15

Chinese Cinema at the Millennium¹

Defining “China” and the Politics of Representation

Gina Marchetti

Chinese cinema has been undergoing dramatic changes since 2000. Many of these changes parallel economic, political, social, and other cultural developments that have radically transformed the Chinese-speaking world. Under Deng Xiaoping and his successors, the People's Republic of China (PRC) has aggressively developed its economy, eviscerated its socialist “iron rice bowl” institutions, and seen a tremendous gulf emerge between the rich and the poor, the countryside and the urban centers, with a shift in the population from the rural hinterlands to booming megalopolises. The suppression of the demonstrations in Tian'anmen Square in 1989 served only as a minor bump on the road to China's eventual membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and nearly complete integration into the global neoliberal economy. In 1997, Hong Kong, a British colony, returned to Chinese sovereignty and, since then, has been charting its own course as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the PRC. Since the end of martial law in the 1980s, Taiwan has struggled to assert itself on the world stage as more than a “renegade” province of mainland China. With the economies in the PRC, Hong Kong, and the Republic of China (ROC)/Taiwan going through cycles of boom and bust, Chinese-speaking people in other parts of the world – including the predominantly Chinese city-state of Singapore, the sizable populations of ethnic Chinese in Malaysia and other parts of Southeast Asia, as well as the “overseas” Chinese living in the Americas, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere – embrace or distance themselves from a global Chinese identity as they see fit.

As Chinese cinema develops out of this diverse population, transnational exchanges, diasporic alliances, and immigrant connections complicate any picture of a “national” or unitary Chinese cinema. However, culture, language, ethnicity, and history link Chinese communities together, and the dynamics of a marketplace in which Chinese films circulate make the study of Chinese cinema a fecund research topic. Within the context of the current scholarship on contemporary Chinese-language cinema, this chapter explores the key themes, issues, and concerns found on Chinese screens at the millennium. Covering some of the principal genres and narrative formulae frequently found in contemporary Chinese cinema, the analysis extends to representations of the nation, ethnicity, and the political processes that form the foundation of a contested and often fragmented “body politic.”

Cataloguing all of the elements of Chinese genre films from 2000 to 2010 would demand more than a single volume – let alone a chapter. As a result, it seems more productive and, potentially, more useful analytically to look at those elements common to more than one genre. To this end, the focus here is on the common characters, plots, icons, themes, and issues that appear in genres such as martial arts, crime, comedy, horror, historical epic, documentary, and melodrama, among others. These films exist in a complex intertexual matrix that, of course, extends beyond the parameters of Chinese-speaking screen culture. These motion pictures compete with and speak to global concerns involving cinematic language and aesthetics, the international marketplace for film, and to popular genres that transcend ethnic Chinese cinema. In addition, these films take up issues that go beyond the borders of the Chinese-speaking world and involve economic, political, social, environmental, and other issues of global significance. In other words, these common elements provide insight into transnational Chinese cinema as well as indicating how Chinese-language motion pictures circulate within global film culture.

Exploring the content, then, of Chinese cinema opens up a window onto those changes that have occurred elsewhere that resonate beyond the borders of the PRC, Taiwan, or Hong Kong. Changing labor relations, migration, growing class inequities, patterns of consumption, gender roles, sexual orientations, human–technology interfaces, cyber-societies, environmental degradation, post-9/11 anxieties, terrorism, surveillance, and the opportunities and stress involved with increased travel and instantaneous global communications all play a part in what can be seen on Chinese screens.

Representing the Chinese “Nation”

Within scholarship on Chinese cinema, debates continue to rage on the definition of the term. Since very different nation-states and other territories lay claim to being “Chinese” (e.g., PRC, ROC/Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau) and diasporic communities produce films in Chinese or about the ethnic Chinese experience outside of Chinese borders, scholars have turned to concepts such as “Chinese-language” (Berry & Farquhar, 2006; Lu & Yeh, 2005; Xu, 2007; Zhang, 2002) or “Sinophone” (Shi, 2007) cinema to use language as a basis for categorization. (For more on the transnational character of Chinese film, see Lo, 2005; Lu, 1997.) However, given that Chinese-language films can be broken down into various dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, among others), using the dominant dialect of Mandarin as a marker of the “Chinese” character of the film can be problematic. Particularly in the past and in recent years, the linguistic hybridity of films made in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the PRC has become more noticeable. Often a switch in dialect makes a plot point as a character speaks to others in a local dialect (subtitled in Chinese characters for the benefit of the audience). Even as Chinese films have globalized, the tendency to make distinctions through language has increased. Hokkien, for example, has resurfaced after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan. The use of this particular dialect divides the audience into those who have their roots in the pre-Kuomintang (KMT) Japanese colony and those who feel more comfortable communicating in Mandarin, the “official” guo yu (national language) of the KMT government-in-exile in Taiwan (Yeh & Davis, 2005). Many independent filmmakers in the People's Republic also use dialects to mark their interest in the local or to contrast rural and/or provincial interests with life in the constantly evolving notion of a Chinese nation. Even as spectacles in Mandarin dominate the new multiplexes, so-called Sixth Generation, “urban,” “underground,” or independent filmmakers (Pickowicz & Zhang, 2006; Zhang, 2007) make films that use Beijing argot or local dialects to capture the feeling of being alienated from this project of fashioning a national identity on screen. In Hong Kong, of course, shifting use of languages has long been a factor as Mandarin and Cantonese productions were often punctuated by English or other Chinese dialects. Multiple soundtracks, dubbed dialogue, layers of subtitles, and alternative versions allow Chinese films to travel across these linguistic borders while maintaining a sense of a common ethnic identity.

The connections among language and national identity as well as local or community affiliations come to the foreground in many films. Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), for example, has been a rather divisive film for Chinese viewers because of Lee's decision to work from a Chinese translation of an English-language adaptation of a Chinese wu xia martial arts novel and have all the actors speak Mandarin (rather than dub the nonnative Mandarin speakers such as Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh). (For more on the production process for this film, see Sunshine, 2001.) Directed by Taiwan-born Lee, the film features ethnic Chinese actors from around the world, including the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. This highlights the melting-pot nature of Qing Dynasty imperial China (ruled at the time by the non-Han Manchu minority) and the polyglot hybridity of an emerging “global” China, or what Confucian scholar Tu Wei-Ming has called “cultural China” (Tu, 1994).

