JCC 6 (1) pp.

1525 Intellect Limited 2012

Journal of Chinese Cinemas

Volume 6 Number 1
2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jcc.6.1.15_1

Sheldon H. Lu
University of California at Davis

Notes on four major

paradigms in Chineselanguage film studies
Abstract

Keywords

This article examines four major critical paradigms in contemporary Chineselanguage cinema studies. It traces the genesis, characteristics, strengths and limitations of each of these theoretical models. Moreover, the author proposes a definition
of Sinophone that includes rather than excludes mainland China.

nation-state
national cinema
transnational cinema
Chinese-language
cinema
Sinophone
paradigm

A remarkable thing about the rise of Chinese film studies in the Englishspeaking world in the last twenty years or so is the attendant self-reflexivity
of the field. Even as scholars are tackling what appear to be Chinese films,
nothing is self-evident or taken for granted. They constantly raise issues about
what constitutes the very subject of Chinese cinema(s), what ought to be the
range of investigation, what are the appropriate analytical tools and what are
the suitable methodologies.
This self-inquisitive spirit manifests itself in the inaugural issue of the
Journal of Chinese Cinemas. In the Issue and Debates section, scholars with
different backgrounds examine the state of the field from various angles and
weigh in on disciplinary or interdisciplinary issues of Chinese cinema studies. Theories and ideas come and go. But those critical paradigms that seem
to better circumscribe and explain the problems at hand tend to stay longer.
It is easy to spot the inadequacies of this method or that approach. But it is

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Sheldon H. Lu

far more fruitful, and more daunting, to produce sustained good analysis of
particular issues, texts and phenomena in a given field.
I welcome the plurality of voices that have been heard in Chinese film
studies. This is a healthy polyphonic world of different persuasions and
visions, as exemplified in the first issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. For
instance, European scholar Jeroen de Kloet makes the following plea: [film
studies] requests a more elaborate theoretical framework, including, for example, not only Gilles Deleuze and Rey Chow but also Pierre Bourdieu and Bruno
Latour (Kloet 2007: 67). Apparently he is hoping for adequate utilization of the
theoretical apparatuses culled from the domains of critical theory and cultural
studies. On the other side of the critical spectrum is the position of a veteran
scholar, Paul Pickowicz, from the Pacific Coast of the United States, one of
the founders of Chinese film studies in the United States. Pickowicz calls for
China-centred models in the study of China and Chinese subjects. Those
interested in present-day Chinese cultural production, including cinema, need
theories that are China-centred, not Euro-centred (Pickowicz 2007: 47).
Early on in his book Celluloid Comrades: The Representation of Male
Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas, Song Hwee Lim perceptively
identifies three major critical paradigms in Chinese film studies (2006: 27).
Each of these models is not about one particular movement or period, say the
Fifth Generation or early Shanghai cinema, but purports to have methodological significance to the entire Chinese cinematic tradition. The three models
are Chinese national cinema, transnational Chinese cinema and Chineselanguage cinema. I happen to be associated with two of the three paradigms,
the latter two, as I have been trying to make sense of the profusion of sound and
fury emanating from a rich and vast body of film output. Although I may disagree with some of his characterization and criticism of these models, I applaud
Lim for grasping the larger picture of our field. At this juncture, I would add a
fourth major theoretical paradigm to the above three: Sinophone cinema. In the
following, I will briefly trace the genealogies of these paradigms and offer my
own comments on them. I do not think that the appearance of these terms and
theories are passing fashions or theoretical novelties. They grow out of a genuine dissatisfaction with existing critical models, especially the model of national
cinema. Theories of transnational cinema and Chinese-language cinema are
attempts to chart alternative ways of examining film production and circulation
from Chinese-speaking areas. More recently, the idea of Sinophone proffers
another lens for looking at the field of Chinese cinema studies.

National cinema
A major work of Chinese national cinema studies is none other than a book
bearing the very title Chinese National Cinema by Yingjin Zhang (2004). This
is part of a Routledge series on national cinemas. Zhangs important book
begins by acknowledging the difficulty of defending the notion of national
cinema in the age of globalization. Nevertheless, it is still meaningful to
carry out the project of a historiography of Chinese cinema. The justification
for writing a book about national cinema is then to contest the idea of
Chineseness as a pre-given, immutable essence. Zhang rightfully writes:
Rather than being constantly apprehensive about the unsettling, multi-faceted
Chineseness in Chinese national cinema, I believe it is the national as historically constructed, circulated and contested in Chinese cinema that demands
our in-depth investigation (2004: 5).

