Cinematic History and Multi-Subcultural Analysis: The Representation of Youth Dreams in Chinese Cinema

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Sheng Qu, M.A.

Graduate Program in East Asian Studies

The Ohio State University

2014

Thesis Committee:

Kirk Denton, Advisor

Mark Bender

Namiko Kunimoto

Copyright by

Sheng Qu

2014

Abstract

The term dream (meng) may be one of the most frequently used terms in Chinese today. Nowhere has the modern been as intimately connected with young people as it has been in . As a historical testimony, Chinese has long paid close attention to images of young people and their dreams. Despite China’s elaborate film censorship system, commercial film, as a type of new cultural production in the market economy, has a degree of freedom to express their individual understandings of the real dreams of Chinese youth, which are not always in harmony with the official “China dream”.

Against this background, this thesis explores the representation of youth dreams in

Chinese cinema from two perspectives, cinematic history and multi-subcultural analysis.

First, inheriting the academic tradition of historical analysis from western academia, I analyze the image of youth dreams in the history of Chinese film and indicate new commercialized trends of cinematic representation of Chinese youth dreams. Second, I attempt to establish a multi-subcultural framework, consisting of generational, structural, and intersectional models of subcultural theories. By applying the framework, the thesis takes the film series Tiny Times as a case to examine how current Chinese cinema represents the image of Chinese young people’s dreams, considering their relationships with parents, peers, and lovers.

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Dedication

Dedicated to my family

献给我的家人

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Kirk Denton, for his constant support and insightful advice. Without the invaluable help I got from him, the completion of this thesis would not have been possible. I am grateful to Dr. Namiko

Kunimoto, for her meticulous feedback and suggestions to my thesis. I also wish to thank

Dr. Mark Bender and Dr. Heather Inwood, who taught me much about how to conduct academic researches. Last but not least, my deep gratitude goes to my parents for their eternal understanding and love. All of you have helped make this thesis possible.

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Vita

2001-2005...... Hailar No.2 High School, Inner Mongolia, China

2005-2009...... B.A. Photography, Communication University of China

2009-2011...... M.A. Broadcast Journalism, Communication University of China

Fields of Study

Major Field: East Asian Studies

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Vita ...... v

List of Figures ...... viii

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

1.1. Literature Review ...... 4

1.2. Multi-Subcultural Framework on Contemporary Chinese Youth Studies...... 8

Chapter 2: Locating Youth Dreams in the History of Chinese Film...... 22

2.1. Destruction of Youth Dreams (1930s and 1940s)...... 23

2.2. Revolutionary Youth Dreams (1950s and mid-1970s) ...... 26

2.3. Renaissance of Youth Dreams (mid-1970s and 1980s)...... 28

2.4. Crisis of Youth Dreams (1990s and 2000s) ...... 31

2.5. Commercialization of Youth Dreams (2010--present) ...... 34

Chapter 3: A Case Analysis on Tiny Times ...... 43

3.1.Guo Jingming and Tiny Times...... 44

3.2.Generational Analysis: Post-80s...... 47

3.3.Structural Analysis: Rich Second Generation ...... 52

3.4.Intersectional Analysis: White-Rich-Beautiful Ladies...... 57

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Chapter 4: Conclusion ...... 63

Filmography ...... 67

Glossary ...... 69

References...... 72

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Multi-Subcultural Analytic Framework ...... 19

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Chapter 1 Introduction

The word dream (meng) may be one of the most frequently used terms in Chinese mass media today, a that can be attributed to Xi Jinping, who became the

President of China in 2012 and who often uses the term “China dream” (Zhongguo meng) to summarize the future vision of “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”1 As an ideological slogan to describe China’s future, the China dream is bound to be inextricably linked with contemporary Chinese young people, the future leaders of China. The context of present Chinese propaganda describes that the personal ambitions of the younger generations should be combined with the dreams of the nation at large. An example related to the medium of , which is highly infused with the values of official state , reflects that the situation constructed by the notion of the China dream is a national myth.

Beginning in May 2013, Dragon Television, a state-run provincial station, broadcast Chinese Idol after buying the to the show from British Fremantle Media.

Although Chinese Idol is still its official English name due to production principles of the original edition, the Chinese production team now uses Voices of the China Dream

(Zhongguo meng zhi sheng) as the of the reality show that targets a youth audience. Owing to the state backing of Shanghai Dragon Television, this process of renaming demonstrates, to a large extent, a sort of unconscious in Chinese mainstream

1 Since 1997, after the 's 15th National Party Congress,“the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation (中华民族的伟大复兴)” was gradually adopted into official ideology. 1

ideology that is sensitive to the idea of idols. Concretely speaking, this unconscious has actively prohibited any form of idols from being launched upon through its media, despite their attractiveness. This means that, to say nothing of dissenters and politicians, present Chinese mainstream ideology is afraid of any personal heroism being portrayed in . Moreover, the title Voices of the China Dream attempts to cover up individual dreams, reattributing them to those of the nation. Against this background, any personal reasons for singing are relegated to the desire to sing the praises of the national dream. To increase attention for the final episode, the penultimate episode of the show’s first season became a gala entitled “Singing the China Dream, Praising the Builders,” in which Han Hong, a famous Tibetan singer and one of the show’s judges, sang a song called “Youth.” Such concepts as dream, nation, and youth have clearly been integrated into a nationalism myth of the “China dream” on the platform of official state media.

As one of “the Communist Party's mouthpieces,”2 Chinese television is controlled by the State Administration of Press, Publication, , Film and Television (SAPPRFT) and has certainly been central to the creation of the myth of the China dream, a myth that is accordance with the nationalism emphasized by Chinese mainstream ideology. Hence, in the medium of television, youth culture influenced by the national myth is bound to reflect the situation expected by the official mainstream rather than the diversified and complicated identities of real Chinese young people. By contrast, despite China’s elaborate film censorship system, commercial film, as a type of new cultural production in the market economy, does not assume the responsibility of being one of “the

Communist Party’s mouthpieces.” As long as they do not radically resist the official

2 The phrase Communist Party's mouthpiece (党的喉舌) is used for describing the function of official state media by Chinese . 2

ideology, filmmakers have a degree of freedom to express their individual understandings of the real dreams of Chinese youth, which are not always in harmony with the official

China dream.

The 2013 film So Young,3 directed by , is a good example of an attempt to break away from representing the dreams of the young solely within the framework of official ideology. The film, which is based on a novel called To Our Youth That Is Fading

Away by Xin Yiwu, is centered around four college roommates, Zheng Wei, Ruan Guan,

Li Weijuan, and Zhu Xiaobei, on their way to womanhood; the story depicts the large gap between the dreams of their youth and their present reality. Upon entering college, the four female students have a discussion about their dreams:

Zhu Xiaobei (to Li Weijuan): What would your dream husband be like?

Li Weijuan: Don’t ask me this meaningless question! I just want to study hard and

be successful. ( three girls give a loud laugh!)

Zhu Xiaobei: The college should make you its poster girl!

Li Weijuan: Don’t make fun of me. You know how hard it was for a small-town girl

like me to get in here. After working hard here, I won’t sell myself short.

Zhu Xiaobei: Ruan Guan, what’s your dream?

Ruan Guan: My dream? I don’t have a big dream, not really. I’m not hankering for

the good life. I just want to be comfortable. My biggest dream is to stay forever

young.

Zheng Wei: Me too! I don’t want to turn into an old bag!

Four Girls: Here’s to being forever young! Cheers!

3 So young is the official English name of the film To our Youth that is Fading Away (致我们终将逝去的青春). 3

The dreams of the youth that are represented in this film—and the realization of these dreams—do not cater to the national expectation of the China dream but reveal the tragic aspects of the dreams of youth in reality. Zheng Wei yearns for love yet is always single, unable to recover after breaking up with her ex-boyfriend, Chen Xiaozheng; Ruan

Guan dies on the way to meet her ex-boyfriend; Li Weijuan finds being a housewife unfulfilling after marrying a fifty-year-old tycoon with twin boys; and Zhu Xiaobei changes her name after being expelled from college for her violent vengeance on a grocery store whose owner mistook her for a thief. In the film, the dreams of the young people are represented very differently from the grand narrative in Voices of China

Dream in that national missions are not important factors influencing the dreams of the four college students the film depicts.

This example leads me to ask the following questions: As it must necessarily be different from the mainstream framework that reinforces the China dream, what theoretical framework should be used to explain the ways in which the dreams of young people are represented in contemporary Chinese cinema? Which historical stages have the cinematic representatives of youth dreams experienced? How are the dreams of the young represented in contemporary Chinese cinema? To answer the above questions, the following sections of this chapter provide a brief literature review of studies on Chinese youth in Western academia and attempt to establish an analytic framework for understanding the dreams of the young in contemporary Chinese cinema.

1.1 Literature Review

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Because youth studies in Chinese academia often takes on the color of official ideology, to discuss Chinese youth problems from a relatively objective angle, this section will only review Western scholarship.

For a long time, Western scholarship on the culture and ideology of Chinese youth has mainly focused on the significance of generational differences rather than class differentiation and multiple identities of young people, dividing the different generations of Chinese youth into three major stereotyped images: the Red Guards (hong weibing) and sent-down youths (zhiqing) of the Cultural era; the educated youth in the

1980s influenced by bourgeois liberalization; and the young users of the new century.

Chinese youth studies in Western academia originated with exploring images of Red

Guards and sent-down youths. In 1977, Thomas P. Bernstein published Up to the

Mountains and Down to the Villages: The Transfer of Youth from Urban to Rural China, which is one of the earliest detailed analyses in Western academia on the generation of sent-down youth. Bernstein (Bernstein 1977) argues that the Chinese government called for educated young people in the cities to go and work in the rural areas in order to relieve the pressure of unemployment in China’s urban areas between 1953 and 1980. In her book, Tempered in the Revolutionary Furnace, Yihong Pan offers a critical update to

Bernstein’s studies by telling the story of the generation of sent-down youth based on interviews, reminiscences, diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts, as well as on the literary and artistic works, such as poems, novels, and , that have emerged since the late 1980s (Pan 2002). However, Michel Bonnin, a French scholar, disagrees with

Bernstein’s viewpoint. In his Lost Generation, he claims that followed

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Nikita Khrushchev, the ’s leader, who sent Soviet young people from cities to Siberia and Kazakhstan to engage in agricultural production in 1950s (Bonnin 2013).

Western scholars have approached Chinese youth studies in a similar manner throughout the past half-century. They continue to insist on an inherent framework based on the relationship between history and generation. Dingxin Zhao’s (2004) The Power of

Tiananmen analyzes how the changes in China’s state-society relations during the 1980s shaped student emotions and public opinion before the Tiananmen Incident of 1989

(Zhao 2004). In his Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in , Fabio Lanza (2010) considers the May Fourth Movement and June Fourth Incident as representative of twentieth century Chinese student . Lanza (Lanza 2010) not only attempts to define young students as a political category, but also discusses the marriage of the cultural and the political, and the intellectual and the quotidian, that occurred during these two movements.

In the Internet era, at the start of the twenty-first century, Chinese youth studies in western scholarship has focused on the interaction among the youth, media, and society.

In her Urban Youth in China: , the Internet and the Self, Fengshu Liu discusses the interaction between Chinese young people and the Internet, exploring “how urban youth, members of the only-child generation, appropriate the Internet in negotiating meaning making within the socio-cultural context of a Chinese society experiencing spectacular transformation” (Liu 2011:2). Drawing on the fields of social and cultural , Alex Cockain’s Young Chinese in Urban China examines how the changes in various dimensions of urban life have aided in transforming young people’s identities in three contexts. In the macro context, he examines the nature of the youth’s connections

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to the nation and the world; the micro context covers the relationship between parents and their offspring, as well as the young people’s attitudes toward education; and the mediated context examines how the use of traditional media and the Internet have influenced young people’s behavior (Cockain 2012). As a scholarly work examining the development of Chinese youth culture, Paul Clark’s Youth Culture in China: From Red

Guards to Netizens argues that the current culture of Chinese young people has both international and local roots, using the perspective of three historical points: 1968, 1988, and 2008 (Clark 2012).

