ABSTRACT
Group discussions with the privileged classes ran for a minimum of an hour if not longer, depending on the breadth of opinions had by audiences. Participants were notably more confident in contradicting their peers' opinions and expressing their own opinions when the opportunity arose. Privileged audiences easily engaged with the narratives of each film and were able to draw lines between the film's content and the realities of Chinese society regardless of whether they enjoyed the film or not. Students and professors in Lanzhou and white collar workers in Beijing and Taiyuan were far from enthusiastic in evaluations of the commercial value of Chinese films in comparison to their lower classed counterparts. The sense-making processes audiences revealed in the subsequent group discussions are evidence of this fact. China's new cinema of class confirms that China's audiences are not uniform, either in the pre-conditioning that they bring to their sense making of Chinese popular cinema or in their film consumption practices.
