 Hi everyone, it's great to see you all. Welcome to the culture panel for Surge's 13th annual China-US Symposium. I hope you're excited to learn more about the Chinese film industry and its interesting role within China-US relations. My name is Megan Starsis. I'm a current freshman here at Tufts, planning to major in international relations and economics, and I'm currently the marketing director for Surge. Hi everyone, my name is Sam Moore, and I'm going to be co-hosting with Megan today. I'm a current sophomore majoring in international relations and Mandarin Chinese, and we're really all excited that you guys could come. So with that, I'm just going to give you some more context about what exactly we're going to be discussing. So with China becoming more influential in the film industry during the past few years, it's become increasingly more important to talk about the political, economic, and cultural impacts that have come about due to its rise in popularity. This panel will focus on the cultural differences reflected in the movies produced both by the American and Chinese film industries respectively, as well as the socio-economic ramifications that have come about due to the blocking of many Western movies and Chinese cinemas and how the American and Chinese public have reacted to the censorship. Specific topics that could be discussed and topics that you can ask questions about include why Disney's live action remake of the movie Mulan, which tried to appeal to both Western and Chinese audiences sparked political outrage in Hong Kong, as well as how China's soft power is growing with Chinese media slowly becoming more popular and palatable to Western audiences. However, our panelists are also free to speak about any other topics related to the Chinese or American film industries as they see fit. So during the presentations, please feel free to submit any questions you have, but please keep in mind that we'll only be answering them after both panelists have finished speaking. So unfortunately, Dr. Ying Zhu was unable to join us today due to some last-minute time conflicts, but we still have two fantastic panelists with us today. The first speaker we have is Professor James Wicks from Point Loma Nazarene University. He's the Professor of Film Studies and Literature. He is also the Department Chair. He grew up in Taiwan, teaches world cinema, post-colonial literature, and Chinese. His PhD in literature with an emphasis on Chinese cinema received from the University of California, San Diego in 2010. He has written two books, Transnational Representations, The State of Taiwan Film in the 1960s and the 1970s, and also an annotated bibliography of Taiwan Film Studies, which was co-authored with Columbia University librarians, Jim Chung and Sachi Nakuchi. The second speaker that we have today is Professor Fan Yang from the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Fan Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, and she is author of Fakes in China, Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization. Young Scholarship lies at the intersection of Transnational Media and Cultural Studies, Globalization and Communication, Post-colonial Studies, and Contemporary China. Her work on China's branding, Internet censorship, food media, and urban communication has appeared in numerous journals including Theory and Culture Society, Physicians, Asia Critique, New Media and Society, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. She has completed a new book entitled Disorienting Politics, Rising China and Chinese American Media, which examines a set of trans-specific media artifacts that enact the entanglements of China in America. Wonderful. So with that, the way the panel will work is after I'm done speaking, each panelist has 10 to 15 minutes or longer for a presentation with a slideshow and any other visual tools they choose to use, then the panelists will have a chance to address each other's remarks. After that, I will ask some guiding questions for the panel for further discussion, and then the last 20 minutes of the panel will be used for a Q&A. So without further ado, let's welcome Professor James Wicks, who will be presenting first. Thank you so much for the kind introduction. Give me one moment here as I share my screen, and I trust you can see that properly. It's a great honor to be part of this year's symposium, and thank you so much for this opportunity to present on this panel as part of this year's China-US symposium. It's also a great honor to be able to present alongside Fanning, whose work is invaluable and of which I rely on in my own scholarship. Following James Palmer's opening address and lecture, here I am on the Pacific Coast, so in the morning here on the West Coast, listening to James Palmer's presentation, one thing that struck me and one thing that I hope will resonate with this particular presentation is the need for there to be more knowledge, in this case between Hollywood and China, but certainly between the US and China in terms of political relations. My presentation title is a transnational approach to China-Hollywood case studies, and I include there my Twitter handle, if you'd like to follow on Twitter and I'll follow you back. Daily I tweet about Chinese and Hollywood cinema news, and there's so many interesting case studies to keep in mind these days, and this exciting way to stay in touch and keep abreast of these situations. My work on Chinese cinema and Chinese cinema relations goes back to