Behind the stage of contemporary Chinese tea culture: branding, soft power, service, and identity-making

This dissertation examines how contemporary Chinese tea culture took shape from the 1980s onward, during the shift from a planned economy to a market economy and renewed cross-Strait exchange. Based on multi-sited fieldwork from 2015 to 2019, followed by archival and online research, this dissertation follows the Tenren-Tenfu family enterprise, tea education, women tea practitioners, middle-class taste, and producing regions. It argues that widely recognizable forms of tea culture were built through family business, commercial and educational institutions, cross-Strait circulation, gendered service labor, heritage, and claims to production authority. Rather than treating the front stage as false and the backstage as real, the dissertation shows how commerce, knowledge, labor, and tradition became intertwined.