Introduction 1

Notes Introduction 1. For example, David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 151. 2. See Edward Wong, “China’s President Lashes Out at Western Culture,” New York Times, January 3, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/world/asia/ chinas-president-pushes-back-against-western-culture.html (accessed March 23, 2012). 3. In their 1989 edited volume, the original Chinese term of unofficial is wu guan- fang 無官方 or fei zhengtong 非正統, and the three editors definepopular culture as any kind of culture, including any idea, belief, and practice that “has its origin in the social side of the tension between state and society” and has “origins at least partially independent of the state.” The topics discussed in the book are something that “the government has wanted to suppress or sought to discour- age . ., or pretended to ignore . ., or warily tried to co-opt.” See Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz, eds., Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), 5. In their 2002 edited volume, they once again belittle the state’s role in the production of popular culture and propose an emphasis on different aspects of globalization that they argue to have stronger centrality than the state in shaping tension in popular culture. This time they analyze “a variety of relatively uncensored forms of expression and communication” such as shunkouliu, which Perry Link and Kate Zhou claim contain popular thought and sentiment. Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz, eds., Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Glo- balizing Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 1, 3. For Perry Link and Kate Zhou’s discussion on shunkouliu, see Perry Link and Kate Zhou, “Shunkouliu: Popular Satirical Sayings and Popular Thought,” inPopular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society, ed. Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 89–110. 4. Jing Wang, “Guest Editor’s Introduction,” positions: east asia cultures critique 9, no. 1 (2001): 3. 5. James Lull, China Turned On: Television, Reform, and Resistance (London: Rout- ledge, 1991), 127–53. 172 ● Notes 6. Liu Kang, Globalization and Cultural Trends in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 80–81. 7. Sheldon H. Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 211–12. 8. Kevin Latham, Pop Culture China!: Media, Arts, and Lifestyle (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 32. 9. I agree with Latham’s conceptualization of popular culture. Yet, his approach is a brief historical outline of different forms of popular culture. He does not perform elaborated close readings to illustrate how the content of popular culture interacts with the state. His work is an “introductory overview,” as he puts it, or good for leisure reading, as stated on the back page of the book. See Ibid,, 32, and back page. Lu’s account is useful in seeing how various kinds of revolutionary culture underwent commercialization and became popular culture that simultaneously challenges the dominant state ideology and elitism and is subject to appropriation of the state ideology. However, he does not explain what good qualities the state uses to establish its reputation and moral superiority during the process of domesticating cultural forms, nor does he evaluate the different levels of the state’s appropriation. Moreover, he ignores the presence of a censorship system that renders state manipulation more direct. 10. Thomas Gold, “Go With Your Feelings: Hong Kong and Taiwan Popular Culture in Greater China,” The China Quarterly 136 (1993): 908, footnote 2. 11. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: Con- temporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 3. 12. Laikwan Pang summarizes three main approaches to the study of Chinese cinema: the assertion of “Chinese national cinema,” the theorization of Chinese cinema as a category composed of different regional cinemas, and the global and transnational dimensions of Chinese cinema. Laikwan Pang, “The Institution- alization of ‘Chinese’ Cinema as an Academic Discipline,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, no. 1 (2007): 55–61. However, I would like to argue these three main approaches are based on, resistant to, and expended upon the notion of the national and transnational, such that we explore issues including but not limited to history, gender, nation, and globalization found in “Chinese cinemas.” A few monographs of this voluminous scholarship include Zhang Yingjin, Chi- nese National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2004) and Screening China: Critical Interventions, Cinematic Reconfigurations, and the Transnational Imaginary in Con- temporary Chinese Cinema (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Chinese Studies, 2002); Sheldon Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007); Rey Chow, Senti- mental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films: Attachment in the Age of Global Visibility (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Chris Berry and Mary Ann Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 2006). Edited volumes on Chinese cinema, covering issues of gender, historiography, identity, diaspora, environmental issues, Chinese languages, Notes ● 173 (post–)modernity, and (post–)socialism are also compiled under an overarching theme—Chineseness or national/transnational Chinese. Some examples are Sheldon Lu, Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Hono- lulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997); See-Kam Tan, Peter X. Feng, and Gina Marchetti, eds., Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009); Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, eds., Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Poli- tics (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005); Sheldon H. Lu and Jiayan Mi, eds., Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009); Olivia Khoo and Sean Metzger, eds., Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (Bris- tol, UK: Intellect, 2009). Chinese TV, compared to Chinese film, is an emergent field; yet, there are promising book-length efforts that have introduced Chinese TV drama and the TV industry to English-speaking academia. Similarly, these works revolved around the industry as an entity in China or its transnational aspect, such as Michael Curtin’s provocative analysis of Chinese film and TV in Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Some academics are aware of the politics in TV dramas or in the industry as a whole, but they do not provide detailed analyses, which are long overdue. Some of these current attempts include Ying Zhu, Michael Keane, and Ruoyun Bai, eds., TV Drama in China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008); Ying Zhu, Television in Post-Reform China: Serial Dramas, Confucian Leadership and the Global Television Market (London: Routledge, 2008); Ying Zhu and Chris Berry, eds., TV China (Bloom- ington: Indiana University Press, 2009). There are also many sporadic articles on the development of the TV industry, production, content, and reception of TV programs. For a more detailed record of scholarship on Chinese TV studies, please refer to Ying Zhu, Television in Post-Reform China: Serial Dramas, Con- fucian Leadership and the Global Television Market (London: Routledge, 2008), 13–17. 13. There are recent books series that treat TV and film as compatible under the theoretical framework of screen culture or screen industries. They, however, not only neglect the state’s role, but also overlook the politics in the common production environment of the two media forms. See, for example, the TransAsia Screen Cultures Series by the Hong Kong University Press and the International Screen Industries Series by the British Film Institute. 14. Miao Di, “Between Propaganda and Commercials: Chinese Television Today,” in Changing Media, Changing China, ed. Susan Shirk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91–114; Chris Berry, “Shanghai Television’s Documentary Chan- nel: Chinese Television as Public Space,” in TV China, ed. Ying Zhu and Chris Berry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 71–89; Yin Hong, “Mean- ing, Production, Consumption: The History and Reality of Television Drama in China,” trans. Michael Keane and Bai Jiannu, in Media in China: Consump- tion, Content and Crisis, ed. Stephanie Donald, Michael Keane, and Yin Hong 174 ● Notes (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 28–40; and Bai Ruoyun, “Media Com- mercialization, Entertainment, and the Party-State: The Political Economy of Contemporary Chinese Television Entertainment Culture,” Global Media Journal 4, no. 6 (2005): article no. 12. 15. See Ying Zhu, Chinese Cinema During the Era of Reform: The Ingenuity of the Sys- tem (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003); and Ying Zhu and Stanley Rosen, eds., Art, Politics, and Commerce in Chinese Cinema (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010). 16. Zhong Xueping, Mainstream Culture Refocused: Television Drama, Society, and the Production of Meaning in Reform-Era China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), 12. 17. Ying Zhu, Two Billion Eyes: The Story of

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