Admittedly, these significant works on Chinese youth culture are informative and offer the insights brought to bear by various academic disciplines, such as political science, , anthropology, and . And their focus on historical analysis is extremely valuable to future Chinese youth studies. Nevertheless, this scholarship has limitations that we need to recognize if youth studies are to advance. First, in the Western academic context, Chinese youth studies emphasizes the integrity of various generations and overlooks their internal differences. This results in a series of stereotyped images of Chinese young people that are rooted in the historical period they are associated with. For instance, at the thought of the , the historical images of Red Guards and sent-down youth often come to . The only internal variation within this generation is the urban-rural .

With the development of the market economy, cultural identities of Chinese young people have changed radically, becoming more diverse and complicated such that a research methodology stressing generational integrity is inadequate to capture the heterogeneity of Chinese young people’s culture. Apart from generational and complex

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class categorizations of Chinese youth, a number of factors, such as gender, sexual orientation, educational background, and local culture, have also played a vital role in defining contemporary Chinese young people’s cultural identities. As one of the earliest works focusing on the impacts from these subcultural factors, James Farrer’s Opening Up:

Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai discusses how Chinese youth’s sexual attitudes have changed since the shift to a more market-based economy (Farrer 2002). In sum, it is necessary to construct a more detailed analytic model that can cover various layers of youth culture and expand the range of Chinese youth studies.

Furthermore, Chinese youth film studies pays special attention to the influence of the bourgeois liberalization in the 1980s on Chinese films and directors. Xuelin Zhou’s

Young Rebels in Contemporary Chinese Cinema concentrates on how Chinese films in the 1980s express the rebellion of young people born during or soon after the Cultural

Revolution, challenging traditional, orthodox, and conventional at that time

(Zhou 2007). The collection titled The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century brings together some academic articles on the cinemas driven by young filmmakers who emerged in the shadow of the Tiananmen

Incident in 1989, such as Jia Zhanke and Zhang (Zhang 2007). The two academic works have begun to explore the relationship between film and youth; however, they lack systematic discourse and establishment of a theoretical framework concerning the cinematic image of Chinese young people in the historical development of Chinese film.

1.2 Multi-Subcultural Framework on Contemporary Chinese Youth Studies

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The previous section provides a literature review of Chinese youth studies in

Western academia. By reviewing the development of theories of youth subculture in the

Western context, my goal in this section is to explore the structural and social patterns of present-day Chinese youth. With an understanding of the close connection between cinematic theme and social landscape, I attempt here to combine the research experiences of Western youth subcultural studies with Chinese youth studies so as to build a framework through which we can further examine how the identity of contemporary

Chinese youth is reflected in youth films produced in the present.

With the surge of youth cultures and social movements since the 1950s, many

Western scholars in the field of cultural studies have undertaken in-depth research of youth subcultures. The psychologist Erik Erikson thinks that young people represent the most vibrant and compelling part of a nation at any given time (Erikson 1968). Because youths are often involved in marginal cultures or belong to vulnerable groups that have resisted mainstream culture and power, they are often taken as the focus of contemporary culture studies. Following Erikson’s lead, research about young people in Chinese society could provide insight into the features of the entire society from its margins to its center.

In the development of Western youth subculture theory, research models can be divided into three stages: generational, structural, and intersectional. The generational model predominantly attributes youth subcultures to the generation gaps resulting from age differences, but neglects the importance of social structures and class differences within the young generation. The structural model emphasizes social structure and the functions of class and race in young people, arguing that studying the subcultures of the young generation can help solve problems that still exist in the culture of their parents’

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generation. The intersectional model concentrates on the complexity of youth’s cultural identity, which is constituted of diverse elements, such as race, class, and gender.

Brought together into an integrated framework, these three models can provide a deeper understanding of young people in terms of different layers. My intention is to build a new multi-subcultural framework that applies the three models so as to provide an in-depth and comprehensive analysis on contemporary Chinese youth. In the following sections, I discuss the connections between the three theoretical model and the cultural identities of

Chinese young people in the present.

1.2.1 Generational Model

Scholars who support the generational model primarily think that age differences play a significant role in cultural differences, emphasizing common behavioral patterns among young people. Its core idea is that the most important concept in history is

“generations,” not “classes,” and that “generations” and “gaps” play an important part in historical evolution. In this model, young people are regarded as an undifferentiated group, and age becomes a powerful marker in society. They replace the , the principal mover in history in the Marxist model, and the continuity of generations becomes the basic engine of social change beyond class struggle (Hall and Jefferson

1976). Therefore, the huge differences between classes in the post-war West are ascribed—for example, in Culture and Commitment by the cultural anthropologist

Margaret Mead—to the generation gap between young people and their parents. In her study of the generation gap, Mead states that the whole world is in an unprecedented

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situation in which young people and their parents regard each other from across a deep gulf (Mead and Taylor 1970).

Although I do not deny the importance of class within the larger category of Chinese youth, the generational model is useful in locating relationships among the different generations and confirming the role that the young Chinese generation plays in society. In the present context, many scholars often utilize the post-1980s and the post-1990s to define and explain the phenomenon of Chinese youth culture. For example, the term

“post-80s” refers to the generation born between 1980 and 1989 in after the introduction of the one-child policy. This classification method adheres to the generational model of youth subculture described by Western theorists and attempts to draw a clear boundary between the culture of Chinese youth and their parents’ generation.

Compared with other social groups, the basic identity of young people relates to their age (generally defined as between 16 and 30). Because of the growing gap between

Chinese youth and older generations, the post-80s and post-90s often are regarded as an independent group that is isolated from their parents’ generation. According to the generational model, the older generations might attribute the irresponsibility of young people to generational differences that developed over time. At the same time, expecting to mark their own cultural identities, the young generation declares that they are completely beyond their parents’ generation. In summary, based on the deep generation gap caused by historical dynamics, the generational model takes a broad perspective on young people. However, we need to deepen our analysis of the differences within the

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young generation in order to provide a detailed explanation of the complex cultural identities of Chinese youth.

1.2.2 Structural Model

In the late 1960s, the structural model became the main orientation in research on youth subcultures. The Birmingham School of the 1960s and 1970s played a central role in developing a structural theory of youth subcultures. The school mainly refers to scholars at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of

Birmingham. Representative theorists include Stuart Hall, Richard Hoggart, and Tony

Jefferson, who studied the youth subculture of the working classes in Britain.

The phenomenon of youth subculture refers to the subsidiary cultural forms that young people use to challenge the dominant culture in order to establish their own identities through stylized and alternative symbols. Subcultures differ from , which resist the mainstream culture by direct and even radical styles of political confrontation. As representatives of “cultural ” and the “” in

Britain, the theorists of the Birmingham School concentrated on the field of youth subcultural studies, mainly because they no longer followed the political and economic orientation of traditional Marxism, but paid attention to cultural issues and sharply criticized from the perspective of culture and aesthetics (Dworkin 1997). The subcultural theories of the Birmingham school reflect political, class, and cultural characteristics as well as the strong social critique associated with cultural studies. The

Birmingham school holds that the youth subculture is a symptom of social crisis and a

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metaphor of social change, stressing the importance of class conflicts, in particular, over economic factors and cultural rights. The main tendencies of youth subcultures are to seek stimuli, as well as new forms of autonomy, identity, and freedom in order to give meaning to their existences. According to the viewpoints of the Birmingham school, as long as the dominant class oppresses the culture of the disadvantaged classes and the power structure between the two is unbalanced, subcultures will continue to emerge.

The scholars of the Birmingham School believe that youth subculture is part of class culture and that it constitutes a form of resistance to mainstream culture and political hegemony in Britain. The challenge to the hegemony that comes from subcultures indirectly demonstrates the importance and existence of styles. Young people create unique symbolic systems—including literature, film, dance, music, behavior, new words—and assert their existence through stylized symbols. Dick Hebdige, a British media theorist and sociologist, believes that “style” is an external manifestation and that the embedding and displaying of resistance and contradiction are located on the surface of symbols. He vividly describes subcultural style as a kind of “noise,” arguing that it interferes with the smooth realization of capitalist hegemony and undermines consensus within the bourgeoisie (Hebdige 1979).

Compared with their parents’ generation, the degree of class differentiation displayed by Chinese young people today is much more pronounced, and it is increasingly so.

Chinese public opinion often utilizes “the second generation” problem ( “er dai” wen ti) to refer to a series of social phenomena led by class differentiation of young generation.

In fact, in the early years of the reform and opening-up, because of the low level of economic development, Chinese society did not directly experience “the second

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generation” problem. With the prosperity of the Chinese economy in the past twenty years, China’s economic structure has already entered the middle stage of industrialization, but her social structure is still in the early stage of industrialization

(Zhao 2013). Against this background, the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor has been an unavoidable problem in the continuous development of a “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics.” Additionally, owing to the collusion between government officials and capitalists, though China has always alleged that is its basic political system, the country has developed into a bureaucratic capitalist country in which many new words that reflect social class, such as “rich second generation” and “official second generation,” have emerged. Accordingly, such an unfair social environment has given birth to the “poor second generation” among Chinese youth.

As a new social trend in the post-80s and post-90s, “the second generation” problem demonstrates the degree of social differentiation among Chinese young people. An example is about educational opportunity. While many young people living in first-tier cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, have chosen to give up on the National College Admission Examination in order to pursue their college degree in western developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, many children from rural areas now living in the floating urban population face difficulties of access to even basic compulsory education.

1.2.3．Intersectional Model

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Subcultures represent the voices and the resistance of marginalized and vulnerable groups in society, such as the working classes, ethnic minorities, and women. Compared with countercultures, subcultures adopt more moderate, less radical ways to express an ideology of counter-hegemony in order to mark the collapse of the capitalist consensus.

Postmodernist theorists think that compared with subculture studies based on differences in social structure, the nature of subcultural phenomenon has changed in postmodern society. This subcultural phenomenon reveals miscellaneous features of postmodern society, such as heterogeneity and fragmentation, and in postmodern society it is increasingly difficult to draw clear boundaries among race, class and gender from a single angle. Therefore, because the definition of subculture and its research paradigm have already undergone fundamental changes, youth subcultural studies need to consider the complexity of race and gender within a group of young people instead of focusing solely on the generation gap or on class structure.

Angela McRobbie, a British cultural theorist and feminist, played a key role in the transition of youth subcultural studies from to post-structuralism. She realized the flaws of adopting approaches that centered only on class or, for that matter, only on race or on gender. Using an approach that combined issues of race, class, and gender, in Girls and Subcultures she investigates the position of young females in youth subculture and argues that the “subculture” itself has a strong gender bias, and questions whether girls are absent in subcultures (Garber and McRobbie 1983).

At the end of the 1980s, an article in the New Times by Stuart Hall marked the important diversion of British culture studies from modernism to

(McRobbie 1994). McRobbie, in her Postmodernism and Popular Culture, states that

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postmodernism is the best way to understand new mass culture because it produces a profound effect upon the “style” of mass culture. According to McRobbie,

What I will be arguing here is that the terrain of all these surfaces Hebdige mentions—pop, music, style and fashion—is neither as homogeneous nor as limited as he (or The Face) would have it. This landscape of the present, with its embracing of pastiche, its small defiant pleasure in being dressed up or ‘casual’, its exploration of fragmented subjectivity—all of this articulates more precisely with the wider conditions of present ‘reality’: with unemployment, with education, with the ‘aestheticization of culture’, and with the coming into being of those whose voices were historically drowned out by the (modernist) meta-narratives of mastery, which were in turn both patriarchal and imperialist (McRobbie 1994: 14).

Over the past several decades, in the Western context, a social movement pursuing the equality of race, class, and gender has showed a broad landscape of social progress.

Intersectionality has become an important sociological and cultural research model because it analyzes race, class, and gender as social constructs. For example, in the US, race, class, and gender remain “the foundations for systems of power and inequality that, despite our nation’s diversity, continue to be among the most significant social facts of people’s lives. Thus, despite having removed the formal barriers to opportunity, the

United States is still highly stratified along lines of race, class, and gender” (Andersen and Collins 2010: 1). In research on American black women, either gender-based or race-based studies cannot explain their multiple oppressions. In the 1990s, Kimberley

Crenshaw, an American critic, race theorist, and feminist, proposed a new term called

“intersectionality,” which refers to how various socio-cultural features, such as race, social class, gender, and sexual orientation, lead to interlocking categories of experience

(Crenshaw 1991). We all stand at the crossroads of multiple identities, so it is useful to

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consider the complexities of youth subculture, in the West or in China, from the perspective of intersectionality.