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Notes on four major paradigms

Zhang further develops this line of thinking in his book Cinema, Space, and
Polylocality in a Globalizing China. He continues to use the model of Chinese
national cinema and offers an expansive yet flexible definition. He writes:
As is well known by now, Chinese cinema has unstable borders; it
may simultaneously refer to pre-1949 cinema based in Shanghai, mainland cinema of the Peoples Republic (1949 to present), Taiwan cinema,
Hong Kong cinema, and even Chinese diasporic cinema (for example,
works by directors like Ang Lee).
(Zhang 2010: 19)
Intuitively, it might not make sense to label diasporic cinema as Chinese
cinema, especially if territoriality has been a factor in the historical process of
nation-building. However, Zhang was trying to develop a supple and nuanced
theory of polylocality and translocality, a theory that fully acknowledges the
messiness of the modern nation-state and its cultural formations.
The English phrase Chinese cinema is ambiguous. What would be
a good Chinese equivalent to it? Zhongguo dianying/cinema of the Chinese
nation? Could a film made outside Chinese territory be considered a Zhongguo
dianying? Is Ang Lees Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) a Chinese
film? Is his Hulk (2003) a Chinese film? Can we call them Zhongguo dianying? Sometimes this sort of expanded model of Chinese national cinema is
self-contradictory and inadequate in dealing with such issues. But the model
of Chinese-language cinema makes perfect sense here: yes, Crouching Tiger
Hidden Dragon is indeed a huayu dianying/Chinese-language film; no, Hulk is
definitely not a Chinese-language film.
Zhang proceeds to point out what he perceives to be a disadvantage in
the alternative model of Chinese-language cinema: its narrow linguistic
emphasis may not be sufficient to capture the rich variety of geopolitics,
regionalism, ethnicity, and polylocality in Chinese cinema (2010: 20). He
mentions film examples, such as Big Shots Funeral (Feng Xiaogang, 2011), that
use extensive English dialogue. Zhangs logic does not seem to be convincing
at this point. It is not clear why the model of national cinema would better
account for the existence of such films than the model of Chinese-language
cinema simply because certain films contain more English dialogues. Should
we call Big Shots Funeral an anglophone film then? Are the viewers of such
films primarily English speakers?
To my mind, in order to define and circumscribe any object of enquiry,
such as Chinese cinema, there must be specific material determinations
(not determinism), whether linguistic, territorial or cultural. Questions of
nationhood, language and geography are necessarily deployed, played out
and consequently interrogated in a given Chinese-language film. A concept
that has no material determination is a phantom object. Therefore, it is overhasty to dismiss any theory that emphasizes the fundamental determinations
of Chinese cinema as linguistic determinism, say, in regard to the concept
of Chinese-language cinema (more on this concept in the following).
Surely Chinese cinema is not German cinema or Japanese cinema precisely
because of certain historical, territorial, cultural and linguistic determinations. I believe that the model of national cinema is still meaningful and
useful if we clearly understand its limitations and range of signification. But
it would lose its explanatory power if it is over-stretched to resemble something it is not.

17

Sheldon H. Lu

Rest assured that the national will not simply disappear in the current
climate of globalization. The nation-state and national cinema will not vanish
too soon. The national persists in the transnational and the global. The revival
of an interest in national cinema studies is testified by the publication of the
anthology Theorising National Cinema (Vitali and Willemen 2006). However, it
is no longer possible to return to some pristine, innocent notion of the nationstate and its cinema. Scholars are aware of the historical contingency of the
nation-state and the limitations of national cinema. In their book China on
Screen: Cinema and Nation, Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar write:
First, the nation-state is not universal and transhistorical, but a socially
and historically located form of community with origins in postEnlightenment Europe; there are other ways of conceiving of the nation
or similar large communities. Second, if this form of community appears
fixed, unified, and coherent, then, that is an effect that is produced by
the suppression of internal difference and blurred boundaries. Third,
producing this effect of fixity, coherence, and unity depends upon the
establishment and recitation of stories and images the nation exists to
some extent because it is narrated.
(2006: 56)
As scholars grow dissatisfied with the limitations and inflexibility of a definition of cinema based on the model of the nation-state, they seek to reformulate and revamp the discourse of national cinema, as in the case of Zhangs
book, or offer alternative theories, such as transnational cinema.

