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From the extraordinary to the everyday: fan culture’s impact on the transition of Chinese post-cinema in the first twenty years of the twenty-first century

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From the extraordinary to the everyday: fan culture’s impact on the transition of Chinese post-cinema in the first twenty years of the twenty-first century

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Content From the Extraordinary to the Everyday: Fan Culture’s Impact on the Transition of
Chinese Post-cinema in the First Twenty Years of the Twenty-First Century
by
HAO GU
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial
Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
CINEMATIC ARTS (MEDIA ARTS AND PRACTICE)
December 2021
Copyright 2021 Hao Gu
Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Professor Holly Willis, my committee
chair, for her constant supports in the past few years. She has walked me through every steps of
the writing of this thesis. Without her encouragement and guidance, I could not have finished this
dissertation.
Secondly, I am greatly indebted to Professor Andreas Kratky and Professor Vicki Callahan, for
their instructive advice and sparing their valuable time to assist on my dissertation. I also would
like to express my heartfelt gratitude to all the teachers in Media Arts and Practice Department
for their direct and indirect help to me.
Last my thanks would go to my beloved family for their continuous support and great confidence
in me.
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii .........................................................................................................................
List of Figures iv ................................................................................................................................
Abstract v ...........................................................................................................................................
Chapter 1: Chinese Cinema in Transition 1 ......................................................................................
The 1990s and the Return of Chinese Cinema: Leading to Change 2 ....................................
The Cultural Revolution and Model works 4 ..........................................................................
The Art-Oriented Period: 1976-1989 7 ...................................................................................
Entertainment-Oriented Films: Early 1990s-early 2000s 9 ....................................................
Internet-Oriented: Mid-2000s-2021 13 ...................................................................................
Personal Reflection 16 ............................................................................................................
Defining Post-Cinema 18 ........................................................................................................
Cinema’s Identity Crisis in China 23 ......................................................................................
The Interactive Spectator 30 ...................................................................................................
Chinese Cinema and Fandom 31 ............................................................................................
Chapter 2: The Impact of Fan Culture on Chinese Genre Films in the Post-Cinema Age 43 ............
From Wulitou Culture to Fan-made Microcinema 49 .............................................................
The Bloody Case that Started from a Steamed Bun and Youth Rebellion 52 .........................
Rebellion Through Re-creating 59 ..........................................................................................
Copycatting Movies and Cultural Surrender 61 .....................................................................
Chapter 3: The Impact of Fan Culture on Movie Viewing Habits in a Post-cinema Age 70 .............
Chinese Media Fan Culture Study 70 .....................................................................................
Barrage Subtitles System Cinema 76 .....................................................................................
Experimenting with !Barrage subtitles system” in the Movie Theater 77 ..............................
Case Study on Tiny Time 3"s Barrage Subtitles System Screening 82 ...................................
Barrage Subtitles System and Subculture 90 ..........................................................................
A New Type of Cinephilia 94 ..................................................................................................
Chapter 4: The Impact of Fan Culture on the Storytelling of Chinese Cinema in the Post-cinema
Age 97 ................................................................................................................................................
Transmedia and Media Convergence 97 .................................................................................
Chinese Media Convergence and Transmedia Storytelling 102 ...............................................
Case Study of Chinese Transmedia Project 107 .......................................................................
Chapter 5: Conclusion 119 ..................................................................................................................
Chinese Cinema Now: In Theaters and Online 120 .................................................................
What Does All of This Mean for Chinese Viewers 140 ...........................................................
Bibliography 148 .................................................................................................................................
iii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1 Movie attendees waiting as the theater staff helps them connect their smartphones 79 .................
2 Audiences sending barrage comments through their smartphones 80 ...........................................
3 The audiences’ barrage comments are projected directly on the theater screen 81 .......................
4 The audiences’ barrage comments projected on the side screens 82 ..............................................
iv
Abstract
From the Extraordinary to the Everyday: Fan Culture’s Impact on the Transition of
Chinese Post-cinema in the First Twenty Years of the Twenty-First Century
During the last twenty years, between the turn of the new century and 2020, Chinese fan culture
has exerted a great influence on traditional Chinese cinema, accelerating a process of transition
between a 20th century notion of cinema with conventional theaters and audiences, to a form of
post-cinema characterized by breaks in time, location, platform, and technology restrictions. In
this dissertation, I argue that Chinese cinema has faded away and is no longer situated at the top
of the pre-established media hierarchies. It has broken down in a piecemeal fashion, subtly
penetrating into media fans’ everyday lives, becoming extensions of their bodies, minds, and
experiences.
v
1

Chapter One: Chinese Cinema in Transition
During the last twenty years, between the turn of the new century and 2020, Chinese fan
culture has exerted a great influence on traditional Chinese cinema, accelerating a process of
transition between a 20th century notion of cinema with conventional movie theaters and
audiences, to a form of post-cinema characterized by breaks in time, location, platform, and
technology restrictions. In this dissertation, I argue that traditional Chinese cinema has faded
away and is no longer situated at the top of the media hierarchy of the past. It has broken down
in a piecemeal fashion, subtly penetrating into media fans’ everyday lives, becoming extensions
of their bodies, minds, and experiences, while at the same time being shaped by fans and their
various practices of making and sharing media.
To begin to make this argument, in Chapter One, I provide context for the metamorphosis
of Chinese cinema across approximately 50 years, from the Cultural Revolution between 1966
and 1976, through the dawn of the digital age and on into the present in 2021. I move on to
introduce and compare several reflections and perspectives from scholars in the West who have
theorized the concepts of post-cinema, fan culture, and media studies more generally. Borrowing
several key notions, I will locate the site of China’s transition, the place where the cinematic
experience gains power and “spreadability” for media fans, or spectators in general. I will also
map the traces of post-cinema in the current Chinese context, which engages new technologies
and media platforms; empowers fans as makers as well as spectators; and inscribes new modes
of cinematic experience. Finally, I will include key moments from my own experience as a
participant on film sets in China during this time. Taken together, these elements combine to
create an interdisciplinary exploration – straddling film studies, media studies, and fan culture –
of this intersection of cinema and fan culture in China.
2

The 1990s and the Return of Chinese Cinema: Leading to Change
Chinese cinema has undergone tremendous change as the country made the transition
between being a nation with virtually no film production in the mid-1960s to having a booming
industry 50 years later. For convenience, many scholars categorize Chinese cinema according to
generations of filmmakers, with many in the West recognizing the significance of the Fifth
Generation film auteurs, for example, who were prominent from the mid-80s to the mid-90s.
However, in contrast, the great complexity of Chinese cinema across this five-decade timespan
has been noted as well, and several scholars have challenged the ways that scholars in the West
tend to define and circumscribe Chinese cinema, encouraging other approaches. In his
introduction to A Companion to Chinese Cinema (2012), Yingjin Zhang highlights several of
these trajectories. He begins by noting Chris Berry’s call for a multidisciplinary and inclusive
exploration in a collection of essays edited by Berry in 1985 titled Perspectives on Chinese
Cinema. Berry’s book was one of the first to begin to assess post-revolution Chinese cinema;
according to Felicia Chan and Andy Willis, the book “marked the beginning of a wave of writing
on Chinese cinema that began to grow exponentially in tandem with the expanding interest in the
post-socialist, auteurist and ostensibly internationalist Chinese cinema that was emerging from
mainland China from the mid-1980s in the form of the Fifth Generation directors” (Chan and
Willis, 2). Berry advocated for multiple modes of analysis as scholarship on Chinese cinema
began to take shape.
In his overview of Chinese film scholarship, Zhang also notes the argument for the
pluralization of Chinese cinema put forward by Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian
Sobchak and Esther Yau in New Chinese Cinemas (1994); this group of scholars hoped to
3

include the study of films from Taiwan and Hong Kong within the broader scope of Chinese
cinema; Zhang also points to an emphasis on transnationalism as a viable framework for Chinese
cinema as suggested by Sheldon Lu in Transnational Chinese Cinemas (1997); and Zhang even
includes an invitation to see Chinese cinema as it intertwines powerfully with nature in the 2009
book Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge, edited by Sheldon Lu and
Jiayan Mi. For my purposes, I will forgo the generational approach and set aside Taiwan and
Hong Kong cinema, and instead offer a brief overview of the key historical moments in the
history of Chinese film during the post-revolution 50-year time period in order to set the stage
for my discussion of more recent fan activity in China’s post-cinematic era.
There are four key periods during this time:
1) 1966-1976: This was a politically-oriented period during the Cultural Revolution, when
there were few movies made, and movie audiences had very limited choices;
2) 1976-1989: The art-oriented period, following the Cultural Revolution with the rise of
the Fifth Generation directors movement;
3) Early 1990s-early 2000s: A shift to entertainment-oriented filmmaking; from the
beginning of the 1990s, movie audiences began to consider movies as entertainment
products;
4) Mid-2000s-2021: With the rise of the Internet, we see the emergence of video sharing
websites and the growth of fan culture, a new concept in China.
4

Below, I explore each of these moments in greater detail, and with the acknowledgment that the
history of Chinese cinema is vast and complex and that a thorough overview is impossible in this
context.
1

The Cultural Revolution and Model Works
Between 1966 and 1970, there were no films produced or released with the exception of
one kind of film, a propaganda news documentary series produced by Central Studio New of
News Reels Production, which was the main source for news production in China since its
founding in 1953. The series is titled 新闻简报 and while it does not have an official English
title it can be translated as The News Briefing, and was strictly controlled by the government.
There are reportedly more than 400,000 minutes of newsreel footage dating back to the 1930s
housed in a warehouse outside Beijing, and while this form was important to China’s leadership
decade by decade, documentary film production, and all forms of filmmaking, were virtually
stopped and did not return until after the end of the Cultural Revolution (Aitken 2013, 160). In
addition, the Beijing Film Academy closed down; it would not reopen until 1978.
2

While traditional film production halted, there was one exception. At the start of the
Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing (also known as Madame Mao), a
former actress on stage and in films, created a series of opera-ballet performances known as yang

1
Readers wanting further context could see The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, Carlos Rojas, ed., (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2019); The Chinese Cinema Book, Song Hwee Lim and Julian Ward, eds., (London:
British Film Institute, 2020) (second edition); and Cinema Approaching Reality: Locating Chinese Film Theory,
Victor Fan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
2
See Zhen Ni’s 2003 book, Memoirs From the Beijing Film Academy: The Genesis of China’s Fifth Generation
(Durham: Duke University Press) for a longer discussion of the role of the film school in the context of this time-
period.
5

ban xi, which translates as “model works.” These were performed widely, and they were also
filmed and photographed. As Barbara Mittler explains in her essay, “Cultural Revolution Model
Works and the Politics of Modernization: An analysis of ‘Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy,’”
there were initially eight model works; that number grew to 18 by the time of the conclusion of
the Cultural Revolution a decade later. She writes, “The model works, including ten operas, four
ballets, two symphonies and two piano pieces, tell stories from China’s recent past: mostly
episodes from the anti-Japanese war and the civil war period, but also from Korean war and the
early sixties” (Mittler 2003, 54). She continues, “The model works depict the Chinese people’s
determined struggle against outer and inner enemies, they glorify the close cooperation between
the People’s Liberation Army and the common people, and they emphasize the decisive role of
Mao Zedong and his thought for the final victory of socialism in China”” (Mittler 2003, 54).
The model works are significant in that they were the only entertainment available for
many years, and in many analyses, the projects have been seen as simply propaganda. Some
question why film, which can draw large audiences more easily than staged events, was not used
instead. According to Paul Clark, a historian of Chinese cinema, the response to this question is
that film was considered a suspicious artform due to the influence of American and Soviet
filmmaking during the Cultural Revolution. At a moment in time when China was trying to
identify and uphold a national art “style” and social purpose for artworks, film was deemed too
open to influence, too foreign. Opera, in contrast, was considered a national artform.
3

Describing the first eight model works projects, National Public Radio journalist
Anastasia Tsioulcas highlights their complexity, noting that they “married elements of Busby

3
See Paul Clark’s book, The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008) for a more detailed account of the model works and this moment in Chinese cinema more generally.
6

Berkeley-era Hollywood fantasy, classical Peking opera, Western ballet and Wagner’s idea of
gesamtkunstwerk with arias like ‘We Will Wipe Out the Reactionaries’ and dance scenes titled
‘Hatred Blazes When Enemies Meet’” (Tsioulcas 2013, np). Tsioulcas goes on to explain that
Zhang Yaxin was invited to be the official photographer to document the works, and his stills
from these operas became famous and were circulated in many formats, including posters,
stamps, books, and even on dishware. These model works, therefore, are significant in that for
several years, the filmed versions of the eight projects were the only films made in China; they
also point to an early example of transmedia proliferation that would become more extensive
within China’s networked culture.
4

As the Cultural Revolution ended, filmmaking slowly returned, along with a
consideration of film’s role in China. Several filmmakers called for a change in film language
with a series of articles published between 1979 and 1981. However, the broader conversation
centered on, as Paul Clark puts it, “the social function of film art” in China (Clark 1983, 321),
and more generally called for a move away from films that seemed too theatrical with
encouragement for filmmakers to explore the specific qualities of film. This indicated the desire
for a reimagining of Chinese cinema.
Yet another direction is shown in what is known as “scar cinema.” The title of this form
of filmmaking owes its name to the Chinese “scar literature” that emerged during the late 1970s
following the death of Mao Zedong. Like scar literature, Chinese scar cinema grapples with the
harsh realities of the cultural campaigns that affected every life in Mao-era China. Often

4
More recently, the model works made a reappearance in the mid-2000s and were showcased extensively; Dutch-
Chinese documentary filmmaker Yan Ting Yuen also made an award-winning documentary film about them titled
The Eight Modelworks in 2005. For a brief introduction to the model works, see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8UnDFJ65X4. For a more expansive exploration, see Yan Ting Yuen’s The
Eight Modelworks here: http://yantingyuen.com/yang-ban-xi-the-8-modelworks/
7

chronicling the revolutionary decades through the narrative of a single individual or family, the
films inject an intensely personal perspective on the time period, challenging the political
movements and their harrowing consequences with tales that highlight the shared humanity of all
involved. However, this genre of film was short-lived; only 70 films were made in the genre,
between 1978 and 1981. Following the tightening of the government cultural control apparatus
after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, films which portrayed the Chinese Communist
Party in a bad light, regardless of their truthfulness, were banned, at least temporarily, and the
“scar” genre all but disappeared in domestic film production. Nevertheless, the films are notable,
according to Chris Berry, because “in both their discursive form and their politics they mark the
first significant and sustained departure from the socialist realist classical cinema of mainland
China since the 1949 Liberation” (Berry 1995, 87). This “sustained departure” leads to the next
phase of Chinese cinema.

The Art-Oriented Period: 1976-1989
With the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the film industry began to return to life.
The number of films made annually increased dramatically along with the advent of reform and
an opening up of China to the rest of the world. Chris Berry has written about this period in a
book titled Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: The Cultural Revolution After the Cultural
Revolution (2004) in which he examines the 89 feature films made between 1976 and 1981, just
as the Cultural Revolution came to an end. He argues that these films, which have been neglected
in larger histories of Chinese film, are the first place where “postsocialist Chinese culture is
constructed in a significant and sustained manner” (Berry 2004, 1). He goes on to offer a broader
understanding of film scholarship in relation not just to China but to any national cinema, asking
8

if, in studying this history, we should focus on the films themselves? Or on the industry,
including modes of distribution and exhibition? Or on the culture within which films are made,
seen, and shared? He also asks difficult questions about history and historiography, about film as
a discursive practice, and about the use of terms such as “postmodernism” and “postsocialism,”
both of which have been adopted and used extensively in Chinese film theory, but in being
applied to a very different context may not be useful (Berry 2004, 3). These are excellent
questions, and he answers them by examining a set of films as a way to understand Chinese
culture in this period.
Following the Cultural Revolution and under new leadership, China moved from a
planned economy to a market economy. This shift had a profound impact on Chinese culture. As
Yingjin Zhang writes in his chapter, “Directors, Aesthetics, Genres: Chinese Postsocialist
Cinema, 1979-2010,” in A Companion to Chinese Cinema, Chinese cinema evolved in tandem
with these cultural changes, moving from its official capacity as a tool of propaganda to offering
entertainment to an increasingly interested audience. He writes, “The principal function of
cinema in postsocialist China has switched from aesthetics and education in the late 1970s
through 1980s to entertainment in the 2000s” (Zhang 2012, 58).
By the 1990s, Chinese cinema really began to shine internationally with the rise of the so-
called Fifth Generation Chinese directors, a group of filmmakers who came of age following the
Cultural Revolution and together moved beyond the social realism of the previous generation of
filmmakers to make more experimental work. Rey Chow offers a precise overview of this group
of filmmakers, who graduated together from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, in her book,
Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema
(1995). The book discusses the concept of visuality and its relationship to film and other media
9

forms, showing how the Fifth Generation filmmakers brought visuality and artistry into the
foreground after many years of propaganda. The Fifth Generation films were acclaimed
internationally and won many awards at international film festivals. For instance, Zhang
Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) won the Golden Lion at the forty-ninth Venice Film Festival
in 1992. Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993) won the Golden Palm Award at the forty-
sixth Cannes Film Festival in 1993. And Xiefei’s Woman Sesame Oil Maker (1993) won the
forty-third Golden Bear award in the same year.
The Fifth Generation is often compared to Italian Neorealism of the 1940s and the French
New Wave of the late 1950s, in part because it designates a “golden age” of cinematic output,
but also due to its impulse to bring attention away from grand propaganda and more toward the
unique experiences of everyday people during this time. Zhang explains, “The Fifth Generation
– including Huang Jianxin (b. 1954), Wu Ziniu (b. 1953), and Zhang Yimou (b, 1950) –
challenged revolutionary heroism and conventional melodrama by experimenting with new wave
cinematic techniques, reaffirming the artist’s subjectivity, and inventing a national allegory
through meditations on modern Chinese culture and history” (Zhang 59). However, Zhang notes,
it is difficult to limit Chinese cinema to specific generations, and indeed, there is instead of
continuity and homogeneity among these generations of filmmakers a sense of multiplicity and
difference.

Entertainment-Oriented Films: Early 1990s-early 2000s
By the early- to mid-90s, Chinese audiences considered watching movies in the theater to
be an artistic activity. In other words, in the audience’s mind, Chinese cinema’s artistic attributes
were more valuable than its entertainment attributes. Entering the 2000s, China successfully
10

joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 and consequently China had to open up its
mainland film market to the world. The Chinese government issued new regulations for film
management that allowed personal and foreign capital to enter the field of film production and
distribution, which signified the end of the planned economy that had previously controlled the
film market. At this stage, Chinese films began to become far more commercial, partly under the
influence of Hollywood blockbusters, but also in accord with the tone put forward by the
government. In his 1989 article, Chen Haosu, then Vice-Minister of Radio, Television, and Film,
explained that the ontology (zhuti) of cinema is entertainment: “The entertainment function is the
origin and foundation, whereas the artistic (or aesthetic) function and the educational (or
cognitive) function are its extension and development” (D. Li 2002, 587; cited in Zhang 2012,
69).
Restrictions regarding story topics still remained in place, and films intended for
international distribution were reviewed for prohibited content. However, as scholars Ying Zhu
and Stanely Rosen note in the introduction to their collection of essays, Art Politics and
Commerce in Chinese Cinema (2010), the bottom line began to play an increasingly significant
role. They write, “In the absence of the familiar state subsidies of the Maoist era, media and
cultural units in postsocialist China are judged by their commercial success in a very crowded
marketplace” (Zhu and Rosen 2010, 4). They go on to identify a process of what they term
“negotiation” that occurs between filmmakers and the state. They write, “After thirty years of
reform, state-society relations are no longer a one-way street. Society has developed a
momentum of its own and the state has to be concerned with and even to accommodate public
opinion” (Zhu and Rosen 2010, 4). Here, Zhu and Rosen acknowledge the growing
empowerment of the public, which will be amplified in the next decade through social media.
11

Before reaching the 2010s, however, I would like to highlight several other features of
Chinese cinema during this time. Entering the 2000s, as China joined the Word Trade
Organization, the film industry was restructured and the triangulation among the politics of the
state, domestic capital and transnational media capital created divergent pressures and
expectations.
5
More specifically, overall, there was a desire both to show Chinese people on
screen, but also to create box office success. Blockbusters, eschewed in the past, became a focus.
In turn, there was a shift in attention toward building Chinese movie stars and finding genres that
would contribute to larger box office returns.
6
In turn, many filmmakers had to shift and change
across their careers. As an example, filmmaker Xie Jin is described by the Harvard Film Archive
as “one of the most remarkable artists in the history of the cinema of mainland China and,
arguably, its most significant director,” but may be most notable in part for his ability to work
decade by decade through a history of tremendous change (Pendleton 2016, np).
Similarly, the industry itself shifted. According to Zhang, “In a changed socioeconomic
environment from the 1990s onward, box-office successes like Xie Jin’s would no longer carry a
stigma of commercialism, for a slate of new reform measures – including the financial self-
sufficiency required for all state-run film studios (Y. Zhu 2003) – had forced Chinese filmmakers
to reevaluate their positions and rethink concepts like art and entertainment” (Zhang 2012, 69).
This is true for director Feng Xiaogang as well, who, like Xie Jin, has enjoyed a long
filmmaking career that began during the period of redefinition in the mid-1980s, shifted direction
the following decade, only to find yet another direction when he made the celebrated film The

5
For more on the economic implications of the Chinese film industry, see Xiaoxi Zhu’s PhD thesis, “A
Neoliberalizing Chinese Cinema: Political Economy of the Chinese Film Industry in Post-WTO China,” The
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), 2019.
6
See Chinese Film Stars, Mary Farquhar and Yingjin Zhang, eds. (London: Routledge, 2011) for more about the
development of Chinese film stars.
12

Banquet, which was released in 2006. Here, Zhu and Rosen quote Feng Xiaogang and his
reflections on the changing nature of cinema during the 2000s: “Now China has gradually
adopted a market economy.... Movies have changed from a propaganda tool to an art form and
now to a commercial product. If someone continues to make movies according to the old rules,
he’ll have no space to live in today’s market” (Zhu and Rosen 2010, 6).
The Fifth Generation directors, too, began to explore the possibilities of making more
commercial films. Zhang Yimou produced Hero in 2002 which topped $177 million USD at the
global box office. Chen Kaige released his first commercial film, The Promise, in 2005. With the
release of Yimou and Kaige’s commercial films, a new generation of directors began to actively
produce commercial films. At this time Chinese audiences have significantly accepted the
entertainment attributes of film and started to enjoy watching movies as leisure activities.
7

To summarize this historical period, then, China moved through a time of
commercialization and decentralization, trends that are reflected both more generally in the
economy of China but also quite specifically in relation to the film industry. To cite Zhu and
Rosen once again, “As the trends of privatization, marketization, and globalization continue to
strengthen, the Chinese film industry has moved closer to a Western-style industrial structure,
management model, and market mechanism” (Zhu and Rosen 2010, 8).
8
The impact of

7
To gain a more nuanced understanding of these shifts, see The Chinese Cinema Book, edited by Song Hwee Lim
and Julian Ward (London: The British Film Institute, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), which offers a good overview
of this period.
8
While commercial cinema was on the rise, China was also home to an independent film movement and a
generation of directors who stepped outside the official industry to make their movies. Eddie Bertozzi outlines this
particular aspect of contemporary Chinese cinema in a chapter titled “The Uncertainty Principle: Reframing
Independent Film in Twenty-First Century Chinese Cinema” (Chinese Cinema: International Perspectives, Felicia
Chan and Andy Willis, eds. London: Taylor and Francis, 2016); he describes his outlook as “bleak,” citing
challenges faced by filmmakers from governmental control. However, he also points to the work “realised by
amateurs, aided by the increasing diffusion of low-budget digital technology” as a promising trend (“The
Uncertainty Principle,” 81).

13

privatization, marketization, and globalization created a good deal of turmoil as did China’s
participation within a global transnational economy. Shuqin Cui writes in “Boundary Shifting:
New Generation Filmmaking and Jia Zhangke’s Films,” “China at the turn of the millennium
strives for and is driven to a new world system defined as transitional globalization. While
affiliation with the global accelerates a market-driven economy, the encounter between the local
and the global is fraught with contradictions as capitalist practices collide with socialist
ideologies” (Cui 2010, 176). While the complexities of the global marketplace and its impact on
China is beyond the scope of my project, the impact of China’s economic transformation can not
be underestimated.

Internet-Oriented: Mid-2000s-2021
With the rise of the internet and a new generation of Chinese people who have grown up
in a digital culture across the last 20 years, film is no longer confined to the big screen. The
popularity of smartphones and personal computers has allowed younger generations to be more
interactive with big and small screens alike. Further, the functional conflicts among the politics,
art, and entertainment of film at this moment were not the main focus for Chinese youth. Young
people were more interested in how to access films, consume films, and interact with films in
order to speak with their own voices and to express their identities. At this point, Chinese cinema
begins to move into a post-cinema age in which film and other media forms begin to blur their
boundaries.
Turning more specifically to cinema, scholars Matthew D. Johnson, Keith B. Wagner,
Tianqi Yu, and Luke Vulpiani began to define a shift in Chinese cinema in the internet era in
their 2014 book China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First
14

Century. Acknowledging the size and scope of Chinese film, they nevertheless point to its
dissolution in the internet era. They write, “While the country is now the world’s second largest
film market in addition to being the world’s second largest economy, visual culture in China is
increasingly multi-platform and post-cinematic” (Johnson et al 2014, 1). They name this shift a
“cinema of dispersion,” writing, “Digital technology, network-based media and portable media
player platforms have contributed to the creation of China’s new cinema of dispersion or
‘iGeneration cinema,’ which is oriented as much toward individual, self-directed viewers as
toward traditional distribution channels such as the box office, festival, or public spaces”
(Johnson et al 2014, 1). I want to highlight the emphasis here on “individual” and “self-directed”
as terms to describe young viewers, as they echo my argument that contemporary Chinese
cinema and its permeation through social media allows viewers to experience these qualities.
The editors of China’s iGeneration go on to highlight the significance of the sociological
and economic changes that came with China’s entrance into the global economic system of
capitalism generally, and the impact of neoliberalism specifically. They write, “Neoliberalism, as
an increasingly visible/powerful governing ideology in China, has come under significant
scrutiny as filmmakers have had more freedom to criticize a party-state which still intervenes in
individuals’ cultural lives through censorship in film, TV and art production, distribution and
exhibition” (Johnson et al 2014, 2). Finally, they also address the set of dichotomies that
characterize China’s culture in the 2010s and the tensions between access to media and yet
strictures on what can be said; between consumption and poverty; and between the desire for
personal happiness and expression and collective notions of identity that remain in place. These
characteristics, in conjunction with the economic shift, create what the editors describe as
“iGeneration cinema.” They write,
15

When we speak of iGeneraton cinema, we are speaking specifically of
three key developments in cinematic and moving image culture: (1) the
emergence of new, non-industry producers and venues as key ‘nodes’
within the Chinese cinema and moving image scene; (2) the ubiquity of
digital and internet-based technologies; and (3) the globalization of
individualization and experience under the conditions of ‘neoliberalism
with Chinese characteristics,’ as we have previous described.
Johnson et al 2014, 4, italics in the original.
The editors add, “Taken together, we argue, these developments have ushered in a new period of
cinematic culture that is significant precisely because it threatens to displace the ‘old’ cinema,
much as digital and on-demand technologies have corresponded with a drop in US movie
attendance to mid-1990s levels” (Johnson et al 2014, 4).
My argument expands on the premise put forward in China’s iGeneration, using case
studies to delve into the practices used by fans in conversation with filmmakers to create a new
understanding of cinema. In the digital age, the way a new generation consumes films is
multiple, multi-channeled, multi-platformed, and dispersed. The theatrical experience with a big
screen with limited resources is no longer the primary option for film viewing. Instead, the new
generation of Chinese people is moving their attention to small screens and a far more active
mode of engagement.
Further, this active engagement has roots in a longer tradition of movie piracy in China.
Yingjin Zhang suggests that we can understand contemporary Chinese film practices by seeing
them as part of this larger practice. As Dan Gao explains in his chapter “From Pirate to Kino-
eye: A Genealogical Tale of Film Re-Distribution in China,” Zhang goes so far as to embrace the
16

study of film piracy “as a whole new area of audience research, suggesting that we may better
understand contemporary moviegoers by looking back at the history of film piracy, given the fact
that illegitimate copies (in the formats of LD, VHS, VCD, DVD, CD-ROM, online streaming
video, etc.) have been and continue to be one of the major means through which films are viewed
in China” (Gao 2014, 125). Again, this area is beyond the scope of my project, but the attention
Gao pays to the ways in which the act of piracy contributes to a sense of active engagement that
coincides with my thesis.
On the one hand, the downsizing of the screens used to access media accelerates the
boundary-blurring among films and other media forms. On the other hand, Chinese new
generations have seized on the opportunities to interact with films in new ways. New youth
cultures and subcultures are in turn generated from such practices. I should point out, too, that by
the twenty-first century, Chinese youth cultures had grown significantly in prominence. The
majority of urban youngsters were from one-child families, so the internet offered a way for
young people to connect with others and to create together. As Clark notes, “The Internet gave
many of these youths a powerful means to connect with others, to perform, create, and show off”
(Clark 2012, 193). All of these trends together contribute to the creation of China’s post-cinema.