my childhood experiences growing up in Taiwan, which is why I have those images there of Taipei and Taiwan in the background, and just from a young age noticing stereotypes about Chinese and Hollywood film art. My primary purpose today in the presentation is to introduce some case studies that we can use as a springboard for further conversation, two of them involving controversies that are current right now regarding the upcoming Oscars, as well as my preferred approach into these types of discussions, and that's specifically within filmic narratives, and namely the poetics and aesthetics of the films that we have a pleasure of analyzing. My approach with the transnational is inspired by and intends to complement the use of the term transnational in contra distinction to the global, a concept bound up with the philosophical category of totality, and in contrast to international predicated on political systems in a latent relationship of parody, a signal by the prefix inter. The advantage of using a transnational approach is to enable hopefully a non Euro American bias when gauging the various points of exchange in terms of cinematic production and analyses of power in terms of gender, race, and class. An example of this would be Wang Zhenling's plans in 2014 when the Chinese billionaire Wang Zhenling made his plans to spend approximately 50 billion yuan which is 8.7 billion US dollars to build the world's largest film studio in China. Stories around the globe articulated Wang's plans in terms of their threat to Hollywood. So you can see there in the Sydney Morning Herald, Chinese mogul Wang Zhenling lays down challenge to Hollywood, all of these vantage points really centering around its impact to Hollywood. The Wall Street Journal discussed it in terms of being co-equal with Hollywood, and the business standard described it as usurping Hollywood's centrality. Each of these perspectives articulated through various media outlets presents Wang Zhenling's intentions in relation to the West. In contrast to transnational lens filters filmic production and analyses in terms of a multi-directional fluid exchange of culture that focuses on the unequal results of dominant power relations. So it's using this approach and briefly having this approach in place that we might turn to the current landscape. Anne Kokos's work in 2017 demonstrates the multiple trans-specific links between financial production policy and marketing that connect Hollywood and China today. Analyzing film Kokos states is the perfect place to understand the multi-layered systems that unite the American and Chinese economies. She states this on page nine. Hollywood and China certainly cooperate in large media ventures today. There is Oriental Dreamworks which is Dreamworks production company in China. Legendary pictures which was acquired by China's Wanda Group and they produce the Pacific Rim films of which I'm a particularly large fan. Shanghai Disney Resort shows the combination between a U.S. marketing brand and its placement in China and Wanda acquired AMC theaters although recently they sold a very large stake of those. Anne Kokos's work describes China's ascension rather to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and how this initiated a shift to globalized piracy's film and media infrastructure but so much has changed in the last two years and so I think this particular panel is so important. If there is a chat box and Megan may I put a couple links in the chat box? Is that work? If so I'm going to go ahead and insert two articles that I'm referring at this segment of the lecture if folks would like to check those out. So much has changed in the last two years in the early times and Ryan Fonder's writes for the last decade or so Hollywood's aim in China was to work with Washington and Beijing to expand the industry's access to the market by opening up quota for foreign films and making sure its movies got through sensors. That goal however has lost some relevance as the Chinese entertainment market has evolved. The biggest challenge for American studios is no longer whether their films are selected under the revenue sharing program or avoid getting banned for negative depictions of China. It's whether Chinese audiences actually want to see the movies that get in. In 2020 the top 10 films in China are all mainland Chinese films. The highest ranked western import for the year was Warner Brothers released Tenet which was at number 11 with 66 US million dollars. Certainly there are many reasons for this. COVID has certainly impacted a delay in Hollywood blockbusters such as MGM's No Time to Die and additionally the Trump trade war spurred China regulators to clamp down on imports especially among the indie films that get in under a flat fee system. At the same time China's film industry production values have improved in terms of appealing to the Chinese audience with Chinese Communist Party support and this has essentially squeezed out as the LA Times article states English language blockbusters. In 2019 eight of the top 10 money makers in China were domestic productions. Taking into account a little bit a different approach on the same topic is a Disney's live action film Mulan which Megan mentioned at the introduction of today's presentation. Mulan offers a case study in what can go wrong once a Hollywood studio film actually is screened in China and in this specific case Liu Yifei who's the main actor in the film supported Beijing's pro police stance in response to Hong