Signifying the Local: Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium 9004259015, 9789004259010

Table of contents :
Signifying the Local: Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 A Historical Review of the Discourse of the Local in Twentieth-Century China
Introduction
Late Qing: Lao Naixuan’s Simplified Script and Zhang Taiyan’s New Dialect
Advocating Dialect and Dialect Literature during the May Fourth Period
The Ambiguous Attitude towards Dialect in the Mass Language
Discussion and the Latinxua New Writing Movement
The Transcendence of the Local and the Reform of Dialect during and
after the “National Forms” Debate
2 An Overview of Television Series Productions in the 2000s
Beijing
Shanghai
Chongqing and Chengdu
Guangzhou
Conclusion
3 Alternative Translation: Performativity in Dubbing Films in Local Languages
Introduction
Dubbing as an Alternative Translation
Local-Language Dubbing as a Reaction to the Putonghua Dubbing Tradition
Laughter and Local Community
Power Reversals in Local-Language Versions of Tom and Jerry
The Issue of Child Audiences
Conclusion
4 Empowering Local Community: TV News Talk Shows in Local Languages
Aliutou Talks News and the News Entertainmentization
News Talks Shows and the Traditional Performing Arts
News Talk Shows and Local Community Building
The Emergence of the Lanmuju Genre and News Dramatization
5 Ambivalent Laughter: Comic Sketches in CCTV’s Spring Festival Eve Gala
Bakhtin’s Theory of Folk Humor
Evolution of Xiaopin in CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala
Zhao Benshan’s Comic Sketches and Northeast Errenzhuan
6 Popular Music and Local Youth Identity in the Age of the Internet
Xue Cun’s Breakthrough and the Wave of Internet Songs in Local Languages
An Alternative Cultural Space
The Use of Local Languages in Rock Music in the Late 1990s
Locality, Youth Identity, and the Internet
A Case Study of Shanghai Rap and the SHN Website
7 The Rhetoric of Local Languages as the Marginal: Chinese Underground and Independent Films by Jia Zhangke and Others
Jia’s Documentary Filmmaking Style
Private Space versus Public Space in Xiao Wu
The Tension between Diegesis and Mimesis in Platform
Gendered Language Use in Unknown Pleasures
Intellectuals’ Representation of the Subaltern in Underground Films in Local Languages
8 Multiplicity in Mainstream Studio Films in Local Languages
Subjectivity in the Use of Language and Voice in Missing Gun
The Language of the “Little Characters”
Grotesque Realism in Crazy Stone and the New Development of the Comedy Genre
9 The Unassimilated Voice in Recent Fiction in Local Languages
Rural Local Languages in Nativist Fiction
Local Languages in Zhiqing Fiction and Their Film Adaptations
Conclusion
Film, Video, and Audio Sources
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Signifying the Local

China Studies Edited by

Glen Dudbridge Frank Pieke

VOLUME 25

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/CHS

Signifying the Local Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium By

Jin Liu

Leiden • boston 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Liu, Jin  Signifying the local : media productions rendered in local languages in mainland China in the new millennium / by Jin Liu.   pages cm. — (China studies ; v. 25)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-90-04-25901-0 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-25902-7 (e-book)  1. Mass media and language—China. 2. Local mass media—China. 3. Mass media and minorities—China. 4. Communication and culture—China. 5. China—Languages.  6. Chinese language—Dialects. I. Title.  P96.L342.C4325 2013  302.23’0951—dc23

2013026601

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1570-1344 ISBN 978-90-04-25901-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25902-7 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. Brill has made all reasonable efforts to trace all rights holders to any copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful the publisher welcomes communications from copyright holders, so that the appropriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Acknowledgments ........................................................................................

ix

Introduction ...................................................................................................

1

Chapter One A Historical Review of the Discourse of the Local in Twentieth-Century China ................................................................ .Introduction .............................................................................................. . Late Qing: Lao Naixuan’s Simplified Script and Zhang Taiyan’s  New Dialect ............................................................................................ . Advocating Dialect and Dialect Literature during the May  Fourth Period ....................................................................................... .The Ambiguous Attitude towards Dialect in the Mass  Language Discussion and the Latinxua New Writing  Movement ............................................................................................. .The Transcendence of the Local and the Reform of Dialect  during and after the “National Forms” Debate ..........................

48

Chapter Two An Overview of Television Series Productions in the 2000s ............................................................................................... . Beijing .......................................................................................................... . Shanghai ..................................................................................................... . Chongqing and Chengdu ....................................................................... . Guangzhou .................................................................................................

59 60 66 71 76

Chapter Three Alternative Translation: Performativity in Dubbing Films in Local Languages .................................................... .Introduction .............................................................................................. . Dubbing as an Alternative Translation ............................................. . Local-Language Dubbing as a Reaction to the Putonghua  Dubbing Tradition .............................................................................. . Laughter and Local Community ......................................................... . Power Reversals in Local-Language Versions of Tom and Jerry  .The Issue of Child Audiences ..............................................................

19 19 22 31 40

83 83 85 87 89 93 101

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Chapter Four Empowering Local Community: TV News Talk Shows in Local Languages ........................................................... . Aliutou Talks News and the News Entertainmentization ............ . News Talks Shows and the Traditional Performing Arts ............. . News Talk Shows and Local Community Building ....................... .The Emergence of the Lanmuju Genre and News Dramatization

105 105 109 113 118

Chapter Five Ambivalent Laughter: Comic Sketches in CCTV’s Spring Festival Eve Gala ........................................................................ .Bakhtin’s Theory of Folk Humor ......................................................... . Evolution of Xiaopin in CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala ................... . Zhao Benshan’s Comic Sketches and Northwest Errenzhuan ....

121 122 126 132

Chapter Six Popular Music and Local Youth Identity in the Age of the Internet .................................................................................. . Xue Cun’s Breakthrough and the Wave of Internet Songs in  Local Languages .................................................................................. . An Alternative Cultural Space ............................................................. .The Use of Local Languages in Rock Music in the Late 1990s . . Locality, Youth Identity, and the Internet ....................................... . A Case Study of Shanghai Rap and the SHN Website .................. Chapter Seven The Rhetoric of Local Languages as the Marginal: Chinese Underground and Independent Films by Jia Zhangke and Others ......................................................................... . Jia’s Documentary Filmmaking Style ................................................. . Private Space versus Public Space in Xiao Wu ............................... .The Tension between Diegesis and Mimesis in Platform ........... . Gendered Language Use in Unknown Pleasures ............................. .Intellectuals’ Representation of the Subaltern in Underground  Films in Local Languages ................................................................. Chapter Eight Multiplicity in Mainstream Studio Films in Local Languages ....................................................................................... . Subjectivity in the Use of Language and Voice in  Missing Gun .......................................................................................... .The Language of the “Little Characters” ........................................... . Grotesque Realism in Crazy Stone and the New  Development of the Comedy Genre .............................................

143 148 151 163 172 176

187 190 192 196 201 204 215 220 227 236



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vii

Chapter Nine The Unassimilated Voice in Recent Fiction in Local Languages ....................................................................................... . Rural Local Languages in Nativist Fiction ....................................... . Local Languages in Zhiqing Fiction and Their Film  Adaptations ..........................................................................................

265

Conclusion ......................................................................................................

277

Film, Video, and Audio Sources ............................................................... Bibliography ................................................................................................... Index .................................................................................................................

287 291 311

251 253

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book developed from my Ph.D. dissertation and my research in the past ten years. First of all, I am grateful to my advisor at Cornell, Professor Edward Gunn. It was his book on this topic that sparked my interest and inspired me to undertake this interdisciplinary research, “a unique and challenging project” in his words. My deep gratitude goes to him for his unfailing interest in and continued encouragement and support to my research, even in the years after I graduated from Cornell. He scrupulously and critically read my entire manuscript in many different drafts. To a large degree, without his help, guidance, and super-vision, I would not be able to find my true calling in scholarship, integrating my former training in linguistics and my obsession with language and sound into my current research bridging language and culture. Professor Gunn has played a key role in defining my research areas and nurturing my academic interests. I am deeply indebted to him. I would also like to express my gratitude to the many scholars who have read various versions of the chapter drafts and gave me valuable and thought-provoking comments for revisions: Andrew Jones, Perry Link, Yomi Braester, Christopher Lupke, Sherman Cochran, John Whitman, Paola Iovene, InYoung Bong, Hongyuan Dong, Qi Wang, and the two anonymous reviewers from Brill. I would like to thank the East Asia Program at Cornell and the Georgia Tech Foundation for providing grants for my field trips in China. I thank the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech for the course release opportunities, which enabled me to focus on my book writing in the past few years. I would also like to thank the following people who provided assistance and support in my data collection in various locations in China. For underground and independent films, many thanks to Wang Zhuoyi, Cheng Kai, Zhang Yaxuan, and Gan Xiao’er. For television programs and shows, my special thanks to Xu Ting and Zhang Jianmin in Hangzhou, Xu Tao, Zhang Liu, Zhang Peng, and Tian Yigui in Chongqing, Liu Aiyi, Liu Bangxing, and Chen Huaguang in Chengdu, Zha Zhengxian in Shanghai, and Xu Zhiqiang in Shandong. For music, my thanks go to Chen Lei­qing, founder and CEO of the shanghaining.com, and the rappers and musicians I interviewed in Shanghai, Beijing, Qingdao, and Chengdu. I sincerely appreciate them generously sharing opinions and providing me

x

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first-hand, insider information. At Georgia Tech, I would like to thank my wonderful colleagues in the School of Modern Languages and the Ivan Allen College, particularly Xiaoliang Li, Paul Foster, and Chao Li. Their support, love, and collegiality made a big difference for me to complete my manuscript in time. Part of the chapters is based on my previously published journal articles. Thanks to Duke University Press, Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture for granting reprinting permissions. At Brill, I thank Qin Higley, the acquisitions editor, for her always effective and efficient work. It was a very pleasant experience working with her, her assistant, Thomas Begley, the production editor, Judy Pereira, and the whole team. The copyeditor Gene McGarry has done a great job. My manuscript would not be the same without his meticulous editing, critical comments, and efficient work. Finally, the most attentive love, support, and company from my husband Zhaoqin Meng have been crucial to the writing of this book. My now ten-year-old daughter Michelle (Ningning) has brought me enormous joy, constant surprise, as well as necessary breaks from my writing. This book is dedicated to them and our so loving families in China.

INTRODUCTION In contemporary mainland China, the standard language is called Putonghua (putonghua 普通话, lit. “common speech”) Mandarin, while nonstandard local languages and dialects are called fangyan (方言, lit. “regional speech”). The classification of these local languages and dialects is still debated, but seven major fangyan groups are conventionally recognized: Mandarin (guanhua 官话 or beifanghua 北方话), Wu 吴, Min 闽, Cantonese ( yue 粤), Gan 赣, Xiang 湘, and Hakka (kejia 客家); each can be further divided into various sub-varieties.1 Chinese local languages and dialects have long been a fundamental feature of Chinese everyday life and popular culture. The essence of fangyan has been variously identified and characterized as the living, vernacular, or oral language; regional speech; one’s mother tongue; folk language; rural patois; the speech of the uneducated; vulgar slang; unofficial subcultural lingo, and so on. During the twentieth century, local languages were associated with and simultaneously dissociated from the historical project of building the Chinese nation-state. Although local languages were valued and promoted at various historical moments, building a unified, modern, national language remained the paramount and overarching concern for China in its quest for modernity. The central government has promoted standard Putonghua Mandarin as the official national language and the principal language for mass media and school education. Thus, local languages have been suppressed, marginalized, transformed, and subordinated as subnational dialects during this ongoing process of building a modern nationstate, a national culture, and a national language. On October 31, 2000, the Beijing government promulgated its first law on language and writing, the Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Use of Chinese Languages and Chinese Characters (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo guojia tongyong yuyan wenzifa 中华人民共和国国家通用语 言文字法), effective as of January 1, 2001. The law prescribes Putonghua Mandarin as the principal language for broadcast radio, television, and 1 This classification of Chinese regional varieties was employed by Yuan Jiahua 袁家骅 in his standard handbook Hanyu fangyan gaiyao 汉语方言概要 (An outline of the Chinese dialects, 1960, 1983, and 2001) and has become one of the foundations on which Chinese dialectological research is based. Jerry Norman, Chinese (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1988), 181.

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movies (Articles 12 and 14). The use of local languages in mass media is strongly discouraged (Article 16).2 However, local languages did not disappear from mass media under the new regulations. Instead, the first decade of the new millennium has witnessed an expanded use of local languages in mass media and literature. A variety of television shows produced in local languages have burgeoned: news talk shows that draw on the arts of traditional storytelling, classic films dubbed in the local language, and lanmuju 栏目剧 (docudrama) programs that cast nonprofessional local residents as the protagonists and tell short stories about their ordinary lives. Film director Jia Zhangke’s 贾樟柯 Hometown Trilogy, largely in Shanxi Mandarin, ushered in a wave of underground and independent films employing local languages. In addition to underground films, increasing numbers of mainstream studio productions, shown in public cinemas, use local languages. On the Internet, rap songs performed in colloquial, nonstandard local languages are in vogue among urban youth. In fiction, a number of established writers who previously adhered to Standard Mandarin have begun to experiment with writing novels in their native local languages. The profusion of local languages in mass media has caused the authorities considerable concern. With increasing frequency, the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) has issued or reiterated regulations restricting the media use of local languages. However, in the post-socialist reform period, as the aesthetic, entertainment, and commercial value of regional dialects is (re)discovered, the tension between the state, capital, and art is intensified. It is true that central and local censors remain in force, but they too have to adjust themselves and take the market and audience seriously. This book addresses this unresolved tension and examines contemporary cultural productions in mainland China through the lens of local language. This study was inspired by Edward Gunn’s 2006 book Rendering the Regional: Local Language in Contemporary Chinese Media. Gunn maps out the role of local language in the television, radio, film, and print culture of late twentieth-century mainland China (especially Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, and Chengdu), Hong Kong, and Taiwan. He argues that mediated and thus “rendered” local languages, unlike the natural speech that 2 The official wording does not prohibit the use of local languages entirely. Article 16 ambiguously states that “dialect can be used if the art forms (folk operas, films, TV produc­ tions, etc.) need it.” But the question of whether a film, for example, must use dialect to convey a particular effect is subjective, and permission is easily denied.



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3

is the usual focus of sociolinguistics and dialectology, signify as Austinian performative social acts and play a prominent role in contemporary cultural productions in Greater China, here defined as mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Gunn claims that a single national language is not adequate to represent the distinct and diverse subnational, regional societies, which have undergone massive transformations. Local communities create media productions in their own languages to assert local identities and reimagine local communities. Gunn meticulously compares media productions in these distinct communities and explores how local cultures, transmitted by local languages, negotiate with, challenge, compete with, or subvert the national culture to varying degrees. Moreover, local languages assert distinctions among and within the fields of cultural production. Taking audience into consideration, Gunn finds that television, aimed at local audiences, was the primary medium used to promote the use of local languages in these localities. The rhetoric of local languages also varies by fields of cultural production. In mainland China, the use of local language on television (mainly in telenovelas and sitcoms) functions to assert the identity of a local community “as a site of distinctive cultural production, not simply as a venue for transmission of a larger, national culture.”3 In film and fiction, Gunn finds that local languages provide a rhetoric to represent “the marginal and the unassimilated,” a trend “away from depicting characters in nationalistic and socialist themes as participants in a broad social mainstream.”4 At the same time, Gunn points out that the role played by local languages in contemporary cultural productions, particularly in mainland China, is ambiguous. In the context of globalization, the production of local-language texts, an assertion of the value of pluralism, can be seen as “a postmodern reaction to the failures of modernism, including centralization and homogenization.”5 The local languages themselves, however, are manifested as a complex and heterogeneous aggregate. As Gunn observes, “the assertion of local languages in the same forms of media otherwise dominated by standard language might have suggested the voice of the subaltern in all its heterogeneity. Then again, its authenticity could be evoked only to demonstrate its own disunity, its hierarchies, its need to

3 Edward Gunn, Rendering the Regional: Local Language in Contemporary Chinese Media (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006), 204. 4 Ibid., 158. 5 Ibid., 13.

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be rescued from its limitations or condemned for them and reeducated.”6 He critically discusses Michel Chion’s theory of sound in film and television, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural productions, and from the field of literary theory the topics of heteroglossia, deterritorialization, and globalization. While all of these theories inform his work, Gunn observes that from the perspective of the local (including local audiences), they are inadequately defined or problematic. The local may have a place in both of those often contradicting ideologies, nationalism and capitalism.7 Gunn concludes, “Local languages became the wild cards that could be played to contest versions of the modern or the postmodern.”8 Gunn’s work opens up a rich new field of study, an interdisciplinary approach to research bridging language and culture. My research is one effort in this direction to examine contemporary Chinese popular culture and media culture from the perspective of language, voice, and sound. In terms of scope, while Gunn’s book surveys mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, I focus on mainland China and include more cities and regions besides Beijing, Shanghai, and Sichuan. While Gunn’s coverage extends to 2000, my book examines new phenomena, new genres, and new media that have emerged in the first decade of the new millennium, roughly 2000–2010. Gunn’s work has had a formative influence on my research, part of which can be seen as an application, development, and revision of his major arguments. However, building on previous scholarship and drawing on the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, film studies, media studies, sociolinguistics, and dialectology, my interdisciplinary research analyzes many crucial but overlooked issues in these fields, thus contributing to the established disciplines and areas in a unique way. First, my study of contemporary Chinese culture from the perspective of local language helps to disable any univocal or monolithic account of the Chinese language, Chineseness, and China. The Chinese language is not a homogeneous entity. Numerous local languages are subsumed under this single name and exhibit various degrees of diversity in different areas. While the speakers of the northern Mandarin varieties can largely communicate with each other despite the tonal and lexical differences, linguistic diversity (especially in phonology and lexicon) is much more pronounced in the south, especially in the Min-speaking areas, where “in

6 Ibid., 208. 7 Ibid., 14. 8 Ibid., 16.



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some cases even neighboring villages use forms of speech that are totally mutually unintelligible.”9 The multiplicity of Chinese local languages has led to much discussion over how the term fangyan should be translated into English. John DeFrancis discusses the terminological dilemma created by the unique linguistic situation in China. He thinks neither “dialect” nor “language” can justifiably convey the ambiguities and obscurities attached to fangyan. He coins the word “regionalect” for the major fangyan groups that are mutually unintelligible, reserving “dialect” “for its usual function of designating mutually intelligible subvarieties of the regionalects.”10 Yet he recognizes that some dialects of the regionalects can still be mutually unintelligible, so it is hard to draw a clear-cut line between dialects and regionalects.11 Victor Mair further examines the problem of the prevalent translation of fangyan as “dialect,” an issue he deems as “extraordinarily sensitive.”12 He develops DeFrancis’s “regionalect” and proposes the term “topolect” as a literal translation of fangyan. But he is well aware of the drawback that these equivalents “do not fit into established Western schemes for the categorization of languages.”13 Taking Mair’s article as a major reference, Shumei Shih claims that those southern fangyans that are most frequently the subject of Sinophone studies, including Cantonese, Hakka, and the Southern Min varieties such as Amoy (Xiamen 厦门) Min/­Taiwanese, Zhangzhou 漳州 Min, Quanzhou 泉州 Min, and Teochew (Chaoshan 潮汕) Min, are not dialects but “clearly separate languages from putonghua.”14 In fact, the controversy over the relationship between dialect and language is a global and often politicized problem.15 Linguistically speaking, the differences among Chinese fangyans are often conceived to be analogous to those that distinguish the Romance languages in Europe.16 However, the 9 Norman, Chinese, 188. 10 John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1984), 57. 11  Ibid., 64. 12 Victor Mair, “What is a Chinese ‘Dialect/Topolect’? Reflections on Some Key SinoEnglish Linguistic Terms,” Sino-Platonic Papers 29 (September 1991), 15. 13 Ibid., 7. 14 Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (Berke­ ley: University of California Press, 2007), 189. 15 For a historical study of standard languages and dialects in the context of European nation building, see Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 51–63, 93–100. For the global problem of the relationship between dialect and language, see Einar Haugen, “Dialect, Language and Nation,” American Anthropologist 68.4 (1966): 922–935. 16 Norman, Chinese, 187. DeFrancis, The Chinese Language, 55.  

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identification of the former as dialects and the latter as languages is never a purely linguistic issue, and cannot be separated from politics, nation, culture, ethnicity, and other nonlinguistic factors. From a post-structuralist viewpoint, Liao Xianhao views dialects as those nonstandard linguistic varieties that were not chosen as the standard language due to certain factors. In the process of linguistic standardization, centralization, and institutionalization, the standard language, through its identification with writing, exerts a centripetal force and enjoys hegemony and authority, while the subordinated dialects, often associated with speech, give rise to a centrifugal counterbalance and have the potential to subvert the status quo of the standard language. The interplay of these two forces forms a dialectic and a dynamic power hierarchy.17 In her critical reflection on Chineseness as a monolithic, culturally essentialized ethnic supplement to Western hegemony, Rey Chow relates the problematic claim of a homogeneously unified, univocal China to the myth of “standard Chinese,” which has been affirmed in the pedagogical dissemination of the Chinese language(s) in the West.18 The new discipline of Sinophone studies continues to explore the issue of Chineseness from the perspective of literary and cultural production. It disputes the common error of equating the Chinese language(s) with Mandarin (or more precisely, the standard Putonghua/Guoyu Mandarin), defies overgeneralization and essentialism in the assessment of China and Chineseness, and provides a new theoretical paradigm to reexamine the relationship between the center and the periphery. Drawing extensively on postcolonial studies— for instance, Anglophone and Francophone studies—diaspora studies, and ethnic studies or minority studies, Shu-mei Shih defines the objects of Sinophone studies as “the Sinitic-language communities and cultures outside China as well as ethnic minority communities and cultures within China where Mandarin is adopted or imposed.”19 In the field of cinema, Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh similarly try to define the study of

17 Liao Xianhao 廖咸浩, “Fangyan de wenxue juese: sanzhong houjiegou shijao” 方言 的文學角色：三種後結搆視角 [The literary role of local dialect: Three post-structuralist viewpoints], Zhongwai wenxue 中外文学 [Chung-Wai literary monthly] 19.2 (1990): 94–96. According to Jerry Norman, as early as from the Spring and Autumn period (770– 476 BC), the two opposed forces between a standard, common language and dialects have operated on Chinese linguistic territory. Norman, Chinese, 185. 18 Rey Chow, “On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” in Sinophone Studies: A Criti­ cal Reader, ed. Shu-mei Shih, Chien-Hsin Tsai, and Brian Bernards (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 48. 19 Shu-mei Shih, “Introduction: What is Sinophone Studies,” in Sinophone Studies, 11.



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Chinese films in terms of language. Noting the nonequivalence and asymmetry between language and nation, they argue that “Chinese language is at once a centrifugal and centripetal force in the nation-building process.”20 In a departure from Sinophone studies’ disengagement with the center, as represented by “Han Chinese writers, intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers from [mainland] China,”21 the umbrella term “Chinese-language cinema” or “Sinophone cinema” that Lu and Yeh advocate to replace “Chinese ­cinema” is defined to cover “films that use predominantly Chinese dialects and are made in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diaspora, as well as those produced though transnational collaborations with other film industries.”22 My research on the multivocal and marginal identities represented by local languages in mainland China participates in this recent academic trend of engagement with and rethinking of the issues of Chinese language, Chineseness, and China. The local-language texts examined in this book assert the value of pluralism and diversity, defy the characterization of China as a unified and homogeneous nation-state, and resist the dominance of national cultural colonization. The rise of regional television shows rendered in local languages, the proliferation of local languages on the Internet, and the commercial success of local-language cultural productions—including news talk shows, dubbed programs and videos, rap albums, comedies, and ring tones—in the local market all attest to the urgency of reimagining a distinct local community that cannot be adequately represented by a single national language. Second, my research on the significance of locality contributes to the study of globalization. Although there has been increasing scholarship on the global and the local, in most research the local appears to be interchangeable with the national. For instance, Timothy Craig and Richard King’s book explores how global or American cultural and musical resources and commodities have been appropriated and integrated with local knowledge by artists and musicians in the so-called “local” nationstates such as China, South Korea, and Malaysia.23 My study presses the issue of localization further, examining local communities that are 20 Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, “Introduction: Mapping the Field of ChineseLanguage Cinema,” in Chinese-Language Film: Historiography, Poetics, Politics, ed. Lu and Yeh (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 4. 21  Chien-hsin Tsai, “Issues and Controversies,” in Sinophone Studies, 20. 22 Lu and Yeh, Chinese-Language Film, 1. 23 Timothy Craig and Richard King, ed., Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia (Van­ couver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002).

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c­ ontained within the nation-state. From this perspective, the function of the nation-state seems more and more aligned with globalization and its concomitant homogenization and centralization. Moreover, my research recognizes a dialectical relationship between the global and the local, which do not pose as cultural polarities but are interpenetrating, interacting, and mutually signifying. For example, in popular music, Andy Bennett argues that far from subsuming distinctive local cultures into a single homogenized global culture, globalization may in fact enhance such ­differences.24 Similarly, Tony Mitchell, drawing on Roland Robertson’s term glocalization, which involves a simultaneous, twofold process of “the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism,”25 argues that “hip-hop and rap cannot be viewed simply as an expression of African American culture; it has become a vehicle for global youth affiliations and a tool for reworking local identity all over the world.”26 However, my research problematizes the local identities constructed through copying and imitation, or the “pseudo-individualization” (to use Adorno’s notion) in this counter-homogenization movement. Competition among regional community members striving to assert a local identity might belie a general anxiety that it is becoming increasingly difficult to define the locality in a dramatically globalized and delocalized world. Therefore, these constructed local identities, which form diversity within similarity, plurality within unity, heterogeneity within homogeneity, and localization within globalization, may turn out to be what Stuart Hall calls that more “tricky version of ‘the local’ which operates within, and has been thoroughly reshaped by ‘the global’ and operates largely within its logic.”27 Third, because a major aesthetic function of local language in mainstream media is to evoke laughter, my research examines a range of comic genres and forms including sketches, situation comedies (sitcoms), and films, thus contributing to the study of comedy, an often neglected and understudied genre in scholarship. In my research, Bakhtin’s theory of folk humor, elaborated in his 1968 book Rabelais and His World, proved relevant and illuminating.28 Bakhtin’s theory applies to moments 24 Andy Bennett, Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity, and Place (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 54. 25 Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), 100. 26 Tony Mitchell, ed., Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop outside the USA (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 1–2. 27 Stuart Hall, “Culture, Community, Nation,” Cultural Studies 7.3 (1993): 354. 28 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1968).



introduction

9

of ­cultural transition and thus has broad implications for contemporary China, which, as a “becoming body,” has undergone a massive cultural transformation during the reform years. Indeed, his terms “carnivalesque” and “heteroglossia” have become clichés in the study of contemporary Chinese literature and culture, including recent Internet culture. Yet my research on language-based and intensely verbal cultural forms has profited from Bakhtin’s focus on socio-ideologically charged language. I apply his theory of grotesque realism, with its essential principle of degradation and debasement, to interpret the ambiguous laughter summoned up by the comic sketches produced by CCTV (China Central Television) for its Spring Festival Eve Gala, and to explore the dynamic dialogue, laced with nuances and indeterminacy, between the central, official discourse from above, represented by Putonghua, and the peripheral, folkloric discourse from below, articulated in local dialects. The characteristic logic of “insider out” that Bakhtin identifies in carnival laughter inspired my discussion of the multiple use of local languages in Ning Hao’s 宁浩 2006 blockbuster Crazy Stone (Fengkuang de shitou 疯狂的石头), which ushered in a new trend of low-budget comedy films (di/xiao chengben xiju dianying 低/小成本喜剧电影). In addition, Valentin Voloshinov’s theory informs my analysis of “reported speech” in a comic television series, The Happy Life of the Garrulous Zhang Damin (Pinzui Zhang Damin de xingfu shenghuo 贫嘴张大民的幸福生活, 1999), and of the sociocultural nature of intonation in Zhao Benshan’s 赵本山 comic sketches, thus enhancing our understanding of the critical edges embedded in Chinese mainstream culture.29 Nevertheless, as Andrew Horton notes, “No totalizing theory of comedy has proved successful. The vastness of the territory, which includes the nature of laughter, humor, the comic, satire, parody, farce, burlesque, the grotesque, the lyrical, romance, metacomedy, and wit, precludes facile generalization.”30 The laughter stimulated in local-language texts is multi­faceted, and a multidisciplinary approach is called for. For instance, in exploring how the laughter evoked by the presence of local languages 29 Valentin Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA: Har­ vard University Press, 1986); idem, “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art (Concerning Sociological Poetics),” in Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, trans. I. R. Titunik (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 93–116. Some scholars believe that works bearing Voloshinov’s name were actually authored by Bakhtin. In either case, both worked together closely in the Len­ ingrad Group and therefore their ideas would have possessed important ­affinities. 30 Andrew Horton, introduction, in Comedy/Cinema/Theory, ed. Andrew Horton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 2.

10

introduction

can help foster a sense of local community, I draw on Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the “bonding activity” of joke-telling in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik’s description of the “communalizing activity” of the sitcom in their book Popular Film and Television Comedy.31 The local-language soundtracks of comic productions provide rich intertextual information that credits the local audience with the knowledge and experience necessary to make sense of its references and offers them the pleasure of recognition. It thus creates a communal bond within the local audience that shares the joke while setting a cultural boundary between that audience and outsiders who cannot appreciate the joke. Affirming inclusion in a community, the media productions rendered in local language perform a consolidating function. Sharing the same linguistic and cultural identity and everyday experiences as their viewers, the shows easily identify and align with their local audiences; both are involved in a communalizing activity.32 Fourth, it is impossible to think about these issues without taking audience and reception into account. This book does not pretend to offer a systematic, quantitative, or ethnographic investigation of the reception of local-language productions, but a concern for audience (on the local, national, and international levels) is threaded through the chapters. The film scholar Yingjin Zhang claims that audience study is an area that “has been unfortunately neglected and sometimes irresponsibly dismissed.”33 31  Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (New York, Norton, 1960); Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, Popular Film and Television Comedy (London: Rout­ ledge, 1990). 32 On this point, I disagree with Christopher Rea and Nicolai Volland’s assumptions about “humor’s translatability across genres, industries, cultures, languages, and national borders,” or their argument that comedy “joins rather than separates different audiences from different backgrounds.” Rea and Volland, “Comic Visions of Modern China: Introduc­ tion,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 20.2 (Fall 2008): xiv. As noted, some comedy works examined in this special issue have little to do with language. For example, the film Laborer’s Love (Laogong zhi aiqing 劳工之爱情, 1922), discussed in Xinyu Dong’s essay as conveying a transnational “operational aesthetic,” is a silent comedy, and Jackie Chan’s transnational martial arts comedies are discussed by Kin-Yan Szeto mainly as a body genre. In linguistics, drawing on Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar, Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo developed Raskin’s semantic script theory of humor into a general theory of verbal humor that attempts to account for a native speaker’s humor compe­ tence and provide a framework for understanding the universal, translingual, and transcul­ tural mechanisms of humor. However, their formal linguistic theory takes a very different approach from that of these film and literary scholars and is not discussed here. Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humor (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994) and Attardo, Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001). 33 Yingjin Zhang, “Comparative Film Studies, Transnational Film Studies: Interdiscipli­ narity, Crossmediality, and Transcultural Visuality in Chinese Cinema,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1.1 (2007): 30.



introduction

11

He advocates the importance of audience research in film studies, which requires an interdisciplinary and consumption-based approach. He argues that the consumer’s or audience’s agency constitutes a key component in audience study. Regarding language issues, his questions on Taiwanese cinema—such as “How did linguistic factors complicate film consumption?” and “How did Taiwanese-dialect films serve their audiences in competition with state-sponsored Mandarin cinema?”—are equally applicable to my research on mainland China.34 Recognizing the ubiquitous linguistic and dialectal hierarchy and polyglossia embedded in Chinese cinema, Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh propose “Chinese-dialect film” as a sub­genre of Chinese-language film.35 Taking audience into consideration, they point out that the function of language and dialects in cinema may change from viewer to viewer. One of their examples is the divided response of Chinese viewers in mainland China and Taiwan, as well as non-Chinese international viewers, to Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh’s Cantonese-accented Mandarin in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wohu canglong 卧虎藏龙, 2000). Taking audience into consideration sheds light on many issues. In problematizing the inauthentic and hybridized dialects Jia Zhangke’s protagonists speak in his Hometown Trilogy, I discuss the stratified reception—on the local, national, and international levels—of his films. For the local audience in his hometown of Fenyang 汾阳, Jia’s branded “documentary realism” is flawed and the “realist” linguistic effect may not be achieved. This indicates that Jia did not intend to highlight a local Fenyang identity, but rather treated Fenyang as a microcosm of China. I further examine the dilemma he faced in negotiating between descriptive mimesis and interpretive diegesis. While underground and independent films are generally inaccessible to the mass national audience, audience reception becomes a more salient and complicated issue in mainstream films, which are shown publicly in cinemas. As Gunn argues, “the film audiences vary linguistically throughout China so much” that “what is overwhelmingly used as a standard of realist conventions providing a unity of sound and image would otherwise be rejected by any audience outside that ‘specific reality’ of the cultural product.”36 Yet as my discussion of the audience reception of Feng Xiaogang’s 冯小刚 2010 blockbuster Aftershock (Tangshan da dizhen 唐山大地震) and other recent local-language films shows,

34 Ibid., 32–33. 35 Lu and Yeh, ed., Chinese-Language Film, 7. 36 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 9.

12

introduction

both local, native-speaker audiences and national, non-native-speaker audiences may accuse these films of inauthenticity and dispute the realism and cinematic verisimilitude they try to achieve. Moreover, I discuss regional imbalances in the audience reception of recent comedy films, which are often viewed as a niche capable of competing with imported Hollywood films and state-subsidized “main melody” (zhu xuanlü 主旋律) blockbusters. While many filmmakers, particularly those working in the martial arts and action genres, strive to compete in a global or transnational film market, these low-budget comedy films may signal another direction in the development of Chinese cinema, namely localization— exploring the regional market and targeting a subnational local audience. Yet even a local audience is far from a single homogeneous entity. It varies in terms of age, gender, social origin, social class, and cultural status, as well as regional identity. Informed by the relatively richer research in television audiences, I explore how local audience members, as the selective makers of meaning, are actively involved in fangyan media productions.37 For instance, taking the Sichuan veteran comedian Li Boqing 李伯清 and his sitcom Stories of Mr. Fake (Jiada waizhuan 假打外转, 2000) as a case study, I analyze its controversial audience reception in light of Bourdieu’s theory of socially constructed taste. I find that the alleged vulgarity of his sitcom is not only related to institutionalization, but also to prime-time scheduling, the stratification of adult and child audiences, and the lack of a rating system in China. The book’s nine chapters are largely organized according to fields of cultural production, except for Chapter 1, which is a historical review of the discourse of the local in twentieth-century China. Chapters 2 to 5 focus on television, and the four chapters are organized by genre and type of shows: telenovelas and sitcoms, television shows and videos of dubbed films, news talk shows and docudrama shows, and comic sketches. Chapter 6 explores rock music and rap music rendered in local languages; the emergence of the latter is closely associated with the new medium, the Internet. Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 respectively treat underground and independent films and mainstream studio films. The ninth and final chapter tracks new developments in fiction in the 2000s by focusing on two subgenres: nativist fiction and educated-youth fiction.

37 David Morley’s study of the Nationwide audience has been acclaimed as a model for audience studies. Morley, Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992), particularly 75–130.



introduction

13

Chapter 1, “A Historical Review of the Discourse of the Local in Twentieth-Century China,” reviews the debates over the nature of fangyan vis-à-vis a unified national language, and explores the discourse of the local in the Chinese nation-building process. Beginning in the late Qing period, I examine Lao Naixuan’s 劳乃宣 “Simplified Script” ( jianzi 简字) system and Zhang Taiyan’s 章太炎 scholarly book New Dialect (Xin fangyan 新方言). Next I discuss the arguments of Hu Shi 胡适, Qian Xuantong 钱玄同, Liu Bannong 刘半农, Zhou Zuoren 周作人, and other prominent May Fourth intellectuals on dialect and dialect literature in the baihua 白话 vernacular movement, including the folk song collection movement. Next, I examine the ambivalent attitudes of Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白, Lu Xun 鲁迅, and other leftist intellectuals towards dialect, dialectal Latinization, and dialect writing during the mass language discussion of 1934 and the Latinized New Writing movement that started in the 1930s. Finally I take up the “national forms” debate of the late 1930s and early 1940s, in which the issue of local language was closely associated with the central topics of “local forms” and “folk forms” in their relationships with the new modern national forms. This chapter helps situate my research on contemporary China in the larger historical context. Chapter 2, “An Overview of Television Series Productions in the 2000s,” tracks new developments in four major urban centers: Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Chongqing, and Guangzhou. I include some television series in Beijing Mandarin made before 2000—for example, Ying Da’s 英达 I Love My Family (Wo ai wo jia 我爱我家, 1994), which is a fine example of the use of language to indicate characters’ social and cultural status. I address the complex factors responsible for the increasingly sluggish output of media productions in Shanghai Wu, as well as the recent strong reactions of both academia and the mass media to the decline of the language. The continuing television productions in Sichuan Mandarin provide rich materials for studying the stratification of audiences. Finally, I discuss Guangdong TV’s sitcom Native Husbands with Foreign Wives (Wailai xifu bendi lang 外来媳妇本地郎, 2000–), the longest-running sitcom in China, as well as new television productions that have aired on CCTV since 2000. Chapter 3, “Alternative Translation,” examines the phenomenon of dubbing films in local languages. Inspired by Walter Benjamin, Rey Chow, and others, I argue that the dubbed or translated text is not necessarily derivative from, secondary to, or residual to the original text. Drawing on performance studies that celebrate the independence of performance from text, I explore the performative force of the local-language dubbing achieved

14

introduction

through a surrogation of Putonghua Mandarin soundtracks: in effect it fosters a real sense of local community that may have been mis-imagined through the official language for decades. Identified as something alien to the local community, the Putonghua soundtrack becomes the object of derision, mimicry, and subversion. The dubbed films, by contrast, speak to and for the local community, using satire to expose its social ills. Chapter 4, “Empowering Local Community,” continues to explore how local language empowers communities by examining the spread of news talk shows in local languages. Taking Hangzhou TV’s hit show Aliutou Talks News (Aliutou/Alodei shuo xinwen 阿六头说新闻, 2004—) as a case study, I explore how the program creates cultural proximity, immediacy, and familiarity by using traditional local storytelling arts to relay news that reflects the everyday experience of local citizens. The program’s capitalization on traditional forms of entertainment in news and information transmission further signifies the gradual re-situation of television as an institution of entertainment. Moreover, the regionalization of news shows can also be viewed as a viable strategy that allows city television stations to compete with state and provincial television stations. I conclude by exploring the emergence of lanmuju docudrama shows nationwide, which were arguably initiated by Chongqing TV’s Night Talk in the Foggy Capital (Wudu yehua 雾都夜话, 1994–). While the television genres and programs in these three chapters mainly target local audiences, the comic sketches in Xiaopin 小品, one of the best-received shows in the annual CCTV Spring Festival Eve Galas, are performed for a national audience. Rather than fostering a sense of local community, the laughter evoked in the comic sketches, which have been gradually infused with the spirit of folk culture, manifests Bakhtinian carnivalesque ambiguity. By analyzing Zhao Benshan’s Northeast Mandarin comic sketches, which are rooted in the local traditional errenzhuan 二人转 performing art, Chapter 5, “Ambivalent Laughter,” explores the dynamic dialogue between the official discourse from above, represented by Putonghua, and the folkloric discourse from below, articulated in local languages. Whereas the central, official discourse attempts to manipulate the peripheral, folkloric discourse for ideological reasons, the latter ends up simultaneously conforming to and subverting the former; both involve ambiguity, nuance, and indeterminacy. Chapter 6, “Popular Music and Local Youth Identity in the Age of the Internet,” examines rock music and rap music rendered in local languages; the emergence of the latter is closely associated with the new media, the Internet. I first dispute the common criticism of Chinese rap as lacking



introduction

15

social and political commentary. Through a close reading of rich locallanguage rap song texts combined with fieldwork interviews, I argue that unlike the Putonghua–dominated, mainstream popular love songs, locallanguage rap songs are characterized by strong social messages, which thus enable Chinese youth to construct an alternative subcultural space. Furthermore, rendered in regional languages, these rap songs are infused with distinctive local knowledge and the sensibilities of a specific place. The songs articulate a distinct musicalized, collective local identity for urban youth by adopting a widespread convention in the rap music genre, that of representing one’s ’hood. Next I examine rock songs rendered in local languages in the late 1990s, before the Internet played a significant role in disseminating local languages, and compare the two musical genres. Finally, taking Shanghai Rap and the SHN website as a case study, I argue that the Internet enabled the global diaspora of Shanghai youth to forge a collective local yet simultaneously transnational identity—Shanghainese. Here I consider the issues associated with the new medium of the Internet, including transnationality, cosmopolitanism, and nationalism. Chapter 7, “The Rhetoric of Local Languages as the Marginal,” turns to the medium of cinema, exploring the use of local languages to represent marginal and unassimilated identities in Chinese underground and independent films. In my treatment of Xiao Wu (小武, 1997), I explore the interactions between the two spaces defined by the film’s soundtrack—a relatively quiet, private, intimate space and a heteroglossic public space. My analysis of Platform (Zhantai 站台, 2000) considers the inauthenticity of Jia’s use of local languages and contends that the protagonists’ hybridized and impure dialects betray the limits of Jia’s ability to forge a linguistic style through a negotiation between mimesis and diegesis. Drawing on gender studies in sociolinguistics, I examine the implications of the divergence in the language of male and female protagonists in Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiaoyao 任逍遥, 2003). Finally, I consider the silent protagonists and sparse dialogue characteristic of Jia’s work and of other underground and independent films in local languages. Here Spivak’s subaltern theory helps to explain the hermeneutic violence the intellectual filmmakers have done to the subaltern, lower-class protagonists represented in the films. Continuing the cinematic focus of the previous chapter, Chapter 8, “Multiplicity in Mainstream Studio Films in Local Languages,” surveys commercial mainstream films rendered in local languages since 2000. First, I explore an unusual use of local language to convey psychological subjectivity in Lu Chuan’s 陆川 Missing Gun (Xun qiang 寻枪, 2002),

16

introduction

which is distinct from the documentary-realist aesthetics that local language usually serves in contemporary Chinese art films. While this may be a divergence from many films of the so-called Sixth Generation independent directors, there is much similarity between this film and Jiang Wen’s 姜文 banned Devils on the Doorstep (Guizi laile 鬼子来了, 1999), in Tangshan Mandarin. Second, I discuss the predominant use of local language to portray “little characters” (xiao renwu 小人物) in mainstream films. While the “marginal characters” associated with local languages in underground films are usually silent, the “little characters” speaking local languages in mainstream films are rather talkative. Taking Guan Hu’s 管虎 made-forTV film Minibus (Shangche zouba 上车走吧, 2000) as an example, I argue that the peasant image portrayed in mainstream media is very different from the stubborn, silent image of Chinese peasants presented in films that reach Western audiences. Third, taking Ning Hao’s Crazy Stone as an example, I discuss the use of local language in recent comedy films, a dominant mainstream genre. Finally, I explore the regional imbalance in audience reception of recent low-budget comedy films, arguing that these films may represent a new development in Chinese cinema, namely regionalization or localization. Chapter 9, “The Unassimilated Voice in Recent Fiction in Local Languages,” tracks new developments in fiction in the 2000s by focusing on two subgenres: nativist fiction and educated-youth fiction. In the first part, on nativist fiction, I examine recent novels by Mo Yan 莫言, Zhang Wei 张炜, Yan Lianke 阎连科, and Jia Pingwa 贾平凹. I discuss these writers’ heightened awareness of fangyan and show how local language and the rural world continue to constitute a marginal space from which writers critique the modern, urban center. In these novels, folk opera rendered in local languages is rediscovered as an indigenous cultural resource for resisting Western influence, and a vanishing rural community is recorded in detail as a memory to be cherished. By comparison, the appreciation of the local in nativist fiction is not shared by writers of recent educatedyouth fiction. I analyze four such novels/novellas and their film adaptations and show how the texts make a distinction between the local villagers’ use of rural dialects and the sent-down educated youths’ use of Putonghua or urban dialects. The traditional, rural local languages spoken by uneducated characters are condemned, transformed, ignored, or negotiated by the educated urban narrators of these tales. In conclusion, my research provides a wide overview of cultural productions in contemporary China from the uniquely revealing perspective of local languages. My study provides an account of the ways in which



introduction

17

local-language media have become a platform for the articulation of multivocal, complex, and marginal identities in post-socialist China. Viewed through the lens of local languages, the mediascape of China is no longer reducible to a unified, homogeneous, and coherent national culture, and thus renders any monolithic account of the Chinese language, Chineseness, and China impossible.

CHAPTER ONE

A HISTORICAL REVIEW OF THE DISCOURSE OF THE LOCAL IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA Introduction The term fangyan has been variously defined as referring to a living, vernacular, or oral language; regional speech; mother tongue; folk language; vulgar slang; or the rural or provincial patois of the illiterate masses. It was an integral part of major literary movements and intellectual debates: the phonetic script reform and the national language movement that began in the late Qing period; the national literature movement, including the folk culture movement in the May Fourth era; the discussion on mass language and the Latinized New Writing movement in the 1930s; and the debate on “national forms” during the period of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Through a critical reading of both primary and secondary materials, this chapter reviews these historical debates and discussions on fangyan and explores the discourse of the local in the nation-building process in twentieth-century China. It examines how Chinese intellectuals conceived of the role of local language in the construction of national language, national literature, and the modern nation-state. How was local language, with its own multiplicity, heterogeneity, and hierarchy, associated with and simultaneously dissociated from this historical project? What did Chinese intellectuals project the relationship between the diverse local languages and a single, unified national language would be? Would building and promoting a national language mean the abolishment of diversity, or would the promotion of local languages threaten national unity? Can the irreconcilable be reconciled, and if so, how? What theories, hypotheses, and practices did Chinese intellectuals come up with to address the dialectical relationship within this dualism? In the first section, I examine the late Qing intellectual Lao Naixuan’s “Simplified Script” system, which was designed to represent four major local-language areas, and Zhang Taiyan’s scholarly book New Dialect, which Zhang himself regarded as the most groundbreaking work on the subject since Yang Xiong’s 扬雄 pioneering survey Dialect (Fangyan), composed during the Eastern Han dynasty (25 AD–220 AD). Viewing the

20

chapter one

promotion of dialect scripts and the unification of the Chinese language as a “seemingly antagonistic but actually mutually complicit” (xiangfan er shi xiangcheng 相反而实相成) relationship, Lao endeavored to implement his systematically designed dialectal scripts in the south in order to achieve the goal of national unification through the propagation of Beijing Mandarin. While Lao was mainly concerned with a pedagogical approach, Zhang offered a more theoretical view on dialect in relation to a unified Chinese language. By exploring the original etymological characters of the dialects, Zhang attempted to prove that synchronic regional variations were in fact diachronically homogenous and unified. He emphasized the historical unity of Chinese linguistic diversity, and more fundamentally, the unity of the Chinese culture and nation. As the leading figure of the National Essence (guocui 国粹) movement, Zhang argued that regional dialect was, without mediation, linked with the intransigent part of the Chinese essence, and further implied that local language was associated with the discourse of anti-Confucianism, thus making a connection with the May Fourth era of the early twentieth century. In the second section, I discuss Hu Shi, Qian Xuantong, Liu Bannong (Liu Fu 刘复), Zhou Zuoren, and other prominent May Fourth intellectuals’ arguments on dialect and dialect literature in the baihua vernacular movement, including the folk song collection movement, which greatly promoted modern Chinese dialectology. Treating dialect as a living vernacular language, in contrast to the dead classical language, the May Fourth intellectuals ascribed much significance and importance to dialects and dialect literature, including folk songs. Yet, on the premise that a literary, written, vernacular language was needed, Hu Shi and other literary reformers focused more on a dialect’s vocabulary than its pronunciation in their enrichment of the new national language and its literature. The diverse dialect sounds were still subordinate to the imperative of nationalization in the official National Language Romanization system (Guoyu Luomazi/Gwoyeu Romatzyh 国语罗马字, henceforth GR), which was based on Beijing Mandarin and stressed national unity through script uniformity. In the third section, I survey the mass language (dazhongyu 大众语) discussion of 1934 and the Latinized New Writing (Ladinghua Xin Wenzi / Latinxua Sin Wenz 拉丁化新文字) movement of the 1930s, which advocated the creation of separate scripts for separate dialects. I examine the ambivalent attitudes of Qu Qiubai, Lu Xun, and other leftist intellectuals towards dialect, dialectal Latinization, and dialect literature, and thus I try to provide a more balanced, revisionist perspective on some ­long-held



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 21

assumptions about the Communists’ liberal attitude towards dialect during this period.1 In contrast to GR advocates, the Latinxua supporters viewed separate dialect scripts as a distinctive feature, but I find that both movements favored a fundamentally similar strategy of exclusion through inclusion to address the dialect and unification issue. In the fourth section, I discuss the “national forms” (minzu xingshi 民族形式) debates of the late 1930s and early 1940s. The issue of local language was closely associated with the central topics of “local forms” (difang xingshi 地方形式) and “folk forms” (minjian xingshi 民间形式) and their relationships with the national forms. Continuing the ambivalent attitude towards dialect in the mass language discussion of the 1930s, in the 1940s Communist intellectuals under Maoist leadership increasingly argued, on the one hand, that the use of dialect and local folk forms was necessary to mobilize illiterate peasants to resist Japanese invasion; on the other hand, they repeatedly made hackneyed assertions that the creation of new modern national forms required them to criticize, transform, refine, and selectively adopt dialect. I explore the ambiguous dialectics in these official clichés as reflected in the discussions on reforming dialect during the Hong Kong Dialect Literature Movement (1947–1949), which claimed that in order to transform the local into the national, it was necessary to homogenize, purify, and politicize dialect to bring it into line with Socialist Realism and to exclude local slang and other distinctive features of dialect, which were labeled as obscenities, hoodlum argot, or backward, feudal expressions. Therefore, the transcendence of the local could be achieved only at the expense of erasing local color. From this review, I conclude that building a unified modern national language remained Chinese intellectuals’ paramount and overarching concern in China’s quest for modernity during the twentieth century. Although the value and significance of local languages was advocated, recognized, or legitimized to a certain degree during a specific historical period, these languages were fundamentally and ultimately suppressed, marginalized, transformed, manipulated, and subordinated into subnational languages in the process of building a modern nation-state and a national language. Nevertheless, a language became a (subnational) dialect only because it was not the national language, and any standard could 1 In this respect, Snow’s general account of the dialect issue in Communist circles in the 1930s and 1940s serves as an example. See Donald Snow, Cantonese as Written Lan­ guage: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 105.

22

chapter one

be other than what it was. The contingent construction of a national language would have been impossible without the foil of dialect. Dialect was doomed to be subsidiary in this historical process, but neither could it be easily discarded, abandoned, or abolished. Late Qing: Lao Naixuan’s Simplified Script and Zhang Taiyan’s New Dialect Beginning in the late Qing period, a strong belief grew that a major factor for China’s purported backwardness and weakness was the traditional Chinese writing system. Unlike the phonetic writing systems of Western countries and Japan, the Chinese system of ideographic characters was believed to create a vast gap between speech and writing, structurally inconsistent with the conditions of modernity. Because of the difficulty of mastering the script, the Chinese writing system was perceived to thwart mass literacy and the transmission of any form of modern learning, such as math, science, chemistry, engineering, and Western medicine. Consistency between speech and writing (yanwenyizhi 言文一致), also formulated as zihuayilü 字话一律 (consistency between the written character and speech) or Huang Zunxian’s 黄遵宪 woshou xie wukou 我手写 吾口 (my hand writes what I speak), became the watchword of the universal modern language movement.2 Late Qing script reformers devoted themselves to transcribing daily speech into writing, often using scientific methods. Fangyan, as the living everyday language, became a central subject and entry point for the late Qing reformers. The very first phonetic scheme composed by a Chinese in the late Qing was the work of Lu Ganzhang 卢贛章, a Fujian Xiamen native: A Primer at a Glance: Chinese New Phonetic Script in the Amoy Dialect (Yimu liaoran chujie: Zhongguo qieyin xinzi xia qiang 一目了然初阶：中国切音新字厦腔, 1892).3 Lu devised

2 Chien-hsin Tsai mistakenly thought that the Chinese intellectuals’ initial efforts to unify spoken and written languages did not emerge until the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Tsai, “Issues and Controversies,” in Sinophone Studies, 21. 3 Before Chinese people began to devise phonetic scripts, Western missionaries had designed romanized scripts for dialects spoken in southeastern coastal provinces to aid in proselytization. See John DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 32; DeFrancis, The Chinese Language, 241. These scripts had a clear influence on many late Qing script reformers, including Lu Ganzhang. See Elisabeth Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 1895–1919 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 95–96. Lu’s scheme was inspired by, yet at the same time a reaction to, the use of Church Romanization for the Amoy dialect (or huayinzi 话音字) in Xiamen.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 23

a system of fifty-five symbols, largely derived from Latin alphabets, to facilitate learning, reading, and writing the Min fangyans, mainly in Xiamen, Zhangzhou, and Quanzhou. According to Elisabeth Kaske, twentynine phonetic schemes were devised between 1892 and 1910, the majority of which were used to transcribe dialects or the creator’s mother tongue.4 The fangyans transcribed included Southern Min (Xiamen, Quanzhou, Zhangzhou), Fuzhou Min, Changzhou Wu, Wenzhou Wu, Suzhou Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, Beijing Mandarin, Hebei Mandarin, Tianjin Mandarin, and Nanjing Mandarin, among others. From the start, the transcription projects were governed by conflicting motives. On the one hand, members of the early phoneticization movement recognized that literacy was the key to achieving modernity, and that the swiftest way to achieve literacy was to devise and promulgate dialect scripts.5 On the other hand, the inventors of transcription systems anticipated a moment when China, as a modern nation-state, would require a unified language in order to transcend locality. Thus, dialect scripts would eventually give way to a national script. In the preface to his 1892 book, Lu Ganzhang proposed designating a standard language for nationwide communication, which in his view should be Nanjing Mandarin. In his script, he actually included ten symbols that represented sounds in fang­ yans other than the Southern Min fangyans.6 Wang Bingyao 王炳耀, the creator of Pinyin Zipu 拼音字谱 (1897), also had a national vision. His scheme was mainly based on Eastern Cantonese, his native tongue. But he also designed symbols for Northern Mandarin, Chaozhou Min, and Hakka. His ambition was not only to provide an alphabet for every dialect in China, but ultimately to unify the Chinese through the use of Mandarin.7 The interplay between dialect transcription and language unification in the late Qing may have been best articulated by Lao Naixuan, who issued his “Simplified Script” systems in 1906 and 1907. Lao followed Wang Zhao’s 王照 “Mandarin alphabet” (guanhua zimu 官话字母, 1900) for Beijing Mandarin, which he renamed jingyinpu 京音谱, and he devised three other scripts, ningyinpu 宁音谱, wuyinpu 吴音谱, and minguangpu 4 Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 93, 152–158. 5 Ibid., 133. 6 Li Jinxi 黎锦熙, Guoyu yundong shigang 国语运动史纲 [A history of the national language movement] (Beijing: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 2011), 92; Ni Haishu 倪海曙, Qingmo hanyu pinyin yundong biannianshi 清末汉语拼音运动编年史 [A chronological history of the late Qing movement for a phonographic script] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1959), 25. 7 Ni Haishu, Qingmo hanyu pinyin yundong biannianshi, 57–58.

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闽广谱, based respectively on Nanjing Mandarin, Suzhou Wu, and Cantonese. In 1907, Lao compiled the four scripts into the “Complete Simplified Script” (jianzi quanpu 简字全谱), which he hoped would suffice to represent all the dialects spoken in China and thus “unify the Chinese language nationwide.”8 Lao stressed a dialectical relationship between the diverse fangyans and a unified national language, emphasizing national literacy—in any dialect—as the key to achieving a national language. He stated in his prefaces to the Ningyinpu and Wuyinpu: Both language unification and simplified writing are the most urgent agendas in today’s China. However, to achieve language unification, one has to start by basing it upon simplified writing. The Japanese first had a kana system before they formed a unified language. Later on, after they established a national language course (in schools), people all over the nation could understand the Tokyo dialect, since they had a simplified (phonetic) script as the basis. Now I have added some initials and finals to the basic alphabet of Northern Mandarin to better represent the sounds in the South. This seems to be the opposite of language unification. However, the advantage of the simple symbols is that they are based on sound. As long as you grasp the phonetic system (in your native tongue), it’ll be very easy to learn Mandarin. This is what I call “a seemingly antagonistic but actually complicit relationship.”9

Previous scholarship on Lao Naixuan has paid insufficient attention to the relationship between his script systems and the goal of language unification. For example, John DeFrancis acknowledges that Lao’s ultimate objective was the establishment of a national language, but he highlights the divisive effects of Lao’s dialect scripts and argues that they were responsible for his failure to achieve linguistic and political unity.10 Elisabeth Kaske, on the one hand, rightly recognizes that Lao “always emphasized that learning the dialect script was only a preliminary stage and the final goal was to popularize the Beijing dialect.”11 But she unconvincingly argues that literacy education was still his major concern and that the idea of a national language unification “was not born from inside the script reform movement,” but was “brought up from outside.”12 Jing Tsu, similar to DeFrancis, attributes the ineffectiveness of ­phoneticization

  8 Lao Naixuan, Jianzi pulu 简字谱录 [A complete volume of the simplified scripts] (Beijing: Wenzi gaige chubanshe, 1957), 275.   9 Ibid., 8 and 78. 10 DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China, 53–54. 11  Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 147. 12 Ibid., 149.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 25

schemes to “their focus on the primacy of dialectal literacy before national standardization.”13 Although she singles Lao out from other late Qing script inventors and recognizes that Lao’s phoneticization of native tones “already implies a form of standard registration,” she does not delve further. It is important to note that Lao’s script system was later highly praised by Li Jinxi, the leading figure of the Chinese national language movement and the author of the authoritative book Guoyu yundong shigang (A history of the national language movement, 1934).14 Li draws a distinction between Lao (and Wang Zhao) and the earlier phonetic script reform pioneers represented by Lu Ganzhang: the latter did not have a clear idea of national language unification, but the former did. In Li’s view, Lao’s scheme had successfully resolved the tension between national language and local languages. Moreover, a complete collection of Lao’s simplified scripts, Jianzi pulu 简字谱录 (A complete volume of the simplified scripts), was (re)printed in 1957, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) made massive efforts to popularize the standard Putonghua Mandarin. In the preface, the editor(s) claimed that Lao’s idea of yin nan gui bei 引南归北 (to gradually introduce southerners to the official northern language without coercion), rather than qiang nan jiu bei 强南就北 (to force the south to follow the north), was consistent with the national language policy, which emphasized the relationship between the dialects and Putonghua; indeed, Lao’s scheme for promoting Beijing Mandarin in the south would prove to be a successful model for the CCP’s popularization of Putonghua. Further evidence for Lao’s vision of dialect literacy leading to a national language lies in the details of his system. First, Lao took Jingyinpu, or the Beijing Mandarin script, as the basis for developing other dialect scripts, reflecting his desire to see Beijing Mandarin become the nation language. The Jingyinpu alphabet contained symbols to represent fifty initials, twelve finals, and four tones. Ningyinpu added ten symbols—six initials, three finals, and one “entering tone” (rusheng 入声)—to the Jingyinpu alphabet; Wuy­ inpu added seven initials, three finals, and a symbol for “voiced sound” (zhuoyin 浊音) to Ningyinpu; and Minguangpu added twenty initials and two finals to Wuyinpu. The Beijing Mandarin system was the foundation of Lao’s dialect scripts and formed the core of the other three systems.

13 Jing Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 41. 14 Li Jinxi, Guoyu yundong shigang, 45.

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For Lao, unity with Beijing Mandarin was the goal, while the approach was dialect script. Second, Lao never intended to design a transcription system for each individual dialect; instead, he divided the Chinese dialects into four linguistic “macro-regions” (to borrow G. William Skinner’s term). The Ning­ yinpu alphabet represented the various dialects administered in the Ning and Anhui prefectures in the late Qing period. Wuyinpu covered the dialects in Su prefecture and Zhejiang province. Minguangpu transcribed the dialects in and around the Min and Cantonese areas, and Jingyinpu accommodated not only the dialects of north China (Beijing, Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, Henan, Shaanxi, and Gansu) and northeastern China, but also those in the vast regions of middle China and southeastern China (Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Sichuan, Guangxi, Yunnan, and Guizhou).15 Lao’s strategy was to integrate the diverse dialects nationwide into four “mass languages”—what Li refers to as fangyan dazhongyu 方言大众语—and then to consolidate these four regional dominant dialects with Beijing Mandarin.16 As a veteran philologist, Lao was certainly aware of the differences within each macro-region.17 He endowed his system with a certain flexibility and elasticity, but he clearly stated that each macroregion should adopt as a standard its dominant dialect, or regional koine. For example, to illustrate the Wuyinpu system, Lao compared his native tongue, Zhejiang Tongxiang 浙江桐乡 Wu, with the standard Suzhou Wu dialect: although the people in his hometown pronounced xu as xi, they would have to use xu to spell out xue 靴.18 Other dialects in the same dialect group would be subject to similar rules. Accommodations, distortions, and compromises would abound and be more prominent if a dialect were to be represented with the system of a different (sub-)dialect group, such as the representation of Hunan Xiang with the Jingyinpu script or Min with the Cantonese-based Minguangpu script, for example. Thus, as Tsu discerns, the learners had already undergone a prior transformation as they had to relearn their mother tongue when subscribing to the system.19 Lao’s description of how the four transcription systems should be applied

15 Lao Naixuan, Jianzi pulu, 313. 16 According to Li Jinxi, Lao interpreted dazhongyu (mass language) as referring to diverse dialects, which is different from many leftist intellectuals’ definition of dazhongyu in the 1930s. See Li Jinxi, Guoyu yundong shigang, 10. 17 Lao Naixuan, Jianzi pulu, 276–277. 18 Ibid., 158. 19 Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, 45.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 27

indicates that for him, the establishment of a national language took priority over the accurate representation of local speech in writing. Nevertheless, although Lao’s system subordinated dialect schemes to the imperative of nationalization, it was not appreciated by his nationalist peers. In 1913, the Conference on the Unification of Reading Pronunciation (Duyin tongyihui 读音统一会), organized by the Ministry of Education of the new Republic of China, adopted a scheme called Zhuyin Zimu 注音 字母 (phonetic symbols), which was based on a phonetic system originally designed by Zhang Taiyan (or Zhang Binglin 章炳麟). Zhang’s system in turn was based on a reformed fanqie 反切 system (the traditional Chinese method of phonetic annotation), and its phonology represented the standard of the rhyme books of the tenth and eleventh centuries.20 Although it was not based on any contemporary dialect, the system was built upon Zhang’s staunch belief in “the totality of dialects” and the historical unity of Chinese linguistic diversity.21 Zhang presented this system as an aid to learning Chinese characters in his famous article, “A Rebuttal to the Proposal for the Adoption of Esperanto in China” (Bo Zhongguo yong wanguo xinyu shuo 驳中国用万国新语说, 1908), which was directed against the Chinese editors of the Paris-based student journal New Century Weekly (Xin Shiji 新世纪). As the leading figure of the National Essence movement, Zhang firmly viewed the Chinese language and script, or more specifically the Han ethnic language and script, as the most important of the three defining features of Chinese cultural and national identity.22 In the article, he argued that China should be unified through the Chinese language, which cannot be replaced by Esperanto, an artificial language based on European languages and thus essentially Eurocentric. Zhang disputed the dominant belief, held by Esperanto advocates and phonetic script reformers alike, that the Chinese characters were difficult to learn and an obstacle to modernity and education. He insisted that the ideographic Chinese writing system cannot be abolished; transcending time and space, Chinese characters are the unifying force for national unity. Defending the Chinese dialects from the Esperanto advocates’ charge that they undermined Chinese unity, Zhang emphasized the common ancestry

20 Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 384. 21  Ibid. 22 According to Zhang, besides Han language and writing, the other two features of national essence are the legal and bureaucratic systems and the loyal deeds of ancient heroes. See Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 241.

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and inherent unity of the seemingly fragmented and variegated Chinese dialects. Therefore, dialect or regional speech assumed an important role in Zhang’s conceptualization of the continual historical unity of the Chinese language, and more fundamentally, the unity of Chinese national culture and the Chinese nation. He argued his case most thoroughly in his scholarly work New Dialect, which was first serialized in a journal in 1907 and 1908 and published as a book in 1909. In his book, Zhang attempted to discover the etymological connections among contemporary dialects and thereby find the root of the national language.23 He traced the origin of 370 words and tried to demonstrate that regional dialects preserved ancient words identified in Han dynasty dictionaries and references such as Xu Shen’s 许慎 Shuowen Jiezi 说文解 字, the children’s primer San Cang 三仓, the semantic glossary Er Ya 尔雅, and Yang Xiong’s Fangyan. Zhang believed that every word has an origin, a root word; he also believed that language evolves from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the single to the multiple, from the simple to the complicated, all of them revolving around the same root.24 Developing and redefining traditional philological notions such as shuangsheng dieyun 双声叠韵 (the same initials or finals of a two-syllable word, similar to alliteration), jiajie 假借 (phonetic borrowing, redefined by Zhang as “the creation of a new character for conveying the extended meaning of another one”), and zhuanzhu 转注 (synonyms, redefined by Zhang as “the extended meaning of one and the same character-word”), Zhang proposed a series of terms and notions such as “sound shift” (­tongzhuan 通 转, yishengzhizhuan 一声之转), “extension” (ziru 孳乳), and “variation” (biantong 变通 or bianyi 变异) to describe the phonetic and semantic changes of words and thus explain the affinity and kinship of the various Chinese dialects.25 Instead of treating dialects as an obstacle to unification, Zhang legitimized their existence. All contemporary dialects 23 Zhang explicitly used guoyu (national language) when he declared the importance and urgency of this project in the preface to his New Dialect. See Zhang Taiyan, Xin fang­ yan: [11 juan] 新方言: 11卷 [New Dialect: 11 volumes] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2002), 178. 24 According to Kaske, Zhang’s historical view of language evolution was influenced both by late Qing philology and Western comparative linguistics, particularly Herbert Spencer’s theory of language progress. See Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Edu­ cation, 366. 25 Ibid., 362. Zhang’s philological methodology, which was consistent with his “national essence” theory, received a mixed response from linguists. For an overview of the responses, see Sun Bi 孙毕, Zhang Taiyan “Xin Fangyan” yanjiu 章太炎《新方言》研究 [A study of Zhang Taiyan’s New Dialect] (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2006), 23–27.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 29

are etymologically related and thus testify to the underlying unity of the Chinese language. In Kaske’s words, Zhang constructed a nation through etymology: “he created a myth of the nation by constructing an uninterrupted linguistic continuum” of the Chinese language and locating it in the distant past.26 Zhang argued that dialect was the very language to embody the principle of “unity between speech and writing.” As he claimed in 1907: Mediocre men often talk of taking the “consistency of speech and writing” as a norm and establishing a written style that is close to the genre of novels and epic stories. Some are writing in pure vernacular written Chinese (baihua), and if they occasionally use some cultured and tempered expressions these are mostly set phrases and idioms invented by the literati in the Tang and Song dynasties. Why not return to dialects, which themselves show no evidence of the difference between speech and writing and also are deeply embedded with ancient meanings (of the Zhou dynasty and Han dynasty)? What’s the point of considering the language of the Tang and Song Confucians as a norm?27

To Zhang, the concept of the “unity between speech and writing” was not synchronic but diachronic: the sound of contemporary dialects corresponds to historical writing in the Han dynasty or earlier times. More importantly, the premise of Zhang and the National Essence group was that “there is indeed a national essence to be recovered from centuries of political censorship under Confucianism since the Han dynasty.”28 They believed that “Han identity or ancient philosophies outside the Confucian canon made up the intransigent essence of the Chinese.”29 Local language, without mediation, is directly linked with this “intransigent part” of the Chinese essence. In this way, dialect is associated with the discourse of anti-Confucianism, a significant component in Zhang’s intellectual thought. This association became more explicit in the May Fourth movement, particularly in the folk song collection movement, whose major advocates included some of Zhang’s students, such as Zhou Zuoren and Qian Xuantong: the low, vulgar folk songs and folk culture transmitted in

26 Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 366. 27 Zhang Taiyan, “Lun hanzi tongyihui” 论汉字统一会 [Debate with the Association for the Unification of the Chinese Characters], in Zhang Taiyan quanji 章太炎全集 [The complete collection of Zhang Taiyan], vol. 4 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1982), 320. The English translation is mainly based on Kaske’s book, with some revisions. Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 377. 28 Liu, Translingual Practice, 244. 29 Ibid., 251.

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dialect served as the antithesis of the literary tradition of Confucianism, the high, refined, elite, aristocratic literature usually written in esoteric classical Chinese. Peng Chunling rightly points out that Zhang used dialect as a theoretical basis to challenge westernizing approaches to language reform, which were heavily influenced by Japan and Europe.30 During the period when he was writing and publishing New Dialect, Zhang debated not only with Esperanto advocates based in Paris, but also with the Association for the Unification of Chinese Characters (Hanzi tongyihui 汉字统一会), established by the Japanese educator Izawa Shuji in 1907. The association later published a dictionary containing a limited glossary of 6,000 characters that are common to the three East Asian countries: China, Japan, and Korea. According to Kaske, the true intention of the association was to use Chinese characters to facilitate Japanese control of East Asia, a case of linguistic imperialism.31 Zhang particularly opposed limiting the number of Chinese characters, which would essentially subjugate speech to writing and thus stifle the potential of the former to resist the latter and its associated repression and autocracy.32 In both debates, Zhang heaped contempt on the blind worship of the West and Japan and boasted of the superiority of Chinese culture and civilization. According to Lydia Liu, at a time of overwhelming dominance by the West, Zhang exhibited a rare insight that “cultural difference cannot adequately be grasped within the Enlightenment framework of power and domination.”33 It is true that Zhang tried to “rehabilitate” dialect to construct a Chinese cultural identity that could resist Western dominance and Western-oriented modernity, yet the conflicting notions of national identity that Zhang and the National Essence group drew from Japanese and Western sources belie “a feeling of crisis concerning the status of Chinese racial and cultural identity in a modern world they saw as defined by competing nation-states.”34 Zhang’s intellectual dilemma finds its analogy in contemporary China in

30 Peng Chunling 彭春凌, “Yi ‘yifan fanyan’ dikang ‘hanzi tongyi’ yu ‘wanguo xinyu’: Zhang Taiyan guanyu yuyan wenzi wenti de lunzheng (1906–1911)” 以“一返方言” 抵抗“汉字统一”与“万国新语”——章太炎关于语言文字问题的论争 (1906– 1911) [Using the “return to dialect” to oppose “unifying Chinese characters” and Esperanto: Zhang Taiyan’s debates about language issues, 1906–1911], Jindaishi yanjiu 近代 史研究 [Modern Chinese history studies] 2 (2008): 65–82. 31  Kaske, The Politics of Language in Chinese Education, 376. 32 Peng Chunling, “Yi ‘yifan fanyan’ dikang ‘hanzi tongyi’ yu ‘wanguo xinyu,’ ” 72. 33 Liu, Translingual Practice, 245–246. 34 Ibid., 242.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 31

the context of globalization. In our dramatically globalized world, there is a rising anxiety of placelessness. The local media in contemporary China draw on regional, traditional resources to define a local community that can resist globalization, yet “the local”—constructed by making paradoxical use of the Internet and other global resources—may operate within the logic of “the global,” as the ensuing chapters will illustrate. Advocating Dialect and Dialect Literature during the May Fourth Period The New Culture movement (xinwenhua yundong 新文化运动) is usually regarded as a literary revolution advocating that a new Chinese national literature be written in the vernacular language (baihua) instead of the classical language (wenyanwen 文言文). Hu Shi, the leader of the vernacular movement, argued that wenyanwen, which had long been divorced from any spoken language, was primarily a visual language; by contrast, baihua, with its closer ties to speech, was a written language combining visuality and aurality. Hu viewed sound as an important feature that distinguishes vernacular literature from classical literature.35 In his words, “the characters of Classical Chinese are readable but not listenable, yet the characters of vernacular Chinese are readable, speakable, and listenable.”36 Characterizing the classical writing style as dead, passé, and elite implicitly aligns the “vernacular” with the living tongue, everyday speech, and colloquial language—“the vulgar jargon of the people.”37 Therefore, the regional, vernacular dialect was naturally included in this definition, posited as the antithesis of the classical language. Nevertheless, it is commonly recognized that the New Culture movement ended up replacing one written form largely with another written form. As Wang Hui 汪晖 points out, the movement advocated the use of the vernacular primarily as a written language, while drawing on oral elements;38 the “oralization” (kouyuhua 口语化) of vernacular Chinese mostly emphasized grammar 35 Wu Xiaofeng 吴晓峰, Guoyu yundong yu wenxue geming 国语运动与文学革命 [National language movement and literary revolution] (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chu­ banshe, 2008), 48. 36 Hu Shi, Hu Shi koushu zizhuan 胡适口述自传 [Hu Shi’s oral autobiography] (Taibei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 148. 37 Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance: The Haskell Lectures, 1933, 2nd ed. (New York: Paragon Books, 1963), 49. 38 Wang Hui, “Local Forms, Vernacular Dialects, and the War of Resistance against Japan: The ‘national forms’ Debate,” trans. Chris Berry, in Wang Hui, The Politics of Imag­ ining Asia, ed. Theodore Hunters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 117.

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and vocabulary, and paid less attention to phonology and ­pronunciation.39 Similarly, Jing Tsu argues that the May Fourth movement reduced the late Qing “aspiration to explore the phonics of dialectal speech” and “the polyphonic possibilities of sound” to a choice between two written, literary languages.40 Tsu valorizes the late Qing reformers, but she fails to recognize that the project of dialect phoneticization ultimately subjugates speech to writing. As Wang Hui finds, “the modern language movement, with written and spoken forms consistent with one another as its defining feature, did not take existing spoken language as the basis for the reform of written language, but produced a new, phonetically driven language that included spoken and written components.”41 In this light, the late Qing reformers were no different from the May Fourth intellectuals; none could really achieve the “unity of speech and writing” or reverse the hierarchy between speech and writing. Downplaying Hu Shi’s valuable explorations of dialect and dialect literature, Tsu comments cursorily, “Hu referred to the use of language in Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber as examples of vernacular writing worthy of emulation, but glossed over the fact that the former used the Shandong dialect and the latter used Beijing colloquialisms.”42 In fact, Hu indicated the specific dialects used in these novels and other Ming- or Qing-period vernacular novels on several occasions, for example, in his 1933 speech.43 Moreover, it is true that Hu’s main concern was indeed a written language, or more specifically, a literary written vernacular language. However, identifying dialect exclusively as a sound to be represented, Tsu seems to dismiss Hu Shi and others’ exploration of dialect and their serious consideration of the contribution of dialect and dialect literature to the construction of the then-new national language and its literature, more in terms of vocabulary and the already materialized sound than in terms of the technical issue of dialect phoneticization. As is well known, Hu Shi proposed his famous dictum for “Literature in the National Language, and the National Language in Literature” (guoyu de wenxue, wenxue de guoyu 国语的文学, 文学的国语) in his influential article “A Constructive Revolution in Chinese literature” (“Jianshe de wenxue geminglun” 建设的文学革命论) in 1918. According to Li Jinxi, 39 Ibid., 116. 40 Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, 33. 41  Wang Hui, “Local Forms,” 133. 42 Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, 33. 43 Hu, The Chinese Renaissance, 60.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 33

Hu’s article signified the convergence between the national language movement and the literary revolution.44 Yet unlike most of his contemporary national-language advocates, Hu Shi argued that to establish a national language, it was first necessary to develop a national literary language which in turn required the cultivation of a national-language literature, not vice versa. But where would such a national-language literature (guoyu wenxue) come from? Hu Shi argued that it would originate in dialect literature ( fangyan wenxue). He claimed, To tell the truth, the national language is nonetheless the dialect that eventually won the competition. The national-language literature of today was merely a dialect literature many years ago. Precisely because the people at that time were willing and dared to write literature in dialect, we have accumulated quite a lot of living literature in the past one thousand years. . . . The national-language literature came from dialect literature, and must still keep seeking new material, new blood, and new life from dialect literature.45

In the conception of Hu Shi, either the national-language literature or the national language should be plural, multi-accented, and open-ended, rather than uni-accented, isolated, or closed. A close examination of his 1933 lecture in English reveals that throughout he referred not to a single “Mandarin dialect” but to “the Mandarin dialects” that “form the basis of the national language.”46 Moreover, on several occasions he even argued that it was “quite unnecessary” to standardize the national language.47 Without in-depth research, some scholars make the sweeping assumption that because the mission of the May Fourth movement was to establish a national language and national-language literature, its ensuing critique and negation of dialect was unavoidable. For example, D. L. Holm unwarrantedly makes a general argument that the early proponents of baihua “attacked pre-modern vernacular and the regional vernaculars of popular

44 Li Jinxi, Guoyu yundong shigang, 136. 45 Hu Shi, preface to Wuge jiaji 吴歌甲集 [A collection of 100 Wu folksongs], ed. Gu Jie­ gang 顾颉刚 (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1926; reprint, 1990), 1–2. Hu expressed a similar opinion earlier in 1918: “the more the dialect literature [is drawn upon], the more useful materials can be channeled into national-language literature, and the richer the content and livelier the spirit will become.” In Hu Shi, “Da Huang Jueseng jun ‘zhezhong de wenxue gexin lun,’ ” 答黄觉僧君“折衷的文学革新论” [A reply to Mr. Huang Jueseng about “A compromised theory on the literary revolution”], originally published in New Youth (Xin qingnian 新青年) 5.3 (September 15, 1918), in Hu Shi wenji 胡适文集 [Collected Essays of Hu Shi], vol. 2 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1998), 91. 46 Hu Shih, The Chinese Renaissance, 59. 47 Ibid., 57.

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fiction.”48 Similarly, Snow argues that “many proponents of Baihua attacked use of regional dialects,” although he excludes Hu Shi and Qian Xuantong in the footnote.49 In fact, many other prominent May Fourth intellectuals besides Hu Shi voiced their positive opinions on dialect and dialect literature. Liu Fu emphasized the regionality of dialect and its distinctive effect in conveying a “regional spirit” (diyu shenwei 地域神味).50 He also identified dialect as the language one learned from one’s mother, the language that is most intimate, most affectionate, and the one in which one can express the most genuine feelings. He observed an interesting inverse relationship between dialect literature and its popularity: the more affectionate and expressive a language is, the more restricted the circulation of artistic work in that language would be.51 Similar to Liu, Yu Pingbo 俞平伯 also identified dialect as the endowed “mother tongue” (mushe 母舌), which is reminiscent of Jing Tsu’s term “linguistic nativity.”52 Yu equated the lack of competence in one’s native tongue with the lack of a sense of belonging, a “hometownlessness,” a nonlocatable subjectivity. To a degree, he viewed Hu Shi’s slogan of guoyu de wenxue, wenxue de guoyu as just an ideal; regarding the national language as one single, unified language, he argued that the real living, colloquial dialects, due to their unruly heteroglossia, were hardly reducible to the totality of the national language and national literature. Responding to Yu, Qian Xuantong, an avid advocate of the national language, argued that promoting dialect did not at all run counter to the promotion of the national language, which, unlike Yu’s definition, should be based on the living Beijing dialect and should integrate some elements from other dialects, foreign languages, and classical Chinese. So dialect was an important component of the national language. Similarly, dialect literature was an important source for constructing a national literature: “the more developed the dialect literature, the more perfect the national literature will be.”53 48 D. L. Holm, “Local Color and Popularization in the Literature of the Wartime Border Regions,” Modern Chinese Literature 2.1 (1986): 7. 49 Snow, Cantonese as Written Language, 104. 50 Liu Fu, “Du Haishanghua liezhuan” 读《海上花列传》[preface to Lives of Shang­ hai Flowers], 1925, in Han Bangqing 韩邦庆, Haishanghua liezhuan 海上花列传 [Lives of Shanghai flowers] (Taibei: Tianyi chubanshe, 1974), 25–27. 51  Liu Fu, “Wa fu ji xu”《瓦釜集》序 [Preface to the Collection of an unworthy man’s work], originally published in Yu si 语丝 75 (1926), cited from Yan Tonglin 颜同林, ­Fangyan yu zhongguo xiandai xinshi 方言与中国现代新诗 [Dialect and the Chinese modern new poetry] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2008), 107. 52 Yu Pingbo, preface to Wuge jiaji, 2. For the term “linguistic nativity” and its resistance to national-language writing, see Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, 3–8. 53 Qian Xuantong, preface to Wuge jiaji, 11.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 35

According to Hu Shi, three dialects had already produced excellent literature: Beijing Mandarin, Suzhou Wu, and Guangzhou Cantonese. In addition, he opined that next to Beijing-Mandarin literature, Wu literature is “the most influential and promising dialect literature.”54 Hu was an enthusiastic advocate of Wu dialect literature. He highly appreciated the late Qing courtesan novel Lives of Shanghai Flowers (Haishanghua liezhuan 海上花列传), by Han Bangqing 韩邦庆 (1856–1894), in which the dialogues were rendered in Suzhou Wu.55 Besides praising and admiring Han’s narrative aesthetic of interruption and his artistic prowess in character portrayal, Hu viewed Han’s biggest contribution to literature as his unprecedented, pioneering use of Suzhou Wu.56 He emphasized the unparalleled effects of using dialect to enhance character delineation. “The reason why dialect literature is so valuable is because dialect can best convey spirit (shenli 神理). The vernacular language is indeed much superior to classical Chinese, but it is inferior to dialect for vividly conveying the speaker’s spirit and tones. The characters in classical literature are dead people; the characters in Mandarin vernacular are living but pretentious persons; the characters in local languages are living and natural persons.”57 Moreover, Hu highlighted Han’s self-conscious ambition to write a novel in the Wu language to compete with Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong lou meng 红楼梦), largely written in Beijing Mandarin. He praised Han’s pioneering, innovative undertaking as “an intentional proposal, a planned literary revolution” to challenge the vernacular tradition in northern Mandarin languages.58 In this sense, Hu and the vernacular movement did not intend to “banish all the southern dialects, leaving behind an ‘aphasic South,’ or a south without language,” as wrongly charged by Kim Chew Ng 黄锦树, a Malaysian Chinese writer who is cited with approval in Tsu’s book.59 On the one hand, Hu, himself a southerner, admitted as a 54 Hu Shi, preface to Wuge jiaji, 4–5. 55 The book was translated into English first by Eileen Chang and revised by Eva Hung as The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 56 Alexander Des Forges argues that the use of the Wu dialect in Han Bangqing’s novel and other early Shanghai novels created “the sense of a distinctive urban milieu” and of modernity. See his book, Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 33. 57 Hu Shi, “Haishanghua liezhuan xu”《海上花列传》序 [preface to Lives of Shanghai Flowers], 1926, in Han Bangqing, Haishanghua liezhuan, 29. 58 Ibid., 29. Similarly, Forges finds in Lives of Shanghai Flowers and other early Shang­ hai fiction “an abstracted Wu regional identity centered on Suzhou that is always already counterposed against a northern, ‘national’ mode of speech and writing.” See Forges, Medi­ asphere Shanghai, 36. 59 Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, 196.

