Organizer and Chair: Sharon R. Wesoky, Allegheny College, USA Discussant: Kristin Stapleton, State University of New York, Buffalo, USA This panel incorporates participants from numerous disciplinary perspectives to examine diverse expressions of political satire and imagination as well as the content of these expressions. Panelists write about different spaces of political imaginings and satire in both China and Hong Kong, as well as compare and contrast the differing terrains available for political expression on both sides of the border.
With respect to contemporary mainland China, Hongwei Lu discusses the use of television dramas to make a case for social cohesiveness and political idealism. This more “official level” discourse contrasts with Ping Le and Sharon Wesoky’s discussion of social and political satire on the internet, and thus both of these papers provide insights into the diversification of political imaginaries at both official and more popular levels. Guo Wu’s paper discusses contemporary dissident novels, about China but published in Hong Kong, also as a representation of more unofficial-level political visions. The potentiality of Hong Kong as an alternative political landscape is also evident in Lisa Fischler’s paper on local and global influences in Hong Kong comics and blogs, as well as King-fai Tam’s paper on the politics of Hong Kong standup comedian Wong Chi Wah.
Together, these papers consider how political imagination transcends governmental and intellectual spheres and manifests in literary, media, and technological spaces, and thus provide cultural and context-specific analyses of expanding expressions of political identity and meaning in contemporary China.
Chinese political fantasy novels emerged in 1902, in Liang Qichao’s incomplete The Future of New China, and the early 20th century saw the appearance of over thirty novels of the future. After a long discontinuity, political fantasy novels have re-emerged in Chinese fiction. This article examines three major works of this genre published outside of mainland China since 1991: Yellow Peril by Wang Lixiong, The Last Struggle in Zhongnanhai by Li Jie and A Flourishing Age: China, 2013 by Chen Guanzhong. As their predecessors in the early 20th century, these novels under study also predict China’s future political system and the prospect of democratization; however, the recent works present a much more complicated scenario and more bleak and pessimistic vision of China’s political future. Yellow Peril envisions the crisis of Chinese population and ecology and the exodus of the Chinese nation, and The Last Struggle in Zhongnanhai precautions the rise of Chinese fascism and war maniacs. At the same time, the recent works demonstrate a more skeptical attitude to the unmodified implementation of Western style parliamentary system in China, exemplified by Yellow Peril; and an ambiguous defense of the current authoritarian governance of the CCP, as A Flourishing Age: China, 2013 suggests. This paper argues that the major historical events of the China’s 20th century: international and civil wars, the Cultural Revolution, and the 1989 crackdown were the main factors that rendered the political imagining at the turn of the 21st century more complicated, pessimistic but perhaps more mature.
Dramatic imaginations of political leadership composition often reflect broad social, economic, and political changes at large. Last year a new revolutionary drama aimed at remapping the modern Chinese political history caught nationwide attention. Known as Renjian zhengdao shi cangsang, the TV drama turns away from the emphasis on political division, combatant strategies, revolutionary campaigns, class conflict, and ideological indoctrination that characterized earlier dramatic imaginations of political affairs. At the crux of its political imagination is its political emphasis on the important role played by faith and idealism in social justice, social political transformation and nation building in the revolutionary discourse. The drama also brings our attention to the historical price paid for ideological differences at the cost of humanist values of love, family, and friendship. The new political rhetoric is the importance of social and political cooperation for nation-building. Moreover, it imagines a new kind of political elite in combining intellectual idealism with veteran pragmatism. Through introducing the life stories and political choices of three siblings, the TV drama adopts the metaphor of family union and separation to advocate that social stability and progress is only achievable through political and social cooperation rather than division. The new rhetoric also reflects a political effort at reinvigorating the political role of faith in contemporary life and reimagining modern Chinese political history to suit contemporary China’s “party-state developmental syndicate.”