Kong's pro democracy movement and additionally Disney shot the film in China's Xinjiang province which has been documented to have labor camps and then this was followed by the fact that Disney executives did not speak out about these issues. So taking us into the current landscape I'll turn to three recent case studies again that we can use springboards for further conversation as well as examples for the current state of an increasingly sensitive relationship between Hollywood and China and the first case here then involves Chloe Zhao and I couldn't hesitate but to include a personal image that I snapped on my phone of Chloe Zhao at Sundance in 2015. I was walking down the street and I'd just seen her film the day before and asked her if I could take her picture and she's very lovely and allowed me to do this and put it on my blog. Right now it is this very Chloe Zhao who is part of a series of two case studies which I would label under the category of Beijing tightening its grasp. A Beijing-born filmmaker Chloe Zhao it was initially celebrated for her nomination for this year's film Nomad Land. Now she has six nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress with the film starring Frances McDormand and was initially hailed by Chinese state media as quote the pride China and quote. But that soon gave way to a nationalist backlash after social media users dug up old interviews in which she appeared to criticize China in an article with filmmaker and if memory serves it's in 2013 that she stated this the director referred to China as quote a place where there are lies everywhere end quote and this article has since been deleted. Chinese film authorities have had initially approved the film Nomad Land for release on April 23rd which would have been next week but now that appears to be on hold. China's central television in terms of the Oscars has screened Oscars either live or on delay since 2003 as have online platforms however this year the Communist Party's propaganda department has ordered state controlled media to play down the 93rd Academy Awards and also not show them live which on this year would have been on the 25th there and in Hong Kong the Oscars will not be televised for the first time in more than half a century with broadcaster TVBs stating it was quote purely a commercial decision and quote. Andoban a popular online platform where films are rated and reviewed the Oscar nominations and winners for every film are listed since 1929 but not the Sears films. Now Chloe Zhao is embroiled in a conflict also involving a short film nominee for the Sears Academy Awards and that is the documentary entitled Do Not Split. I had a chance to attend Sundance as well in 2020 and while this is not my photograph I did have a chance to see a Norwegian filmmaker Anders Hammer there and also my own way in which that documentary which documents Occupy Central as well as the umbrella movement brought to mind for me also some old photographs of images from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where just a couple weeks before the umbrella movement students had started posting banners and I took some of those pictures and then followed along in the news once returning to San Diego as the umbrella movement unfolded and it's that movement which Anders Film Do Not Split documents. The nominated short film Do Not Split by Norwegian filmmaker Anders Hammer covers the anti-Beijing demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019 and China's growing influence in the territory. Just days after its nomination in the short documentary category the state-run Global Times stated that the film quote lacks artistry and is full of biased political stances and quote. Such movies if they win awards will hurt the feelings of Chinese audiences the article goes on to state and this will also dent Oscar's reputation among Chinese movie goers. Another Global Times piece and again if you would like to follow me on Twitter when I locate you as I try to tweet these news stories out and another Global Times piece of Beijing-based film critics say that quote the Oscars and Do Not Split depicts China in a negative light. In response Anders Hammer who made the documentary stated that Beijing has helped us a lot. The main aim of making a documentary is not to win the Oscar but to bring attention to the critical situation in Hong Kong. Anders goes on to say this alleged censoring of the Oscars due to our documentary being nominated is unfortunately not a big surprise after witnessing how freedom of speech and freedom of press is being drastically curtailed in Hong Kong. Producer of the film Charlotte Cook goes on to say quote it is important for the world to know about the erosion of liberties happening in Hong Kong and any form of censorship only furthers the case for how crucial it is that the story and the past current and future events in Hong Kong are being told as widely as possible. So primarily today I've been introducing and relaying case studies it's not from my original work or scholarship but rather just giving a snapshot of the current landscape. But for this final point I would like to you and for this third of three case studies I would like to turn to my preferred way of using transnational scholarship to locate the ambivalencies as well as the tensions in these kind of Hollywood and China relations and I would argue that the best way to do so is actually to analyze the film narratives themselves to analyze the film poetics and aesthetics to