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­ istorical fact that the vernacular written literary language is traditionally h based on the northern Mandarin dialects.60 On the other hand, he by no means discouraged writing in the southern, non-Mandarin dialects and thus exacerbated the north-south divide in the modern vernacular. In addition to revisiting the earlier excellent dialect literature, Hu highly applauded the contemporary collection Wuge Jiaji 吴歌甲集 (A collection of 100 Wu folk songs), edited by his student Gu Jiegang in 1926. He praised particularly the children’s songs as most geographically “authentic” (daodi 道地).61 As is well known, Gu Jiegang, Zhou Zuoren, and Liu Fu were the pioneers of the folk song collection movement, which was initiated in 1918. Chang-tai Hung’s Going to the People: Chinese Intel­ lectuals and Folk Literature, 1918–1937 may be the only book-length study of this movement in English. Noting the intrinsic relationship between folk song and dialect, Hung devotes one chapter to “dialect literature.” He summarizes the various serious attempts to collect and study both dialect folk songs and experiments in writing poetry in the new vernacular during the period: Liu Fu’s pioneering collection of twenty boat songs from his hometown and his own vernacular poems in Wafuji 瓦釜集 (Collection of an unworthy man’s work), which imitated the tonal pattern of the folk songs of his hometown, sijutou shan’ge (四句头山歌, folk song in fourline verse), both in Jiangyin 江阴 Wu; Dong Zuobin’s 董作宾 comparative study of the song “Seeing Her” (“Kanjian ta” 看见她) in different dialect versions; Gu’s carefully annotated Wuge Jiaji, which “was perhaps the ­finest [study] on dialect literature . . . till that time”;62 the increasing interest in Feng Menglong’s 冯梦龙 rediscovered Mountain Songs (Shan ge 山歌), a collection of folk songs from the Wu region in the Ming dynasty, which Feng tried hard to “record in a language as close as possible to local Suzhou dialect”;63 and the reiterated admiration of other pioneers in the late Qing such as Huang Zunxian, who collected fifteen mountain songs in his native Hakka, and Zhao Ziyong 招子庸, who imitated local tunes and created the popular genre Yue’ou (粤讴, Cantonese love songs).64 60 Tsu mistakenly thought that Hu did not admit this until 1958. As a matter of fact, Hu explicitly stated in English as early as 1933 that the Mandarin dialects form the basis of the national language. See Hu Shih, Chinese Renaissance, 59. 61  Hu Shi, preface to Wuge jiaji, 5. 62 Chang-tai Hung, Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature 1918– 1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 64. 63 Ibid., 26. 64 Hung also briefly discussed the influence of folk song on the new literature, par­ ticularly the new vernacular poetry (ibid., 59–62). But his approach is mainly historical.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 37

Moreover, Hung notices that although “dialect literature” as a term was first proposed (by Hu Shi), widely used, and enthusiastically discussed at that time, the concept is “by no means clear.”65 He raises some critical questions that the May Fourth intellectuals failed to address: “What are some of the major characteristics of a dialect, or regional literature? Is dialect the only determining factor in the formation of a distinct local literature? What is the exact relationship between a literature and its locality?” It is true that Hu Shi may not have systematically theorized dialect literature itself, as he was more concerned about the role played by dialect literature as a vernacular literature in the construction of the new national literature. But Hu Shi did have an answer for the second question Hung poses. Speaking of the Wu dialect novels, Hu highly praised Lives of Shanghai Flowers for the role he envisioned it would play in the construction of a new literature.66 But he explicitly stated that novels such as The Nine-tailed Turtle ( Jiuwei gui 九尾龟, 1906–1910) and Spring Dream in New China (Xinhua chunmeng ji 新华春梦记, 1916) were bad imitations of The Scholars (Rulin waishi 儒林外史, 1750) and could not be counted as new literature, although they used the vernacular (Suzhou Wu). Hu Shi drew parallels between the relationship between dialect literature and dialect to that between national-language literature and national language. He explicitly stated that the use of vernacular language was not the only criteria for the new vernacular literature, so it can be logically inferred that the use of dialect should not be the only defining feature for regional literature either.67 Edward Gunn cites abundant examples in contemporary Chinese literature to show that the use of local language was not uniform among writers of the same geography, literary movement, or narrative genre, “however much they confirmed a place for local language as a fundamental feature of their own experience.”68 In examining this complex phenomenon, he further finds that the decision to use Yan Tonglin more extensively examines the literary and aesthetic achievements of Liu ­Bannong’s new vernacular poems in Beijing Mandarin and Jiangyin Wu in his book, Fang­ yan yu zhongguo xiandai xinshi (102–116); he also treats the experiments of Xu Zhimo 徐志摩, Wen Yiduo 闻一多, and the Crescent Moon Society (xinyuepai 新月派) poets with dialect poems, or tubaishi 土白诗, in the 1920s (122–130), as well as the relationship between the folk song movement and the new vernacular poetry (207–225). 65 Hung, Going to the People, 64. 66 Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai, 162–163. 67 Hu Shi, “Jianshe de wenxue geminglun” 建设的文学革命论 [A constructive revolu­ tion in Chinese literature], in Hu Shi wenji 胡适文集 [Collected essays of Hu Shi], vol. 2 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1998), 52. 68 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 171.

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local language was “also a matter of genre, and increasingly of a particular concern to construct a social and cultural space, designated as marginal, from which to critique a center, consisting of dominant or metropolitan social formations and their cultures.”69 Hung discusses the important issue of folk songs and nationalism. After a brief comparison with the nationalistic folklore campaign initiated by Herder and the Grimm Brothers, who promulgated local folk songs as carriers of authentic national cultures, Hung argues that the rising interest in folklore and folk songs in China in the early 1920s, if not earlier, was closely related to a growth in nationalism. He cites Gu Jiegang and other intellectuals’ views on folk culture and nationalism—for example, that “folk literature could best represent the spirit of the nation,” “folksongs and children’s songs could portray vividly the distinctive national character,” and that folk songs and folk literature should be used to “reconstruct society, to save our nation.”70 Indeed, in their efforts to sinify the Chinese cinema, leftist filmmakers in the 1930s frequently rearranged and rewrote regional folk songs to signify Chineseness.71 It is also a common practice among contemporary Chinese rock musicians to appropriate indigenous regional folk music, folk tunes, and the musicality of local language (such as intonation) to represent a “national” Chinese music, as I will show in Chapter 6. But it is important to note that if a given folk song is usually sung in a dialect and circulates in a certain region, it can only embody part of the national spirit. Hu Shi talked about the importance of dialect literature in representing “part of the national spirit.”72 He argued that a work written in the national language would lose and obscure part of the national spirit. This is the paradox of folk song and nationalism: folk song in dialect can only represent part of the national spirit, yet a work in the national language would not represent the totality of the national spirit either. Arguing that “the nation is represented only in terms of the

69 Ibid. 70 Hung, Going to the People, 17. 71  A good example is the leftist classic Street Angel (Malu tianshi 马路天使, 1937), which features two Suzhou folk songs, “Song of Four Seasons” (“Siji ge” 四季歌) and “Songstress of the World” (“Tianya genü” 天涯歌女), rearranged by He Lüting 贺绿汀. The two songs were considered “hallmarks of Chineseness” by Yueh-yu Yeh in her article “Historiography and Sinification: Music in Chinese Cinema of the 1930s,” Cinema Journal 41.3 (2002): 88. 72 Hu Shi, “Guoyu yundong yu wenxue” 国语运动与文学 [The national-language movement and literature], originally given as a lecture on December 31, 1921, in Hu Shi xueshu wenji, 311.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 39

local,”73 Gunn problematizes the conventional reading of the play Bird Men (­Niaoren 鸟人, 1993) that would view Peking Opera and the subculture of bird-raising as an allegory of Chinese culture. A similar tension between the particular and the universal is also manifested in contemporary Chinese independent films, as I will discuss in Chapter 7. It is widely accepted that the folk song movement promoted modern dialectology in China. Zhou Zuoren’s 1923 article is often credited as the first to explicitly advocate dialect investigation in the folk song collection movement. Zhou described folk songs originally as the “poetry of dialects,” and maintained that a better grasp of dialects was essential for understanding folk songs thoroughly.74 Yet, similar to Hu Shi, Zhou mainly focused on the vocabulary and grammar of dialects that contributed to the national-language literature. He argued that regional dialects, along with classical lan­guage and foreign languages, can provide solutions to the shortcomings of the new national-language literature, in particular its “limited, inadequate vocabulary” and “loose, imprecise grammar structure.”75 For example, he thought the dialect word qinzui 亲嘴 expressed the sexuality of kissing better than the word jiewen 接吻, currently part of the national lexicon.76 According to Peng Chunlin, Zhou’s focus on the semantic vocabulary of dialect as a rich literary resource was closely related to his deep concern with the relationship between language and his “humane literature” (ren de wenxue 人的文学).77 Yet Zhou’s ensuing dialect studies diverged from his original proposal and mainly focused on the phonetics of dialects within the formal discipline of linguistics.78 73 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 114–115. 74 Zhou Zuoren, “Geyao yu fangyan diaocha” 歌谣与方言调查 [Folksongs and dialect investigation], Geyao 歌谣 [Folksongs] 31 (1923): 1. 75 Ibid., 3. 76 Zhou doubted the Chinese origin of the word jiewen, which is actually a SinoJapanese-European loanword (seppun in Japanese). He seems to have had a preference for using indigenous dialect words rather than foreign loan words to enrich the national language. 77 Peng Chunling 彭春凌, “Fendaoyangbiao de fangyan diaocha: Zhou Zuoren yu ‘Ge Yao’ shang de yichang lunzheng” 分道扬镳的方言调查：周作人与《歌谣》上的一场 论争 [Bifurcation on dialect investigation: A debate between Zhou Zuoren and the journal Folksongs], Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan 中国现代文学研究丛刊 [Modern Chinese Literature Studies] 1 (2008): 126–136. 78 In this sense, Shen Jianshi’s 沈兼士 article answering Zhou Zuoren’s call may have played a more important role than Zhou himself in promoting Chinese dialectology dur­ ing the folk song movement. See Shen Jianshi, “Jinhou yanjiu fangyan zhi xin qushi” 今后 研究方言之新趋势 [The new trends in studying dialect], December 1923, in Shen Jianshi Xueshu lunwenji 沈兼士学术论文集 [Collection of Shen Jianshi’s scholarly work] (Bei­ jing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1986), 42–49.

40

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In 1924, a “Dialect Investigation Society” (fangyan diaochahui 方言调 查会) was established at Beijing University, headed by Lin Yutang 林语 堂, a trained linguist. The society’s work was best represented by Zhao Yuanren’s (Yuenren Chao 赵元任) monograph Studies in the Modern Wu Dialects (Xiandai wuyu yanjiu 现代吴语研究, 1928), which laid the foundation of modern dialectology in China. Yet dialect investigation and the introduction of the so-called runyin 闰音 (literally meaning “redundant sound”) symbols, which were designed to denote dialect pronunciation as a way to help popularize the national pronunciation (guoyin 国音), became an integral part of the national language movement. Qian Xuantong defined the three most important connotations of the notion of a “national language” as national language unification, the investigation of dialectal phonetics ( fangyin 方音), and the design of a phonetic writing system.79 Despite the May Fourth intellectuals’ positive view of dialect literature in the new culture movement and the literary revolution, the diverse dialect pronunciations had to be subordinated to the imperative of unified nationalization in the national language movement. In 1928, the GR system, which was based on Beijing Mandarin and stressed national unity through script uniformity, was adopted as China’s official romanization system.80 Yet it was soon to be rivaled by Latinxua New Writing in the 1930s, which promoted dialectal romanization and argued for unity in diversity. The Ambiguous Attitude towards Dialect in the Mass Language Discussion and the Latinxua New Writing Movement The Latinxua phonetic script was originally developed around 1930 by the Chinese communist Qu Qiubai and Soviet linguists to reduce the illiteracy of the Chinese migrant workers in the far east region of the Soviet Union. As the workers were mostly from Shandong province, the system was originally based on the Shandong dialect. According to DeFrancis, besides dispensing with tone representation and advocating the strikingly politicized abolishment of Chinese characters, the Latinxua system also broke with 79 Qian Xuantong, “Yi gongli yiliusiba niansui zai ‘wu’ zi wei guoyu jiyuan yi” 以公历 一六四八年岁在“戊”子为国语纪元议 [Proposal to set 1648 as the beginning year of the national language movement], 1933, in Li Jinxi, Guoyu yundong shigang, 87–88. 80 Beijing Mandarin did not formally become the pronunciation standard for the national language until 1932, when the dictionary Guoyin Changyong Zihui 国音常用 字汇 [Vocabulary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use] was published. S. Robert ­Ramsey, The Languages of China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 10.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 41

the general Chinese approach to the problem of alphabetic writing with respect to dialects.81 Qu urged the adoption of separate romanization systems for separate dialects. As DeFrancis notes, this approach to dialects was regarded at that time as being fundamentally in conformity with the Soviet approach of federal nationalism, “nationalism which stressed unity in diversity,”82 and “with Lenin’s policy against the imposition of a single state language on peoples of different speech.”83 On the enduring issue of separate dialect scripts and a unified Chinese script, Qu seemed to “minimize the unifying power of a uniform script, whether phonetic or ideographic.”84 He thought things “other than linguistic factors [such as political unity] accounted for Chinese unity.”85 Proposing “a kind of linguistic federalism,”86 Qu argued for the legitimate existence of dialect scripts. “In the first place, if the various regional ‘dialects’ are very different from each other, then basically they cannot be forcibly unified but must be provided with several different scripts. In the second place, China now has a Putonghua (common language) which can serve as a general standard and can be used provisionally in creating a common script.”87 However, Qu’s attitude towards dialect became ambiguous and vague when it came to the relationship between dialect and Putonghua. Qu is often credited as “the first to popularize the use of the term Putonghua,”88 although he never got around to explaining what exactly it meant beyond its class associations. In his famous 1932 article, “The Question of Mass Literature and Art,” Qu harshly criticized the May Fourth vernacular movement, vociferously attacking baihua as a “new-style classical” language that was confined to small circles of Westernized bourgeois and intellectual classes (zhishi jieji 智识阶级) and held little appeal for ordinary people.89 He called for a new literary revolution that should “make use of the modern vernacular spoken by living Chinese when we write, especially the language spoken by the proletariat.”90 He argued that the

81  DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China, 94. 82 Ibid., 89. 83 Ibid., 96. 84 Ibid., 224. 85 Ibid., 224. 86 Ibid., 225. 87 Ibid., 94. 88 Ibid., 232. 89 Qu Qiubai, “The Question of Popular Literature and Art” (Dazhong wenyi de wenti 大众文艺的问题), trans. Paul Pickowicz, in Revolutionary Literature in China: An Anthol­ ogy, ed. John Berninghausen and Ted Huters (White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1976), 48. 90 Ibid., 49.

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genuine vernacular language was Putonghua, which was evolving from the proletariat’s language and now was emerging in major cities and modern factories. While Putonghua was associated with the new urban proletariat and working class, dialect, frequently identified as or juxtaposed with tuhua (土话, rustic patois, backward language), was explicitly linked with the rural peasant class; both terms were strongly charged with class ideology. As Qu articulated it, “the proletariat cannot be compared to the rural peasantry. The language of ‘rural folks’ is primitive and obscure.”91 Therefore, “it [Putonghua] contains aspects of a variety of local dialects while having eliminated the obscure localisms of these dialects, and it has been receptive to modern phraseology. Thus it [the proletariat] is creating a new technical language for modern scientific, artistic, and political usage”92 Here, dialect is both included and excluded. To serve an alternative form of modernity, the “backward” dialects of the peasant class, when presented as the antithesis of Putonghua, the speech of the “progressive” proletariat class, would have to be rejected. Implying an “anti-peasant bias of his Soviet Marxist sources,”93 Qu emphasized the defining role of the urban proletariat in “leading all the laboring people in the task of creating a new and rich modern Chinese literature,”94 or the revolutionary mass literature. It is only under this premise that Qu was willing to consider the occasional use of dialect in literature, noting that “at times it will be necessary to use the various local dialects in writing, and in the future perhaps a special literature for Guangdong, Fujian, and other places will be constructed.”95 This kind of ambiguous attitude towards the bearing of Putonghua on dialect continued in the debate, largely among leftist intellectuals, on mass language in 1934. Despite Qu Qiubai’s harsh criticism of the vernacular movement, in important respects the mass language movement is regarded as “an attempt to restage Hu Shi’s baihua movement,”96 and the phrase “mass language” is viewed as “an extension and refinement” of baihua language.97 On the one hand, these intellectuals largely agreed that similar to baihua, dazhongyu was posited against the dead classical 91  Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Holm, “Local Color and Popularization,” 8. 94 Qu Qiubai, “The Question of Popular Literature and Art,” 49. 95 Ibid. 96 Edward Gunn, Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 47. 97 DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China, 112.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 43

­ hinese and advocated as the new modern Chinese written language C developed from people’s spoken language. However, on the other hand, being more politically and ideologically charged than the May Fourth intellectuals, they regarded dazhongyu as superior to and more competent than baihua: while the latter was Europeanized, refined, and relegated to a small group of the bourgeois, the former was perceived as a language “owned by the masses, needed by the masses, and used by the masses.”98 Most of them also agreed that mass language was something new and as yet to be formed. Then the question of the place of local dialect in mass language arose. Wei Mengke 魏猛克 proposed to declare Putonghua, the common speech, the verbal standard of the written mass language. Emphasizing the communicative function of a common language, Wei opposed integrating dialect into Putonghua. Following the same class-based framework as Qu, Wei defined tuhua as a primitive language lacking progressive qualities.99 Similarly, Fo Lang 佛郎 regarded tuhua as an old, conservative form of speech imbued with feudalism. He particularly stated that local expletives—the most popular tuhua—were not important at all for building dazhongyu.100 Ni Lu 霓璐 added that the heterogeneous tuhua were hard to transcribe into writing, and thus ran counter to the establishment of a (written) mass language.101 However, Er Ye 耳耶 pointed out that Putonghua, as a nationally popularized language, was still in its early formative stage of development, and thus could not supply the entire lexicon of a mass language. Since the majority of the masses still spoke tuhua, Putonghua needed dialect to enrich its vocabulary and enhance   98 Li Helin 李何林, Jin Ershinian Zhongguo wenyi sichaolun 近二十年中国文艺思 潮论 (1917–1937) [On the trend of thought in literature and art in the recent twenty years] (Shanxi: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1981), 288.   99 Wei Mengke, “Putonghua yu ‘dazhongyu’ ” 普通话与“大众语”[The common lan­ guage and the “mass language”], in Wen Yi 文逸, Yuwen lunzhan de xian jieduan 语文论战 的现阶段 [The present stage in the debates on language and writing] (Shanghai: Tianma shudian, 1934), 201–204. 100 Fo Lang, “Zai tichu dian yijian: guanyu tuhua fangyan wenti” 再提出点意见：关于 土话方言问题 [More comments on local patois and dialects], in Wen Yi, Yuwen lunzhan de xian jieduan, 246–253. 101 Ni Lu, “Dazhongyu wenti pipan” 大众语问题批判 [Criticism on the issue of the mass language], Da Wan Bao [Great evening newspaper], July 6, 1934. In the same article, Ni promoted the use of drama and film to teach the masses the proper use of Manda­ rin and thus initiated the dialect-cinema debate largely within the left-wing film circle in July and August 1934. According to Laikwan Pang, most leftist filmmakers and critics at the time repudiated dialect cinemas and ambiguously promoted the official state language, Guoyu, in their films. See Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement, 1932–1937 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 179–187.

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its linguistic effectiveness.102 Similarly, Hu Feng 胡风 encouraged writers to adopt dialect in their writing so as to “fully represent the lives of the masses.”103 He believed that dazhongyu should not be a single national language, but should develop to suit the masses in different localities such as Shanghai, Guangdong, and the middle part of the Yangtze River.104 It seemed to Hu Feng that mass language was more closely related to various regional languages than to a single standard language. Due to fangyan’s dual identification as both a backward language of the peasantry and a living language spoken by the masses, intellectuals reached a theoretical consensus that one should oppose adopting dialect unconditionally but selectively admit the “refined” elements of tuhua into Putonghua, or in Er Ye’s words dizhi de jieshou, heli de yangqi 抵制地接受，合理地扬弃 (to critically adopt and rationally sublate).105 In practice, as Gunn observes, “the mass language movement took up regional speech as a principle of composition. . . . The movement encouraged a number of writers to experiment more with regional speech.”106 For example, at least three articles published in a major newspaper in August 1934 were written in dialect.107 The most celebrated example of this phenomenon was Lao She’s 老舍 novel Camel Xiangzi (Luotuo xiangzi 骆驼祥子, 1937), composed in Beijing Mandarin. Since mass language was largely identified as a written language built on the living language spoken by the masses, the issue of Latinization was brought up in the 1934 discussion on how the mass language should be transcribed. Among others, Lu Xun played an important role in promoting the Latinxua movement. Lu Xun proposed to abolish Chinese characters, which were reserved as the privilege of the ruling class and resulted in a “mute China” (wusheng de zhongguo 无声的中国). By contrast, he argued, the Latinized New Writing, through its simplicity, facility, and efficiency, would empower and enlighten the vast illiterate masses, enabling the silent majority to have their own voice and allowing the subaltern to 102 Er Ye, “Dazhongyu gen tuhua” 大众语跟土话 [The mass language and local patois], in Wen Yi, Yuwen lunzhan de xian jieduan, 83–84. 103 Hu Feng (Gao Huang 高荒), “You fandui wenyanwen dao jianshe dazhongyu” 由反 对文言文到建设大众语 [From opposing the classical language to building the mass ­language], 1934, cited from Hu Feng quanji 胡风全集 [The complete collection of Hu Feng], vol. 2 (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1999), 63. 104 Ibid. 105 Wen Yi, Yuwen lunzhan de xian jieduan, 84. 106 Gunn, Rewriting Chinese, 47. 107 Lu Xun, Lu Xun lun wenzi gaige 鲁迅论文字改革 [Lu Xun on writing reform] (Jinan: Shandong Renmin chubanshe, 1979), 66.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 45

speak.108 Drawing upon his personal experience of reading Lives of Shang­ hai Flowers as a Shaoxing Wu native, Lu Xun further suggested that Latin letters were better suited to dialect literature than Chinese characters.109 Sharing Qu Qiubai’s vision of linguistic federalism, Lu Xun took priority in promoting dialectal Latinxua, or “multiple mass writings” (duoyuan de dazhong yuwen 多元的大众语文), in major dialect areas, over building a single national language.110 However, Lu Xun’s reservations about dialectal Latinxua should be noted. He suggested that the use of dialect should be restricted to specific times and places—namely, at the initial stage in the development of mass-enlightenment literature and in remote villages. He discouraged the use of distinctive, “esoteric,” regionalisms in writing.111 On the key issue of particularity and universality that dialectal Latinized writing would entail, Lu Xun maintained that universality would win out in the end.112 In his study, DeFrancis seems to stress the wholeheartedness of Lu Xun’s support of Latinxua and does not give much weight to his disagreements with various groups. As Gunn points out, Lu Xun was always suspicious of being manipulated and used by promoters of a National Language or Mass Language movement.113 His complicated and seemingly contradictory thoughts on dialect writing may be related to his view of the role of mimesis in narrative. According to Gunn, Lu Xun promoted a narrative style that would permit the reader to interpret stories as allegories about China as a whole rather than about a particular locale. Indeed, in his own writing he seldom made an extensive use of regionalisms from his native Shaoxing Wu.114 So Lu Xun would have disapproved of mimetic literature imitating regional speech, such as Lao She’s Luotuo Xiangzi, which “encouraged readers to identify situations and issues with a given locale rather than with China as a whole.”115 108 Lu Xun, “Wusheng de zhongguo” 无声的中国 [The mute China], 1927, in Lu Xun lun wenzi gaige, 6–14. 109 Lu Xun, “Hanzi he ladinghua” 汉字和拉丁化 [The Chinese characters and Latinxua], in Lu Xun lun wenzi gaige, 63–66. 110 Lu Xun, “Zhi Cao Juren” 致曹聚仁 [To Cao Juren], in Lu Xun lun wenzi gaige, 15–19. 111  Lu Xun, “Da Cao Juren xiansheng xin” 答曹聚仁先生信 [To respond to Cao Juren’s letter], in Lu Xun lun wenzi gaige, 20–24. 112 Lu Xun, “Men wai wen tan” 门外文谈 (Outside literary chats), in Lu Xun lun wenzi gaige, 39. 113 Gunn, Rewriting Chinese, 103. 114 A linguistic analysis of the use of Shaoxing Wu vocabulary in Lu Xun’s works can be found in Wu Zihui’s 吴子慧 “Lu Xun zuopin de fangyan yunyong” 鲁迅作品的方言运用 [The use of dialect in Lu Xun’s works], Zhejiang xuekan 5 (2007): 93–97. 115 Gunn, Rewriting Chinese, 104.

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Nevertheless, the ambivalent attitude towards dialect during the mass language debate and the Latinxua movement points to the dilemma faced by Latinxua supporters as they tried to distinguish themselves from the GR proponents. DeFrancis summarizes the agreements and disagreements of the two sides as they emerged in a broader discussion between the integralist and federalist nationalists on the relationship between writing systems and national unity.116 DeFrancis, however, did not pursue much the specific issue of dialect in this debate, and there are a few observations that can be added to his discussion. First, as DeFrancis points out, Latinxua advocates opposed establishing Beijing Mandarin as the standard national language because it would create “a dictatorship of the Peiping [Beijing] speech”117 and also “support the policy of subordinating Cantonese or other forms of speech to an exclusive standard language.”118 However, it is difficult if not impossible to achieve the “dialect democracy” ( fangyan minzhu 方言民主) that Latinxua advocates desired. As some Latinxua writers noticed while promoting the so-called Northern Mandarin Latinxua (beifanghua ladinghua 北方话拉 丁化), which was based on the eastern Shandong dialects, people from other regions, even in North China, would have to learn a distinction that is not part of their native language, an issue touched on above with respect to Lao Naixuan’s dialect schemes. For example, as Wang Yuchuan 王玉川 argued, people whose native language did not distinguish between the sharp sound ( jianyin 尖音, like /zi, ci, si/) and the rounded sound (tuanyin 团音, like /ji, qi, xi/) would have to learn this distinction based on the Northern Mandarin Latinxua scheme. He further argued that this would be against the principle of dialect democracy, as a certain degree of compulsion and imposition is involved.119 Second, DeFrancis points out that Latinxua advocates tried to define the idea of “national language” differently from GR advocates: “In their view the National Language is not a fixed standard which is to be imposed

116 DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China, 221–236. 117 Ibid., 118. 118 Ibid., 232. 119 Wang Yuchuan, “Dao xieshou zhilu: Yu Pan Gugan xiansheng zai lun ladinghua zhi quedian” 到携手之路： 与潘古干先生再论拉丁化之缺点 [Further discussion with Mr. Pan Gugan on the shortcomings of Latinxua], in Ni Haishu, Zhongguo yuwen de xin­ sheng: Ladinghua Zhongguozi yundong ershinian lunwenji 中国语文的新生：拉丁化中 国字运动二十年论文集 [The rebirth of the Chinese language: A collection of papers on the Latinization movement in China in the past twenty years] (Shanghai: Shidai chuban­ she, 1949), 164.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 47

on all the people. Instead it is to function in the present as a common language only for those who need it and is to emerge in the future as a uniform language only after a long process of fusion with other forms of speech.”120 Indeed, a typical defense from the Latinizers is that the dialectal Latinxua scripts would not hinder the development of a unified national language, which would be made up of elements taken from all the dialects of China. Such a common language, however, would be an artificial language, an amalgamation of various dialects. As Li Jinxi fiercely retorted, this approach to a unified language had proved a failure as early as 1913 during the Conference on Unification of Pronunciation, when the pronunciation of characters was determined by majority vote of the delegates, who spoke various native tongues.121 He argued that the national language must be based on a natural, real dialect, e.g., Beijing Mandarin, which itself was a fusion of dialects that had come into contact during the past few hundred years. Third, DeFrancis discusses the defense of the GR adherents against the charge of authoritarian uniformity. For example, Li Jinxi repeatedly argued that unification of the national language did not really involve abolishing the dialects, which is also the official position in China today. Ho Jung used the phrase “National Language-izing the dialects and dialectizing the National Language” to summarize the process whereby “elements from the various dialects of China would gradually become absorbed by the standard language until the dialects themselves disappeared.”122 Interestingly, an almost identical view was expressed by Guo Moruo 郭沫若, a prominent Latinxua supporter. He said that the ultimate goal for Latinxua was to build a standard national language that would unify the various dialects. Stressing a “dialectic” relationship between the standard language and dialect, as did Ho Jung, he claimed that “the purpose of dialectal Latinxua is to eliminate dialects.”123 Thus, when envisioning dialect’s role in building a national language, both Latinxua promoters and the GR advocates shared a strategy of exclusion through inclusion.

120 DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China, 234. 121  Li Jinxi, “Su E de ‘Zhongguozi ladinghua’ yu guiding de ‘guoyu luomazi’ zhi bijiao” 苏俄的【中国字拉丁化】与国定的【国语罗马字】之比较 [A comparison between the Soviet Union’s “Chinese Latinization” and the Chinese “National Language Romaniza­ tion”], 1936, in Ni Haishu, Zhongguo yuwen de xinsheng, 131–132. 122 DeFrancis, Nationalism and Language Reform in China, 230. 123 Guo Moruo, “Lun Fangyan ladinghua zhi qieyao” 论方言拉丁化之切要 [On the importance of dialect Latinization], in Ni Haishu, Zhongguo yuwen de xinsheng, 119.

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The Transcendence of the Local and the Reform of Dialect during and after the “National Forms” Debate Similar to the discussion of mass language in the 1930s, the debate on national forms primarily attracted leftist intellectuals. It is generally accepted that the “national forms” discussion originated in 1938 with a talk by Mao Zedong 毛泽东, in which he advocated the “Chinese style and Chinese flavor that the common folk of China love to see and hear” (中国老百姓所喜闻乐见的中国作风和中国气派).124 Between 1939 and 1942, about two hundred essays and several dozen journals, spanning Yan’an, Chongqing, Chengdu, Kunming, Guilin, the Jin-cha-ji border region, and Hong Kong, discussed the national forms. Taking into account the larger context of the international communist movement and the ­formation of a third-world nation-state, Wang Hui links the national forms discussion with modernity, viewing it as “one of the primary forces behind the creation of a modern national cultural identity and subjectivity.”125 The issue of local language was closely associated with the central topic of the relationship between national forms, local forms, and folk forms. The war provided an occasion for intellectuals to propose the idea of employing local forms—rural dialects and the traditional (old) oral performative forms, such as local opera and folk songs— to mobilize the largely illiterate masses in the rural areas against Japan.126 Dialect, as the language of the (local) folk forms, also provided an opportunity to criticize the Europeanized baihua language. Xiang Linbing 向林冰 argued that folk forms, as opposed to “the new literary forms that have developed since May Fourth,” were the core source of national forms.127 Chang Hong 长虹 further claimed that folk language should be the true core source of national forms.128 However, Ge Yihong 葛一虹, Hu Feng, and others argued for the legitimacy or the “negation of the ­negation” of the May Fourth vernacular movement, reaffirming the logic of “linguistic 124 Wang Hui, “Local Forms,” 98. 125 Ibid., 100. 126 Ibid., 101–107; Gunn, Rewriting Chinese, 48. 127 Xiang Linbing, “Lun ‘minzu xingshi’ de zhongxin yuanquan” 论 “民族形式” 的中 心源泉 [On the core source of the “national forms”], 1940, in Wenxue de “minzu xingshi” taolun ziliao 文学的 “民族形式” 讨论资料 [Documents from the discussion on “national forms” in literature], ed. Xu Naixiang 徐迺翔 (Beijing: Zhishi chanquan chubanshe, 2010), 156–159. 128 Chang Hong, “Minjian yuyan, minzu xingshi de zhenzheng de zhongxin yuan­ quan” 民间语言，民族形式的真正的中心源泉 (Folk language, the real core source of national forms), 1940, in Wenxue de “minzu xingshi” taolun ziliao, 340–341.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 49

modernity” in the May Fourth tradition.129 As Wang Hui summarizes, the issues underlying the opinions and arguments included how to appraise the May Fourth Literary movement; how to reevaluate in the context of war the binary oppositions between old/new, modern/traditional, and urban/rural; how to handle the class-based views on literature set forth during the massification movement of the 1930s; and how to understand the relationships between the local and the national in regard to language and form.130 It is the last issue in particular that is explored here: how Communist intellectuals gradually considered the issues of how to transcend locality and transform the local into the national, how to transform old local folk forms into the modern national form, and how to reform, refine, reinvent, and transvaluate dialect. Among others, Du Ai 杜埃 explicitly claimed that the use of the living spoken language of the masses and the various dialects was an important condition for creating national literary forms. Citing Soviet writers such as Michail Sholokhov and Alexander Serafimovich and their efforts in collecting dialect vocabulary, he argued that dialect would play a significant role in expressing the life of the nation, adding that Chinese writers should adopt a large amount of dialect and oral language from the masses so as to compile and create a rich vocabulary.131 However, at the same time, he implicitly suggested that the creation of the new national forms required criticizing, transforming, and refining dialect, along with other old forms.132 In terms of the relationship between the local forms and national forms, he believed in building a national identity out of the various local forms, finding the universal in the particular. “The creation of national forms is first to identify local distinctive features, and then select those features that are nationally common and the most representative.”133 In a more sustained way, Huang Sheng addressed the issue of national forms from the perspective of language. He argued that the language of the national forms should be neither that of the literary forms after May Fourth nor that of the old folk forms, but should be a literary language 129 For Hu Feng’s reevaluation of the May Fourth movement, see Wang Hui, “Local Forms,” 130–135. For Wang’s analysis of “linguistic modernity” in Pan Zinian’s 潘梓年 and Huang Sheng’s 黄绳 papers, see “Local forms,” 124–130. 130 Ibid., 97. 131  Du Ai, “Minzui xingshi chuangzao zhu wenti” 民族形式创造诸问题 [The issues around the creation of the national forms], 1939, in Wenxue de “minzu xingshi” taolun ziliao, 93. 132 Ibid., 91. 133 Ibid., 92.

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processed from the mass language. Dialect, as a language of the masses, became Huang’s concern at this point. He concluded: “Therefore, we advocate learning language from the masses and using vernacular dialect and local patois critically so that our work may gain local color and so that the national character can be expressed through this local color. Naturally, we do not advocate the indiscriminate use of dialect and local patois, nor do we recognize the possibility of so-called dialect literature. For the most part, dialect is backward, disorderly, and pays no attention to grammar. Only after selection, refinement, and reinvention can it be of any literary significance.”134 Huang prepared a detailed and comprehensive summary of the arguments on the transformation of dialect in 1949 during the Hong Kong dialect movement, which I will discuss later. Here, I will first elaborate on the issues of “local color” and the representation of the national through the local, as Huang touched upon it. As Holm notes, “local color” (difang secai 地方色彩)—a commonly used term in contemporary Chinese literary criticism and a com­ monly observed phenomenon in modern Chinese literature—was used as the foundation for cultural policy and cultural practice in the wartime border regions in the 1940s.135 The use of local color and local languages was a pragmatic method for introducing the party to the people, creating effective ideological propaganda and mobilizing the illiterate peasantry to resist Japanese invasion, and promoting what Chalmers Johnson calls peasant nationalism.136 Among the many War of Resistance stage plays produced at that time, Holm discusses the play Cha Lutiao 查路条 (Inspecting road passes, 1938) by the North Shaanxi playwright Ma Jianling 马健翎.137 The play is set in a village in the Wutai County in North Shanxi in the Jin-cha-ji Border Region, but the script is not written in Shanxi dialect.138 As Holm notes, in the 1944 version “the playwright cast the play in generalized North Chinese vernacular, with special treatment for words he recognized would vary considerably from place to place. These are distinguished from the main text by square brackets, with 134 Huang Sheng, “Minzu xingshi yu yuyan wenti” 民族形式与语言问题 [National forms and the issue of language], 1939, in Wenxue de “minzu xingshi” taolun ziliao, 106. The English translation is largely from Wang Hui, “Local Forms,” 130. 135 Holm, “Local Color and Popularization,” 7. 136 Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power (Stanford, CA: Stan­ ford University Press, 1962). 137 Ma Jianling, Cha Lutiao 查路条 (N.p.: Xinhua shudian, 1944). 138 Holm mistakenly thought the spoken dialect was that of Hebei. See Holm, “Local Color and Popularization,” 11.



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the equivalent in local patois. Most of the words so treated are kinship terms like ‘grandmother,’ ‘father,’ specifiers like wai for neige and pronouns like na for ta, but there are descriptive phrases like ‘ku-de hua mei hua huzi de’ cried her eyes out.”139 In other words, the playwright made conscious efforts to ensure that a local work could be adapted for wide circulation. Citing this play as a model, Ke Zhongping 柯仲平 claimed it was possible to transform the old local folk forms into the modern national forms. The play was heavily adapted from the local Shaanxi Qinqiang 秦 腔 folk opera and Mihu 眉户, a local variety of little opera. In the 1962 version, the play was explicitly identified as a Qinqiang opera play.140 When it was performed in North Shaanxi, the cast was composed of local actors and actresses who spoke the local dialect and sang the local tunes. Ke emphasized the decisive role of content in transforming the old folk opera into modern opera. In the wartime context, he recognized the compelling need to link the general (the anti-Japanese theme) with the specific, noting “the artistic locality ( yishu shang de difangxing 艺术上的地方性) is of utmost importance in the job of mobilization and popularization.”141 Yet at the same time, he envisioned little difficulty in the transition from the local back to the national. He suggested that one way to transcend locality would be to replace some of the language specific to one area with localisms from another place where the show would be performed as well,142 which was exactly what the playwright Ma was trying to do. Wang underlines Ke’s assumption that “local forms are not and should not be resources for the formation of local identity, but aid in the formation of national identity instead. Similarly, the permutability in the use of local dialect suggested that the role of dialect in operatic performance is to help construct a ‘national’ rather than a local identity.”143 Nevertheless, the transcendence of the local is a more complicated issue. It involves a process of transforming, transvaluating, and ­politicizing dialect. Examining the recorded version of another dialect play, Man 139 Ibid. 140 Ma Jianling, Ma Jianling xiandai xiqu xuanji 马健翎现代戏曲选集 [Selected works of Ma Jianling’s modern opera] (Xi’an: Dongfeng wenyi chubanshe, 1962). 141  Ke Zhongping, “Jieshao ‘Cha Lutiao’ bing lun chuangzao xin de minzu geju” 介绍《查路条》并论创造新的民族歌剧 [An introduction to “Inspecting Road Passes” and some views on creating the new national opera], 1939, in Wenxue de “minzu xingshi” taolun ziliao, 33. 142 Ibid. 143 The English translation is largely from Wang Hui, “Local Forms,” 107, but with some revisions based on his original Chinese version in Wang Hui Zixuanji 汪晖自选集 [Selfselected work of Wang Hui], 351.

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and Wife Learn to Read (Fuqi shizi 夫妻识字, 1944), Holm finds that the dialect performed in this play “doesn’t seem to conform entirely to that of any particular locality,” and is “somewhat artificial North Shaanxi standard . . . with a number of peculiarities removed.” It is particularly striking to note that in order to serve the national vision, the peculiarities of the local language had to be removed. Party critics conventionally used the words “selectively,” “critically,” and “properly” when discussing the use of dialect. Thus, identifying what part(s) of a local language need to be refined (tilian 提炼), improved (gaijin 改进), transformed (gaizao 改造), sublated ( yangqi 扬弃), eliminated, or discarded becomes an interesting question emanating from the “national forms” debate. Hu Feng indicated the principle that governed the treatment of dialect and language overall, arguing that “the issue of language is essentially related to (Socialist) Realism.”144 He opposed uncritical adoption of the language of folk culture as the language of the national forms. He denounced the puns (shuangguan 双关) and other similar rhetorical devices in traditional folk culture as simply wordplay that reflected a feudal hedonic lifestyle, not the national reality in the wartime period. Punning is one form of what Bakhtin calls grammatica jocosa; the double-voiced, double-signified utterance can evoke ambiguous laughter in the Bakhtinian sense of folk humor. However, in party discourse, such ambiguity, ambivalence, and vagueness should be avoided and eliminated. Hu Feng cited his influential mentor, Lu Xun, in his argument to reform and improve dialect. Lu Xun used the sentence “这妈的天气真是妈的，妈的再这样，什么都要妈 的了” to demonstrate that as an interjection the expletive 妈的 māde could convey multiple or indefinite meanings and emotions: curse, admiration, or exclamation. Lu Xun argued that the task of intellectuals and writers was to “provide the rural masses with many words so that they can express themselves more clearly and definitely; [and] at the same time to enable the masses to understand more precisely (what the masses were instilled with and educated in).”145 This is reminiscent of the reductive, minimalist discourse of “Newspeak” as depicted in George Orwell’s novel

144 Hu Feng, “Tongguo yuyan wenti: wenzi gaizao he dazhong de renmin wenyi de fazhan” 通过语言问题: 文字改造和大众的人民文艺的发展 [On the problem of language: Writing reform and the development of the mass people’s literature and art], 1940, in Hu Feng quanji 胡风全集 [The complete collection of Hu Feng], vol. 2 (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1999), 778. 145 Ibid., 779. Lu Xun’s original piece can also be found in his “Da Cao Juren xiansheng xin,” in Lu Xun lun wenzi gaige, 21.



historical review of discourse of local in 2oth-century china 53

1984. Hu also opposed completely replicating the living oral language of the masses as the language of the national forms. He said the task of a socialist artist and writer is to “choose the most accurate, proper, and meaningful words and sentences from the living language. . . . They [the words from the masses] need the writer’s selection and organization.”146 Zhao Shuli’s 赵树理 The Rhymes of Li Youcai (Li Youcai banhua 李有才 板话, 1943) has frequently been regarded as a sterling example of the use of local language and regional folk features in literature. However, Gunn examines how Zhao transvalued the local folk entertainment (here, the kuaiban 快板 rhymes) and regional speech (Shanxi Mandarin) and transformed it into party literature. With the development of the narrative in this novel, Zhao Shuli gradually “shift[ed] conventional associations of the local folk form with the risqué and ribald release of sexual tensions, and sometimes political ones [i.e., satires] as well, to new associations with political activism and ultimately political panegyric, to express the will of the Communist leadership on behalf of the peasantry.”147 Contrary to the common impression that Zhao’s use of local colloquialisms is extensive, Gunn finds that Zhao’s use of dialect was “occasional” and appeared “subsumed under the commitment to a Modern Standard Chinese,” a writing style chosen “for the benefit of a wider audience and a leadership seeking to promote a national, common language.”148 Similar to other socalled dialect novels in Northern Mandarin languages at the time, Zhao’s use of dialect was mainly limited to “yanyu proverbs and chengyu patterned idioms of northern China, features of northern regional speech such as ‘we’ (咱) ‘I, we’ (俺), ‘what’ (啥) and ‘no use, no point, needless’ ( 甭), as well as an array of sentence-final particles and distinctive syntactic construction.” Besides the subtle and condescending use of local language, Gunn analyses the discrepancy between Zhao’s use of classical Chinese and of abstract terms of Euro-Japanese origin. While abstractions like “importance” (重要性), “significance” (意义) and “value” (价值) were sometimes used to evoke ridicule, coinages such as “the masses” (群众), “to organize” (组织), “cadre” (干部), “rectification” (整风), and “to transfer, design”

146 Ibid., 779. This would remind us of “Lefort’s paradox” of Soviet ideology, which Alexei Yurchak analyzes as “the paradox between the goal of a total liberation of culture, and the means of achieving it through subjecting culture to total control by the party.” Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 165. 147 Gunn, Rewriting Chinese, 134–135. 148 Ibid., 136.

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(分配) were meant to create “symbols of authentic political power.”149 In this way, Gunn concludes, “Zhao’s novel became a representative work in response to a call for ‘national form’ and Mao’s injunction ‘to make the past serve the present, and foreign things serve China.’ ”150 A more sustained and explicit discussion of dialect reform and its implications for Communist national politics is found in the debates within the Hong Kong or Huanan 华南 (South China) Dialect Literature Movement (DLM) of 1947–1949.151 According to Snow, the DLM writers and critics made “the most sustained attempt”152 in dialect writing. They not only wrote plays, fiction, and short stories purely in dialect, but also attempted to write several theoretical essays entirely in Cantonese. Yet their extensive use of dialect made some critics concerned about the issue of national unity. For example, Lan Ling 蓝玲 and Lin Luo 林洛 argued that literature should still be written primarily in Standard Chinese and be intelligible to a national audience; when dialect is used on occasion to convey local color, the words should be carefully selected. As Lin Luo argued, “to refine dialect is not only an issue of method, but an issue of thought as well. . . . We should not only choose spoken language, but also infiltrate our thoughts and feelings into those of the workers, peasants, and soldiers, learn their living language, and then filter out the refined dialect, . . . a precise and vivid dialect without backward consciousness.”153 Both Lan and Lin argued that if dialect literature was written completely in dialect, then dialect writers would risk producing “pornography” (huangse wenzi 黄色 文字) or “hoodlum literature” (liumang wenxue 流氓文学), which was traditionally associated with dialect.154 Although their arguments in favor of the minimal use of dialect evoked much opposition, their discussion on the nature of the language that should be used in literature met with agreement. Echoing Lan and Lin’s argument, Hua Jia, the leading editor, theorist, and writer of the movement, agreed that “written dialect should not include ‘hoodlum language’ and ‘local slang’ (shijing liyu 市井俚语)

149 Ibid., 138. 150 Ibid. 151  For a detailed summary of the history of the DLM, see Snow, Cantonese as Written Language, 101–123. 152 Ibid., 101. 153 Huang Sheng, “Fangyan wenyi yundong jige lundian de huigu” 方言文艺运动几 个论点的回顾 [Retrospective on several arguments concerning the Dialect Literature Movement], in Fangyan wenxue 方言文学 [Dialect literature] (Hong Kong: Xin minzhu chubanshe, 1949), 24. 154 Snow, Cantonese as Written Language, 115.



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because they are not the best features of the dialect.”155 Ruziniu 孺子 牛 further distinguished local slang from dialect, denouncing the former as the oral language of the hooligan proletarian class and thus the dregs, instead of the essence, of a dialect.156 Zhou Gangming 周刚鸣 introduced class into the discussion of the nature of dialect: The dialect we’re talking about is the language in a given region. Yet there are various social classes in each region. Therefore the dialect in the region reflects the lives, identities, thoughts, and feelings of various classes. For example, there are many hooligan slang expressions in Cantonese denoting threatening, swindling, cheating, pornography, or obscenity. This language one hundred percent represents the thoughts of the feudalist exploiting class and parasitic class. . . . [It is] outdated and noxious language . . . pornographic language. . . . To write in dialect, we must go through thought-criticism of the dialect vocabulary, or to put it another way, select and sublate the dialect.157

It seems to Zhou that the dialects or languages in each region are heterogeneous, yet the languages within each class across the regions are homogeneous. If “the problem of nation superseded the problem of class as the leading problem for the Chinese Communist movement during the War of Resistance,” as Wang Hui argues, on the eve of the Communist national victory in 1949, the problem of class again superseded other problems as the leading concern in the Communist literary circle.158 Measured by the yardstick of class-based socialist realism, the transcendence of the local could be achieved only at the expense of erasing authentic local color. Excluding slang and other distinctive features of the dialect, DLM writers had no choice but to resort to a language that was criticized as flat, lacking “the vividness of true Cantonese flavor.”159 After 1949, along with the “selected” dialect, the thenceforth “enriched” (or “impoverished”) national language, Putonghua, also experienced linguistic engineering, purification, reduction, formalization, and orthodoxization, which culminated in the Cultural Revolution.160 The Beijing 155 Ibid. 156 Huang Sheng, “Fangyan wenyi yundong jige lundian de huigu,” 25. 157 Ibid., 26. 158 Wang Hui, “Local Forms,” 99. 159 Holm, “Local Color and Popularization,” 116. 160 Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics, Center for Chi­ nese Studies Research Monographs 41 (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1992); Rudolf Wagner 瓦格纳. 鲁多夫, “Zhonggong 1940–1953 nian jianli zhengyu zhengwende zhengce dalüe” 中共 1940–1953 年建立正語、正文的政策大略 [An overview of the CCP policies to establish an orthodox language and discourse from 1940–1953], in Wenyi lilun yu tongsu wenhua 文藝理論與通俗文化 [Literary theory and

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novelist Wang Shuo 王朔 points out that in the contemporary post-socialist period, standard Putonghua in mainland China has evolved into an overly politicized language, featuring a hollow, exaggerated emotionalism, a harsh and aggressive rhetoric, and a standard, authoritative “broadcasting intonation.”161 Similarly, the Kunming, Yunnan, poet Yu Jian 于坚 finds that when he speaks in Putonghua, he becomes a different person who “has no sense of humor and is self-abased, nervous, stuttering, and pretentiously serious.”162 He argues that from the perspective of sociolinguistics, Putonghua is not just a tool for nationwide communication, but rather a “social dialect” that is highly politically charged. This “social dialect” is best suited to mass mobilization; metaphysical spirituality; abstraction; central state-sanctioned ideological and literary orthodoxy; propagandistic eulogy in the public sphere; grandiose, heroic, and utopian narrative; formal diction and power; and revolutionary discourse. In this sense, the contemporary resurgence of the use of local languages in literature, mass media, and the public sphere provides a unique vantage point from which to critique and challenge Putonghua and the Putonghua-dominated official discourse. Long excluded and marginalized by the national language, the “vulgar” slang-studded local languages perform several services, as the popular culture], ed. Peng Xiaoyan 彭小妍 (Taipei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan Zhongguo wenzhe yanjiusuo choubeichu, 1999), 11–38; Fengyuan Ji, Linguistic Engineering: Language and Politics in Mao’s China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004); Ban Wang, ed., Words and Their Stories: Essays on the Language of the Chinese Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2011). For a study of language and politics in contemporary China, including the distinction between everyday language and official language, see Perry Link, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 234–348. 161 Wang Shuo 王朔 and Lao Xia 老霞, Meiren zeng wo menghanyao 美人赠我蒙 汗药 [A beauty presents me with a sleeping potion] (Wuhan: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe, 2000), 209. As for the “broadcasting intonation,” the linguist Robert Ramsey aptly describes it: “All Radio Peking announcers, both men and women, broadcast in a pitch range noticeably higher than that of their normal speaking voices. Each sentence begins high and shrill. Then pitch falls gradually, reaching a lower key by the end of the sentence. Pauses are exaggerated, and the normal rise of a nonconcluding clause becomes longer and more drawnout. The devices of this strident intonation may well be borrowed, in part, from traditional Chinese drama and opera; but their use in the media today seems intended to arouse in the audience an impression of struggle and determination.” S. Robert Ramsey, The Languages of China, 47. 162 Yu Jian, “Shige zhi she de ying yu ruan: shige yanjiu cao’an: guanyu dangdai shige de lianglei yuyan xiangdu” 诗歌之舌的硬与软---诗歌研究草案：关于当代诗歌的两 类语言向度 [The hard and the soft of the tongue of poetry: A draft of poetry study: on two different directions in the language of contemporary poetry], in Jujue yinyu: Zongpi shouji, pinglun, fangtan 拒绝隐喻: 棕皮手记.评论. 访谈 [Refusal of metaphor: Brown notebook, criticism, interviews] (Kunming: Yunnan renmin chubanshe, 2004), 137. Gunn gives an account of the dilemma faced by Yu Hua, Ge Fei, Jia Ping’wa, and other writers regarding writing in Putonghua. See Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 175–177.



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ensuing chapters will demonstrate: they articulate marginalized and unassimilated identities in post-socialist China; they foster a strong sense of a distinctive local community that challenges any monolithic accounts of Chineseness; they enable those on the periphery to criticize the center and comment on the failure of modernity; and they provide youth with a noninstitutional language that allows them to explore an alternative cultural space.

Chapter Two

AN OVERVIEW OF TELEVISION SERIES PRODUCTIONS IN THE 2000s Edward Gunn has mapped out the production of television series in mainland China through the 1990s.1 The function of local languages varies in the three geographic areas he studied. In Beijing, the use of language corresponds to social and cultural class: the inept intellectual speaks Putonghua while the diligent and capable members of the working class speak the local Beijing dialect. In Shanghai, telenovelas that are labeled as produced in the Shanghai Wu dialect often turn out to be rendered in local forms of Shanghai Wu with various accents. The lack of a homogeneous, standard form makes Shanghai Wu an improper media language, the use of which “evokes disparities and controversy as much as community.”2 As for Chongqing and Chengdu, Gunn found that instead of competing with Chengdu for the status of cultural center of southeast China, Chongqing merely distinguishes itself from Chengdu by staging its linguistic difference. This chapter tracks new developments in television series genre in the 2000s in these cities and beyond. In the section on Beijing, I include some television series made before 2000 that Gunn did not address. Ying Da’s sitcom I Love My Family provides a better example of the use of language to indicate characters’ social and cultural status than Wang Shuo’s media productions, which Gunn examined. This also holds true for the 1999 telenovela The Happy Life of the Garrulous Zhang Damin. But in the drama series, Don’t Mess with Love (Dongshenme, biedong ganqing 动什么，别动感情, 2005), all of the major characters speak Beijing Mandarin regardless of their cultural and social status, age, gender, urban or rural origins, or prominence in the plot. In Shanghai during the 2000s, fewer new shows were broadcast in Shanghai Wu, except for a small number of sitcoms that bear a strong resemblance to the traditional local huaji 滑稽 opera. In addition to the few radio shows and stage plays in Shanghai Wu, I will address the complex factors responsible for the increasingly sluggish production of television shows in Shanghai Wu, as well as recent

1  Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 124–156. 2 Ibid., 141.

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strong reactions to the decline of the language. Chongqing and Chengdu continue to be one of the most productive regions in dialect media productions. Because of their greater quantity and more varied reception, television productions in Sichuan Mandarin provide richer materials for the study of the local audience, which I argue is always a complex and heterogeneous aggregate rather than a single homogeneous mass. Taking the 2000 Chengdu series Stories of Mr. Fake as a case study, I analyze its controversial reception according to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of socially constructed taste. This study also takes into account prime-time scheduling, which is related to the issue of the stratification of adult and child audiences. In addition, I discuss Guangdong TV’s sitcom Native Hus­ bands with Foreign Wives, the longest-running sitcom in China, as well as the new television series productions that have been shown on CCTV since 2000. Beijing In the early 1990s, the novelist and scriptwriter Wang Shuo was associated with a long list of hit media productions, including the film The Operators (Wan zhu 顽主, 1988), the telenovela Yearning (Kewang 渴 望, 1990), the comedy series Stories of an Editorial Department (Bianjibu de gushi 编辑部的故事, 1991), and the telenovelas Loving You for Keeps (Ai ni mei shangliang 爱你没商量, 1992) and Hearts’ Content (Guobayin 过把瘾, 1994). Although these media productions are usually described as possessing a Beijing flavor, Wang prefers to refer to his novels as examples of a “New Beijing Flavor” (Xin jingwei’r 新京味儿), particularly in the sense that his language has little relation to the old Beijing dialect as it is represented in Lao She’s novels. The essence of Wang’s “New Beijing Flavor” is rather a new style of speech that parodies and satirizes revolutionary and intellectual discourses with a Beijing intonation. This tiaokan 调侃 (playful, ironic, cynical, or sardonic chatter) style gained national currency in the early 1990s, and by 2000 had exercised a far-reaching influence on media productions in Beijing Mandarin (including Feng Xiaogang’s early New Year’s comedy films, discussed below in Chapter 8). Compared with Wang Shuo’s media productions, Ying Da’s first sitcom, I Love My Family, produced during the same period, exhibits a more distinctive old Beijing flavor. The sitcom revolves around the daily life of an ordinary Beijing family in the early 1990s. The language of the characters well reflects their social class and level of education. The father, Fu Ming



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傅明 or Fu Lao 傅老, a recently retired party bureaucrat, speaks a language full of revolutionary jargon. The two intellectuals in the family—his elder son, Jia Zhiguo 贾志国, a government civil servant, and his daughter, Jia Xiaofan 贾小凡, a college student—speak a Beijing-accented Putonghua.3 By contrast, the younger son, Jia Zhixin 贾志新, a high school graduate, is an idle, unemployed youth who occasionally makes small deals on the side. Unlike most of the heroes in Wang Shuo’s novels, who speak a Beijing dialect used in the military district (budui dayuan 部队大院) of the city, Zhixin speaks a Beijing dialect of the hutong 胡同 (alley), blending popular urban expressions with old Beijing phrases. Taking episode 17 as an example, the old Beijing words he uses include dǎowo 倒卧 (frozen stiff), chuō 戳 (stand), shùn 顺 (walk off with), qíle 齐了 (all set), zìdāng 只当 (as long as), and xúnmo 寻摸 (look for). He Ping 和平, Zhiguo’s wife, is less educated than the other family members. Both she and her mother perform the local art of singing and storytelling, jingyundagu 京韵 大鼓. Their speech is peppered with old Beijing expressions and pronunciations that indicate their low cultural and social status. In episode 5, He Ping’s mother uses words like m3men 姆们 (we), qìnniáng 亲娘 (the form of address used by a husband’s siblings when speaking to his mother-inlaw), zhēluó 折箩 (a chop suey of leftovers), bāngchèn 帮衬 (help), qíhuór 齐活儿 (all set), and qínghǎor 掅好儿 (to see an expected good result). Outside the circle of urban family members, the less-educated working class speaks various local dialects other than Beijing Mandarin. For example, the housemaid Xiao Zhang speaks Sichuan Mandarin; the construction workers speak Tianjin Mandarin and Henan Mandarin (episode 1); peasant merchants speak Northeast Mandarin (episode 7); Xiao Liu, who sells youtiao 油条 (fried breadsticks), speaks Shandong Mandarin (episode 8); a migrant worker couple speak Shaanxi Mandarin (episodes 23 and 24), and so on. Nevertheless, a non-Beijinger’s level of education is paramount to determining whether (s)he speaks a dialect or Putonghua. For example, Chunsheng 春生, a rural criminal, speaks Putonghua when he pretends to be a scientific inventor in episode 17. As much as the character’s language is keyed to their social and cultural status, dynamic reversals between the seemingly higher class and the lower class abound. The father Fu Lao is represented as flawed 3 They rarely use local Beijing expressions, which are not, however, entirely absent. For instance, Xiaofan uses shuǎdān 耍单 (to dress too thinly for cold weather) in episode 2, and Zhiguo uses chènqián 趁钱 (wealthy) in episode 5.

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and imperfect, beginning with the first episode. Fu Lao’s grand plan to reform (gaige 改革) and govern (zhili zhengdun 治理整顿) family matters much like a state bureaucracy is met with opposition from the rest of the family, resulting in total chaos. With the patriarchy shattered, the authority of the father figure is undermined, though not in a malicious way. In a recurring trope, members of the lower class always have the potential to play tricks on the upper class by borrowing their discourse, but not vice versa. The finest example occurs in an exchange between He Ping and Fu Lao. In episode 15, He Ping convinces Fu Lao to invest in stocks by presenting such an investment as a sublime way to support the state economy. Conversely, knowledge particular to the lower class is beyond the comprehension of the cultural elite. In episode 35, He Ping follows the then-current zouxue 走穴 trend of pop stars going on tour, making substantial sums, and evading state taxation. She proudly unleashes a torrent of professional jargon to describe her success, which to Fu Lao just sounds like a stream of nonsensical “Japanese sentences.” 这穴头可不是空码，我攒儿亮着呢，知道他真把上我啦！ . . . 昨儿有 穴头到我们团来团这事儿，想让我们给出个底包儿，看了我这大鼓 说我这活儿还能单档杵，每场置点儿黑杵总比干拿份子强啊。虽然 没腕儿那么嗨吧，可也念不到哪儿去。 The head of the zouxue troupe is not an amateur. I’m quite aware that he’s trying to win me over. . . . Yesterday he came over to our troupe to negotiate this thing. He wanted us to give a bottom-line price for performing. After watching my dagu performance, he said I could even get a separate bonus. The under-the-table tips [from fans] are always better than the profit sharing from each performance. Although I don’t earn as much as those big shots—it’s almost the same.

Tailoring language use to characters’ cultural and social class is also a feature of Beijing TV’s hit telenovela The Happy Life of the Garrulous Zhang Damin, adapted from Liu Heng’s 刘恒 1997 novel of the same title.4 Zhang Damin, an ordinary Beijing factory worker with a high school education, speaks in a colloquial, Beijing Mandarin intonation including, for instance, the distinct phonetic feature of “[er]-suffixed rhymes” (er hua yun 儿化韵). His excessive language matches his overweight body. Damin’s everyday Beijing Mandarin makes a sharp contrast with the language of his college-educated youngest brother Daguo 大国, whose speech

4 The novel was earlier adapted as the film A Tree in House (Meishi touzhe le 没事偷着 乐, 1998) featuring Tianjin Mandarin, which I briefly discuss in Chapter 8.



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features ­Putonghua vocabulary he learned in school. For example, in episode 12, Daguo ruefully reflects on his college dream of planting crops in the remote Xinjiang as a “naïve” (幼稚) project he “can’t bear to recall” (不 堪回首) and chooses a more practical goal: “to pursue a career in politics” (走仕途). But Daguo’s intellectual language is often debased and deflated by Damin’s working-class language. For example, Damin explains Daguo’s metaphorical phrase “swim freely (in the ocean of knowledge)” (在知识 的海洋里自由地游泳) to their senile mother as “freestyle swimming” or “dog paddling” (狗刨) in episode 10, and in episode 12 he glosses Daguo’s word shitu (仕途) as a climbing pole used in a monkey show, deflating his lofty political ambitions. The telenovela does not lack the “critical edge” of the film version, which Yomi Braester argues may “be read as a condemnation of official policy for failing to acknowledge the social alienation that accompanies demolition-and-relocation.”5 An analysis of the show’s language and discourse reveals other examples of subversive comments on the dominant ideology. In episode 12, Damin, named “the model worker in technology and science,” is invited to give a talk at a model worker meeting. He begins by reading from a script written by others: “Dear leaders, guests, comrades, and coworkers . . . ” (各位领导，各位来宾，同志们，工友们 . . . ). This is what Volosinov terms “reported speech,” “an utterance belonging to someone else.”6 He defines reported speech as rationalistic and dogmatic in nature, linear, impersonal, and monumental in style, and “display[ing] a complete stylistic homogeneity.”7 Parallel to the idea of exemplary governing as a way to reinforce nation-building effects,8 reported speech is an important method for the ruling class to maintain ideological control. However, the usually articulate Damin becomes nervous and begins to stammer, clearly uncomfortable with this speech norm. He soon decides to discard the script. Resuming his natural speech style, he tells an unscripted, “individualized, colorful, and nonauthoritative”9 anecdote of his addle-brained superior Chen Zong 陈总. This kind of “pictorial style” of reporting speech

5 Yomi Braester, Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract (Dur­ ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 272–273. 6 Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 116. 7 Ibid., 120. 8 Andrew Kipnis, “Constructing Commonality: Standardization and Modernization in Chinese Nation-Building,” The Journal of Asian Studies 71.3 (August 2012): 736. 9 Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 121.

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permeates and debilitates the “linear” reported speech “with its own intonation—humor, irony, love or hate, enthusiasm or scorn.”10 Nevertheless, in the drama series Don’t Mess with Love, all the major characters speak Beijing Mandarin, regardless of status, age, gender, or urban or rural origins.11 The majority of the plots revolve around He Jiaqi 贺佳期, a white-collar Beijing girl who works at a real estate company, and her complicated romantic life, which features three men: her Beijing boyfriend Wan Zheng 万征, her boss Pengzong 彭总 from Taiwan, and her younger colleague Liao Yu 廖宇, who allegedly came to Beijing from a city in the south. Except for Pengzong, who speaks a Taiwanese-accented Putonghua, both the Beijingers and the non-Beijingers speak Beijing Mandarin. For example, the non-Beijinger Liao Yu utters Beijing slang words like qiā 掐 (to not get along well), yǒuyìtuǐr 有一腿儿 (illegitimate love affair), and wūtu 乌秃 (vague or ambivalent attitude). However, an outsider’s imitation of Beijing dialect may be a way to assimilate into metropolitan life. Thus Liao Yu adopts the Beijing dialect in order to emulate Jiaqi’s unique sense of Beijing pride, a quality he finds most attractive in her. In the novel from which the TV series was adapted, it is more evident that Jiaqi and her family members are ready to imitate Hong Kong Cantonese and Taiwanese accents (gangtaiyin 港台音) whenever they talk with Pengzong, but such self-reflexivity is only briefly revealed in the telenovela version. In episode 6, when Jiaqi explains in a Taiwan accent why Pengzong picks her up every day, Liao Yu responds, “I’m not used to hearing a Beijinger speak that Taiwan Putonghua” (我就听不惯一个 胡同串子说那个台湾普通话). Jiaqi immediately retorts, “Well, I’m not used to an outsider picking up our Beijing intonation!” (我还听不惯一个 外地人操着我们京腔京韵呢！) Witnessing the further penetration of popular culture from Hong Kong and Taiwan in the late 1990s, Wang Shuo claims that gangtai-accented Putonghua is the only language to completely defeat the overly politicized language (fan zhengzhihua yuyan 泛政治化语言) that peaked during the Cultural Revolution on the mainland. However, the soft- and tender-sounding gangtai Putonghua, a perfect language for romance, has become the predominant speech style to imitate in mainland drama productions featuring youth idols. Wang worriedly predicts that the gangtai

10 Ibid. 11  When the drama series first aired in spring 2005, it topped Beijing TV’s rankings chart and repeated that feat when it was rebroadcast in summer 2005.



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Putonghua would supplant the Northern Mandarin dialects, including Beijing Mandarin, among the younger generations within two decades.12 However, Wang himself had actually written a series of hit xin jingwei television shows with romantic themes in the early 1990s—for example, Loving You for Keeps and Hearts’ Content. By comparison, the series Don’t Mess with Love, made around a decade later, seems to suggest more assertively that Beijing Mandarin can function as a romantic language. Unlike most of Wang Shuo’s media productions, revolutionary and intellectual discourse characteristic of Putonghua rarely springs from the mouths of the characters in this series; Pengzong’s gangtai Putonghua, which is full of business jargon spoken in a condescending and forceful tone, indicates his economic and social power rather than serving as a romantic language per se. The drama explores almost all the twists on romantic love: traditional man-woman love, cyber romance, relationships between older women and toy boys (jiedi lian 姐弟恋), love between senior citizens (huanghun lian 黄昏恋), extramarital affairs, and divorce. Almost everyone is trapped in a love triangle, pursuing someone who loves someone else. The peculiarity of unattainable, frustrated love among Beijing people can only be expressed by the local adjective níngba 拧巴, which literally means “twisted in the opposite direction.” As Wan Zheng remarks to Liao Yu about Jiaqi in episode 5, 你是外地来的吧？北京姑娘还就这样，你对她越好，她越防着你， 你要不理她，她倒来劲了，就有了征服欲了。所以说，没必要对她 们好。小贺就是一典型的北京姑娘。我就喜欢她那付滚刀儿肉的架 势，特经得起伤害。 You’re not from here, are you? That’s the way Beijing girls are. The better you treat her, the more distant she’ll be; yet if you play hard to get, she will have enough motivation to win you over. So there’s no point in treating her well. Xiao He [Jiaqi] is such a typical Beijing girl. I like how she can hold up [gundao’rrou, a Beijing slang expression literally meaning “the meat rolls back and forth under the cleaver”]. She can take anything.

The fact that many such phrases related to love were widely circu­lated among young fans in Beijing indicates the potential of Be­ijing Manda­ rin to become a language of romance, yet to what extent Beijing Mandarin can compete with gangtai Putonghua is still an open question.

12 Wang Shuo and Lao Xia, Meiren zeng wo menghanyao, 227–234.

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Shanghai The unique heterogeneous nature of Shanghai Wu was established in its formative stage when the local dialect of Shanghai county blended with Ningbo Wu, Suzhou Wu, Jiaxing 嘉兴 Wu, Jianghuai 江淮/Subei Mandarin, and some other variants.13 The use of multiple local languages has been characteristic of Shanghai stage and media productions. In the 2006 Shanghai Wu–dubbed version of the martial-arts sitcom My Own Swordsman (Wulin waizhuan 武林外传),14 the six regulars speak four dialects. The female innkeeper Manager Tong 佟掌柜, who originally migrated from Shaanxi to Beijing, speaks Subei Mandarin; Tong’s most capable employee, the martial-arts master Bai Zhantang 白展堂, speaks Shanghai Wu; the inept scholar Lü Xiucai 吕秀才 speaks Suzhou Wu; and the illiterate, impetuous cook Big Mouth Li 李大嘴 speaks Chongming 崇明 Wu. In the Shanghai comedies the stereotypical use of local languages has been perpetuated to the extent that any attempt to go against the stereotypes proves difficult. In the comic sketch series (a radio show later available in VCD format) The Comedic Wang Xiaomao (Huaji Wang Xiaomao 滑稽王小毛, 1987–), the protagonist Wang Xiaomao is depicted as an ordinary Shanghai citizen originally from Subei. Therefore he speaks Subei Mandarin or sometimes a Shanghai Wu with a strong Subei accent.15 The show has made a conscious effort to promote Wang as a new type of Shanghai citizen in the image of a good Samaritan.16 Nevertheless, some audiences from Subei angrily called for a ban on the show because of the offensive portrayal of Subei people as comic figures speaking the Subei dialect.17 At the same time, some Shanghai audiences originally from

13 Qian Nairong 钱乃荣, Shanghai fangyan 上海方言 [Shanghai dialect] (Shanghai: Wenhui chubanshe, 2007), 13–24. 14 The original sitcom employs more than ten local languages, including Shanghai Wu, which I briefly discuss in the conclusion of this chapter. 15 The character Wang Xiaomao had been played by at least four actors by 2006, each with a different accent. 16 For the statement from the producer Ge Mingming 葛明铭, see Wei Qing 韦清, “Tiji ‘Huaji Wang Xiaomao,’ Shanghaitan renren jiezhi” 提及《滑稽王小毛》，上海滩人人 皆知 [Everyone in Shanghai knows The Comedic Wang Xiaomao], Renmin ribao haiwai ban (People daily overseas edition), April 23, 2003. 17 Chen Li 陈莉, “Wei xin Shanghairen lizhuan, Wang Xiaomao zuo guo 20 sui shengri” 为新上海人立传 王小毛昨过 20 岁生日 [To celebrate the 20th birthday of the show], April 10, 2006, http://news.sina.com.cn/o/2006-04-10/09468659604s.shtml.



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Ningbo denied the possibility that Subei people could serve as the representatives of a new Shanghainese identity.18 The unsettled Shanghai identity of earlier immigrants seems downplayed in such telenovelas as Rumbling in Shanghai (Chuang Shanghai 闯上海, 1999), which depicts the struggles of new arrivals in the reform era. To distinguish them from the group of Henan immigrants who speak Henan Mandarin, the local Shanghai characters, regardless of their origins, speak the national compromise, Putonghua, with the exception of a single minor character, a laid-off female worker who speaks Shanghai Wu. When He Wenchang 贺文昌 and his Henan townsmen first arrive in Shanghai, they are despised and mocked, together with their accent, by the Shanghai people. By learning to speak Putonghua, he is gradually accepted by his Shanghai colleagues in a foreign enterprise. His successful integration into the local community culminates in his taking the place of his former superior, the self-important, pompous sales manager Tuoni 托尼 (Tony), a U.S.-educated Shanghainese who speaks Putonghua and is ready to switch to English whenever the occasion allows. Since 2000 there have been fewer telenovela productions in Shanghai Wu. Even those portraying local Shanghai history and culture stick to Putonghua. The recent telenovela Song of Unending Sorrow (Chang hen ge 长恨歌, 2006) stands out as a rare exception for the fact that it inserts a healthy quantity of Shanghai Wu vocabulary into its otherwise Putonghua soundtrack. Wang Anyi’s 王安忆 original novel of the same title narrates a half-decade in the life of a former Miss Shanghai, Wang Qiyao 王琦瑶, as an allegory of the city of Shanghai. Although the author consciously avoids attributing vocabulary with a distinctive Shanghai flavor to her characters,19 the two scriptwriters of the telenovela version, Zhao Yaomin 赵耀民 and Jiang Liping 蒋丽萍, make frequent use of Shanghai Wu expressions and vocabulary in their adaptations. The distinctive words, mostly pronounced in Putonghua and sometimes delivered in Shanghai Wu, provide a new layer of information as they indicate specific historical temporalities and convey rich cultural connotations that Putonghua alone would have been incapable of. For example, nostalgia for the vanishing

18 Ruan Shi 阮石, “Huaji Wang Xiaomao ershinian ji” 滑稽王小毛二十年记 [Notes on 20 years of The Comedic Wang Xiaomao], posted on his blog on April 10, 2006, http:// yuanshi.yculblog.com/post.1190687.html. 19 Wang once declared her intent to avoid linguistic stylization (yuyan fenggehua 语言 风格化) in her novel writing. Chen Sihe 陈思和, “Yingzao jingshen zhita” 营造精神之塔 [To build a spiritual tower], Wenxue pinglun 6 (1998): 51.

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world is evoked by words from pre-1949 Shanghai, such as 杜六房 (the old brand name of a local deli store), 绞肠痧 (a former name for appendicitis), and 弹性女郎 (taxi-stand girls in old Shanghai). Compared with the already scarce use of Shanghai Wu in telenovelas, its use in stage plays is even rarer. The longtime promise of staging Song of Unending Sorrow in Shanghai Wu has yet to be fulfilled. The 2006 dialect version of the play Crows and Sparrows (Wuya yu maque 乌鸦与 麻雀) turned out to be a market failure.20 The play employs a variety of Wu dialects: Ningbo Wu, Shanghai Wu with a Suzhou accent, Changshu 常熟 Wu, and the Pudong suburban Shanghai Wu, as well as the urban Shanghai Wu.21 As much as the myriad dialect-dialogues realistically reflect the moment when many immigrants were first putting down roots in Shanghai in the Republican era, the dialect version of the stage plays failed to secure the patronage of young, diverse immigrant audiences who were more used to plays rendered in Putonghua.22 Thus, the heterogeneity and complexity of Shanghai Wu is coupled with a generational difference: while the Shanghai Wu of the older generation is inflected in different accents that reveal its mixed origins, the younger generation is increasingly influenced by Putonghua usage. This is best illustrated in the sitcom Good Samaritan (Laoniangjiu 老娘舅, 1995–2007), which revolves around a Shanghai family of three generations and their daily lives. The generation of Laoniangjiu and Laojiuma 老舅妈, in their late 60s, speaks Shanghai Wu with varying accents. For example, Laojiuma still distinguishes the sharp sound from the rounded sound, like siao instead of xiao for “small” (小). However, such distinctions are absent from the tongues of their sons’ and grandsons’ generations. Similarly, in one episode Laojiuma pronounces shuai 帅 in the line “伊长了勿要忒帅哦” as se, which is mocked by her daughter and the daughter-in-law, who articulate it as sue. In other words, the three major factors Gunn identifies still account for the Shanghai media’s continued preference for Putonghua rather than 20 The film version made in 1949 portrays the struggle between the tenants of a Shang­ hai Shikumen 石库门 building and their exploitative nationalist landlord at the dawn of the Communist Party’s seizure of power. Most of the characters speak a language much like Putonghua, except for the peddler Little Broadcast, played by Zhao Dan 赵丹, who occasionally slips into Shanghai Wu. 21  Zhu Meihong 朱美虹, “Yi Huyu weizhu de huaju ‘Wuya yu Maque’ Shanghai yanchu yuleng” 以沪语为主的话剧《乌鸦与麻雀》上海演出遇冷 [The Shanghai Wu version of the play Crows and Sparrows received a chilly reception], Xinwen chenbao, July 25, 2006. 22 Email correspondence with Nick Rongjun Yu in January 2007. Yu is a playwright and was the marketing director of the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre.



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Shanghai Wu: the intrinsic heterogeneous nature of Shanghai Wu, the massive influx of middle-class immigrants from across China, and the city’s stated goal of becoming an international metropolis—and one making use of universal and official rather than local forms of expression.23 I would like to add one more consideration to those enumerated by Gunn: the conservative local government policies that have long imple­mented the central government’s pro-Putonghua agenda. In the early 1980s, the Shanghai government initiated a ban on Shanghai Wu in all schools from kindergarten up. In the 1990s, it strengthened its control over the media. For instance, the Shanghai Wu–dubbed version of the telenovela Why the Need to Recall? (Hexu zai huishou 何须再回首, 1999) was effectively banned in spite of its “main melody” motif of the relocation of released prisoners, which was highly affirmed by the prime minister at that time, Li Peng 李鹏.24 In 2001, legislation was passed to require that all civil servants speak Putonghua in the public realm. As the first regulation of its kind nationwide, the city ordinance carrying out the 2001 national-language law went into effect in March 2006. Accordingly, dialect-based news programs were strictly controlled from then on, and media outlets that launched new entertainment shows in Shanghai Wu without approval from Shanghai SARFT were punished. Nevertheless, the very reasons previously cited by Gunn as evidence against use of the dialect can be cited by defenders of Shanghai Wu to promote the dialect: insofar as the use of Shanghai Wu may create communication obstacles for the increasing number of migrants and foreigners, local dialect sitcoms and telenovelas can function as teaching materials and facilitate their acculturation and integration into the community. While the promotion of Putonghua or even English may enhance Shanghai’s image as a cosmopolitan city, preserving the city’s distinctive local linguistic and cultural heritage seems more urgent in the context of global/local dialectical dynamics. As the leading advocate of Shanghai Wu, the linguist Qian Nairong has voiced alarm at the prospect that Shanghai Wu is in decline. His series of articles on the significance of protecting Shanghai Wu aroused heated debate and discussion in the

23 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 141–144. 24 “Li Peng chongfen kending dianshiju Hexu Zai Huishou” 李鹏充分肯定电视剧 《何须再回首》   [The Premier Li Peng praises the television series Why the need to recall?], Renmin ribao, March 1, 1998.

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field of ­Chinese linguistics and beyond.25 The linguist’s call for preserving Shanghai Wu and the local cultural heritage resonated in the press. The Shanghai Times (Shenjiang fuwu daobao 申江服务导报), which boasts the largest local circulation, devoted two installments of in-depth reporting to the topic of Shanghai Wu: “Nine Sins in the Decline of Shanghai Wu” and “Seven Strategies to Revive Shanghai Wu,” published on January 19, 2005. In a Xinmin Weekly (Xinmin zhoukan 新民周刊) article dated February 2, 2005, the author Wang Che 王澈 angrily criticized the CCTV Spring Festival Galas as a demonstration of northern hegemony. His ire was triggered by the fact that a local comic skit was disqualified from the gala in the last round.26 Even the newspaper Xinmin Evening News (Xin­ min wanbao 新民晚报), which does not usually promote the language, ran two articles on the topic in April 2006: one commented on the recent nationwide emergence of media productions in local languages, while the other proposed protecting dialect just as one would protect one’s mother tongue against the dissemination of the “artificial” Putonghua.27 As a possible consequence of this activity, a reading entitled “Do you know Shanghai dialect?” (上海话 “侬啊晓得口伐”), which briefly introduces the history of Shanghai Wu and its vocabulary, was added to a supplementary textbook designed for elementary students in 2005. A 2006 TV talk show, Three Person Spicy Hot Soup (Sanren malatang 三人麻 辣烫), hosted by a Shanghainese man and a Romanian woman both speaking in Shanghai Wu, became an instant hit. In contrast to the decrease of local-language productions in traditional media, the Internet 25 One of Qian’s most influential articles, “Zhiyi ‘xiandai hanyu guifanhua’ ” 质疑“现代 汉语规范化” [Questioning the “standardization of modern Chinese language”], was first published in Shanghai wenxue 4 (2004) and later posted on a major Chinese linguistics BBS website (www.pkucn.com) on April 2, 2004. It aroused heated debate and discussion there and had garnered 1,320 comments as of August 30, 2005. The discussion and debate focused on three related issues: the changing nature of language and the (im)possibility of language standardization; tension between Putonghua and dialects; and the extent of the use of dialects in the media and literature. An overview of the online debate can also be found in Yang Wenbo 杨文波, “‘Zhiyi xiandai hanyu guifanhua’ taolun zongshu《质疑“ 现代汉语规范化”》讨论综述 [A summary of the discussion on Qian’s article “Question­ ing the standardization of modern Chinese language”], Yuyan jiaoxue yu yanjiu 5 (2008): 87–96. 26 Wang Che 王澈, “Chunjie wanhui de ‘beifang baquan’ ” 春节晚会的 “北方霸权” (The northern hegemony in the CCTV Spring Festival Galas), Xinmin zhoukan, February 2, 2005. 27 Wen Xin 闻心, “Fanyan dailai quanxin yule jingji” 方言带来全新娱乐经济 (Dialect has brought brand new entertainment economy), Xinmin wanbao, April 22, 2006; Li Tian­ gang 李天纲, “ ‘Baowei fangyan’ yu ‘jianchi muyu’ ” “保卫方言” 与 “坚持母语” (“To pro­ tect dialect” and “to insist on (speaking) mother tongue”), Xinmin wanbao, April 17, 2006.



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played an active role in promoting Shanghai Wu among Shanghai youth in the 2000s through popular websites hosting Shanghai rap songs and burgeoning blog writings in Shanghai Wu, as well as numerous tests of fluency in Shanghai Wu that mimicked the style of the CET, TOEFL, and GRE. Nonetheless, as I argue elsewhere, although the use of Shanghai Wu did become a dominant marker for Shanghai youth articulating a Shanghai identity, their endeavors were frustrated by their inadequate and nonstandard Shanghai Wu, which has been heavily influenced by Putonghua usage.28 It remains to be seen how Internet usage will affect the answer to the question, “Whither Shanghai Wu?” Language remains an unstable marker of Shanghai identity, and so the controversy in the media over the use of Shanghai Wu will continue for a long time. Chongqing and Chengdu Chongqing and Chengdu (usually combined as chuanyu 川渝) in southwest China continued to lead the country in media productions in local languages during the 2000s. Between 2000 and 2005, over forty television series were produced in Sichuan Mandarin.29 In Chongqing, the series The Legendary Anshimin (Qiren Anshimin 奇人安世敏, 2001) is based on the folktale of a local scholar in the late Qing dynasty who is celebrated for his resourcefulness in transforming evil people into good, cooperative ones. The 1960s classic film and play versions of Forced Draft (Zhua zhuangding 抓壮丁) in Sichuan Mandarin, featuring the local corrupt GMD officer Wang Baozhang, were adapted for a couple of television series.30 As is usually the case with such adaptations, the new stories of Wang Baozhang treat issues facing society at the time of their production, rather than the time in which they are set, namely the 1960s.31 In

28 Jin Liu, “The Use of Chinese Dialects on the Internet: Youth Language and Local Youth Identity in Urban China,” in Chinese under Globalization: Emerging Trends in Language Use in China, ed. Jin Liu and Hongyin Tao (Singapore: World Scientific, 2012), 75–76. 29 Tian Yigui 田义贵, Chuanyu fangyan yingshiju fazhan jianshi 川渝方言影视剧发 展简史 [A brief history of media productions in Sichuan Mandarin] (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 2005), 140–150. 30 The original plot is about how Wang economically exploits poor peasants and coerces them to enlist in the army during the Sino-Japanese War. 31  This famous argument was made by Brian Henderson in his analysis of The Search­ ers, in which he reads this film about relations between whites and Native Americans in 1868–1873 as a film about relations between whites and African Americans in 1956. “ ‘The Searchers’: An American Dilemma,” Film Quarterly 34.2 (Winter 1980–1981): 9–23.

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the 2001 Anecdotes of Wang Baozhang (Wang Baozhang waizhuan 王保 长歪传), most episodes are devoted to the power struggle between Wang and a local landlord, reflecting the burning issue of bureaucratic corruption in today’s China. In a contemporary urban setting, Neighbors ( Jiefang linju 街坊邻居, 2000) and its sequel depict the everyday life of a group of familiar neighbors in a Chongqing district. Drawing on the local culture, history, and everyday practice of district residents, these television series rendered in the local dialect greatly appealed to the local audience. On one occasion, the station’s decision to replace dialect voices with a Putonghua soundtrack triggered an immediate, strong objection from the audience.32 Driven by the wide popularity of dialect media productions, Chongqing TV introduced a comedy channel to show television series in Sichuan Mandarin in July 2004. To a large extent, media productions in the chuanyu region continue to assert the local as the site of their own cultural productions. A subversive attitude toward the mandated dominance of Putonghua in mass media is explicit in a comic sketch, “Recruiting a TV Hostess” (“Zhao­pin zhuchiren” 招聘主持人), the first show of the Chongqing Satellite New Year Gala in 2006. In the sketch, two established television hosts are interviewing a young woman for a job as a TV hostess. After initially responding in Chongqing Mandarin, the young woman is asked to speak Putonghua, to which she pointedly responds, 撒子叫普通话嘛？伟大祖国的首都北京讲的呀？普通话嘛就是普通 人听得懂，说得来的话撒。我讲的就是普通话撒。 What’s Putonghua? Spoken by the people in our great capital Beijing? Putong­ hua [common speech] should be what the ordinary people can understand and communicate with. What I’m speaking is exactly Putonghua.

The candidate plays on the word putong, which can mean “ordinary” as well as “universal.” As revealed later, she actually exhibits an apparent competence in Putonghua, which prompts the two hosts to recall their struggle to correct their own accents in order to pass the broadcasting Putonghua examination.33 When compared with the fledgling dialect programs in most other regions of China, the television productions in Sichuan Mandarin, with their greater numbers and more varied reception, provide richer mate32 Information obtained from my interviews in January 2006 with the producers and scriptwriters of two hit TV shows in Chongqing: Wudu Yehua and Shenghuo Malatang. 33 The script of the sketch was provided by the scriptwriter Yan Ran. It is slightly dif­ ferent from the actual onstage performance.



