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This introductory chapter first highlights the “fate” of Chinese mainstream culture and debates about it in the West, with a brief observation about their own sociocultural particularities. It argues for a need to move beyond the existing mode of state–market dichotomy in order to arrive at a historically informed understanding of the production of contemporary Chinese mainstream culture in general and television drama in particular. The chapter then sets out four seemingly straightforward terms—television set (dianshi ji), television industry (dianshi chanye), television culture (dianshi wenhua), and television drama (dianshiju)—in order to both focus and expand the discussion regarding the relationship between state and market forces and cultural production. These four terms indicate television’s role among “global” and globalizing technology-aided cultural phenomena, but they are also socially and historically particular to modern and contemporary Chinese history, rich with specific implications. They illustrate the complex relationship between the state and the collective imaginary of “modernization” shared by different social groups, and between the state and different players who have participated in the development of television culture as mainstream popular culture in ways specific to the social characteristics in contemporary China.

This chapter examines the rise of Chinese dramas about dynastic emperors. These dramas have become an important subcategory of “history drama” on television. It argues that emperor dramas and critical responses to them reflect the changing and contradictory nature of contemporary Chinese mainstream culture, especially of its uncertainty about how to reaffirm China’s own historical agency, fully acknowledge its own historical choices, and examine their successes and failures without subscribing to either a postmodern nihilistic cynicism or a simple-minded nationalism. At the same time, emperor dramas, their popular reception, the debates about them, and various other related intellectual concerns continue to constitute the complexity of and agency within mainstream culture. In this sense, the emperor dramas, like the other subgenres studied in this book, function as “open-ended” texts that invite both cultural and historical readings not only into the texts themselves, but also into the social, economic, cultural, and political realities of market-reform-era China.

This chapter focuses songs, especially their lyrics, composed for television dramas. In an age when poetry reading has become a marginalized activity, popular songs, including those composed for television dramas, have become (popular) poetics of the age.Together with the exponential increase in the production of television dramas in the last three decades, the bulk of songs composed for them has also accumulated into a phenomenon of its own. Some of them have become part of the regular repertoire of popular music, often heard independent of their original dramas. As part of television drama and popular culture, their musically conveyed expression manifests a range of sentiments, indeed the pathos of the age. As such, they offer another point of entry into understanding contemporary Chinese mainstream culture and the social and ideological implications within it.

This chapter focuses on Chinese youth drama, a subgenre on television that offers yet another interesting example of mainstream culture’s representations of social contradictions and ideological tensions. It examines three types of well-received Chinese-made youth dramas and their best-known texts. First, it considers the dramas by the so-called master of Chinese youth drama, Hai Yan. It explores the representations shared by the young characters and the social and ideological implications of the commonality in Hai Yan’s dramas. Second, it examines the phenomenon of “post-youth” youth drama, which refer to dramas that focus on the generation of Chinese who grew up during the Mao era but who encountered significant changes in their lives during the post-Mao era. It looks at the ambivalence expressed within those dramas in which their main characters live through two sharply different eras. Third, the chapter examines “counteridol” youth drama, in particular one of its latest representatives, Shibing tuji (Soldiers, be ready, 2007). Focusing on its main character, Xu Sanduo, and the popular following this unlikely hero has generated, it speculates on why an unconventional “youth idol” has successfully captured the public’s imagination.

This chapter focuses on the anticorruption televisual subgenre, which enjoys a much wider viewership than its counterpart, the anticorruption novel. Many of the anticorruption novels by such writers as Lu Tianming, Zhang Ping, and Zhou Meisen have been adapted into television drama. In some cases, such as that of Lu Tianming, what was originally conceived as a television drama script became a novel. This genre crossing in popular representations of corruption was partially driven by the market and partially attributable to the fact that popular culture’s representations of anticorruption themes essentially functioned as popular expressions of discontent. The chapter examines the “formulaic” narrative style of the anticorruption novel and its mass culture adaptations by, first, fully acknowledging its melodramatic characteristics and, then, examining the melodramatic codes and the politics (and their historicity) within. More specifically, it explores the extent to which televisual representations of corruption and anticorruption activities pertain to some frequently evoked notions such as fa (law), fazhi (rule by law), fazhi (rule of law), quanli (power), and quanli (rights), and various structural, ideological, and sociocultural issues related to them.

This chapter examines the relationship between women and their desire for happiness as represented in the “family-marriage” drama (jiating hunyin ju), especially those scripted or adapted from stories by women writers. It explores the gendered social and ideological implications in the relationship between urban women and consumer-culture-defined “private” domains such as love, marriage, and family. Ot looks into the pursuit of happiness and its related discontent in relation to the difference between women’s writings in the decade of the 1980s and televisual dramas based on women’s writings popularly received in the 1990s and beyond. Three decades since the start of economic reform, the “happiness”-informed female identity has generated new questions, challenges, and problems with regards to gender politics in contemporary China. While the ideology of happiness is powerfully advertised and subliminally alluring, it has also redrawn social domains for women in which they tend to find themselves being identified mainly with sexuality, love, marriage, and family.