Description
The Emergence of the New Rich as a Structure of Feeling in Stand Straight, Don’t Bend Over (1993) and Shanghai Fever (1994)
This paper aims to show how studying the experience of money in Chinese films can provide a refreshing angle to understand social changes when People’s Republic of China (PRC) was transforming into a market economy after Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour since 1992. My film analysis will delineate how the transformation of subjectivity connects with the change of the milieu through characters’ everyday experiences of money as depicted in Stand Straight, Don’t Bend Over(Zhanzhi Luo, Bie Paxia, Huang Jianxin, 1993) and Shanghai Fever (Gu Feng, Lee Kwok-Laap, 1994). Both Stand Straight and Fever were made after Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour and the following Fourteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1992, when ‘the market economy was, for the first time, officially recognised as the ultimate goal of China’s economic reform’ (Coase and Wang 2012, 123). Both films narrate the emergence of the new rich – a getihu (self-employed businessman) in Stand Straight and a stock market parvenu in Fever – and the impact of their sudden wealth on their surrounding communities. The emergence of the new rich in these two films brings about new emotional and bodily experiences of money. I argue that these new experiences lead to a (trans)formation of subjectivity and a structure of feeling unique to the era when market economy was booming in China.
| Period | 5 Jun 2024 → 6 Jun 2024 |
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| Event type | Conference |