Abstract
Scholarly interest in Chinese cinema has exploded since the international craze for wuxia films at Western multiplexes sparked by Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in 2000. Within China, while films such as Lee’s were not popular, there has been increasing nostalgia in the 21st century for the popular culture of the Maoist era, including the films of this time. One particular subset of these films, predominantly produced in the 1960s, was known as the ‘Red Classics’. During the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, these were the only films which could be officially screened in mainland China. These films are frequently remembered by those who lived through those times as representing their only exposure to entertainment, even though the official aim of the Chinese Communist Party in disseminating these films was educational rather than entertainment-based.
An increasing number of scholarly works discussing the Red Classics and the affection Chinese people of a certain age have for them have appeared on the market in recent years. Many of the Red Classics have been remade in the last few decades, as both TV dramas and films, with varying levels of popularity and critical acclaim. Qian Gong is a researcher who has published extensively in this field, and Remaking Red Classics in Post-Mao China: TV Drama as Popular Media is an important addition to her existing work. Remaking Red Classics in Post-Mao China is focused on TV drama remakes of these Red Classics and uses an innovative structure to analyse them.
The book interrogates how these TV drama remakes are ‘market commodities, cultural artifacts and social practices’ (p. 1). Within this, popular topics in the TV and film studies disciplines such as gender representations are discussed, as well as how the heroic figures that populate the Red Classics have been reshaped for modern Chinese audiences and their changing sensibilities in these TV dramas. A close study of the city of Linyi in Shandong Province, in Chapter Five, provides scope for examining how local socio-cultural attitudes inform responses to these remakes from people of different generations including those familiar with the original Red Classics. Chapter Six examines how issues of faith, including morality and ethics, are dealt with in the TV dramas and how this has undergone dramatic changes since the creation of the original Red Classics.
Remaking Red Classics in Post-Mao China makes a significant contribution to existing scholarship in Chinese television studies and on the Red Classics and their remakes. The book’s literature review is extensive, and Gong’s analysis of earlier works is frequently both incisive and informative. Gong provides comprehensive examination of works by notable scholars in the field of Red Classic remakes, such as Li Yang, Richard King and Rosemary Roberts. Additionally, she analyzes relevant television and cultural studies theories, notably Althusser and his theory of interpellation, which is applied to her discussion of the TV dramas. The need for interpellation to be a primary theory applied to the Red Classic TV remakes is explained well.
Gong’s book is also useful not only for Chinese scholars but also for outsiders looking to learn more about contemporary culture and society in the People’s Republic. She creates a convincing argument that there is a plethora of influences on Chinese TV dramas, which is a helpful counterpoint to those outside the field of China Studies, who all too often hold an inaccurate view of Chinese society as completely homogenous, in contrast to the reality of its multifaceted and complex nature. Gong’s interrogation of these influences on TV remakes of red classics combines an insider’s depth of knowledge with the distance of an expatriate, providing further evidence of the book’s originality and importance.
Gong makes an astute point about tourists engaging in ‘red tours’ which are provided free by the Chinese Communist Party: ‘who is taking whom for a ride’ (p. 28). This again poses an important challenge to inaccurate views of the homogeneity of Chinese society and politics, which invariably assume that the all-powerful Party controls the people. Her examination of the TV dramas and their characters through the lenses of gender, market commodification and social issues has an appropriate level of detail throughout the book and her arguments are consistently compelling.
There are some flaws in Remaking Red Classics in Post-Mao China. Some cited examples, which are often referred to as ‘recent’, date from the early 2000s or 1990s – not what many readers would consider to be recent. Likewise, there is an example cited of a ban implemented by the SARFT (State Administration of Radio, Film and Television) in 2004 – could a more recent example not be found? This issue of using old information is a common problem with books, although in Gong’s case this is a minor issue which does not detract substantially from the quality of the work.
While the entire focus of the work, as the title suggests, is on how TV dramas remade the Red Classics, it is surprising that there is no mention made of film remakes of the same primary content. This is notable in sections such as that on the TV drama remake of Tracks in the Snowy Forest, based on the novel of the same name which was also remade by Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark as The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhi qu wei hu shan, 2014). There is a minor error in the bibliography, which incorrectly cites both Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald as the authors of Evans’ seminal work Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949. Also in the bibliography, it would have been helpful to add Chinese characters to the pinyin for Chinese-language references, particularly for readers who are second-language learners of Chinese.
Remaking Red Classics in Post-Mao China: TV Drama as Popular Media is a valuable new addition to Red Classics studies as well as Chinese television and cultural studies. It would be informative both for the scholar working in the field and those who are less familiar with the topics Gong discusses. The innovative combination of topics analysed has resulted in a monograph which deserves its place on bookshelves.
