ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how media has re-shaped connectivity, providing new space for production and consumption of urban yueju. It illustrates how under economic censorship yueju increasingly changed from art to light entertainment, in order to maximize audiences and economic gain. Although this approach has led to the popularization of yueju, it in fact leads to the artistic limitation for both the audience and the Shanghai Yueju Company (SYC) artists. The chapter emphasizes the concept of the emerging 'have-less' urban working class's connective power through Internet and mobile phones, to suggest that these new media forms are providing the mass people with a new space to assert their culture and identity in today's urban China. In the new millennium it is this connected 'have-less' working class which forms the strongest power group to challenge Chinese elite dominance and it is this connected grassroots power which continues to support the existence of regional opera.
