URBANISM AND POST-MAO CHINESE CINEMA

HARRY KUOSHU

FURMAN UNIVERSITY

Chinese post-Mao cinema left behind an allegorical era of cultural critique to move into the urban realistic era in the last decade of the 20^th century. This article explores the theoretical implications of the post-Mao cinematic urbanism. It traces various roles urbanism plays in changed historical junctures. It contrasted Chinese critical reception of urbanism with Western discussion of urbanization to illustrate the special features of post-Mao cinematic urbanism, which accompanied the perplexing cultural process of separating the individuals from the collective entities. City (the Faustian) shattered the status quo (the Apollonian). Urbanisms held by the 4^th and 6^th generations of film directors illustrated a changing structure of feelings towards city and the differed ways to represent city—from the allegorical and the universal to the fragmental and the specific. The early post-Mao allegory about city was quickly drowned by the raw realism of everyday urban lives. The ensuing cinematic urbanism has been a deviation from the Utopian urbanism of Maoist China. The new urbanism presented a complex spectrum of feelings and issues. It cut through topics of globalization, common culture, lifestyle, youth, emotion, and position of art with the rising materialism and commercialism. As the grandest urbanization is yet to peak in China, this cinematic urbanism keeps reinventing China and itself, and it merits our study.

City films in post-Mao cinema were first identified as an emerging trend in the mid-1980s. They were hailed as a deviation from the pre-eminent roots-searching films that had marked the onset of 5^th-Generation filmmaking only a few years earlier[1]. As such, they were seen as a departure from the grand narrative of national culture discourse, shifting from an allegorical redemption of the nation and its people to a down-to-earth attention to the fragmented situations of individuals. In immediate post-Mao China, the concept of the city film became a test balloon for the general direction of the culture[2].

German sociologist Oswald Spengler’s contrast of city and countryside offered some Chinese film critics an early terminology for pinpointing the cultural significance of this emerging cinematic trend. Using Western culture as a model, but believing that his urbanism was applicable to non-Western cultures as well, Spengler proposed the idea of a cyclical development of City: first, the agrarian phases of a culture will develop a particular identity or “folk spirit.” Second, this cultural identity will be fragmented by the development of the City, which encourages individuality and separateness in its members. Third, the inevitable corruption of the city—through over-institutionalizing the process of human interchange and a “routinism” that reduces warm personal contact between individuals—will lead the culture to revert to another agricultural phase and another round of growth and decline. While one may not agree with Spengler’s idea of cycles, what is fascinating in his thinking on urbanism is how urbanization may obliterate a particular cultural identity and how dismal the prospect of urbanization can be. Applying Spengler’s insight to contemporary postcolonial globalization, we are also forced to see that urbanization in the developing countries has often used routinized Western life to erase various national cultures.

Spengler’s thoughts on city culture connect him to other prominent sociologists of the German School, such as Max Weber and Georg Simmel. Their critical thinking about city culture in the first half of the 20^th century identified the cold, impersonal aspects of city development such as bureaucracies, fragmentation, and isolation[3]. For Chinese film criticism, the German School’s warnings about urbanization were almost inaudible. Political bureaucracies were already highly developed in Chinese socialist totalitarianism. The Chinese “folk spirit” at the threshold of the new push for urbanization was a blend of ancient Confucianism based on closely-knit communities and of Communist ideology of collective social action. The culprit for the dismal urban future, individualism, had become an inspiration rather something to fear ever since it was introduced into the Chinese culture during the New Cultural Movement at the beginning of the 20^th century. Urbanization was also a cultural change with political implications. The tendency was not to look down the road for the problems of urbanization, but to focus on how the individualism and heterogeneity of urbanization challenged the monolithic cultural and political totalitarianism. An emerging cultural discourse in post-Mao China was speaking of the separation of individual beings (geti ren) from collective beings (qunti ren), and economic beings (jingji ren) from political beings (zhengzhi ren). In light of this discourse, individuality took an affirmative tone that was a far cry from how the German School used it in relation to its discussion of urban culture.

Urbanization, with all its modernist implications, was playing a different cultural role in post-Mao China. Prior to and contemporary with the emergence of the new city films, in the 4^th Generation filmmaking, as Chinese film scholar Dai Jinhua observed, the City had already been provoking an underlying contrast of itself with the Countryside (even when the films involved did not have an urban subject)[4]. The City represented constant reformation, openness, science, education, and civilization; the Countryside stood for the inertia of history, closure, ignorance, an anti-human attitude, and decay. In the 4^th Generation’s film language and in their idealistic “missionary” sense of cultural redemption, the Countryside became the synonym for the post-Mao Chinese cultural status quo. This countryside could refer to the vast rural areas and it could also refer to, as one film title suggested, “villages in the metropolis,” that is, urbanites who possessed a rural mentality. So that China might leave behind the disappointment caused by the revolution, many hopes for cultural change were read into the symbiosis of the City. This was indeed a willful misreading. “If the 4^th Generation film texts represented old China, the ancient countryside, and the national homeland as doomed,” Dai Jinhua commented sharply, “what they provided as a rescue—science, progress, and humanism—was also a shattered dream in the West… In the majority of 4^th Generation texts, the existence of the first world—be it the political and economic infiltration or a cultural perspective—was not a social reality but an imaginary other”[5].

It was in this context that film critics borrowed, through the writing of a Chinese sociologist, Spengler’s adjectives of Apollonian and Faustian to contrast Countryside and City[6]. In this interpretation, Apollonian stands for a monolithic social order and the human acceptance of it and Faustian speaks for the spirit of conquering and the prospect of endless changes that the future has in store for human beings. What Chinese film critics read into the Faustian spirit was their general fascination with the novelties of urbanization. One critic wrote: “[The Faustian spirit] is in a constant search for change. It never ceases generating passionate drives for overcoming obstacles. It is an exploration, groping for the unknown and challenging the order of the status quo”[7].

Although thoroughly fascinated, the Chinese film critics were not superficially optimistic; they pinpointed all kinds of discomfort in the representation of the City: marginal characters, suspicious values, offensive styles, social ills, anger, loss, loneliness, and alienation[8]. Chen Xiaoyun, for example, related urbanization to the isolation of individuals and their modern feeling of lonely anxiety, a common topic in Western writing about the City. Concluding his exploration, however, Chen called for an effort to appreciate the unavoidable progress of urbanization:

Faced with the contrast of City and Countryside, artists can’t help but love and praise the Countryside and put down the noise and chaos of the City. The Chinese countryside films are always relatively more emotive…As China moves towards the 21^st century, however, the progress of civilization and urbanization has become irresistible. A big job faced by film artists now is how to experience, dig, discover, and express the unique beauty of the contemporary city.[9]

Obviously, Chen didn’t need to see urbanization as an unavoidable “natural” development but rather a collective desire to see what the City had in store for the post-Mao Chinese who were so fed up with Apollonian totalitarianism. She began her article by stating that “the City, as a sign of freedom and symbol of civilization, has endless attractions for people” and her article ended with a short but meaningful one-sentence paragraph: “We are hopeful”[10].

