Serialized television drama (dianshiju), perhaps the most popular and influential cultural form in China over the past three decades, offers a wide and penetrating look at the tensions and contradictions of the post-revolutionary and pro-market period. Zhong Xueping’s timely new work draws attention to the multiple cultural and historical legacies that coexist and challenge each other within this dominant form of story telling. Although scholars tend to focus their attention on elite cultural trends and avant garde movements in literature and film, Zhong argues for recognizing the complexity of dianshiju’s melodramatic mode and its various subgenres, in effect "refocusing" mainstream Chinese culture. Mainstream Culture Refocused opens with an examination of television as a narrative motif in three contemporary Chinese art-house films. Zhong then turns her attention to dianshiju’s most important subgenres. "Emperor dramas" highlight the link between popular culture’s obsession with emperors and modern Chinese intellectuals’ preoccupation with issues of history and tradition and how they relate to modernity. In her exploration of the "anti-corruption" subgenre, Zhong considers three representative dramas, exploring their diverse plots and emphases. "Youth dramas’" rich array of representations reveal the numerous social, economic, cultural, and ideological issues surrounding the notion of youth and its changing meanings. The chapter on the "family-marriage" subgenre analyzes the ways in which women’s emotions are represented in relation to their desire for "happiness." Song lyrics from music composed for television dramas are considered as "popular poetics." Their sentiments range between nostalgia and uncertainty, mirroring the social contradictions of the reform era. The Epilogue returns to the relationship between intellectuals and the production of mainstream cultural meaning in the context of China’s post-revolutionary social, economic, and cultural transformation. Provocative and insightful, Mainstream Culture Refocused will appeal to scholars and students in studies of modern China generally and of contemporary Chinese media and popular culture specifically.

This ready reference is a comprehensive guide to pop culture in Asia and Oceania, including topics such as top Korean singers, Thailand's sports heroes, and Japanese fashion. This entertaining introduction to Asian pop culture covers the global superstars, music idols, blockbuster films, and current trends—from the eclectic to the underground—of East Asia and South Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Pakistan, as well as Oceania. The rich content features an exploration of the politics and personalities of Bollywood, a look at how baseball became a huge phenomenon in Taiwan and Japan, the ways in which censorship affects social media use in these regions, and the influence of the United States on the movies, music, and Internet in Asia. Topics include contemporary literature, movies, television and radio, the Internet, sports, video games, and fashion. Brief overviews of each topic precede entries featuring key musicians, songs, published works, actors and actresses, popular websites, top athletes, video games, and clothing fads and designers. The book also contains top-ten lists, a chronology of pop culture events, and a bibliography. Sidebars throughout the text provide additional anecdotal information.

The Confucian doctrine of tianxia (all under heaven) outlines a unitary worldview that cherishes global justice and transcends social, geographic, and political divides. For contemporary scholars, it has held myriad meanings, from the articulation of a cultural imaginary and political strategy to a moralistic commitment and a cosmological vision. The contributors to Chinese Visions of World Order examine the evolution of tianxia's meaning and practice in the Han dynasty and its mutations in modern times. They attend to its varied interpretations, its relation to realpolitik, and its revival in twenty-first-century China. They also investigate tianxia's birth in antiquity and its role in empire building, invoke its cultural universalism as a new global imagination for the contemporary world, analyze its resonance and affinity with cosmopolitanism in East-West cultural relations, discover its persistence in China's socialist internationalism and third world agenda, and critique its deployment as an official state ideology. In so doing, they demonstrate how China draws on its past to further its own alternative vision of the current international system. Contributors. Daniel A. Bell, Chishen Chang, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Prasenjit Duara, Hsieh Mei-yu, Haiyan Lee, Mark Edward Lewis, Lin Chun, Viren Murthy, Lisa Rofel, Ban Wang, Wang Hui, Yiqun Zhou

In late 1995, the drama Heaven Above (Cangtian zaishang) debuted on Chinese TV. Featuring a villainous high-ranking government official, it was the first in a series of wildly popular corruption dramas that riveted the nation. Staging Corruption looks at the rise, fall, and reincarnation of corruption dramas and the ways in which they express the collective dreams and nightmares of China in the market-reform era. It also considers how these dramas - as products of the interplay between television stations, production companies, media regulation, and political censorship - unveil complicated relationships between power, media, and society. This book will be essential reading for those following China's ongoing struggles with the highly volatile socio-political issue of corruption.

Women and Gender in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium, by Ya-chen Chen, examines underexposed gender issues in more recent films, focusing on the contradictory feminism in the film narratives. Through the lens of Chinese martial arts films, Chen delves into "Chinese cinematic martial arts feminism," highlighting the glass ceiling which marks the maximal exercise of feminism which the patriarchal order is willing to accept.

In the face of rapid and radical social changes since the late 1970s, contemporary China faces tremendous challenges. What is China transforming toward? What are the ideological positions and, more generally, cultural values that inform, question, and demand critical assessment of the social transformations in the reform era? This collection of essays aims at addressing these questions. Written by some of the leading intellectuals and thinkers in and outside of contemporary China, the essays, in different ways, examine the extent to which three major cultural resources, namely traditional, May Fourth, and socialist, have been (re)interpreted, (re)appropriated, and mobilized to address the challenges brought about by the changed and changing social and economic conditions of the reform era.

This book integrates culture and authenticity into Chinese classroom practice through exploring the potential of contemporary TV drama as teaching and learning materials for intercultural Chinese language teaching and learning. In addressing the four main challenges in culture teaching in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL), this book focuses on precisely this area of pedagogical practice in Chinese as foreign language education and draws on a wide interdisciplinary base, including foreign language education, cultural studies, and intercultural communication to explore the potential of authentic TV drama as language and culture materials for revitalising TCFL and foreign language teaching more generally. It examines in detail the culturally shaped beliefs, values, and practices that give meaning to the action and language of the selected clips in a modern, award-winning Chinese TV drama. This book shows a potential experiential pathway into (pedagogical) practices to bring contemporary culture into classrooms, to engage learners with contemporary and authentic texts, and to encourage inquiry-focused teaching practices, which – in being intercultural – allow for learners’ own interpretations of cultural messages in interaction and to recognise learners as learning to understand their own values and beliefs as they learn to explore those of other cultures.