gauge what the directors and what the audiences are experiencing and and actually analyze that filmic object as the object of analysis. The as I conclude then and and mention one such study I will also like to return to the chat box here just for a moment and for anyone who's interested they can refer to a more lengthy lecture on this final topic because it's actually in looking at representations in both Taiwan and China where the subtlety of these kind of tensions are most transparent. We can see then in analyzing films and the film narratives on their own terms where these contested terms of find themselves revealed. China's film industry as we've seen from the examples in the media today are certainly produced under an author authoritarian regime and as we know the PRC and Taiwan disagree on their political relationships. So as I began the presentation we can see these generalizations about Hollywood and China but once you get into the film narratives you get to much more nuanced perspective. In Taiwan a term such as China is an extremely contested term. We know that in Hollywood films references to Tibet Taiwan or Japan and negative scenes involving Chinese people have to be removed but actually looking at these artifacts created in Taiwan and China and Hong Kong themselves we start to see the ways in which they're revealed. In the film Cafe Lumiere for example a main a film from Taiwan it represents a relationship between a family and their connections to Japan and meanwhile in Zhang Yimou's film Writing Alone for Thousands of Miles a Japanese character travels to China and learns about the opera industry there. In looking at the actual narratives we can go to a much more sophisticated level of analysis and respond to a question such as the one that Liao Pinghui writes when he asks what does a comparison reveal about the ambivalent nature of Taiwanese post-coloniality and again it's at this juncture when we get to the multi-layered approach actually comes to fruition in terms of looking at the film narratives themselves. In this particular a case study what is so fascinating is to recognize the psychological distance between Taiwan and China in within their representations and so using this again as my third and final case study I would just like to conclude with the idea that ultimately it requires an analysis at this level of the actual film analysis the way in which the poetics and aesthetics reveal the tension and that's where all of the real action is taking place. Thank you so much for this opportunity to share. Okay thank you Professor Wicks so we're going to move now to Professor Liao and she's going to give her presentation. Hey good afternoon everyone just want to check and see if my screen sharing is functioning okay thank you so much and I really appreciate this opportunity to speak with you about a new project that I'm working on I call it completed but really hoping to get more feedback and it's really an honor too to be on the same panel with Professor Wicks who is an amazing film scholar or cultural studies scholar but also maintaining a really amazing blog that everybody should check out and let me just see. So just as a way of introducing today's talk I know the title of the panel is Chinese film industry but if you think about China's cultural export film industry may not be as successful as the Chinese state or other entities in China might aspire to be at this moment at least but at the same time if you think about another kind of export which is the Chinese language that seems to be quite on the minds of many within the U.S. and beyond so this is part of my current book project titled this orienting politics rising China and China American media so immediately you might recognize oh China American combination of China America so indeed China America was a term coined by the financial historian Nio Ferguson but I'm kind of appropriating that term to modify media so as we can think about these entanglements of the two superpowers as they are manifested in some of these trans specific media artifacts so hopefully we can get into some more discussions about that as the value of that kind of approach resonating with Professor Wicks point about this transnational approach in many ways so just the overview of today's talk first I want to share with you some of the observation I have regarding this phenomenon that I call the rise of the Chinese speaking non-Chinese figures in American popular culture and public life and then I'll like to go into a little bit about China's own promotion of mentoring learning globally and then thirdly I want to share with you some alternative imagination for the relationship between language and culture and power in this short-lived but very popular TV show called firefly some of you might have seen it so we love to hear your thoughts on that first off these are the shows that some of you might have seen films house both of which featuring brilliant characters and I didn't watch every single episode but just a few episodes that I watched it so happened that these characters somehow also really know Chinese and understand Mandarin so that struck me for a second and then there's all these different films as compiled by video that I'm going to show a clip of later on lots of films including also other shows like friends or big bang theory feature non-Chinese or you know typically at least non-Chinese speakers who perform a kind of Chinese speaking capacity so I'm going to show you a real quick clip from a