Preview: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Ang Lee's 2000 wuxia (martial arts) film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is credited with popularizing Chinese film, especially martial arts film internationally, grossing over $200 million worldwide. Watch the international trailer below and rent the full film on Amazon or YouTube, or check out the DVD from the library.
Watch Chinese Films:
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Chinese Films in the Illinois LibraryTo browse the collection of over 200 Chinese films in the Library, use the links to the right to filter by genre and topic.
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Drama FeverThis streaming service offers Latin American telenovelas, Korean soap operas, and other Asian TV and movies. Watch for free or purchase an account to watch ad-free.
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Viki.comStreaming service for Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese movies and TV. Some videos are available for free with ads, with more content available ad-free with subscription.
Web Resources:
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The China Film Archive (in Chinese)Research resources on Chinese film (current and historical).
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The Chinese Movie DatabaseNavigate from this page to three versions of the site: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and English. The Chinese Movie Database covers "production, cast and crew, awards and biographies, reviews and books, and many other information of Chinese language movies made in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other regions. Starting from 2006, the Database also includes TV programmes. In total there are 16563 feature films, 509 TV programmes, 18453 unique individules, and 1204 companies in the Database." --site text
Books in the Library:
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The Chinese Cinema Book
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Call Number: PN1993.5.C4 C4422 2011ISBN: 9781844573448Publication Date: 2011-05-09The Chinese Cinema Book provides an essential guide to the cinemas of the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora, from early cinema to the present day. -
Chinese Martial Arts Cinema
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ISBN: 9780748632510Publication Date: 2009-01-01This is the first comprehensive, fully-researched account of the historical and contemporary development of the traditional martial arts genre in the Chinese cinema known as wuxia (literal translation: martial chivalry) - a genre which audiences around the world became familiar with through the phenomenal 'crossover' hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). -
Chinese Animation
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ISBN: 9780786459773Publication Date: 2014-12-03With an output of 250,000 minutes annually, and with 8,000 producers and production units around, the Chinese are leading the field of animated films. This guide provides a comprehensible introduction to the industry's infancy, its Golden Age (Shanghai Animation Film Studio) and today's Chinese animation (in feature films, television series, and students films).
Watch Chinese TV
The Library collection has limited holdings of Chinese television shows, but you can watch online at the following links:
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Viki.comStreaming service for Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese movies and TV. Some videos are available for free with ads, with more content available ad-free with subscription.
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Drama FeverThis streaming service offers Latin American telenovelas, Korean soap operas, and other Asian TV and movies. Watch for free or purchase an account to watch ad-free.
Learn more:
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Chinese Television in the Twenty-First Century
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ISBN: 9780415745123Publication Date: 2014-09-06Although television networks are still state-owned and Party-controlled in China, the ideological landscape of television programs has become increasingly diverse and even paradoxical, simultaneously subservient and defiant, nationalistic and cosmopolitan, moralistic and fun-loving, extravagant and mundane. The book presents a number of studies of popular television programs that are sensitive to the changing production and regulatory contexts for Chinese television in the twenty-first century. -
TV Drama in China
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ISBN: 9789622099401Publication Date: 2008-11-11This collection of essays brings together the first comprehensive study of TV drama in China. The examples are diverse, highlighting the complexity of producing narrative content in a rapidly changing political and social environment. Genres examined include the revisionist Qing drama, historical and contemporary domestic dramas, anti-corruption dramas, "pink" dramas, Red Classics, stories from the Diaspora, and sit-coms. -
Television in Post-Reform China
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ISBN: 9780415425469Publication Date: 2008-03-25This book explores the political, economic, and cultural forces, locally and globally that have shaped the evolution of Chinese primetime television dramas, and the way that these dramas in turn have actively engaged in the major intellectual and policy debates concerning the path, steps, and speed of China's economic and political modernization during the post-Deng Xiaoping era.
C-pop (Chinese popular music) merges Chinese traditional music with a range of influences from the West, from hip hop to jazz to pop ballads. There are 3 main subgenres of C-pop, divided by language: Mandopop (Mandarin), Cantopop (Cantonese), and Minnan pop (Taiwanese Minnan). Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music all have large collections of C-pop available to stream. Check out the Mandopop playlist below, and explore other genres on Spotify or other streaming services.
