Youth Culture in Chinese Language Film

Xuelin Zhou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138678064
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317194101
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the vigorous film cultures of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong from the perspective of youth culture. The book relates this important topic to the wider social, cultural, and institutional context, and discusses the relationship between the films and the changes that today are transforming each society. Among the areas explored are the differences between the three film industries, their creation of new types of screen hero and heroine, and their conflicts with traditional Chinese attitudes such as respect for age. The many films discussed provide fresh perspectives on the ways in which young people are coping with gender, sexuality, class, coming of age, the pressures of education, and major social shifts such as rural to urban migration. They show young adults in each society striving to construct new value systems for a complex, rapidly changing environment.

1 Introduction

Hong Kong director Benny Chan Muk Sing’s 陈木胜 2004 New Police Story 新警察故事 is a popular action drama in which an ageing local police officer (played by local action hero Jackie Chan) is involved in a lengthy campaign against a group of trouble-making, tech-savvy teenagers.¹ One scene is set on the wide rooftop of a skyscraper in central Hong Kong. The young people are using the rooftop for an ‘X-party’ at which they demonstrate their skills of skateboarding and cycling with daredevil stunts along the edge of the building.

A number of close-up shots show the youths from a low angle speeding past against a background of blue sky. Then there is a crane shot which isolates the rooftop as a strange, self-contained world. The scene is as symbolically rich as it is visually striking. The adolescents have found a space in the city they can claim for their own culture, a space where they can party and take extreme risks, with no interference from parents or teachers. Here on the margins there are no traffic lights and no need for restraint. The danger and openness help them to feel fully alive and to perform stunts they regard as heroic. The camerawork implies that they feel themselves to be flying far above the mundane adult world many storeys below. Soon, however, this secret world is invaded by the police led by Jackie Chan. Then the rooftop becomes a battleground between the generations.

This scene symbolises some of the themes to be explored in this book: the tension between generations, the development of a distinct culture among young people, their energy and confidence, their desire for a space of their own, and their hunger for risks and pleasures from which the adult world seeks to shield them. Also significant is the landscape, that of a contemporary city. A location of this kind provides young people with the freedom to shape their own lives; but it can also, as the above film illustrates, become a combat zone.

While the precise forms of youth culture – or the ways in which it is represented on the screen – differ from one society to another, the above themes are widespread. The present book traces what might, in symbolic terms, be called the ‘rooftop’ dramas of young people in the films of Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China.² Looking closely at dozens of films which feature young people as central characters, the book investigates the complex but revealing relationship between those themes and the social dynamics of their societies.

Youth in context

The idea of youth as a period of disjunction, a transition between the dependent child and the self-sufficient adult, is a relatively recent development, but today it is accepted as an important phenomenon in most societies. Youth is seen as an intermediate phase of life during which the young individual is developing an autonomous personality and starts to establish his or her own place in society. Youth as a distinct audience with its own taste in films, music, clothing, and other products has become an everyday concept in the entertainment and media industries. It is natural that the subject should attract increasing attention from scholars in many countries. As Timothy Shary has said in his book on ‘the image of youth in contemporary American cinema’: ‘youth media can serve as a bridge between the past and present … [and] may well lay the foundations for our future’ (2002: xi).

Yet while the complexities of ‘youth’ are discussed constantly and passionately by the media, by scholars, educators, politicians and parents, the debate is highly polarised. On the one hand young people are celebrated as the key to the future and the hope of the nation, like the sun rising; but on the other hand they inspire moral panics as ‘folk devils’ (Cohen, 1972), symbolising a society’s deepest worries and disappointments. And while sometimes young people appear to be everywhere, highly visible in public spaces, at other times they are invisible, ignored and excluded from public policymaking in such areas as politics and economics.

One of the reasons why this subject lends itself to such conflicting interpretations is the fact that youth is inflected differently by the various factors at work in a particular setting. Even the definition of ‘youth’ is contested. Biologically the term can be applied to all those who have not yet reached full sexual maturity. During the International Year of Youth in 1985, the United Nations defined youth as those between 15 and 25 years of age. But this kind of uniform category is difficult to apply universally, since every nation has different ideas about youth. As one extreme example, when Hu Jintao 胡锦涛 (the President of China from 2003 to 2013) was introduced by his predecessor during his first public appearance as a member of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China in 1992, he was described as ‘a young man’. This ‘young man’ was then 48 years old!

Other factors (besides political experience) include family structure, the education system, gender, class, geography (such as an urban or rural society), disposable income (as a source of economic independence), and the state of the job market. For example, in terms of gender a man’s maturity may be measured by his ability to lead and to provide for a family, while womanhood may be linked with childbearing and motherhood. This emphasis has shifted in some industrialised societies, and women can now, like men, gain status by having a career and earning a salary. In terms of class, young people from middle-class backgrounds are more likely than their peers from low-income backgrounds to extend their youth until they have completed advanced education, and in some cases until they are married. Young men from low-income backgrounds can, however, have difficulty in making the transition to adulthood because of unemployment and social marginalisation.

While the three societies of Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China appear to have all developed towards economic prosperity and an increasingly urbanised way of life, each has moved through a different history and still exists in its own social and political field of forces. Each has its own distinctive film industry. The films about youth have different emphases which the book will seek to compare. When Marlon Brando in The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953), one of the first American films of youthful rebellion, was asked ‘What are you rebelling against?’ he delivered the famous reply ‘What have ya got?’. Each of the three cinemas studied here offers its own answer to that question.

