MAINSTREAMMAINSTREAM CULTURECULTURE REFOCUSEDREFOCUSED 4%,%6)3)/.$2!-! 4%,%6)3)/.$2!-! 3/#)%49 !.$3/#)%49 !.$ 4(%02/$5#4)/.4(%02/$5#4)/. /&-%!.).')./&-%!.).'). 2%&/2- %2!#().!2%&/2- %2!#().! ZHONGZHONG XUEPINGXUEPING Mainstream Culture Refocused Mainstream Culture Refocused Television Drama, Society, and the Production of Meaning in Reform-Era China ZHONG XUEPING University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu © 2010 University of Hawai‘i Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zhong, Xueping. Mainstream culture refocused : television drama, society, and the production of meaning in reform-era China / Zhong Xueping. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3417-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8248-3469-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Television plays, Chinese—History and criticism. 2. Television—Social aspects—China. 3. Popular culture—China. I. Title. PL2368.T44Z46 2010 791.45'70951—dc22 2010010583 An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access ISBN for this book is 9780824882501 (PDF). More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. The open access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To the memory of Charles Nelson (1925–2008): mentor and friend Contents ix Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION 1 Mainstream Culture Refocused: Toward an Understanding of Chinese Television Drama CHAPTER ONE 28 Looking through the Negatives: Filmic-Televisual Intertextuality and Ideological Renegotiations CHAPTER TWO 47 Re-collecting “History” on Television: “Emperor Dramas,” National Identity, and the Question of Historical Consciousness CHAPTER THREE 73 In Whose Name? “Anticorruption Dramas” and Their Ideological Implications CHAPTER FOUR 97 Beyond Romance: “Youth Drama,” Social Change, and the Postrevolution Search for Idealism CHAPTER FIVE 123 Also beyond Romance: Women, Desire, and the Ideology of Happiness in “Family-Marriage Drama” CHAPTER SIX 144 Listening to Popular Poetics: Watching Songs Composed for Television Dramas viii : CONTENTS 162 Epilogue: Intellectuals, Mainstream Culture, and Social Transformation 165 Notes 193 Glossary 197 Filmography 201 Bibliography 215 Index Acknowledgments The idea of writing a book on Chinese television drama began to take root in the year 2000, when a Chinese-television-related conference was held at Tufts University. I thank a former colleague, Wang Qingping, for proposing and orga- nizing the conference. I would also like to thank my colleagues, especially Vida Johnson and Christiane Romero, of the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literatures of Tufts University for making the conference possible and for actively participating in welcoming the Chinese delegation at the conference. I am also grateful to my colleague Mingquan Wang for his untiring willing- ness to help me troubleshoot computer-related problems. An American Council of Learned Societies research grant as well as a sum- mer faculty research grant and other research grants from Tufts University made it possible for me to make several trips to China. Invited talks and presen- tations were good opportunities for me to flesh out ideas and questions about how to approach what proved to be a challenging project. I thank Yomi Braester for inviting me to a conference on visuality at the University of Washington, Hong Zhang for asking me to give a talk on the phenomenon of Chinese televi- sion drama at Colby College, Zhang Zhen for having me give a talk on “history drama” at New York University, Chris Berry for inviting me to join a panel at the Association for Asian Studies on Chinese television drama, Paul Festa for the opportunity to present the chapter on television songs at a workshop on popular culture in Asia at Harvard University, and Wang Ban and Ching Kwan Lee for inviting me to present the chapter on anticorruption drama at a confer- ence held at University of Michigan. Many colleagues and friends have been, in various ways, inspirational over the years in confirming the importance of this project. Thanks are therefore due to Cai Rong, Cao Tianyu, Chen Huifen, Claire Conceison, Huang Zhen, Haiyan Lee, Lin Chun, Liao Kebin, Lu Yan, Wang Ban, and Ye Weili. I must also thank the two anonymous readers of the manuscript for this book for their constructive comments and suggestions. I am particularly grateful to Pamela x : AcKNOWLEDGMENTS Kelley at the University of Hawai‘i Press for her recognition of the significance of the book’s subject matter and for her professionalism, which made the revi- sion process smooth and efficient. Special thanks go to Lili Ch’en, whose upbeat spirit, sense of humor, and wisdom have sustained me throughout years of a sometimes drudging way of life. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Susan Greenberg, whose excellent editorial skills unfailingly help clean up a nonnative-language writer’s various mistakes, big and small. I would not have developed a critical sense of my own writing if not for Malcolm Griffith, who has been the most critical, sharp, and demanding reader of what I write in English. Indeed, I will never be able to thank Susan and Malcolm enough for the help they have given me over the years and for the special friendship I have with each of them. My final thanks are reserved for the late Charles Nelson, my mentor at Tufts Uni- versity, whose friendship was essential during the years I have been at Tufts. He was a liangshi yiyou to me, a most kind, considerate, supportive, and funny mentor and friend. I dedicate this book in memory of Charlie. INTROductiON Mainstream Culture Refocused Toward an Understanding of Chinese Television Drama ❏ ❏ ❏ ❏ ❏ It seems only yesterday that scholars of Chinese literature and culture were all in an uproar about the “second renaissance” of modern Chinese literature and the new generations of Chinese filmmakers who burst onto the cultural scene of the 1980s. Since the early 1990s, however, this cultural landscape has evolved, and literature and film no longer occupy the central position they held during the 1980s. Among other things, they have had to contend with television and other forms of commercialized mass media and the Internet for public atten- tion. One of the major storytelling forms in China today exists on television as dianshiju (television drama) or dianshi lianxuju (television serial). In the last three decades, especially since Kewang (Yearnings, 1990), television dramas have generated widespread public attention and serious debate on a range of issues.1 Television drama has come to constitute a major part of contemporary China’s cultural landscape, and critics are hard-pressed to disregard its pres- ence and larger sociocultural implications. Yet many still do (despite burgeon- ing scholarly attention).2 The propagandistic and commercial dimensions of television culture and the mainstream and quotidian nature of television drama in particular have continued to ensure a minor status for Chinese television drama in the hierarchy of cultural forms studied by the humanities.3 Many critics have casually used the term “soap opera” to identify Chinese television drama. Indeed, even though the term “soap opera” originated in the United States, making visible the connection between corporate sponsorship and the production of daytime television dramas, today its connotation mainly pertains to the representational characteristics of television drama in general, referring to the melodramatic “codes” of its narrative construction.4 I will return to the notion of “melodrama” later in this Introduction, but as a cultural form and practice, has Chinese television drama, dianshiju, always been American soap opera’s double? If we hesitate to answer “yes,” it is chiefly because a ready 2 : iNTRODUCTION application of the term to Chinese television drama collapses one set of cultural production with another without fully recognizing their very different social, cultural, and historical conditions and contexts of meaning production. The casual application of “soap opera” in the Chinese case is therefore more indica- tive of an ongoing low-level intellectual interest in the topic of (Chinese) televi- sion drama rather than a clearly delineated understanding of the phenomenon. More than that, it is also indicative of an ongoing intellectual uncertainty about how to engage this cultural phenomenon. Along with some recent studies of Chinese television drama, mostly by media studies scholars, this book aims at changing these dynamics.5 Instead of merely lamenting and dismissing the rise of television culture and the impact of televisual dramas in China—a perspective largely informed by (Western) intellectual criticisms of “mass culture” and “mainstream popular culture”—I argue for a need to recognize that, along with the powerful rise of the televi- sion medium (which is now competing with the rise of yet another technol- ogy-aided medium, the Internet), Chinese “mainstream culture,” including both