Global Film Cultures – peer-reviewed Cinergie – Il cinema e le altre arti. N.14 (2018) https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2280-9481/8388 ISSN 2280-9481 The Construction of the Post-socialist Urban Identity: China’s Reform and Drifting Urban Population Huimin Deng Submitted: July 3, 2018 – Revised version: October 22, 2018 Accepted: November 6, 2018 – Published: December 31, 2018 Abstract In the transition from the socialist system to the postsocialist system since 1978, thousands of Chinese urban- to-rural migrant workers and students of socialist movements and urban laid-off workers of socialist state- owned enterprises were no longer safeguarded by Chinese government in terms of political status, job oppor- tunities, welfare, and living standard. Struggling for returning to cities and integrating into the competitory market economy become the living dilemma of the two urban groups respectively. This paper explores the images of those troubled urban figures within both the Chinese Sixth Generation cinema and the Chi- nese independent documentary. It aims at exposing Chinese urban people’s drifting experience within the postsocialist social context in relation to Chinese modern cinema. The spatial and ideological drifting of troubled urban people in postsocialist China, it shall argue, derives from the transition from the socialist class struggle to the postsocialist economy-oriented reform and from the socialist planned economy to the postsocialist market economy. Keywords: urban drifters; socialist movements; social reform; ideological transformation; spatial move- ment. Huimin Deng: University of St Andrews (United Kingdom)
[email protected] Huimin Deng is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Film Studies of the University of St Andrews and is supervised by Prof.