Personal Reflection: Filmmaking in a Shifting Context
With the change of the function of the film in China, the position of film in relation to
other media products has also changed significantly. Film has changed from having a top role in
a hierarchy to having an equal one with other media. This change has been inconvenient for the
film industry, but there have been positive developments. I offer my own experience as an
example.
17

When I was making my first film in 2008, we came to the Chinese film base because we
were shooting a history drama. Since it was at the height of the shooting season – summer –
there were a lot of crews shooting on the same site. Most of the cast and crew needed to record
audio simultaneously, which involves the coordination among all of the shooting sequences. In
our communication and coordination with the site staff, we found that they gave different kinds
of treatment to the crews based on the type of media projects they were making. Basically,
movies were in first place, at the top of the hierarchy; TV projects were in second place; and
other video-based projects were at the bottom of the food chain. In other words, if you were
shooting a film, you had a huge advantage in coordinating the shooting sequence, and this in
turn forced other non-film crews to have to stop and wait. In some ways, then, working on a film
with a film crew had major advantages.
On the other hand, this kind of film and its high status was linked to larger cultural
expectations that were out-dated and created a lot of disadvantages. For example, holding what
is called the opening ceremony before the film production began shooting is still a standard
process for Chinese filmmakers till today. The so-called opening ceremony is actually a form of
worship, praying to the gods to ensure the smooth production of the film. This sort of practice
aligns film with an outmoded sense of feudal superstition.
In addition to these outmoded habits, I found that the status of women on film crews has
also been a great challenge. For example, the industry has a long tradition of not allowing
female workers to sit on the light boxes because filmmakers think it will bring bad luck to the
crew. These bad habits have been greatly improved by the change of the film’s status and the
entry of a new generation of film workers.

18

Defining Post-Cinema
Having offered a sketch of the history of Chinese cinema across the last 50 years, I turn
now to a discussion of post-cinema as it has been theorized in the West, and how it applies to
Chinese cinema in a similar, but also different, manner. I believe these accounts of the post-
cinematic will provide context for the changes affecting contemporary Chinese cinema.
In my view, the increasing integration of cinema and other media forms signals the
transition from cinema to post-cinema. Nowadays, in 2021, online video-streaming websites are
experiencing unprecedented prosperity due to the increasing expansion and convenient access of
the Internet.
9
Mobile applications make small screens more competitive and dynamic than big
screens for people to consume movies and other media products. The development of digital
technologies brings new aesthetics and interactions to the current media landscape.
Theorist Steven Shaviro began to theorize the post-cinematic in 2010 when he published
a long essay, “Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales.” In
it, he claims that we are now living in a post-cinematic media landscape where cinema no longer
has the position as dominant medium or aesthetic form. He argues that movies only gradually
lost their dominant role, in the wake of a whole series of electronic, and later digital,
innovations.
10

So, what is the media landscape of post-cinema since cinema has lost its culturally
dominant position, and how do new media trends reshape cinema into post-cinema? To answer

9
China’s video streaming revenue increased from $7.7 billion in 2015 to $18.1 billion in 2020 and is projected to
reach $34 billion by 2025, with companies like TenCent, iQiyi, and Youku among the leading platforms, according
to an analysis by David Curry published “Video Streaming App Revenue and Usage Statistics,” Business of Apps,
May 7, 2021.
10
Steven Shaviro’s lengthy essay was turned into a book, Post-Cinematic Affect, published the same year by Zero
Press. He continued to discuss the concept of the post-cinematic on his blog the following year with a post titled
“What Is the Post-Cinematic?” http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=992. Accessed 9 July 2020.
19

this question, we have to understand that the term post-cinema does not mean what happened
after cinema. Post-cinema represents a new cultural dominant or regime where old media and
new media collide and combine, producing new social, cultural, and technological possibilities.
In a way, we are exploring a new media environment where one cannot draw a clear line
between cinema and other forms, but this also leaves open many possibilities for what cinema
could be.
To acknowledge the breadth of these shifts, and of the term post-cinema itself, theorists
Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, co-editors of Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21
st
Century Film (2016),
argue that post-cinema is a summative or synoptic term, “one that allows for internal variety
while focusing attention on the cumulative impact of the newer media” (Denson and Leyda
2016, 2). They suggest that we understand post-cinema not as a radical change, but as an
ongoing conversation among disparate media forms. Indeed, for many scholars, cinema as a
medium is drastically blurring its boundaries with other media, and this is no less true in the
context of Chinese film, if in different ways; in China, the impact of mobile devices and social
media has had a profound impact.
11

As an example of scholarship on the blurring of boundaries among media, in their book
The Global Screen (2009), Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy use the term “hypercinema” to
describe a world where nothing and nobody can fully escape the mediation of screens; this is a
world marked by, in their words, “the omnipresent, multi-form, planetary, multimedia screen”
(Lipovetsky and Serroy 2009, 10). For some, the invasion of all these screens in our lives – first,
the TV, then, the computer, and lately, cell phones with cameras – could mean the death of

11
For further background, see Wang Ting’s analysis in “Social Culture of Mobile Phones: A Case Study of China
and Japan” (Journal if East Asian Studies, No. 14, 2016.3, pp: 179-202), which shows the changing forms of social
interaction and forms of personal expression allowed by mobile devices.
20

cinema. Again, this observation has specific meaning in China, where there is a growing synergy
among three main companies, namely the search engine Baidu, the e-commerce business
Alibaba, and the social media company Tencent; taken together, they are known as BAT.
Journalist Emma Barraclough writes, “The BAT companies are pursuing ambitious strategies to
create what are known as online to offline ecosystems, encouraging people to conduct more of
their daily activities – from buying cinema tickets to watching movies – on their platforms”
(Barraclough 2016, np). This combined online and offline ecosystem underscores my argument
about the blurring of boundaries, and the creation of a kind of hypercinema and mediation of the
worlds of Chinese youth with screens.
Laurent Jullier uses yet another term, namely “transmediality,” to portray the new media
sphere and claims that in these times of transmediality, “the ‘audiovisual narrative’ object has a
greater importance and clarity in daily life than the ‘cinema’ [or ‘television’] object.”
12
Again,
the notion of ecosystem comes into the foreground, and the idea that what is more important than
the central narrative “object” is the interactions it affords, and the ways it allows people to have
an affective relationship with larger story worlds and their proactive communities.
Finally, Caitlin Benson-Allott argues that, since the 1980s, audiences, not just in the US
but also internationally, have consumed movies on different platforms, from VHS, VCD, DVD,
to the latest HD-VOD. This, too, contributes to the sense of boundary-blurring among movies,
television, and video. Such movie-viewing shifts have a tremendous impact on the spectator

12
Cited in Ted Nannicelli, Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge,
2016) 55, in reference to Jullier’s essay “Specificity: Medium II,” an entry in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film
Theory, Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland, eds., (New York: Routledge, 2014). Nannicelli also cites Noël
Carroll’s 2001 article, “TV and Film: A Philosophical Perspective,” which argues that film and TV can be
considered parts or phases in the history of the moving image, a trans-media form of expression and communication
“…that has sometimes been implemented by film, sometimes by TV, sometimes by digital computers, sometimes by
some combination of all of these, and sometimes by that we cannot yet imagine” (cited in Nannicelli, 56)
21

(Benson-Allot 2013, 1), and again, in China, with its history of piracy, there is a specific kind of
fluidity that audiences enjoy.
What I have tried to show here is that each of these scholars is identifying a new
configuration of cinema as it intersects with the internet and social media, focusing specifically
on shifting forms of distribution and exhibition, of sharing and watching media content.
However, while the ecosystem I have described for watching and sharing media has shifted
within this context of post-cinema, so, too, has the visual style of media as it appears on all kinds
of screens. Carol Vernalis takes this up in her book, Unruly Media YouTube, Music Video, and
the New Digital Cinema (2013); she supports this observation with a study that focuses on the
moving image itself, working to clarify the boundaries between film and other movie-image
forms formally. She demonstrates how to understand post-classical film, YouTube clips, and
music video in the current situation and argues that it is difficult to draw a clear line among them
since all these media have become so similar. They have all been influenced by the same
technologies and socioeconomic pressures that also extend beyond national borders. According
to Vernallis, “We’re in the midst of an international style that has heightened sonic and visual
features; they’ve been intermedially reconfigured and accelerated (Vernallis 2013, 4). She adds,
“A range of contemporary global media, including viral web media, music video, South Asian
cinema, and the feature films of music video directors who have crossed over to cinema, have
changed in similar ways, through this new intensified style has also permeated these forms
unevenly” (Vernallis 2013, 4).
The post-cinema media landscape has brought not only the change of screening platforms
for movies, blurring the boundaries among media products, but also an attempt to reshape the
aesthetic style and internal standard of films. In the post-cinema age, the classic narrative and
22

aesthetic that used to be the key components in establishing the hegemony of cinema is
dramatically changed.
Building on the concept of the post-cinematic, Shaviro uses the term post-continuity in
his book Post-Cinematic Affect, explaining that with post-continuity “a preoccupation with
immediate effects trumps any concern for broader continuity – whether on the immediate shot-
by-shot level, or on that of the overall narrative” (Shaviro 2010, 123). Shaviro uses post-
continuity to describe a series of new filmmaking techniques in Hollywood action films that
deliberately disturb or even go against the classical continuity in film structure in order to deliver
a continual series of shocks to the audience. In order to map the geography of this term, Shaviro
looks back to David Bordwell’s notion of “intensified continuity,” where Bordwell argues that
Hollywood action scenes became “impressionistic,” rendering combat or pursuit as a blur of
confusion.
13
He further argues that Bordwell’s conclusion regarding intensified continuity, which
labels it not as a radical shift but as a new style that amounts to an intensification of established
techniques, is no longer a suitable description for new Hollywood action cinema. Shaviro adds to
this idea and redefines “continuity” as a cultural term that is not just a basic editing technique as
continuity in Hollywood narrative cinema, but also implying that the homogeneity of space,
time, and narrative organization is disrupted (Shaviro 2010, 5). By extending its definition,
Shaviro actually links post-continuity with contemporary society, putting these filmmaking
techniques into a bigger cultural scope (Shaviro 2010, 5). Under such circumstances, traditional
continuity (continuity structure in classical narrative Hollywood films) is no longer at the center
of the audience’s experience. Furthermore, Shaviro points out that the function of continuity
structures is not just to articulate narrative; it is more about the spatial orientation and regulation

13
See David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” Film Quarterly,
Vol. 55, No. 3, Spring 2002, pp. 16-28.
23

of the flow of time (Shaviro 2010, 6). In this sense, he argues that in post-continuity films, unlike
classical ones, continuity rules are used opportunistically and occasionally, rather than
structurally and pervasively. Narrative is not abandoned, but it is articulated in space and time
that are no longer classical. For space and time themselves have become relativized or unhinged
(Shaviro 2010, 7).
For all the above, the post-cinema media landscape presents an approach where cinema
mixes with other media forms, generating new characteristics. In addition, cinema has lost a
sense of specificity, causing an identity crisis in the post-cinema age rather than forging a united
and cohesive new identity. As philosopher Gilles Deleuze points out, the electronic image, that
is, the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into being, either had to transform
cinema or to replace it, to mark its death (Deleuze 1986, 265).
While this scholarship focuses on non-Chinese cinema and media practices, it
nevertheless provides a backdrop for my study. There are parallels between the events in the
West and the rise of the internet and social media practices in China and how they have affected
and expanded the idea of cinema and moving image storytelling, moving from the auteur-driven
narratives and post-socialist filmmaking of the previous decades to new, more fractured forms in
recent years. This is also reflected in changes in theatrical distribution and exhibition in China,
and in forms of media that exist not as finite, complete works, but as ongoing conversations
among filmmakers and fans, who themselves have changed over the last two decades in
remarkable ways.

Cinema’s Identity Crisis in China
24

In my view, one of the most direct impacts of the identity crisis of cinema is that the
theatrical screen has lost its hegemony in the post-cinema age. This has happened in the US,
especially in the context of increased streaming, and, as an important part of the global film
industry, the Chinese film industry has also suffered from this identity crisis.
According to the statistics in a report titled “Analysis Report on the Development of
Chinese Original Network Programs in 2018 (online films),”
14
when a movie is shown at the
same time in the movie theater and on a video website, 40.27% of the people tend to watch it on
the Internet, 34.68% of the people’s choice depends on the movie itself, 14.79% of the people
feel indifferent in watching it in the movie theater or on the Internet, while only 7.95% of the
people go to the movie theater to watch it. In the face of the data, many Chinese scholars and
people in the industry have expressed the negative view that movies are going to die and the
movie theater is going to disappear.
The global pandemic in early 2020 also witnessed a significant transition from theatrical
movie-going to digital viewing. According to a report published by Maoyan Entertainment,
while China’s movie industry was severely hit by the pandemic, the online entertainment market,
including TV and streaming platforms, were booming as people were confined to their homes.
The pandemic led to soaring traffic for online streaming platforms. Total users increased by
17.4% to reach 310 million during the Chinese New Year holiday compared to a regular week
(January 2 to 8, 2020), while users spent an average of 98 minutes daily on such platforms
during the holiday.

14
文化产业评论. “2018 年网络原创节目发展分析报告（网络电影篇.” 网易号, edited by 李姝婧, 11 Jan. 2019,
https://dy.163.com/article/E592FI600519CS5P.html.
25

With the growing popularity of online streaming platforms, alongside the challenges
posed by a pandemic, some movies gave up their theatrical release dates to turn to streaming
platforms. On January 24, 2020, for example, the highly-anticipated comedy Lost in Russia
(2020), directed by and starring Xu Zheng and produced by Xuanxi Media, became the first
Chinese movie released online for free through an innovative arrangement based on cross-
promotion and revenue sharing across several platforms and companies. The film appeared on
both the Xuanxi and ByteDance platforms, including TikTok, Xigua Video, and Toutiao. The
film drew more than 600 million views within the first three days. A representative from Huanxi
stated in Variety, “The film will keep the appointment to meet everyone on Jan. 25, but the
meeting point has changed to your cellphone and television, instead of the cinema” (Frater 2020,
np). Another Chinese comedy, Enter the Fat Dragon (2020), also moved to iQiyi and Tencent
Video on February 1, 2020, and viewers could pay for early-access. The movie generated 63
million paid views on the Tencent Video platform within the first three days.
15
While these are
experiments driven by the pandemic, it is clear that Chinese filmmakers, distributors, and
exhibitors, alongside social media and mobile media platforms, are reimagining the revenue
models for moving-image storytelling in China.
The battle between the silver screen theater and streaming platforms did not just happen
in China; it is a global phenomenon. Recently, Martin Scorsese directed the movie The Irishman
(2019), which was only shown on Netflix in 2019. In order to participate in the Oscar
competition, Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma (2018) was shown in the movie theater only on a small
scale, but then it was launched on Netflix for members to watch. Many well-known film
directors are playing their own films on the Internet. The number of streaming companies also

15
Staff writer, “Maoyan: China’s Online Entertainment Market Booming with the COVID-19 Pandemic,”
Entrepreneur, 9 Apr. 2020, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/349002.
26

exploded in 2021 and in the US now includes Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Paramount +,
Disney +, Peacock and Apple TV+; this has prompted many industry analysts to speculate on
Hollywood’s future.
16
Does internet streaming mean the death sentence for cinema’s theatrical
screening?
17
Will it result in a fundamental change of cinema’s media specificity?
In fact, in the history of the film industry, we often see scholars and professionals raising
questions about cinema’s specificity as a medium and its ability to endure through various shifts.
In every moment of technological change that threatens to subvert movie exhibition in theaters,
with the advent of technologies such as television, 3D, or VR technology, for example, there has
been a discussion about the death of the cinema, alongside an evolution of cinema in the midst of
such arguments. For example, with the popularity of television in the US in the 1940s, the status
of film began to become unstable. In the 1990s, the emergence of home theaters and DVDs
accelerated this process. Before that, the movie theater was the only venue for films to be shown.
The audience would not be able to watch a film if it stopped being shown in the movie theater. In
the age of television, and then of the VCR, the audience shifts to watching films in the living
room, and this has many implications for viewing patterns, and for cinema itself.
Further, the change from the big screen to the small screen has affected the expression of
movie language. For example, early films adopted composition styles featuring deep depth of
field, perspective shots, and so on, while on the small screen, close-up shots and quick cuts are

16
See, for example, Sharon Waxman’s predictions in “Hollywood in 2021: Why Streamers Will Rule Even Post-
Pandemic,” The Wrap, Jan. 3, 2021:
https://www.thewrap.com/hollywood-2021-streaming-power-post-pandemic/
17
A recent report from Deloitte states that the cinema will continue as a venue post-pandemic, but studios need to
reimagine their distribution and exhibition planning. The authors write, “The industry could benefit from
reconceiving storytelling and cinema.By moving past the TV-or-cinema dichotomy, studios could pursue a more
diverse array of storytelling vehicles.” They note that this diverse array could include not only shorter content, but
content directly linked to social media, a trend already popular in China. “Digital Media Trends: The Future of the
Movies,” Chris Arkenberg, David Cutbill, Jeff Loucks and Kevin Westcott, Deloitte Insights, December 10, 2020.
https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/future-of-the-movie-industry.html
27

often used to attract attention on a small screen. This becomes even more significant for mobile
phone viewing. In the past, the ratio of the film screen was 1.33:1, which was very similar to that
of the TV screen. In order to distinguish the film and TV, the picture ratio of the film gradually
changed to 1.85:1 and eventually to 2.35:1. At the same time, movie theaters were also
vigorously updating audio-visual equipment, which was different from the small screen. For
example, the IMAX screen, which is several floors high, posed a great challenge to the film's
picture quality, composition, and lighting, but offers an almost immersive viewing experience
and a special experience for viewers.
As we enter yet another era of competition among media forms, what remains the core
competitiveness of cinema? First, I believe public screenings play a role. Since the birth of
cinema, movies have succeeded when they are public. For example, although Thomas Edison
had successfully shown a film on the Kinetophone in 1894, which could only be viewed by one
person at a time, the Lumière brothers’ public film screening in 1895 caused them to be
recognized as the inventors of film. The desire for collective viewing plays a strong role in
bringing viewers to the movie theater.
18

When films are only shown in movie theaters, they are not in competition with other
formats. However, when films open both online and in the movie theater simultaneously, the
advantages of movie theaters seem to disappear. That said, many believe that going to the movie
theater is primarily a social experience, and visiting the theater has a sense of ceremony to some
extent. The closed viewing space of the movie theater enables dozens of people to experience a

18
A 2017 report by Deloitte shows that Chinese movie theaters are using data from box office attendance to
optimize screening schedules based on viewer habits. See “China’s Film Industry: A New Era,” Deloitte China,
2017.
28

“collective dream” at the same time. This is particularly significant in China where, over the last
decade, there has been a desire to reinforce a sense of Chinese collective identity.
19

For many film scholars and professionals, cinema as a medium has always had many
unique attributes that appeal to its viewers. Scholar Raymond Bellour, for example, describes
what cinema should be: “A film projected in a movie theatre in the dark for the fixed duration of
a screening that is to varying degrees collective has become and remains the condition of a
unique experience of perception and memory. It defines its viewer. Every other viewing situation
alters this experience to varying degrees. And this thing alone merits being called ‘cinema’”
20

Similarly, in her 1996 article “The Decay of Cinema,” Susan Sontag expressed her worries about
cinema’s future under the influence of the boom of living room television theaters and the
decline of traditional theaters. What would she think of the dramatic increase in online streaming
technologies between 2020 and 2021? Now, sitting at home will only become more prevalent
than before.
So, what motivates moviegoers or movie fans to seek out the cinema experience? Sontag
chooses the term “cinephilia” rather than “moviegoer” to describe a certain kind of obsession
with cinema and movies. To some extent, she considers the cinema itself to be a ritual space. The
word “theater” comes from the Greek word theatron, meaning “seeing place.” Theater historians
have connected the origins of theater with agrarian and fertility rites and with special places for
enactment of these rites.
21
The movie theater nowadays remains special, and there are certain

19
Giuseppi Richeri shows the relationship between the US film industry and its desire to reach Chinese viewers,
and, on the other hand, China’s desire to use film to help create a collective identity while also bolstering ticket
sales. See “Global Film Market, Regional Problems,” Global Media in China, Vol. 1, Issue 4, 2016.
20
Cited by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion in The End of Cinema?: A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age.
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015) 21. Raymond Bellour’s article is “La querelle des dispositifs,”
Artpress 262 (2000) 48-52.
21
As an example, see Milly Barranger, Theatre: A Way of Seeing (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2014) 24.
29

rituals and rules for audiences to follow. Ushers need to check the tickets before entering.
Audiences sit with others as a group for a collective experience in a darkened hall before a
curtained stage. Theater lights dim to darkness which signals the beginning of the movie.
Audiences will also be told through the pre-show announcements to turn off electronic devices.
Viewers are expected to be quiet. And theaters themselves are increasingly designed to be
exciting, even luxurious venues with attention to architectural design.
22
All of these rituals make
audiences consciously or unconsciously behave with courtesy and try to concentrate on the
screen. Scholars have described this theater viewing experience as something unique, as
something even symbolic.
23

As can be seen from the above statements, the real dilemma in the age of post-cinema is
that there is a debate between acknowledging that cinema as a medium is changing over time
while at the same time holding on to the idea that there is something distinctive about cinema.
24

For me, cinema is a technology, a historical phenomenon, a cultural entity, and more
importantly, an experience. As Peter Greenaway pointed out many years ago, cinema-as-a-
medium is not dead, but because its dominant form is dead (or in the process of dying), one
should not use the word “cinema” to describe its new form: “All the new languages will certainly
be soon giving us, I won’t say cinema because I think we have to find a new name for it, but

22
These theaters are featured in design magazines attentive both to architecture and interior design. See, for
example, Dezeen’s cinema section.
23
See Kevin J. Corbett’s overview of cinema exhibition as a technology in “The Big Picture: Theatrical
Moviegoing, Digital Television, and Beyond the Substitution Effect,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 40, Issue 2, Winter
2001. He writes of cinema’s longevity: “Its perseverance may be due to its symbolic importance to our culture, a
symbolism that has shifted with every threat and transition the film industry has experienced. Its perseverance may
also be due to industrial efforts to exploit the theater's symbolic value,” np.
24
Director Martin Scorsese has pointed out that although the theater-based communal experience for cinema will
always be there, the cinematic experience has changed dramatically. Scorsese argued that the “proliferation of
images” on devices and screens of all kinds has made the cinematic experience less special for young audiences. See
Adam Epstein’s “The Movies Are Dead, According to Martin Scorsese and Ridley Scott,” Quartz, 4 Jan. 2017,
https://qz.com/878002/the-movies-are-dead-according-to-martin-scorsese-and-ridley-scott/.
30

cinematic experiences” (Greenaway, in Gaudreault and Marion 2015, 1). He adds that the death
of cinema occurred on a specific date, namely 31 September 1983, when the remote control was
introduced, making cinema an interactive, multi-media art (Gaudreault and Marion 2015, 22). In
the post-cinema age, then, we no longer purely consume film, but cinematic experience within a
larger ecosystem that, post-pandemic, is truly in flux.
25

The Interactive Spectator
While the hierarchy of cinema has shifted and options for viewing have proliferated, I
want to discuss one other feature that is significant in the context of contemporary Chinese
cinema. Powered by digital technologies, the cinematic experience nowadays is more interactive.
Richard Grusin, in his essay “Video Games, and the Cinema of Interactions,” has argued that
digital cinema engages viewers interactively via two layers, namely in the new ways that viewers
consume films and in the interaction between cinema and other mediums. Over the past decade,
the formerly immobilized movie-goers who sat in the darkened space of the theater facing a
dream-screen have been replaced by interactive multimedia spectators. The divide between
screen and audience in classical Hollywood cinema gives way to a continuum between the digital
artifact and the viewer’s/user’s interaction. Consequently, we can no longer consider the film
screened in the theater as the complete experience of film consumption. In our current cinema of
interactions, the experience of the film in the theater is part of a more distributed aesthetic or
cinematic experience.

25
Bruce Isaacs adds to the conversation about the future of cinema when he argues in The Orientation of Future
Cinema: Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) that whatever cinema is, it functions in a
network of image systems (61).
31

Grusin takes film-related DVD and video games as examples, arguing that the
remediation of theatrical releases in DVD and increasingly other digital formats marks a
fundamental change in the aesthetic status of the cinematic artifact, which implies that a film
does not end after its closing credits, but rather continues beyond the theater to the DVD, the
video game, the soundtrack, the websites, and so forth. Grusin argues that such distributed
cinema becomes part of a logic of remediation in which media not only remediate each other but
increasingly collaborate with other media technologies, practices, and formations. His concept of
media convergence suggests that in our current historical moment, there is almost no sense of a
medium that exists in itself, but rather only media that exist in relation to or in collaboration with
other media. Television or the Internet or film should be understood as networks or systems of
technologies, practices, and social formations that are generally stable for the most part, but that
in the process of circulation and exchange tend to fluctuate or perhaps overlap at various nodes
or crossings. The new cinema of interactions involves not the creation of a distinctly new
medium but the remediation of a number of older, existing media. Such cinema interaction
creates new forms of knowledge suitable to the changing conditions of moving image
technologies brought about by the changes in media technologies, forms, and practices. This
cinema of interactions is particularly true in China where fandom plays such an important role in
the larger ecosystem of contemporary cinema. This brings me to the third important aspect of
contemporary Chinese cinema experience.
Chinese Cinema and Fandom
From the perspective of cinematic experience, we might have an answer to what cinema
could be in the post-cinema age when digital technologies have tremendous impact on almost
32

every aspect of our daily lives. In the following discussion, I will bring in the methodology of
fandom studies to further elaborate my understanding of Chinese post-cinema as it relates to
spectators. Why borrow from fandom studies? Because, in my view, Chinese fan culture is one
of the primary driving forces leading Chinese cinematic experience into a more interactive and
dynamic environment in the post-cinema age. That said, the discussion of fan culture in China is
a new one.
The concept of fan culture in China was introduced in 2009 by Dongfeng Tao and the
publication of The Fan Culture Reader. Prior to this book, Chinese fandom did not have a
systematic theoretical backbone; fan culture was simply not a focus of study. The Fan Culture
Reader is a translated volume that includes many well-known Western fan culture scholars’
work, including that of Henry Jenkins, John Fiske, Constance Penley, and Jackie Stacey. Their
studies cover several types of fandom culture, such as media fandom and sports fandom, across
several decades. Tao’s collection was a fundamental breakthrough for Chinese fandom study
when it was published. Not only did he introduce the idea of fandom studies from the West, but
he inspired Chinese scholars to explore Chinese fandom culture. According to his co-editor Yang
Ling, “This anthology has provided much-needed academic legitimacy and theoretical
frameworks for the fledgling Chinese fandom studies and is probably still the most-cited
publication in this field for better or worse” (Jenkins 2008a, np).
Tao went on to publish another translated volume in 2009 named Subculture: A Reader,
which covers Western subculture scholars’ works, such as Stuart Hall, Albert Cohen, Sarah
Thornton, and Martin Roberts, just to name a few. Tao’s work once again sheds light on the
study of Chinese fandom by bringing fan studies and youth subculture together.
33

Due to the lack of theoretical guidance in the early study of Chinese fan culture, Western
fan studies were a primary focus for Chinese fan culture scholars. There were many useful books
published in the West, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
(1992); Lisa Lewis’ The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (1992); Matt Hills’
Fan Cultures (2002); and Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and Lee Harrington’s Fandom:
Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (2007). These works helped Chinese fandom
researchers to establish a theoretical framework. In addition, the work of Jenkins, especially in
Textual Poachers and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, has been
translated into Chinese and been very influential. His methodology of ethnographic audience
research and his positive attitude towards fan culture has created a profound impact on Chinese
fan study. Many Chinese scholars have tried to apply both his methodology and his embrace of
fan culture to the Chinese media context.
With regard to Chinese fan activity, the first wave of Chinese local fandom study started
in 2004, when a TV reality show titled Super Girl (2004-2011) aired in China for three
consecutive years. The show would continue to air on and off until 2011, but for these initial
years, the reality show became the talk of the town. Its success and the significant number of
fans who followed it in turn drew the attention of Chinese scholars. Scholar Ling Yang, noted
above, published her book, Entertaining the Transitional Era: Super Girl Fandoms and Popular
Cultural Consumption in Contemporary China in 2012. She uses ethnographic audience research
to discuss the relationship between Super Girl fans and the Chinese entertainment industry. She
points out the positive significance of Super Girl fans’ activities and how they changed the
power relations between producers and consumers in the entertainment industry. She also notices
the power of the internet among Chinese fans. Fans actively and positively use the internet to
34

gather together, creating their own community and supporting their favorite idols during the
show (Yang 2012, 39-50). This is an early example, but it begins to show the interests of fans
and their ability to form communities.
There are several other key Chinese publications devoted to fan culture. For example,
Qiang Zhang’s book Fans Are Powerful ( 粉丝力量大) discusses fan economies and how new
media technologies impact the way fans create their communities. Lirong Liu’s Fan Research: A
Case Study of Super Girl Fans ( 粉丝受众研究—以超女粉丝为例) offers a preliminary analysis
of, and research on, Super Girl fans’ backgrounds, relationship with the material, organizational
characteristics in how they structure their interactions, and the interactive relationship with
media, alongside a comparison to traditional audiences. This extensive overview demonstrates
the complexity of fan culture in China, and begins to suggest the role of economics.
With the advent of a number of Chinese local fandom works, the academic community
began to pay more attention to fan culture nearly 10 years ago. In 2012, for example, Suzhou
University established a research center called New Media and Youth Culture. A book series
named New Media and Youth Culture （新媒介与青年亚文化) has published several book that
discuss Chinese fandom and youth culture. Their research objects include, but are not limited to,
Cosplay, ACG and Otaku, online spoofs, online hacker activities, and online gaming.
It is worth noticing, too, that many early Chinese fan studies are connected with celebrity
fandom in particular. This is partially because the Hong Kong and Taiwan idol culture had a
35

significant impact on Chinese fans in the late-80s and ’90s.
26
In 2013, Ling Yang and Dongfeng
Tao published Celebrity Studies: A Reader. This edited book introduces the influential
theoretical works in the field of celebrity studies, and expounds on the complicated relations
between celebrities and modern society. It also examines the social and historical context and
expression of the celebrity system in film, business, politics, literature, academia, and other
fields.
Apart from a focus on celebrity fandom, other scholars have joined the field of Chinese
fan studies with other areas of focus. For example, several scholars are interested in fan
economics and the growing economy related to the entertainment industry and, further, how fans
exert power over that industry. Kanghua Li’s Fans Consumption and the Construction of Fan
Economics ( 粉丝消费与粉丝经济的建构) (2016) explores the characteristics of fan
consumption and points out how the entertainment industry should embrace fans economics.
Jianying Chen and Danfeng Wen’s book Fan Economics (解密社区粉丝经济学) discusses the
consumption activities of Chinese fans from the perspective of marketing theory, exploring the
emergence, development, operation, and future commercial trends of the Chinese fan economy.
Finally, Yanzhen Xu’s Film Marketing Strategies of Fandom ( 粉丝文化视阈下的电影营销研
究) discusses how the movie franchise Tiny Time interacts with its fans and promotes box office
sales. These books offer a backdrop for my work as they show how fan activity in China has
shifted such that the film industry, along with the game and publishing industries, considers fans

26
Idol culture refers to a movement that began in Japan in the 1960s in which entertainers are created and promoted
as singers and actors, with close connections to merchandising. Idol culture has expanded beyond Japan and is still a
strong element in Japan, Taiwan, and China.
36

not simply as passive viewers, but as very active participants in the larger ecology of a project,
helping market and share the project as it enters the marketplace.
Chinese scholars are also interested in specific groups of fans, for instance, fans of
movies, TV dramas, animation, or other specific aspects of Chinese culture. Weihua Wen’s
book, American TV Fans: Media Consumption and Identity Building （美剧迷群：媒介消费与
认同建构）explores the ways American TV dramas are disseminated in China and the activities
of online American TV drama fans. Through the activities of watching, discussing, and
disseminating American TV dramas in China, these fans explore their cultural identities and a
sense of belonging in terms of cultural value.
Graduate students are increasingly focusing on this area as well. For example, Yulin Li’s
dissertation, The Communication Research of One Piece in China from the Perspective of
Subcultural Capital (1999-2019) 亚文化资本视角下《海贼王》在华传播研究 (1999-2019),
discusses how a Japanese animation, One Piece (1999-2019), became popular in China and
attracted a significant number of Chinese fans. Li explores how Chinese One Piece fans actively
participated in the dissemination of the animation and One Piece’s commercial strategies to
engage its Chinese fans. Similarly, Ran Cao’s graduate thesis, Doujin Fans: An Analysis on a
Kind of Internet Sub-culture Group (2013) (同人粉丝: 对一种网络亚文化群体的分析), focuses
on one specific group of fans called Doujin fans, who are interested in self-published amateur
works which are outside the regular entertainment industry. These works might include fan
fiction, novels, magazines, and manga She describes the relationship between Chinese Doujin
fans and the commerce system, exploring how Chinese Doujin fans pursue questions of self-
37

identity and group identity on the Internet by creating and sharing work based on commercial
works.
There are also a significant number of scholars interested in establishing fan
communities. Yu Chen’s book Subculture and Creativity: Fan Culture Under New Media
Technology ( 亚文化与创造力—新媒体技术条件下的粉丝文化) (2016)
27
takes Baidu Tieba, a
social media platform introduced in China in 2003, as its focus, concentrating on text
reproduction and regenerative text consumption activities of the virtual fan community; Chen
discusses the formation, representation, and significance of fan subculture in relation to new
media technology and puts forward the concept of “fan creativity,” showing how it emerges from
the relationship and interaction between micro-fan creativity, macro-industrial productivity, and
cultural creativity.
Lu Chen’s Masters thesis, Consumption and Empowerment: A Study of the Power
Expression of Idol-forming Fans in Weibo Space: A Case Study of TFBOYS Fans (2020) （消费
与赋权：微博空间中偶像养成系粉丝的权力表达研究—以TFBOYS 粉丝为例), discusses the
formation, operation, and characteristics of TFBOYS idol fan community. The TFBOYS are a
teen boy band called The Fighting Boys whose careers began in 2013 with the release of a hit
song; their fame grew immensely in the subsequent years, as did their fanbase. Chen argues that
the development of social media and the empowerment of consumption transforms fan groups
into a more powerful and active audience group than before.

