China Pop!: Pop Culture, Propaganda, Pacific Pop-Ups - Softcover

Ma, Sheng-mei

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814259308 ISBN 13: 9780814259306

Publisher: Ohio State University Press, 2024

Synopsis

In China Pop! Sheng-mei Ma analyzes the propaganda-laced millennial Chinese pop culture—particularly TV dramas, films, and web novels—that streams online for over one billion Sinophone consumers in China and in diaspora. In part 1, Ma lays bare the “seductive art of propaganda” by reviewing TV series aired during the Chinese Communist Party Centennial in 2021 and the ways pop culture and propaganda are spliced. In part 2, he zeroes in on how the shared traumatic shock of the Cultural Revolution continues to echo. Parts 3 and 4 cross the Pacific to incorporate analysis of media originating outside of China, such as white depictions of revolutionary zeal and Asian American portrayals of immigrant characters that fetishize Asianness and reanimate stereotypes. With methodological daring, Ma challenges existing scholarship by blending the professional and the personal through a lively and accessible autotheoretical approach. China Pop! walks the East-West cultural tightrope to critique a wide range of pop culture from both sides of the Pacific and sheds new light on the workings of propaganda on its intended audiences and its wider, more subtle reaches in both political and cultural spheres.

About this title

About the Author

Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University and author of over a dozen books, including The Tao of S: America’s Chinee & the Chinese Century in Literature and Film,Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity, East-West Montage: Reflections on Asian Bodies in Diaspora, and The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity.

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The Art of Propaganda
Some TV Series circa the Chinese Communist Party Centennial

Founded in 1921, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has had a hundred years to perfect its propaganda apparatus. Dictated by Chairman Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art” and the slogan “Serve the People,” propaganda and art are the conjoint Sino-ese twins: art serving at the pleasure of the State, or “a culture army” in support of the “armed front” in national liberation. Propaganda has been the ball and chain to art in its century-long incarceration. Mao’s “Yan’an Talks” stipulated that art exists to advance politics, a dictum crystalized in Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong or The Little Red Book, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Bible that was all the “rage”: “A revolution is an insurrection, a violent action by one class of people to overthrow another class,” namely, the proletariat of workers, peasants, and soldiers—plus gullible Red Guards—taking over control in a perpetual bloodletting called revolution. The power elite to be toppled consists of counterrevolutionaries, among other stigmatized categories at any given moment of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Revolution Incarnate was how the founding father Mao envisaged the People’s Republic of China. Mao’s Revolution, however, is Art-less, or R-less, lapsing into mere Evolution, even corrupted into Devolution. Despite its genetic predisposition for degeneration, that Maoist ideology continues to hold sway posthumously. On June 4, 1989, Deng Xiaoping justified the crackdown against demonstrators labeled “counterrevolutionaries” at the Tiananmen Square. Among other surveillance and repressive measures in the new millennium, Xi Jinping rationalized Xinjiang concentration camps in the name of a benevolent healing of errant Uighur minds and poverty-stricken lands.


R-Less Revolution: The Art of Heeling Shanzhai, China’s Outlawry

This so-called healing is but heeling, bringing to heel Beijing protestors and Uighur Muslims, if not to decimate any dissent and minority cultures. The self-proclaimed revolutions by Mao, Deng, and Xi constitute not so much eternal Marxist class struggle for the communist utopia. Instead, they amount to Revolution decapitated, with its capital R off, descending into evolution. Worse still, they reverse the course of history into devolution, devolving into Lu Xun’s social Darwinism of “man-eat-man.” The historic convulsion of the PRC in theory belies a gradual adaptation, even sclerotic ossification, of China’s imperial and feudal tradition. Revolution is worn by various emperors as their new clothes, a raw prevarication by potentates orchestrating the “Chinese Century.” Mao’s revolutionary China evolves, rather than departs, from the past; it devolves into the past, including chronically heeling insurgent hero(ine)s in the name of healing them. Ostensibly an absolute, scorched-earth break, Mao’s revolution is at best a flash in the revolving door of history.

Rather than demolishing history to remake China, the Mao Inc. taps into, flush with foreign investment from Marxism-Leninism, the laozihao (老字號 centuries-old brands) of shanzhai (山寨), China’s outlawry. Shanzhai literally means mountain fortress and hideout of imperial-era bandits in opposition to the established government and its law. In contemporary usage, shanzhai has come to denote counterfeit products or any practice that imitates and parodies the real, creating an alternate reality. Classical Chinese novels are rife with such shanzhai-style heroes, rebellious and destructive at first, eventually returning to serve the royal court. Wu Cheng’en’s sixteenth-century Journey to the West (Monkey) opens with the Monkey King’s path of rambunctiousness until the Buddha subjugates him and tasks him to safeguard the monk Tripitaka in the pilgrimage to India. Likewise, the Boy God Nezha from Lu Xixing and Xu Zhonglin’s sixteenth-century Creation of the Gods experiences a symbolic death to be reborn into a good, tamed retainer of the authority. One of Mao’s favorite classics, Shi Nai’an’s fourteenth-century The Outlaws of the Marsh sings of anti-establishment exploits of one hundred and eight outlaws, yet Shi’s seventy-one chapters were subsequently edited by Luo Guanzhong and possibly expanded to one hundred chapters. In Luo’s hands, the outlaws undergo piaobai, a Chinese buzzword for having been bleached clean or whitewashed (yellowwashed?). The strays of outlaws return to the imperial fold in the fight against invading Liao “barbarians” from the north and the domestic rebel Fang La in the south. These classics exemplify the conundrum of revolution, either rise-and-fall, or fall-and-rise, depending on one’s perspective. Seen from the haves at the center and in the mainstream, shanzhai renegades wreak havoc for self-aggrandizing, subsequently mellowing into and healed as self-sacrificing heroes. Seen from the have-nots at the bottom and in the fringes, heroes ascend to smash the chains of enslavement, only to be heeled by the master.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0814259308
• ISBN 13: 9780814259306
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 274