MCLC Resource Center is pleased to annnounce publication of Chuanhui Meng’s review of Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation, by Sheldon H. Lu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/chuanhui-meng/. My thanks to Shaoling Ma, our film/media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication. This is Prof. Ma’s first review since she replaced Jason McGrath in that position.
Kirk Denton, MCLC
Contemporary Chinese Cinema and
Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation
By Sheldon H. Lu
Reviewed by Chuanhui Meng
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright December, 2024)
Sheldon H. Lu, Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Xi + 256 pp. ISBN 978-1350234185 (hardcover)
Zhang Yimou’s 张艺谋 2016 blockbuster production The Great Wall (长城) presents a fantastical narrative where foreign mercenaries join forces with Chinese defenders to protect the Great Wall, and by extension the Chinese nation, from monstrous and foreign invasions. The film’s story and production embody two seemingly contradictory aspects. On the one hand, the diegetic narrative aims to consolidate the “border” of the Chinese nation by fortifying the Great Wall against external threats. On the other hand, the diegetic incorporation of friendly foreign forces and the extra-diegetic, transnational collaborations between U.S.-China-and-Japanese film production companies in the making of the film cross the proverbial “Great Wall” in today’s global film industry. These ongoing tensions—among nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization; among the “walling” and “de-walling” of culture and national borders—capture a central concern of Sheldon H. Lu’s most recent book Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture. In theorizing nation-building in contemporary China within the context of transnationalism and globalization, Lu examines this distinguished phenomenon of “walling,” defining it not primarily as “setting up physical barriers,” but more as “the selective, restrictive flow of information, ideas, and ideology” in both physical and virtual spaces (12).
Addressing critical concepts related to the study of national cinema in “Greater China,” including “transnational cinema,” “Chinese-language cinema,” and “Sinophone cinema,” Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture is a much-needed book in the field of Chinese film, media, and cultural studies. Taking as its starting point a reexamination of these contested terms and approaches, the book sheds new light on the relationships among “the local, the national, the transnational, and the global” (2). Lu begins by identifying a dialectical relationship between nation and transnationalism that is central to contemporary China’s postsocialist condition: while the Chinese state has extensively integrated itself into global capitalism, it simultaneously maintains rigorous internal control through mechanisms of body politics and surveillance. Lu therefore proposes a “double movement” model in his study of the relationship between nation and transnationalism in postsocialist China, foregrounding the dialectic between the consolidation of the nation through transnational venues and the top-down, authoritarian government of the state. Lu further interrogates the border of the nation in postsocialist China by bringing together critical discourses including transnational Chinese film history, Chinese-language cinema, and the worlding of Chinese cinema.
Lu’s study is structured into two parts, each consisted of four individual chapters. Part 1 (chapters 1 through 4) examines the changing cinematic image of the modern Chinese nation across China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, in alignment with issues emerging from the process of globalization, such as spatiality, mobility, and modernity. The first chapter offers a comparative study of Hollywood’s representation of the Chinese nation and contemporary Chinese blockbusters. Shedding light on the different yet interrelated ways of projecting images of the Chinese nation on domestic and global screens, Lu traces the entwinement of the domestic and the global in the reimagination of the Chinese nation in an era marked by increasing geographic expansion and mobility. He offers a case study of the 2019 Chinese blockbuster China Peacekeeping Forces (中国蓝盔), an action drama that lauds China’s contribution to United Nations peacekeeping operations around the world. He pays special attention to the “interracial politics and gender dynamics” in the film’s representation of the Chinese nation in a global setting, analyzing the interweaving yet convoluted relationships among white European women, black African men, and male Chinese soldiers (48). Lu specifically analyzes the film’s gender dynamics in its portrayal of female spies, thus resituating the socialist-era espionage genre into a new global setting. If the femme fatale figure—embodied in socialist-era film in dangerously seductive female antagonists—paradoxically became some of the first “screen lovers” for Mao-era film spectators, the representation of foreign female spies in contemporary Chinese blockbusters, as Lu argues, reenacts the gender and sexual uncanniness of this trope in their potential destablization of the mainstream films’ nationalist narratives.
