Chinese Pop Culture

Introducing the Best of Chinese Pop Culture 

• chinese dramas all have to be completely pre-produced 

  • because all content have to pass censorship, production has to be completed before a show airs 

  • due to scheduling reasons some tv shows air after they’ve been sitting on a shelf for months or even years 

  • homosexuality or promoting terrorism are banned, but also anything that “blurs the jugement between beauty and ugliness” or depicting “extreme vengence” 

• china has the largest video game market in the world 

• government have attempted to limit the number of japanese films and tv shows in china and have had little effect on their popularity since almost anything can be watched or bought online 

  • some anime and mangas have been banned as well 

• the korean wave, or hallyu wave describes the ever growing popularity of korean pop culture in the past 20 years 

  • kdramas and kpop are hugely popular in china but recently the lack of copyright laws has turned off korean production companies and artist from investing too much in conquering the chinese market 

• 1930s — chinese cinema had its first golden age in shanghai and produced the first film stars starring in progressive, socially conscious realist pictures 

  • with the japanese invasion in 1937, most filmmakers fled to shanghai with some moving to hong kong 

    • hong kong cinema developed into its own distinct industry 

    • the cultural revolution brought an end to movie production in mainland china for almost a decade and almost all previous and foreign films were banned / locked away or even destroyed 

      • fourth generation of filmmakers reemerged, expressed the country’s scarring experiences of film 

      • industry flourished again, fifth gen made chinese cinema popular abroad with experimentation, epic/symbolic images, and complex/critical thinking 

  • after tiananmen square protests, some sixth gen filmmakers had to continue their work underground and smuggle their works abroad 

    • advancement of global capitalism ended towards the 20th century and increased international exposure brought to foreign investments to chinese productions with an eye on global market

• after the cultural revolution, the state started seeing non-hetero behaviors as a threat to its moral authority and was criminalized under the so-called hooliganism law until 1997 

  • new tv censorship rules ban depictions of homosexuality as ‘abnormal behavior’