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rials for the study of local audiences. The “local audience,” which is a concept often contrasted with national audience, is far from a single homogeneous group. It varies in terms of age, gender, social origin, social class, and cultural status as well as regional identity. Accordingly, the categories into which local audience members in the chuanyu area can be sorted include adult/child, male/female, urban/rural, intellectuals/ upper-middle class professionals/working class, Chongqinger/Chengdu’er, and so forth. As the active, selective makers of meaning, local audience members are highly involved in dialect media productions. Although I am not proposing a simple cause/effect relationship between an audience’s orientation and a show’s success, there are examples—both successes and failures—that reflect producers’ accentuated awareness of the stratification of the local audience. The docudrama show Night Talk in the Foggy Capital on Chongqing TV, clearly targeting local middle-class and lower-class women, enjoyed a perpetually high audience rating in its first decade. By contrast, the telenovela The Chongqing Soccer Fans (Chongqing qiumi 重庆球迷, 2000), although well received in Chengdu, was cancelled in Chongqing after the first two episodes because local soccer fans found certain plotlines offensive and humiliating. Not surprisingly, stratification of the local audience may manifest itself in varied reactions to many sweeping media issues, such as the controversy over the alleged vulgarity of dialect productions. Some television series made in the 2000s were criticized for their poor quality or lack of taste, particularly when compared with mid-1990s telenovelas that enjoyed a national reputation, such as General Asinine (Sha’r shizhang 傻儿师长, 1994) and Shoulder Stick Brigade of the Mountain Metro­polis (Shancheng bangbangjun 山城棒棒军, 1995–1996). Here I take the controversial Chengdu television series The Stories of Mr. Fake as a case study. The show had to be cancelled in late August 2000 due to claims of vulgarity made by the Chengdu audience. The local veteran comedian Li Boqing plays the protagonist Mr. Fake or Mr. Jiada ( jiada 假打 “to fake, talk big”), a very local term invented by Li himself. In a scene which is identified as “obscene and nasty,” Mr. Fake wins a lottery jackpot and is shown becoming amorous in a hot spring with his new mistress. Given the complex composition of the local audience watching the show, two questions arise: Which groups of viewers found this scene vulgar? Would those viewers find the scene offensive in all circumstances? Pierre Bourdieu’s study of taste sheds light on this question. Defining taste as socially constructed, he stresses the role of education in and the influence of cultural capital on perceptions of taste. He asserts, “Taste classifies, and it classifies the

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classifier.”34 His work has inspired television audience researchers to consider “the relationship between tastes for particular kinds of television genre and class position.”35 Based on the data I collected, those who called for a ban on The Stories of Mr. Fake were largely college professors, teachers, parents, engineers, bank professionals, lawyers, and retired cadres.36 The Chengdu intellectuals had long been dissatisfied with Li Boqing’s made-for-profit vulgarity in his sanda pingshu 散打评书 (a local storytelling form allegedly invented by Li). By expressing this dissatisfaction, the intellectuals with more cultural capital legitimate their own privileges, envisioning themselves as superior to those whose tastes differ from their own. At the same time, audiences with less or limited cultural capital expressed their regret over the show’s cancellation. For example, Mr. Zeng, a local taxi driver, and Mr. Li, a worker, thought it inappropriate to ban a series that was entertaining and relaxing.37 The program’s scheduling is another factor related to the show’s closure. In 2000, the series was imprudently scheduled during prime time (8:20 p.m.) on Sichuan TV Channel 1, which enjoyed the widest provincial coverage. Li’s humor is appealing to an audience of lower-middle-class adults with limited education, but the show reaches such a broad audience that the majority of viewers are likely to call for a ban on his work. Moreover, prime time is often regarded as a time for family viewing, and 34 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 7. 35 Ellen Seiter, “Qualitative Audience Research,” in The Television Studies Reader, ed. Robert C. Allen and Annette Hill (London: Routledge, 2004), 470. Her summary of Bour­ dieu’s influence on television studies and audience studies can be found on 470–473. 36 In a field trip to Chengdu in June 2009, I collected local newspaper reports on this controversial sitcom from late August 2000. I also interviewed a veteran Chengdu director, Chen Fuqian 陈福黔, who provided me with much valuable insider information about Li Boqing, the controversy involving the vulgarity of his sitcom, and the gradual transforma­ tion of Li from a street performer to a “commoner artist.” In addition, I talked with the local TV director of a mini-docudrama show, Chengdu qingshi, and his negative opinion of Sichuan comedians echoed that of many local intellectuals and cultural elite. A story mentioning the social class of the audience who called for the ban can be found in Wang Xiao 王箫 et al., “ ‘Guanzhong han Jiada waizhuan xia ke’ zhuizong” “观众喊《假打外 传》下课” 追踪 [Tracking the audience request to ban The Stories of Mr. Fake], Chengdu shangbao, August 26, 2000, A8. 37 Wu Deyu et al. 吴德玉 等, “Zhang Guoli: wo hen yuanyi zaici paishe chuanwei ying­ shiju” 张国立：我很愿意再次拍摄川味影视剧 [The controversy over the recent televi­ sion series], Huaxi dushibao, August 29, 2000, http://ent.sina.com.cn/tv/tv/2000-08-29/ 14870.html. Cai Mao et al. 蔡茂等, “Jiada waizhuan gaibugai xiake” 《假打外传》该不 该下课？ [An audience survey about whether The Stories of Mr. Fake should be banned], Chengdu shangbao, August 25, 2000, B4.



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one of the first audience members to write to Sichuan TV requesting the immediate cancelation of the show, Mrs. Luo, was a parent who found the show too salacious to watch with her daughter.38 The lack of a rating system in China and the consequent failure to segregate underage viewers effectively is often the crux of the controversy over the vulgarity of media productions in local languages. In my analysis of local-language versions of the cartoon Tom and Jerry in Chapter 3, aesthetic judgments of “good” or “bad” are often similarly replaced by a moral judgment intertwined with standards of educational responsibility. It is fitting, then, that Bourdieu points out that the changing and contingent judgment of taste has much to do with the perceived legitimacy and institutionalization of its object. Li Boqing, despite his wide popularity in the local teahouses, had no official affiliation by 2000, around the time he filmed the series. Responding to the broad censure he received for his vulgarity, Li said, “Once I get an official title and become a state artist, my work will no longer be in bad taste.”39 Clearly knowing the importance of institutional support, Li left Chengdu in 2000 for Chong­qing, where he was offered for the first time a senior professional title from the Chongqing Mass Art Bureau (Chongqing qunzhong yishuguan 重庆 群众艺术馆). Six years later, when the Emei Film Channel in Chengdu resumed broadcasting the series on prime time (at 7:55 p.m.), Li was no longer a “folk artisan/performer” (minjian yiren 民间艺人), as the local media called him in 2000, but had become a well-established “folk artist” (minjian yishujia 民间艺术家) or, in the official lingo, “commoner artist” (pingmin yishujia 平民艺术家), commanding much symbolic capital. There was no further debate about the vulgarity of the series, much less any possibility of a ban. The audiences’ enthusiasm for watching the series created a kind of fandom around Li, and the series went on to rank among the top ten television shows in Chengdu.

38 Wang Xiao 王箫, “Guanzhong han Jiada waizhuan xia ke” 观众喊《假打外传》 下课 [Audience requests a ban of The Stories of Mr. Fake], Chengdu shangbao, August 24, 2000, A1. A Sichuan director and producer also briefly suggested that the failure of the series was due to insufficient attention to the stratified audience when scheduling the program. See He Shengtao 何声涛, “Ganga de Sichuan dianshi zhipianren” 尴尬的四 川电视制片人 [The embarrassing producers of Sichuan TV series], Sichuan ribao, May 31, 2004, 6. 39 From an online post, “Sichuan fangyan yingshiju daole zui weixian de shihou,” 四川 方言影视剧到了最危险的时候 [Sichuan dialect media productions are mostly endan­ gered now], http://qqzone.7139.com/739522/8.html.

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Guangzhou The hit sitcom Native Husbands with Foreign Wives first appeared on Guangzhou TV in 2000, and by the end of February 2006 one thousand episodes had aired, making it the longest-lived sitcom in China. As the title indicates, a major theme of the sitcom is the increase in immigration to Guangzhou. The parents of four children, all sons, live in an old city district (xiguan 西关) in Guangzhou and wish to have local Guangzhou girls as their daughters-in-law. However, none of their (future) daughtersin-law are native to Guangzhou. While the second-eldest son finds a wife from Chaozhou 潮州 or Shantou 汕头 in eastern Guangdong, the other three sons marry girls from other provinces or even other countries. The eldest daughter-in-law, Xianglan 香兰, is an honest migrant worker from a humble Henan village. She speaks a Putonghua that features a distinctive Henan Mandarin word, ǎn (俺). The third daughter-in-law, Xingzi 幸子, is a shrewd Shanghainese who works in an insurance company. She speaks an accented Putonghua that is peppered with Shanghai Wu phrases. The fourth son’s girlfriend, Diana 戴安娜, turns out to be an American. She speaks both Cantonese and Putonghua with a foreign accent. Their outsider accents or languages contrast with the standard Guangzhou Cantonese spoken by the members of the family, including the parents, the four sons, and a grandson. The language problem itself is so salient that it became the topic of a two-part episode (episodes 61 and 62, broadcast in 2001) entitled Ji tong ya jiang / kai thung ap kong 鸡同鸭讲, a Cantonese saying that describes the misunderstandings caused by language barriers. Both Xianglan and Xingzi are highly motivated to learn Cantonese from their husbands. Yet unaware of the multilayered hierarchy within the Cantonese language, they are learning a kind of Cantonese that is not the type they are supposed to learn. Although Xianglan hopes to learn some useful Cantonese for daily shopping, what her husband Ah Guang 阿光 thinks the easiest and most fun to teach are the local expletives, for example, 痴线 ci sin (idiot), 戅居 ngong geoi (asinine, stupid), and 点极都不明 dim gik dou dim m ming (blockhead, literally meaning “one who still can’t get it no matter how hard you explain”). Fearing that his wife will leave him to pursue a better job opportunity, Ah Yao 阿耀 teaches Xingzi Taishan/ Toi San 台山 Cantonese, a variant of the Cantonese spoken by the rural lower class, instead of the “aristocratic-sounding” Guangzhou Cantonese. For example, Ah Yao teaches her neih mat sui instead of neih bingo for “Who are you?” and yahk fan, not sihk fan, for “to eat.” Much amusement



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arises from the immediate, intensive “performative” effects their utterances evoke from the native Cantonese family members, something the two hard-working nonnative learners would never understand. In a similar vein, in order to better their marital relationship, Ah Guang and Ah Yao learn their wives’ dialects by studying their local opera styles (Henan yuju 豫剧 and Shanghai yueju 越剧 respectively) and pop songs in their local languages. Yet Ah Yao’s blunt translation of the female third-person pronoun (she/her) in a pop love song by the Shanghai Wu word yi 伊 makes Xingzi furiously probe into his former love affairs. The father’s decision to promote Putonghua as the common language of the family does not make the situation better. As things turn out, the parents’ Cantonese-accented Putonghua (which as they pronounce it sounds like baodonggua 煲冬瓜 [winter melon stew]) is so heavily accented that the misunderstandings only multiply. While the mother pronounces xi 洗 (to wash) as si 死 (to die), the father’s pronunciation of jiaoqu 郊区 (新房子) is misheard as jiaoqi 娇妻 (新房子) by Xianglan, who then suspects that her father-inlaw has had an affair. As a final resort, the whole family turns to Diana, hoping she will teach them English, the universal language, as the common language of the family. Yet their awkward Chinglish leaves Diana at wit’s end. At the same time that linguistic and cultural differences contribute to both dramatic conflicts and amusing misunderstandings, the family members’ wholesome efforts to overcome linguistic chaos and local stereotypes and to forge harmony and union are obvious. Throughout the series, the local family members converse in Cantonese while the non­ native daughters-in-laws use their own local languages. For the most part these languages are mutually unintelligible; nevertheless, the characters seem to be able to communicate with each other, which may indicate, at least, mutual respect and appreciation.40 Many episodes showcase the richness and diversity of both Lingnan 岭南, the Cantonese-speaking regional culture, and other regional cultures and customs, particularly those of north central China and Shanghai. Moreover, the sitcom positively portrays immigrant characters who endeavor to succeed in Guangzhou. For example, a three-part episode (episodes 13–15) titled “Rumbling in Guangzhou” (“Chuangdang Guangzhou” 闯荡广州, 2000) depicts an immigrant countryside girl named Zhang Yongfang 张永芳. As Xianglan’s

40 Subtitles in written standard Chinese ensure that educated audiences, either in Cantonese-speaking areas or beyond, can comprehend the dialogues.

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townswoman, Zhang speaks Henan Mandarin. Realizing Zhang’s difficulty in understanding Cantonese, the local Cantonese family members immediately switch to accented Putonghua. It is her perseverance and hard work that account for her eventual business success in Guangzhou, which is little hampered by her incompetence in Cantonese. In other words, the relationship between the facility of speaking Cantonese and the job market is patently underplayed. The sitcom fosters a sense that Guangzhou is no longer a closed and homogeneous city with a single, indigenous language and culture, but has become an open-minded, receptive, and dynamic site where the local and multiple other cultures are in a process of interaction, confrontation, reconciliation, and compatibility. Conclusion Besides the cities discussed above, television series in local languages have emerged and burgeoned in other parts of China since 2000. Most conspicuous is the rise of television series rendered in Northeast Mandarin. The popular use of Northeast Mandarin in the media began with comic sketches in the 1990s. Among others, the comedian Zhao Benshan achieved nationwide fame for his Northeast Mandarin comic sketches at the CCTV Spring Festival Galas. Since 2003, Zhao has produced, directed, and starred in a series of telenovelas with a strong northeast flavor. Just as Zhao epitomizes northeastern peasants in his comic sketches (the rich implications of his sketches are examined in Chapter 5), his rural-themed telenovelas are likewise concerned with the reality of marginalized peasants in an increasingly commercialized, urbanized, and modernized society. Liu Laogen 刘老根 (2003) and its sequels tell the story of the peasant-turned- entrepreneur Liu Laogen, who manages a vacation resort, Longquan Shanzhuang 龙泉山庄, in his village. In portraying Liu coping with his family members, fellow villagers, and the corrupt local cadres, the series illuminates the struggles, dilemmas, and illusions in a peasant’s business adventure. Ma Dashuai 马大帅 (2005) and its sequels narrate how the eponymous protagonist Ma Dashuai and his rural family members survive after migrating to the city, and how Ma later on struggles to run an elementary school for the children of immigrant peasant workers. Zhao’s telenovelas, with their dense use of northeastern words and ­idioms, were aired during prime time on CCTV-1.41 Ambiguously enough, 41 To test audiences’ understanding of the local speeches in Zhao’s series, a so-called “Standard Test on Northeast Mandarin” was circulated online: level 4 for the southerners,



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the authorities do not consider his series subject to a 2005 SARFT regulation stating that all television series should use standard Putonghua.42 The privilege enjoyed by Northeast Mandarin in the state media evokes resentful envy from other parts of China. For example, Sichuan comedians see Zhao as a rival in their national initiative to allow television serials in Sichuan Mandarin to also be shown on CCTV.43 As a matter of fact, besides Zhao’s rural-themed telenovelas, the main-melody revolutionary epics shown on the central state media have also allowed a moderate use of local languages to depict characters other than the revolutionary leaders. For instance, in the CCTV-1 telenovela The Legend of the Heroes in the Lüliang Mountains (Lüliang yingxiong zhuan 吕梁英雄传, 2005), which was shot in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the victory of the Sino-Japanese War, the anti-Japanese peasant heroes in the Lüliang Mountains speak a Shanxi Mandarin variety that is intelligible to the national audience. In another revolutionary series, Eighth Route Army (Balujun 八路军, 2005), the Shanxi warlord Yan Xishan 阎锡山, his native subordinates, and the Eighth Route Army soldiers from Shanxi all speak Shanxi Mandarin.44 Although the same 2005 regulation also stipulates that the revolutionary leaders should speak Putonghua, in Eighth Route Army Deng Xiaoping still speaks Sichuan Mandarin, a privilege the other revolutionary leaders, including Mao Zedong and Zhu De, no longer enjoy. Furthermore, having to take audience and the market seriously, CCTV shows non–main melody productions such as the wildly popular costume martial-arts sitcom My Own Swordsman (2006) in multiple local languages.45 Set in an inn during the Ming dynasty, the series is a tale

level 6 for the northerners not including the northeasterners, and level 8 for the native northeasterners. 42 Zhao Nannan 赵楠楠, “Dianshiju yaojiang Putonghua, Ma Dashuai deng fangyanju huo lüdeng” 电视剧要讲普通话,《马大帅》等方言剧获绿灯 [The television series have to speak Putonghua, yet Ma Dashuai is not regulated], Jinghua shibao, October 14, 2005, http://ent.sina.com.cn/x/2005-10-14/0813865032.html. 43 Zhao Bin and Wang Jia 赵斌 王嘉, “Sichuan weisha chubuliao Zhao Benshan?” 四 川为啥出不了赵本山? [How come Sichuan cannot produce Zhao Benshan?], Chengdu ribao, June 18, 2005. 44 In an interview, the director Song Yeming said that Yan’s dialect well depicts his pro­ vinciality, as he would discredit any subordinates who spoke a dialect other than Shanxi Mandarin. 45 Anthony Fung views CCTV’s increasing responsiveness to market demands for more entertainment programs as a reaction to the threat and challenge posed by the rising regional media powers, such as the competitive provincial satellite television networks and the growing regional corporation alliances. Anthony Fung, Global Capital, Local Cul­ ture: Localization of Transnational Media Corporations in China (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 190.

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of the jianghu 江湖 underworld featuring Manager Tong, her employees, and their customers from every walk of life. Almost every major character speaks a local language or an accented Putonghua—for example, Shaanxi Mandarin, Northeast Mandarin, Shanghai Wu, Shandong Mandarin, Tangshan Mandarin, and Tianjin Mandarin. By contrast, only the scholar Lü Xiucai speaks unaccented Putonghua and sometimes he uses English to showcase his high educational status. However, the pattern of language distribution between working classes and intellectuals we found in the Beijing telenovelas does not really apply here. To be sure, Lü Xiucai is ridiculed for his ineptness and pedantry most of the time, but in one episode, his ontological reasoning exerts a performative force that leads an assassin intending to kill Lü to kill himself. Adopting the wulitou 无厘头 (literally “nonsense”) film style that Zhou Xingchi initiated, the series destabilizes all the seemingly stable social orders as well as the spatial-temporal order. The dialogue in the series is packed with witty jokes, sophisticated satire, and numerous intertextual references to contemporary popular culture and Internet youth culture. As the sitcom is an intensely verbal genre, Ying Da, the father of the Chinese sitcom, has long followed a practice of “the localization of the sitcom” (qingjingxiju diyuhua 情景剧地域化). Following his I Love My Family in Beijing Mandarin, Ying produced a series of sitcoms that explore the wit and humor of other local languages, for example, New Seventy-Two Tenants of Prosperity (Xin 72 jia fangke 新 72 家房客, 2001) in Shanghai Wu, A Family in the Northeast (Dongbei yijiaren 东北一 家人, 2002) in Northeast Mandarin, and A Family in Xi’an (Xi’an hu jia 西安虎家, 2003) in Xi’an Mandarin. As I indicated in my previous discussion of I Love My Family, the topics of the episodes were of concern and interest to the local audience at the time. In addition, the sitcoms evoked the immediacy of news programming by trying to integrate recent social news into their narratives. Even though these sitcoms were well received by local markets, Ying Da recognized the limitations of productions in local dialects that appeal to local tastes when it comes to audience reception. As he points out, the fundamental solution to the problem of reaching a national market with a sitcom is not the inclusion of local dialects but a good script.46 In conformity with this observation, a recent practice in sitcom production is to purchase the script of a regional hit sitcom,

46 From Ying Da’s speech at the Symposium of the 10th Anniversary of the Chinese sitcom on December 19, 2003, http://sh.sina.com.cn/20031219/143523897.shtml.



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reshoot it with local actors, and redub it with the local dialect of the target area. For instance, Guangdong TV’s popular serials Native Husbands with Foreign Wives was remade as Yijia laoshao xiangqianchong 一家老少向 前冲 in Changsha Xiang by Hunan TV, Kaixin yijiamen 开心一家门 in Hangzhou Wu by Zhejiang TV, and Songbai xiangli wanjiaren 松柏巷里 万家人 in Nanchang Gan by Jiangxi TV. This practice recalls Ma Jianling’s creation of a dramatic script that could be easily adapted for performance in various local languages. All of the “translations” of Native Husbands with Foreign Wives turned out to be local hits and were well received by local audiences. Yet this kind of transregional practice entails a hierarchy of homogenization and heterogenization and the problematic construction of local identities, issues which I will consider in the conclusion of this book.

Chapter Three

ALTERNATIVE TRANSLATION: PERFORMATIVITY IN DUBBING FILMS IN LOCAL LANGUAGES Introduction A new phenomenon in broadcast television that became very popular in the 2000s is the dubbing of films into local languages. A wide variety of sources—silent films and talking pictures, foreign and domestic movies, classics and standard fare—were redubbed. In most cases, the dubbed version arranges selected clips from the original film in a new order and replaces the original soundtrack with new dialogue rendered in local languages.1 Examples abound: Charlie Chaplin speaks the Yunnan Mandarin variety of Luliang 陆良 County in an entertainment show that ran in Yunnan Kunming TV in 1996. In a series of VCDs aired on many Sichuan local TV stations in 2000, Jane Eyre, speaking Zhongjiang 中江 Mandarin, asks Rochester about the previous night, and he responds in Chengdu Mandarin that he lost big (xibe 洗白) playing mahjong. Besides the foreign classics, the series also included episodes from famous domestic films such as the 1955 revolutionary feature Guerrillas on the Plain (Pingyuan youjidui 平原游击队) and the 1984 martial-arts comedy Kids from Shaolin (Shao­ lin xiaozi 少林小子); in both cases, the dialect versions largely repeat the original lines in Sichuan Mandarin. This trend took off nationally in 2004 with redubbings of the American cartoon classic Tom and Jerry (Mao he Laoshu 猫和老鼠 in Putonghua); by 2005, approximately seventeen local-language versions had appeared nationwide.2 Tom the cat and Jerry the mouse were given local names such as laopi 老皮 and suizi’r 碎子儿 in the Shaanxi Mandarin version, ergazi 二尕子 and xiaobudian’r 小不点 in the Northeast Mandarin version, maodatou 猫大头 and shuyaya 鼠丫丫 in the Beijing Mandarin version, laonaodan 老孬蛋 and xiaojingdou 小精豆 in the Henan Mandarin version, hantoumao 憨头猫 and xiao 1 Replacing a foreign movie’s soundtrack is a well-known device for achieving a comic effect. For example, Woody Allen’s film What’s Up, Tiger Lily? transforms the Japanese spy film Kagi no kagi (Key of keys) into a comedy with a completely different plot. 2 The original Tom and Jerry cartoons were produced by Fred Quimby for MGM in the 1940s.

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jin’guaixü 小精怪鼠 in the Hubei Mandarin version, and loryoedio 老油条 and siortzinkua 小精怪 in the Shanghai Wu version, to name a few. Already in 2004, local TV stations were launching new shows that featured films dubbed into local languages. In Shandong TV’s Fresh Air from Drama (Ju lai feng 剧来风, 2004), the German officer in La Grande Vadrouille responds to the nun in Jinan Mandarin: “Just had an egg bun with a Shandong-style sweet sauce. Awesome!” (吃了个鸡蛋包弄了碗甜 沫, 杠赛了!). In a redubbed version of the 2001 comedy Big Shot’s Funeral (Dawan 大腕), the funeral ceremony of the internationally renowned film director Don Tyler is set to take place in the Temple of Confucius in Shandong. Chosen as the overture for the ceremony is a famous aria from Puccini’s opera Turandot, “No one shall sleep tonight” (图兰朵: 今晚无法入 眠), sung in Putonghua. In Jinan Mandarin, the original Italian title of the aria, “Nessum dorma,” becomes the colloquial phrase, “We’re not gonna sleep tonight” (今天晚上不睡觉). In Hangzhou, West Lake Pearl Channel’s Fun from Dubbed Films (Yingshi hahaha 影视哈哈哈, 2004–2006), the native Beijing actor Ge You 葛优 in Be There or Be Square (Bujian­ busan 不见不散, 1998) becomes a local businessman speaking Shaoxing Keqiao 绍兴柯桥 Wu, while the Beijing-based actress Xu Fan 徐帆 turns into a school teacher in Hangzhou. Similarly, in the dubbed Hong Kong movie Only Fools Fall in Love (Dailao baishou 呆佬拜寿, 1995), the Hong Kong actor Liu Qingyun 刘青云, speaking Hangzhou Wu, quarrels with the Hong Kong actress Wu Qianlian 吴倩莲, who speaks Shaoxing Wu, over smelly preserved bean curd at West Lake. To some extent, the dubbing of films into local languages can be viewed as part of a larger trend of parodying classics, allegedly ushered in by Zhou Xingchi’s A Chinese Odyssey (Dahua xiyou 大话西游, 1995). Often regarded as spoofing the classic vernacular novel Journey to the West (Xiyouji 西 游记), A Chinese Odyssey epitomizes the so-called wulitou (nonsense) or dahua rhetorical style: a pastiche of discourses transcending the delimitation of time and space. Largely following John Fiske’s theory of resistant audiences, Tao Dongfeng 陶东风 points out that cynical Chinese youths’ pleasure in consuming dahua texts is derived from the parody and subversion of classic works as well as of the underlying ethical, moral, and cultural orders they convey.3 Although, to a degree, Tao’s explanation of the

3 Tao Dongfeng, “Dahua wenxue yu xiaofei wenhua yujing zhong jingdian de mingyun” 大话文学与消费文化语境中经典的命运 [The Dahua literature and the fate of the clas­ sics in the context of culture consumption], Tianjin shehui kexue 3 (2005): 89–98.



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pleasure is relevant to my study of the comedic function of local language, his assertion that dahua texts are solely parodies of classic works implies an academic bias that considers the parodies to be derivative and inferior to the latter, which are tacitly regarded as the origin, the center, and the authority. Furthermore, Tao is so preoccupied with the “nonsense” of the dahua texts that he fails to notice the “sense in the nonsense,” that is, the performative force of the new text achieved through parody, or in other words, what is reconstructed by deconstructing the original text. In this direction, Kun Qian’s analysis of A Chinese Odyssey, Part II is inspiring. Applying Deleuze’s philosophy of space and time, Qian finds that the film itself is complicated enough to create a dialogic double structure in temporal-spatial dimensions, and further explores the notion of “being as becoming” in the Monkey King/Joker’s identity construction.4 Dubbing as an Alternative Translation The performativity of the local-language soundtrack, which would be normally dubbed in Putonghua, is illuminated by theories of translation and performance that celebrate the independence of a translation or performance from the original text. In his classic essay “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin offers a distinctly different theory of translation.5 For Benjamin, translation “serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages.”6 What needs to be translated is not the meaning of the original, but an “intention,” “which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other.”7 The intention of the original can only be grasped as something supplemented or added by translation: “in all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated; depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that symbolizes or ­something symbolized.”8 Still, it should be recognized that the intention of the origi-

4 Kun Qian, “Pandora’s Box: Time-Image in A Chinese Odyssey and the Becoming of Chinese Cinema,” Asian Cinema 22.1 (2011): 308–328. 5 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens” (1923), in his Illuminations, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 69–82. 6 Ibid., 72. 7 Ibid., 74. 8 Ibid., 79.

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nal is not always easy to fathom or fully grasp, so Benjamin’s wording of “echo of the original” may better convey the essence of translation.9 Rey Chow interprets Benjamin’s theory: “Translation is primarily a process of putting together. This process demonstrates that the ‘original,’ too, is something that has been put together.”10 Chow further argues that Benjamin’s theory of translation is not simply a deconstructive reading of the original as self-différance, but also “a process of ‘literalness’ that displays the way the ‘original’ itself was put together—that is, in its violence.”11 So “a real translation is not only that which translates word by word but also that which translates literally, depthlessly, naively.”12 However, precisely “in its naive, crude, and literal modes,” the so-called light or superficial popular and mass culture “is a supplement to truth, a tactic of passing something on.”13 As an interlingual practice rather than the intralingual self-différance, the original lets the translation affect, infect, liberate, destabilize, expose itself, and vice versa. From a different perspective, scholars in performance studies reach the similar conclusion that performance is a surrogation of the original text. In his theoretical article “Drama, Performativity, and Performance,” Worthen agrees with Parker and Sedgwick’s rethinking of Austin’s classic example of the marital “I do.”14 While Austin stresses the performative force of the text/language “I do” when uttered in conventional social circumstances, scholars in performance studies foreground the Austinian conventional procedure, here the wedding ceremony. They argue that it is the (nontheatrical) performance (the wedding ceremony) that reconstitutes and produces the text “I do,” which “gains its force not because it is an utterance of a text, not because the words themselves accomplish an action, but because the ‘I do’ cites and so reproduces an entire genre of performance.”15 Moreover, performance, redefined in nonliterary and nontheatrical terms, can be associated with the orally based ritual and everyday practices in ethnographical studies. To resist reading performances as texts is to chal-

9 Ibid., 76. I would like to thank Perry Link for his helpful comment here. 10 Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 185. 11  Ibid. 12 Ibid., 186. 13 Ibid., 200. 14 W. B. Worthen, “Drama, Performativity, and Performance,” PMLA 113 (1998): 1093– 1107. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Introduction,” Performativity and Perfor­ mance, ed. Parker and Sedgwick (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1–18. 15 Worthen, “Drama, Performativity, and Performance,” 1097.



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lenge the conventional, colonizing ethnography as a form of writing that textualizes “the other” cultures within Western epistemologies. Worthen powerfully demonstrates the performance’s surrogation of text with the example of Baz Luhrmann’s film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). Obviously enough, the filmic performance is not derivative from, secondary to, or residual to the original text, Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. On the contrary, Shakespeare’s lines uttered in Elizabethan English are reinvigorated and empowered, and simultaneously interrogated and surrogated by this modern MTV-style performance. The rich televisual citation in the film signifies its self-conscious address to the contemporary MTV-generation audience. As Worthen concludes, Luhrmann’s film presents “this version of Shakespeare’s work not as a performance of the text and not as a translation of the work but as an iteration of the work, an iteration that necessarily invokes and displaces a textual ‘origin’ by performing the text in a specific citational environment—the verbal, visual, gestural, and behavioral dynamics of youth culture, of MTV. . . . It [the drama] can be performed only by or as its surrogates.”16 Local-Language Dubbing as a Reaction to the Putonghua Dubbing Tradition In this light, local-language dubbing, as an alternative translation, echoes the original but is not necessarily dependent on or faithful to the dubbed source. By an act of replacement, the local-language version surrogates the original soundtrack and constitutes a new work with its own performativity. First of all, the rendition of film in local language subverts the conventional social expectation of film dubbing in Putonghua Mandarin. In other words, in terms of soundtrack, the dubbing of foreign films into local languages is addressed not so much to the original foreign­language soundtrack as to the dominant tradition of dubbing foreign films in Putong­hua. Take Jane Eyre as an example. Among the most popular dubbed foreign films in the 1970s and 1980s—such as Zorro (1975, Italy/ France), La Grande Vadrouille (1966, France/United Kingdom), Death on the Nile (1978, United States), and Cross the Angry River (Kimi yo fundo no kawa wo watare 君よ憤怒の河を渉れ, 1976, Japan)—the dubbed Jane Eyre from the version directed by Delbert Mann in 1970 has been long

16 Ibid., 1104.

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regarded as a model work of film dubbing in China. The lines dubbed in Putonghua have been acclaimed for following the traditional principles of translation aesthetics: fidelity (xin 信), fluency (da 达), and elegance (ya 雅). For instance, it was not Jane’s original monologue in English but its Chinese dubbing that became the most memorized and widely recited line for the Chinese audience of that generation: Dubbed version in Chinese: 你以为我穷, 不好看, 就没有感情吗? 我也 会的, 如果上帝赋予我财富和美貌, 我一定使你难于离开我! 就象现 在我难于离开你! 上帝没有这样! 我们的精神是同等的! 就如同你跟 我经过坟墓, 将同样站在上帝面前! Original English soundtrack: Do you think, because I am poor and plain, I have no feeling? I promise you, if God had gifted me with wealth and beauty, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me now, as it is difficult for me to leave you. But He did not. It is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal!

Moreover, a noteworthy fact about the dissemination of this dubbed movie is that it was circulated more widely in audiocassette form or over the radio than through the theater. In other words, it was listened to more so than watched. Le Lin 乐琳 argues that the film itself may or may not be viewed as a classic in its home country, but it is the charming voices of Chinese dubbing artists that establish its “classicness” in the genre of film dubbing in China.17 To a large extent, the Putonghua-dubbed voices become an inseparable part of these western “classic” films. For most of the Chinese audience, that the exotic heroes or heroines speak standard Putonghua has long been viewed as realistic, natural, and redundant. In this sense, local-language dubbing brings to the audience new information, unpredicted and undetermined by expectations based on social conventions. It functions as an alienatory mode that runs counter to the conventional practice that has been perpetuating Putonghua as the only “real” media language for any local community. In the dubbed version of Jane Eyre, the Sichuan Mandarin soundtrack, replete with verbal citations of local words (basi 巴适, anyi 安逸, comfortable), local idioms (suode qinqiao, cigen dercao 说得轻巧, 吃根灯草, to talk as if it were a simple matter) and local products (zongjiang guamian 中江挂面, a noodle made in Zhongjiang), evokes the familiarity and “realness” of everyday

17 Le Lin, “2003 nian wo xinzhong de shida yizhipian DVD” 2003 年我心中的十大译 制片 DVD [The top ten DVDs of dubbed foreign films in 2003], posted on the author’s blog on February 3, 2004, http://www.moon-soft.com/program/bbs/readelite1015955.htm.



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life in the local community. The Putonghua lines, when reiterated in the local language and addressed to the local audience, have to be reoriented, reconstituted, and recontextualized. Thus Jane’s famous utterance on love equality in Putonghua, cited above, becomes a performative utterance by a low-status Zhongjiang immigrant girl, a speech act that prompts Rochester, now a Chengdu citizen and the employer, to abandon his mahjong addiction. In examining the ideology of priority in the terminology “translation” (meaning “unoriginal” and “derivative” in contrast to the “original”), Rey Chow points out, “this terminology suppresses the fact that the ‘unoriginal’ language may well be the ‘native tongue’—that is, the original language—of the translator, whose translating may involve turning the ‘original’ which is actually not her native/original language into her ‘native’/‘original’ language.”18 Therefore, the rendition of the film into the local language falsifies the residual sense of local community that used to be mis-imagined as a product of Putonghua. Identified as something alien to the local community, the Putonghua soundtrack becomes the object of derision, mimicry, parody, appropriation, and subversion. Laughter and Local Community The laughter evoked by local-language dubbing helps to enact a real sense of local community imagined by local language. In his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud suggests the “bonding activity” of joke-telling in his discussion of the third person. A joke, particularly a tendentious joke, involves a tripartite structure of address: the teller of the joke or the first person, the butt of the joke, and the hearer of the joke or the third person, through whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled. While Freud’s major concern is to explain why it is the third person, not the first person, who laughs, his discussion of the common psychical process shared by both is more relevant here. About one of the conditions of generating laughter, Freud notes that “it is essential that he [the third person] should be in sufficient psychical accord with the first person to possess the same internal inhibitions. . . . Thus, every joke calls for a public of its own and laughing at the same jokes is evidence of far-reaching psychical conformity.”19 In his discussion of the smutty joke, one type of tendentious joke, Freud finds that the third person, replacing 18 Chow, Primitive Passions, 183. 19 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 184–185.

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the second person (usually the sexually exposed woman), “becomes the person to whom the smut is addressed, and owing to this transformation it is already near to assuming the character of a joke.”20 Noting that a joking relationship between the teller and the listener is established in this transformation, Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik further argue that “the telling of a joke . . . serves to establish a demarcation between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside.’ . . . Such jokes create a communal bonding between the participants which establishes a relationship of power, of inclusion and exclusion.”21 Viewing the audience in the position of the third person, they extend the Freudian “bonding activity” of joke-telling to the “communalizing activity” of the sitcom that they study and of broadcast TV in general. Concerned with affirming a sense of inclusion in a community, the sitcom performs its consolidating function and “represents an institutionalizing of the pleasures.”22 These insightful arguments are very useful for explaining the significance of television programs rendered in local languages and the function of the laughter they evoke among the local audience. Sharing the same linguistic and cultural identity and similar daily experiences, local audiences and shows were easily identified and aligned with each other, giving rise to communalizing activity. The dubbing studios employed online BBS, cell phone SMS, and phone calls to recruit local-language dubbers, decide which films were to be dubbed, and solicit new storylines, while simultaneously getting feedback from the local audience. The producer of the entertainment show Absolutely OK (Juedui OK 绝对 OK, 2005–2006) in Zhejiang TV even conceived of a live competition in dialect dubbing in order to maximize the audience’s participation in 2005. This idea was actualized in 2007 in the Jiangsu Film and Television Channel’s live shows in which voice actors dubbed the popular television series My Fair Prin­ cess (Huanzhu Gege 还珠格格, 1998, 1999, and 2003) in Nanjing Mandarin, which reportedly attracted thousands of Nanjing citizens wishing to participate.23 In return, the local audience, rather than functioning as ­passive and detached viewers, became part of the scene and actively involved in programming production and reception.

20 Ibid., 118. 21 Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, Popular Film and Television Comedy, 243. 22 Ibid. 23 Gu Xiaoping and Xing Hong 顾小萍 邢虹, “Shangqian shimin zhengshang fang­ yan jiemu peiyin xiu” 上千市民争上方言节目配音秀 [The dialect dubbing live show attracted thousands of citizens], Nanjing ribao, February 5, 2007.



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The laughter the local audience evoked helped to foster a sense of local community. The following dialogue is from the dubbed film Hero in Jinan Mandarin in the Shandong TV show Fresh Air from Drama in 2004, between Nameless (played by Jet Li), now the sales manager of a fly-bynight company, and a guard. 侍卫: 给老总捎麽土特产来了? 倷刚从法国回来, 对吗? Guard: What kind of local products have you bought for our CEO? You just came back from France, right? 无名: 没错, 法国俺都转遍了, 仲宫, 柳埠, 八里洼, 土屋, 俺都去了。 Nameless: Correct. I visited every corner of France, like Zhonggong, Liubu, Baliwa, Tuwu, etc. 侍卫: 哇, 还净去的大城市啊! Guard: Wah, you’ve been visiting all BIG cities!24

It is true that the generation of laughter here is in accordance with a general principle of satire: incongruity and exaggeration by confusion of the “categories of actuality.”25 However, the premise that guarantees such laughter is the ability to identify these disrupted categories. If the audience is unfamiliar with the local place names cited above, which are all small rural towns around Jinan city, and further unable to establish the categorical contrast between the big and the small, (s)he won’t laugh. Yet for the local audience, or more specifically, the Jinan audience, the above lines provide intertexuality that credits them with the necessary experience to make sense of such references and offers them the pleasure of recognition. In this way, a local-language soundtrack creates a communal bonding among the local audience members who share the joke and laugh, while at the same time setting a boundary that excludes those who cannot appreciate the joke and thus fail to laugh—therefore reinforcing an identity for the community.26 24 The script was provided by the show’s producer, Xu Zhiqiang 徐志强. 25 Leonard Feinberg, Introduction to Satire (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1967), 102–142. 26 Salvatore Attardo uses the term “social management” to generalize the social func­ tion of jokes and humor, namely to “facilitate in-group interaction and strengthen ingroup bonding or out-group rejection.” Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humor, 323. For more extensive studies on humor’s function to mark boundaries and to produce inclu­ sion and exclusion, see Martina Kessel and Patrick Merziger, ed., The Politics of Humour: Laughter, Inclusion, and Exclusion in the Twentieth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), and Giselinde Kuipers, Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006).

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Moreover, the dubbed program Hero is engaged in telling a completely new story with the local community as its central concern. Ignoring entirely the original plot about an attempt to assassinate the king of Qin in the Warring States period, the dubbed version, with a new subtitle, Hero: A Rotten Restaurant (Yingxiong: chennian mifanpu 英雄: 陈年米饭 铺), focuses on the character Nameless, who becomes the sales manager of a local fly-by-night company and later the manager of a local rotten restaurant. The dialogues, replete with local street names, local product names, and local slang and expressions, transform the remote past into the here and now. To deviate and detach from the original text is simultaneously to strive for a proximity to the local community. In the same program Fresh Air from Drama on Shandong TV, Niujin yishi (The fun anecdote of the beef tendon) changes the plot of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone into the story of how a local professional school illegally recruits as many students as possible to make a profit. By replacing niujin yishi 牛津轶事 (the anecdote of Oxford) with the homophone niujin yishi 牛筋逸事 (the fun anecdote of the beef tendon), the tongue-in-cheek title itself implies the commercial fraud in the plot. In another episode of the same show, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in True Lies, is transformed into a Jinan director who charges exorbitant tuition for a program that trains actresses who crave movie stardom. In the Wuhan-Mandarin version of Modern Times, the original critique of the problems brought by modern industrial production after the Great Depression is appropriated to critically address the harsh life of a laid-off worker from a state-owned factory in today’s Wuhan. The Sichuan Mandarin version of Swift’s Gulliver’s Trav­ els becomes a story entitled No Phony Commodities in the World (Tianxia wu waihuo 天下无歪货), which narrates how Wang Heping, a villager in a Sichuan village called Shurong cun 蜀荣村, fights against the manufacturers of counterfeit goods when his father is sent to the hospital after drinking a bottle of phony wine and his mother’s face is disfigured by fake cosmetics. The dubbed versions address real social problems in the local community and convey the opinions and concerns of its members. Once they realize the inadequacy of one monolithic community habitualized by Putonghua, local subjects feel the urgency of reimagining a local community of their own through their native local languages. These overwhelmingly popular television productions rendered in local languages created substantial commercial profit in local markets. For instance, the advertising revenue from the Sichuan Mandarin version



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of Tom and Jerry was around ¥ 20 million during its first month on air. The TV show Fresh Air from Drama became an instant hit in Shandong in 2004, and advertisers even bid up to ¥ 1.2 million to compete for the privilege of being the Gold Sponsor. Its ratings shot up to 7–9 percent in the first two weeks; by comparison, the average rating of shows in Putonghua is less than 1 percent. In the Kunming area, the series of dubbed films produced by the studio Happy Montage (Kaixin Mengtaiqi 开心蒙太奇, 1996–2004) were among the most requested programs. Local TV stations increasingly realized the great appeal of media productions in local languages. Yet even by 2004, the majority of local TV stations still lacked enough experience and funding to produce telenovelas or other television productions rendered in local languages. Dubbing, an attractive venture because of its low production costs and commercial potential, became an initial step in the self-definition of the local community. Not only the national metropolitan cultural forms but also the traditional indigenous local cultures were appropriated in the process of self-definition and self­development. The traditional local art forms in Shandong such as Lü Ju 吕剧 (Shandong local opera) and Shandong Kuaishu 山东快书 (Shandong clappertale) were deftly integrated into dubbed films on the show Fresh Air from Drama. Hangzhou Pinghua 杭州评话 (Hangzhou Storytell­ ing), a localized genre of the traditional narrative performance art form, quyi 曲艺 or shuochang yishu 说唱艺术, was used to introduce the show Fun with Dubbing on Hangzhou TV. In another recent trend, appropriation from local cultural resources has acquired a more serious function on news talk shows in local languages, where traditional storytelling arts are integrated into broadcasts of the utmost concern and interest to local audiences. This is a topic that will be addressed in Chapter 4. Power Reversals in Local-Language Versions of  Tom and Jerry In the above analysis, I did not make a distinction between the use of domestic and foreign films as dubbing sources. Yet if we take the image into consideration and view it as the dubbing source, dubbing foreign films into Chinese local languages merits further analysis. The Sichuan Mandarin version of Tom and Jerry provides a wonderful text to explore the dynamics of uneven power relations in the visual-aural dimension. Because the original cartoons have no dialogue, the original image is

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conventionally viewed as the source text, to which the dubbed voice is supposed to conform. However, in practice the dubbed voice often overshadows the image, pushing the latter into a subordinate position. In one scene of the episode “The New Sworn Brotherhood in the Peach Garden” (“Xin taoyuan sanjieyi” 新桃园三结义), the dog Butch presides over an oath-signing in Zigong 自贡 Mandarin, a subdialect of Sichuan Mandarin. Table 1 lists each element of the scene and the corresponding dubbed dialogue. Table 1. A Dubbed Scene in the Sichuan Mandarin Version of Tom and Jerry Frame 1

2 3 4

5

6 7 8 9

Image Sequence Butch persuades Tom and Jerry not to fight any more and the cat and mouse drop their sticks.

Dubbing

Translation

现在我们就学一下刘关张 Let’s come follow 桃园三结义 the Sworn Brotherhood in the Peach Garden between Liu (Bei), Guan (Yu), and Zhang (Fei) Butch writes the 我们来签个协议 Let’s sign an treaty. agreement. An image of the 我念给你们听一下 I’m reading to you guys. cover of the “Peace Treaty.” Intertitle: 狗, 猫, 耗子一致同意, 于 The dog, cat, and “The dog, cat, 今日义结金兰, mouse swear and mouse agree brotherhood to live together today . . .  peacefully.” “With this truce, 从此以后, 有福同享, 有难 From now on, (we we won’t tinker. 同当, will) share joys and The one that does sorrows, weal and is a stinker.” woe . . .  “Signed 签名: Signed (by) . . .  Tom, Jerry, and Butch.” Butch nods to 假老练, 风车车 Names of the cat Tom and Jerry and mouse respectively. 闷墩 Dog’s name Butch points to himself. The three shake 我们成为兄弟 We’re sworn hands happily. brothers now.



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As Table 1 shows, the dubbed voice is quite fittingly synchronized with the original images, which seem in turn to have been constructed to match the new soundtrack. This becomes a typical example of a “playback” process rather than a “dubbing” process, as Michel Chion defines these terms.27 The breakdown of the distinction between the two processes causes the viewer to oscillate between a centrifugal process, “tending toward rupture and dispersion,” and a centripetal process, “tending strongly toward concentration and tension.”28 On the one hand, the mise-en-scène, including the setting, figure design, and English letters, conveys a strong American ambience. On the other hand, the American cartoon characters experience identity confusion and cultural dislocation in the dubbed version. Tom, Jerry, and Butch are given local names, respectively Jialaolian 假老练, Fengcece’r 风车车, and Mendur 闷墩儿, forms of address in Sichuan jokes. They speak in accents which they never had in the original cartoons, and their speeches are a mosaic of popular idioms, popular songs, dirty jokes, advertising language, Internet language, and English with a Sichuan accent. Furthermore, the story of this episode is changed to recall the famous story about the three legendary heroes in the Kingdom of Shu, Liu Bei 刘备, Guan Yu 关羽, and Zhang Fei 张飞. The sound-image mismatch not only plays on the audience’s expectations, but also reverses the presumed power relations between the hegemonic West, represented by the United States, and the culturally colonized local communities. Moreover, another layer of gender reversal is added in the local-language version of Tom and Jerry. The premise of the cartoon is that the imposing cat is always outwitted by the innocent, petite mouse. Through correlative thinking, the weak triumphs over the strong, the yielding over the assertive, and the feminine over the male. In the introductory remarks composed for the Sichuan-Mandarin version, Li Boqing draws a parallel between the unconventional victory of the mouse, usually prey for the cat, and the enhanced social status of women in today’s China, as compared to ancient China. Without exception, in the local-language versions Jerry speaks in a female voice, although his gender ambiguously remains male. Correspondingly, other vulnerable characters such as a duckling and nibbles are also dubbed with female voices, while physically robust characters such as the lion and the bull are dubbed with male voices.

27 Michel Chion, Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Colum­ bia University Press, 1999), 153. 28 Ibid.

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Different local languages may be used to depict positive and negative characters. For instance, in the Sichuan Mandarin version of Tom and Jerry the mouse speaks Chengdu Mandarin while the cat and the dog speak Zhongjiang and Zigong Mandarin respectively. The smart and rebellious Xiaoxin (Shin Chan) speaks Chengdu Mandarin while his somewhat patriarchal parents speak Zhongjiang and Dayi 大邑 Mandarin respectively in the Sichuan Mandarin version of the Japanese cartoon Crayon Shin Chan (Labi Xiaoxin 蜡笔小新).29 Han Hong 韩 鸿 argues that local-language dubbing continues to perpetuate the linguistic hierarchy among local languages. He notes that in many media productions in Sichuan Mandarin, whether comedic or not, the mainstream characters speak Chengdu or Chongqing Mandarin, while the socially, economically, or morally marginalized characters speak local languages of lower status, such as the dialects of Zhongjiang, Zigong, and Leshan 乐山 (as opposed to Chengdu Mandarin); and the dialects of Wanzhou 万州 and Fuling 涪陵 (as opposed to Chongqing Mandarin). When the dubbed videos ridicule or satirize the characters who speak subdialects, audiences speaking Chengdu or Chongqing Mandarin acquire a sense of identity superiority or narcissism, which further strengthens the dominance of the regional koine in the local community.30 Han’s point is consistent with Gunn’s argument that Sichuan comedians often manipulate linguistic stereotypes to emphasize the regional hegemonic status of Chongqing and Chengdu Mandarin.31 The situation becomes more complicated when there is competition between regional languages. In the Sichuan Mandarin version of Crayon Shin Chan, Shin Chan uses many words characteristic of the Chengdu area, the western part of the Sichuan Basin. For example, /tφiau sau/ 搅肇 for “to continually make trouble or bug,” /ni piεn/ 利边 for “deliberately,” /tφin iəu/ 经佑 for “take care of,” and /pa φi/ 把细 for “steady and 29 A similar example can be found in the dubbing of the TV serial The Sunshine Pigsy (Chunguang canlan zhubajie 春光灿烂猪八戒) into Yunnan Mandarin. The producers attempted to depict different characters by their accents. The local languages used in the dubbing include the dialects of Kunming, Honghe 红河, Qujing 曲靖, Simao 思茅, Yuxi 玉溪, Xishuangbanna 西双版纳, and Xianggelila 香格里拉 (Shangri-la). See Zhai Chunxia 翟春霞, “Fangyanban ‘Chunguang canlan Zhubajie’ shou zhuipeng” 方言版《春 光灿烂猪八戒》受追捧 [The dialect version of The Sunshine Pigsy is warmly received], Chuncheng wanbao, November 10, 2004. 30 Han Hong, “Fangyan yingshi de wenhua jiexi” 方言影视的文化解析 [A cultural analysis of media productions in dialects], Xinwen yu chuanbo yanjiu 新闻与传播研究 [Journal of journalism and communication] 1 (2003): 67–74. 31 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 146–147.



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attentive.”32 These words may create problems of comprehension for viewers in the eastern part of the Sichuan Basin as well as in Chongqing. With regard to the phonetic system, Chongqing and Chengdu Mandarin have much in common. For example, syllable-final /an/ in Putonghua is pronounced as /an/ in both dialects. However, a recent sociolinguistic study finds that the young generation in urban Chengdu, especially the girls, tend to pronounce /an/ as a nasalized vowel /æ̃ / or even a single vowel /æ/.33 There are numerous examples of this in the Sichuan Mandarin version of Tom and Jerry. From the mouth of the mouse Jialaolian, dubbed by a Chengdu girl, Jin Li, we hear /kan/ 杆 (a golf club) as /kæ̃ /, /tşa tan/ 炸弹 (bomb) as /tsa tæ̃ /, /wan φiau/ 玩笑 (joke) as /wæ φiau/. It is thus possible that representing Sichuan Mandarin with Chengdu Mandarin could create a sense of exclusion for people in Chongqing and in eastern ­Sichuan.34 In a more explicit example of dialect substitution, a Shaanxi scholar Zhang Yuezhuo 张岳琢 noticed that the so-called Shaanxi Mandarin version of Tom and Jerry turned out to be dubbed in Xi’an Mandarin, and it is debatable whether Xi’an Mandarin can represent the heterogeneous subdialects of Shaanxi Mandarin. For instance, “碎仔儿, 你看我咋拾掇你!” (See how I’ll settle you!) in Xi’an Mandarin would be “碎娃, 看我咋日 塔你!” in the dialects of Yangling 杨陵 and Wugong 武功; “碎娃, 看我咋 式塔你!” in the Chang’an 长安 dialect; and “看这挨锤子的, 看我咋收 拾你!” in the dialects of Baoji 宝鸡 and Fufeng 扶风.35 In the context of globalization, English is usually perceived as the global hegemonic language, suppressing and marginalizing other languages, including Putonghua Mandarin, as local languages. At the same time, Chinese local languages have long been suppressed and ignored by Putonghua Mandarin, which enjoys national hegemony. Although the tension is pervasive in the multilayered linguistic hierarchy, English-as-global versus Putonghua-as-local is the most threatening and politically sensitive 32 These words were provided by Meng Yuanliang 孟元亮, January 2005. 33 The information here is largely drawn from the scholarly exchanges in www.pkucn .com in 2005, but linguists still argue over whether this new feminine speech style is serv­ ing to assert the local identity of the youth in Chengdu. 34 Some audiences from the eastern part of Sichuan expressed their anger on a dis­ cussion board about a Sichuan TV program in which the host always introduces Sichuan cuisine in a Chengdu accent. 35 Zhang Yuezhuo, “Cong Mao he Laoshu fangyanban kan shehui zeren yu fangyan wenhua de chuanbo chongtu” 从《猫和老鼠》方言版看社会责任与方言文化的传 播冲突 [The conflicts between social responsibility and dialect cultures in the dialect versions of Tom and Jerry], 2005, http://yywz.szedu.com/szlanguage/showinfo/showinfo .aspx?infoid=ba2f0001-090a-42b4-a8e9-a919cc73eaf7&siteid=1.

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rivalry of them all. The dubbing of the American Tom and Jerry in Chinese local languages may provide a vent for nationalistic sentiments for some Chinese. A number of producers and audiences argue that since Disney could freely fashion versions of Mulan and Butterfly Lovers that deviated greatly from the Chinese classics, the Chinese are also entitled to adapt and localize Hollywood classics, because the two cultures should be equal. These critics even claim that the dubbing of Tom and Jerry has ushered in a new era in which China starts to alter Hollywood.36 The wave of sentimental nationalism should be considered in the context of globalization, or more specifically, Americanization. In interpreting the surge of nationalism represented by the best-seller China Can Say No (Zhongguo keyi shuo bu 中国可以说不, 1996), Dai Jinhua points out that China, in its economic development and social transformation, often chooses the United States as model, goal, and ideal ally. But China’s enthusiasm for an idealized version of America has not been reciprocated on the American side. Therefore, this nationalism is an outgrowth and expression of China’s disappointment, “a feeling of resentment, an attitude of self-consolation and self-love and yet an earnest appeal.”37 In this way, Dai associates recent Chinese nationalism with the larger social critique of globalization—the economic, cultural, and political imperialism of the West. Indeed, as Gayatri Spivak argues, the “politics of translation” currently gives prominence to English and the other “hegemonic” languages of the ex-colonizers, and many translations over-assimilate the literature of the Third World to dominant Western discourses and ideology, so that “the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan.”38 In this light, the dubbing of films into local languages becomes a project of resisting homogenization and restoring diversity. Widely circulated on the Internet, the famous monologue of “The Holy Writ of Love” in Zhou Xingchi’s A Chinese Odys­ sey had been rendered into about twenty Chinese local languages as well as English and Japanese by 2005. “A Mouse Gets Drunk” (Yizhi laoshu zuile 一只老鼠醉了), a short text in modern Chinese, was rendered into more than fifty local languages, pidgin English, and even classic Chinese in 2005. Moreover, one version of Xue Cun’s song turns it into a parody of 36 Liu Yi 刘易, “Mao he Laoshu fangyanban: shi wenhua xianfeng haishi shangye laji” 《猫和老鼠》方言版: 是文化先锋还是商业垃圾? [The dialect-versions of Tom and Jerry: Cultural avant-garde or commercial garbage?], Beijing yule xinbao, June 22, 2004. 37 Jinhua Dai, “Behind Global Spectacle and National Image Making: the Tide of Nation­ alism,” Positions 9.1 (2001): 175. 38 Gayatri Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London: Routledge, 2000), 400.



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the United States’ pride in its military power, with lines such as “俺们那 旮全球有驻军, 俺们那旮都是轰炸机, 俺们那旮山上有核弹, 怕你我 就不是美国人” (We have garrisons all over the globe. We have bombers everywhere. On the hills in our place are there nuclear weapons. If I feared you, I wouldn’t be an American).39 The lyrics, posted online on July 23, 2001, were inspired by the controversial incident in which a U.S. surveillance aircraft collided with a Chinese fighter jet in the South China Sea in 2001 and the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in the former Yugoslavia in 1999. Here, taking into account the multiple layers of linguistic hierarchy (English, Putonghua Mandarin, and dialects), the comic technique of degradation in either the Freudian or Bakhtinian sense may explain why the lyrics are risible for the Chinese.40 Similar examples include a mock interview in which Osama Bin Laden uses vulgar and violent Beijing Mandarin words to speak about the 9/11 attack on America, and a mock dialogue between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair on the war in Iraq, which was widely circulated online particularly in 2003 in the distinctive local slangs of Beijing Mandarin, Northeast Mandarin, Shanghai Wu, Sichuan Mandarin, and Cantonese.41 It is interesting to note that grassroots nationalist sentiments among the Chinese are often recognized and manipulated by the government as a diplomatic lever. Actions like the student protest against the embassy bombing in Belgrade in 1999 or the many small-scale anti-Japanese protests over the past years have enjoyed tacit support from the Beijing government, which itself has kept a low profile and neutral attitude most of the time. Discussing a petition containing 22 million signatures that opposed Japan’s bid to secure a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council in 2005, Kahn reasons that “by allowing millions of people to sign their names to a petition against Japan, Beijing’s new leadership seems determined to show that recent Japanese actions have so inflamed popular sentiment that China has no choice but to adopt a tougher diplomatic line.”42 Furthermore, Gunn points out, “local language always implied a project of cultural excavation to expose older layers of cultural colonization by the metropolitan culture of the empire, adapted to ­construct the opposition to modern forms of colonization from overseas.”43 The 39 A more detailed discussion of Xue Cun’s original song can be found in Chapter 6. 40 Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 200–202; 208–211. 41 From the website http://club.xilu.com/yywt/msgview-10238-43418.html, the “mock dialogue” is dated March 29, 2003. 42 Joseph Kahn, “If 22 Million Chinese Prevail at U.N., Japan Won’t,” New York Times, April 1, 2005. 43 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 208.

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adoption of local languages as the voice of the masses seems to make the confrontation between China and the West rhetorically less direct and more subtle.44 It is true that the dichotomy of global English versus local Putonghua parallels the rivalry between national Putonghua and local dialects, but the argument that the West does not recognize China would be threatening to the Chinese and could arouse their anger and indignation, while the fact that the Putonghua-speaking cultural elites do not recognize local languages has long been taken for granted and thus does not hurt. Therefore, by replacing Putonghua with local dialects to construct the opposition to the West, what is threatening and strained becomes nonserious and comic, particularly to the Internet-savvy young educated Chinese.45 For the central government, the performativity of dubbing into local languages is a double-edged sword. Whereas nationalism works to liberate the “mouse” of China from the “cat” of the United States, it unfortunately works at the same time to empower the “mouse” of local Chinese culture against the “cat” of Putonghua. Quickly realizing that the trendy phenomenon ran counter to the broadcasting media’s mission to promote Putonghua, the SARFT ordered an end to broadcasting dialect-dubbed foreign films on October 13, 2004.46 The regulation alleged that the decision was made “to provide a healthy and favorable linguistic environment for underage viewers.” The law was drafted in recognition of the fact that children, inadvertently or not, made up the majority of viewers of dialectdubbed films, particularly cartoons.

44 This may be the “decommitment function” Attardo discusses as one of the social functions of humor, which can be seen as a tool for negotiating “issues that might be too threatening to be handled overtly.” Attardo, Linguistic Theories of Humor, 326. Similarly, in discussing the formal features of the popular shunkouliu in contemporary China, Perry Link and Kate Zhou point out that the purpose of punning in political shunkouliu is “not only for its humorous effect but as a way of referring to sensitive matters indirectly.” Link and Zhou, “Shunkouliu: Popular Satirical Sayings and Popular Thought,” in Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society, ed. Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Picko­ wicz (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 95. 45 For this analysis I owe much to Gunn’s inspiring discussion with me in 2005. 46 Ironically, it was the official media outlet, China Central TV, that first set this “bad example.” At the 1989 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the dubbing celebrity Li Yang 李扬 introduced to a national audience as entertainment the dubbing of a segment of the Japanese film Cross the Angry River (Kimi yo fundo no kawa wo watare 君よ憤怒の河を 渉れ, 1976), or Pursuit (Zhuibu 追捕), in Chinese, in various northern Mandarins, all by the veteran dubber Zhou Guiyuan 周贵元.



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The Issue of Child Audiences The issue of children’s access to dubbed materials is an example of how the use of local languages can lead to the stratification of local audiences. Some condemned the dialect versions of Tom and Jerry on the grounds that they undermined children’s acquisition of Putonghua, while the many vulgar, brash, and blatantly sexual references contained in the dialogue were harmful to children’s development. As for the former accusation, the promoters of local language often contended that it was equally important to pass on homegrown culture to the next generation. Yet the accusation of vulgarity has much to do with the identity of the target viewers (adults or children) and the related rating system. The Shanghai Wu–dubbed Tom and Jerry intentionally targeted local Shanghai kids, a generation whose loss of competence in Shanghai Wu alarmed the producer.47 As a result, this quite “pure” version was applauded by defenders of Shanghai Wu as an effective way to teach Shanghai children their local language and local cultural heritage. By contrast, the majority of the lines in the Beijing Mandarin version reflect the sexuality and mentality of adults, with jokes about extramarital affairs, sexual products and positions, and aging single women. The scriptwriter Dai Pengfei 戴鹏飞 stated that he wrote it for adults, joining in the emerging trend of adult cartoon making.48 An example of an alternative that satisfies both audiences is the pair of Shaanxi Mandarin versions, one designed for adults, and another, purged of sexual and violent language, for the kids. Nevertheless, despite some producers’ accentuated awareness of their target audiences, due to the lack of a rating system in China, the children remain the primary viewers of dialect-version cartoons designed for adults. Debate over the appropriateness of dialect versions for child viewers led to an urgent call for a rating system in China, the theme of a well-researched article in the newspaper Nanfang dushibao in 2004. The author Xu Linlin 许琳琳 argued that in China the cartoon had long been a children’s genre, and

47 Chen Li 陈莉, “Mao he Laoshu kaijiang-Shanghai xianhua”《猫和老鼠》开讲― 上海闲话 [Tom and Jerry begin to speak Shanghai Wu], Shanghai qingnianbao, July 2, 2004. 48 Xiao Zhiying and Zhou Jing 肖执缨 周静, “Mao he Laoshu gaoxiaoban: shi shi­ shangxianfeng haishi wenhua laji”《猫和老鼠》搞笑版: 是时尚先锋还是文化垃圾? [The comedic version of Tom and Jerry: Fashionable avant-garde or cultural garbage?], Yangcheng wanbao, July 3, 2004.

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that it was the lack of a rating system and a related concept of adult cartoons that made adult materials available to underage audiences.49 Conclusion When drafting the 2004 regulation, the central authorities were not thinking this far ahead. Ambiguous and loose as it is, the official regulation targeted foreign-film dubbing only and outlined no measures to punish violators. Implicitly, dubbing of domestic films and other media productions into local languages was still permitted, although such productions could also have a negative influence on children. Hence the Hangzhou TV show Fun from Dubbing, which was mainly adapting Zhou Xingchi’s comedy films, had been a vigorously sought-after and marketed program until 2006. The popular television series Prime Minister Liu Luoguo (Zaixiang Liu Luoguo 宰相刘罗锅, 1994) was dubbed into Chongqing and Yunnan Mandarin in 2005 and Huanzhu Gege was dubbed into Nanjing Mandarin in 2007. Furthermore, the central and local SARFT censors remain in force, but they too have to adjust their judgments by taking market and audience into consideration. In 2004, the Shandong TV show Fresh Air from Drama, after being aired for only one month, was cut by the local SARFT after an allegation that the Jinan Mandarin lines were so vulgar as to denigrate the images of Jinan and Shandong.50 However, it was the same local SARFT that ambiguously authorized two new programs in Jinan Mandarin: the 2005 hit news talk show Chat (Lagua 啦呱) on Shandong Qilu TV and the 2006 martial-arts sitcom All Things Considered (Medouguan 么都馆) on Shandong TV. More interestingly, after being canceled for four years, “Fresh Air from Drama” was restaged on Shandong TV in 2008. On the other hand, official concerns were ignored as frequently as they were articulated. Despite the 2004 regulation, episodes of the series Tom and Jerry dubbed into Hangzhou Wu were openly aired on the Zhejiang TV show Absolutely OK from September 2005 until the show itself was banned in 2006. More recently, a few local TV stations launched new shows dubbing films and television series, such as Nanjing 49 Xu Linlin, “Dongman, cuoxu gei ertong de zhuanli” 动漫, 错许给儿童的专利 [Manga and cartoon, a privilege mistakenly granted to the children], Nanfang dushibao, August 10, 2004. 50 According to the show producer Xu Zhiqiang, this was the actual reason for the show’s cancellation, although the alleged reason was copyright infringement. Telephone interview with Xu on December 27, 2004.



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TV’s Showtime in the Nanjing Vernacular (Baihua xiuchang 白话秀场) in 2007 and Guangxi TV’s Let’s Watch Film (Kan dianying le wei 看电影 了喂) in 2011. It is true that the popularity of the local-language film-dubbing phenomenon faded after the 2004 regulation, but the state authorities could by no means be the sole determiner of its fate. The overwhelming popularity and market success of dialect-dubbed soundtracks, with the underlying need to reimagine a local community, have made television productions in local languages a flourishing cultural phenomenon in most parts of China.

Chapter FOUR

EMPOWERING LOCAL COMMUNITY: TV NEWS TALK SHOWS IN LOCAL LANGUAGES In Chapter 3, I argued that the dubbing of films into local languages helps to foster a sense of local community through a double motion to iteration—the Luhrmannian and the Freudian. The urgency of reimagining a local community is manifested by the overwhelming popularity of the dialect-dubbed soundtrack and its unprecedented market success. In a way, local TV stations have been inspired to explore local cultural and linguistic resources as a new strategy to appeal to local audi­ences and local advertisers. In this chapter, I examine another phenomenon, the rise of news talk shows in local languages. Taking Hangzhou TV’s hit show Aliutou Talks News as a case study, I explore its appropriation of local traditional, indigenous cultural forms and its implications for the empowering of a local community. Aliutou Talks News and the News Entertainmentization The news talk show Aliutou Talks News was launched in January 2004 on Hangzhou TV’s West Lake Pearl Channel (or HTV 2). It is hosted by An Feng 安峰 and Zhou Zhihua 周志华, who alternately serve as the show’s anchor. The anchor, dressed in a long, traditional man’s gown (paozi 袍子), stands in a storyteller’s house-like setting with the requisite furnishings, such as a table, chair, teapot, and fan. He plays the role of an ordinary Hangzhou citizen named Aliutou (pronounced Alodei in Hangzhou Wu), a common name in Hangzhou Wu that literally means he is the sixth son in his family. The show begins with a verse-like passage performed by An and Zhou. 熬稍, 熬稍, 不要吵不要吵; 熬稍, 熬稍, 阿六头来了。市面蛮灵, 说法 儿蛮好; 听听新鲜, 看看味道; 9:30, 频道锁牢, 阿六头来了! Come on, come on, please be quiet. Come on, come on, Aliutou is coming. He’s so well-informed and eloquent. Come taste the freshness. 9:30 p.m., stay tuned please. Aliutou is coming!

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Similar to the xingmu 醒木 (awakening rod, gavel) used in traditional storytelling, the opening credits function to get the audience’s attention and invite them to watch the show. Mainly recruited from local opera (Hangzhou or Shaoxing huajixi) troupes, the comedian-turned-anchor delivers an improvised monologue narrating local social news and stories of particular interest to Hangzhou citizens, on topics such as medical care, housing, transportation, and community life.1 This kind of integration of material from contemporary everyday life with speaking and singing is a distinguishing feature of Hangzhou Xiaorehun 小热昏 (one of the local quyi), which is arguably different from Yangzhou storytelling, in which the repertoire mainly consists of serialized historical novels.2 Sometimes Aliutou spontaneously creates additional fictional characters and plots as a narrative device. From time to time he mingles professional acting and singing, which are often accompanied by elements drawn from the traditional mode of storytelling.3 Because the language of the traditional Hangzhou performing arts is based on the spoken dialects of the Hangzhou area, Hangzhou Wu words and slang abound in the newscasts. For instance: 这两天, 平时出门都骑自行车的张先生有点吃不消了, 外面太阳白晃 晃的, 不如改乘公交车吧。为了躲太阳, 木佬佬骑车的人都和张先生 的想法差不多。不过, 要是你坐的不是空调车, 上去就同洗桑拿没啥 两样的。如果是上下班高峰, 火火热, 人贴人, 自己晓得。 Lately Mr. Zhang, who normally rides a bike, can’t take the sizzling sun and is better off taking the bus. He’s not alone. Lots of cyclists trying to beat the heat have a similar idea. But unless you’re taking a bus with AC, it’s not much different from a sauna on wheels. If you’ve taken the rush-hour bus where the passengers are packed like sardines, you know the feeling of being cooked.

1 There are no subtitles for the introduction to the news because of the anchors’ unscripted broadcasting style. 2 Yangzhou storytelling is examined in detail in Vibeke Børdahl, The Oral Tradition of Yangzhou Storytelling (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996). 3 For example, when the anchor tried to explain why the National Day of Loving Ears is set on March 3 in a 2004 show, he drew the numeral 3 close to each of his ears while saying, “Aren’t they like two ears?” Gu Fangfang et al. 顾芳芳等, “Yong Hangzhouhua shuo xinwen: chengshi dianshitai xinwen bendihua de sikao” 用杭州话说新闻―城市 电视台新闻本地化的思考 [To broadcast news in Hangzhou Wu: Thoughts on the news localization of city TV stations], Xinwen shijian 4 (2004): 41.



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Correspondingly, the headlines are more colloquial and even prolix compared with the terse and formulaic headings conventionally used. For example: 双休日 三八商机木佬佬 There’re a whole bunch of commercial opportunities on the March 8 holiday weekend. [木佬佬 /mo lo lo/ meaning “many, a whole bunch”] 铁道路口面不平 车子经过慌兮兮 The road is so uneven that cars are scared stiff to go through. [慌兮兮 /huaŋ φi φi/ meaning “afraid, scared”] 多算饭钿 吃客发火 The customers are mad at being overcharged. [饭钿/vẽ tiẽ/ meaning “a bill for a meal”] 老酒吃饱 司机十字路口睏觉 Drinking too much, the driver takes a nap in the crossroad! [睏觉/kun tφio/ meaning “to sleep, nap”]

The vivid use of local language in the show serves to create a sense of cultural proximity and familiarity as well as entertainment among local Hangzhou citizens, which Putonghua Mandarin cannot do. This is more evident from a comparison of a news report on the topic “Bridge Changmu: The manhole in the bus stop is left open-mouthed” (长木桥: 公交站点窨 井开口) in Putonghua and Hangzhou Wu respectively. “市民们说, 这个没盖的窨井在白天大家注意一点还可避让, 但晚上就 危险了。 ”《明珠新闻》 “The citizens said, ‘It might be possible to avoid [falling into] the lidless manhole in the daytime if we pay some attention, but it would be very dangerous in the evening.’ ” Broadcast in Putonghua on the show Mingzhu News. “专门来这里等车子的人说, 白日里光线亮还好一点, 要是到了夜里墨 塔铁黑介格会看得出? 人又不是猫罗, 晚上头看得出的呀?”《阿六头 说新闻》 “The people who are here waiting for the bus said, ‘It’s ok in the daytime when the light is bright. But when it’s black as ink who can make out [the manhole without the lid]? People aren’t cats, who can see when it’s dark?’ ” Broadcast in Hangzhou Wu on the show Aliutou Talks News

In one sense, Aliutou Talks News is a reaction to conventional news broadcasting, which features serious-looking anchors skilled in Standard Mandarin. According to Gunn’s study, as the target audience for television

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news began to shift from the cultural elite to urban citizens in the late 1980s and 1990s, news programs with a format that includes investigative reporting and-interviews have increasingly accepted their reporters’ nonstandard Mandarin.4 The media scholar Li Xing 李幸 further observes that there have been three innovations in the figure of the news anchor on Chinese television in the past decade: first, the reporter as anchor ( jizhe xing zhuchi 记者型主持), such as Bai Yansong 白岩松 in CCTV’s Focus (Jiaodian fangtan 焦点访谈) and Oriental Space (Dongfang shikong 东方时空); then the actor as anchor (yiren xing zhuchi 艺人型 主持), such as Li Xiang 李湘, who formerly appeared in Hunan Satellite TV’s Citadel of Happiness (Kuaile dabenying 快乐大本营); and now the commoner as anchor (pingmin zhuchi 平民主持). Li is also quick to point out that the distinguishing linguistic feature of commoner anchors is their unconventional use of nonstandard Putonghua or dialects; for instance, Aliutou speaks Hangzhou Wu, Meng Fei 孟非 speaks Nanjing-accented Putonghua in the news show Nanjing at Zero Distance (Nanjing lingjuli 南 京零距离) on the Jiangsu TV City Channel, and Yuanyuan 元元 speaks ­Beijing Mandarin in the news talk show The Seventh Day (Di qi ri 第七日) on the Beijing TV station. According to Li, the replacement of anchors drawn from the cultural elite with commoners signifies a new ideology, that is, to depict commoners’ life from the perspective of the commoners ­themselves.5 Indeed, the abovementioned TV news shows, together with Anhui TV’s Fastest News (Diyi shijian 第一时间), Hunan TV’s Evening News (Wanjian xinwen 晚间新闻), and Qingdao TV’s Life Online (Shenghuo zaixian 生活 在线), are often cited as examples of an emerging news genre called minsheng xinwen 民生新闻, which literally means “news about ordinary people’s lives.” Overlapping with Western categories like soft news, human interest news, or social news, minsheng news programs capture the everyday experience of common people, particularly of local citizens in urban areas. Therefore a prominent feature of minsheng news is the local focus, which is often presented as a survival strategy chosen by local city television stations competing with national CCTV and provincial TV stations. Lu Di 陆地 proposes an interesting comparison. He characterizes CCTV and provincial TV stations with cable or satellite channels as umbrella-shaped, because they feature broader coverage, stronger admin4 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 127. 5 Li Xing, “Shinian lai zhongguo dianshi de disanci geming” 十年来中国电视的第三 次革命 [The third revolution of Chinese TV in the past decade], Shi ting jie 1 (2004): 5–7.



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istrative forces, and a more flexible market orientation. In contrast to the mass-oriented, umbrella-shaped media, most urban city TV stations are like wells drilled to tap the resources of a fixed local market. The local media outlets exploit their market niche by producing shows palatable to local tastes.6 Among other resources, local languages and traditional oral performing arts employing local languages are used to appeal to a specific geographically and culturally defined group. According to Weng Xiaohua 翁晓华, the producer of the Aliutou show, the production crew is not only concerned with “what to say,” but also “how to say it”—how to report serious news not in the conventional formal style but in an easy, lively, and entertaining way.7 The entertainmentization of news (xinwen quweihua 新闻趣味化), greatly facilitated by drawing on elements of traditional entertainment forms, is paramount to earning audience ratings and market success.8 Aliutou Talks News proved to be an instant blockbuster hit in the Hangzhou area. As of 2005, it topped the AC Nielsen ratings at an average of 11 percent, almost five or six times higher than Mandarinspeaking news programs in the Hangzhou area. In 2004, the advertisement revenue from the show ($5 million) accounted for half of the annual ad income of the entire channel.9 News Talks Shows and the Traditional Performing Arts Many local TV stations eagerly copied the successful formula of Aliutou Talks News, and news talk shows mushroomed around 2004. Table 2 lists selected TV news talk shows in local languages.

6 Lu Di, “Zhongguo dianshi chanye shichang fazhan de xianzhuang fenxi” 中国电视 产业市场发展的现状分析 [A status quo analysis of the market development of the TV industry in China], Meijie yanjiu 媒介研究 [Media studies] 2.1 (2004). Page numbers are not available. 7 Nevertheless, it should be kept in mind that the “serious” news Weng talked about here is soft, social news, not hard, political news. According to Wang Changtian 王长田, China’s “entertainment king,” “news, especially serious news, is not the most profitable market niche” and “producing news does not make business sense if it would launch a confrontation with the state.” Yuezhi Zhao, Communication in China: Political Economy, Power, and Conflict (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 226, 225. 8 Weng Xiaohua, “Yansu xinwen qingsong bao: shilun dianshi xinwen de quweihua changshi” 严肃新闻轻松报: 试论电视新闻的趣味化尝试 [To report the serious news in a lively way: A preliminary discussion of the entertainmentization of news], 2004. From the program pamphlet I obtained in 2005. 9 Data obtained from my interview with Zhang Jianming 张建明, the vice director of HTV 2, on June 5, 2005.

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Show Name

TV Station and Local date of first Languages broadcast

Wo he ni shuo Hangzhou 我和你说 TV 3, 2004 (I’m talking with you) Baixiao jiang xinwen 百晓讲新闻 (Baixiao talks the news) Laifa jiang shaxi 来发讲啥西 (What’s Laifa talking)

Wenzhou City TV, June 2004 Ningbo TV 2, Feb. 2005

Xiaoshan Wu and Shaoxing Wu Wenzhou Wu Ningbo Wu

Shaoxing Lifolo, a traditional art of storytelling in Shaoxing, is used on the show.10 Baixiao in Wenzhou Wu refers to someone who is very informed.

Jiaxing Wu

The titles of the segments of the show are all Ningbo Wu phrases, for example, /kaφiŋtφio/ 解心焦 (play jokes) and /zakuaŋa/ 石骨 硬 (not skilled at Putonghua). Shaoxing had long enjoyed a nationwide reputation for producing scholars or shiye (private secretaries) employed by prefects, magistrates, and other top yamen 衙门 officials through the nineteenth century. Tan Shanhaijing (to talk the “Classic of Mountains and Seas”) is local slang in Wu, meaning “to chat.” Liaozhai is the abbreviation of Liao zhai zhi yi 聊斋志异 (Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio) by Pu Songling 蒲松龄. Liao in Liaozhai literally means “chat.” Jinzhao in Wu local language means “today.”

Yangzhou Mandarin

Yangzhou pinghua (Yangzhou ­storytelling) is used on the show.

Shiye shuo xinwen Shaoxing TV, 师爷说新闻 Jan. 2005 (Private Secretary talks news)

Shaoxing Wu

Tiantian shanhaijing 天天山海经 (Daily chatting)

Suzhou TV, 2004

Suzhou Wu

Afu liaozhai 阿福聊斋

Wuxi TV, Dec. 2004

Wuxi Wu

Jiaxing TV, Jinzhao duo kandian Nov. 2005 今朝多看点 (To watch more today) Yangzhou TV, Xinwen pinghua Jan. 2005 新闻评话 (News pinghua) Nanjing TV, Dagang shuo xinwen March 2004 大刚说新闻 (Dagang talks news) Sichuan Xinwen shuchang 新闻书场 Cable TV (News storyteller house)

Notes

Nanjing Mandarin Chengdu Mandarin

Shuchang refers to the traditional ­storyteller’s house.

10 Compared with Hangzhou Pingshu, Shaoxing Lifolo includes more singing. The sto­ ries are mainly about everyday life, not drawn from serialized historical novels like the repertoire of Hangzhou Pingshu.



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Table 2 (cont.) Show Name

TV Station and Local date of first Languages broadcast

Laoxi’r pie ba 老西儿谝吧 (Laoxi’r’ chat bar) Lagua 拉呱 (To chat)

Shanxi TV Public Channel, May 2005 Shandong Qilu TV, Oct. 2005

Taiyuan Mandarin

Dushi chazuo 都市茶座 (Urban teahouse)

Hubei TV, 2000

Wuhan Mandarin

Jinan Mandarin

Notes

In Jin local language, pie means “chat”; the anchor was recruited from the local xiangsheng troupe. In Shandong Mandarin, lagua means “chat”; the anchor was recruited from the local xiangsh­ eng troupe. Hubei Pingshu, comic skits, and huajixi are employed on the show.

Without exception, all of the news shows listed in Table 2 were warmly welcomed by their local audiences and climbed to the top of the local ratings. As the commercial, entertainment, and aesthetic values of traditional arts were being rediscovered, many shows tried to integrate elements from local forms, such as the Hangzhou xiaorehun, Shaoxing lianhualao/lifolo 绍兴莲花落, Yangzhou pinghua 扬州评话, and Taiyuan xiangsheng 太原相声. In turn, traditional performers and comedians became instant regional celebrities as hosts of the news talk shows. Their appearance on stage in performances of local opera achieved unprecedented box office success. It was reported that during the big festivals of 2005, all of the live theater performances of local Huajixi were sold out in Hangzhou.11 Prompted by the burgeoning quyi market, a TV show featuring local performing arts, Happy Teahouse (Kaixin chaguan 开心茶馆), was aired on HTV 2 in 2005 and its ratings soared. As some producers of HTV 2 optimistically claimed, TV shows were saving traditional local opera. It is true that the gradual resituation of TV media as an institution of entertainment enabled the producers to draw inspiration from traditional entertainment forms, which in turn may have heightened awareness of the need to protect local cultural heritage. Around 2005, in the midst of heated discussions on the issue of dialect use in the media, an official from Hangzhou, motivated by the success of the Aliutou show, came up with four suggestions of ways to protect and save the Hangzhou dialect and Hangzhou local arts. 11 Chen Jinhong 陈进红, “Hangpai yanchu de xingfu shiguang laile” 杭派演出的幸 福时光来了 [The happy time of Hangzhou Opera is coming], Xin minsheng bao, Febru­ ary 28, 2005.

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Nevertheless, it is still debatable whether the revival or rejuvenation of traditional entertainment is the motivation or the side effect of such media shows. The orally oriented media of radio and television have long been viewed as posing a threat to the survival of the traditional oral arts. Zhang Lianhong’s series of articles examines the historical transformation of traditional opera’s performing space with the advent of modern media in Shanghai at the turn of the twentieth century.12 Zhang finds that as the opera’s performing space shifted from open-air shelter (xipeng 戏棚), to teahouse (chalou 茶楼), and then to new-style theater (juchang 剧场), the originally spontaneous, random, and chaotic opera performances became more regulated, orderly, and rational activities for public consumption. This transformation, first enabled by commercial market forces during the urbanization and modernization of Shanghai, was intensified by the politics under Mao’s version of modernity. Particularly, in the opera reform movement in the 1950s and 1960s, the operas’ commercial and entertainment functions were greatly suppressed and denied. Together with other forms of noise and symbolic violence, traditional opera styles were dramatically transformed into a vehicle to carry on party ideology, as a way of being integrated into a unified modern nation-state system. With the increasing cultural commercialization in the 1990s, the commercial and entertainment value of the traditional arts was rediscovered by the media, as analyzed above. However, when the performing space moved to the studio, many performers-turned-hosts experienced difficult adjustments. Zheng Guanfu 郑关富, the anchor for the show Shiye shuo xinwen on Shaoxing TV, admitted that instead of face-to-face interaction with the audience of a stage performance, what he faced now in the studio was an emotionless camera that would enlarge or distort his image and make his performance less spontaneous.13 The Tianjin and Beijingbased xiangsheng performer Guo Degang 郭德纲, who quickly became the most popular xiangsheng comedian in North China in 2006, insisted

12 Zhang Lianhong 张炼红, “Cong mingjianxing dao renminxing: xiqu gaibian de zhengzhi yishi xingtaihua” 从民间性到人民性: 戏曲改编的政治意识形态化 [From popularism to peopleness: The ideologization of play adaptation], Dangdai zuojia pinglun 1 (2002): 40–47. Zhang Lianhong, “‘Haipai jingju’: jindai zhongguo chengshi wenhua yule kongjian de yizhong chengxian” “海派京剧”：近代中国城市文化娱乐空间的一种呈现 [Beijing Opera in a Shanghai style: A space representation of urban entertainment in mod­ ern China], Xiju yishu 26.3 (August 2005): 14–23. 13 Zhu Xiaoyan 朱小燕, “Dianshi fangyan jiemu huobao zhejiang gedi, fangyan mingzui zhengshuo xinwen” 电视方言节目火爆浙江各地 方言名嘴争说新闻 [The dialect TV shows mushroomed in Zhejiang], Qianjiang Wanbao, February 8, 2006.