27
Untranslated dissertation; translation of title mine. Sichuan University Press (2016)
38

Finally, Yijia Zhou’s dissertation, Research on the Identity of Idol-supportive Group
Members in New Media (2020) ( 新媒介中应援团成员的身份认同研究), explores how fans
build their identities among the fan group and the differentiation and conflict within the group
caused the instability and mobility of the fan group. Here, the emphasis is on how interactions
with media help create a sense of self and of belonging, with attention to identity formation.
Chinese fan culture also attracts the Western world’s attention; several English
publications can be found in academia on this topic, with special attention to the concept of
nationalism. Hailong Liu’s edited book From Cyber-Nationalism to Fandom Nationalism: The
Case of Diba Expedition in China, published by Routledge in 2019, describes the quality of
nationalism that emerged in January 2016 with the Diba Exhibition, when young Chinese fans
used emojis to attack various online sites using Diba, an online media forum launched by Baidu.
The authors of the book’s eight chapters discuss the change of Chinese fandom activities under
the influence of national political education, commercialism with Chinese characteristics, and
grassroots online culture, and distinguish among differing generations of fans and how that
influences their forms of resistance. This will return in my analysis of fans and cinema as here,
too, differing generations have very different notions of resistance.
Lu Chen’s book, Chinese Fans of Japanese and Korean Pop Culture: Nationalistic
Narratives and International Fandom (2019), explores Chinese fans of Japanese and Korean
popular culture and how they have formed their own nationalistic discourse. She points out that
the fandom of foreign popular cultures negotiates between the market and state power to carve
its own space, and that fans of foreign pop culture have a complex relationship to nationalism
(Chen 2018, 156). Similarly, in her 2016 PhD dissertation Borderless Fandom and
Contemporary Popular Cultural Scene in Chinese Cyberspace, Xiqing Zhang explores the
39

relationship between online fan subculture and the mainstream cultural values system. She
argues that Chinese fan culture is far from a subversive community on the periphery that simply
rebels against the center, which is a common description of fans in the West, but instead is a
constantly negotiating subculture that adopts various evaluation systems and hierarchies from the
mainstream culture and the educational institution. Lin Zhang and Anthony Fung’s “Working as
Playing? Consumer Labor, Guild and the Secondary Industry of Online Gaming in China”
discusses how the Chinese information economy’s dependence on consumer labor and the
gamers’ entrepreneurial resourcefulness have produced a secondary industry. In “The Bounded
Embodiment of Fandom in China: Recovering Shifting Media Experiences and Fan Participation
Through an Oral History of Animation-Comics-Games Lovers,” Yiyi Yin and Zhuoxiao Xie pay
attention to ACG lovers, arguing that mass media has played a role in changing the forms and
meanings of the embodiment of the imaginary and the affective relationships between fan and
their objects. The shifting embodiments provide fans with hints of situated experience and a kind
of priority of meanings regarding being-in-the-fandom.
As you can see, the research on fan culture is large, growing, and complex. Much of it
builds on key concepts identified by Henry Jenkins, John Fiske and other Western scholars, but
in China, issues related to nationalism, values, identity, youth culture, and resistance have very
specific attributes that help explain fan interaction with movies. However, instead of studying
fan culture in detail, I plan to pay more attention to the characteristics of cross-culture, cross-text,
and cross-media platforms of Chinese fan culture, which fascinates me more. That’s why I like
to use the relatively broad definition of what I study as a media fan. Overall, the development of
fan culture in China is more complicated than that in the West, and yet it is deeply affected by
the West. The origin of Chinese fan culture is influenced by foreign culture in contrast with
40

Western fans, who often have more enthusiasm for native cultural products. Chinese fans have
been traveling through cross-cultural texts, including Korean drama, Japanese anime, Western
movies and TV series, Japanese and Korean idols, and video games, especially in recent years.
With the rise of social media platforms, the ways in which fans practice and participate are
constantly changing, with fans moving more frequently among texts and cultures. In a relatively
short history of Chinese fandom, most scholars have paid attention to celebrity fandom, fan
economics, and the fan communities. In my dissertation, I embrace fan studies and film studies
together. My research is concentrated on the impact of fans on Chinese cinema, not so much on
the film industry itself, but more on film genres and aesthetics, and how the contributions of fans
impact Chinese cinema’s transition to the post-cinema age.
For my purposes, then, media fans are those who actively engage with media texts and
enthusiastically contribute to communities with common interests. In the digital age, media texts
have penetrated into our daily lives, and the majority of the audience is not passive in how they
receive media content. Most contemporary audience members choose to interact with media
texts in different ways, and to more or less consciously be involved in the production or
circulation of media. In today’s media landscape, audiences are viewers, spectators, movie-goers,
cinephiles, netizens, and prosumers, but more importantly, they are all media fans at different
levels. Therefore, by bringing fandom studies into Chinese post-cinema, we will have an
alternative way to understand the new directions and characteristics of Chinese post-cinematic
experience.
As Henry Jenkins points out, fandom studies have provided us with an alternative set of
models and concepts through which to understand media audiences, stressing their active
participation within their own networked communities; foregrounding their own creative
41

transformations and ideological negotiations with mass media texts; and imagining ways they
speak back to texts, producers, and fellow fans by asserting their own agenda about what kind of
popular culture they want to consume.
28

In my opinion, the interaction between Chinese media fans and Chinese cinema in
different media environments is one of the most distinctive characteristics in the post-cinema age
in China. The ideological differences between China and the Western world make the interaction
between Chinese media fans and Chinese post-cinema a unique case. China also has distinctive
political and cultural structures, as well as a complex history related to nationalism. The way
Chinese media fans participate with media texts in the post-cinema age can be seen as what I call
a “soft rebellion” to cultural hegemony. The following chapters with a series of case studies
point out an intensifying struggle for political and cultural power between the government
authorities and grass-root media fans. In a way, the Chinese cinematic experience in the post-
cinema age represents the successful attempt to convert subcultures into the mainstream ideology
made by the government, and the compromise that grass roots media fans have had to reach in
return. This is what differentiates Chinese post-cinema from the post-cinematic culture elsewhere
in the world.
In conclusion, my research focuses more on the media fan’s perspective, discussing how
cinematic experience shifts with the participation of media fans; how cinematic experience
subtly penetrates back into media fans’ everyday lives; and how in turn it has further impact on
the development of cinema. While cinema is always evolving – this is inherent, a part of its
charm, core to its ontology – the participation of media fans is the driving force behind the shift

28
For an introduction to fandom studies see Paul Booth, A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies. John
Wiley & Sons, 2018. Jenkins is quoted on page 14.
42

from cinema to post-cinema. Rather than consider what cinema will be in the post-cinema age, it
seems more practical to discuss what it could be. What is a cinematic experience as media fans
play an increasingly significant role in the development of cinema? They have a deeper,
individualized, intensified, and multidimensional interaction with the cinematic experience, and
this means that cinema itself becomes more vital.
It is in this context, we may remain cautiously optimistic and agree with Philippe Dubois’
argument that cinema is not in the process of regressing, or disappearing, or being consigned to
oblivion. Rather, with the increasingly boundless diversity of its forms and practices, it is more
alive than ever, more-multifaceted, more abundant, more omnipresent than it has ever been.
29

In other words, in the post-cinema age, cinema experience is taking on the characteristics
of new media, existing in a networked, intertextual, interactive space, which enables new
developments and permutations. As André Bazin pointed out many years ago, every new
development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In
short, cinema has not yet been invented (Bazin 2005, 21).

29
Cited in André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age (New
York: Columbia University Press) 2.

43
Chapter Two:
The Impact of Fan Culture on Chinese Genre Films in the Post-Cinema Age

Chinese cinema entered the post-cinema age through a process of transformation from
hot media into a combination of both hot and cool media. Fan culture plays a key role in this
shift as it tightly connects cinema with media fans, encouraging media participants to actively
interact with media texts. In his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964),
Marshall McLuhan introduces the concept of “hot” and “cool” media depending on the degrees
of participation from audiences. According to McLuhan, a hot medium allows for less
participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book
for less than a dialogue.
1
In this sense, a film is hot media, focusing on a single sense in “high
definition” for the viewer, while a comic book is “cool” and “low definition,” requiring much
more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.
2

McLuhan’s terms remain relevant in the post-cinema age to some degree, as they reflect
and underline a new media culture grounded not in passive spectatorship but in proactive
participation and action to strengthen the power of the experience and the agency of viewers.
This participation is in turn supported by what is known as the “poor image,” defined by
filmmaker and scholar Hito Steyerl as “a copy in motion.” She writes of the poor image, “Its
quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an
image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed

1
Matteo Ciastellardi and Emanuela Patti explain McLuhan’s concept and bringing into a contemporary context in
their edited collection of International Journal of McLuhan Studies, titled Understanding Media, Today: McLuhan
in the Era of Convergence Culture (Barcelona, Spain: Editorial UOC, 2011) 25.
2
Ciastellardi and Patti, Understanding Media, Today, 22.

44
through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied
and pasted into other channels of distribution.”
3

Film scholar Francesco Casetti similarly highlights the poor image in his book, The
Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (2015) noting that contemporary
cinema gives an increasing amount of space to them and makes them its own. Cinema migrates
toward poor images because it is now functioning in a cool age. The lowering of the temperature
had already begun in the 1950s with the advent of television. Today, in the Internet age, the
temperature has dropped even lower, and cinema, by adopting “poor images,” acts accordingly
(Casetti 118).
In the context of Chinese film in the post-cinema age, the temperature is even lower than
it is in the US. This is because the imagery of contemporary Chinese cinema constantly involves
other media interfaces and thus incorporates what McLuhan calls “low-definition” images from
other screens. These poor images invite the viewer to actively participate in the consumption of
cinema, transforming cinema from a hot medium to a cool one, from a passive experience to a
very active one as viewers move among differing screens, as well as differing movies cobbled
together through collage and parody.
So what results could be expected for such expansion of cinema? According to Casetti,
the adoption of poor images allows for the opening of a different space in which to maneuver.
On the one hand, working with poor images can recuperate a consciousness of cinema itself and
of the field in which it operates. In this sense, the merging of a hot medium and low definition
allows for the launching of a “critique of the political economy of signs”; that is, we see the

3
In her essay, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” Hito Steyerl defines the concept of the poor image in detail. “In
Defense of the Poor Image,” e-Flux Journal 10, 2009. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-
poor-image/

45
launching of a line of thought that attempts to uncover reflexively what media are and what they
can do today (Casetti 119). On the other hand, the adaptation of poor images allows cinema to
remain in its chosen space. Poor images force cinema to renounce “high definition” on the level
of perception, but they help it to gain “high definition” on the level of cognition. They elicit a
reflection on the circulation of signs and their truth value. The senses cool down, but thought
heats up. An “illusion machine” also manages to acquire an “intelligence” (Casetti 121).
Indeed, the low-definition image emphasizes the important role the audience has to play
in mobilizing enthusiasm and commitment for filling the gap. It cultivates a critical
consciousness that investigates the state of media and their responsibilities in the processes of
knowledge. If these poor images are “low definition,” the consciousness they raise is “high
definition” (Casetti 122).
In the following paragraphs, I will investigate a very popular subgenre of fan-made
microcinema in China, i.e. the postmodern microcinema. I will demonstrate how Chinese cinema
embraces “low definition” fan-made works and how these poor images make viewers more
engaged in the process of viewing. Through an examination of several representative case
studies, I argue that, first, the fan-made postmodern microcinema is largely influenced by the
wulitou movie genre that began in Hong Kong cinema in late 1980s and has generated a culture
of parody and spoofing on the internet which demonstrates youth rebellion in contemporary
China, forming a significant aspect of Chinese youth culture in the transforming period.
Second, I argue that the fan-made postmodern microcinema launches a new genre of film
in mainland China, namely the copycat film. The copycat film inherits the characteristic film
language from postmodern microcinema, but it loses its elements of youth rebellion and becomes
instead a harmless form of entertainment among audiences of Chinese popular culture.

46
The term “microcinema” did not originate in China. It was first coined in 1994 by
Rebecca Barten and David Sherman, who created San Francisco's Total Mobile Home
microCINEMA, where all the films were “underground” because they were shown literally in a
basement. The term, then, was generally used to describe low budget movies shot on relatively
cheap formats such as Hi-8 video, DV and, less often, older film stocks such as 16mm and
Super8; the venues where this work was screened were also quite small.
4
With the development
of digital technologies, a variety of video sharing websites and small-scale film festivals started
to host microcinema events and gradually created a microcinema subculture defined by online
communities and viewing. The result is that now the term “microcinema” refers both to those
small, often local distribution and exhibition outlets, such as small rental store chains and
independent distributor line-ups, as well as to web-based communities.
The Chinese notion of microcinema shares many similarities with the American term. In
most cases, Chinese microcinema is used to describe “poor image” amateur films shot mostly on
digital video, edited on a computer, and then distributed via videotape, disc or over the Internet.
In the earlier stage of Chinese microcinema, its definition was more restricted by the distribution
platform and the occupation of its makers. The term designates a low-budget, exclusively online
video made by amateurs. Indeed, this is an extremely general definition that includes short films,
web serials, animated films and experimental documentaries made by non-professional
filmmakers; all of these could be included in this genre. Then, as the microcinema matures, more
professional agencies join the club, and the genre gradually develops and now designates more
conventional narrative short films shown online. Although most of these projects are still low-
budget amateur works, there are in addition more and more works included that are created by

4
Basement Films, “HOME.” Basementfilms, http://www.basementfilms.org. Accessed 18 Jan. 2021.

47
famous directors with larger budgets. Over time, what was an amateur and very experimental
subculture is invaded by more traditional filmmakers with more conventional short films.
Similarly, the term microcinema can refer to the genre, the subculture, or to specific films.
Unlike the microcinemas in the west, the microcinema subculture in China is not a niche
market. The Chinese microcinema has witnessed rapid growth over the past two decades
– between 2000 and 2020 – and has become an integral part of the cinematic experiences in
Chinese cinema. In my view, there are two reasons why the microcinema form is so widely
accepted in the Chinese cinematic landscape. First, due to the foreign movie quota policy and
severe movie piracy in China, many Chinese media fans, especially the younger generation, have
already become accustomed to enjoying movies on their personal media devices such as the
VCD player or computer since the 1990s. For many Chinese audiences, the “cinematic
experience” is not necessarily connected to the theatrical film experience at all. In other words,
sitting in the theater and enjoying high quality imagery is not a top priority for Chinese
audiences. Therefore, the “poor image” and online viewing has not prevented microcinemas
from developing a significant audience base, and becoming a new cinematic experience for the
young generation in the digital age.
The second reason that the microcinema format has become so widely accepted in
Chinese film culture is that, unlike traditional movies shown in cinemas, microcinemas have
existed in a relatively uncensored world from the very beginning. Without certain government
censorship at the earlier stage, Chinese microcinema empowered a younger generation of media
makers to explore concepts of self-identity with a special emphasis on the freedom of expression.
Chinese microcinema shifts the cinematic experience from a government-oriented one with films
made by professionals about acceptable topics to a dynamic, grassroots, participatory experience

48
for a broader range of creatives. The result is the creation of films that offer a soft rebellion
against cultural hegemony. More specifically, the Chinese microcinema generates a subculture
style of parody of Chinese culture and the government, and therefore has a powerful impact on
theorizations of film as an art form while contributing to a rethinking of media fans’ collective
presence.
The microcinema does not have a long history in the Chinese language region but it has
become an increasingly popular and influential genre in the Chinese cinematic scene. Ever since
its first appearance in Taiwan in 2000, it has made itself a conspicuous phenomenon that is being
greatly appreciated by citizens in general and youth in particular. The first example of
microcinema in Mainland China was The Angel's Wing ( 天使的翅膀), produced in September
2000; it tells a story about the stock market and shareholders. In 2001, the first postmodern style
microcinema, The Big Historical Records (大史記), came into being through the hands of an
editor from a Beijing TV station. It creatively uses postmodern techniques such as bricolage and
parody to deconstruct a series of classical movies which are well known by Chinese audiences
and turn them into a nonsensical farce.
In 2005, the first batch of Video Sharing Websites such as Youku ( 優酷) and Tudou ( 土
豆) were established. These sharing websites provide a perfect platform for the microcinema by
offering an easy form of dissemination on the Internet; further, because they are distributed
online, they have set foot into people’s cyber lives, becoming a part of a day-to-day digital
culture more than a rarefied cinema culture. In 2006, another postmodern style microcinema, The
Bloody Case that Started from a Steamed Bun ( 一個饅頭引發的血案), set off a national debate
by deconstructing Chinese director Chen Kaige's big-budget project The Promise into a
ridiculous legal-affairs show. It has provoked a microcinema row, which in turn drew a

49
tremendous number of netizens to making microcinemas and circulating them on the internet. In
2009, China Film Group, the biggest filmmaking organization, in association with Tudou, which
had developed into a leading video sharing website in Mainland China, began to make
microcinema. This indicates in many respects that the traditional mainstream filmmaking is
being challenged officially by novel ways of movie making, and is moving toward
standardization and specialization while at the same time the industrial chain of microcinemas is
being established. After ten years of development, the microcinema has reached a considerable
scale.

From Wulitou Culture to Fanmade Microcinema
In 2002, Fifth-Generation director Zhang Yimou made Hero ( 英雄), the commercial
success (and critical failure) of which marked yet another turning point in the evolution of
Chinese cinema in the context of Hollywoodization. The film has been seen widely as China’s
first blockbuster movie that won a battle in the war against Hollywood. This film’s budget was
260 million yuan, while the average budget of a feature film in Mainland China was only a few
million yuan. Zhang’s work generated huge box-office revenues, making it the first Chinese film
to achieve the box office of over 100 million yuan in Chinese film history. Other Chinese
directors rushed to join the ranks. Chen Kaige, another Fifth-Generation leading director, soon
made The Promise ( 無極, 2005), a fantasy blockbuster. As the only Chinese filmmaker whose
work has won the Cannes Palme d’Or, Chen and his new project, even prior to its start, had been
subjected to many hopes and expectations, ranging from the audience’s expectation of Chinese
blockbusters to the movie industry’s hope for profits, from academia’s celebration of the art of
the Fifth Generation directors to the expectation of the director himself to re-draw the world
cinema’s attention to the Chinese film industry. Unfortunately, the film’s release in 2005 did not

50
repeat Hero’s commercial success at all, though, in a similar vein, it received many severe
critiques. This movie was extensively criticized. Indeed, it was the mockery and sarcasm
expressed by young people for The Promise that inspired a Shanghai-based netizen, Hu Ge. He
re-edited scenes taken from Chen’s film to complete a piece of work titled The Bloody Case that
Started from a Steamed Bun. The young man eventually circulated his work on the internet,
which almost immediately caused a sensation. It was calculated that the audience of Hu’s film
was 10 times more than that of Chen’s The Promise.
The parody and spoofing used in Hu’s work are quite similar to Wulutou movies. Wulitou
is a Cantonese slang word meaning “nonsense” or “meaningless.” It is often used to describe
someone who is neurotic or something that is not logical. The birth and rise of wulitou culture
are in many respects related to the disappointment of Hong Kong people in a context of
mainlandization that started in the mid to late-1980s following the publication of the Sino-British
joint-agreement over the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. The pursuit of purely pleasurable or
entraining culture – including wulitou culture – is consistent with the feeling of Hong Kong
people, who felt hopeless and confused at that time.
5
Stephen Chow’s ( 周星馳) movies represent
the pinnacle of wulitou culture in cinema. The employment of parody and spoofing are common
in his movies. One of Chow’s representative works is A Chinese Odyssey ( 大話西遊,1994).
Allegedly adapted from Chinese classic literature work titled A Journey to the West( 西遊記), the
film tells a story that tackles many contemporary issues and subjects from a destructive point of
view; the main characters retain the names of those in the original novel. When A Chinese
Odyssey was released in the Chinese film market in 1995, it was not initially widely accepted or
appreciated. The spoofing and parody technique that was extensively employed by the filmmaker

5
Elizabeth Sinn, Hong Kong Culture and Society (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 44.

51
was quite new to Chinese audiences in the last decade of the twentieth century. Mainstream
society was still quite serious and did not have much tolerance for the pioneering comedy. As a
result, the box office for this movie was low in mainland China. It was calculated that the film
earned only 200 thousand Yuan in the Beijing area. As time passed, however, with the massive
dissemination of pirated DVDs, this movie suddenly became amazingly popular among Chinese
college students, who came to see that many of the wulitou attitudes and behaviors portrayed by
the film, wittingly or unwittingly, rang a bell with those of their own. This proved to be a good
start. The wulitou culture which originated in Hong Kong became increasingly popular in
mainland China. In this wave, Chow’s movies consistently stood out, being widely and
substantially appreciated by young audiences from the mainland. In 2004, his wulitou movie
Kung Fu Hustle( 功夫) became of the bestselling films of the year, receiving 160 million yuan in
mainland China.
A significant amount of the parody and bricolage used in Hu’s work can also be found in
Stephen Chow’s works. First, Hu parodied the form of a TV program to generate humorous
effects. Chow also parodied the form of a TV program in his movie Forbidden City Cop ( 大內密
探零零, 1996), using an award party to present the prizes to an actress who in fact does not
deserve the prize in order to generate humor. Second, Hu parodied several well-known songs in
his movies. For example, he parodied Bobby Soul’s “Only You” in the movie A Chinese
Odyssey. Third, Hu deliberately used a high-pitched voice to dub the voice of Duke Unhappy,
one of the actors, to make audiences laugh. The use of a deliberately high-pitched voice can also
be found in Chow’s movie. In fact, one of the defining characteristics of Chow’s movies is the
high-pitched voice dubbing. Fourth, Hu added advertisements to make fun of actors. Chow also
used this strategy in his movie Flirting Scholar ( 唐伯虎點秋香,1993), adding advertising to

52
exaggerate the efficiency of poisons in the actor’s hands to generate humorous effect. Fifth, in
Hu’s second postmodern microcinema The Empire of Spring Festival Travel ( 春運帝國, 2006),
Hu directly parodies six movies from Chow.
With the emergence of wulitou culture, spoofing and parody gradually set foot into the
cultural life of Chinese people, inviting more people, especially Chinese urban youth, to
participate in such cultural activities. The wulitou culture makes parody and spoofing a
grassroots activity, making the latter an entertainment as well as a strategy of political rebellion
among Chinese youth living under rigid cultural censorship.

