History, Memory, Nostalgia: Rewriting Socialism in Chinese Cinema and Television Drama

Abstract

This study will focus on a cluster of new films and television dramas that revisit and rewrite the history of Chinese socialism from a different point of view in light of the capitalist frenzy of commercialism and commodification in contemporary post-socialist China. It seems that it is only possible after some 20 years, after the historical wounds and traumas have been largely healed, that a new critical distance can be reached in regard to the past. Socialism during the 1950s-1970s conveniently signifies the values and ideals that are putatively absent today—idealism, egalitarianism, self-sacrifice, and innocence. The critique of the present consumer society thus comes in the form of nostalgia for the past in contemporary Chinese cinema.