video that I found on Facebook I feel like it must be target marketed or something let me see if I could switch to that can you see the screen all right so this is a clip from the film limitless of 2011 so for the time I'm not going to show the other clips but you get a sense of what this video is trying to show it's compiling all these different segments of characters who impress their audiences at this moment in the film that they can be quite fluent in the Chinese language despite the fact that if you are indeed a Chinese speaker oh first of all can you come back to my slides okay or is that not working just want to check yes okay so so you can see even though if you're a Chinese speaker you may not be able to understand what the character is actually saying but his interlocutors seem like they were able to understand him perfectly and that seems to be quite similar across many of these different clips if you're interested I can share the link to that video with you in the chat later on but you you probably also know this is not a phenomenon limited to entertainment or fictional context but also in public figures like Mark Zuckerberg who is tirelessly demonstrating all the time his aspiration if not actual ability to speak Mandarin including in this case with the president of China in 2015 and then you also have former president's granddaughter Arabella Kushner here featured on big screen during President Trump's Beijing trip in 2017 well don't get me wrong Arabella's Chinese is actually quite impressive but it was also quite interesting that this in this case she was shown on big screen singing Chinese songs reciting Chinese poems to a room full of Chinese state officials and she was also in the internet sensation in Chinese social media sphere as well and then last but not least you have John Huntsman a former ambassador to China who also was running his campaign in many ways on the premise that he's the only one who could speak Chinese and can handle China and interestingly in a lot of different interviews by different people journalists who are not really knowledgeable about Chinese but when they asked him to perform something in Chinese despite the fact that these other inculaculars are not Chinese speakers they always clap and say oh that's so great so fantastic so there's something really interesting going on here and I would like to see say that there's a sense of performance that is demonstrated through this linguistic prowess that's represented on screen and through these public speeches and on the one hand you can think of these like entertainment figures being able to speak Chinese as a marker of their prestige or talent or effort but there's also this kind of performative dimension of the listening and this is where I think it may be interesting to think about this in relation or in contrast to the historical racialization of Asian or Chinese American on screen so an Asian American scholar like Chopa Dali has talked about the racialization through accent of particularly Asian Americans and if you think about if the body that this Chinese speeches carry is the Asian body on screen and that really just contributes to the stereotype of Chinese Americans as perpetual foreigners but here you have Chinese who are not you know typically Chinese speakers who are not you know typically Chinese then even when they're not completely speaking wonderful Chinese like probably many of you in the audience actually do the environment in which they appear oftentimes gives them that kind of confirmation that they are so capable of doing so so that's the kind of phenomenon that I'm kind of wondering if this is informed by this desire to contain a rising China on the horizon so this is reflective of how China perhaps is shifting from a mere object to be represented like Orientalist critique has informed us but rather may be better seen as a subject who is shaping what is ostensibly American media so this is the reason that I think perhaps it could be very useful to think about China American media as a framework so just kind of going on to the next part of the presentation perhaps nothing demonstrates China's status as an agent or subject in shaping global culture more prominently than its promotion of Mandarin globally through particularly entities such as the Confucius Institutes so if you look at their own publicity information sometimes this activity is described as the Chinese state or government providing a service for the world there is a demand for Chinese learning and therefore a need for something like Confucius institutes to exist modeling on like Alianz-Falces and Goethe Institute or other institutions but as we all know as of late a lot of the Confucius institutes in the U.S. have been closed because of the controversy around it oftentimes having to do with the perception that the Chinese state is infiltrating and influencing U.S. higher education and culture so this kind of controversy sometimes delights the underlying push toward building a linguistic or cultural soft power the kind of discourse that's very much inspired by the American political scientist Joseph Nye who famously coined the soft power concept and I see this discourse around building cultural soft power through language promotion as an indigenization of soft power discourse in the sense that it's actually all about allowing the state to accrue power through the instrumentalization of language and in my previous work I've also been really interested in how the Chinese states only