Paper co-authored with Sharon Wesoky, Allegheny College
The vast expansion of the internet, text-messaging and micro-blogging in China in the past decade has both increased the space available for political and social expression as well as created new venues for statist intervention and market-oriented hegemony. Contemporary research on the internet focuses particularly on its potentialities as a channel of communication—for instance, arguments that its expansion promotes “technological empowerment” (as in Yongnian Zheng’s 2008 book) and creates venues for activism (as elaborated in the work of Guobin Yang). At the same time bloggers such as Han Han demonstrate the potentialities of internet expression to convey new political visions through irony and satire. This paper will examine the content of jokes and satire relating to women as well as political and social issues on the internet and in text-messaging in order to assess both micro and macro-level perceptions of power relations in contemporary China. In particular, analysis of political satire on the internet provides insights regarding popular visions of the effects of reform on Chinese society and conceptions of modernity. Attention in particular to gendered expressions of satire also allow for greater understanding of mass-level contemporary views of the place of women within the Chinese polity. Content analysis of political satire can thus provide new insights regarding the evolution of socio-political consciousness in China today.
Until the reform era in China, political critique in the form of satire was hard to find except in places at the margin like Hong Kong. In the then-British colony, Japanese-inspired manhua, ex-patriot comics, Hong Kong’s own film industry, and other media forms like talk radio combined to produce a uniquely indigenous pop culture that reflected both sociopolitical developments and a growing local identity. Since 1997, this medium of political expression has continued to express the changes impacting Hong Kong and its own local identity even as the Special Administrative Region (SAR) returned to and has been partially integrated with the Chinese mainland. By exploring the content of contemporary Hong Kong-focused blogs, comics, and other online forums, this paper will analyze how political satire and humor reflect the complex connections between sociopolitical developments and Hong Kong’s changing identity as a “global city” of the 21st century. The paper will cover the background of political satire and humor in the form of comics and film, focusing most specifically on Hong Kong’s political transition, and the emergence of a distinct local identity amidst the turmoil of the approaching 1997 handover. The paper turns to more contemporary issues such as land reclamation, a new generation of female political candidates, and citizenship and belonging in order to demonstrate the ways in which political satire and humor that critique the SAR government’s handling of the challenges of globalization in the present era also reveal important shifts in local identity and responses to sociopolitical change.
The 1990s signaled the openness of political discussion unseen in any other periods in Hong Kong history. The recent memories of the 1989 June 4 Incident and the projection of the imminent return of Hong Kong to China’s sovereignty in 1997 combined with other social and institutional factors to create a sense of urgency among the populace to express their understanding of Hong Kong’s past and present and their visions of its future. Such an environment of political openness gave rise to the innovative use of established media such as film, political cartoons, and mass demonstrations on the one hand, and the proliferation of new forms of public discourse such as radio call-in shows, experimental theater and art, and face-to-face debate on the other. This paper will study the political satire found in a new popular art form, the standup comedy of Wong Chi Wah, taking into consideration: 1) the hybridization process that this art form has undergone as it adapts to the cultural context of Hong Kong; 2) Wong’s exploitation of the interactive nature of standup comedy whereby he attempts to direct and shape even as he reflects the political opinions of his audience; 3) the targets of his political satire, including those on the institutional and personal level; and 4) Wong’s revisionist version of Hong Kong history which accounts for his understanding of its political reality. The paper will conclude with a discussion of standup comedy’s potential as a tool of Hong Kong political discourse in the future.
Paper co-authored with Li Ping, University of International Business and Economics
The vast expansion of the internet, text-messaging and micro-blogging in China in the past decade has both increased the space available for political and social expression as well as created new venues for statist intervention and market-oriented hegemony. Contemporary research on the internet focuses particularly on its potentialities as a channel of communication—for instance, arguments that its expansion promotes “technological empowerment” (as in Yongnian Zheng’s 2008 book) and creates venues for activism (as elaborated in the work of Guobin Yang). At the same time bloggers such as Han Han demonstrate the potentialities of internet expression to convey new political visions through irony and satire. This paper will examine the content of jokes and satire relating to women as well as political and social issues on the internet and in text-messaging in order to assess both micro and macro-level perceptions of power relations in contemporary China. In particular, analysis of political satire on the internet provides insights regarding popular visions of the effects of reform on Chinese society and conceptions of modernity. Attention in particular to gendered expressions of satire also allow for greater understanding of mass-level contemporary views of the place of women within the Chinese polity. Content analysis of political satire can thus provide new insights regarding the evolution of socio-political consciousness in China today.
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