More changes came with the turn of the decades, and many differences can be found between the first two post-Mao decades: the 1980s and the 1990s. In her lyrical writing, Dai Jinhua offered the following intellectual index to the two decades. The 1980s, during which various discourses supported an optimistic goal of China reaching for the outside world, brought a sense of crisis, discontinuity of history, allegories of death and rebirth, China opening to the outside world, and China’s fight to earn the right to knock on the gates of the 21^st century. The 1990s with the loss of a clear goal and the co-existence of heterogeneous motives and wishes brought cultural dissent, the fall of the arts, a reformulated postmodernism, post-Cold-War ideology, and postcolonialism[11].

In this transition of the decades, a group of diversified film artists stepped onto the scene. Their filmmaking was outside or on the margins of the state monopoly of production, drawing funds from the emerging venture capitalism in China and seeking the support of overseas funding. It further illustrated the heterogeneity and globalization of cultural production in the new decade. Since the films they produced were clearly different[12], these film artists were interchangeably described as “self-centered,” “marginal,” “alienated,” “embittered,” “decadent,” “nihilistic,” “carnal,” “vulgar,” and so on. The diverse descriptions of the group corresponded with the multiple names these artists have received both as a collective and as smaller groups. In China they were associated with such trends and terms as independent filmmaking (duli zhipian yundong), auteurism (geren dianying), new-image movement (xin yingxiang yundong), status movie (zhuangtai dianying), and new city films (xin dushi dianying). Overseas, they were known as Chinese underground filmmakers, independent filmmakers, or dissident filmmakers. The two umbrella names for them everywhere have been the 6^th Generation or the New-Born Generation (xinsheng dai).

Some film critics cautioned the continued use of generation names because they held that generation labels had become increasingly irrelevant to the emerging group of film artists. The post-5^th-Generation Chinese filmmaking, as these critics suggested, had entered a non-generational, individualistic, diversified, and urban-oriented era[13]. Indeed, the irrelevance of generational labels in the 1990s either suggested an era with no commanding social concerns or reflected those artists who resisted using a certain hegemonic discourse of the time to mark a group identity.

The resistance of the new artists to the generation labels may help illustrate their changed cultural status. My explanation for this change is the companion transition of Chinese cultural discourse from modernity to post-modernity and the changing role of intellectuals in this transition[14]. The modernist discourse on culture, either in the May 4^th era or in the post-Mao decade of the 1980s, featured such grand narratives of cultural resurrection as enlightenment, nationalism, individualism, and democracy. The intellectuals of modernist discourse assumed the role of, in Michel Foucault’s term, universal intellectuals: “speaking in the capacity of a master of truth and justice…the spokesman of the universal”[15]. Post-modernist discourse emerged on the Chinese intellectual scene in the 1990s, when China started to engage itself in developmental urbanization and integrated into the global market economy at full speed. The rising consumerism cold-shouldered the modernist narrative of the elite culture (jingying wenhua) and encouraged the expansion of popular culture through the mass media. The grand narratives of modernism were also fragmented, with the intellectuals themselves humbled not only economically but also by their lost access to those narratives. In a way, the Chinese intellectuals in this situation moved very close to what Foucault called specific intellectuals, those dealing more with what Foucault described as questions of “real, material, everyday struggles” and the confrontation with “multinational corporations”[16].

The Foucaultian contrast of universal and specific intellectuals coincided with the changing horizons of Chinese intellectuals from the 1980s to the 1990s. The Chinese cinema’s corresponding transition from the era of grand narratives (e.g., historical, allegorical, and cultural roots-searching) in the 1980s to the urban-focused, artistic heterogeneity of the 1990s further illustrates how the changed roles of artists may have significantly affected a particular aspect of cultural production.

With all this said, I still find myself unable to avoid using a generation name to refer to the emerging film artists. Reflecting Chinese mind of synthesis, generation has been a favorable Chinese intellectual concept. Chinese cultural scholar Li Zehou in his Discussion of Chinese Contemporary Intellectual History emphasizes that the study of generations may reveal some “historical personalities,” that is, how groups of people with common social experiences will form a dynamic communities showing some common characteristics in values, social behaviors, ways of thinking, emotional inclinations, and moral standards.[17] Generation, especially in the way the six generations of filmmaking have been used commonly, I must suggest, refer more to a historic period (the time of a certain historical personality) and not necessarily to a group of people for all of their lifetime—people often outlive a historical period or generation. The difference between the 5^th and the 6^th Generations, for instance, really involves contrasts between the first two post-Mao decades. Generation, in this sense, to use a Raymond Williams term, refers more to a “structure of feelings.” Williams uses this term to characterize historical periods for their particular patterns of interests, impulses, and restraints. He also uses the term to discuss the influences between generations, that is, how the impact of the early generations has to relocate in a new structure of feelings[18]. If we add this perspective of Williams, a film generation does not necessarily refer to a homogeneous group. The term refers rather to diverse artists woven into a structure of feelings of a particular historical period. Heterogeneity, which should always be assumed when one talks about a generation, has become more evident with the film artists emerging since the 1990s.

With the transition of the decades and the emergence of new film artists, and with more artists—old and new, serious and playful, conventional and avant-garde, commercial and highly artistic—turning their cameras on the City, the perception of post-Mao city films changed in the 1990s. The city film was no longer considered just a cinematic trend within trends; the whole Chinese cinema appeared to have stepped into an urban-focused era. Indeed, the city film turned into a predominant symbol of the cultural production in Chinese filmmaking. It became not just a window to the contemporary urbanization of China but also itself part of its genesis. It dramatized varied aspects of everyday life in urbanization by producing a spectrum of feelings, life styles, fashions, and values.