Transnational cinema
I initiated the transnational approach in the anthology Transnational Chinese
Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender (Lu 1997). The transnational opens a
path for rethinking the problematics of nationality, identity and language in
cinematic discourse beyond the unit of the nation-state. When I first used the
term, I was also addressing certain emergent phenomena at the time, namely,
the immediate post-Cold War period in the 1990s. That was the beginning of
inter-Chinese, regional and transnational co-production of Chinese-language
films. The film industry, as a cultural industry, also participated in the general
patterns of transnational, global capitalist mode of production and circulation.
The mechanisms of film production, exhibition and consumption in China
as well as other parts of the world have spilled over the erstwhile narrow
confines of national markets. Such scattered, flexible, postmodern, postFordist mode of capital accumulation and industrial production also entails
the formation of border-crossing bodies with flexible subjectivity in cinematic
discourse. Moreover, in the writing of film history, this newfound or belated
transnational perspective allows us to re-examine what was taken for granted
as a given national cinema with a fresh eye.
The transnational does not necessarily imply the crossing of national
borders only. It could also be border-crossing on smaller or larger scales at
the subnational or supranational levels. Translocal flows (between Macau
and China, for instance), or transregional trafficking (within East Asia, e.g.
between Korea and China), are also particular expressions of transnationalism. Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar are prescient when they state that
the transnational is understood not as a higher order, but as a larger arena

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Notes on four major paradigms

connecting differences so that a variety of regional, national, and local specificities impact upon each other in various types of relationships ranging from
synergy to contest (2006: 5).
The transnational is not necessarily an accomplice of triumphant transnational capitalism. It manifests itself in multifarious ways, and is subject to appropriation by film-makers of different persuasions. I called for a more precise
delineation and classification of various kinds of transnational cinema. One may
speak of commercial transnational cinema, independent art-house transnational cinema, exilic transnational cinema and so forth (Lu 2005: 22324).
Gina Marchetti is especially sensitive to the tension between the centripetal and centrifugal forces unleashed by the transnational, namely, the dialectic
between Greater China and the Chinese diaspora. She writes:
As transnational productions become more common, questions of politics and nationalism, particularly involving Hong Kong and Taiwan,
continue to strain against a facile leap to an imagined Greater China.
However, the common experiences of the Chinese diaspora and the
global links among various communities must not be dismissed.
Particularly for those who radically may be at odds with a conservative
Chinese patriarchy, such as many heterosexual women, lesbians, and
gay men, the ability to cross borders and to participate in a wider, global
sphere transcends ethnic and cultural ties. The contradictions surrounding the label of Chinese cinema call for a truly dialectical film criticism.
(Marchetti 1998: 72)
Marchetti is attentive to both sides of the picture. The transnational is not a
euphoric celebration of a capitalist mode of production and circulation. It can
be a progressive force that liberates individuals from oppressive social structures and living conditions.
This transnational approach has been taken up in the study of world
cinema. See, for instance, the publication of books such as Transnational Cinema:
The Film Reader (Ezra and Rowden 2006) and World Cinemas, Transnational
Perspectives (Durovicova and Newman 2010). A journal titled Transnational
Cinemas has been launched in Great Britain. The Journal of Chinese Cinemas
devoted a special issue on this topic (Volume 2, Number 1, 2008). Countless
essays have taken a transnational perspective in the study of films from China,
Taiwan, Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora. I would only mention the titles
of several outstanding book-length studies in this direction in recent years:
Gina Marchettis From Tiananmen to Times Square: Transnational China and
the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens, 19891997 (2006); Gary Xus Sinascape:
Contemporary Chinese Cinema (2007); the anthology Hong Kong Connections:
Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (Morris et al. 2005); Chinese
Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity, and Diaspora co-edited by
Tan See-Kam et al. (2009); and Lingzhen Wangs volume Chinese Womens
Cinema: Transnational Contexts (2011).