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that xiangsheng needs to return to the teahouse in order to recover its original function of pure entertainment. In Guo’s opinion, the dominance of televised xiangsheng has diminished its charm over the years, not only because the xiangsheng pieces are often truncated on TV for scheduling reasons, but also because a television performance lacks interaction with a live audience and the related improvisation, something essential to this art form.14 He showed a strong contempt for the 1980s generation of xiangsheng performers whose short-lived, TV-made fame crumbled in the late 1990s; many of them had abandoned xiangsheng for comic sketches and sitcoms. In spite of his criticism of the media, Guo relies heavily on modern media for self-promotion. He hosts TV shows, appears in blockbuster films, writes a blog, and many of his live performances in teahouses are disseminated over the Internet. Therefore, it might be safer to contend that modern media play a role, although not the key role, in the reappreciation of traditional arts. News Talk Shows and Local Community Building As Table 2 indicates, the majority of news talk shows emerged in Wuspeaking cities in the lower Yangtze Delta region. Among the nine macro­ regions of socioeconomic integration identified by William Skinner, the lower Yangtze was the most urbanized district as early as 1843,15 and today its level of urbanization is second only to that of the Zhujiang 珠江 Delta region. Targeting a specific linguistically, culturally, and geographically defined group, the shows are viewed as a kind of “narrowcasting” (zhaibo 窄播) as opposite to broadcasting.16 Yet Shi Tongyu 时 统宇 points out that this relatively limited audience came from regions

14 Xinhua News Agency, “A Teahouse Performer of Traditional Humor,” February 8, 2006, http://www.china.org.cn/english/culture/157246.htm. 15 William Skinner, “Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth Century China,” in The City in Late Imperial China, ed. William Skinner (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977), 211–249. 16 As Laura Mumford defines it, “‘narrowcasting’ refers to cable networks’ practice of selecting or producing programming designed to appeal to a specific target audience, such as viewers of a particular age, gender or ethnic identity.” Mumford, “Feminist Theory and Television Studies,” in The Television Studies Book, ed. Christine Geraghty and David Lusted (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 127. Although “narrowcasting” has been a standard practice in the West’s cable TV media, China has mainly applied this notion to regional TV without cable.

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­enjoying economic prosperity and cultural ascendancy.17 Taking Hangzhou as a case study, Yu Hong 俞虹 tries to find some common features in the areas where dialect programs are active: a developed economy, a long tradition of cultural heritage, excellent natural conditions, and adequate leisure time.18 In the case of Hangzhou TV’s Aliutou show, according to data from 2005, the show attracted a considerable number of viewers with higher degrees. Approximately 55% of the total audience came from the 25–55 age group, the demographic most valued by advertisers. So Yu argues that Aliutou’s show not only provides information and entertainment for local Hangzhou citizens, but also becomes a vehicle for cultural identification, or even cultural narcissism.19 What these shows tried to promote is a strong sense of local community. The shows were dominated by local news, and national or international stories were seldom covered. The shows tried every means to encourage local citizens’ involvement and participation. Based on a sample study of the Aliutou show for one week (from March 1, 2004, to March 7, 2004), news from the citizens’ telephone hotline accounted for 29.8 percent of a total of 57 news items.20 Besides news talk shows in the Hangzhou area, Hangzhou’er (Hangzhoulao 杭州佬) or I Love Hangzhou’er (Wo ai Hangzhoulao 我爱杭州佬, 2003–2008) was a docudrama-type show featuring ordinary Hangzhou residents in everyday situations. The filmdubbing show Fun from Dubbed Films frequently invited local citizens to contribute their voices. Prior to the TV shows, both the local radio stations and newspapers started programs or columns in Hangzhou dialect. For instance, Atongbo Talks News (Atongbo shuo xinwen 阿通伯说新闻) from Hangzhou People’s Radio began in 1994, and The Happy Time at

17 Shi Tongyu, “Dui Fangyan shuo xinwen de jige xiangguan beijing de fenxi” 对方言说 新闻的几个相关背景的分析 [An analysis of news narrated in local languages], unpub­ lished paper. 18 The converse is probably not the case. Compared with the burgeoning dialect shows in many cities of the lower Yangtze Delta, there are fewer TV shows in Shanghai Wu except for some sitcom productions. A story has it that one of the channels under Shanghai Media Group tried to broadcast news in Shanghai dialect in 2005, but the effort was later halted for undisclosed reasons. See “Shanghai Dialect Takes Back Seat to Mandarin,” Shanghai Daily, February 23, 2006. 19 Yu Hong, “Zhimian fangyan bobao yu zhuchi” 直面方言播报与主持 [Discussing broadcasting news in local dialects], Xiandai chuanbo 1 (2005): 51–52. 20 Gu Fangfang et al. 顾芳芳等, “Yong Hangzhouhua shuo xinwen: chengshi dianshitai xinwen bendihua de sikao” 用杭州话说新闻―城市电视台新闻本地化的思考 [Broad­ casting news in Hangzhou Wu: Thoughts on the news localization for city TV stations], Xinwen shijian 4 (2004): 42–44.



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1 p.m. (Kaixin shisandian 开心十三点)21 and Axing Awang (阿兴阿旺) from Hangzhou West Lake Radio came on the air in 1998. In addition, the local print media experimented with writing in local language, such as the “Hangzhou tuofu” 杭州托福 (Hangzhou TOEFL) column in the Hang­ zhou Daily, which started in 1998 and tests readers on Hangzhou Wu slang and phrases, and “Rongge Talks News” (“Rongge shuo xinwen” 荣哥说 新闻), which has appeared in Today Morning News (Jinri chenbao 今日 晨报) since 2000. A passage from the latter that describes how the author stopped a theft attempt follows. “昨天中午2点多, 我 . . . . . . 快要到体育场路口时, 只见毛十个一群的男 伢儿在路旁边逛。格辰光, 只看到其中一个最小的、大眼睛、卷头 发伢儿朝一个遇着红灯慢骑的女子跑过去, 手脚轻快地拉开女子挂 落后腰间的小皮包拉链。我在后面看得煞煞清爽, 大吼一声“喂”, 小 偷儿连忙缩手, 格女子也回过头来晓得发生了啥个事体 . . . . . .” 《荣 ( 哥说新闻: 路见不平一声吼》, 2003年7月22日) Around 2 p.m. yesterday when I . . . was nearing the road leading to the gym, I saw a dozen young guys loitering by the road. Just at that moment, the smallest of them, who had big eyes and curly hair, began running towards a young woman who slowed her bicycle while approaching a red traffic light. (The guy) yanked down the zipper of the woman’s purse, which was on her back at waist level. I observed every detail so clearly and couldn’t help yelling out “Hey!” The petty thief at once drew back his hands. This young woman also turned her head back, having now figured out what had happened. (“Rongge Talks News: Yelling Out at an Injustice on the Road,” July 22, 2003)

The local media, anxious to employ local language to construct a cohesive and centripetal community, have facilitated the assimilation of the increasing number of migrants who wish to learn the local language. Besides providing subtitles for dialect shows, the media has been involved in various dialect training workshops (fangyan peixunban 方言培训班). Similar workshops held in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Nanjing, Suzhou, Wuxi, and other cities were all well received. In Ningbo, a 2006 report stated that the number of people who signed up for the workshop had doubled in the past two years; 95% of the students were middle class white-collar workers or had a higher degree.22 Taking a similar workshop may even become mandatory for migrant taxi drivers in Hangzhou. According to a

21 As a pun, shisandian in Wu language describes an idiosyncratic person. 22 Zhu Xiaoyan, “Dianshi fangyan jiemu huobao zhejiang gedi.”

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controversial regulation passed in 2005, they had to pass a Hangzhou Wu exam in order to get a work permit.23 As much as the local media tries to uphold a hegemonic place for the dominant local language, it is hard to reach an agreement on what the standard media language should be, not only because of the suburban and urban linguistic variants, but also because of generational differences. The producer of the show All Things Considered with Afugen (Tantian shuodi Afugen 谈天说地阿富根), which resumed broadcasting on Shanghai People’s Radio in 2002, worried that there were only four professionals skilled in broadcast standard Shanghai Wu, which, as he insisted, was much different from what ordinary Shanghai citizens speak.24 Audiences also pointed out that some hosts of news talk shows, such as Suzhou TV’s Tiantian shanhaijing and Hangzhou TV’s Aliutou Talks News, did not speak the authentic local languages. One of the hosts of the Aliutou show, An Feng, defended himself, saying that while it was true that his Hangzhou Wu was different from that of his contemporaries, he was trying to follow the old generation’s pronunciation (which to him seems more authentic and standard), such as that of the blind storyteller in the film Sanmao Studies Business (Sanmao xue shengyi 三毛学生意, 1958).25 Such a profusion of media shows in local languages has drawn considerable attention from the media and academia, as well as the authorities. A national symposium on regional news broadcasting was held in Hangzhou in 2004, producing a number of in-depth academic papers focusing on dialect broadcasting. One media critic listed the rise of dialect media productions as one of the top ten broadcasting events in 2004.26 A core topic perpetually debated in media and academia is how to balance the use of local languages in the media against the overriding state policy of promoting a single national language. Interestingly, the promoters of dialect broadcasting also used the ambiguity of the 2001 national language law to justify their arguments. As Zhang Jianming pointed out, none of 23 Ma Lili 马莉莉, “Budong fangyan nengbuneng dang dige ‘hangzhouhua ceshi’ yinfa zhengyi” 不懂方言能不能当的哥 “杭州话测试” 引发争议 [The controversy over the Hangzhou Wu test taken by taxi drivers], Zhejiang ribao, August 1, 2005. 24 “ ‘Huyu boyin’ binlin miejue, zhuanye zhuchiren jinsheng siren” “沪语播音”濒临灭 绝 专业主持人仅剩4人 [Broadcasting in Shanghai Wu is facing extinction, there are only 4 professional anchors], Xinwen chenbao, August 1, 2002. 25 Zou Yingying 邹滢颖, “Hangzhouhua fuxing bibukai de renwu” 杭州话复兴避不开 的人物 [A key figure in the revival of Hangzhou Wu], Hangzhou ribao, January 1, 2004. 26 Wang Chenyao 王辰瑶, “2004 nian guangbo dianshi yanjiu de shige guanjianci” 2004 年广播电视研究的十个关键词 [The ten key words in broadcasting media in 2004), Sheng­ ping shijie 2 (2005): 15–16.



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the dialect programs shown on HTV 2 ran afoul of the National Language Law, as they all got permission from the state or the provincial SARFT as stipulated in article 16. Furthermore, consistent with the state policy known as the “Three Closeness” (Santiejin 三贴近) mandate,27 dialect broadcasting would facilitate the dissemination of party policy, ­making it more comprehensible, especially for elderly people.28 Moreover, Putong­ hua did not completely disappear from these dialect shows. On many of the news talk shows, although the anchors spoke the local languages, the vox populi from on-the-street interviews was often speaking Putonghua. On entertainment shows, a common hosting pattern paired an older male host speaking in dialect with a younger female host speaking Putonghua. To a large extent, Putonghua enjoys the elevated status in the linguistic hierarchy. A Southern Weekly reporter took interest in how the anchor of Sichuan Economy Radio’s talk show Eating in Chengdu (Chi zai Chengdu 吃在成都) varied his speech when introducing restaurants. Roughly speaking, he used Sichuan Mandarin for small eateries less than 100 square meters in size, jiaoyan 椒盐 Putonghua for restaurants between 100 and 2,000 square meters,29 Sichuan-accented Putonghua and Beijingaccented Putonghua for more elegant and luxurious ones, and finally standard Putonghua for Western-style restaurants.30 Still, state and provincial censors show their concern over the expansion of media productions in local languages by frequently reiterating the regulations on media language. In February 2006, Shanghai announced the city’s first legislation to enforce the National Language Law; the statute prescribed that any new shows in Shanghai Wu must be approved by the Shanghai Culture, Radio, Film, and Television Administration. In Zhejiang province, where the number of TV and radio shows in local languages was rapidly climbing toward fifty by the summer of 2005, provincial censors set a quota on dialect shows (one such show for each channel, and no more than two for each station). The tension between capitalism and

27 The “Three Closeness” mandate requires the broadcast industry to provide program­ ming that is “close to reality, close to life, and close to the masses.” 28 Interview with Zhang Jianming. 29 Sichuan-accented Putonghua is usually called chuanpu. According to Li Boqing, Jiaoyan Putonghua, as a subvariety of chuanpu, is used jokingly for Sichuan Mandarin vocabulary spoken in the tone of Putonghua, such as dīngdīngmāo for dragonfly. Yuan Lei 袁蕾, “Huyou Sichuanhua” 忽悠四川话 [To cheat with Sichuan Mandarin], Nanfang zhoumo, November 10, 2005, D25. 30 Yuan Lei, “Sichuanhua jiule yige diantai” 四川话救了一个电台 [Sichuan Mandarin has saved a radio station], Nanfang zhoumo, November 10, 2005, D26.

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the state spelled trouble for the burgeoning local media industry, especially when the media tried to become more commercially self-sufficient. After the quota was announced, the Hangzhou West Lake Pearl Channel (HTV 2) and the Life Channel (HTV 3) each increased their number of local language programs to three by June 2005. For Hunan TV, which won national attention for producing leading entertainment programs, the local popular talk show The More Chatter, the Happier (Yue ce yue kaixin 越策越开心, 2002–) in Changsha Xiang, similar to its other nationwide hit shows such as Citadel of Happiness (1997–) and Super Girl (Chaoji nüsheng 超级女声, 2004–2009), was somewhat dismissive of criticism from the state as well as from CCTV.31 In the Sichuan and Chongqing regions, the media has a longer tradition of producing dialect shows. A short list compiled in 2006 included the news talk show Acong Reads News­ papers (Acong dubao 阿聪读报) in Sichuan-accented Putonghua, the food show Food in Sichuan (Tianfu shifang 天府食坊) in Chengdu Mandarin, the entertainment shows Spicy Life Soup (Shenghuo malatang 生活麻辣 烫) in Chongqing Mandarin, Spicy Economy Soup (Jingji malatang 经济麻 辣烫) in Chengdu and Gonglai Mandarin, and Super Taste (Chaoji pinwei 超级品位) in Chengdu Mandarin. The Emergence of the Lanmuju Genre and News Dramatization Finally, I briefly discuss an emerging television program genre, lan­ muju, that features local languages and is related to news dramatization. Chongqing TV’s Night Talk in the Foggy Capital in Chongqing Mandarin was arguably the herald of this genre, which the creator and producer Ma Jiren 马及人 christened lanmuju, literally “drama show.” Stylistically speaking, lanmuju is closer to the docudrama genre. Yet as the documentary drama is usually defined as a work “that has developed very much in the conventional manner of a play (a script emerging largely from individual creative work which is then cast and shot) but that has employed some of the looks and sounds of documentary material to deliver a more

31 A 2006 media regulation, which was interpreted by Geoffrey Fowler and Juying Qin as directly aimed at Hunan TV’s “Super Girl,” stipulates that contestants on all future talent shows must be at least eighteen years old. It also requires that entertainment programs “avoid vulgar or gross styles.” Fowler and Qin, “China’s Censors Target Teen Behavior,” Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2006, A4.



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‘realist’ impact,”32 most lanmuju productions instead follow a practice that is the reverse of this. The scripts are normally based on recent local news stories to capture the immediacy and authenticity of news programming. But at the same time, the scriptwriting emphasizes storytelling narrative techniques that deliver a melodramatic effect. As the show is specifically geared to be palatable to the local female audience, the stories mainly cluster around the themes of family, marriage, love, friendship, and ­ethics.33 In the early years of the show, around 1994, the stories were almost exclusively concerned with hot topics such as love triangles and extramarital affairs. Moreover, a distinctive feature of lanmuju is its ­brevity. A complete story is usually told in one or two episodes, so that it can be completed in two twenty-minute broadcasts at most. According to Ma, it is a reaction to the lengthy serialized television genres for which audiences usually cannot afford enough time.34 In the opening credits of Night Talk in the Foggy Capital, a voiceover in Chongqing Mandarin states: “This is not a television series. This is a real story about real people, an authentic story about Chongqing people played by themselves.” Indeed, audience participation has always been crucial to the program. The stories are acted by nonprofessional, volunteering local residents who speak their native Chongqing local dialects, and whom a professional branch organization recruits and trains. Furthermore, a radio station actively solicits story leads through a telephone hotline. Consequently, the topics of the stories on the show are of the utmost immediate concern and interest to the local audience, as are the scripts of the telenovelas and sitcoms discussed in Chapter 2 and the content of the news talk shows examined earlier in this chapter. It became a mushrooming trend in 2006 that the local television stations on the provincial and city levels made their own lanmuju programs of short-story telling.35 Together

32 Glen Creeber, ed., The Television Genre Book (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 32. 33 That the show targets local female viewers is consistent with a broader study on the audiences for television series or telenovelas in China in 2004: “the audiences for televi­ sion dramas tend to be older, poorer, less well educated, less likely to work in state admin­ istration, business management, and white-collar occupations, [and are] more likely to be female and rural residents.” Yuezhi Zhao, Communication in China, 212. 34 My interview with Ma Jiren on January 18, 2006. 35 A long list of examples would include Gushihui 故事会 and Gushi jiuba 故事 酒吧 in Changsha Xiang and produced by Hunan Economy TV, Jingshi gushihui 经视故 事会 in Wuhan Mandarin by Hubei Economy TV, Juedui gushi 绝对故事 in Shandong Mandarin by Shandong Satellite TV, Dushi suixi 都市碎戏 and Langren huju 狼人虎剧 in Xi’an Mandarin by Shaanxi Satellite TV, Goutong gushihui 沟通故事会 in Hangzhou Wu by Zhejiang Economy TV, Daocheng gushi 岛城故事 in Qingdao Mandarin by Qingdao

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with other local shows rendered in local languages, these lanmuju programs produced by local television stations, intimately portraying a slice of ordinary residents’ lives, foster the imagination of local communities while greatly empowering them as real local entities.

TV, Gushihui 故事会 in Suzhou Wu by Suzhou Economy Channel, Beifang gushi 北方故 事 in Northeast Mandarin by Jilin Entertainment Channel, Feichang banzha 非常板扎 in Kunming Mandarin by Yunnan Kunming TV, and Tage zou tianya 踏歌走天涯 in Hainan Mandarin by Hainan TV.

CHAPTER FIVE

AMBIVALENT LAUGHTER: COMIC SKETCHES IN CCTV’S SPRING FESTIVAL EVE GALA* In the years since Zhongyang dianshitai chunjie lianhuan wanhui 中央电 视台春节联欢晚会 (China Central Television’s Spring Festival Eve Gala Performance) began in 1983, it has gradually evolved as part of China’s ritual celebration of its biggest folk festival, the Spring Festival (Lunar New Year). As a significant cultural event, annually organized and produced by the state-run CCTV, the Gala is often seen as a valuable opportunity for the Communist Party or the state to convey central, state-sanctioned, official ideology to the populace. Signaling the official mainstream discourse, the national language, Putonghua Mandarin, is predominantly employed in the Gala performance. Xiaopin (comic sketches), the best-received popular show in the Gala, evokes laughter among the largest national audience.1 Approximately since the early 1990s, xiaopin has evolved from a training exercise in urban academic drama schools to a dialogue-based comic genre infused with the spirit of folk culture—minjian wenhua 民间文化 in Chinese.2 Correspondingly, xiaopin performers, drawn largely from the “lower,” local, rural folk art troupes, tend to speak various local languages * This chapter is based on my previously published article: “Ambivalent Laughter: Comic Sketches in CCTV’s Spring Festival Eve Gala,” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 10.1 (2010): 103–121, and is presented here with permission from the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese. 1 According to data culled from a CCTV audience group, the Gala enjoyed the largest national audience for almost two decades, as the average rating per family between 1996 and 2003 was 89.5 percent. Wang Liejun 王列军, “Guanxi shijiao xia de quanli shijian: 21 nian chunjie lianhuan wanhui de shehuixue jiexi” 关系视角下的权力实践－21 年春 节联欢晚会的社会学解析 [Power practice with a relational perspective: A sociological analysis of Spring Festival Gala in the past 21 years] (master’s thesis, Beijing University, 2004). 2 Although the terms folk in English and minjian in Chinese are not exactly equiva­ lent, my approach blends their connotations in each language under the umbrella word folk. Therefore, on the one hand, “folk” means “traditional, premodern, preindustrial, and pretechnological.” In this sense, folk culture could, according to Michael Kammen, sig­ nify “traditional” popular culture as contrasted with technologically transformed, modern popular culture. Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 6. On the other hand, the term connotes “among the ordinary people” (what minjian means literally in Chinese), “not elite or highbrow,” “not associated with academic institutions,” or “not associated with official government.”

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or Putonghua with distinct accents. Zhao Benshan, the acclaimed king of the comic sketch, often played a comic role in errenzhuan, an art form of Northeast China in which a duet of performers, one male and one female, sing and dance. His sketches, rendered in Northeast Mandarin, are deeply rooted in the traditional peasant errenzhuan art that he and his scriptwriters have grown up with. By examining the laughter evoked by the language-based comic sketches in the Gala, with a focus on Zhao Benshan and errenzhuan, this chapter explores the dynamic dialogue between the central, official discourse from above, represented by Putonghua, and the peripheral, folkloric discourse from below, articulated in local dialects. Whereas the central, official discourse attempts to manipulate the peripheral, folkloric discourse for ideological reasons, the latter ends up simultaneously conforming to, and subverting, the former; both involve ambiguity, nuance, and indeterminacy. Bakhtin’s Theory of Folk Humor Bakhtinian theory, with its fascination with folk culture and obsession with socioideologically charged language, provides an insightful theoretical framework for this study. In his oft-cited Rabelais and His World (1968), Bakhtin examines the culture of folk humor in the spirit of carnival, as depicted in François Rabelais’s series of novels La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel (The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel), written in vernacular French in the Renaissance. According to Bakhtin, the ideal of carnival comprises festive ritual spectacles, such as pageants, comic shows, and open-air amusement, with the participation of clowns and fools. As carnival is predicated on the basis of laughter, Bakhtin ascribes great importance to the nature of carnivalesque laughter: It is, first of all, a festive laughter. Therefore it is not an individual reaction to some isolated “comic” event. Carnival laughter is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity. Third, the laughter is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies, it buries and revives. Such is the laughter of the carnival.3

3 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 11–12, emphasis added.



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Fundamental to the corporeal, collective nature of carnival laughter is what Bakhtin terms “grotesque realism.” As its essential principles are degradation and debasement, the function of grotesque realism is to transfer things on a high, spiritual, ideal, abstract level to a low, material, bodily, and concrete level. Grotesque realism presents the human body as multiple, bulging, over- and undersized, protuberant, and aged. Again, the grotesque body in its exaggerated and distorted form is ambivalent and contradictory. On one hand, it is “ugly, monstrous, hideous from the point of view of ‘classic’ aesthetics, that is, the aesthetics of the readymade and the completed.”4 On the other hand, Bakhtin celebrates the unfinished and open body for its positive force, a growing, regenerating, renewing, and creative one. The unity of image and sound demands that the grotesque body seek a grotesque language. For Bakhtin, such grotesque language may take the forms of comic verbal compositions (oral and written), such as parodies and travesties, and various genres of billingsgate, including abusive language, profanities, oaths, slang, humor, popular tricks, and jokes.5 Consistent with his positive assessment of the lower stratum of the human body, Bakhtin celebrates the vitality of all sorts of “low” and “dirty” folk humor: the forbidden laughter that is usually excluded from official ideology. Among other forms of carnivalesque language, Bakhtin highlights the tension between Latin and the French vernacular or dialect employed in Rabelais’s novel: The line of demarcation between two cultures—the official and the popular—was drawn along the line dividing Latin from the vernacular. The vernacular invaded all the spheres of ideology and expelled Latin. It brought new forms of thought (ambivalence) and new evaluations; this was the language of life, of material work and mores, of the “lowly,” mostly humorous genres, the free speech of the marketplace (although popular language, of course, was not homogeneous and contained some elements of official speech). On the other hand, Latin was the medium of the official medieval world. Popular culture was but feebly reflected in it and was distorted, especially in the Latin branch of grotesque realism.6

Local dialect, alongside other socio-ideologically charged languages and speech styles, is an important component of Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia. In heteroglossia, a phenomenon found in Renaissance literature 4 Ibid., 25. 5 Ibid., 5–17. 6 Ibid., 465–466.

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as well as in contemporary Chinese literature, a local dialect is employed to decentralize the central discourse, to distort the standard form, and to excite a perception of critiquing differences and contradictions masked by the master narrative.7 In the above-cited passage, Bakhtin provides a historic account of heteroglossia. During the Renaissance, various vernaculars or dialects besieged, penetrated, and relativized Latin and all the unitary, ecclesiastical, feudal, and political discourses that expressed themselves through it. In recognition of the performative power of the vernacular, Bakhtin emphasizes that rather than composing a clear-cut binary opposition, the discourse at the center and the discourse at the periphery form a dynamic, dialogic relationship of interpenetration, interaction, and interillumination. “Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward.”8 Liu Kang defines Bakhtin’s heteroglossia as a theory for times of cultural transition: for example, the ancient Greco-Roman era, the Renaissance, and the turn of the twentieth century.9 Bakhtin’s theory definitely has broad implications for contemporary China. Undergoing a comparable cultural transition in the reform years, China has witnessed an increasing encroachment of popular, vernacular culture on the realm of official, elite culture, and a further blurring of the boundary between high and low culture. For example, Barmé observes “an uneasy coexistence” among various forms of culture since the early 1990s, “one characterized more by constant compromise rather than simply a mutual antagonism or entrenched opposition.”10 CCTV’s annual Spring Festival Gala constitutes just such a field of “uneasy coexistence,” where the official, statesanctioned culture, the modern, technologically transformed popular culture, and the traditional, premodern, preindustrial folk culture form a dynamic dialogical relationship, exhibiting Bakhtinian tension, contradiction, and ambivalence.

7 Liao Xianhao, “Fangyan de wenxue juese: sanzhong houjiegou shijao,” 96–99. 8 Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 272. 9 Liu Kang 刘康, Duihua de xuansheng: Bahejin de wenhua zhuanxing lilun 对话的喧 声－巴赫金的文化转型理论 [Dialogic heteroglossia: Bakhtin’s theory of cultural transi­ tion] (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1995). 10 Geremie Barmé, In the Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 100.



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On one hand, as the Chinese New Year celebration is fundamentally of folk- cultural origin, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala shares some elements of the utopian ideal of Bakhtinian carnival. The almost five-hour-long performance is an extravagant display of singing and dancing, particularly by groups; language-based comic shows including xiangsheng (comic cross-talk) and xiaopin; xiqu 戏曲 (folk opera) performance; and other variety shows. The comic, clownish role, as a constant element of the New Year celebration, is manifested most prominently in the Gala’s comic sketches, as later analysis will show. The collective laughter the Gala evokes is shared by the roughly 90 percent of Chinese families nationwide watching the show. Coupled with other festive rituals such as nianyefan 年夜饭 (New Year’s Eve feast) and shouye 守夜 (staying up late or all night on New Year’s Eve), the Gala serves a basic function of carnival in celebrating the death of the old and the birth of the new. However, on the other hand, many critics point out that even Bakhtin’s notion of a carnival is a licensed affair, sanctioned or endorsed by the authorities themselves, and therefore the Bakhtinian carnival spirit does not necessarily undermine authority. Gluckman asserts that although the “rites of reversal obviously include a protest against the estab­lished order . . . they are intended to preserve and strengthen the established order.”11 In the Chinese form of the carnival during the Lunar New Year, the state broadcast media CCTV sees the Spring Festival Gala as an invaluable opportunity to inculcate party ideology into the populace, as well as to showcase official mainstream culture. Nevertheless, in an era of cultural transition, the state media policy has correspondingly had to undergo gradual infrastructural changes. Therefore, Bakhtinian “grotesque realism,” characteristic of folk culture, is allowed temporarily to rupture hegemony, challenge authority, and dissolve ideology. However, this brief carnivalesque laughter, generated by comic sketches and the like, in turn serves to solidify the position of the long-term party leadership. Prepared under the scrutiny of censors, each year the Gala is carefully orchestrated to stay safely within the party line, initiating and structuring a process of self-containment and ambivalence.

11 Max Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa (New York, Barnes and Noble, 1965), 109.

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Evolution of Xiaopin in CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala Xiaopin, which literally means a short skit, originally referred to a theatrical sketch serving as a training exercise in metropolitan, professional film and drama schools. This academic acting tradition is discernible in early Gala sketches by the famous film actors Chen Peisi 陈佩斯 and Zhu Shimao 朱时茂, who both largely speak Putonghua. Chen plays a comic role as an extra in a movie shoot in the sketches “Eating Noodles” (“Chi miantiao” 吃面条, 1984) and “Shooting a Film” (“Pai dianying” 拍电影, 1985). Some skits are cast in the “sketch within a sketch” mode, as when Chen plays a supporting role as a traitor who tries by every means to steal the show from the lead role, an Eighth Route Army officer played by Zhu in the sketch “The Leading Actor and the Supporting Actor” (“Zhujue yu peijue” 主角与配角, 1990). The playfully subversive theme in this sketch seems to exhibit the genre’s potential to incorporate carnivaleque, folk-cultural elements. Lü Xinyu further points out that xiaopin is better suited than either xiqu or xiangsheng for modern television transmission: the plot development of the typical sketch framed in time and space corresponds to the linear movement of the television camera.12 Thus the televised xiaopin performances prove to be an effective way for the CCTV Gala to legitimatize itself as a traditional festive ritual celebration. The comic, clownish role, always indispensable in rural folk festival celebrations, is manifested most prominently in the increasingly “folkified” comic sketches. In the CCTV Galas of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the comic figure played by the school-trained professionals gradually evolved from an urbanite who speaks Putonghua into a “lower,” rural peasant who speaks a variant of Northern Mandarin or who speaks Putonghua Mandarin with a distinct accent. Guo Da 郭达, from the Xi’an Spoken Drama Theater (Xi’an Huajuyuan 西安话剧院) at that time, plays a “feudal” peasant husband and speaks Shaanxi Mandarin. He is anxiously hoping for an infant son instead of a daughter in “In Front of the Delivery Room” (“Chanfang menqian” 产房门前, 1987). In “A Slacker’s Blind Date” (“Lanhan xiangqin” 懒汉相亲, 1989), Song Dandan 宋丹丹, trained in the Beijing People’s Art Theatre (Beijing Renyi 北京人艺), speaks a strongly accented Mandarin.

12 Lü Xinyu 吕新雨, “Jiedu 2002 nian Chunjie Lianhuan Wanhui” 解读 2002 年春节 联欢晚会 [An Interpretation of the 2002 CCTV Spring Festival Gala], Dushu 1 (2003): 93–94.



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She plays a single-minded, provincial rural young woman, whose most memorable line is “俺叫魏淑芬，女二十九岁，至今未婚” (My name is Wei Shufen, female, 29 years old, not married yet). In “Birth-QuotaExceeding Guerrilla” (“Chaosheng youjidui” 超生游击队, 1990), Song and Huang Hong 黄宏, a Shandong-born comedian from a Shenyang military performance troupe, both speaking an identifiable Northeast Mandarin, play a shabbily dressed and uncouthly behaved rural couple. With three daughters already in tow, the wife is visibly pregnant with a fourth child. In order to evade the heavy fine demanded by the Birth Control Policy, they lead a guerrilla-like vagrant life. At roughly the same time, those responsible for casting xiaopin actors stopped hiring urban stage actors, trained by the academic schools, in favor of more authentic peasant performers from regional folk art troupes. The late Zhao Lirong 赵丽蓉 had long played the female comic role 彩旦 (caidan) in Pingju 评剧, a folk opera allegedly originating among the village beggars in the Hebei area. Zhao Benshan, Pan Changjiang 潘长江, and Gong Hanlin 巩汉林 had traditionally played comic roles in errenzhuan in their home villages. For instance, Zhao Benshan’s hometown is at the bottom of the administrative hierarchy—Shizui village, in Lianhua town, Kaiyuan county, Tieling city, and Liaoning province. Mirroring these casting changes, the sketch writers were increasingly drawn from those who had been working on folk art production. For example, Shi Lin, who wrote most of Zhao Lirong’s sketches, works in a quju 曲剧 troupe in Beijing. Zhang Chao, Cui Kai, He Qingkui, and Zhang Huizhong, the scriptwriters or directors responsible for most of Zhao Benshan’s sketches, are peasant errenzhuan artists in the local folk art troupes in North Liaoning. In the various dialect-speaking sketches in the CCTV Galas, a key difference between the staged Mandarin varieties and the standard Putonghua Mandarin is the Chinese characters’ tonal change in the phonetic sense (see Table 3). The Mandarin varieties listed in Table 3, identifiable or unidentifiable as specific dialects, could be viewed as forms of accentual liberation from standard Putonghua Mandarin. The intonation of the official language can relatively freely undergo deployment and differentiation within the range of its basic, standard tone. In this sense, Putonghua is not uni-accentual, isolated, or closed, but can be exaggerated, distorted, or diffused, thus becoming multi-accentual, plural, unfinished, and unpredictable. Among others, Zhao Lirong’s sketch “A Day in the Life of the Hero’s Mother” (“Yingxiong muqin de yitian” 英雄母亲的一天, 1989), scripted

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Table 3. Tonal Changes of the Staged Mandarin Varieties in CCTV Comic Sketches Performer Mandarin Variety

Tones in the Tones in Sketches Putonghua

Sketch Name

Year

Chen Peisi

Mandarin 乌鲁木齐 (Urümqi) with an Uygur accent wu53 lu55 wu55 lu214 mu55 qi53 mu51 qi35

“Yangrouchuan” 1986 (Skewering the shish kebab)

Shen Fa

Sichuan Mandarin

“Jie Qi” (Pick up the wife)

1988

打麻将 (to play Mahjong) da42 ma31 jiang12

Da214 ma35 jiang51

Song Dandan

Mandarin 俺娘说 (my mom said) with an An214 unidentifiable ŋæ~ 35 niang45 niang35 accent suo55 shuo55

“Lanhan xiangqin” (A slacker’s blind date)

1989

Ni Ping

Shandong Rongcheng Mandarin

“Tianqi yubao” (Weather forecast)

1990

“Chaosheng youjidui” (Birth-quotaexceeding guerrilla)

1990

“Huan dami” (Exchanging rice)

1991

Huang Hong

Northeast Mandarin

Guo Da

Shaanxi Xi’an Mandarin

Zhao Benshan

Northeast Mandarin

Zhao Lirong

Hebei Tangshan Mandarin

天气预报 (weather forecast) tian31 qi21 tian55 qi51 yu12 baor21 yu51 bao51 知道不？(you know?) zi35 dao bu44?

zhi55 dao51 bu?

换大米 (exchanging rice) huan55 da55 mi53

huan51 da51 mi213

别紧张 (don’t be nervous) “Wo xiang you ge jia” Bie51 jin214 bie35 jin214 (I want a zhang22 zhang55 family) 有啥说啥 (say whatever you want) you214 sha53 shuo35 sha51

you 214 sha35 shuo55 sha35

1992

“Mama de 1993 jintian” (My mother’s today)



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by Shi Lin and Zang Li, manifests the folkloric subversion enacted by local dialects against the official discourse represented by Putonghua. In this sketch, Zhao Lirong plays an ordinary rural old woman speaking Hebei Tangshan Mandarin. Going out to buy tofu, Zhao is visited by a Putonghua-speaking television director, surnamed Hou. He has come to make a documentary of Zhao’s daily life in celebration of International Women’s Day (March 8). Because her son became a hero for capturing a criminal, Zhao is cast by Hou as a model of a hero’s mother. Director Hou reads the bombastic and grandiose conception for shooting the documentary from his folder: Through you, we want to set up a glorious image of a hero’s mother. Through you, we want to capture the spiritual perspective and the characteristics of the time period of women in the 80s; through you, we will track how the hero grows up; through you, we also want to reflect the aesthetic pursuits of Chinese women.

The subgenre of the “model-setup” has been an entrenched propaganda technique since the Maoist era. In it, the grand, ideal, abstract ideology is materialized and personalized by a concrete, real human body. In this sketch, the director, or the party, the authority, attempts to materialize Zhao’s body and to have her project the morality of a hero’s mother in the 1980s: an educated, urban, fashionable, and extraordinary woman with a positive outlook on life. However, Hou’s attempt at materializing the ideal is thwarted by Zhao’s materialization working in the opposite direction, that is, toward degradation and debasement, the essential principle of Bakhtin’s grotesque realism. At every turn, Hou’s sublime, ideal, spiritual, and grand message is lowered by Zhao’s flippant and vulgar utterances. Hou (following his purported reasons for shooting): Do you understand  what I’ve just said? Zhao (raising head from doing chores): Oh, yes. [I] understand. . . . Well,  what did you say just now? Hou (disappointed): Anyway, stay where you are, and let’s get to work. . . . What  do you do when you get up every morning? I mean, the FIRST thing? Zhao: The first thing? Can I say anything? Hou: Say whatever you’d like. Zhao: The first thing is to GO TO THE TOILET.

Hilariously, her response deflates the director’s expectation of something lofty or unique, and lowers the interview to quotidian, bodily functions such as excretion. Zhao’s materialization of her own body defies the materialization expected or assigned by the director: elsewhere, she dismisses the movements of disco dance, a fashionable metropolitan cultural form

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at the time, as less attractive than the motions of a policeman directing traffic in her neighborhood. She sings the then-popular Taiwanese melodrama theme song “Zuoye xingchen” 昨夜星辰 (The constellation last night) so that it gradually devolves into a Pingju tune. And she never correctly pronounces the title of the “meaningful” ancient story about the literati, “Sima Guang za gang” 司马光砸缸 (Sima Guang breaking the jar), whereas she is quite familiar with “superstitious” folk ghost stories and fairy stories.13 Puns are also a ubiquitous element in the xiaopin shows as they appear in the Gala. Punning is one of the forms of what Bakhtin calls grammatica jocosa, which, as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White explain, is a form of locution where “grammatical order is transgressed to reveal erotic and obscene or merely materially satisfying counter-meaning.”14 They further cite Arthur’s argument on Bakhtinian-style punning: [The pun] violates and so unveils the structure of prevailing (pre-vailing) convention; and it provokes laughter. Samuel Beckett’s punning pronouncement “In the beginning was the Pun” sets the pun against official Word and at the same time, as puns often do, sets free a chain of other puns. So, too, carnival sets itself up in a punning relationship with official culture and enables a plural, unfixed, comic view of the world.15

The sketch “A Day in the Life of the Hero’s Mother” makes frequent use of punning. For example, Hou’s identity as a daoyan 导演 (director), a prestigious job title, is degraded by Zhao as daoye 倒爷, a derogatory word for black marketeer/profiteer. The same holds true for punning on the abstract professional jargon term gousi 构思 (conception) with the word for the concrete, everyday food doufusi 豆腐丝 (sliced tofu), on jikuair 几块儿 (several episodes) with jikuair 几块儿 (several chunks of tofu), and on xiayige danyuan 下一个单元 (the next unit of camera shots) with xiayige danyuan 下一个单元 (a downstairs unit of a building), and so forth. From a sociological perspective, Wang Liejun is quick to point out that the model-setup is a technique of power control prevalent both in society generally as well as in the yearly Gala. The “parody of the lofty model” in the 13 The ancient story of “Sima Guang za gang” tells how the young Sima Guang of the Song dynasty saved a fellow child who had fallen into a big jar full of water by bravely breaking the jar with a stone. 14 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 10–11. 15 Ibid., 11.



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sketch “A Day in the Life of the Hero’s Mother,” when compared with the dominant model-setup form exalted in other shows in the Gala, can be seen to serve as a necessary lever of power rather than as an instance of resistance to it.16 Such sketches are arguably an alternative technique of power control devised by the state media, thus helping to form a “compromise equilibrium” in the Gramscian sense, where the power exercised by dominant groups operates through subtle and complex negotiations and compromises rather than through explicit domination of, or direct conflict with, subordinate groups.17 In this light, both Wenwei Du and Bin Zhao only partially make sense of the legitimatization of xiaopin in the state-sanctioned Gala.18 While Du attributes the popularity of xiaopin exclusively to its critical potential for lampooning the commercial ethos in the market economy, Zhao goes to the other extreme by arguing that xiaopin, as the most popular form of entertainment, is made to convey effectively the packaged official propaganda. Nevertheless, all three authors fail to identify the traditional folk culture in which xiaopin is implicitly grounded, and thus they are unable to fully comprehend how the dominant ideology legitimizes itself by staging folk forms in the major cultural productions of modern broadcast media, such as the CCTV Gala. It is true that the various folk forms (folk opera, ballads, and songs, as well as the folk performing arts integrated in the comic sketches) are a way for the Gala to establish continuity with traditional festive celebrations, and it is equally true that these premodern, preindustrial folk entertainment forms have been increasingly threatened and marginalized by modern, industrial, popular forms of entertainment such as television. In this way, by staging, recognizing, and even possibly valorizing the folk forms in the CCTV Gala, the most prestigious cultural spectacle of the mainstream media, the state and mainstream society alike seem to convey a cultural message that no valuable cultural heritage has been sacrificed, victimized, or will perish in China’s modernizing process. At the same time, however, these authorities may not be aware that to inculcate the populace with any such ideological message is to employ a double-edged sword. The comic sketches embedded in peasant folk performance art can simultaneously 16 Wang Liejun, “Guanxi shijiao xia de quanli shijian.” 17 John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (Athens: Uni­ versity of Georgia Press, 2003), 4. 18 Wenwei Du, “Xiaopin: Theatrical Skits as Both Creatures and Critics of Commercial­ ism,” The China Quarterly 154 (1998): 382–399. Bin Zhao, “Popular Family Television and Party Ideology: The Spring Festival Eve Happy Gathering,” Media, Culture & Society 20 (1998): 43–58.

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conform to and subvert the state ideology in an ambivalent and nuanced way, as Zhao Benshan’s comic sketches most clearly illustrate. Zhao Benshan’s Comic Sketches and Northeast Errenzhuan Ever since his first appearance in the CCTV Spring Festival Gala in 1990, Zhao’s sketch has almost become a perennial staple in the yearly Gala, ushering in a tradition of comic sketches delivered in Northeast Mandarin. Zhao Benshan is often claimed to be the performer who transformed xiaopin from a training exercise used in metropolitan drama and film schools into a comic genre, charged with peasant folk performance art. His achievement in these sketches is inseparable from the errenzhuan he and his long-time collaborators grew up with. As his scriptwriter Cui Kai comments, the common characteristic of all of Zhao’s comic roles, encompassing various ages, genders, and personality types, is chou 丑 (ugly or grotesque), which is applicable to his appearance, language, or slapstick behavior.19 Choujue 丑角 is the comic role Zhao has long played in the local errenzhuan troupe in his home village in North Liaoning. In errenzhuan, choujue is also called xiazhuang 下装 (the lower dress), which is consistent with Bakhtin’s analysis of the clown’s grotesque body as “the lower bodily stratum.” By inverting the bodily hierarchy of spiritual upper functions and vulgar lower ones, the choujue clown’s body image is ambivalent: destroying and generating, swallowing and being swallowed.20 For the choujue or xiazhuang, the most characteristic part of his performance is shuokou 说口 (speaking), as opposed to singing, dancing, or acting. There are at least ten interwoven types of shuokou delivered in colloquial Northeast Mandarin, such as pingkou 平口 (strictly or loosely rhymed, toned in ping and ze), xiangsheng kou 相声口 (delivering the punch line of a joke), zhuakou/geda kou/ ling kou 抓口/疙瘩口/零口 (spontaneous improvisation), and gushi kou 故事口 (short stories or jokes).21 As its main function is to evoke laughter, the language is often 19 Li Shanyuan 李善远 and Zhang Feifei 张非非, “Gei yiwan guanzhong dailai xiaosheng de yishujia: ping Zhao Benshan de xiju xiaopin” 给亿万观众带来笑声的艺 术家：评赵本山的喜剧小品 [The performer who has brought laughter to audiences of millions: Comments on Zhao Benshan’s comic sketches], Renmin fayuan bao, October 12, 2002. 20 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 163. 21 Wang Qiuying et al., 王秋影等, “Lüetan dongbei errenzhuan biaoyan yishu” 略谈 东北二人转表演艺术 [A discussion of the performing arts in Northeast errenzhuan], in Errenzhuan yanjiu ziliao 二人转研究资料 [Research materials on errenzhuan], ed.



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discredited as being vulgar, low, and dirty. Here is a typical excerpt from a traditional errenzhuan work, “Wang Meirong enjoys the flowers” (“Wang Meirong guanhua” 王美容观花).22 Wang speaks to herself when meeting her future husband, Mr. Right: 被窝里睡新人儿，一条腿儿，蘑菇根儿；两条腿儿，芦花鸡儿；三 条腿儿，煎饼鏊子儿；四条腿儿，饭桌子儿；脸对脸儿，是小镜子 儿；嘴对嘴儿，是烟袋锅子儿；腿摽腿儿，那是麻花子儿。 A newlywed couple sleeps in the quilt. One leg—a mushroom root; two legs—Dominique Hen; three legs—a tripod griddle; four legs—a table for eating; face to face—a small mirror; mouth to mouth—a long-stemmed pipe’s mouth; leg intertwined with leg—twisted fried dough.

The humor arises from a series of witty, rhymed metaphors linking erotic sexuality and familiar objects of rural life. The passage evokes folk, unofficial laughter, not only because it strongly emphasizes the bodily, material level of food, drink, digestion, and sexual life, but also because the doublevoiced utterances reveal an ambiguous, plural, comic world. Zhao’s dialogues in the sketches are rooted in the folk art tradition of errenzhuan, and especially in the colloquial speech art of shuokou. In a series of sketches since 1990, Zhao has successfully set up a number of comic scenarios featuring the speech styles of niangen 蔫哏. Niangen could be translated as “cold humor.” Nian describes somebody who appears honest and speaks sparingly, and gen means a punch line. Niangen has been hailed as the highest achievement of the shuokou art, where intonation is paramount. The music critic Li Wan 李皖 highly praises the resourcefulness of intonation in errenzhuan. The various intonation patterns within the same wording create a mood of paradox, through which an ambiguous clarity emerges. He further points out that the distinctive feature of this local art form is biaoqing 表情 (emotive-affective) instead of biaoyi 表义 (semantic-referential), insofar as the meaning is expressed not in the content but in the form of intonation.23 Li’s observation echoes Volosinov’s argument that intonation makes the word it attaches to “virtually empty semantically.”24 From a more theoretical perspective, Volosinov Zhongguo quyi gongzuozhe xiehui jinlin fenhui 中国曲艺工作者协会吉林分会, vol. 1 (Changchun, 1979), 73. 22 Ma Qiufen 马秋芬, Dao dongbei kan Errenzhuan 到东北看二人转 [Errenzhuan in Northeast China] (Wuhan: Hubei meishu chubanshe, 2003), 107. 23 Li Wan, “Nan huo nü, errenzhuan he yaogun” 男或女，二人转和摇滚 [Man or woman, errenzhuan, and rock music], Beifang yinyue 1 (2005): 39. 24 Volosinov, “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art,” 102.

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elaborates on the social nature of intonation. He argues that a different treatment of intonation is the key distinction between discourse in art and discourse in life, though both discourses remain dependent on their direct contexts to varying degrees. In the extraverbal context, intonation “always lies on the border of the verbal and the nonverbal, the said and the unsaid,”25 therefore exhibiting “the greatest sensitivity, elasticity, and freedom”26 when compared with other factors of verbal utterances. Zhao Benshan is a master of such intonation.27 Most of his catchy lines are registered with unique, expressive intonation. In the sketch “Blind Date” (“Xiangqin” 相亲, 1990), scripted by Zhang Chao, although most of his dialogue is muffled, conveying shyness or uneasiness, his forceful, emotion-charged articulation rhymed with ao—“就兴你们年轻人连蹦 带跳又搂又抱, 我们老年人就只能干靠” (just let you young people dance and jump, kiss and hug, so the elderly are left to be lonely?)— highlights the social issue of remarriage among the elderly at the time. In the sequel “Laonian Getting Married” (“Laonian wanhun” 老蔫完婚, 1991) scripted by Zhang Chao and Zhang Huizhong, Zhao parodies the Cantonese accent of his peasant fiancée, who has changed considerably following several months’ stay in Shenzhen. In order to test her love, Zhao feminizes his voice and plays an elderly woman engaging her in conversion.28 In “The Elders Pay a New Year’s Call” (“Lao bainian” 老拜年, 1993), scripted by Cui Kai and Zhang Chao, since the traditional opera troupe has been marginalized in the booming modern market economy, the errenzhuan master Zhao has to pay a New Year’s call on his former students-turnedentrepreneurs in order to find a job. He laments: 咱们那个地方戏团办成气功训练班儿了，排练场租给小商小贩儿卖 货摆摊儿了，把我这副科级给我挤兑靠边儿了，整得我一· 周· 七·天·全·是·礼·拜·天儿·了。

25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 105. 27 As the term “intonation” is interpreted here as “emotion-charged” or “emotiveaffective,” it should be clear that this study uses a broad definition of intonation, which not only includes the melodic tone contour, as defined in Halliday, but also other vocal factors such as rhythm and variation in tempo and loudness. M. A. K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar (London: E. Arnold, 1994), 9. 28 Double-gender acting is characteristic of errenzhuan performance. In contrast to cross-gender acting—for instance, the female role played by Mei Lanfang in the Beijing Opera—the person playing a double-gender role in errenzhuan art can easily be identified as a man who acts like a woman.



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Our local opera troupe has become a Qigong training class; the rehearsal room has been rented to the peddlers; I’ve been pushed aside, and for me EVERY DAY IS A SUNDAY, SEVEN DAYS A WEEK.

The intonation epitomizes the style of niangen, that is, puping dianwen jiedexiang 铺平垫稳揭得响 (A controlled foreshadowing leads to a more effective climax). In “Red Sorghum Fashion Model Group” (“Honggaoliang mote dui” 红高粱模特队, 1997), scripted by Cui Kai and He Qingkui, Zhao makes a hilarious analogy out of “hidden similarities” between modern model training and rural insecticide spraying. 29 收腹，是勒紧小肚子；提臀，是要把药箱卡住；斜视，是看准果树； 这边加压，这边就喷雾。它的节拍是这样的：一刺刺，二刺刺，三刺刺， 四刺刺。 To push your belly in is to cinch up your belt; to lift your hip is to buckle on the spray box; to cast a sidelong glance is to look towards the fruit tree; while pumping direct the spray. The beat is like this: yi ci ci / er ci ci / san ci ci / si ci ci [the sound of spraying in the rhythm of a Viennese waltz, 3/4 time].

In “Paying a New Year’s Call” (“Bainian” 拜年, 1998), scripted by He Qingkui and Zhang Qingdong, Zhao stammers when he suddenly realizes the xiangzhang 乡长 (town leader), a distant cousin whom he had assumed to have been dismissed, allegedly due to corruption, has actually been promoted to the higher position of xianzhang 县长 (county magistrate). Zhao’s stammering exemplifies the Freudian “mechanism of a slip of the tongue,”30 the suspension of a previous intention as a result of a series of socially hierarchical reversals: the family hierarchy of filial piety between Zhao and his cousin, temporarily rescued from the hierarchical political repression that separates common villagers and the xiangzhang, is repressed again by a stauncher political hierarchy between common villagers and the xianzhang. There are other examples of intonation alone being self-sufficient and meaningful. In “Uncle Niu Promoted” (“Niudashu tigan” 牛大叔提干, 1995), scripted by Cui Kai, Zhao plays Uncle Niu, who is sent by a poverty-stricken village school to a local government-sponsored company 29 A favorite definition of joking has long been that it involves a statement that reveals the similarity between dissimilar things, that is, hidden similarities. Jean Paul expresses this definition in a joking form: “joking is the disguised priest who weds every couple.” See Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 11. 30 Freud, A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis (New York: Liveright Pub. Co., 1935), 30–47.

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seeking some funding. He is temporarily “promoted” to fill in for the company manager, who has been hospitalized because of a stomach problem stemming from endlessly attending business banquets. Preparing for the guests’ arrival, Uncle Niu practices a toast, reading a text written by the manager’s secretary. But what the audience hears is just a stream of toned utterances except for some filtered words: “zhe ge . . . a, wo shuo . . . a” 这个 . . . 啊，我说 . . . 啊 (well . . . a, I say . . . a). Taken in isolation, the into­nation itself would be empty and unintelligible. But here in the extraverbal context, the audience bursts into laughter hearing the illiterate Uncle Niu parodying the stereotyped, tedious, and overbearing tonal speech pattern of party cadres and officials. The politically and culturally inferior addressee’s rendition of the superior addresser’s intonation becomes a meaningful locution because of the performer’s and the audience’s shared “knowledge and social evaluation of the situation.”31 What is said is determined by what is unsaid; at the same time, what is said anticipates what is unsaid. As a whole, the sketch satirizes the social ills of excessive dining-out on public funds. This turns out to be in conformity with the national anticorruption movement, an effort undertaken by the Zhu Rongji 朱镕基 regime at the time. Therefore, one may argue that the intention of Zhao’s sketches is dual: to dissolve authority through satire, and at the same time to gain proximity to authority. Nevertheless, neither the conforming nor the subversive voices are explicit; both are involved with ambiguity and indeterminacy, as a close reading of the following sketch will demonstrate. The sketch “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” (“Zuotian, jintian, mingtian” 昨天 今天 明天, 1999), scripted by He Qingkui, is about an elderly Northeast rural couple who come to the hit CCTV talk show To Tell the Truth (Shihua shishuo 实话实说). The sketch sets up a hierarchical opposition between the host at the center and the couple on the periphery right from the beginning. The Putonghua-speaking host, Cui Yongyuan 崔永元, is a real television celebrity hosting the show on the state station in Beijing. The rural couple, Dashu 大叔 (played by Zhao Benshan) and Dama 大妈 (played by Song Dandan), speaking the Northeast dialect, are nameless members of the folk mass from the Northeast region, the “guests” who are notified to come to the official realm they do not really belong to. Yet soon the hierarchy between the central, official discourse and the peripheral, folk discourse is reversed: 31 Volosinov, “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art,” 99.



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Cui: The topic of today’s talk show is “yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” This  time, we’ll change our rules and have Dashu talk first. Zhao: We prepared at home last night, came over here today, and will go  back tomorrow. Thanks. Cui: No, no. Dashu. I didn’t mean for you to talk about “yesterday.” I was hoping you’d talk about something even earlier [than yesterday]. Song: The day before yesterday? We got the notification from the xiang government [to come to the show] the day before yesterday. Thanks! Cui (becoming a little anxious): Dashu and Dama, the “yesterday, today, and tomorrow” I was talking about is not “yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” Zhao: The day after tomorrow? Cui: Not the day after tomorrow. Song (puzzled): Then which day do you mean? Cui: Not a specific day. What I meant is to ask you to recall the past, comment on the present, and then look into the future. Zhao: Aha! Then that’s “the past, the present, and the future.” Song (echoes Zhao): That’s not the same thing as “yesterday, today, and tomorrow.” Zhao (speaks to Cui): Yeah, the way you asked was a little problematic. Song (echoes again): No one asked this way. Zhao: Exactly. Cui (shaking his head): Well. Seems to be my fault?

For the host, his interpretation of the phrase “yesterday, today, and tomorrow” is uni-accentual, excluding the original, basic meaning of the phrase and fixating on its extended meaning as “the past, the present, and the future.” Implicit in this phrase, in its official interpretation, is another typical party formula of class education dating from the Maoist era, yikusitian 忆苦思甜: to recall the bitterness of the past (in the old society) and to savor the sweetness of the present (in the new society). The audience, long inculcated with party ideology, found the couple’s retrieved meaning of the phrase to be unexpected and unanticipated. This is what lies behind the carnivalesque laughter: not only does folk discourse restore the familiarity, originality, and multi-accentuality of language, but also official discourse becomes aware of its own limitations or flaws only when confronted with folk discourse. Nevertheless, once the couple figures out what the official intention is, their utterance soon seems to conform to the mode of yikusitian. As Zhao passionately reads: Dear leaders and comrades. . . . Good evening. The year 1998 was an unusual year. A bumper crop harvested, a flood repelled. The people live and work in peace and contentment. [We] all praise the unexcelled party leadership. It’s especially hard to find a better army in the world than the PLA; other

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Here, apparently, the party’s achievement in the past year is exalted by Zhao’s rhymed accumulation of “comparatives and superlatives.” Wang Xiaokun thus argues that the essence of Zhao’s sketches is the unity found in diversity. His various comic images are in fact consistently a transmission of the official discourse in the center from a peasant position in the periphery, a rhetorical strategy from below to attempt to render, interpret, and illustrate the state ideology disseminated from above.33 However, it is important to note that Zhao reads the whole passage from a notebook. Reading from a text rather than speaking spontaneously is the standardized form of transmitting an official message. This is what Volosinov terms “direct discourse” or the “referent-analyzing modification of the indirect discourse,” which is “somewhat rationalistic and dogmatic in nature.”34 As Zhao reads the utterance that belongs to the party or the state, he transmits only passively an ideology that he may not have internalized very well. Such literal or mechanical transmission in turn testifies to the official discourse being a finished, fixed, inert, and immutable one. A new twist emerges. Immediately following Zhao’s utterance of “Dear leaders and comrades,” the host dismissively comments, “You want to give a report?” It seems that this form of transmitting the party voice is not quite favored by the authorities or the state media itself. In order to adjust the couple to the shifting role of the media, the host Cui is ready to borrow the language of ordinary folk: “Dashu and Dama. The talk show is for talking, chatting, or shooting the breeze. Just like you Northeast people chatting (laoker 唠嗑儿) on the kang 炕 (a northern brick kiln-like bed). How are things at home, how are things going here.” Having converted the public, official space into the private, intimate space channeled by the host, the couple freely unleash a torrent of backhanded compliments, addressing Cui’s popularity in their village: “The 32 The original monologue rhymes in ao. 33 Wang Xiaokun 王孝坤, “Zhongguo xianshi wenhua xuanze yu fazhan zhuangkuang de yinyu: Zhao Benshan yingshi wenhua xianxiang de wenhua shixue jiedu yu sikao” 中国现实文化选择与发展状况的隐喻－赵本山影视文化现象的文化诗学解读与思考 [Thoughts on the Zhao Benshan phenomenon], Juzuojia 剧作家 [Playwright] 2 (2005): 71–75. 34 Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 130.



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people in our village really like you. . . . Everyone praises you, saying you do a great job in hosting, except that you could be a little handsomer.” Song’s utterance is immediately followed by Zhao’s: “Your show is everyone’s favorite in our village. Your hosting style is unique. When you’re laughing, it looks like you’re crying. And when you’re crying, it looks like you’re laughing.” The simultaneous praise and abuse is characteristic of folk language, of which Bakhtin comments: “the praise is ironic and ambivalent. It is on the brink of abuse; the one leads to the other, and it is impossible to draw a line between them.”35 Such folk language abounds when the couple begins to chat about their past love story, their present personal life of idol worship, and their future plan to write books and travel. The couple’s heteroglot speech showcases the Bakhtinian internal stratification within one language, Northeast Mandarin: abusive language (abusive praise or praiseful abuse), such as xiebazi lian 鞋拔子脸, zhuyaozi lian 猪腰子脸, kechen 坷碜 (the local derogatory idioms for one’s appearance), and baxia 扒瞎 (talk nonsense); puns, such as the literary idiom ansongqiubo 暗送秋波 (a beautiful woman secretly makes eyes at her lover, or ogles) degradingly taken as ansongqiubo 暗送秋菠 (to secretly deliver the autumn spinach); popular song titles, such as “Dayue zai dongji” 大约在冬季 (Probably in the winter), “Taosheng yijiu” 涛声依旧 (The wave still as before), and “Xiangyue” jiuba 相约九八 (Meet in 1998); phrases popular in the 1990s such as xiagang 下岗 (laid off ) in “两颗洁白的牙齿也光荣下岗了” (Two pure white teeth have been honorably laid off); idioms of the younger generation such as xinzhong ouxiang 心中偶像 (idol in the mind) and mengzhong qingren 梦中情人 (dream lover); revolutionary jargon, such as Wa shehuizhuyi qiangjiao, hao shehuizhuyi yangmao 挖社会主义墙角，薅 社会主义羊毛 (To dig the socialist corner, to weed the socialist wool); classical Chinese, such as yushihu 于是乎 (thereupon); jocose grammar, such as bijiao shuai dai le 比较帅呆了(relatively hunkish handsome); Western political jargon, such as dongxi liangyuan yiyuan 东西两院议员 (senators and congressmen) and tanhe 弹劾 (impeach), in “这家伙把我 们家的男女老少、东西两院议员全找来开会，要弹劾我” (This gal implores everyone in our big family, every senate and congressman/ congresswoman to hold a meeting in order to impeach me); foreign words,

35 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 165.

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such as “hello,” “OK,” and “mishi” (咪西)36 in “天天吃饭啥的, 也不正经 叫我了，打电话，还说外语：Hello 啊，饭已 OK 啦，下来咪西吧”; and so on. The various social “languages” and speech styles, however alien, opposite, or supplementary to one another, are bound together through debasement, augmentation, or leveling. As the hybridized utterances dynamically transgress the limits of the established linguistic and social conventions, the laughter arises. The celebration of ambivalent laughter continues toward the end of the sketch. The host asks each member of the couple for one concluding remark “from the bottom of your hearts” 发自肺腑 (fazifeifu), which would be conventionally rendered in a solemn, pompous, and formulaic tone. Song’s strong wish to meet her idol (shifen xiangjian Zhao Zhongxiang 十分想见赵忠祥) seems a debasing parody of the revolutionary jargon of worshiping Chairman Mao (shifen xiangnian Mao Zhuxi 十分想念毛主席). Zhao’s response in his unique errenzhuan niangen style is more about material necessity, which is key in his own words: “Who is going to reimburse us for our train tickets?” 来前儿的火车票谁给报了? (Laiqian’er de huochepiao shei gei bao le?). The art of errenzhuan as a local folk form has come a long way from the marginalized, unofficial “marketplace” of rural fields, courtyards, and village inns 大车店 (dachedian) to its legitimatization in official mainstream broadcast media. Even though Zhao still lamented the dimming future of local folk art in his 1993 sketch (“Laobainian”), this “low” art form has gradually ascended to the high official realm and has also become a household name, with Zhao’s comic sketches in the CCTV Galas of the 1990s and a series of telenovelas Liu Laogen (I, II, III), Ma Dashuai (I, II, III), and Zhengyue lilai shi xinchun 正月里来是新春 (Story of an errenzhuan troupe) that have aired on CCTV-1 since 2003. Thus in the 2005 CCTV Gala, the sketch “Xiaocui Talks” (“Xiaocui shuoshi” 小崔说事), a sequel to the 1999 sketch “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” is followed by a show of errenzhuan dance performance. Cui’s clumsy dance among Zhao and other professional errenzhuan performers makes the CCTV host himself a comic figure, out of place in the realm of presumably high official culture. Although the peripheral, premodern folk reality is represented by the central, official discourse in such a manner as to convey the ideological initiatives of the state media and official culture alike, it also seems to

36 The Japanese noun meshi めし (meal) is often misconceptualized by Chinese as a verb and mispronounced as mishi or mixi in pinyin.



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find legitimacy and agency in the modern medium of television, which has enabled its survival and development. And although the central, official discourse attempts to manipulate the peripheral, peasant folkloric discourse to confirm its own elevated position, this confirmation is not achieved without compromise, ambiguity, nuance, and indeterminacy. The “high” official discourse has become porous enough to allow the “low” folkloric humor, with its concern with “grotesque realism,” to mix with it, to form a dialogic relationship. Since the undermining of authority and the dissolving of ideology appear to be contained within some bounds, the folk humor manifested in the CCTV Gala’s comic sketches evokes an ambivalent laughter, in the spirit of a utopian, Bakhtinian carnival, which simultaneously conforms and subverts, praises and abuses, asserts and denies. Such is the dynamic relationship of interpenetration, interaction, and interillumination between the discourse at the center and the discourse at the periphery.

CHAPTER SIX

POPULAR MUSIC AND LOCAL YOUTH IDENTITY IN THE AGE OF THE INTERNET* In the previous four chapters, I have discussed the burgeoning use of local languages in the field of television production. While most TV shows rendered in local languages appeal to the local audience, the younger and comparatively better educated segment of that audience has migrated to a new medium—the Internet. Ever since its introduction to China in the early 1990s, the Internet has been passionately embraced by ­Chinese youth. As of January 2010, according to a state-sponsored study by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), more than 70 percent of Internet users (384 million total) were young people under 35 years of age, and the age group between 18 and 24 years old consistently accounted for a much higher portion (usually 35–42 percent) of users than any other age group. Regarding their level of education, approximately half of the users had a college or associate degree. Roughly one-third of China’s netizens were students, and the incidence of Internet use in urban areas was 6.5 times greater than in rural areas. As part of a distinct urban youth culture in China, the Internet plays an increasingly prominent role in promoting and disseminating the use of local languages among urban, educated Chinese youth: through local-language texts parodying Chinese characters and the writing system; through standard tests of local-language competence that mimic the format of official English exams; through downloadable cell-phone ringtones recorded in local languages; through blogs, cyberfictions, and recently micro-blogs (weibo 微博) and other social media employing local slang and expressions; and through independent and city-government sponsored websites devoted to promoting regional dialects.1 Alongside this online cultivation of local languages, popular songs rendered in local languages, aided by cybertechnologies, have become the * Part of this chapter is based on my forthcoming article: “Alternative Voice and Local Youth Identity in Chinese Local-Language Rap Music,” positions: Asia Critique 22.1 (2014), and is presented here with permission from Duke University Press. 1  For an overview, see Jin Liu, “The Use of Chinese Dialects on the Internet,” in Chinese under Globalization, 59–78.

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vogue among urban educated youth. The Internet-age phenomenon of the promotion of local-language use by educated youth can be traced to what was arguably the first Internet-mediated hit song in 2001, Xue Cun’s 雪村 “The Northeasterners Are All Living Lei Fengs” (“Dongbeiren doushi huo Leifeng” 东北人都是活雷锋). This song, with a strong Northeast flavor, initiated a trend of Internet songs (wangluo gequ 网络歌曲) rendered in local languages. Besides reworking popular songs whose lyrics were originally in the dominant Standard Mandarin, Internet-savvy youth began to write rap songs in the various Chinese regional languages. Rap music and hip-hop culture, usually perceived as originating in the local African-American street culture of the South Bronx area of New York City, have been continually relocalized and thus globalized by youth speaking different languages all over the world. The distinctive linguistic ­feature of the localization of rap music in mainland China is not so much that it is rendered in the official Standard Mandarin, but rather that the rhythmic vernacular transforms into distinct colloquial, nonstandard local languages. A handful of (semi-)Chinese rap songs, largely in Putonghua, predate the Internet.2 However, the emergence of rap songs performed in Chinese local languages was clearly made possible by the Internet. Particularly since 2001, there has been a proliferation of rap songs, sometimes blending English and Standard Mandarin words, in Shanghai Wu, Hangzhou Wu, Suzhou Wu, Wenzhou Wu, Yixing Wu, Jinyun Wu, Changsha Xiang, Hakka, Nanjing Mandarin, Yangzhou Mandarin, Wuhan Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin, Northeastern Mandarin, Sichuan Mandarin, Qingdao Mandarin, Guangzhou Cantonese, and so on.3

2 Cui Jian’s 崔健 “It’s Not That I Don’t Understand” (“Bushi wo bu mingbai” 不是我不 明白, 1987), Zang Tianshuo’s 臧天朔 “Let’s Chat” (“Shuo shuo” 说说, 1995), and Dou Wei’s 窦唯 “Advanced Animal” (“Gaoji dongwu” 高级动物, 1994) are sometimes credited as being the first compositions in China to incorporate rap into a primarily rock-music style. Yet the music critic Li Wan dismissed Cui Jian’s song, for example, as being merely a ver­ sion of the traditional, folk kuaiban(shu) performance, in which the performers recite lines rhythmically to the beat of bamboo clappers that they hold. Li Wan, “Rap, shuode xiaqu ma?” Rap, 说得下去吗? [The prospect of rap in China], Dushu 5 (1994): 85–88. Similarly, an anonymous reviewer is critical of a 1994 rap mixtape for its lyrical incoherence and incomprehensibility. See “Daoban: guoyu rap zhuanji”《盗版》: 国语 rap 专辑 [Pirated copy: A rap album in the national language], Yinxiang shijie 3 (1995): 18. 3 A couple of hip-hop scholars have mentioned in passing the use of multiple dialects in Chinese rap songs, without delving into detailed analysis. For example, Jeff Chang describes this “unusual” linguistic feature in an annual “Iron Mic” rap battle in Shanghai in 2007: “One rapper spits out words in a distinctive Beijing accent, scolding the other for not speaking proper Mandarin. His opponent from Hong Kong snaps back to the beat in a trilingual torrent of Cantonese, English, and Mandarin, dissing the Beijing rapper for not



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This chapter first disputes the common criticism of Chinese rap as lacking social and political commentary. In one of the few critical studies on Chinese hip-hop, Jeroen de Kloet, inspired by Rey Chow’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s translation theory and Mary Douglas’s book Purity and Danger, views Chinese hip-hop as cultural pollution and contamination that affects both the “assumed origin” and the “alleged copy.”4 Taking the group Yin-Tsang 隐藏, which is composed of members from various nationalities, as a case study, de Kloet briefly discusses how the “inauthentic” Chinese hip-hop pollutes the imagined and constructed “origin” of hip-hop. However, his comparison of the Chinese “copy” and the Western “origin” is cursory. Using a stereotyped U.S.-based hip-hop ideology as the yardstick and evaluating the oeuvre of Yin-Tsang alone, de Kloet lists a series of superficial “absences” in Chinese rap songs, for instance, “the absence of (the violence in) the ghetto or the ’hood,” and fails to explore many underlying “presences,” or the intrinsic generic similarities in Chinese hip-hop, something this chapter tries to demonstrate.5 Taking an explicit Americocentric approach, several critics covering the emerging rap music scene in China also fault Chinese hip-hop for its lack of rebelliousness and explicit social and political commentary. They thus dismiss Chinese rap as being too mainstream and further suggest that Chinese youth have been brainwashed by the CCP’s official ideology.6 It is important to recognize that in one sense, Chinese hip-hop is, in fact, imitation. The perceived origin of rap music in the United States is a source of inspiration and aspiration for young Chinese rappers. Wang Fan 王凡, a Shanghai-based pioneer of rap, named himself BlaKK Bubble, the double Ks paying homage to his favorite rap duo, Kris Kross. Wang was representing the people.” Jeff Chang, “It’s a Hip Hop World,” Foreign Policy 163 (Novem­ ber/December 2007): 58. Similarly, the Fulbright scholar Angela Steele made a brief film entitled “Language & Chinese Rap,” including interviews with several rappers, as part of her series of research reports on the Chinese hip-hop scene mainly during 2007 and 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsZPFAjWysA (accessed on October 19, 2012). 4 Jeroen de Kloet, “Cosmopatriot Contaminations,” in Cosmopatriots: On Distant Belong­ ings and Close Encounters, ed. Jeroen de Kloet and Edwin Jurriens (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 133–153. 5 Ibid., 140. 6 Ralph Frammolino, “Chinese Find a Way to Tame Hip-Hop,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 2004; Daniel Beekman, “Beijing Hip-Hop Trio Hopes Olympics Will Help Pick Up the Beat,” Seattle Times, June 14, 2008; Anthony Fung, Global Capital, Local Cul­ ture, 97. In addition, Anouska Komlosy even identifies the “socialist” agenda of a Yunnan rap band, Gumbo, without much elaboration, in her article “Yunnanese Sounds: Creativity and Alterity in the Dance and Music Scenes of Urban Yunnan,” China: An International Journal 6.1 (2008): 44–68.

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first introduced to hip-hop music in the 1990s through the dakou 打口 (cut) audiocassettes and CDs illegally imported from the United States.7 He became friends with Dana Burton, a Detroit native who is credited with founding an annual rap competition in China in 2002. For the local Chinese wannabe emcees (MCs), the element of the ethos of freestyling and American gangsta rap they espouse the most is the freedom “to speak your piece,” although this perceived freedom would merely mystify their peers in the United States. They identify with this American minority youth music genre in part because it empowers marginalized, alienated, and restless teenagers, which is evidenced, for example, in the PBS show Frontline’s interview with the Beijing rapper Wang Xiaolei in 2008 and Jimmy Wang’s New York Times reportage on the Northeastern rapper Wang Li in 2009.8 In addition, in terms of rap production, Chinese rappers freely and sometimes mindlessly borrow the Western beats that they download from the Internet. For instance, the beat for Beijing trio In 3’s (Yin San’er 阴三儿) furious “Hello Teacher” (“Laoshi hao” 老师好, 2008), which I will discuss later, is from the slain Tupac Shakur (2Pac)’s “Hit’Em Up.” However, as Ian Condry warns, amid the never-ending charges of “imitation” leveled at hip-hop musicians in Japan, original authenticity and local creativity are often inextricably intertwined in these transnationally oriented productions.9 He suggests, for example, that “if we define imitation as working within a genre of music, in the case of hip-hop perhaps characterized as sampled and programmed tracks over which emcees rap rhythmically nuanced rhymes, then all contemporary hip-hop, in Japan and anywhere else, for that matter is imitation.”10 Rather than arguing over the extent to which Chinese rap is imitative, this chapter is more interested in exploring the performative force that Chinese rap achieves through imitation or appropriation—in other words, the music’s impact on the local community and the local significance that Chinese youth ­create by mobilizing the generic conventions of hip-hop. Through a close    7 For a detailed discussion of the dakou generation and Chinese rock culture since the mid-1990s, see Jeroen de Kloet, “Popular Music and Youth in Urban China: The Dakou Generation,” China Quarterly 183 (September 2005): 609–626. 8 Jimmy Wang, “Now Hip-Hop, Too, Is Made in China,” New York Times, January 23, 2009; “The Young and the Restless in China,” Frontline, PBS, 2008, written and directed by Sue Williams, distributed by PBS Video. 9 Ian Condry, “Yellow B-Boys, Black Culture, and Hip-Hop in Japan: Toward a Trans­ national Cultural Politics of Race,” positions 15.3 (2007): 637–669. 10 Ibid., 648.



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reading of rich local-language rap song texts combined with fieldwork interviews, I argue that unlike the mainstream popular love songs in the mainland China music market, which are dominated by Standard Mandarin, local-language rap songs are characterized by strong social messages, which thus enable Chinese youth to construct an alternative subcultural space outside that defined by adult culture and hierarchical institutions. Mediated by the largely uncensored Internet musical space, these rap songs assert an oppositional, counterhegemonic voice against the Chinese educational system, high official culture, and mainstream discourse. Furthermore, rendered in regional languages, these rap songs are infused with distinctive local knowledge and the sensibilities of a specific place. The songs articulate a distinct musicalized, collective local identity for urban youth by adopting a strong convention in the rap music genre, namely the representation of one’s ’hood/posse/city/region/­territory.11 Focusing on this convention, I compare local-language rap songs with local-language rock songs from the late 1990s, a time when the Internet had not yet played a significant role in disseminating local dialects. I argue that Chinese youths articulate a distinctive youth identity through their use of local languages in both of these musical genres, albeit in different ways: whereas migrant rock musicians largely employ the musicality of local languages (including variations in intonation) to signify a marginal, outsider identity, urban rappers make substantial use of a distinctive local vocabulary in their lyrics to articulate a privileged local identity that celebrates their urban roots. More importantly, the rock musicians tend to appropriate indigenous regional folk music and folk tunes to represent a “national” Chinese music, yet Chineseness per se is rarely a concern for the hip-hop generation. Finally, once disseminated over the Internet, dialect songs encourage the formation of a collective identity among young people who share knowledge and sensibilities rooted in a given locality, no matter where these youths are physically located. From a case study of Shanghai Rap and the SHN website (2004–2011), its hosting server, I argue that the motive to construct a distinct imagined community underpinned the website’s dedicated promotion of Shanghai Wu and Shanghai rap. The Internet enabled the diasporic, globally dispersed Shanghai youth to forge a ­collective local yet simultaneously transnational identity—Shanghainese. Current

11 An important study in this respect is Murray Forman, The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002).

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scholarship on transnationality and new media (particularly the Internet) is divided over the potential of the Internet to promote the subversive power of border-crossing and transnational subjectivity in disembedding the state-nation and facilitating sociopolitical changes. Generally speaking, the earlier studies on the Internet tend to be optimistic, while some recent works express doubt. Unlike their nation-centered approach, my research is concerned with a locality intertwined with transnationality and an imagined local community associated with a border-crossing, cosmopolitan subjectivity. Based on my fieldwork on the SHN website over the last seven years, I propose a more balanced account of this issue. On the one hand, young Shanghai rappers sometimes foreground their local identity over their national identity, thus making Chineseness a contested identity. On the other hand, however, the Shanghai youth are largely apolitical and cosmopolitan. Even their strong nationalist sentiments could be viewed as part of a cosmopolitan youth identity. Xue Cun’s Breakthrough and the Wave of Internet Songs in Local Languages In China and elsewhere in the world, the production and dissemination of popular music is inextricably bound up with the technology that makes it possible. In 2000, the first online purchase of a popular song, enabled by digital audio technology, was successfully made in China.12 In 2001 Xue Cun’s “The Northeasterners Are All Living Lei Fengs,” with a distinctive Northeastern spin aided by Flash-animation cybertechnology, arguably became the first widely circulated Chinese online song. The song eulogizes the good deeds of the Northeasterners through a synecdochic substitution of an ordinary working-class or peasant Northeasterner for the entire population. In a basic, mostly repetitive diatonic melody, the seventy-fivesecond song tells a simple story: Mr. Zhang drives to the Northeast and gets injured in a car accident. The driver who caused the accident flees the scene. Fortunately a Northeasterner helps out by taking Mr. Zhang to the hospital. After recovering, Mr. Zhang invites the Northeasterner for dinner to thank him, and the Northeasterner “says”:

12 Shen Wenyu 沈文愉, “Woguo diyizhi wangluo gequ xiaoshou chenggong” 我国第 一支网络歌曲销售成功 [The first online song sells successfully], Beijing wanbao, Febru­ ary 22, 2002.



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俺们那旮都是东北人/俺们那旮特产高丽参/俺们那旮猪肉炖粉条/俺 们那旮都是活雷锋/俺们那旮没有这种人/撞了车哪能不救人/俺们那 旮山上有榛蘑/这个人他不是东北人! We are all Northeasterners. The regional specialty in our place is Korean Ginseng. And pork stewed with bean noodle. We are all living Lei Fengs. We don’t have such a person in our place. How can someone not help the injured after causing the accident? On the hills in our place grow fungus mushrooms. That man is not a Northeasterner!

In the song, typical Northeast Mandarin pronunciations such as yin for ren 人 (person) and zuyou for zhurou 猪肉 (pork) are integrated with characteristic Northeast Mandarin words such as anmen naga 俺们那 旮 (we there, our place), words for well-known regional specialties such as gaolisen 高丽参 (Korean ginseng), and words for local cuisine such as zuyou dun fentiao 猪肉炖粉条 (pork stewed with bean noodle). The Internet played a key role in making the song a national hit. The singersongwriter Xue Cun, a dropout from Peking University (PKU), wrote the song as early as 1995, but it was dismissed by record companies at the time. In 2001 a PKU alumnus, Liu Lifeng 刘立丰, among others, made a quirky Flash animation and uploaded it to a PKU-hosted website, which soon became the major source for the song’s dissemination among college students, including diasporic students overseas. In 2002, Ying Da, also a PKU alumnus, adopted the song as the theme song for his popular Northeast Mandarin sitcom A Family in the Northeast (Dongbei yijiaren, 2002), which revolves around a working-class family in the Northeast. Thus in 2003, the song’s final soliloquy “Cuihua, get me pickles” (Chuihua’r, shang shuaichai 翠花上酸菜) ranked among the top three catchphrases among Chinese youth in a survey.13 As this chronology of the song’s success clearly shows, the song, although written by a college dropout, was first appreciated and promoted by university-educated youth, particularly cultural elites from the most prestigious universities, such as PKU. Their (re-)appreciation of noninstitutional knowledge that lies beyond the scope of their formal ­education—for example, knowledge of local language and indigenous regional culture— cannot be understood without the context of globalization. The writer Li Rui 李锐 expresses great consternation that the Internet would encourage the global dominance of hegemonic English to the point that all other 13 Chen Si 陈思 and Yang Changzheng 杨长征, “Qingshaonian ‘liuxingyu’ xianxiang diaocha baogao” 青少年“流行语”现象调查报告 [Survey on youth’s catchy expressions], Zhongguo qingnian yanjiu 2 (2003): 55–63.

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l­ anguages, including standard Chinese, would be marginalized as local dialects and face the threat of elimination. He cites Han Shaogong’s 韩少功 critically acclaimed novel Dictionary of Maqiao (Maqiao cidian 马桥词典, 1996) as an admirable effort to demonstrate the complexity, richness, and liveliness of Chinese local languages and cultures.14 He writes, “In such an age of the Internet, under such circumstances, resisting formatting, resisting the hegemonic control of the language of the center, insisting on the independence of local dialects, reexamining the value and significance of local dialects, and appealing for and establishing the equality of languages are issues unavoidable not only for literature but also for everyone.”15 In this light, Xue Cun’s song can be interpreted as resisting global or national homogenization and celebrating diversity and pluralism. As Zhang Ning 张拧 vividly illustrates with a culinary metaphor, the younger Chinese generation is fed up with the ketchup and French fries of the ubiquitous McDonald’s and is now turning to indigenous regional peasant cuisines such as Cuihua’s Northeastern pickles for a fresh alternative.16 Subnational local languages and cultures are reinvented as an unexpected and refreshing source of popular youth culture that Chinese youth are exploring on the Internet in the new millennium. Xue Cun’s song ushered in a trend of online songs rendered in local languages. Reworked versions of popular songs, originally set in standard Mandarin, the dominant language for lyrics, are rampant on the Internet. For instance, Yang Chengang’s 杨臣刚 Internet hit “The Mouse Likes Rice” (“Laoshu ai dami” 老鼠爱大米, 2004) was rendered in numerous versions encompassing the seven major dialect groups. Taiwan pop superstar Zhou Jielun’s (Jay Chou 周杰伦) “Nunchuks” (“Shuangjiegun” 双截棍, 2001) was reworked as “The Chongqing Peasant Version of ‘Nunchuks’ ” (“Shuangjiegun zhi Chongqing nongmin ban” 双截棍之重庆农民版) in Chongqing Mandarin and was ranked among the top ten most-searchedfor dialect songs in 2004 on a baidu 百度 chart. Xue Cun’s song was also reworked in other dialects as a way for urban youth to eulogize the Lei Feng–like good deeds of citizens in their home cities and thus to celebrate their local identities. One example is Ye Zhenhong’s 叶振宏 (a.k.a Ye Pi 叶皮) Jiangsu Zhangjiagang 张家港 Wu version in 2005: 14 Li Rui, “Wangluo shidai de fangyan” 网络时代的方言 [Local language in the age of the Internet], Dushu 4 (2000): 42–47; reprinted in his book of the same title (Shenyang: Chunfeng wenyi, 2002), 30–39. 15 Ibid., 44. 16 Zhang Ning, “Cuihua, gei beida shang suancai” 翠花: 给北大上酸菜 [Cuihua, serve the pickled cabbage to Beijing University], Baixing 5 (2002). Page numbers are unavailable.



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偶里几朗都是港城人/偶里几朗特产拖炉饼/偶里几朗韭菜裹馄饨/偶 里几朗都是活雷锋/偶里几朗恩驳里种人/撞了车他哪能不救人/偶里 几朗身朗有良心/个只棺材佛是里郎人17 We are all Zhangjiagangers. The regional specialty in our place is the Toulou pie baked in a double furnace. And wonton stuffed with Chinese chives. We are all living Lei Fengs. We don’t have such a person in our place. How can someone not help the injured after causing the accident? The people in our place have consciences. That man is not a native here!

Moreover, the rap songs created by Internet-savvy urban youth are primarily a form of digital music. The rappers create songs on home computers with music software, using sampling and beats downloaded from the Internet. Upon completion of these homemade, mostly raw pieces, they upload their demos onto the Web. Sometimes accompanied by Flash­animation versions, the songs are disseminated mainly among local urban youth sharing the same native dialect. Clearly, the Internet is the major venue for the production, circulation, and consumption of local-language rap songs. It offers a largely unofficial space for Chinese youth to voice their discontent, frustration, and rebellion against their parents’ culture and hierarchical systems. The next section elaborates on this trend. An Alternative Cultural Space Addressing social issues is a prominent theme in Chinese local-language rap songs, as Table 4 illustrates. Sometimes the young rappers’ social comments and opinions are so biting and polemical that they are likely to arouse controversy and debate. For example, in his “Qingdao Bumpkins” (“Qingdao laobazi” 青岛老巴子, 2004), the then seventeen-year-old MC Sha Zhou 沙洲 unabashedly expressed his strong dislike of the peasant workers migrating to Qingdao, using derogative local words such as laobazi 老巴子 (country bumpkins) and bæ biaola 别彪啦 (stop being a sucker or an idiot). Sha Zhou complains about the urban chaos and moral decline brought by the migrant workers, such as the salon prostitutes from rural Jimo 即墨 county. He is 17 The Chinese characters of these dialect songs may not be the original characters (benzi 本字) or the correct characters (zhengzi 正字) for the local words. A common strat­ egy adopted by local youth in dialect transcription on the Internet is to type in a Chinese character that denotes the same or a similar phonetic sound as that of a particular dialect to represent that dialect word. I explore this approach of phonetic borrowing and its sig­ nificance in Jin Liu, “Deviant Writing and Youth Identity: Representation of Dialects with Chinese Characters on the Internet,” Chinese Language and Discourse 2.1 (2011): 58–79.