The importance drawn by the city film in the first two post-Mao decades reflected a profound change in urbanism in China. What contemporary Chinese filmmaking projected on the screen was China’s change from a utopian urbanization to a developmental urbanization. As scholars commonly attest, the urbanism of Maoist China was a blend of utopianism and a peculiar model of anti-urban development[19]. Utopianism not only kept revolutionary myths alive, but also curbed urbanization by forcing a limited set of standards on everyone through political campaigns and central control. This model had institutional features such as strict migration controls, a penetrating residential work-unit organizational system, a highly developed bureaucratic allocation system, an emphasis on production rather than consumption, a relatively egalitarian distribution system, and so on. Putting aside the painful price of political enforcement that its members had to sustain, the social consequences of this urbanization model, as Whyte and Parish have observed, were impressive and capable even of invoking nostalgia in today’s China for what was seen as “high stability in jobs and residences, involvement and familiarity with neighbors and workmates, minimal differentiation of consumption patterns and lifestyles, low divorce, high female work participation, and rapid changes in fertility, religious customs, and other realms of behavior”[20].

There were historical reasons for China’s anti-urban development. Modern Chinese history is characterized by a century of foreign incursion, from the Opium Wars of the mid-19^th century to U. S. intervention against the Communist takeover of China in the mid-20^th century, all of which had taught the Chinese about the alien corruption and social ills of the modern city. The impact of a century of urbanism had erased China’s own ancient, mainstream, favorable images of cities as administrative centers, seats for garrisoned troops, and a home for commerce and the cultural industries encouraged by the court and the troops; of cities as epitomes of power, order, stability, and prosperity[21]. The Chinese leftist filmmaking based primarily in the treaty-port city of Shanghai illustrated this changed perception: city in most leftist films produced there connoted colonialism, capitalism, individualism, exploitation, corruption, and alienation. The implied solution for shattering this alien entity of city was the communist revolution, a collective social action whose roots lay in the countryside. This cinematic tradition, in turn, influenced the anti-urban (urban read as capitalist corruption) development of Maoist cinema. After all, the tenet for the success of the Chinese Communist revolution was the revolutionary countryside “gulping down” the reactionary cities. Anti-urban development was a logical follow-up to this tenet.

The deep-rooted ideological reason for this anti-urban development was, thus, an equation between the City and the social ills of modern capitalism. Theoretically, there were ample supplies of this train of thought from the West. Marxism, as the ideological fountainhead for the Chinese Communist revolution, emphasized the increasing inequality of social classes and the alienation of human beings that accompany capitalist urbanization. Spengler and the other German sociologists stressed the urban growth of overdeveloped bureaucracies, isolated individuals, and impersonal rationality. “The predominant tone of most Western social commentary on the modern city,” Whyte and Parish noted, “has been negative”:

[M]odern cities tend to be characterized by increased bureaucratization and unresponsiveness of the authorities; stark inequalities, class and ethnic group conflicts, and the existence of an unemployed underclass; slums, neighborhood decay, and other symptoms of the inability to provide needed services for all; impersonality, anonymity, and alienation; the primacy of cash transactions and segmental role relationships over relationships between individuals as whole human beings; the fragmenting of kinship, family, and other primary ties and with them a shared sense of moral values; and rising rates of crime and other forms of deviant behavior.[22]

Today, many of the descriptions here ring true of Chinese cities. The large number of unemployed state workers shares the city with the big population of rural migrant laborers. Many new city films tell the touching stories, often with much misery, of these people.[23] In these stories, the people are simultaneously drawn to and discarded by the fast-growing market economy and they become living indicators for a changed China. These films leave the viewer with no doubt that the City has become a hotbed for new forms of class, gender, and ethic conflicts. Urban unrest has become an inexhaustible source of inspiration for the post-Mao city film.

The utopian urbanism in China had indeed become fragmented and had given way to the developmental urbanization distinguished by market distribution systems. In this transition, such tradeoffs as centralized political sovereignty and decentralized consumer sovereignty, direct state allocation and private market distribution, social equality and economic efficiency, had pushed China into the same situation faced by many other formerly socialist countries. Indeed, in China and in other formerly socialist countries, the transition from socialism to post-socialism has always been the context and subtext for any discussion of modernity and post-modernity.

In a study of city films, one particular aspect of this transition from utopian to developmental urbanization, the representation of everyday life, becomes especially meaningful. The emergence of the new city film, I suggest, represents a transition from Mao’s socialist holy everyday life to the post-Mao secularized everyday life. Resembling the cultural characteristics of the 16^th-century Reformation, the post-Mao secularization of everyday life was a process of depoliticization. It was a transition from an abstract ideological monopoly to an opening up to the richness of diversified, individual situations. It aimed at separating the state monopoly of upholding the holy status of the everyday and a privatized, decentered recreation of the everyday.

Maoist cultural production of the everyday, in its representational blend of “realism plus romanticism,” refuted trivial deviations from the glorious revolutionary goals, curbed distracting heterogeneity for collective actions, and ignored uninteresting profanity for inspiring ideals. “A collective desire to resist the inertia of everyday life,” as Tang Xiaobing observed, “was an integral part of the grand socialist movement in modern China”[24]. Examining peasant painting, Tang noticed such utopian features as completeness and transcendence, aesthetics of scale but not detail, panoramic perspective, stylization of socialist ideals, and homogeneity. This Maoist effort to overcome the anxiety of everyday life, Tang commented, was “often at the cost of impoverishing it”[25]. The case of peasant painting is relevant here because Maoist China, with its anti-urban development, was a sum of villages, rural and urban. The urban spirit associated with diversity, individuality, and impersonality was greatly discouraged. In Maoist cinema, films of urban spirit were hard to find. Films on urban subjects usually featured not individuality, alienation, or diversity but such efforts as curtailing “bourgeois” lifestyles, promoting equality of all walks of urban life (e.g., people in the service sector were not seen as lower in social status), or praising altruism for urban public benefit.

We may gain a better understanding of the changing concept of the everyday by referring to Raymond Williams’ proposal of common culture or culture as ordinary. Williams proposed this concept against the backdrop of a particular 19^th-century British distinction between culture as the realm of noble, elegant, and ideal standards and non-culture, which was associated with a modern, industrial, dehumanized society featuring a semi-literate populace catered to by vulgar, popular forms of entertainment. What this British distinction implies, in reference to the situation in China, is a holy, nostalgic, and narrow concept of culture that excludes various emerging modes of everyday life. In Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, Williams refuted the concept of using culture to oppose the historical development of a society and suggested that culture was always “ordinary.” Turning its back on closed traditions and embracing the possibilities of openness, Williams’s common culture (“lived experience”; “a whole way of life”) calls for a cultural revolution that pushes for new modes of communication, the growth of public education, and a more participatory democracy[26]. This British lesson for post-Mao China was not so much that of a public education, which the utopian urbanization of China had achieved, but one of broadening the meaning of culture to recognize the importance of the ordinary, to reveal underrepresented realms, and to make room for diversity. The post-Mao Chinese redefinition of the everyday calls for the removal of tightly centralized control. The loosening of centralized control will lead to a more participatory democracy that will allow the public (people of different gender, age, ethnicity, religion, social status, economic standing, etc.) more access to the meaningful production of everyday life. It is a change from the monolithic to the plural, from closure to openness, and from regulation to negotiation.

