No abstract

Using the Mandarin-language global blockbuster Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a case, this project aims to study how an oriental culture is globalized against the odds as predicted by theories of cultural imperialism. First, the globalization of local talents is found to be a precondition for this reversed cultural flow. Second, the formation of a global-local alliance, consisting of networks of both local and global firms and professionals, plays a critical role. The alliance serves to translate local cultural capital into economic capital and to enhance the transculturability of the cultural product. To be accountable to the Western agencies and to be faithful to local culture, the production team is under constant pressure to strike a balance between particularization and universalization. The implications of this unprecedented case are discussed.

Advertising in early 20th-century China played a central role in turning Chinese people into consumers. Advertisements between 1921 and 1929 in Shenbao, one of the most influential newspapers ever published in China, were studied to identify discourses of gender within the overarching discourse of Chinese people as a consumer population. Four discursive formations were identified: (1) female and male as ungendered categories of the consumer population, (2) woman and man as citizens of China, (3) one happy family as a consumption unit, and (4) women as a special group of consumers.