Borrowing liberally from the cinematic heritage of Beijing native King Hu, who established the new wu xia pian in Hong Kong in the 1960s, Lee, himself the child of mainland exiles, peoples the landscapes of mainland China (something King Hu never had the opportunity to do) with a younger generation from the PRC (Zhang Ziyi as Jen) and Taiwan (Chang Chen as her love interest in the wilderness), middle-aged characters played by Hong Kong stars (Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh), and an older generation associated with King Hu and exiles from the mainland (Cheng Pei-Pei as Jade Fox). As the first transnational Chinese-language mega-hit of the new millennium, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon continues an aesthetic tradition that predates the advent of the cinema in China. Like many other wu xia stories of heroes, bandits, stolen objects, warrior women, frontier wastelands, and a countryside outside the control of the central government, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon uses its story to allegorize the Chinese nation with a woman – Jen, in this case – torn apart by the various contending forces trying to assert ideological hegemony. With a dramatic Western Chinese setting in the Gobi desert, the edges of the Qing Empire easily stand in for the contested borders of present-day China – from the nationalist movements in Taiwan and the democracy movements in Hong Kong to the calls for greater autonomy for Tibet and the Uighurs of Xinjiang. Jen, significantly played by a mainland actress (a fact driven home by her accent), romanced by old Shanghai (Cheng Pei-Pei), Taiwan (Chang Chen), and Hong Kong (Chow Yun-Fat), remains elusive as she jumps into the void at the end of the film – just as the PRC, from the perspective of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the diaspora, maintains its mystery accompanied by a certain dread.

Although shunned in the PRC (as seen in a cool critical reception as well as box-office returns) (Chan, 2003; Kim, 2006; Klein, 2004; Martin, 2005; Wang & Yeh, 2005), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon serves as the base for a series of call-and-response productions that reverberate in the first decade of the new century. The first clarion reply to Lee's feature came from another formidable auteur – Fifth Generation film-maker Zhang Yimou. His film Hero (2002) provides a mirror image of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with Lee's film set in China's last (Qing) and Zhang's in China's first (Qin) dynasty. It features an all-star pan-Chinese cast with actors from the PRC (Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi), Hong Kong, and the diaspora (Tony Leung, Maggie Cheung, Donnie Yen). However, rather than ending with a leap of faith into an abyss, the film highlights the return of the eponymous hero (Jet Li), who remains nameless in the film, to the deadly embrace and unifying power of China's first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi (Chen Daoming).

Jet Li had made a name for himself as a transnational martial arts star, working in Hong Kong, Europe, and the United States, after getting his start as part of the PRC's prestigious wu shu team. Working through a narrative about rebellious factions trying to defy the Qin emperor's drive for Chinese unity, Jet Li's return to work in the mainland seems to add to the significance of his performance, gesturing toward national unity – conforming to this vision with the character's dying breath even after he purposely botches the assassination attempt (Chan, 2009). Told in a series of flashbacks that literally color the truth with different hues associated with various versions of the story, Hero complicates its depiction of nationalism and submission to a central figure of authority that can consecrate China as “our land.”

Subsequent films have continued this allegorical back and forth between visions of the Chinese nation as a unified whole (often, as in the case of Hero, bloodily achieved) and invocations of “China” as more diffuse and diverse, spilling over the edges of any definable nation-state, and characterized by a diasporic, flexible identity with the Chinese wanderer as a citizen of the world. These narratives take place in dynastic China at pivotal points in history when diverse peoples came together to acknowledge their fealty to the Chinese empire or at points when these same people rebelled against the emperor's heavenly mandate to rule imperial China. All of these films play with a similar dialectic. China acts as a modern (“Western”) nation-state based on what Anderson might call an “Imagined community” (Anderson, 1983). However, this image of the modern state vies with an older vision of China as an empire made up of tribute nations, non-Han minorities, and hybrid populations linked to trade along ancient routes, for example, the Silk Road (Warriors of Heaven and Earth, 2003; The Treasure Hunter, 2009) or the Tea-Horse Road between Yunnan and Tibet (Tian Zhuangzhuang's documentary Delamu, 2004). The edges of the empire provide the setting for many of these films, with Western China from the Gobi Desert to the grasslands of Mongolia as particular favorites; for example, Mulan (2009) or Tian Zhaungzhuang's Warrior and the Wolf (2009).² Even films by independent filmmakers from the Sixth Generation feature references to the Western deserts and grasslands as a nod to the importance of the border and the limits of the national. For example, several of Jia Zhangke's films including The World (2004) and Zhu Wen's East–West meditation Thomas Mao (2010), among others, are set in or near Mongolia or enlist Mongolia as a central trope within the film.

The Russian (Jiang Wen's The Sun also Rises, 2007) and Korean (Zhang Lu's Dooman River, 2010) borders also pop up periodically, and characters from Japan and the Middle East pass through. Although it may be tempting to say that films directed by filmmakers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or the diaspora would highlight the idea of “China” as a cosmopolitan, pre- or post-national entity, unified by a written language and shared history rather than by the “mandate” of any particular government or notion of “citizenship,” this is really not the case. As the example of Hero shows, stories about the founding moments of the Chinese nation tend to contain contradictions, and, as various depictions of Emperor Qin show (contrast Chen Kaige's The Emperor and the Assassin, 1999, with his classmate/former collaborator/fellow Fifth Generation rival Zhang's Hero and the Jackie Chan vehicle, The Myth, 2005), specific historical figures may be sympathetic and justified at one point and depicted as villains the next.

Looking at films set in feudal China (The Warlords, 2007; Red Cliff, I and II, 2008–2009; Confucius, 2010) and films about the founding moments of the Republic of China (Bodyguards and Assassins, 2009) and the People's Republic of China (The Founding of a Republic, 2009) may help to clarify this point. All the films deal with challenges to the Chinese nation as a unified state, questions of the legitimacy of rule, and narratives that allegorize the construction of the nation by references to actual historical figures and incidents as well as mythic reconstructions of legendary figures and their exploits. The two sets of films are directly in conversation with each other. The Warlords self-consciously references the same material on which Red Cliff is based (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms), and Bodyguards and Assassins shares much of the same production team and star power with its counterpart, The Founding of a Republic. While The Warlords and Red Cliff highlight the tendency of China to be torn apart by uprisings, rebellions, and challenges to its imperial ambitions, Bodyguards and Assassins and The Founding of a Republic point toward the constitution of China as a modern nation-state under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong respectively as “founding fathers.” However, as these films circulate in the same markets with quite a lot of shared talent and resources (e.g., Peter Chan directed The Warlords and produced Bodyguards and Assassins), the ideological differences may be smoothed over by common narrative strategies, star performers, locations, stunts, and computer-generated imagery (CGI). Nationalist fervor or anti-nationalist resistance become less a conscious declaration of a specific auteur and more a manifestation of the range of ideological positions available within the hybrid genre of the historical epic/wu xia pian.