On this point, Zhang Yuan’s filmmaking comes to mind. In his independent or semi-independent filmmaking since 1990, this 6^th-Generation director has focused on such under-represented subjects as single mothers, retarded children, alcoholism, mental illness, homosexuality, reformed prisoners, and the emotional turbulence of the young. His filmmaking has forced people not to overlook the shaded, less-than-ideal, and marginal realms of Chinese everyday life. Zhang Yuan leads us to see a contemporary or consequence trend of the documentary-like movie: Sun Zhou’s Breaking the Silence (1999) featured a retarded child along with the professional actors; Wang Guangli’s Go for the Broke (2001) used a group of unemployed state workers playing themselves; Zhang Yang’s Quitting (2001) had a drug-addicted film actor playing his own story, with his real-life family members, about his difficult mental journey of quitting. Stylistically, there was a return to the “documentary aesthetics” (jishi meixue) that had been advocated by the 4^th Generation directors nearly a decade before. The style then, in the hands of such directors as Zheng Dongtian and Zhang Nuanxin, served to deviate from the dominant ideological discourse and a melodramatic representation. Now, in the hands of a younger group, this style helped draw attention to the ignored margins of a gradually decentralized culture. In mapping these areas of everyday life, the candid camera became that of exploration, using what is real (what is under-represented) to challenge what is artificial (what is over-represented).

A further implication of Williams’ common culture, the issue of cultural hierarchy, has a wider implication than broadening the scope of everyday life. In China, long before Maoist utopianism, elite literary genres (poetry, prose, and narratives of history) had kept despised genres (story telling, fiction, and theater) on the margins and had thus kept the masses from the center of cultural production. The reigning Confucian tenet had been wen yi zaidao or writing as the vehicle of the Tao (the dominant ideology and the cultural mainstream). The Tao, through such institutions as the civil service examination, decided the cultural status of various forms of communication. Even in the Chinese modernist movements of the May 4^th and early post-Mao eras, the commitment to the Tao (the grand narrative, the sense of totality, or cultural resurrection) remained intact. “Carrying the Tao in a modern context,” as Tonglin Lu observed, “often means to spread the discourse of modernity in order to contribute to the modernization process in China. In its ambiguity, this discourse can be articulated from different or even opposite perspectives, from communism to liberal humanism”[27]. The Tao, connoted differently, still functioned to keep out the ordinary and the profane. When the 6^th Generation emerged in Chinese cinema, their initial breakthrough was to attack the Tao of the by-then elite 5^th Generation with their allegorical representation of China related to the national cultural discourses of roots-searching, national resurrection, and cultural redemption. Ironically, the initial criticism of the 6^th Generation was also their lack of Tao or reason for making films[28]. Today, with the initial shocking effects of new films dissipated, it is time to investigate how these films opened a window to the common culture in the act of creating a new round of Chinese urbanization.

One Chinese critic’s changing perception of 6^th-Generation filmmaking illustrates my point here. In 1996, Li Yiming proclaimed the end of 5^th-Generation filmmaking in his landmark two-part article “Fin de Siècle: Ethnic Crisis and the Funeral for the 5^th Generation Filmmaking”[29]. Li offered sharp comments on the “dictatorship of consumerism” in China in the 1990s and on the spiritual, ethical, and social crisis it was causing: loss of belief; corruption; distanced, cold human relations; drugs; prostitution; the flooding of profanity; bad taste. With these comments, he criticized the 5^th Generation’s allegorical filmmaking, claiming that these directors had indulged in “faking history,” had ignored the cultural status quo of the 1990s, and had betrayed their roles as humanist intellectuals. To the emerging 6^th Generation, Li was also not sympathetic; he believed their filmmaking showed more interest in film technique than in cultural values. For the 6^th Generation’s narcissism, interest in novelty, and focus on urbanites living on the cultural margins, Li observed that they were “faking reality.” With the 5^th Generation faking history and the 6^th Generation faking reality, the prospect of Chinese cinema looked, to him, really dismal. Two years later, Li published another article on the 6^th Generation with a more affirmative stance.[30] He emphasized that the 6^th-Generation directors had never learned wen yi zaidao (writing as the vehicle of the Tao) and thus would be unable to represent the cultural mainstream. Emerging as other and existing on the cultural margins, Li asserted, the 6^th Generation only knew how to express themselves (“things in their bones,” as the 6^th Generation directors suggested), or how to express the marginal. Nevertheless, he stopped asserting that the 6^th Generation was “faking reality.” Instead, he cautioned that “there must be multiple channels between the cultural margin and the cultural center” and affirmed that the cultural margin will enrich the understanding of the culture as a whole. Behind Li’s affirmation of the 6^th Generation was his “pan-cultural theory,” as I call it:

The multi-cultural and multi-ethnical heterogeneity constituted by reform and the opening up [of China] has also cracked open the traditional, closed ideological fortress of China beyond repair. In the mid-1990s…this cracking fell into the tracks of the commodity market, circling around “cultural-ized capitals” and “capitalized cultures.” One product of this circling was the rise of mass and popular cultures, which forced avant-garde arts to discard their pride and move closer to each other albeit reluctantly.[31]

Obviously, a broadened concept of culture admitting center and margin, high and low, heterogeneity and capitalization led to Li’s changed concept of the 6^th Generation. Li was himself moving closer to a particular vision of common culture in China.

