This book examines Chinese film in the twenty-first century. Organised around the themes ‘movements’, ‘genres’, and ‘intermedia’, it reflects on how Chinese cinema has changed, adapted, and evolved over past decades, and prognosticates as to its future trajectories. It considers how established film genres in China have adapted and transformed themselves, and discusses current shifts in documentary filmmaking, the ethos and practices of ‘grassroots intellectual’ independent filmmakers, and the adaption of foreign film genres to serve the ideological and political needs of the present. It also explores how film is drawing upon the socio-historical and political contexts of the past to create new cinematic discourses, and the ways film is providing a voice to previously marginalised ethnic groups. In addition, the book analyses the influences of past aesthetic traditions on the creative and artistic expressions of twenty-first century films, and cinema’s relation to other media forms, including folktales, moving image installations, architecture and painting. Throughout, the book assesses how Chinese films have been conceptualised, examined, and communicated domestically and abroad, and emphasises the importance of new directions in Chinese film, thus highlighting the plurality, vitality, and hybridity of Chinese cinema in the twenty-first century.

This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date scholarly examination of how China builds international relationships through public diplomacy practices, together with an assessment of the impact of these practices around the world. It explores the sources of China's evolving strategies, how the past influences the present, and the impact of domestic factors that shape China's communication strategies. Including a wide range of detailed examples, the book also discusses how far China is creating new models that will reshape the current landscape of public diplomacy. Chapters 1 and 11 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com.

The "Reform Era" (1979-present) in China has been a time of massive social and economic change, and has witnessed China's transition from socialism to capitalism. This book focuses on how this period of change has been constructed in the films of Jia Zhangke through analyzing the five class figures of worker, peasant, soldier, intellectual, and entrepreneur that are found in his films. It examines how the figures' representation and the films' cinematography create what Raymond Williams terms "structures of feeling" feelings that concretize around a particular time and place which are captured and evoked in art and culture. The book argues that Jia's cinema should be understood not just as narratives that represent Chinese social transition and the director's changing attitudes to them through characters of different social classes, but also as an effort to engage the audience's emotional responses to those figures through representation, symbolism, and the affective experience of specific cinematic tropes. While making specific observations on Jia's films, the book adds to the scholarship about the Reform era by considering how this period's enormous transformations have been "felt," and also opens up many new areas, not only in the existing body of literature about Chinese film, which has mainly taken a political or sociological approach, but also in the larger fields of Chinese visual culture, cultural studies, and the affective qualities of film.