Exporting Taiwanese dances: The touring of Taiwanese ideologies through the Chinese Youth Goodwill Mission.

摘要

The study interweaves my personal experiences with theoretical discourses to analyze the transformation of ideologies about nation, ethnicity, and gender in Taiwan as well as its relation to the exportation of a youth performing group in propagating transforming ideologies. I deepen my discussion by exploring the birth, expansion, and termination of the "Chinese Youth Goodwill Mission." I focus on tracing how the Kuomintang (the KMT Party) in Taiwan produced and transformed the notion of Taiwan, with the aim of maintaining the party's hegemony domestically and representing itself to the international community. I also investigate the selection and training process of the Chinese Youth Goodwill Mission. I call the selection and performance production of the Mission as the process of building national bodies for Taiwan. I further compare the training routines and moral requirements of the Mission with those of the American Boy Scouts in investigating the utilization of mental and physical trainings in embodying ideologies. The analysis of the Mission's dance programs reveals how movements in the Mission conveyed meanings; it also reveals through what kind of movements and images the KMT ideologies were projected and reinforced. In the conclusion, I revisit the salient features of the different dance forms and traditions that I analyzed in the previous chapters. Revisiting them enables the dissertation to foreground changing ideologies that animate and ultimately define Chinese and Taiwanese national identities. I clarify how the notions of "Taiwaneseness" and "Chineseness" have changed over the years I have covered, and how these fluid definitions are registered at the site of the dancing body. The Mission was cancelled in 2000, but the transformation of Taiwanese ideologies will continue to proceed. I argue that various expressions of Taiwanese dances provide researchers resourceful grounds in analyzing cultural conflicts, embodiment, and strategies and tactics for negotiation.