The focus on gender and sexuality continues through the remaining chapters of Part I. Chapter 2 examines the figure of the female prostitute and its relationship with space, mobility, and modernity in Chinese-language films over the past century. Tracing this figure’s transformation across films from Taiwan at the millennium’s turn, 1930s Shanghai, and post-1997 Hong Kong, chapter 2 sheds light on her increasing mobility from “indoor house-sitter” to a “long-distance border-crosser” in the context of late-twentieth-century global capitalism (55-56). Chapter 3 turns to the representation of masculinity in post-1997 Hong Kong cinema to further investigate the interplay between gender, sexuality, and nationalism. Analyzing three films produced at critical historical junctures—Farewell China (爱在别乡的季节, 1990), Almost a Love Story (甜蜜蜜, 1996), and American Dreams in China (中國合伙人, 2013)—Lu identifies an evolving masculinity in leading male figures, transitioning from incapacitation and self-exile to “triumphant manhood/nationhood” (81). These changing representations of masculinity are shown to be entangled with Hong Kong cinema’s multiple geopolitical dimensions—including the national, local, regional, and global—while navigating processes of “epochal social changes, traumatic political dramas, and intense personal feelings” (94). Chapter 4 continues this line of inquiry into masculinity, although the focus shifts to films by Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯, a representative director of the Sixth-Generation filmmakers from mainland China. Tracing the cross-border influences of Hong Kong cinema and pop culture on Jia’s works, Lu further investigates the “formation and deformation” of masculinity in postsocialist mainland Chinese cinema following the state’s transition from a planned economy to a capitalist market economy (98). While socialist-era masculinity was defined by the worker-peasant-soldier (工农兵) ideal, China’s rapid transition to a market economy in the post-Mao era resulted in a crisis of masculine identity. As socialist masculinity lost its economic viability and cultural appeal, alternative masculine ideals failed to emerge in China’s new socioeconomic order. Lu analyzes how Jia’s films portray working-class men navigating this identity crisis through their consumption of Hong Kong, East Asian, and Western media—particularly their identification with Chow Yun-fat’s charismatic gangster persona in Hong Kong cinema—revealing how global popular culture mediates local masculine identity formation in postsocialist China.
Part II (chapters 5 through 8) moves beyond feature films to study diverse genres, media, and the built environment in contemporary mainland China, including documentary, TV drama, architecture, ballet, and literature, which in various ways reconstruct the boundary between the national and the global. Chapter 5 examines independent cinema’s navigation between underground filmmaking and state-led production and distribution, exploring the dialectical relationships among nation and state, center and periphery, and mainstream and underground cinema. Chapter 6 brings to the fore the “exoticization, objectification, and fetishization” of the foreign female figure in transnational cultural productions of Sino-Russian romantic encounters in film, TV drama, and ballet (139). Chapter 7 shifts focus to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and investigates the reshaping of Beijing’s urban space across multiple media platforms ranging from state-commissioned , all of which, the author argues, sustain the dynamic interaction between national development, transnational artistic collaborations, and globalization. One prominent example Lu studies in this chapter is Qin Yufen 秦玉芬, the renowned Chinese diasporic female artist whose 2008 exhibition Beijing 008 at Beijing’s Today Art Museum was commissioned by Aston Martin, a British luxury car producer. Flanking the iconic vehicle parked on an enlarged map of Beijing are a gigantic sculpture of a tape measure and the suspended figure of British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking whose quote about the correlation between time and disorder inspired the artist. Qin’s installation, while ostensibly celebrating Olympic-era China and the global luxury market, invites viewers to juxtapose the measure of value and meaning in an increasingly consumerist society with Hawking’s more elevated, more cosmic and metaphysical view of space and time. Such questions of scale and relationality, moreover, dovetail with the book’s overall concern with the entangled relationships between the Chinese nation, the postsocialist state, and diasporic spaces and identities.
Chapter 8 concludes the study by emphasizing the changing meaning and function of art in post-1990 mainland and diasporic China across a wide range of media, including billboards, propaganda posters, graffiti, and poetry. This chapter synthesizes the book’s thematic concerns over the interplay between nation and state in contemporary China’s artistic production, juxtaposing the state’s centralized regulations and propaganda with local, marginal, and individual artists who maintain a critical, reflexive distance due to their peripheral positions. Lu’s case studies range from Shanghai-based independent artist Ni Weihua’s 倪卫华 repurposing of propaganda billboard as critiques of official, developmentalist policies, to the Taiwanese filmmaker Ho Chao-ti’s 賀照緹 2010 documentary My Fancy High Heels (我爱高跟鞋). Through detailed accounts of mainland Chinese female migrant workers working for a Taiwanese-owned shoe factory with high-end urban clienteles in North America and Taiwan, the documentary tracks the impact global production and consumption chains has on the complicated boundaries between mainland and diasporic Chinese communities.
In addition to his critical analyses of Chinese-language films produced in various places, Lu further provides a detailed theoretical genealogy of important discourses in Chinese film criticism. For example, he traces the formation and development of the term “Chinese-language film” (华语电影) from as early as the 1930s. He notes that the first systematic usage and elaboration of the term was by the Singaporean critic and filmmaker Yi Shui 易水, and argues that although the critical discourses of the “Chinese-language film” emerged to transcend cultural-political divisions, it ironically led to a new form of exclusion by prioritizing the dominant language used in films in the categorization process. The independent Tibetan director Pema Tseden 万玛才旦, for example, makes Tibetan-language films that depart from the ethnic minority film (少数民族电影) genre established in the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike Hanyu (汉语) films made by Han-Chinese film directors for Han-Chinese audiences about ethnic minorities in service of socialist-nationalist discourses of cross-ethnic unity and solidarity, Pema Tseden’s films take a personal, subjective perspective in documenting ordinary Tibetans’ everyday lives. International film critics consider his work a Tibetan “minor cinema,” representing a dynamic process, as Lu puts it, of “becoming minor” within major, hegemonic narratives and cultural-political spaces (18).