Considering the youth of the 6^th Generation film artists themselves and youth as the dominant subject of the new cinema since the 1990s, Paul Willis’ study of urban youth in light of Raymond Williams’ concept of common culture resonates with the Chinese situation of new city films. With the British urban youth of the 1980s as the subject of study, Willis argued for broadening the scope of the arts and becoming attentive to the symbolic work at play in the everyday culture of the young:

“Official culture” has hardly recognized informal everyday culture, still less has it provided usable materials for its dialectical development. Worse, the “holiness” of “art” has made the rest of life profane….[32]

Further, he noted:

Commerce and consumerism have helped to release a profane explosion of everyday symbolic life and activity. The genie of common culture is out of the bottle—let out by commercial carelessness. Not stuffing it back in, but seeing which wishes may be granted, should be the stuff of our imagination.[33]

The same open-minded orientation should also be part of the study of post-Mao city film. In today’s China, one obviously might doubt if it is possible for art to survive the invasion of consumerism into everyday life. One might also be uncertain about the forms of new arts. A recent Chinese film offered an interesting response to this uncertainty. Chicken Poets (2002), the first feature by a celebrated experimental theater director Meng Jinghui, illustrates a new product of common culture, or artwork, emerging out of the profanity of commercialized everyday life. As experimental as his earlier theatrical works, Chicken Poets is a dreamlike meditation on the role of poetry (or art) in everyday life in a rapidly changing China that has given way to consumerism. The hero, an established poet who has lost the ability to continue writing poetry, joins his entrepreneurial-minded former classmate to market black chicken eggs from his experimental farm. His usual muse, a girl who has fallen for him and who is always confident that he will write again, does not inspire him. Instead, he is tempted by a black market CD-ROM that offers introductions to various schools of poetry and effective guidance to a new kind of poetry writing. As a result, he becomes a publishing and marketing star. The success of this chicken poet is the same as the success of Meng’s film. Definitely avant-garde, the film is fun to watch even for an audience that is not particularly interested in art films. Although there are underlying meanings in many non-narrative excursions of the film, the playful multi-media mixture of animation, video, computer graphics, electronic games, music videos, and advertisements is hard to miss. With Chicken Poets, hybrid elements of mass media, popular entertainment, and consumerist literature compete with traditional poetry writing for the status of art and they all end as art exactly because they find a way to co-exist.

In post-Mao cinema’s recreation of everyday life, one can detect a strong interest in the emotional life and an unmistakable yearning for intimacy. So many films bear testimony to this interest and yearning.[34] The complexity of human sentiments, of course, had been an under-represented subject in Maoist China and now it was opening up for exploration. More interestingly, the search for intimacy involves a redefinition of human relations and society in post-Mao urbanization. Richard Sennett concluded his lengthy book The Fall of Public Man with a brief chapter on intimacy. He first drew a contrast between two kinds of tyrannies in the forms of intimacy. In capitalist society, a person is obligated by the domestic routine of everyday life. In a police state (although Sennett had a Stalinist state and Fascism in mind, Mao’s China suited his description as well), “one’s activities, friends, and beliefs pass through the net of governmental surveillance”[35]. Both tyrannies of coercion, however, only lead to a more subtle tyranny of intimacy: the seduction of security in the flux of ordinary life or one’s need for a single authority, be it a person, an institution, or a belief. In other words, the personal realm of private life reinforces the glorious sense of a human being who can allay his troubles in the impersonal public life. Confronting drastic urbanization in post-Mao China, film artists were retaining humanist ideals. Just as the humanist logic of ambiguity, complexity, psychological uncertainty, or emotional subtlety had served to replace the oversimplified, social class concept of human beings in immediate post-Mao cinema, humanism was now challenging a new enemy: the modern city. Post-Mao urbanization was the instrument of impersonality, chance encounters, formality, distance, coldness, insincerity, and so on. The film artists who searched for intimacy hoped to hold on to humanism while their films braved the flux of new everyday life in modern Chinese cities.

A corresponding cultural trend to this cinematic interest in emotional life and the yearning for intimacy is the contemporary rise of xiaozi (petty-bourgeois) and their claim to representation. According to a two-volume critical anthology of ten female xiaozi writers, all of whom born since the 1970s, xiaozi has almost become the synonym for today’s urban life style of the young. “Xiaozi,” as one critic elaborates, “is not created by God, nor produced by Nüwa. Xiaozi’s mother is the metropolis.” “Xiaozi,” this critic continues to explain, “is not a social stratum. It is a life style, a cultural taste, a manner, and a standard.”[36] Xiaozi are conscious of what they are pursuing of. They care about styles, follow fashions, are particular about brand names, emphasize taste of living, nourish sentiments, search for romance, love aura of metropolis, travel in cyberspace … Xiaozi are absolutely urban.

The critics anthologized in these volumes are unmistakably sarcastic about Xiaozi. According to the editor, all the critics writing in the anthology are about the same age as the xiaozi writers and have the insider’s knowledge of this life style. Their criticism itself is an elaboration of xiaozi culture. Reading these critics, we detect a shared disgust of these critics of xiaozi’s bad tastes, their submission to the market demands, their materialism, narcissism, vanity, and hybridism in cultural orientation (post-colonial influences of the West, Hong Kong and Taiwan). If these critics are part of the xiaozi culture, what they exemplify is exactly the self-consciousness of the xiaozi writers. It is just like xiaozi novelist Wei Hui would self-consciously comment on post-colonialism in today’s Shanghai in her Shanghai Darling, while in the meantime making her foreign-inspired sensual life in the city (she cites foreign writers constantly to guide her navigation in sensibilities) and her love affair with a foreigner a post-colonial spectacle.[37]

While xiaozi writers are often self-consciously critical of themselves, the editor of the anthology, Ge Hongbing, clearly subscribed the discourse that I identified earlier while discussing the rise of the post-Mao city films.[38] The discourse features a deviation from the grand narrative of the Maoist revolutionary ideology and a rekindled interest in the everyday. Informed by this same discourse, Ge relates xiaozi with the collapse of revolutionary ideology. He assigns some light colors—pink (suggesting warmth and gentility), light green (symbolizing love for nature and human beings) and light blue (implying such qualities as quiet, elegant and tasteful)—as the symbolic colors of xiaozi, letting them contrast the revolutionary, violent red of the Maoist ideology. In this light, Ge believes that the light-colored xiaozi taste of life has contributed to the social stability of the most recent Chinese history. Using this contrast, Ge has actually elevated xiaozi from a subculture isolated to the educated, white-collar urban youth to the prevailing feature of today’s urban life—materialistic, every-day and profane. “The spiritual essence of our era,” Ge writes, “is becoming more and more xiaozi. The materialist glory of xiaozi culture presents concretely a spiritual void that is close to ‘nothingness’ (wu) and that has a façade of everyday-ness.”[39] Ge’s description of the market dominance of xiaozi culture—how market has deprived the individuality, uniqueness, and depth of the culture—may have reflected some of his not-so-optimistic view of this culture. This view, which may even remind us of the German School’s warning of the cold aspect of urbanization that I wrote about earlier, is only fleeting. The contemporary Chinese mind, as Ge’s writing indicates, does not want to think much about the negative social effects of xiaozi culture but want to live it first. “In the new century,” Ge writes, “xiaozi is no longer just confined to the literary interest of the intellectuals who have bourgeois tastes. Xiaozi is no longer just found in words flowing in fashionable xiaozi journals but is found everywhere alive on city streets. Xiaozi sings in the hearts of the young. It has become a popular tendency of life, a mass movement of life.”[40]