With reference to that focus on the analyses of race, class, and gender representations, Stuart Hall defines the concept of ideology as “those images, concepts and premises . . . through which we represent, interpret, understand and ‘make sense’ of some aspect of social existence” (Hall 1995: 82). In film studies, because of the connection between social ideology and film texts, an intersectional analysis of film could, to a large extent, reflect the interplay of race, class, and gender within a social group. Although the sociocultural contexts of the West and China are vastly different,

Western theories, particularly intersectionality, could go a long way toward enhancing the research on contemporary Chinese youth culture.

In its concern with class identity and the inherent generational identity of young people, my study of youth and their dreams in filmic representation stands at the crossroads of generation and class. However, as mentioned above, considering the importance of other cultural labels, such as gender, sexual orientation, educational background, and regional environment, the representations reflecting various details about Chinese young people have exceeded the explanatory possibilities of a series

“second generation” categorizations. In China, the public sphere of the Internet has already inspired many discussions on the diversity and complexity of young people. For example, young Chinese Internet users have begun to use terms such as

“white-rich-beautiful” (for women) and “tall-rich-handsome” (for men) to describe the

“rich second generation” and that epitomize their ideals for individual development.

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Accordingly, “corny-fat-round” (for women) and “short-poor-ugly” (for men) mainly refer to the group of young people that are neither sexually attractive nor rich.

In addition to phrases that refer to the intersectionality of generation, class, and gender, the epithet diao si (penis hair) is widely used by young people in Mainland China to refer to youth who grew up in the country and now work in urban areas. With the popularity of these new words, young people have increasingly utilized the Internet in their daily lives to, in the spirit of Ah Q, laugh at their own predicament and flatter their peers. Even the have utilized them to portray the complicated landscape of present Chinese society.

This carnival of language has given full expression to the complicated intersectionality of Chinese youth identities. By rationalizing a combination among the different identities of young people, the new terms, such as “white-rich-beautiful” ladies, establish a context that deeply reflects not only the logical connection between the sexual attraction and the private wealth of young people, but also the intersectionality of contemporary Chinese youth, based on their generation, class, and gender.

1.2.4 Multi-Subcultural Analytic Framework

In reviewing the development of youth subculture theory, I have shown how the study of young people has gradually moved from generational to structural to intersectional models. Before the late 1960s, the generational model, which regards young people as a unified entity, occupied the mainstream position in academia. However, with the rise of the Birmingham school, the structural model came to play a significant

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role in youth subcultural studies, identifying differences within the group of young people. Since the 1980s, the intersectional model, which is influenced by poststructuralism, has considered the complexity and diversity of young people’s identity, in terms of differences in race, class, gender, and so on. Therefore, the development of theories of youth subculture has led to the notion that to fully understand young people, it is necessary to recognize the different layers that make up their multiple cultural identities.

Figure1: Multi-Subcultural Analytic Framework

This development does not mean that new theories completely replace old theories, which then exit the historical stage. Therefore, considering the theoretical value of the three models discussed above, I can construct a multi-subcultural analytic framework that

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enables me to explore the complexity of cinematic representations of Chinese youth dreams. (See Figure1: Multi-Subcultural Analytic Framework.)

As shown in Figure 1, my method makes use of all three models discussed above, the generational (post-80s), the structural (“rich second generation”), and the intersectional

(“white-rich-beautiful” ladies). First, in researching the issues concerning contemporary

Chinese youth based on their age, the generational explanation concentrates on their historical position, providing perspectives not only on the entirety of Chinese young people but also the relationship among different generations. Hence, this pattern places an historical emphasis on observing social features and explaining social phenomena related to the post-80s generation. Furthermore, because of the neglect of intrinsic differences within Chinese youth growing up in the age of economic prosperity, my framework also needs to utilize a structural analysis to understand the “second generation” problem and to explain the role that the “rich second generation” as a subcultural group of the post-80s generation plays in Chinese society. Additionally, recognizing the place of generation, class, and gender, the intersectional analysis promotes observations of the “rich second generation” to consider how “white-rich-beautiful,” as the byword of female “rich second generation,” forms and what social reality is reflected by this cultural expression.

A multi-subcultural analytic framework avoids the limitations of a single explanatory model and allows one to see the multiple layers involved in youth identities and their dreams. With a multi-subcultural analytic model, neither age nor class is the only standard used to discuss the image of youth dreams in films.

In the previous sections, I reviewed the development of Chinese youth studies in

Western academia. Although these established studies constitute an important research

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tradition centered on historical analysis, they ignore the internal differences of various generations. The result is a series of stereotyped images of Chinese young people from particular historical periods. Against the background, combining research theories of

Western youth subculture with a series of cultural phenomena regarding the current culture of Chinese young people, I attempt to establish a multi-subcultural framework, consisting of generational, structural, and intersectional analyses, to capture a more diverse and complicated state of contemporary Chinese youth’s identities.

The following chapters plan to contribute to two aspects of Chinese youth culture and film studies. First, inheriting the academic tradition of historical analysis from western academia, Chapter 2 makes a detailed analysis of the image of youth dreams in the history of Chinese film and indicates new commercialized trends of cinematic representation of Chinese youth dreams. Second, applying the multi-subcultural framework, Chapter 3 takes the film series Tiny Times as a case to examine how contemporary Chinese film represents the image of Chinese young people’s dreams, considering their relationships with parents, peers, and lovers.

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Chapter 2: Locating Youth Dreams in the History of Chinese Film

Analyzing films in the specific historical and cultural context of their production leads to invaluable insights into their meanings. As a result, film studies should attach importance not only to changes in historical and cultural factors, but also their influence on the content of films. An understanding of Chinese films cannot exclude historical and cultural background. The discourse of youth dates back to the period of the May Fourth

Movement. The movement advocated the end to traditional represented by

Confucianism and held up the banners of science and . In an essay called

“Warning to Youth” (jinggao qingnian) in New Youth, one of the most influential magazines in early modern Chinese history, Chen Duxiu encouraged young people to be independent, progressive, aggressive, cosmopolitan, utilitarian, and scientific (Jiang

1995). From the May Fourth movement to the June Fourth incident, nowhere has the modern been as intimately connected with young people as it has been in China. As a historical testimony, Chinese film has long paid close attention to images of young people and their dreams.

In this chapter, I provide an analysis of the history of the images of youth dreams in

Chinese film. I divide that history into five periods: (1) Destruction of Youth Dreams

(1930s and 1940s); (2) Revolutionary Youth Dreams (1950-1976); (3) The Renaissance of Youth Dreams (mid-1970s and 1980s); (4) Crisis of Youth Dreams (1990s and 2000s); and (5) Commercialization of Youth Dreams (2010--present). The transformation of the

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images of youth dreams in Chinese film not only reflects differences in cinematic function over time but also demonstrates the key role played by young Chinese people in cultural discourse. This chapter attempts to scrutinize “Chinese youth dreams” by placing them at the intersection of Chinese history and culture, cinematic text and political ideology. I conclude that the youth dreams portrayed in Chinese film have salient features that are largely determined by the given historical and cultural context that produced them. This chapter shows that the youth dreams portrayed in Chinese film change from typical images that serve the grand narrative of the collective and the state to individualized expressions that focus on the nature of humanity.

During the period of the silent film in China, most movies were intertwined with traditional art forms. For example, the first Chinese film, The Battle of Mount Dingjun

(1905) produced by Beijing's Fengtai Photography Studio, was a recording of a performance of Tan Xinpei, a famous Beijing opera master (Hu 2003). The origin of

Chinese youth films can be dated back to this period. Laborer's Love (1922), directed by

Zhang Shichuan, is the first Chinese film to portray the theme of romance and free love of young people. Influenced by the New Culture Movement, this twenty-two minute silent comedy feature shows a scene in which Carpenter Zheng proposes to Miss Zhu.

Avant-garde for that time, this scene was obviously out of step with the traditional concept of arranged marriage, thus reflecting a resistance to feudal ethical codes.

2.1 Destruction of Youth Dreams (1930s and 1940s)

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In the 1930s and 1940s, Chinese young people were faced with troubles at and aggression from abroad. Because of the two Civil Wars (1927-1937 and 1946-1949) and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), the internal and external conflict reached unprecedented complications in Chinese society with all kinds of class and national contradictions thrown into the mix.

From the advent of the Leftist Film Movement in 1931 to the outbreak of the Second

Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Chinese film experienced its first golden age. Youth films in particular became an important genre and included several works, such as Plunder of

Peach and Plum (1934), The Goddess (1934), Song of the Fishermen (1934), The Big

Road (1935), New Women (1935), Crossroads (1937), and Street Angel (1937).

Why did the Left-Wing Cinema Movement produce such a large number of excellent youth films? The reasons can be traced back to the New Culture Movement of the mid

1910s and 1920s. Although led by a few older intellectuals, this iconoclastic movement reached out to Chinese youths and promoted their cause and their role in social transformation. The related May Fourth movement of 1919 was a student-led movement. As the movement developed, the New Culture Movement gradually divided into two currents. One part included intellectuals such as Hu Shi, who advocated taking the road of “wholesale ” and , while another group of pioneers represented by Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu inherited the spirit of science and democracy and promoted socialist realism in support of a communist Revolution. Against this background, the cultural elites of the latter current established the League of the

Left-Wing Writers, of which was considered a spiritual leader. In the Leftist Film

Movement, many famous writers who were inspired by the New Culture Movement, such

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as , Xia Yan, and Zheng Boqi, were worried about the future of China and hoped to awaken the Chinese people by emphasizing class struggle and resistance to external threats, as well as reflecting the conflict between traditional ethics and modern values. Young people became the focus of these left-wing films, which depict the process of radical social change. Plunder of Peach and Plum, a Chinese version of Les

Miserables, dramatizes the tragic destiny of a well-educated couple, Tao Jianping and Li

Lilin, whose dream of working for the betterment of society is broken because of the corruption and injustice of society. Tao has to steal money from the manager of the factory he has been reduced to working in so as to treat Li’s injuries after she fell down the stairs. Tao is caught and finally sentenced to death. Crossroads provides a social landscape of troubled times in China in which four unemployed young people feel very confused about their futures, their loves, and their dreams. Street Angel shows that two sisters, Xiao Yun and Xiao Hong, never give up their dreams of freedom, love, and happiness, even though Xiao Yun paid with her life. Almost without exception, these left-wing youth films depict, from a critical realist perspective, the destruction of youth dreams and the tragic lives of young people, aiming directly at the reality of Chinese society at that time and expressing deep sympathy for Chinese youth who could not be masters of their own fates.

When the Sino-Japanese war broke out in 1937, young people became the protagonists of “anti-Japanese war movies,” such as in Young China (1940) and Storm on the Border (1940). Meanwhile, other film companies controlled or established by the

Japanese occupiers, including the Manchukuo Film Association, produced several films that display imperialist propaganda about goodwill and coexistence between China and

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Japan (Zhang 2003; Baskett 2008). The image of young people in films promoting the

Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, such as China Night (1940) and Eternal Regret on the Spring River (1944), centers on the love between a Japanese man and a Chinese woman, suggesting that the Japanese conquered China through the power of a beautiful love.

During the second Civil War, the critical realism promoted by leftwing filmmakers continued in films that reflected the common desperation and helplessness of young people, such as in Eight Thousand Li of Cloud and Moon（1947）and The Spring River

Flows East (1947). These films reflect not only the social tragedies caused by wars, but also the countless crises and limitations of the social reality that affected the dreams of young people at that time.

2.2. Revolutionary Youth Dreams (1950s and mid-1970s)

According to talks given by Mao Zedong at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art in May 1942, the role of literature and art in China has two main missions. First, all art should reflect the life of the working class and consider them as an audience. Moreover, art should serve politics, specifically the advancement of socialism (Mao 1942). Under the influence of the Maoist left in China, film became the tool of ideological propaganda and had to serve political needs by deliberately countering the culture and ideology of capitalism. After the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded by the China

Communist Party in 1949, this revolutionary ideology served as a kind of that forged new narratives in which youth dreams were defined as a process of

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self-improvement for collective and national causes, and were linked with the revolution, completed or uncompleted.

From 1949 to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the third-generation film directors produced a series of youth films to which revolutionary heroism was central. These films included The Youth in Flames of War (1959) by Wang Yan, Song of

Youth (1959) by Cui Wei, Woman Basketball Player No. 5 (1957) and Red Detachment of

Women (1961) by , and Struggles in an Ancient City (1963) by Yan Jizhou.