Chinese-language cinema
The idea of huayu dianying has been used in the Greater China area since the
early 1990s. People employ such terms as huayu dianying and huayu yinyue
rather than Zhongguo dianying and Zhongguo yinyue to designate film and
popular music that have been produced, sung and circulated across Hong Kong,

19

Sheldon H. Lu

Taiwan, China and the Chinese diaspora. As we know now, the concept of
huayu dianying allows film scholars to bypass a geopolitical impasse caused by
the idea of the nation-state. While mainland scholars were fond of speaking of
the categories of Zhongguo dianying (mainland Chinese cinema, literally cinema
of the Chinese nation), Taiwan dianying and Xianggang dianying, Taiwanese
scholars used the vocabulary of guopian (national cinema, namely films from
the Republic of China in Taiwan), dalu pian/mainland Chinese cinema and
Gangpian/Hong Kong cinema. Apparently, film scholars from across the Taiwan
Straits had diametrically opposed views about what constituted proper Zhongguo
dianying. By leaving aside the question of political legitimacy and national
boundary, huayu dianying allows film workers of different ideological persuasions to engage in fruitful dialogues and collaborations. And fortunately this is
what has happened since the early 1990s to the present day.
However, the term huayu dianying did not receive wide circulation,
let alone adequate theorization, in the English-speaking academia. It did
not have an English equivalent. The first appearance of the English phrase
Chinese-language cinema is probably Emilie Yueh-yu Yehs article Defining
Chinese, which is a book review of Chinese Cinemas: Identities, Forms,
Politics published in Jump Cut in 1998. Yeh was dissatisfied with the term
Chinese cinema (Zhongguo dianyang) and the incorporation of Taiwanese
cinema and Hong Kong cinema under this broad rubric. Yeh surveys the state
of English scholarship at the time and is dismayed by its blind spots. She looks
for inspiration from the other direction, and writes:
[R]ecent Chinese publications in Hong Kong and Taiwan have been
striving to modify the ambivalent term Chinese cinema by suggesting a counter-hegemonic perspective to study the three cinemas. Some
have begun to replace Chinese cinema with Chinese-language cinema
(zhongwen dianying or huayu dianying) as a more accurate term that
would not privilege any one of the three cinemas. However, it functions
more as an ad hoc term. As this interpretation has only begun to gain
popularity and validity in many Chinese articles, it is hardly addressed
in the most recent English books on the subject.
(Yeh 1998: 74)
Yeh and I then took steps to disseminate this term to English speakers/
readers in a theoretically coherent way. The film journal Post Script published
a special double issue on Chinese Cinema in 2001. In our introduction to
the special issue, Centennial reflections on Chinese-language cinemas, the
term was defined and highlighted (Lu and Yeh 2001: 3). The special issue
was later expanded into a definitive anthology Chinese-Language Film:
Historiography, Poetics, Politics published by the University of Hawaii Press
in 2005. We defined Chinese-language films as films that use predominantly
Chinese dialects and are made in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and
the Chinese diaspora, as well as those produced through transnational collaborations with other film industries (Lu and Yeh 2005: 1). Once an ad hoc
term, Chinese-language cinema (huayu dianying) is now a concept that has
been widely accepted and used in film scholarship. Institutions send out new
job descriptions and advertisements in order to recruit scholars of Chineselanguage cinema. The term entails scholars to circumvent certain thorny
issues without getting into the pitfalls of the politics of the modern Chinese
nation-state.

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Notes on four major paradigms