Clearly, the same social and ideological factors in today’s China are setting the critical perception of xiaozi culture and urbanism of post-Mao cinema into the same trajectory. Recently, xiaozi film has started to emerge. Take Shanghai Panic (Women haipa, 2002), a film that attended 2002 Vancouver International Film Festival, as an example. Written and performed by the internet xiaozi writer Mianmian, this film documents the emotional and sensual life of a group of young people—their indulgence in drug and alcohol, their sexual drives (homosexual and heterosexual), their fear for aids, their roaming of the city streets, their riding of the cyberspace, and their anxiety about their lives.[41] Set in contemporary Shanghai, this film echoes Zhang Yuan’s earlier films about the young people living Beijing, Beijing Bastard (Beijing zazhong, 1992) and Sons (Erzi, 1995). If these films are still rare examples of independent or underground filmmaking, in a broader sense, xiaozi tastes and lifestyles have also started to prevail in the state issued films. In Xia Gang’s Love at First Sight, a comedy of war between sexes, the characters are all stylish, young professionals who are independent (no family ties at all), well educated, tasteful in life and diversified in personalities. Compared with the youth of the Maoist and immediate post-Mao China, they are depoliticized, down-to-earth and profane. They don’t bother to be heroes, they don’t talk about missions and goals of life, and they don’t care about personal sacrifice for the sake of the state. The Chinese youth today are finally distant enough from the country’s revolutionary past to allow xiaozi tastes and lifestyles to win through.

The ascendancy of xiaozi tastes is also related to what David Chaney described as a change from “ways of life” to “lifestyles,” which brings the distance between West and East closer.[42] A way of life is typically associated with pre-modern, Apollonian society at a particular geographical locale. Its social significance ties more to ownership and organization of means of production. It is displayed in features such as shared norms, rituals, and patterns of social orders. It is based on the production and reproduction of stable institutions. A way of life describes Maoist China of anti-urban development. Lifestyles, in contrast, can only prevail in an era of modernity or even late-modernity. They are forms of social status derived from the mass access to consumption and leisure. They are often as widespread as the global market and the distributive networks of communication and entertainment. Whereas lifestyles have long prevailed in developing countries, post-Mao China has recently opened up to the flow of not only material commodities but also lifestyles. In this sense, the winning through of xiaozi tastes is part and parcel of China’s exposure to market-distributed international lifestyles. Here, let’s take a few films distributed on the Valentine’s Day of 2004 for examples. First of all, the holiday itself is a recent import catering the rising xiaozi culture. The casts of these films are also international so as to better appeal the Mainland audience. Ye Weixin’s Leaving Me, Loving You (Dacheng xiaoshi, 2004), set in contemporary Shanghai, mixes Hong Kong and Mainland stars. Last Love (Zuihou de ai, zuichu de ai, 2004), also set in Shanghai, is a co-production of China and Japan. Hong Kong and Japan are among the places of fashions that the Mainland xiaozi care.

A study of urbanism and cinema necessarily involves the issue of urban space and its representation. If the most enduring spatial symbol of the roots-searching films of the 1980s was the vast span of yellow earth (its grandeur, depth of history, and as a reminder of social structure, mode of production, hardship of life, endurance of the people, and limitation of the culture), what would be the corresponding spatial symbol for post-Mao city films? First of all, the heterogeneous and ever-changing nature of urban space challenges the very idea. Urban space is exactly what Michel Foucault calls a “heterotopia,” that is, heterogeneous spaces of sites and relations. Any attempt made to capture the city’s essence, I must emphasize, is going to be partial and reductive.

Once this argument is made, it does not keep us from finding some interestingly allegorical uses of space. For the allegorical function of the space, Foucault also assures us that “the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”[43]. In the emergence of post-Mao city films, especially in the initial phases when filmmaking had to break with a politically-controlled past, there was an excellent and telling example of a “single real place” that might function as a spatial symbol, partial and reductive as it was, for the diversified drives of city films: the well-known Tiananmen Square.

To delineate this role of Tiananmen Square, I rely on Henri Lefebvre’s 3-fold approach to construing space as a historic and social product. In The Production of Space (1974), Lefebvre proposes three related perspectives for understanding a space: the actual production of space (practices of building or creating a space), representations of space (how through theories and figures people identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived), and representational spaces (historical experiences, images, and symbols that are crucial for one’s recognition of these spaces). Tiananmen Square at the center of the city of Beijing, undoubtedly, is a typical representational space; its unmistakable images have been woven into the memories of modern Chinese history. A representational space as such, plus the perspectives of its space production and representation, may allow Tiananmen Square to move closer, in its symbolic suggestiveness, to the role that yellow earth played in the roots-searching films.

First constructed as a functional and ritual place to display the power of emperors, Tiananmen Square was reconstructed time and again throughout modern Chinese history to be a public and political place remembered for various student demonstrations or government-sponsored mass gatherings and parades. In 1989, when the student occupation of this representational space led to a massacre and to the consequent depoliticized 1990s of consumerism, the specter of this political space was even linguistically transferred into the new culture milieu; square (guanchang) became a fashionable name for many new shopping plazas[44]. The political space of the bygone eras of revolution was turned into a mental space that accompanied the new zeal and leisure of consumerism. Here this particular reference to Tiananmen Square involved both a new historical process of space production and, interestingly enough, several mental transfers.

The mental transfers, albeit exciting to see as space production, are triggered by a representation of the space. Tiananmen Square has played the gamut of representational roles in city films. Some films have used the Square as a setting to mark certain unconventional behaviors, such as in Mi Jianshan’s Trouble Shooters (1988) or in Huang Jianxiin’s Samsara (1988). Others use the Square to mark certain heroisms, as in Yan Xiaozhui’s Unlikely Hero (2000). Yet the most profound representation of Tiananmen Square—covering the long historical process from the last emperor until today, contrasting the drastic changes of the past and present, and reflecting the globalized nature of today’s consumerism—is found in Feng Xiaogang’s Big Shot’s Funeral (2001). The film is not exactly set in Tiananmen Square, and for purposes of this argument, I have broadened the concept of the Square to include the nearby buildings and open spaces in the Forbidden City. This refigured square (a representational building and space accommodating mass gatherings) has spatially represented the mental transfer of Tiananmen Square, or any square in this sense, in the consumerism of today.

