China Pop!: Pop Culture, Propaganda, Pacific Pop-Ups

Sheng-Mei Ma

Book cover for China Pop!: Pop Culture, Propaganda, Pacific Pop-Ups
Book cover for China Pop!: Pop Culture, Propaganda, Pacific Pop-Ups
Book cover for China Pop!: Pop Culture, Propaganda, Pacific Pop-Ups
Book cover for China Pop!: Pop Culture, Propaganda, Pacific Pop-Ups

China Pop!: Pop Culture, Propaganda, Pacific Pop-Ups

China Pop!: Pop Culture, Propaganda, Pacific Pop-Ups

Sheng-Mei Ma

Member Benefits

  • 30% Off All Books - Savings that support storytellers, not stock prices.
  • Fight Book Bans - Every membership sends a book to LGBTQ+ youth in affected states.
Member Book Price
$199.92 $139.94
Non-Member Book Price $199.92

An annual membership will be billed at $48/year.

Discount applies to first-time members only. Already a member? Log in here.

View full details

Description

In China Pop! Sheng-mei Ma analyzes the propaganda-laced millennial Chinese pop culture-particularly TV dramas, films, and web novels-that streams online for over one billion Sinophone consumers in China and in diaspora. In part 1, Ma lays bare the "seductive art of propaganda" by reviewing TV series aired during the Chinese Communist Party Centennial in 2021 and the ways pop culture and propaganda are spliced. In part 2, he zeroes in on how the shared traumatic shock of the Cultural Revolution continues to echo. Parts 3 and 4 cross the Pacific to incorporate analysis of media originating outside of China, such as white depictions of revolutionary zeal and Asian American portrayals of immigrant characters that fetishize Asianness and reanimate stereotypes. With methodological daring, Ma challenges existing scholarship by blending the professional and the personal through a lively and accessible autotheoretical approach. China Pop! walks the East-West cultural tightrope to critique a wide range of pop culture from both sides of the Pacific and sheds new light on the workings of propaganda on its intended audiences and its wider, more subtle reaches in both political and cultural spheres.

About the Author

Sheng-mei Ma is Professor of English at Michigan State University and author of over a dozen books, including The Tao of S: America's Chinee & the Chinese Century in Literature and Film, Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity, East-West Montage: Reflections on Asian Bodies in Diaspora, and The Deathly Embrace: Orientalism and Asian American Identity.

Critical Reviews

"With remarkable depth and breadth, China Pop! offers a timely exploration of the intricacies, dynamics, and tensions in Chinese millennial popular culture both within and beyond the national border. In this valuable and fascinating contribution to the limited literature on contemporary Chinese pop culture, Ma convincingly analyzes the duality and dialectics inherent in propaganda, the doubling motif, the aesthetics of the uncanny, the cleaving of Chineseness, and more. A stroke of genius." --Jin Liu, author of Signifying the Local: Media Productions Rendered in Local Languages in Mainland China in the New Millennium

Publishing Information

Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Pub date: 2024-11-15
Length: 274 pages

The Allstora Membership

Membership Perks:

  • Save 30% on all online store purchases
  • Exclusive access to author's content
  • You pay less, but authors still earn double

Membership Terms:

First Month: $0.00
Monthly price: $5.00
  • To access membership discount simply log in and add to cart, discount applied automatically.
  • One month free trial, cancel anytime. Membership renews on the 15th of each month.