The Bloody Case that Started from a Steamed Bun and Youth Rebellion
Steamed Bun reassembles bits and pieces taken from The Promise to create something
that is both entertaining and rebellious. It virtually deconstructs every single aspect of the
original work, from plotline to characterization, from mise-en-scene to soundtrack. It tears the
film’s grand story about fate, betrayal and myth into meaningless pieces. In many respects, Chen
Kaige’s The Promise offers an interpretation of Eastern mythology, telling a philosophical story
about love and redemption. The Queen Beauty (Qingcheng) used to be an orphan born in
turbulent days. She met the Goddess of Fate and made a deal with her. The Queen could enjoy
the most wealthy life possible, and have the most beautiful face in the world, but only if she to
surrenders her soul to a curse, which makes her unable to find true love unless time can be turned
back and the dead resurrected. Duke Unhappiness (Wuhuan) and General Brightness
(Guangming) are obsessed with her beauty and therefore fight for her. At the end, Slave Kunlun
breaks the curse on the princess by running beyond time, taking her back to the start of life, thus
regaining the chance of love. These major characters can find their proper places in accordance

53
with the analysis of the functions within mythology described by Vladimir Propp in Morphology
of the Folktale (1958). Duke Unhappiness is the villain, Assassin Ghost Wolf (Guilang) is the
donor and the helper, Queen Beauty is the princess, Goddess of Fate is the dispatcher, Slave
Kunlun is the hero and General Brightness is the fake hero. These characters, each playing their
own role, weave a myth of Eastern colors.
The maker of Steamed Bun, however, distorts the storyline of The Promise, abandons its
philosophical thinking, and turns an Eastern myth into a television program with the pattern of a
legal-affairs show that is aired by CCTV, the state-owned television station. The steamed bun,
which appears in the original movie as a mere prop, becomes the center of the plot, and the story
becomes a case concerning the steamed bun. In this new movie, Queen Beauty becomes a
stripper, Duke Unhappiness is an advertising endorser, General Brightness is the leader of an
urban management team, and the Goddess of Fate is a negotiator. Such deconstruction
overthrows the original text and forms a completely new one.
Parody and spoofing, two features that are often employed by directors of postmodern
movies, are prevalent in Steamed Bun. For instance, the urban management team leader, a figure
representing the government, was a Japanese soldier who participated in the Sino-Japanese war
in the 1930s and 1940s. By giving him this background, the movie satirizes the urban
management team by comparing them to Japanese invaders. In addition, the movie makes the
following comments about this figure: “Mr. Zhentian was Japanese. But he came over to China
without any hesitation, as a way of apology and redemption. A foreigner, without any selfish
purposes, takes the development of China as his own course. What is the spirit behind this?”
These comments mock a famous paragraph in Chairman Mao’s 1939 article “In Memory of
Norman Bethune.” The original text became a paragraph in the textbook of Chinese compulsory

54
education to be memorized by all students: “Comrade Norman Bethune, a member of the
Communist Party of Canada, was around 50 when he was sent by the Communist Party of
Canada and the United States to China; he made light of travelling thousands of miles to help us
in our War of Resistance Against Japan. What kind of spirit is this that makes a foreigner
selflessly adopt the cause of the Chinese people's liberation as his own?” [citation]
Another example is the parody of Law on Line, a legal-event TV show. The producer
uses the framework of this program to structure his own movie and inserts advertisements as in
TV programs.
Postmodern microcinema, such as Steamed Bun, are created by young people in most
cases. As social media has marched rapidly into the life of ordinary people, Chinese youth have
acquired a space of their own, both physically and on a metaphorical level. They do not just have
their own thoughts and observations about things that are happening around them; some also like
to insert their feelings and experience in the works they create so as to share them with others.
These works can be seen as a visual expression of the youth subculture in contemporary China.
Through these postmodern microcinemas, the youth express their rebellion to the authorities by
deconstructing the classical texts which represent the foundation of established culture and
thoughts.
Another example to illuminate this well is Story of Eliminating Rascals in the Niaolong
Mountain ( 鳥籠山剿匪記) which was made by Hu Ge in 2006. The title of the work is
reminiscent of that of a classic revolutionary text, Story of Eliminating Rascals in the Wulong
Mountain ( 乌龍山剿匪記). The latter is a popular television series program of the 1980s. The
TV series tells a story about the battle between The Chinese People’s Liberation Army and the
bandits in Xiang Xi, Hu Nan province during the period of The War of Liberation in China in the

55
1940s. It is based on a true story and since it was created in the time when the majority of
Chinese people just started to appreciate TV programs, this TV serial achieved huge success at
that time. It successfully portrays positive images of Communist soldiers who fearlessly
conquered the stronghold of rebellions in the Wulong Mountain area and received heartfelt help
and support from local civilians. Thus, it is viewed as a symbolic work of Chinese mainstream
ideology and deeply touches a whole generation at the beginning of the Chinese reform period.
Hu’s work is quite similar to this popular TV serial, but he changes one word. “Wulong
Mountain” is substituted by “Niaolong Mountain.” The former is an actual mountain and the
latter mocks it through the shift from the word Wu ( 烏) to Niao ( 鳥). These two words are quite
similar in Chinese characters. However, the meaning is totally different. Wu ( 烏) is a neutral
word and does not have any particular meanings. However, Niao ( 鳥) is a relatively derogatory
word, usually indicating the male reproductive organs and thus has a sense of indecency or
lewdness. Therefore, via slightly changing the title, Hu already creatively parodies the classical
TV serial and mocks it.
In addition to this title change, Hu also parodies the plot of The Story of Eliminating
Rascals in the Wulong Mountain by replacing the two belligerent parties with world police and
bandits in Niaolong Mountain. This time, Hu makes fun of the war between America and Iraq.
The world police is a metaphor for the US army, while the bandits in Niaolong Mountain are a
metaphor for the Iraqi resistance. Indeed, Hu satirizes America in many places in this movie. For
example, the world police look for a weapon they never saw before called Da Sha Qi ( 大殺器),
which is the short form term for weapons of mass destruction in the Chinese language. The
peace-preserving army, which has been sent to Niaolong Mountain to suppress the bandits by
world police headquarters, has a special name, An Niao Hui ( 安鳥會), which sounds like a pun

56
with the Security Council of the United Nations but with different meanings in Chinese, which
can be loosely translated as “Do not give a damn about the United Nations Security Council.”
Through these name changes, Hu effectively makes fun of national super powers.
Third, although the setting of this movie has moved to a world stage, it retains its parody
of mainstream ideology in China. For instance, in the movie, one of the reporters accuses the
chairman of world police, saying that he should not be so shameless, and then the chair proudly
says, “I could be so shameless.” Here Hu is actually responding to Chen Kaige, who earlier
harshly accused Hu for parodying The Promise. Hu is responding to Chen through this plot.
Later in the movie, the bandits in Niaolong Mountain capture a spy from the world police
headquarters and they cruelly penalize the spy by forcing him to watch movies made by “the
fifteenth generation.” The fifteenth generation here is a metaphor, of course, for the Chinese
Fifth Generation. Hu indicates that watching their works, which are the symbol of the dominant
ideology in the cinematic field, brings a horrible and unbearable pain to the audience.
Furthermore, when Hu Ge’s Steamed Bun first appeared in 2006, it did not only cause a
cultural sensation; it also irritated the director of its target text, i.e. Chen Kaige. The latter’s
initial response to Hu’s “recreation,” and the comment about being shameless, became itself a
household phrase. “People should not have been so shameless.” As a key figure of the Chinese
new wave cinema of the 1980s, Chen Kaige had established and cemented his fame in Chinese
film circles as a representative of elite culture with films such as Yellow Earth ( 黃土地), Life on
a String ( 邊走邊唱), The King of Children ( 孩子王, and Farewell, My Concubine ( 霸王別姬).
Early in his career, Chen has been widely seen as the most apocalyptic Chinese director, known
for films that are philosophically profound and artistically innovative. But many changes had
occurred in China’s cultural scene by the time he made The Promise, and within himself as well.

57
He had completed the transformation from being an avant-garde, experimental, and marginalized
filmmaker to becoming a renowned, established director working from the center. His response
to the parody work signals on the one hand his attempt to maintain his elite status, and, on the
other, a sense of powerlessness in a changed context.
The postmodern microcinema thus creates a diversified discourse. The negligence,
carelessness, and irresponsibility demonstrated in Steamed Bun should be put in a broader
context. The fan-made postmodern microcinema is more consistent with elements of youth
culture and popular culture in contemporary China where consumerism is growing fast and
cultural democracy is awake among new generations. After the cultural revolution and the
protests in late 1980s, youth subculture in China has dramatically changed, from a radical youth
movement to a more subdued virtual resistance, due in part to harsh supervision from the
government.
On the one hand, people’s attention has partly shifted away from the strong political
demands due to the extraordinary progress of Chinese society in the last few decades. Since the
reform program and the open-door policy in late 1970s, civilians have been gradually
encouraged to break away from their old institutionalized survival patterns (which included
collective occupation assignments, equal salary allocations, etc.) and apart from the social
principle of egalitarianism, which Chinese individuals had already become accustomed to.
Instead of political extremism, the possibility of increasing individual wealth came to the
forefront of people’s daily lives. For the first time, marketing and business were raised to a high
priority. The long existing policy of being pro-agricultural and anti-commercial, which had been
established in the feudal society for thousands of years and had been deeply ingrained in the
Chinese people’s cultural awareness, are now being largely drowned in this monstrous wave of

58
marketing. The reform program has also subtly destroyed the social foundation of Chinese
civilization in many aspects. For instance, social positions are no longer tightly linked with
occupation, which caused those working-class members who used to be worshipped and
respectable to suddenly lose their “halo.” Admitted or not, a new social ranking system, which
has a latent, wealth-oriented criteria of judging an individual’s social status, has been
progressively settled and spread like wildfire. With the establishment of such specifically and
materialized personal goals, Chinese citizens, willing or not, have to give up the dream of
“common prosperity,” changing their mind to chase a material life in case of being abandoned by
mainstream society. Meanwhile, lofty political pursuits and other related spiritual chases are
dying out rapidly. Thus, unlike their parental generation, who came through the Cultural
Revolution and used to possess a solid political belief, the new generation, nurtured on
marketing, has little to believe in except for commerce and wealth. Contemporary youth are
eager to gain “hard capital,” which further weakens the political and/or ideological side of the
youth subculture in contemporary Chinese society.
On the other hand, the virtual world, brought by the advent of online technology,
suddenly provides people with a “democratic” site where they can air their (often rebellious)
voices through (sometimes) creating pieces of work characterized by a so-called postmodern
style. People may argue that what this online work deconstructs (and rebels against) is not just a
big-budget film from a mainstream director, but also, consciously or unconsciously, elements of
the established ideology and/or governance. They satisfy in many respects youngsters’ desires to
become “rebels without a cause.” By deconstructing and mocking classical texts, youth cleverly
deconstruct and mock the realities, so as to acquire a sense of psychological satisfaction and

59
emotional purging. Through the appreciation of and sharing these movies, youth find a virtual
way to express feelings of rebellion.
The main value of the postmodern microcinema, then, lies in its brand new practice of
artistic language, the use of nonsensical narrative arcs, as well as subversive thematic motifs.
The youth creators have kept their eyes on China’s new cityscape, the phenomena of a consumer
society, and other heated topics in a society that is undergoing unprecedented transformation. By
taking advantage of the new media technology, such microcinemas penetrate into ordinary
people’s lives, especially young ones’, deeply and more rapidly.

Rebellion Through Re-creating
Admittedly, such re-editing works are by no means specific to the Chinese context; it is
also an international phenomenon. A well-known example in this category is the re-edited
version of the prequel to the Star Wars Trilogy, The Phantom Menace (1999). In what has been
called The Phantom Edit (2000), the creator, a disappointed Star Wars cinephile, used materials
of the original film to recreate his own version. When George Lucas saw this version of his
work, he was initially reported to be amused by it, but later clamped down on its distribution.
6

This movie became quite popular on the Internet and consequently led to a discussion of digital
freedom and democratic culture within the academic field. The fan’s re-editing gradually became
a fashionable trend in digital space, with the development of fan editing websites created by
netizens.
7
With the massive duplications and distributions, this fan re-editing behavior is strongly

6
See Richard Fausset, “A Phantom Menace,” Los Angeles Times, June1, 2002, Part 6 (Calendar), at 1, and J.
Hoberman, “I Oughta Be In Pictures,” The New York Times, July 15, 2001, Part 6 (Magazine), at 13.
7
There are many fan editing websites on the internet influenced by The Phantom Edit; the biggest is the fanedit.org,
see more on fanedit.org.

60
related to the issue of fair use. Although many netizens argue that fan editing should not be
linked to copyright infringement, facing powerful original distributors or creators, most fan
editors or websites choose to be silent on this issue. The creator of The Phantom Edit publicly
apologized to Lucasfilm and the fanedit.org pulled off its entire download links under the
pressure of MPAA and issued a statement that viewers must own an officially released version to
legally watch a fan edit.
Returning to Hu Ge’s re-edited version of Chen’s The Promise and the latter’s response,
it is noteworthy to see how the two similar cases have generated different social discussions in
different social contexts. Unlike the situation in The Phantom Edit, Hu’s The Bloody Case that
Started from a Steamed Bun has not been seriously entangled in legal disputes of copyright
issues and thus raised several queries such as the lack of copyright protection in mainland China
and the youth rebellion to authority on cyberspace. When Hu used the image material of The
Promise to create another movie, Chen mercilessly accused Hu, which changed the nature of this
popular spoofing event to an official legal issue. What stands at the two polarized ends of this
issue are the venerable civilian and the strong government-backed top artist.
In a sense, copyright is a new issue that requires more serious attention from all walks of
society in mainland China. It is not uncommon for people, especially young people, to watch
local and imported movies on pirated DVDs, which are both easy and cheap to acquire. The
circulating time of Hu Ge’s work coincided with that of the rise of video sharing websites in
mainland China. These websites were in their beginning stage, without sufficient funds to
purchase copyrights from distributors but desperately needing movies to expand their online
browser numbers. Therefore, showing pirated movies became their choice, which was enhanced
by a lack of sufficient laws prohibiting online piracy. Under this circumstance, it came as little

61
surprise that almost every major video sharing website would exhibit unauthorized movies on
their websites in order to attract netizens. From the perspective of the reception, online viewers
were even less concerned about these subtle or sensitive issues as long as they had access to the
most recent movies online and free of charge. Such tolerance to pirate behaviors provided some
netizens misleading information that watching pirated movies online was acceptable. And with
the conventional Chinese concept of “no punishment if everybody does it” ( 法不責眾), not many
people thought they were breaking the law when watching online piracy. Chen Kaige’s claim
that he would bring a lawsuit against Hu for having taken the liberty of using his movie clips
should be put in this context, which also explains why the majority of online viewers have
sympathy for Hu. They would deny themselves if they thought Hu’s behavior had been
inappropriate.
On the other hand, when Chen’s work disappointed people, they were trying to find a
way to express their discontent. The timely appearance of Hu’s work mocking The Promise
ironically and the background of Hu as a self-employed youth who enjoyed surfing on the
Internet, made him perfect as the representative of young netizens. Thus, his work consequently
became the common discourse of young netizens in general. Through the dissemination of Hu’s
work on the Internet, young netizens not only mocked the mainstream director, but also enjoyed
the independent opinion and free criticism on cyberspace. Therefore, Hu maintained silence
while Chen directly humiliated him. He even apologized after Chen aggressively pronounced to
accuse him for copyright infringement. Hu’s silence made some young people feel that their
power of discourse was being deprived by the dominant ideology which Chen and his
contemporaries’ represented. It is no longer viewed as a question of whether Hu should get the

62
footage cleared or whether such parodies trigger lawsuits, but a sensitive conflict between the
online-based youth and government-backed mainstream media.

Copycatting Movies and Cultural Surrender
At least one specific film genre boasts a close relationship with the postmodern
microcinema, namely the copycatting movie. Following the ripples caused by The Bloody Case
that Started from a Steamed Bun, more fans jumped into working on such microcinemas to
practice their dreams of making films and making fun of society at the same time. They see this
genre as an efficient channel for their alternative voices and to express their individual feelings.
Enjoying a groundswell of enthusiasm in the mid-2000s from a large number of browsers on the
Internet, copycatting movies gradually grew as an entertainment trend not only in the field of
online space, but also spreading into the field of Chinese cinema. Professional filmmakers
realized that such parody and spoofing in postmodern microcinemas could be used to generate a
new cinematic genre, blending classical clips or interesting plots from other films into a whole
new film. Therefore, the copycatting movie genre was born, becoming popular in Chinese
cinema in recent years. As a genre, some defining ingredients of copycatting movies include
low-budgets, comical characterizations, independent production, and the parodying of other,
often classic films, genres, and scenes.
The genre has developed rapidly and the copycatting movies parody from a wide variety
of media texts, including TV serials, online videos, comics, music, even sculptures, and so on.
The projects use intertextuality among film and other art forms to generate pleasure by
consuming and recreating classical or well-known texts and bringing them into a brand new
context. As an example, in 2006, director Ning Hao’s Crazy Stone ( 瘋狂的石頭) pioneered a

63
new way of low-budget comedy films. The total cost of this film was 3 million yuan. In the past,
such low-budget films were very difficult to finance. However, the film’s box office sales finally
amounted to 23 million yuan, becoming a cinematic miracle in mainland China in that year.
Studies have been made to investigate the market performance of the film. What Crazy Stone has
achieved in today’s competitive market has also encouraged Chinese filmmakers, many of whom
came to conceive that making such low-budget copycat comedy films could be another way to
enrich and dynamize the Chinese film industry. Within the same year of the circulation of Hu’s
Steamed Bun, director A Gan completed a comedy film called Big Movie ( 大電影之數百億) by
using the parody and bricolage which was applied in The Bloody Case that Started from a
Steamed Bun. This was the first copycatting movie to be shown on the big screen in mainland
China. It deconstructed more than 20 well-known clips from both national and international
classical films. The audiences were refreshed by its postmodern expressions and as a
consequence, it received more than 10 million yuan at the box office within just one week. Since
then, Chinese cinema has seen the production of a long-lasting tide of copycatting movies – titles
include Tracing Shadow ( 追影), On His Majesty’s Secret Service ( 大內密探靈靈狗), World
Second ( 天下第二), Panda Express ( 熊貓大俠), Just Another Pandora’s Box ( 越光寶盒), Wind
Blast ( 西風烈), etc. The production of copycatting movies has proved to be what scholars called
“Duan, Ping, Kuai” – a way of cheaply making films and easily making profits.
One theory that has been used to interpret the Chinese copycatting movies is Russian
literary critica Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnival. To put Bakhtin’s theory in the Chinese
context, copycatting movies attempt to create a carnival onscreen. For instance, with regard to
the films’ settings, copycatting movies often place the story in a crowded space, such as a stage,

64
competition site, or a restaurant. These open-structured and mass-participated spaces share the
same popular cultural backgrounds, such as multi-language and anti-loftiness, as carnival does.
Sometimes, the copycatting movie in Chinese context is translated to “Shanzhai Movie” (
山寨電影). The term “Shanzhai” originally means the strongholds in mountains where bandits
gathered and lived, which suggests the sense of an outlaw or somethough outside of the system.
In recent years, this term has been used to describe a new series of productions created by
unknown home workshops or unauthorized small factories, which plagiarize the famous brand
names. Therefore, the Shanzhai productions are often related to plagiarism, and are seen as
cheap, low-quality, and practical in terms of functionality. The Shanzhai production dramatically
satisfies a great deal of customers, those who want to enjoy the updated technology, but cheaply.
As a consequence (not surprisingly), Shanzhai mobile phones, Shanzhai MP3 players, Shanzhai
cameras: these copycatting digital productions flood the Chinese market, generating a strong
Shanzhai culture, which brings great changes to the cultural scene of China today. People hold
different opinions about this Shanzhai phenomenon. Some argue that it should be encouraged
because it satisfies the desire of those who have limited consuming capacity but strong
consuming desires. Others point out that the Shanzhai movement actually stifles invention and
gives people wrong information on while supporting plagiarism.
Like it or not, the Shanzhai culture has been an integral part of popular culture in today’s
China. Within a short period of time, the Shanzhai trend has expanded to other cultural arenas,
such as the Shanzhai version of Chinese Spring Festival Gala ( 山寨版春節晚會), the Shanzhai
version of Lecture Room ( 山寨版百家講壇), and the Shanzhai version of Stars ( 山寨版明星臉).
Partly initiated by the postmodern microcinema The Bloody Case that Started from a Steamed
Bun, Shanzhai culture’s spin-off into the cinematic field is also fruitful.

65
It should be noted that drawing on the postmodern microcinema to create copycatting
movies may not be good for the nurturing of postmodern microcinema itself. Outwardly,
copycatting movies could spread the spirit of postmodern microcinemas into a much broader and
more influential level, bringing it into a larger cinematic territory. Taking a deeper look, the
postmodern parodies in such films have been through rigid censorship and have to be responsible
to the box office. Therefore, what is shown on the big screen are some compromised outcomes of
commercial concerns as well as the official approval. In other words, the copycatting movie that
audiences are able to see has been sanitized for the commercial film market which, in turn, is
under the strict control of the authorities. This would result in a situation that I intend to call
“cultural surrender.”
“Cultural surrender” means that a newly emerged cultural phenomenon is modified to
accommodate the mainstream culture and the official ideology. This is a procedure that involves
the modifying of some radical and cutting-edge ideas into a more acceptable and nonaggressive
attitude in order to conform to the dominant ideology. It is noticeable that this procedure is not
simply a response by political forces to strike at pioneer subcultures. The hegemonic ideology
often adopts a policy that offers a combination of rewards and punishment in order to modify
such cultural phenomena into a controllable state.
Like many other national cinemas in the world, Chinese cinema also somewhat enters
into an age of blockbusters. The making of the so-called big-concept movies has received official
endorsement in China. On one hand, it is hoped that such high-budget, commercially viable
movies equal higher quality and better market performance so that the local film industry may
survive and prosper in confronting an aggressive Hollywood. This explains in part why power is
sometimes involved in scheduling the distribution of imported blockbusters in order to clear the

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way for local ones. On the other hand, audiences, being hyped up by the media, have many
expectations from such movies. If they realize that these home-made blockbusters fail to meet
their expectations, they would feel cheated by the media or the distributor. In this context, when
the copycatting movie first emerged, it was warmly welcome and appreciated by the public as it
was treated not just as an entertainment; it also inherited the critical spirit from postmodern
microcinemas, challenging authority by mocking such government-supported blockbusters. From
this aspect, copycatting movies provide a chance and channel for audiences to alleviate their
suppressed, if not suffocating, feelings and emotions. On the other hand, and from the
perspective of the filmmaker, copycatting movies would allow their makers to somewhat express
their “independent” and individual thoughts under a harsh censorship system. By using
postmodern expression to create irony, the copycatting movie puts critical thinking into
entertainment, making audiences laugh as well as making them think about society.
Making a copycatting movie is to a certain extent like rapping to the tune of a
revolutionary song. Filmmakers should work with care to maintain a fine balance between
arousing sufficient interest from the audiences and critiquing society without alerting film
censors. In Big Movie, more than twenty well-known blockbusters were parodied to amuse
audiences while, at the same time, pouring irony on a wide range of social issues, from the
relationship between Wenzhou real estate “flippers” to the affection for the Chinese real estate
industry, to the deprivation of human rights from peddlers by “chengguan” ( 城管, Chinese city
inspectors). In Crazy Stone, the embarrassing situation of state-owned enterprises during the
transforming period in mainland China has been treated sarcastically. While parodies like these
are not tolerated by the government at large, they stand a good chance to survive through being
modified in these copycatting movies.

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Another “strategy” adopted by these copycatting movies in “confronting” the official
censorship is to decrease their works’ contemporary references by having the film story set in the
past. For instance, recent copycatting movies such as Almost Perfect ( 十全九美), The Second
Best ( 天下第二), Panda Express ( 熊貓大俠), and Royal Tattoo ( 皇家刺青), take place in
ancient China. Such historical backgrounds give filmmakers enough space to create the story,
although the subject that receives parody here does not necessarily contain substantial cultural
meaning. One result of this “strategy” is the film’s entertainment value outweighs its critical
function. What appears perplexing here is that when copycatting movies become totally
entertainment movies, they are sometimes severely criticized by some among mainstream media.
Once a copycatting movie is driven and drowned by commercial elements, it may also lose its
energy and vitality, for example, and may in turn seem inconstant in its narrative arc,
exaggerated in its performances, vulgar in telling its jokes, and nonsensical in its parodying.
To conclude, when copycatting movies first emerged in China, they were seen as a
subculture with anti-authority characteristics, deconstructing mainstream culture with
postmodern expressions such as parody and spoofing. They have been highly recognized as a
cultural resistance to dominant ideology. Although they have submitted to “cultural surrender”
and gradually developed into a Chinese film genre which mainly concentrates on entertainment,
they are still significant in that they help enrich the comedy film genre in Chinese cinema.
Chinese film has been criticized for its lack of imagination, especially compared with Hollywood
and other Western films. By using a postmodern approach, the copycatting movie expands the
imagination of Chinese comedy film.
Secondly, the copycatting movie helps to bring Chinese filmmaking down to a more
grassroots level. In addition to its parodying and satirizing functions, a primary feature of the

68
copycatting movie is its entertainment and its potential of maximizing pleasure for the audience.
The not infrequent impressive box office revenues of copycatting movies prove this and at the
same time direct the Chinese film industry toward a more commercially-driven development.
Furthermore, the target audience of the copycatting movie constitutes young people who grow up
alongside the prosperity of the Internet. The copycatting movie reduces the distance from film
and Internet, attracting young viewers from Internet to cinema. The form often quotes online
popular jokes and humor with which these young netizens are already familiar. Efforts have also
been made on the Internet to promote the movie; some censored clips are even directly being put
on the Internet to attract young browsers. According to the director of Big Movie, the rigid
censorship has restricted his creation. He said that “[while making the second comedy movie,
Two Stupid Eggs] I have to cut off several minutes which are full of parody in case the movie
could not pass the censorship. I had planned to put these parody clips at the end of the film,
matching with the ending subtitle. However, I finally chose to put them on the Internet as a
trailer of the movie, where the censorship is not so harsh.” Such mutual interaction between film
and the Internet would bring more young people back to cinema in the cyber age.
Third, the copycatting movie has the potential to create a new generation of Chinese
filmmakers. At present, Chinese cinema is still dominated by a few directors, such as Zhang
Yimou, Chen Kaige, Jia Zhangke, and Wang Xiaoshuai. Under their shadows, the new
generation directors hardly have a chance to copy their seniors’ success in the more commercial
atmosphere. However, with little investment and relatively high commercial rewards, to make
copycatting movies becomes a way for new filmmakers to present themselves to Chinese
audiences. New directors, such as Agan, Ning Hao and Wang Yuelun, quickly won a position in
the Chinese cinematic circle by producing copycatting movies.

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The spirit of Chinese postmodern microcinema targeted mainstream ideology. The
rebellion against authority, the attack on hegemonic ideology, and the queries about society,
which were originally established by the postmodern microcinemas through parody and other
postmodern expressions, are hardly identified within their newer cinematic version, the
copycatting movie. Rather, what is behind the copycatting movie is the idea of cultural
surrender. While the genre still has its role to play in advancing the further evolution of the
Chinese film industry, it is no longer seen as a rebellion against the mainstream and the
established. The once subversive subculture has been trampled when it is just about to
bloom. However, what cannot be denied is the fact that the postmodern microcinema has
bridged the distance between Chinese cinema and its new generation of fans. In the post-cinema
age, although cultural democracy seems elusive, media fans have found their way to construct
their feelings and options by the interaction between among diverse texts.

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Chapter Three:
The Impact of Fan Culture on Movie Viewing Habits in a Post-Cinema Age
As film scholar Tom Gunning has points out in his essay “The Cinema of Attraction(s):
Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” every change in film history implies a change
in its address to the spectator, and each period constructs its spectator in a new way (Gunning
2006, 387). One of the outstanding features of film in the post-cinema age is that the
relationship between cinema and its audiences shifts from a relatively passive experience to one
that is far more interactive. In his 2007 book, The Virtual Life of Film, D.N. Rodowick echoes
Gunning when he argues that the spectator of contemporary cinema is no longer a passive
viewer yielding to the ineluctable flow of time, but rather alternates between looking and
reading, as well as immersive viewing and active controlling (Rodowick 2007, 177). In fact,
these spectators are no longer traditional spectators or audiences; they are “viewers” and
“prosumers.” For me, however, in the context of contemporary Chinese cinema in the midst of
transformation, spectators are even further changed: they are media fans who avidly interact
with media projects, and as such become the co-authors of media works.
Chinese Media Fan Culture Study
In the post-cinema age, the role of the media fan has gained increased attention in the
West. However, the study of media fans in China has also grown, and it, too, has gained
significant attention in academia. In the past two decades, the way academia examines media
fandom has changed from an often negative, “othering” viewpoint to a relatively positive
perspective. Scholar Mark Duffett defines media fandom as “the recognition of a positive,

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personal, relatively deep, emotional connection with a mediated element of popular culture”
(Duffett 2013, 2). Henry Jenkins, who has written extensively on fan culture, describes fans as
thoughtful, collaborative, productive and creative people. He explains in his 2006 book Fans,
Bloggers, Gamers: Media Consumers in a Digital Age that “one becomes a ‘fan’ not by being a
regular viewer of a particular program but by translating that viewing into some kind of cultural
activity, by sharing feelings and thoughts about program content with friends, by joining a
‘community’ of other fans who share common interests”

(Jenkins 2006, 41). However, in the
context of globalization, Duffett also points out that during the study of media fandom, “much
of the account is focused on the United States or the United Kingdom, missing out the cultures
and traditions of many other countries” (Duffett 2013, 17).
In fact, Chinese fandom culture, especially media fandom culture, and American fandom
culture have many similarities. With the ending of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s and
the beginning of reform and open up policy in the 1980s, Chinese cultural industries have been
blooming for the past decades, and so too has fan culture. By the end of the 1980s, the first
generation of Chinese media fans, who were labeled idol worshippers, had gradually emerged.
Between the 1980s and the 1990s, the media market in China had opened significantly, allowing
a considerable number of media products, including movies, television series, and music videos
from Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as a small number of television series from Europe and
America, to air in major television stations in mainland China.
1
Meanwhile, during China's

1
See “The Film Industry in China: Past and Present” by Ainhoa Marzol Aranburu in the Journal of Evolutionary
Studies in Business (Volume 2, Number 1, 1-28, January - June 2017) for a helpful timeline charting the evolution of
the Chinese film industry during this time, with close attention to the primary regulations that shaped the industry.
The author notes, for example, “The main redefinition of the industry came in 1984, when the state argued, for the
first time, that cinema was an integral part of the cultural industries instead of just an instrument to reinforce the
government’s ideology.” Then, in 1993, foreign films were allowed to be screened in Chinese theaters for the first
time.

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transition from a planned economy to a market-oriented one, people started looking for
entertainment-focused cultural products to enrich their lives. Movie and TV stars from Hong
Kong and Taiwan were often seen as the spokespeople of Western popular culture by
mainlanders at that time since they had open access to Western culture. These idols suddenly
became extremely popular among mainland people as they brought various forms of
entertainment products to them. Many teenagers treated these idols as targets of avid pursuit and
adulation. Such behavior was often interpreted as a cultural representation of a new generation
of Chinese people seeking self-expression and self-actualization.
The idol worshipper discussed here can be considered as the predecessor of the Chinese
media fandom, which emerged around 2005. In 2004, Hunan Television created and distributed
a singing competition television series called Supergirl (2004-2006). This show, which bears a
substantial similarity to ABC’s television show American Idol (2002-2016) in both form and
content, suddenly became the most successful singing competition show in the history of
Chinese television.
2
The concept of Supergirl involves discovering singing stars from among
unsigned talent, with the winner determined by viewers using phones, Internet, and SMS text
voting. Since it was designed for viewers to vote for their favorite participants, the show formed
many large-scale fan-based activities to create more interaction. The show’s finale received
eight million votes, topping the ratings in that year and bringing fame to many ordinary but

2
Many international news outlets marveled at the success of the Chinese TV show, with The Guardian exploring
“the Supergirl phenomenon” in a 2005 article that notes that 400 million viewers watched the show’s October 4,
2005, episode. The author, Benjamin Joffe-Walt, also quotes Chen Shangjun, professor of humanities and literature
at Fudan University: “In every sphere of Chinese life - social, economic and academic - it’s simply too difficult for
young people to beat everyone and win. There are so many restrictions and you have to be perfect and extremely
lucky to attract any attention at all…[But with Supergirl] “anybody, really anybody wanting to show off could take
part. This is very unique in China.” In “Mad about the Girl: A Pop Idol for China,” The Guardian, October 7, 2005,
np. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/oct/07/chinathemedia.broadcasting

73
talented people, making them famous overnight. Following the trend, many television stations
created similar talent shows, and these shows produced powerful emotional attachments among
fans who participated in the fan activities; the shows also incubated varying scaled fan
organizations, both online and offline. It is indeed because of the success of the Supergirl show
that Chinese scholars and researchers began to face up to the phenomena of media fandom
culture, even though some of them still discussed media fans from an elite class perspective.
However, over time, media fandom culture has evolved from individualized, broad-based, and
marginalized personal behavior into organized, centralized, and collaborative social behavior.
With the development of new media technology and the optimization of a market-driven
environment, more and more media fans “come out of the closet” about their fan identities,
making Chinese fandom culture more diversified and complicated as well. It now appears that
media fans in China, like fans in the US and in many other nations, too, are no longer willing to
passively receive media information and influence, but are getting more actively involved in
shaping their own identities and their influence on others through media consumption, and even,
sometimes, taking the lead in social change.
3
The increasing power of fandom also makes
media producers and advertisers – and even researchers – take for granted the idea that the
success of a media franchise depends on fan investments and participation.
The awakening and growth of Chinese media fandom and the ways in which Chinese
media fans process media content is similar to the description of American media fandom in
Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, a book co-authored

3
Anthony Fung describes the situation in China for young fans, and the tensions between consumerism, identity,
and ideology. He explains, “How this new generation copes with this emerging global consumer culture, and how
they make sense of the images in popular culture in the process of searching for their own identity and exploring
their gender values within the parameters set by the cultural industry, have significant implications for the
communist state,” 286, “Fandom, Youth and Consumption in China,” European Journal of Cultural Studies,
Volume 12(3), 2009, 285-303.

