Transnationalism and Translocality in Chinese Cinema

Chinese cinema has experienced a paradoxical time of boom and doom in recent years. In terms of statistics, the industry and the market have posted unprecedented double-digit growth, and the government has been eager to tout its economic agenda by facilitating the production and circulation of transnational Chinese blockbusters. After the centennial celebration of Chinese cinema in 2005, no one doubted the extraordinary growth of Chinese cinema in the new century, and today production and box office figures continue to feed a general sense of euphoria. Annual feature productions increased from 88 in 2001 to 406 in 2008. Similarly, total box office revenues rose from RMB 840 million in 2001 to 4,341 million in 2008, while domestic films' box office jumped from RMB 294 million in 2001 to 2,689 million in 2008. In a short period, overseas sales of Chinese films grew from RMB 550 million in 2003 to 2.528 billion in 2008. Moreover, new box office records for domestic films were established one after another. In early 2002, Big Shot's Funeral (Da wan; Feng Xiaogang, 2001) claimed an unprecedented RMB 42 million; in 2003, Hero (Ying xiong; Zhang Yimou, 2002) raked in RMB 250 million in domestic exhibition. The seemingly unstoppable expansion was confirmed by The Curse of the Golden Flower (Man cheng jin dai huang jin jia; Zhang Yimou, 2006), which took in RMB 290 million in China alone, and the most recent domestic record was RMB 340 million scored by If You Are the One (Fei cheng wu rao; Feng Xiaogang, 2008).¹

A fundamental problem, however, is that aside from the most prominent films, most feature productions do not receive theatrical exhibition and therefore incur huge financial losses. Moreover, in 2004, seven of the top ten titles were coproductions with Hong Kong, and they represented over 70 percent of the year's box office total. Exhibition revenues from the top three films that same year were roughly equal to total revenues for the 209 other domestic films. This means that the average box office for the latter was approximately RMB 2 million, or less than 1 million after sharing revenues with the distributors and exhibitors. The production cost of most low-budget features ranges from RMB 1.5 to 3 million, and RMB 5 million is considered a safety mark beyond which it is difficult to recoup investment. Given this dire situation, up to 85 percent of low-budget feature productions in 2005 and 2006 never entered exhibition and therefore never recovered their investments from theaters.²

Clearly, Chinese cinema is a lopsided industry strong in production but weak in exhibition. Industry personnel and scholars have listed other problems that constrain Chinese cinema, such as rampant video piracy, exorbitant ticket prices (RMB 40-80 in major cities) in relation to incomes, underreported ticket sales, and the absence of a ratings system (which continues to make censorship an unpredictable issue). Still, given the spectacular box office records of recent blockbusters, most scholars seem to believe that transnationalism has worked wonders for Chinese cinema and that globalization is the only choice for the Chinese film industry if it is to compete with Hollywood.

I should clarify that, unlike the standard concept of "transnationalism" as "beyond the national but below the global," in the Chinese context "transnationalism" often implies "across national, geopolitical, or linguistic borders," as the term "transnational Chinese cinema(s)" suggests.³ The notion of national cinema has always been problematic in the Chinese context, especially when it involves Hong Kong and Taiwan. What happens, then, if we move away from transnationalism and instead examine the horizontal tactics of translocality? How might it alter our perspective on Chinese cinema? I contend that film production, distribution, exhibition, and reception often take place at the scale of the local or translocal rather than the national, especially in terms of market economy. Translocality prefers place-based imagination and reveals dynamic processes of the local/global (or glocal)—processes that involve not just the traffic of capital and people but that of ideas, images, styles, and technologies across places in polylocality. Moreover, translocal traffic...