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chapter six Table 4. Social Issues in Chinese Local-Language Rap Songs

Artist/Band Name

Song Title and Year

Local Language

Pen Peng 喷嘭 (Poom Poom)

“Go Back Home, Peasant” (“Huiqu zhongtian” 回去种田, 2003)

Jihetuxing 几何 图形 (Geometric Figure) Hao Yu 郝雨

“A Turbulent Day in School” Suzhou Wu (“Xuesheng fengyun” 学生风云, 2004) “College Evening Study Northeastern Room” (“Daxue zixishi” Mandarin 大学自习室, 2003)

Koushuijuntuan 口水军团 (Saliva Regiment) Hei Bang 黑棒 (Hi-Bomb)

“Someone with Too Much Swagger” (“Ren’er deng” 人儿灯/登, 2001) “No. 87 Avenue Joffre” (“Xiafeilu de bashiqi hao” 霞飞路的87号, 2004) “Everything Is Being Dismantled; Cantonese Must Not Be Dismantled” (“Mat dou caak, gwongzauwaa m hoji caak” 乜都拆, 广 州话唔可以拆, 2010) “Beijing Evening News” (“Beijing wanbao” 北京晚报, 2008) “Fuck Japan” (“Liansi xiaoriben” 练死小日本, 2003) “Hello, Chen Shuibian” (“Nihao, Chen Shuibian” 你好，陈水扁, 2006)

Unknown

Yin San’r 阴三儿 (In 3) Hei Sa 黑撒 (Black Head) Zhu Xiaolei 朱小磊

Shanghai Wu

Hangzhou Wu

Theme a critique of pop stardom and the entertainment industry a condemnation of school education a snapshot of the chaos and disorder of college students’ evenings of study everyday urban experience

Shanghai Wu

childhood nostalgia

Guangzhou Cantonese

a protest against ­restrictions on Cantonese in local media

Beijing Mandarin

a bashing of mainstream media

Shaanxi Xi’an Mandarin

anti-Japanese nationalism

Partly Nanjing Mandarin

political commentary

outspoken about what is going on around him and what he thinks about it. Yet his strong opinions were perceived as offensive and immediately evoked controversy in the local community after the song was uploaded. Some migrant workers felt so demeaned and insulted when they first heard the song in an Internet café that they called the local newspaper to find out who the singer was and demand a public apology from him.18 18 “‘Laobazi’ ge renao Qingdaoren, Qingdao fazhan zenke wangji dagongzhe” “老巴子” 歌惹恼青岛人，青岛发展怎可忘记打工者 [The “bumpkin” song angered Qingdao­ nese; how can we forget the migrant workers in developing Qingdao?], Qingdao chenbao, August 26, 2004.



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Thus when we compare these local-language rap songs to the mainstream popular songs largely rendered in the Putonghua Mandarin of mainland China,19 we find that the lyrics of the former are usually about more collective social issues and not about personal romantic love,20 while the latter are largely dominated by love songs, although sometimes nationalistic or propaganda songs are also popular. In this sense, dialect rap songs can be viewed as a conscious reaction of young rappers to the prevalence of pop songs. The Shanghai rap duo Hi-Bomb said in an interview, “The domestic music market is unanimously those love songs, yet actually young people need more styles to choose from, and our album provides just such an alternative for fans.”21 Sichuan Chengdu rapper Li Sui 李随 (a.k.a. Sleepycat) also told me that he was sick of those saccharine love songs; embracing the genuine, “keep-it-real” attitude of rap, he characterized pop love songs as fake and pretentious.22 This reaction to mainstream pop music, of course, is not confined to the relatively new genre of rap. As early as the mid-1980s, Cui Jian, the godfather of Chinese rock, had viewed rock and roll ideology as an expression of resistance and of opposition to the “superficial, empty, soft, and feminine” pop music from Hong Kong and Taiwan and to the popular music industry in general.23 And a play That Night, Let’s Do Music (Nayiye, women gao yinyue 那一夜, 我们搞音乐), first staged in June 2009 in Beijing, parodies a Grammystyle music award gala and satirizes evil practices in the contemporary pop music industry. In the play, the veteran Beijing folk rock singer Qiu Ye 秋野 pokes fun at his own CCTV-broadcasted, commercially successful jingle for a health-care product to show that love songs are all so similar

19 Pop music in mainland China has been heavily influenced by Cantopop from Hong Kong and Mandopop from Taiwan, so the language rendered in the pop songs would be more accurately described as standard Mandarin with a gangtai accent, imitating ­Cantonese-accented Mandarin and Taiwan Mandarin. 20 By this, I do not mean that no rap songs are about love. In fact, one topic of dialect rap songs is coming-of-age love experiences, for example, “Utterly Stupid” (“Hadengluan/ hadelõ” 哈等卵, 2004) in Changsha Xiang, and Mild Wild Child’s “The Lonely Valentine’s Day with Myself ” (“Yigeren de eryue shisiri” 一个人的 2 月 14 日, 2005) in Shanghai Wu. 21 Jiang Hui 姜晖, “Women huijiang xiha jinxing daodi” 我们会将嘻哈进行到底 [Take hip-hop to the end: Interview with Hi-Bomb band by www.tom.com], July 30, 2004, http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/fOc7HZyVq8s/. 22 Li, interview with the author, June 23, 2009. 23 Timothy Brace, “Popular Music in Contemporary Beijing: Modernism and Cultural Identity,” Asian Music 22.2 (1991): 43–66; Andrew F. Jones, Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music (Ithaca, NY: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1992); Nimrod Baranovitch, China’s New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Poli­ tics, 1978–1997 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

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that it is very easy to get mixed up. Nevertheless, although romantic love is usually regarded as a universal theme of pop music, love songs experienced a decade-long struggle with government institutions before they were officially recognized by the state in the late 1980s as a legitimate musical genre in mainland China.24 But now that formal institutions have largely accepted free love as a sphere in which youth can be assertive, Standard Mandarin nevertheless remains the dominant language by far for romantic expression, and so using local language provides access into another sphere that is not yet defined and sanctioned by formal institutions. Local-language rap opens up and constructs an alternative, subcultural space in which youth can actively and assertively voice their views about society and their own lives rather than passively submit to their parents’ culture and hierarchical institutions.25 Among other symbols of authority, the “notorious” Chinese educational system is a major institution against which disaffected youths rebel. Most rappers can hardly be regarded as high academic achievers. Both Dong Lei 董磊, the founder of the Hangzhou band Saliva Regiment (2001–2003), and Sha Zhou, the Qingdao MC, dropped out in their first year of technical high school. MC Webber (Wang Bo 王波), one of the founding members of the Beijing band Yin Tsang, quit school at the age of fifteen. Shanghai rapper Sun Bin 孙斌 (a.k.a. Lotz) never liked school and his formal education ended with elementary school.26 Chengdu rapper Li Sui, a senior high school student in 2009, resisted the university entrance exam by writing a rap composition in one of the mock exams.27 Instead of allowing themselves to be ostracized for incorrect thoughts or actions, these youngsters showed agency and subjectivity in making their decision to leave school voluntarily. Regarding rap as a powerful form of expression and empowerment, Sha Zhou raps in the song “Why I Sing” (“Weishenme gechang” 为什么歌唱) on his debut album, 24 Baranovitch, China’s New Voices, 10–18. 25 I owe the idea of comparing Standard Mandarin pop songs and local-language rap songs to Edward Gunn’s comments. Nevertheless, the two musical genres are not mutually exclusive. The general distinction discussed here does not imply that love songs cannot be subversive or resistant, as some love songs can be read allegorically or symbolically, and their signification thus cannot be simply confined to love. Moreover, as this chapter sug­ gests, besides lyrical content, the difference in their subversive potentials may also have to do with the location and distribution of the songs, as the former are usually distributed in the world of mass-marketed, mainstream pop for a broad audience while the latter are mainly circulated on the Internet among a niche audience. 26 Sun, interview with the author, May 30, 2009. 27 Li, interview with the author, June 23, 2009.



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My music is the only way for me to vent out my feelings, can’t imagine where I would be without it. . . . I gave up that suffocating place, where I felt depressed, trapped in a prison; everyone is doing the same thing, and that place deprived me of the right of being me. Even if the price is to give up that so-called diploma, I don’t believe a piece of paper can really prove anything. What a joke.28

And he did soon find that rapping was another path to fulfillment, something that demonstrated his talents and self-worth, particularly after the big commercial success of his first album. Aside from the dropouts, even those college students who got their diploma have a strong opinion about ­Chinese education. Chen Haoran 陈浩然 of In 3, himself a graduate from the Central Conservatory Academy, similarly blamed Chinese education for discouraging individualism, blunting creativity, and exerting uniformity.29 And in his group’s powerful song “Hello Teacher,” Chen launched a fierce denouncement of his middle-school teacher and his education. The song starts with a sample from Wang Shuo’s banned film I’m Your Daddy (Wo shi ni baba 我是你爸爸, 1996), adapted from his novella of the same title.30 The sound clip is about a conflict between the son Ma Che 马车 and his teacher in the classroom, which is triggered when Ma questions the ridiculousness and implausibility of the revolutionary rhetoric in the textbook the teacher is reading: a captured Communist soldier stares at his Nationalist executor with his eyes simultaneously conveying three emotions: fury, optimism, and contempt. Completely blind to the illogic in this typical piece of rhetoric in a Maoist hero narrative, the teacher scolds Ma for behaving pompously and asks him to get out of the classroom. Refusing to leave, Ma daringly confronts his teacher, and the whole class becomes chaotic. Losing his temper, the rapper unleashes a torrent of filthy language, venting his years of pent-up anger in a hysterical and furious voice. . . .  你丫上课忘了词就说是让我气的 你扔了我的书包这事儿我永远记得 对你有偏见是因为我没换过座位 一年四季挨着垃圾桶说话能不脏么

28 Sha Zhou, MC Sha Zhou (Jinan: DIY, distributed by Qilu yinxiang chubanshe, 2004). 29 Chen, interview with Angela Steele, “Hip Hop in China: Chinese Education and Hip Hop,” YouTube video, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H7xprfQbAU. 30 The other title for the film is Father (Yuanjia fuzi 冤家父子), in which Feng Xiao­ gang plays Ma Che’s father.

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chapter six You lost your fucking words so you say I made you lose your mind You threw away my bag, I don’t think I can forget that I got issues with you because you never let me switch chairs How do you expect me not to talk dirty when you always seat me next to a trash can . . .  明明开卷考试说我作弊撕了我的卷子 瞧你丫那操性 借着更年期跟我傻屄回家操自己吧操自己 我在学校外面犯的都是你丫不敢想的 上课两分钟我接个下茬堵了你的嗓子 我的作业从来不判全她妈是 2 分 其实除了体育老师都是狗娘养的 You ripped up my paper for “plagiarizing” on an obviously open notes test Look at your bitch-ass self Fucking with me just because you’re menopausal, go home and fuck yourself Everything I committed outside you wouldn’t dare think about, bitch 2 minutes into class, excuse my interruption, but I’ve already cut you off Never checked my homework, everything’s just a motherfucking 2 Apart from the gym teacher, you’re all sons of bitches.31

A prominent feature of In 3’s lyrics, as in many other dialect rap songs, is their trademark use of local expletives and slang, such as their pet phrase, the Beijing curse word (ni) ya (你) 丫 (lit. “daughter of a bitch”).32 The rapper deliberately uses taboo language, forbidden and censored in schools, to launch a discursive revenge against his teachers and the educational system. Therefore, as a noninstitutional language that has long been excluded and expunged from formal education, mass media, and mainstream society, local language provides a rhetoric of social status and identity outside the categories defined by these hierarchical

31 In 3, Unknown Artists (Weizhi yishujia 未知艺术家) (DIY, 2008). 32 Chen provided an interesting account of his band’s trademark use of expletives in their interview with HipHop.cn (http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4d1296c20100c9ri.html): the curse words function as an interjection (yuqi 语气) rather than as a content word (yuyan 语言). This is similar to how Angel Lin interprets the use of chou-hau (vulgar speech) in MC Yan’s Cantonese rap song “War Crime.” See Angel Lin, “Respect for Da Chopstick Hip Hop: The Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy of Cantonese Verbal Art in Hong Kong,” in Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Lan­ guage, ed. H. Samy Alim et al. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 168.



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institutions. In this sense, local language becomes associated with an oppositional youth subculture.33 Some local-language rap songs, peppered with local gang argot and street slang, depict a gangsterish, violent world, a world that is largely excluded from the formal school curriculum. For instance, in the band’s hit song “A Mooched Meal” (“Jian’er fan/Jiẽ er vẽ” 贱儿饭, 2002), set to the “Can-Can” tune from Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, Dong Lei rhymes in Hangzhou Wu about eating in a restaurant with no intention to pay. 松开裤腰带, 开始吃起来; 但是我是麻袋, 要么装装看; 老板跑过来, 老子肚皮吃坏; 你说怎么办 (赔, 钞票拿过来!) 你再说说看, 老子摊儿 掀翻; 搞七捻三, 立即鞭三饭; 朋友你不要怪, 老子劳改犯; 弄弄你这种 小鬼真当色色宽宽 Loosen my belt and I start eating. I ain’t got no money to meet no ends, so let me pretend. Hey, go get the manager. My stomach’s broke, and it’s all your fault, son! So what are you gonna do!? (Pay me son!) One more word and I'm wrecking your business. Keep eating my time and you’ll eat my fist. Son, don’t blame me, I’m just an OG. Messing with a punk like you isn’t even a thing.

The dense use of local words and slang such as bahuangcẽ 霸王餐 (a despot’s meal [unpaid by force]), made 麻袋 (no money in one’s pocket), gaoqiniẽsẽ 搞七捻三 (mess around), sesekuẽkuẽ 色色宽宽 (more than enough), and piẽsẽvẽ 鞭三饭 (to beat someone) convey a strong sense of hooliganism or chivalry in the jianghu underworld, a particular entity hardly reducible to the official mainstream society where standard Mandarin is spoken. Chen Xu’s 陈旭 “The Northeast Specialty Is Not Underworld” (“Dongbei techan bushi heishehui” 东北特产不是黑社会, 2004) in Northeast Mandarin seems at first to refute the regional stereotype, in line with the song’s title, but ultimately reinforces the stereotype with its dense use of violent and aggressive local slang and idioms pronounced in the distinct Northeast Mandarin intonation, for example laotie 老铁 (buddy), kejing’er 可劲儿 (exert all one’s strength), shuadadao 耍大刀

33 Also in this sense, the use of Chinese local language is in conformity with the use of “English from below” in hip-hop discourse. As Bent Preisler defines it, in contrast to “Eng­ lish from above,” which is officially promoted and institutionally transmitted, English from below is acquired via noninstitutional channels and is motivated by “the desire to symbol­ ize subcultural identity or affiliation, and peer group solidarity.” Preisler, “Functions and Forms of English in a European EFL Country,” in Standard English: The Widening Debate, ed. Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts (London: Routledge, 1999), 247.

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(play tricks), baxia (talk nonsense), danlian 单练 (one-to-one fight), dang shanpao 当山炮 (treated as a bumpkin), huzhoubache 胡诌八扯 (talk nonsense), yansi huishui de / dasi jiangzui de 淹死会水的/打死犟嘴的 (drown to death those who can swim / beat to death those who are stubborn), xiaoshu buxiu bu zhiliu / ren bu xiuli genjiujiu’r 小树不修不直溜/ 人不修理艮赳赳 (a tree wouldn’t be straight without pruning / a person would be arrogant without fixing). These unconventional songs—widely circulated online and energetically performed at nightclubs—generate the “emotional energies” among the youth audience that promote peer group solidarity and form a collective subcultural youth identity.34 Chen Haoran of In 3 found that the power of hip-hop is in getting people together and uniting them.35 And their provocative song “Hello Teacher” undoubtedly provides a form of cathartic release as well as empowerment for numerous disgruntled, oppressed students in China. The song was overwhelmingly well received online and has greatly helped to launch the rap trio’s rise to underground stardom in Beijing. As of September 2009, the video had been viewed over one hundred thousand times on YouTube since it was posted in September 2008. Similarly, once Dong Lei uploaded the song “A Mooched Meal” onto several Hangzhou-based campus networks in 2002, local young fans enthusiastically raved about it.36 Chen Xu’s “The Northeast Specialty Is Not Underworld” also ranked number one on a baidu chart of the top ten most-searched-for Internet songs in 2004. Although rap is a male-dominated field in China and elsewhere in the world, a small number of Chinese young women have taken up rapping to challenge this male dominance and the patriarchal view that women are not suited for performing this style of music.37 “Fall Under Your Spell” (“Xinliao ni di xie” 信了你的邪, 2006), a song by the Wuhan female artist

34 This term is borrowed from Eric Ma, who uses it to explore subcultural social for­ mations in his case study of the Hong Kong rap band LMF (LazyMuthaFucka). See Ma, “Emotional Energies and Subcultural Politics in Post-97 Hong Kong,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3.2 (2002): 187–190. 35 Chen, interview with Angela Steele, “Hip Hop in China: What is Hip Hop,” YouTube video, 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruZlPU7ESvc. 36 Zhang Lei 张磊, “Chang Jian’erfan de nageren” 唱《贱儿饭》的那个人 [Interview with Dong Lei, the person who sang “A Mooched Meal”], Hangzhou ribao, February 26, 2005. 37 As early as 1995, an anonymous critic commented on the only female rap song on a rap mixtape, He Jing 何静’s “Women’s Street” (“Nürenjie” 女人街), as “feeling like a witch chanting incantations,” which implies, according to Baranovitch, “that it is a rare and abnormal phenomenon that should not exist at all.” China’s New Voices, 157.



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Duan Sisi 段思思, relentlessly criticizes evil practices in the entertainment industry. MC Lucy’s “Shanghai KTV Girls” (“Shanghai K jie” 上海 K姐, 2005) is a vitriolic denunciation of the escort girls working in KTV (Karaoke TV) bars and night clubs, who seek only to take advantage of men for their money. Although their criticism is no less forceful than that of their male counterparts, they were first introduced to the rap genre mainly by their male rapper friends. Since the males are the mentors and enlighteners, the females become identified with this male-gendered musical form and its associated masculine ideals such as competitiveness and aggressiveness. We can discern such masculinized discourse explicitly in the song “Shanghai KTV Girls.” At the beginning of the song, the male MC niggAslim shouts in English, “This song iz from me & my ­sister MC Lucy, and dedicated to all da real azz hoez in SHANGHAI CITY!!” Throughout the song, the persona of the greedy, materialistic KTV girl that MC Lucy plays is a voice to be ridiculed, condemned, negated, and maligned. Trying to bring the wild girl back to social order, the female rapper thus assumes a patriarchal stance and joins in her male partner’s condemnation: “shoot all’em bitchez.” As much as the wild girl’s own voice is silenced and obscured in MC Lucy’s song, we hear subjective female voices defining their femininity in “Yangzhou Crazy Girls” (“Yangzhou fengnüyuan” 扬州疯女院, 2006), which is sung by a group of five girls in Yangzhou Mandarin. The rappers are identified by their distinctive, linglei 另类 (alternative) Net ID names: duwu me wudu 髑吾メ无毒 (poisonless skull), shichong erjiao 恃宠而娇 (spoiled and doted), fen dudu 粉嘟嘟 (pinky), xiehou de ai 邂逅的爱 (chance love), and langman yinghua 浪漫 樱花 (romantic cherry blossom). By referring to themselves as fengnü in the song title they make a self-conscious statement that distances them from socially prescribed feminine values. The song starts with a declaration that imitates revolutionary jargon yet is couched in a nonserious tone: “Wherever there is oppression, there will be resistance. In a dark night in which you can’t see your six fingers, we finally break the feudal cage.” Although at one point in the body of the song the singers try to legitimize their gender identity by denying that of the androgynous Super Girl Li Yuchun 李宇春, whom they call a lady-boy (renyao 人妖) and later “a man,” their constructed femininity is far from conventional and orthodox. They are hedonistic and seductive; they carelessly nickname a friend’s husband “Mao Zedong’s elder brother,” “Mao Zechang” 毛泽长 (which sounds like “Mao zhichang” 毛直长 in the Yangzhou dialect, meaning “has long hair on the body”); they boldly use a plethora of local expletives and violent words, such as diao 屌 (penis,

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fuck) and erbishan/a pi φiẽ 二屄闪 (idiot, sick). And in the end, they send a “teachy but not preachy”38 message of a carefree, transcendent attitude towards love affairs and the arbitrary, irrational world: 生活本来就这样子, 何必那么认真呢 爱来爱去不累嘛，公鸡怎么可能下蛋呢 赖昌星人就不嫁来嘛, 陈水扁不照样有弊案嘛 男人照样当超女嘛, 女人照样当皇帝嘛 世界哪来那么公平呢 再伤心不也过去了嘛 不要那么愤怒，不要那么想不开啦 没得用的男人可以甩得啦 粘人的女人叫她滚蛋啦 什么倒头一见钟情, E网情深,一心一意,都他妈骗人的哎 马克思哲学学过的哎?事物没得静止的哎 让我们大家动起来不要听人家甩啊摆 我要自己主宰 Life’s just like that, so why be so serious? Falling in and out of love is tiring, isn’t it? How can roosters lay eggs? Even a smuggler (Lai Changxing) can easily find a wife, even a president (Chen Shuibian) can be prosecuted for corruption Men can still be Super Girl, women can still be Emperor How can the world be so fair? No matter how heartbroken you are, won’t you still get over it? Don’t be so mad, don’t be so stuck on it Dump those useless guys; ditch those clingy girls All that “love at first sight,” “falling head over heels,” “loving with all your heart,” it’s all a fucking facade Learn from Marxist philosophy, nothing is static Let’s start the revolution, no matter what the others do or say I want to be my own destiny

As an epitome of rap music as a contested arena, the song became highly controversial in the local community immediately after it was uploaded. Undoubtedly, the song challenges the patriarchic social order, established mainstream norms, and high official culture. As to be expected, it was mainly those cultural authorities, cultural elites, and elders who attacked the song for being decadent, profane, and vulgar.39 They were particularly 38 The phrase “teachy but not preachy” is borrowed from Imani Perry, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 62, in which she cites from Henry L. Gates’s The Signifying Monkey the other seven features of “signifyin(g),” a prominent rhetorical trope in the African American literary tradition as well as in hip-hop narrative. 39 Xu Qing 徐庆, “Yangzhou MM: Women zhishi ziyuzile” 扬州MM: 我们只是自娱自 乐 (Yangzhou girls: What we did was just for fun), Yangzhou wanbao, July 27, 2006.



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upset by the girls’ use of local dirty words in a public space. This transgressive speech act was even criticized for denigrating the Yangzhou image.40 However, as Ove Sernhede argues, “One aspect of youth culture is, and always has been, the breaking of taboos.”41 The girls’ defiant attitude also won them avid patronage from hip-hop fans like themselves. Nonetheless, the rhetoric of resistance and opposition, which is characteristic of hip-hop music, or more generally of youth culture, often manifests complexity, complicity, and ambivalence. In demystifying the “keep-it-real” ethos of rap in the United States, Samuel Watkins and Imani Perry, among others, point out that as street credibility has become the selling point for corporate rap music, ironically the hip-hop celebrities have to stay “ ‘hood” and live out the narratives of gangster lives in order to authenticate a valorized and fabulously hyped portrait of ghetto life.42 Tricia Rose, in a more systematic way, explores some of the most crucial issues, such as violence, sexism, race, and market manipulation, in the polarized debates of resistance and oppression in American hip-hop.43 Like any other binary framework, the resistance-oppression dualism is dialectic and dynamic. What looks like resistance from one perspective can be viewed as oppression from another perspective. Take In 3’s “Hello Teacher” as an example: as much as this song resists the oppressive education system, the expletive-laden verbal attack on a female schoolteacher is insulting, demeaning, and degrading toward women, reinforcing a kind of gender oppression that conforms to the notorious charges of sexism and misogyny laid against hip-hop. Furthermore, some forms of resistance imply or breed other forms of compromise and submission. For instance, the very action of the five Yangzhou girls’ posting anonymously belies their apparent fearlessness and rebellion, although one might hail Internet anonymity for providing a platform for self-expression. Similarly, Duan Sisi commented that she hesitated quite a while before putting her song

40 Shun Chao and Song Yuan 顺朝 松元, “Shouzhi Yangzhou fangyan RAP gequ rebo, Yangzhou jida wangzhan yin zhengyi” 首支扬州方言 Rap 歌曲热播，扬州几大网站 引争议 [The first hit Yangzhou dialect rap stirred controversy online], Yangzhou shibao, July 25, 2006. 41 Ove Sernhede, “Exoticism and Death as a Modern Taboo: Gangsta Rap and the Search for Intensity,” in Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, ed. Paul Gilroy et al. (London: Verso, 2000), 306. 42 Samuel Craig Watkins, Hip Hop Matters: Politics, Pop Culture, and the Struggle for the Soul of a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 2–3; Perry, Prophets of the Hood, 90–95. 43 Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop— and Why It Matters (New York: BasicCivitas, 2008).

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online for fear of possible attack, until she decided to use a new Net ID. MC Lucy changed the original beat of her song “Shanghai KTV Girls” to a less harsh one after one of her friends warned her of the image issue. Such self-censorship is not limited to female rappers, of course. Cao Shi 曹石 and Wang Daye 王大冶 of Xi’an’s Black Head later revealed that they processed their voices to make them unrecognizable when making their widely circulated online song “Fuck Japan.” Moreover, probably because of its extreme nationalistic sentiment, this song did not appear on the band’s first released album, Wake Up Earlier Than The Rooster (Qi de bi ji hai zao 起得比鸡还早, 2007).44 It is quite noticeable that these songs with counterhegemonic potential, although they made the rappers instant cyberheroes, were altered for or excluded from their debut record releases, which, compared with the largely uncensored Internet musical space, normally puts the artists under greater scrutiny. In 2002 the Little Lion, half of the Hi-Bomb duo, uploaded a demo of “No. 1,” a song performed in Shanghai Wu that outspokenly expresses a self-empowered swagger in filthy language. The success of the demo through downloads eventually led to the pair signing a contract with EMI.45 However, during the production of their first album A-Yo Hi-Bomb (Xiha di yi bang 嘻哈第一棒, 2004), the duo were forced to rewrite this hit “dirty” song more than twenty times in “clean” Putonghua Mandarin, until they “eventually vented their frustrations in the form of lyrics, spouting their anger at their recording label into their music.”46 Chen Xu, after signing with a record label, deleted some of the violent, aggressive lines when preparing the “official version” of the song “The Northeast Specialty Is Not Underworld” for his album released in 2005.47 MC Sha Zhou did not include the controversial “Qingdao Bumpkins” on his first CD in 2004. In my interview with him on June 3, 2009, Sha Zhou, who was establishing a music company at the time, said he was now mature enough not to offend the public and would rather let the newer singers in his company handle sensitive themes. Although the rapper tried to ­maintain 44 Black Head, Qi de bi ji hai zao [Wake up earlier than the rooster] (Xi’an: Shiyin Records, 2007). 45 BBC News, “Web demo launches hip-hop in China,” March 8, 2005, http://news.bbc .co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/4329531.stm. 46 Wendy Liu, “Cultural Spotlight: Hip-Hopping,” posted on the City Weekend web­ site on December 4, 2006, http://old.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/cw-magazine/ reviews/Review_HipHop/. 47 Chen Xu, Chen Xu VS huaping 陈旭 VS 花瓶 [Chen Xu VS vase] (Guangzhou: Feile Records, 2005).



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his artistic independence by not contracting with a record company, he consciously catered to mainstream taste by incorporating more lovethemed songs in the albums he later recorded. The compromise between rap music’s position in the marketplace and its function as a potentially counterhegemonic cultural resource is best illustrated by the story behind the first Shanghai rap album, released in July 2005, an album coproduced by Sony-BMG/Xinsuo Records and Shanghaining.com, the major institution promoting Shanghai rap at the time. Although the album is entitled Say What You Gotta Say (You sha jiang sha / you sa gang sa 有啥讲啥), the inside story is far different. The rapper SRC was asked to rewrite portions of his furious lyrics dealing with such sensitive topics as official corruption and peasant immigration in his song “I Don’t Always Feel Good” (“Wo lao fa shuang / ŋu lao vəsuang” 我老伐爽). MC Lucy’s “Shanghai KTV Girls” underwent a more radical overhaul: the original lyrics were completely rewritten so that they described the daily life of a fun-loving, fashionable young urbanite, and the revamped song was released with a new title, “Shanghai Cute Girls” (“Shanghai dia nannan/nønø” 上海嗲囡囡).48 Young Chinese artists are subject to manipulation, mediation, and (self-) censorship by powerful mainstream tastes, capital, the state, and record companies. Their authenticity and integrity are challenged when they become involved with commercialization and institutionalization. For the nascent Chinese rap music industry, the future still looms large. The Use of Local Languages in Rock Music in the Late 1990s The strong social commentary and subcultural sensibility of Chinese rap draw on a generic feature of rap music as a form of resistance against authority and a vehicle for furthering social and political purposes. Another prominent feature of rap music—which, as a genre, has always been obsessed with locality and spatiality—is the articulation of a collective local identity rendered in local language and slang. As Murray Forman observes, “A highly detailed and consciously defined spatial awareness is one of the key factors distinguishing rap music and hip-hop from the many other cultural and subcultural youth formations.”49 Prioritizing the significance of ’hood, ghetto, inner-city, and posse in American rap 48 Chen Leiqing 陈雷清, founder and CEO of the SHN website, interview with the author, May 30, 2009. 49 Forman, The ’Hood Comes First, 3.

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acts, Forman examines regional differences in style, musicality, theme, and discourse between East Coast, West Coast, “Dirty South,” and Seattle rap and hip-hop.50 Chinese local-language rap articulates a comparably intense sense of place and locality, as the next section will illustrate. However, different from the dialect rap of southern Italy, which mainly draws on local traditional folk songs and instrumentation,51 Chinese rap songs are more verbal than musical, capitalizing more on the vocabulary (the distinctive local terms, slang, and expressions) than the intonation of local languages. Indeed, Chinese rock musicians, particularly in the late 1990s, employed and explored the musicality of local languages and regional folk music to articulate a distinct youth identity and to signify the Chineseness of their music. Therefore in this section I trace the use of local languages in the rock-music genre and examine its overlap with and difference from rap music. Ziyue 子曰 (Confucius Says) is a Beijing-based rock band mostly active in the late 1990s. The band’s lead singer, songwriter, and lyricist is Qiu Ye, a native of Beijing. The band is known for its distinctive Beijing flavor. For example, the song “Ciqi” (1997) describes a particular kind of friendship among Beijing youth—the local Beijing word ciqi 磁器 means “very good buddies.” As the lyrics go, “We’re friends. We’re brothers. We’re comrades. We’re ciqi.” To varying extents, the friendship is associated both with the brotherly love indexed by the musical citation of Cao Zhi’s 曹植 ancient “Seven-step Poem” (Qibushi 七步诗) and with the revolutionary love referenced through the insertion of a party cadre’s lecture on a comradesubordinate relationship. However, both associations seem to be negated even as they are evoked. In a parodying and distorted way, Qiu Ye recites the poem in a feminized falsetto voice and replaces all the otherwise standard retroflex initials (juansheyin 卷舌音) /zh ch sh/ with /z c s/ in the cadre’s speech, which is replete with revolutionary jargon. The kind of buddyship indexed in the word ciqi, which has a connotation of chivalry, cannot be fully described without the intertextual use of another word from Beijing street slang, siqia 死掐 (to fight, never to give in): 你拉我 一把/我会帮你一下儿/你要是耍我/我就跟你死掐 (If you give me a hand / I’ll help you in return / if you try to make fun of me / I’ll fight you till the end).

50 Ibid., particularly 173–212. 51 Tony Mitchell, “Fightin’ da Faida: The Italian Posses and Hip-Hop in Italy,” in Global Noise, ed. Mitchell, 194–221.



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Nonetheless, compared with the occasional use of distinctive Beijing Mandarin vocabulary, the band is more inclined to employ melodic and tonal variation to convey the political satire characteristic of their songs. In the song “Big Tree” (“Dashu” 大树, 1997), Qiu Ye spins an allegory around a big locust tree in the center of a typical Beijing courtyard: Around this courtyard live all my dearest family members / [they] survive till today depending on this reliable big tree / until now its heresy and horror was concealed / but it’s too difficult to uproot it now. What a big regret it was at the outset!

The lyrics are rendered in a tune typical of jingyundagu, a local drumaccompanied musical storytelling form. It is through such nuanced tune and tonal variations that the political metaphor of the big tree as the once all-powerful party authority is conveyed. In another song, “To Stay Obedient” (“Guaiguai de” 乖乖的, 1997), the son has been constantly asked by his authoritarian father to be obedient and compliant. Every time the frustrated son tries to speak his true feelings, his overbearing father silences him by inserting a piece of candy into his mouth, and then gives a lecture: Stay obedient! No matter how hard the road is, your daddy, me, has walked through The various tastes I’ve had, the sour, the sweet, the bitter, the spicy, the salty, the savory, the foul, are even more than the meals you, little devil, have had That’s why I tell you: my boy, if I am contented, so should you be happy. Don’t knit your eyebrows and pretend to be deep in thought; The nice things you eat, you drink, you wear are what your daddy, me, has spent my whole life to earn! Understand?

It is noteworthy that the words of the patriarchal figure are imitated by the Beijing Mandarin-speaking “son” in an intonation that may be identified as Tianjin Mandarin. The father’s distorted intonation, coupled with his coarse, colloquial, uneducated language, creates a deliberate garbling of the lyrics that ridicules and undermines the dominant patriarchal didacticism, whether it is interpreted literally at the family level or metaphorically at the national level. The resistance of the oppressed is most manifest in the last line, where the long-victimized son finally blurts out the truth: “The piece of candy you give me IS NOT SWEET AT ALL.” Like the band Ziyue, many folk rock (minyao yaogun 民谣摇滚) bands have tried to tap into regional folk music in order to carve out a distinct identity for the band and the musicians themselves. The band The ­Second-Hand Rose (Ershou Meigui 二手玫瑰), formed in Beijing in

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2000, features a strong Northeast flavor. As the lead singer Liang Long 梁龙 is a native of Heilongjiang in Northeast China, the band combines “secondhand,” imported Western hard rock with the double-gender acting and rich intonation resources of the local errenzhuan performing art form. Always brightly dressed in the outfits of an enchanting woman, Liang manipulates various intonation patterns to convey ambiguity and sarcasm in his songs of social criticism. Branding itself as “the most seductive band in Chinese rock,” the band appropriated regional folk music for its self-definition.52 Likewise, singing with a strong Yinchuan 银川 Mandarin accent, Su Yang 苏阳 tells stories and legends of his remote hometown in Ningxia 宁夏 in the Northwest to the Beijing audience, and both his melodies and lyrics bear a strong resemblance to traditional local folk music such as Hua’er 花儿. As Beijing is the assumed center of Chinese rock music, migrant musicians largely use their native dialects to convey a sense of nostalgia, marginality, alienation, and estrangement. The members of the duo The Wild Child (Ye Haizi 野孩子, 1995–2004), singing with a Northwest Mandarin accent, speak about their disillusionment and bewilderment in the ­lyrics “Beijing, Beijing, is not our home / I didn’t know the working people are the poorest until now / Life is not ideal, not a fantasy, not what we can understand” in the song “Live Underground” (“Shenghuo zai dixia” 生活在地下, 1996?), about their harsh life in a rented basement room in Beijing. Zhang Guangtian 张广天, a native of Shanghai, wrote the song “Shanghai Shanghai” around 1994, when he was leading a wandering, rootless life in Beijing. A strong nostalgic sentiment is evoked by his enumeration of “familiar” local places in his Shanghai Wu accent, such as the Bund, Huangpu River, Yangpu Bridge, and Xujiahui district. Wang Lei 王磊, a native of Sichuan, is a reggae musician based in Guangzhou. As in the music of the migrant musicians in Beijing, the themes of alienation, loneliness, and depression are featured in many of the songs on his first album, entitled Sojourner (Chumenren 出门人, 1994). In his 1998 album The Spring Comes (Chuntian laile 春天来了), Wang consciously employed Sichuan dialect to signify his marginal outsider identity. One of his songs 52 Jeroen Groenewegen extensively studies the band in his Ph.D. dissertation, “The Performance of Identity in Chinese Popular Music” (Leiden University, 2011), especially 36–39, 62–67, 150–152, and 122–125.



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about a quarrel among a three-member Sichuan family is even entitled “Sichuan Dialect” (“Sichuan fangyan” 四川方言). Without the usual accompaniment of heavy metal instruments, Wang speaks in a Sichuan Mandarin intonation: Youge xiaohuozi / si ge dusenzi / fumu xi’ai ta / suohua dai bazi / Bazi sige sa? / Sicuan di zanghua There is a young fellow / the only child in the family / his parents love him / he likes to speak with bazi / what is “bazi”? / Sichuan’s offensive language

Obviously enough, the song about “here” is addressed to an audience “elsewhere”—and not Wang’s Sichuan townsmen—since he has to explain the local slang, such as bazi 巴子. Rhetorically, the song’s evocation of an outsider identity also positions Wang himself outside of the mainstream musical practices fostered by the official state apparatus. The outsider theme is also discernable in Hu Mage’s 胡嗎個 1999 album Everyone Has a Little Bench, and Mine Won’t Be Brought To The TwentyFirst Century (Renren dou you ge xiao bandeng, wode bu dairu ershiyi shiji 人人都有个小板凳, 我的不带入二十一世纪). Of rural origin in West Hubei, Hu bummed around suburban Beijing after graduating from a university in Wuhan. In the song “Some Potatoes Come into the Cities” (“Bufen tudou jincheng” 部分土豆进城), the singer recites the lyrics in his West Hubei Mandarin accent, which provides exactly the unique sonic texture of a migrant peasant worker persona that Putonghua Mandarin cannot render. That big cat on the roof is so lucky to have a balcony She can comfortably sleep all day long, holding the hukou [permanent urban residency] of the city Really want to marry her, thus walking to the street with a new identity Pass by a two-story Western-style building, which is just like my newly built house Awe-inspired, I walk towards the entrance The female doorkeeper hands me a piece of toilet paper, saying “thirty cents one person” Oh, yet [is it because of ] my outsider accent?!

The singer’s obsession with his accent, which marks a marginal, outsider identity, is most prominently manifested in the final line cited above. Repeating kosi wodi waidi kouyin 可是我的外地口音 no less than thirty times, the singer conveys a spectrum of emotions by varying his ­intonation

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in each iteration: puzzlement, bewilderment, disbelief, self-irony, frustration, helplessness, desperation, preoccupation, and so on.53 In an article entitled “Singing in Local Dialect,” the veteran music critic Li Wan highly praises Hu’s alternative musical style, citing his spontaneous and nonformulaic composition, his loose, idiosyncratic narrative structure, his half-speaking and half-singing style, and his rural accent. Li points out that Hu’s music maintains an important link to regional folk opera and local storytelling arts in the Hubei villages where he grew up. Li claims that Hu’s music is the voice of the rural country folk, optimistically predicting that it holds the future of Chinese popular music.54 Implicit in Li’s optimism is the obsessive desire of Chinese music critics and musicians to locate the “Chineseness” of contemporary Chinese popular music, which has been heavily influenced by musical styles imported from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the West. Yet for Li, the ultimate definition of Chineseness seems to be expressed in terms of the local, namely the local folk music and local language in which it is embedded. Focusing on the realm of rock music, Jeroen de Kloet explores Beijing rock musicians’ various efforts at authentication and sinification in order to distinguish themselves from both gangtai pop and the assumed-to-be Western-­originated rock.55 But among the five authenticating tactics he examines, the tactic of rebellion-construction may only enable rock musicians to distinguish themselves from their perception of not-so-authentic gangtai pop, as rebellion is basically in line with the spirit of Western rock. Likewise, the tactic of invoking ancient China may protect Chinese rock from accusations of being an imitation of the West, but pride in Chinese cultural heritage is a theme shared with gangtai pop, too. Most astutely, the music critic Yuan Yue 袁越 argues that Chinese dialects offer mainland musicians a unique resource for differentiating their work from both Western rock sung in English and gangtai pop rendered in Cantonese and Taiwaneseaccented Mandarin. Sharing a vision similar to Li Wan’s, Yuan argues that

53 Discussing Hu Mage, Zhang Chu 张楚, Zheng Jun 郑钧, Xiao He 小河, and Zhou Yunpeng 周云蓬 in his treatment of folk rock, de Kloet similarly observes these musicians’ migratory experience and comments that “folk-rock is a scene where predominantly male troubadours muse on living in a rapidly modernizing society.” Jeroen de Kloet, China with a Cut: Globalization, Urban Youth and Popular Music (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 83. 54 Li Wan, “Yong fangyan gechang” 用方言歌唱 [Singing in local dialect], Zuojia 3 (1999): 65–68, also published in Yinxiang shijie 141 (July 1999): 42–43. 55 Jeroen de Kloet, “Authenticating Geographies and Temporalities: Representations of Chinese Rock in China,” Visual Anthropology 18.2-3 (2005): 229–256.



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the appropriation of indigenous Chinese regional folk music, ­including local accents, local folk tunes, and local vocabulary, is ultimately a way to construct an authentic Chinese national identity vis-à-vis Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the West.56 This nationalist proposal to construct a national character from Chinese folk music has precursors, such as the folk song collection movement of the May Fourth period and the sinification of music in leftist films of the 1930s, as I mentioned in Chapter 1. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the New Leftist musician and playwright Zhang Guangtian advocated the “New Folksong Movement.” In line with the strong anti-American and antiglobalization position reflected in the controversial play Che Guevara (Qie Gewala 切格瓦拉, 2000–2001),57 which Zhang directed and for which he composed the music, the movement evinced a strong antiWestern nationalist sentiment. Commenting on his signature album, a compilation of folk music entitled Poetry and Songs in the Era of Indus­ trialization (Gongyehua shidai de shi yu ge 工业化时代的诗与歌, 2000), Zhang claimed that the album was intended to muster the folk music of the people, by the people, and for the people against the capitalist, imperialist, and industrialized popular music. He strongly condemned the economic globalization and ideological homogenization brought about by the hegemonic popular music of the United States.58 Proposing to rename popular music “folk music” (minjian yinyue 民间音乐), Zhang championed the traditional principles of the melody-tone relationship in folk music, particularly that of yizixingqiang 依字行腔 (the melodic pattern of composition in accord with the tonal pattern of Chinese characters).59 Oddly, even though Zhang highlighted the determining role the Chinese 56 Yuan Yue, “Liuxing gequ yu fangyan” 流行歌曲与方言 [Popular songs and local lan­ guage], Huaxia wenzhai 415, 9.11 (March 12, 1999), http://archives.cnd.org/HXWK/author/ YUAN-Yue/cm9903b-7.gb.html. 57 For an analysis of this play, see Yinghong Cheng, “Che Guevara: Dramatizing China’s Divided Intelligentsia at the Turn of the Century,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 15.2 (2003): 1–43. 58 Zhang Guangtian, “Gongyehua shidai shiyuge de duihua”《工业化时代诗与歌》的 对话 [A dialogue on the album Poetry and Songs in the Era of Industrialization], Guoji yinyue jiaoliu 11 (2000): 130–131. 59 Zhang Guangtian, Wode wuchanjieji shenghuo 我的无产阶级生活 [My proletariat life] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2003), 122. Zhang Ming 章鸣 illustrates the prin­ ciple of yizixingqiang with the example of jingyundagu 京韵大鼓 and Beijing Mandarin as well as Beijing opera and Wuhan Mandarin in his book Yuyan yinyuexue gangyao 语言音 乐学纲要 [An outline of Chinese linguistic musicology] (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chuban­ she, 1998), 24–40; one chapter of the book is devoted to the topic of dialects and regional folk music, 70–111.

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tones play in traditional melodic construction, in practice, most of the “new” regional folksongs on the album did not use dialect to achieve a tune-tonal harmony but fell back on Putonghua lyrics. The veteran rock pioneer Cui Jian also pays attention to the peculiarity of the Chinese language as a tonal language. But unlike Zhang, who recognizes the positive importance of the tones, Cui finds that the four tones of Putonghua impose an undue restriction on the rhythmization of the language (yuyan jiezouhua 语言节奏化). Cui, who has become increasingly fascinated with rhythm as opposed to melody, has long been experimenting with rhythmizing the Chinese language, using it as an instrument and thus making compound rhythms. Set to a strong beat structure, many of Cui Jian’s songs are reminiscent of the rhythmic rap style, for instance, his famous “It’s Not That I Can’t Understand” in 1987 as well as most of the songs on his 1998 album Power of the Powerless (Wuneng de liliang 无能的力量). Noriko Manabe makes an interesting observation on Cui’s timing of the placement of fourth-tone and second-tone words in his song “Slackers” (“Hunzi” 混子) on this album: “[On the one hand,] Cui Jian increases his use of the fourth tone at the end of a line toward the end of his rap on ‘Slackers,’ making the rap sound increasing aggressive and driving it effectively to its conclusion. On the other hand, the rising second tone can sound questioning; Cui Jian exaggerates the intonation of the final words, toule [头了], lending a mocking tone to his final line.”60 Although he largely used Putonghua for rapping, Cui consciously experimented with Chinese intonation in the song “The Evening of the Era” (“Shidai de wanshang” 时代的晚上) on the same album. The lyrics, such as “no new language, no new methods either / no new power to express new feeling” (没有新的语言，也没有新的方式/没有新的力 量能够表达新的感情), are uttered in a way that deliberately minimizes the original tones of the Putonghua characters and subordinates them to the 4/4 drumbeat. Sometimes, lyrics rendered in this way have a certain degree of tone distortion that suggests they are delivered in a northern Mandarin variant. His 2005 album Show You Colors (Gei ni yidian yanse 给你一点颜色), a mix of rock and rap, is often recognized for the use of local dialects—for instance, the Shandong dialect in the song “Net Virgin” (“Wangluo chunan” 网络处男) and the Hebei Tangshan dialect in 60 Noriko Manabe, “Globalization and Japanese Creativity: Adaptation of Japanese Lan­ guage to Rap,” Ethnomusicology 50.1 (2006): 28. Similarly, Perry Link observes that the fourth tone in Mandarin sometimes suggests “authority or finality,” while the second tone could indicate a playful and less austere tone. Link, An Anatomy of Chinese, 94–96.



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“Villages Besiege Cities” (“Nongcun baowei chengshi” 农村包围城市). In the latter, Cui adopts the persona of a migrant peasant to justify the legitimate existence of migrant workers, on the one hand, and to criticize the arrogance and hypocrisy of urban citizens, particularly intellectuals, on the other hand. As for the Tangshan Mandarin intonation identified in this rap, Cui explains, “It just sounds like Tangshan dialect, as I’m a big fan of Jiang Wen’s Devils on the Doorsteps [featuring Tangshan dialect]. But native Tangshan people would dispute its authenticity. Actually this is not a specific dialect, but a kind of liberated accent.”61 Cui was concerned about the Chineseness of hip-hop music in such an experiment in “accent liberation,” but paradoxically its Chineseness can only be presented in the absence of the peculiarity of Chinese as a tonal language. As he said, “Once the problem of the Chinese language [intonation] is solved, the Chineseness of my music will come out naturally.”62 In a sense, Cui’s musical transition from rock to rap may attest to what de Kloet describes as “cultural synchronization,” the accelerated globalization that irresistibly exacts conformity with the musical stylistic trends of the West from Chinese musicians. As he argues, compared to Chinese rock culture, Chinese hip-hop is more intrinsically cosmopolitan and more “synchronized.”63 In a later essay on this topic, he similarly argues that Chinese hip-hop culture renders the notion of Chineseness “highly problematic,”64 and therefore subverts “any longing for cultural essentialism and nationalism.”65 This assertive argument, drawn merely from a case study of the Yin-Tsang band, which includes several non-Chinese members, may be a convenient and sound assumption in theory. Yet based on the rich data of rap songs in Chinese local languages that I will discuss in the next section, the real scenario is more complicated; the materials do not always fit neatly into the theoretical paradigm. On the one hand, what happened in China is a further localization within the nation-state through Western-inspired music. These songs articulate distinct local identities that take a more diverse, complex, and distinctive regional 61 Li Ruyi 李如一, “Jiefang yuyan, yong Hip-hop shuqing” 解放语言 用 Hip-Hop 抒情 [To liberate language, to express emotions with hip-hop], Nanfang dushibao, December 19, 2003. 62 Ibid. 63 Jeroen de Kloet, “Cultural Synchronization: Hip Hop with Chinese Characteristics?,” paper presented at the 2005 biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. 64 de Kloet, “Cosmopatriot Contaminations,” 138. 65 Ibid., 133.

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experience as their foundation than Putonghua ever did. It is true that Chineseness per se is rarely a concern for the hip-hop generation, but it is hard to say that these subnational identities are not of the ­Chinese identity. On the other hand, there are indeed songs—particularly in Shanghai rap—that suggest that young rappers sometimes negotiate with and challenge the national identity, thus making Chineseness a contested identity. However, it is still hard to assert that the nationalism of Shanghai youth (including diasporic Shanghainese) and their local/transnational identities are mutually exclusive, an issue de Kloet himself tries to tackle and essentialize with the coined term “banal cosmopatriotism.”66 Locality, Youth Identity, and the Internet As noted, many of the rap songs in local language manifest young urbanites’ pride in their home cities and celebrate their urban roots. This theme is conspicuously and abundantly evidenced in such song titles as Saliva Regiment’s “Hangzhou Is a Good Place” (“Hangzhou shi ge hao difang” 杭州是个好地方, 2002/2003); Xiong Jie’s 熊杰 “In Wuhan” (“Zai Wuhan” 在武汉, 2004); “Love Shanghai for 99 Times” (“Jiushijiu ci lian’ai aishang Shanghai” 99 次恋爱爱上上海, 2006), sung by a group of Shanghai rappers; Black Head’s “Shaanxi Delicious Food” (“Shaanxi meishi” 陕西 美食, 2007); and Run Tu’s 润土 “I’m a Chongqinger” (“Wo shi Chong­ qingzai” 我是重庆仔, 2006). Drawing on a keen sense of what Forman calls the “extreme local,” these rap songs are replete with explicit citations and references to specific local landmarks, specialties, cuisines, trademark streets, and other cultural sites with local significance. For instance, in “Hangzhou Is a Good Place,” the band proudly enumerates in Hangzhou Wu the local landmark West Lake, the dish “West Lake Sour Fish” 西湖 醋鱼, the specialty tea longjing 龙井, the popular restaurant Meijiawu 梅家坞, the famous pharmacy Huqingyutang 胡庆余堂, and the wellknown road Wulin 武林. Furthermore, as Martin Stokes points out, “The ‘places’ constructed through music involve notions of difference and social boundary.”67 If Sha Zhou constructs his superior identity as a Qingdaonese by setting up social

66 Ibid., 137–138; see also de Kloet and Edwin Jurriens’s introduction to Cosmopatriots, 9–17. 67 Martin Stokes, ed., Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Oxford: Berg, 1994), 3.



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and moral boundaries between the urban and the rural in his “Qingdao Bumpkins,” a highly privileged identity as a Shanghainese is articulated through an implicit comparison between Shanghai and the rest of the larger national community in PZ-FRAN’s “Our Shanghai” (“Ala Shanghai” 阿拉上海, 2004). Asserting a unique relationship between Shanghai and China, the rapper rhymes “We’re the upper corner of China,” in which the local expression shangzhijiao/zãtsako 上只角 (upper corner) refers to the fashionable, expensive neighborhoods in the former French Concession in western Shanghai, as contrasted with the “lower corner,” the loweror working-class neighborhoods in other parts of the city.68 In addition, defending the reputation of one’s hometown can be a strong motivation for making a rap. For instance, Chen Xu’s “The Northeast Specialty Is Not Underworld” was written in 2004 when he indignantly read a story about a number of non-Northeastern bandits imitating the Northeast Mandarin accent to carry out a robbery.69 From the perspective of the rapper, the song is a Northeasterner’s refutation of (non-Northeasterners’) stereotypes of Northeasterners, no matter that the song ends up reinforcing this clichéd image. These rap songs in local languages are infused with distinctive knowledge and sensibilities that originate from the particular place in which the languages were acquired. Take two songs as examples: D-Evil’s “Squeeze in the Packed Bus” (“Ji gongjiao” 挤公交, 2007) in Nanjing Mandarin depicts a mundane urban experience of taking the bus, which is always packed, in Nanjing. Besides the use of distinctive Nanjing Mandarin words, the lyrics integrate a range of locally embedded images and sounds, for instance, the recorded voice from the machine for swiping the bus pass, “Too quick to swipe your card. Please swipe again” (刷卡太快请重刷); the bus driver’s pet phrase to keep order, “One step up, keep moving, come up faster and don’t block the entrance” (上一步, 往里走, 再快点不要堵 门口); and comments on the local media celebrities, such as Meng Fei, who do not have to take the bus. In a similar vein, Sha Zhou’s “Hang Out in the Zhanqiao Port” (“Guang Zhanqiao” 逛栈桥, 2004) narrates in authentic Qingdao Mandarin his one-day experience of hanging out in a

68 Luo Xiaowei and Wu Jiang 罗小未 伍江, ed., Shanghai longtang 上海弄堂 [Shang­ hai alley] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin meishu chubanshe, 1997), 3. 69 Zhao Yuqing 赵宇清, “Chen Xu: ‘Dongbei techan bushi heishehui’ wei dongbeiren zhengming” 陈旭:《东北特产不是黑社会》为东北人正名 [Chen Xu’s “The Northeast Specialty Is Not Underworld” provides justification for Northeasterners], Heilongjiang ribao, March 30, 2005.

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local place of interest, Zhanqiao. The lyrics draw on everyday knowledge gained through living in Qingdao, for example, taking bus number 5 to Zhanqiao and spoofing a 2008 Olympics propaganda song, “Welcome to Qingdao,” whose video was shown daily on the local buses.70 Coupled with the Qingdao Mandarin words siaomer/siaoge 小嫚儿/小哥 (the form of address for a young girl and a young fellow respectively) and zhenjingla 真惊啦 (damn, that is surprising), the rap elicits an instinctive emotional response, and by evoking an intimate familiarity with everyday life in the local community it offers local citizens the pleasure of recognition. These lighthearted and inoffensive rap songs celebrating locality may sound mainstream when compared with the more hard-edged songs that carry an underground sensibility. In fact, some Western media critics, overlooking Chinese rap songs that feature the latter theme, criticize ­Chinese rap for its absence of subversion and rebellion. For example, Ralph Frammolino uses Yin-Tsang’s “In Beijing” (在北京, 2003) to dismiss Chinese hip-hop as “tamed,” a genre that has become the “unofficial music of the Communist government.”71 Daniel Bekman, although recognizing the antisocial message in In 3’s lyrics, finds it puzzling that the underground band didn’t oppose the Beijing Olympics but rather sang the “patriotic” paean “­Beijing Welcomes You Back,” which is in line with mainstream ­propaganda.72 However, these arguments are misleading because they presuppose a simplistic binary framework in which youth subculture and mainstream society are in a fixed, clear-cut, oppositional relationship. It is true that sometimes young rappers have to compromise when they encounter the music industry and mainstream audiences; however, their songs of local pride may be better understood as converging and overlapping with mainstream discourse rather than surrendering to or collaborating with it. Moreover, it is important to point out that the above-mentioned media reports citing the two songs that “glorify national pride”73 made a synecdochic substitution of the local for the national, as the songs are, after all, eulogies of their home city by the youth of Beijing, and, in this sense, are no different than the hometown boosterism of urban youth in other parts of China. Unlike migrant rock musicians, urban rappers usually perform for local audiences in their home cities. Their songs, once uploaded online, are also 70 The 2008 Summer Olympics sailing event took place in Qingdao. 71  Frammolino, “Chinese Find a Way to Tame Hip-Hop.” 72  Beekman, “Beijing Hip-Hop Trio.” 73  Frammolino, “Chinese Find a Way to Tame Hip-Hop.”



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most likely welcomed by young netizens who speak the same native dialect. Except for those controversial rap songs that may split the local community between younger and older generations, most local-language songs celebrating locality draw another kind of boundary: they include both the youth and mainstream audiences in the local community who share the same native mother tongue, while excluding those outsiders who do not belong to the community. Therefore, along with TV shows in a wealth of local languages, such as shows that feature dialect-dubbed soundtracks (Chapter 3) and TV news talk shows in local languages (Chapter 4), these dialect raps facilitate bonding among local audiences and thus foster a sense of local community. The commercial success of dialect songs in the local music market, which has been saturated with standard Mandarin songs, testifies to the need for reimagining distinct local communities. For example, Sha Zhou’s first album sold fifteen thousand copies (RMB 15 per CD) in two weeks in Qingdao in 2004, not to mention the much higher circulation of pirated copies and Internet downloads. The ringtone of the Nanjing-Mandarin rap “Eat Wonton” (“He hundun” 喝馄饨) was downloaded 16,252 times (RMB 0.5 per time) by local Jiangsu China Unicom users in about ten days in 2005.74 Moreover, rap songs were frequently integrated into regional media—including newspapers, thus reaching local mainstream audiences—as well as films with a regional flavor. For instance, Saliva Regiment’s “Hangzhou Is a Good Place” and He Wei’s 何畏 “Wenzhou Is a Good Place” served as the music for the ending credits of the local hit news talk shows Aliutou shuo xinwen in Hangzhou Wu and Baixiao jiang xinwen in Wenzhou Wu, analyzed earlier in Chapter 4. The Shanghai local newspaper Shenjiang fuwu daobao sponsored and organized local rappers who produced the single “Love Shanghai for 99 Times” in Shanghai Wu as an event to promote local identity in 2006. Run Tu’s “I’m a Chongqing’er” served as the music for the ending credits of Ning Hao’s film Crazy Stone, which is set in Chongqing and Sichuan and was a big hit at the box office (Chapter 8). Similarly, Black Head’s “Shaanxi Delicious Food” and other rap songs were integrated in A Gan’s 阿甘 comedy film Happiness (Gaoxing 高兴, 2009) in Xi’an Mandarin, which captured 40 percent of the total revenue of the film market in Xi’an during the film’s run. Dialect raps thus contribute to the formation of a

74 Yang Yude 杨余德, “Cailing: Lirun jingren de fukuang” 彩铃: 利润惊人的富矿 [Ringtones: A rich mine with astonishing profit], Jiangsu shangbao, August 24, 2005.

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soundscape that fosters a strong sense of local community and constructs a distinct local identity. When considering the role of rap in community formation, however, it is important to note that it reaches a different audience than local television broadcasts do. Unlike the programming produced by satellite television stations, which receives national exposure, locally produced TV shows (such as Hangzhou West Lake Pearl TV’s Aliutou shuo xinwen) are normally shown to a local audience, including a considerable elderly audience, in a specific geographic place (such as Hangzhou). Rap songs, however, mediated through the Internet, are distributed and consumed by globally dispersed youth speaking the same dialect. Shanghai serves as a good example of the divergent use of local languages in these two media. In contrast to the decline of productions in Shanghai Wu in traditional broadcasting media, as discussed in Chapter 2, Shanghai Wu and Shanghai rap have been ardently promoted by Shanghai youngsters, particularly by the Shanghai diaspora, on the Internet. A Case Study of Shanghai Rap and the SHN Website Shanghai rap, characterized by the rhythmic patois of Shanghai Wu, was probably the most prolific of all the dialect raps. During its heyday, largely from 2004 to 2006, over twenty rap bands created roughly sixty Shanghai rap songs. Moreover, although most rappers in other dialects were physically based in their home cities, although they enjoyed a global fan base, a considerable number of Shanghai rappers resided, or had resided, overseas. For example, around 2004–2006, Mild Wild Child (MWC) resided in the U.S. city of Seattle, and Lil Yining in Germany. Little Lion, or the former MC Tang, one of the earliest rappers in China, spent his middle school and college years in the United States before forming the duo Hi-Bomb Band in Shanghai in 2001. Gintonic, the key member of the band 201 Crew, spent many years in Japan before returning to Shanghai in 2004. On the one hand, compared with their domestic peers, Shanghai rappers benefited from being immediately and consistently exposed to hip-hop music and its related lifestyle. Yet on the other hand, their commitment to rapping in Shanghai Wu proves how the diaspora played a role in promoting local language and engendering a local identity. As Gunn argues, local language functions as “a discourse for the



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dislocated and relocated, as much as a location.”75 According to Stokes, one way of cultural ­relocation for the diasporic population is through music, which “evokes and organizes collective memories and present experiences of place with an intensity, power and simplicity unmatched by any other social activity.”76 Through rapping in Shanghai Wu, the diasporic Shanghai youth associate their affective attachment for their native dialect with a collective memory of the city of Shanghai itself. In Hi-Bomb’s “No. 87 Avenue Joffre,”77 Little Lion tries to do exactly this, to identify Shanghai Wu with a reconstructed memory of the past. Verse 1 The red fire station by the road Was that place we used to rendezvous Ohhhey~ throwing crazy cockfighting party Just to win some vanilla-flavored chocolate Yeah~, So sweet, I was exuberant It’z like u n me n he n she, then back 2 me I can talk all day and not explain it Back 2 my people~ppl~ppl~people, playing a hand game For boys, fighting is the favorite pastime Out of them all, I was the trickster The boy next door was like my little brother, and my partner in crime I miss him whenever I’m nostalgic Thank you, my childhood comrades Da time we spent 2gether was so great And I want to turn back time Back to that noisy alley No. 87 Avenue Joffre78 Verse 2 The summer nights were the longest I’d sit in my yard, chillin’ Used to peep on the girl next door like I thought I was sneaky While she was dressing She was my beauty with her jet black hair flowing I dreamt that one day, she’d be my bride But time flies in the blink of an eye I’ve grown up too long ago

75 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 16. 76 Stokes, Ethnicity, Identity, and Music, 3. 77 Interestingly, Cheng Liang’s 程亮 independent film Avenue Joffre (Xiafeilu 霞飞路, 2001), also in Shanghai Wu, seems to be an elaborated filmic version of this song. 78 Words in italics are the English words used in the original lyrics.

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chapter six Thinking of it, she has probably been married for a long time now Leaving me with the memory of her sweet pear candy Yet another sweet fantasy I won’t dare forget Is there time to ride my rocking horse one last time? Haha~ these hallmarks of childhood, They will never grow old Only more beautiful, like aged wine But what to change, and what remains? No. 87 Avenue Joffre79

Relegating his English mostly to the refrain, Little Lion rhymes the first verse in Shanghai Wu. He makes a dense use of Shanghai Wu vocabulary, such as aklak 阿拉 (I, we), baksian/bəφiã 白相 (play, have fun), hoexi 欢喜 (like), noexionin 男小人 (little boy), dacamakfoqi 大叉没福气 (a group hand game to select the most unlucky player), loziu 老鬼 (slippery), yi 伊 (he/she), and ladzibi 赖极皮 (to act shamelessly). The rapper narrates playful scenes with his pals in the Shanghai longdang 弄堂 when he was a boy: a crazy cockfighting party, vanilla-flavored chocolate, fighting as a pastime, playing tricks with the boy next door. Switching to Putong­ hua Mandarin in the second verse, the rapper reflects upon his dawning love for a neighboring girl. Here, the association of Shanghai Wu with the constructed past is suggested in the remembered sound of the girl’s voice, reciting the ballad of Yo’a’yo, yo’a’yo, yodo ŋakbu jio 摇啊摇, 摇啊摇, 摇到 外婆桥 (Row, row, row to grandma’s bridge) in Shanghai Wu, which is followed by the rapper’s nostalgic line in Putonghua, “Is there time to ride my rocking horse one last time?” Nostalgia for one’s childhood is a common theme in youth culture, as it characterizes the transience of youth in general. However, what makes this song particularly interesting is that the rapper’s nostalgia for his faded childhood in the 1980s and 1990s is entwined with nostalgia for the Shanghai modernity of the 1930s. The song’s title refers to Huaihai Middle Road as Avenue Joffre, the name of the street between 1915 and 1943. As is well known, Avenue Joffre was a trademark street in the French Concession in Shanghai in the 1930s. According to Leo Ou-fan Lee, the exotic cultural aura conveyed in the coffeehouses in the French Concession attracted a number of Francophile Chinese writers, such as Zeng Pu 曾朴, Zeng Xubai 曾虚白, and Zhang Ruogu 张若谷. In the view of these writers, the

79 I thank Shawn (Shuang) Kong for his help with translating the lyrics of this song, as well as two other songs previously discussed: “Hello Teacher” and “Yangzhou Crazy Girls.”



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coffeehouse craze was one of the crucial symbols of modernity and had an enormous impact on their literary output.80 Furthermore, at the end of this song, Zhou Xuan’s 周璇 song “Songstress of the World” from the classic film Street Angels (1937) is layered over another ballad in Shanghai Wu. As Sue Tuohy argues, the music that accompanied films from that time played a pivotal role in the making of the cosmopolitan, modern culture of China in the 1920s and 1930s. She notes that most of the background music consisted of well-known pieces from the European classical and romantic symphonic traditions.81 Yet for Yueh-yu Yeh, this specific song, “Songstress of the World,” rearranged from a Suzhou folk song, exemplifies the process of “negotiated sinification,” as an effort on the part of leftist filmmakers to establish the use of indigenous Chinese folk songs as diegetic and Western music as nondiegetic.82 Nevertheless, for the young generation of Shanghaiese born in the late 1970s and 1980s, the simulacrum of 1930s Shanghai is glowing in its oversimplified version of modernity and cosmopolitanism. This mediated memory of the old Shanghai turns out to be consistent with the hip-hop generation’s lifestyle, which is perceived as comparably (if not more intensely) cosmopolitan and modern. Therefore, the identification with 1930s Shanghai becomes a way of constructing continuity between past and present to create a culturally privileged identity for the rapper and diasporic Shanghai youth alike. Sharing a diasporic experience similar to Little Lion’s, Chen Leiqing, the founder and CEO of the SHN website (www.shanghaining.com, 2003– 2011), immigrated to Maryland when he was eleven years old. Launched from California in July 2003, the SHN website immediately proved to be very popular among Shanghai youth all over the world. It had 63,000 registered members by April 2005, and the number increased to 189,000 by April 2007, and to 280,000 by April 2008. Most of the members were self-identified Shanghainese in Shanghai or in other countries, such as the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Japan, Australia, and Austria. Oriented as a platform to provide members with cutting-edge entertainment and culture, the SHN was dedicated to boosting and promoting Shanghai rap, defining it as “a burgeoning avant-garde street ­culture

80 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 17–23. 81 Sue Tuohy, “Metropolitan Sounds: Music in Chinese Films of the 1930s,” in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922–1943, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford: Stanford Univer­ sity Press, 1999), 208. 82 Yeh, “Historiography and Sinification.”

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in Shanghai.” The website provided a platform for rappers to upload their work and hosted the most complete collection of Shanghai rap MP3s and lyrics for public download. Besides, one of the website’s highly featured BBS (bulletin board system) forums was entitled “Shanghai Rap.” According to the lead singer of the band Poom Poom, Robin Shi Lifeng, almost every one of their songs was well received by the fans on that forum, and this gave him and the band much confidence and ­motivation.83 In addition, the SHN theme song “What Are You Gonna Play?” (“Noŋ bəφiã sa” 侬 白相啥) was rapped in Shanghai Wu. Besides online activities, the website organized many offline hip-hop parties in local bars and invited rappers to perform at SHN-member parties. For instance, nearly 700 people attended the “Shanghai Hip-Hop” party in the Fusion Club in 2004. The website’s avid promotion of Shanghai rap culminated when it co-produced with Sony-BMG the first (and so far only) so-called Shanghai rap album in 2005, Say What You Gotta Say, discussed above.84 The motive of constructing a distinct Shanghai youth identity underpins the website’s dedicated promotion of Shanghai rap and Shanghai Wu. As the website introduced itself, “We are the new generation of Shanghai. We represent the new culture of Shanghai. Come chat in our own language [Shanghai Wu], sing with our own music [rap], and dance to our own rhythm [hip-hop].” This distinct local identity, defined by local dialect, was achieved to a large extent by replacing Mandarin words with Shanghai Wu words. As the national language, Putonghua Mandarin has become too common, general, and amorphous, and therefore insufficient for the purpose of articulating a distinct identity for young people. SHN members made a highly visible break from standard Mandarin style to construct a symbolic “otherness” and establish for themselves a distinct identity in opposition to a standardized linguistic identity. They kept a deliberate distance from Putonghua Mandarin, to the point that Chinese characters displayed on the site were defamiliarized and reoriented. For example, SHN members conventionally replaced 我 (们) with 阿拉 for “I” or “we,” 什么 with 撒额 for “what,” 谢谢 with 下下 for “thanks,” 好 with 灵 for “good,” 上海人 with 上海宁 for “Shanghainese,” and 在 with 了了 for “be in/at.” A website with such a strong local flavor sets up a linguistic and cultural boundary that excludes those unfamiliar with Shanghai Wu, 83 Michelle Zhang, “Rap Sheets in Shanghainese,” Shanghai Daily, June 15, 2005. 84 Of the thirteen songs included on this CD, the majority are rendered in Shang­ hai Wu (with some parts rhymed in Putonghua), but at least three songs are entirely in ­Putonghua.



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in keeping with an attitude PZ-FRAN raps about in his song “Our Shanghai”: “If you don’t understand our Shanghai Wu, just stop talking” (不懂阿 拉上海闲话叫侬歇脚). But at the same time the website serves as a virtual community for members all over the world. The SHN members who belong to the global Shanghainese diaspora celebrate an imagined collective local identity, modeled on that of Shanghainese in their physically confined places. What a World (Sagǝsigai 萨额世界, 2004–2006) was a SHN-hosted online talk show in Shanghai Wu.85 Of the four hosts, one was in Seattle, a second in Los Angeles, and the other two in Shanghai, and they invited guests from around the world. According to the founder/host Mild Wild Child, himself a rapper too, the hosts and guests recorded their parts wherever they happened to be, and he spliced together the audio files with editing software.86 Despite a time-consuming production process, the synchronized, “on-site” sound effects, which included no explicit indication of participants’ locations, seemed to evoke an integrated sensibility and forge a local yet simultaneously transnational identity and imaginary. On the shows, young diasporic Shanghainese, wherever they were physically located, conversed in Shanghai Wu about issues concerning Shanghai, such as Shanghai rap, films and film music of 1930s Shanghai, Shanghai longdang culture, childhood in Shanghai, and Shanghainese studying abroad. On the topic of transnationality and the new media, particularly the Internet, many studies take an optimistic view of the sociopolitical potential of nation-state border crossing and associated transnational subjectivities. For example, in her 1997 study, Mayfair Mei-hui Yang argues that the new technological media of the time (the cassette recorder, telephone, television, and VCR) “enabled the detaching of Chinese subjectivity from the state”87 and helped construct a transnational Chinese cultural imaginary associated with a deterritorialized national border and a space disembedded from the state. With an equally strong sense of cultural politics, Kang Liu examines a variety of online political forums, ranging from the China News Digest (CND, Huaxia wenzhai 华夏文摘), created 85 A total of fourteen episodes of the talk show were broadcast, from August 12, 2004, to April 20, 2006. 86 Information obtained from e-mail communication with Mild Wild Child in April 2005. 87 Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis,” in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (New York: Routledge, 1997), 311.

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by two overseas Chinese students in Canada in 1989, to the late 1990s Strong Power Forum (Qiangguo luntan 强国论坛), the online chatroom of People’s Daily, and he optimistically states, “The Internet offers a major venue for China’s political, ideological, and intellectual debates, with little and largely ineffective censorship or official interference.”88 Similarly, the sociologist Guobin Yang has consistently argued for the power of the Internet in creating a sort of digital civil society. He states that trans­ nationalism “expands and intensifies”89 online activism, and he identifies four types of diasporic networks that are engaged in transnational online activism.90 Now, however, two decades after China became connected to the Internet, some recent scholarship on the Chinese Internet expresses less optimism about the Internet’s subversive potential to challenge the nation-state. For instance, James Leibold statistically proves that “entertainment and socializing rather than ‘hard news’ retrieval, political activism and social criticism dominate Chinese internet usage,”91 and he probes “those elements of Chinese cyberculture that might be working against positive social change”: shallow infotainment, pernicious misinformation, and cyber sectarianism.92 Andrew Kipnis further argues that the Internet in China, which is highly regulated by the state, “has become an intensely national social arena,”93 and part of the state’s recent efforts to construct nation-building or “national commonality,” to use his wording. Citing the 2008 protests in defense of the Olympic torch by overseas Chinese students, who he thinks have undergone intensive educational standardization and pro-party propaganda brainwashing, Kipnis argues that the Internet is a site “for fostering, defining, and enforcing Chinese

88 Kang Liu, Globalization and Cultural Trends in China (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 2004), 148. 89 Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 18. Among others, Patricia Thornton studies three Chi­ nese transnational cyber sects of those quasi-spiritual groups banned by the government, including Falun Gong and their dissent activism. But she incisively points out the potential outcomes of their manufactured cyber boosterism: the intended “boomerang” became the “backfire,” which “made their organization, beliefs, and tactics more vulnerable to sur­ veillance.” Patricia Thornton, “Manufacturing Dissent in Transnational China,” in Popular Protest in China, ed. Kevin O’Brian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 188. 90 Ibid., 192–195. 91 James Leibold, “Blogging Alone: China, the Internet, and the Democratic Illusion?,” The Journal of Asian Studies 70.4 (2011): 1026. 92 Ibid., 1025. 93 Andrew B. Kipnis, “Constructing Commonality: Standardization and Modernization in Chinese Nation-Building,” The Journal of Asian Studies 71.3 (2012): 735.



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nationalism.”94 These studies have their own individual merits, as they deal with different data in different phases of the Internet’s development in China. But none of them offers a balanced account of this issue, since they are all preoccupied with the nation-state. Either the Chinese within the national border or the overseas Chinese seem to be identified as a homogeneous and undifferentiated whole. This nation-centered approach fails to consider the locality my research addresses, which is simultaneously intertwined with transnationality. The mass media, especially the Internet, are vehicles for imagining not only the nation but also a local community that crosses national borders, such as the SHN virtual community serving diasporic Shanghai youth all over the world. On the one hand, Shanghai youths’ multiple identities can be a source of richness or a source of conflict, or both. A good example is the song “Made in Shanghai” (2004) by the female rapper Lil Yining, who lived in Germany at the time. Taking a shot at some Shanghai young people’s blind idol worship of Japanese and Korean entertainment stars, the rapper rhymes: I feel very proud of being a Shanghainese But I feel mad when I see something unpleasant I don’t know why some Shanghainese become mindless fans of foreigners How come they worship the Japanese and Korean stars, which really pisses me off? As Chinese, we should be proud of ourselves We Shanghainese lead the trend, and stay at the cutting edge of the era As China’s most fashionable city, what else are you unsatisfied with? We China has a history of five thousand years So why bother to care about other countries? Come on, let’s be the idols for them instead Believe in yourself. We’ll never be defeated The Chinese are not the “Sick Men in East Asia” anymore We’re the most brilliant and the most capable The Shanghainese lead a brand new way and begin to create a new world We Shanghai is No. 1

This song simultaneously manifests a strong sense of nationalism and of pride in being Shanghainese. However, it is interesting to note that the word “China” is frequently exchanged with “Shanghai” in the lyrics and, most noticeably, replaced with “Shanghai” in the title. It is “Made in Shanghai,” not “Made in China,” the label on a multitude of products that have crossed national boundaries and a visual indicator of the global

94 Ibid., 750.

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position of China in economic terms. Drawing on the spatial notion of a field, Shanghai is defined in relationship with other nations such as Japan and Korea, rather than other cities within China. As Rey Chow incisively argues, the notion of a field is analogous to the notion of hegemony in the sense that its formation involves the rise to dominance of a group that is able to diffuse its culture to all levels of society.95 Therefore, while it is unlikely that Shanghai youth would replace their Chinese identity with their Shanghainese identity, they do give precedence to their local identity over their national identity and imply that Shanghai could be a synechdoche for China in competition with other nation-states, either Korea or Japan. The strong Shanghai youth identity cannot be separated from the long-held Shanghainese identity. From the large literature on Shanghai identity, culture, and literature, I briefly cite here two scholars’ assessments of Shanghai’s “local” sensibility. Xudong Zhang suggests the unique relationship between Shanghai and China by stating that “Shanghai has a closer link to the west than to the rest of the country [China] to which it geographically, that is to say, accidentally, belonged.”96 Yu Qiuyu 余秋雨 explicitly claims that unlike other local cities in China, Shanghai’s cultural identity is metropolitan, and it is unsatisfactory to define it as “local” simply on the basis of its administrative local identity.97 Nevertheless, no matter how metropolitan and even cosmopolitan Shanghai youth view themselves as being, they are equally as nationalistic as Chinese youth in other places. When I interviewed Chen Leiqing in 2009, he said, “We do usually highlight our Shanghai identity. See, only our name in English (Shanghainese) ends with “ese” (not “er”), which is usually used for the people in a nation, like Chinese, Japanese, etc.98 Only when there is a national crisis, we’d foreground our Chinese identity. After all, we’re patriotic.” Indeed, in March and April 2008, SHN members actively participated in demonstrations defending the Olympic torch from hecklers and pro-Tibet protesters in San Francisco, London, Canberra, and other global cities. On the SHN website, they posted their protest photos, shared their experiences, expressed their love of China 95 Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 15. 96 Xudong Zhang, “Shanghai Nostalgia: Post-revolutionary Allegories in Wang Anyi’s Literary Production in the 1990’s,” positions 8.2 (2000), 351. 97 Yu Qiuyu, during a talk given at the first symposium comparing Shanghai and Hong Kong metropolitan culture, Wenhui bao, June 24, 2000. 98 Here, Chen overlooked at least the English term for the people from Sichuan, ­Sichuanese.



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and hatred of Tibetan separatism, commented on the biased Western media coverage of the Tibet riot and of the overseas pro-Tibet demonstration, and so on. Examining these “cosmopolitan nationalists,” Pal Nyiri, Juan Zhang, and Merriden Varrall try to frame this new surge of Chinese nationalism among the younger generation of post-80ers (80-hou 80 后, those born after 1980), within popular culture. Calling it “online nationalism” or “hip nationalism,” they argue that “nationalism has become part of a cosmopolitan Chinese youth identity in overseas locations.”99 Without doubting the sincerity of young people’s patriotic sentiments, their study emphasizes that this nationalism is “intended for the consumption of other Chinese youth,” rather than as a message of loyalty to the Chinese government. Discussing the same 2008 protest, Andrew Kipnis assumed the exclusive use of simplified Chinese characters on online forums, which “allowed the [transnational Chinese] students to express themselves in much more strident and patriotic terms for their Chinese audiences than the more measured terms they attempted to use when speaking in English for the international media.”100 However, just looking at a single discussion thread posted on the SHN website during April 8–11, 2008, shows that SHN members communicated with their peers in a mixture of Shanghai Wu and Putonghua, as well as English. As a matter of fact, for the youth of Shanghai and other cities in China, the bilingual or multilingual competence (in dialect, Putonghua, and English) that mediates the inadequacies of any individual language is earning them an identity distinct from those who define themselves in terms of either a single language/ dialect or a multilingual ability. In the context of the global/local dialectical dynamic, as Chinese urban youth make paradoxical use of globally synchronized music and stylistic resources to articulate a local identity, localities thus constructed are simultaneously associated with a global cosmopolitan subjectivity, and even nationalism could become part of a both cosmopolitan and local Chinese youth identity.

   99 Pal Nyiri, Juan Zhang, and Merriden Varrall, “China’s Cosmopolitan Nationalists: ‘Heroes’ and ‘Traitors’ of the 2008 Olympics,” The China Journal 63 (2010): 25. 100 Kipnis, “Constructing Commonality,” 750.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE RHETORIC OF LOCAL LANGUAGES AS THE MARGINAL: CHINESE UNDERGROUND AND INDEPENDENT FILMS BY JIA ZHANGKE AND OTHERS* In the early 1990s, the emergence of “underground,” “independent” docu­ mentary films and fiction films with a “documentary impulse”1 in mainland China aroused attention in the international film world, both on the film festival circuit and among film scholars. The documentaries are exempli­ fied by Wu Wenguang’s 吴文光 Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (Liulang Beijing: zuihou de mengxiangzhe 流浪北京：最后的梦想者, 1989) and 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (1966, wo de Hongweibing shidai 1966, 我的红卫兵时代, 1993), and the fiction films with a docu­ mentary impulse by Zhang Yuan’s 张元 Beijing Bastards (Beijing zazhong 北京杂种, 1993) and Wang Xiaoshuai’s 王小帅 The Days (Dongchun de rizi 冬春的日子, 1993).2 Although “underground” and “independent” are terms fraught with contradictions, they still have merit if defined broadly: * Chapter 7 is largely based on my previously published article (with revisions): “The Rhetoric of Local Languages as the Marginal: Chinese Underground and Independent Films by Jia Zhangke and Others,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 18.2 (2006): 163–205, and is presented here with permission from Modern Chinese Literature and Culture. 1 Yomi Braester and Charles Leary, among others, have pointed out the “documentary impulse” in fiction films by young filmmakers in recent years. See Yomi Braester, “Tracing the City’s Scars: Demolition and the Limits of the Documentary Impulse in New Urban Cinema,” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 21st Cen­ tury, ed. Zhen Zhang (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 161; Charles Leary, “Perform­ ing the Documentary, or Making it to the Other Bank,” Senses of Cinema 27 (July–August 2003), http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/performing_documentary/. 2 For an insightful overview of young film and video directors in mainland China in the 1990s, see Jinhua Dai, “A Scene in the Fog: Reading Sixth Generation Films,” in Cinema and Desire: Feminist Marxism and Cultural Politics in the Work of Dai Jinhua, ed. Jing Wang and Tani E. Barlow (London: Verso, 2002), 71–98; Shuqin Cui, “Working from the Margins: Urban Cinema and Independent Directors in Contemporary China,” Post Script 20.2–3 (2001): 77–94, later reprinted in Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, eds., ChineseLanguage Film, 96–119; Chris Berry, “Miandui xianshi: Zhongguo de jilupian, zhongguo de houshe­huizhuyi” 面对现实：中国的记录片，中国的后社会主义 [Facing reality: Chinese documentary, Chinese postsocialism], in Chongxin jiedu: Zhongguo shiyan yishu shinian 重新解读：中国实验艺术十年 (1990–2000) [Reinterpretation: A decade of experimen­tal Chinese art: 1990–2000), ed. Wu Hong 巫鸿, Wang Huangsheng 王璜生, and Feng Boyi 冯博一 (Guangzhou: Chuangdong Museum of Art, 2002), 121–131; and Lü Xinyu, Jilu Zhongguo: dangdai Zhongguo xinjilupian yundong 记录中国：当代中国新记

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films produced outside the state studio system and its ideological cen­ sorship.3 Without official channels of distribution, such films cannot be shown publicly in cinemas within China and thus are often largely inac­ cessible to the domestic audience. Diverging from the Fifth Generation directors’ preoccupation with traumatic histories and allegorical nar­ ratives, as in the early works of Chen Kaige 陈凯歌 and Zhang Yimou 张艺谋, this younger generation of filmmakers shows a keen concern for marginal figures in contemporary China. Yet this “underground” cinema is difficult to define, not only because the filmmakers differ from each other in significant ways, but also because they change styles with the times. Tony Rayns contends that the dominant current in underground film­ making arrived with the appearance of Jia Zhangke’s films in the late 1990s.4 Although Jia continued to use the underground production mode and a documentary filmmaking style, interviews with and reports about him attest to his conscious effort to distinguish his films from those of his predecessors. As Jia often argues, China has no sustained tradition of documentary filmmaking apart from state-sponsored propaganda films and technical or educational films. His contention is that although China is undergoing tremendous change, contemporary Chinese movies seem to avoid grappling with “the here and now” (dangxia 当下);5 “there is a responsibility to film [the present],” he says, “so that in the future we will be able to see how it really was.”6 Hence, his Hometown Trilogy—Xiao Wu, Platform, and Unknown Pleasures—offered Chinese cinema a “supple­ mentary history,” a documentary-based representation of a contemporary Chinese underclass, particularly those people living in small towns who are marginalized by sweeping societal developments. One of the distinctive characteristics of Jia’s films is his consistent and pervasive employment of local languages, a striking deviation from the Putonghua Mandarin–dominant soundtrack in all but a handful of studio 录片运动 [Documenting China: Contemporary China’s new documentary move­ment] (Beijing: Sanlian Shudian, 2003). 3 Cui, “Working From the Margins,” 77–79; Jason McGrath, “The Urban Generation: Underground and Independent Films from the PRC,” in The Chinese Cinema Book, ed. Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward (London: British Film Institute, 2011), 167–175. 4 Tony Rayns, “The Class of ’89,” paper presented at the 8th Pusan International Film Festival, 2003, http://www.asianfilms.org/china/pdffiles/classof1989.pdf. 5 Zhang Yaxuan 张亚璇, “Huidao dangxia de qingjing li: Jia Zhangke fangtan” 回到当 下的情境里—贾樟柯访谈 [To return to the context of “the here and now”: An interview with Jia Zhangke], Furong 3 (2000): 126. 6 Chris Barden, “Jia Zhangke: Pickpocket Director,” Beijing Scene 5.23, August 27– September 2, 1999, http://www.beijingscene.com/V05I023/feature/feature.htm.