The Warlords is based on legends surrounding an actual assassination during the Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864) against Qing rule. Like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Warlords references another film from Hong Kong's golden age made by Chang Cheh, who, like King Hu, was an exile from mainland China. Chang Cheh's film Blood Brothers (1973) takes up the story of three comrades-in-arms who find themselves on the side of the Qing forces but whose sympathies change during the course of the story – helped along by an adulterous love triangle. Again, casting may take on allegorical significance, since the two blood brothers, who turn away from the violence of the state, are played by Hong Kong actor Andy Lau and Taiwanese/Japanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro, while the Qing general is played by PRC-born Jet Li. In this case, Jet Li sacrifices his sworn brother in order to bring peace to war-torn China. Seeing the general as a traitor to his sworn brother (by having an affair with his wife) as well as to the common people, the third brother Jiang (Takeshi Kaneshiro) knifes the general while Qing sharpshooters simultaneously shoot him in the back. Jet Li, then, takes it from both sides, dying at the hands of his bandit comrade as well as of his imperial masters.

Figure 15.1 An opera presentation of The Three Kingdoms in The Warlords (2007), produced by Media Asia Films; Morgan & Chan Films; China Film Group.

As China settles into a relationship with Hong Kong based on a “one country, two systems” model developed for the repatriation of Taiwan, films about people facing a decision involving their loyalty to one side or another in a particular historical conflict increasingly find their way to Chinese screens. In The Warlords, for example, the allusion to The Romance of the Three Kingdoms underscores the traditional importance of personal loyalty and “brotherhood” at moments when conflicting forces tear at China. The Ming Dynasty novel revolves around upholding the oath of brotherhood among three sworn brothers at a time when those bonds are tested by changing political loyalties at the end of the Han Dynasty. When the three blood brothers in The Warlords are doubled in the Peking Opera interlude in Chan's film, their face makeup resembles the makeup usually used for the Peach Orchard sworn brotherhood of Liu Bei, Kwan Yu (Guan Gong), and Zhang Fei of Three Kingdoms fame. The crosscutting in that scene highlights the mythic nature of the story and juxtaposes it with the “brotherhood” of the three protagonists in The Warlords as founded, by contrast, on the superficiality of popular entertainment, publicity generated by the general's exploits, and theatrical displays. Genuine brotherhood is dead, if it existed at all, and only the shallow performance of these fundamental ties remains.

Several other films take up characters and incidents from Lo Kuan-chung's The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (including Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon, 2008, and The Lost Bladesman, 2011), which begins with the line generally translated as “The Empire, long divided, must unite: long united, must divide.” (For more on the novel, see Wu, 2003.) This line eloquently addresses the anxieties surrounding the “rise of China” as a global economic force, a new or renewed imperial presence, as well as the calls for greater autonomy from places such as Taiwan, Xinjiang, and Tibet. Given this, John Woo's choice to return to Hong Kong/PRC filmmaking with Red Cliff (Parts I and II), based on a famous river battle from the period, makes considerable sense. Woo established his career within the Hong Kong triad genre, making classic films about brotherhood such as A Better Tomorrow (1986) and The Killer (1989). These hits spoke to the audiences between the signing of the Joint Accord, which set the timetable for Hong Kong's change in sovereignty, to the repercussions of the June 4 crackdown in Tian'anmen on the British colony. Woo moved to Hollywood around the time of the Handover (1997). With Red Cliff, Woo returns to Asia to take up an adaptation of perhaps the best-known Chinese story about brotherhood and the nation, reworking it to focus on the friendship between two men who are depicted as rivals in the novel, Zhou Yu (Tony Leung) and Zhuge Liang (Takeshi Kaneshiro). Again, the casting may be significant, with Hong Kong and Taiwan stars facing off against a mainland actor who takes on the role of the arch-villain Cao Cao (Zhang Fengyi), obscuring what this classic tale, which is also a hugely popular videogame, actually says about China as a world power or coherent nation-state. The spectacle of military formations, featuring geometric designs, also complicates the picture quite literally by appealing to what Siegfried Kracauer (1995) has termed the aesthetics of the “mass ornament,” in which individual volition merges into the repetitious patterns of mass society (as seen, for example, in Zhang Yimou's staging of the opening ceremony at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing). (For a look at how Red Cliff has been received within the Chinese diaspora, see Cheung, 2010.)

As another case in point, Hu Mei's Confucius (2010) ostensibly pays tribute to the venerable ancient sage who has become, for some, a token of China's reinvention of itself as a mercantile society based on traditional values. Given that Confucius had been denounced as a feudal holdover opposed to women's equality just a few years before, female director Hu Mei's reinvention of the figure by casting Chow Yun-Fat as the scholar-politician-deity merits some consideration. Chow may be best known for his triad-brotherhood films with John Woo (such as A Better Tomorrow and The Killer) as well as forays into history in films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and comedies such as Once a Thief and God of Gamblers. Hailing from Hong Kong and associated more with the action of the jiang hu than with the veneration of a Confucian temple, Chow appears to undercut the gravity to which a tribute to Confucius would likely aspire. Although the sage does get to engage in a bit more military action than he did historically, Confucius tends to look foolish on many occasions. At one point, even his horse seems to laugh at him when the master falls in the mud while trying to make a hasty escape after being excluded from a ritual. Nan-zi (Zhou Xun, a mainland actress known for her beauty as well as acting ability), who plays the female villain in historical accounts, seems to get the best of Confucius, who ends up acting like an awkward teenage boy in her presence. Fifth Generation director Hu Mei, in fact, may not be alone among women of her cohort who linked feudalism, Confucianism, sexism, and anti-Mao/anti-revolutionary sentiments together. Resurrecting Confucius through a Hong Kong actor known for his gangster/action/romantic comedy roles may be one way of keeping that contradiction between Confucius as business advisor and Confucius as feudal counterrevolutionary alive.

