ABSTRACT

The First and Second Comings of capitalism are conceptual shorthands used to capture the radical changes in global geopolitics from the Opium War to the end of the Cold War and beyond. Centring the role of capitalism in the Chinese everyday, the framework can be employed to comprehend contemporary Chinese culture in general and, as in this study, Chinese cinema in particular.

This book investigates major Chinese-language films from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in order to unpack a hyper-compressed capitalist modernity with distinctive Chinese characteristics. As a dialogue between the film genre as a mediation of microscopic social life, and the narrative of economic development as a macroscopic political abstraction, it engages the two otherwise remotely related worlds, illustrating how the State and the Subject are reconstituted cinematically in late capitalism. A deeply cultural, determinedly historical, and deliberately interdisciplinary study, it approaches "culture" anthropologically, as a way of life emanating from the everyday, and aesthetically, as imaginative forms and creative expressions.

Economy, Emotion, and Ethics in Chinese Cinema will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese cinema, cultural studies, Asian studies, and interdisciplinary studies of politics and culture.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

Culture and contemporary Chinese cinema in the Second Coming of Capitalism

part |72 pages

Homo economicus

chapter |37 pages

Primitive accumulation and the emergence of the liberal subject in the People's Republic

Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum and Zhou Xiaowen's Ermo

chapter |33 pages

Crazy English with a Chinese face

Zhang Yuan's documentary on the neoliberal pedagogy of the self

part |75 pages

Homo sentimentalis

chapter |36 pages

Neoliberalism's family values

(Re)production and (re)creation in Ang Lee's trilogy and Zhang Yimou's Happy Times

part |54 pages

Homo ethicus

chapter |29 pages

The world of Jia Zhangke viewed

Neorealist aesthetics against neoliberal logics

chapter |23 pages

Abiding by nature's time

The caution of cannibal capitalism in Fruit Chan's Dumplings