imagination is oftentimes informed by America as an imaginary and in this case it's not an exception particularly if you think about the rhetoric about about the so-called Chinese fever the fever of among people who want to learn Chinese oftentimes comes from a U.S. media so in this case one example is the time magazine cover that features bilingual China one message and that was indeed a real reference in a lot of the Chinese press talking about the need to promote Mandarin in the U.S. among other places and so comparing these two phenomena or practices of imagining Chinese as a global common tongue in the future I observe some shared common melodies and in both cases there is a sense of a desire to instrumentalize language and oftentimes it has to do with the acquisition of power in the case of the Chinese speaking non-Chinese phenomenon one can argue that there's a desire to contain the other it's becoming more powerful than the self but on the more micro level the fact that there are indeed so many middle-class upper middle-class families who are so deeply invested in wanting to contribute the future of their offsprings by securing their futures through language learning and this is what the anthropologist Jennifer Huber in her wonderful book China in the World talks about how the neoliberal culture of self-help is informing this kind of self-securitization through language learning and I think it's also probably quite important to point out the influx of Chinese money for a lot of public schools in the U.S. to to conduct language instruction also had to do with the reduced funding under the neoliberalized climate that has inflicted on the budget for some of these universities so if I'm here to kind of be more I'm more critical of these two practices I do have a bit more hope when it comes to a cultural artifact that is of American origin that is firefly it's quite short-lived but it went on to achieve a sort of a cult status there's still comic con panels organized around it it went on to become films because of fandom surrounding it and in part has having to do with with this very interesting imaginative future that the creator creator Joss Whedon has put forth so in his vision this is a year 2517 and the universe will be dominated by what he calls an Anglo-Sino alliance and interestingly in this world lots of people if not all presumably all understand Chinese and speak some oftentimes actually swear words and it's in a lot of different moments of the main characters which are actually a group of underdogs rather than the kind of really clean aesthetics of the Star Trek or Star Wars that you are also very familiar with this is more very kind of underdog outcast that is featured as the main characters and they oftentimes wear in Chinese so I wanted to give you a flavor of what Chinese sounds like and and how the creators and the characters themselves talk about it so let's see if this works um not sure why this is is there a reason that uh are you guys seeing any okay let me try something else here that you didn't have to believe anything out and you could actually say you know frog humping cat sucking piss ant in Chinese and not have to worry about the censors going oh you can't say shit for other things actually the riders would be in their room in their riding room and they come up with really funny things it was French it would be fine but speak Chinese off the bat and um it just gives us a lovely kind of lived intact idea was your most basic white trash person can speak Chinese the person you know no education who you know was the last person you would expect to speak Chinese off the bat and um it just gives us a lovely kind of lived in texture as far as the Chinese goes I resented it they just randomly come into my head like Wang Yi you did a shit it wasn't easy at all Chinese is not exactly you know I mean French is easier than Chinese it was French it would be fine but it was a little difficult yeah I like to think we educated the world by teaching them a little bit of Mandarin the riders would be in their room in their riding room and they come up with really funny things to say if you knew what you were saying in English we only did phrases that we didn't need to know what they meant like if he showed his way we know he's saying shut up and if he goes blah blah blah blah blah blah blah we know he's going oh my god I'm very surprised he wouldn't put one word expletives that you've been switched to Chinese like man and you know who is and then explain it was these long wood demand who talk to who found the why shouldn't and I don't speak Chinese and I have even trouble ordering at Chinese restaurants every episode I was making several phone calls to a group of people and it was always a back and forth um trying to to get the right words. I did love the fact that you didn't have to believe anything out and you could actually say you know frog humping cat sucking piss ant in Chinese and not have to worry about the sensors going oh you can't say shit. For other things more current slang like baboon's ass crack per se I would call my friends who was more up on the current colloquialisms and curse words in China or Taiwan. We had cassette tapes that we were to listen to to get the sound of it right and most of the time none of us got the sound of it right anyway. I would sort of hear what it was supposed to sound like and then I'd hear the actor say it. And I bet there are a lot of people in China going what the hell are they saying. We wanted