ABSTRACT
In its 9May 2005 issue, Newsweek ran a special report, ‘China’s Century’, devoted in part to exploring questions such as ‘Is China the world’s next superpower?’ (Newsweek 2005: 5). Gracing its glossy cover is a frontal pose of Zhang Ziyi (b. 1979), who greets the viewer with her charming smile and slim figure and who looms large against a background composed of the GreatWall, a symbol of ancient China and the Pearl of the Oriental (the Shanghai Television Tower), a symbol of a contemporary globalizing China. A newly risen star who became internationally known after Ang Lee (Li An, b. 1954) cast her in a scene-stealing martial arts role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Zhang was endorsed by Newsweek as ‘the face of a new China’. If the twenty-first century is indeed China’s century, then why did Newsweek avoid choosing the face of a political leader or a business tycoon to represent China’s rise as a new superpower? In response to this question, Gary Xu speculates that, in the judgement of Newsweek, ‘Zhang’s star power and beauty’ might embody the merging of old and new China, simultaneously marking her as ‘the quintessential Oriental woman’ and a ‘representative of the turn-of-the-millennium generation: youthful, energetic, confident, cosmopolitan, and entrepreneurial’ (2007: 1-2).
