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Børge Bakken explains that the Party ideology of the “Chinese Dream” is not the alleged dream of the people as presented by the propaganda, but rather the dream of the emperor. The “Dream” is instead building on a strategy of “betting on the strong”. Inequality in China as measured by the Gini coefficient of relative income differences has reached world top levels, making China one of the most unequal societies in the world today. It is virtually impossible for poor migrants to achieve any kind of prosperity under circumstances disfavouring them. In coping with this problem, the poor and the destitute employ illegal strategies and employ certain “weapons of the weak” in order to cope with the strain created by the unequal framework they are operating within.

This chapter interrogates the geopolitical implications of a contemporary development in the region’s media industries — the institutionalization of location shooting into modes of nation branding that commoditize cultural signs in line with the states’ soft power objectives. Drawing from examples of recent location-shot film and media, including En Chen’s Island Etude, Chi Po-lin’s Beyond Beauty, and Zhejiang TV's Keep Running, I demonstrate how location shooting since Taiwan’s membership in the WTO has been institutionalized within the discursive contours of the “Love Taiwan” movement, a process which can be compared with the PRC’s marketing of the “Chinese Dream” to domestic tourists via convergent and place-based film and televisual media. While the resulting national brands could not appear more different, these discourses operate on the shared assumption that for place identities to be readily consumable and exportable, they must be coherent within a global “experience economy” that circulates images of distinctive yet fixed cultural identities. This reduction of place into readily consumable cultural signs can be contrasted with the enigmatic representation of Shanghai found in Jia Zhangke's I Wish I Knew, which fashions on-screen Doreen Massey’s notion of the “progressive place,” a poststructuralist reinterpretation of place that focuses on conflicting sociocultural processes that imbue spaces with richly layered meanings. Building on Massey's concept of the progressive place, this chapter argues that location-shot film and media in China and Taiwan, more than offering diversely themed experiences, have untapped potential in cultivating alternative public cultures through reflexive, minor, and performative modes of place making.

This chapter provides an overview of the most important works in happiness studies today as well as an analysis of the available happiness data on China since 1990, charting the main development and their underlying social and economic causes. It links the rise of reported happiness since 2005 in China to the government’s stepped up ideological efforts, notably through the Chinese Dream campaign and its associated happiness education campaign. This chapter also provides an analysis of the main themes emerging in the book, which include propaganda and political discourse, suzhi, and the appearance of Ah Q as important cultural archetype. Finally, the Introduction also provides a short summary of each chapter, and in its conclusion argues that despite the multiplicity of influences which shape the various discourses, we can find broadly shared agreement about values and aspirations in relation to happiness across a wide spectrum of society.

The political destiny of the Chinese and the Tibetans are intertwined. Yet, the increasing politicization in the Tibet Autonomous Region threatens to worse the conflict between them. The 2008 Beijing Olympics and the Qinghai-Tibet Railway are vehicles of such politicization. The Tibetans’ political future lies less with the Dalai Lama but more with the initiative to abandon wishful thinking and take up organizing. Self-immolation is futile sacrifice. If the Tibet question is not resolved during the Dalai Lam’s lifetime, the next riots will be much worse than those in March 2008.