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Replace This with the Actual Title Using All Caps SIGNIFYING THE LOCAL: MEDIA PRODUCTIONS RENDERED IN LOCAL LANGUAGES IN MAINLAND CHINA SINCE 2000 A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Jin Liu August 2008 © 2008 Jin Liu SIGNIFYING THE LOCAL: MEDIA PRODUCTIONS RENDERED IN LOCAL LANGUAGES IN MAINLAND CHINA SINCE 2000 Jin Liu, Ph. D. Cornell University 2008 My dissertation examines recent cultural productions rendered in local languages in the fields of television, film, fiction, popular music, and the Internet in mainland China since 2000, when the new national language law prescribed the standard Putonghua Mandarin as the principal language for broadcast media and movies. My dissertation sets out to examine this unsettled tension and to explore the rhetorical use of local language in different fields of cultural production. In television, local language functions as a humorous and satirical mechanism to evoke laughter that can foster a sense of local community and assert the local as the site of distinctive cultural production. In film and fiction, local language serves as an important marker of marginality, allowing filmmakers and writers rhetorically to position themselves in the margins to criticize the center and to repudiate the ideologies of modernism. In popular music, increasingly mediated by the Internet, local language has been explored by the urban educated youth to articulate a distinct youth identity in their negotiation with a globalizing and cosmopolitan culture. Drawing on cultural and literary theories, media studies, sociolinguistics, and dialectology, my interdisciplinary research focuses its analysis on many important but overlooked issues. I explore at length the rhetorical use of local languages to represent “the marginal and the unassimilated” in the underground and independent films of Jia Zhangke and others; I apply Bakhtin’s theory of folk humor to the ambiguous laughter evoked by Zhao Benshan’s comic sketches that are deeply rooted in the Northeast folk performing art Errenzhuan; I explain how the laughter wrought through the presence of local language in the regional TV shows can help foster a sense of local community. My research on the significance of locality also contributes to the study of globalization. If globalization is seen as homogenization and centralization, the local language texts assert the value of pluralism and diversity, and at the same time resist the dominance of both global and national cultural colonization. The burgeoning regional television shows rendered in local languages and the proliferation of the use of local languages on the Internet attest to the urgency of re-imagining a distinct local community for the local inhabitants in the increasing uncertainty of defining locality. Both the global, national cultures and the traditional, indigenous cultural resources are appropriated for self-definition and self-development. On the dialectics of the global and the local, the global and the local do not pose as cultural polarities, but are interpenetrating, interacting, and mutually signifying. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Jin Liu got her B.A. and M.A. in Chinese Linguistics respectively in 1997 and 2000 in the Department of Chinese Languages and Literature at Peking University in the People’s Republic of China. She pursued her Ph.D. degree in East Asian Literature in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University from 2000 to 2008. She will become an assistant professor of Chinese at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the fall 2008. iii to Zhaoqin 照钦 and Ningning 宁宁 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Professor Edward Gunn. It was his book on this topic that first sparkled my interest in this area of study and inspired me to undertake this dissertation research. My deep gratitude to him for his unfailing interest in and continued encouragement to my research, his super-vision in directing my attention to important theories and sources, his scrupulous reading and meticulous editing of all of the manuscript in several drafts, his incisive and invaluable comments, as well as his step- by-step guidance in my different stages of writing. I am also indebted to Professor Sherman Cochran and Professor John Whitman for their thought-provoking courses, their consistent encouragement and support, and for introducing theories and scholarship in their fields that are related to my research. I would like to thank the East Asia Program at Cornell for providing me grants for my field trips in China. I would also like to express my gratitude to the many people who have provided assistance and support in my data collection in various locations. For underground films, many thanks to Wang Zhuoyi, Cheng Kai, Zhang Yaxuan, Gan Xiao’er, and other film scholars and directors in Beijing. For the television, my special thanks to Xu Ting and Zhang Jianmin in Hangzhou, Xu Tao, Zhang Liu, Zhang Peng, and Tian Yigui in Chongqing, Zha Zhengxian in Shanghai, and Xu Zhiqiang in Shandong. I sincerely appreciate their generously sharing opinions and providing me first-hand, insider information. Finally, the most attentive love, support, and constant “pushing” from my husband Zhaoqin Meng have been crucial to the writing and completion of this dissertation. My now five-year-old daughter Michelle (Ningning) has also been very understanding to tolerate her mom who cannot spend many weekends playing with her. This dissertation is dedicated to them and our loving families in China. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgments v List of Tables vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 An Overview of Television Series Productions since 2000 12 Chapter 2 Performativity in Dubbing Films in Local Languages 37 Chapter 3 Empowering Local Community: TV News Talk Shows in Local Languages 60 Chapter 4 Ambivalent Laughter: Comic Sketches in CCTV’s “Spring Festival Eve Gala” 79 Chapter 5 Popular Music and Local Youth Identity in the Age of the Internet 105 Chapter 6 The Rhetoric of Local Languages as the Marginal: Chinese Underground and Independent Films by Jia Zhangke and others 142 Chapter 7 The Unassimilated Voice Continued in Recent Fiction in Local Languages 173 Conclusion 205 Visual and Audio Sources 213 Bibliography 217 vi LIST OF TABLES Table 1 A Dubbing Clip in the Sichuan Mandarin Version of Tom and Jerry 49 Table 2 TV News Talk Shows in Local Languages as of 2005 66 Table 3 Intonation Variations in the Comic Sketches in the Galas 87 vii INTRODUCTION For years, the central government in Mainland China has been promoting the standard Putonghua Mandarin (common speech Mandarin) as the official national language, the principal language for mass media and school education. Those subnational local languages, dialects, 1 or fangyan (―regional speech‖) in Chinese have been thus subordinated and suppressed in this project of building a modern, national culture. On October 31, 2000, the Beijing government promulgated the first law on language and writing, the Law of the People‘s Republic of China on the Use of Chinese Languages and Chinese Characters (Zhonghua renmin gonghegong guojia tongyong yuyan wenzifa), effective from January 1, 2001. As the law prescribes, Putonghua Mandarin is the principal language in broadcast radio and television, and movies (Articles 12 and 14). Local languages are strongly discouraged in mass media, and their use is limited to a few occasions (Article 16). However, the use of local language in mass media didn‘t disappear with the new regulations. Instead, the new millennium witnesses an expanding use of local language in mass media and literature. In the television field, a variety of television shows and genres rendered in local languages are burgeoning: the news talk shows in which news is narrated in local language rather than broadcast in the standard Mandarin, the programs of dubbing films in local languages, the so-called lanmuju (column docudrama) programs that cast nonprofessional, local residents and tell short stories about their ordinary lives. In the film field, Jia Zhangke‘s ―Hometown Trilogy,‖ largely in Shanxi Mandarin, ushered in a wave of underground and independent films employing local languages. Besides 1 The controversy over the relationship between dialect and language is a global and often politicized problem. This study will mainly use the term of ―local languages‖ for fangyan. For a historical study of standard languages and dialects in the context of nation building, see Hobsbawm (1992: 51-63). For the terminological dilemma faced in the Chinese linguistic situation, see DeFrancis (1984: 55-57). 1 underground films, increasing numbers of studio productions, shown in public cinema, are rendered in local languages. Among the cultivation of local languages on the Internet are rap songs using local languages as the rhythmic patois and aided by Flash cyber-technology, so-called standard tests on local-language competence, local- language texts parodying Chinese characters, blogs employing local slang and expressions, and downloadable cell-phone ringtones recorded in local languages. Finally, in the fiction field, there has been a growing conscious awareness of local language among writers. A number of established writers, who used to stick to the standard Mandarin writing style, now experiment with writing novels in their native local languages. Such a profusion of media use of local language has caused considerable concern among the authorities. The State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) has been issuing or reiterating regulations, more often than before, to contain the media use of local language. However, as the entertaining and the commercial value of local language have been rediscovered, the tension between the state and capital is intensified. Almost all the news talk shows rendered in local languages topped the local audience ratings, higher than Mandarin-speaking news program in the local market. Similarly, local-language dubbing programs and videos, albums of local-language rap, and local-language ringing tones have also created substantial commercial profit in local television, audio-video, and/or telecommunications markets.
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