This book explores the ways the narration of the nation in popular literatures, film, and television gives rise to various public discourses of contemporary China, and defines social subjects such as intellectuals, netizens, media elites, and state-sponsored filmmakers. It argues that these subjects have, to varying degrees, transformed the state project of modernization into their own through mass aestheticization of the nation, whereby postsocialist politics is contingent upon and performative through national aesthetics. By analyzing cultural products from a wide range of media, including the Internet, this book sheds light on the historical significance of nationalism for mass imagination and identification in the less-than-democratic system of China for the past three decades.

Yipeng Shen is Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies and International Studies at Trinity College, USA. His main research interests are Asian literature, films, and media culture, particularly modern and contemporary Chinese culture and society.