CONCLUSION

This book has explored the rhetorical use of local language, with special attention to variations in the way local language functions in different media and genres, and the reception of local language productions by their audiences. I have argued that local language plays a prominent yet diversified role in contemporary Chinese popular culture. In television programming targeted to a regional mainstream audience, local language functions as a humorous and satirical mechanism, evoking laughter that can foster a sense of local community and assert the local as the site of distinctive cultural production. In comic productions (films, sketches, and sitcoms) shown to a mainstream national audience, local language stimu­ lates an ambiguous laughter that manifests Bakhtinian grotesque realism. In fiction and underground film, local language serves as an important marker of marginality, allowing filmmakers and writers to criticize the center by positioning themselves rhetorically on the periphery. In popular music, increasingly mediated by the Internet, urban youth employ local language to articulate a distinct youth identity in their negotiation with the globalizing and cosmopolitan culture in which they live. Nevertheless, to what degree the use of local language can fos­ ter a sense of local community in regional media is still debatable. As local languages themselves participate in a linguistic and cultural hier­ archy, local media productions often perpetuate regional stereotypes about local languages and confirm the elevated status of the local lan­ guage that enjoys regional hegemony. It is not surprising to find that the most engaging characters usually speak the hegemonic local language of the region, be it Chengdu Mandarin, Chongqing Mandarin, Xi’an Manda­ rin, Guangzhou Xiguan Cantonese, Hangzhou Wu, or the urban Shanghai Wu, whereas the comedic characters and/or the characters of less prom­ inence speak the “stigmatized,” rural, local languages in the lower layer(s) of the linguistic hierarchy. Examples of this linguistic marginalization include the often manipulated and defeated cat dubbed in Zhongjiang Mandarin in the Sichuan version of Tom and Jerry; the illiterate, impetuous cook Big Mouth Li speaking Chongming Wu in the Shanghai Wu version of the sitcom My Own Swordsman; and the clownish, “rustic” cook Ah Jiao 阿娇 speaking rural Huazhou 化州 Cantonese in the Cantonese sitcom Native Husbands with Foreign Wives. Audiences who are not in the regional 278 conclusion center often resent and are offended, humiliated, or alienated by such hierarchical use of local languages, mirroring the dissatisfaction provoked by the use of Standard Putonghua vis-à-vis regional languages in the national media. Furthermore, as there are almost infinite varieties of local languages, media use of the “central” local language may evoke linguistic and cultural proximity only within the audience speaking that dialect and not among audiences outside the geographic center of a region. For exam­ ple, the host Chen Laoxi’s Taiyuan Mandarin in the Shanxi news talk show Laoxi’r Chat Bar could hardly strike a chord among the audience in Linfen 临汾 in the south Shanxi, where the dialects are much different from that of Taiyuan. Therefore, media use of the regional hegemonic dialect may have a greater potential to divide and fragment a region than to foster a unified sense of local community. More fundamentally, on the one hand, I argue that local-language media productions assert the value of pluralism and diversity and defy the characterization of China as a unified, homogeneous nation-state. On the other hand, there is a problem with the construction of local iden­ tities, namely, the underlying similarities beneath their apparent distinc­ tiveness. In discussing the practice of the localization of sitcoms in Chapter 2, I mentioned the trans-regional adaptation of the popular Cantonese sit­ com Native Husbands with Foreign Wives. Other provincial TV stations purchased the script, recast it with local actors, redubbed it with the local target dialect, and reproduced the success of the original. Similarly, as discussed in Chapter 4, it has been a common practice for provincial or city television stations to purchase scripts of the pioneering Chongqing docudrama lanmuju show Night Talk in the Foggy Capital and produce their own lanmuju shows. In Chapter 6, an examination of Ye Pi’s song “The Living Lei Fengs in Zhangjiagang” (“Gangcheng huo Leifeng” 港城 活雷锋), a reworking of Xue Cun’s “The Northeasterners Are All Living Lei Fengs” in Zhangjiagang Wu, revealed that although his song proved instantly popular among netizens from the singer’s hometown,1 its cel­ ebration of that local Zhangjiagang identity was largely achieved by sim­ ply replacing the Northeastern regional specialties named in the original song with those of Zhangjiagang. By the same token, rap songs that praise the performers’ hometowns almost always list the local tourist attractions

1 Qian Chaoxin and Wu Hui 钱超新 吴慧, “Wangluo geshou Ye Pi wangshang chang­ hong Zhangjiagang fangyan ge” 网络歌手叶皮网上唱红张家港方言歌 [Internet singer Ye Pi’s hit Zhangjiagang dialect songs], November 24, 2006, http://www.js.xinhuanet.com/ zjg/2006-11/24/content_8609045.htm.