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films.7 This assertive linguistic stance, a stylistic hallmark of Jia’s films, ushered in a wave of underground films in local languages. This chapter explores how local language serves as an important marker of marginality in the feature films of Jia Zhangke and others, an approach not taken in previous studies of these films. Following an overview of Jia’s use of local languages as an integral part of the director’s documentary filmmaking style and his underlying realist aesthetic, this study closely examines Jia’s Hometown Trilogy. In my discussion of Xiao Wu, I explore the interac­ tions between the two spaces defined by the soundtrack—the relatively quiet, private, intimate space where the eponymous protagonist dwells, and the heteroglossic, public space characteristic of a media-savvy soci­ ety. In this framework of private versus public spaces, the analysis also highlights the role in the film narrative of nondiegetic popular music and its contrast with the diegetic silence of the protagonist. In my discussion of Platform, I consider the inauthenticity of Jia’s use of local languages, because none of the leading actors and actresses speaks Fenyang Man­ darin, the local dialect spoken in the community in which the film is set. The protagonists’ hybridized and impure dialects indicate Jia’s intention not to assert a local Fenyang identity. Instead, he may be manipulating a real local community to create a fictionalized “Fenyang” as a microcosm of China. In Unknown Pleasures, the female protagonist speaks the local dialect and shows no interest in upward social mobility. The two male high school graduates speak Putonghua, which carries with it a certain cultural and symbolic capital, but they still have no prospects for escaping small-town life. The difference in the male and female protagonists’ lan­ guage reveals a stratification among disaffected and disillusioned youth in China. Finally, I explore the feature of silent protagonists and sparse dialogue common to Jia’s work and other underground and independent films in local languages. Drawing on subaltern theory, I trace the voice of intellectuals or elites in their re-presentation of the subaltern. This study of films from the perspective of local languages suggests that when China is represented by local dialects, it is revealed as a fragmented and unas­ similated country where a unified, coherent discourse is impossible.

7 The use of local languages in mainstream studio films and telenovelas in the 1990s has been discussed in Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 108–156, 194–203.

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Jia’s Documentary Filmmaking Style Jia Zhangke’s use of local language is an integral part of his documentary filmmaking style and of his realist aesthetic,8 which favors the represen­ tation of bare events as the most efficacious way to capture reality. His Hometown Trilogy films are all set in Shanxi Province, with the first two in Fenyang xian 县 (county), Jia’s hometown, and the third in Datong, a run-down mid-sized city in north Shanxi. The xian or xiancheng 县城 (county seat) functions as an important geographical-cultural crossroad marker in China because it links villages with big cities and thus becomes a site where an urban lifestyle intersects with the rudimentary life of peas­ ant migrants. It has often been said that Jia Zhangke discovered China’s xiancheng, just as Shen Congwen 沈从文 discovered west Hunan. The choice of xian or xian-like city settings breaks with both the early Fifth Generation cinema (e.g., northwest villages in Zhang Yimou’s films) and earlier independent movies (generally set in big cities). To evoke an authentic spatially and temporally defined environment, Jia uses local lan­ guages supposedly spoken by real people living in small towns. Integral to this vérité style, long takes are used to convey an objective and detached perspective. Synchronized recording without ambient noise filtering is adopted to achieve a naturalistic and primitive sound. Jia uses nonprofes­ sional actors to minimize the artificiality of dramatic and formalistic act­ ing styles. Improvisation rather than recitation of lines is encouraged to create a sense of spontaneity and individuality. In many ways, these film techniques are reminiscent of Italian neorealism of the 1940s. As Laurie Jane Anderson argues, the neorealists’ desire for a faithful reproduction of events led to a wholesale adoption of everyday language and dialects, such as the Sicilian dialect spoken by the village fishermen in Luchino Visconti‘s La terra trema (The earth trembles, 1948).9

8 Tony Rayns generalizes Jia’s filmmaking style as “minimalist realism,” featuring “wide-angle compositions, extended takes and low-key, undemonstrative performances.” See Rayns, “The Class of ’89.” For a more thorough discussion of the realism in Jia’s films, see Jason McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic,” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Soci­ ety at the Turn of the 21st Century, ed. Zhen Zhang (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 81–114. 9 Laurie Jane Anderson, Challenging the Norm: The Dialect Question in the Works of Gadda and Pasolini (Stanford, CA: Humanities Honors Program, Stanford University, 1977), 41.



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In his 58-minute Xiao Shan Going Home (Xiao Shan huijia 小山回家, 1995), about a migrant worker in Beijing who plans to return to his rural hometown in Henan for the Chinese New Year, Jia began consciously to employ nonprofessional actors who spoke Henan Mandarin. By speaking their local dialect throughout the film, Xiao Shan and his fellow townsmen are portrayed as closed off from the dominant Beijing Mandarin commu­ nity; their estrangement conveys the sense of alienation experienced by the hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants who have migrated to the big cities in search of employment. Jia Zhangke has remarked that Wang Hongwei 王宏伟, the Anyang (Henan) native who plays Xiao Shan, gives a natural and spontaneous performance and that his body type and pecu­ liar gait are rare among professional actors.10 Gu Zheng, who collaborated with Jia in shooting the film, found that the actors could not understand each other well because they spoke different variants of Henan Mandarin; even so, allowing the actors to speak their own dialects helps them iden­ tify with their characters and thus exhibit personal traits more fully.11 Note that the actors are allowed to speak their native dialects, which are not necessarily the dialects their characters would have spoken. On the one hand, this is at odds with the director’s desire for cinematic verisi­ militude (the implications of this are considered further in my discussion of Platform). On the other hand, the disregard for the appropriate and realistic use of dialects may indicate, to some degree, that the use of local languages is aimed more at creating an atmosphere than at conveying a particular message or reproducing a style of speech. Following production of the documentary In Public (Gonggong changsuo 公共场所, 2001), set and shot in Datong, Jia Zhangke made a decision not to use subtitles: “The audiences do not have to know what the character is exactly saying. His voice is part of the environment. What matters is not his words, but his behavior and mannerisms.”12 In Xiao Shan Going Home, Jia himself plays 10 Wu Wenguang, “Fangwen Xiao Wu daoyan Jia Zhangke” 访问《小武》导演贾樟柯 [Interview with Xiao Wu director Jia Zhangke], in Wu ed., Xianchang 现场 [Document], vol. 1 (Tianjin: Tianjin Shehui Kexueyuan Chubanshe, 2000), 194. 11 Gu Zheng, “Women yiqi lai pai bu dianying ba: huiwang ‘qingnian shiyan diany­ ing xiaozu’” 我们一起来拍部电影吧—回望“青年实验电影小组” [Let’s make a film together: A look back at the “Youth Experimental Film Group”], in Jia Zhangke Dianying: Guxiang Sanbuqu zhi Xiao Wu 贾樟柯电影：故乡三部曲之《小武》[ Jia Zhangke’s Home Trilogy: Xiao Wu], ed. Lin Xudong 林旭东, Zhang Yaxuan, and Gu Zheng (Beijing: Zhongguo mangwen chubanshe, 2003), 31. 12 Jia Zhangke, “Qu yige chuanshuo zhong de chengshi” 去一个传说中的城市 [To go to a city I always wanted to visit], in Jia Zhangke Dianying: Guxiang Sanbuqu zhi Ren Xiaoyao 贾樟柯电影：故乡三部曲之《任逍遥》[Jia Zhangke’s Home Trilogy:

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one of Xiao Shan’s Henan townsmen, and in a gathering he unleashes a torrent of filthy language in his own Shanxi Fenyang Mandarin, which is unintelligible even to a Shanxi audience outside Fenyang, not to men­ tion a potential national audience;13 his monologue thus becomes more a registering of expletives than a vehicle of communication. The creative space opened up by the underground mode of filmmaking allows for such unrestrained dialogue, which does not have to adhere to the social or educational obligations of mainstream public media in China. Freed from national language regulations and official censorship, Jia’s films use language that might otherwise be heard only in informal, uncensored conversations. Private Space versus Public Space in Xiao Wu Perhaps one of the most influential Chinese independent fiction films, Xiao Wu provides an excellent text to further examine the function of local language in relation to soundtrack and narrative structure. As Wang Zhuoyi incisively points out, “the key dramatic conflicts in Xiao Wu, with social change as its central theme, unfold not in a diachronic dimension but rather in a synchronic space, where aural effects are more promi­ nent than visuality.”14 Jia also believes that the soundtrack should have a structure that is integrated within the film narrative. Indeed, the film successfully sets up an opposition, defined by the soundtrack, between a relatively quiet, private, intimate space—where the protagonist, a pick­ pocket, and his “crew” pursue their traditional occupation, following the ethical code of an agrarian society15—and a heteroglossic, public space

Unknown Pleasures], ed. Lin Xudong, Zhang Yaxuan, and Gu Zheng (Beijing: Zhongguo mangwen chubanshe, 2003), 4. 13 Both the Shanxi Fenyang and the Henan Anyang dialects belong to the Jin yu 晋语, which is often unintelligible to Mandarin speakers and thus sometimes classified sepa­ rately from Mandarin. Because its classification is still an unresolved issue, this study treats Jin yu as one subtype of Mandarin. 14 Wang Zhuoyi 王卓异, “Zai Karaoke zhong shenghuo” 在卡拉 OK 中生活 [Random thoughts on the film Xiao Wu], posted on March 15, 2001 at http://www.xici.net/d1327909 .htm. 15 In presenting a pickpocket (pashou 扒手) as the protagonist in Xiao Wu, Jia Zhangke said that his intent was to depict a shouyiren 手艺人 (a craftsman, such as a blacksmith, a tailor, or a cook, who earns his living by his hands) as someone with a tenuous con­ nection to industrialized society. What the director intends to highlight, then, is that the victim of dramatic societal changes maintains the traditional moral values that modern society is losing, such as codes of brotherhood and fidelity. See Zhang Yaxuan and Jian



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occupied by broadcasted propaganda as well as entertainment programs of the modern media. The conflict between the two spaces is highlighted when a TV reporter stops Xiao Wu’s fellow wanderer, San Tu 三兔, in the street to ask him—in Fenyang-accented Putonghua—questions about the ongoing countywide “strike hard” ( yanda 严打) campaign against petty crime. According to Wang Zhuoyi, “the microphone held by the reporter is always situated at the center of the image sequence. As a tool for recording and amplifying sound, the microphone seems to become some­ thing connecting the private and the public space. However, the public audio space is so privileged and selective that those who fail to express a conforming opinion are rejected. Metaphorically, the microphone as well as the Putonghua it transmits symbolizes a threatening intrusion to peo­ ple like Xiao Wu, who have to remain concealed and speechless in the public space.”16 However, as the story develops, Xiao Wu’s “sworn brothers,” first Xiao Yong 小勇, and later San Tu, appear talking on television; this shift from the private space to the public space signifies their gradual accommoda­ tion and surrender to the dominant system. In one scene, Xiao Yong, Xiao Wu’s erstwhile best friend and partner-in crime, who is now a prominent local businessman, is granted the opportunity to deliver a public speech in a television report that announces his wedding and hails him as a “model entrepreneur,” so designated by the authorities. His speech is full of the formulaic and bombastic vocabulary characteristic of mainstream authoritative discourse, yet his effort to achieve mainstream assimilation through mimicry is undermined: the speech is delivered in Fenyang Man­ darin rather than Putonghua Mandarin. 各位父老乡亲，亲朋好友，首先感谢大家多年来对我的支持和  帮助，值此本人新婚之际，我谨向多年来关心恒通商贸公司的各位 领导，各界人士表示感谢。现在我公司决定捐款三万元，用于汾阳 的希望工程。 Ladies and gentlemen, friends and relatives, first of all I‘d like to express my gratitude to all of you for your support and help over the years. On the occa­ sion of my wedding, I’d like to thank the leaders and friends who are always concerned with the development of Fenyang Hengtong Company. And now

Ning 简宁, “Ba Jia Zhangke chedi gao qingchu” 把贾樟柯彻底搞清楚 [Interview with Jia Zhangke], May 11, 2000, http://www.xici.net/d134293.htm; and Chris Barden, “Jia Zhangke: Pickpocket Director.” 16 Wang Zhuoyi, “Zai Karaoke zhong shenghuo.”

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chapter seven our company has decided to donate 30,000 yuan to support Project Hope in Fenyang.

The parody ends with a cut to Xiao Yong back in a private space following his speech; here he utters vulgarities to his relative (played by Jia himself ), still in Fenyang Mandarin. Just as the politics of identifying new-generation films as “underground” or “independent” reveals the preoccupation of Western festival juries and art house distributors with the films’ “transgressive qualities,”17 the use of local languages in Jia’s films is sometimes interpreted as politically and ideologically subversive. In analyzing Jia’s own extensive chatter in Fenyang Mandarin in Xiao Shan Going Home, Kevin Lee comments, “Jia’s unapologetic use of dialect” compensates for “seven decades of Chinese movies that have been dubbed in standard Mandarin dialect in accor­ dance with government language policy.”18 A close reading of Xiao Wu reveals that local language is so pervasively used in both public and pri­ vate spaces that its potential subversiveness is hard to pin down. Like the nouveau riche Xiao Yong, the policeman Hao Youliang 郝有亮 also speaks Fenyang Mandarin, whether or not he is on duty. In spite of the repeated loudspeaker exhortations in broadcast-standard Putonghua to crack down on petty crime, in the first scene, his encounter with Hao, Xiao Wu greets Hao as “teacher,” and they seem to be longstanding asso­ ciates: tension between authority and criminality is thereby undermined. Hao urges Xiao Wu to reform, following Xiao Yong’s example. During the course of the movie, everyone tries to adapt to modern society except Xiao Wu, who cannot let go of his old value system and embrace the new. The marginalization of Xiao Wu parallels the fate of the small county in which he loiters. Although Fenyang used to be the hub of the Shanxi draft banks (piaohao 票号) and a national financial center in late imperial China, it has been left behind in the reform era. Xiao Wu’s actual Henan Anyang Mandarin (spoken by Wang Hongwei), which is often unintelligible to the Fenyang people, has already excluded him from the local speech com­ munity, evoking an aesthetic effect of alienation for the local Fenyang audience. On the other hand, Wang’s difficulty in understanding other 17 The term “transgressive qualities” is borrowed from Shuqin Cui, who writes that “these qualities depend specifically on a commitment to independent filmmaking, and thus to subverting mainstream production and official censorship.” See Cui, “Working from the Margins,” 77. 18 Kevin Lee, “Jia Zhangke,” Senses of Cinema 25 (February 2003), http://sensesofcinema .com/2003/great-directors/jia/.



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actors’ Fenyang Mandarin makes an interesting parallel with Xiao Wu’s bewilderment over his surroundings in the film.19 Music plays as prominent a role as language in Jia’s films. Yueh-yu Yeh argues that music is central to Chinese dialect opera films of the 1930s: “productions of low-budget dialect films often skipped the process of recruiting good scripts” and “tended to recycle opera repertoires that were already familiar to regional audiences.”20 Jia’s films extensively rely on the cheap “wallpaper” of popular music to establish a period scene, although local Jin opera ( Jin Ju 晋剧) is also occasionally used to enhance the regional flavor of the setting. The leitmotifs of “synchronized” popular songs are well integrated within the film narrative. In Xiao Wu, the mid90s karaoke hit “Heart Rain” (“Xin yu” 心雨) is played several times; this song is a musical dialogue between a man and his lover who “will become someone else’s bride tomorrow.” Played on TV as a celebration of Xiao Yong’s wedding and sung by a young duo in front of a funeral parlor, the song is heard in public in an absurd and incongruous way. Only when Xiao Wu sings it in private, while bathing, do the lyrics become relevant in conveying the subjective melancholy of his doomed love affair with a bar escort, who soon leaves him for more lucrative customers. Here the song functions, as Michel Chion would say, “empathetically,” mean­ ing that “music can directly express its participation in the feeling of the scene.”21 In a similar vein, Tu Honggang’s 屠洪刚 hit song “Farewell to My Concubine” (“Bawang bieji” 霸王别姬), which alludes to the ancient hero Xiang Yu 项羽, recurs every time Xiao Wu feels betrayed. We hear it first when Xiao Wu learns he has not been invited to Xiao Yong’s wedding, and again after he is arrested. Xiao Wu not only watches San Tu denounce him on TV and cheer his arrest, he also finds out what made his pager sud­ denly ring while the crime was being carried out, leading to his capture: it was a weather forecast, rather than a call from the bar girl Mei Mei 梅梅, who had asked him to buy the pager so that she could contact 19 In an interview with Zhang Yaxuan, Wang Hongwei mentioned his difficulty in communicating with the actors playing Xiao Yong and Xiao Wu’s parents because of lan­ guage barriers. Zhang Yaxuan, “Dianying keneng zhishi yige pudian” 电影可能只是一 个铺垫 [Interview with Wang Hongwei], in Jia Zhangke dianying: guxiang sanbuqu zhi Ren Xiaoyao 贾樟柯电影：故乡三部曲之《任逍遥》[ Jia Zhangke’s Home Trilogy: Unknown Pleasures], ed. Lin Xudong, Zhang Yaxuan, and Gu Zheng (Beijing: Zhongguo mangwen chubanshe, 2003), 181. 20 Yeh, Yueh-yu, “Historiography and Sinification: Music in Chinese Cinema of the 1930s,” 79. 21 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 8.

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him. The nondiegetic music in a throbbing beat makes a sharp contrast with the diegetic silence of the protagonist, signifying the powerlessness of any speech. His bewilderment, his dignity, and his struggle over his selfworth all seem to be encapsulated in the lyrics: “Ask the deep blue sky, clouds moving in all directions. With sword in hand, I ask the world, who is the hero?” (问苍天，四方云动。剑在手，问天下谁是英雄？) In this section, I have described the use of local language versus Putonghua Mandarin in the framework of public and private spaces defined by the soundtrack. The analysis explored how popular songs, as an integral part of the soundtrack, function empathetically for the silent protagonist. The local dialect, as the everyday language of the local com­ munity, is extensively used in both public and private spaces. By contrast, Putonghua Mandarin, symbolizing the mainstream, is reduced most of the time to background noise in the heteroglossic public space. Virtually no character speaks standard Putonghua, and none are depicted in the heroic light typically found in mainstream propaganda films. To a large degree, local language in Jia’s films is associated with the marginal—those not (well) absorbed into mainstream society. The Tension between Diegesis and Mimesis in Platform Popular music continues to play an important role in Jia’s next film, Plat­ form, which follows the lives of four performers in a local Fenyang troupe from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. As Mark Kermode argues, “more than any other art form, pop music is a disposable, transient product which reflects, mimics, and occasionally shapes the zeitgeist. As such, pop music can serve as a film’s memory, instantaneously linking it with its audience, tapping into a nostalgic past, or fixing the film firmly in the present.”22 In many interviews, Jia recalled the enormous role of popular music in the lives of his contemporaries as they came of age;23 this is abundantly evidenced in Platform. The numerous “classic” pop songs—whether the revolution­ ary song “A Train Traveling toward Shaoshan” (“Huoche xiangzhe Shao­ shan pao” 火车向着韶山跑) from the late 1970s, Teresa Teng’s 邓丽君 “Fine Wine and Coffee” (“Meijiu jia kafei” 美酒加咖啡) from the early 1980s, the rock song “Platform” (“Zhantai”) in the mid-1980s, or the theme 22 Mark Kermode, “Twisting the Knife,” in Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies Since the 50s, ed. Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 9. 23 For example, Michael Berry, “Cultural Fallout,” Film Comment 39.2 (2003): 61–62.



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song of the early-1990s telenovela Yearning (Kewang 渴望)—capture a specific temporality and authentically evoke a particular period of history. As a whole, the use of popular music is consistent with the filmmaker’s efforts since Xiao Wu to document the social and cultural changes that have taken place in his hometown of Fenyang. However, this authentic documentation of local Fenyang is problema­ tized by the inauthentic and hybridized dialects the protagonists speak. As noted earlier, the protagonist in Xiao Wu speaks Henan Anyang Mandarin, which is different from the Shanxi Fenyang Mandarin spoken in the com­ munity where the film is set. More noticeably, none of the four leading actors and actresses in Platform are native to the locale, and consequently none of them speak Fenyang Mandarin, even though they are portraying Fenyang natives: Wang Hongwei (playing Cui Mingliang 崔明亮) speaks Henan Anyang Mandarin, Zhao Tao 赵涛 (playing Yin Ruijuan 尹瑞娟) and Liang Jingdong 梁景东 (playing Zhang Jun 张军) speak Shanxi Tai­ yuan Mandarin, and Yang Tianyi 杨天乙 (playing Zhong Ping 钟萍) speaks only Putonghua. In a way, the performers’ actual outsider identity may make them more easily identifiable with their characters, who seem eager to break loose from the isolated local town. Still, to a large extent this discrepancy between the actors’ actual dialects and the protagonists’ supposed dialects is at odds with the filmmaker’s emphasis on cinematic verisimilitude, especially when compared with his meticulous treatment of minor characters’ accents or dialects. Besides the dominant Fenyang Mandarin spoken by the real local residents in the films, most of the outsider accents of the minor characters could be reasonably explained away. For instance, the bar escorts in Xiao Wu speak Northeast or Sichuan Mandarin, and in fact, prostitutes usually do business in places other than their hometowns; the bar boss in Xiao Wu and the troupe leader in Platform speak Putonghua with a strong Beijing accent, which is consis­ tent with their identity as sent-down youths from Beijing; in Platform, the Fenyang Rural Culture Troupe, which is privatized and repackaged as the allegedly “Shenzhen All-Star Break Dance Electronic Troupe,” adver­ tises its tour performance with an imitation of a Cantonese accent. Jia’s response to such “flawed” linguistic authenticity is that as long as the effect as a whole seems coherent and harmonious, it does not mat­ ter whether actors speak Fengyang Mandarin.24 This somewhat dismis­ sive explanation has to do with the subjective ambivalence intrinsic to his 24 My telephone interview with Jia Zhangke, winter 2004. Also see Jia’s response to a similar question posed by viewers online, as indicated in n. 26 below.

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brand of documentary realism. Jia summed up his realism in an interview with Sun Jianmin 孙健敏 in this way: “For me, all the realist methods are there to express the real world of my inner experience. It is almost impossible for us to approach reality in itself, and the meaning of cinema is not simply to reach the level of reality. I pursue the feeling of the real in cinema more than I pursue reality, because I think the feeling of the real is on the level of aesthetics whereas reality just stays in the realm of sociology.”25 Nevertheless, Jia’s version of realist linguistic effect raises questions about audience reception. For some local audiences, the effect of linguistic coherence is not achieved; some viewers from the region have indicated as much in an online Q&A with Jia.26 For the national audience, linguistic harmony might be possible but is still problematic, a topic I will further explore in Chapter 8. In addition, without government approval of public screening in domestic cinemas, Jia’s films are generally inaccessible to the vast Chinese audience, including Fenyang viewers.27 Chinese underground films have to seek recognition through inter­ national channels to raise funds and obtain distribution. Yet for the international audience unfamiliar with Chinese, and particularly for the international film festival juries and art-house distributors, the unify­ ing linguistic effect seems pointless, because their understanding of the dialogue depends on subtitles that do not convey the different dialects.

25 Sun Jianmin, “Jingyan shijie zhong de yingxiang xuanze: Jia Zhangke fangtan lu” 经验世界中的影像选择－贾樟柯访谈录 [Image choice in the experimental world: An interview with Jia Zhangke], Jinri xianfeng 今日先锋 [Avant-garde today] (Tianjin: Tianjin shehui kexueyuan chubanshe) 12 (March 2002): 31. Translations are from McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke,” 110. 26 In an online Q&A with Jia Zhangke in 2001, some participants from Shanxi and Henan provinces who can distinguish Fenyang from Anyang Mandarin questioned the authenticity of Jia’s films; see “Jia Zhangke zuoke Wangyi liaotian jilu” 贾樟柯作客网 易聊天记录 (Record of Jia Zhangke’s chat with NetEase users), http://ent.163.com/edit/ 001220/001220_67534(2).html. 27 A limited audience within China does have access to Jia’s films. Xiao Wu, for exam­ ple, was screened unofficially at four locations in Beijing before 1999: a French elemen­ tary school in Sanlitun 三里屯 (the screening was organized by the Culture Office of the French Embassy), an auditorium at the Beijing Film Academy, a critics’ salon at Beijing University, and a painting studio in Zuo’anmen 左安门. The number of spectators totaled around 200 and consisted of directors, film critics, poets, professors, college students, and film buffs. At its “premier” screening in Sanlitun, Jia reportedly used a microphone to translate Shanxi dialects into Putonghua Mandarin for the audience. See Wu Wenguang, “Fangwen Xiao Wu daoyan Jia Zhangke,” 205–206; Jian Ning, “Xunzhao sheyingji de juese: Jia Zhangke fangtanlu” 寻找摄影机的角色—贾樟柯访谈录 [Searching for the camera’s role: An interview with Jia Zhangke], Beijing wenxue 1 (1999): 102.



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If linguistic unity can be achieved only by taking advantage of the audience’s limited or nonexistent knowledge of Chinese local languages, to what extent can hybridized Mandarin still sound coherent and har­ monious? The answer has to do with the director’s vision of Fenyang as a microcosm of China and the consequent view of Mandarin variet­ ies as a collective voice for the Chinese masses. Jia never set the recon­ struction of a local Fenyang identity as his ultimate goal. In response to a question about his extensive use of local dialects and local features in an interview with Jian Ning, Jia said that his emphasis is not locality or regionalism, but the general existential state of the Chinese masses.28 His ambition to have his hometown, a small landlocked county in North China, stand for China is more explicit in a statement about shooting Plat­ form. Without ever mentioning Fenyang, his statement begins: “The film takes place over a period when the greatest change and reform were going on in China . . . The narrative of Platform follows the development of the characters against a background of constant change. The natural cycle of birth, age, illness, and death evokes a melancholic feeling of the imperma­ nence of life.”29 In a sense, Jia manages to transform the particular and the specific into the universal and the general. In an interview with Stephen Teo, Jia, reflecting upon the delineation of characters in his films, says that he endeavored to “go beyond the local factor” and to “create real human beings who possess universality or universal human emotions.”30 Indeed, numerous critics read his films through metonymic, or more precisely synecdochic substitution. For instance, Elbert Venture regards Platform as “an allegorical epic that traces China‘s snarled transition from Maoism to the economic liberalization of the 1980’s.”31 Similarly, Xiaoping Lin tends to interpret many of the details in this movie in an allegorical way.32 But the dialectic between particularity and universality in the film is not so easily reconciled. It is exactly his protagonists’ hybridized and impure 28 Jian Ning, “Xunzhao sheyingji de juese,” 108. 29 Jia Zhangke, “Daoyan de hua” 导演的话 [Words from the director], in Jia Zhangke Dianying: Guxiang Sanbuqu zhi Zhantai 贾樟柯电影：故乡三部曲之《站台》[ Jia Zhangke’s Home Trilogy: Platform], ed. Lin Xudong, Zhang Yaxuan, and Gu Zheng (Beijing: Zhongguo mangwen chubanshe, 2003), 190. 30 Stephen Teo, “China with an Accent—Interview with Jia Zhangke, Director of Platform,” Senses of Cinema 15 (2001), http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/feature-articles/ zhangke_interview/. 31 See Elbert Ventura’s review of Platform at http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p= avg&sql=1:220970. 32 Xiaoping Lin, “Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Trilogy: A Journey across the Ruins of PostMao China,” In Chinese-Language Film, ed. Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, 186–209.

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dialects that reveal the limits of Jia’s ability to forge a linguistic style through a negotiation between mimesis and diegesis. As Gunn defines it in the Chinese language context, “mimesis is a concept of style as imitat­ ing conventions, as of speech.”33 By contrast, “diegesis is the concept of style as having elements belonging to a shared inventory (e.g. Chinese) but determined by an interpretation of phenomena (e.g. the adoption of a Modern Standard Chinese to present the world of a text as a modernized China), rather than by imitation, or mimesis, of the world portrayed in the text (e.g. regional speech idiom of a given historical time.)”34 Analyzing Lao She’s hallmark use of Beijing speech in his novels, Gunn argues that “the more the local speech serves a mimetic function, the more it speci­ fies the environment as a particular one. . . . The more particular the envi­ ronment becomes, the more it restricts the sort of diegesis that Lu Xun promoted, to avoid the interpretation of a story as about a single locale” rather than an allegory of China as a whole.35 The tension between diegesis and mimesis is a dilemma that troubled the great writers, such as Lu Xun, Lao She, and Mao Dun. Jia Zhangke is similarly troubled: although he takes pains to employ mimetic, descriptive features by peppering his films with the real-life experience of real people speaking their real dialects, he expects the audience to view his style as interpretive diegesis. As a result, he risks manipulating a real community to create a fictive one. In this regard, Yiu Wai Chu’s exploration of the “Hong Kong (G)local identity” in cinematic representation is particularly illuminating. As Chu problematizes them, post-1997 films that strive for an “authentic” portrayal of local Hong Kong history cast leading actors and actresses who are not native to Hong Kong and cannot speak a pure Hong Kong Cantonese. Using a postmodern cultural logic and postcolo­ nial identity politics perspective, Chu concludes that the reconstructed Hong Kong local imaginary remains impure, hybridized, “inauthentic,” unstable, and mixed.36 In a similar vein, it could be argued that the pro­ tagonists’ hybridized and inauthentic dialects in Jia’s films make the local Fenyang community inauthentic and fictive. Just as the slippery nature of his brand of realism both deploys and denies the documentary impulse, so the mimetic imperative within the function of local language is “simul­ 33 Gunn, Rewriting Chinese, 299. 34 Ibid., 298. 35 Ibid., 114–115. 36 Yiu Wai Chu, “Hybridity and (G)local Identity in Postcolonial Hong Kong Cinema,” in Chinese-Language Film, ed. Sheldon Lu and Yueh-Yu Yeh, 312–328.



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taneously the factor which both supports and subverts the entire interpre­ tive enterprise.”37 Gendered Language Use in Unknown Pleasures The inauthentic use of local language is carried forward in Jia’s third fea­ ture film, Unknown Pleasures, in which the female lead, Zhao Tao, speaks her native Taiyuan Mandarin even though she plays an entertainment demi-star, Qiao Qiao 巧巧, who is a native of Datong. Yet the use of local language takes a new twist in this film, which distinguishes the language of the female and male protagonists. The two male leads, Wu Qiong 吴琼 (playing Xiao Ji 小济) and Zhao Weiwei 赵维威 (playing Bin Bin 斌斌), speak Putonghua rather than dialect throughout the film. The difference in the male and female protagonists’ language depicts a stratification among disaffected and disillusioned Chinese youth, a feature many crit­ ics have yet to discuss. Although broadcast-standard Putonghua Manda­ rin continues to be used in this film as the mainstream media language largely for its ideological connotations, the film seems to ironically con­ firm its elevated position in the hierarchy of linguistic practices. One of Bourdieu’s main theses is that the educational system as an institution plays a decisive role in the standardization, legitimization, and imposi­ tion of an official language; the dialectical relation between the education system and the labor market conspires to devalue local dialects, which are often dismissed as uneducated and coarse.38 The Putonghua spoken by the high school-educated Bin Bin and Xiao Ji in this movie is there­ fore endowed with a certain cultural and symbolic capital. That they are able and willing to speak unaccented Putonghua indicates their desire for upward social mobility. By comparison, their underprivileged parents, mired in the lower social strata, speak the local Datong Mandarin. Bin Bin’s mother, a dedicated practitioner of Falun Gong 法轮功, works at a failing textile factory. Xiao Ji’s father fritters away time working in a

37 See Grant Stirling, “Re-reading the Function of Language Variance in Post-colonial Literary Theory,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 22.3–4 (1995): 414. Stirling elaborates on this point: “the mimetic imperative supports the function of language vari­ ance by grounding the language of the literary text in a specific culture. But the mimetic imperative subverts that same function because of the numerous critical problems which inhabit any attempt to read literary texts mimetically.” 38 Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. J. B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

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shabby motorcycle repair shop. The two native Datong teenagers never speak their parents’ Datong Mandarin, implying that they are uncomfort­ able with their local identity, if not eager to abandon their local roots altogether. In one scene Xiao Ji expresses his wish to have been born in the United States instead of Datong. The influence of the upwardly mobile society is often revealed in their daily speech, as in their use of terms such as “international trade” and “laptop.” Eager to embrace the outside world, they watch Hollywood videos such as Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and television news programming transmitted in Putonghua, including stories of China’s effort to enter the WTO, Beijing’s successful bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, Falun Gong practitioners’ self-immolation at Tian’anmen Square, and China’s condemnation of the controversial U.S. surveillance aircraft incursion. Their readiness to link their immediate surroundings with the outside world is amusingly portrayed: in one scene, upon hearing an explosion from a local factory, Bin Bin seems alarmed and says, “Fuck, are the Americans attacking again?” By contrast, Qiao Qiao is very provincial. She was dismissed from mid­ dle school when her illicit affair with her gym teacher (who later becomes her gangster boyfriend) was exposed. Although she has less education than Xiao Ji and Bin Bin, she can argue furiously in Putonghua with a doc­ tor over the hospital’s neglect of her father’s illness. Otherwise, however, she insists on speaking the local dialect. Here, a sociolinguistic gender approach may shed some light. A widely affirmed principle of women’s linguistic conformity states that “women show a lower rate of stigmatized variants and a higher rate of prestige variants than men.”39 Women’s care­ ful behavior, William Labov argues, is “a reflection of their greater assump­ tion of responsibility for the upward mobility of their children—or at least of preparing the symbolic capital necessary for that mobility.”40 Yet Qiao Qiao’s use of language serves as an example of the contrapositive of this principle: a woman who does not seek upward mobility will not embrace prestige variants. Showing a more radical attitude of nonconformity than Xiao Ji and Bin Bin, Qiao Qiao makes no effort to reject her stigmatized local speech in favor of the more prestigious pattern. In contrast with the naiveté and awkwardness of the two young men, Qiao Qiao displays more social sophistication with local practices. In the hotel scene in which the

39 William Labov, Principles of Linguistic Change, vol. 2, Social Factors (Oxford: Black­ well, 2001), 266. 40 Ibid., 278.



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infatuated Xiao Ji finally gets a chance to touch Qiao Qiao, he is befuddled by the shower controls, which she manipulates with ease. Furthermore, as Labov observes, “the leaders of linguistic change are often female members of the highest status local group, upwardly mobile, with dense network connections within the local neighborhood, but an even wider variety of social contacts beyond the local area.”41 Again, this is obviously not the case with Qiao Qiao, who shows no interest in building a network of connections with the outside world. Indeed, the blaring televisions of Bin Bin and Xiao Ji’s homes are absent from Qiao Qiao’s home. Her unsophisticated understanding of the Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zi’s 庄子 Xiaoyao You 逍遥游42 as “free to do whatever you want” comes from her gangster boyfriend. Qiao Qiao resigns herself to the local sub-society, as reflected in her almost exclusive use of the local dialect. The gendered linguistic difference between Qiao Qiao and Xiao Ji and Bin Bin further distinguishes stratified layers within disaffected Chinese youth. As much as Putonghua and its association with higher education facilitate the teenagers’ status seeking, the educational system, according to Bourdieu, “involves a certain kind of objectification” and becomes a “mechanism for creating and sustaining inequalities,” enabling “those who benefit most from the system to convince themselves of their own intrin­ sic worthiness, while preventing those who benefit least from grasping the basis of their own deprivation.”43 In the film, such inequality is exemplified by a minor character, Bin Bin’s girlfriend, who speaks Putonghua properly and correctly. As a studious and upright high school student, she is excited by China’s entry into the WTO and hopes to major in international trade in a Beijing university. By passing the national college entrance examina­ tion, she can leave her hometown. However, for more typical teenagers, such as Bin Bin and Xiao Ji, who fail the exam, unaccented Putonghua rather indexes a sense of “spatialized alienation and nonlocatability,” terms used in Michael Silverstein’s observation of an “accent eradication” program in mid-1980s New York. The standard register is a voice “from nowhere in particular.” By contrast, “To talk from ‘somewhere’ is to be 41 Labov, Principles of Linguistic Change, 366. 42 The first chapter of Zhauangzi, Xiaoyao You (translated as “The Happy Excursion” by Feng Youlan 冯友兰), conveys the Daoist idea that “there are varying degrees in the achievement of happiness. A free development of our natures may lead us to a rela­ tive kind of happiness; absolute happiness is achieved through higher understanding of the nature of things.” Youlan Feng (Fung Yu-lan), A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1966), 105. 43 Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 24–25.

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from ‘somewhere’; it is to belong.”44 In the spectrum of potential social mobility, Xiao Ji and Bin Bin are cast between Qiao Qiao and Bin Bin’s girlfriend. The two male protagonists experience a type of limbo: they are stuck in a detestable birthplace, yet they resist the sense of belonging they could enjoy if they used the local language; they are teased by the promise of upward mobility that Putonghua affords, yet that language carries the taint of rootless, nonlocatable subjectivity. The unemployed and disen­ chanted teenagers drift between the erotic massage parlor, the pool hall, the disco, and the private KTV bar, never escaping from their stagnant hometown. In the end, after their abortive bank robbery, Xiao Ji flees on his motorcycle until it splutters and stops; Bin Bin, having been arrested, is ordered by a policeman to sing Richie Xianqi Ren’s 任贤齐 pop song “Ren Xiaoyao” 任逍遥. The talismanic significance of the movie’s theme song lyric “Don’t ask a hero how humble his origin is” (英雄莫问出身 太单薄) resonates with the small-town teenagers. The futility of struggle and resistance conveyed in the film’s final scenes recalls the mundane closing scene of Platform, where Cui Mingliang is found dozing on a lazy afternoon, while his wife and toddler play in front of a whistling kettle. The hometown, a humble and isolated backwater, is the site of the local youths’ hopeless rebellion—a place they want to escape but cannot. Intellectuals’ Representation of the Subaltern in Underground Films in Local Languages Jia Zhangke’s documentary filmmaking style, featuring local languages, small-town settings, marginalized protagonists, nonprofessional actors, long takes, and digital video (DV) shooting, set an agenda for indepen­ dent feature films in the new century. Recent movies in local languages deal unsparingly with sensitive and controversial topics in contemporary China, such as prostitution, unemployment, peasant migration, illegal mining, homosexuality, and religion. For example, Li Yang’s 李杨 Blind Shaft (Mang jing 盲井, 2002), in Henan Mandarin, is a crime story that is both chilling and provocative. Two con men murder fellow workers in the illegal coal mines and claim compensation by posing as relatives of

44 Michael Silverstein, “NIMBY Goes Linguistic: Conflicted ‘Voicing’ from the Culture of Local Language Communities,” in Language, Identity, & the Other, Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) 35, ed. Sabrina J. Billings, John P. Boyle, and Aaron M. Griffith (Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, 1999), 112–113.



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the victims. In a sympathetic light, the film explores the social factors responsible for the criminals’ moral decline. Wang Chao’s 王超 Orphan of Anyang (Anyang ying’er 安阳婴儿, 2001), in Henan Kaifeng Mandarin, is about a laid-off worker who, after adopting the baby of a prostitute from the Northeast, ends up imprisoned for killing a local gangster, the orphan’s alleged birth father. Liu Bingjian’s 刘冰鉴 Crying Woman (Kuqi de nüren 哭泣的女人, 2002), in Guizhou 贵州 Mandarin, is a black comedy about a debt-ridden woman who becomes a professional mourner, putting on a show of wailing at funerals. Gan Xiao’er’s 甘小二 The Only Sons (Shanqing­ shuixiu 山清水秀, 2002), in Cantonese, explores how Christianity offers comfort to impoverished rural Chinese such as Ah Shui 阿水, who has to sell his only baby boy to raise money to commute his criminal brother’s death sentence to life imprisonment. Yet after both his brother and wife die, the dying Ah Shui despairs: he is unable to take care of his baby who is returned to him in the state’s crackdown on baby traders. With a similar concern about China’s moral and spiritual anarchy, Ning Hao’s Incense (Xianghuo 香火, 2004), in Shanxi Datong Mandarin, depicts a young Buddhist monk who tries every means, including swindling, to collect money to repair a statue of the Buddha in his rural temple, only to find that the temple is about to be torn down to make way for a road. Promoted as the first Chinese lesbian film, Li Yu’s 李玉 Fish and Elephant ( Jinnian xiatian 今年夏天, 2001), in Mandarin with local accents, eloquently depicts the pulse of lesbian life in Beijing by unfolding an elephant keep­ er’s relationship with her (ex-)girlfriend, while her mother desperately sets her up with prospective husbands. Against the backdrop of metropolitan life as well, Cheng Yusu’s 程裕苏 Shanghai Panic (Women haipa 我们害 怕, 2001), in Shanghai Wu and adapted from Mian Mian’s novel of the same title, exposes the decadence, self-indulgence, violence, and ennui of the big city’s linglei generation. Although earlier films occasionally made extensive use of local languages,45 the profusion of underground and independent films devi­ ating from Putonghua Mandarin marks a turning point in film dialogue. Consistent with Gunn’s findings in films of the 1990s, the rhetorical use of local languages in recent Chinese underground and independent films 45 For example, Zhang Yimou’s studio films The Story of Qiuju (Qiuju da guansi 秋菊 打官司, 1992) and Not One Less (Yige dou bunengshao 一个都不能少, 1999–2000), both in Shaanxi Mandarin; Zhou Xiaowen’s 周晓文 Ermo (二嫫, 1994) largely in Hebei Zhang­ jiakou Mandarin; and Li Shaohong’s 李少红 Blush (Hongfen 红粉, 1996) in Wu dialect varieties.

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is largely associated with the aesthetic of the marginal and the unassimi­ lated. The protagonists—laid-off workers, migrant peasants, prostitutes, criminals, homosexuals, illegal mineworkers, and monks—are marginal­ ized from mainstream society, where Putonghua Mandarin dominates. To borrow Wang Xiaobo’s 王小波 book title The Silent Majority (Chenmo de daduoshu 沉默的大多数), these underprivileged people remain silent most of the time. When they do speak, the dialogue is usually laconic. An extreme example occurs in Gan Xiao’er’s second feature film, Raised from Dust ( Juzi chentu 举自尘土, 2006), which explores religious beliefs in rural China. The female protagonist, Lin Sao 林嫂, a stoic and suffering Henan villager and a Christian, speaks so tersely that her speech is mostly monosyllabic, one-word sentences such as zhong 中 (okay, all right).46 Here, subaltern theory may be helpful in exploring the silent protago­ nists and sparse dialogue that recur in the films just mentioned. Ranajit Guha explains that subalterns are nonelite groups, the people of “inferior rank” in a society, “whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way.”47 Gayatri Spivak’s seminal article “Can the Subaltern Speak?” asserts that in the context of (post)colonial production, the subaltern cannot speak. The subaltern may make an attempt at self-representation yet fail to achieve the dialogic level of utter­ ance between speaker and listener. She notes elsewhere that “subaltern consciousness is subject to the cathexis of the elite, that it is never fully recoverable, that it is always askew from its received signifiers, indeed that it is effaced even as it is disclosed, that it is irreducibly discursive”48 Tak­ ing the notion of “subaltern” in a more empirical sense, Gail Hershatter argues instead that the subaltern can speak: the disenfranchised Chinese underclass, or more specifically the prostitutes in early twentieth-century Shanghai whom Hershatter studies, left discursive traces for a historian to investigate, identify, and analyze. At the same time, Hershatter agrees that Chinese intellectuals in semicolonial Shanghai employed prostitution to articulate their own sense of subalternity.49 Insofar as the present study is concerned, the otherwise-invisible underclass, in Hershatter’s sense of “subaltern,” becomes publicly visible and thus seems empowered in these 46 Information is based on the film script provided by the director. 47 Ranajit Guha, “Preface,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 35. 48 Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Sub­ altern Studies, ed. Guha and Spivak, 11. 49 Gail Hershatter, “The Subaltern Talks Back: Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chi­ nese History,” Positions 1.1 (Spring 1993): 103–130.



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quasi-documentary independent films. Yet the question posed here is whether we can trace the intellectuals’ or elites’ voice in their seemingly objective re-presentation of subalterns’ lives.50 If we accept Hershatter’s view of the possibility of multiple, relational degrees of subalternity, the previously mentioned independent filmmak­ ers could be regarded as subalterns. These movies were debut features for most of their directors, who were amateurs lacking formal training in directing films. Li Yang had been an actor,51 Li Yu a TV hostess. Neither Jia Zhangke, Wang Chao, Gan Xiao’er, nor Ning Hao majored in film directing at the Beijing Film Academy (BFA), the most orthodox of the Chinese film institutions that produce directors. In the Chinese film world, then, these newcomers are relegated to the margins, in comparison with the estab­ lished Fifth Generation directors and recognized independent filmmakers such as Zhang Yuan. For example, after Li Yang became a German citizen he faced questions about whether his film should be classified as a Ger­ man or a Chinese production. He was aware of being “on the margins as a Chinese filmmaker working illegally in China and basing himself outside the country.”52 Jia Zhangke had a different experience of marginality. Hav­ ing twice failed college entrance exams, Jia was not officially permitted to enroll at the BFA in 1993 and could only audit paid courses, without any guarantee of a graduate diploma four years later. His major was not film directing but film theory in the department of literature—a margin­ alized field.53 In many senses, Jia felt himself to be (and was seen to be) profoundly subaltern with respect to his filmmaker peers. While shoot­ ing Xiao Shan Going Home, he developed an increasingly strong sense of himself as a “migrant worker type of filmmaker” (dianying mingong

50 Spivak distinguishes two “related but irreducibly discontinuous” senses of representa­ tion: “representation as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation,’ as in art or philosophy.” The independent filmmakers’ representation of the subalterns is presumably closer to the second sense of “re-presentation,” as staging or signification. See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 275. 51 Li Yang had been an actor for a long time before he studied film directing in Germany. 52 Stephen Teo, “There is No Sixth Generation: Director Li Yang on Blind Shaft and His Place in Chinese Cinema,” Senses of Cinema 27 (2003), http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/ feature-articles/li_yang/. 53 As in the interview with Wu Wenguang, Jia admits that he chose this major not out of personal interest but strategically, because it gave him a better chance of getting enrolled. Wu, “Fangwen Xiao Wu daoyan Jia Zhangke,” 187–189.

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电影民工).54 Jia’s representation of migrant peasants such as Xiao Shan becomes something of a self-representation, or a re-representation. In the words of Hershatter, “their sense of their own subordination shaped the rhetorical uses that intellectuals made of subaltern groups,” and they use an “even more subordinated group as a metaphor through which to articulate their own subordination.”55 In this light, Jia’s passionate advocacy of amateurism can be viewed as asserting a higher position for directors who lack symbolic capital in the field. He declares that shooting movies should not be the privilege of those with BFA degrees, especially those who majored in directing; everyone has the right to make films. Jia’s influential article “The Age of Amateur Cinema Will Return” passionately defends the importance of “amateurism” at the dawn of the DV era: it is a call for an individualistic, creative, sincere filmmaking spirit to take a stand against rigid, repetitive, soulless conformity to professional formulas.56 Zhu Wen 朱文, the writerturned-director of the DV film Seafood (Haixian 海鲜, 2000), believes that to sustain its vitality, art has to come from amateurs. Professional train­ ing is not important for shooting films, which is, to the contrary, enabled by artistic imagination and creativity.57 Wu Wenguang, a documentary filmmaker, shares the optimistic view of DV filmmaking as a means of individual expression. When reflecting upon his DV-shot documentary Life on the Road ( Jianghu, 1999), about a rural traveling circus, Wu said, “It is a really weird feeling, as if I’m shooting my own life, kind of an autobi­ ography. I’m not certain if this performance troupe can be representative of troupes in China, but I’m pretty sure it’s about my own life.”58 Exhi­ bitions and competitions of DV works have flourished on campuses, on websites, and on TV, especially since 2000. For young, aspiring people, the 54 Hao Jian 郝建, “ ‘Di Liu Dai’: mingming shi zhong de siwang yu jiafeng zhong de huayu shengming” “第六代”：命名式中的死亡与夹缝中的话语生命 (The Sixth Gen­ eration: The death in the naming ceremony and the discursive life between the cracks), Shan Hua 3 (2005): 133. 55 Hershatter, “The Subaltern Talks Back,” 111–112. 56 Jia Zhangke, “Yeyu dianying shidai jijiang zaici daolai” 业余电影时代即将再次  到来 (The age of amateur cinema will return), Nanfang zhoumo 770, November 13, 1998, 4; reprinted in Yigeren de yingxiang: DV wanquan shouce 一个人的影像：DV 完全手册 (All about DV: Works, making, creation, comments), ed. Zhang Xianmin 张献民 and Zhang Yaxuan (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 2003), 306–308. 57 Li Yizhong 李亦中, “Zhongguo shuma yingshi de xianzhuang ji fazhan jiyu” 中国数 码影视的现状及发展 (The status quo and the trend of digital media in China), Shanghai jiaotong daxue xuebao 4 (2002): 103. 58 Mei Bing 梅冰, “Wei diceng nahan de xinjilupian” 为底层呐喊的新记录片 (The new documentaries speaking out for the lower class), Dongfang 6 (2002): 76.



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DV is regarded as a mode of individual expression: they can turn their DV cameras on any person they would like to shoot. In the process, though, they assign protagonist roles to the subalterns, who are at the same time objectified to embody, carry, and project the intellectuals’ imaginary. In this regard, the later underground filmmakers’ representations of the sub­ alterns do not differ significantly from those of the artists portrayed in earlier independent films. As Shuqin Cui describes it, the director-author’s selection of the artist as subject and protagonist of the film “engenders a subjective self-representation, as the film directors themselves share with the characters a marginal position and insignificant status.”59 The point is not to cast aspersions on young DV filmmakers by ques­ tioning the sincerity of their humanitarian concern and sympathy for their lower-class characters. However, a paradox arises: although underground films concern the lives of subalterns, the movies themselves are not read­ ily accessible to subalterns,60 and therefore there is little understand­ ing of how this audience might perceive the films.61 The circulation of these underground films within China is limited almost exclusively to the cultural elites and intellectuals in big cities. According to Yu Aiyuan 鱼爱源, there are three major channels for underground film distribution in China: sales and circulation of pirated VCDs or DVDs, the most common channel; Internet downloads; and screenings in bars or universities orga­ nized by “unofficial film clubs” (minjian guanying zuzhi 民间观影组织) in major cities.62 Yu is also quick to point out that underground films are still “invisible” in the sense that they are not screened on film in cinemas, although watching these films in the form of videos has become a notice­ able part of urban youth subculture. The interest in these films culmi­ nated in the summer of 2002 in a heated online debate among film critics,

59 Cui, “Working From the Margins,” 80. 60 Chinanews.com.cn (August 10, 2005) reported that the first theater for migrant peas­ ant workers in Beijing had screened more than one hundred films between November 2004 and August 2005. Among their favorites were revolutionary films such as The Little Messenger (Jimao xin 鸡毛信) and Early Spring in February (Zaochun eryue 早春二月), and contemporary commercial films such as A World without Thieves (Tianxia wuzei 天下 无贼) and Kungfu Hustle (Gongfu 功夫). 61 Jia Zhangke used the word “interesting” to characterize his experience of videoscreening Xiao Wu for the Fenyang townsmen engaged in making the film: “The viewers were completely unconcerned with the film’s content. Their primary thrill derived from identifying friends and relatives appearing in the film.” See Wu Wenguang, “Fangwen Xiao Wu daoyan Jia Zhangke,” 207. 62 Yu Aiyuan, “Kanbujian de Zhongguo dianying” 看不见的中国电影 (The invisible Chinese films), Shanghai wenxue 1 (2004): 90.

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ignited by conflicting comments about Wang Chao’s Orphan of Anyang. The debate included discussions of the mentality of intellectuals and the authenticity of mimicry and representation of subaltern lives, regional differences between the director’s origin and the film’s setting, and the politics of film.63 As audiences were quick to point out, these underground films, in which nonprofessional actors usually speak their native dialects to achieve a realistic aesthetic, encountered problems of authenticity similar to those in Jia’s films. Consider Blind Shaft: the two male leads play peasant mur­ derers but speak the urbanized Mandarin varieties of the Henan cities of Zhengzhou and Kaifeng. As a viewer from Henan commented, their city-bred accents are inappropriate for rural characters.64 Similarly, in Orphan of Anyang, although both the film’s title and its script suggest that the story is set in Anyang, the actual shooting locale is Kaifeng, and the male lead playing the laid-off worker speaks Kaifeng Mandarin. In Fish and Elephant, the elephant keeper speaks a strongly southern-accented Mandarin, and her mother speaks Shandong Mandarin. In The Only Sons, the uneducated Cantonese peasant Ah Shui—played by the director, who is himself a Henan native—speaks the language of a schooled person in a very unnatural pronunciation. Typical of these directors’ dismissive responses to such criticisms is that as long as the audience cannot tell the difference, the actual accent of actors does not matter.65 Obviously, without subtitles, local-language dialogue would be unintelligible to most Chinese as well as non-Chinese audiences. And for young underground filmmakers, the international film circuits—where subtitles are a must— are the primary place to seek recognition and distribution. Without excep­ tion, the previously mentioned local-language films received a succession of awards in international film festivals. Take Jia Zhangke as an example: his Hometown Trilogy won him numerous big-name international film 63 The debate was conducted in a major online film BBS forum in China, www.xici.net, and prompted about 350 responses. In a sense this sort of informal debate in film circles echoes a larger and more scholarly debate in poetry: the polemic between intellectual writ­ ing (zhishifenzi xiezuo 知识分子写作) and popular writing (minjian xiezuo 民间写作) in the years 1998–2000. For a detailed analysis of the Popular-Intellectual polemic in Chinese poetry, see Maghiel Van Crevel, “What Was All The Fuss About? The PopularIntellectual Polemic,” in his book Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem, and Money (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 399–458. 64 To this anonymous poster, even their uncensored words seem to belong to the lan­ guage of underclass city dwellers, not rural peasants. See http://wjl.cn/bbs/simple/index .php?t15241.html, posted on September 27, 2005, and accessed in May 2008. 65 Personal communication with the director, Gan Xiao’er, summer 2004.



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awards, including a Palme d’Or nomination at the 55th Cannes Film Festival for Unknown Pleasures, the Best Asian Film Award at the 57th Venice Film Festival for Platform, and the Wolfgang Staudte Award at the 48th Berlin Film Festival for Xiao Wu. Jia’s most prestigious award so far was given for Still Life (Sanxia haoren 三峡好人, 2006), which won the Golden Lion in the 63rd Venice Film Festival in September 2006. Seem­ ingly, the documentary filmmaking style appeals to aspiring, first-time filmmakers not only because of low production costs, but also because of its potential to attract cultural, social, and economic capital.66 For this reason, the use of local languages is often seen as a calculated move and part of a “formula of success,” a term Geremie Barmé uses in his criticism of Zhang Yuan.67 In a widely circulated online article, “Filmmaking Guide for Underground Films,” Zhang Xiaobei 张小北 satirically notes that an actor’s ability to speak the desired local dialect is an underground direc­ tor’s only casting requirement. Chinese subtitles can be omitted because of budget constraints, but employing a skillful English translator is para­ mount to a film’s success.68 As Sheldon Lu writes with regard to the New Chinese Cinema represented by Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, Chinese directors are often maligned for their strategic self-orientalism, with China being “exoticized, eroticized, or politicized to create visual effects for the international community.”69 Rey Chow remarks that the subal­ ternity with which Fifth Generation directors are preoccupied has been spectacularized and commodified “as a type of late-capitalist cinematic sign.”70 The young generation of directors, including Jia Zhangke, faces similar criticism. As Paul Pickowicz observes, “the need for underground artists to chase foreign funding, production, distribution, and discourse networks causes various difficulties, the most obvious of which is the need 66 Jia Zhangke clearly sets a model for other filmmakers. The award-winning Xiao Shan Going Home debuted at a Hong Kong film festival and earned him funding for Xiao Wu. This budget film (RMB 300,000; US $37,500) in turn brought in profits from the sale of distribution rights to overseas countries. The market success of Xiao Wu then financed his later, higher-budget projects. Platform, which cost RMB 5,000,000 (US $625,000), is a transnational production backed by investors from Hong Kong, France, Japan, Switzer­ land, and China. 67 Barmé, In the Red, 194–198. 68 Zhang Xiaobei, “Dixia dingying paishe zhinan” 地下电影拍摄指南 (Filmmaking guide for underground films), posted on Zhang’s blog on May 6, 2004, http://blog.tianya .cn/blogger/post_read.asp?BlogID=5717&PostID=267813. 69 Sheldon Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global Postmodernity (Stanford, CA: Stan­ ford University Press, 2001), 20. 70 Rey Chow, “Framing the Original: Toward a New Visibility of the Orient,” PMLA 126.3 (May 2011): 556.

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to make movies about China that one imagines foreign viewers, especially foreign art-house viewers and critics, would like to see”—a phenomenon he identifies as related to the key issue of Occidentalism.71 It is true that some of these films are advertised in the West with marketable, attractive labels such as “banned” or “underground,” although they may never have been submitted to the censors.72 Yet at the same time, Jason McGrath calls attention to “the influence of the global art-cinema market on the aesthetics of Chinese independent films,” which “may be just as important as the marketing of their allegedly subversive politics.”73 In other words, artistic choices such as the long-take realist aesthetic, with which the use of local language is closely associated, are well suited to the current mar­ ket demand of the global art house. Nevertheless, the underground or independent film movement certainly has been one of the major developments in Chinese cinema during the post-Mao era. Aesthetically, it offers an alternative to both foreign, Holly­ wood-style blockbusters and domestic “main melody” propaganda films. Partly because of relaxed censorship brought by reforms in China’s film industry especially since 2004,74 increasing numbers of young inde­ pendent filmmakers are able to work within the mainstream system. Wang Guangli 王光利, who made one of the earliest independent documentary films, I Graduated (Wo biye le 我毕业了, 1992), later made studio films including Go for Broke (Heng shu heng 横竖横, 2001) in Shanghai Wu, and Karmic Mahjong (Xuezhan daodi 血战到底, 2006), partly in Sichuan Mandarin. Guan Hu’s feature debut Dirt (Toufa luanle 头发乱了, 1994), about disaffected rock-and-roll youth in Beijing, was financed “indepen­ dently” (without studio money) and reluctantly approved by the censors. But since then he has mainly worked within the system and become an acclaimed director of films and TV dramas. While Ning Hao’s art films

71 Paul Pickowicz, “Social and Political Dynamics of Underground Filmmaking in China,” in From Underground to Independent: Alternative film Culture in Contemporary China, ed. Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 13. 72 For a critical examination of the connotation of being “banned” or “underground,” see Valerie Jaffee, “Bringing the World to the Nation: Jia Zhangke and the Legitimation of Chinese Underground Film,” Senses of Cinema 32 (2004), http://sensesofcinema.com/2004/ feature-articles/chinese_underground_film/. 73 McGrath, “The Urban Generation,” 171. 74 Some changes explicit in the new regulations by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television include encouraging private and overseas investment and requiring submission of a script outline instead of a full script to get a shooting license. For details, see Zhu Linyong, “Movies on the Move,” China Daily, January 8, 2004, and Jaffee, “Bring the World to the Nation.”



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Incense and Mongolian Ping Pong (Lü caodi 绿草地, 2005), in the Mon­ golian language, were mainly screened at international film festivals, his Crazy Stone became a national blockbuster in 2006 and he is one of the most successful commercial filmmakers in China so far. Although some filmmakers would blame the censorship system as the major obstacle to the development of Chinese cinema, which is sluggish when compared to the booming growth enjoyed by the domestic televi­ sion industry, Guan Hu, Lu Chuan, Wang Guangli, Wang Quan’an 王全安, and others warn against exaggerating the determining role played by state censors. Citing Iranian cinema, where ideological control is stricter than in Chinese cinema, Guan Hu remarked, “I always feel it’s actually not nec­ essary to go ‘underground’ unless the subject one chooses has no hope at all to pass the censors. If working within the system does no considerable harm to your work, why would you give yourself a hard time by being ‘underground?’ Besides, working within the system would also guarantee you a much broader audience.”75 Indeed, some filmmakers are able to continue or maintain their linguistic style by employing local languages in their new aboveground films. Jia Zhangke’s first approved film, The World (Shijie 世界, 2004), on migrants’ failure to integrate into what seems to be an easily accessible global culture, continued his hybrid linguistic style by blending Shanxi Mandarin, Henan Mandarin, Wenzhou Wu, ­Putonghua Mandarin, and even Russian. Gu Changwei’s 顾长卫 debut feature Peacock (Kongque 孔雀, 2004), in Henan Anyang Mandarin, is a drama about the unfulfilled dreams of small-town youth in the late 1970s and 1980s. Li Yu’s melodrama Dam Street (Hongyan 红颜, 2005), in Sichuan Mandarin, deals with an oedipal relationship between a Sichuan Opera performer and her son. Qi Jian’s 戚健 The Forest Ranger (Tiangou 天狗, 2006), in Shanxi Mandarin, tells about a military veteran, Li Tiangou, now a forest ranger in a state-protected woodland, who fights against the local evil powers and ultimately loses his life. These films, publically shown in cinemas, share an overlapping trend with earlier underground films in local languages: local languages, spoken by protagonists scattered in obscure corners of the country, continue the aesthetic of the marginal and the unassimilated. Through the lens of local languages, China as represented in these art films with an “indie” aesthetic consists of fragmented subcul­ tures, no longer reducible to a unified and coherent national culture.

75 Shaoyi Sun and Li Xun, eds., Lights! Camera! Kai shi!: In Depth Interviews with China’s New Generation of Movie Directors (Norwalk, CT: Eastbridge, 2008), 177.

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The use of local languages is no longer limited to independent and underground films. Mainstream commercial cinema in contemporary China has undergone considerable changes in recent years. Despite the national language law promoting Putonghua in the media, an increasing number of films rendered in local languages have been shown in theatres across the country. The rhetorical use of local language is diversified: to convey psychological subjectivity, to portray “little characters,” and to characterize grotesque realism, to name a few. The divergence and con­ vergence between mainstream commercial films and independent art films with respect to the aesthetics of local language will be explored fur­ ther in the next chapter.

CHAPTER EIGHT

MULTIPLICITY IN MAINSTREAM STUDIO FILMS IN LOCAL LANGUAGES The definition of mainstream cinema (zhuliu dianying 主流电影) underwent significant changes during the market reform years. Yomi Braester argues that a true commercial mainstream cinema was established only in the late 1990s with the advent of Feng Xiaogang’s New Year’s movies (hesuipian 贺岁片). The features of mainstream cinema include “genre films of relatively high production values, financed by private, increasingly transnational investors, and distributed in main venues, with a growing emphasis on multiplexes . . . [incorporating] elements of art film and state propaganda, with the explicit goal of achieving wide distribution and box-office success.”1 In this sense, mainstream cinema is more associated with commercial cinema (shangye pian 商业片) and entertainment cinema ( yule pian 娱乐片), and thus largely distinguishes itself from the state-sponsored, patriotic “main-melody” cinema, although there has been a growing symbiosis between them in recent years.2 In the 1980s and 1990s, local languages and dialects were permitted in main-melody films and television series, where they were primarily used to portray revolutionary leaders of Socialist China.3 However, in the new millennium, as a result of the national language law of 2001 and especially a 2005 SARFT regulation mandating that revolutionary-leader characters speak Putong­ hua, dialect has largely disappeared from recent main-melody films, such as The Founding of a Republic ( Jianguo daye 建国大业, 2009), produced and directed by Han Sanping 韩三平. However, local language, as an important element in traditional entertainment forms, is reinvented and 1 Yomi Braester, “Contemporary Mainstream PRC Cinema,” in The Chinese Cinema Book, ed. Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan; London: British Film Institute, 2011), 176. 2 Ibid., 181–182. 3 For example, in these media productions, Mao Zedong usually speaks with a Hunan accent, Zhou Enlai a Tianjin accent, Jiang Jieshi a Ningbo accent, and Deng Xiaoping speaks Sichuan Mandarin. Note that the characters do not speak the same exact dialect as the historical figures they portray, but “imitate local-language features on the condi­ tion that the resulting sound be intelligible to audiences in general.” Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 111–112.

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increasingly employed in mainstream commercial entertainment films, whose business model relies on box-office revenue rather than generous government subsidies. Therefore, mainstream film has become a battlefield where tension between the state, capital, and art is intensified, and the official position on the use of local language is ambiguous. For example, the official response to Lu Chuan’s 2002 directorial debut, Missing Gun, in Guizhou Mandarin was divided. This film created a national sensation, and within the first month after its premiere the domestic box office tally had reached RMB 9 million and the overseas rights were worth USD 1.5 million. However, the state official in charge of Putonghua popularization criticized the veteran leading actor, Jiang Wen, who speaks Guizhou Mandarin in the film, for countering the national language policy and bringing to the big screen the “dregs” of the dialects.4 But as Lu Chuan argued in his rebuttal, the fundamental function of film is neither propaganda nor pedagogy, but entertainment; in his commercial blockbuster he was trying to revive the cinematic spirit of amusement, thrills, excitement, and suspense to make an enjoyable film.5 Despite the language official’s disapproval, the film received support from Han Sanping, the head of the state-owned China Film Group and director and producer of numerous main-melody films. Han played a Sichuan Mandarin-speaking role in Missing Gun and facilitated its production and distribution. Earlier, as president of the Beijing Film Studio in 1997, Han initiated the tradition of Feng Xiaogang’s New Year’s commercial films with their distinctive Beijing flavor.6 And later in 2006, he endorsed the distribution of Ning Hao’s Crazy Stone in multiple dialects, and the film

4 Yin Tingting 尹婷婷, “Guojia yuwei fuzeren piping Jiang Wen jiang yuyan ‘zaopo’ banshang yinmu” 国家语委负责人批评姜文将语言 “糟粕” 搬上银幕 [The official from the state language commission criticizes Jiang Wen for bringing linguistic dregs to the silver screen], Chengdu ribao, September 2, 2002. 5 Interview with Lu Chuan, http://ent.sina.com.cn/s/m/2002-05-14/83187.html; Wei Lixin 魏力新, “Xun Qiang wei zhongguo dianyingye xunzhao xinxin”《寻枪》为中国 电影业寻找信心 [Missing Gun brought confidence to the Chinese film industry], Beijing People Broadcasting Radio report script, June 11, 2002. A similar view can be found in the earlier debate on the value of entertainment films in the 1980s; see Rui Zhang, The Cinema of Feng Xiaogang (Aberdeen, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 21–25. 6 Han encouraged Feng to shoot a New Year’s comedy rather than a main-melody film, in order to slip pass censorship. He approved Feng’s proposal to adapt Wang Shuo’s novel You’re Not a Commoner (Ni bushi yige suren 你不是一个俗人) into Party A, Party B, Feng’s first New Year’s film. Feng Xiaogang, Wo ba qingchun xian ge ni 我把青春献给你 [I dedi­ cated my youth to you] (Beijing: Changjiang wenyi, 2003), 102–103.



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became a blockbuster. In an interview, Han said it was particularly the use of Sichuan Mandarin in the film that facilitated his decision-making.7 Complementing Chapter 7, this chapter surveys mainstream films rendered in local languages since 2000 and discusses the divergence and convergence between independent art films and mainstream commercial films, as well as the unique function of the use of local language in mainstream comedy films. In the first section, I discuss the rhetorical use of local language in Lu Chuan’s Missing Gun. I explore an unusual function of local language, namely to convey psychological subjectivity, which is distinct from the documentary-realist aesthetics that local language usually supports in contemporary Chinese art films. While this use of dialect is rare in films by the independent directors of the so-called Sixth Generation, there is much similarity in linguistic style between this film and Jiang Wen’s 1999 banned Devils on the Doorstep in Tangshan Mandarin. Jiang’s filmmaking style is very different from Jia Zhangke’s “documentary filmmaking style,” which I generalized in the previous chapter.8 While Jia recognizes the impossibility of absolute objectivity and rather views his brand of documentary realism as an attitude,9 Jiang Wen overtly and insistently claims that all of his films are subjective.10 In Missing Gun, in which Jiang not only played the protagonist but also served as production supervisor, thus helping to define the film’s style, local languages, speech, and sound effects are consciously deployed to depict the psychological world and portray subjective reality and mental anxiety in the protagonist’s search for his lost gun. The use of local language and sound effects to signify fear and horror in this film bears a strong resemblance to many audio-visual techniques used in Jiang Wen’s own Devils on the Doorstep, in which both the villagers and the Japanese captive and his Chinese interpreter are threatened by the unfathomable fear of imminent death. The two films thus form a peculiar convergence between underground film and mainstream film. 7 Yuan Lei 袁蕾, “Han Sanping: Shuo zhongying yizhi duda geng zhunque” 韩三平: 说中影一枝独大更准确 [Han Sanping: It’s more accurate to say that China Film Group is “outstanding and strong”], Nanfang zhoumo, September 10, 2009. 8 The documentary style generally prefers long takes over close-ups, synchronized recording over the filtering of ambient noise, amateur nonprofessional actors over schooltrained professional actors with dramatic performance styles; and improvisation over the recitation of well-composed lines. 9 Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, 252–253 n. 15. 10 For example, Jiang Wen and Li Erwei 李尔葳, “Xun Qiang ye xun lixiang”《寻枪》也 寻理想 [Missing Gun also seeks ideals: Interview with Jiang Wen], Dianying yishu 2 (2002): 377–379.

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In the second section, I discuss the predominant use of local language to portray “little characters” in mainstream films. Rui Zhang interprets the Chinese term xiao renwu as the underprivileged, “insignificant people situated at the bottom of the power hierarchy.”11 However, by this definition, the term “little characters” could be easily confused with the term “marginal characters,” commonly used for the protagonists in underground and independent films. Actually, many mainstream directors such as Guan Hu dislike using the latter label for their common, ordinarypeople protagonists.12 Moreover, while the “marginal characters” speaking local language in the underground films are usually silent, I find that the “little characters” speaking local language in the mainstream films are rather talkative. I first briefly discuss Feng Xiaogang’s glib, urban Beijing little characters in his first three New Year’s films, and the Tianjin Mandarin-speaking chatterbox Zhang Damin in Yang Yazhou’s 杨亚洲 A Tree in House (Meishi touzhe le, 1998), finding that for both directors, the excess of language becomes a catharsis of pressure, anxiety, and depression. Then I examine the rural Shandong Mandarin spoken by the two migrant-peasant protagonists in Guan Hu’s made-for-TV film (dianshi dianying 电视电影) Minibus.13 I argue that the peasant as portrayed in mainstream media is very different from the stubborn, silent image of Chinese peasants usually perceived by a Western audience, a perception perpetuated and stereotyped by Zhang Yimou’s films, such as The Story of Qiuju and Not One Less, and the international film festival submissions of the younger generation, such as Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Shan Going Home and Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle (Shiqisui de danche 十七岁的单车, 2001). In Minibus, the rural migrant characters are not silent, but discursively and rhetorically articulate their experiences of displacement, disorientation, and disillusion while making the rural-to-urban transition. The binary of rural local language versus urban language continues in Feng Xiaogang’s melodramas Cell Phone (Shouji 手机, 2003) and A World Without Thieves (2004), yet in both films the rural local language and the

11  Rui Zhang, The Cinema of Feng Xiaogang, 4. 12 Shaoyi Sun and Li Xun, eds., Lights! Camera! Kai shi!, 93. 13 The CCTV Movie Channel (CCTV-6) started to produce made-for-TV films in 1999. This relatively new genre in China is studied in a dissertation by Ya Ning, 亚宁 “Zhong­ guo dianshi dianying yanjiu” 中国电视电影研究 [Study on made-for-TV films in China], Ph.D. diss., Zhongguo yishu yanjiuyuan [Graduate School of the Chinese National Acad­ emy of Arts], 2010. The telefilm Minibus was awarded the first Television Film Lily Award and the 10th Golden Rooster “Best Television Film” Award.



multiplicity in mainstream studio films in local languages 219

primitive, unassimilated rural society are reidealized and romanticized as a utopian counterpart to the morally corrupt urban society. In the third section, I discuss the use of local language in recent comedy films, a dominant genre in mainstream cinema. In his survey of Chinese comedy films, Rao Shuguang 饶曙光 argues that comedy, rather than tragedy, has increasingly become the dominant mode in mainstream films since the 1990s.14 The use of local language in contemporary commercial films is now, as it used to be, often associated with the genre of comedy.15 Feng Xiaogang’s early New Year’s films with their distinctive Beijing flavor are typical romantic comedies. Yet with the generic diversification of Feng’s recent films, a new trend of the so-called low-budget comedy films was ushered in by Ning Hao’s Crazy Stone, featuring littlecharacter protagonists, the use of multiple local dialects, and the “web of life”-style plot. In the films discussed in the second section, language use largely marks the boundary between the urban and the rural, the insider and the outsider, and the little characters and the big shots. However, in Crazy Stone, any neat binary boundary or hierarchy is blurred, disturbed, and destabilized. I apply Bakhtin’s theory of grotesque realism to examine the multiplicity in the language use in this comedy, which demonstrates well the characteristic logic of “insider out” that Bakhtin identifies in carnival laughter. However, the politicized view intrinsic in Bakhtin’s theory is largely absent in these recent comedies. The little-character or lowerclass protagonists, rather than the “people” Bakhtin positively and seriously 14 The factors Rao considered include the rise of commercial, popular, consumer-driven culture, the commercial and entertainment tendencies of main-melody films, the chang­ ing taste of an audience that now seeks entertainment and pleasure, and the related mar­ ket demand. Rao Shuguang, Zhongguo xiju dianyingshi 中国喜剧电影史 [The history of Chinese comedy films] (Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe, 2005), 238–240. 15 There is a long tradition in Chinese comedy films of using characters stereotypically associated with local languages to evoke laughter and entertainment. For example, one of the earliest silent slapstick comedies, The Silly Hanging Out in Town God’s Temple (Erbaiwu baixiang chenghuangmiao 二百五白相城隍庙, 1913), used the Shanghai dialect word 白 相 in its title to attract a Shanghai audience. Many of the film’s gags rely on the migrant peasant as an object of derision. Dai Yuxin 戴宇新, “Lun Zhongguo dianying zhong de fangyan shiyong” 论中国电影中的方言使用 [On the use of dialect in Chinese cinema], M.A. thesis, Beijing Film Academy, 2006. A handful of dialect comedy films in the 1950s, such as Sanmao Studies Business, in Shanghai Wu and Yangzhou Mandarin, continued the vaudeville entertainment tradition of early twentieth-century Shanghai drama perfor­ mance, in which “army officers and policemen spoke Shandong dialect, wealthy matrons and socialites spoke Suzhou dialect, compradores and interpreters for foreign firms spoke Cantonese, important bosses and merchants spoke Ningbo dialect, scholars, scribes, and fortunetellers spoke Shaoxing dialect, barbers and rickshaw pullers spoke Yangzhou dia­ lect, and so forth.” Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 194–195.

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envisioned as possessing revolutionary potential against the official ruling class, are fantasized and domesticated by the logic and ideology of the middle-class spectators. Moreover, as an Internet-savvy generation becomes the main body of the Chinese film audience, the subversion in these films as a sort of “sanctioned social release” within the system may also be viewed as part of a youth subculture, which signals a recent trend toward a growing symbiosis between the film field and the Internet field. Finally, I discuss the regional imbalance in audience reception of recent comedy films and argue that these films may show a new direction in the development of Chinese cinema, that is, regionalization or localization. Instead of targeting a more or less homogenized national or international audience as broadly as possible, these comedy films target the subnational, local, or translocal audience speaking the same dialect, thus tapping the local film market and sometimes the rural market. Subjectivity in the Use of Language and Voice in Missing Gun One common function of the use of local language in Chinese cinema is to support a realist aesthetic, which emphasizes capturing unadorned real life and creating a documentary effect. This is largely the case with the Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou’s studio films The Story of Qiuju and Not One Less, both in Shaanxi Mandarin; Zhou Xiaowen’s Ermo, largely in Hebei Zhangjiakou Mandarin; and the films of Jia Zhangke and many Sixth Generation independent filmmakers in local languages, as discussed in the previous chapter. This also aligns with Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh’s observation on the predominance of local dialects in contemporary Chinese art cinema, which “create[s] an immediacy and a raw quality in the texture of the films” and “effectively builds the realism of characters, ambiance, locale, and atmosphere.”16 In his analysis of Jia’s long-shot realist style in the visual dimension, Jason McGrath argues that, to some degree, the aesthetic subjectivity in a realist film “does not convey the real itself any more than an oneiric film delivers an actual dream.”17 As he states, “even Andre Bazin, in his classic essay championing the ontological realism of the photographic image, attributes the power of photographic realism to a ‘need for illusion’ that is ‘purely psychological,’ the origins of which ‘must be sought in the proclivity of the 16 Lu and Yeh, Chinese-Language Film, 7. 17 McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, 133.



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mind towards magic.’ ”18 But still, in the aural and acoustic dimension, the aesthetic use of local language and voice to convey psychological subjectivity is not so explicit and prominent in films with a strong documentary realist impulse. Exceptionally, in Lu Chuan’s Missing Gun local language, largely Guizhou Mandarin, is consciously employed as a distinctive voice to depict a psychological world and to portray subjective mental reality. The film was adapted from Guangxi writer Fan Yiping’s 凡一平 1999 novella Search for a Missing Gun (Xun qiang ji 寻枪记). It starts as a smalltown policeman, Ma Shan 马山 (played by Jiang Wen), wakes up one morning to find that his gun, loaded with three bullets, is missing. The loss of the gun precipitates an identity crisis that becomes more severe as he searches for the gun as the film progresses. All that once was familiar starts to appear defamiliarized and distorted. He loses the sense of belonging he had in the place where he lives, feeling disoriented and alienated from his family, relatives, former lover, friends, the police force, and the town. The nonlocatable anxiety prompts Ma Shan to retrieve a (re-)locatable identity and reassert a lost subjectivity by searching for the gun. In the end he recovers his gun, but at a great cost: he only succeeds in catching the thief by impersonating someone else, giving up his own identity—and indeed his own life—in the process. As the director states, the anxiety Ma experiences after losing his gun is what the film tries to convey, “to explore the protagonist’s spiritual world after he lost the gun, to present the disoriented real world from his eyes, and to tell a story of gun searching in a subjective, metaphysical way.”19 So his shooting ethos was to “make a subjective film” (做一个主观的电影). To serve this aim, the filmic location is set in a small town, Qingyan 青岩, in Guizhou, rather than Guangxi, where the original novella was set. According to Jiang Wen, the film crew first looked for a shooting location in Guangxi but found the scenery there was too beautiful, too much like a tourist site.20 By contrast, the humid and misty climate, the mountainous geography, and the low dim houses in Guizhou in southwest China well match the psychological ambience the film tries to create. In some sense, the use of local language is closely related to or even contingent upon the film’s location. After the location was chosen, the 18 Ibid. 19 Xie Xiao 谢晓, “Xun Qiang daoyan Lu Chuan: Wei chunüzuo cheye nanmian”《寻枪》 导演陆川: 为处女作彻夜难眠 [Interview with Lu Chuan, the director of Missing Gun: Sleepless for his debut work], Nanfang dushi bao, June 7, 2002. 20 Jiang Wen and Li Erwei, “Xun Qiang ye xun lixiang,” 367.

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crew tried to recruit professional actors and actresses who speak Guizhou Mandarin or a dialect variety close to Southwestern Mandarin. Local language is consciously viewed as a native tongue that fundamentally affects the conceptualization and mentality of the actors and presumably that of the characters they portray, in a way evoking the principle of linguistic relativity formulated in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Instead of conjuring an artificial Putonghua with a Guizhou accent, the actors and actresses were asked to speak their own native dialects. Therefore, Jiang Wen and Ning Jing 宁静 (playing Li Xiaomeng 李小萌, Ma’s first love) speak Guizhou Mandarin, Wu Yujuan 伍宇娟 (playing Ma’s wife) speaks her Hunan Xiang, and Han Sanping, playing the head of the police bureau, speaks his native Sichuan Mandarin.21 Lu Chuan insisted on the use of dialect instead of Putonghua in this film. He believes “dialect has more variations in acoustic texture and modulation (zhigan 质感) than Putonghua. Each dialect has its own individuality and specificity. You need to explore the fundamentals beyond the superficial surface. Hidden behind different dialects are different cultural backgrounds, which directly affect the way of one’s thinking.”22 Lu Chuan’s view on dialect is very similar to Jiang Wen’s. As a filmmaker obsessed with sound, Jiang has a very strong opinion about fangyan. He regards it as a language, “which gives you a very different feeling.”23 He stresses that the importance of using a certain language or regional dialect is not because of the peculiar accent, but because people speaking different languages have different psychological outlooks on life. In this sense, “the accent becomes the content.”24 Recognizing the form-content duality of every sign in art, Jiang claims “Beijing

21 The use of local language largely obeys the rule of filmic verisimilitude. For example, Ma’s wife, played by Wu Yujuan, is not a Guizhou native but an outsider who married a local man. Ibid., 368. 22 “He Lu Chuan yiqi Xun Qiang” 和陆川一起《寻枪》[Interview with Lu Chuan and the film crew at the Beijing Film Academy], October 9, 2002, http://www.bfa.edu.cn/ zt/2004-01/04/content_7350.htm. A print version of this interview (with some changes) appeared in Jiang Baolong 姜宝龙, “Jiang Wen, Lu Chuan he Xun Qiang” 姜文、陆川 和《寻枪》[Jiang Wen, Lu Chuan, and Missing Gun], Beijing dianying xueyuan xuebao 6 (2002): 77–79. 23 Wu Guanping 吴冠平, “Bushi bianju de yanyuan bushi hao daoyan: Jiang Wen fang­ yan” 不是编剧的演员不是好导演: 姜文访谈 [An actor who doesn’t know scriptwriting is not a good director], Dianying yishu 2 (2011): 81. In this interview, Jiang Wen also men­ tioned his initial attempt to shoot his 2011 film Let the Bullet Fly (Rang zidan fei 让子弹飞) in Sichuan Mandarin, and how he compromised by making a post-production version dubbed in the dialect. 24 Meng Jing 孟静, “Jiangwen dianying dixian zai nali?” 姜文电影底线在哪里 [What’s the bottom line of Jiangwen’s films], Zhongguo xinwen zhoukan 7.1 (2002): 62–63.



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Mandarin, except for depicting characters in the Beijing area, is not suitable for portraying characters in other regions or in ancient times.”25 In many interviews, he has emphasized the determining role native language plays in the characterization. And this may be best illustrated in his own film Devils on the Doorstep. In one scene, Liu Wang 六旺 reports to his fellow villagers his adventure meeting Wu Duizhang 伍队长 (Captain Wu), who is supposed to be the unnamed phantom, “me” (wo 我), who dumps a captured Japanese soldier and his Chinese interpreter on Ma Dasan 马大三 (played by Jiang Wen) and unleashes the turmoil of events on the whole village: “I left the village, crossed a river; crossed a river, went up a hill; went up a hill, entered a town; entered a town, went into a medicine shop; went into a medicine shop, found Liu Mazi” (我出了村就过了河, 我过了河就上了山, 我上了山就进了城, 我进了城就去了药铺, 我去 了药铺就找了李麻子).26 According to Jiang Wen, the composition of this long line is based on speech patterns he identified in Tangshan Mandarin. He finds that his townsmen in Tangshan seldom respond to questions directly. If you ask the result of something, they would rather tell you about the process, and vice versa. Their speech often features word repetition (diezhe shuo 叠着说).27 Hilarious as they sound, the rhythmic repetitions and the longwinded narration are not “useless,” as Julian Ward interprets,28 but accurately depict the peasants’ inner hesitation, mental struggle, and sense of uncertainty and fear when dealing with the two unexpected captives. In Missing Gun, local language and sound cinematically function to depict the characters’ mentality and psychological subjectivity. This can be illustrated by the character Li Xiaomeng and her voice. Li was Ma’s first love many years ago, went to Shenzhen for quite a while, and unexpectedly appears when Ma knocks on the door of a local businessman. In a highly seductive voice in Guizhou Mandarin, accompanied by slow, gentle guitar music, Li calls Ma Shan’s name. The frame switches between two 25 Jiang Wen and Li Erwei, “Xun Qiang ye xun lixiang,” 368. 26 The following line, which did not appear in the film, appears in the script, “Liu Mazi brought me to the Shangzhuang village along a zigzag path, and in Shangzhuang, I met a person called Wu Duizhang” (李麻子带着我叽里拐弯地去了上庄, 在上庄我见了一 个叫伍队长的). See Su Huan 苏欢, “Wo chule cun guole he: Kan Jiangwen pai Guizi Laile,” 我出了村过了河: 看姜文拍《鬼子来了》[I left the village, crossed a river: Wit­ nessing Jiang Wen’s shooting of Devils on the Doorstep], Dazhong dianying 3 (1999): 12. 27 Cheng Qingsong and Huang Ou 程青松 黄鸥, Wo de sheyingji bu sahuang 我的摄影 机不撒谎 [My camera doesn’t lie] (Beijing: Zhongguo youyi chuban gongsi, 2002), 69. 28 Julian Ward, “Filming the Anti-Japanese War: The Devils and Buffoons of Jiang Wen’s Guizi Laile,” New Cinemas 2.2 (2004): 112.