Sinophone
We may add another major critical paradigm to the three that Lim outlined
earlier, namely, the Sinophone, or Sinophone cinema. It appears then that
Chinese national cinema, transnational Chinese cinema, Chinese-language
cinema and Sinophone cinema are the four major theoretical modes at the
moment, with significant points of contrasts as well as overlaps between them.
The term Sinophone probably first appeared in a long footnote in
Shu-mei Shihs essay Global literature and the technologies of recognition
published in the PMLA in 2004. Shih writes:
By sinophone literature I mean literature written in Chinese by
Chinese-speaking writers in various parts of the world outside China
as distinguished from Chinese literature literature from China. The
largest outpost of sinophone literature is from Taiwan and prehandover
Hong Kong, but throughout Southeast Asia there were many vibrant
sinophone literary traditions and practices in the twentieth century.
Numerous writers in the United States, Canada, and Europe also write
in Chinese, the most luminary of whom is Gao Xingjian, the Nobel
Prize winner in 2000. The imperative of coining the term sinophone is
to contest the neglect and marginalization of literatures in Chinese
published outside China and the selective, ideological, and arbitrary
co-optation of these literatures in Chinese literary history. Sinophone, in
a sense, is similar to anglophone and francophone in that Chinese is seen
by some as a colonial language (in Taiwan).
(2004: 29, emphasis in original)
Later on, she expanded the term from literature to the visual field in her book
Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific published in
2007. The site of the Sinophone is a network of places of cultural production
outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, where a historical process of heterogenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture has
been taking place for several centuries (Shih 2007: 4). Yet in another essay,
Shih seems to further expand the notion of the Sinophone to accommodate
the voices of ethnic minorities from within mainland China: Tibetan, Uighur,
Mongolian and other (Shih 2010: 474).
Shihs groundbreaking coinage of Sinophone is refreshing and inspiring. The term opened an entirely new way of framing Chinese-language
cultural production and circulation. Of course, we may disagree with particular inconsistencies of Shihs first theorization of the term in the PMLA
and subsequent writings. For instance, Taiwan is not a monolithic entity
although Shih calls it a large outpost of Sinophone literature. True, some
indigenous Taiwanese may regard Chinese a colonial language; but the official name of the body politic is still the Republic of China as if it were the
sole legitimate heir to the Chinese nation. For them, Chinese is their cherished mother tongue.
Shih also lumps together anglophone and francophone as similar linguistic and historical formations. But as we all know, these notions are rather
distinct in an important way. Anglophone includes literature or cultural
productions from all English-speaking countries, from both Great Britain and
its former colonies: United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and so
forth. In contrast, francophone includes cultural productions from outside the

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Sheldon H. Lu

sovereign nation of France. Shih is apparently leaning towards the model of

francophone in the definition of the Sinophone. As a result, Sinophone carries
an ideological bent: anti-sinocentrism. Because China lies outside the perimeters of Sinophone as defined by Shih, her theory of Sinophone also sounds
like a theory of Chinese diaspora that does not privilege ancestral home. In the
words of another critic, Sinophone studies, in dialogue with national studies,
have the potential to open up new perspectives. By looking beyond the usual
circle of Chinese-language writers and readers, Sinophone studies compel us
to rethink the relationship between modern China and the world on multiple
scales (Tsu 2010: 23637).
True as that might be, this definition is restrictive in some other way even
as it opens new vistas of critical engagement. Sinophone is predicated upon
the exclusion of China in the same way francophone is built on the exclusion
of France. But China is not France. More precisely, China was not as extensively involved in the colonization of other countries in the modern era. In
fact, part of China itself was colonized by major European powers such as
France. There was such a thing as the French Concession in Shanghai in the
age of colonialism and imperialism. China and France, and Sinophone and
francophone, do not carry the same valence in the complex web of history,
language, politics and culture across the modern world.
Another way of defining Sinophone is not to exclude China from its
geographic and linguistic range. Sinophone would include China, Taiwan,
Hong Kong, Macau and the Chinese diaspora. This is how I have deployed
the term. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and I myself first invoked the idea Sinophone
cinema in Introduction: Mapping the field of Chinese-language cinema,
published in 2005 (Lu and Yeh 2005: 4). I further elaborated on the notion
of Sinophone in the essay Dialect and modernity in 21th-century Sinophone
cinema published in 2007. In that piece, I stated the following:
Greater China is not necessarily a monolithic, colonial, oppressive
geopolitical entity, or an intrinsically conservative concept. Neither is
Sinophone cultural production from the margins an inherently postcolonial, counter-hegemonic discourse. A films political and cultural
impact depends on specific conjectures of forces and circumstances.
There is no one dominant voice in the field. The multiple tongues and
dialects used in varieties of Sinophone cinema testify to the fracturing
of China and Chineseness. Each dialect-speaker is the voice of a special
class, represents a particular stage of socio-economic development, and
embodies a specific level of modernity within a messy ensemble of heterogeneous formations in China and the Chinese diaspora. This profusion of accents in fact comprises a pan-Chinese world a collective of
diverse identities and positionalities that a single geopolitical, national
entity is unable to contain. Shijie or tianxia is not a monologic world
speaking one universal language. The world of Sinophone cinema is a
field of multilingual, multi-dialectal articulations that constantly challenge and re-define the boundaries of groups, ethnicities, and national
affiliations.
(Lu 2007)
Subsequently, I debated the usage of the term in my review of Shu-mei Shihs
book Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Lu 2008)

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Notes on four major paradigms

as well as in an interview with Chinese scholar Li Fengliang (2011: 24951).

