Performing an 'Absent' China: Cultural Propaganda in anti-Communist Taiwan in the 1950's and 1960's

Abstract

Taiwan was liberated from its fifty year Japanese colonization in 1945. In 1949, an estimated 1.5 million Chinese migrants retreated to Taiwan along with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government, due to the defeat to the Chinese Communists. During the subsequent two decades, the Nationalist government utilized cultural propaganda to assist the political anti-Communist campaigns to retake Mainland China. Thus, scholars in Taiwan and abroad have long regarded these anti-Communist pieces as nothing more than political manipulation. This dissertation offers a social and cultural study of anti-Communist propaganda during the 1950's and 1960's. In this dissertation, I examine visual and verbal representations of propaganda--plays, films, comic strips, documentaries, and textbook illustrations. These representations were intended to generate hatred toward Communist enemies, and alleviate the nostalgia of Chinese migrants. I propose that anti-Communist propaganda helped the Nationalist government to craft a China in concepts of `nation, leader, gender, class and ethnicity.' It was an 'absent' China that had never existed in Taiwan.