Screening Post-1989 China: Critical Analysis of Chinese Film and Television by Wing Shan Ho (review)

Through the finesse of textual readings and critical analyses of seminal screen products, Wing Shan Ho's research enriches our understanding about the perplexing question of state–individual relations in post-1989 China. Her investigation brings to light how the Chinese state, decades into the reform era, or in a postsocialist time, is not monolithic, rigid, or even repressive but is able to absorb values both congruent to and contradictory to its revolutionary past to sustain its claims to authority. Intermingling state-sanctioned zhuxuanlü ("main melody") films and those banned by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT), Screening Post-1989 China elucidates the multivalent subjectivities demonstrated by filmmakers and audiences alike. Ho explains how censorship should be understood as existing alongside a reward system that seems to be able to work with dissenting cultural workers. In that regard, she considers zhuxuanlü films and independent films two sides of the same coin, rather than two separate territories as currently perceived in film studies.

Ho's discussion of the socialist spirit, as an aperture to the mercurial and often self-contradicting Party-state, warrants a high degree of academic attention. The disintegration of "the sublime figure," a term by Ban Wang, in the new era into various nodes of subjectivities, is encapsulated by the ramifications of the socialist spirit in continuing political campaigns and under different Party leaders. Such a reapplication of socialist values is demonstrated by the economic subject who "embraces altruism and self-sacrifice," the sexual subject who "maintains a long marriage and sexual faithfulness," and the political subject who "practices the socialist spirit of submission to the greater good" (pp. 12–13).

Screening Post-1989 China suggests that the central ideology of reform-era China is its lack of one: the reform is a departure from Mao's revolution because the revolutionary spirit of righting what is wrong is abandoned, or at least infested. By proposing such a replacement, a lexical maneuver that suspends any in-depth question about what constitutes socialism, the state nonetheless exposes the many levels of contradictions involved, as Ho delicately displays. That is, the legacy of revolution consolidates the Party rule, in sustaining a teleological view that history had only one choice in the tumultuous twentieth century; yet in the name of maintaining stability, what the government fears most now seems to be revolution.

Amid sweeping capitalistic development, propositions about the righteousness of socialism are mere slogans shrewdly treated at their face value. Be it the idea of "building a harmonious society" put forth by the preceding Chinese president or "the Chinese dream" newly invented by Xi Jinping, the mutations of ruling concepts indicate a missing ideological arc, and this is the moment neo-Confucianism comes in handy. By promoting a certain type of Confucian values, such as sacrifice for a greater public good and acquiescence to a higher authority, the state resorts to something they have largely discredited during revolutionary time.

Such an unlikely amalgamation of the socialist spirit and Confucian values are poignantly examined in the three sections of the book. Part I expounds on the economic subject in films ranging from zhuxuanlü ones—Ren Changxia, Days Without Lei Feng, and Kong Fanshen—in which the state promotes good and selfless characters against pervasive moral decline, to films that provoked the ire of the censors such as Li Yu's Lost in Beijing and Li Yang's "blind" series. Exemplar Party officials on screen reify the campaign to recognize role models, both serving to "associate superior morality with the Party" (p. 13). On the contrary, Lost in Beijing had its screening permit revoked by SARFT due to its "exploration of the commercialization of everyday life and its portrayal of a brutally money-oriented subjectivity" (p. 51). The contrasting...