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by Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green in 2013. The book uses the experience of Susan
Boyle, a contestant who appeared on Britain’s Got Talent (2007-present) and became an
overnight global sensation, to demonstrate how top-down, broadcast content can be reshaped
and recirculated through grassroots communities. Since in many countries, Boyle’s video was
not officially released, her international success and fame should be credited to fans who
actively circulated the original clip or remixed videos of it and shared them. Furthermore, the
book points out that these kinds of cultural practices, such as the dissemination of Boyle’s
performance, have evolved within a “networked culture,” where the participating public is both
more collectively and individually literate about social networking online (Jenkins, Ford and
Green 2013, 19).
Jenkins, Ford and Green go on to explain that American media fandom focuses on how
media fans have the agency to digest and spread media content at will, and they focus
specifically on the circulation of media content, arguing that in a networked media space,
content circulation is becoming more participatory than ever before. Compared to the media
consumers in the pre-Web 2.0 era, the public nowadays is less interested in pre-constructed
messages. Instead, they prefer to get involved in the circulation of media content by remixing
and reshaping messages in their own way and spreading content within their communities or
networks.
As the book’s title points out, the term “spreadable media” is contrasted with “sticky
media,” the latter being a term generated in the era of broadcast-dominated media space.
According to the book, stickiness is used as a business term to describe the need to create
content that attracts audience attention and engagement (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013, 12). In
regard to the online business environment, the term refers to centralizing the audience’s

75
presence in a particular online location to generate advertising revenue or sales (Jenkins, Ford,
and Green 2013, 13). In short, sticky media represents a top-down, one-way, centralized, media
companies-controlled and pre-structured media content circulation system, whereas spreadable
media concentrates on grassroots, collaborative, dispersed, diversified, and open-ended message
flow environments. According to such a description, spreadable media is more advanced than
sticky media, and the latter should be replaced in order to achieve better distribution effects.
However, the real situation is more complicated, designating a media space where spreadable
and sticky content co-exist. This is our current situation, and we will continue to consume
media content in these mixed ways.
By arguing that our cultures are moving toward more participatory practices, Spreadable
Media also expands on the notion of “participatory culture.” Jenkins coined the term to describe
the cultural production and social interaction of fan communities, initially seeking a way to
differentiate the activities of fans from other forms of spectatorship (Jenkins, Ford, and Green
2013, 11). In Spreadable Media, the boundary of what is understood as “participatory” has
dramatically expanded to describe audiences who actively circulate and shape media content
within networked communities. In short, participatory culture is no longer exclusive to fan
communities, but is a hybrid function attached to media content in a networked media-sphere.
The authors also argue that such media-flow transformation is attributable to new platforms and
new tools that enable audiences to circulate and re-create media content in new ways. They
acknowledge the impact of this intersection of tools and audiences, noting that the “affordances
of digital media provide a catalyst for reconceptualizing other aspects of culture, requiring the
rethinking of social relations, the re-imagining of cultural and political participation, the

76
revision of economic expectations, and the reconfiguration of legal structures” (Jenkins, Ford,
and Green 2013, 12).
The questions I am interested in for this case study, or perhaps in any popular, circulated
entertainment content, is why participating individuals are obsessed with distributing and
remixing the material, and what they may gain from such behavior. I am also interested in the
differences between contexts, between the American experience of spreadable media and a set
of behaviors, and the Chinese experience of spreadable media. How do they differ?
The Barrage Subtitles System in Chinese Cinema
In order to explore these differences, let’s examine “Danmu,” also known as the barrage
subtitles system cinema, a new cinema-viewing method in China, as a case study. I will focus
on the impact of media fans’ interaction with cinema in the post-cinema age; how media fans
communicate with others in a “networked culture”; and how this media content can reshape the
identities of media fans and allow them to express their feelings.
The barrage subtitles system has become popular in major cities in China since 2010. In
this case, the word “Danmu” has two meanings. On the one hand, it can be understood as a
verb, similar to “pop up.” It pithily describes how audience members interact with the movie
screen, sending messages via their smartphones while watching the movie. Messages
immediately pop up on the screen and overlap with the original film footage. On the other hand,
the word is also a noun, meaning “bullet.” It refers to the text messages that moviegoers send to
the screen. The multiple messages are often placed together and scroll across the screen, giving
a visual impact of a “barrage.”

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The idea for this form of viewing originated from a Japanese ACG video-sharing portal
called Nicodou. (ACG is based on an abbreviation of the words animation, comics, and games.)
Later, some Chinese ACG video-streaming portals, such as AcFun and Bilibili, borrowed the
idea and offered a barrage subtitles system to Chinese viewers. ACG video portals became quite
popular among younger online viewers. In order to appeal to this group of people, then, movie
producers began experimenting with the “barrage subtitles system” in cinema, trying to appeal
to younger audiences by combining these popular elements and increasing the pace of the flow
of information, while also making the cinematic experience suddenly feel communal and
collective.
Experimenting with Barrage Subtitles System in the Movie Theater
On August 4, 2014, a special movie screening was held in a Beijing-based theater. Signs
reading, “Welcome to the first global barrage subtitles system screening of the movie, Tiny
Times 3,” adorned the stage. The film is the third installment of a franchise created by novelist-
turned-film-director Guo Jingming, and is based on his five-volume series of novels about four
young women who are friends; the series traces their evolution from high school to adulthood.
Many critics found the film unbearable, with The Hollywood Reporter’s Clarence Tsui
describing how the film’s “laughable narrative, scatterbrained storytelling and inconsistent
characterizations basically magnify the previous film’s flaws to an improbable extreme” (Tsui
2014, np). He also admits that these elements don’t matter to the film’s primary audience
– teenagers – and they might make the film perfect for the barrage subtitling system.
For the screening, theater staff handed out cards to every audience member as they
walked to their seats. The card said, “Please set a nickname and enjoy the shooting.” This

78
“enjoy the shooting” instruction refers to “shooting” comments from mobile devices onto the
screen, and the card’s instructions told viewers how to participate in the barrage subtitles system
in the theater. This innovative activity was co-hosted by a major video streaming company and
a film technology company. They provided Wi-Fi in the screening space. Audience members
first connected their smartphones to the Wi-Fi, then logged on to a specific page; they could
then send text comments within this page. The messages would automatically pop up on the top
of the theatrical screen, along with feature film footage.

This image shows movie attendees waiting as the theater staff helps them connect their
smartphones to special wifi so they can send barrage comments on the theater screen later.
Source: http://ent.people.com.cn/n/2014/0806/c1012-25414260-4.html

The screening suffered chaos in the beginning of the show, since it was a brand new
experience for both the audiences and the theater staff. Further, the barrage subtitles system is

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not totally compatible with some smart phones. Therefore, many audience members complained
that they could not send texts during the first few minutes, and even though they were able to
send the messages later on, some of the messages were missing. During the whole movie, texts
such as “where are my last comments?” and “I cannot connect to the Wi-Fi” or “I cannot even
send a word” were occasionally shown on the big screen. Also, there was a 5- to10-second
delay after the participant sent the message due to a built-in censorship system. Audiences were
not quite adapted to the delay and it caused them to miss the current topic on the screen. And
outside the theater, fans complained about the scarcity of screening tickets. Media outlets vied
to break the news of this new form of theatrical interaction. Inside the theater, the whole screen
looked like a visual party. Despite some chaos, the barrage subtitle system was a huge success.
According to Winston Ma, a banker who studies what he calls “information consumption,” the
film earned $20 million with very little advertising (Ma 2016, 189), and further, this special
screening injected an exuberant vitality into the film market. Ma notes that in the past,
“consumers were very passive. But in the mobile Internet context, consumers are not satisfied.
They would like to be part of the production of content and we have seen that with the film Tiny
Times” (Landreth 2017, no page).

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Here we see audiences sending barrage comments through their smartphones while they
are watching the movie in the theater.
Source: http://ent.people.com.cn/n/2014/0806/c1012-25414260.html

Actually, this was not the first barrage subtitles system film in China. A local animated
movie called The Legend of Qin had its theatrical release in July 2014. It was the first movie in
Mainland China that offered a barrage subtitles system functioning on the big screen. Two
movies, almost at the same time, coincidently chose the same method to interact with their
audiences. However, the way they used this barrage subtitles system technology was different,
and together, the experiences represent two different development trends.

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The audiences’ barrage comments are projected directly on the theater screen of Tiny
Times 3.
Source: http://ent.people.com.cn/n/2014/0806/c1012-25414260-3.html

The Legend of Qin provided 100 barrage subtitles system screenings in its premiere
week. The producers temporarily installed two additional screens and put them along both sides
of the original theater screen, then used two projectors to show barrage subtitles appearing on
the additional screens. Therefore, audiences actually were watching three screens during the
show. People who wanted to participate in the barrage subtitles system screens needed to use
their cellphone to send a text message to a certain platform and then it would be shown on the
side screens. Tiny Times 3, on the other hand, only used the original screen to show barrage
subtitles system information. During their special barrage subtitles system screening, the
producers developed a website that allowed audiences to use their smartphones to log-on and to
make live-comments. They also provided a Wi-Fi system and gave participants free access to it.

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This image shows an audiences’ barrage comments as they are projected on the side
screens which are connected to the main theater screen.
Source: http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2014-08-05/15004186700.shtml

Case Study of Tiny Times 3’s Barrage Subtitles System Screening
For barrage subtitles system screening proponents, watching the movie is not the point.
They argue that audiences are more interested in getting together and discussing the movie.
During the screening, all kinds of messages cropped up on the screen, which actually gives us a
golden opportunity to have a closer look at the fans in the theatre. With the classification and
detailed analysis of the live-comments from Tiny Times 3, we may have an opportunity to
understand how these moviegoers interact with each other and what are the motivations behind
it.
1. Tsukkomi (venting/ranting)
Samples of barrage subtitles:

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“I spent two hours to watch this trash movie? A total waste of time.”
“This is such a great mix of MTVs. How many of them have we seen so far?”
“Oh my god, is there going to be a fourth installment of this franchise?”
Similar to the case of online barrage subtitles systems, the largest group of the
comments in this screening is Tsukkomi. Tsukkomi is a translated word from Japanese. It is
often used to describe a certain type of comment, which usually contains a sarcastic tone. It also
indicates that the people who make such remarks quite frequently and it thus becomes a habit.
Tsukkomi normally goes hand in hand with the plot; these comments happen when the drama is
cheesy, cliché, predictable, overdramatic, or unrealistic. Audiences often use a creative and
sarcastic way to mock it. For instance, the movie took place in Shanghai, in southern China. It is
a city that seldom snows. However, during the movie, the city experienced constant snow for
two years. Fans mocked this situation by borrowing a local Meteorological Bureau identity and
shooting a comment on the screening reading “Shanghai Meteorological Bureau: Shanghai
snow for two years? Please do not mislead the whole nation’s audiences, thank you.”
2. Interaction with on-site theatrical staff
This group of remarks is new to barrage subtitles system activity. Normally online
audiences do not have the chance to communicate with the staff in the video streaming
websites. However, in the theater, fans can connect directly with the on-site staff and this
generated many interesting responses. For instance, someone sent a comment that read, “Help! I
am in row 11, my cell phone ran out of power, can anyone lend me a power bank?” Soon, there
was a reply, sent by the staff, on the screen saying, “Dear fans, we prepared a power bank at the

84
main gate, please come and charge your phone.” During the show, sometimes when the topic or
the language is too sensitive, the on-site system administrator will also send a comment to the
big screen to warn the audience to behave with their remarks. The audience therefore realized
the existence of the administrator and later began to tease the administrator, writing comments
such as “Hi administrator, do you want to have a date with me?” and “Administrator, I want a
refund for the tickets, where are you?” Some remarks even borrowed the tone of the
administrator, such as “Administrator: Dear audience, please do not leave after this show, we
will be screening another movie later.”
3. Advertising
“Lefeng.com: A woman should use authentic cosmetics.”
“Zhouchou.cn: raise little money, do big things.”
“Huxiu.com is coming”
“Male public relations wanted, please contact XXXX.”
These kinds of comments are new to the barrage subtitles system activity. Due to a
mature censorship system on the Internet, advertising remarks are rarely shown on video
sharing websites. However, during this theatrical screening, many advertisement-like remarks
cropped up throughout the whole movie. It is hard to tell whether audiences actually sent them
for advertising or just for fun.
4. Soft political and hot news-related jokes

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Although it may sound irrelevant to the movie plot, audiences like to bring recent
political issues and hot topics into the barrage subtitles system activity. Fans often borrowed the
celebrities’ identities to make a comment, such as “Sephirex [the CEO of Wanda group, Wang
Jianlin’s son]: I booked the whole theater, everyone please leave now.”
5. Barrage subtitles system exclusive terms
Although online barrage subtitles are a new activity, it has already generated a
considerable number of terms. These widely received technical terms also appeared on the big
screen. For instance, the term, “Beware of the upcoming high energy,” was constantly shown on
the screen. This term originally appeared in a Japanese animation serial, when a spaceship scout
found the enemy launching a high-power weapon and warned his captain by saying, “We found
a high energy reaction in front of our spaceship.” It was later borrowed by barrage subtitles
system fans and its meaning expanded to describe a situation where something dramatic and
stirring is about to happen in the plot. In the theater, fans that had already seen the movie before
used such terms to warn other audience members when some dramatic scenes were about to
happen.
6. Peer interaction
“There is a handsome boy in row 4, come and check it out.”
“Dear lady in row 10 number 3, do you want to have a date?”
Beyond the online barrage subtitles system experience, the ability to make remarks in
the theater while surrounded by a group of people gives audience members the chance to
communicate with each other. Fans seemed to be quite pleased in the on-site interaction with

86
their peers. Some of the remarks sound like a social invitation such as, “So hungry, anyone want
to have hot pot with me after the show?” and “Anyone going to Hiadian district? Need a free
ride later, thanks.” Some of the messages are more oriented around humor and entertainment,
such as “Hi, I am in row 7 number 6, desperately need a boyfriend,” or “To the lady in row 7,
when you went to the restroom, your boyfriend kissed your bestie. You’re welcome.”
Interactive and Socialized Cinema
What is really interesting here is to see how social tools can be used to augment the
experience surrounding or even within movies. It is not unrealistic to consider this barrage
subtitles system trend as the starting point for an interactive and socialized movie movement. It,
in some ways, fundamentally changes the way people engage with cinema, from a closed, static
movie-going experience to a more open, dynamic, interactive viewing activity.
The Chinese film industry is in a constant state of evolution. Different technologies have
been used in filmmaking in recent years to achieve better viewing experience. Along with the
intense following of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), 3D movies became “the next big thing”
in cinema. IMAX, a high-resolution film format with very large screens, makes the theater
screen “bigger than bigger.” 4K, which designates high image resolution, now is the standard
theatrical distribution requirement for films. These newly-emerged technologies emphasize
different sensory entertainment and experiences, with 3D movies giving audiences a more
immersive viewing experience, IMAX bringing bigger images to moviegoers, and 4K resolution
offering better image quality; however, the core philosophy behind these technologies remains
the same, namely to keep audience’s eyeballs more concentrated on the screen.

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Also, it seems to be common sense that interpersonal and man-machine communication
is largely prohibited while watching the movie. Think about it: audiences in the theater will
inevitably have to watch a theatre policy trailer before the film begins and no matter how fun
this policy trailer might be, they all say the same thing: please turn off your personal devices
and do not talk to your friend loudly during the entire show. Filmmakers and critics frequently
argue that people who go to the cinema want to have a group experience, and that they enjoy the
sense of going out and participating in a film together with their families and friends. Ironically,
when it is time to watch films in the theater, the experience becomes quite a personal one, until
the end of film, when the theater lights glow in the background of the screen, and people once
again have a chance to talk freely with their companions.
In this context, three terms are of particular interest: 1) the changing roles of cinema
audiences; 2) the open meaning of cinema; and 3) the shifting attitudes of filmmakers. Firstly,
the role of the moviegoer has significantly changed from that of a passive viewer to an active
participant. In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2008), Jenkins
created the term “prosumer” (a combination of the word producer and consumer) to describe
how new media would alter the position of traditional audiences. In the new media age, the
boundaries between media creators and content consumers are blurred. Fans are no longer the
passive receiver. They want to and can directly take part in the process of media production/re-
reproduction and content sharing. Now, with barrage subtitles system movies, moviegoers
become prosumers. They have the chance to produce meaningful information and circulate it on
the big screen. The messages they created were left on top of the original film footage. By
posting these messages, these “textual poachers,” to use another term by Jenkins, changed the
original media content and made it become a more personal media product. In the screening

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process of the barrage subtitles system movie, the movie is not only watched, but also used and
turned into a platform for communication. Further, the message of the movie shifts in relation to
the interaction of the audience. The degree of media fan participation has a direct impact on the
viewing experience of the bullet screen movie, which makes the status of the audience have a
new significance. In the movie field full of bullet screens, the movie itself is no longer the main
driving force of communication; the audience has become the main entity. In this process of
communication, the “individual” and “group: of the audience have been well displayed
Secondly, as far as the film is concerned, in the process of traditional film exhibition, the
film itself maintains integrity and unity when it is projected. The most important feature of the
bullet screen film, however, is that the bullet screen has “reproduced” the film. In the viewing
environment of the barrage subtitles system cinema, the original film material is only part of the
final work. The complete barrage subtitles system film is composed of the original film material
as well as the barrage subtitles information with its feedback from the audience. In this way, the
film text changes from a closed text to an open text. Further, the meaning produced by the film
will also change with each barrage subtitles system screening, constantly generating new
meanings with each new audience. For the media fans experiencing the barrage subtitles
system, the film is no longer a complete aesthetic object, but instead is fragmented into pieces
of information they are interested in and want to share. As Yeqi Zhu points out, “Through the
Danmu system the viewers collectively participate in a movement of mingled ‘modern
construction’ and ‘postmodern deconstruction’ of film meanings” (Yeqi 2017, 47).
Thirdly, barrage subtitles system movies indicate that media producers are re-examining
their relationship with fans by weighing their authority and balancing it against the creativity of
their fans. Barrage subtitles system movies create a platform for audiences and filmmakers to

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share and communicate together. In the process of watching the bullet screen film, there is an
equal relationship between the original image creator and the audience, and they can convey
their opinions to each other. In Spreadable Media, Jenkins uses the term “gift economy” to
explain the logic behind media producers and the motivation of participatory consumers.
Consumers do not simply consume. They recommend content they like to their friends who
recommend it to their friends who recommend it on down the line. They do not simply “buy”
cultural goods; they “buy into” a cultural economy, and while their participation is unpaid, they
earn respect and social status through their participation.
In these two barrage subtitles system movies, producers were actively and assiduously
wooing fans. Fans are literally creating something new out of the original footage, and the
original creators, are now, rather than reluctantly acquiescing to demands by fans as they did on
the Internet, are actively assisting audiences in satisfying their needs on the big screen. Instead
of being utterly discomfited of having their authority be challenged by grassroots moviegoers,
the creators fully expect such fan participation to help them spread their movie to a broader
audience. Both of the movies’ producers admitted that they used barrage subtitles system
screenings as a way to communicate with their fans rather than creating a new revenue model.
Indeed, each barrage subtitles system screening costs a considerable amount of money, and it is
paid by the producers not the fans. Even more, Tiny Times 3 offered free tickets for its barrage
subtitles system screening to the public as a way to reward their fans.
Bringing the barrage subtitles system, an Internet-generated technology, into the
traditional movie industry offers an example of what Chinese cinema will be in the post-cinema
age. In time, the barrage subtitles system may become a standard exhibition practice, becoming
conventional technology alongside 3D and Imax movies. Or it may just be a fleeting activity,

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quickly dethroned by the theater or replaced by another emerging technology. But this is not the
point. Instead, the barrage subtitles system points to the shift in moviegoing from a passive
experience to an active one in which audiences can communicate with media makers. It
represents a traditionally stubborn cinema opening its gate to greet cinephiles and to embrace
their creativity.
Barrage Subtitles System and Subculture
As an open text on a networked platform, the barrage subtitles system is consistent with
the elements of participatory culture, emphasizing that netizens participate in the production of
bullet texts spontaneously, so as to achieve identity and further feedback within a cycle of
image creation. The new viewing format of the barrage subtitles system content has begun to
create a new subculture. For media fans, the barrage subtitles system comments destroy the
original video content, and the viewers’ direct and often outrageous comments serve to cut,
break, and block the screen, preventing the traditional aesthetic experience and offering another
form of emotional catharsis. In this case, the division between the film and the comments does
not affect the harmony and unity of the whole in the eyes of the media fans, but allows
participants to enjoy a strong sense of ritual satisfaction. In the process of watching the film and
writing, sharing, and reading bullet screen texts, participants gain pleasure through their
appreciation and derogation of the film. However, over time, the pleasure of this experience will
shift from the novelty of the experience to the emotional energy brought by the fact that they are
members of a subculture. Participants will feel that it does not matter what video they watch or
what they say. What is important instead is a sense of existence within a group; the exciting
experience generated in the process of contributing texts shifts to become an almost ritualized
interaction exclusive to a cultural group.

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I will use the online barrage subtitles system website Bilibili as an example. Launched in
2010 in Shanghai, BiliBili is a video sharing website focusing on games and animation. It has a
strict membership access system with a clear hierarchy of differences among members. This
membership system has shifted over time. When BiliBili began, member registration was only
available on a certain date. Later, in the process of development, the company gradually
liberalized the right of member registration in order to expand the scale of users. However, the
process is still rigorous. Currently, users who want to become full members have to go through
the following process: First, you become a registered member through the registration process.
Then you must answer a set of 100 questions, of which 40 are basic questions about bullet
screen etiquette, within 120 minutes. Only when all the questions are answered correctly can
you enter the next stage. Here, you encounter another set of 60 multiple choice questions that
cover animation, music, games, science and technology, ghosts and livestock, and so on. The
scope of the topics is wide and difficult, and the expression of each topic is the term commonly
used by the otaku group. This strict access system makes the barrage subtitles system
participants who become official members have a strong sense of belonging and honor.
In order to understand the shifting status of participation across differing barrage subtitle
system platforms, is useful to explore how mainstream Chinese media culture incorporates the
subculture that is generated through the barrage subtitles system community. Regarding
subculture, scholar Dick Hebdige’s work, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), has had a
profound influence on my understanding of media fandom. Hebdige’s work, which is based on
a cultural studies perspective from the Birmingham School, with its theoretical combination of
Marxism, media studies, and semiotics, focuses on how mainstream culture fights with and
incorporates subculture. In his analysis of the differences between mainstream culture and

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subculture, Hebdige uses three keywords, namely rebellion, style, and incorporation, to
demonstrate how subculture affects our everyday life. He explains the emergence of subculture,
the function of its rebellious nature, the formation of its style, the misleading of the mainstream
media, and how the dominant ideology and commercial market eventually incorporate the
subcultural style over time.
Hebdige starts with two primary definitions of culture. The first definition, which is
essentially classical and conservative, explains that culture represents a standard of aesthetic
excellence, “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” and is derived from an
appreciation of “classic” aesthetic forms, such as the opera, ballet, drama, literature, and art
(Hebdige 1979, 6). The other explanation of culture is rooted in anthropology. It is best
described by Raymond Williams in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976)
who says that culture is a “whole way of life” (Williams 1976, 13). As Hebdige explains, the
emphasis shifts from immutable to historical criteria, from fixity to transformation (Hebdige
19797). Hebdige goes on to use Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to connect subculture
with mainstream ideology. He points out that the way subculture challenges hegemony is not
through straightforward means, but through “style.” Hebdige uses the word “incorporation” to
describe the way subculture melts into mainstream culture. He points out two ways of
incorporation: first, the conversion of subcultural signs into mass-produced objects, and second,
the labeling and re-definition of deviant behavior by dominant groups.
Borrowing these terms from Hebdige, we cannot see the barrage subtitles system
subculture as a symbol of radical rebellion against hegemony. I would rather use the term “soft
rebellion” to describe such a cultural phenomenon. It functions as a digital bridge between
professional filmmakers and enthusiastic amateurs, giving the commercialized and market-

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oriented Chinese media industry a diversified set of visual and narrative expressions. A
relatively loose and free environment in which most online barrage subtitles system media
products were created gives Chinese individuals more space to express their feelings. However,
the growing influence on Chinese youth of the barrage subtitles system subculture started to
draw the attention of Chinese officials. Barrage subtitle platforms have to accept increasing
harsh censorship, just like other media in China, including real-name registration for barrage
subtitle system users and online media content licenses, and more stringent regulations on
media copyrights. As Pang-Chieh Ho (2017) reports:
The CAC’s latest order will have a chilling effect on streaming sites like AcFunTV and
Bilibili, both of which have made their name by fostering vocal, interactive online
communities. Over the past two months, AcFunTV and Bilibilihave faced increasingly
stringent control from the government. In July, both websites were reported ... to have
taken a large number of foreign movies and TV shows offline, a move many speculated
had to do with censorship from the SAPPRFT, and on September 5, AcFunTV was fined
(in Chinese) 120,000 yuan ($18,500) for posting content in violation of government
regulations (Ho, Pang-Chieh. 2017, np).
With incredibly enhanced surveillance and rigid censorship in cyberspace, the barrage
subtitles system media products are being drastically incorporated into the mainstream, and then
mainly consumed for recreational purposes. This is not to say that media fandom or the
subculture which is generated from the barrage subtitles system media products does not have
meaning. On the one hand, to Chinese young media fans the diversified discussions through a
barrage commenting system on the platforms actually gives them more space to develop their
non-political identities and shared interests. As scholar Ling Yang argues that online fan-

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subcultural platforms provide Chinese netizens with an avenue for discussions concerning
topics that are not necessarily related to the fan objects, and “seemingly apolitical online
fandoms are likely to be embraced by more Chinese netizens as a sanctuary where they can be
empowered to forge new types of consciousness, identity, shared meanings, communities,
relationships, space and place” without the unwanted influence of the state” (Yang 2017, 380).
On the other hand, I believe barrage subtitles system media products and its subculture’s main
contribution lie in their aesthetic innovation rather than their political pursuits.