This same tension appears to exist in other films that deal with Chinese history. During the Cold War, historical films were sharply divided ideologically with figures like Confucius, for example, and his teachings venerated in Hong Kong and Taiwan and denounced in the PRC. However, these earlier divisions erode as co-productions within the Chinese-speaking regional industry become commonplace. The ideological swirl of films such as Bodyguards and Assassins (pointing toward the commemoration of the centenary of Sun Yat-sen's triumph over the Qing, 1911–2011) and The Founding of a Republic (made to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of the People's Republic, 1949–2009) that results can be dizzying. While Emperor Qin and General Ma may be ambivalent subjects of assassin attempts, any threat to Sun Yat-sen would be taken as an assault on one of the few unifying figures in modern Chinese history. As the mastermind behind the movement that led to the downfall of Manchu rule and the founder of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen is venerated by the Nationalists (KMT) in Taiwan as well as the Communists (CCP) in the PRC. After his death, his wife, Song Qingling, went on to be a key supporter of Mao and the 1949 Revolution, while her sister, Song Meiling, became Chiang Kai-shek's wife and first lady of the ROC government-in-exile on Taiwan (finally dying in 2003 in New York City where she had taken up residence).

Bodyguards and Assassins and The Founding of a Republic, made by many of the same co-producers (including Fifth Generation filmmaker Huang Jianxin) and showcasing a common pool of on-screen star power, use a similar formula to update the turgid genre of the “propaganda” film or patriotic epic. While Bodyguards and Assassins involves pure fiction with a dash of history and The Founding of a Republic tries to put in as many “true” facts and details as possible, both films allow the pan-Chinese audience to see “their” history on screen as well as spot dozens of the region's most popular stars in either leading or cameo roles. While Bodyguards and Assassins can rely on Sun Yat-sen as a dependable unifying figure, Mao gets sidelined in The Founding of a Republic with figures such as Chiang Kai-shek's son, Chiang Ching-Kuo (played by dashing mainland actor Chen Kun), taking up more screen time than might be expected. This may acknowledge Taiwan's reinstatement of the KMT with the election of Ma Ying-jeou in 2008 and improved relations with the PRC – after the years of “separatist” tensions coming from the presidency of the Democratic Progressive Party's Chen Shui-bian.

Coming full circle with his reconsiderations of the Chinese nation, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007) restates many of the same concerns found in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Although as a sexually explicit spy thriller it seems to be galaxies away from the wu xia pian, both films have quite a lot in common, specifically a focus on a central female protagonist as an ideological battleground for conflicting personal and political sentiments. Although James Schamus calls Lust, Caution “the Chinese porn movie” (Sperling, 2008), he followed the same procedure for both films, which he co-wrote, by working with English translations of the original materials, scripting them in English, and then working with translators/co-writers to put them back into Chinese. The similarities in the films' characterizations of women contending with their own desires within the oppressive context of feudal or fascist attitudes toward women speak to preoccupations that include and transcend patriotic feelings and specifically Chinese concerns. (For more on Lust, Caution, see Chang, Schamus, & Wang, 2007; Chi, 2009; L. Lee, 2008.)

Like Lou Ye's Purple Butterfly (2003) and Chen Kuo-fu and Gao Qunshu's The Message (2009), Lust, Caution deals with spies in Japanese-occupied China. Chia-chih (played by Tang Wei, a relative newcomer from the PRC) becomes embroiled in an assassination plot (as another iteration of the political assassination theme) against Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), a higher up in the quisling Wang Jingwei's regime, which collaborated with the Japanese invaders in Shanghai during the Occupation (World War II). To execute the plan, Chia-chih becomes Yee's mistress; however, at the fatal moment, she chooses to put aside her patriotic sentiments and her loyalty to the resistance in order to save her lover's life. The film builds to this climactic moment, which takes place in a jewelry store. Yee has decided to solidify his bond with Chia-chih by purchasing a ring for her. Chia-chih uses the assignation in the jewelry store as a setup for Yee's assassination, but she allows him to escape instead.

No voice-over narration, no intertitles, no dialogue spoken by other characters allows us into either Yee's or Chia-chih's head at that critical moment in the jewelry store. Lee keeps the film on the level of speculation – she loves him, she thinks he loves her, she has lost “faith” in the validity of her cause (maybe she simply can no longer see the Japanese as all that bad or the Nationalists as all that good). Ultimately, then, the film remains mute, and the political implications of Chia-chih's action obscure. Lee's use of explicit sex and mixed sentiments about the Chinese nation, putting glamorous Hong Kong star Tony Leung as a murderous traitor in bed with a young Chinese actress, eliciting rumors about whether they actually “did it” during shooting, did not play well in the mainland. Cinematic choices, then, involving casting and nudity may make more of a statement about the differences within the Chinese-speaking world than any direct statement about democratic rights, sovereignty, or local autonomy could.

The Global Economy and the Rule of Law

Intertwined with questions of China as a “nation,” “empire,” and global presence, the gargantuan changes in China's political economy preoccupy many filmmakers. China's embrace of capitalism, consumerism, and what Debord has called the “society of the spectacle” (1994) finds its expression on screen in often caustic treatments of publicity, advertising, marketing, and tourism. In several films, the neoliberal “new” economy is satirized as a transnational scam. Hong Kong comic Stephen Chow's Shaolin Soccer (2001) lampoons the dog-eat-dog competitiveness of Chinese society, for example, by displacing it onto the exploits of an amateur soccer team hoping to find some spiritual redemption and brotherhood through kung fu. The purity of their intentions aside, the losers know they have “made it” not from the level of their skill but by the appearance of their captain and his girlfriend's faces on a giant billboard as the “Kung Fu Couple” at the film's end (of course, alluding to the concluding image of the Hollywood musical Singin' in the Rain, 1952).

In a similar vein from across the border, Feng Xiaogang's Big Shot's Funeral (2001) features a Chinese cameraman, Yo Yo (Ge You), employed by a declining film director, Don Tyler (Donald Sutherland), who falls into a coma when faced with the financial failure of his current project being shot on location in the PRC. Yo Yo, a natural publicist and budding entrepreneur, sells advertising space and time as part of the fake funeral for the Western celebrity auteur, but Tyler's recovery, of course, complicates the spectacle of his death. (See Braester, 2005; Wang, 2003; Zhang, 2008.) Jia Zhangke's The World (2004) uses a theme park (shot on location in Beijing and Shenzhen) as a metaphor for China's entry into the global economy. Behind the exotic spectacle of India, Japan, the United States, and Europe, the tourist site becomes the meeting ground for human traffickers, designer label counterfeiters, sex workers, petty thieves, and other miscreants from across China as well as across the Russian border. In both films, the global economy, the “open market,” and the “free” flow of people and images add up to corruption, exploitation, and deceit. (For more on the film, see Lu, 2008; McGrath, 2007; Silbergeld, 2009; Zhang, 2009.)

