![]()
1
Chinese audiences and the cinema of class
What is often discussed is a nation’s cinema, but very seldom do we speak of a nation’s cinema of class. Namely, how a national cinema socialises the class structures that inform the nation’s broader narrative of social organisation. Studies of Chinese cinema to date are not excluded from this predicament. While one can draw general assumptions in hindsight about the role that Chinese cinema played in socialising class in the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC, hereafter referred to as “China”) during 1949–1976, in part because class rhetoric was so prominent in the establishment of the modern Chinese nation state, the relationship between film consumption and the socialisation of class among Chinese audiences in contemporary China has been largely overlooked – not only in terms of how filmmakers portray narratives about class for the big screen, but how one film narrative may take on unique meanings when consumed by audiences through different class lenses, and what implications this may have for everyday life in socially stratified China. China’s cinema of class emerges in this book through textual analyses of five commercially distributed and exhibited films across the country during 2010–2011: Let the Bullets Fly ≪让子弹飞≫(Jiang: 2011), Lost on Journey ≪人在囧途≫(Yip: 2010), Go Lala Go! ≪杜拉拉升职记≫ (Xu: 2010), House Mania ≪房不剩防≫ (Sun: 2011) and The Piano in a Factory ≪钢的 琴≫ (Zhang: 2011); and their receptions gathered through discussion groups with Chinese audiences of varying classes in Beijing, Hangzhou, Lanzhou, Nanjing and Taiyuan.
Class in contemporary China is ubiquitous, though the previously favoured peasant-worker-soldier narratives are notably absent from the current Chinese commercial film circuit. The absence of socialist narratives for commercial consumption provides cinema-goers a clear indication that class struggles are no longer matters of concern for China’s big-screen characters, and by extension should not be for their audiences. A glance at the domestic films exhibited in China’s rapidly expanding cinema circuit would lead one to believe that Chinese society is full of optimism and opportunities for all to contribute to the nation’s development – and stem from the dominant Han Chinese ethnicity. For characters that do struggle, they are shown to understand that their hardship or class subordination is for the nation’s and their own interests. In contrast to the language of the “masses” (qunzhong, 群众) that glossed over the very likely inequalities of film consumption during Mao Zedong’s leadership from 1949 to 1976 (Clark 2011; Hemelryk Donald 2014), today’s commercial cinema programming overseen by the State Administration of Press, Publications, Film, Radio and Television (SAPPRFT) appears to favour urban lifestyles and middle class audiences over any others. Not a class that prefers to watch films more so than any other, merely a class that will ideally characterise and lead China’s harmonious development to an olive-shaped (ganlanxing shehui, 橄榄型社会) consumer society.
It is difficult in hindsight to draw conclusions with certainty about how propaganda films exhibited during Mao’s leadership aided the socialisation of class, particularly as box office information from this era is sketchy at best (Zhang 2004: 192; Clark 2011). Paul Clark’s (2012: 42) comment that film spectatorship was a “combination of pleasure at the images of socialist heroes of this era and pain at the limited choices available” does provide some indication of the film consumer’s experience. The replication of production values and authoritative moral voice of propaganda films from this period in Chinese film history (so much so Yomi Braester [2008] calls for the political campaign to be understood as a genre) does seem to suggest that Chinese filmmakers during the socialist era produced films from the position that Chinese audiences were or had to be uniform in how they were socialised, even if this was in rhetoric only. Likewise, Chinese audiences possessed a willingness and commitment to the communist class narrative onscreen, or at a minimum were required to appear to do so. As such, scholarship to date has generally accepted that the communist narratives and film production qualities during Mao’s reign were unapologetically instructional and broadly targeted. The Chinese audience’s engagement was, in turn, appropriately pedagogical.
Now facing one of the world’s greatest degrees of social and economic inequality, maintaining social harmony while pursuing China’s economic reform agenda requires new approaches to the stories people tell, consume and share about what China’s current socio-economic status quo is. Contemporary mainstream cinema in China thus produces class narratives that inform new class identities, legitimises prejudice towards class others, affirms assumptions about the permanence of these inequalities and advocates a pragmatic acquiescence to the politico-economic structure as it is currently organised. Chinese audiences in turn are far from uniform in their film consumption practices, and class position quite explicitly informs the sense-making processes they employ when watching these very films.
As film consumers, Chinese audiences actively seek out commercial films that appeal to their entertainment sensibilities to watch (if they have the opportunity to do so at all), or act upon recommendations of their peers. These entertainment sensibilities are informed by their experiences of Chinese society, which is more frequently being informed by their experiences with China’s now politically acceptable class differentiation, vis-à-vis historically, when film production and consumption were exercises in propagating Mao’s discourse of a class less society. A range of factors can inform class positioning and thus experience in contemporary China: income, education, access to social welfare and infrastructure, political membership or association, household registration (hukou 户口), geographical location, gender and ethnicity. Often, the variances in these factors are informed directly or indirectly by social planning policies initiated by the Party-state. In a country rapidly increasing its number of cinema projection screens, Chinese audiences are in turn becoming finely attuned to commercial films that were not intended for their consumption. In other words, Chinese audiences are resound-ingly conscious of which class films are targeted to. As a result, class ideals in film narratives can be tailored to appeal to either privileged or underprivileged audiences, or a combination of both; ultimately informing the moral and entertainment value that audiences gain from being active (or potentially active) cinema-goers. A narrowing diversity of commercial films produced that are attractive, however, or accessible to all Chinese audiences, has meant that the tastes of a great majority of Chinese audiences are not being catered to within the commercial cinema space, creating inequalities in cinema consumption across China.
