A Chinese American Vision of The King and I: American Culture, Democracy, and Policy in Soft Power

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: This thesis on David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori’s Soft Power foregrounds the importance of cultural exchange in an era when global powers like the US and China are obsessed with wielding greater influence and spreading their respective values. Hwang offers an alternative vision from the perspective of a Chinese American: he sees cultural collaboration rather than cultural competition as the key to examining the faults within each culture, and as an essential step in creating a pluralist world. The “musical within a play” itself is an example of how the in-depth understanding of one country can expose the inherent flaws within another: Hwang uses the debate surrounding China’s rise, namely, the “China Threat” theory versus “China’s Peaceful Rise” policy, the Confucian concept of self-cultivation, and his cross-cultural experience as a Chinese American to expose the arrogance of Western culture, the fragility of American democracy, and the short-sightedness of unilateralist foreign policy. I argue that David Henry Hwang’s bicultural perspective allows him to transform a problematic musical into a star vehicle for elevating Asian voices artistically and politically. More importantly, Soft Power reveals the healing of the division in both America and the world today requires the insights of people like Asian Americans who can negotiate different ways of seeing.

Type of resource	text
Date created	December 2020

Author	Zhao, Zhiyun
Primary advisor	Wang, Ban
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Stanford Global Studies, Center for East Asian Studies

Subject	Center for East Asian Studies
Subject	China-US relations
Subject	Asian American
Subject	Theatre
Subject	David Henry Hwang
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/ct913hh2270

License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

Preferred Citation: Zhiyun Zhao. (2020). A Chinese American Vision of The King and I: American Culture, Democracy, and Policy in Soft Power. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/ct913hh2270

Stanford Center for East Asian Studies Thesis Collection

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