Academic discussion in recent years has tended to focus on the differences between Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. While acknowledging these differences, this book will continue to search for parallels and common factors. The academic trend to separate and contrast can be very fruitful, but it can also become limiting. My own approach, as this introduction will explain in detail, will be continually to compare as well as contrast, since both approaches offer important insights, and together can build up a three-dimensional picture of the subject.

While broader international comparisons are not the focus of the book, a cross-cultural approach has been fruitful in the study of youth cultures in western societies. It is a striking aspect of our age that so many young people around the world watch the same movies, listen to the same music, and wear the same clothing fashions. Film seeks to be a global industry, and a comparative survey can ‘illuminate the tendency in the commercial cinema to deploy the genre system as a convenient and economically profitable way of developing a film language that can generate a sense of familiarity and of shared values and attitudes’ (Landy, 1991: 11). At the same time, as Marcia Landy adds, when we look closely at genre films, we can see ‘culturally specific’ features. The present study will reveal both fascinating similarities between developments in the cinematic representation of youth across the three territories, and also some important local differences.

Reviewing the literature

Though there is widespread evidence that youth and intergenerational conflict are frequent subjects for film within each of the three societies, they have received surprisingly little attention from film scholars. In contrast to the dynamic development of Chinese film studies in general, academic interest in the particular theme of youth culture is scant. Chinese youth film has been, to quote Christina Lee’s remark on the subject, ‘resigned to the slums of celluloid culture in film criticism’ (2010: 29). As a conspicuous example of the neglect of this field, when more than 40 topics were suggested to participants of the 2008 China Film Forum (a large international symposium on the achievements of Chinese cinemas over the previous three decades), there was no mention of ‘youth’. This lack of coverage is surprising when we consider the increasing importance of young people as the subject matter and the audience for Chinese films.

One possible explanation is the emphasis on auteur criticism and on movements. International film festivals and critics have always taken a particular interest in exceptional artists and in new avant-garde movements – the latest innovations from overseas – and the same preoccupations seem to shape much of the academic discussion back home in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. Auteurs and movements are seen as ways to mobilise Chinese cinemas to win global attention.

Scarce as it is, the discussion of youth films as a genre has great potential for social research, since genre criticism with its emphasis on numerous examples can offer a firm basis for sociological analysis. Whereas auteur study tends to target a small, elite audience, genre criticism focuses on popular culture. Genre criticism of Chinese films does exist but it has been a fairly recent phenomenon, and it tends to focus on other areas such as the traditional genre of the melodrama, and the genre of the blockbuster, which is aimed at the general audience and not only the youth audience.

Scattered articles on the subject of youth film have appeared in individual journals and anthologies, generally focusing on two aspects: the ideological contradictions of youthful rebellion, and youth culture as a barometer of social change. Often, however, there is little shared debate, and the writers tend to adopt a grand approach to the topic, rarely including evidence of detailed textual reading or analysis. This generalising tendency is particularly common in the work by critics and scholars from mainland China.

Let us look closely at the existing scholarship, since it will serve to introduce some important themes. It will also help to establish the differences between the three contexts (Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China), though I will later wish to add some other differences as well as similarities.

Although ‘Taiwan film scholarship is a recent development’ (Yeh, 2014: 7), Jinn-Pei Chang’s 1995 article ‘The mind space of Taipei’s adolescents’ was a pioneering attempt to investigate the filmic representation of youth culture in Chinese film studies. Chang argued that Taiwan cinema began to give serious attention to marginalised youth only from the mid 1980s onward. A contributing chapter to the Special Program of 1995 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival that focused on the representation of Taipei in Taiwan films over a span of 40 years (1950–90), Chang’s work discussed the cinematic treatment of adolescents inhabiting this capital city since the mid 1980s. In Taiwan, according to Chang, ‘adolescence’ refers to the period of transition from childhood to adulthood, encompassing young women between 12 and 21 years old and young men between 14 and 25 (1995: 99). Young men and young women going through this transitional phase of life demonstrate a number of features such as ‘dynamic energy, powerful force, unstable personality, flexible value system, lack of sophistication and regression to impulsive action’ (p. 93). Taiwan’s secondary education system is arguably among the most competitive in the world. Each year, as decided by the examination results, only about 10 per cent of high school students become ‘winners’ in gaining a chance to receive tertiary education. High school students who cannot pass the university entrance examinations are considered losers by adult society. Many of the ‘losers’ are less valued by traditional institutions or authorities, and become marginalised. Some drift on the fringes of adult society, looking for a physical and spiritual ‘space’ they can regard as their own.

For Chang, there were three social changes that led to the ‘cinema of adolescence’, starting with a change in family structure in Taiwan. Conventional institutions or authorities such as the family and the school used to play a key role in shaping the attitude and behaviour of adolescents, but recent decades have seen an increasing number of nuclear and single-parent families, and this has undermined the traditional function of family and its influence on children. The second change was the corruption and stagnation of the education system in Taiwan. As described above, academic performance is used to separate adolescents into ‘mainstream’ and ‘marginalised’ subgroups, both of which live in a polarised world with a distorted mindset. Those who are successful are ‘spoiled by society and are apt to be egotistical and selfish’, while the left-overs ‘live in an impoverished condition and are apt to underestimate themselves’ (Chang, 1995: 102). Barriers are built between members of different generations of a family. Now, however, the wall that used to separate the school from the outs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgement
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The film industries of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China
• 3. ‘We all grow up like this’: coming of age in Taiwan cinema
• 4. ‘Villagers in the metropolis’: young peasant workers in Chinese cinema
• 5. ‘Cramming for college’: high school boys and girls in Taiwan cinema
• 6. ‘Spring sunshine’: school films in the People’s Republic of China
• 7. ‘Made in Hong Kong’: youth genres in Hong Kong cinema
• 8. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index