On September 21, 2013, If You Are the One, the most successful dating show on Chinese television, presented a manâs determined pursuit of one of 24 female contestants. Fan Gang, a healthy, wealthy, attractive man in his mid-30s, who had graduated from a college in England, taught English in Beijing for a few years, and ended up managing a successful family-owned business that produces railway parts. He seemed mature, honest, responsible, loyal, and romantic. He appeared on the show specifically to pursue Li Lina, who had caught his attention and whose files he had carefully studied. Because Li had graduated from a technology college in China and taught auto repair and mechanics, Fan believed they were the perfect match in all respects. He was deeply attracted to Li because of her talent, beauty, and her wishes concerning her future husband and life. After Fan poetically and sincerely expressed his interest in Li on air, an entire wall covered with the pictures that Fan had collected from Liâs online posts was displayed, a white wedding dress descended from the ceiling, and audience members supported Fan by waving their cell phones showing Liâs picture. The result seemed so obviousâLi would leave with Fan and start a romance. However, surprisingly, Li began to cry, bowed to Fan, and told him, âI know I should say yes, no matter for what reasons. However, being touched doesnât mean having the feelings. I am sorry.â The showâs host and audience members appeared shocked and disappointed. Fan left by himself, as disappointed as everyone else. The rest of the episode seemed dull and lacking in energy after Fan departed. It was also awkward for Li to remain. She disappeared from the show after the episode and neither she nor the show gave any explanation about her withdrawal, leaving the public wondering why she had left and what happened to her.
Liâs dramatic rejection of Fan Gang sparked many online discussions. Most people doubted her sincerity about finding a husband on the show. Comments included âWhat kind of man does she want?â âDoes she really want to find a husband there?â while others wrote, âShe probably was waiting for a man, a man that she already knew before she joined the show and has been waiting for for a long time.â Guesses, assumptions, and random criticism appeared all over the internet. There even were rumors that Li had been married before and lied to the showâs producers about her past. Despite these accusations, some netizens supported her choice and suggested rational and logical reasons for her âirrationalâ decision, including the following: (1) Fan Gan is in the second generation of a wealthy family (Fu Erdai), which means he enjoyed the privilege of studying in England and managing a company without having to work hard or exhibit any talent; (2) he looked good on TV but if he took off his suit, he might resemble a farmer looking for work in a cityâtanned and not very tall; (3) he sounded mature and steady but that was to be expected, given that he was already 35; and (4) Li was not interested in luxury brands, so his wealth was not important to her. Thus, Liâs rejection of Fan was not that hard to understand.
Although my interest in studying the portrayal of romantic relationships started long before this episode of If You Are the One, I open with this story because it highlights some key facets of the topic. It reflects romantic love as a convergent discourse of public opinion and individual choice and the conflict, consensus, and negotiation between the two. Meanwhile, television seems like a platform that gives the public and individual contestants an opportunity to express and display their views on a perfect match. However, the most important element for an imagination of romantic loveâpassion, or âfeelingsâ as Li Lina said when she rejected Fan Gangâs pursuitâis nearly unspeakable, powerless, and even disappointing when compared to the majorityâs perception of a happy couple. These are the key issues that make romantic love a window through which to examine mainstream mediaâs expectation of a happy life and the mediaâs âsoft powerâ1 over the topic that may be trivial in terms of its direct political influence yet crucial for individual identity, self-realization, and happiness.
Given romantic loveâs undeniable significance for Chinese people, especially the post-socialist generationâs attitudes toward possibilities for marriage, life, and self-realization, and its role in Chinese mainstream cultureâs construction of a peaceful, content, and harmonious society, it is supremely important to examine how popular culture has portrayed romantic relationships. âWhile Eurocentric media studies narratives now routinely depict television as a heritage form, in South and East Asia television is far from in decline; on the contrary, in many Asian countries it represents the most powerful and ubiquitous media form, with large and growing investment from the commercial and, in some cases, state sector.â (Lewis et al. 2016) Chinese television is one of the main media providing examples for the popular imagination of romantic relationships. Therefore, this book focuses on Chinese television, whose role as the main cultural source is still undisputed in contemporary China, even with viewers divided among so many different forms of digital media.