Despite the above critique and his recognition of the subfield of Sinophone cinema, an extension of Shu-mei Shih’s launch of Sinophone studies nearly two decades ago, Lu asserts his preference for the term “Chinese-language” over the Sinophone. Following Kuei-fen Chiu and Yingjin Zhang’s use of the term in their recent co-authored work New Chinese-language Documentaries, Lu contends that it is necessary to “keep a distance from the territorial definition of the ‘Sinophone’” and to “redirect critical attention to Chinese-language cultural productions from both mainland China and other Chinese-speaking societies” (19). Lu thus deploys the concept of Chinese-language cinema as a flexible supplement to recent Sinophone scholarship that also includes cultural productions within mainland China as counter-hegemonic and decentralizing forces. This angle extends the book’s larger interest in examining how national forces interact with globalization as it crosses national, geopolitical, and cultural borders all at once, to “make visible the cracks, gaps, tragedies, and absurd comedies emerging from the processes of national development and globalization” (19). Lu’s study of cross-border interactions between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese filmmaking since 1997, for example, raises a crucial counterexample to more restrictive definitions of the Sinophone and constitutes, instead, the Chinese-language cinema paradigm in a “‘borderless world’ in the age of globalization” (80). Enlarging the traditional scope of “Chinese-language film,” Lu proposes investigating the plural histories of the critical discourses that are characterized by “many lines of development” and “multiple sites of formation” (19).
Lu’s theoretical contribution to the study of the Chinese-language cinema opens up intriguing possibilities for further scholarly explorations. Readers might be curious, for instance, about how his insights could illuminate the relationship between the Sinophone and mainland China when viewed through the lens of other nation-building processes, particularly in Southeast Asia. For example, how could we theorize the relationship between the two when viewed through the lens of Singapore’s or Malaysia’s own nation-state-globalization dynamics? As Lu fully theorizes the interplay between national and global forces in the China-Taiwan-Hong Kong triangle, one wonders how this framework could contribute to the distinct dynamics at play in Southeast Asian contexts, where Chinese-language cultural production operates within different diasporic histories, media infrastructures, and localities in the transnational forces of globalization.
The most rewarding discussion in Lu’s book is its revelation of two seemingly contradictory, yet closely intertwined, strategies adopted in mainland China toward globalization. I’d like to conclude this review by revisiting the central complexities of “walling” and “crossing the wall” around which Lu structures his entire study: on the one hand, globalization brought abundant resources and border-crossing dynamics that contribute to a blurred national boundary between mainland China, regions of Greater China, and the rest of the world; on the other hand, these “de-walling” opportunities and agents were simultaneously recruited in the fortification of a single nation-state. Such “double-handed” processes of walling and border-crossing, to use Lu’s original term, are most vividly illustrated in his analysis of three blockbuster films known as the “Trilogy of the Republic,” co-produced across national and regional borders in Greater China during the early twenty-first century (109). Consisting of The Founding of a Republic (建国大业), The Founding of a Party (建党伟业), and The Founding of an Army (建军大业), the trilogy predictably aligns with the self-aggrandizing narrative traditions that extol the party and nation in the PRC. However, Lu astutely observes that despite their primary function as nationalist propaganda and reinforcement of the nation-state concept, these films paradoxically employ both transnational and transregional collaborations in their casting, direction, and exhibition strategies. This analysis exemplifies his broader argument that the process of globalization in China is characterized by a persistent negotiation between cultural openness and ideological closure, between transnational media flows and state-controlled narratives. Lu reveals how the Chinese state strategically embraces global capital and production methods while simultaneously reinforcing nationalist ideologies, ultimately demonstrating the intricate and often paradoxical nature of China’s “double-handed” engagement with the global cultural economy in the postsocialist era.
Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture is an essential contribution to Chinese film and cultural studies, offering a critical examination of the contested interplay between nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization in contemporary China’s visual media landscape. Through innovative concepts like “walling” and “double movement” and interdisciplinary methodologies, Lu provides crucial insights into China’s paradoxical engagement with global forces, making this book indispensable for scholars of contemporary Chinese-language film and media productions, the Sinophone, and transnational cultural studies seeking to understand the intricate dynamics of globalized cultural production and nationalism in postsocialist China and beyond.
Chuanhui Meng
Brown University