Start your research on Chinese pop music:
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Cries of Joy, Songs of Sorrow
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ISBN: 9780824833695Publication Date: 2010-01-01This work explores Mandopop's surprisingly complex cultural implications in Taiwan and the PRC, where it has established new gender roles, created a vocabulary to express individualism, and introduced transnational culture to a country that had closed its doors to the world for 20 years. -
China with a Cut
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ISBN: 9789048511143Publication Date: 2010-01-18Provides insight into the vibrant popular music scene of contemporary China in the context of globalisation and rapid economic and social change -
Listening to China's Cultural Revolution
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ISBN: 9781137479105Publication Date: 2015-11-10Bringing together the most recent research on the Cultural Revolution in China, musicologists, historians, literary scholars, and others discuss the music and its political implications. Combined, these chapters, paint a vibrant picture of the long-lasting impact that the musical revolution had on ordinary citizens, as well as political leaders.
The Library has about 85 Chinese comics, or manhua, in English and Chinese. Webtoons (Chinese webcomics) are also popular in China, following their boom in Korea. Line Webtoon provides access to a range of webtoons from the region in English, Chinese, Korean, Thai, and Indonesian. The English page unfortunately does not indicate where comics are from. For links to Chinese-language webtoon platforms, check out Wikipedia's Manhua page.
Underground comics in China are also self published and sold in print zines in independent shops. Time Out Beijing has a short article about the underground comics scene.
Image: Time Out Beijing
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Comics Art in China
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ISBN: 9781496811745Publication Date: 2017-07-20In the most comprehensive and authoritative source on this subject, Comics Art in China covers almost all comics art forms in mainland China, providing the history from the nineteenth century to the present as well as perspectives on both the industry and the art form. -
Mangasia
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ISBN: 0500292434Publication Date: 2017-11-14An exhaustive and visually engaging account, Mangasia charts the evolution of manga from its roots in late nineteenth-century Japan through the many and varied forms of comics, cartoons, and animation created throughout Asia for more than one hundred years. With maps, timelines, and reproductions from Japan, China, Taiwan, North Korea, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh, this book is the first to explain the significance of key themes, the meanings of embodied myths, and the connections between various manga traditions. -
Hong Kong Comics
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ISBN: 1568982690Publication Date: 2002-03-01Wendy Siuyi Wong's voluminously illustrated book Hong Kong Comics examines the history of this genre from its beginnings in the early twentieth century to its most influential contemporary practitioners, and in the process traces the origin of a unique Hong Kong style. Over one thousand color manhua (each with English annotation) introduce the reader to this rich and varied form of Chinese popular culture. Available via I-Share.
2008 Beijing Olympics
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2008 Beijing OlympicsExplore photos and highlights from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and learn more about the effects of the Games and sport in China with the links and books below.
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Photos: 2008 Beijing Olympic Venues - Then and Now (2016)Photos of Beijing Olympic venues, some of which have fallen into disrepair, and others that have been renovated and repurposed.
Current events in Chinese sports:
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China Sports Review"We believe sports reflect society, and this is especially true in contemporary China. The stories in the sports leagues, clubs and personalities here often mirror the strength and resilience of the Chinese people, whose paths and choices speak for the complexity and rapid change in Chinese society. China Sports Review is a writing project established in October 2008, one month after the Beijing Olympics, with the aim of picking up interesting stories in the Chinese sports world."
Library resources:
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China SportsCall Number: Q. 796.05 CH1A print magazine on Chinese sports, in English and Chinese. Click through to the catalog record to access the titles covering earlier dates, beginning in 1960.
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Beijing's Games
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ISBN: 9780742556409Publication Date: 2008-01-28Susan Brownell sets the historical and cultural stage for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games by exploring the vital links among sports, gender, state power, Chinese nationalism, and China's national image in the West over the past century. She places the 2008 Games within the context of China's hundred-year engagement with the Olympic movement to illuminate what the Games mean to China and what the Beijing Olympic Games will mean for China's relationship with the outside world. --Amazon.com -
Women, Sport and Society in Modern China
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ISBN: 0714652350Publication Date: 2002-10-30Drawing on Chinese sources hitherto unavailable in the West including official documents and interviews with top athletes, the author explores the rise of Chinese super sportswomen and their relationship with politics, culture and society before and during the Cultural Revolution and through China's transition to a market economy. -
The National Games and National Identity in China
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ISBN: 1138628190Publication Date: 2017-06-15The history of China's National Games reflects both the transformation of elite sport in China and wider Chinese society. This is the first book to describe the origins and development of the National Games through their dynamic relationship with Chinese politics, nationalism and identity in the modern era. -
Olympic Dreams
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ISBN: 9780674028401Publication Date: 2008-05-31This book approaches questions about the nature and future of China through the lens of sports--particularly as sports finds its utmost international expression in the Olympics. Drawing on newly available archival sources to analyze a hundred-year perspective on sports in China, Olympic Dreams explores why the country became obsessed with Western sports at the turn of the twentieth century, and how it relates to China's search for a national and international identity.
