Leaving China

This fascinating book offers fresh insight into contemporary China and the Chinese diaspora experience and consciousness through a lively and innovative examination of media old and new. Exploring the relationship between media, mobility, and the formation of transnational subjectivities, Wanning Sun shows how media production and consumption within China and among Chinese diasporic communities contributes to a changing sense of self, place, space, and nation. Writing with verve and understanding, Sun draws on a close reading of print, film, television, internet, and other new media technologies to draw a rich picture of the Chinese transnational imagination.

More than ever before, China is on the move. When the flow of people and images is fused, meanings of self, place, space, community, and nation become unstable and contestable. This fascinating book explores the ways in which movement within and across the national borders of the PRC has influenced the imagination of the Chinese people, both those who remain and those who have left. Travelers or no, all participate in the production and consumption of images and narratives of travel, thus contributing to the formation of transnational subjectivities. Wanning Sun offers a fine-grained analysis of the significant narrative forms and discursive strategies used in representing transnational space in contemporary China. This includes looking at how stay-at-homes fantasize about faraway or unknown places, and how those in the diaspora remember experiences of familiar places. She considers the ways in which mobility-of people, capital, and images-affects localities through individuals' constructions of a sense of place. Relatedly, the author illustrates how economic, social, and political forces either facilitate or inhibit the formation of a particular kind of transnational subjectivity.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Leaving China
Chapter 2 Going Home or Going Places: Television in the Village
Chapter 3 Going Abroad or Staying Home: Cinema, Fantasy, and the World City
Chapter 4 Arriving at the Global City: Television Dramas and Spatial Imagination
Chapter 5 Haggling in the Margin: Videotapes and Paradiasporic Audiences
Chapter 6 Fantasizing the Homeland: The Internet, Memory, and Exilic Longings
Chapter 7 Eating Food and Telling Stories: From Home(land) to Homepage
Chapter 8 Fragmenting the National Time-Space: Media Events in the Satellite Age
Chapter 9 Chinese in the Global Village: Olympics and an Electronic Nation
Chapter 10 Conclusion: Toward a Transnational China?