From real time to virtual reality: Chinese cinema in the internet age

What has become of the collective memory in the years between the Tian'anmen incident of 1989 and the PRC joining the WTO in 2001, a period that witnessed the proliferation of McDonalds restaurants and Internet bars in Chinese cities? This paper explores the changing values through three works that take the World Wide Web as their subject, namely Love in the Internet Age, also known as Love in Cyberspace (Wanglu shidai de aiqing, 1999), Q3 (1999), and First Intimate Encounter, also known as Flyin' Dance (Diyici de qinmi jiechu, 2001). The films do not offer a single vision of cyberspace, nor do they ascribe to the same filmic aesthetics or genre. Yet as a whole they provide a glimpse of China in the Internet age. They suggest that from a repository of collective memory, cyberspace has become the arena for an alternative existence free of the limitations of time and space. They trace the trajectory from a culture insistent on collective commemoration to a society willing to suspend its consciousness outside historical memory.