“An invaluable aid for student understanding of sociopolitical, sociocultural, and sociolinguistic aspects of Chinese studies. Highly recommended.” —Choice, March 2006

For centuries the sub-national languages of China have been a fundamental feature in daily life and popular culture, while a standardized form of Mandarin has been adopted as the language of the state (including education). Suppressed during powerful movements to establish a modern, national culture, these local languages or dialects have nevertheless survived, and their resurgence in the media and literature has caused tensions to surface. Concerns for education, law, and commerce have all promoted a standard national language, yet, at the same time, as local societies have undergone massive transformations, the need to re-imagine communities has repeatedly challenged the adequacy of a single language to represent them. Moreover, local languages have been presented in dramatically different and conflicted roles—as symbols of the failure to assimilate to a cultural mainstream (which in turn may be parodied as contingent and inadequate) or asserting the identity of a community as a site of its own cultural production and not merely as a venue for transmitting a national culture. Acknowledging local language as authentic may also reveal cultural hegemonies within regions and contested versions of communities.

This ground-breaking study surveys in detail the sweep of local languages in television, radio, film, and print culture of late twentieth-century mainland China, especially Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Chengdu, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Focusing on these regions, the analysis contrasts and compares these distinct communities to each other and to the ways in which they mediate culture as a national institution. It draws on a wide range of critical, cultural, and media studies and explores how varied genres and media have sought to represent the tensions and assertions within these societies and how they construct the local in an age of globalization.

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Edward M. Gunn is professor of Chinese literature in the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University.

Read the introduction (PDF).