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very similar close-up images of Li; one is her as she is now and the other is her with a different hairstyle and clothes resembling what Ma remembers.29 Ma’s memory and fact, imagination and reality are thus obfuscated, fused, and confused. While Li continues to talk, the camera cuts back and forth between Li’s smiling face and Ma’s perplexed face. The close-up shot/ reverse shot editing, as a retrospective and self-reflective style, functions to heighten the suspense and mystery of the whereabouts of Ma’s missing gun. Back home, Ma is absentminded while washing dishes. In a visual flashback scene, Li was there too at the wedding of Ma’s sister the previous night, the night he lost his gun. Ma’s hallucination is soon interrupted by the irritated voice of his wife, who discovers that Ma “was murmuring the name of Li Xiaomeng just now.” In other words, Ma’s materialized and voiced interior monologue is heard by his wife but not by the audience; his subjective “internal diegetic sound” is presented in the absence of sound-over or “external diegetic sound.”30 This technical innovation cinematically highlights Ma’s oscillation between reality and illusion in his stressful search for the missing gun. One night Ma is awakened by Li’s full-bodied, erotic voice calling his name, only to find that she has been shot to death. Li’s haunted voice therefore achieves the distinctive effect of eliciting from Ma deep guilt about her mysterious death, presumably by a bullet from his lost gun. The town becomes a subjective space in which to unfold Ma’s psychological world of enormous anxiety, fear, and even horror. Unlike the “raw” town of Fenyang in Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu, the town where Ma searches for his gun is rather processed and abstract, as those involved in the incident seem to be the only inhabitants of the town. In terms of sound effects, while Jia Zhangke insists on synchronized recording without ambient noise

29 This scene is reminiscent of the two photographs in Jiang Wen’s film In the Heat of the Sun. In the color one, Mi Lan 米兰 (played by Ning Jing as well) wears a red swimsuit, and in the black-and-white one she wears a white shirt. This detail suggests the instability of memory, which is “suspended between fiction and reality.” Yomi Braester, “Memory at a Standstill: From Maohistory to Hooligan History,” in his book Witness against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 204. 30 According to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, “External diegetic sound is that which we as spectators take to have a physical source in the scene. Internal diegetic sound is that which comes from inside the mind of a character; it is subjective.” Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2008), 284. Like the film Wings of Desire, mentioned by Bordwell and Thompson, Lu Chuan’s film thus constitutes another “interesting exception to the general rule that one character cannot hear another’s internal diegetic sound.” Ibid., 285.



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filtering to achieve a naturalistic and objective sound effect, Lu Chuan did the opposite. According to the film’s sound director Wu Jiang 吴江, his original recording had a lot of background noise. But Lu Chuan insistently asked him to redo it, to filter the ambient sound and noise from the soundtrack in order to highlight the voices of the major characters.31 The subjective sound effect is most dramatic in the scene exactly when Ma Shan tells his friend in a booming voice, “I can’t find my gun”; the background soundtrack of a group of girls singing songs suddenly halts. Everything comes to a standstill. This moment of aural void created by filmic silence produces an effect of excessive intimidation. What is foregrounded is Ma’s terrified voice in Guizhou Mandarin: “There are THREE bullets in my gun, do you know?! If it’s in the hands of a criminal, three bullets would be three lives! If that’d be a professional killer and he’d shot two with one bullet, it’d be six lives! If one bullet for three, it’d be nine lives!” Here, Ma basically repeats how the police bureau head alarmed him earlier— six lives could be lost—but he adds one more hypothetical case—nine lives. The exaggerated numerical narration parallels his intensified pressure, fright, and terror. Right after Ma roars “Nine lives, do you know!?” (九条人命, 你晓不晓得!?), a wall of canned fish suddenly falls down. Ma’s doubled psychological fear about the destruction his missing gun might bring extends to the real world and creates a real-life disaster. The use of local language and sound effects to signify fear and horror in this film bears a strong resemblance to many audiovisual techniques used in Devils on the Doorstep, for example, the acousmêtre’s bodiless voice “me”; the speaking shadows during the villagers’ first group interrogation of the two captives; filming in black and white, which enables the audience to focus more on dialogue; and the panic-stricken interpreter’s mistranslation, which creates a gap between one’s thoughts and one’s words. Devoid of a grand historical narrative of peasant nationalism, the film efficiently highlights Chinese peasants’ instinctive reactions when confronting the very primitive issue of survival, the core motif of the film—reactions that are largely unfettered by any lofty political consciousness or ideological commitment. The film thus subverts the stock image of heroic Chinese peasants in classic 1950s and 1960s anti-Japanese films who fight against the Japanese invaders under the leadership of the CCP, an image that is visually and virtually absent in this film.

31 “He Lu Chuan yiqi Xun Qiang.”

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In a similar yet far less subversive way, Lu Chuan’s film does not easily identify Ma’s image with the revolutionary heroes so “expressive of male chauvinism and patriarchal authority in Chinese cinema of the Mao era,”32 a time when the use of local language to portray heroic characters was taboo.33 Throughout the film, the line between the heroic and the mediocre, the sublime and the humble is blurred. On the one hand, without a high school diploma, Ma’s masculine authority is often undermined in front of his wife, an elementary school teacher, and further challenged by his sexual incompetence. The patriarchal hierarchy is again reversed when Ma’s teenage son lectures him as he is confined in a cell. However, after losing his gun, this insignificant little character supposedly faces grim consequences when the head of the police bureau learns that the gun has been missing for twenty hours: Twenty hours?! If the criminal takes the bus, he is now in the provincial capital; if by train, he’s in Beijing, and if by plane, he’s now in the U.S.! I don’t care about the issue in the States. But if the gun is now in Beijing, how much harm you would bring to the party and the state!

In analyzing the script of Missing Gun as adapted by Lu Chuan, Wang Anyi comments that the text creates an unrealistic space between a theoretically plausible yet unlikely consequence (such as threatening the safety of the state) and the realistic punishments Ma receives (such as the withdrawal of his award money and the negation of his identity as a policeman), or a space between an abstract aftereffect and a concrete repercussion. Thus, all the searching for the gun developed in this space creates a distorted

32 Xiaoping Lin, “Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Trilogy,” 188. 33 A remarkable example of this aspect is Shi Hui’s 石辉 much-condemned film Pla­ toon Commander Guan (Guan Lianzhang 关连长, 1951). The uncivilized Shandong col­ loquialisms and curse words spoken by the peasant-soldier protagonist, Guan (played by Shi Hui), were harshly criticized as denigrating the PLA image. Information obtained from the CCTV show The Story of Movies: The Stories That Should Not Have Happened in Platoon Commander Guan (Dianying Chuanqi: Guan Lianzhang zhi bu gai fasheng de gushi 电影传 奇: 关连长之不该发生的故事, 2007), hosted by Cui Yongyuan. Furthermore, the strong local identity Guan and his troop manifested was unacceptable to authorities “at the time of the Korean War who wanted to see China and Chinese troops presented as unified and culturally sanitized ‘national’ subjects who spoke perfect Putonghua.” Paul G. Pickowicz, “Acting like Revolutionaries: Shi Hui, the Wenhua Studio, and Private-Sector Filmmaking, 1949–52,” in Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China, ed. Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 281.



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effect, an exaggerated absurdity: by sacrificing his life in the end, a humble little character abruptly transforms into a sublime hero.34 The Language of the “Little Characters” In contemporary mainstream popular films, local languages have been predominantly used for portraying little characters. Among urban characters, examples are numerous: the Beijing Mandarin–speaking protagonists played by the popular star Ge You in Feng Xiaogang’s first three New Year’s films, respectively, the unemployed former state-film studio worker in Party A, Party B ( Jiafang yifang 甲方乙方, 1997), the Chinese immigrant-drifter without a permanent job in Be There or Be Square (Bujian busan 不见不散, 1998), and the tour bus driver who had not been paid for a year in Sorry Baby! (Meiwan meiliao 没完没了, 1999); the protagonists played by the famous cross-talk comedian Feng Gong 冯巩, including an ordinary factory worker speaking Tianjin Mandarin in Yang Yazhou’s A Tree in House, a pedicab driver speaking Hebei Baoding Mandarin in Eat Hot Tofu Slowly (Xinji chibuliao re doufu 心急吃不了热豆 腐, 2005), and the minor factory-sector cadre, gongzhang 工长, speaking Tianjin Mandarin in A Big Potato (Biena ziji budang ganbu 别拿自己不 当干部, 2007), the latter two directed by Feng Gong; Lao Zhao, played by Zhao Benshan, the laid-off worker formerly employed in a state-owned factory in Zhang Yimou’s Happy Time (Xingfu shiguang 幸福时光, 2000); and recently, the Northeastern Mandarin–speaking Chen Guilin 陈桂林, a steelworker from a shut-down steel mill in Liaoning Anshan in Zhang Meng’s 张猛 The Piano in a Factory (Gang de qin 钢的琴, 2011). As for rural characters, for instance, there are the two protagonists played by the former CCTV celebrity hostess Ni Ping 倪萍: Zhang Meili, a plucky peasant teacher speaking Shaanxi Mandarin in Pretty Big Feet (Meili de dajia 美丽的大脚, 2002), and Niqiu, a rural Shaanxi woman migrating to Beijing in Loach Are Fish Too (Niqiu yeshi yu 泥鳅也是鱼, 2006), both directed by Yang Yazhou. These little characters are not quite identical to the “marginal characters” in independent films discussed in the previous chapter. A noticeable difference in terms of language use is that while marginal characters 34 Wang Anyi, “Biandi de zhongcheng: du Xun Qiang” 边地的忠诚: 读《寻枪》[Loy­ alty to the borderland: Reading Missing Gun], preface to Lu Chuan’s book, Missing Gun (Beijing: Xiandai chubanshe, 2002), 3–4.

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are usually silent, stoic, and melancholic, the little characters in mainstream studio films tend to be talkative, optimistic, and cheerful. This is best demonstrated in the above-mentioned urban films directed by Feng Xiaogang and those starring Feng Gong. As Shuyu Kong points out, an important trademark of Feng Xiaogang’s early New Year’s films is “their street-wise, humorous dialogue built on the foundation of Beijing local dialect.”35 According to Feng, “Beijing has suffered its share of misfortune and disaster, and average Beijingers can’t always depend on material solutions to their problems. So they rely on their sense of humor, their ability to make light of their circumstances, as a means to digest their bad luck.”36 In a typical Beijing style of speech, tiaokan, which Wang Shuo first popularized nationwide and Feng Xiaogang soon adopted, Feng’s little characters mock and parody Maoist-style revolutionary language, hypocritical intellectual discourse, and all kinds of discursive authority in the transitional commercialized society. Thus, to a large degree, the “victory of little characters” is achieved by discursively “mocking the privileged,” two of the recurring themes Rui Zhang identifies in Feng’s early New Year’s films, which are intensely verbal comedies.37 A chatterbox (pinzui 贫嘴) even becomes the protagonist, Zhang Damin, in A Tree in House, which was adapted from Liu Heng’s novel The Happy Life of the Garrulous Zhang Damin (Pinzui Zhang Damin de xingfu shenghuo 贫嘴 张大民的幸福生活, 1997). As the eldest son of a working-class family, Damin lives with his senile mother and four siblings in a cramped tworoom house in a shabby compound courtyard in Tianjin. Damin’s mundane everyday life is marked by housing woes, poverty, family troubles, and later demolition and relocation, yet these setbacks are overcome by his humorous verbosity. His excessive language and loquacious speech, rendered in Tianjin Mandarin, becomes a catharsis of anxiety and repression, manifesting optimism. Nevertheless, as an urban dweller, although he is a little character in the city, he possesses a privileged status when compared to the little character from the countryside, in this case the only rural character in the film, Li Mushao/Mushuo 李木勺, Damin’s Shanxi Mandarin–speaking brother-in-law. Damin initially discourages his sister, Ermin 二民, from marrying Li on account of his rural identity. He calls Li Laoxi 老西, a slightly derogative word for the people from Shanxi. Later, 35 Shuyu Kong, “Big Shot from Beijing: Feng Xiaogang’s He Sui Pian and Contemporary Chinese Commercial Film,” Asian Cinema 14.1 (Spring/Summer 2003): 183. 36 Cited from Kong, “Big Shot from Beijing,” 180. 37 Rui Zhang, The Cinema of Feng Xiaogang, 82–87, 87–93.



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after Damin helps Li solve his infertility problem and thus eliminates the cause of the couple’s quarrels, Li worships Damin as a “savior” ( jiuming enren 救命恩人) and a “(morally) good person” (haoren 好人). The urban character’s superiority, resourcefulness, and civility are confirmed by the rural Other’s inferiority, ignorance, and clumsiness. Although the film does not highlight this mutual rural-urban exclusiveness, in the end Li remains outside the urban family and the urban city. After temporarily working in Tianjin, Li takes Ermin back to his Shanxi hometown and mostly resides there. While Shanxi Mandarin is portrayed as submissive to hegemonic Tianjin Mandarin in A Tree in House, the juxtaposition of rural versus urban language takes a new twist in Guan Hu’s made-for-TV film Minibus. The film narrates how two migrant young men from rural Shandong, Liu Chengqiang 刘承强 and Gao Ming 高明, struggle to survive in Beijing, working in the private minibus (xiaoba 小巴 or xiao gonggong 小公共) business.38 Liu and Gao are very different from the rural migrants stereotyped in underground and independent films. For example, Xiao Shan in Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Shan Going Home never demonstrates the agency necessary to assimilate into the urban Beijing-Mandarin speech community and mainstream society. Throughout the film, obscurely and silently, he remains estranged, staying in a closed-off community and speaking Shanxi dialects with his fellow townsmen. Similarly, Gui/Guei 贵 in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle is largely silent throughout the film.39 Western scholars may be mostly familiar with the stubborn, silent image of Chinese peasants perpetuated by Zhang Yimou’s films, such as The Story of Qiuju and Not One Less, and the younger generation’s films, screened at 38 As an alternative form of transportation midway between comfortable taxis and crowded buses, minibus transport was a prosperous business in 1990s Beijing, but by 2001 it had largely vanished from the central Beijing area and moved to suburban areas. Gao Shan 高杉, “Beijing xiaogonggong jintian tuichu sanhuanlu, 79 tiao xianlu mingnian 1 yue kaitong” 北京小公共今天退出三环路79条线路明年1月开通 [Beijing mini-bus with­ drawn from the third-ring roads, 79 new bus routes will embark next January], Beijing qingnianbao, December 15, 2001. 39 The film was banned in China after it was sent to the Berlin International Film Fes­ tival in 2001 without first acquiring state approval, but the ban was lifted in 2004. In the film, the house maid (played by Zhou Xun 周迅) never speaks because her accent would immediately betray her rural identity; Gui’s accent, on the other hand, was not successfully portrayed, considering his village friend speaks with a rural accent in the film. The actor who plays Gui speaks an urban Putonghua Mandarin on those occasions when he does talk, and his words are mostly “repetition of simple statements.” Richard Letteri, “Realism, Hybridity, and the Construction of Identity in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle,” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 29 (2007): 80.

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international festivals. Elizabeth Wright interprets Gui’s silence as “simply acknowledg[ing] his difference and wonderment at the city.”40 Similarly, Richard Letteri argues, “it is a sign of his tie to the rural world, a connection experienced more directly through the body and physical labor than through language and social discourse.”41 However, these generalized explanations can hardly be applied to the peasants portrayed in mainstream films, television, and mass media, where rural migrant characters experience similar displacement, disorientation, and disillusion but are more likely to respond linguistically, articulately, and discursively instead of remaining silent. The use of local language is well integrated into the narrative of Minibus as a plot device. Speaking Shandong Qingdao Mandarin, Liu and Gao are despised by their Beijing competitors, who pejoratively call them laomao’r 老冒儿 (yokel or hick) in Beijing Mandarin. Showing an avid desire to engage with the city, Liu and Gao attempt to learn Beijing Mandarin, realizing that their accents are an obstacle to competing successfully for business. However, their process of linguistic assimilation devolves into imitation and parody. In one scene, Gao Ming, the helper, imitates in Beijing Mandarin the different versions of his competitors’ shouts, for example, “走吧上车啦, 上车您了走啦, 上车走了您嘞” (Come on, get aboard, and go). The intonation of his rendition may sound like the eunuchs addressing the Empress Dowager in a popular Qing dynasty television serial, or the waiters serving customers in some Beijing Mandarin television serials such as The World’s Top Restaurant (Tianxia diyilou 天 下第一楼, 2004), a story of “supplementary history” about the famous Beijing-duck restaurant, Quanjude 全聚德.42 This also finely conforms to one of the stereotypes of Beijing Mandarin described by Jiang Wen: “Beijing Mandarin is a language to pander in, to ingratiate oneself in, and to be used in the service industry.”43 Following Gao’s lead, Liu, the driver, deliberately rolls his tongue to imitate the distinctive retroflex pronunciation in Beijing Mandarin. Utterly enjoying their subversive imitation, Gao comments in his Shandong Mandarin intonation, “Beijing Mandarin sounds really awful” (北京话太难听了). On the one hand, this comment empowers the two migrant peasants by degrading the hegemonic 40 Elizabeth Wright, “Riding Towards the Future: Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle,” Senses of Cinema 18 (2001), http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/feature-articles/beijing_bicycle/. 41 Letteri, “Realism,” 80. 42 Gunn analyzed its earlier version, a play with the same title that was staged in Beijing in 1988–1989. Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 117. 43 Jiang Wen and Li Erwei, “Xun Qiang ye xun lixiang,” 368.



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language. Yet on the other hand, it may also manifest the embarrassing, uneasy, or even painful experiences of their urban assimilation, which requires them to renounce their native tongue and selves, and to adopt an unfamiliar, foreign language in order to become the Other. At the same time, the film tries to stratify the migrant peasants. Similar to Gui and his rural friend in Beijing Bicycle, Gao and Liu are also infatuated with girls. Yet, instead of a fake “city girl,” Liu becomes attracted to a real Beijing white-collar girl, Lijuan, who teaches English to business professionals. In his conversations with Lijuan, Liu tries not to use his dialect and even asks her to teach him Beijing Mandarin. Lijuan is not only the object of Liu’s sexual desire, but more importantly, as the “urban Other,” she becomes the mediator of Liu’s desire for the urban.44 When Lijuan later implicitly rejects his proposal, Liu realizes, “you can never be an urbanite” (你永远不是城里人). Even if this realization indicates Liu’s frustrated fantasy and his alienation, it does not “destroy the spell of the metropolitan Other.”45 The film ambiguously suggests that Liu, looking for other mediations, eventually becomes urbanized and assimilated somehow. In the first-person voice-overs at the beginning and end of the film, Liu narrates retrospectively in Putonghua, the urban language he seems to have grasped now. By contrast, Gao never becomes urbanized. Befriending an immigrant girl from Sichuan, he persistently speaks his Shandong dialect. His native language becomes a resource allowing him to locate his dislocated identity not only emotionally but also economically. This is best dramatized in the film when Gao starts to speak to customers in Shandong dialect, “Shangche zoula” (上车走啦), an idea inspired by Zhao Benshan’s popular CCTV comic skits in Northeast Mandarin, which epitomize the folk humor of the peasants in Northeast China (see Chapter 5). Unexpectedly, Gao’s distinctive style becomes the turning point of their business, and even becomes the subject of a feature story in a CCTV show within the film. Going by this evidence, it seems that Gao and Liu’s assimilation into the city and the mainstream media, if any, is achieved through dissimilation. However, their success soon arouses the ire of their jealous local competitors, who scheme against them and eventually drive them out of business. As his hopes are diluted and dashed, Gao realizes 44 The term “urban Other” is borrowed from Jian Xu, “Representing Rural Migrant Workers in the City: Experimentalism in Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Close to Paradise and Bei­ jing Bicycle,” Screen 46.4 (Winter 2005): 446. My analysis of Liu owes much to Xu’s analysis of the triangular relationship between Gui, his rural friend, and the house maid. Ibid., 446–447. 45 Ibid., 447.

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that yelling in Shandong Mandarin is no more than an exotic façade like “putting on a monkey show” (shuahou 耍猴) for the acoustic “gaze” of the urbanites. In the end, while Liu chooses to stay, Gao decides to return to his hometown. At the end, the two young men, drunk, utter their complicated feelings on this rural to urban journey: Liu: Beijing belongs to us, belongs to our people. Gao: Beijing is yours, and not mine. Liu: No. Beijing belongs to our working people. Gao: Beijing is yours. I don’t want it. (I’ll) Give (it to) you.

Liu’s line “Beijing belongs to our working people” (北京属于我们劳动 人民) evokes familiar Maoist vocabulary and ideology. The ending thus becomes a double negation of two modern utopian idealisms, both the economic utopia of the market reform era and the socialist utopia of the revolutionary period, when the working people, including the peasants, were idealized as the authentic backbone of the nation-state. Once again, they render the phase “get abroad and go” in Beijing Mandarin. But this time, the frustration and failure of their urban adventure permeates their tone more than any subversive triumph of clever parody. While the unassimilated, disillusioned Gao Ming has to retreat to the rural to avoid the sense of rootlessness, the urban also starts to retreat to the rural for a different reason—moral redemption—in Feng Xiaogang’s Cell Phone. The film is mainly about how Yan Shouyi 严守一, a TV celebrity famous for hosting a national talk show, To Tell the Truth (You yi shuo yi 有一说一) paradoxically lies to and cheats on his women (wife, mistress, and girlfriend) over his cell phone. Despite its contemporary setting, the film begins with a flashback to 1969, during the Cultural Revolution period, when the thirteen-year-old Yan made his first phone call in his rural hometown in Henan. Speaking Henan Mandarin, Yan is calling his cousin, Niu Sanjin 牛三斤, on behalf of Niu’s newly wed wife, asking whether he will come back home soon. This supposedly private message from the wife to the husband, transmitted by Yan, is publicly broadcast over the loudspeaker to the entire mine region where Niu works. As Kun Qian observes, “this opening nostalgically glorifies the simplicity and transparency of communication in the Mao era,” and “what would now be criticized as the suppression of privacy is idealized as promoting pure and sincere emotions that are innocently shared with the public.”46 In 46 Kun Qian, “Tracing Desire: Cell Phone and the Self-Reflexivity of Contemporary Chi­ nese Media,” MCLC Resource Center Publication, May 2011, http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/ qian.htm.



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this sense, the abandoned socialist utopia or rural countryside, which was “consistently idealized as the site of the authentic Chinese nation,”47 is reidealized and reinvented as a moral utopia (not) interrupted by history in post-socialist China. If Feng’s earlier film Sigh (Yisheng tanxi 一 声叹息, 2000) is obsessed with exhibiting the terror accompanying the extramarital affairs of a middle-aged man in contemporary urban China, in Cell Phone Feng becomes more purposeful and tries to find a solution for the ubiquitous moral bankruptcy of technology-charged urban society. The rural and the past become the remedy to rescue the urban and the present. When Yan left his hometown in rural Henan and abandoned his native tongue, indulging himself in the Putonghua-speaking urban lifestyle, he also lost his honesty and fidelity, the very virtues still preserved among his Henan Mandarin–speaking grandmother, cousins, and local villagers. Only near the end of the film, after Yan returns to his hometown yet misses the chance to take a last look at his dying grandmother, does his conscience prick him, and he throws his cell phone into the funeral pyre in disgust. The film largely makes a neat binary distinction between local language, represented by Henan Mandarin, which is associated with the rural past, and Putonghua, embodying the urban present. Yet another aesthetic use of local language is manifested in the Sichuan Mandarin spoken by the Professor Fei Mo 费墨, a pretentious and hypocritical intellectual who serves as the executive producer of Yan’s talk show. To have an intellectual speak dialect is a sharp deviation from the conventional image of the standard Putonghua-speaking cultural elite in media productions in Beijing.48 Always speaking in a slow-paced tone, this cultural elite figure utters the most sophisticated and incisive observations on the television show’s proceedings. For example, in a comic-ironic meeting scene constantly interrupted by phone calls, Fei warns, “they are no longer handsets (shouji), they have become hand grenades (shoulei 手雷).” In another scene, when his own illicit love affair is exposed, he sighs, “The agricultural society is better.” The irony arises as these thematic comments are rendered not in Putonghua, endowed with cultural and symbolic capital, but rather in dialect, usually conceived of as lacking cultural capital. Moreover, when asked about choosing Sichuan Mandarin for this character, Feng said that many senior army officers he encountered during his military service in the 1980s spoke Sichuan Mandarin. “I feel, on the one 47 Xu, “Representing Rural Migrant Workers in the City,” 435. 48 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 115, 129–135.

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hand, Sichuan Mandarin sounds condescending; on the other hand, it’s full of wisdom and makes you feel close.”49 So the military power associated with Sichuan Mandarin seems to be transformed into cultural power while simultaneously undercutting the supposed cultural authority of the character. In this way, Sichuan dialect becomes the perfect language for Fei Mo, a “pseudo-cultural figure” (wei wenhuaren 伪文化人) the director attempted to portray. Furthermore, the fact that behind the scenes the real soul of the program speaks dialect while the show itself is conducted exclusively in Putonghua also illustrates the irony that what society is supposed to have is not what society really has. Jason McGrath finds that the ironic sense of humor featured in Feng’s New Year’s films partly arises from its strong reflexive, meta-cinematic elements, or “playful self-referentiality.”50 But he thinks this feature was replaced by “a much more didactic, moralizing formula”51 in Feng’s later films, including Cell Phone. It is true that Cell Phone is a departure from Feng’s earlier films in many ways. However, I would argue that by featuring a TV host as the protagonist, the film is not short of meta-media comments and reflexivity on the media reality and Feng’s own changes in film style. In a scene when Yan and other hosts are participating in a Putonghua training program, the teacher Shen Xue 沈雪 comments in a heavy Beijing accent that none of the hosts meet the broadcast standard pronunciation yet. She adds, “Some hosts are obviously northerners. Why do they bother to speak a Taiwan-accented Mandarin?” Here, Shen Xue’s didactic tone foreshadows a 2005 SARFT regulation, stipulating that broadcasting hosts should always use a standard Mandarin based on Beijing Mandarin and should stop adopting Hong Kong or Taiwanese slang and accents.52 Yet, interestingly, Shen’s earnest criticism is flippantly interrupted twice by Liu Yiwei 刘仪伟, who at that time actually hosted a real CCTV show, Everyday Cooking (Tiantian yinshi 天天饮食), with a strong Sichuan Chengdu accent. The discrepancy

49 Sang Qin 桑琴, “Feng Xiaogang kuangchui Shou Ji: ta zhishao neng da liushi fen” 冯 小刚狂吹《手机》: 它至少能打60分 [Feng Xiaogang brags about Cell Phone: It can get a score of 60/100 at least], Changsha wanbao, December 12, 2003. 50 McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, 179. 51  Ibid., 197. 52 As stipulated on September 10, 2005 by the SAFFT, broadcasting hosts and hostesses should always use standard Mandarin Chinese and refrain from Hong Kong or Taiwanese slang and accents. Edward Cody, “On Chinese Television, What’s Cool Is No Longer Cor­ rect,” Washington Post, September 29, 2005.



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between what is expected by the state-run media and the actual media industry is revealed. In another scene, Feng seems to examine his outstanding linguistic trademark, Beijing Mandarin, and its privileged relationship with the national language in a self-mocking and self-reflexive way. Shen Xue, now Yan’s girlfriend, tells a joke mocking the bumpkin-like Henan people in a Henan accent, but Yan immediately rebuts: We Henanese are not that silly. If it were the Song Dynasty, it would be we Henanese who train your pronunciation. Once you turn on the TV, all of the hosts would have to speak Henan Mandarin. Up to the national leader Emperor Huizong and down to the prostitute Li Shishi, everyone would speak Henan Mandarin. And you know what? At that time Beijing Mandarin was no more than a barbarian language (huyu 胡语). Do you know where the phrase “to talk nonsense” (huyanluanyu 胡言乱语) comes from?

Yan’s words evoke Derrida’s deconstructive attitude toward language and text: “All is flux. . . . All hierarchies, power, and constructs are shown to contain the traces of différance, of their own overthrow, negation, destruction.”53 Just as the hegemonic status of a language is unstable and contingent, so are the dynamics between the rural and the urban, the margin and the center. Considering that today’s rural Henan was the site of the highly urbanized capital of the Northern Song dynasty, Kaifeng, what can be expected for the future of today’s capital, Beijing? The romanticized view of the rural and the primitive mediated by local language carries over into Feng’s next film, A World without Thieves. It tells of a young migrant peasant worker, Shagen 傻根 (Stupid Root), who, carrying 60,000 yuan on his way back home, becomes the target of two gangs of thieves. One gang, the duo Wang Bo (played by Andy Lau 刘德 华) and Wang Li (played by Rene Liu Ruoying 刘若英), are gradually so touched by his simplemindedness and honesty that Wang finally sacrifices his life to help realize Shagen’s dream of a world without thieves. Again, the homely, naive, and muddle-headed peasant speaking Hebei Nanhe Mandarin becomes the agent of spiritual salvation for the seasoned master pickpockets who speak English and the trendy Hong Kong Cantonese or Taiwanese-accented Mandarin. It is true, as Rui Zhang notes, that the protagonists in Feng’s films since Sign become those big shots

53 Andrew Horton, introduction, in Horton, ed., Comedy/Cinema/Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 8.

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rather than remaining the little characters of his earlier films.54 However, consistent with Feng’s redemptive aesthetic, it is still the little characters who become the saviors of the big shots, so the triumph of the little characters is still celebrated. Another change in Feng Xiaogang’s recent films noted by scholars is a shift in genre. While his earlier New Year’s films are typical romantic comedies, his later ones include what are regarded as “family dramas” or “pedagogical dramas” (Sigh, Cell Phone, and A World without Thieves), a martial arts film (Banquet [Ye yan 夜宴, 2006]), and a melodrama on catastrophe (Aftershock).55 Furthermore, many of the films discussed in this section are often categorized as comedies or “pan-comedies” ( fan xiju 泛喜剧),56 albeit laced with ironic and even tragic overtones. The littlecharacter protagonists, often played by celebrity comedians (e.g., Feng Gong, Ge You, and Zhao Benshan) are represented in a comic mode as cheerful and optimistic. Nevertheless, it is widely recognized that it was Feng’s 1997 Part A and Part B that initiated the new comedy-dominated genre of New Year’s films, which reached its climax in 2000 when about nine films were shown under this rubric, including Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times. Yet with Feng’s recent style change, the New Year’s comedies, once much defined by Feng’s comic style—“romantic comedy combined with an ironic sense of humor and a great deal of metacinematic play”—also largely came to a standstill.57 In the post–Feng Xiaogang era, a new wave of comedy films emerged ushered in by Ning Hao’s Crazy Stone in multiple local languages.58 Grotesque Realism in Crazy Stone and the New Development of the Comedy Genre The story of Crazy Stone revolves around a priceless jade stone discovered in a formerly state-owned handicraft factory that is facing bankruptcy in downtown Chongqing. The jade stone becomes the focus of three groups with their own distinctive accents. The first is the factory’s security team, 54 Rui Zhang, The Cinema of Feng Xiaogang, 138–141. 55 Braester, “Contemporary Mainstream PRC Cinema,” 178; McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, 197. 56 Rao Shuguang, Zhongguo xiju dianying shi, 266. 57 Ibid., 197. 58 The film was shown nationwide on June 30, 2006, so it was not a New Year’s film, as Yomi Braester mistakenly notes. Braester, “Contemporary Mainstream PRC Cinema,” 178.



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led by Bao Shihong 包世宏, speaking Chongqing Mandarin, who are assigned to protect the treasure by the factory head, Xie Qianli 谢千里, also speaking Chongqing Mandarin. The second is a gang of three thieves: Daoge 道哥, speaking Hebei Mandarin; Xiaojun 小军, speaking suburban Beijing Mandarin; and Heipi 黑皮, speaking Shandong Qingdao Mandarin. The third is a professional thief from Hong Kong, Mike, speaking Cantonese or Putonghua with a strong accent, who is hired by the real estate developer, the CEO Feng 冯董, who speaks Putonghua with a southern accent, and his assistant, Qin Fengshou 秦丰收, speaking in Chengdu Mandarin. The story is complicated by the character Xie Xiaomeng 谢 小萌, the son of the factory head who, seeking to impress girls, is the first to steal the stone and replace it with a fake one. A native speaker of Chong­qing Mandarin, the girl-crazy Xie sometimes speaks Putonghua with a Cantonese accent in order to impress women. Besides these main characters, there are minor characters speaking Tianjin Mandarin, Shandong Jinan Mandarin, and Shaanxi Mandarin. The story thus unfolds in a web woven by multiple narratives in multiple dialects and accents. The multiplicity of local languages employed in this film is reminiscent of Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia and his theory of grotesque realism, which I applied in Chapter 5. When asked about the film’s location, Ning Hao said that Chongqing, as China’s newest municipality (created in 1997), is rapidly developing. He did not choose his hometown, Taiyuan in Shanxi, where development has just started slowly, or Beijing or Shanghai, where development has largely been institutionalized.59 In this sense, Chongqing becomes the unfinished, open, and becoming “grotesque body” in China’s transition toward modernization, privatization, urbanization, and globalization. The film is obsessed with the “lower bodily stratum.” In the opening scene, Bao, suffering from prostatitis, is seeking help in the hospital. During the film, there are abundant scenes taking place in rancid bathrooms. Indeed, the jade stone, the point of origin for the entire story, is discovered in a toilet. The Buddhist temple, where the gem is exhibited and where the (anti-)theft primarily takes place, becomes a “public toilet,” as Bao roars, now incensed by the problems of guarding the stone. In this grotesque location, the heteroglot speech styles interact and conflict with one another; they are “filled with the carnival spirit, transform[ed

59 Interview with Chai Jing 柴静, host of the CCTV show “Xinwen huiketing” 新闻会 客厅 (People in the news), August 8, 2006. The text version is available at http://ent.sina .com.cn/v/m/2006-08-08/23491191876.html.

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into] their primitive verbal functions, [and] acquire a general tone of laughter.”60 In the films discussed in the previous section, language use largely marks the boundary between the urban and the rural, the insider and the outsider, and the little characters and the big shots. However, in this film, any neat binary boundary or hierarchy is about to be blurred, disturbed, and destabilized. The use of language in characterization fully demonstrates the characteristic logic Bakhtin identifies in carnival laughter, “the peculiar logic of the ‘insider out,’ of the ‘turnabout,’ of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties, humiliations, [and] profanations.”61 First there is the Chongqing Mandarin that Bao and his team members speak in the collapsing factory. Although they are urban residents, they are rather provincial. This is first and foremost manifested by their local Chongqing colloquialisms, coupled with details such as Bao’s mistaking Nikon for Nike, and the choice of background music for the jade exhibition, which is the theme song of a 1980s telenovela, The Legend of a Rare Stone (Muyushi de chuanshuo 木鱼石的传说), thematically appropriate but hilariously out of date in the 2000s. Moreover, although these factory employees belong to the urban little-character stratum, they can hardly be the savior of the “evil” big shots due to their own limited talents and defects. Having received some professional training in the police academy, Bao speaks a language featuring military strategies, such as “subdue or intimidate the enemy without fighting” (敲山震虎), “ascend a height to control the low ground” (高灯下亮), and “there can never be too much deception in war” (兵不厌诈). However, his strategies never actually work, and the jade is stolen behind his back again and again. As an urban resident, he accurately senses that “the floating population is the biggest hidden threat” (流动人口是最大的隐患). However, he mistakenly suspects that the local migrant rural workers, bangbang 棒棒 (shoulder-stick porters), would scheme to steal the stone. He uses the cant of the local underworld Paoge 袍哥, “Bobber brothers never go around shitting all over / Bobber brothers never break their promise” (袍哥人家绝不拉稀 摆带), to win them over, but it is ironically yet essentially equated with the “authoritarian word”62 by the bangbang, who mistake him for the chengguan 城管 (the thuggish city management officers who often abuse 60 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 17. 61  Ibid., 11. 62 This term, as opposed to “dialogue,” is borrowed from Krystyna Pomorska’s foreword to Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, x.



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the bangbang), who are sarcastically “enforcing the law with civility” (文明执法 wenming zhifa). And indeed when Bao catches Mike by the end, he utilizes the method he foreshadows earlier in the film, “Who cares about wenming zhifa? Just splash some white lime on his face.” Second, the two groups of Chongqing outsiders—the real “hidden threat”—speak local languages. One group is the gang of three migrant thieves led by Daoge. Their regional accents clearly mark their outsider identity, if not their rural/urban identity. This is particularly telling when their collaborative swindle on a subway fails, as the local Chongqing passengers are already alert to the threat from the “floating population” and quickly flee from them. On the one hand, they are clumsy, bumbling, and coarse. The foul-mouthed Heipi thinks the casual wear company Baleno (班尼路) is quite a “brand” (牌子), a brand which was actually out of fashion by 2006 when the film was made. The Daoge’s very name has an ambiguous meaning and sound; it means “big brother of the underworld, the Way, or the morality,” but it sounds like “dog” in English, a term insulting to a person in Chinese. However, on the other hand, these minor criminals, particularly Daoge, often utter the jargon of upper-middleclass professionals, such as “human quality” (素质), “career” (事业), “professional” (专业), “high tech” (高科技), “IQ” (智商), “moral quality” (人格), and “morality” (道德). The mismatch between their bodies and their language reveals the “world inside out”63 and aroused much laughter among audiences. The other outsider is represented by the professional cat burglar Mike. This “international master thief ” (国际大盗) with an English name is nevertheless a decidedly local criminal from Hong Kong.64 Still, this figure reminds us of the façade of the global: the high-tech skit including the Sandisk memory card, the reference to Mission Impossible as he descends from the ceiling attached to a rope, the Western classical music he listens to in the car, and his professionalism, a sort of working ethos of the global economy. However, in this film the global is no match for the local. Mike’s burglary tools are stolen by the three thieves immediately after he arrives on the local scene; he is hindered from stealing the stone by the too-short rope he bought from a local “unscrupulous

63 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 11. 64 According to Yue Xiaojun 岳小军, one of the scriptwriters, the thief was originally portrayed as a man from New York City. Li Jun 李俊, “Shitou dao Xianggang piaofang bu fengkuang, yuyan zhang’ai shi zuida yinsu” “石头”到香港票房不疯狂 语言障碍是最大 因素 [Crazy Stone is not crazy in Hong Kong; the biggest obstacle is language], Shanghai qingnianbao, August 21, 2006.

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merchant” (奸商); he becomes stuck in the AC vent tunnel due to his sticky outfit, again bought in the local market; he inadvertently shoots his employer; and finally he is caught by Bao, who employs a very primitive method devoid of any technology whatsoever. Mike’s catchphrase is a local Cantonese expletive, “damn it, fuck” (我顶你个肺), which he utters every time he is stuck, frustrated, or despairing. Nonetheless, the defeat of the global is not necessarily the triumph of the local. Despite the fact that the three thieves become somewhat “globalized” with Mike’s equipment, they end up stuck in a sewage tunnel (Heipi), caught by the police (Xiaojun), or killed in a motorcycle accident (Daoge). As always, the film both affirms and negates, or neither affirms nor negates. Third, Putonghua has nothing to do with its commonly associated cultural prestige, but rather becomes an affectation, either as a language of romance or as a language of economic exploitation.65 Putonghua is mainly spoken by two characters, Xie Xiaomeng and the CEO Feng. Xie speaks Putonghua when courting girls. Disguising himself as a photographer with an art certificate from Hong Kong, he introduces himself to a girl he wants to hook up with (actually Daoge’s girlfriend) on the aerial cableway in Chongqing. 我叫谢小萌, 叫我查尔斯好了。每当我从这个角度看这个城市的时候, 我就强烈地感觉到, 城市是母体, 而我们是生活在她的子宫里面。 I’m Xie Xiaomeng, or just call me Charles. Every time I look at the city from this perspective, I strongly feel, the city is the mother’s body, and we all live in her uterus.

His literary statement rendered in Putonghua pretends to sound artistic, metropolitan, or even profound. Although it is pressed into service by Xie as a language of romance to impress his intended female listener, Putonghua is derided as the language of the “hooligan” (流氓), as the two local women passengers disdainfully say in Chongqing Mandarin. For this character, Putonghua is also the language of perversion, deceit, 65 Gunn analyzes the use of Putonghua as an affectation in the Chongqing-Manda­ rin sitcom Hot Air (Kong lechui 空了吹, 1999). Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 151–152. A similar aesthetic use of Putonghua can be found in a DV film, Love with Mandarin (Yong Putonghua tan lian’ai 用普通话谈恋爱, 2008), by a graduate of Qingdao Agricultural Uni­ versity. In this short film, the protagonist, Li Ersuo 李二锁, a college student, decides to give up his native rural Shandong dialect, the language he uses to communicate with his rural girlfriend over the phone. Refashioning himself as an urbanite with an English name, “Michael,” Li starts to court a city girl in his class with his new language of romance, an affected Putonghua, borrowing his sweet talk from popular romance drama series. Yet his new romance is doomed, together with his feigned urban identity.



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and trickery. When he schemes to beg his father for money, he speaks his native Chongqing Mandarin, the same language as his father. But once he prevails, the wayward son comments on his furious father in Putonghua: “He’s lost his reason” (失去理智了). In the ensuing phone call to his pal in the factory’s restroom, he speaks Putonghua with a strong Hong Kong Cantonese accent as he reveals his tricks for seducing women. 搞定没, 要浪漫, 先浪费啦, 冇钱怎么抠女啊？没钱, 问你老爹要啦, … 与 daddy 斗其乐无穷… 好了, 不同你讲 (gang) 啦, 我还在开会呢 All set? To be romantic, be extravagant first. How to hit on a girl without money? No money? Ask your daddy . . . To struggle against daddy is an endless joy . . . Ok, it’s time. I’m now having a meeting.

When these words are unwittingly overheard by his father, Putonghua exposes and discloses itself as an affectation, deceit, and fraud. The CEO of the Global Development Company, Feng, usually speaks Putonghua with a southern accent. His undisputed authority is built on admonishing, blaming, and abusing his assistant, Qin. For Feng, Putong­ hua is a language of aggressive exploitation. This business tycoon uses the saying “The wolf eats meat, and the dog is left to eat shit” (狼吃肉, 狗吃 屎) to illustrate the rules of survival in today’s market economy. When negotiating with Xie Qianli to buy the land on which the factory stands, he discursively legitimates his illegal practice of gentrification: when Xie uses the word “set to eat up” (吃定) in Chongqing Mandarin, Feng corrects him and explains in Putonghua: “It’s not ‘annexation’ 兼并, but ‘cooperation’ 合作.” In the press conference announcing the deal, Feng continues this rhetoric in his public speech, using the official lingo of China’s urban and economic development such as “deep collaboration” (深度合作) and “keep developing this great land” (继续开发这片热土), without a single word explicating the property purchase. Yet, back behind the scenes, his abuse of Qin, both verbal and physical, for his ineptness during this transaction ends with a local Chongqing expletive, “go to shit, fuck off ” (找个 cuancuan). Because Feng has always spoken in Putonghua before, his utterance of the dialect expletive directly controverts the audience’s expectations. According to Freud, this “slip of the tongue” reveals “the concurrence, or interference, of two different intentions of speech with one another.”66 The “intention” rendered in the vulgar dialect may exclude, distort, or modify the “intention” in the refined Putonghua. The “slip of the

66 Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis, 40.

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tongue” not only makes it unclear whether Feng may be another “insider out” like Xie Xiaomeng, but more substantially, it powerfully belies the affectations of Feng’s Putonghua and his real estate business. When Qin later tries to revenge himself on Feng, he reveals that what Feng has done in the past couple of years is “enough to serve a life sentence eight times.” Behind the spectacle of state-approved and -promoted real estate development, which may even reflect a global ambition (as indicated in the company’s name), is in fact an illegal gangster world full of underhanded bribery, cunning theft, and callous murder. This is the essential principle of grotesque realism: degradation and debasement. Crazy Stone was a huge market success. With an investment of RMB 3 million from Andy Lau’s Asian New Director initiative program, it reaped RMB 2 million in the first three days after its national release on June 30, 2006, RMB 6 million in the first week, and over RMB 23 million in total box office gross in mainland China. The film became a milestone as it marked the emergence of a new business model in the domestic commercial film industry, the so-called low-budget comedy films, which usually feature little-character protagonists, the use of multiple local dialects, and a “web of life” plot or multithreaded narrative. This new genre of comedy was viewed as a niche capable of competing with imported Hollywood films and state-subsidized main-melody blockbusters. It was favored particularly by young filmmakers as an alternative to underground filmmaking because it brought recognition in the film world. The commercial success of Crazy Stone spawned a series of dialect comedy films, for example, Chen Daming’s 陈大明 One Foot Off the Ground ( Jiquanbuning 鸡犬不宁, 2006) in Henan Mandarin, Ma Liwen’s 马俪文 I Am Liu Yuejin (Wo jiao Liu Yuejin 我叫刘跃进, 2007) in Henan Mandarin, and Wang Yuelun’s 王岳伦 costume film Almost Perfect (Shi quan jiu mei 十全九美, 2008) in a mishmash of dialects and accents. In 2009, about one-third of domestic films (around forty films) were marketed as “comedy” and shown in cinemas nationwide, including Ning Hao’s Silver Medalist (Fengkuang de saiche 疯狂的赛车), again in multiple dialects; A Gan’s Happiness in Xi’an Mandarin; Guan Hu’s Cow (Douniu 斗牛) in Shandong and Shaanxi Mandarin; and Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop (Sanqiang pai’an jingqi 三枪拍案惊奇) featuring Northeastern Mandarin. Bakhtin’s theory has a broad application to contemporary Chinese culture, particularly in the genre of comedy, but it is not always applicable. As noted, recent comedies often feature little characters, for example, the unpaid factory workers and petty thieves in Crazy Stone, the middle-aged performers of a disbanded local Henan opera troupe in One Foot off the



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Ground, the migrant cook Liu Yuejin in I Am Liu Yuejin, and the migrant junk collector of Xi’an, Liu Gaoxing, in Happiness, which was adapted from Jia Pingwa’s novel in 2007. However, these lower-class protagonists are unlikely to be the people Bakhtin positively and seriously envisioned to possess the potential for revolution against the official ruling class and culture. Beijing University professor Li Yang 李阳 finds that both Crazy Stone and I Am Liu Yuejin present two opposite ends of the social spectrum: the incapable and emasculated lower class (Bao Shihong and Liu Yuejin) and the vicious and callous real estate tycoon upper class (CEO Feng and Yan Ge 严格 in I Am Liu Yuejin), yet both are portrayed as if refracted through the gaze of cinematically absent middle-class spectators. In these games of searching, the virtual signifier (a gem or USB drive in I Am Liu Yuejin), following the logic and ideology of the middle class, the signified or the social reality of either the lower class or the upper class is no more important; both groups are destratified as an “ideological fantasy” (Li Yang borrows Žižek’s term) to be consumed by the middle class.67 Based on audience survey statistics, Yang Liu 杨柳 further specifies the “middle-class audience” as young people between twenty and thirty years old, with stable incomes and higher education, mostly white-collar workers or students.68 Similarly, Zhang Yiwu 张颐武 notices the dramatic change in the demography of film audiences in China. The main audience for (comedy) films is no longer the general population but young people, whom he specifies as the urban youth of the post-1980s generations, those who have been trained as sophisticated viewers by watching films on the Internet and who are big fans of Hu Ge’s 胡戈 online parody of Chen Kaige’s film Promise (Wuji 无极, 2005), “The Murder over a Steamed Bun” (“Yige mantou yinfa de xue’an” 一个馒头引发的血案, 2005).69 In examining the online parody subculture (egao 恶搞) exemplified by Hu Ge’s work, scholars such as Yongming Zhou and Daria Berg on the one hand draw upon Bakhtinian concepts of the carnivalesque and explore the

67 Li Yang, “Youxi: liudong de xiandaixing—cong “Fengkuang de shitou” dao “Wo jiao Liu Yuejin” 游戏: 流动的现代性——从《疯狂的石头》到《我叫刘跃进》[Game: The modernity of fluidity—from Crazy Stone to I Am Liu Yuejin], Yishu pinglun 3 (2008): 54–56. 68 Yang Liu, “Xiaojie yu egao de kuanghuan” 消解与恶搞的狂欢——国产小成本 喜剧电影与青年亚文化 [The carnivalesque in deconstructing and parodying: Domes­ tic low-budget comedy films and youth subculture], Beijing dianying xueyuan xuebao 2 (2010): 27. 69 Zhao Juan 赵娟, ed., “Xinzuo pingyi: Fengkuang de shitou” 新作评议:《疯狂的石 头》[Discussion on new movies: Crazy Stone], Dangdai dianying 5 (2006): 19.

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subversive power of parody to challenge authority.70 However, on the other hand, as Yongming Zhou, Haoming Gong, and Xin Yang note, the online parody “does not have a clear political agenda and cannot turn into any activism,” therefore the subversion has its own limits.71 It is true that the young Internet generation has become the main segment of the Chinese comedy film audience. As the film critic Zheng Dongtian 郑洞天 observes, instead of watching on (pirated) DVD and/or online, many young audience members chose to go to theaters to watch Crazy Stone in order to laugh together72 or to seek “collective laughter” in the Bakhtinian sense. Yet at the same time, the subversion enacted in this “sanctioned social release” can also be viewed as a youth subculture associated with the Internet culture. Moreover, recent comedy films show another new direction in the development of Chinese cinema: localization or regionalization. As Zhang Yiwu notes in the context of the globalization of Chinese cinema, recent comedy films are rather highly localized, dwelling upon the details of daily local life. The decoding of much of the humor depends on everyday life experience and knowledge gained while living in mainland China. He projects that these films have great potential as the film market develops in China’s mid-sized cities, small-sized cities, and counties.73 In an interview, Ning Hao said that localization, particularly with respect to characterization, is what his team discussed most in scripting Crazy Stone.74 His film is often accused of imitating the style of Guy Ritchie’s 1998 heist film Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. As a BFA graduate, Ning did not deny the influence of Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, and Emir Kusturica, among others. But he rather regards this stylistic similarity as a generic convention,75 as the “web of life” plot is the best option for him to tell a crazy story in a crazy city about the “reality of the crazy developing China.”76 Yet despite the film’s national commercial success, there is actually a regional imbalance in the cinema market. Sichuan, Beijing,

70 Haoming Gao and Xin Yang, “Digitized Parody: The Politics of Egao in Contemporary China,” China Information 24.1 (2010): 4, 7. 71 Ibid., 7. 72 Zhao Juan, “Xinzuo pingyi: Fengkuang de shitou,” 19. 73 Zhang Yiwu, “Xiaochengben xiju de qianshi jinsheng” 小成本喜剧的前世今生 [The past and present of low-budget comedy films], Beijing dianying xueyuan xuebao 2 (2010): 4. 74 Zhao Juan, “Xinzuo pingyi: Fengkuang de shitou,” 5, 18. 75 Ibid., 18. 76 “Young director’s heist flick steals Chinese hearts,” China Daily, August 7, 2006.



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and Guangdong were the top-grossing areas during the first two weeks after Crazy Stone’s release; by contrast, the film received just a lukewarm reception in Hong Kong and Shanghai.77 The use of local language may not be the most decisive factor contributing to this market imbalance, considering the different audience responses from Guangzhou and Hong Kong; in both places Cantonese is spoken. But local language always plays a role in the distribution of dialogue-based comedy films. Feng Xiaogang’s earlier New Year’s comedies with a strong Beijing flavor mostly appealed to northern audiences. Around one-third of the total box office revenue of Part A and Part B came from the Beijing area.78 Feng’s later films, such as Big Shot’s Funeral, A World without Thieves, and Banquet, showed a conscious effort to attract a broader national audience and sometimes a transnational audience. Taking into consideration the national market, another New Year’s comedy, Family Tie (Kaoshi yijia qin 考试一家 亲, 2000), which is set in Shanghai, offered the lead roles of a Shanghainese couple to two Beijing comedians, Song Dandan and Fu Biao 傅彪. The Guangdong-based producer hoped the combined star power of the northern comedians, coupled with the local Shanghai comedians and the Shanghai setting, would guarantee box office success both in the north and the south. Unlike these New Year’s comedy films, marketed to as broad a national audience as possible, a recent trend in dialect comedy film production is to target a local or translocal audience speaking the same dialect. A case in point is the film No Kidding (Bushi naozhe wan de 不是闹着玩 的, 2010) in Henan Mandarin. Marketed as a “native Henan comedy” (河南本土喜剧), or “made in Henan,” the film cast native Henan actors, was directed by Henan native Lu Weiguo 卢卫国, and was produced by the Henan Film and Television Group and the Henan Film Studio. It is about a village’s film projectionist Cai Youcai 蔡有才, who works hard with other villagers to shoot a film about the Japanese invasion of his 77 Er Dong 尔东, “ ‘Shitou’ zhongpo qianwan guan, ‘haidao’ kuanglan liang yi wu” “石头” 终破千万关 “海盗” 狂揽两亿五 [Crazy Stone reaped over 10 million RMB, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest a quarter billion RMB], http://ent.sina.com. cn/x/2006-07-18/09201162234.html; Zhang Yuhong 张玉洪, “Fengkuang de shitou weihe zai Xianggang yahoo”《疯狂的石头》为何在香港哑火 [Why Crazy Stone failed in Hong Kong], Beijing qingnian bao, August 31, 2006; “Young director’s heist flick steals Chi­ nese hearts,” August 7, 2006. 78 Its national box office revenue was RMB 33,000,000, while the revenue from the Beijing area was RMB 10,500,000. Li Haixia 李海霞, “Feng Xiaogang dianying shichang yanjiu” 冯小刚电影市场研究 [Study on Feng Xiaogang’s film market], Dangdai dianying 6 (2006): 57.

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village during the Sino-Japanese war. As the alter ego of the film’s director Lu, the peasant director Cai in the film-within-the-film delivers abundant meta-commentary about filmmaking. For example, Cai claims the only criteria for recruiting actors is their ability to speak the Henan dialect, yet while attempting to show his film to a national audience, he employs a Putonghua trainer who justifies and even glorifies the use of Henan Mandarin, as it was the dialect of the capital in the North Song dynasty (similar to the situation in Cell Phone); despite the fact that his film is about Japanese atrocities during the war, Cai clarifies that it is not a mainmelody film funded by the government. Although a peasant, Cai takes his hobby of filmmaking seriously, and his catchphrase is “no kidding,” as in the film’s title. In many ways, the film-within-the-film manifests the liminality that director Lu struggled with in making this comedy, a series of boundaries between freedom and control, the main-melody and the commercial, the nonserious and the serious, the comic and the tragic, the local and the national. Nonetheless, this unsophisticated comedy was a box office success in the local Henan market (grossing over RMB 1 million in one month). It prompted the production team to make a sequel called Just for Fun ( Jiushi naozhe wan de 就是闹着玩的, 2012). Besides the local middle-class urban audience, these two films, with their rural theme, also attempted to exploit the market potential in the countryside, targeting the rural audience in Henan and the migrant population in other provinces.79 This trend of regionalization emerged elsewhere as well. The promotion and distribution of the comedy Big Big Man (Da renwu 大人 物, 2011), which was produced by a Chongqing native 杨乐乐 and cast Li Boqing and other Sichuan comedians speaking Sichuan Mandarin, focused on the Sichuan and Chongqing areas. For this low-budget film (less than RMB three million), 80 percent of its box office revenue (RMB ten million total) was from the southwest.80 Similarly, the film Peony Legend ( Jiatianxia 甲天下, 2011) about culture in the middle-China region (zhongyuan 中原) mainly targeted audiences in Henan, Hebei, Shaanxi, and Shanxi. As the director Wei Dahang 魏大航, a Henan native, claimed, “Rather than hastily showing a film in the cinemas nationwide and having 79 Sina Henan 新浪河南, “Bushi naozhe wande piaofang guo baiwan, zheng chouhua di’erbu bentu dianying”《不是闹着玩的》票房过百万 正筹划第二部本土电影 [No Kidding reaped over 1 million RMB, planning to shoot a second native Henan film], http:// henan.sina.com.cn/news/2010-04-22/185321927.html. 80 Ni Zifang 倪自放, “Jinchun xiaochengben dianying quyuhua fangying cheng qushi” 今春小成本电影区域化放映成趋势 [The trend of regionalization in low-budget films this spring], Qilu wanbao, March 29, 2011.



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it withdrawn [due to poor box office performance] in one day, it’s better to give up other regions and focus on one region, running for a couple of months. . . . Cultivating finely and deeply the local market is key to a film’s box office.”81 While there is a strong trend for Chinese films, particularly in the martial arts genre, to strive for a global or transnational film market, these low-budget films mark a turn toward regionalization, exploring the regional market and targeting the subnational local audience. Finally, also on the issue of audience reception, in Chapter 7 I examined the inauthenticity in Jia Zhangke’s employment of dialect in his Hometown Trilogy and briefly discussed the reception of the films among a stratified audience (local audience, national audience, and international audience). Unlike the underground and independent films that are generally inaccessible to the mass domestic audience, audience reception becomes a more salient and complicated issue in mainstream films that are shown publicly in cinemas. While the local languages in Jia’s and many underground films are virtually nonsensical to most Chinese audiences if presented without subtitles, the accented Mandarin varieties in mainstream films are largely intelligible to a national audience. Thus local language is not used to achieve an aesthetic effect by replacing the clarity of theatrical speech, as Jia purposedly did in his In Public. While Jia mainly asked his nonprofessional actors to speak their actual native dialects, many directors of mainstream films require professional actors or celebrities to speak the dialect supposedly spoken in the film for an allegedly realistic effect. A typical example is Gong Li 巩俐, a Shandong native who played a rural woman in Shaanxi in Zhang Yimou’s Story of Qiu Ju. Gong Li spent a couple of months living with the local people and learning the local dialect. Similarly, Fan Wei 范伟, a famous sketch comedian from the Northeast, who plays Yan Shouyi’s Henanese cousin in Cell Phone, “spent several days in Zhengzhou, found a local to record his lines for him, and then practiced them over and over.”82 Guo Tao 郭涛, a Xi’an native who plays Bao Shihong in Crazy Stone, learned Chongqing Mandarin from the local actor who plays Bao’s assistant in the film. Xu Fan, a Hubei Wuhan native and a professional spoken-drama performer, regards learning and speaking a dialect authentically as the most difficult part of playing in a dialect film. However, although the actors’ efforts and 81 Ibid. 82 Meng Jing, “Wuli de fangyan” 无力的方言 [Impotent dialect], posted on May 31, 2010, http://weekly.news365.com.cn/qt/201005/t20100531_2722610.htm. English translation is from Danwei.org, http://www.danwei.org/tv/annoying_fake_accents_on_chine.php.

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their language skills may make their imitated accents sound realistic to most members of a national, nonnative speaker audience, their hastily acquired language sounds artificial, inauthentic, and unbearable to local, native speaker audiences. There are numerous examples. Native speakers of Chongqing Mandarin can immediately detect the outsider status of Guo Tao, the actor playing Bao Shihong in Crazy Stone, by listening to his attempt to render the dialect. Jiang Wen’s Guizhou Mandarin was perceived as jarring in Missing Gun, although his Tangshan Mandarin was acceptable to native Tangshan spectators. The dialect spoken by Ni Ping, a Shandong native who plays the rural teacher in Shaanxi in Pretty Big Feet, was regarded as the biggest defect of the film. For spectators in the Northwest, the female protagonist’s hybrid accent sounds like a pastiche of Shandong Mandarin, Ningxia Mandarin, and Shaanxi Mandarin.83 According to Meng Jing 孟静, a film and TV critic and a Henan native, Xu Fan’s Henan Mandarin in One Foot off the Ground, in which she plays a leading performer in a Henan Opera troupe, “was enough to make your skin crawl.”84 Xu Fan later played the mom, a speaker of Tangshan Mandarin, in Feng Xiaogang’s 2010 blockbuster Aftershock, a story about a family that becomes separated, estranged, and reunited by earthquakes over the span of three decades. Given the immense audience for the film—it earned a recordbreaking RMB 670 million at the box office—the reception of the use of local language was vastly divided, stratified, and complicated. While one quarter of the audience in a Sina survey said the great performances of the movie’s cast moved them the most, Xu and other actors’ nonstandard Tangshan Mandarin evoked strong responses from audiences of native Tangshan speakers. They complained about the actors’ shabby accents, which became sheer torture for them. Someone even made an audio list of Xu’s nonstandard pronunciations in dialogues and the corresponding “standard” versions.85 Even for the nonnative audience, the dialect spoken in the film does not necessarily sound realistic either. The conventional association of dialect with the comedy genre made some spectators think it inappropriate for the actors to speak dialect in 83 Tang Aiming 唐爱明, “ ‘Dajiao’ yubao jinjigui, xiying jiemi ‘meili’ de gushi” “大脚” 欲抱金鸡归 西影解密 “美丽” 的故事 [Pretty Big Feet expected to win Golden Rooster; the Xi’an studio reveals stories from shooting the film], http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2002-10-18/ 1119107206.html. 84 Meng Jing, “Impotent dialect.” 85 From an online post on August 26, 2010, at http://bbs.wps.cn/viewthread .php?tid=21894630&page=1.



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a film about tragedy. Among others, the Beijing critic Ma Weidu 马未都 argued that the characters should rather speak Putonghua for the desired dramatic (tragic instead of comic) effect.86 Indeed, some southern viewers such as those in Guangzhou found Xu’s accent comical and laughable and were reminded of Zhao Lirong’s CCTV comic sketches in Tangshan Mandarin.87 Finally, casting a celebrity as a speaker of rural dialect, an “inversion of star type,” is increasingly becoming a commercial strategy or selling point. For example, there was much media coverage when the Taiwanese actress Lin Zhiling/Chiling 林志玲 spoke a dialect while playing a rural woman in the film Welcome to Shama Town ( Juezhan Shamazhen 决战刹马镇, 2010), which is set in a small town in the northwest. Yet despite help from a dialect teacher, the supposedly “Hebei Baoding dialect” Lin utters is an awkward, unidentified, highly personalized accent with a Taiwanese flavor. For the audience, listening to such a forced, artificial accent can be agonizing, nagging, and painful. This is a double predicament. If actors were to speak their actual dialects or Putonghua, it would violate the principle of cinematic verisimilitude and realism that directors try to achieve. However, if actors cannot speak the diegetic dialects without lapsing into fake accents, they risk the criticism of the audience, particularly the local native speaker audience; in either case they may be accused of inauthenticity.

86 From Ma’s blog on the film, posted on August 1, 2010, at http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/ blog_5054769e0100l6lu.html. 87 Chen Shuang and Xie Yijuan 陈爽 谢奕娟, “Tangshan Dadizhen Guangzhou ling­ dian piaofang chaoguo 50 wan”《唐山大地震》广州零点票房超过50万 [Aftershock reaped over RMB 500,000 in Guangzhou], Xinxi shibao, July 23, 2010.

Chapter NINE

THE UNASSIMILATED VOICE IN RECENT FICTION IN LOCAL LANGUAGES Edward Gunn examined contemporary fiction from mainland China that employs local language through the 1980s and 1990s.1 His major argument is that local languages represent unassimilated, marginal voices. In the fiction of “supplementary history,” rendered in Beijing Mandarin, Shanghai Wu, and Cantonese, urban local languages are associated with an unconventional, oppositional subculture that provides a narrative lying beyond the official master narrative of history. In fiction on “rural themes,” rural local languages, representing a marginalized, irrational, premodern, traditional discourse, are employed to repudiate the central, rational, modern discourse signified by the use of Standard Mandarin. The dialogue between the two discourses not only results in each canceling out the significance of the other but also manifests mutual inadequacy and dependency in providing a holistic representation of human experience. Besides critically examining the aesthetics of local language through a close reading of the texts, Gunn also studies the writers’ awareness of local language as a formal style. Whereas Wang Shuo finally secured an important position in the field of literature through the use of Beijing Mandarin, Hong Ying 虹影 and He Dun 何顿 have achieved stylistic distinction by demonstrating the ability to control both a standard style and a local style. For writers who employ local languages, such as Han Shaogong and Li Rui, dialect writing powerfully demonstrates the insufficiency of a single national language to represent China’s diverse and distinct cultures. As for writers who adopted a Putonghua style, for example Yu Hua 余华, employing standard language is equally a compromise that these authors chose to make after failing to write effectively in their native languages. This chapter tracks new developments since 2000 in fiction that employs local language by focusing on two subgenres: nativist fiction and educatedyouth fiction. A number of established writers of nativist fiction who previously adhered to the Standard Mandarin writing style have begun to experiment with writing novels in their native local ­languages. Examples 1 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 157–188.

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include Mo Yan’s Sandalwood Death (Tanxiangxing 檀香刑, 2001), in Shandong Gaomi 高密 Mandarin; Zhang Wei’s Scandal or Romance (Chouxing huo langman 丑行或浪漫, 2003), in Shandong Dengzhou 登州 Mandarin; Yan Lianke’s Pleasure (Shouhuo 受活, 2004), in Western Henan Mandarin; and Jia Pingwa’s Qin Opera (Qinqiang 秦腔, 2005), in Southeastern Shaanxi Mandarin. In the first part, I discuss these writers’ heightened awareness of local language and show how (a) local language and the rural world continue to constitute a marginal space from which writers critique the modern, urban center; (b) folk opera rendered in local language is rediscovered as an indigenous cultural resource to resist Western influence; and (c) a vanishing rural community is recorded in detail as a memory to be cherished. By comparison, the appreciation of the local in nativist fiction is not shared by writers of recent educated-youth fiction (zhiqing xiaoshuo 知青小说) who provide nostalgic accounts of the “Educated youth go up to the mountains and down to the villages campaign” (zhishiqingnian shangshan xiaxiang yundong 知识青年上山下乡运动), primarily set in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example, Yan Geling’s 严歌苓 novella Celestial Bath (Tianyu 天浴, around 1996),2 Shi Xiaoke’s 石小克 novella First Love (Chulian 初恋, 1998), and Dai Sijie’s 戴思杰 novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Balzac et la Petite Tailleuse chinoise, 2000/2001)3 all employ Sichuan Mandarin, and Yi Ling’s 懿翎 novel To Separate the Sheep from the Goats (Ba mianyang he shanyang fenkai 把绵羊和山羊分开, 2002) uses northern Shanxi Mandarin. I analyze these works and their film adaptations in the second part of this chapter, showing how the texts make a distinction between local villagers’ rural dialects and the Putonghua or urban dialects spoken by sentdown educated youth. The uneducated, traditional, rural local languages are condemned, transformed, ignored, or negotiated by educated urban narrators, thus manifesting a different view of the use of local language in recent nativist fiction.

2 Yan’s novella was probably written before 1996, as it received a literary award in Taiwan in 1996. See Yan Geling’s blog at http://redroom.com/member/geling-yan/blog/ honors-and-awards. 3 The novel, originally written in French, was published in 2000 and became an imme­ diate bestseller in France. It was translated into English in 2001 and into Chinese in 2002. The citations in this study follow the English version.



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Rural Local Languages in Nativist Fiction Since 2000, there has been a growing conscious awareness of local language among Chinese writers. When writing the novel Reams of Rubbish (Yiqiang feihua 一腔废话, 2002), Liu Zhenyun 刘震云 increasingly realized the insufficiency of writing solely in Putonghua, an opinion shared by Han Shaogong and Li Rui.4 As Liu claimed, “the Chinese language has become an obstacle for creative writing. To a large degree, the imagination of the language has been desertized like the riverbeds of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River. It’s so dull and dry that its ability as a life language has been destroyed. This language may be enough for those idealist-type writings, but for my works such as Reams of Rubbish that are supposed to convey a very nuanced state, it’s far from enough.”5 Liu, who realized the problem of using “Chinese language” (here referring to Standard Mandarin) while writing Reams of Rubbish, which is still in the stan­dard style, shifted to local language in his next novel, Cell Phone (Shouji, 2003), from which Feng Xiaogang’s film is adapted.6 As I argued in the previous chapter, both the rural local language (Shanxi Mandarin in the novel) and the primitive, unassimilated rural society were romanticized and idealized as the cure for the ubiquitous moral bankruptcy of technology-ridden urban society. Zhang Wei is famed for writing novels on rural life in his hometown in the northern Shandong peninsula, yet he did not experiment extensively with using his native language, Dengzhou Mandarin, until the appearance of Scandal or Romance in 2003. He describes this first experience as follows: “When I wrote in Dengzhou Mandarin, I experienced a pleasure I have never had before. All kinds of voices of the characters first made my ears ache, and soon brought me an unprecedented pleasure. This is a state I have been dreaming of in my long-time writing career. . . . In some sense, only the dialect is the real language. Fundamentally speaking, literary writing can’t depend on Putonghua, because it’s a compromised language.”7 4 For Han and Li’s opinions and arguments, see Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 171–174, 191–192. 5 Liu Zhenyun, “Zai Xiezuo zhong renshi shijie” 在写作中认识世界 [To know about the world through writing], Xiaoshuo pinglun 3 (2002): 28. 6 Feng’s film was scripted by Liu Zhenyun. In the novel, Yan Shouyi’s hometown was located in Shanxi. Correspondingly, Yan’s townspeople speak Shanxi Mandarin. 7 Han Xiaodong 韩晓东, “Zhang Wei zhiyan kongju youyu chengshi, xungen xiezuo zhiyi gongye wenming” 张炜直言恐惧囿于城市, 寻根写作质疑工业文明 [An inter­ view with Zhang Wei], Zhongguo youzheng bao, June 28, 2003.

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Instead of making a black-and-white distinction between the rural and the urban, as in Liu Zhenyun’s Cell Phone, Zhang’s novel puts the heroine Liu Mila 刘蜜蜡 in a situation that oscillates between them. Liu is a village girl with “big breasts and full hips.” She is inspired to love studying and writing by her school teacher, Lei Ding 雷丁, who is sent down to the village in the 1970s because of his rightist father. Soon after Lei unexpectedly flees the village, Liu is forced to marry Xiaoyoucuo 小油矬, a vicious militia officer in the neighboring village, and experiences one inhuman torture after another. Moved by a strong desire to find her lovers, first Lei Ding, who she later learns drowned while escaping, and later Tongwa 铜娃, whom she meets and becomes separated from during her search for Lei, Liu evades Xiaoyoucuo and the evil captors twice, leading the life of a vagrant for about twenty years until she happens upon Tongwa in the provincial city in the 1990s. Although she speaks in her native Dengzhou dialect, Liu Mila’s vocabulary is that of an educated person. She utters educated words such as shaonian 少年 (17) for “teenager, adolescents” rather than the local words hai’r 孩儿 (41).8 Her language is also that of romantic love, which is most manifest in her continual writings about her relationships with her lovers while on the road. Liu’s language makes a sharp contrast with that of the evil powers, represented by Xiaoyoucuo, his father Laohuan 老獾, and their village head Wuye 伍爷. They may speak the Dengzhou dialect like she does, but their language features local slang, argot, and idioms that connote cruelty, brutality, viciousness, and violence, for example: quan 圈 (lock up), poda 泼打 (to exert oneself in beating), liaojuezi 尥蹶子 (“not obedient,” originally referring to mules or horses giving a backward kick), niao 鸟 (“fuck,” a curse-word prefix), wujian 物件 (referring to human beings as things), titoudaozi kaiding—haoxian 剃头刀子开腚——好险 (lit. “to shave one’s butt with a razor,” very dangerous). Although speaking the same dialect, Liu cannot understand Wuye’s argot term kaca (喀嚓), an onomatopoeic word actually meaning “beheaded” (110). She also rebukes Lao Huan for uttering too many zanghua 脏话 (dirty words) (113). Incompatible and irreconcilable with the dominant linguistic community in the village, Liu has no choice but to leave for the city. Her flight, from another perspective, becomes a process of losing her native language. After being identified as having a Dengzhou accent several times on the

8 In this chapter, for the sake of convenience, citations of page numbers from the dis­ cussed novels are given parenthetically in the text.



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road (135, 137, 157), Liu decides to change her intonation, which at first sounds like that of the foreign missionaries in the old society (166). Later, heading to the provincial city where Lei Ding spent his childhood, Liu works hard to learn the “broadcasting” city language from a parrot—the niaoyu 鸟语 (bird language), as the novel sarcastically describes it. However, the urbanites she encounters in the city are an unfaithful wife, a picky hostess, a subordinate currying favor with the leader, a restaurant boss using waitresses as sex workers, a domineering and unfilial son and daughter-in-law, and an aberrant and hypocritical artist. Experiencing suffering in the city comparable to what she experienced in the village, Liu finally tells Tongwa, the lover she eventually seems to settle with, “let’s speak Dengzhou dialect from today on” (303). However, speaking now with an accent that even her Dengzhou townsmen cannot identify (270), Liu Mila has lost her rural identity and roots. With an accent neither rural nor urban (261), she seems stuck in an impasse with nowhere to turn. Neither the village nor the city is the destination of her journey. If the dialect world in Zhang Wei’s novel has been sullied and made impure so that the heroine cannot return home, the dialect in Yan Lianke’s novel Pleasure constitutes a minimalist utopian world that is free from any ideology and any form of modernity that contemporary society should return to. The novel takes place in a village called Shouhuo in the Palou 耙耧 mountain area of western Henan. The Shouhuo villagers, although physically disabled and handicapped, used to lead a carefree and happy life when they were cut off from the outside world. But after Grandma Maozhi 茅枝婆 leads the village to join the socialist commune in the 1950s, the Shouhuo villagers experience political movements and upheavals one after another. So Grandma Maozhi decides to withdraw the village from the commune, an effort that continues for the next forty years. In the 1990s, Liu Yingque 柳鹰雀, the head of Shuanghuai 双槐 county, to which Shouhuo belongs, plans to build a memorial hall in honor of Lenin to attract tourists as part of his ambitious political dreams. In order to collect money to buy Lenin’s corpse from Russia, he organizes the Shouhuo villagers into two troupes of freak show performers and sends them on a national tour. However, when his frantic dream is destroyed, Liu not only signs the official contract to free Shouhuo from the control of the county, but also joins the Shouhuo community after deliberately crippling himself. One of the most innovative features of the narrative is its “padding” (xuyan 絮言) or authorial glosses, which take the form of footnotes and provide lexical annotations and explanations for certain words in the story

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proper. These lexical entries pertain to the language used exclusively in this community, which only the Shouhuo villagers can understand. So all the footnoted words could be regarded as part of a “dialect,” if that term is broadly defined, as in Han Shaogong’s novel A Dictionary of Maoqiao. However, Yan Lianke seems to have his own definition of “dialect.” Examining the twenty-four words that the writer explicitly denotes as fang­ yan or dangdi fangyan 当地方言 (local dialect), more than half of them are simply about nature and objects, void of history and politics. For example, he has entries for rexue 热雪 (snow in the summer) (3), chudi’er 处地儿 (place) (5), manquanlian 满全脸 (the whole face) (25), dingmen 顶门 (forehead) (184), wogua 倭瓜 (pumpkin) (224), and erguasheng 耳瓜生 (peanut) (224). Having a close relationship with nature and the earth, the Shouhuo villagers value shouhuo (“pleasure,” implying that they seek joy while suffering in the Palou mountain area) (3) and denounce those with a sileng 死冷 (cold and hard) (12) heart and those without erxing 耳性 (i.e., people who forget what shouldn’t be forgotten) (171). By comparison, Yan does not regard words that have complex ideological and political connotations and are associated with a specific historical period as dialect. Such words include shejiao 社教, “aka socialist education movement. This is a specific historical noun. Shejiao ganbu 社教干部 refers in particular to those cadres who are engaged in the socialist education movement” (16); gouliekuan 购列款, which “refers in particular to the special money used to purchase Lenin’s corpse; this is the most frequently used technical word since Shuanghuai county decided to buy Lenin’s corpse” (33–34); and rushe 入社, which “is an abbreviation of a historical expression that only the Shouhuo villagers can understand, a historical story that solely belongs to Shouhuo” (80–86). Yan Lianke’s understanding of dialect as a minimalist language divorced from history and politics, with their overloaded connotations, is most manifest in his footnote for the word titian 梯田: “titian is not a dialect term, but a special noun indicating a historical relic. On the one hand, it refers to the terraced fields; on the other hand, it refers to the revolutionary form embodied in the unprecedented laboring in the ‘Villages Learn from the Dazhai’ movement” (224). In other words, titian is rooted in historical events and its understanding cannot be separated from them. Yan’s concept of dialect in this novel partially echoes Gunn’s analysis of the Putonghua spoken by the character Jigongzuozu 季工作组 in Lao Cun’s 老村 Prurient Earth (Sao Tu 骚土, 1993). As Gunn incisively points out, “the expressions in Putonghua Mandarin are those of a particular moment in history, while the expressions of Yan’gucun [village] are not bounded by historical events, and thus appear



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to endure as the authentic legacy lying outside the official history of the nation.”9 In an interview with Li Tuo 李陀, Yan claims that language is not only a form of expression, but also content in and of itself, an integral part of the story; since dialect has been suppressed by Putonghua to an unprecedented degree, his use of dialect returns language to its normal state.10 “Return” is a major theme of the novel. In analyzing Yan’s fictional world in Pleasure, Jianmei Liu rightly points out that the return to a timeless, useless, traditional utopia is a critical negation of two modern utopian dreams, “both the socialist utopia of the revolutionary period and the economic utopia of the market-reform era.”11 For Yan Lianke, the “return” to dialect and the dialectal utopian world in literary writing also becomes part of his reconceptualization of the definition of literature and literary mode. In the postscript of Pleasure, Yan vehemently condemns the dominant literary mode of realism as the biggest obstacle to the development of literature. He denounces works under the clichéd label of realism as hypercritical, exaggerated, superficial, overly conceptualized, and dogmatic (207–209). This echoes Yu Jian and Wang Shuo’s observation that Putonghua has been a hollow, exaggerated, and overpoliticized language ever since the Maoist era, as I mentioned in Chapter 1. Therefore, the “normal state” that Yan hopes dialect will return his readers to would be a minimalist language that is not as ideologically and politically loaded as Putonghua is in the classic works of socialist realism. If Yan Lianke draws on local language as a reaction to the socialist legacy, in the writing of his novel Tanxiangxing, Mo Yan explores local folk opera rendered in local language as a means of resisting Western literary influence. Like his famous Red Sorghum series, this story also takes place in his hometown, Dongbeixiang 东北乡 in Gaomi county in Shandong. Around 1900, when the Germans are building the Jiaoji railway through the town’s farmland, Sun Bing 孙丙, a master of the local opera form, Mao Qiang 猫腔 (Cat Tune), kills a German railway technician who is sexually harassing his second wife. The German soldiers then take revenge and kill his wife, his two children, and many townspeople. Sun Bing therefore

9 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 178. 10 Yan Lianke and Li Tuo, “Shouhuo: chaoxianshi xiezuo de zhongyao changshi” 《受活》： 超现实写作的重要尝试 [Pleasure: An important attempt at surrealism], Nanfang wen­ tan: 2 (2004): 26. 11 Jianmei Liu, “Joining the Commune or Withdrawing from the Commune? A Reading of Yan Lianke’s Shouhuo,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 19.2 (2007): 8.

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joins the Boxer Rebellion against the Germans. But under pressure from the pro-German Qing government, the county magistrate Qian Ding 钱丁 has to hunt down and arrest Sun Bing, despite the fact that his lover is Sun Bing’s daughter, Meiniang 眉娘. Sun Bing is finally caught and impaled on a sandalwood stake (tanxiangxing). And this cruel death penalty is devised and executed by Meiniang’s father-in-law, Zhao Jia 赵甲, a chief executioner of the court who served the Dowager Empress and General Yuan Shikai 袁世凯 before his retirement. In the postscript to Tanxiangxing, Mo Yan says that this novel is about sound, a book to read with one’s ears (561, 566). One of the two major sounds is the local opera style, Mao Qiang. To a large extent, the novel dwells on an opera with the same title, Tanxiangxing, and many lines from the opera are integrated into the text. Sun Bing and his villagers embody the carnivalesque spirit of folk culture in the Bakhtinian sense. Through the opera and all the folk sounds, the novel depicts a folk world, a primitive, irrational, vigorous, and violent world that transgresses the order the authorities try to maintain. Associated with the folk performing art tradition, the structure of the novel is allegedly inspired by a principle in traditional storytelling that calls for a beginning that is beautiful and interesting like the head of phoenix ( fengtou 凤头), a well-developed middle part like pork tripe (zhudu 猪肚), and a powerful ending like the tail of a leopard (baowei 豹尾). In the beginning and ending parts, the major characters speak out one by one as first-person narrators. According to Zheng Jian 郑坚, this “modern” technique of articulating multiple subjectivities can also be viewed as borrowed from the formal device of role speaking (daobai 道白) in traditional opera performance.12 As for the middle part, in Mo Yan’s own words, “it is seemingly written from an omniscient (third-person) perspective. As a matter of fact, it records a folk legend in a storytelling way” (561). Mo Yan views his return to Chinese folk tradition as a reaction to the reception of Western literary modes. Like most writers in his generation, Mo Yan has been influenced by Western literature and literary theories that were introduced to China in the 1980s. He expressly acknowledges his indebtedness to Faulkner as a source of inspiration.13 He also admits 12 Zheng Jian, “Zai minjian xishuo minjian: Tanxiangxing zhong minjian xushi de jiexi yu pingpan” 在民间戏说民间—《檀香刑》中民间叙事的解析与评判 [On the folk narrative in Sandalwood Death], Dangdai wentan 1 (2003): 68. 13 Mo Yan, “Shuoshuo Fukena zhege laotou’r” 说说福克纳这个老头儿 [To talk about this old fellow Faulkner], Dangdai zuojia pinglun 5 (1992): 63–65. Thomas M. Inge earlier



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that some of his early novels, such as The Yellow-Haired Baby ( Jinfa ying’er 金发婴儿) and Explosions (Qiuzhuang shandian 球状闪电) in the late 1980s, bear strong evidence of influence from magic realism.14 Yet gradually he realized that his writing should be firmly rooted in Chinese folk culture rather than being a derivative imitation of Western models.15 In the postscript to Tanxiangxing, he wrote, “after writing about 50,000 words, I found it had an obvious flavor of magic realism. So I decided to write it again. . . . The richness of my work could be weakened consequently [in rewriting], but in order to maintain more of the pure Chinese folk essence, I made this sacrifice without any hesitation.” He continues, “Chinese novels used to be rooted in the folk singing and talking performing arts. But today, the novels have gradually evolved into a highbrow art which borrows much from Western literature. In this context, I would call my book as a ‘great leap backward,’ and I haven’t stepped backward enough yet.”16 In an interview with Zhang Huimin 张慧敏, he further elaborates his point: “when I said ‘I haven’t stepped backward enough yet,’ I mean that the language in my novel is still mixed with much Western stuff; it’s not as pure as Zhao Shuli’s language. In my future writing, I hope to step backward further and use a really rustic but very vibrant language.”17 Although Mo Yan takes Zhao Shuli as his model, for the critic Zhou Zhixiong 周志雄, Mo Yan’s folkification (minjianhua 民间化) is different from Zhao Shuli’s nationalization (minzuhua 民族化). As Zhou argues, it is true that Zhao tries to avoid Western literary devices so that his novels appear very “Chinese,” but his language is fundamentally the modern, intellectual, Enlightenment discourse.18 Ge Hongbing 葛红兵 shares a similar view. Comparing Mo Yan to Lu Xun, Ge claims that Mo Yan’s folk, “pre-Enlightenment” language amplifies the voices that have been

wrote an article entitled “Mo Yan and William Faulkner: Influence and Confluence,” The Faulkner Journal 6.1 (1990): 15–24. 14 Mo Yan and Wang Yao 王尧, “Cong Honggaoliang dao Tanxiangxing” 从红高粱到 檀香刑 [From Red Sorghum to Sandalwood Death: An interview with Mo Yan], Dangdai zuojia pinglun 1 (2002): 16. 15 On this point, his view echoes that of the earlier roots-seeking movement in vogue in the mid-1980s, but he thinks that the folk culture he tries to explore is less exotic and grotesque than most roots-seeking fiction. Ibid. 16 Mo Yan, Tanxiangxing, 566. 17 Zhang Huimin, “Yong erduo yuedu: yu Mo Yan de duihua” 用耳朵阅读——与莫言 的对话 [To read with one’s ears: An interview with Mo Yan], Shenzhen zhoukan, August 4, 2001. 18 Zhou Zhixiong, “Tanxiangxing de minjianhua yiyi”《檀香刑》的民间化意义 [The significance of the folkification in Sandalwood Death], Mingzuo xinshang 3 (2004): 41–46.

