Chair & Organizer: Shuyu Kong, University of Sydney, Australia

Discussant: Ying Zhu, The City University of New York

Ratings statistics show that Chinese Television Drama has gained pre-eminence in Chinese television programming and viewing schedules. Prime-time television drama has not only spawned a major cultural business attracting huge revenues; it also exerts a profound influence in shaping the popular imagination and building social consensus. However, television drama is an understudied field which "receives little sustained attention", especially in English scholarship. This panel calls attention to this important cultural form, building on the work of a pioneering panel on Chinese Television at the 2004 AAS Annual Meeting.

All four papers in this panel, through their very different approaches to the narrative forms of television drama, explore the complicated matrix of social agencies and power relations at work within the genre. Both Qian Gong and Shuyu Kong argue that history and memory are utilized in a discursive way to make sense of the present. While Gong’s paper deals with a collective "misreading" strategy in remakes of Red Classics, Kong examines one specific narrative device, chronicling the personal, in state-sponsored dramas and commercial romances. Bai Ruoyun and Sun Wanning focus on the cultural politics of producing and consuming television series. Bai’s paper brings to light the dialectics of commercial imperatives versus government censorship in anti-corruption dramas; Sun engages in a gender-conscious critique of televisual constructions of maids in the city, setting these against real domestic workers' personal accounts. The panel as a whole highlights the central function of television as a riveting cultural forum in China’s post-literary "imagined community".

Qian Gong, Curtin University of Technology, Australia

The phenomenon emergence of "Red Classics" television series can hardly eclipse the attention of both the common audiences and scholars alike. Towards the end of last year, about 40 of them were either in the making or have come off the roll. So significant is its scale and influence, that China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television sent out a special notice on regulating the adaptation of such type TV drama.

Considering that post-Mao subjectivity comprises very much of a breakaway from Maoist past, it is worthwhile to explore how "Red Classics," a reworking of revolutionary literature and films in the 50s and 60s can become popular in today’s China. How do the audience bring their historical memories from previous political projects to bear when they view the TV drama? How do they negotiate the post-Mao modernity with the codes and values crystallized in the drama? How do they see the adaptations that contains many "misreadings of the original work", which "mislead the audiences resulting from a misunderstanding of the market," as pointed out by the state authorities" in the notice mentioned above? Through textual analysis and interviews with some of the Chinese viewers, this paper aims to analyze the complex networks of power that underlines the production and consumption of "Red Classics" series and argues that rewriting of history and collective memory is an important process through which the viewers comes to terms with ever vehement changes in the post-Mao China.

Shuyu Kong, University of Sydney, Australia

One of the most distinctive formulae of recent Chinese television drama is the chronicle of personal or family life. Utilizing the serial form, this formula not only delineates personal/family life as a historical process, but also emphasizes the impact of social/political events at a personal and domestic level.

In this paper I will examine two representative prime-time television series permeated by this narrative format: the government-sponsored drama Year after Year (Yinian you yinian), and a commercial romance Coming and Going (Lailai wangwang). Broadcast in 1999, on the fiftieth anniversary of PRC, both series stress social/political changes as shared experiences which shape the characters’ lives and fate.

I will analyze the narrative devices and strategies employed to formulate this chronicle approach and its social/cultural functions in building a televisual "imagined community". Contesting previous arguments that there is a distinction between officially constructed drama and independent TV productions, I argue that all TV drama in contemporary China is a necessarily collaborative work comprising several social agencies, including intellectual populism, state ideology, commercial imperatives and popular imagination. The chronicle formula thus provides a discursive way to make sense of social changes, to build a group consensus and national identity, and to reorganize both personal and collective memory in a radically transforming society.

Ruoyun Bai, University of Illinois

Though investigative journalism in China that developed from the mid-1990s has received ample attention from media scholars, a parallel development in Chinese television has largely escaped scholarly scrutiny: the rise and fall of anti-corruption dramas. In this paper, I focus on the three anti-corruption dramas written by Lu Tianming and broadcast at the prime time on the flagship channel of CCTV: Cangtian zaishang (High Above Is Heaven) (1995), Daxue wuhen (Pure as Snow) (2001), and Shengwei shuji (A Provincial Party Secretary) (2002). These three dramas allow me to investigate the origin and the structural constraints imposed upon this genre. I submit that Lu’s anti-corruption dramas provide a site for the dialectics of commercial imperatives and political censorship. Interestingly, though the commercial imperative felt by CCTV from the early 1990s helped to jump start this genre in 1995, it does not make anti-corruption dramas any more subversive as more and more anti-corruption dramas follow in the wake of Cangtian zaishang. In fact, it not only leads to the genre’s eventual decline by resorting to too much visual violence, but also flattens the potentially fruitful subject matter and endorses the neo-liberal discourses by foregrounding bad party-state officials and keeping corrupting businessmen out of sight.

Wanning Sun, State University of New York, Binghamton

Dominant ways of visualizing, imagining and commenting on the modern city are often from the perspectives of male, authoritative, and public figures such as those of politicians and the police. Yet the ubiquitous 'invisible' maid, often a female migrant from rural China, can offer a privileged or alternate angle of observation. By combining a critique of the production and consumption of televisual constructions of the maid with domestic workers' personal accounts of their experiences in the city, this paper calls into question the modernist 'master' narrative of the city and, instead, seeks to empower the maid with an epistemological position of 'eye-witness' and anthropologist of the city and modern ways of living. It shows that although peripheral in most narratives of urban life, the figure of the maid offers important clues to unraveling the dark side of the modern city and, indeed, the dark side of certain people who assume power within it.

The television dramas which I will discuss include: "Professor Tian and his 28 Maids" (Tian jiaoshou he tade ershiba ge baomu), "Chinese Maids in Foreigners' Home" (She wai baomu), and "Heaven Knows Justice" (Cang tian you yan).