In Chinese media, the portrayal of love and romantic relationships has always been coded with expectations and desires taken from Chinese mainstream culture and political ideology. Affected by imported media products and social changes, the representation of love and romantic relationships in Chinese television has evolved rapidly in the past two decades. Compared to a likely imagined socialist past when everyone knew what love meant, there are many voices engaged in debate today regarding how love should be best expressedâdifferent forms of love are in competition with each other. Contemporary Chinese television programsâ representations of romantic love appeal to viewersâ interest in the topic while attempting to support governmental policies. Although viewers sometimes understand these depictions to be subversive, for the most part the shows (subtly) reinforce mainstream norms, shutting down gestures of protest or criticism. In particular, televisual representations of romantic love enable us to analyze the personal, shared, and governmental conflicts surrounding contemporary manifestations of neoliberalism and capitalism.
Therefore, this book is about how the representations of romantic love on television reflect the change and the dilemma of dominant values in post-socialist Chinese mainstream culture. These values mainly center on the effects of individualism, consumerism, capitalism, and neoliberalism, often referred to as Western culture, on the perception of romantic love and self-realization in China. However, I do not want to use romantic love merely as a way to examine social problems in post-socialist China; I want to focus on how romantic love, which plays a vital role in Chinaâs ideologically highly restricted social environment, by empowering people with individual choice, change, and social mobility, must struggle and compromise with reality , specifically the values and problems emerging in a transitional China. I also want to examine how the representation of romantic love celebrates idealsâindividual freedom, passion, and gender equalityâand promises changes based on individual diligence and talent while simultaneously obstructing the fulfillment of these ideals. To understand the popular imagination created by television, we need to learn what romantic love and its cultural referents have become in scholarly investigations.
Discussions on romantic love are ubiquitous and cross several fields: academic and popular; sociological and literary; psychological and philosophical; anthropological and economic; practical and fantastic, and so on. The large body of studies and literature on the topic is insightful and exciting; however, it probably complicates more than illuminates romantic love and its cultural significances and implications in media. In the many writings from different disciplines, the study of romantic love generally centers on a few themes. These include love as a psychological function and reaction in interpersonal communication (Branden 1988, 218â231); a mythical process that should be directed by soul rather than techniques of communication and interaction (Moore 1994, xv); an emotion that is historically regulated and manipulated (Kaufmann 2011; Piorkowski 2008, 5; Coontz 2005; Illouz 1997; Ackerman 1994); intellectualsâ, especially writersâ, views on youthâs engagement in and the revolution of gender roles (Dooling 2005, 103â135); a defense of individualsâ choice or a revolution on dominant familial norms and moral controls (Zheng 2008, 211â241); a Western cultureâs difference from and challenge to non-Western cultures (Piorkowski 2008, 6; Dion and Dion 1988, 264â289); and a gendered engagement in cyberspace (Feng 2013).
It is impractical to review all the scholarly discussions on romantic love in detail, but it is vital to at least acknowledge how romantic love has been discussed as a belief and an ideal in various academic disciplines. The academic discussions, as the above samples illustrate, not only provide tools to analyze the cultural connotation of romantic love but also establish a foundation explaining the importance, and therefore legitimizing the study, of popular romance in contemporary China. Because romantic love is an essential foundation of a modern conjugal family, as well as the most important element that signaled the modernization imported to China from the West in the 1930s, it is imperative to understand the conceptâs evolution in the West and its interaction with the ideology that created and sustained Chinese society. As Lynn Pan (2015) argues, there was no comparable concept to Western âromantic loveâ in China before Western colonial contact, which introduced romantic literature and the idea of romantic love to Chinese intellectuals. Moreover, Pan observes that romantic love was never accorded a higher status than filiality and that it was only in 1934â1935 that polygamy was made illegal for men. These tussles between traditional Chinese values and modern Western social and sexual mores have evolved over time and still have resonances in contemporary Chinese television. Therefore, a few essential studies and concepts that can initiate a serious critical reading of Chinese television programs are summarized below.
Romance in the Socialist Era
In her tracing of the history of sentiment in China and exploration of the relationship between individual and community in Chinese society, Haiyan Lee claims that âlove is anything but the ânativeâ language of the heart, and ⌠whether it whispers or wails, the heart always already speaks in borrowed tonguesâ (Lee 2007, 298). Love is a complicated concept, as has been shown in discourses on filial piety, nationalism, and revolution in pre-modern and modern Chinese literature. As Lee points out, both the emotion and the subjectivity of love have been linked to moral codes since Confuciusâs time. While the moral codes of love were given more emphasis in pre-modern China, revolutionary codes, which stressed nationalism, the liberation of individual choices, and womenâs roles, influenced discussions of love in the 1930s and 1940s. A few intellectuals, such as the female writer Ding Ling and the poet Xu Zhimo, were themselves liberated individuals who expressed romantic and erotic love sentiments and had such relationships (Pan 2015). In the 1950s and 1960s...