Big Shot’s Funeral tells the story of Taylor, a big-shot Western film director (played by Donald Sutherland) who comes to China to shoot another film about the last emperor. Before falling into a (first real, then feigned) coma, he entrusts Yoyo, a Chinese photographer, with planning and running his funeral. What Yoyo does, on the movie set where Taylor plans to shoot his last-emperor film, is an advertising-driven-and-funded funeral that surpasses by ten times the crowning of the last emperor in the grandeur of its spectacle. Shocked by the inspiration of how the massive gathering of advertisements has transformed the square, Taylor decides that his own funeral run by Yoyo is actually what he wants to shoot about China.

In a way, this is also advice to a Western audience as to what kind of China they should now expect. If cinematic perceptions about China were still dominated by Bertolluci’s The Last Emperor, it was high time to discard them. Since the 1980s, as Deborah Davis observed in an earlier study of Chinese post-Mao Urbanization, Chinese cities best illustrated the nation’s “material and ideological dislocation,” they became “a critical meeting ground” for new urbanites freed from “the reduced scope of political controls,” and they “provided the physical and social space where previously suppressed economic, political and cultural activities emerged into public view.”[45] Now, with the turn of the centuries, momentums of all these changes have not yet shown signs of slowing down. On daily basis, urbanization in China today is still drastically changing the Chinese landscape and everyday life. As the grandest urbanization in a most populated country has yet to peak, urbanism of post-Mao cinema keeps reinventing both China and itself.

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[1] Following the common usage in Chinese film studies, six chronological generations are used to refer to film artists of different eras: the 1^st Generation refers to China’s film pioneers of the silent films of the 1920s; the 2^nd Generation, the leftist filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s; the 3^rd Generation, mostly Yan’an-trained filmmakers who became important in the early PRC cinema of the 1950s; the 4^th Generation, those trained in the early 1960s but who had to wait until the post-Mao late 1970s to start making films; the 5^th Generation, the first post-Mao graduating class from Beijing Film Academy and several other young directors who joined them in the post-Mao cinematic new wave; and the 6^th Generation, also known by several other group names and including the post-1989 (Tiananmen Square massacre) young film artists in an urban-focused era.

[2] The representative titles of early new city films include primarily works by the 4^th and 5^th Generation directors: Huang Jianxin’s Black Cannon Incident (1986), Dislocation (1986), and Samsara (1988); Huang Jianzhong’s Questions for the Living (1986); Song Jiangbo’s Masquerade (1986); Zhang Zeming’s Sunshine and Showers (1988); Sun Zhou’s Add Sugar (1988); Zhou Xiaowen’s Price of Madness (1988); Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Rock Kids (1989); Zhang Junzhao’s Arc Light (1989); Zhang Liang’s A Woman’s Street (1989); Xie Fei’s Black Snow (1989); and Zhang Nuanxin’s Good Morning, Beijing (1990).

³ See Richard Sennett, ed. Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969). This anthology offers a concise introduction and the essential writings of the German School of urban studies.

[4] See Dai Jinhua, “Xin zhongguo dianying: disanshijie piping de biji” (New Chinese film: a note on third-world criticism), Dianying yishu 1 (1991): 46-54. My brief account in this paragraph is loosely based on Dai’s discussion in this article with my own observations. The 4^th Generation films referred to here include Ding Yinnan’s A Back-lit Picture (1982), Wu Tianming’s The Story of Life (1984) and Old Well (1986), Teng Wenji’s A Village in the Metropolis (1982) and On the Beach (1985), Hu Bingliu’s The Country People (1986), Yan Xueshu’s In the Wild Mountains, (1985), and Zheng Dongtian’s Young Couples (1987).

[5] Dai Jinhua, “Xin zhongguo dianying: disanshijie piping de biji,” 49.

[6] Some basic ideas of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West became known to Chinese film critics through Fei Xiaotong’s anthropological study of Chinese earth-bound society, Xiangtu zhongguo (Rural China), which was repinted in 1985 by Sanlian Shudian in Beijing.

[7] Wang Hui, “Dangdai dianying zhong de xiangtu yu dushi” (City and countryside in contemporary films), Dianying yishu 2 (1989), 18.

[8] See, for instance, Long Haiqiu, “Paihuai dushi: tan jinqi de chengshi ticai yingpian” (City at a loss: On recent city films). Yishu guangjiao 2 (1989): 56-61; Wang Liaonan, “Shisu shenhua: muqian chengshi dianying de pingge pinggu” (Worldly mythology: An evaluation of the present city films), Yishu guangjiao 2 (1989): 49-55; Wei Xiaolin, “Bianyuan ren: yizhong xinde yinmu zhurengong xingxiang” (Marginal hero: A new image of the screen protagonists), Yishu guangjiao 2 (1990): 70-75; and Chen Xiaoyun, “Gudu de chengshi: chengshi dianying yanjiu zhiyi” (Lonely city: A study on city films), Wenyi pinglun 4 (1990): 88-89.

[9] Chen Xiaoyun, 88-89.

[10] Chen Xiaoyun; 84, 89.

[11] See Dai Jinhua, Wuzhong fengjing (Foggy sceneries: Chinese cinematic culture, 1978-1998) (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2000): 380-382.

[12] The early titles include Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastard (1992), Lou Ye’s Weekend Lovers (1993), He Jianjun’s Red Beads (1993), Wang Xiaoshuai’s Days (1993), Hu Xueyang’s Drowning (1994), Guan Hu’s Dirt (1994), Wu Di’s Yellow Goldfish (1996), and Zhang Ming’s In Expectation (1996).

[13] See, for instance, Wang Yichuan, “Wudaiqi zhongguo dianying” (Non-generation era Chinese cinema), Dangdai dianying 5 (1994): 20-27, Han Xiaolei, “Dui diwudai de wenhua tuwei: Hou wudai de geren idanying xianxiang” (Getting beyond the Fifth Generation culture: Post-Fifth-Generation individual filmmaking), Dianying yishu 2 (1995): 58-63, and Lü Xiaoming, “Jiushi niandai zhongguo dianying jingguan zhiyi: ‘diliudai’ jiqi zhiyi” (An aspect of Chinese filmmaking of the 1990s: “the 6^th Generation” and challenges to this lable), Dianying yishu 3 (1999): 23-28.