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silenced and obscured by the May Fourth intellectual discourse exemplified by Lu Xun. For example, the executioner Zhao Jia, a character in Mo Yan’s novel depicted as devoted to his career, is analogous to Uncle Kang in Lu Xun’s “Medicine” or Ah Gui in his The True Story of Ah Q, an object to be criticized and condemned rather than a subject who can speak out.19 So for Ge, Mo Yan rediscovers folk culture not only to resist Western influences beginning in the 1980s, but also to challenge the May Fourth tradition that itself had been influenced by the West since the beginning of the twentieth century. Gao Yuanbao 郜元宝 does not totally agree with Ge. He warns of the danger of repudiating all the modern traditions and resorting to one purely premodern tradition. Moreover, he doubts the possibility of returning to the literary styles in fashion prior to the May Fourth period, since the writers at the turn of the twenty-first century, willingly or not, have been exposed to rich and varied linguistic sources across time and space.20 Mo Yan explores folk language and folk culture less to search for a pure national language and national literature and more to establish a distinctive personal writing style. In his interview with Zhang Huimin, Mo Yan said, “I think the biggest pursuit for a writer should be language and style. He should always strive to own a voice different or sort of different from others. This pursuit may have nothing to do with the issue of ‘national language,’ or the Chineseness of their novels. It’s a writer’s own business.” As minjian (folk) became a buzzword for Chinese critics when commenting on Tanxiangxing,21 Mo Yan interpreted this overused term as “stressing individualism.”22 He made this point clear in his interview with Wang Yao: “if a writer can make himself distinguishable from other writers, his writing can be regarded as folk writing.”23 He further criticized the increasingly homogenized leisure literature that began to appear in the 1990s and is obsessed with the details of material life on which the dreams and values of the emergent middle class are established, noting, 19 Ge Hongbing, “Wenzi dui shengyin, yanyu de yiwang he yayi: cong Lu Xun, Mo Yan dui yuyan de taidu shuokaiqu” 文字对声音、言语的遗忘和压抑——从鲁迅、莫言 对语言的态度说开去 [The Chinese character’s forgetting and suppression of sound and parole: Starting from Lu Xun and Mo Yan’s attitude towards language], Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan 3 (2003): 154–165. 20 Gao Yuanbao and Ge Hongbing, “Yuyan, shengyin, fangkuaizi, yu xiaoshuo” 语言、 声音、方块字与小说 [A conversation on the relationship between language, sound, Chinese character and novel], Dajia 2 (2002): 146–151. 21 For the nuances of the term minjian, see Chapter 5, n. 2, above. 22 Zhang Huimin, “Yong erduo yuedu.” 23 Mo Yan and Wang Yao, “Cong Honggaoliang dao Tanxiangxing,” 15.



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“this trendy style appears very elegant. It favors transitional words and those exaggerating adjectives. If there were just a few writers employing this linguistic style, it would be refreshing. But if everyone tries to imitate the style like a swarm of bees, it’s really tiresome.” As such, he views his recourse to folk language and folk opera as a resistance to prevalent writing styles, whether translation style, gangtai style, or the leisure style.24 Similar to Mo Yan, Jia Pingwa also chooses local folk opera as the subject for his novel Qin Opera. But whereas Mo Yan optimistically returned to folk opera in hopes of finding a distinctive style, local opera in Jia Pingwa’s fictional world becomes a sad symbol of a disappearing peasant culture. This epic novel presents a marginalized and vanishing rural community superseded by China’s increasing marketization and urbanization by detailing the everyday life of the Xia family and other villagers in Qingfengjie 清风街 village in southeast Shaanxi for over one year in the late 1990s. Xia Tianyi 夏天义, the long-time village head back in the socialist period, views the land as the center of peasant life. Despite the objection of his nephew Xia Junting 夏君亭, the current village head, who advocates building a farmer’s market, Xia Tianyi calls on villagers to fill in a waste ditch, the Qiligou 七里沟, and transform it into farmable land. Depicted in a tragic heroic light, Xia Tianyi ends up buried under the earth he has been so attached to in a landslide.25 If Xia Tianyi symbolizes the collective socialist tradition, his brother Xia Tianzhi 夏天智 represents the folk culture tradition. For this retired school principal, Qin opera is the spirit of the Qin land and the fundamental feature of local peasants’ daily life. He is so obsessed with folk art that he wishes to use his book on Qin opera masks as a pillow and to have his face covered with opera masks when he dies. He finally dies of cancer, yet it is pitiful that the whole village cannot find enough male laborers to carry his body to the graveyard due to the massive exodus of peasants to the cities. Among the younger generation depicted in the novel, Bai Xue 白雪 (Snow White), the beautiful and kindhearted Qin opera actress, is portrayed as the incarnation of Qin opera. She marries Xia Feng 夏风, the son of Xia Tianzhi and currently a writer in the provincial city. Unlike his wife, the modern-style Xia Feng strongly dislikes Qin opera and intends to find his wife a different job in the city. But Bai Xue insists on staying with her beloved local troupe, although it

24 Zhang Huimin, “Yong erduo yuedu.” 25 Through the character Xia Tianyi, the author seems to be sympathetic to Mao’s socialist narrative, which becomes a local one nonetheless.

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is to be disbanded as traditional opera is gradually being marginalized by modern popular songs. This fundamental disagreement between the two dooms their marriage to failure. Their ultimate divorce, coupled with the birth of a premature, abnormal baby, signals the incompatibility between the modern and the traditional. In the postscript, Jia Pingwa states that this book was written as an epitaph for his vanishing hometown. In remembrance of something he would rather forget, he adopts “a detailed, dense, chronicle-style writing” to record “the trivialities of everyday life” in his hometown Dihuacun 棣华村 in southeast Shaanxi (565). Local language is thus extensively employed to serve a mimetic function. The use of local language is usually limited to dialogue as opposed to narration. Yet a remarkable feature of this novel is that it is largely composed of dialogues. Therefore, Qin Opera makes a much denser use of local language than do most novels allegedly written in a local language, more dense than even Lao Cun’s Prurient Earth. For example, to take a random sample, from page 126 to page 138 there occur around thirty distinctive southeast Shaanxi Mandarin words, among them wai 口外 (that), houpao 后跑 (diarrhea), wang 汪 (spicy), tẽxi 弹嫌 (to dislike, to hold a grudge against), erliuzi 二流子 (hooligan), sigeng 厮跟 (to go together), jiu 蹴 (squat on the heels), pẽmiẽ gidatang 拌面疙瘩汤 (a local porridge made of flour), zengchu maopie 挣出毛病 (to come down with an illness), zhiqi 致气 (to become irritated or annoyed), and gouzi 勾子 (the buttocks or hindquarters of a person or animal). Associated with this colloquial style is a fragmentary, incoherent, and disorganized narration by a madman, Zhang Yinsheng 张引生. As the firstperson narrator, Yinsheng plays an important role as a narrative device. Through his “insane” narration, the 557-page novel chronicles the daily life of as many as 170 characters without a central plot or a unified thread. There are no chapter divisions either. Furthermore, as the narrator identifies himself as a local villager without much education, the novel makes no distinction between the narrated peasant characters’ language and the narrator’s language, which normally would be assumed to be an intellectual one if the I-narrator is an alter ego of the writer. Xia Feng, the writer mentioned above, is the only college-educated intellectual in the novel, but he is relegated to a minor role, narrated about rather than narrating. Thus the novel depicts the totality of a rustic, dialectal world without much intrusion or interference from an assumed authoritarian, intellectual discourse. Following this line, as Gao Yuanbao is quick to point out, the absence of a controlling, dominating narrative, an organized structure,



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and a unified plot reveals the author’s inability to control his writing since the changes in rural life are beyond his power to understand or to interpret. Jia’s response confirms Gao’s observation: “The village I witnessed is too complex for me to fathom. I really feel powerless, and it is painful. As a matter of fact, I tried to grasp something (to comment on or to judge), but I couldn’t.”26 Thus, Jia Pingwa’s experience of the anxiety of losing control compels him to document and record the authentic reality that will soon slide into memory. Lydia Liu evaluates the voice of the madman as a pioneering voice in modern Chinese fiction, and her analysis of Lu Xun’s “A Diary of a Madman” (“Kuangren riji” 狂人日记, 1918) and Zhang Tianyi’s “Notes by an Abnormal Man” (“Jiren shouji” 畸人手记, 1936) is relevant to understanding the madman Yinsheng in Jia’s novel. Liu interprets the insane voice of the I-narrator in Lu Xun’s pioneering story as a Bakhtinian doublevoiced discourse upon which the multiple ironies of the story are based: “a series of reversals that operate on dialogized categories of reason and madness, of sense and nonsense, of cannibalism and humanitarianism, of society and the individual, of complacency and terror, and of classical and colloquial Chinese.”27 In Zhang’s story, set in the 1930s, a period of “confusion about self-identity and about new and old values,”28 the voice of the I-narrator is not as assertive in terms of condemning the Confucian tradition as that of Lu Xun’s madman. As Liu points out, “a group of Chinese intellectuals who have survived the triumph of the New Literary Movement of the first and second decades are no longer content with the black and white division of tradition and revolution, and now turn to the traditional ways of life in hopes of finding more permanent values.”29 Zhang’s narrator finds himself trapped by confusion, uncertainty, and ambiguity after returning to his native village. Experiencing a comparable cultural and social transition in the reform years, Jia Pingwa contributes to the tradition of the insane narrative voice with the image of the madman Yinsheng. Compared with Lu Xun’s double-voiced narrator and Zhang’s split-identity narrator, Yinsheng experiences a different mental anxiety 26 Jia Pingwa and Gao Yuanbao, “Guanyu Qinqiang he xiangtu wenxue de duitan” 关于《秦腔》和乡土文学的对谈 [A dialogue on Qin Opera and nativist literature], Shanghai wenxue 7 (2005): 61. 27 Lydia Liu, “The Politics of First-Person Narrative in Modern Chinese Fiction,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International [U.M.I.], 1990), 45. 28 Ibid., 59. 29 Ibid., 60.

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and tension. On the one hand, he shows an unambiguous commitment to upholding tradition, either the folk tradition or the socialist tradition. As the novel begins, he is obsessed with Bai Xue: “if I’d say it, the woman I most like is Bai Xue.” He is also one of the two villagers who follow Xia Tianyi to fill in the Qiligou. On the other hand, he is helpless and powerless in the face of the unavoidable demise of tradition. This is the dilemma he and the author face. Therefore, in the novel, Yinsheng’s affection for Bai Xue results in his own self-mutilation. She is sympathetic to him but nothing more. Yinsheng cannot save her, her marriage, nor the declining Qin opera. Neither is he capable of organizing the villagers to complete the unfinished Qiligou project after Xia Tianyi dies. Yinsheng’s contradictory character is also illustrated by his attitude toward the use of Putonghua. On pages 179–180 of Qin Opera, when Junde’s daughter visits back from the provincial capital, she greets Yinsheng with nihao (hi) in Putonghua, rather than in the usual way that villagers greet each other, such as “Have you eaten?” or “Are your elderly healthy, your kids well?” The girl’s greeting shocks the narrator at first, yet very quickly he reproaches her for “not speaking human words” and asks her to “put her tongue right and say again.” Here, in the introduction of Putonghua versus rural language in the narrative, Putonghua is associated with urbanity. As the narrative continues, the girl brags of life amid the skyscrapers, bars, and Internet cafés in the provincial city, which seems very exotic to her village audience. Yet Yinsheng knows such urbanity is earned by the sacrifice of abandoning the land and her rural roots. He knows the girl’s father, Junde, had to go to the city to work as a junk collector after failing to take good care of his land at home. In addition, it is hinted that this girl may make a living as a prostitute, as most of the village girls do after migrating to the cities. Both occupations seem despicable to Yinsheng, although they may bring them enough economic capital to survive. Second, since Putonghua is often associated with education, it is likely that speaking this language endows the girl with a certain amount of cultural and symbolic capital. Yet for Yinsheng, economic capital is not necessarily equivalent to cultural capital, something that he is interested in. Viewed in this way, it is not surprising to find later on that the narrator himself recites in Putonghua a literary poem that is written in classical Chinese and dedicated to Bai Xue (341). It appears that he is invoking Putonghua as an educated, cultural language in order to elevate his love for Bai Xue. But his attempt is thwarted by his inability to speak Standard Mandarin. As the narrator admits, “I can’t speak Putonghua well, and my Putonghua has a vinegar flavor” (341). As a result, he renders the poem



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in the Qin opera speech style, which sounds rather odd to Li Shangshan 李上善, the village accountant who is also good at singing Qin opera. Li quickly rebukes Yinsheng: “Put your tongue right and read it well. What’s the point of speaking Putonghua?” (342) Yinsheng’s reproach of the girl’s Putonghua thus receives an ironic reversal when Shangshan dismisses Yinsheng’s Putonghua. Local Languages in Zhiqing Fiction and Their Film Adaptations In recent educated-youth (zhiqing) fiction rendered in local languages, it is more manifest that Putonghua, as the language of the educated, is largely spoken by the sent-down educated youth, while dialect, as the language of the uneducated, is spoken by local people. In this part, I will explore how uneducated, rural, local languages are condemned, transformed, ignored, or negotiated by educated urban narrators by examining three recent tales and their film adaptations as well as one novel without a film version. In Joan Chen’s film Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl (Xiu Xiu 秀秀, 1998) adapted from Yan Geling’s novella Celestial Bath, the protagonist speaks her native urban Chengdu Mandarin at home. Yet she speaks Putonghua after being sent down. Her shift in language as she moves from a private space to a public space parallels the gradual exposure of her body in public, which is seduced, violated, and ruined by local men who speak various rough rural dialects. In Dai Sijie’s novel and film Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2001/2002), two educated youths with urban accents try to transform a mountain girl and her rural accent through exposure to Western literature and art. Lü Yue’s 吕乐 Foliage (Meiren cao 美人草, 2003), adapted from Shi Xiaoke’s novella First Love,30 focuses only on the Putonghua-speaking educated youth and ignores the local people who speak various dialects. In Yi Ling’s novel To Separate the Sheep from the Goats, the sent-down girl Tang Xiaoya 唐小雅/唐小丫 from Beijing tries to assimilate among the local people by speaking the local dialect and adopting a local name, Xiaokuazi 小侉子. Yet she experiences an identity crisis because of her double appellation. Moreover, her identification with the local people is recognized by neither the villagers nor her educated teachers.

30 My analysis will be based on the film version only, since I cannot locate Shi’s novella.

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The film Xiu Xiu narrates the tragic experience of its title character, a sent-down urban girl in Chengdu. In the opening shots, the teenage protagonist spends her final days in her urban home. Here, she speaks Chengdu Mandarin with her family and a teenage boy from her school who is in love with her. Where her native language is spoken, Xiu Xiu enjoys parental affection, neighbors’ care, and dawning romantic love. However, Xiu Xiu begins to speak Putonghua Mandarin after she is sent down to a remote Sichuan-Tibet borderland.31 That she never speaks Chengdu Mandarin again indicates that she is forever deprived of the intimacy and pure love that only her native language could afford her. Since Putonghua is generally a language used in the public domain, Xiu Xiu’s body, in parallel with this public language, can no longer be concealed in a private space. Yearning to go back to her urban home, the innocent and helpless Xiu Xiu has to sell her body for a return permit. As her body is tortured and gradually exposed in public, her image is transformed accordingly. She used to dress in colorful clothes and wear her hair in two braids. But after suffering one sexual exploitation after another, Xiu Xiu gradually comes to wear an oversized military overcoat and leave her hair disheveled. An interesting detail is that she begins to scratch her hair from bottom to top, a behavior she previously identified as apelike. Her change in body image, which indicates her reduced humanity, is a sarcastic reversal of the revolutionary slogan in the red classic White-Haired Girl (Baimaonü 白毛女), in which a girl is transformed from a ghost to a human being by the new society. Largely regarded as a feminist work (both the director Chen and the screenwriter/author Yan are women), this film implicitly intends to denounce men and prove that all patriarchal discourses are in bad faith. First and foremost, the film is a bone-chilling indictment of the patriarchic figure of Chairman Mao and his infamous rustification movement that victimized his numerous loyal and obedient young followers. Xiu Xiu’s journey from the city to the farm, and eventually to the nomadic tents on the steppes, could be an emblem of obedience to Chairman Mao’s call 31 Her use of language in the film is different from that of the original novella by Yan Geling and the film script by Yan and Chen. Yan Geling 严歌苓, “Tian Yu” 天浴 [Celestial bath], in Yan’s Shuijia younü chu zhangcheng 谁家有女初长成 [A collection of Yan Geling’s novels and novellas] (Beijing: Zhongyang bianyi chubanshe, 2002), 111– 125. Yan Geling 嚴歌苓 and Chen Joan 陳沖, Tian Yu: Xiu Xiu The Sent Down Girl (Taibei: Jiuge chubanshe youxian gongsi, 1998), 79–187. In both versions, Xiu Xiu always speaks her native Chengdu dialect. So far I have not discovered the reason for the change of language in the film version.



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in many senses. Clichéd propaganda is broadcast by a male voice over a loudspeaker at the beginning of the film: “When we go to a place, we must integrate ( jiehe 结合) with the local people there; must take root and blossom in that place. Go to the countryside, go to the borderland, and go to wherever the homeland needs you most.” As the director remarked in an interview, her film is full of metaphors and allegories.32 In its filmic context, the sublime and grand rhetoric heard through the loudspeaker becomes double-voiced and ambiguous, with a sexual undertone. For example, the word jiehe can also mean “the combination or unity between a male and a female,” and “what is most needed” turns out to be the satisfaction of the insatiable sexual desire of the local men, who speak various local dialects.33 Taking advantage of Xiu Xiu’s innocence and helplessness, these morally corrupt men seduce and violate her after promising to get her a permit to return to Chengdu. But none of them keep their promises, all of which prove to have been made in bad faith. For example, the local personnel officer at the headquarters of the farm, who assigned Xiu Xiu to learn horse herding in the more remote grassland, told her that they would pick her up in six months; after she returns, she is to form an educatedyouth girl cavalry to compete with the local Iron Girl Cavalry. But the film later reveals the brutal facts: Xiu Xiu is not picked up in six months and has been forgotten and abandoned forever; the Iron Girl Cavalry has been disbanded for a long time; and this official himself turns out to be one of those who rape her. At the same time, the film does depict two morally good father figures, Xiu Xiu’s father and Lao Jin 老金, a Tibetan herdsman with whom Xiu Xiu stays while she is on the steppes.34 However, neither of them can be regarded as fully a man or a masculine patriarch.35 Xiu Xiu’s father is portrayed as very feminized and domesticated. He is briefly 32 Li Feng 里丰, “Tianyu xiran Fusang: Chen Chong fangtan shilu”《天浴》洗染《扶桑》 [An interview with Joan Chen], Zhongguo xinshidai 2 (1999): 18. 33 Some speak Putonghua Mandarin with a strong local accent; some speak a local Sichuan dialect, and one man speaks Tianjin Mandarin. The accents of these villians are also indicated in the film script; one has a Shaanxi accent (155) and one a Northeast accent (165). Yan and Chen, Tian Yu. 34 Portrayed as a Tibetan, Lao Jin speaks rather flawless Standard Mandarin in the film, which is different from his use of local language in both the original novella and the film script. His Standard Mandarin in the film version sounds odd to Pauline Chen. As she argues, Lao Jin’s language seems to suggest Tibetans’ assimilation to Han culture, and so the film seems to lend support to the party line of “harmonious integration under Com­ munism.” Pauline Chen, “Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl,” Cineaste 24.4 (1999): 40. 35 Feng Lan makes a similar observation. Feng Lan, “Reframing the Chinese Cultural Revolution in Diaspora: Joan Chen’s The Sent-Down Girl,” Literature/Film Quarterly 32.3 (2004): 197–198.

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presented in the film as a sentimental figure, using a sewing machine to make an undershirt for Xiu Xiu before she leaves home, a household duty usually carried out by the mother in China. Lao Jin displays a mixture of fatherly care and platonic love for Xiu Xiu during her reeducation days. But he is not a man in the full sense because he was castrated twenty years ago in a tribal war. His physical impotency parallels his inability to protect and save Xiu Xiu. At the end of the film, the dignified yet powerless Lao Jin chooses to shoot the desperate girl to death as a means of salvation. He also takes his own life and dies besides Xiu Xiu’s body, holding a ceremony that is both a funeral and a wedding.36 Expressing a similar concern about the repressed humanity of reeducated youth, Dai Sijie’s first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2001), and its 2002 film adaptation37 narrate how literature, particularly novels by Balzac and other great French writers, awakens the repressed love and passion of two reeducated young men from Chengdu and changes the life of a girl in an isolated and remote mountain village in Sichuan province.38 Although both the male and female protagonists speak local Sichuan Mandarin, the film as well as the novel sets up a binary opposition between their accents—the urban versus the rural, the educated versus the uneducated, and the civilized versus the primitive. The two reeducated young men, the narrator Ma Jianling 马剑铃 and his best friend Luo Ming 罗明, both from intelligentsia families, speak urban Chengdu Mandarin. In contrast, the virtually illiterate Little Seamstress, whose appellation is an epithet stemming from her (grand)father’s profession as a tailor rather than a proper given name, speaks a dialect with a distinct rural

36 The closing shots of hovering vultures after Lao Jin shoots himself suggest tian zang 天葬 (celestial burial), a distinctive Tibetan funeral ceremony in which the corpse is left under the open sky for the vultures, so that the soul can go to heaven. 37 There are at least two Chinese translations of the film title: 小裁缝 or 巴尔扎克 与小裁缝. 38 Also set in the Cultural Revolution, Dai Sijie’s film debut China, My Sorrow (Niu Peng 牛棚, 1989) tells of the victimization of a thirteen-year-old boy in a labor camp in Can­ ton during the first years of this turbulent movement. The film contrasts the use of local language and Putonghua. All of the reeducated counterrevolutionaries in the labor camp speak Cantonese, regardless of their former social and cultural status. By contrast, the grandiose revolutionary propaganda is broadcast from the loudspeaker in Putonghua, and Putonghua is used in the stage performance of an acrobatic troupe as well. The troupe leader, who the film suggests is forcing one of the female performers to have an affair with him, speaks Putonghua, a language thus associated with abuse and corruption.



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accent.39 Characterizing her as “uncivilized enough” in the novel (29) and her accent as “too rustic” (tai tu le 太土了) in the film, Luo is determined to transform the village girl into “a refined, cultured, and urban girl” (64).40 In this surprisingly smooth transformation, the Little Seamstress seems to embrace everything associated with urbanity and civilization that Luo and Ma introduce her to: the violin (a Western instrument) and Western music, the “high-tech” modern clock, and most significantly, the novels of Balzac. Along with her gradual transformation, the Little Seamstress also changes her language by imitating the two young men’s urban accents. At the end, learning from Balzac that a woman’s beauty is a treasure beyond price, she decides to leave the two men and the mountain to go to a big city. This decision, partially a superficial rebellion against the two Chinese men, is fundamentally influenced by a more remote, Western male, Balzac. In this sense, the text is often read as a postcolonial allegory of the Western male’s enlightenment of the Other, Oriental female.41 Although the use of Sichuan Mandarin is dominant in both the film and the novel, the latter includes an interesting chapter, unrepresented in the film, in which Putonghua Mandarin is used. In order to trade for some French novels owned by Four-Eyes, another sent-down youth, Ma and Luo volunteer to help him collect some “sincere, authentic folk songs full of romantic realism” (67), which Four-Eyes could capitalize on to facilitate his return to Chengdu. During their encounter with an old miller, a master of local folk songs, Ma pretends to be a revolutionary cadre from the capital city Beijing accompanied by his secretary, Luo. In order to live up to his adopted identity, Ma intentionally speaks Putonghua Mandarin instead of his native Sichuan dialect (71). Putonghua is first portrayed as an unintelligible language to the old miller, as he asks Luo, “What language is he [Ma] speaking?” (71). This suggests that although Putonghua is the conventional language used to convey party ideology and propaganda to the masses in broadcast media, in practice it malfunctions as a communicative tool and therefore a translator, played by Luo, is needed to 39 The urban/rural distinction is hard to discern in the film because only one leading actor is native to Sichuan and the other two hastily learned their accents on site. But the difference is clearly indicated in the content of their dialogue. 40 The pagination is based on the English version: Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, translated from the French by Ina Rilke (New York: Knopf, 2001). 41 Among others, Wang Yuan provides an interesting close reading in this regard. Wang Yuan 王远, “Caijian gei ‘Ba’erzhakemen’ de momoqiubo” 裁剪给 “巴尔扎克们” 的脉脉 秋波 [A postcolonial analysis of the film The Little Chinese Seamstress], Dushu 9 (2003): 98–103.

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mediate between the party and the masses. Yet once the old miller figures out that what Ma is speaking is the official language of Beijing—or as it was formerly known, Beiping (which the miller is more familiar with and pronounces as Baiping)—he “threw me [Ma] a look of deep respect” (72). The symbolic power of the official language is thus manifest. Despite the fact that the old miller is so isolated that he is unaware of the capital city’s name change from Beiping to Beijing, he is aware of the pervasiveness and ubiquity of Communist control and its deployment of Putonghua ­Mandarin. Nonetheless, the narrator repeatedly describes his own Putonghua Mandarin, which imitates the language of the revolutionary propaganda films of the time, as “shaky” (72) and “very poor” (74). In other words, this is a fake, artificial, and unreal language. And the artificiality of Putonghua serves as a foil to the authenticity of the local language of the miller and his folk songs. As the narrative continues, after the old miller sings a “ditty,” which he does not consider to be a “folk song,”42 the two educated youths hail it as a “sincere, authentic, romantic mountain song” (79). For the first and only time, they seem to be identified and aligned with the local people. At the end of the chapter, the authenticity of the old miller even restores Ma to his own original, authentic identity. Cheering on the old man’s singing, Ma drinks lamp oil instead of liquor by mistake, which makes him forget his role as he blurts out in Sichuan Mandarin, “What’s your moonshine made of?” (79). In an interview, Dai said that he wrote this part with much emotion, and it is to his great regret that the scenes based on this chapter were cut out from the film due to censorship.43 Without the interaction between the old miller and the young men, the film unfortunately becomes an unqualified assertion of the educated youth’s superiority over the local people, the urbane elite’s enlightenment of the rural, and civilization’s triumph over the primitive. A clear demarcation between the educated youth and the local people is also seen in the language used in the film Foliage, directed by Lü Yue. The film narrates a love triangle among three educated youths in Yunnan. The female protagonist Ye Xingyu 叶星雨 finds her true love when 42 This is reminiscent of the dialogue between Cui Qiao’s father and Gu Qing in Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth. See Helen Hok-Sze Leung, “Yellow Earth: Hesitant Apprenticeship and Bitter Agency,” in Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes, ed. Chris Berry (London: BFI Publishing, 2003), 191–197. 43 Wu Fei 吴菲, “Dai Sijie: Zhenzheng taohao le ren de shi qinggan” 戴思杰：真正讨 好了人的是情感 [Dai Sijie: What is really appealing to the audience is one’s true feeling], Beijing qingnian bao, August 27, 2003.



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by chance she encounters Liu Simeng 刘思蒙, another sent-down youth. Her struggle to balance her feelings for Liu and her longtime boyfriend, Yuan Dingguo 袁定国, is worsened by the fact that Liu and Yuan are in separate, hostile, clique-like military regiments. The film is noteworthy for using multiple local languages and accents, such as Sichuan Mandarin, Henan Mandarin, Hunan Xiang, and many Yunnan Mandarin varieties, including those from Kunming, Honghe, and Jinghong. The director may see the use of multiple local languages as a realistic representation of the time when youths were sent to Yunnan from all over the country.44 However, the distribution of languages still largely corresponds to education and urban origin. Except for one minor character, Lin Shan 林山, who speaks Sichuan Mandarin, all the urban, educated youth, regardless of their origins, speak Putonghua. For instance, Ye Xingyu speaks Putonghua, although she is supposedly from Kunming city.45 In contrast, the various local languages are mainly assigned to the local rural people, including the local military officers.46 As the film is preoccupied with young intellectuals, Putonghua serves as the intelligible “theatrical speech” that conditions the film’s mise-enscène,47 while the local languages are largely reduced to “emanation speech” that is not essential to the narrative.48 Correspondingly, the depiction of the local people is minimized, isolated, and fragmentary. In the beginning, the military personnel officer, speaking Henan Mandarin, sends a suggestive message to Ye Xinyu. Yet he never appears again in the film. The regimental commander, who gives a harsh lesson in Yunnan Mandarin to his subordinates, who are obsessed with bloody fights, later on suddenly goes insane after a deadly military conflict.49 The local character that the film seems to pay most attention to is a thirteen-year-old

44 Jiang Wei 姜薇, “Jiepai Meirencao, Shuqi kaishi zhiqing shenghuo” 接拍《美人草》 舒淇开始知青生活 [Shooting Foliage, Shuqi starts a life as an educated youth], Beijing qingnian bao, July 30, 2003. 45 Ye’s Putonghua carries a noticeable Taiwan accent, as the actress Shu Qi 舒淇, who plays Ye, is originally from Taiwan. 46 The association of characters’ language with their level of education in Foliage is consistent with the director’s previous film, Mr. Zhao (Zhao Xiansheng 赵先生, 1998), in which the college professor Zhao speaks Putonghua, while his wife (a laid-off worker) and her friend (an ordinary local citizen) speak Shanghai Wu. 47 Chion, Audio-Vision, 171. 48 Ibid., 177. 49 The presentation of the two officers may be interpreted as consistent with the film’s theme: the irregularity, coincidence, and destiny of life. But still, the editing seems too abrupt for many audiences.

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wandering orphan, Goupi 狗屁 (Dog Fart), who speaks Kunming Mandarin. As a loyal follower of Liu’s clique, Goupi helps Liu contact Xinyu several times. But still, the film is careless toward him. An interesting inconsistency is revealed in the end credits: although the credits list the name of the actor who plays the grown-up Goupi, the film itself includes no scene with the adult Goupi. The film’s carelessness toward local characters parallels the plot’s disinterest in them: Wei Hong 卫红, Xinyu’s favorite girlfriend in the film, is contemptuous toward the local rural people. Wei refuses to teach a literacy class (saomang ban 扫盲班) because she thinks that the illiterate local people “are too dumb to learn.” She cites the classical maxim Xiumu buke diao ye 朽木不可雕也 (Rotten wood cannot be carved) from The Analects to describe them. Xinyu then takes Wei’s teaching position, but she seems motivated to teach because she views the work as a break from physical labor. In one scene, Xinyu, speaking Putonghua, asks her rural students to review at home the new characters that denote all kinds of cooked meat, yet one of them argues in his Yunnan dialect the uselessness of this assignment: “practicing those words would make them hungrier.” Although this detail is presented in a comic tone, the film, intentionally or not, reveals a contrast between the living conditions of the local people and the sent-down youths. In the next shot, Xinyu receives a bag of cans of meat from Goupi on behalf of Liu. The local people are thus presented as both spiritually and materially impoverished compared to the educated youths. If Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is about how the educated youths transform the local people and their rural accents, Foliage is only concerned with educated youths and ignores the local people. Nevertheless, in both texts, the educated youths keep their distance from the local people, and there is a clear distinction in their languages and accents. In this sense, Yi Ling’s novel To Separate the Sheep from the Goats seems to present the counter-stereotypical image of an educated youth who is eager to become integrated into the local people by learning their dialect. Set against the background of the tide of education return ( jiaoyu huichao 教育回潮) at the end of the Cultural Revolution, the novel revolves around a fifteen-year-old educated youth from Beijing, Tang Xiaoya or Xiaokuazi, and her love for her math teacher, Jiang Yuanlan 江远澜, in the Xicheng 喜城 middle school in North Shanxi. The teenage heroine, the first-person narrator of the film, explains her two appellations thus: “in the city, I am ‘Tang Xiaoya’ 唐小丫, and my nickname is ‘Xiaoya’ 小雅. I heard from my mother that my father won her heart by reciting the piece



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“Caiwei” 采薇 (Collecting wei) from the “Xiao Ya” 小雅 (“Minor Odes” in the Book of Poetry), so my name became a mark in memory of their love. In the village, I am called ‘Xiaokuazi’, a nickname meaning ‘a very stupid gourd’ ” (5). “Ever since I came to the village, the villagers call me ‘Xiaokuazi’ because of my terrible outsider accent. In the beginning, I asked Hudie, Niubanjing, Quhubao, and other villagers to teach me the rustic language (tuhua) . . . Soon I spoke tuhua very fluently, and I also became integrated with the local fellows who taught me the dialect” (9). Here the heroine’s two identities are associated with two appellations. Her original name is not only a typical girl’s name in North China but also indicates her family’s intelligentsia background. By contrast, as befits the name “Xiaokuazi,” the heroine is a rough, uneducated, and genderless local teenager. She speaks a coarse North Shanxi dialect featuring local expletives such as qiu 㞗 (fuck) and ye 爷 (“I, your grandfather,” similar to the Putonghua laozi 老子). She is a daredevil who often volunteers to carry corpses, a chore even the young men are scared to do (6–7). Unlike the two book-loving educated youths in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Xiaokuazi hates school and prefers heavy labor, or shou 受, as it is locally called. Always deliberately speaking with the villagers in their dialect, she is ready to be integrated with the local peasants, who have some qualities she admires. For instance, she remarks of Wei Fengyan 魏丰燕, one of her best peasant friends, that “her roughness and chivalry are just what I want” (97). To a large degree, the dialect-speaking heroine, who has aligned herself with the local peasants, seems intent on being favorably compared with her schoolteachers, a group of purged rightist intellectuals who graduated from some of the most prestigious universities in China. The contrasts between Xiaokuazi and the intellectuals are twofold in terms of language use. First, all the teachers speak Putonghua. This is consistent with the body-voice matching principle. For example, the hero Jiang Yuanlan, who got his bachelor degree in mathematics from Nankai University and his Master of Science degree from Xiamen University, speaks a language featuring math jargon, classical Chinese, literary Chinese, and even German and other foreign words. His education-laden language makes a sharp contrast with Xiaokuazi’s uneducated dialect. Second, all the teachers speak nonstandard Putonghua with heavy accents, which indicate their outsider identity; for instance, Jiang Yuanlan has a Cantonese accent, the politics teacher has a Shanghai Wu accent, and the Chinese teacher speaks with a Hakka accent. In the novel, Xiaokuazi frequently uses

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women 我们 (we, our), a word with a strong exclusive implication, to underscore her assumed inclusion in the local linguistic community, while she uses nimen 你们 (you) to categorize her intellectual teachers as waishengren 外省人 (people from other provinces). Interestingly, the first-person narrator often assumes a superior position when describing the intellectuals’ accents. She details a chaotic class in which Xiaokuazi and her classmates mock the Hakka accent of their Chinese teacher, who pronounces chu 初 (beginning) as chuo 戳 (jab, poke), yāoqiú 要求 (demand) as yǎoqiú 咬 (bite) 球 (ball), and nanfang 南方 (south) as lanfang 兰 (orchid) 方 (direction) (100). Xiaokuazi’s ability to judge and evaluate the “nonstandardness” of the intellectuals’ Putonghua, a linguistic superiority she may extend to other village students here, implies her own competence in Putonghua and hints at her own identity as an educated youth. As a matter of fact, on one occasion in the novel, Xiaokuazi deliberately speaks Putonghua and explicitly states her zhiqing identity in order to avoid paying for a train ticket (120). Nonetheless, the heroine’s willingness to identify with the local people and her intention to differentiate herself from the intellectuals are not necessarily recognized by either group. At the beginning of the novel, the heroine describes feeling alienated when she finds that the head villager records her name on the school roster as “Tang Xiaoya” rather than “Xiaokuazi” (5). Yet as much as she embraces her local identity and prefers her local name, that name paradoxically and permanently indicates her outsider identity. As implied earlier, kuazi literally means someone with an outsider accent, a local term that the local villagers should easily understand. Although most teachers are oblivious to her local name, which may conversely confirm their nonnative identity, the politics teacher infers on the basis of her nickname that she is “at least a waishengren” (56), the very term Xiaokuazi often uses to distinguish herself from her “outsider” teachers. Her fluency in the local language, in combination with her local name, is nevertheless not sufficient to achieve a local identity. Jiang, who falls in love with Xiaokuazi later, seems to negate her local identity from the very beginning. As he later tells Xiaokuazi, “When I first saw you in the cinema, I didn’t think you’re native here, although you speak the Xicheng dialect very well” (353). So from the very beginning Jiang distinguishes Xiaokuazi from the rest of the village students and associates her more with himself and other intellectuals.



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As teacher, mentor, lover, and “father,”50 Jiang serves as the agent for Xiaokuazi’s self-realization of her identity. It is mainly through memories evoked in her daily make-up sessions in Jiang’s dormitory that Xiaokuazi gradually reveals her internal, urban identity. The food in Jiang’s dorm, such as jizaibing 鸡仔饼 (a kind of Cantonese cookie) and yezitang 椰子糖 (coconut candy), reminds Xiaokuazi of her childhood in her grandmother’s home in Guangzhou and by extension of her urban, educated lifestyle in Beijing. Moreover, Jiang’s Cantonese accent is simultaneously presented as an outsider’s accent, indicating differentiation and exclusion, and as a sound from her hometown, evincing proximity and empathy. When assigning Xiaokuazi a math question, Jiang pronounces ershi tou xiaoyang 二十头小羊 (twenty lambs) as aoxi tou xiaoniang 奥细头小娘, xiaoniu 小牛 (calf ) as xiaoyou 小油, and jiushisi tou xiao­ zhuzai 九十四头小猪仔 (ninety-four piglets) as jiuxixi xiaojuzai 九洗 细小居仔 (68). On the one hand, his nonstandard accent is depicted as laughable to the Putonghua-competent protagonist. On the other hand, as the narrator immediately writes nostalgically, “The sound from my hometown (xiangyin 乡音) transcends space and time, and I don’t know where my real hometown is.” Confused by her split identity, the heroine seems to maintain her local peasant identity at the conscious level and her urban intellectual identity at the subconscious level. There are two moments when she unconsciously speaks Putonghua. On the first occasion, the crayons in Jiang’s dormitory remind Xiaokuazi of her drawing class in elementary school in Beijing, and she unconsciously utters, supposedly in Putonghua, the popular ballad-like instructions on how to draw a duck. It is at this moment that Jiang confirms her educated-youth identity (223–224). On the second occasion, when making a call to the village, she unconsciously speaks soft, polite Putonghua, which is mistaken as the voice of a female spy by the villager who thus hangs up the phone (318). In this context, Putonghua is associated with an explicit gender identity (female) and a non-peasant-class identity (spy). Still, it is Jiang who redefines her gender identity and class identity. Toward the end of the novel, too eager to marry Xiaokuazi, the idiosyncratic Jiang fabricates a crime: “I raped the Beijing educated youth Xiaokuazi, no, not Xiaokuazi, but Tang Xiaoya” (513). By correcting his slip of the tongue regarding her name,

50 The narrator recalls her hostile relationship with her father, who is often absent from home. Jiang, who is about twenty-seven years older than the narrator, seems to be the “lost father” she is looking for.

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Jiang negates the heroine’s local peasant identity and reclaims her identity as an urban educated youth. Furthermore, by using the word “rape,” Jiang confirms the female gender of the object of his discursive violence and restores her female identity, which had been erased by her genderless local name. Jiang’s love for, and transformation of, Xiaokuazi is far from an illustration of the urban intellectual’s enlightenment of the rural masses, as some Chinese critics have misinterpreted it. The novel is still a tale of love between two intellectuals. As narrated in the epilogue, after graduating from college in the 1990s Xiaokuazi travels from Beijing to visit the village in search of Jiang. Despite her eagerness to identify with the local people, Yi Ling’s heroine ends up joining the educated-youth characters. Thus we see that the uneducated, traditional, rural local languages are either condemned, as in Xiu Xiu, transformed, as in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, ignored, as in Foliage, or negotiated, as in To Sepa­ rate the Sheep from the Goats. The voices of local people are still silenced, obscured, marginalized, or unassimilated in these recent examples of educated-youth fiction and films narrated by urban cultural elites.

CONCLUSION This book has explored the rhetorical use of local language, with special attention to variations in the way local language functions in different media and genres, and the reception of local language productions by their audiences. I have argued that local language plays a prominent yet diversified role in contemporary Chinese popular culture. In television programming targeted to a regional mainstream audience, local language functions as a humorous and satirical mechanism, evoking laughter that can foster a sense of local community and assert the local as the site of distinctive cultural production. In comic productions (films, sketches, and sitcoms) shown to a mainstream national audience, local language stimu­ lates an ambiguous laughter that manifests Bakhtinian grotesque realism. In fiction and underground film, local language serves as an important marker of marginality, allowing filmmakers and writers to criticize the center by positioning themselves rhetorically on the periphery. In popular music, increasingly mediated by the Internet, urban youth employ local language to articulate a distinct youth identity in their negotiation with the globalizing and cosmopolitan culture in which they live. Nevertheless, to what degree the use of local language can fos­ ter a sense of local community in regional media is still debatable. As local languages themselves participate in a linguistic and cultural hier­ archy, local media productions often perpetuate regional stereotypes about local languages and confirm the elevated status of the local lan­ guage that enjoys regional hegemony. It is not surprising to find that the most engaging characters usually speak the hegemonic local language of the region, be it Chengdu Mandarin, Chongqing Mandarin, Xi’an Manda­ rin, Guangzhou Xiguan Cantonese, Hangzhou Wu, or the urban Shanghai Wu, whereas the comedic characters and/or the characters of less prom­ inence speak the “stigmatized,” rural, local languages in the lower layer(s) of the linguistic hierarchy. Examples of this linguistic marginalization include the often manipulated and defeated cat dubbed in Zhongjiang Mandarin in the Sichuan version of Tom and Jerry; the illiterate, impetuous cook Big Mouth Li speaking Chongming Wu in the Shanghai Wu version of the sitcom My Own Swordsman; and the clownish, “rustic” cook Ah Jiao 阿娇 speaking rural Huazhou 化州 Cantonese in the Cantonese sitcom Native Husbands with Foreign Wives. Audiences who are not in the regional

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center often resent and are offended, humiliated, or alienated by such hierarchical use of local languages, mirroring the dissatisfaction provoked by the use of Standard Putonghua vis-à-vis regional languages in the national media. Furthermore, as there are almost infinite varieties of local languages, media use of the “central” local language may evoke linguistic and cultural proximity only within the audience speaking that dialect and not among audiences outside the geographic center of a region. For exam­ ple, the host Chen Laoxi’s Taiyuan Mandarin in the Shanxi news talk show Laoxi’r Chat Bar could hardly strike a chord among the audience in Linfen 临汾 in the south Shanxi, where the dialects are much different from that of Taiyuan. Therefore, media use of the regional hegemonic dialect may have a greater potential to divide and fragment a region than to foster a unified sense of local community. More fundamentally, on the one hand, I argue that local-language media productions assert the value of pluralism and diversity and defy the characterization of China as a unified, homogeneous nation-state. On the other hand, there is a problem with the construction of local iden­ tities, namely, the underlying similarities beneath their apparent distinc­ tiveness. In discussing the practice of the localization of sitcoms in Chapter 2, I mentioned the trans-regional adaptation of the popular Cantonese sit­ com Native Husbands with Foreign Wives. Other provincial TV stations purchased the script, recast it with local actors, redubbed it with the local target dialect, and reproduced the success of the original. Similarly, as discussed in Chapter 4, it has been a common practice for provincial or city television stations to purchase scripts of the pioneering Chongqing docudrama lanmuju show Night Talk in the Foggy Capital and produce their own lanmuju shows. In Chapter 6, an examination of Ye Pi’s song “The Living Lei Fengs in Zhangjiagang” (“Gangcheng huo Leifeng” 港城 活雷锋), a reworking of Xue Cun’s “The Northeasterners Are All Living Lei Fengs” in Zhangjiagang Wu, revealed that although his song proved instantly popular among netizens from the singer’s hometown,1 its cel­ ebration of that local Zhangjiagang identity was largely achieved by sim­ ply replacing the Northeastern regional specialties named in the original song with those of Zhangjiagang. By the same token, rap songs that praise the performers’ hometowns almost always list the local tourist attractions 1 Qian Chaoxin and Wu Hui 钱超新 吴慧, “Wangluo geshou Ye Pi wangshang chang­ hong Zhangjiagang fangyan ge” 网络歌手叶皮网上唱红张家港方言歌 [Internet singer Ye Pi’s hit Zhangjiagang dialect songs], November 24, 2006, http://www.js.xinhuanet.com/ zjg/2006-11/24/content_8609045.htm.



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and culinary specialties. Local identity is thus often constructed by way of mimicry, imitation, copy, and derivation. Although in some instances, as Liao Ping-hui concludes in his study of cultural criticism columns pub­ lished in the literary supplements of Taiwanese newspapers, “the local can put the global into use in the form of ‘neocolonial’ mimicry, in the mode of cultural bricolage or reproduction, that helps constitute multiple lines of invention and transformation,”2 the local identity thus constructed is problematic. The eager desire to assert a local identity for a community might belie a rising anxiety that it is becoming increasingly difficult to define local­ ity in a dramatically globalized world. Despite the different urban narra­ tives these cultural productions construct, we can find the same or similar patterns behind many of them. These similarities call to mind Adorno’s term “pseudo-individualization,” which he defines in a different context as “the stylization of the ever-identical framework” or “the standardiza­ tion of its own deviation.”3 In the case of Chinese local-language media productions, we thus encounter the underlying “homogeneity” of “hetero­ geneous” local identity: one “local” is tantamount to any other, and the central distinction is between “the local” and the national standard. In this sense, the invocation of local identity may be deictic but not substantive.4 The pro-Cantonese protests and demonstrations against restrictions on Cantonese in the media in the summer of 2010, first in Guangzhou and soon echoed in Hong Kong, may be viewed as not simply a linguistic action, but also a reflection of “collective concerns about the progressive disappear­ ance of Cantonese culture and social dislocations resulting from massive urban renewal and construction.”5 However, at this moment, the discourse of the local in mainland China is not yet a fully formed, explicitly politicized discourse on regional autonomy, politics, and factionalism. As Stuart Hall argues, although globalization has “led to a strengthening of ‘local’ 2 Ping-hui Liao, “The Case of the Emergent Cultural Criticism Columns in Taiwan’s Newspaper Literary Supplements,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transna­ tional Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 344. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th ed., ed. John Storey (Harlow: Pearson, 2009), 68–69. 4 For these elaborations, I owe much to Andrew Jones’s inspiring comments. 5 Bob Eng, “Is Cantonese in Danger of Extinction? The Politics and Culture of Language Policy in China,” posted on his blog on August 20, 2010 at http://chinamusictech.blogspot .com/2010/08/is-cantonese-in-danger-of-extinction.html. For more information on this protest, see Arthur Waldron, “Will Linguistic Centralization Work? Protesters Demonstrate against Restrictions on Cantonese,” China Brief 10.16 (August 5, 2010): 12–15.

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allegiances and identities within nation-states,” what may emerge is what he calls a more “tricky version of ‘the local’ which operates within, and has been thoroughly reshaped by ‘the global’ and operates largely within its logic.”6 Thus, the “distinct” local identities that are promoted and cel­ ebrated in Chinese local-language media productions may turn out to be examples of diversity within conformity, pluralism within unity, heteroge­ neity within homogeneity, and localization within globalization after all. This study has explored the use of local language by considering dis­ tinctions among various fields of cultural production as well as among audiences. As much as this approach has proven necessary and produc­ tive, the aesthetics of local languages may overlap between different fields that are interacting and mutually signifying. For media productions of the 1990s, Gunn points out that the use of local language in the CCTV Henan docudrama The Black Ash Tree (Hei huaishu 黑槐树, 1992) as “a cultural emblem of marginalized society” might be inspired by Zhang Yimou’s film The Story of Qiu Ju, released the previous year.7 Influence may also run in the reverse direction, from television to film: Feng Xiaogang’s early comedy films of the late 1990s are closely associated with Wang Shuo’s (and his own) television productions in the early and mid 1990s.8 Zhang Yimou’s Keep Cool (You hua haohao shuo 有话好好说, 1997), an urban film with comic overtones, has even been identified as a comic-sketch type of film.9 Nevertheless, as both the CCTV productions and the films were cre­ ated for a national audience, Gunn’s argument that audience is the most fundamental distinction within each field still holds. As he argues, “While most films were produced for national or international audiences from their conception, many television productions were financed by advertis­ ers whose first considerations were the appeal of the production to a local audience. It follows that much fiction and poetry, like film, was written for a national audience, while many stage productions and portions of journalism, like television, were aimed first at local audiences.”10 However, with the proliferation of the Internet and other technological innovations in the new millennium, the intermediality, cross-mediality, or transmediality is intensified, and the corresponding relationship between 6 Hall, “Culture, Community, Nation,” 354. 7 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 124–125. 8 Rui Zhang, The Cinema of Feng Xiaogang, 44–47. 9 Wang Yichuan 王一川, “Xiaopin shi xiju yu shimin wutuobang: Youhua hao hao shuo yinxiang” 小品式喜剧与市民社会乌托邦—— 《有话好好说》印象 [Comic-sketch style comedy and a civil society utopia: On Keep Cool], Dianying yishu 6 (1998): 31–35. 10 Gunn, Rendering the Regional, 9–10.



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audience and fields of cultural production proves more and more difficult to untangle. First, film does not necessarily target a national or interna­ tional audience. For example, the comedy films I discussed in Chapter 8 tend to target a local audience and exploit a regional market. However, in terms of aesthetics, these commercial comedy films are different from the so-called “native films” (bentu dianying 本土电影), a new phenomenon that spread across the country in 2012; these films are heavily funded by local governments at the city or county level and carry strong propaganda messages.11 Moreover, with the dramatic change in film audience in China, the so-called national audience of Chinese mainstream commercial films has increasingly become a niche youth audience in big urban cities, who are at the same time savvy Internet users.12 Recent comedy films fre­ quently incorporate popular online phrases and target the young Internet citizen-audience, for example, Wang Yuelun’s costume films Almost Per­ fect and Panda Express (Xiongmao daxia 熊猫大侠, 2009). These films bear a strong resemblance to emergent online comedy productions. For instance, Something Happened (Zheli you qingkuang 这里有情况, 2011), in Dalian Mandarin and a broadly Jiaoliao 胶辽 Mandarin, was copro­ duced by a local Dalian website, Xin qingnian wang (新青年网 we54.com), and shown to its members and the local (or trans-local, transnational) Dalian young netizens. The growing symbiosis between film and the Internet can also be seen in the emergence of the micro-film (weidianying 微电影), a new Internet-based digital medium. Local language is modestly used in “city micro-films” (chengshi weidianying 城市微电影), a project co-launched by the website Aiqiyi (爱奇艺 iqiyi.com) in 2011. These new digital media manifest new features in their reinventing and remediating of a conventional medium, but at the same time maintain close ties to the historical root from which they emerge. How to view the current moment as a critical juncture is a topic for further exploration. The new millennium has also witnessed a trend toward the rehabili­ tation and resurgence of traditional folk culture: consider the national 11 Wu Jianfei and Cai Zhiming 吴剑飞 蔡志明, “ ‘Bentu dianying’re ying bimian ‘zhengjihua’ ” “本土电影” 热应避免 “政绩化” (The craze for native films should avoid sublime propaganda), Xinhua ribao, August 7, 2012. 12 According to a survey conducted in 2004, only 6 percent of the subjects (90 persons) went to the theatre to watch films. Fang Yaqin 方雅琴, “Guanyu yingyuan dianying xiaofei de diaocha fenxi” 关于影院电影消费的调查分析 [A survey on theatre and film consumption], Dianying yishu 3 (2004): 20. According to Li Haixia, 70 percent of film audiences are young people between 15 and 35 years old. Li, “Feng Xiaogang dianying shichang yanjiu,” 60.

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popularity of the Northeast errenzhuan troupe performances of Zhao Benshan and his disciples (mostly Xiao Shenyang 小沈阳), the sold-out performances of the xiangsheng comedian Guo Degang and his Deyunshe 德云社 club in Beijing, the box-office success of the huaji comedian Zhou Libo’s 周立波 “Shanghai-style clear talk” (Haipai qingkou 海派清口) in Shanghai and the huaji opera performances of comedians-turned–TV hosts in Hangzhou, the sustained popularity of Li Boqing and his sanda pingshu folk storytelling in Sichuan, and the buzzword “folk” or minjian in Chinese-language literary criticism within China. Although modern media such as radio and television (and now the Internet) have long been viewed as posing a competitive threat to premodern folk culture, they seem in fact to have played a role in the reappreciation of traditional arts. Nevertheless, as the previous chapters have revealed, local folk culture has been appropriated and transformed in a variety of ways. The staging of errenzhuan, folk operas, and other folk forms in the CCTV Galas, the most prestigious cultural spectacle of the mainstream media, seems to convey a cultural message from the state and mainstream society, namely that no valuable cultural heritage has been sacrificed or victimized in China’s modernizing process, nor will any perish in the future. The local television stations, radios, and stages capitalize on the entertaining function and commerciality of local performing arts, and furthermore use local cultural heritage to assert a distinctive cultural identity. Writers such as Mo Yan rediscovered folk opera as an indigenous cultural resource to resist West­ ern literary influence and claim a distinctive place in world literature.13 The current revival of Chinese local, traditional, and indigenous culture has to be considered in the context of globalization, as it joins a wider trend of global and local synergy. As demonstrated by the essays collected in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, edited by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, cultural appropriation and nativist resistance take place worldwide. Among others, Liao Pinghui mentions the resurgence of Taiwan’s aboriginal cultures with the help of cultural criticism columns written by bilingual intellectuals.14 Likewise,

13 Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, is the first Chinese writer residing in China to receive this award. His ability to integrate “folk tales” and “old Chinese literature and oral tradition” into his novels was cited in the announcement of the Swed­ ish Academy. “The Nobel Prize in Literature,” Nobelprize.org, Oct 13, 2012, http://www .nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/. 14 Liao Ping-hui, “The Case of the Emergent Cultural Criticism Columns in Taiwan’s Newspaper Literary Supplements,” 337–347.



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drawing on local folk cultural resources to resist global homogenization has also become a knee-jerk response in China and Chinese communities. Nevertheless, a frequent charge against the use of local language in the media is vulgarity. From time to time, parents and teachers, citing educa­ tion concerns, complain that the media’s use of “vulgar and uncultured” dialects is counterproductive to children’s mastery of Putonghua. (In other words, speaking Putonghua is equated with being civilized.) Similar to Li Boqing and his Stories of Mr. Fake, Xiao Shenyang and his errenzhuan shows are often accused of vulgarity, obscenity, and pornography. Guo Degang was condemned by the state media in 2010 as a classic example of the “three vulgarities” (sansu 三俗, namely “vulgar, low, and pander­ ing” 庸俗, 低俗, 媚俗) in the national anti-vulgarity campaign, which the government launched in 2009 to tighten political control of the entertain­ ment industry and the Internet.15 However, the vulgarities (cukou 粗口) that local language is often associated with play a diverse and indispen­ sible role in contemporary Chinese popular culture. Local expletives and slang are often one of the most distinctive features of a local language, and they are the very first Cantonese words Ah Guang teaches his Henan wife Xiang Lan in Native Husbands with Foreign Wives. In Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Shan Goes Home, Jia’s own unrestrained dialogue of dirty words suggests that the underground filmmaking mode opened up a creative space in which filmmakers do not have to adhere to the social or educational obli­ gations of the mainstream public media. Again, in Li Yang’s underground film Blind Shaft, the two con men who murder fellow workers explode with crude expletives, which may convey masculinity and/or draw the audience’s attention to their violent, nasty, and filthy environment in the coal mines. In popular music, a prominent feature of rap songs is the trademark use of local expletives, street slang, and gang argot. Echoing Lu Xun’s multiple interpretations of his famous sentence with māde, the young rappers use curse words as interjections, emotional intensifiers, and a cathartic release of their strong sentiments and resentments. In the local media, the distinctive slang expressions in Shandong TV’s Ju lai feng and other dubbing programs evoke proximity and identification with the local community, a logic similar to the use of racist words such as “nigger” as a term of endearment and bonding in the African American

15 Joel Martinsen, “Launching a People’s War against Crosstalker Guo Degang,” Danwei. org, August 9, 2010. http://www.danwei.org/media_regulation/launching_a_peoples_war_ agains.php.

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community.16 Finally, on the Internet dirty puns, such as “grass-mud horse” (a homophone of cao ni ma, literally “fuck your mother”) and the highly subversive neologisms compiled in the “grass-mud horse lexicon,” have led to a powerful online discourse against Internet censorship.17 The phenomenon of intonation in Chinese language provides another intriguing point of view in my analysis of the use of local language. In the various dialect-speaking comic sketches shown on CCTV’s Galas, exam­ ined in Chapter 5, a key difference between the staged Mandarin varieties and standard Putonghua Mandarin is the tonal change in the pronuncia­ tion of Chinese characters. Sometimes, a certain degree of tone distortion may lead to the identification of an utterance as a northern Mandarin variant. I argue that the staged or rendered Mandarin varieties, whether or not they are identifiable as a specific dialect, can be viewed as forms of accent liberation from the single Putonghua Mandarin intonation. The intonation of the official language can undergo relatively free deployment and differentiation within the range of its basic, standard tone. In this sense, Putonghua is no longer uni-accentual, isolated, or closed, but can be exaggerated, distorted, or diffused, thus becoming multi-accentual, plural, unfinished, and unpredictable. Again, intonation became an issue in Chapter 6 when I compared rock songs and rap songs that employ local languages. Whereas migrant rock musicians largely employ local variations in intonation to signify a marginal outsider identity, urban rap singers capitalize on local vocabulary resources to articulate a privileged local identity that celebrates their home cities. Furthermore, recognizing the influence of the Chinese tones on musical composition, the musi­ cian Zhang Guangtian champions the traditional principles of the mel­ ody-tone relationship in folk music, particularly that of yi zi xing qiang (the melodic pattern of composition in accord with the tonal pattern of the Chinese characters), whereas Cui Jian finds that the four tones of Putonghua impose an undue restriction on the globalization of Chinese music. In practice, the band The Second-Hand Rose takes full advantage of errenzhuan intonation patterns for their rich emotive-affective aesthet­

16 Jabari Asim, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007). 17 For the Grass Mud Horse phenomenon, see Michael Wines, “A Dirty Pun Tweaks China’s Online Censors,” The New York Times, March 12, 2009; for the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon of the China Digital Times (CDT), see http://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/GrassMud_Horse_Lexicon.



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ics, while Cui Jian tries to distort or diminish tones in order to rhythmize the Chinese language and synchronize with global musical trends. Finally, compared with mass media, fiction has a limited ability to rep­ resent the sound of local languages. However, the writer Chen Zhongshi 陈忠实 offers an interesting defense for rendering local language in writ­ ten text. Commenting on the play version of his novel White Deer Plain (Bailuyuan 白鹿原, 1993), which was staged by Renyi artists in Shaanxi Mandarin in 2006, Chen Zhongshi said that some local vulgarities used by the secret lovers in his novel, such as ri yi hui 日一回 (screw you), sound jarring when heard on the public stage; he maintained that his narration of the private conversation between the two involved parties is only for visual effect and not suitable for reading aloud.18 The play ver­ sion erased ambiguity, intimacy, and privacy in the process of rendering the text out loud. In other words, sound in writing does not necessarily provoke a crisis in representation. Rather, as Mark Stevenson argues, “Lit­ erature reduces some complexities and introduces others.”19 In compari­ son, the young Internet generation produces a different aesthetic effect of defamilarization and reorientation as users transcribe the audible local language into visual written text. The Chinese character is deprived of its semantic reference function and reduced to a phonetic symbol. As I argue elsewhere, online writing, as a third genre that integrates spoken and writ­ ten features, incorporates orality and is more sound-salient and acousti­ cally prominent when compared with writing in traditional print media. A historical connection could be made between contemporary youth and the May Fourth youth as participants in a youth culture who exhibit a phonocentric obsession in inverting the hierarchical relationship between speech and writing. Yet the vernacular movement one century ago ended up transforming the hierarchical order of two written forms (Classical Chinese and vernacular Chinese), whereas what young netizens seek to invert through dialect writing is the hierarchical relationship between two sounds: local languages and the standard language.20 The local-language 18 Chen Zhongshi, “Wo kan huaju Bailuyuan” 我看话剧《白鹿原》[My view on the play version of White Deer Plain], Changjiang wenyi 1 (2007): 6. 19 Mark Stevenson, “Sound, Space and Moral Soundscapes in Ruyijun zhuan and Chipozi zhuan,” Nan Nü 12 (2010): 258. There is growing academic interest in sound and aurality in Chinese literature. For example, an international symposium on sound and Chinese litera­ ture was held at Harvard University on April 25–26, 2008. But so far the publications on this topic mainly focus on the Ming and Qing periods; only a few address the contemporary period. For a summary of the research on this area, see ibid., n. 9. 20  Jin Liu, “Deviant Writing and Youth Identity.”

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soundscape formed in the mass media and on the Internet compete, nego­ tiate, and play with the dominant media language, Putonghua Mandarin, and its associated official hegemonic discourse. This ongoing counter­ movement that promotes the media use of local languages continues to defy a homogeneous national culture by asserting a symbolic value for noninstitutional knowledge and promoting a sense of community.

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Mang jing 盲井 (Blind shaft). DVD. Dir. Li Yang 李杨. Hong Kong: Xingbao jituan youxian gongsi (Star treasure holdings LTD). 2002. Mao he laoshu《猫和老鼠》上海方言版 (The Shanghai Wu version of Tom and Jerry). VCD. Dir. Zhang Dingguo 张定国. Fujian wenyi yinxiang chubanshe. 2004. Mao he Laoshu《猫和老鼠》四川方言版 (The Sichuan Mandarin version of Tom and Jerry). VCD. Dir. Chen Liya 陈利亚 and Zhi Qian 支迁. Art advisor: Li Boqing 李伯清. Fujian wenyi yinxiang chubanshe. 2004. MC Sha Zhou. CD. Sha Zhou 沙洲. Jinan: DIY, distributed by Qilu yinxiang publishing. 2004. Mei ren cao 美人草 (Foliage). DVD. Dir. Lv Yue 吕乐. Written by Shi Xiaoke 石小克 (Frank). Guangzhou: Guangdong yinxiang chubanshe. 2003. Meili de dajiao 美丽的大脚 (Pretty big feet). DVD. Dir. Yang Yazhou 杨亚洲. Xi’an Film Studio. 2001. Meishi tou zhe le 没事偷着乐 (A tree in house). DVD. Dir. Yang Yazhou. Xi’an Film Studio. 1998. Modeng shidai zhi chaoji gexing: Sichuan fangyan ban 摩登时代之超级歌星: 四川方 言版 (The Sichuan Mandarin version of Charles Chaplin’s films). VCD. Chengdu: Sichuan emei dianying yinxiang youxiangongsi. 2003. Niqiu yeshi yu 泥鳅也是鱼 (Loach are fish too). Dir. Yang Yazhou 杨亚洲. Beijing sihai tengfei production. 2006. Pinzui Zhang Damin de xingfu shenghuo 贫嘴张大民的幸福生活 (The happy life of the garrulous Zhang Damin). 20-episode telenovela. Dir. Shen Haofang 沈好放. Written by Liu Heng 刘恒. Beijing dianshi yishu zhongxin et al. 1999. Qi de bi ji hai zao 起得比鸡还早 (Wake up earlier than the rooster). CD. Heisa 黑撒 (Black Head) band. Xi’an: Shiyin Records. 2007. Ren xiaoyao 任逍遥 (Unknown pleasures). DVD. Dir. Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯. 2003. Renren dou youge xiao bandeng, wode bu dairu ershiyi shiji 人人都有个小板凳, 我的不带 入二十一世纪 (Everyone has a little bench, and mine won’t be brought into the 21st century). CD. Hu Mage 胡嗎個. Modern Sky. 1999. Sanmao xue shengyi 三毛学生意 (Sanmao studies business). VCD. Dir. Huang Zuolin 黄佐临. Tianma Film Studio. 1958. Sanqiang pai’an jingqi 三枪拍案惊奇 (A woman, a gun, and a noodle shop). Dir. Zhang Yimou 张艺谋. Beijing New Pictures. 2009. Shan qing shui xiu 山清水秀 (The only sons). DVD. Dir. Gan Xiao’er 甘小二. 2002. Shangche zouba 上车走吧 (Minibus). Dir. Guan Hu 管虎. CCTV-Film Channel. 2000. Shi quan jiu mei 十全九美 (Almost perfect). Dir. Wang Yuelun 王岳伦. Beijing Poly-bona Films. 2008. Shijie 世界 (The world). DVD. Dir. Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯. Shanghai Film Group; Shanghai Film Studio; Xinghui Production, Hong Kong. 2004. Shiqisui de danche 十七岁的单车 (Beijing bicycle). DVD. Dir. Wang Xiaoshuai 王小帅. Arc Light Films and Beijing Film Studio. 2001. Shouji 手机 (Cellphone). DVD. Dir. Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚. Huayi Brothers and Taihe Film. 2003. Tangshan da dizhen 唐山大地震 (Aftershock). DVD. Dir. Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚. Huayi Brothers. 2010. Tiangou 天狗 (The forest ranger). DVD. Dir. Qi Jian 戚健. Shanghai Film Studio et al. 2006. Tianxia wuzei 天下无贼 (A world without thieves). DVD. Dir. Feng Xiaogang 冯小刚. 2004. Wailai xifu bendi lang 外来媳妇本地郎 (Native husbands with foreign wives). 1,000+-episode sitcom. Volumes 1–2. Guangdong TV station. 2000–. Weizhi yishujia 未知艺术家 (Unknown artists). CD. Yin san’r 阴三儿 (In 3). DIY, 2008. Wo ai wo jia 我爱我家 (I love my family). 120-episode sitcom. Dir. Ying Da英达. Written by Liang Zuo 梁左 et al. Zhongguo guoji wenhua yishu zhongxin; Changchun shi hengda qiye fazhan gongsi. 1994.



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289

Wo jiao Liu Yuejin 我叫刘跃进 (I am Liu Yuejin). Dir. Ma Liwen 马俪文. China Film Group. 2007. Women haipa 我们害怕 (Shanghai panic). DVD. Dir. Andrew Yusu Cheng 程裕苏. 2001. Wulin waizhuan 武林外传 (My own swordsman). 80-episode sitcom. Dir. Shang Jing 尚敬. Written by Ningcaishen 宁财神. Shanghai dongshanghai guoji wenhua yingshi youxian gongsi; Kongjun dianshi yishu zhongxin, et al. 2006. Xianghuo 香火 (Incense). VHS. Dir. Ning Hao 宁浩. 2004. Xiao caifeng 小裁缝 (The little Chinese seamstress). Dir. Dai Sijie 戴思杰. Media Asia. 2002. Xiao Shan huijia 小山回家 (Xiao Shan going home). VCD. Dir. Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯. 1995. Xiao Wu 小武 (Xiao Wu). DVD. Dir. Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯. Zhongguo yinyuejia yinxiang chubanshe. 1997. Xiha diyibang 嘻哈第一棒 (A-yo hi-bomb). CD. Shanghai Busheng. 2004. Xingfu shiguang 幸福时光 (Happy time). DVD. Dir. Zhang Yimou 张艺谋. Guangxi Film Studio and New Image Film. 2000. Xinji chibuliao re doufu 心急吃不了热豆腐 (Eat hot tofu slowly). DVD. Dir. Feng Gong 冯巩. Shanxi Film Studio et al. 2005. Xiu Xiu 秀秀 (Xiu Xiu: The sent down girl). Dir. Joan Chen 陈冲. Written by Yan Geling 严歌苓. 1998. Xun qiang 寻枪 (Missing gun). DVD. Dir. Lu Chuan 陆川. Beijing Film Studio; Columbia Pictures Film Production Asia LTD. 2002. Youhua haohao shuo 有话好好说 (Keep cool). DVD. Dir. Zhang Yimou 张艺谋. Guangxi Film Studio. 1997. Yousha jiang sha 有啥讲啥 (Say what you gotta say). CD. Sony-BMG. 2005. Zhantai 站台 (Platform). DVD. Dir. Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯. Artificial Eye. 2000. Zhiyou yige Ningxia: Suyang yuedui Beijing zhan xianchang 只有一个宁夏: 苏阳乐队北 京站现场 (There is only one Ningxia: Su Yang Band live performance in Beijing). CD. Niba yinyue (mud music). Ziyue 子曰 (Confucius says). CD. Beijing Jingwen. 1997.

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index Aliutou shuo xinwen (Aliutou Talks News; TV show) 14, 105–118, 175–176 Anyang ying’er (Orphan of Anyang; film)  205, 209–210 audience 3, 10–12, 72–75, 101–102, 113–114, 119, 176, 191–192, 198–200, 210, 220, 243–249, 277–278, 280–281 Bailuyuan (White Deer Plain; play) 285 Bakhtin 8–9, 99, 122–125, 129–141, 219–220, 236–244, 258, 263 Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (film) 265, 268–270 Ba mianyang he shanyang fenkai (To Separate the Sheep from the Goats; novel) 252, 265, 272–276 Beijing Mandarin in dubbing 83, 99, 101 in film 197, 222–223, 227, 228, 229–232, 234–235, 237, 245 in Latinxua 46–47 in music 144n, 146, 169n, 174. See also Yin San’er and Ziyue in national language movement  23–27, 34, 35, 36n, 40 on TV 59, 60–65, 108 Cantonese 1, 5, 11, 23–26, 36, 54–55, 76–78, 99, 144n, 152, 156n, 200, 205, 210, 219n, 237, 240, 268n, 277, 279, 283 Cha lutiao (Inspecting Road Passes; play)  50–51 Chen Kaige 188, 211, 243, 270n Chen Zhongshi See Bailuyuan Chouxing huo langman (Scandal or Romance; novel) 252, 253–255 Chow, Rey 6, 86, 89, 184, 211 comedy films 8–9, 10n, 12, 16, 71, 83, 102, 219–220, 236, 242–247, 280–281. See also Feng Xiaogang and Fengkuang de shitou Cui Jian 144n, 153, 170–171, 284–285 Dahua xiyou (A Chinese Odyssey; film)  84–85, 98 Dai Sijie 252, 268n. See also Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Dialect See fangyan “Dongbeiren doushi huo Leifeng” (“The Northeasterners Are All Living Lei Fengs”; song) 98–99, 144, 148–151, 278 “Dongbei techan bushi heishehui” (“The Northeast Specialty Is Not Underworld”; rap) 157–158, 162, 173 Dongshenme, biedong ganqing (Don’t Mess with Love; TV series) 59, 64–65 educated youth (zhiqing) fiction and film  16, 252, 265–276 errenzhuan 122, 127, 132–141, 166, 282, 283, 284 Ershou Meigui (Second-Hand Rose) band  165–166, 284 fangyan and comedy 8–10, 219, 245, 248. See also comedy films and audience as folk language 36, 39, 48–54, 121–141, 282–283 as one’s mother tongue, native language 34, 70, 222–223 as the living, vernacular, or oral language 20, 31, 34, 35, 44 as the speech of the uneducated 61–63, 165, 201, 210, 265–276 as rural patois 42, 43, 44, 210, 218–219, 227, 228, 229–236, 265–276 as vulgar slang 21, 54–55, 73–75, 76, 101, 155–158, 159–161, 191–192, 283–284 controversy over the English translation 4–7, 5n its hierarchy and stereotype 3–4, 11, 66, 88–89, 96–97, 117, 219n, 228–229, 277–278 vis-à-vis a national language in the nation-building historical process 19–55 Feng Gong 227, 228, 236. See also Meishi touzhe le Fengkuang de shitou (Crazy Stone; film)  9, 16, 175, 213, 216–217, 219, 236–245, 244, 247, 248 Feng Xiaogang 60, 84, 155n, 215, 216, 218, 219, 227–228, 236, 245, 280. See also

312

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Shouji, Tianxia wuzei and Tangshan da dizhen folk song 48, 164–170, 179, 269–270 folk song collection movement 13, 20, 29–30, 36–39, 169 Freud, Sigmund 10, 89–90, 99n, 135, 241–242 gangtai (Hong Kong Cantonese and Taiwan Mandarin) accent 64–65, 153n, 168–169, 197, 234, 235, 241, 249, 261, 271n, 273, 275 Gan Xiao’er 206, 207. See also Shanqing shuixiu Gaoxing (Happiness; film) 175, 242, 243 Ge You 84, 227, 236 globalization 3, 4, 7–8, 30–31, 97–100, 149–150, 168–172, 237–240, 244–245, 278–280, 282, 284 Gu Jiegang 36, 38. See also folk song collection movement Guan Hu 212, 213, 218, 242. See also Shangche zouba Guan lianzhang (Commander Guan; film) 226n Guizhou Mandarin 205. See also Xun qiang Guizi laile (Devils on the Doorstep; film) 16, 171, 217, 222–223, 225 Gunn, Edward 2–4, 11, 37, 38–39, 44, 45, 53–54, 56n, 59, 68–69, 96, 99–100, 107–108, 176–177, 189n, 200, 215n, 219n, 233n, 240n, 251, 253n, 256–257, 280 Guo Degang 112–113, 282, 283 Hakka (kejia) local language 1, 5, 23, 36, 144, 273, 274 Hangzhou Wu 81, 84, 93, 102, 110–111, 114–118, 119n, 282. See also Aliutou shuo xinwen and Koushui juntuan band Han Sanping 215–217, 222 Heibang (Hi-Bomb) band 153, 162, 176. See also “Xiafeilu de 87 hao” Heisa (Black Head) band 152, 162, 172, 175 Henan Mandarin 61, 67, 76–78, 83, 191, 194, 197, 204–205, 206, 210, 213, 232–235, 242, 245–248, 255–257, 271, 280 Hong Kong Dialect Literature Movement (DLM) 21, 54–55 Huang Sheng 49–50, 54n, 55n Huang Zunxian 22, 36 Hubei (Wuhan) Mandarin 92, 111, 119n, 158–159, 167–168, 169n, 172

Hu Feng 44, 48, 49n, 52–53 Hu Mage 167–168 Hunan (Changsha) Xiang 81, 118, 119n, 153n, 215n, 222, 271 Hu Shi 13, 20, 31–38. See also May Fourth vernacular movement independent and underground films  187–189, 204–213. See also Jia Zhangke Internet 14–15, 70–71, 98–99, 143–144, 147–148, 179–185, 220, 243–244, 280–281, 284, 285–286. See also “Dongbeiren doushi huo Leifeng,” rap music, and Shanghai rap intonation 56n, 60, 62, 127–128, 133–136, 163–171, 230, 254–255, 284–285 Jane Eyre (film) 83, 87–89 Jiada waizhuan (Stories of Mr. Fake; sitcom) 12, 73–75 Jiang Wen 216, 224n, 230, 248. See also Guizi laile and Xun qiang Jia Pingwa 16, 243. See also Qinqiang Jia Zhangke 2, 11, 15, 187–214, 217, 218, 220, 224, 229, 247, 283 Jinnian xiatian (Fish and Elephant; film)  205, 210 Jiquanbuning (One Foot Off the Ground; film) 242, 248 Ju lai feng (Fresh Air from Drama; TV show) 84, 91–93, 102, 283 Ke Zhongping 51 Koushui juntuan (Saliva Regiment) band  152, 154, 157, 158, 172, 175 lanmuju (docudrama) 118–120. See also Wudu yehua Lao Naixuan 13, 19–20, 22–27, 46 Lao She 44, 45, 60, 200 “Laoshi hao” (“Hello Teacher”; rap) 146, 155–157, 158, 161 Laoxi’r pieba (Laoxi’r Chat bar, TV show)  111, 278 Latinized New Writing (Ladinghua Xin Wenzi /Latinxua Sin Wenz) 13, 20, 21n, 40–47 Laws and SARFT regulations on limiting the use of dialect in the media 1–2, 2n, 69, 79, 100, 102–103, 116, 117–118, 118n, 215, 234 Lee, Ang 11 Li Boqing 95, 117n, 246, 282. See also Jiada waizhuan



index

Li Jinxi 23n, 25, 26n, 32–33, 40n, 47 Li Rui 149–150, 251, 253 Liu Bannong (Liu Fu) 13, 20, 34, 36, 37n. See also folk song collection movement Liu Zhenyun 253. See also Cell Phone Li Wan 133, 144n, 168 Li Yang 207. See also Mang jing Li Yu 207, 213. See also Jinnian xiatian local language See fangyan Lu Chuan 213. See also Xun qiang Lu Ganzhang 22–23, 25 Lu Xun 13, 20, 44–45, 52, 200, 259–260, 263, 283 Lü Yue 271n. See also Meirencao Ma Jianling 81. See also Cha lutiao Mang jing (Blind Shaft; film) 204–205, 210, 283 Mao he laoshu (Tom and Jerry; dubbed versions) 75, 83–84, 93–102, 277 mass language (dazhongyu) discussion  13, 20, 42–44 May Fourth vernacular movement 13, 20, 22n, 29–30, 31–40, 41–43, 48–49, 259–260, 285 Meirencao (Foliage; film) 265, 270–272 Meishi touzhe le (A Tree in House; film)  62n, 218, 227–229 MC Sha Zhou 151–152, 154–155, 162–163, 172–174, 175 Min local language 1, 4–5, 22–23 Mo Yan 16, 282. See also Tanxiangxing Nanjing Mandarin 23, 24, 90, 102–103, 108, 110, 115, 152, 173, 175 “national forms” debate 13, 21, 48–54 nationalism 38–39, 97–100, 148, 152, 171–172, 181–185 National Language Romanization system (Guoyu Luomazi/Gwoyeu Romatzyh/ GR) 20, 40 news talk show See Aliutou shuo xinwen Ningbo Wu 66–67, 68, 110, 115, 215n, 219n Ning Hao 205, 207, 212–213, 242. See also Fengkuang de shitou Ni Ping 128, 227, 248 Northeastern Mandarin in comic sketches 127, 128, 132–141 in dubbing 83, 99 in film 227, 242 in music 146, 148–151, 152, 157–158, 165–166, 173 on TV 61, 78–79, 80, 120n

313

phonetic script reform in late Qing  22–30, 32 Pinzui Zhang Damin de xingfu shenghuo (The Happy Life of the Garrulous Zhang Damin; TV series) 9, 59, 62–64 Putonghua Mandarin as affectation 240–242 as cultural and symbolic capital  60–63, 74, 80, 201–202, 203, 264–276 criticism and reflection 55–56, 55n, 56n, 72, 253, 256–257, 270 dubbing tradition in 87–88 Qu Qiubai’s interpretation 41–42 Qian Nairong 66n, 69–70 Qian Xuantong 13, 20, 29, 34, 40 Qinqiang (Qin Opera; novel) 252, 261–265 Qiu Ye 153–154. See also Ziyue Qu Qiubai 13, 20, 40–42, 45 rap music 2, 14–15, 144–163, 151–164, 171–185, 278–279 Ren xiaoyao (Unknown Pleasures; film)  15, 189, 201–204, 211 rock music 15, 144n, 146n, 147, 153, 164–171, 284–285 Shaanxi Mandarin 61, 80, 83, 97, 101, 119n, 126, 128, 172, 175, 205n, 220, 227, 242, 247, 248, 261–265, 285 Shandong (including Qingdao) Mandarin in comic sketches 128 in fiction See Zhang Wei and Mo Yan in film 210, 219n, 226n, 237, 239, 240n, 242, 248. See also Shangche zouba in Latinxua 40, 46 in music 170. See also MC Sha Zhou on TV 61, 80, 102, 108, 111, 119n. See also Ju lai feng Shangche zouba (Minibus; made-for-TV film) 16, 218, 229–232 Shanghai Rap 15, 71, 145–146, 147–148, 152, 153n, 154, 159, 162, 163, 171–172, 173, 175, 176–185. See also Heibang (Hi-Bomb) band Shanghai Wu in dubbing 84, 99, 101 in film 177n, 205, 212, 219n, 245, 271n in music 166. See also Shanghai rap on radio 66–67, 116 on TV 59–60, 66–71, 76–77, 80, 114n, 117

314

index

Shanqing shuixiu (The Only Son; film)  205, 210 Shiqisui de danche (Beijing Bicycle; film)  218, 229–231 Shi Xiaoke 252. See also Meirencao Shouhuo (Pleasure; novel) 252, 255–257 Shouji (Cell Phone; film) 218–219, 232–235, 246, 247, 253 Sichuan (and Chongqing) Mandarin in dubbing 83, 88–89, 92, 93–97, 99 in fiction 252, 269–270 in film 197, 212, 213, 216–217, 222, 233–234, 236–241, 244–245, 246, 247–248, 265–269, 271 in music 150, 153, 154, 166–167, 172, 175 on TV 60, 61, 71–75, 79, 102, 110, 117, 118, 118–120, 128 sitcom 59–62, 66, 68, 73–75, 76–78, 79–81, 90, 102, 149, 240n Song Dandan 126, 128, 136, 245 Suzhou Wu 23–24, 26, 35, 36, 37, 38n, 66, 68, 110, 115, 116, 120n, 152, 219n Tangshan da dizhen (Aftershock; film)  11–12, 236, 248–249 Tangshan Mandarin 80, 128, 129, 170–171, 223, 248–249 Tanxiangxing (Sandalwood Death; novel) 252, 257–261 Tianjin Mandarin 23, 61, 80, 165, 215n, 218, 227, 228–229, 237, 267n Tianxia wuzei (A World without Thieves; film) 209n, 218–219, 235–236 traditional local art forms 14, 51, 93, 106, 109–113, 257–265, 281–283. See also errenzhuan Volosinov, Valentin 9, 63–64, 133–134, 136n, 138 “Xiafeilu de 87 hao” (“No. 87 Avenue Joffre”; rap) 152, 177–179 Xiaopin (comic sketches) 9, 14, 66, 72, 113, 121–141, 249, 280 Xiao Shan huijia (Xiao Shan Going Home; film) 190–192, 194, 207–208, 211n, 218, 229, 283 Xiao Wu (film) 15, 189, 192–196, 197, 198n, 209n, 211, 224 Xiu Xiu (Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl; film) 265, 266–268 Xu Fan 84, 247, 248

Xue Cun See “Dongbeiren doushi huo Leifeng” Xun qiang (Missing Gun; film) 15–16, 216, 217, 220–227 Yan Geling 252. See also Xiu Xiu “Yangzhou fengnüyuan” (“Yangzhou Crazy Girls”; rap) 159–161 Yan Lianke 16. See also Shouhuo Yi Ling See Ba mianyang he shanyang fenkai Ying Da 80–81, 149. See also Wo ai wo jia Yin San’er (In 3) band 152, 174. See also “Laoshi hao” Yin-Tsang band 145, 171, 174 Yuan Yue 168–169 Yu Jian 56, 257 Yunnan Mandarin 83, 96n, 102, 120n, 145n, 270–272 Yu Pingbo 34 Wailai xifu bendi lang (Native Husbands with Foreign Wives; sitcom) 13, 60, 76–78, 81, 277–278 Wang Anyi 67, 226–227 Wang Bingyao 23 Wang Chao 207. See also Anyang ying’er Wang Lei 166–167 Wang Shuo 56, 59, 60, 61, 64–65, 155, 216n, 228, 251, 257, 280 Wang Xiaoshuai 187. See also Shiqisui de danche Wang Yuelun 242, 281 Wo ai wo jia (I Love My Family; sitcom)  13, 59, 60–62, 80 Wo jiao Liu Yuejin (I Am Liu Yuejin; film)  242, 243 Wudu yehua (Night Talk in the Foggy Capital; TV show) 14, 73, 118–119, 278 Wulin waizhuan (My Own Swordsman; sitcom) 66, 79–80 Wu Wenguang 187, 208 Wuya yu maque (Crows and Sparrows; play) 68 Zhang Guangtian 166, 169–170, 284 Zhang Taiyan 13, 19–20, 27–30 Zhang Wei 16. See also Chouxing huo langman Zhang Yimou 188, 190, 205n, 211, 218, 220, 227, 229, 236, 242, 247, 280 Zhang Yuan 187, 207, 211



index

Zhantai (Platform; film) 15, 189, 196–201, 204, 211 Zhao Benshan 9, 78–79, 122, 127, 128, 132–141, 227, 231, 236, 282. See also Xiaopin Zhao Shuli 53–54, 259 Zhao Yuanren 40

315

Zhou Libo 282 Zhou Xingchi 80, 102. See also Dahua xiyou Zhou Zuoren 13, 20, 29, 36, 39. See also folk song collection movement Zhu Wen 208 Ziyue (Confucius Says) band 164–165