A New Type of Cinephilia
The barrage subtitles system also suggests the birth of a new type of media fan. Whether
it is in the online barrage subtitles system or a theater’s barrage subtitles system, it is easy to
find a certain group of people. They often act as the leader or guide for a particular topic. They
are very good at discovering plot holes, errors, and gaffes, as well as the artistic virtues and
highlights. Through their live-comments, it feels as if they have watched a considerable number
of films and they are willing to guide other views into discussion. Given the short-lived and
ever-changing nature of the barrage subtitles system, it is almost impossible for fans to leave in-
depth and integral remarks, and their comments seem to be less rigorous and more Internet-
slang oriented. However, one can still sense that this particular group of viewers is well-
educated and has a better understanding and passion towards film.
How to describe this type of media fan? Are they similar to movie fans or are they more
than that since they have special feelings toward film? I think the definition changes and adapts
with time. Susan Sontag used the word “cinephilia” in her essay, “The Decay of Cinema”

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(1996), to describe “the name of the very specific kind of love that cinema inspired.” She
greatly expanded the role of cinephilia, arguing that if “cinephilia is dead, then movies are dead
too” (Sontag 1996, 60). With the emergence of digital culture, she further argued, “Perhaps it is
not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia” (Sontag 1996, 60). However, other scholars
argue that cinephilia is not dead; it changes into new forms alongside the development of new
technology. In 2010, Jonathan Rosenbaum argued in an article titled “DVDs: A New Form of
Collective Cinephilia” that DVDs are the new form of collective cinephilia during the past few
decades, and Paul Snyder indicates that streaming movies will replace DVDs to become the
future of cinephilia in his article, “The Future of Cinephilia: Will Streaming Movies Replace
DVD?” (2017). Putting aside the debates, one should first notice that the film viewing
experience and its environment have significantly changed from what Sontag described in the
earlier days of film to the more recent digitized cinematic world. With easy access to online film
data, such as IMDB and Wikipedia, and the sophistication of search engines, viewers can easily
master all kinds of film information. In addition, as discussed earlier, since the movie theater is
no longer the only place where people have access to movies, the sense of ritual that was a part
of traditional cinema is fading dramatically. Perhaps this echoes what Sontag says about the
death of cinephilia. However, we must also see that new forms of movie viewing through such
platforms as television and the Internet have also generated new types of cinephilia. Rather than
arbitrarily jump to the conclusion that cinephilia is dead, we might want to consider that
cinephilia is in a constant transition alongside the evolution of movie platforms. Meanwhile, it
is good to see that in the wake of developments in cinematic technology such as barrage
subtitles systems, cinephilia has produced a return to movie theaters. Although their viewing

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experiences and watching habits are different from earlier times, they still play a powerful role
in the film history.
Whether or not we should call this motivation/passion as cinephilia and define these
people as cinephiles, one thing must be admitted here: cinephiles within the context of the
barrage subtitle system have a great effect on promoting film culture. Firstly, they are guides for
other moviegoers, leading them into the cinema world. Most people go to the cinema for
entertainment, not seeking knowledge. During the barrage subtitles system screening of Tiny
Times 3, the majority of remarks are for fun and gossip. However, there were also some
comments that offer film knowledge and meaningful information that often caused a debate or
led to a discussion. Those cinephiles who left these comments are not like critics from the
academy, speaking with long academic words, which are too obscure to the general population
and therefore tend to keep them away. Looking at the live-comments made by cinephiles, it is
hard to find academic and professional remarks. Most of the comments are understandable,
ultra-brief but startling. These comments may not be deep enough to change your way of
understanding film, but they open the door for collaborative learning and lead to a broader film
culture. For instance, once these cinephiles leave comments on the screen, frequently other
follow-ups comments appear, such as, “I would love to watch them (the movies cinephile
mentioned before).”
Secondly, it greatly enriches the methodologies of film criticism. Unlike the professional
film critics mostly from cinema schools, these cinephiles come from different backgrounds.
They are intellectual elites in their domains and have their own specialties. For instance, quite
often we see comments from a biology or chemistry point of view in detective movies, and
these remarks often help audiences to better understand the plot. Viewers often leave follow-up

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comments such as “finally understood why he dies” and “please pay attention to the red
comments (cinephiles often leave colorful remarks in order to distinguish them from ordinary
comments), it is a great explanation.” Other viewers often watch these comments with gratitude.
It helps them to access more information behind the movie.
Again, I might well abuse the word cinephilia, and others may argue that what appeared
on the barrage subtitles system are just remarks left by some movie fans. However, one cannot
deny their passion for film and their efforts to explore (or expand or develop) film culture. It
may differ from Sontag’s definition of cinephilia, but I argue that this is a new cinephilia for the
digital age. It is the direct product of digital cinema in the transition period. It is the ideological
embodiment of film culture. It is the development motivation of cinema in the digital age. As
Sontag once said, if cinema can be resurrected, it will only be through the birth of a new kind of
cine-love.
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Chapter Four:
The Impact of Fan Culture on the Storytelling of Chinese Cinema in the Post-cinema Age

In the post-cinema age, across both American and Chinese cinemas, the interactions among film and other
media forms have increased both in scope and in depth. These interactions not only represent a more
complex media market driven primarily by financial profit, but also indicate that there is strong demand
from media fans who want their film experiences to be more approachable in their daily lives through
social media.
1
Media fans desire to consume and respond to movies in a variety of ways across a variety
of media platforms now. In recent years, from approximately 2007, the concepts of “transmedia
storytelling” and “media convergence” have grown out of the need of media producers to have a strategic
framework to describe how media projects not only move from platform to platform, but how fans now
use a variety of methods to explore and respond to their favorite media products. The following chapter
clarifies various notions of media convergence and transmedia storytelling in China as they contrast with
the context within the United States. In order to offer detail, I will present a case study based on a Chinese
movie project I participated in and discuss the characteristics of Chinese transmedia projects as they
evolved in response to this particular project.

Transmedia and Media Convergence
Film and media scholar Marsha Kinder coined the term “transmedia” in her 1991 book, Playing
with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles to describe how media entities are in dialogue with each other through various kinds of
intertextual referencing. In 2003, Henry Jenkins built on this idea and described a new form of
storytelling called “transmedia storytelling”; nine years later, in 2011 on his official blog titled

1
For more on the recent growth of media fan engagement in China, see “Fan Economy in the Chinese Media and
Entertainment Industry: How Feedback From Super Fans Can Propel Creative Industries’ Revenue,” by Yilu Liang
and Wanqi Shen, Global Media and China, March 2017. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059436417695279
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“Confessions of an Aca-Fan,” he revised the definition, writing: “Transmedia storytelling represents a
process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels
for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium
makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story” (Jenkins 2011, no page). According to
Jenkins, what makes transmedia happen is media convergence. He argues that “media convergence makes
the flow of content across multiple media platforms inevitable” (Jenkins 2008, 106). He continues,
writing, “In the era of digital effects and high-resolution game graphics, the game world can now look
almost exactly like the film world – because they are reusing many of the same digital assets” (Jenkins
2008, 106). It is noteworthy that transmedia storytelling strategies are not something that emerged in the
early 2000s. Jenkins takes Biblical stories as an example to demonstrate that the Bible, too, is a text that
has spread across different media forms, from the printed page to live performances, stained-glass
windows and paintings. However, Hollywood studios, from a profit-driven standpoint, successfully
developed transmedia storytelling strategies by expanding stories into film franchises and other media
formats. With his analysis of transmedia storytelling, Jenkins made a groundbreaking contribution in the
transmedia storytelling area as his research concentrates on media fans and discusses the social, political,
technological, economic, and cultural shifts surrounding trends in transmedia, and the ways in which
transmedia strategies encourage activism. In his analysis, fans are not passive receivers but active
participants who are willing to establish a dialogue with producers, as well as with other fans, either to
have a better understanding of the media products they consume or to create new works based on the
original media projects.
Other scholars have made similar attempts to conceptualize transmedia storytelling strategies. In
“Living on Dawson’s Creek: Teen Viewers, Cultural Convergence and Television Overflow” (2001), Will
Brooker analyzes the Warner Bros. teen drama Dawson’s Creek (1998-2003), and conceptualizes its
narrative across different media platforms as “overflow.” He argues that “contemporary television
increasingly ‘overflows’ from the primary text across multiple platforms – particularly onto dedicated
internet sites – and that certain programs invite a participatory, interactive engagement which constructs
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the show as an extended, immersive experience” (Brooker 2001, 113).Through his studies of regular
television drama and the consumer’s point of view, Brooker observes that the mainstream viewing
experience no longer applies to some viewers. They are eager to “follow” the show, to engage with the
main characters and the plot even after the show ends. As a result, television stations started to offer other
channels for viewers to enhance their experience, such as the official website for a particular show. He
takes Warner Bros.’ website as an example to demonstrate how viewers may encounter additional
information about the characters and an extended plot on the website, and how consumers can express
their feelings, exchange information, and showcase their fan-made artifacts on the bulletin boards. These
activities offer viewers an immersive experience and significantly make the text of the show flow into
other media platforms.
Matt Hanson, in his book The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age (2004), offers the
concept of “screen bleed,” which originally was a technical term used to discuss color issues in broadcast
safety, to describe a modern narrative condition in which fictive worlds extend into multiple media and
moving image formats, and each strand of narrative offers a new dimensional layer (Hanson 2004, 47).
Hanson discusses how the core elements of storytelling flows or “bleeds” from the movie to other media
platforms. He includes in his discussion many avant-garde and cutting-edge multimedia projects, such as
Matthew Barney’s five-piece work The Cremaster Cycle (1994-2002), Danny Boyle’s transmedia project
28 Days Later (2002-2007), and the Wachowski siblings’ transmedia work now known as the Matrix
franchise. Through these works, Hanson demonstrates that digital technologies enable film projects to
transform and to actively engage with other platforms and other formats, including games, websites, and
portable devices. He notices that although the film is still one of the most dominant art forms in modern
society, it has gradually been freed from the constraints of the typical big-budget, colossal production
process; he also shows that the relationships between filmmakers and viewers are no longer constrained to
one-way communication. Further, audiences are no longer satisfied with simply discussing film
aesthetics. Besides the commercially successful films and favorite genre films, audiences yearn for more
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manipulatable and personalized media content, and they want to connect with an array of film and media
products in order to make sure that what they consume is meaningful.
In the book The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison
Avenue, and the Way We Well Stories (2011), Frank Rose discusses the concept of “deep media,” a term
originally used by Nigel Hollis to describe media changes and later adopted by Rose, who uses it to refer
to stories that are not just entertaining, but immersive, taking you more deeplyinto the story than an hour-
long TV drama or a two-hour movie or a 30-second spot will permit (Rose 2011, 3). Rose distinguishes
between transmedia or cross-media storytelling, which focuses more on the process of storytelling itself,
and deep media, which he believes emphasizes the audience. The goal of deep media is “to enable
members of the audience (for want of a better term) to delve into a story at any level of depth they like, to
immerse themselves in it” (Jenkins and Rose 2011, no page). With the emergence of the Internet and the
rapid development of social networking, audiences have evolved from passive consumers of media
products to active participants in the creation and distribution of media content. Such transitions of
audiences’ identities inevitably puts the relationship between producers and audiences into a more intense
situation where both of them are trying to have control of media content. Rose considers this transition to
be a positive influence for the media industry and argues that “once the audience is free to... start
directing events, the entire edifice of the twentieth-century mass media begins to crumble” (Rose 2011,
119).
Similarly, in her article “Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yugioh, Media Mixes and
Everyday Cultural Production,” cultural anthropologist Mizuko (Mimi) Ito examines the concept of
“media mix” through an analysis of the Japanese comic series Yugioh (1996-2004). The Yugioh is a
highly successful media product that started as a printed comic series that was then turned into a major
Japanese television cartoon in 1998. Later, it gradually developed into many cross-media products,
including card games, video games, amusement parks, location-based game arcades, and merchandise
such as collectible action figures, gifts, and custom clothing. Ito follows scholar Arjun Appadurai’s path,
where Appadurai notices the digital mass media has the ability to blur the boundaries between the
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imaginary world and our everyday lives. In the case of Yugioh, the strategy of the “media mix” indeed
facilitates the fusion between real and virtual worlds by integrating cross-media products into one unified
imaginary Yugioh world. Ito, therefore, argues that “the real is being colonized by the virtual as
technologies of the digital imagination become more pervasive in the everyday environment” (Ito 2005,
92). She continues, “Yugioh and an ecology of pervasive digital technology in urban Japan are indicative
of this porous membrane between the real and virtual, the imagination and everyday life” (Ito 2005, 92)
.

Furthermore, Ito notices that through the diversification of the cross-media content, the media mix
enables what she calls a hypersociality. For instance, she notices that “the activities of children in our
world closely mimic the activities and materialities of children in Yugi's world. They collect and trade the
same cards and engage in play with the same strategies and rules (Ito 2005, 92). She also explains, “The
image of solitary kids staring at television screens and twiddling their thumbs has given way to the figure
of the activist kid beaming monsters between Game Boys, trading cards in the park, text messaging
friends on their bus ride home, reading breaking Yugioh information emailed to a mobile phone” (Ito
2005, 92). The media mix, then, facilitates a hypersociality that allows ordinary audiences to become
more active while also giving them access to participatory media.
With these concepts – transmedia, media overflow and bleed, deep media, and the media mix
– the above scholars all notice new trends of media consumption based on transmedia strategies in which
the formally fairly contained media object expands beyond its boundaries. Through their analyses, they all
point out two key qualities: 1) the integration of the media industry within the transmedia design ecology,
and 2) the participation of audiences. These two critical elements make transmedia strategies go beyond
the mixing of two different media. Transmedia strategies are not about a decorative remake or simply a
retelling of a story in another media format; they are instead based on how to build a complex world by
employing different media platforms, and how to welcome and encourage an “encyclopedic impulse” in
viewers and creators. In doing so, transmedia storytelling enhances the consumer or participant’s
experience.

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Chinese Media Convergence and Transmedia Storytelling
In general, transmedia storytelling has evolved very differently in China than in the U.S. or other
countries based on levels of government control. Media convergence in China has two modes. The first
one is a top-down approach, driven by the central government. In order to strengthen its legitimacy and
effectiveness among different media outlets, and especially with new and emerging media platforms, the
central government considered media convergence as a technological and political pursuit.
2
The second
mode is a bottom-up cultural mechanism, driven by the media fans. Compared with the older generation
audiences, contemporary Chinese media fans are more interested in consuming media products across
different media platforms and actively promoting media convergence as a cultural practice on their end.
3

The growing interest among media fans also draws attention from private capital, which encourages
private-owned media groups to develop multimedia products. Transmedia storytelling, as an effective tool
to bring different media together and provide media fans a purpose to explore, has played a significant
role, then, in both modes of Chinese media convergence.
The concept of media convergence has gained interest in both the Chinese media industry and
academia in recent years, due to its unique political significance. With the continual emergence and
innovation of new media technologies, the central government has worked strategically to build a strong
sense of national culture. Building on this foundation, the Chinese media industry is now in an
increasingly networked environment encompassing cloud computing, big data, the fifth generation
cellular network, and other new technologies and applications in diverse areas from so-called traditional
media to new media, while moving towards a future characterized by a smart and centralized media

2
See Dan Wang’s blog post titled “Behind China’s Media Convergence Campaign,” on the University of
Nottingham’s Contemporary Chinese Studies website, December 1, 2016, for an overview of the political
implications of media convergence and the Chinese government.
3
It is important to understand the differences among generations; in his essay “Understanding China’s Young
Consumers,” Zak Dychtwald explores how the younger generation in China is the first “for whom consumerism
comes naturally.” He continues, “This is in stark contrast to their parents and grandparents, most of whom grew up
poor in a very different political climate, and as a result developed a famously thrifty approach to life – one akin to
the approach many Americans developed during the Great Depression.” He goes on to explore the ramifications of
these very different relationships to consumerism, and these in turn impact attitudes toward participatory media.”
See Zak Dychtwald, “Understanding China’s Young Consumers,” Harvard Business Review, June 11, 2021.
https://hbr.org/2021/06/understanding-chinas-young-consumers
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ecosystem. Media convergence plays an essential role in accelerating the Chinese media industry growth.
Qibao Liu, the head of the Central Propaganda Department of the Communist Party of China, pointed out
that promoting the convergent development of traditional media and new media is a major strategic
decision that the Party Centre made with a view to consolidating propaganda, ideology, and the cultural
battlefield, all of which assist in expanding mainstream ideology and public opinion (Liu 2014, no page).
On August 18, 2014, the Chinese Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening
Reform published the report of “Guiding Opinions Concerning Promoting the Converged Development of
Traditional Media and New Media” at its fourth meeting.
4
During the meeting, President Xi recapitulated
the significance of the media industry and highlighted the importance of the convergence between
traditional media and new media. Xi said the media should pay attention to both convergence and
management, and ensure media convergence advances in the right direction. Such politically-oriented
media convergence has become the dominant force among public media organizations. However, top-
down approach to media convergence is not quite appreciated by audiences or by the market. Without
clear market-driven modes and enough consumers, the political-oriented media convergence in China has
experienced significant problems. Most of the state-owned media convergence centers or groups suffered
tremendous profit losses.
In The 2014 China Media Integration and Development Report, it is argued that, although
Chinese media has entered the era of media integration, we do not have clear for-profit models and the
benefits of the media convergence do not outweigh the costs. If the convergence media cannot finance its
growth privately, then such development of media convergence is unsustainable and unstable.
5
For the
2016 Chinese Media Convergence Campaign, the general secretary of China Newspaper Cultural Industry
Alliance pointed out the difficulties in the process of media convergence. The government has

4
See Haoran Li’s coverage of the report here: “People’s Daily People’s Commentary: Only by Embracing
Convergence Can Traditional Media Have a Tomorrow.” China Copyright and Media, 20 Aug. 2014,
https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/08/20/peoples-daily-peoples-commentary-only-by-embracing-
convergence-can-traditional-media-have-a-tomorrow/.
5
See the coverage of The 2014 China Media Convergence Annual Report ( 中国媒体融合发展年度报告) in
People’s Daily Press, 2015, p. 42.
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encouraged media organizations to converge with digital platforms by telling them that there is a
prosperous future there, but most local media entities have not experienced it. These challenges for real
transformation make it impossible to realize freedom of expression in online culture; journalists are still
struggling, and it is difficult for companies to maintain networks with other media outlets under this idea
of convergence. All of these difficulties have pushed media organizations to choose another path of
survival.
6

A few months later, the Central Party published its 2019 nationwide budget with a 14 percent
increase from the 2018 budget, around 14.7 billion yuan, to be spent on local public cultural services
development. According to the budget report, the increase was accounted for largely by new allocations
for the support of convergence media development at the county-level since these city-level media have
encountered tremendous financial shortages in recent years.
7
The newly increased budget will temporarily
alleviate the cash squeeze during a digital restructuring. However, without addressing how to find market
outlets for these county-level media, these financial-incentive solutions are costly and unsustainable.
Eventually, these local, converted media centers will have to turn to the central government for raising
more funds in order to survive.
On the other hand, as Henry Jenkins points out, convergence represents a cultural shift as
consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media
content. “[It] is about the work – and play – spectators perform in the new media system,” he writes
(Jenkins 2008, 3). Rather than considering media convergence as a technological, economic, and political
term, Chinese media fans approach media convergence as a cultural movement, actively participating in
the creation, circulation, re-creation, and re-circulation of media materials through different media

6
See Dan Wang’s analysis for more detail on the campaign for convergence, “Behind China’s Media Convergence
Campaign.” Contemporary Chinese Studies at UNNC, University of Nottingham, 1 Dec. 2016,
http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chinesestudies/2016/12/01/behind-chinas-media-convergence-campaign/.
7
See Shasha Fu’s article, “Learning Is Not Imitation, Only Innovation Could Go Further” in Chinaxwcb, 16 Apr.
2019, https://www.chinaxwcb.com/info/551886.
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platforms. The omnipresent media content becomes a part of their daily lives. Their identities and
relationships are being reshaped across different media platforms.
Chinese media fans’ desire for consuming media content on different channels has received
tremendous attention from Chinese privately-owned multimedia conglomerates. The companies have
more power to join the dots among different media platforms, offering opportunities and also controlling
the directions for the media text to flow in a unified path with coherence. The development of privately-
owned multimedia conglomeration in China is relatively slow. The emergence of large-scale multimedia
conglomerates did not appear until the 2000s. Chinese internet startups also began to form multimedia
entities in recent years. These internet companies, such as Alibaba Group and Tencent Group,
demonstrate a real sense of how to build solid and efficient multimedia groups.
8
Many of these internet-
based multimedia giants claim that they will build an entertainment ecology.
9
What needs to be clarified
here, however, is that it is not only multimedia conglomerates that enable its creators to make transmedia
projects. On the contrary, there are a significant number of transmedia works created by independent
makers. Away from the tedious corporate culture and lengthy administrative procedures, the freelance
artist sometimes makes fabulous transmedia works that in turn can lead the development of the media
industry. However, it is also the fact that the privately owned multimedia conglomerates tend to launch
transmedia projects to national or international attention. These market-oriented transmedia projects
easily gain more attention from media fans and are thus able to create a cultural phenomenon.
Jenkins has described seven core concepts of transmedia storytelling in his research on American
media.They are: 1) spreadability versus drillability; 2) continuity versus multiplicity; 3) immersion versus
extractability; 4) world building; 5) seriality; 6) subjectivity; and 7) performance. These principles also
work for Chinese transmedia projects. There are no fundamental differences between the two cultures

8
See Jinling Li’s essay, “The Platformization of Chinese Cinema: The Rise of IP Films in the Age of the Internet+,”
in Asian Cinema, Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 203-218, 2020 for a discussion of how Alibaba and Tencent have used IP and
transmedia storytelling to create a new paradigm of content creation based on platforms more than storytelling.
9
Adam Lashinsky details the evolution of Alibaba and Tencent as media ecosystems in his article in Fortune,
“Alibaba v. Tencent: The Battle for Supremacy in China,” June 21, 2018, https://fortune.com/longform/alibaba-
tencent-china-internet/
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with regard to how the media fans engage with media platforms and how creators design the media
content to suit fans' needs. The globalization and the convergence of technologies allow Chinese
audiences the ability to catch up with the ways in which American consumers interact with media
platforms nowadays. Chinese media creators also employ transmedia storytelling strategies in order to
seek the sustainable development of their multimedia projects.
One prevalent tactic that Chinese media creators use in their transmedia storytelling work is to
translate an established work into a new medium. In recent years, many popular web novels have been
turned into transmedia projects since these web novels already have many fans.
10
The privately-owned
multimedia conglomerates bought the copyright of these popular web novels and then used transmedia
storytelling strategies to turn them into movies, TV dramas, and computer games, bringing more media
fans to consume diverse elements across the media franchise. Eternal Love (2017-2018), Time Raiders
(2016), Mojin: The Lost Legend (2015, and Jade Dynasty (2019) are all successful examples of web
novels that were translated into feature films. It is worth noting that, in these transmedia projects, cinema
contributed less to the overall strategic goals of the project. Most of the time, there is no fundamental
change between the movie and the novel in terms of the storytelling.
This is not to say that cinema cannot be the core focus of a transmedia storytelling strategy. There
are transmedia projects that started with movies. For instance, Detective Chinatown (2015-2021), a
Chinese comedy-mystery film released in 2015, is a successful transmedia project that started with a
theatrical movie, then was carefully developed into a 12-episode web series, a board-based role-playing
game, mobile game, and movie franchise. The story is about a Chinese Sherlock Holmes-like detective
and his not-so-smart cop cousin as they solve a murder case together in Bangkok Chinatown. It was the
ninth highest earning film in China in 2015, grossing $126 million at the box office. With such huge

10
Heather Inwood offers an overview of the relationships between web fiction and online gaming in her 2014 essay,
“What’s in a Game? Transmedia Storytelling and the Web-Game Genre of Online Chinese Popular Fiction”
published in Asia Pacific Perspectives, Spring/Summer 2014. She explains that the creation and consumption of
literature is the eleventh most prevalent activity on the Chinese Internet, with a utilization rate of 44.4% and a
population of over 274 million users at the end of 2013” (Inwood 2014, 6).
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success, the creators set out to build a larger world based on the plot of the first movie. Since the movie is
about how detectives solve mystery cases, the producers added a software named Crimaster to show the
world detective ranking in the second movie. The characters in the movie use the software to view their
rankings and useful information in order to solve cases. The mobile application is not just a fictional piece
of software created only in the movie plot. The creators have also brought it into the real world and have
used it to connect with media fans. The mobile application is designed to be a global online community of
detectives. Media fans can interact with main characters, support characters, and even future characters
through the mobile app. The narrative space is also expanded from a few Chinatowns to the global
Chinese community.
The creators encourage media fans to explore the world of Detective Chinatown through multiple
channels by dispersing story elements into different media platforms. The 12-episode web series gives
media fans more time to explore different characters and their own stories. making it supportive of and
complementary to the movie plots. In the role-playing board game, media fans get access to a detective's
notebook and then log on to the mobile app to solve the cases along with the characters in the movie and
the web series. In the world of Detective Chinatown, cinema is an essential component to achieve the goal
of storytelling development, but it is not in a dominant position compared with the other media platforms.
Indeed, in terms of character development, the web series features more prominently on the creators’
agenda. In terms of interaction, the mobile game gives media fans more options and freedom to explore
the storyworld at their own pace and based on their own interests. Transmedia storytelling promotes
cinema to converge with other media platforms to meet media fans’ needs. Cinema’s narratives in
transmedia works are no longer closed.
11

Case Study of a Chinese Transmedia Project: Dragon Nest

11
There have been several additions to the Detective Chinatown franchise. In February of 2021, Detective
Chinatown 3 earned $398.6 million during its first weekend, making it one of the largest global debuts ever. See
“Detective Chinatown 3 Shatters Box Office Records With $400M China Debut,” by Scott Mendelson, Forbes,
February 14, 2021.
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In the following section, I will describe the strategies used for creating a transmedia experience
based on a specific movie project I participated in, showing how we designed the story and characters to
interact with the original online game, and how we managed to engage with media fans from different
media platforms.
The movie, Dragon Nest, is based on the online multiplayer role-playing game of the same title
and is a multiplayer online role-playing game (RPG) developed by Eyedentity Games (a Korean online
game company) and represented by Shengda Game. In all RPG games, each player plays a fictional role
and controls various activities in the game through this role. There are seven professions for players to
choose: Warrior, Archer, Priest, Magician, Scholar, Kali, and Assassin. Among them, Warrior, Priest, and
Assassin are designated as male, while the Archer, Magician, Scholar, and Kali are designated as female.
The main plot of Dragon Nest is an adventure in which players need to fight back nine dragons or become
another legendary dragon. Due to its gorgeous color palette, the richness of the plot, the numerous roles
that can be played – especially with the innovative global linkage competitive model – the game has
attracted many young players in China.
The first movie, Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn (2014), revolves around an event 50 years ago
about the first black dragon raid of the main line of the game story and tells a fantastic adventure story
that happened on the mainland of Altria. Several races inhabit the continent: humans, elves, wizards, and
monsters. The black dragon leads the race of monsters. Long ago, other races of Justice defeated the black
dragon, but they did not completely eliminate it. So now the black dragon is rising again and has become
more powerful. The protagonist of the movie is Lambert, nicknamed Little Fish, who teams up with the
fairy girl Liya by mistake. Then, in order to protect the human habitat, he joins the Hero League
established to fight against black dragon. This temporary mixed army alliance, composed of elves,
magicians, Rangers, and legendary soldiers, has embarked on the long-lost ancient road, crossing the
strange jungle and the fantastic snow mountain to find the black dragon’s nest. The path of exploration is
also a journey to find their own souls. The wonderful story unfolds here, and the love between Little Fish
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and Liya also grows. This year, it happens to be the once-in-50-year raid of the dragon in the legend. Only
by working together can all groups of different races avoid being burned by the black dragon.
The second movie, Throne of Elves (2016), tells a story that peace had been restored to the world
after the black dragon was defeated. The Dragon Slayer hero, the human Little Fish, returned to the
human King City, worshipped the blacksmith as his teacher, and began his ordinary life. His Elven lover,
Liya, returned to the Elven kingdom with Princess Meier. The princess was crowned Queen. Under her
rule, the Elven Kingdom flourished. A few years later, at the Queen's wedding, Little Fish and Liya
finally meet again. In the joy of love, Little Fish suddenly realizes that their love is strongly opposed by
Liya's brother, Kyle. At this time, Meila, a dark elf, broke into the wedding ceremony and tried to take
away the precious jade that maintained the stability of the Elven kingdom and used it to rule the world.
After being blocked by the queen, the dark elf kidnapped the queen in a rage. In order to save the Elven
queen and destroy the dark elf, Little Fish, Liya, and others launch a rescue. But this time, they face not
only evil enemies, but also doubts and estrangement among companions. They both encountered an
unprecedented crisis. And the final solution to everything and a return to peace may be closely related to
their love. The two movies of Dragon Nest project have their own main storylines; Warriors’ Dawn is
about a dragon slayer, and Throne of Elves is about a rescue; but the overall plot is based on the love
between the male and female protagonists.
Compared with the game, the biggest features of the movie Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn are its
story design and its character building. In the story design, the film strives to be closer to the tastes of a
global audience. The narrative of the film is a typical three-stage narrative structure in the Western style:
the hero accepts the task (killing the black dragon through team-work), he suffers setbacks, he grows up
in the process of the task (various crises and rebellions encountered by the Dragon killing team), and
finally the hero completes the task (kills the black dragon and a little Saltfish successfully turned over and
finally embraced beauty). This is an easy-to-use story structure, which also makes the movie easier to
promote internationally. In 2014, the Cannes Film Festival successfully sold the film to more than 30
countries overseas. In fact, it is not hard to see that Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn tries to enlarge the
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story into a war epic at the narrative level, and constantly combines the characters with the same purpose
in the game to form an expedition and Crusade army, which is just like the structural mode and character
formation of The Lord of the Rings movie series. Through this combination, the plot and pattern of the
film can fully construct a relatively large worldview of Dragon Nest. In this worldview, there are human
beings likely living in the middle ages, the mysterious and heroic Rangers of Justice, the elegant Elves
with their fluid gestures and superb magic, and the powerful but gloomy magician. They finally form an
alliance to fight against the black dragon sleeping in the valley. The dragon is not only the so-called evil
being in existence in the story, but also gathers many people around it. Evil forces, which breed in the
dark, attempt to invade the whole world through barbaric force. Therefore, although the plot of the movie
is relatively simple, we can still feel that the worldview of Dragon Nest is quite large, and it holds all of
the sectarian conflicts between wizards and priests, the conflicts between human beings and elves, the
conflicts with the dragon and so on. In addition, in terms of character building, there are three people in
the Dragon slaying team in the movie whose motivations are not pure, and four people with love stories,
besides the complicated relationship between the master and apprentice, monarch and minister, brother
and sister, friends and other characters. All of these elements make the interaction of the team much more
complicated than that of a typical game guild. The unveiling of the race, the ambition of the black man,
the bitterness of the first love, and the worry of growing up all make the final battle full of variables, and
also affect the direction of the final outcome, making the audience experience tension through visual
design, but also cannot relax at all.
As a movie adapted from the game, Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn tried both to restore the game
elements and build on the audience it had achieved through the game. With regard to its plot, the movie
selected four common characters as players: Warrior, Archer, Priest and Magician. The protagonist team
of Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn includes Humans, Elves and Mysterious Races in race classification; in
professional weapon classification, there are one-handed swords, two-handed swords, two daggers, big
swords, staffs, and bows, which basically reproduces the diversified settings in the game. The main point
of the movie is the meeting of the powerful boss “black dragon,” the main creator who planned a dazzling
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team battle through the cooperation of different professions and races. Indeed, the greatest strength of the
MMORPG is that it values teamwork – the cooperation among different races and professions. In the
film, this point is tightly grasped to make a big deal: There are at least two rounds of fighting
implemented by fully mobilizing the team cooperation. This kind of cooperation is designed to help
players experience the same feeling of cooperation among themselves. With the collaboration of the
protagonist team, it is easy to ignite the blood spirit of the players at the moment when the black dragon’s
chest is breaking, because the level of the black dragon is far higher than that of everyone. In addition, the
game's classic monsters such as ogres, gargoyles, dark shamans, and so on also appear in the movie. For
players, when classic skills are waved out by movie characters, they can arouse resonance in their hearts.
Many scenes in the game have also been reproduced in the movie. For example, the familiar pictures of
the dark monarchy have also appeared in the key plot in the later part of the movie.
In order to capitalize on the large community of game players already dedicated to the game, for
the release of the film, the producers launched a prize collection activity for all the game players; it
involved collecting the subtitles of the film theme song. The reward of the selected players was game
tickets valued at 30,000 points, and they were invited to the movie premiere of Dragon Nest: Warriors’
Dawn; in addition, the role ID of the awardees in the game was to be displayed in the end credits. Also, in
order to encourage the game players to actively participate in the promotion of the movie, the film
producers launched a movie poster activity between June 6 and June 30 for all the game players of
Dragon Nest. The game players received basic production materials created and available to download on
film’s the website. All the characters of all professions in the game could be used as poster materials for
design and creation. Finally, through the form of player voting, the winning prize was selected from the
collected posters. The lucky winners would get a limited skin for their characters in the game. All players
who uploaded their works were rewarded with medals in the game.
While the movie pays homage to the game, the terminal game Dragon Nest, as the cornerstone of
a big brand, is also constantly interacting with the movie. On the day of the movie premiere, a new
version of Big Bang was launched. In the new version of the game, a large film theme fashion was
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specially launched. Players could wear black robes and welcome the new online version of the battle with
the characters in the movie. Then, during the movie's release, the new version of Hero Awakening was
launched on the game terminal. Meanwhile, the new clothes of the same name as the movie, “Dawn” and
“Warrior,” were also opened for operation. Game players could enjoy the movie, walk into the larger
world of the Dragon Nest and experience the passion of taking risks to kill the dragon. In addition, during
the movie screening, all players who logged in to the game for the first time could access the activity page
and use the activation code to activate their account and get the “Dragon Nest Movie Novice Gift Bag.”
In the gift bag, there were not only the specialty fashion clothes and cute pets from the Dragon Nest
movie, but also many adventure props related to the movie, which could help the novice players grow up
quickly. The hot-blooded adventure story brought by Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn not only attracted
many new players, but also made many old players remember their passion again. As time goes by, to
remain true to our original aspiration, Dragon Nest welcomes all old players to return to the mainland and
continue their unfinished journey. For all the old players who have an account that has not been logged in
for 30 days, if they logged in to the game during the release of the movie Dragon Vallegy: Warriors’
Dawn, they could get the pets and weapons specially made for the game by the filmmaker.

