Cosmopolitanism with Chinese Characteristics: transnational male images in Chinese TV Dramas

Abstract

The study of Chinese masculinities in a transnational setting has now emerged as a both imperative and promising area of exploration. On the one hand, “Chinese masculinity” is increasingly represented in relation to foreigners and foreignness in the Chinese media and involves a paradoxical interplay between nationalist sentiments and cosmopolitan desires in the popular imagination. On the other hand, new discourses and practices of masculinities exhibit a deterritorialized Chinese subjectivity, either through physical migration or imagination through the media. In both respects, television plays an important role that invites fruitful analysis. The paper analyzes a group of male images in Chinese television dramas of recent years and examines how national identity is constructed through negotiation of the meaning of gender. These images, such as white-collar elite in transnational corporations, returnees from overseas and Chinese businessmen in foreign countries, show a conspicuous desire to represent Chinese men in a cosmopolitan fashion and to link masculinity with modernity. In representations of this “transnational business masculinity,” English is widely spoken and has become a symbol of the cosmopolitan identity. A Western lifestyle (e.g., drinking coffee) is represented as a middle-class status symbol and an indicator of knowledge of the world and modernity. Another venue for the performance of cosmopolitan masculinity is some foreign locale. Dramas depicting the lives of overseas Chinese, including students, tourists, new immigrants and merchants, have become increasingly popular in recent years. The paper examines how these transnational male images exhibit hybridity and negotiation between global and local discourses of masculinity and how this cosmopolitan masculinity squares with the state’s agenda of building a modern and cosmopolitan image of the country and, in particular, its educated younger elite.