Revolutionary heroism is the main ideology of these youth films, which reflected not only the core values of nationalism and , but also an enthusiastic and progressive image of revolutionary youth. Films depicting revolutionary heroism have two main features. First, the personal dreams of Chinese young people involve collectivities and the state, which means that young people must suppress any individualized and self-interested thoughts and devote their personal values to collective and national goals. In Song of Youth, for example, Lin Daojing gives up her love for Yu

Yongze for the dream of . And in Woman Basketball Player No. 5, Lin

Xiaojie learns that she plays basketball not only to strengthen her physique but to win honor for her country. In these youth films, the individual emotions and dreams of young people are subsumed within nationalism and collectivism. Thus, in these films, the purpose of personal growth is to contribute to the unquestioned grand narrative of nation and revolution.

Furthermore, most of these films glorify the “perfect figures” (gao da quan) of youthful protagonists, which means that as positive images, these young people are often characterized as moral models for the whole society. Because these films almost

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completely obliterate their independent personalities, emphasizing instead a common image of “heroism,” the expression of the entire generation of youth is concentrated in a small number of similar character types. In such films, the life experiences of youth are the main content, but the definition of youth is a mere “footnote” to the whole great narrative reflecting nationalism and collectivism. Consequently, in the 1950s and 1960s, the image of an independent young person was lacking in youth films, and youth dreams were depicted as part of national, collective, and revolutionary dreams. Youth films of this period avoid in particular depicting sexual desire and attraction or presenting enchanting female characters. Thus, in these youth films, the external appearance of young characters lack the kind of vibrancy and energy we associate with young people, instead reflecting the ideology of revolutionary heroism and covering up the independent personality of young people.

In February 1966, , Mao’s wife, convened a forum on work in the literature and art of the armed forces. She released a document named Summary of the

Forum, which denied all achievements in literature and art since the founding of the PRC and claimed that Chinese literary and artistic circles had been ruined by the dictatorship of the anti-socialist line. In this period, Jiang Qing promoted “model operas,” all of which were adapted into films in order to more widely and effectively propagate Maoist ideology (Lu 2007; Lu 2004). The dreams of young people in the revolutionary model operas are both limited and formulaic, used as a tool of ideological propaganda.

2.3. Renaissance of Youth Dreams (mid-1970s and 1980s)

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When the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping initiated the policy of reform and opening-up in 1978, China began to rethink the traumatic memory of the

“ten-year catastrophe,” but also to embrace diverse ideas, including ideas from abroad.

As a product of the economic and social reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s, youth films in this period are primarily concerned with three key themes: traumatic memory, romance, and rebellion.

Undoubtedly, the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong was a turning point in Chinese history toward the radical anti-traditional and anti-western social ideology of the ultra-leftist Maoist line. Historical facts have demonstrated that this political line had a devastating impact on the entire country and its people. When the film industry recovered from the shadow of the Cultural Revolution, a large number of youth films were produced that reflect the traumatic memory of the Cultural Revolution that a large amount of urban educated youth sacrifice their personal dreams to be sent down to live and work in rural areas. Unlike their Mao-era counterparts, these films draw attention to the enduring power of the human spirit to survive political calamity. Representatives of

“traumatic” youth films include Narrow Street (1981), Our Farmland (1983), Sacrificed

Youth (1985), and so on. Narrow Street not only criticizes the dehumanization of the

Cultural Revolution and destruction of the dreams of young people, but also expresses the desire for a humanistic renaissance (renwen huigui) by displaying symbols of negative excesses of that time, such as “unisex hairstyles” and model operas. Sacrificed Youth represents the legacy of an entire generation of young Chinese who were sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution and whose dreams were lost. The film tells the story of an educated female youth named Li Chun and the discovery of her femininity

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and sexuality while living and working among the Dai ethnic minority as a sent-down youth.

Humanistic renaissance was reflected also in youth films with a romance narrative line. Romance on Lu Mountain (1980) is a significant milestone in the development of

Chinese youth romance films because it abandons the paradigm of the tragic ending that often appears in romantic youth films. In this film, historical background and family status can never again obstruct true love. The first romantic movie after the Cultural

Revolution ended, Romance on Lu Mountain included a scene showing the two protagonists kissing that created a sensation across the nation (Zhou 2007), shattering the established screen image of young Chinese completely dedicated to the cause of nationalism and collectivism. In Romance on Lu Mountain, youth dreams pursued only personal happiness in life.

In the Mao era, Chinese youth were an important element of mainstream ideology and propaganda. In the 1980s, China began to promote the development of the economy through a modernization program that unraveled the very fabric of the socialist economy.

Since that time, Western universal values of democracy and freedom have had a great influence on Chinese youth. Meanwhile, the conservative one-party system led to severe corruption in government. Because of the imbalance between political and economic reform and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe at the end of 1980s, the resistance of Chinese youth to mainstream ideology peaked in the Tian’anmen Square protests of

1989, in which Chinese people held the flag of anti-corruption and promoted the reform of the Chinese political system. Correspondingly, the screen images of Chinese young people lacked a spirit of resistance to mainstream values until a series of young-rebel

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films appeared in the late 1980s. These films depict angry and alienated youth living on the periphery of mainstream society, a far cry from the heroic workers, peasants, and soldiers in Mao era films (Zhou 2007). In particular, in 1988, four films adapted from the works of Wang Shao were released, including Masters of Mischief (1988), Samsara

(1988), Out of Breath (1988), and Half Flame, Half Brine (1988). Although they do not directly involve sensitive political issues, these films about young rebels undoubtedly were quite ahead of their time, and they set a significant precedent of poking fun at mainstream ideology. In these films, young rebels from all walks of life reflect the spiritual crises and diseased society of the 1980s. Against this background, in these films, the dreams of Chinese young people reflect a refusal to cave into the demands of mainstream culture and to examine the mainstream society with an oppositional attitude; the films extol youths for daring to live according to their own principles.

2.4. Crisis of Youth Dreams (1990s and 2000s)

By the 1990s, Chinese youth cinema entered a period of diversity engendered by a binary production system consisting of independent and commercial cinemas. The films of independent, sixth generation directors, including , Jia Zhangke, Wang

Xiaoshuai, He Jianjun, Guan Hu, Lu Xuezhang, and so on, show a strong awareness of resistance to mainstream society by focusing on the lives of young people on the margins of society. Most directors in the sixth generation were born in the 1960s and 1970s and had graduated from three flagship colleges in the field of film, television, and drama: the

Beijing Film Academy, the Central Academy of Drama, and the Beijing Broadcasting

Institute—hence labeled as the “academics” (xueyuan pai) of Chinese film circles. The

Cultural Revolution did not directly influence their childhood, but they witnessed or 31

participated in the Tian’anmen student movement of 1989. Therefore, these directors, who entered Chinese film circles in the 1990s, experienced the collapse of the old ideas and the establishment of new thoughts within Chinese society, which led to their suspicion toward conventions and traditions. Understandably, because of the further tightening of film censorship by the Chinese government after 1989, the directors in the sixth generation had to produce their works outside the state-controlled studio system in order to reflect their radical views of the cruel tragedies faced by young people.

Many independent films that could not be legally distributed in China have become classics. By viewing these films, we are able to understand the dreams of Chinese youth from a perspective that is far from the mainstream ideology. ’s The Days

(1990), for example, expresses the ideological transition of Chinese youth from nationalism to at the beginning of the 1990s. The dreams of the young protagonists are no longer limited to the frame of the national dream, and they dare to give up everything within a system that appears hopeless to them. Zhang Yuan’s Beijing

Bastards (1990) implies a rejection of mainstream values by depicting the counter-cultures of rock, sex, violence, drugs, and so on. He Jianjun’s Postman (1995) describes the introspectiveness of a voyeuristic postman who reads other people’s mail.

The young postman becomes more and more tied to the letters, and he begins to intervene in the lives of those who write and receive the letters. But at last he realizes that one person is unable to change another’s life, having only just enough ability to change his or her own. As an important representative of the sixth generation directors of Chinese film,

Jia Zhangke finished his “trilogy of youth”—Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000), and

Unknown Pleasures (2002)—at the turn of the new century. Unlike critical realism, Jia’s

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films never make explicit moral judgments, but in his visual language he often explores the details behind grand historical events by concentrating on the lives of marginalized or disenfranchised youth.

In terms of commercial cinema, Chinese youth films since the 1990s have narrated stories from two angles: student life and nostalgic memories. The former not only tell stories of young people growing up against the background of the new era but also reveal the huge difference in the quality of youth’s lives in urban and rural China. Zhang

Yimou’s Not One Less (1999) describes the extremely poor life of young rural people who nonetheless harbor their own dreams. The Story of Blossom Season, Rainy Season

(1997) is set in Shenzhen, a , and involves issues of census registration (hukou), which has become a peculiar social phenomenon in China because it directly influences the future life of a young person, including employment, marriage, and the qualification to take the National College Admission Examination. In the film, the problem of Shenzhen’s census registration has always hindered the young protagonist,

Xie Xinran, and has led to many annoyances in her life. Although her parents have worked in Shenzhen for over twenty years and she was born in the city, she has no right to take the College Admission Examination as a Shenzhen person, so she cannot become a true citizen of the city in which she was born and raised. These two student-life films, which are set in the poorest and richest areas in China, demonstrate not only that the developmental disparity between regions is still the source of many social problems that obstruct the dreams of Chinese youth, but also that young Chinese, whether they come from rural or urban areas, cannot escape the social limitations of the day.

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Since the 1990s, youth films about nostalgic memories have also become an important genre. These films explore common youth memories, focusing on eternal human themes of family, love, and friendship set in different historical periods. In the

Heat of the Sun (1994), directed by , was one of the earliest films in this genre.

It recalls the adolescent memories of a mischievous fellow named Ma Xiaojun one summer during the Cultural Revolution. Examination 1977 (2009) depicts how a group of educated young people face choices and struggles about love and friendship after the

National College Admission Examination was restored in 1977. In addition, many youth films are about true love coming grievous endings, such as The Foliage (2003), A Time to

Love (2005), Shanghai Dreams (2005), The Knot (2006), and so on. Likewise, a shift in the parent-child relationship from conflict to understanding is often shown in the youth films of this period, such as (1999), My Father and I (2003), and Sunflower (2005).

2.5 Commercialization of Youth Dreams (2010-present)

The aim of this section is to analyze macroscopically cinematic images of youth in the new commercialized trend in Chinese filmmaking since 2008. I begin with a brief introduction to the commercialized process of youth cinemas and then describe some representative works of Chinese youth films in the present. Then I attempt to discuss how state apparatus and market influence the representation of youth dreams in the present.

After 2000, with the releases of Big Shot's Funeral (2001), by , and

Hero (2002), by , the Mainland Chinese film industry entered an era of

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big-budget commercial films. With the exception of “leitmotif films,” which are state-sponsored films that disseminate ideological propaganda, and independent films that express dissent or pursue artistic value, most Chinese films are commercial products that not only conform to official film censorship but also cater to the needs of the cultural market and popular taste. Before 2008, the genres of big-budget commercial films were mainly “Costume Films” or “New Year’s Films.” However, after 2008, Chinese youth films entered a new period of development and have become a main force in the film market. Because Chinese youth are a huge cultural market, the majority of youth films are about the new generation born since the 1980s. These films treat increasingly diverse subjects, including student life, college entrance exanimations, romance, family, business start-ups, and so on, depicting a broad and deep landscape of Chinese society.

Young Style (2013) and Mark of Youth (2013) describe the maturation of young people and their experiences with the National College Entrance Examination, which is often regarded as the first step in “entering society” in China. So Young (2013) recalls the campus life of several schoolgirls and explores the changes in their loves and friendships face after their graduation from university. Go LaLa Go! (2011) focusses on the loves and struggles of young urban white-collar workers. Love is Not Blind (2011) is about the struggle of a young female to get over disappointment in love. City Monkey (2010) reflects the deep generation gap between a young man who is fond of parkour, an extreme sport, and his mother. (2013), which is adapted from the true story of the New Oriental School,4 tells an uplifting story of three young men successfully establishing the largest comprehensive educational company in China. The

4 The New Oriental School is the precursor to the New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc, which is one of the most famous providers of private educational services in China. 35

Tiny Times (2013) series focusses on the loves, families, and friendships of the “rich second generation” living in Shanghai.

