Ideology and Utopia in China’s New Wave Cinema investigates the ways in which New Wave filmmakers represent China in this age of neoliberal reform. Through a close reading of the narrative strategy of key films in New Wave Cinema, Xiaoping Wang studies the movement’s impact on film, literature, culture and politics.

1. China’s “New Wave Cinema” in the Era of Globalization.- 2. The Arrival of Post-Socialism: Silence, Sound and Fury.- 3. The Fate and Fantasy of China’s “New Poor”.- 4. The Taste and Tragedy of China’s “Middle Class”.- 5. Memoire of Socialism and the Chinese Enlightenment.- 6. Elitism of Populism? The Problematic of Imagining the Other.- 7. The Politics of Dignity and the Destiny of China’s New Wave Cinema.

Ideology and Utopia in China’s New Wave Cinema investigates the ways in which New Wave filmmakers represent China in this age of neoliberal reform. Analyzing this paradigm shift in independent cinema, this text explores the historicity of the cinematic form and its cultural-political visions. Through a close reading of the narrative strategy of key films in New Wave Cinema, Xiaoping Wang studies the movement’s impact on film, literature, culture and politics.

“With Ideology and Utopia in China’s New Wave Cinema, Xiaoping Wang offers a nuanced and ground-breaking examination of the collective known as the Sixth Generation and their remarkable films. By positioning this body of work within the context of globalization, Wang peels away the complex layers of social questions that filmmakers like Wang Xiaoshuai and Jia Zhangke have engaged with, while offering fresh new insights into the cultural field in contemporary China.” (Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies, UCLA, USA, and author of Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy, 2009)“In this outstanding and original study, Xiaoping Wang examines many of the Chinese films celebrated in the West in recent decades, giving readers a deeper understanding of their social contexts and effects. Challenging the common view of scholars and critics who celebrate this cinema as politically subversive, he offers a trenchant Marxist critique of the ways these films, despitetheir apparent style of social realism, ultimately are complicit in the bourgeois neoliberalism that has extended its global reach into China.” (Jason McGrath, Associate Professor of Asian Languages & Literatures and Moving Image & Media Studies at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, USA, and the author of Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age, 2008)

Provides a rigorous critique of China’s new independent cinema Studies the political, cultural and societal landscape of post-socialist China Utilizes a Marxist perspective to unpack the problematic cultural politics of new wave films