Transmedia Storytelling and Transcultural Development
In my opinion, the essence of transmedia storytelling is the collaborative work that takes place
across the various media. A story is perfected through continuous supplements added to the various media
within the ecosystem, which requires mutual support among them all. Media convergence makes
transmedia storytelling possible. From the previous discussion, it can be seen that although China’s media
integration started relatively late compared with that of Western countries, the media integration of state-
owned media groups has proceeded quite quickly due to the impact of political factors. However, because
it is not for the purpose of profit, the market-oriented strategy of transmedia storytelling with
entertainment attributes has not attracted much attention among state-owned media groups. Among the
private capital media groups, with the continuous development of media integration in recent years,
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transmedia storytelling has begun to receive attention. However, there are not many successful cases of
transmedia storytelling experience in China, and the focus of large private media groups has been on
foreign classic examples, such as the success of The Matrix series and the Star Wars series. These classic
foreign transmedia projects have brought huge profit returns to investors, which makes Chinese domestic
media practitioners hope to create similarly successful transmedia cases that belong specifically to China.
It was under this background that I began to participate in the operation of the Dragon Nest transmedia
project. When planning for the Dragon Nest transmedia project, the main challenges we began with were
these: how can we localize the transmedia strategy for the project? How can we better integrate it within
Chinese culture? And how do we attract a tremendous number of Chinese media fans?
As can be seen from the description above, the Dragon Nest project itself has the attributes of
being both cross-cultural and cross-border. Dragon Nest’s online game was developed by a South Korean
company, Eyedentity Games, founded in 2007. The story and style of the game are based on European
and American structures, telling the mythical story of slaying dragons. The copyright was later bought by
a Chinese Internet company, and it became successful after localization, attracting a considerable number
of young Chinese gamers.
Because Dragon Nest online games have transcultural attributes, when we decided to use the
Dragon Nest’s online game as a foundation for a transmedia storytelling experience, we wanted to pay
more attention to how to make use of these transcultural attributes. We hoped to create a high-level
domestic animation work comparable to Hollywood animations, such as the animated films of Disney and
Pixar, namely films that a domestic audience will come into contact with easily and repeatedly. The
original intention of our design was to make an international animation work that did not feel like a
domestic production, but more like a big Hollywood production. We set the target audience of the movie
Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn to be global. In fact, in terms of movie box office, Chinese movies have
been performing poorly on the international stage. For example, Hero (2002) directed by Zhang Yimou in
the early days, Kung Fu (2004) directed by Stephen Chow and Lost in Thailand (2012) directed by Xu
Zheng, all high-profile films produced within the last two decades, have achieved huge box office success
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in China and have been successfully released overseas.
12
However, despite their international notoriety,
the overseas box office or copyright income has been very low.
13
So our goal was to make an animated
film that had box office appeal both at home and abroad, and we also wanted to make movies that would
be shown all over the world, not just in China.
Prior to this, Chinese animated films were still in a state of nationalist creation, and they rarely
tried to integrate elements of Western narrative. However, in contrast, American animation works have
borrowed Chinese elements to make strong animations, such as with both Mulan (1998) and Kung Fu
Panda (2008) and conveyed the American spirit in such movies. In order to be able to integrate with
international animation, we created an international team, with the specific goal of producing an
experience with global appeal.
We invited the experienced Hollywood producer Bill Borden, whose long list of credits includes
serving as supervising producer on J.J. Abram’s Mission Impossible III (2006) to join us, along with the
New Zealand-born production designer Grant Major, known for a series of acclaimed films, including
Heavenly Creatures (1994), Whale Rider (2002), and all three of The Lord of the Rings films (2001, 2002,
2003). Our goal was to satisfy audiences from different cultural backgrounds in the East and the West, as
well as audiences from different age groups. Further, Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn was initially
positioned to target the game crowd, as well as audiences who have been exposed to similar magical
literature and movies. Our American producer gave Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn a new positioning,
however, when he described the project as a family carnival movie.
After cooperating with Borden, the film’s story structure was significantly adjusted, and even
brought a brand new visual style to the film. In the eyes of Western audiences, the movie has the style of
Japanese animation, while in the eyes of Chinese audiences, it is like a Hollywood-style work. Judging

12
See The Hollywood Reporter’s article “Chinese Movies Still Struggle Overseas Despite Kung Fu’s Global Appeal,
Survey Shows,” by Clifford Coonan, April 7, 2015, for an overview of the struggle for filmmakers to integrate Chinese
cultural elements for films destined for a global market.
13
See “Do Chinese Films Hold Global Appeal?” about the overseas box office of recent Chinese blockbusters, by
the China Power Team, in China Power, March 1, 2019. Updated September 18, 2020.
https://chinapower.csis.org/chinese-films/
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from the results, the style of Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn has been accepted by many overseas
audiences. Before the domestic release, at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn
was sold to more than 30 countries and regions, including France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands,
with nearly $4 million U.S. in overseas sales.
However, it must be admitted that, in terms of the final domestic box office, Dragon Nest:
Warriors’ Dawn is a failed work. This is mainly due to the fact that we did not use transmedia storytelling
strategies well enough, and our experience in transcultural narration was not sufficient.
First of all, when designing the story, we did not grasp the integration of Chinese culture and
Western culture. It now appears that although what we wanted to create was a transcultural work, it
should have featured Chinese characters more prominently. For example, when designing a new movie
character, that character should embody the qualities of Chinese culture. In fact, in the early stage of
script creation, the creative team had considered incorporating some Chinese elements, such as designing
characters who boasted a martial arts spirit. However, after taking into consideration the acceptance of
overseas audiences and worrying that they would not be able to understand the Chinese elements, this
idea was ultimately abandoned. In fact, Dragon Nest is not an original world view. Many popular online
games, including World of Warcraft, are developed from a retelling or reimagining of Western fantasy
literature. Dragon Nest is no exception. Therefore, we were not thinking about how to add Chinese
elements, but thinking about how to be more loyal to the original online game. The result of this is that
the movie failed miserably at the domestic box office.
In fact, it is not only the Dragon Nest movies that have been neglected in the domestic market.
Among the domestic animated works that have invited senior Hollywood producers to participate, few
can earn back their costs at the domestic box office. For example, Tofu (2017) and Rock the Tibetan
Mastiff (2016) were produced by senior Hollywood animators. But the former’s domestic box office is
only half of the cost, and the latter’s domestic box office is less than one-tenth of the cost. Obviously,
audiences are still more willing to pay for the original Hollywood popcorn animated movies. For
example, Zootopia (2016) earned 1.5 billion box office in China, Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011) received 610
116
million yuan in China, and Big Hero 6 (2014) earned 520 million box office. Indeed, the experience that
Hollywood has accumulated in making animated films over the years is quite mature. Chinese animation
should figure out its own new aesthetic, so that it can make domestic animation movies with pure Chinese
characteristics that will stun the world.
14
The reason why we chose Dragon Nest as a transmedia
storytelling attempt is that Dragon Nest’s previous online games have accumulated a considerable
number of fans, and we imagined that all we had to do was convert these fans into movie audiences and
then attract a group of new fans. Unfortunately, we have to admit that we did not master the transmedia
storytelling strategy very well. We had hoped to be able to take care of both new and old audiences at the
same time, but the final result is that both sides were not pleased. Old fans felt that the introduction of the
characters and story background in the movie was too abrupt and did not arouse a sense of curiosity. The
new audience feels like it was in a mist of confusion; this confusion caused by the narrative contributed to
the film’s failure.
In terms of the storyline, Dragon Nest tells a fantasy adventure story that takes place on the
Altera continent. As I have already explained, several races live on this continent, including humans,
wizards, elves, and monsters, and the film uses a traditional three-act structure. We felt that it was easy to
understand, and is a bit similar to the Lord of the Rings series. Taken together, we felt that this was a
relatively easy-to-navigate structure, which we hoped would make the international promotion of the film
easier. However, while the story of this film is simple, we hoped to take care of more Dragon Valley
online game players, so we hoped to bring the main game characters appearing in online games into the
film as much as possible, so that the audience will have emotional resonance. And the result of this is that
there are too many people on the stage. Each role needs to be introduced more or less, and there is no
more time for in-depth description of each role. The role in the narrative is missing or confused, and what

14
There have been debates about whether Chinese animation should be nationalized or internationalized. See
Shurong Wan’s article “The National Narrative in Current Chinese Animated Movies: Deficiencies and
Countermeasures” ( 当前中国动画电影民族化叙事的缺失及对策) and Xiang Ning’s “The Nationalization and
Internationalization of Current Chinese Animation” ( 中国当代动画电影的民族化与国际化), Journal of Hainan
Normal University (Social Sciences), Issue 9,2013, pp. 87-91.
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is appropriate for a game – namely introducing new players and a process of accumulation – does not
work in a narrative. The multiple character roles from a game cannot be fully developed in a narrative;
there simply is not enough time as the plot advances. Nor can they have their own independent chapters to
play a key role, nor can they produce levels and depth in the description of their relationships. The
characters can only appear within a limited time and shots. This experience of presenting game characters
within the limited scope of a movie timeline demonstrates the conflict between the parameters of
narrative storytelling and those of a sprawling, more database-oriented game structure. We were also
confined by the budget; animated work is expensive to produce, and after production, distribution and
exhibition becomes more complex if the film increases in length. A film that is 90 minutes or shorter will
thrive in the theater more easily than a 120-minute or longer film. So, we only had a limited time to work
within. Add to these constraints the fact that many of the project’s team members, both within the cast
and the crew, were young and relatively inexperienced, so we could not develop the nuances of the
project. Finally, there were conflicts among the producer, director and others about how to achieve
success internationally. Much of the project had been completed when Borden and Major were invited to
participate, so making changes was difficult.
In the end, Dragon Nest: Warriors’ Dawn won strong support from young Chinese fans on the
Internet by virtue of its excellent digital technology in the early days. Fans called it “the light of the
country” and looked forward to this work as the pride of Chinese animation films to shine on the world. It
is a pity that since the story was not well told after the release, it did not get more support from the fans.
The domestic box office was dismal, so that when we made the second Dragon Nest movie,Throne of
Elves, the copyright was taken back by Shanda Games, but even so, the production team still insisted on
finishing the sequel of The Throne of Elves.
Transmedia storytelling provides opportunities for cinema to interact with other media outlets in
the Chinese post-cinema age. This is not to say that transmedia storytelling is the only method or the best
mode for the sustainable development of Chinese cinema. But it is indeed gaining significant traction
from Chinese media fans and consequently media conglomerates. Transmedia storytelling is a strong
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demand for media fans. In the post-cinema age, fans are no longer loyal to a particular media platform.
We should not separate them as movie fans, music fans, or comic fans. They are all part of a broader
media landscape that I prefer to call media fans, in which fans freely and willingly explore information
across multiple media platforms.
Some Chinese scholars have noticed such a trend among fans. For instance, Cui Di called the
current fan culture in China “Fandom 2.0,” in order to distinguish it from previous models of fandom in
an article titled “From Fandom 1.0 to 2.0: The Cultural Shift of Fans Practice” (2019). Cui Di borrows the
concept of database consumption from Japanese Scholar Azuma Hiroki to describe the transformation of
Chinese fans in the past decades. Azuma proposes a database consumption mode among Japanese fans,
arguing that the practice of breaking works down in terms of elements which trigger an affective response
is replacing the narrative consumption mode whereby one consumes fragments of a narrative in order to
gain insight into the underlying order of the work, world, or “grand narrative.”
15
Similarly, Cui Di argues
that Chinese fandom has also turned into the era of database consumption, in which media texts are
widely available in the form of fragmented information, like a database. Fans can enter and modify these
fragmented resources at will.
In my view, transmedia storytelling in contemporary Chinese media can be considered a stage of
transition for Chinese media fans as they try to find a balance between narrative consumption and
database consumption. Storytelling is still a strong bond to make media fans’ activities more target-
oriented and yet flexible enough to help media fans to explore different media platforms. By striking this
balance between narrative and the database, Chinese transmedia storytelling makes other media forms
become the extension and supplement of cinema; however, the cinema is also becoming the extension and
supplement of other media.

15
See Paul Perkijk’s “Database Consumption – Japanese Media and Popular Culture,” Japanese Media and Popular
Culture, https://jmpc-utokyo.com/keyword/database-consumption/. Accessed 28 Mar. 2021.
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Chapter Five:
Conclusion

During the Chinese New Year in 2020, a pandemic named COVID-19 swept across
China. China has approximately 60,000 movie theaters spread across the country, and these had
to remain closed for at least several months. As a result, China’s leading film studios were forced
to cancel the holiday releases of their most anticipated movies of the year. However, as I
mentioned in Chapter One, during the peak of the sudden outbreak in China, one major movie
titled Lost in Russia (2020) went straight to an online platform for its premiere. Despite suffering
tremendous resistance from major cinema chains, the movie was streamed 600 million times and
was seen by more than 180 million viewers in the first three days of its online release (Fanghan
np, 2020). Such a large number of online viewers indicates that the streaming companies now
have the ability to change the way Chinese films are made and distributed. While devastating in
many ways, the coronavirus lockdowns have helped force traditional film studios rethink their
relationships with an array of new media platforms more quickly than they might have without a
pandemic.
The fear that new media platforms may undermine the Chinese film industry has haunted
traditional filmmakers in China for many years. In fact, Lost in Russia was not the first
blockbuster to be released as an online premiere in China. Five years earlier, in 2015, Le Vision
Pictures claimed to stream its film The Vanished Murderer (2015) to its online platform
members the day before its official theatrical release. However, the online release was strongly
resisted by Chinese cinema owners. The major cinema chains announced immediately that they
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would cut a significant number of screenings if the movie had its premiere online. Under
enormous strain, Le Vision finally backtracked and announced the cancellation of the online
premiere due to exceptional reasons. The movie went on to suffer a tremendous loss at the box
office since the cinema chains decreased the movie distribution rate to lower than 10% as a form
of punishment.
Similarly, in 2018, Smart Cinema, a mobile application for smartphones, claimed that it
would allow viewers to watch the latest theatrical releases on their smartphones. Again, within a
few days, the loud protests of Chinese cinema chains forced the company to pull a majority of
popular films from their app. The app has recently gained more traction however, especially
during the pandemic, and Smart Cinema CEO Jack Gao argues that the shifts that occurred
during that time will have a lasting impact. “As a longtime industry veteran, I can firmly tell you,
after the pandemic, the cinema and film industry box office model will still stand, but changes
will also come,” Gao claims in a 2020 article about the app (Rui np, 2020). He explains that the
app will serve as a supplement to the physical theater, but the addition of the ability to share a
movie with friends and to comment on it via text messages continues the trend I have described.
These examples highlight the recent shifts in film distribution and exhibition practices in
China, which, like cinemas globally, are struggling to integrate online venues, apps, and
streaming services. These examples also show how significant the pandemic has been in
prompting change. Taking a broader viewer, these shifts demonstrate that, as I have argued
throughout this project, we are in the post-cinema age. Cinema, once the dominant cultural
medium, now is seeing its role shift in the post-cinema era. The silver screen no longer
dominates the small screen but is part of a larger, active ecology of viewing practices. Indeed, in
the last several years, the small screen has attracted more audiences and has generated far more
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revenue in the Chinese context. I have explored the causes for this shift, focusing specifically on
social and cultural transformation. The development of technology facilitates progress, but
equally important, social and cultural shifts in the audience accelerate and even direct such a
revolution. Therefore, throughout my analysis, I have adopted the term “media fans” instead of
“audience” in order to indicate that the interactions between the media text and the viewers are
much deeper, more multidimensional, and ultimately more powerful than ever. Media fan culture
is changing every aspect of the Chinese film industry in the post-cinema age.
Chapter Two explores the impact of media fan culture on Chinese genre films in the post-
cinema age. I used the genre of the fan-made, online micro-cinema parody, or Wulitou, and the
copycat film in theaters as examples to demonstrate how media fan works can interact with
professional theatrical works.
In the past, a traditional system of cinematic production, distribution, and exhibition of
theatrical movies offered audiences a way to enjoy a ritualized viewing experience with
heightened visual and audio effects that often resulted in the creation of a dreamy image space.
This form of cinema satisfied the desire for an entertaining and aesthetic experience among
audiences. However, the production and distribution of such traditional cinematic films often
requires massive capital, professional technical teams, superior equipment and technical
conditions, as well as huge and complex distribution channels. Further, the audience is excluded
from the production of such large-scale cinematic films.
In contrast, unlike traditional theatrical movies, the production and dissemination of
online micro-cinema works include the participation and interaction of media fans. Media fans
do not need professional equipment and film production technology to complete the production
and dissemination of their projects. This filmmaking mode profits from the progress and
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widespread use of digital media technology and social media. In the post-cinema era, the
progress and widespread use of digital media technology has provided excellent conditions for
breaking the traditional film industry system, opening up the film production process, as well as
promoting mass participation in micro-cinema production and sharing. With the development of
computers, smartphones, and other mobile terminal techniques, video editing software has
become easier to use, and the portability and image definition of tools for capturing images have
also been dramatically improved. The pre-production activities and post-editing process of
micro-cinemas can basically be finished by relatively cheap digital cameras and personal
computers. Additionally, video sharing websites have made it easy to distribute and spread
micro-cinemas on the Internet. This low-cost investment and popular technical requirements
have significantly reduced the threshold for film production and distribution, and have mobilized
the enthusiasm and creativity of media fans’ participation. What’s more, in the post-cinema era,
media fans are more and more accustomed to using a kind of fragmented time and space to
receive and spread information whenever and wherever possible.
The production and dissemination of micro-cinemas are mainly specific to this new type
of video consumption. Micro-cinemas have a short play time which meets the needs of rapid
image transmission and the audience’s fragmented viewing and attention. Although the
dissemination of micro-cinemas still needs to be promoted by producers or official organizations
to some extent, it is more fundamental to follow the model of network information diffusion,
which is continually transmitted and shared because of the recognition and likes of media fans,
thus spreading rapidly in the manner of viral videos in the West. Furthermore, the producers of
micro-cinemas have changed the distribution and profit model of traditional films as well. They
can choose a variety of channels to upload their own micro-cinema works and adopt a more
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flexible and convenient soft marketing mode which is accepted by media fans more readily.
Further, the development of online advertising, internet cinemas, and mobile cinemas has rapidly
become a major way to earn profits in the micro-cinema industry. The emergence of online
micro-cinemas has broken the monopoly held by professional producers in the traditional film
industry, and has formed a new film mode that encourages public participation. At present, in the
process of the production and dissemination of micro-cinemas, there are both micro-cinemas
carefully created by professional film and television companies and professional teams, and
micro-cinemas produced by ordinary media fans, who use digital tools such as camcorders and
mobile phones which are well within reach. These micro-cinema works produced by media fans
have brought different artistic perspectives and values, and there is now a continuous exchange
between professional filmmakers and non-professional media fan-makers, as well as a flow
between mainstream culture and its various subcultures.
As far as the impact of micro-cinemas on theatrical movies is concerned, first of all,
micro-cinemas can enrich the types of theatrical movies that are made. Mischievous parody
micro movies account for a considerable proportion of micro cinemas. The Bloody Case that
Started from a Steamed Bun (2006), which was discussed in Chapter Two as the originator of the
micro-cinema, used material from Master of the Crimson Armor (2005) to spoof, subvert, and
deconstruct the original work. From then on, spoof parodies became popular and media fans used
an approach of disassembly and reconstruction, dissolving the boundary between art and non-art,
to question the films and television programs of elite directors, and to entertain each other in a
more fragmentary, non-sanctified, inelegant, and superficial way, which in turn gradually helped
shape a unique subculture. Since then, a number of film and television classics have been used as
source material, and current social affairs have been used as the critical material. Multimedia
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tools have been adopted to re-edit and dub the source material, thus producing a large number of
micro-cinemas and, in the process, creating a whole new form for entertainment among media
fan producers, and new forms of parodic entertainment for audiences. At the same time, a new
type of theatrical movie is derived from this sort of spoofing. Known as “mockbusters,” these are
movies that in terms of form and comedy were inspired by the micro-cinema spoofs.
Secondly, low-quality movies represented by micro-cinemas are actually complementary
to traditional high-quality theatrical movies. In the post-cinema era, even though the mainstream
film industry has been pursuing higher definition displays, it is clear that low-quality images
(produced with portable cameras, mobile phones, and so on) have penetrated all aspects of movie
creation. According to Marshall McLuhan, high-definition movies belong to hot media, which
can provide abundant detail and stimulate through intensity, but reject the creative intervention
of the viewers to a great extent. Low-quality images, in comparison, are cold media and require
viewers to use a variety of resources to fill in the “gaps” and “blanks.” Micro-cinemas have
made the film industry undergo a fusion of hot and cold media in the post-cinema era. The
massive appearance of low-quality images has returned the creative right, which was originally
held in the hands of a few elites and monopolistic giants, to media fans, thus broadening the
movies’ horizons and opening up a space for more participation. The sleepy and negative
audience member in front of the increasingly stylized Hollywood blockbuster is awakened by
low-quality Chinese images instead, and becomes an active media fan. Low-quality images make
media fans more dedicated and more interested in participation, which in turn deepens perception
and stimulates thought. Seen in this light, it is the seemingly casual and rough images that have
gotten rid of the shackles of industry and capital, and have recalled the long-lost “trance”
experience in us. In a word, what the low-quality images really awaken is the awareness of the
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media fans’ sense of self-reflection; this is significant due to the fact that “self-reflection” is a
major concept within Chinese culture, in which notions of the self have shifted decade by decade
based on political ideology. This helps explain why these works created by media fans are so
important.
In Chapter Three, I discussed the impact of media fan culture on movie viewing habits in
the post-cinema age. Barrage film, as an excellent illustration, represents one example of how
media fans consume films in the post-cinema age. The appearance of barrage films is a test for
traditional cinema. At present, there are two types of barrage technology used in Chinese
theaters. One type of barrage technology is the wall barrage represented by The Legend of Qin
(2015), which guarantees a certain level of audio-visual quality. That is to say, during the
screening of the movie, the theater adopts a mobile phone messaging platform to receive the
comments which are screened by the backstage staff. And after screening the comments, the
backstage staff posts them on the walls on both sides of the theater. Another type of barrage
technology is to layer the barrage and the movie on the same screen; this technique moves closer
to the barrage function of the online video sharing websites. As an example, the barrage format
of Tiny Times 3.0 (2014) in the cinema provided media fans with the assigned wifi conditions
using the local area network environment. The media fans input a specific address on the basis of
a web page, which allowed them to enter the barrage system interface; then they created a
nickname, and even selected the font that they wanted to use; they then hit the send button. In the
background, the film projector only needed to connect the port of the field server and output to
the screen. The whole process relies mainly on network techniques and program designs. Both
the former “wall barrage” and the latter “screen barrage” depend on the intersections and
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combinations of technology to make the barrage and the movie appear on the same broadcast
platform, and both offer yet another example of a new viewing pattern.
With the new type of viewing method created by the barrage system, the movie and the
audience are no longer attached to the huge screen in the dark. Instead, audience members pay
close attention to their small electronic screens. Viewers use their smartphones and other mobile
devices to express their opinions about the movie by means of barrages, so that the small screen
in their hands interacts with the large screen of the theater. The barrage acts as a new form of
viewing, behaving in a parasitical nature with the big screen, and quietly affecting the viewer’s
sense of identity in the process. Audience members are no longer passive receivers when
watching movies. As a kind of immediate comment, the barrage breaks the silence that the
audience is required to keep in the process of watching movies, which means that viewers no
longer need to choke back their inner emotions. They can express and share their own and others'
views when the video is playing simultaneously. Audience members are also no longer
worshippers under the giant screen, but living individuals with independent thinking capacity.
While this kind of public interaction may seem insignificant in other national contexts, the sense
of personal identity that is created is profound for Chinese viewers; notions of silence,
obedience, public commentary, and so on have strong emotions attached to them.
Typically, the word “audience” gathers all kinds of individuals together within real space
and creates a shared experience. However, the barrage system recovers the presence of
individual viewing audience members and makes those who are accustomed to keeping silent
step onto the judgement seat to master the right of speaking, so for the first time in their lives, the
viewer who adapts to the invisible state can, in a sense, find themselves in the mirror of the big
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screen. The big screen is no longer just a film projection apparatus; it has become an extension of
the thought and body of media fans.
Exploring the content of the barrages published by the media fans based on the video
works, we can see several kinds of interactions: some are reflections on the film itself, with
reviews, taunts, comments about science, spoilers, and so on. Because this type of interaction is
often based on the text of the movie, there is an instant commentary discussing the film’s plot, its
mode of cinematography, the depth of its content, the performances of the actors, and even the
director’s skill; this enables a timely exchange and form of communication among the media
fans, and even between the media fans and the director. At the same time, through this activity,
the communicator can gain a sense of identity and the resonant emotional experience, and also a
sense of belonging to the movie. Some barrage comments expand beyond the movie itself and
are social interactions with obvious social purposes. Media fans put their comments on the
screen, and then all the spectators sitting in the same theater will see the comments. In this way,
the screen of the movie has actually become a chat platform for media fans, the movie’s
production team, and the theater’s staff. This platform is open as well as transparent. Comments
may range from “air conditioning is too cold” and “let’s dine together after watching the movie.”
Therefore, the social interaction among different the media fans, and between the media fans and
the theater personnel, can be expanded. In short, in a barrage movie, the media fans’ feedback
about the movie using the mobile phones in their hands expands the feedback process. Through
barrage, media fans gain the opportunity to interact with others, satisfy emotional needs and an
inner eagerness to communicate with others, and gain emotional resonance and a sense of
identity that builds from a sense of group solidarity.
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Barrages also offer a platform for voicing opinions publicly. Barrages are presented as a
form of both spoofing and elaboration. The original movie or television image and the barrage
text which joins it combine to become a new work. Because the barrage comments directly
participate in the final presentation of the work as a kind of collage, and because they describe
the emotions of viewers, they suggest a sense of rebellion. The result is that the formerly closed
and authoritative relationship between the original author and the work no longer exists.
The barrage format has constantly inspired new meanings of film and television works,
and has successfully formed a corresponding group of people who were unacquainted with each
other previously. In the barrage system, then, we see the evolution for Chinese audience
members as they discover a new relationship of freedom, a sense of public informality, as well as
a shift in the sense of personal and collective identity that has formed among people. This new
habit of watching movies will essentially change how film and television works.
In Chapter Four, I discussed the impact of media fan culture on the storytelling of
Chinese cinema in the post-cinema age. The arrival of the post-cinema era is inseparable from
the concept of media convergence. The latter allows media makers to coordinate a variety of
media platforms, and to develop projects that are shared across them in a coordinated way, which
in turn leads to reforms in media ownership and modes of production. This integration has
spawned a participatory culture and has brought about a huge transformation in the role of the
audience. The consumption habits and patterns of the audience have gradually evolved, shifting
the audience from being pure media consumers to adopting a new role which has both the double
identity of media consumer and media producer, that is, the new Chinese film audience member
is a media fan. At the same time, late-model media partnerships have brought about new ways of
producing media content as well, which in some ways is counterproductive to the formal film
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industry, and the most prominent part of this shift is transmedia storytelling. Transmedia
storytelling has totally different characterizations and a very different logic than that of
traditional narrative. In the new media age, audience participation in transmedia storytelling is
diverse and complicated, and no more so than in China, which has witnessed a very rapid
transformation of cinema in a relatively short period of time.
The story world constructed by transmedia storytelling usually spans a variety of media
platforms and it has a depth and breadth that is difficult for a single audience member to master
alone. However, with the development of fan culture, the exchanges among fans have become
more and more frequent. Through the function of collective intelligence, fans share their own
texts on exclusive online or offline communities, which makes the specially created transmedia
story world deeply interpreted by the fan group. Compared with the traditional audience, media
fans are often more fanatical and active. It can be said that media fans are the core of transmedia
storytelling, and media fans play a vital role in transmedia storytelling. Not only have they been
early users of new media technologies, but also their fascination with the virtual media world
often produces new cultural products. They refuse to simply accept the content provided to them,
but insist on having the right to be a participant in the full sense. Fans are willing to spend a lot
of time and energy collecting information, tracing clues, participating in community discussions
as well as exchanging information, and they seek out all the ways to explore the story text, and
even take part in the creation of media texts, such as the production of fanworks.
At the same time, media producers also understand that only with the support of media
fans can transmedia works be successful. Thus, they actively promote the participation of fans in
the production and dissemination of media texts as well. Fan groups are more involved in the
exploration of clues and product creation, jointly completing transmedia storytelling, enriching
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the story world, gaining a more immersive experience, and establishing connections with the real
world in this process. Feedback enables transmedia storytelling to better meet the needs of fans,
thus better encouraging creation and creating better works of art. This process embodies the
interdependence and mutual needs of fans and media producers. In the new media age, the
development of media technologies has provided new distribution channels for fan cultural
products. The professional fan network platform has greatly promoted the participation of fans,
and has further deepened the relation between fans and media producers.
Transmedia storytelling has become a relatively mature form in the United States over
the last 15 years. Different from Chinese politics-driven media convergence, American business-
driven media convergence has developed rapidly. The relationship between transmedia narrative
strategy and more commercial aims help make this media convergence a strategy that spans
multiple platforms to develop in a coordinated way to quickly occupy the mainstream market.
Taking Marvel Comics as an example, transmedia narrative has become the most fundamental
strategy for realizing the commercial value of this asset. Marvel is not simply adapting its mature
texts to movies, TV shows, or video games. Instead, Marvel uses its own texts as the foundation
for the operation and development of its Marvel world outlook. Marvel simultaneously
transplants comics and books that have already taken shape and have a certain fan base into
transmedia storytelling in order to construct a coordinated and unified worldview that spans a
variety of media platforms. Then Marvel makes full use of the unique properties of different
media to develop the text, and essentially emphasizes the uniqueness and expandability of the
story content. In this way, through the spread across different platforms, media fans can be
immersed in Marvel’s story system on various outlets, which makes fans feel that even though
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there is inextricable intertextuality among the series of works, they are independent of each other
as well.
Compared with the construction of a grand worldview and complicated transmedia
narrative strategy of various Marvel series, the transmedia strategy of the Chinese domestic film
and television industry is still in its initial stage. Although the so-called IP industry fever has
appeared in recent years, it is not difficult to observe that although much IP has been developed,
and many types of media products have been derived, there is no intertextuality. There is no
meticulous mining and development of characters and story clues between works across a series,
and there is a serious lack of activity in using different media to expand on story content.
Therefore, these are not transmedia narratives in the strict sense, and the projects do not give full
play to the unique narrative affordances of each media.
As an example, take the relatively mature IP work of Time Raiders in recent years. Its IP
operations include novels, movies, TV shows, games, online dramas, operas, and radio plays.
Almost all aspects of entertainment media are covered. However, the works of each media
platform version are adapted based on the original novel, and there is no extension of the story
clues or main characters. There is also no intertextual referencing across the storylines of the
disparate iterations of the story. Various media have not assumed either strong independent
narratives, nor have the different features of media been exploited to create a viable transmedia
narrative model. This has resulted in serious repetition of the story elements for the target fan
groups, a lack of potential for developing new fan groups, and little motivation for fans to
continue to consume the IP of these stories as well.
A major characteristic of media convergence is its emphasis on the active participation
and interaction of media fans. The appropriate application of transmedia narrative strategies can
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integrate the resources of different media platforms and collectively construct a deep,
complicated, yet coordinated and huge story text. When these carefully designed industrialized
texts arouse the interest of media fans, the power of fans is highlighted. While they are having
fun, they at the same time reorganize and remould these texts. Media fans actively get involved
in the production and circulation of the new meaning of the text. On the one hand, in the
exploration of communication with other fans, they also expand their right to speak through
participation, and, in this way, remodel their identities. On the other hand, they also help
generate reforms in media production and transmission methods.
I addressed some of these shortcomings in the case study of a transmedia project,
showing what worked and did not work as a film team tried to create a project across several
media platforms. Overall, each chapter outlined a specific activity of the contemporary Chinese
media fan, helping illustrate new forms of interaction, a shifting sense of identity, and, in some
cases, opportunities for soft rebellion.