In the present era of the commercial film in China, youth films play a vital role in the

Chinese film industry and show a range of many kinds of characters. Due to the fundamental changes in cultural institution and production modes, compared with the previous periods, it is necessary to reevaluate the present relationship between youth films with the state/party and the market. In his book, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese

Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age, Jason McGrath thinks that, based on the logic of capitalist marketization, the Chinese economy and culture are experiencing a transition from “state heteronomy” to “relative autonomy” (McGrath 2008:

9), which “is generated by, and ultimately must adjust itself to, various market conditions, from the demands of domestic consumers to those of a global cultural market” (11). The following two sections analyze how the transition from “state heteronomy” to “relative autonomy” is reflected in the present roles played by, respectively, state/party and market in the production of Chinese youth films.

2.5.1. Reduced Influence of Official Ideology

According to the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary, an authoritative one-volume

Chinese language dictionary, the word “youth” refers in China to individuals between the ages of 16 and 30. Therefore, the present generation of Chinese youth was born between

1984 and 1998 and their growth stage occurred from the 1980s to the present. During the growth process, they witnessed great national achievements, such as the transfers of sovereignty of and Macau to the PRC, accession to the World Trade

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Organization (WTO), the success of the Chinese manned space program, all of which have been touted in state propaganda. After the successful hosting of the Beijing Olympic

Games in 2008, national dreams among some young people seemed to have already reached a state of completion in the great national narrative and the relationship between individuals and the state has been reorganized in a new context. This means that national dreams play a much less role in youth culture than they did in earlier times.

From the perspective of mainstream ideology, in 2013, after the 18th National

Congress of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping, the new leader of China, proposed the “China Dream” as the core of Chinese socialist thought, which led to its widespread use in the Chinese media. The term “China Dream” emphasizes the role of the individual, especially youth, in Chinese society. Compared with the , which emphasizes the importance of individual endeavor, the China dream attaches more importance to the interrelationship between national and personal success, which means that the mainstream ideology in present-day China still attempts to establish a consensus of thought. The term China Dream is a core propagandistic phrase used to reject self-centered thought.

However, reflecting the concerns of the current generation of young people, the contents of today’s youth films lack this kind of expression of the connection between the individual and the national mission emphasized by President Xi’s “China dream.” Youth dreams in these films involve study, love, and career development, and belong to individuals instead of the state and the collective, which runs in the opposite direction.

After experiencing the transition from “state heteronomy” to “relative autonomy,” official ideology has increasingly reduced its direct influence on youth films. Because

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youth films still have to pass the censorship standards of the Chinese government, the present autonomy is a relative not absolute status. Consequently, in order to enter the film market, these youth films do not explicitly criticize social reality; they ignore the current political system in which young people who have experienced the age of the steadiest growth in prosperity in modern Chinese history pay more attention to their own personal development than to the future and destiny of the Chinese nation. Compared to their parents’ generation, which chose resistance to the social system and power in Tiananmen

Square in 1989, today’s young people lack education about the history of the struggle for the future of the nation and have chosen a compromise with the current political situation for pursuing individual interests. Some of them might even regard the status quo as the best option for China.

Moreover, in cinematic narrative, “dream” has also become a key word in the current context of Chinese youth films. If the metaphor of a film as a dream reflects psychological desires cinema audiences fulfill by connecting their personal experiences with the contents of a film, the stories of film protagonists may also be explained from the perspective of dreams. Most recent Chinese youth films directly probe the topic of youth dreams through their dialogue, plot, and theme songs.

2.5.2. Formation of Consumer Market

The previous section discussed how the state restrains the autonomy of the Chinese film industry, even as youth films no longer need to fulfill the demands of official propaganda in the present commercialized trend. In this section, I will explore the autonomy from the angle of the consumer market of contemporary youth films.

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Having grown up during the country’s economic boom, Chinese youth today are consumer-obsessed. Jean Baudrillard, the author of The Consumer Society: Myths and

Structures, thinks that constitutes the intrinsic logic of capitalism society

(Baudrillard 1998). Consumption reflects not only the level of material culture but also cultural meanings and individual identities. Hence, for Baudrillard, the purpose of consumption is less about supplying useful commodities and services than it is about generating meanings necessary to sustain a capitalist society.

Since the Chinese film industry entered the commercialized era, film production has mainly relied on capital investment, which means that commercial films as cultural products need to have powerful box-office appeal. According to , the cultural logic of late capitalism relates to consumer society, in which consumer goods and have saturated all facets of social life (Jameson 1991). In her Consumer

Society, Celia Lury states that commodity value depends on the values of consumers, which means that the purpose of choosing and buying goods is for people to assert and maintain social position (Lury 1996). In China, youth films and their target market, young Chinese people, have formed a consumer relationship based on the operational mode of the market economy. In the market, dreams built by youth films become a kind of commodity that attempts to provide the masses with a sense of happiness or longing for the future. Consequently, as a kind of commercialized cultural product, contemporary youth films can reflect, at least, the following three features that are different from those of previous periods.

First, despite their success at the box office, most Chinese youth films in the post-Olympic period are not considered great films with high artistic value; they are

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consumer goods. As more and more Chinese films have been targeted at the huge demography of young people in China, the artistic quality of youth films has gradually decreased as commercial profit have been pursued. Even so, as long as youth films can exhibit a large amount of entertainment value, the market is large enough to allow these youth films, regardless of their artistic quality, to recover costs and make a profit. In a consumer society, the purpose of young people’s consumption has never been restricted to satisfying the basic needs of life. For them, the consumption of cultural products can assist in achieving cultural identities; in particular, it also can help these young people take part in the discussion of public topics that are in accordance with their cultural identities. Therefore, their consumption of youth films has less to do with artistic quality than with the cultural touchstones the films reflect for young people. Though some might argue they are wasting their money on bad movies, their consumerism allows these young people to participate in public discourse and to demonstrate their own cultural existence.

Moreover, instead of seeking greater artistic value and risking failure at the box office, these recent Chinese youth films make use of handsome and beautiful popular idols to attract young people and to achieve their box office goals. Despite cut-and-dried plots and terrible performances, the strategy of using idols diverts the viewing experience from film appreciation to the worship of popular stars. In Chinese youth films that reflect urban life, such as Go Lala Go! and Tiny Times, this pattern successfully caters to the needs of commercial culture. What attracts the young audience in the films is not the story, but the particular combination of wealth and beauty as a fashion style. In a sense, this combination constructs an imaginary space for the so-called dream of Chinese youth.

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In addition, in the present circumstances, Chinese youth films strongly exhibit an alliance between nostalgia and fashion. In his : and Global

Culture, Roland Robertson argues that nostalgia is inherent in the processes of globalization, and a personal sense of “homelessness” can be dated back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “the take-off period of rapidly accelerating globalization.” As a form of cultural politics, willful nostalgia has been a significant characteristic of globalization (Robertson 1992) and regarded as a sensibility, “that is a crucial marker of postmodernization in a variety of social fields” (Simon 1995: 26). Such ubiquitous nostalgia projects all kinds of consumerist desires onto the past. As the post-1980s generation has entered their thirties, an ever-growing number of their works in the field of literature, cinema, and popular culture have become more noticeable and have achieved success by adopting nostalgia as a narrative strategy. For instance, published in 2006 in Mainland China, You Are the Apple of My Eye, by Giddens Ko, is a semi-autobiographical Internet novel that has aroused the sympathy of mainland China’s audiences with its literary representation of campus life in . In 2011, this Internet novel was adapted into a film, which gained a considerable box office success. In similar fashion, Eternal Moment, a film adaptation of the popular 1998 TV drama Cherish Our

Love Forever, caused wave of discussion related to the concept of marriage and love in the post-80s generation in 2011.

In this chapter, I have not only placed images of Chinese youth in their ideological and historical contexts, but also examined the gradual transformation of the cinematic

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expression of youth dreams from that of a conveyer of social and political functions to a vehicle for the expression of human values.

This overview demonstrates that the images of youth in Chinese film do not transcend the limitations of the historical period in which they were produced—for example, the Left-wing Film Movement of the 1930s, in which Chinese youth dreams are so intertwined with the various social crises of the day. During the 1960s, the cinematic narrative of Chinese young people revealed a monotone image of revolutionary heroism.

In the process of choosing film as an ideological tool or artistic form, Chinese directors since the 1980s have gradually begun to realize the importance of human emotion and have depicted the personal stories of Chinese youth—their loves, families, and friendships. Since the 1990s, Chinese youth films have no longer overemphasized political ideology by using the framework of a grand narrative, but instead have told personal stories set against an historical background. Such Chinese films have gradually offered this individual emotional structure and replaced the dominance of political propaganda; the main goal of artistic expression in youth films has shifted toward the depiction of the variety of images of Chinese youth. By rejecting singular moral standards and respecting more multiple values, the directors of these Chinese youth films have made many positive efforts to portray Chinese youth from new and varied angles, with artistic values different from those in previous periods. Entering into the commercialized period with the transition from “state heteronomy” to “relative autonomy,” although youth films are still faced with the restrictions of government censorship, they have gradually exhibit the relative autonomy of the consumer market so as to cater to the needs of consumerism and commercialization.

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Chapter 3: A Case Analysis of Tiny Times

Tiny Times is a series of films written and directed by Guo Jingming, a famous writer who was born in the 1980s, and based on the best-selling novel of the same name also by

Guo. In 2013, this series of two films, Tiny Times 1.0 and Tiny Times 2.0 became hits.

(Tiny Times 3.0 is to be released in the summer of 2014.) Set in the present, the films feature the narrator and protagonist Lin Xiao and her best friends Li, Nan Xiang, and

Tang Wanru as they navigate love, career, and friendship in Shanghai. The series was a huge commercial success in the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Nevertheless, the

Tiny Times series has received a mass of negative reviews from official media, freelancers, and some audiences. After the release of the series, the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the CCP, issued two editorials to discuss the Tiny Times series.

Although it was a big-budget production and many young idols performed in the series, critical and official opinion condemned it for its conventional plots and hedonistic values.

Because of the nationwide controversy it unleashed, the Tiny Times series is chosen as a case study to show how Chinese youth films in the post-Olympic period reflect youth dreams. Utilizing the multi-subcultural framework, this chapter concentrates on the representation of the dreams of Chinese young people in Tiny Times, particularly the rich second generation, to determine whether it illustrates the “China dream,” the ideological slogan proposed by President Xi Jinping. From a deeper perspective, I ask the following key questions: How do these youth films generally portray their parents’ generation as

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negative characters that destroy the dreams of young people? Why do young dreams in contemporary Chinese films reflect an apolitical attitude, instead of drawing attention to the importance of the nation and the Chinese people as emphasized by Xi Jinping in his

“China dream” speeches? Why are many female characters in these films portrayed as insane and submissive? What cultural factors and social dynamics produce this regression from in Chinese youth films?

3.1 Guo Jingming and Tiny Times

Born in 1983 in Sichuan province, Guo Jingming is a popular writer, film director, screenwriter, and businessperson. Guo became famous while attending the third and fourth New Concept Writing Competitions sponsored by Mengya Magazine, a famous

Chinese journal publishing youth literature. His “The Script” and “Our Last Song on

Campus” eventually won first prize in both contests in 2001 and 2002, respectively.

When he was twenty-three years old, Guo became the youngest member of the China’s

Writers Association. At present, he is the chief editor of Changjiang Literature & Art

Press. His representative, best-selling works are City of Fantasy (Huan cheng), Zui novel

(Zui xiaoshuo), Before the Arrival of Summer Solstice (1995-2005 xia zhi wei zhi),

Never-Flowers in Never Dream (Meng li hua luo zhi duo shao), and River of Sorrow

(Beishang niliu cheng he).

Guo wrote and directed Tiny Times 1.0 and Tiny Times 2.0, which were released together in August 2013. Set in Shanghai, the Tiny Time series depicts the friendship of four post-80s girls, Lin Xiao, Gu Li, Nan Xiang, and Tang Wanru. Narrated from Lin

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Xiao’s perspective, the series illustrates significant changes in the young women’s philosophies. At the beginning of Tiny Time 1.0, the four best friends sing the Scottish folksong “Auld Lang Syne” at their high-school graduation ceremony, and they go on to attend the same college where they are roommates. Both on and off campus, they all confront the heavy pressures of their emotional lives and their part-time jobs and they have to cope with continuous, intractable challenges. When she is the special assistant of

Gong Ming, the chief editor of the prestigious M.E. fashion magazine, Lin Xiao has to resolve a misunderstanding with her boyfriend, Jian Xi. The “white-rich-beautiful” lady

Gu Li possesses wisdom and wealth but is annoyed that Ye Chuanping, her boyfriend’s mother, breaks up her relationship with Gu Yuan, Gu Li’s boyfriend. Nan Xiang, who majors in costume design, is often harassed by her ex-boyfriend, Xi Cheng. Tao Wanru, the jokester, secretly falls in love with an athlete named Wei Hai. At last, after the four girls deal with the numerous troubles involved with the collegiate fashion contest organized by Lin Xiao as a staff of M.E. magazine and Gu Li as a representative of their college, Nan Xiang, one of competitors, gives a speech to praise the youth of the four girls.