[14] My idea on this point was supported by Sheldon Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001): especially 31-47.

[15] Foucault, Michael. Power /Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 126.

[16] Ibid.

[17] See the post-script of Li Zehou’s Zhongguo xiandai sixiangshi lun (On the history of Chinese contemporary thought) (Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 1999). Chinese film scholar Ni Zhen cited this idea of Li Zehou in his Story of Beijing Film Academy (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2002) to justify the usage of filmmaking generations.

[18] See Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Penguin, 1965), 63-88 and Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979), 157-68.

[19] The anti-urban feature of Mao’s China has been discussed by many sources. See, for instance, L. J. C. Ma, “Anti-Urbanism in China,” Proceedings of the Association of American Geographers 8 (1976): 114-18; C. P. Cell, “De-urbanization in China: The Urban-Rural Contradiction,” Bulletin Concerned Asian Scholars 11.1 (1979): 62-72; M. B. Farina, “Urbanization, de-urbanization and class struggle in China 1949-79,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research IV (Dec., 1980): 487-501; R. J. R. Kirkby, Urbanization in China: Town and Country in a Developing Economy, 1949-2000 AD (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and Victor F. S. Sit, ed.; Chinese Cities: The Growth of the Metropolis Since 1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

[20] Martin King Whyte and William L. Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 358.

[21] In a comparison of Western Europe and China, Rhoads Murphey emphasized the importance of Chinese cities as administrative centers. “The city has been a center of change in western Europe,” he observed, “while it has been the reverse in traditional China, despite the broad similarity in urban economic functions in both areas.” See Murphey, “The city as a Center of Change: Western Europe and China,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 44 (1954): 349-362.

[22] Whyte and Parish, 1-2.

[23] See, for example, Tang Danian’s City Paradise (1999), Xia Gang’s A Country Boy in Shanghai (1999), Ah Nian’s Call Me (2000), Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle (2001), and Wang Guangli’s Go for Broke (2001).

[24] Xiaobing Tang, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 2000), 279.

[25] Xiaobing Tang, 280-284.

[26] See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (London: Penguin, 1961) and The Long Revolution (London: Penguin, 1965). See also Alan Swingewood’s discussion of Williams in Cultural Theory and the Problem of Modernity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).

[27] Tonglin Lu. Confronting Modernity in the Cinemas of Taiwan and Mainland China. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002: 1.

[28] See, for instance, Han Xiaolei, 1995, and Zuo Shula, “Cong ‘diliudai’ dianying dao Wushan yunyu” (From “6^th generation” film to Expectation), Dianying yishu 3 (1996): 80-83.

[29] Li Yiming, “Shiji zhimo: shehui de daode weiji yu diwudai dianying de shouzhong zhengqin” (Fin de siècle: ethnic crisis and the funeral for the 5^th generation filmmaking), Dianying yishu 1-2 (1996): 9-13, 24-28.

[30] Li Yiming, “Cong diwudai dao diliudai” (From the 5^th Generation to the 6^th Generation), Dianying yishu 1 (1998): 15-22.

[31] Ibid., 15.

[32] Paul Willis, Common Culture (Boulder, CO, and San Francisco, CA: Westview Press, 1990), 129.

[33] Willis, 27.

[34] Examples include Huo Jianqi’s A Love of Blueness (2000) and A Time to Love (2005); Xia Gang’s Love at First Sight (2002); Wang Rui’s After Divorce (1995); Zhang Yuan’s I Love You (2002) and Green Tea (2003); Zhang Yibai’s Subway to Spring (2002); Li Chubo’s Don’t Cry, Girl (2002); Li Xin’s Dazzling (2001); Liu Xin’s Love Captives (2000) and 38 °C (2003); Zhaoyan Guozhang’s A Dream of Youth (2002); and Sheng Zhimin’s Two Hearts (2002). For more examples and further discussion of this topic, see chapter 6.

[35] Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 337.

[36] Zhizhu Yi, “Youxiu xiaozi de ruogan qingjie” (Random episodes about a good xiaozi), in Fengse de biaoqing: shi xiaozi nüzuojia jiexi, I (Pink expressions: analysis of ten female xiaozi writers, I), ed. Ge Hongbing (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2002), 50. Nüwa is the legendary Chinese goddess who created human beings. Zhizhu Yi, the critic’s name, is obviously a mischievous pen name and internet login name meaning Spider #1. The emphasis in the quote is mine.

[37] Although her writing is not included in this anthology, Wei Hui is considered the most influential, pioneering xiaozi writer whose name is often mentioned by critics edited in this anthology. See Wei Hui, Shanghai baobei (Shanghai Darling) (Shenyang: chunfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1999). The subtitle for this semi-autobiographical novel is “a novel written by a woman for women about her body-and-heart felt experiments in life.”

[38] Born in 1968, Ge Hongbing is known as a “new-born generation” literary scholar in China.

[39] Ge Hongbing, Preface to both Fense de biaoqing and Ganshang de landiao: Shi xiaozi nüzuojia jiexi,I and II (Pink expressions, and Sentimental blue tones: Analysis of ten female xiaozi writers, I and II), ed. Ge Hongbing (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2002), ii.

[40] Ge Hongbing, “Preface,” i.

[41] Mian Mian and Wei Hui, both in their 20s, have caught the attention of Western readers as China’s bad girls of letters. The two of them, however, are only part of a fashionable trend in today’s urban youth subculture in China. It's really the tip of an iceberg—the tip is two female writers and their books in print, and the iceberg is the abundance of similar writings circulating on the Internet. With less control and censorship, a large and highly participatory young readership, and no need for publishing editors, cyberfiction in the style of Wei Hui and Mian Mian has been proliferating.

[42] See David Chaney “From Ways of Life to Lifestyle: Rethinking Culture as Ideology and Sensibility,” in Culture in the Communication Age, ed. James Lull (London & New York: Routledge, 2001): 75-88.

[43] Michael Foucault’s 1967 lecture notes, “Des Espaces autres,” as quoted in Edward W. Soja. Postmodern Geographies (London & New York: Verso, 1989), 17.

[44] For an excellent discussion of the “guangchang (square) complex” in Chinese mass culture of the 1990s, see Dai Jinhua, Cinema and Desire, eds. Jing Wang and Tani Barlow (London: Verso, 2002): 213-234.

[45] See Deborah S. Davis “Introduction: Urban China” in Urban Spaces in Contemporary China, eds. Deborah S. Davis, et al. (Washington, DC and Cambridge, UK: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7-8.