American Family Entertainment and the Only Child Generation In
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American Family Entertainment and the Only Child Generation in Contemporary Urban China Ting He Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) University of East Anglia School of Film, Television & Media Studies Submitted April 2013 ©This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that no quotation from the thesis, nor any information derived therefrom, may be published without the author's prior, written consent. Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor team, Mr Peter Kramer and Prof Mark Jancovich, for their always insightful suggestions and expert guidance. It has been a privilege and memorable experience to work with both of them. I am also grateful to Rayna Denison, who provided many comments and suggestions on my work during my upgrade panel. I would also like to thank Dr Melanie Williams and Dr Andrew Willis for their valuable feedback from the viva exam. My special thanks go to the PhD students of my school, Erin Giannini, Oliver Gruner, Antonella Palmieri, Seb Manley, Vincent Gaine, Derek Johnson, Rachel Mizsei Ward, Heather Wintle and everyone else involved in the PhD seminars over the past years for their comments and suggestions on the papers I have presented in these seminars. Lastly, but most of all, thanks to my parents, He Yuansheng and Pan Jie, my husaband, Zhang Yu, for their unconditional love and support, without which this thesis would have never come into being. Abstract As a result of the economic reform which took place three decades ago, imported American family entertainment had gradually become an important part of the everyday entertainment for Chinese consumers. During the same period, a particular group of Chinese people, generally referred to as the post-80s or the only child generation, had emerged, grown up and become the main contributors to China’s media consumption. In this thesis, a study of the only child generation and the American family entertainment will be presented. The study sees the only child generation as groups of audience exposed to American family entertainment as the media, and the focus of this study is to understand the audience-media relationship between the two. As they are two objects emerged within their own social and cultural boundaries, the thesis will first tackle how the connection between the audience and the media was established. Then, the only child generation will be approached as a social creation. Findings on their social sophistications that are able to influence their relationship to media will be presented. Four case studies form the reset of the thesis. Each of the case studies will focus on one significant aspect of the generation’s social characteristics and how it is connected to the group’s receptions to media texts. i Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................... i Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... ii Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 Global Hollywood, American Family Film and China ............................................ 4 The Open Door Policy, Entertainment Import and Chinese Media ......................... 8 The Only Child Generation .................................................................................... 12 Methodologies and Resources ................................................................................ 18 Contributions .......................................................................................................... 23 Chapter 1 American Entertainment in Urban China since 1978 ................................ 25 Pre-1994: Television as the Window of the World ................................................ 26 1994-2001: Have you seen the “Dapian”? ............................................................. 34 Post-2001: Opened Door = Free Market? .............................................................. 42 Lessons for Hollywood .......................................................................................... 56 Chapter 2 Only Child Generation – A Mediation Model ........................................... 62 The Emergence and Rise of the Only Child Generation ........................................ 63 Entertainment for the OCG .................................................................................... 67 The Family as They Know It .................................................................................. 71 Tomboy, to Be or Not to Be ................................................................................... 76 Struggling in the Mass Production of Education .................................................... 82 Nostalgia: a Tribute to Childhood .......................................................................... 88 Chapter 3 Disney, The Lion King and China’s “Little Emperors” ............................ 94 Disney’s Image in China ........................................................................................ 94 Disney’s Journey in China...................................................................................... 99 Disney in Chinese Market .................................................................................... 107 The Lion King: a Legend of Disney in China ...................................................... 115 Chapter 4 Mulan: Disney’s Chinese Heroine .......................................................... 132 Disney’s Reconstruction of Mulan ....................................................................... 134 Who Is that Girl I See ........................................................................................... 142 Cultural Enrichment and its Implications in Reception ....................................... 151 Chapter 5 Harry Potter: Tailored Education vs. Mass Education ............................ 156 ii Reading Harry Potter in Urban China .................................................................. 157 Harry Potter Films in Chinese Market.................................................................. 165 Why Didn’t I Go to a School Like That? ............................................................. 175 Chapter 6 Transformers: the Power of Memories .................................................... 185 Transformers – from TV to the Cinema ............................................................... 186 Science Fiction in Chinese Cinema ...................................................................... 192 Transformers Toys: Memories and Self-Fashioned Identities ............................. 198 Memories, Nostalgia and Reception..................................................................... 202 Conclusions .............................................................................................................. 211 Appendix A. Imported American Films (Revenue-Sharing Basis) and Top 10 Chinese Domestic Films (1994-2001) ..................................................................... 218 Appendix B. Imported American Films and Top 10 Chinese Domestic Films (2002- 2010) ........................................................................................................................ 233 Appendix C. Disney Focus Group ........................................................................... 262 Appendix D. Transformers Focus Group ................................................................. 264 Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 265 Primary Sources: Newspapers, Magazines, Yearbooks and Websites ................. 265 Secondary Literature ............................................................................................ 266 iii Introduction It is not very surprising that, up until the end of 2008, the world record keeper Titanic (1997) was still the most commercially successful film that had ever been screened in China,1 but it may be unexpected to some that the second most successful film at the Chinese box office was Transformers (2007), the No. 30 in the table of all-time worldwide grosses at that time.2 Why does it appeal so much to Chinese audiences? A report from Beijing Review sheds some light on this, pointing out that “people who are crazy for this film are actually not the kids, but those who were born in the late 1970s or the early 1980s”.3 An article from Shanghai Daily goes a step deeper, claiming that “their memories of the cartoon TV series Transformers in the 1980s attracted them to the film”.4 It is believed that, starting from 1988, Transformer cartoons and related merchandise had been gradually burned into the childhood memories of nearly a generation of Chinese people.5 The success of Transformers demonstrates the power of a special group of audiences in urban China. They belong to the generation of people who were born right after the establishment of China’s “One Child Policy” in the late 1970s. Lu Taihong, a Chinese professor of marketing studies, defines this generation as the 1 Unless stated otherwise, China refers to Mainland China. 2 The box office data come from: Box Office Mojo, Worldwide Grosses, <http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/> [accessed 13 Aug. 2008]. 3 Anon.,