Globalized Chinese Cinema and Localized Western Theory (Report‪)‬

The time Chinese cinema grabbed international attention coincided with the People's Republic of China's determination to launch a modernization campaign and its concomitant "opening" to the West, as well as the general increasing trend of globalization. Since the mid-1980s, Chinese cinema, led by the so-called Fifth-Generation, has won many international awards and been widely circulated in the global market. Chinese cinema, however, has encountered oppositional criticism from both China and the West. Chinese cinema has become a hot topic in Western film criticism and has enjoyed international acclaim. Meanwhile, Chinese intellectuals and cultural/film critics have employed Western theories, such as Orientalism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism, to interpret Chinese cinema, and they claim that the images of China and the meanings of Chinese culture have been distorted and commodified to satisfy "foreigners." In other words, they feel the Fifth-Generation films give an "inaccurate" picture of China. From the mid-1980s to early 1990s, Fifth-Generation cinema was part of a broad, nationwide intellectual movement, paradigmatic of the predicament of Third World culture confronting globalized modernity. A number of Chinese critics have discussed "China's unique conditions," and "unique solutions to China's problems" from a postmodern perspective. They insist on legitimizing the local knowledge derived from China's historical context as a means to question established mainstream Western discourse. The discussion on the internationalization of Chinese cinema shows a tension that has long existed in China's objective of modernization since the late nineteenth century. That is, the tension between learning from the West and resisting the West, between particularism and universalism, and between nationalism and internationalism.