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China's Igeneration Cinema: Dispersion, Individualization And Wagner, Keith B., Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani. "China’s iGeneration Cinema: Dispersion, Individualization and Post-WTO Moving Image Practices." China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu and Luke Vulpiani. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 1–20. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 2 Oct. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501300103.0007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 2 October 2021, 08:45 UTC. Copyright © Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu, Luke Vulpiani and Contributors 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Introduction China’s iGeneration Cinema: Dispersion, Individualization and Post-WTO Moving Image Practices Keith B. Wagner, Tianqi Yu with Luke Vulpiani Chinese cinema is moving beyond the theatrical screen. While the country is now the world’s second-largest film market in addition to being the world’s second-largest economy, visual culture in China is increasingly multi-platform and post-cinematic.1 Digital technology, network-based media and portable media player platforms have contributed to the creation of China’s new cinema of dispersion or ‘iGeneration cinema,’ which is oriented as much toward individual, self-directed viewers as toward traditional distribution channels such as the box office, festival, or public spaces. Visual culture in China is no longer dominated by the technology and allure of the big screen, if indeed it ever was. While China’s film industry still produces ‘traditional’ box-office blockbusters and festival-ready documentaries, their impact and influence is increasingly debatable. This volume of essays captures the richness and diversity of China’s contem- porary moving image culture, while suggesting that familiar notions of ‘cinema’ must be reconceptualized as just one of many platforms and experiences available within that broader culture. In the process, each essay contributes to the larger project of mapping out where this moving image culture exists within the context of China’s individualizing, consumption-oriented, urban and technologically mutable post-WTO society. Cultural dispersion in a WTO era One of the ways we can conceptualize the dispersion of Chinese cinema and moving image culture in the new millennium period is to understand it in relation to socio- logical and economic changes ushered in by the country’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. This climactic moment signalled not only China’s official integration into the global economic system of expanding capitalism, but also a moment 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 1 14/04/2014 09:12 2 China’s iGeneration of significant financial and cultural rescaling. For more than a decade, China’s new forms of cinema and moving image practices have been capturing this new neoliberal reality in ways that cannot be neatly portioned into the standard regional, national and transnational perspectives. Rather, this book shows how individual aspirations expressed through post-WTO digital and new media can be classified as appraisals of cultural realities and possibilities that were either unthinkable or untenable one decade earlier. Examples of the new ground broken by Chinese visual culture include: documentary exposés, based on found footage of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, about substandard construction and the death of thousands of schoolchildren; multimedia artists’ films exhibited in upmarket galleries and purchased by collectors for large sums of money; filmmakers’ digital activism in preserving Cantonese language through videos like Rap Guangzhou; and personal documentaries individually produced by subaltern villagers, marginalized juveniles and self-realizing women. This volume examines the great upheaval that Wang Hui has described as ‘neo liberalism with Chinese characteristics,’ while paying special attention to what these characteristics mean for new forms of moving image culture. In other words, we do not posit a dichotomy between economics and culture in China. In reality, this dichotomy should be superceded by analyses that interrogate the intersection of both realms. In furthering this goal, this volume examines a wide array of sources, ranging from blockbuster movies to individual auteur films to experimental documentaries. Our contributors draw on reception theory, neo-formalism and sociological method- ologies to unpack depictions of China’s cultural transformation in the past decade. Neoliberalism, as an increasingly visible/powerful governing ideology in China, has come under significant scrutiny as filmmakers have had more freedom to criticize a party-state which still intervenes in individuals’ cultural lives through censorship in film, TV and art production, distribution and exhibition.2 The chaotic task of keeping up with these changes inspires much reflection and critical assessment, as is the case with almost everything new in the post-WTO era. Following the further implementation of neoliberal policies since 2001, the Communist Party continues to eviscerate social programmes, neglect wage–price factors and deny the internal antagonisms that exist because of these changes – mainly ‘industrial democracy versus corruption’3 – all to ensure the survival of this political– economic system. The rationale is that because of Chinese neoliberalism, social welfare institutions and local governments remain in perilous fiscal health, while consumption soars along with profits derived from the state-owned enterprises and entrepreneurial sectors of the economy. It is also this rise in consumption that frames the debate in China over ‘individualization’ (geren hua), a thesis suggested by Yan Yunxiang, and one developed from the ‘contemporary individualization thesis’ found in the Western social theory, proposed earlier by Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman and others. While the discourse of neoliberalism promotes the absence of external interference on individuals’ lives, the individualization thesis emphasizes the ongoing negotiation between the individual and the state, whereby public interventions and modern social institutions can promote individual autonomy and self-determination.4 In the context of postsocialist China, Yan Yunxiang argues 9781623565954_txt_print.indd 2 14/04/2014 09:12 China’s iGeneration Cinema 3 that the individualization thesis is not only central to, but also a development away from, the earlier neoliberal model, as both ideologies emphasize the importance of promoting and protecting individual rights and freedoms.5 A post-WTO transition, of course, continues to impact the cultural sphere beyond just the question of individual choice. As Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake have argued, ‘[In] the creative–destructive dynamic driving contemporary phases of global capitalism, the local goes on being micromapped and micromined into so many consumer zone(s).’6 We find this ‘micromapped’ and ‘micromined’ local culture in China, which is connected to the cross between privatization and socialism that Li Zhang and Aihwa Ong call ‘socialism from afar.’7 With this confluence in mind, we observe that China’s politico-cultural and consumer spheres have experienced dramatic changes since 2001. New developments include more hedonistic revelry (including frank discussions about sexuality and sex acts); more cosmopolitan travel for business, leisure and educational opportunities (including mobility in and out of the country); more concern on personal happiness (ie. food safety, air pollution, environ- mental issues, real-estate market); self realisation as the heated public discussion on the marriage issue of high income, highly educated women); outspoken activism (and repression, in the case of Ai Weiwei); neo-nationalism (in positions vis-à-vis Tibet, Japan and the United States); more black market criminality (and its growing consumer base); greater levels of migration (as a result of shrinking job opportunities in rural areas and the eroding of familial bonds); and greater social flexibility around questions of gender identity (as more LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) organizations in metropolises and more queer personalities online and on the ground than ever before), to name a few. These examples of ‘multiple private choices’ and new expressions show an ‘increased latitude to pursue self-interest that are at the same time variously regulated or controlled by the party-state.’8 Regardless of how amorphous this regulation of choice may sometimes seem, the Chinese government continuously censors external internet content via the Great Fire Wall, its cancellation of gay rights parades and film festivals (YunFest in 2007 and 2013), its detainment of foreigners who speak out ‘politically’ in the country (as happened after Elton John’s so-called controversial support of Ai at a concert in Beijing in 2013). All of these developments ultimately point to the existence of several different dichotomies in contemporary China: between media access and suppression, material acquisition and deprivation, middle-class mobility and enduring poverty – dichotomies which are all depicted across official, semi-official and unofficial media platforms. iGeneration cinema: Scene, technologies, global contexts China’s ‘iGeneration cinema’ began sometime in the first decade of the twenty-first century, when digital
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