a multi racial sort of mix of people because our statement was in the future you know there's two superpowers and everybody's mixed that's why the way people dress are mixed and he wanted to have that reflected in these people coming together. My very original concept was a little smaller. I had like five characters and then when I sort of think I was up there I showed a little bit longer than I originally intended because we might have a bit more time just so you get a better sense of what this show is about in case you haven't seen it. But what's really interesting here as you probably gather a bit from the discussion in the clip is a rethinking of language not as a set system of rules or structures but more in terms of language gene kind of thinking about it as an open-ended process. So even though you have the translator trying to come up with some slang words but as the creator said we're not really trying to get real Chinese we're actually creating something new. So just the fact that pandas may not be a real Chinese word right now that doesn't mean it can't be some Chinese word in 2517 and so this is quite interesting rethinking to me about the relationship between language and power and in many ways these underdogs of this new universe they are fighting the Anglo-Sino alliance in the show and so what they're doing here using Chinese is oftentimes not about necessarily accumulating power but rather more about generating meanings. So that comes back to the very basic idea of culture which is about meaning making and in their own efforts there's also this sense of community building through practices like language among other things and this is a sense of community that some argue is very much lacking under the neo-liberal estates of individualism and self-help. So this leads to my conclusion so perhaps one value of thinking about China American media as an approach as opposed to just like Chinese or American media is precisely it may allow us to take the concept of rising China as more of an opportunity than danger because these cultural artifacts might offer competing visions of global futures and in my book I would like to think that it opens up these different ways of imagining a politics that's more about relational politics and I would love to talk to you more about this in the Q&A if you're interested. Thank you. Thank you so much Professor Yang that was amazing. So before we move on to any of the questions that may have come up during the presentations I wanted to give the panelists the opportunity to address each other's presentations if they had any questions comments anything like that so. Yes Megan with that stated I'd be happy to go first I think Dr. Fan Yang thank you so much for your presentation and all the opportunities that you've given us to learn about the impact of language both as not only an accumulation but a way of generating meaning and it's really doubt that I would like to follow up on first at the end of the presentation you mentioned that language acquisition is an opportunity for community building and it's at a time when we have competing visions and I wonder if this is one of our both of our presentations key overlap in is that we're at a moment and I think that we often believe right now that the time is now right that both you know Chinese futures as well as US Hollywood futures are at a moment where they're intersecting and we just feel impelled that right now is the time where we need to make some kind of difference if that may or may not be true but certainly there is that sentiment and yet you conclude that rather than this being a dangerous time this is a time for opportunity and I was just wondering if you could elaborate further on why you conclude that it's a time for opportunity rather than danger and then how you can see perhaps even in in language acquisition how the idea of opportunity might be the future that we select rather than the one of danger. Oh I like what you ended on which is opportunity is a matter of selection as well I think my main goal to include that in the conclusion is to tie it back to the theme of the insymplosium so it might be a bit too arbitrary but I do think that what you have provided is precisely it's a matter of choice on the part of us participants in the moment and I'm not sure if I'm always claiming that the present is the most important moment but as a cultural study scholar in practice I do often ask why this why now as a starting research question for a lot of this phenomenon that I look at so the fact that you do have so many entertainment media artifacts and public figures kind of aspiring to become fluent in Chinese but perhaps imperfectly represented one could argue because given that there's actually so many households in the US who are Chinese speakers only second to Spanish but the fact that these shows don't seem like they even acknowledge that fact that is perhaps a reflection of negligence or one can argue ideological force of this kind of conception of us as a white English speaking homogenous nation which we all know is not necessarily the case so the job that I see a cultural scholar scholarship would be able to offer is precise to pull at this type of emergence of the phenomenon and then try to think about how it might have to do with how rising China is represented and what kind of ideological work that it's doing in ways that sometimes offers some different visions but sometimes also obscure alternative imaginations and so that's what I see myself