Tiny Times 2.0 begins with an old video shot of their high school commencement, in which the four girls and Gu Yuan talk about their dreams of what they will do when they graduate from university. The narrative then skips ahead to the time when all the students are preparing for their university graduation. While her internship at M.E. fashion magazine has ended, Lin Xiao also ends the relationship with Jian Xi. Nan Xiang breaks up the friendship with Gu Li at the luxury banquet to celebrate Gu Li’s birthday because she knows that Gu Li had sex with her ex-boyfriend. After the birthday banquet, Gu Li

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has to face the blow that her father has died in a traffic accident. Nevertheless, she does not seem to be negatively affected by these setbacks and successfully takes control of her father’s company. Finally, when her company is confronted with the acquisition by M.E. company and Ye Chuanping, Gu Yuan, as the representative of Ye’s company, helps Gu

Li sell her company to M.E. company for a high price. At the end of Tiny Times 2.0, compared with their own unsophisticated dreams in the old video, all four young women have completely changed.

Since Tiny Times 1.0 was published in 2008, Guo’s intentions in writing it have been a controversial topic. From the literary perspective, Tiny Times attempts to describe the life, values, and affective relationships of young Chinese people living under circumstances of material prosperity. However, the series is not only a literary work but also a cultural commodity, meaning that the mass audience pays more attention to the fashion, luxury goods, lifestyles, and young idols than the story itself. Guo has seized on the psychological conditions of many young people, and used them to create a sort of imaginary space through the combination of wealth and young beauty. In reality, Guo’s lifestyle is different from those of other traditional writers. Like the young protagonists in

Tiny Times, Guo, as a popular idol with a strong commercial appeal, is famous for showing off his wealth in public. As a result, Tiny Times reflects Guo’s personal values and, to a large extent, it glorifies consumer culture. With regard to the tragic ending of the novel Tiny Times 3.0, published in 2011, in which almost all of the young protagonists are engulfed in flames, this cannot be defined as a negative critique of the rich second generation. In fact, Guo has always been good at portraying tragic endings, and this has become a sort of trick he uses to make up for his literary deficiencies and

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commercial attractiveness.

3.2 Generational Analysis: Post-80s

When studying youth subcultures from the perspective of generational theory, scholars are often inclined to ignore the class-based feature of subcultures. In the generational model, class, as the dimension and motivation of social structures in previous times, is rejected as an outdated term. This standpoint is very useful for us in observing the relationship between young people and their parents’ generation, as depicted in youth films. From a holistic point of view, we can easily identify a clear and profound gap between them that is sometimes characterized by adversity. By considering the post-80s as a group, this section utilizes the generational theory to analyze how parents in the film become negative characters that destroy young dreams and how Tiny

Times represents the generational conflicts between young people and their parents.

Traditionally, Chinese people attach great importance to the relationship between parents and children, in particular the filial obligations of the latter toward the former. In such a social system, individuals are connected in a web of patriarchal relations with the whole clan. However, the image of parents as barriers dates back to at least the May

Fourth period, where parents were often barriers to “free love”; even in the Maoist era, the older generation were sometimes depicted as ideologically suspect. In Tiny Times, the parents of the young protagonists also play negative roles that become the biggest barriers to the dreams of the young people, instead of the traditional positive image of

“stern father and compassionate mother.” Ian MacDonald theorizes that the identity of

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young people who cut themselves off from traditional culture is not clear, and that the culture created by them has classless attributes (MacDonald 2007). Tiny Times does not include any plotlines that involve the parents of Lin Xiao, Nan Xiang, and Tang Wanru.

Gu Yuan’s mother, Ye Chuanping, manipulates her son’s love relationship in order to seek further financial benefits. Gong Ming’s father, who is only referred in the film, shows no hesitation in ceasing to pay for the education of his half-brother, Zhou

Congguang. Gu Li always wrangles with her father about something, but the relevant scenes only show Gu Li’s peremptory attitude toward her father from angle of a camera placed behind his back. The camera never depict the facial expression of Gu Li’s father, at least until he dies in traffic accident. In the limited number of scenes that deal with the relationships between the post-80s characters and their parents, the generational gap is represented as irreconcilable.

Tiny Times dramatically portrays the impossibility of intergenerational cultural communication and the antagonistic relationship between parents and children.

Consequently, while the elders refuse to listen to their children and pull every string to attain the path that they want for their children, the young people in the film firmly reject any indoctrination by their parents.

Tiny Times completely separates material connections from emotional connections between the young people and their parents in order to depict as negative an image as possible of their relationship. The tremendous imbalance between the material and emotional connections of these young people and their parents further results in the collapse of intergenerational understanding. When children receive material support from their parents, they become tools of parents who can relentlessly sacrifice their children's

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happiness for their own interests. For Gu Yuan’s mother, it is still acceptable to interfere in her son’s relationship with Gu Li. When Gu Yuan expresses his dissatisfaction, the first thing she does is to freeze Gu Yuan’s credit card. Similarly, no family in the film provides emotional support or understanding for their child, and the family even becomes the source of the child’s pain. Amongst these young protagonists, for example, Gu Li is portrayed as a cold and unaffectionate person toward her parents. On the day of her father's funeral, Gu Li carefully and peacefully reads his will and coherently analyzes her inheritance. After the funeral, Gu Li has a vehement quarrel with her step-mother：

Gu Li’s step-mother: If you didn't make him rush to your birthday party, he

wouldn’t have sped so recklessly on the highway. Now he’s lying here. Are you

happy? Are you pleased? You’re already looking though the will. I really wasted

time raising you.

Gu Li: Yes, mother. It’s not easy to raise me.

Gu Li’s step-mother: Mother? Who’s your mother? That slut who gave birth to

you is your mother.

Gu Li: No need to remind me. It’s mentioned in the will. [This is the first time

Gu Li learns about her birth mother.)

Gu Li’s step-mother: I regret raising. You’ll get what is coming. Your dad is still

lying there. His body isn’t cold yet. You just see how much money you can get. Your

heart has been devoured by a dog!

Gu Li: My dad is cremated. There are only ashes, no bones.

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In the scene, Gu Li stands in front of Lin Xiao and Tang Wanru while her step-mother is isolated in the right half of the frame. In the unbalanced photographic composition, Gu Li and her step-mother hold their own umbrella and scowl at each other with hatred in their eyes. Compared with the colorful scenes in most of the film, the greyness of the scene set in front of the grave of Gu Li’s father presents a sort of depressing tone toward the family relationships of the post-80s generation. In fact, this scene dramatizes the abnormal state existing in current Chinese society, in which young people seek revenge for the lack of emotional support from their parents who nonetheless have provided them with material support.

Returning to the historical analysis, we find that the post-80s urban youth, who have experienced the age of the steadiest growth in prosperity in modern Chinese history, pay more attention to their own personal development than to the future and destiny of the state. In the work, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain,

Hall and Jefferson use three key words—affluence, consensus, and embourgeoisement—to explain the ideology of classlessness that followed the establishment of the British benefit system after II (Hall and Jefferson 1976).

To a certain extent, these three terms can also summarize the reality of contemporary

Chinese society, in that the accumulation of social wealth makes young people spend much more energy on their emotional lives than on striving for basic material necessities, as their parents did.

Moreover, taking account of the impact of the one-child policy, most post-80s youth are “little emperors” or “little princesses” in their families. The parents of the post-80s generation provided their only children with sufficient material support, but this sort of

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material satisfaction hardly made up for the loneliness of solitary children who could not gain emotional support from their parents. While they trust their peers, the young people in Tiny Times neglect and are even hostile toward their families, resisting any communication with the older generation. In a sense, Tiny Times merely affirms the importance of peer communication. In terms of the four female friends, while each faces problems of love, friendship, and family, the only solution is to learn from their peers.

Breaking away from their parents’ generation, the small collective with Gu Li as the core is able to overcome all difficulties. In Tiny Times 1.0, Nan Xiang plans to take part in the design competition organized by Gu Li and Lin Xiao but she does not qualify. So Nan

Xiang wants Lin Xiao to put in a good word to Ye Chuanping, Gu Yuan’s mother, who is one of the judges. But Lin Xiao is even refused permission to enter Ye’s house. In the end, Gu Li helps Nan Xiang get the chance of taking part in the show by pleading with a teacher in their college. Understandably, their small collective of friends has become the most important part of these young people’s lives. They hope to gain the support, understanding, acceptance, and encouragement from their peers that are not provided by their parents.

It should be pointed out, however, that the dramatic plots in Tiny Times exaggerate human weaknesses. The film cold-heartedly declares that the blood ties valued in traditional Chinese culture have lost emotional significance and that they are centered on material connections alone. Moreover, faced with the material and emotional support, the post-80s generation in the film shows their self-directed ambition. All their behavioral motives, including resisting their parents and forging bonds with their peers, converge in the individualization of youth dreams. As a result, from the perspective of Chinese

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mainstream ideology, various individual dreams pursued by the young protagonists only belong to the category of their small collective rather than a bigger collective—the nation.

This kind of small collective catering to the needs of individualism reflects an inter-class union analyzed in the following section.

3.3 Structural Analysis: Rich Second Generation

The generational model adopted in the previous section to highlight the films’ intergenerational conflicts cannot, however, provide a detailed analysis of the differences within the groups of young people in China. As Dick Hebdige states, the disadvantage of emphasizing only the generation gap and rival relationships between the young and the old is that we miss the specific concepts, forms, and details in a given period (Hebdige

1979). Mike Brake thinks that the term “culture” is not neutral and contains historical, particular, and ideological meanings (Brake 1985). Consequently, the generational explanation cannot answer many questions, such as why new words like “rich second generation” are generated in China today? How does a film reflect the image of the rich second generation? What relationship is depicted in the film between the rich second generation and other young people?

Structural theories used to decode subcultures emphasize the class structure in which the youth subculture is situated, and the consistency of the different forms of youth subculture within a same structure, in particular, the connections and contradictions within class structure. Fundamentally, the structural explanation argues that the awareness of generations has been rooted in class experience, and that the political

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analysis of youth culture should concentrate on the nature of class instead of solely on youth’s generational identity.

After the release of Tiny Times, the People’s Daily expressed the official position on this film in two editorials. In one comment, titled “Tiny Times and Great Times,” published on July 15, 2013, Liu Qiong directly criticizes the beautification of the rich second generation in the film:

Nowadays, if films like Tiny Times are all that flood our ears and eyes, it may be because they are profitable, but it will lead to [our society] unconditionally indulging in the appearance of Tiny Times 2 and Tiny Times 3. As materialism and consumerism lead the social ethos of today, tiny times, tiny world, and tiny structure cover up and even replace great times, great world, and great structure. The capital operations of individuals or small groups perhaps succeed, but humanistic construction and communication of the times are out of control. (Liu 2013).

In another opinion piece titled “Rectifying the General Mood of Society Cannot Rely on Suppressing Tiny Times,” Xiong Jian argues “Under the condition of the market economy, a product can only gain market recognition after it has met demand. Tiny Times has accomplished this. First, its literary value cannot be compared with previous masterpieces, but it does not deviate from the rules of literary creation to reflect real life.

Second, it does not violate the rules of market-oriented economy, meeting demand. Is there anything wrong with that?” (Xiong 2013)

Although these two editorials express critical and tolerant attitudes, respectively, toward Tiny Times, both are aware of the connection between the money worship of the rich second generation and the mainstream atmosphere in Chinese society and both point out how the film shows admiration for these rich young people, which Chinese public opinion generally regards negatively. As for the cinematic image of the post-80s and

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post-90s youth, who directly gained immense amounts of wealth from their parents, the rich second generation in the film are only represented by Gu Li, Gu Yuan, and Gong

Ming who were born with “silver spoons in their mouths.” They do not need to launch businesses through hard work as their parents’ generation did, and they are able to enjoy extremely luxurious lives. In contrast, three of the four girls represent the middle-class second generation that comprises the majority of the post-80s youth living in urban areas.