Regardless of whether film production directly or indirectly relies on the Party-state institutionally through SAPPRFT for production assistance and distribution endorsement, the films that do receive commercial exhibition across China can only be understood as very real (and sometimes lucrative) proponents of social change in China. This book does not attempt to determine whether the film narrative or the audience is of greater importance in socialising class, though it does argue that the class of an audience plays a significant role in determining how a film’s narrative is comprehended and what elements of a narrative attract an audience’s focus when watching these very films. It is furthermore not explicitly concerned with critiquing the artistic practice of commercial filmmaking in contemporary China. It is about the narratives, the audiences, and how they both relate to the socialisation of class taking place on the periphery of what is typically discussed and examined by scholars of Chinese cinema and society.
New directions
Scholarship to date has typically focused on addressing Chinese films attractive to the Western academe’s curiosities and opportunities in the Chinese film industry, while the domestic film industry’s social relevance to Chinese audiences has been little explored (Berry 2012: 494). With local blockbusters becoming legitimate commercial competition to Hollywood imports, the time is ripe for examination of the domestically produced films that Chinese filmgoers are willingly paying to consume. As Yomi Braester (2005: 552) says, contemporary commercial Chinese films “aim not only at box office success, but also at shaping economic agendas and visual experience, social networks and [the] aesthetic environment” of its Chinese audiences. But while Braester stops short of including class identities and class relations to this list, one could argue that socialising new class identities and relations is in fact the crux of each of the agendas that Braester lists.
Since the commercial reform of the Chinese film industry, the argument has been made by Ying Zhu (2003: 2) that “[t]he arrival of a Hollywood-influenced popular entertainment wave has taken Chinese cinema back to its commercial roots, undermining cinema’s pedagogical/ideological value promoted by the state and its aesthetic value advocated by film artists.” Zhu’s position, though, overlooks the continued prerogative that the Party-state maintains over the control of cinema and cultural production through its censorship approval processes, and media broadcasting more broadly. As Matthew Johnson (2012: 173) warns, “it is easy to overestimate the degree to which these reforms represent an actual challenge to the propaganda state model.” What may seem like a retreat from official control over the Chinese commercial film industry could arguably have as much to do with a socialised consensus among Chinese filmmakers of the necessity for China’s broader reform agenda than a loosening of intense interest in the film industry by the Party-state. Indeed, SAPPRFT’s duty is to be the Chinese Party-state’s institutional cultural gatekeeper, and the Party-state does not answer to the film industry – the film industry requires SAPPRFT and the Party-state’s approval for its viability and expansion; like any other industry that operates on the financial and ideological scale that the film industry does in China. Commercial filmmaking in China can only be understood as a mutually beneficial activity for all involved: the Party-state, filmmakers, commercial film exhibitors and film consumers. This said, Chinese audiences do continue to be aware of the authority the Party-state has through SAPPRFT in officially sanctioning film exhibition in China, while also recognising the quantity of non-official interests involved in a film’s production. As such, the dynamic between commercial film production and consumption in China is unique to film industries and audiences around the world.
The commercialisation of China’s film industry is not solely responsible for China’s present degrees of class consciousness; nor is the Party-state solely responsible for the narratives commercial films relay. The Chinese commercial film industry with its potential for mass production and distribution and ongoing need for state approval, though, is simply one forum within which class and class consciousness in Chinese society is manifest and can, and should, be investigated as imaginary, politically and economically driven phenomena. As the following chapters reveal, filmmakers’ narratives and audiences alike appear to be in agreement about the inability to reverse China’s class society, some audiences even indicating a preference for a class society after watching the films that are the focus of this study. If this is the case, then China’s popular cinema’s contribution to legitimising the inequalities that China faces as acceptable, particularly among a privileged and educated audience who are most inclined to visit a mainstream cinema, should be keenly investigated and contemplated for how we may understand social change and the responsibilities of creative work in contemporary China.
Audiences and sense making
Suggesting that class influences media consumption is not new. A recent study by Shanghai’s Fudan University’s Research Centre for Information and Communication Studies (复旦大学信息与传播研究中心 2010: 1–3) for example found that the adoption and utilisation of new media in a Shanghai context is influenced by a user’s economic capacities, gender and age, which results in dif ferences in residents’ understandings of their citizenship, identities and attitudes towards social integration and class awareness. Similarly, audience research in England has revealed the extent to which class lenses can, and do, influence television consumption and identity formation among English audiences (Morely and Brunsdon 1999; Skeggs 2009; Wood and Skeggs 2011). Despite China’s and the UK’s contrasting social histories and contemporary sys tems of political organisation, scholarship suggests that where class exists, social inequalities can and do influence how media is consumed, and by extension social behaviour. While Guiquan Xu (2014: 151) argues that Chinese communications scholars have yet to develop terminology in Chinese that captures the notion of sense making implied by the English term “audiences”, this book argues that sense making is, nonetheless, what Chinese audiences do when they watch cinema, and that the present-day socialisation of class directly informs this sense-making process. Arguably, this has always been the case, and it is from this standpoint that this book takes its point of departure. Simply put, understanding the sense making of contemporary Chinese commercial films by Chinese audiences requires an understanding of the pre-conditioning audiences bring to their sense-making processes: whether class privilege has pre-conditioned an audience member to engage in spectatorship-as-citizen and agent, or class subordination has encour aged spectatorship-as-state subject; albeit these are not always mutually exclusive. China’s cinema of class is a dynamic site by which variances in pre-conditioning create variances in sense making among Chinese audiences. As such, China requires a diversified film industry to meet these audience needs, as the films featured in these following pages reveal.
Commercial filmmakers rely on engaging narratives for their audiences to be convincingly transported and ensure a film’s commercial success. In turn, audiences pitch their own realities and experiences against the experiences of the fictitious characters to make sense of the...