The triad film perhaps best exemplifies this treatment of the global economy out of control. Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs trilogy (2002–2003) (Marchetti, 2007), remade by Martin Scorsese as The Departed (2006) (Marchetti, 2010), unravels the knot that binds cop and crook within the underground economy of sex, drugs, and contraband munitions. The trilogy highlights the uncertain power of state/police authority in an era of changing political loyalties (Hong Kong's transformation from a British colony to a “Special Administrative Region” of the PRC) and globalized economics. The narrative interweaves the crisscrossed lives of two moles (one a triad masquerading as a cop, the other an undercover operative in the gangs) as a metaphor for the schizophrenic identities these mercurial economic positions and shifting political loyalties foster. Although they operate on opposite sides of the law, something disturbingly similar about these two moles makes them interchangeable in several significant ways.

Played by two of the biggest stars in Hong Kong, Andy Lau and Tony Leung, the pair meet only briefly at various points in the story. At the beginning and end of the narrative, the two encounter each other in a shop selling classic audio equipment. The two strangers immediately bond (forgetting that they had met before in the police academy) as salesman and customer in the quintessentially Hong Kong act of shopping. Both part of the consumer/service economy, they listen to a Mandarin singer from Taiwan and finish the sales transaction with a credit card, the global symbol of middle-class financial power. The fake cop/real customer does not suspect the real undercover/fake merchant of hiding drugs inside one of the speakers, and both play their roles as consumer and merchant with more sincerity than either manages to muster as either cops or crooks. However, the deal-making that takes place in the legitimate economy parallels the corruption of the police force as well as of the underworld. The traditional values of loyalty and brotherhood found in the Confucian classics as well as in epics like The Romance of the Three Kingdoms no longer operate, and the global marketplace has challenged the authority of older institutions.

Figure 15.2 Tony Leung and Andy Lau in Infernal Affairs (2002), produced by Media Asia Films; Basic Pictures.

Uncertain identity and unclear loyalties become central to films similar to Infernal Affairs that focus on their protagonists' paranoid delusions and schizophrenic tendencies. These include Confession of Pain (2006), Mad Detective (2007), To Live and Die in Mongkok (2009), Accident (2009), and Overheard (2009), which, like Eye in the Sky (2007), highlight surveillance as a major theme. The Jackie Chan–Daniel Wu vehicle Shinjuku Incident (2009) exports the madness to Japan with a story about mainland migrant workers on the wrong side of the local yakuza and transplanted Taiwanese triads. Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Millennium Mambo (2001) also deals with a woman drifting on the edges of Taiwan's triad societies and against the landscape of Japan. However, unlike Jackie Chan's love interest in Shinjuku Incident, Vicky (Shu Qi) moves between men accompanied by her voice-over meditation on her youth, which takes the film far outside the usual parameters of the triad genre.

Featuring the spectacular and violent encounter of the state with the criminal, the triad film has taken up many of the anxieties associated with changing understandings of the “rule of law” in the Chinese-speaking world. As producer and director, Milkyway's Johnnie To has developed this theme as part of his auteur signature. Whether looking at police units or criminal gangs, To falls back on generic themes of brotherhood and bloodshed in order to explore the anxieties associated with the vicissitudes of global capitalism (including the economic downturns in 1997, 2003, and the post-2008 economic “tsunami”) in relation to the legal system. In films such as PTU (2003) (Ingham, 2009; V. Lee, 2008; Teo, 2007) and Election (2005), the plot revolves around the possession of a coveted object (a gun, a ruling scepter) that signals the vulnerability of authority and its putative legitimacy to loss or theft.

Although the English title of Election refers to a vote for a new triad chief rather than the chief executive of the HKSAR (the film's Chinese title simply refers to the “black society” of the triads), the allegorical possibilities of the cross-border jockeying for power that forms part of the plot for To's film cannot be ignored. Documentary filmmaker Tammy Cheung, in fact, does not hesitate to use the same English title for her film Election (2008), a cinéma vérité treatment of Hong Kong's electoral process. Both To and Cheung put their fingers on the issue of “democracy,” access to government decisions, and the transparency of the legal system as key to an understanding of the legitimacy of any political form, and many other films throughout the Chinese-speaking world deal with the same issue. In the People's Republic of China, documentary films such as Zhao Liang's Crime and Punishment (2007) and Petition (2009) take an acerbic look at the law, and hybrid fictions such as Ying Liang's The Other Half (2006), set in a Chinese law firm, also deal with the PRC legal system.

Several fiction and nonfiction films from the PRC, in fact, bring together a constellation of issues involving environmental degradation, the corrupting forces of global capitalism, and the political excesses of the nation-state. Li Yang's fictional Blind Shaft (2003), for example, deals with murderers who prey on migrant workers involved in illegal mining operations. Other films chronicle the impact of the Three Gorges project on the lives of those displaced by the dam, including documentaries such as Li Yifan and Yan Yu's Before the Flood (2005) and Jia Zhangke's fiction/documentary diptych Still Life (2006) and Dong (2006). Wang Bing's epic documentary West of the Tracks (2003), with a running time of 554 minutes, chronicles the slow decay of factory life in the “rust belt” of China's northeast, and Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui sets part of her fiction feature The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (2006) amidst the same provincial industrial wasteland. (See Marchetti, 2009; Szeto, 2011.)

Jia Zhangke's hybrid documentary/fictional reenactment 24 City (2008) also depicts the transformation of China's heavy industry, but in a different part of the nation – the city of Chengdu in Sichuan. Because of its proximity to the epicenter of the 2008 earthquake, Chengdu has occupied the minds – and the screens – of many since the disaster. Du Haibin's documentary 1428 (2009) takes its title from the precise time the earthquake struck at 2:28 p.m., and Feng Xiaogang's blockbuster Aftershock (2010) mixes the family melodrama with the disaster epic as its story journeys from the 1976 Tangshan earthquake to the Sichuan quake of 2008. In the case of Aftershock, the natural disaster depicted on screen may not appear to be so “natural” when the story of a mother who chooses to have her son rescued at the expense of her daughter in 1976 likely conjures up images of collapsed school buildings and photographs of the student victims in Sichuan in 2008.