Hence, Tiny Times represents class differentiations within the group of Chinese young people. In particular, the following paragraphs mainly discuss the rich second generation in the film from three aspects, including their image-rebuilding, relationship with other young people, and values.

First, Tiny Times praises the rich second generation and its lifestyle, although the term rich second generation has gained a negative connotation in public opinion because social news often reports that members of the rich second generation engage in bad behavior, even as their social connections (guanxi) can keep them out of trouble. The narrator, Lin Xiao, a common girl, constantly expresses her worship of the rich second generation. At one point, Lin Xiao remarks:

“And there are others, who since birth, have been living in expensive real estate. Their lives are sweet and lavish as rose nectar. Their feet are removed from worldly dust. They are cherubs of fate, living in the clouds . . . those wealthy, at the tip of the pyramid; every day for them is like a carefully designed formula. Every nutrient placed according to the best ratio. Their bodies, in turn, maintain the best shape. Brightly shining lives eternal, sparkling. They occupy the most wonderful areas of Shanghai, receiving the envy of many.”

Meanwhile, the film shapes Gu Li into the absolute “queen” of the four young women by repeatedly showing her in scenes where rituals take place. A girl takes an imaginary

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crown from another girl and invests Gu Li with the crown. The three girls then bend their heads to greet their queen, Gu Li. By extolling the rich second generation in this way,

Tiny Times not only represents a resistance to the negative impression of rich second generation in the mainstream values but also hints that only the dreams of these rich young people are truly precious.

Second, Tiny Times attempts to depict a relationship between the different classes of young people. This reflects their unequal friendship based on different social positions. In the film, when other girls have difficulties in life or work, their queen,

Gu Li, plays the role of savior. She resolves the crisis of the fashion show organized by

Lin Xiao, protects Nan Xiang from her ex-boyfriend’s harassment, and makes a match between Tang Wanru and Wei Hai. It seems that the dreams of the three common girls rely on this girl of the rich second generation for their fulfillment. At the end of Tiny

Time 1.0, the scene of the fashion show in which four girls take their bows onstage is intercut with the scene of their high-school graduation ceremony at which they sing together. With the accompaniment of the Scottish folksong “Auld Lang Syne,” it seems that their friendship has already stood the test of time successfully. But in fact their queen’s behavior is not consistent with that of moral savior, according to current Chinese mainstream values. For example, she has a sexual relationship with Nan Xiang’s ex-boyfriend and makes caustic remarks about Lin Xiao when Lin breaks up with Jian Xi.

She says to Wei Hai, who already had a girlfriend before Tang Wanru: “These years, as long as there’s no registered marriage, legally, everyone is still single.” Except for the end of the friendship between Nan Xiang and Gu Li, Li Xiao and Tang Wangru can bury the past to follow Gu Li after their university graduation and even move into Gu’s luxury

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villa as roommates. The loss of rich second generation’s morals and the other girls’ dignity, which obviously are not a target criticized by Tiny Times, reflect class differences among Chinese youth.

Third, Tiny Times advocates the values of the rich second generation regarding wealth, values that are at odds with mainstream ideology. Compared with the representation of wealth depicted in American Dreams in China, another Chinese youth film released in 2013, which encourages young people to create wealth by going into business in the market economy, the rich second generation in Tiny Times valorizes money worship and overlooks the sin of unearned social positions. Furthermore, through the authority of their wealth, the rich young people in the film establish the behavioral rules in their “youthocracy” rules that are reflected in luxury brands, money worship and even personal indulgence. For instance, Gong Ming likes to collect various types of cups used for different beverages. After breaking one of them, Lin Xiao knows off the top of his head that the price of the glass is the equal to that of a large diamond ring. Although mainstream public opinion often criticizes the rich second generation for flaunting its wealth, Tiny Times does not hesitate to display and sanctify the kind of behavior.

In summary, the youth dreams portrayed in Tiny Times belong to the rich second generation and other young people who aspire to become rich. Instead of drawing attention to class conflicts within the group of young people, class differentiation resulting from a family’s economic condition implies that the poor are subject to the wealthy in the small collective of young people in the film. A film like Tiny Times that is centered on wealth can only reflect the values of the rich second generation. The structural model allows us to see that the film caters to the needs of the rich second

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generation, which is anxious to rectify its name by constructing an illusory class harmony that lacks humanistic sympathy for the entirety of Chinese young people.

3.4 Intersectional Analysis: White-Rich-Beautiful Ladies

The previous two sections found that the film reflects the subtle oppositional relationship between young protagonists and their parents caused by an imbalance between material and emotional connections and that the peers of the rich young people attempt to show their respect for authority based on unearned wealth, respectively. This section considers the importance of gender as a category in analyzing the phenomenon of

“white-rich-beautiful” ladies. Never before has systemic research focused on the phenomenon from the perspective of intersectionality. After all, the intersectional identities of Chinese young people have only recently become an obvious social phenomenon within the China’s larger socio-economic development. This section focuses on white-rich-beautiful ladies in the rich second generation by considering the intersection of generation, class, and gender.

The theory of intersectionality can be traced to African American women’s studies, which emphasize the multiple oppressions of race, class, and gender to which black women are subject. Negative images of African American women are reflected in literature, film, music, and mass media. Hence, African American women need to build a theoretical framework to reflect their oppressed reality in order to extricate themselves from hegemonic knowledge systems (Collins 1999). By contrast, although

“white-rich-beautiful” ladies are obviously not images of oppression, Tiny Times shows

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that their identities results from the intersectionality of generation, class, and gender. In this series of “chick-flicks,” the visual style and plot resemble a combination of The Devil

Wears Prada (2006) and Sex and the City series (2008, 2010), three American commercial films, and the types of female protagonists in Tiny Times represent to some extent young women living in Chinese urban areas. Gu Li is a typical

“white-rich-beautiful” girl; Lin Xiao is not rich but she is a beautiful girl who worships the rich; Nan Xiang is an introvert with high self-esteem; and Tang Wanru is a jokester with low self-esteem.

As a “white-rich-beautiful” girl, Gu Li seemingly can control her relationships with parents, peers, and even lovers. This sort of female power, which is based on beauty and personal wealth, demonstrates a regression from feminism in Chinese society. In this section, I analyze this regression in terms of three aspects.

First, although this film includes several love relations of young people, the relationship between Gu Li and Gu Yuan is the most important storyline. This couple, which represents the combination of “white-rich-beautiful” ladies and

“tall-rich-handsome” gentlemen, is obviously different from the motif common in earlier youth films. This new model of the romantic story differs not only from the “Cinderella” model in Western romance films, but also from the love tragedies in Chinese films in which a young couple cannot be united because history and politics interfere, such as the

Cultural Revolution.5 While the love stories of the other three girls end in failure, only this rich second-generation couple succeeds and, despite their disagreements, remains a model of love in the film. However, this model vividly shows the reappearance of men dang hu dui, a traditional Chinese concept referring to marriages between families of

5 For this genre of film that reflects true love with grievous endings, see the Chapter 1.4, pp.19. 58

equal status, within the rich second generation. The reason that Gu Li and Gu Yuan form a relationship is that they were both good at mathematics in high school. The film seems to glorify their relationship as a myth of caizi jiaren (scholar-beauty). However, during a quarrel, Gu Li points out the nature of the love relationship between a

“white-rich-beautiful” girl and a “tall-rich-handsome” gentleman, saying, “Don’t be childish. How old are you? You really think these things aren’t worth anything. Let me tell you. Love without materialism is just a pile of sand. Even without the following wind, it will spill after a few steps’ walking.” This causes Gu Yuan’s immediate query: “If I were a poor guy today, would you still like me?” While the end of Tiny Times 2.0 forces the myth of the materialized love model to a climax in which Gu Yuan helps Gu Li sell her company to Gong Ming, the film clearly depicts love relationships of young people as a kind of production relation rather than something based on personal emotion.

Moreover, adopting a male chauvinist attitude, Tiny Times ruthlessly satirizes the dream of female youth. At their high school graduation, the four female friends make a video in which they express their hopes and expectations for their future after college graduation. But most of those dreams remain unfulfilled. Gu Li takes over her father’s company, so she has to give up her dream of studying abroad. After breaking her friendship with Gu Li, Nan Xiang’s life reaches an impasse, so she can no longer contemplate her long-term dream of a personal fashion show to display her works. Tang

Wanru’s dream of becoming a beautiful girl seems unreasonable, given her homely looks.

Only Lin Xiao realizes her humble dream of finding a good boss; however, this dream obviously lacks feminist self-awakening and places the female in a subordinate position within the socio-economic structure. In this regard, Tiny Times depicts shallow goals,

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including becoming a beautiful girl or finding a good boss, as “what female young people truly want,” and it depreciates any dream that displays female self-awareness, such as studying abroad and displaying one’s designs in a fashion show. In the film, female youth must submit to male-centered social values. As Zhu Ying and Frances Hisgen argue,

“The male chauvinism in the film is symptomatic of a society where the choices for women are severely limited. The ones with bodies are enticed to become material girls under the thumb of men, the ones with brains who dare to use their thinking faculties are condemned to eternal loneliness, and the ones possessing neither are banished to a corner”

(Zhu and Hisgen 2013).

Third, though Gu Li, as a representative of “white-rich-beautiful” ladies, shows female power that depends on her wealth and appearance, the film constructs this sort of feminism at the expense of other more common female youth, such as Lin Xiao, Tang

Wanru, and Nan Xiang. Although a specific feminist movement has not occurred in

China, socialism provided the dynamics for promoting gender equality in Chinese society, which was deeply influenced by Confucian patriarchal culture before the establishment of the communist government in 1949 (Wen 2000). Compared with pre-modern times, the position of Chinese women has progressed, both within the family and society. However, because of the concept of traditional patriarchy and prejudices against women’s ability to work, Chinese women are still confronted by many pressures in applying for jobs and getting married. In the film, Chinese society seems to have regressed to pre-modern times.

Economic development has led to the dissolution of gender rights, “reviving cultural traditions that reduce women to a sub-human status” (Zhu and Hisgen 2013). For an interview for an internship position at M.E. fashion magazine, Lin Xiao carries a pair of

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high-heeled shoes borrowed from Gu Li. The cold scene at M.E. Company makes the young girl feel nervous. Lin Xiao witnesses how many interviewees either break down in tears or faint after their challenging interviews. Set against the exaggerated character expressions in the scene, Lin Xiao waits anxiously for her turn while Gong Ming, the chief editor of M.E., appears before each of the applicants. Gong’s female secretary randomly chooses Lin Xiao to buy a cup of coffee downstairs as a test. As Lin Xiao takes her first step forward, she awkwardly falls before Gong’s feet because of her nervousness.

At this moment, accompanied by the romantic sound of piano music, the audience sees

Lin Xiao slowly look up from Gong’s feet to his head. During the process, Gong helps

Lin Xiao up like a gentleman and lovingly asks her, “Are you okay?” As the two young people look at each other with love, the piano sound stops abruptly, indicating that the preceding scene has only been in the girl’s imagination. The real situation is that Gong looks down on the embarrassed girl with scorn and then walks right past her. The whole scene shows a sharp contrast between the arrogant “tall-rich-handsome” man and the common girl. However, this disrespect for her as a young woman does not prevent Lin

Xiao from working toward her goal of becoming Gong’s assistant and serving the rich.

Therefore, the whole scene can express that, for many female youth in China, the dream of being their own master has been replaced by catering to the values of a male-centered society.

In this intersectional approach to “white-rich-beautiful” ladies, we gain insight into cinematic details of the group of Chinese youth portrayed in Tiny Times. The intersectional analysis shows that the film expresses a male hegemony that has emerged in the economic prosperity of China and that the “white-rich-beautiful” ideal is a

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patriarchal myth. The combination of a “white-rich-beautiful” lady and a

“tall-rich-handsome” gentleman negates the emotional value of love and renders it into an exchange of benefits. Furthermore, Tiny Times not only sneers at almost all dreams that reflect female self-awareness, but also sacrifices a larger feminism for the skin-deep power of the “white-rich-beautiful” lady.

