Center for East Asian Studies Brown Bag

Tobias Zuern, Visiting Student Researcher at University of California-Berk​eley. The Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics seems to mark a new era of Chinese self-confidence in which the country displays itself as an important and indisputable part of a world society in its cultural specificity. This paper claims that Zhang Yimou's 张艺谋 performance stages an interpretation of a notion of harmony (he 和) as pushed forth in the Asian values discourse of the 60's, 70's, and 80's.