The Aftershock of History

As films such as Aftershock, 24 City, The Postmodern Life of My Aunt, and Lust, Caution demonstrate, the writing and rewriting of recent Chinese history preoccupies filmmakers as much as the dynastic past. Filmmakers return to key traumatic moments time and again, for example, the Japanese Occupation, the Cultural Revolution, the White Terror in Taiwan, the 1967 riots in Hong Kong, the June 4, 1989, crackdown in Tian'anmen. The 1937 Rape of Nanjing, for example, has often been brought to Chinese (as well as Western) screens, and it continues to elicit controversy. Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death (aka Nanjing! Nanjing!, 2009) challenges Chinese understandings of the massacre by including a humanized portrait of Kadokawa (Hideo Nakaizumi), a Japanese soldier who also decries the slaughter and commits suicide rather than be part of the violence. Li Ying's documentary Yasukuni (2007) takes a more indirect approach by focusing on the controversies surrounding the Shinto shrine in Tokyo that honors Japan's war dead, including war criminals involved in the Rape of Nanjing and Taiwanese soldiers conscripted to fight against other ethnic Chinese during the Pacific War.

While known for casting Japanese karateka as villains, Chinese martial arts films, perhaps acknowledging the continuing importance of the Japanese audience, often feature Japanese warriors in sympathetic roles. In the Jet Li vehicle Fearless (2006), loosely based on the historical figure Huo Yuanjia and set before World War II, Tanaka (Shido Nakamura) sits down for a civilized cup of tea to bond with opponent Huo. The Donnie Yen film Ip Man (2008), also based on the life of an actual martial artist (Bruce Lee's Wing Chun master), set during the Occupation, portrays the Japanese martial artist Miura (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi) as more sinister. Wei Te-Sheng's Cape No.7 (2008) takes a very different approach to the Japanese colonization of Taiwan by imagining the end of the war as a series of love letters between a teacher, repatriated to Japan, and his local Taiwanese student, providing a nostalgic backdrop for a story about contemporary life on the island. Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Café Lumiére (2003) wittily imagines the sexual flow between Japan and its former colony going in the opposite direction as a Japanese woman returns home pregnant after a sojourn in Taiwan working on a biography of composer Jiang Wen-Ye, born in colonial Taiwan and educated in Tokyo, who worked in Japanese-occupied Beijing and stayed after 1949 until his death in 1983. Like Lust, Caution, Café Lumiére dares to question the line between personal and political loyalties – individual desire and nationalist sentiments. Hou takes up the challenge of making a Taiwanese film in Japanese – as a reversal of the Japanese propaganda films made in Manchukuo in Chinese during the Occupation that play in the movie theaters depicted in Lust, Caution.³

Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai's Running on Karma (2003) examines the atrocities of the war from a spiritual distance, making unexpected karmic connections between the present and the past in a story about a Hong Kong lady cop and a former monk turned exotic dancer from mainland China. Working in the PRC, actor-director-writer Jiang Wen's Devils on the Doorstep (2000) uses satire to confront the legacy of the war in a story about two hapless Japanese prisoners detained by Chinese villagers; the controversy surrounding the sympathetic portrayal of the bond between the Japanese POWs and the peasants caused the film to be banned and Jiang barred from directing for several years. (See Martinsen, 2005.)

After the ban, Jiang moved from the Japanese Occupation to the Great Leap Forward (1959) and the end of the Cultural Revolution (1976) with The Sun also Rises, a magic-realist sweep across China to the Gobi Desert and the Soviet border. Historical tensions and political realities become a whirl of images and sensations, bedroom farce, and slapstick comedy. In fact, PRC films made after 2000 tend to move away from depicting the violent excesses of periods such as the Cultural Revolution to focus on the continuing impact of political movements on individuals and their families. Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams (2005) features a family torn apart by the drive to return to Shanghai from Guiyang after the Cultural Revolution. Zhang Tianhui's documentary Farewell, Beijing (2010) follows Gong Fenghai, a “sent-down youth” from the Cultural Revolution, as he tries to find a way to return to Beijing and retire closer to his family (much to their chagrin). Hong Kong director Ann Hui's The Postmodern Life of My Aunt focuses on a woman who had been sent away from Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution and had made the choice to abandon her working-class husband and their daughter in order to make a life for herself back in the metropolis.

In Everlasting Regret (2005), Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan uses the life of his female protagonist Qiyao (Sammi Cheng) to trace the political vicissitudes of life in Shanghai from the 1930s through the end of the Cultural Revolution and into Deng's Reform Era. Even a film such as Ning Ying's Perpetual Motion (2005), an all-female look at approaching middle age in Beijing, contrasts the shiny Mao buttons and Cultural Revolution LPs stored away in the attic of the privileged courtyard home in which the film is set with the trauma of families destroyed by the political climate of that era.

In a parallel fashion, Hong Kong cinema returns to the trauma of British colonialism and the Cold War era, while Taiwanese films look back in horror at the KMT's “White Terror” purges. Wong Kar-wai, of course, masters the depiction of the pain and desire characteristic of Hong Kong's postwar period in his films In the Mood for Love (2000) and its sequel of sorts, 2046 (2004). Dealing with characters displaced temporally (historically) and spatially (geographically) in the wake of World War II, the 1949 Chinese Revolution, and the rise of US influence and the Japanese economy, the films use adulterous couples, cuckolded husbands, bored housewives, and frustrated lovers to explore the ways in which that era parallels our own. Using a roving camera, a soundtrack sampling world music, and a stylishness exemplified by the tailored qi pao/cheung sam the women wear, Wong creates a cinematic world full of broken dreams, exiles' fantasies, displaced people, and misplaced romantic desires.

In fact, the qi pao stand as emblems of this trauma of displacement. Beautifully tailored, using patterns that mark the passage of time and the seasons, as well as marking the line between the elegance of high fashion and the drab, cramped surroundings in which the refugees find themselves after fleeing Mao's China for crowded Hong Kong across the border, the distinctive Chinese dress does more than mark the women as desirable sex objects sown into silky gowns that cling to their bodies. The qi pao define the exiles as part of an affluent, displaced class from Shanghai, known as the center of Chinese fashion before 1949, pointing to the only way they can continue to display their wealth and privilege in their new environment.