Chinese Cinema Now: In Theaters and Online
In the previous chapters, I have shown that media fan culture exerts a great influence on
Chinese cinema, accelerating the process of transition of Chinese cinema into the post-cinema
age. With the break of time, location, platform, and technology restrictions, on the one hand,
Chinese cinema has faded away from the top of the pre-established media hierarchies and on the
other hand, has subtly penetrated media fans’ everyday lives, becoming extensions of their
bodies, minds, and experiences. Indeed, cinema as a form has experienced tremendous change in
China. The media specificity of cinema has been increasingly blurred in the post-cinema age
globally, but in China, the transformation has been more rapid and therefore more exacerbated.
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Under such circumstances, one may want to come to a conclusion similar to that of some of the
scholars that I have discussed, namely that all of Chinese cinema is dying, too. However, I would
like to emphasize that while the setbacks, as well as the opportunities, that we have discussed
may indeed lead to the death or even the rebirth of Chinese cinema in terms of its ontology,
Chinese cinema, as an industry and business, on the contrary, is blooming. This is due to the
incredible momentum of Chinese economic growth. In other words, the ambiguity of Chinese
cinema in regard to medium specificity and the ontology of cinema does not immediately impact
the development of the Chinese film industry. The ontology of cinema and the development of
the cinema industry are two different although interwoven categories.
Chinese cinema as a business has received a lot of private and foreign capital in recent
years.
1
With increasingly market-oriented operations, and pressures, the Chinese film market is
growing rapidly every year. Further, there is no doubt that watching movies in the theater is one
of the main forms of entertainment for young Chinese audiences in the 2020s.
2
In addition to the
causes of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, which tremendously damaged the Chinese
cinema business, China’s movie box office market has actually maintained a high growth trend
in the past decade. Chinese box office sales rose from 13.1 billion yuan in 2011 to 64.1 billion
yuan in 2019, with an annual compound growth rate of 22.73 percent.
3
The movie attendance
increased from 281 million in 2010 to 1.727 billion in 2019, with an annual compound growth

1
See “From Deal Frenzy to Decoupling: Is the China-Hollywood Romance Officially Over?” by Patrick Brzeski
and Tatiana Siegel, for an overview of the strained relationship between American investors and China in The
Hollywood Reporter, May 21, 2021. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/hollywood-and-
china-what-now-1234955332/
2
Reporter Liz Shackleton notes in Screen Daily that 60% of Chinese moviegoers are under the age of 30 in her
article, “China Box Office Topped North America in 2020 Thanks to Quicker Post-lockdown Recovery, Strong
Local Titles,” January 13, 2021. She also notes that younger audiences are less fearful of the enclosed spaces of the
movie theater in the context of a global pandemic. https://www.screendaily.com/features/china-box-office-topped-
north-america-in-2020-thanks-to-quicker-post-lockdown-recovery-strong-local-titles/5156165.article
3
“China’s 2091 Box Office Gross Hits a Whopping $9.2b,” No author, Chinadaily.com, January 3, 2020,
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202001/03/WS5e0eceaba310cf3e3558250f.html
134

rate of 22.35 percent. Overall, China’s film industry has achieved steady growth under the new
development situation of the national economy. Measured by the box office revenue, China’s
film market has become second only to the United States, the world’s second largest film market,
and in 2021, industry experts expect China to surpass the US in total box office revenue.
4
In
2020, even with the impact of the pandemic, the Chinese box office earned 20.3 billion yuan,
such that China overtook the U.S. to become the top movie market that year, as the pandemic
shut American film theaters for longer than those of China.
5
Further, in the past ten years, the
number of movie theaters nationwide has increased, from 2,000 in 2010 to 11,453 in 2019, with
an annual compound growth rate of 21.40 percent. The number of screens increased from 6,256
in 2010 to 69,787 in 2019, with an annual compound growth rate of 30.73 percent.
6
Now, China
boasts the largest number of movie screens in the world, and with this physical infrastructure in
place, along with an increasingly consumption-oriented generation,we can expect movie
attendance to continue to rise.
Indeed, based on this data, we might easily come to the conclusion that Chinese cinema
industry is burgeoning. Although the pandemic had a brief impact on the development of
Chinese cinema, with box office receipts of only 20.3 billion yuan in 2020 according to data
from Maoyan entertainment,
7
as the Covid-19 situation was brought under control in China,
Chinese moviegoers quickly returned to cinemas in the beginning of 2021. While January 1,
2021, saw the highest New Year box office collection in China, the Lunar New Year on Feb. 12

4
https://www.qianzhan.com/analyst/detail/220/200828-b9e624dc.html, according to the author, the data is from
China film distribution and exhibition association.
5
Shirley Zhao, “Hollywood Struggles for Fans in China’s Growing Film Market,” Bloomberg, February 15, 2021.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-15/hollywood-struggles-for-fans-in-china-s-growing-film-
market
6
https://www.qianzhan.com/analyst/detail/220/200828-b9e624dc.html according to the author, the data is from
China film distribution and exhibition association)
7
https://piaofang.maoyan.com/rankings/year
135

recorded the highest one-day taking. Ticket sales during the first five days of the Lunar New
Year holidays touched 5.7 billion yuan, or about 33% more than the same period in 2019,
according to Bloomberg News.
8

Despite these impressive figures of growth, we should also take note of the identity crisis
of cinema that I have described and the fact that it still does have an impact on the traditional
Chinese cinema industry. Traditional cinema markets are growing for sure, but they are no
longer in a dominant position culturally. The channels for watching movies are changing, just as
they are in the US as studio executives realize the powerful potential of online streaming
platforms. In China, to underscore this point, the growth rate of online movies is faster than that
of traditional movies. Moreover, if we compare the box office per movie screen, in fact, it has
been declining in recent years. In 2015, the box office per screen in China was 1.37 million yuan.
In 2019, the number had dropped to 0.91 million yuan per screen, decreasing more than 33%,
according to data from the Suning Institute of Finance.
9
This means that the growth of
attendance cannot keep up with the proliferation of movie screens. Further analysis by the
Suning Institute of Finance shows that since 2016, the growth rate of the number of moviegoers
in China has been significantly lower than the growth rate of the number of screens. In 2019, the
number of moviegoers increased by only 0.64% compared with 2018, but the growth rate of
screens reached 16.16% . The national average has also fallen from a peak of 17.4% in 2016 to
11% in 2019. In the past, Chinese movie theaters looking to reach moviegoers have typically
been focused on cosmopolitan audiences in China’s first and second tier cities. However, with
the slow growth of audiences as the market has become oversaturated, movie theaters have

8
Again, see Zhao, “Hollywood Struggles for Fans in China’s Growing Film Market,” Bloomberg, February 15,
2021 for more on this trend.
9
https://sif.suning.com/article/detail/1596418501497
136

turned to less-developed urban centers and rural areas in recent years, trying to create a new
wave of movie consumption in the countryside. But the audience growth in these areas is
extremely limited, and investment and return is not proportional.
On the other hand, the online film industry is growing fast, especially during the
pandemic. China’s Online Film Industry Annual Report 2020
10
shows that with the cinema
shutdowns and overall decline of the film market, online film performance in 2020 bucked the
trend of growth and increased market share. In 2020, a total of 1,089 new films were released in
China, including 305 new films released in traditional cinemas and 784 new films released on the
internet, accounting for 72% of the total number of new films released in China. Among these
online released movies, 79 movies surpassed the box office of 10 million yuan. The number has
doubled since 2019. The box office revenue of online releases for the movie producers is nearly
1.4 billion yuan, reaching 21% of the total movie box office revenue in the 2020 theatrical
market, reflecting the overall profitability of online films. In 2020, there were 7.6 billion online
view counts, which is an increase of 59 percent from the same period last year.
11

In addition, there is still a lot of room and potential for online film development.
According to the 47th China Internet Development Statistics Report released by the China
Internet Network Information Center, as of December 2020, China has 927 million internet video
users, accounting for 93.7 percent of the total.
The pandemic hit offline theaters seriously in 2020, which has contributed to the rise of
movies online as a major trend. The epidemic has accelerated the innovation of global film
distribution. The development of Internet movies has witnessed a breakthrough. For instance, in

10
https://pdf.dfcfw.com/pdf/H3_AP202102241464847275_1.pdf?1614175284000.pdf
11
https://www.tisi.org/17832
137

April 2020, Universal Pictures released Trolls World Tour(2020) online and offline
simultaneously, which makes it the first “Zero window” Hollywood movie. Disney’s new titles,
Artemis Fowl (2020), Mulan (2020, and Soul (2020, have all been released directly on Disney +
, the company’s streaming platform. In December 2020, Warner Bros. Pictures’ Wonder Woman
1984 (2020) debuted on HBO Max, simultaneously on the streaming platform as well as the big
screen.
In China, online video platforms are also actively using the PVOD (Premium Video On-
Demand) mode to distribute films online. Iqiyi, a major Chinese online video sharing website,
launched the first PVOD model in China. With this model, the action film Enter the Fat Dragon
(2020) was launched at the Iqiyi “Super Cinema” in February 2020. Later, Oscar Award winning
Marriage Story (2019), the Chinese action drama Double World（2020), and Paramount
Picture’s The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run (2020) were released on the Iqiyi
platform.
In 2021, Chinese audiences also ushered in the first “online movie Spring Festival
season.” Before the official opening of the Spring Festival season for traditional theaters, the
Network Audiovisual Program Management Department of the State Administration of Radio
and Television, hosted by the Network Film Working Committee of the China Film Association,
and supported by Tencent Video, iQiyi, and Youku, held the first online film Spring Festival. At
the conference, the concept of creating an “Internet Movie Spring Festival season” was first put
forward. This concept not only responds to the “Notice on Doing a Good Job in Local Chinese
New Year Service Guarantee Work for the People,” which is an initiative to increase the supply
of online programs during the pandemic to encourage people to stay home; it announced a list of
up to 43 films to screen online. Behind the “online movie Spring Festival season” is not only the
138

short-term impact of reducing unnecessary outings and celebrating the New Year on the spot at
home, but also the long-term logic of the development of online movies and online theaters
under the influence of the pandemic.
For the Spring Festival of 2021, Dreams of Getting Rich (2021) was released exclusively
on the Internet. The three video platforms of iQiyi, Youku, and Tencent Video made joint
announcements. In this way, in the context of the pandemic in China, the PVOD model has
gradually been accepted, and the PVOD model has also expanded the audience for niche movies
such as those based on literary genres. For example, films such as Spring Tide (2019) and
Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (2019) are all distributed through this mode. Among them,
Spring Tide （2019) was shortlisted for the “Best Medium and Small Cost Feature Film” at the
32nd China Film Golden Rooster Awards. This is also the recognition of leading domestic film
festivals for the necessity of online distribution and screenings, indicating that the PVOD model,
which has encountered relatively little resistance in domestic development.
There is not only a competitive relationship between online theaters and traditional
theaters, but also complementary relationships. Those who find it inconvenient to travel can
choose not to go to the theater and instead cna watch movies on the video platform anytime,
anywhere. Film producers have more channels to distribute films. For example, in 2019, the
production scale of domestic films has reached 1,037 films produced, which is almost double
compared with 526 in 2010. However, in 2019, there are only 545 films that can be shown in
theaters, which is only half of the annual production. The remaining films that cannot be shown
are almost all low- and medium-cost films, which cannot be shown in theaters due to cost
considerations. For small- and medium-cost film producers, the maturity of the online film
distribution model can provide a strong guarantee for the film’s income generation, and can also
139

alleviate the problems of schedule and funding, so that small and medium-cost films can get the
opportunity to meet with the audience.
According to this trend, cinema movies and online movies are actively cooperating.
Traditional cinemas still have their own uniqueness. But moviegoers also have more diversified
demands for cinemas. After the pandemic ends, many people will still want to go back to the
theater to watch movies, which is what caused the rapid growth of IMAX cinema in China. At
the same time, private cinemas are also developing. In the so-called private cinemas, movies are
no longer the only content of cinemas.
In addition, the rise of young audiences with differing habits has not only caused the
formation of online movie viewing patterns and the rapid development of online movies, but also
changed offline viewing habits. As a result, traditional cinemas need constantly to adjust to meet
the needs of young Chinese audiences. In traditional offline theaters, movies are no longer the
only content in theaters. In recent years, Chinese theaters have been actively experimenting with
live broadcasting services. With the rise of live broadcasting, young audiences can watch Esports
games and variety shows in movie theaters. Back in 2013, Chinese internet giant Tencent, as the
Chinese agent of the online game League of Legends, tried to broadcast esports matches in
Chinese theaters related to the game. Around 2015, with the gradual maturity of the domestic
esports system, Tencent partnered with Wanda Cinema chains, holding some of the League of
Legends city league matches in the theaters, which directly let the players go to the cinema to
play a game match. Similarly, the esports Dota competition in 2015 and the final match of the
esports game Honor of Kings in 2019 are examples of esports games live-streamed in Chinese
theaters.
140

In addition to esports games, in 2013, Hunan TV station and Wanda Cinemas teamed up
to live broadcast the finals of the variety show I Am a Singer (2013-2020) simultaneously in 12
theaters across the country. In 2014, several domestic cinemas streamed the FIFA World Cup.
Live broadcast activities in theaters are not limited to China. In fact, in Japan, more than 400
theaters across the country have opened live broadcast services. In the United Kingdom, where
opera and ballet performance culture is popular, live broadcasting performances including opera,
drama and ballet have been in theaters since 2009. In 2013, live broadcasts of shows such as The
Nutcracker and The Bohemia have surpassed blockbuster films such as 007: The Devil (2011)
and ranked among the top of the UK box office. Although due to the current domestic
regulations, domestic theaters have not yet broadcast live performances on a large scale like
other countries, what can be expected is an expansion in Chinese theaters of non-cinematic
content.

What Does All of This Mean for Chinese Viewers?
As I offer a conclusion, I want to underscore the dramatic flux of the Chinese cinema and
media scene in 2021. This dissertation has presented an examination of Chinese cinema’s recent
past, with the argument that contemporary Chinese cinema, from 2010 to 2021, has shifted and
now is part of a particular and unique form of post-cinema. This form of post-cinema takes shape
as the congruence of the Chinese media fan, a sense of personal and public identity, and the
exploration of soft rebellion. For this reason, I have emphasized the active media fan in order to
be as specific as possible in relation to Chinese culture. Indeed, to understand the significance
and specificity of China’s fan culture, we must first understand China’s political and economic
141

environment. China is in a special stage of what we call postsocialism. As Xudong Zhang points
out,
The use of ‘postsocialism’ does not suggest a more advanced, superior—or, for
that matter, more backward and inferior—form of socioeconomic and political
development. Rather, it is an experimental way to address a bewildering
overlap of modes of production, social systems and symbolic orders, all of
which lay claim to a fledgling world of life. These contending socioeconomic
and sociopolitical forces are somehow equalized in the postsocialist space by
the global context of capitalist world market and ideological domination: they
also enter a more level terrain of engagement guaranteed by the Chinese state
apparatus as both a generator of bureaucratic capitalism and the inheritor of the
revolutionary and socialist legacies of Mao’s China (Xudong 2008, 10).

In such a postsocialist China, with so much rapid social and economic change, new
generations have struggled with ideological conflicts and fan culture serves as an outlet for their
emotions. Jenkins (2003) points out that most amateur filmmakers and media fans do not have
radical political goals, and indeed, most of the Chinese fandom works that I have discussed
support his argument. Scholars such as Xiao Liu argue that even in the pioneers of fan-made
works – as with the work of Hu Ge, for example – we can sense an “ideological ambiguity” (Liu
2010, 242). This ambiguity contributes to the sense of soft rebellion I have described.
One of the reasons that I connect Chinese fan culture to youth subculture and youth
rebellion is that Chinese fan groups are largely composed of Chinese youth. As Zheng points out
“...fan culture is up to now a youth subculture in China; in other cultures, fan identity does not
142

have a direct relationship with age and generation” (Zheng 2016, 367). Chinese fan culture has
only a short history compared with the fan cultures of other countries. Whether it is Chinese fans
under the influence of the culture of Hong Kong and Taiwan from the 1980s to the 1990s; the fan
craze caused by the TV Show Super Girl after 2004; those fan communities obsessed with
European or American culture; or Japanese and Korean popular culture, these fans were born
primarily in the 1980s and 1990s, so nearly a decade after the Chinese Reform and Opening up,
which occurred beginning in 1978. These younger generations are a major force in China’s fan
culture. With the end of the Cultural Revolution and the advent of Reform and Opening up,
young people have had the opportunity to come into contact with different cultures, legally and
illegally, which, combined with their own culture, has influenced the values and codes of
conduct of their generation. It has formed a youth subculture different from China’s older, more
mainstream culture.
It should be pointed out that China’s fan culture, as a representative of China’s youth
culture, is not a radical culture. This is why I use the term “soft rebellion” to characterize it. As
Xiqing Zheng argues, “Chinese fan culture is far from a subversive community on the periphery
that simply rebels against the center; instead, it is a constantly negotiating subculture that adopts
various evaluation systems and hierarchies from the mainstream culture and educational
institutions” (Zheng 2016, iii).
Soft rebellion is actually a somewhat contradictory term, which not only reflects the
Chinese fan culture as a representative of youth subculture and its confrontation with the
mainstream culture, but also reflects the limitations of the development of Chinese fan culture.
Under the influence of political factors and a strong commercial atmosphere, surrender to the
mainstream culture is the final destination for much Chinese fan culture in regard to its soft
143

rebellion. There has been an inseparable relationship between the formation of this soft rebellion
and China’s special national conditions, as well as its censorship system. First, the Internet as a
new medium in China has developed rapidly, and may at times move beyond the control of
ideology, but the government is bound to control the internet. Compared with the context of the
foreign internet, the system for Chinese internet censorship is much more strict. For instance, in a
study published in 2010, scholar David Kurt Herold points out that in early June 2010, “the
Information Office of the State Council, i.e. the Chinese central government, published its first
ever Internet White Paper to outline the official views of the Chinese government on the current
status and the future of the Internet in China.” He continues, noting, “This White Paper has
caused a stir among observers of the Chinese Internet because of the Chinese government’s
stated intention to keep regulating, censoring, and controlling the part of the Internet that can be
accessed from within China’s borders” (Herold and Marolt 2011, 201)
In their book’s conclusion, titled “Netizens and Citizens, Cyberspace and Modern
China,” Herold and Marolt go on to describe Chinese internet users, writing, “Chinese netizens
are less connected to the world wide web, and therefore less influenced by ‘global’ Internet
trends. Instead, Chinese internet users have developed their own forms and sites of interaction,
communication, e-commerce, politics, etc. and their own, Chinese Internet culture” (Herold and
Marolt 2011, 200). The specific form of Chinese internet use, with its inward-looking
perspective, coincides with my formulation of the Chinese media fan within the context of post-
cinema. This is a viewer who is not so much interested in a global worldview, and is drawn
instead to more local or national politics, humor, and forms of interaction.
Herold and Marolt also underscore the presence of the Chinese government in helping
create this sort of viewer based on its oversight of online access. They write,
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The main reason for the development of this Internet ‘with Chinese
characteristics’ is the strong involvement of the Chinese government in online
China. Government officials issue regulations, censor information, limit the
expression of online opinion, make it difficult for Chinese netizens to engage with
the non-Chinese Internet, attempt to influence online opinion, etc. The state is far
more (openly) involved in online China than governments in America or Europe
are with the non-Chinese Internet (Herold and Marolt 2011, 200).
This observation in turn points to the relevance of humor in the previous chapters as it relates to
Chinese post-cinema. Humor and spoofing allow viewers to have some critical response, but
without being overt.
Online society in China is dedicated to creating, celebrating, and instrumentalising what
is known as the online carnival. Indeed, compared with other countries, China’s internet
development has been conducted under the guidance and supervision of the government. But it is
worth noting that the internet is relatively lightly censored and regulated compared to other
media in the country, including cinema and television. Or at least for a while, it was relatively
loose, giving China’s fan culture room to question the mainstream form of soft rebellion.
In her 2019 book, Zoning China: Online Video, Popular Culture, and the State, scholar
Luzhou Li uses the term “cultural zoning” to describe how the Chinese state has strategically
applied market regulation and rules to certain media sectors or forms more than to others, which
has led to a dual cultural sphere (Li 2019, 2). She writes, “By zoning culture, the Chinese state
has strategically configured the cultural realm into multiple zones in relation to the market,
which allows it to enjoy the fruits of economic development while simultaneously retaining
socialist legacies through its own state media” (Li 2019, 2). She shows the radical differences
145

between the more state-controlled form of television, and the far more loosely structured realm
of online video. She goes on to show how online video was subject to more lenient forms of
regulation, which allowed the internet to become a space for questioning the state, history, and
society. Overall, the book helpfully outlines the history of regulation from the 1930s forward,
and for my purposes, with its history of online regulation, including the spoofing forms I
highlight in previous chapters, offers support for my argument that online creative fan activity
has provided a platform for soft rebellion.
To offer more detail, in relation to micro cinemas, Li points out, “After a year’s survey
and research into the industry, in July 2012, the SARFT announced its Notice on Further
Strengthening the Regulation of Web Soaps, Micro Movies, and Other Online Audiovisual
Programs, which put in place a regulatory framework for formalized self-censorship by the
makers of web soaps and similar productions” (Li 2019, 184). The possibility of soft rebellion
arose due to the lack of censorship in the beginning of internet use. During the early period of the
internet in China, the government encouraged self-censorship rather than centralized official
censorship, and that gave space for a form of soft rebellion among youth.
However, the self-censorship of the internet ended by the last months of 2014, as Li
points out. She writes, “In December 2014, the State Administration of Radio, Film, and
Television announced at several online video industry conferences that content forbidden to be
broadcast on traditional media would also be forbidden on new media” (Li 2019, 1). She
continues, “If we consider these announcements in the context of increasing oversight of public
discourse since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, the unequivocal message was that
online and offline censorship standards would be unified” (Li 2019, 1). With the unified
146

censorship, the Internet is no longer a free space of emotional or critical expression as it was in
the past.
Another trend for Chinese media fan culture in recent years is that the activities of fans
are not limited to the online world. Chinese media fans currently are shifting toward being more
market- and profit-oriented, as well as being increasingly engaged in more community-based
activities; all of these lack the characteristics of the soft rebellion that I have described in regard
to the young Chinese media fan’s life.
As Zheng points out, during these years, this community is finding an interest in
connecting in the three-dimensional world, not only through simple personal connections, but
also through an arranged space that in the most direct way is capable of showing that the
participants share similar tastes and interests. Fan conventions offer a good example. They are no
longer a place where fans search for a community and people “similar to me,” but a place where
fans materialize in real life a virtual community that they know from online spaces; the
convention becomes a special space in which the most surreal and unconventional dreams come
to life (Zheng 2016, 259). As a result, communities based on virtual identities and activities are
emerging rapidly offline. The circulation of materialized fan products both online and offline is
tremendous in scale. Most fan writers or fan artists would post advertisement online – especially
through the venue of SNS websites – calling for statistics of demands and then put their fanzines
in to print and sell (Zheng 2016, 359).
As Zheng points out, contemporary society has often been described as a society with the
tendency for over-consumption and high commodification, no matter the cultural or historical
background (Zheng 2016, 365). With the rapid development of China's economy, China’s fan
culture is also changing. The degree of commercialization of Chinese fan culture is constantly
147

increasing, which may make us question whether the nature of Chinese fandom has changed
from a non-profit shared interest community to a fully market-oriented fan culture, or is Chinese
fandom always part of the commercialized society, waiting to be incorporated into mainstream
ideology? As China’s economic growth trend diverges from developed urban areas to second and
third tier cities, China’s fan culture will also expand from major cities to second and third tier
cities. China’s fan base will continue to expand, and it will increasingly become a consumer
force that cannot be ignored. Further, with the aging of the first generation of Chinese media fans
and the rise of the new generation fans, the age group of media fans in China is also expanding.
In the early stage, Chinese media fans used soft rebellion as a political detour to bypass
censorship; they employed sarcasm and irony as tools to softly rebel against the authorities.
However, in the process of moving closer to commercialization and mainstream culture, the soft
rebellion in Chinese fan culture has become less and less a rebellion, and to some extent, it has
been replaced by cynicism or ultranationalism. The possibility of soft rebellion evolving into
radical political movements is unrealistic. As online supervision becomes more stringent, the
possibility of using online space for counter hegemonic activities is minimal. In addition, with
the country’s prosperity and economic development, Chinese youth have become more and more
confident. Young people no longer want to challenge those in power, but tend to be more
interested in how to find their own value in an increasingly commercialized society. Under this
premise, China’s fan culture promotes the continuous advancement of Chinese films on the road
of commercialization and entertainment.

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Creator Gu, Hao (author)

Core Title From the extraordinary to the everyday: fan culture’s impact on the transition of Chinese post-cinema in the first twenty years of the twenty-first century

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Media Arts and Practice)

Degree Conferral Date 2021-12

Publication Date 09/22/2021

Defense Date 09/21/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Chinese cinema,fan culture,OAI-PMH Harvest,post-cinema

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Language English

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Advisor Willis, Holly (committee chair), Callahan, Vicki (committee member), Kratky, Andreas (committee member)

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