Organizer and Chair: Julia F. Andrews, Ohio State University
Commercialism and Nationalism: Chinese Cinema’s First Wave of Entertainment Films
Ying Zhu, University of Texas, Austin
Chinese cinema has been going through a series of institutional restructurings since the mid-1980s to cope with the demands of the market economy ushered in by the Chinese government. The upshot has been the commercialization and decentralization of a formerly state-subsidized film industry. Competing with imported blockbusters for domestic market share, some Chinese filmmakers have turned to Hollywood for inspiration, imitating Hollywood’s big budget, high tech entertainment formula. The resulting surge in domestic entertainment fare has incited nationalistic sentiment among the cultural critics and some industrial practitioners in favor of a cinema with more cultural significance. Chinese cinema is thus caught between economic ambition to capture the domestic market occupied by the Hollywood-led imports and cultural ambition to produce films with Chinese characteristics. The current tension between commercialism and nationalism has its parallel in the early development of Chinese cinema, especially from 1922 to 1931, another time when competition from Hollywood cast a shadow on the domestic screen. At times antagonistic, while threatened by Hollywood, nationalism argues for protecting China’s cultural identity by protecting its domestic cultural market; commercialism, on the other hand, offers a strategic solution (however partial) for winning back market share by producing popular entertainment pictures. Viewed from this perspective, nationalism helps to justify the rise of commercialism yet the latter eventually incites the resurgence of the former. Such is the case of Chinese cinema’s first and the most recent entertainment picture waves. Such is also the focus of my comparative research paper.
Rumor, Legend, Fiction, History: The Story of Lü Siniang, Assassin of the Yongzheng-Emperor
Roland Altenburger, University of Zurich
The Yongzheng-emperor’s sudden death, in Fall, 1735, has nourished people’s fantasies ever since. From early on it was rumored that the emperor had not died from an acute illness, as the official version stated, but had been assassinated. The emperor’s death was related to the notorious case of ‘literary inquisition’ against the posteriority of the Ming-loyalist Lü Liuliang under the Yongzheng-reign. Legend had it that Lü’s grand-daughter, named as Siniang, had evaded arrestation, learned fighting skills, joined a group of knights-errant, and eventually assassinated the emperor in revenge for the draconian punishment of the Lü-clan. In Twentieth-century popular literature, the Lü Siniang-lore evolved into an extended narrative corpus, mainly in the genres of embellished history and knight-errantry fiction. Around 1920, fictionalizing histories of the Qing-dynasty favorized the Yongzheng-emperor’s death on the hand of the avenging swordswoman Lü Siniang; and some works of chivalric fiction promoted the legendary figure Lü Siniang as the foremost representation of the female knight-errant in Qing-history. Based on a typology of the story’s versions produced in the process of its narrative evolution, the paper will explore these intersections of history, fiction, genre, and topos. The story of the swordswoman assassinating the emperor offered more than just a sensational tale of revenge. Its appeal to early Republican readers can also be explained by the important ideological issues of the time it touched upon, such as Han-nationalism, or the role of women in changing the fate of the nation.
Women’s Yue Opera and the Culture of Republican Shanghai
Jin Jiang, Vassar College
Women’s Yue opera was a popular theatrical form in which all roles were played by actresses for a largely female audience. The opera first started as an all-girls’ theater in the countryside of Shengxian, Zhejiang province, in the early 1920s. It became extremely popular in Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s and then spread throughout the mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of a half-century, a "traditional" art form was reshaped by "modern" conditions to become an important part of an emerging urban mass culture.
One of the most important factors in the formation of such a modern culture in Republican Shanghai was women’s entrance into the cultural market. While women were avid readers of butterfly literature and authors of love stories, their entrance into the opera market, both as consumers and producers, was central to the transformation of the male-dominated opera culture of the Qing Dynasty to a female-centered one in the twentieth century. Women’s opera was the single most important case of women’s entrance into the urban entertainment market. Tracing the emergence and transformation of women’s Yue opera in the context of revolution, war, and nation building, this paper examines women’s views and experience in a rapidly changing semi-colonial urban society as well as women’s roles in shaping the public culture of modern Shanghai.
The Making and Unmaking of the Leftist Woman in Chinese Cinema
Vivian Shen, Davidson College
Few have noticed that the success of Zhang Yimou’s rebellious and seductive women is attributable to his departure from the leftist tradition that dominated Chinese cinema for over fifty years. Nothing exemplifies this leftist tradition more powerfully than the process of making and unmaking of the ideal leftist woman in Chinese cinema.
The cinematic birth of the ideal leftist woman began in the Leftwing Chinese Film Movement (1932–37). She begins as an urban proletarian worker with a collective identity (as Aying in The New Woman). In the 1940s, she is a sophisticated underground nationalist fighter with the same collective identity (as Xinqun in Women Side by Side). The heyday of the ideal leftist woman emerges in the 1960s and 1970s, underlined by "The Model Operas" during the Cultural Revolution. She is associated with the party, either as a nationalist heroine during the wars or as a leader in socialist production (as Hanying in The Red Guards of Lake Honghu). Following the death of Mao Zedong and the fall of Jiang Qing, the portrayal of the female Party secretaries in the 1980s marks the end of the leftist woman in Chinese cinema (as Li Guoxiang in Hibiscus Town and Zhou Yuzhen in The Black Cannon Incident). Here the leftist woman serves as an antagonist, and her narrow-mindedness and her "super-maternal ego" keep China from moving forward.
In these three stages of development, the making and the unmaking of the ideal leftist woman serve as an emblem reflecting fifty years of changeable and troubled Communist ideology.
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