexts eventually led to fundamentally different evocations of modernity and industrialization. The location of this study on the old fault line of China-vs-Taiwan discourse, however, leaves one wondering about its inclusion here: where are the explorations of hybridity and the popular cultural dimensions promised in the introduction? Joseph Allen's contributes a complementary article, re-integrating literary discussion into the book's more broad-ranging themes (chapter four). His presentation of classical Chinese literary influences found in contemporary life strikes a number of familiar chords. These include school textbook and website circulations of classical texts, the annual ritual of penning Chinese New Year couplets, the showy inclusion of four-character chengyu in vernacular speech, the use of classical syntax in public signs and the glorious depiction of Li Bai's infamous poem, Quiet Night Thoughts, on women's underwear. The very familiarity of these depictions, however, sometimes verge on the trite: as Allen himself notes of the cliched status of Li Bai's poem as recounted by a Singaporean Chinese writer (p. 80), such manifestations are no more specific to Taiwan than to other Chinese-speaking communities.
Perhaps the self-evident nature of these presentations might be an end in itself, as is shown in Allen Chun's retrospective – and glaringly honest – account of the development of the International Community Radio Taipei. Rather than focusing on broadcast content, he locates his discussion in the experiences of foreign DJ personalities who mediate the needs of listeners, commercial markets and state mandates. In exploring how such cultural brokers ground themselves in Taiwan's urban cultures (and also contribute to their hybrid nature), Chun contextualizes the ugly aspect of sexual colonization against a backdrop of cultural-economic networks. The premium of being a “mini-rock star” (p. 97), merely on account of an expatriate passport, has depreciated over time, as Chun hints in recounting the recent relocation of DJs away from Taiwan.
The book's second half takes the reader into the territory of “new ethnoscapes” (p. 14), with ethnographies on transport, food consumption and the virtual world. Anru Lee and Chien-hung Tung's juxtaposition of Tapei's Mass Rapid Transit and the newly installed High Speed Railway (HSR) is topical and revealing in its evaluation of resulting changes in time-space and identity mappings across compressed regional and national networks. The writers have also pinpointed Taipei's metro system as encouraging new modes of public behaviour, alongside its symbolic value as evidence of globalized cityhood. One reason for the arguable success of Taiwan's almost overnight transformation into a giant metropolis lies in the island's relatively small physical size. However, the impact on lifestyles, local allegiances and imagined conceptions of home, birthplace and workplace, as pointed out in the article, remains acute.
Lucia Liu's valuable chapter on betel nut consumption as a masculinized practice among country folk or “liminal” gangster communities sheds some light on both gender and class politics. While she argues her case persuasively, one might quibble with how Taiwan's indigenous peoples, who form a crucial demographic of her research area, remain unaddressed in her study, as do social-cultural aspects of spitting out betel pith, and health concerns.
The last two chapters, on Pili puppetry (Teri Silvio) and Harry Potter cults (Moskowitz), concern the internet worlds of fan fiction and web forums. Silvio describes how a once old-fashioned genre has been re-appropriated by certain young Taiwanese women. Rather than emancipated, these communities seem passive-aggressive in channelling Japanese “Boy's Love” themes, creating virtual Pili spinoffs in homo-erotic fantasies. In contrast, Moskowitz looks at cults surrounding J.K. Rowling's books and films, examining the localized referencing of the dark-haired and myopic Potter as an almost-Chinese underdog hero who fights the stereotypically blonde Malfoy, the epitome of a hegemonic Western presence. Together the articles make two complementary pieces of a giant and wonderful jigsaw depicting aspects of Taiwan's popular and counter-cultures pieced together slowly and surely by book editor and team.
What sort of new, “charismatic” or modern frameworks are Moskowitz and team arguing for in understanding Taiwan's popular cultures? The writers define neither “charismatic” nor “modernity” in the text. A number of the insightful discussions, framed by Taiwan's relations to Japan, the US and the PRC, show that old debates retain dominance. And yet there is surely scope for more breadth of coverage: one yearns for a full treatment of the phenomenon of “girlishness” so tantalizingly presented by Moskowitz in his “Introduction,” or a deeper discussion of the nostalgic and romanticized perception of Europe (particularly, the Czech republic) in Taiwan's café cultures.
The number of potential case studies is theoretically limitless and any selection would be hard to collate under a central theme. Perhaps, ultimately, the disparate nature of this book's engaging and highly readable representations do indeed testify to the transnational hybridity that Moskowitz presents as the chief axis of his analysis.
