ABSTRACT
Perhaps more extensively than many of its global counterparts, death haunts the Chinese television screen, particularly in its multitude of representations addressing the formation of modern China. Death pervades the series; during most of its 41 episodes, characters are killed and/or engage with the subject of dying in their conversational exchanges. Instead, Ming Cheng describes the Japanese agent's offscreen death as an act of "self-sacrifice". Even as the people recognize the consolatory value of such meaning-making processes, anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes contends that "the arbitrary character of suffering and death [remains] hidden" as a result of human attempts to rationalize "the useless suffering and death of the Other", be it in war or other contexts. For better or worse, human beings work hard to make ethical meaning of death, even as engaging in such processes complicates a text's ethical horizons. In the Chinese war drama, notions of a good death take on distinctly utilitarian values with pragmatic, communal consequences.