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Chapter 4 Conclusion

After reviewing the development of Chinese youth studies in Western academia, I proposed that these established studies offer a valuable tradition of historical analysis, but that they overlook the internal differences of various generations and result in a series of stereotyped images of Chinese young people connected to different historical periods. As a result, to account for and respond to the more diverse and complicated state of contemporary Chinese youth’s identities, I developed an analytic framework that combines various research theories of Western youth subculture and applies them to present Chinese youth cultural studies. As a matter of fact, the theoretical development of subcultural studies does not mean that new theories completely replace old theories, which then exit the historical stage. Therefore, considering a series of cultural phenomena regarding current Chinese young people, such as post-80s, “rich second generation,” and

“white-rich-beautiful,” Chapter 1 establishes a multi-subcultural framework, consisting of generational, structural, and intersectional models, for exploring the cinematic representation of contemporary Chinese youth dreams.

At the end of the first chapter, I raised two aspects of major research objectives of this paper concerning the cinematic image of Chinese youth’s dreams: (1) providing a detailed historical analysis of the cinematic image of Chinese youth dreams; and (2) applying a multi-subcultural framework to conduct a case study of the film series Tiny

Times.

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Using historical analysis, the second chapter presents an overview of the historical trajectory of youth films from the 1930s to the present. I found that the cinematic representation of young people reflects the historical period in which it was produced—the war and destruction of the Republican era, the revolutionary ethos of the

Mao era, the renaissance of the post-Mao reforms, the crisis of the post-Tiananmen era, and the commercialization of the present—but also documents the various roles that

Chinese young people have played throughout the different historical periods. As the

Leftist Film Movement promoted the first wave of Chinese youth films, youth dreams suffered from the various social crises resulting from World War II and the civil war.

From the establishment of socialist China in the early 1950s to the eve of the Cultural

Revolution in the mid 1960s, revolutionary heroism became the only expression of

Chinese youth whose personal dreams were replaced by the revolutionary ideals of the state and collectives. After the interruption of the Chinese film industry in the Cultural

Revolution era, Chinese film directors attempted to balance the cinematic function as an ideological tool and artistic form. This development led to an increased number of youth films depicting the love, family, and friendship of young people.

Due to the development of the market-oriented economy, Chinese youth film has gradually divided into independent and commercial routes since the 1990s. The sixth generation directors, influenced by the trend of liberalization in the 1980s, focused on not only young people living at the margins of society but also the topic of campus life and nostalgic memories to present a range of emotions and destinies of Chinese young people.

The final section of Chapter 2 focuses on Chinese youth dreams in the contemporary films. Due to the transition from “state heteronomy” to “relative autonomy,” while youth

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films still have to experience government censorship, they have gradually established a relative autonomy to cater to the needs of consumerism and commercialization.

Subsequently, Chapter 3 applies the multi-subcultural framework to observe the different layers of current Chinese young people, including post-80s, “rich second generation” and “white-rich-beautiful” ladies. In examining Tiny Times through the lens of the multi-subcultural framework, we can see how the film series reflects the details of contemporary Chinese youth’s identities in the post-Olympic period, and draw several conclusions.

Tiny Times attempts to dramatize the weaknesses reflected in the different layers of current Chinese young people’s identities. Through the generational explanation, Tiny

Times declares that the relationship between post-80s and their parents is more material than emotional. While their parents play a negative role in obstructing their goals, the dreams of young protagonists display self-directed value orientation. Moreover, structural analysis argues that the film attempts to rectify the image and reputation of “rich second generation” by singing their praises. The youth dreams of Tiny Times only belong to the

“rich second generation” and other young people who respect and aspire to their lifestyle.

Deliberately contradicting the mainstream ideology, class differentiation resulting from the family’s economic condition implies that the inferior is subject to the superior in the small collective of young people in the film. At last, owing to the intersectionality of the identities of white-rich-beautiful women, the intersectional analysis claims that the film series expresses a kind of male hegemony that has reemerged along with the economic prosperity in China. The combination of a “white-rich-beautiful” women and a

“tall-rich-handsome” man marginalizes the emotional value of love and transforms it into

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an exchange of benefits. At the same time, Tiny Times not only ruthlessly sneers at almost all dreams reflecting female self-awareness, but also sacrifices feminism in favor of creating the skin-deep power of the “white-rich-beautiful” lady.

Admittedly, as a methodological attempt, the multi-subcultural framework is not without fault. Future research needs to further confirm whether the framework can be adapted to youth studies of other countries and cultural genres. Meanwhile, another pressing problem is how to strengthen the connection between historical and multi-subcultural analysis on a given research objective. However, by applying the multi-subcultural framework, the analysis of Tiny Times reflects the representation of youth dreams based on the different layers of cultural identities of young Chinese people, from the generational, structural and intersectional perspectives. There is no denying the fact that Tiny Times only expresses the living situation of urban young people who grow up in economic prosperity and not that of, for example, migrant workers or peasants.

However, as a theoretical framework, the combination of generational, structural, and intersectional theories in the field of Western subcultural studies is consistent with the diversified identities of contemporary young Chinese individuals, including the post-80s, the rich second generation, and the “white- rich- and beautiful.” This consistency between subcultural theories and young Chinese identities suggests a new analytic perspective on Chinese youth problems for future related studies that aim to avoid the limitations set by a single theoretical model.

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Filmography

A Time to Love（情人结, 2005）/ / 霍建起 American Dreams in China (中国合伙人, 2013) /Chen Kexin/陈可辛 Beijing Bastards (北京杂种,1990) /Zhang Yuan/张元 Big Shot's Funeral (大腕, 2001) / Feng Xiaogang/ 冯小刚 City Monkey (玩酷青春, 2010) /Kong Lingchen/孔令晨 Crossroads (十字街头, 1937) /Shen Xiling/沈西苓 Eight Thousand Li of Cloud and Moon (八千里路云和月, 1947) / Shi Dongshan/史东山 Eternal Regret on the Spring River (春江遗恨, 1944) / Hiroshi Inagaki/稻垣浩 Examination 1977 (高考 1977, 2009) / Jiang Haiyang/ 江海洋 Go LaLa Go!（杜拉拉升职记, 2011）/ Jinglei/ 徐静蕾 Half Flame, Half Brine (一半是火焰, 一半是海水, 1988) // 夏钢 Heat of the Sun (阳光灿烂的日子, 1994) /Jiang Wen /姜文 Hero (英雄, 2002) / Zhang Yimou/ 张艺谋 Laborer's Love (劳工之爱情, 1922) / Zhang Shichuan/ 张石川 Love is Not Blind (失恋 33 天, 2011) / Teng Huatao/ 滕华涛 Mark of Youth (全城高考, 2013) /Zhong Shaoxiong /钟少雄 Masters of Mischief (顽主, 1988) /Mi Jiashan / 米家山 My Father and I (我和爸爸, 2003) / / 徐静蕾 Narrow Street (小街, 1981) /Yang Yanjin/ 杨延晋 Not One Less (一个都不能少,1999) /Zhang Yimou/ 张艺谋 Our Farmland(我们的田野，1983) /Xie Fei/ 谢飞 Out of Breath (大喘气, 1988) /Ye Daying/ 叶大鹰 Platform (站台 2000) /Jia Zhangke/贾樟柯 Plunder of Peach and Plum (桃李劫, 1934) /Ying Yunwei/应云卫 Postmen In The Mountains (那山那人那狗，1999) /Huo Jianqi/ 霍建起 Romance on Lu Mountain (庐山恋, 1980) /Huang Zumo/黄祖模 Sacrificed Youth (青春祭, 1985) /Zhang Nuanxin/张暖忻 Samsara (轮回, 1988) //黄建新 Shanghai Dreams (青红, 2005) /Wang Xiaoshuai/王小帅 So Young (致我们终将逝去的青春, 2013) /Zhao Wei/ 赵薇 Song of the Fishermen (渔光曲,1934) /Cai Chusheng/蔡楚生 Song of Youth (青春之歌, 1959) /Cui Wei/崔嵬

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Storm on the Border (塞上风云, 1940) /Ying Yunwei/应云卫 Street Angel (马路天使, 1937) /Yuan Muzhi/袁牧之 Struggles in an Ancient City (野火春风斗古城, 1963) /Yan Jizhou/严寄洲 China Night (支那の夜, 1941) / Osamu Fushimizu/伏水修 Sunflower (向日葵, 2005) //张杨 The Battle of Mount Dingjun (定军山,1905) /Ren Jingfeng/任景丰 The Big Road (大路, 1935) // 孙瑜 The Days (冬春的日子, 1990) /Wang Xiaoshuai/王小帅 The Foliage (美人草，2003) /Lv Le/ 吕乐 The Goddess (神女, 1934) /Wu Yonggang/ 吴永刚 The Knot（云水谣，2006）//尹力 The New Women (新女性, 1935) /Cai Chusheng/蔡楚生 The Red Detachment of Women (红色娘子军, 1961) /Xie Jin/谢晋 The Spring River Flows East（一江春水向东流，1947）/Cai Chusheng/蔡楚生 The Story of Blossom Season, Rainy Season (花季雨季,1997) /Qi Jian/戚健 The Youth in Flames of War (战火中的青春,1959) /Wang Yan/王炎 Tiny Times (小时代, 2013) /Guo Jingming/郭敬明 Unknown Pleasures (任逍遥，2002) /Jia Zhangke/贾樟柯 Woman Basketball Player No. 5 (女篮五号, 1957) /Xie Jin/谢晋 Xiao Wu (小武,1997) /Jia Zhangke/贾樟柯 Young China (青年中国, 1940) /Su Yi/苏怡 Young Style (青春派, 2013) /Liu Jie/刘杰

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Glossary

Before the Arrival of Summer Solstice (1995-2005 夏至未至) Beijing's Fengtai Photography (丰泰照相馆) Carpenter Zheng (郑木匠) caizi jiaren (才子佳人) census registration (户籍) Changjiang Literature & Art Press (长江文艺出版社) Chen Duxiu (陈独秀) Chen Huai Ai(陈怀皑) China Dream (中国梦) City of Fantasy (幻城) corny-fat-round ladies (土肥圆) Cui Wei (崔嵬) diao si (penis hair, 屌丝) Feng Xiaogang (冯小刚) Guan Hu (管虎) Han Hong (韩红) He Jianjun (何建军) Hong Shen (洪深) Hu Shi (胡适) humanistic renaissance (人文回归) Jia Zhangke (贾樟柯) Jiang Wen (姜文) League of the Left-Wing Writers (左翼作家联盟) Left-Wing Cinema Movement (左翼电影运动) Li Chun (李纯) Li Dazhao (李大钊) Li Lilin (黎丽琳) Lin Daojing (林道静) Lin Xiaojie (林小洁) Lu Xuezhang (路学长) Lu Xun (鲁迅) Ma Xiaojun (马小军) May Fourth Movement (五四运动)

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men dang hu dui (门当户对) Miss Zhu (祝小姐) model operas (样板戏) National College Admission Examination (高考) Never-Flowers in Never Dream (梦里花落知多少) New Concept Writing Competition (新概念作文大赛) New Cultural Movement (新文化运动) New Year’s Films (贺岁片) New Youth (新青年) official second generation(guan er dai, 官二代) perfect figures (高大全) Post-80s (80 后) Post-90s (90 后) Postman (邮差,1995) Red Guard (红卫兵) rich second generation (fu er dai, 富二代) River of Sorrow (悲伤逆流成河). sent-down youth (知青) Shanghai Dragon Television (上海东方卫视) short-poor-ugly gentlemen (矮穷挫) spirit of Ah Q (阿 Q 精神) Summary of the forum (部队文艺工作座谈会纪要) tall-rich-handsome gentlemen (高富帅) Tan Xinpei (谭鑫培） Tao Jianping (陶建平) leitmotif films (主旋律电影) unisex hairstyle (阴阳头) Voice of the China dream (中国梦之声) Wang Shao (王朔) Wang Xiaoshuai (王小帅) Wang Yan (王炎) Warning the youth (敬告青年) white-rich-beautiful ladies (白富美) Xi Jinping (习近平) Xia Yan (夏衍) Xiao Hong (小红) Xiao Yun (小云) Xie Jin（谢晋） Xie Xinran(谢欣然) Yan Jizhou (严寄洲). Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art (在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话)

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Yu Yongze (余永泽) Zhang Shichuan(张石川) Zhang Yuan(张元) Zui novel (最小说) Zheng Boqi (郑伯奇)

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