Hong Kong Cinema on the Web:
In the Library:
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Chinese Face/off
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The book offers a critical perspective for approaching the question of cultural otherness by problematizing what it means to be Chinese and explaining how Hong Kong popular culture serves as an imaginary screen for its many compatriots seeking to understand what it means to be Chinese in a global age.
ISBN: 025202978XPublication Date: 2005-03-30 -
Undercurrents
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Explores Hong Kong cultural productions - cinema, fiction, popular music, and subcultural projects - and argues that while there is no overt consolidation of gay and lesbian identities in Hong Kong culture, undercurrents of diverse and complex expressions of gender and sexual variance are widely in evidence. Undercurrents uncovers a queer media culture that has been largely overlooked by critics in the West and demonstrates the cultural vitality of Hong Kong amidst political transition.
ISBN: 9780774814690Publication Date: 2008-04-16 -
Multimedia Stardom in Hong Kong
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This book elaborates the distinction between multimedia stardom and celebrity, asserting that in Hong Kong stardom has been central in the production and consumption of local media, while demonstrating the importance of multimedia stardom as part of the 'cultural Chinese' mediascape and transnational popular culture from both historical and contemporary contexts.
ISBN: 0415709121Publication Date: 2014-12-16
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Envisioning Taiwan
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Yip traces a distinctly Taiwanese sense of self vis-à-vis China, Japan, and the West through two of the island's most important cultural movements: the hsiang-t'u (or "nativist") literature of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Taiwanese New Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s.
ISBN: 9780822333579Publication Date: 2004-10-07 -
Situating Sexualities
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This is the first book in English to analyse the stunning rise to prominence of cultures of dissident sexuality in Taiwan during the 1990s. Positioned at the crossroads of queer theory and postcolonial cultural studies, this book intervenes in current debates on sexuality and globalization to argue that the current emergence of public, dissident sexualities in non-Western locations like Taiwan cannot be reduced to the effects of homogenizing 'Westernization'.
ISBN: 9789882202771Publication Date: 2003-05-01 -
The Minor Arts of Daily Life
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The Minor Arts of Daily Life is an account of the many ways in which contemporary Taiwanese approach their ordinary existence and activities. It presents a wide range of aspects of day-to-day living to convey something of the world as experienced by the Taiwanese themselves.
ISBN: 9780824827373Publication Date: 2004-03-31
Search Terms
Use these geographic terms for your subject searches in the catalog to find Chinese popular culture resources (e.g., Popular culture - China):
- China
- Taiwan
- Hong Kong (China)
- East Asia
- Chinese Language
General Resources
Web Resources:
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China Daily Culture and EntertainmentEnglish-language daily newspaper published in China.
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The BeijingerAn alternative English-language publication covering events and popular culture in Beijing.
Books:
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Locating China: Space, Place, and Popular Culture
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Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this volume examines the relationship between space and the production of local popular culture in contemporary China. The international team of contributors examine the inter-relationship between the cultural imaginary of a given place and China's continuing drive towards urbanization.
ISBN: 9780415366557Publication Date: 2005-08-08 -
Pop Culture China! Media, Arts, and Lifestyle
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This book begins with an introduction to understanding popular culture in China and covers mass media; print media; cinema, film, and video; the Internet; and also discusses the rise of consumption and consumerism. From the modernization of traditional theater to the traditional uses of modern technology, this book presents a guide to the emerging culture of a country that will inevitably become increasingly influential in coming years.
ISBN: 1849723796Publication Date: 2009-01-12 -
Popular China
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The culture of popular China emerges as a mixture of exhilarating new aspirations--as seen in the basketball fans who dream of "flying" like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant; rueful cynicism--as bitingly conveyed in the many satirical jingles that circulate by word of mouth; and painful ambivalence. The people depicted here have built their popular culture out of ideas and symbolic practices drawn from old cultural traditions, from concepts about modernity debated during the early twentieth-century republican era, from the legacies of Maoist socialism, and from contemporary global culture.
ISBN: 0742510786Publication Date: 2001-12-18