As an outsider who does not come from Shanghai, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) has difficulty even seeing his wife's affair with the husband of the glamorous Su Lizhen (Maggie Cheung), who lives next door. While he plays the cuckolded husband and repressed lover in In the Mood for Love, Chow Mo-wan undergoes a complete change of character in 2046, perhaps alluding to the ways in which the times demand radical changes in even the deepest parts of the psyche. The changes in clothing, mood, and morals seem to parallel the vicissitudes of the time, and Yonfan's Prince of Tears (2009) takes up similar themes against the backdrop of the KMT's “White Terror” in Taiwan. As in Wong's films, Yonfan's narrative looks at the Cold War through women's fashions and romantic entanglements, while adding a layer of political intrigue as the KMT tries to ferret out and execute so-called communist spies.

Samson Chiu's Mr. Cinema (2007) and Alex Law's Echoes of the Rainbow (2010) explore life in Hong Kong at its poorer margins during the Cold War period. Living on the edges of the colonial city as squatters, the characters in these films lead a precarious existence. In Echoes of the Rainbow, for example, the tailors, shoemakers, and small businessmen who eke out a living as squatters in Hong Kong must contend with corruption at every point. The British cop on the beat demands bribes to permit them to stay in business. In order to get basic care in the hospital, nurses and technicians for blood transfusions must have an inducement that literally becomes “blood” money when the young patient dies. The hospital in the mainland to which the family turns in desperation to help their son offers no solace, since it has been incapacitated by the Cultural Revolution. While US dreams of space flight and the promise of advancement through an English education offer some hope to the younger generation in the film, the passing away of the young leukemia victim lessens the impact of the film's nostalgic evocation of the past.

Mr. Cinema looks at the same era through the eyes of a leftwing film projectionist, who also struggles to maintain himself and his family in colonial Hong Kong. The protagonist Zhou (“Jow” in Cantonese is a homophone for “left” so the character, played by Anthony Wong, is also known as “Leftie”) acts, however, as a somewhat naïve idealist rather than a radical communist ideologue. He neglects his family to attend political meetings and rallies in addition to spending hours screening films from the PRC. Although his environment may speak to his political sentiments, the fact that his banter with his KMT neighbor eclipses any leftist political organizing he actually accomplishes points to Mr. Cinema's failure to take the left seriously. In fact, one of the more droll scenes in the film involves Zhou realizing that both he and his KMT neighbor agree that the disputed Diaoyu Islands belong to “China” (whether PRC or ROC) and definitely not Japan. In Prince of Tears, communist sentiments become the stuff of high drama and tragic consequences, whereas, Mr. Cinema treats the left as comedy and its impact on the family as melodrama.

Although Zhou dreams of going to Tian'anmen, the film does little to examine the roots of the anticolonial feelings that may be fueling that wish. Echoes of the Rainbow, in fact, appears to address the reasons for the 1967 riots better, even though the film is conveniently set two years after the fact in 1969. While Echoes of the Rainbow may avoid the riots, it does not shy away from British colonial excesses and the creeping cultural and military presence of the United States in Hong Kong. Mr. Cinema breezes past the 1967 riots on its own way to the 1997 Handover, while avoiding that other milestone that shook Hong Kong – the demonstrations in support of the May–June 1989 protests in Tian'anmen. The centrality of Tian'anmen in Zhou's imagination and as a visual icon in the film only serves to underscore that absence in order to make a tacit ideological point.

In fact, the trauma of Tian'anmen has seldom found its way to Chinese screens in any substantive way. Emily Tang's Hong Kong-produced Conjugation (2001) does take up the lives of recent graduates trying to get by in Beijing immediately after the crackdown, and Lou Ye's Summer Palace (2006) explores the sexual meanderings of a group of university students before, during, and after the demonstrations. Stanley Kwan's queer romance Lan Yu (2001) includes a scene featuring the June 4 crackdown, but the connection between the political demonstrations and any call for lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) rights in China remains obscure. Mr. Cinema, then, may say more by the conspicuous absence of the 1989 demonstrations in either Tian'anmen or Hong Kong by leaving it as a void in Chinese history.

Conclusion

As “China” continues to be a contested concept on transnational screens in the first decade of the millennium, filmmakers return to the same themes – defining the nation, borders/border crossings, political divisions and controversies, the marketplace, law, and history. As Hong Kong redefines its new position as an SAR, Taiwan continues to struggle with its status, Tibet and Xinjiang agitate for greater autonomy, and the ethnic Chinese living elsewhere negotiate their identities within various nation-states, Chinese-language cinema plays a role in imagining these identities and alliances. Of course, these crises of national legitimacy, economic clout, and personal identity go beyond the specifics of Chinese film culture. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, for example, Gilles Deleuze notes that while in the past filmmakers could address moviegoers en masse, this no longer remains true. He states: “the people no longer exist, or not yet . . . the people are missing” (1989, p. 216). This seems to be a fair characterization of contemporary Chinese cinema. The Cold War politics and national alliances of the past no longer operate, and this has consequences for the cinema that extend beyond the case of Chinese film. Again, as Deleuze observes:

As stories about the disintegration of Chinese dynasties such as the classic The Romance of the Three Kingdoms vie with popular histories of founding moments of the modern Chinese nation-state, this tendency to see the Chinese people as “missing,” fragmented, and/or in the process of being united or not resonates with trends in global film culture.

Many related issues of family structure, women's roles, sexual orientation, migration, class divisions, and labor appear in other Chinese-language films during this period as well, all pointing to a crisis of defining the Chinese “people” as their identities multiply and mutate. Ranging across ideological positions, geopolitical considerations, and very different conceptions of what it means to be “Chinese” in the world today, contemporary cinema allows for debates about identity to occur and various possibilities to be visualized. However, Chinese screens also close off other avenues for consideration, cordoning off areas of the imagination, placing them “off limits.” Many films, therefore, appear to say more through what filmmakers have chosen to leave offscreen than what, in fact, appears in the cinema. Some positions receive considerable attention at the summit of blockbuster epics, while other perspectives remain in shadow in the valleys of independent production. The contemporary visual landscape contains the contradictions and concerns that form a vision of “China” in the last 10 years, and this brief overview prompts further consideration of why filmmakers define, visualize, and present the issues surrounding China in these particular ways at this moment in time.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Fanny Chan and Lin Yiping for their help with this chapter. I am also grateful to Sebastian Veg and Sharon Mazzarella for their comments on an earlier draft.

NOTES

1 The Romanization of Chinese names does not follow any single system in this chapter. While pin yin is used for names and phrases associated with films from the People's Republic of China, other systems (or commonly used English renderings) are used for names associated with other places and/or Chinese dialects.

