1)
In the last two decades, entertainment media and popular culture have seen an explosive growth to become a dominant presence in both personal and public life in China. At the same time, the internet and other social media have developed into increasingly important venues for delivering media and cultural content, and have created new forms of social interactions in an instant and multi-directed way not seen in conventional print and electronic media. What do these new developments mean for China’s public communicative space?
This research will shed light on this question through an empirical study of online audience responses to and interpretative practices surrounding popular media texts, such as popular TV drama and domestic box office film. I argue that in a transitional post-socialist society where on the one hand, various social issues such as inequality, corruption, and misuse of power have become daily concerns of the public, yet on the other hand the formal public sphere is largely undeveloped and media censorship is omni-present, Chinese audiences frequently make use of their engagement with popular media as a way to articulate their political ideas and social concerns. By linking this media content with their lived experience and forming online commentarial and interpretative communities, they have developed a new kind of cultural public sphere (Jim Mcguigan, Ronald Jacobs) where civic values and critical ideas are articulated through aesthetic and emotional communication.
2)
From 1950s to early 1990s, PRC imports of foreign films were a consistent but discreet practice determined by, on the one hand, an elitist paternalistic cultural policy, and on the other, China’s aspirations to become member of the international socialist alliance, and later in the Deng era, a member of the modern world community. This paper focuses on the continuity and change in the cultural practice of screening foreign films during the late 1970s and the 1980s, when China entered a “new era” of imagining modernity. The importation and exhibition of foreign films at that time and the debates surrounding them bear witness to an intriguing dynamic between emerging market mechanisms, state authority and policies, and the cultural public sphere of the early reform era.
This paper will draw on oral histories from people who lived through those years, including my personal experience as a Peking University student in the mid and late 1980s, complemented by archival data from the institutions involved in translating and distributing foreign films, and popular film magazines that recorded the public fascination for and controversies swirling around foreign films. Three streams of questions and issues will be discussed: 1) the general characteristics and social circumstances of the trans-border flow of foreign films during the late 1970s and the decade of the 1980s: in particular, I ask whether 1976/1978 marks a change in this dynamic; 2) how contradictory state policies typical in a transitional time have affected the cultural practice of exhibiting foreign films in China, such as “audience differentiation,” “discreet screening”, and inequality in accessing knowledge of the foreign as cultural capital; 3) Finally, the paper will ask what implications and impact did foreign films and their images of modernity have on social practices, especially social mobility, and on the construction of meaning in contemporary Chinese society.