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245 Pages·2008·2.04 MB·English

SIGNIFYING THE LOCAL: MEDIA PRODUCTIONS RENDERED IN
LOCAL LANGUAGES IN MAINLAND CHINA SINCE 2000
A Dissertation
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of Cornell University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
by
Jin Liu
August 2008
© 2008 Jin Liu
SIGNIFYING THE LOCAL: MEDIA PRODUCTIONS RENDERED IN
LOCAL LANGUAGES IN MAINLAND CHINA SINCE 2000
Jin Liu, Ph. D.
Cornell University 2008

My dissertation examines recent cultural productions rendered in local
languages in the fields of television, film, fiction, popular music, and the Internet in
mainland China since 2000, when the new national language law prescribed the
standard Putonghua Mandarin as the principal language for broadcast media and
movies. My dissertation sets out to examine this unsettled tension and to explore the
rhetorical use of local language in different fields of cultural production. In television,
local language functions as a humorous and satirical mechanism to evoke laughter that
can foster a sense of local community and assert the local as the site of distinctive
cultural production. In film and fiction, local language serves as an important marker
of marginality, allowing filmmakers and writers rhetorically to position themselves in
the margins to criticize the center and to repudiate the ideologies of modernism. In
popular music, increasingly mediated by the Internet, local language has been
explored by the urban educated youth to articulate a distinct youth identity in their
negotiation with a globalizing and cosmopolitan culture.
Drawing on cultural and literary theories, media studies, sociolinguistics, and
dialectology, my interdisciplinary research focuses its analysis on many important but
overlooked issues. I explore at length the rhetorical use of local languages to represent
“the marginal and the unassimilated” in the underground and independent films of Jia
Zhangke and others; I apply Bakhtin’s theory of folk humor to the ambiguous laughter
evoked by Zhao Benshan’s comic sketches that are deeply rooted in the Northeast folk
performing art Errenzhuan; I explain how the laughter wrought through the presence
of local language in the regional TV shows can help foster a sense of local
community. My research on the significance of locality also contributes to the study of
globalization. If globalization is seen as homogenization and centralization, the local
language texts assert the value of pluralism and diversity, and at the same time resist
the dominance of both global and national cultural colonization. The burgeoning
regional television shows rendered in local languages and the proliferation of the use
of local languages on the Internet attest to the urgency of re-imagining a distinct local
community for the local inhabitants in the increasing uncertainty of defining locality.
Both the global, national cultures and the traditional, indigenous cultural resources are
appropriated for self-definition and self-development. On the dialectics of the global
and the local, the global and the local do not pose as cultural polarities, but are
interpenetrating, interacting, and mutually signifying.
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jin Liu got her B.A. and M.A. in Chinese Linguistics respectively in 1997 and 2000 in
the Department of Chinese Languages and Literature at Peking University in the
People’s Republic of China. She pursued her Ph.D. degree in East Asian Literature in
the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University from 2000 to 2008. She will
become an assistant professor of Chinese at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the
fall 2008.

iii
to Zhaoqin 照钦 and Ningning 宁宁

iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Professor Edward Gunn. It was his book on this topic that first
sparkled my interest in this area of study and inspired me to undertake this dissertation
research. My deep gratitude to him for his unfailing interest in and continued
encouragement to my research, his super-vision in directing my attention to important
theories and sources, his scrupulous reading and meticulous editing of all of the
manuscript in several drafts, his incisive and invaluable comments, as well as his step-
by-step guidance in my different stages of writing. I am also indebted to Professor
Sherman Cochran and Professor John Whitman for their thought-provoking courses,
their consistent encouragement and support, and for introducing theories and
scholarship in their fields that are related to my research.
I would like to thank the East Asia Program at Cornell for providing me grants
for my field trips in China. I would also like to express my gratitude to the many
people who have provided assistance and support in my data collection in various
locations. For underground films, many thanks to Wang Zhuoyi, Cheng Kai, Zhang
Yaxuan, Gan Xiao’er, and other film scholars and directors in Beijing. For the
television, my special thanks to Xu Ting and Zhang Jianmin in Hangzhou, Xu Tao,
Zhang Liu, Zhang Peng, and Tian Yigui in Chongqing, Zha Zhengxian in Shanghai,
and Xu Zhiqiang in Shandong. I sincerely appreciate their generously sharing opinions
and providing me first-hand, insider information.
Finally, the most attentive love, support, and constant “pushing” from my
husband Zhaoqin Meng have been crucial to the writing and completion of this
dissertation. My now five-year-old daughter Michelle (Ningning) has also been very
understanding to tolerate her mom who cannot spend many weekends playing with
her. This dissertation is dedicated to them and our loving families in China.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Biographical Sketch iii
Dedication iv
Acknowledgments v
List of Tables vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 An Overview of Television Series Productions since 2000 12
Chapter 2 Performativity in Dubbing Films in Local Languages 37
Chapter 3 Empowering Local Community: TV News Talk Shows
in Local Languages 60
Chapter 4 Ambivalent Laughter: Comic Sketches in CCTV’s
“Spring Festival Eve Gala” 79
Chapter 5 Popular Music and Local Youth Identity in the Age of the Internet 105
Chapter 6 The Rhetoric of Local Languages as the Marginal: Chinese
Underground and Independent Films by Jia Zhangke and others 142
Chapter 7 The Unassimilated Voice Continued in Recent Fiction
in Local Languages 173
Conclusion 205
Visual and Audio Sources 213
Bibliography 217
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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 A Dubbing Clip in the Sichuan Mandarin Version of Tom and Jerry 49
Table 2 TV News Talk Shows in Local Languages as of 2005 66
Table 3 Intonation Variations in the Comic Sketches in the Galas 87

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INTRODUCTION

For years, the central government in Mainland China has been promoting the standard
Putonghua Mandarin (common speech Mandarin) as the official national language, the
principal language for mass media and school education. Those subnational local
languages, dialects,1 or fangyan (―regional speech‖) in Chinese have been thus
subordinated and suppressed in this project of building a modern, national culture. On
October 31, 2000, the Beijing government promulgated the first law on language and
writing, the Law of the People‘s Republic of China on the Use of Chinese Languages
and Chinese Characters (Zhonghua renmin gonghegong guojia tongyong yuyan
wenzifa), effective from January 1, 2001. As the law prescribes, Putonghua Mandarin
is the principal language in broadcast radio and television, and movies (Articles 12
and 14). Local languages are strongly discouraged in mass media, and their use is
limited to a few occasions (Article 16). However, the use of local language in mass
media didn‘t disappear with the new regulations. Instead, the new millennium
witnesses an expanding use of local language in mass media and literature. In the
television field, a variety of television shows and genres rendered in local languages
are burgeoning: the news talk shows in which news is narrated in local language rather
than broadcast in the standard Mandarin, the programs of dubbing films in local
languages, the so-called lanmuju (column docudrama) programs that cast
nonprofessional, local residents and tell short stories about their ordinary lives. In the
film field, Jia Zhangke‘s ―Hometown Trilogy,‖ largely in Shanxi Mandarin, ushered in
a wave of underground and independent films employing local languages. Besides

1 The controversy over the relationship between dialect and language is a global and often politicized
problem. This study will mainly use the term of ―local languages‖ for fangyan. For a historical study of
standard languages and dialects in the context of nation building, see Hobsbawm (1992: 51-63). For the
terminological dilemma faced in the Chinese linguistic situation, see DeFrancis (1984: 55-57).
1