This essay examines media dissemination in mid to late twentieth-century China, during and after the Cultural Revolution, as China established its place in the modern world. Through a psychoanalytic inquiry into the revolutionary romance genre and fifth- generation Chinese film—in particular, Zhang Yimou’s film To Live (1994)—this essay will analyze the formation of national narratives across media formats and the hierarchization of this modern knowledge production. I argue that the dissonance between the popular images of the Cultural Revolution and post-Mao highbrow filmography reveals the imaginative essence of nationhood.
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Iris Shu (2024) studied this question.
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