Crossing the Taiwan Strait: Global disjunctures and multiple hegemonies of class, politics, gender, and sexuality (China)

This research is an examination of the process of globalization as it is enacted in everyday life. By viewing economic affairs as socio-cultural processes, I examine the role of several related social factors---class, politics, gender, and sexuality---in shaping power relations between Taiwanese business people and their Chinese hosts in China. I identify four interconnected hegemonic forces that shape cross-Strait relations: the force of "Greater China" as a potentially integrated economy, political, and cultural entity, the force of transnational Taiwanese capitalism and the associated Taiwanese capitalist class, the force of the "One China" nationalistic principle, and the force of transnational Taiwanese business masculinity. These forces are the products of complex interactions and the sources of disjunctures in Taiwanese-Chinese relations. During the period from 1999 to 2001 I interviewed Taiwanese business people, their families, and Chinese women who are significant others of Taiwanese businessmen, conducted ethnographic field research, and gathered documentary data in Taiwan and China in order to examine how these four hegemonic forces produced differences, maintained hierarchies, and created simultaneous integration and disintegration between the two states. Specifically, I try to show how everyday life is a terrain in which large-scale social structures and processes are constituted and how individual actions in micro settings can shape macro structures and processes. This study has implications for Taiwanese-Chinese gender politics, for Taiwanese-Chinese politics, for the development of the "Greater China" regional economy between Taiwan and China, and for the on-going scholarly understanding of the relationships among the intersections of class, politics, gender, and sexuality resulting from the process of globalization.