ABSTRACT
In these two examples of a pop song and a television series can be detected a deterritorialized Chinese subjectivity that cannot be contained by the state apparatuses of either mainland China or Taiwan. What Homi Bhabha (1994) calls a “third space” of cultural hybridity has begun to spill out over the constrictive molds of a fixed, state-spatialized Chinese identity and homogeneous national culture. This “third space” is the “intervention of the ‘beyond’…. [which] captures something of the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world-the unhomeliness-that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations” (Bhabha 1994, 9). Whereas only a tiny proportion of people in Shanghai have been able to physically cross state boundaries and venture into the outside world, it is through the proliferating media that the mass of the people now also occupy a “third space” of transnational encounters.19 In this space, the lines between home and world, one’s own nation-state and another country, Chinese and foreign, socialism and capitalism get blurred through traveling identities.
