The not-so-great rapprochement: Taming and consuming Chiang Kai-shek in the era of cross-strait rapprochement tourism

Abstract

This article seeks to examine the interplay of material culture and identity politics during what we call the Great Rapprochement Era between China and Taiwan. It focuses on how the government and non-state actors dealt with sensitive histories and difficult heritages as manifested in their taming of Chiang Kai-shek for cross-strait tourists’ consumption. The article argues that as much as both governments strove to put ‘economics before politics’, there was evidently a great deal of political work that went into making an ‘inconvenient’ past more ‘palatable’. Discussion shows that despite the depoliticization of difficult heritages, and the domestication, commercialization and cartoonization of sensitive historical figures as manifested in tourism products, these practices were inherently political.