Translating Chineseness through Popular Culture

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed growing concern about national soft power in China. Popular culture, web fiction and TV drama in particular, has become a new form of Chinese soft power. It manifests a zealous pursuit of transnational modernity and cosmopolitan identity in the global age while simultaneously reinforcing a China-centric nationalist view of the world. On the one hand, the population’s enthusiasm for globalization and cosmopolitanism reflects an entrenched obsession with the Western model of modernity. On the other, the national Other, both demonized and idolized, serves as a foil against the population’s flourishing self-esteem and self-confidence. With growing transnational mobility, the construction of the Self is increasingly played out in, and through, the inscription of Otherness. Through critical readings of recent Chinese films and TV programs, this talk explores the ideological features associated with discourses of the Self and the Other in a global context, with particular attention to how a state-sanctioned vision of Chineseness and Chinese-style cosmopolitanism has been constructed against an exotic Other.