2 It is interesting to note that Tian Zhaungzhuang, the film's director, started his career with a very different sort of film set in Inner Mongolia, On the Hunting Ground (1985).

3 Although this chapter examines Chinese-language cinema, an exception is made in this case because this Japanese-language film, made by a Chinese-speaking director, is clearly part of Hou's oeuvre and in conversation with other Chinese-language films analyzed here.

REFERENCES

Anderson, B. R. O. (1983). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London, UK: Verso.

Berry, C., & Farquhar, M. A. (2006). China on screen: Cinema and nation. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Braester, Y. (2005). Chinese cinema in the age of advertisement: The filmmaker as a cultural broker. China Quarterly, 183, 549–564.

Chan, E. (2009). Zhang Yimou's Hero: The temptation of fascism. In S. Tan, P. X. Feng, & G. Marchetti (Eds.), Chinese connections: Critical perspectives on film, identity and diaspora (pp. 263–277). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Chan, F. (2003). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Cultural migrancy and translatability. In C. Berry (Ed.), Chinese films in focus: 25 new takes (pp. 56–64). London, UK: BFI.

Chang, E., Schamus, J., & Wang, H. L. (2007). Lust, Caution: The story, the screenplay, and the making of the film. New York, NY: Pantheon.

Cheung, R. (2010). Red Cliff: The Chinese-language epic and diasporic Chinese spectators. In R. Burgoyne (Ed.), The epic film in world culture (pp. 176–204). New York, NY: Routledge.

Chi, R. (2009). Lust, Caution. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 3(2), 177–187.

Debord, G. (1994). The society of the spectacle (Donald Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). New York, NY: Zone Books.

Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The time-image (Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Ingham, M. (2009). Johnnie To Kei-Fung's PTU. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Kim, L. S. (2006). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, making women warriors: A transnational reading of Asian women action heroes. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 48. Retrieved November 24, 2010, from http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/womenWarriors/index.html

Klein, C. (2004). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: A diasporic reading. Cinema Journal, 43(4), 18–42.

Kracauer, S. (1995). The mass ornament: Weimar essays (Thomas Y. Levin, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lee, L. O. F. (2008). Ang Lee's Lust, Caution and its reception. Boundary, 2(35), 223–238.

Lee, V. (2008). PTU: Re-mapping the cosmopolitan crime zone. In C. Berry (Ed.), Chinese films in focus II (pp. 182–188). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lo, K. C. (2005). Chinese face/off: The transnational popular culture of Hong Kong. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Lu, S. H. (Ed.). (1997). Transnational Chinese cinemas: Identity, nationhood, gender. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

Lu, S. H., & Yeh, E. Y. Y. (Eds.). (2005). Chinese-language film: Historiography, poetics, politics. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

Lu, T. (2008). Fantasy and reality of a virtual China in Jia Zhangke's film The World. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2(3), 163–179.

Marchetti, G. (2007). Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs – The trilogy. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Marchetti, G. (2009). Gender politics and neoliberalism in China: Ann Hui's The Postmodern Life of My Aunt. Visual Anthropology, 22(2–3), 123–140.

Marchetti, G. (2010). Departing from The Departed: The Infernal Affairs trilogy. In K. Louie (Ed.), Hong Kong culture: Word and image (pp. 147–167). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Martin, F. (2005). The China simulacrum: Genre, feminism, and pan-Chinese cultural politics in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In C. Berry & F. Lu (Eds.), Island on the edge: Taiwan new cinema and after (pp. 149–160). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Martinsen, J. (2005). Jiang Wen back behind the camera, but devils not likely to screen anytime soon. Danwei. Retrieved November 24, 2010, from http://www.danwei.org/trends_and_buzz/jiang_wen_back_behind_the_came.php

McGrath, J. (2007). The independent cinema of Jia Zhangke: From postsocialist realism to a transnational aesthetic. In Z. Zhang (Ed.), The urban generation: Chinese cinema and society at the turn of the twenty-first century (pp. 81–114). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Pickowicz, P., & Zhang, Y. (Eds.). (2006). From underground to independent: Alternative film culture in contemporary China. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Shi, S. (2007). Visuality and identity: Sinophone articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Silbergeld, J. (2009). Facades: The new Beijing and the unsettled ecology of Jia Zhangke's The World. In S. H. Lu &J. Mi (Eds.), Chinese ecocinema: In the age of environmental challenge (pp. 113–128). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Sperling, N. (2008). Ang Lee and James Schamus get frank. Entertainment Weekly. Retrieved November 24, 2010, from http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20185085,00.html

Sunshine, L. (Ed.). (2001). Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: A portrait of Ang Lee's epic film. New York, NY: Newmarket Press.

Szeto, M. M. (2011). Ann Hui at the margins of the mainstream Hong Kong cinema. In E. M. K. Cheung, G. Marchetti, & S. Tan (Eds.), Hong Kong screenscapes: From the new wave to the digital frontier (pp. 51–66). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Teo, S. (2007). Director in action: Johnnie To and the Hong Kong action films. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Tu, W. (1994). The living tree: The changing meaning of being Chinese today. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Wang, G., & Yeh, E. Y. Y. (2005). Globalization and hybridization in cultural products: The cases of Mulan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 8(2), 175–193.

Wang, S. (2003). Big Shot's Funeral: China, Sony, and the WTO. Asian Cinema, 14(2), 145–154.

Wu, J. (2003). Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel and history introduction. Kongming's Archives: Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Retrieved November 24, 2010, from http://kongming.net/novel/intro/

Xu, G. G. (2007). Sinascape: Contemporary Chinese cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Yeh, E. Y. Y., & Davis, D. W. (2005). Taiwan film directors: A treasure island. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Zhang, H. (2009). Ruins and grassroots: Jia Zhangke's cinematic discontents in the age of globalization. In S. H. Lu & J. Mi (Eds.), Chinese ecocinema: In the age of environmental challenge (pp. 129–153). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Zhang, Y. (2002). Screening China: Critical interventions, cinematic reconfigurations, and the transnational imaginary in contemporary Chinese cinema. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Chinese Studies.

Zhang, Y. (2004). Chinese national cinema. New York, NY: Routledge.

Zhang, Y. (2008). Big Shot's Funeral: Performing a postmodern condition of attractions. In C. Berry (Ed.), Chinese films in focus II (pp. 17–24). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Zhang, Z. (Ed.). (2007). The urban generation: Chinese cinema and society at the turn of the twenty-first century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.