ABSTRACT
Introduction Honey Bee Man (Woai nanguimi, 2014) is a TV serial about romance in the city. Its backdrop is the post-divorce life of contemporary Chinese women, particularly those who were born in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and it depicts many of the typical encounters experienced by these women. With a focus on the post-divorce lives of three generations of modern-day Chinese women, Honey Bee Man maps out a nuanced and discursive gender space which gives light to the considerable economic changes that have impacted the lives of ordinary Chinese people, and particularly Chinese women. This chapter discusses the varying relationships and marital forms and reveals the utility and value of China’s divorced women in relation to the government’s propaganda rhetoric, as it bids to stimulate what it defines as a competent, considerate and buoyant citizenry. By constructing an “ideal woman image,” “a suitable female subject” and a “preferred femininity” via the TV screen, the state discourse creates an apt, virtuous and desirable model for its ideal Chinese woman. In doing so, official publicity promotes a particular “model” of divorced women (such as the Huiyun character in the show) as even-tempered, caring and strong females who do not complain about their fate, but instead strive to become even more tender, virtuous and generous after their marriage breakups, while it remolds those “unqualified or incompetent wives” (such as the Ye Shan and Fang Yiyi characters in the show) into a submissive and traditional Chinese good wife-wise mother figure and rewards them with a happy “second spring.” Furthermore, by producing “mismatched” couples, which are politically useful, the show helps to relieve the sour taste of social disparity and wealth discrimination that is the upshot of a resurfacing class demarcation and social discord generated by the ongoing economic transformations.
