In Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan, Nancy Guy has brought out a fascinating, clearly written, and informative case study exploring the institutionalization of Peking opera in Nationalist occupied Taiwan.
Drawing upon nearly twenty years of research and fieldwork with Peking opera performers, Guy offers a novel perspective on the genre by looking at the ways the Taiwan-based Republic of China (ROC) government employed the art form to promote its own political agenda. This agenda, which Guy explores from several angles, illustrates the ways that “an art [becomes] caught up in a whirlwind of ideologies” (3-4), and “demonstrates that factors quite apart from the art itself may be critical in influencing receptivity to, revulsion for, or simple lack of interest in its performance” (4).
In some ways, her tale is a “just-so” story that explains how a musical genre that became popular in Peking in the late eighteenth century could become a national symbol of China in the early twentieth century and then a centerpiece of political contestation in the second half of the twentieth century: first, between the Communist government in mainland China and the Nationalist government in Taiwan, and then between the Nationalist government and the Taiwanese population. Guy begins by discussing Peking opera’s place within Taiwan’s politics throughout the twentieth century, exploring how and by whom the form was supported in light of the shifting colonial rule on the island--from the Japanese in the first half of the twentieth century to the Nationalist government after 1949. During each era, Guy shows, Peking opera had a different meaning, and consequently a shifting role within the island’s public/private cultural economy.
From there, Guy focuses on Nationalist-run-Taiwan’s turn to Peking opera as a means of cultural competition. In Chapter Two, she describes the art form’s central place as a site of Chinese national identity within the sphere of international diplomacy. Competing tours of Peking opera troupes from the governments of both the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the ROC aimed to convince audiences around the world of each government’s hold on the Chinese “national essence” (44). By the early 1970s, she notes, with United Nations representation at stake, the ROC mounted even more ambitious tours in the fading hope that they would help sway the world away from recognizing the Maoist government. Even after these efforts failed, however, the ROC continued to view its Peking opera tours as a key form of international diplomacy.
Guy then explores Peking opera on the domestic front, through the ROC government’s use of it to enforce a political agenda and to disseminate its ideology. By holding state-sponsored events, both programs and contests (Chapter 3), establishing schools for Peking Opera training, and regulating the repertoire, the ROC aimed to differentiate it from the newer “Revolutionary” Peking opera that had been officially developed and supported on the Mainland.
The final chapters of the book explore the form’s development since the 1980s in light of the re-establishment of contact between the two Chinese governments and the emergence of a strong Taiwanese identity movement. These chapters, which illustrate the complex dynamics involved in reacquainting what had become two quite different forms of expression, are most interesting in their ethnographic detail. From Taiwanese Peking opera troupes’ practices of copying Mainland troupes’ performances exactly through nth-generation audio and video tapes, to the economics involved in Taiwan troupes’ commissioning of Mainland artists for new works, to the confusion of a Taiwanese audience regarding when to applaud for a Mainland troupe’s “modern” Peking opera style, Guy’s account offers a gloss on the region’s political atmosphere through an important and innovative artistic lens.
Guy’s clarity and linguistic efficiency makes her book easily accessible to the non-specialist, a quality enhanced by the invaluable Peking opera primer she includes in an appendix. By the same token, however, the sparing detail she uses in some sections--offering one anecdote per argument in later chapters of the book, for example--occasionally makes the evidence she uses to support her points rather thin. While this issue does not occur often enough to constitute a significant weakness, it nonetheless leads some of the book to read more as a tour than as an analysis.
Similarly, Guy seems to make good use of secondary and journalistic Chinese-language sources for significant swaths of the book; in the process, she tends (in this reader’s opinion) to incorporate a lesser proportion of her fieldwork into her historical and political frame. The mere act of bringing the Chinese-language sources into the English-speaking world provides, of course, a wonderful service to the literature. A more involved description of the project’s methodology, however, would have been useful in understanding how Guy came to create her presentational structure, and how she deals with it as an ethnomusicologist.
Such critiques are relatively minor in comparison to Guy’s achievement. In addition to constituting a significant contribution to the literature on Chinese opera and East Asian music, Peking Opera and Politics in Taiwan provides a wonderful chronicle of a musical genre and its performance practices in a shifting political landscape. While I have trouble subscribing to Guy’s assertion that the book’s “most important lesson” is that “Taiwanese people have never succumbed to oppression or coercion” (164), I nonetheless find much to admire about this lucid and well-researched work.
[Reviewer’s note: I am grateful to Sue Tuohy for her valuable comments on a draft of this review.]
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[Review length: 894 words • Review posted on May 17, 2007]