Inventing “Thirdness”: Third World Internationalism and Lee Yu’s Baodiao Writing
Video Arts & Humanities 2025 Graduate ExhibitionPresentation by Muyun Zhou
Exhibition Number 529
Abstract
In 1970, the Baodiao Movement began on US university campuses traversed by Black and other Third World internationalist thinking. Students from Taiwan passionately joined protests with Hong Kong youth and Asian Americans, defending a vaguely ‘Chinese’ sovereignty over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the Pacific Rim. How did those American political currents stir alternative imaginations for Taiwan through those Baodiao youths? My project approaches the Baodiao Movement as a transpacific cultural movement, deeply entangled with the American political environment but operating beyond hollow claims of solidarity, rather than a nationalism-driven political event. I argue that Third World internationalism inspired the activists to imagine a Taiwanese “thirdness,” which does not wield cultural productions as a tool of politics but as a political end that inventively transforms prevailing binaries into aesthetic forms. I read the writer and art historian Lee Yu ’s short story “” [Desolate Rivers and Frontiers](1981) commemorating a Baodiao protest, alongside her art criticism “”[Protesting and ‘Un-protesting’ Artists] that redefines the parameters of artists’ political engagement and its success. As Lee’s case shows, the Baodiao Movement offered literature and art an opportunity to undo the binary thinking overdetermined by the antagonistic Cold War blocs in Taiwan, as seen in its nativism-modernism debate, and to start conceiving a “third world” on the US-aligned Asia Pacific nations’ terms, marginalized by the non-aligned and Third-Worldism frameworks.
Importance
My project examines the grassroots literature and art created by Chinese diasporic communities from Taiwan during the Cold War. I demonstrate how the Chinese diasporic activists forged cultural networks across national boundaries and political divisions, presenting political alignments that diverged from Cold War international blocs. Moreover, the grassroots activists negotiating local interethnic dynamics alongside nation-state interests sought to overcome the Cold War divisions by drawing from artistic debates and transforming politics into aesthetic ideas. This study brings to light the transnational perspectives’ creative capacity that may serve as a counterpoint to the growing isolationism and antagonism of today’s world. In addition, it moves beyond a lingering Cold War mentality to a nuanced understanding of the global geopolitics, past and present.