When I adopted the term, it was almost interchangeable with Chineselanguage cinema except that Sinophone evokes certain connotations beyond
its surface literal meaning: phone, francophone, anglophone, lusophone,
etc. The phone connection brings up the past history of European colonization of other parts of the world as well as the continual lingering effect of
colonialism, namely, postcoloniality that manifests itself in language, culture,
psychology and everyday life. Sinophone as such shares the same postcolonial problematic with other phones. I would say that Sinophone cinema
denotes the field and range of Chinese-language cinema and yet at the same
time is particularly sensitive to issues of diaspora, identity-formation, colonialism and postcoloniality.
To me, it would be more productive if we include mainland China within
the range of the Sinophone. The cinema, culture, history, languages and
dialects of mainland China are bound with those of the periphery. This is
even the case within the one same film. For instance, how would one categorize the national origin of numerous co-productions? These films and TV
dramas very often are at the same time mainland-Chinese, Taiwanese and
Hong Kongese.
I would like to end my discussion by tracing the transnational screening
and circulation of Chinese films from the silent era. The story goes as follows.
One of the great classics from the silent era, Shenn/Goddess (Wu Yonggang,
1934), was screened at the San Francisco Silent Festival in 2004. Because of its
popularity at the festival, another film starring Ruan Lingyu, Taohua qixu ji/
The Peach Girl (literally, Peach Blossoms Shed Tears of Blood, Bu Wancang, 1931)
was screened at the festival the following year, 2005. New piano music was
added to the silent films. Now the films speak not only through acting, gesture,
image, editing, but also through music in the latest North American incarnation. Films from the heyday of Shanghai modernity in the 1930s received
a new lease on life in the transnational circuits of exhibition and consumption. Film, a medium and public sphere for debating about social issues (class
inequality, prejudice) in the nation-building process of Republican China, is
decontextualized and recontextualized in a theatre on Castro Street, an area of
San Francisco known for its multicultural tolerance.
Interestingly enough, The Peach Girl also appears in a Taiwanese documentary Tiaowu shidai/Viva Tonal: The Dance Age (2003). This is documentary about
the rise, popularity and demise of Taiwanese-language (or Taiwanese dialect,
Taiyu) songs in Japanese-rule colonial era. As such, the film is a description of
and argument for a distinct local modernity Taiwanese modernity grounded
in language. Pro-independence critics and politicians could easily seize upon
this film to make a case for their cause.
However, Shanghai film culture turned up in the film. The screening of
The Peach Girl was accompanied by a benshi (bianshi), an interlingual translator who explained the film to the audience in Taiyu. The benshi tradition
harked back to a Japanese practice, which was later transported to Taiwan.
This Taiwanese adoption of a Japanese cinematic convention is already an
intriguing story of cultural and linguistic translation (Chiu 2011). It becomes
an even more fascinating case when this Japanese convention is utilized by
local Taiwanese to translate films from mainland China. Chinese culture must
be translated and made indigenous for the local population. Chinese national
cinema, in the silent Shanghai era, must literally speak to a transnational
circuit of audiences in the Chinese diaspora. It must speak the language of the

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Sheldon H. Lu

locals. Cinematic modernity is the story of the translocal, transregional and

transnational circulation of images, speeches and dialects inside and outside
China, in Chinese cultural centres whether under colonial rule or under the
sovereignty of another nation. Chinese national cinema from cosmopolitan
Shanghai is embedded as well as dissolved in a multiplicity of locales: Taipei,
San Francisco and so forth. In the long process of transnational migration
and screening that spans decades and crosses continents, these films have
obtained multiple new layers of meaning.
In conclusion, there are two definitions of Sinophone. One includes China
and the other excludes China. I would opt for a definition of the term that
includes China for the various reasons stated above.

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Suggested citation
Lu, S. H. (2012), Notes on four major paradigms in Chinese-language
film studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6: 1, pp. 1525, doi: 10.1386/
jcc.6.1.15_1

Contributor details
Sheldon H. Lu is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University
of California, Davis. He is the author, editor and co-editor of many books,
including Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge (Hong Kong
University Press, 2009).
Contact: Comparative Literature, 213 Sproul Hall, One Shields Avenue,
University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
E-mail: shlu@ucdavis.edu

25

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