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Post-millennium Beijing experienced rapid economic growth as a result of Chinas reform policies, fostering burgeoning urbanization and intensifying materialism and societal stratification. Witnessing this metropolitan backdrop, Chinese auteur Li Yu adopted a documentary style in her cinematic narrative in the feature film Pingguo (Lost in Beijing, 2007), which premiered in the same year. Under the influence of Western feminist filmmakers, Lis notable call for social attention to marginalized female workers in the film demonstrated her distinctive ways of amplifying womens voices in Chinese cinema. Through an intertextual analysis of masseuse Xiao Mei, a "Northern Drifter" who tragically descends into a sexualized worker, this thesis would argue how by portraying the gradual psychic and physical alienation of Xiao Mei under the pressure of urbanization and economic competition, Li condenses the existential and spiritual dilemmas of contemporary underclass women into a supporting figure. While advocating for metropolises like Beijing to consider these "neglected majorities" in their development, this endeavor contributes to the study of productions from the late period of China's reform and opening up, as well as to the examination of contemporary Chinese feminist cinema.
Jichu Zha (2024) studied this question.