ABSTRACT
The earliest application of the term ‘middlebrow’ to the Chinese context is Liu Ts’un-yan’s discussion of Chinese fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Ts’un-yan discusses the problems of applying the term middlebrow to the analysis of Chinese fiction. The caution Idema advises is understandable because re-grading Chinese artistic and literary works according to an Anglophone scale is tricky. Despite Chinese film critics’ contempt for middlebrow tastes, films depicting middle-class urban life are often blockbusters in China. They are popular because they not only provide a venue for many viewers, particularly the lower middle class, to observe an imagined, desirable upper-middle-class lifestyle, but also strike a chord by exposing the problems encountered by the nouveaux riches despite their wealth. However, China’s economic reform and urbanization in the past decades has forced its film industry to adjust its policy and focus on the urban audience, particularly the affluent new middle class.
