The Question of the Nation in Contemporary Chinese Film: An Introduction

Abstract

The government of the People’s Republic of China is committed to a policy of irredentism with regard to Taiwan, and Taiwan, for its part, seems at best interested in maintaining the status quo and, increasingly over time, more inclined toward all out separation from the Mainland when it comes to matters of State. Yet there is little pondering of this problem in Chinese cultural studies. The four articles in this symposium do not all explicitly address the problem of the nation in Chinese film to the exclusion of other themes, but they do implicitly engage this issue as they endeavor to parse the work of filmmakers from the liang’an sandi of the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.