Opening the Stage Door: Opera, Reform and International Economic Policy, 1979–2008

The author argues that the resumption of tours from the late 1970s onwards correlate with the economic strategy that led China towards greater internationalism following the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Although the artistic decisions behind the intercultural experiments from the 1980s and 1990s are not directly connected to PRC government initiatives, and were motivated as much by aesthetic concerns as political ones, the author nevertheless argues that they took place in a socio-political and economic context that made such intercultural experiments, and the prospect of touring them abroad, possible. By drawing upon models from foreign policy and international relations, he argues that Chinese opera remains a potent tool of cultural diplomacy both in this period and into the twenty-first century, and continues to play an important role in asserting Chinese structural power.