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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 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 discusses three films that use television as a motif. These are Ermo (Ermo, dir. Zhou Xiaowen, 1994), Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiaoyao, dir. Jia Zhangke, 2002), and Still Life (Sanxia haoren, dir. Jia Zhangke, 2006). After discussing the filmic representations and their implications, it considers the extent to which the filmic-televisual intertextuality invites additional analysis and interpretation of the most dominant form of storytelling in contemporary China. Film–television dynamics (and intertextuality between the two) in these films helps bring television into the foreground as an important sociocultural phenomenon and a cultural text for direct analysis and interpretation. The use of television as a motif in these films also represents the extent to which television exists in a rapidly changing physical and social landscape either as an object of desire (to possess), as background noise that nevertheless reveals part of everyday life, or as a source of complex self-identification. These representational characteristics help situate television in the context of social relations in contemporary China, while making visible the complex cultural and ideological implications within this context.

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.