doing and by doing so I do think we can create different ways of imagining global and Chinese and American futures well thank you for that question absolutely yeah I uh I was so happy that you touched on Chloe Zhao because recently I watched No Med Land with a group of diasporic Chinese scholars like me and a lot of my friends felt well first of all I really loved the film despite my critical tendency to kind of resonating with some of my friends that it's not necessarily a blatant critique of entities like Amazon and it's kind of you know very terrible labor practices among other things but to me it's a very emotional film but a lot of my friends who are of Chinese descent felt that one of the surprises of the film is that it doesn't feel Chinese at all if you don't know the background of the Chinese director you almost don't get any sense at all this is directed by someone who has pretty deep history in the Chinese cultural industry one can argue being the stepdaughter of a very famous Chinese comedian so yeah I'm curious what you thought of that and if you especially I loved your your last point about bringing aesthetic approach to cinema studies and especially transnational film studies and I just wanted to see your take on that yeah thank you so much for so kindly addressing my third point it was one which I truncated to fit in the time constraints of the presentation one that I felt at least optimistic about in terms of the delivery I do believe that looking at the film narrative itself is so important certainly as crack hour has stated that it's it's looking at the through the film narrative that we can see the national psyche represented and it's certainly in cinema such a wonderful object to analyze because it's not an individual but rather a collective production and just the way that mass audience through explicit themes or discourses are brought to the surface and so with that said in in response to Chloe Zhao's film you know I recollect Professor Fan Yang watching a Brokeback Mountain with one of my good friends who was he's from Taiwan he was doing his PhD in music at the same time that I was at UCSD and when he was watching Brokeback Mountain his conclusion was that that film is so Chinese and he and and in his words not mine said even at the end of the film when one of the characters goes to a closet and takes out an old jacket and and smells it to recollect his his friend he said that that's just so even went further on this one Taiwanese and and yet I think that you're absolutely right in in terms of that response to Chloe Zhao's work when she made her film in 2015 which is a fantastic film songs my brother's taught me and one that if you want to as a filmmaker want to know how do you end a film you end it like Chloe Zhao ends films at the very last clip it's a camera it's really at the ground level and as someone departs there's just dust in the air and it blows away that's that's how you end the movie Chloe Zhao knows how to do that for that particular work if memory serves she embedded herself with a Native American Indian tribe for two or three years in the production of that film and and so I just wonder Dr. Fan Yang in in response to your question about how it doesn't have perhaps a noticeable or stereotypical Chinese component to it I wonder if it is due to just how just the duration of research that she puts in each of her of her films to capture the landscape as carefully on it on on on its own terms and if and if that premise is correct it might help us understand nomad lands access into parts of US culture that are just to be honest for me I'm that I'm totally a foreigner of while living here and yet she depicted it in such a way that I felt like an outsider learning about that as well so it's a bit of my response there oh thank you so much can I just follow up really quickly that that sense of being an outsider and observer I so resonate with especially how it's depicted in the film and I believe that's also one reason many of my other guys were Chinese friends fell the same way and it's interesting one other film that this film reminding me of is precisely robot mountain which also had this kind of elusiveness that one can associate with maybe ancient Chinese art if not poetry so I just feel like this is some one indication of how important your as a proponent of aesthetic approach how important that approach might be so thank you thank you um so we haven't seen any questions in the chat yet but we did have a few follow-up questions to some of your presentations so um professor wicks we were wondering since you grew up in taiwan like do you see any kind of major differences between the taiwan versus the chinese film industry like censorship or western perception or anything like that yeah thank you so much for that question I think that um again the the the topic that I glossed over the most quickly at the end of my presentation might be the one to return here once again as as the most relevant way of responding to your question Megan um and and that was you know just the brief point was let's let's get into the film narratives and the film poetics and aesthetics in order to to ultimately read what's going on in terms of these tensions and and these transnational relationships in the two films I cited both film makers one from taiwan and one from mainland china analyze they depict japan and so that's just one in road into this conversation now very interestingly in the taiwan film by ho xiao shen japan is depicted as a place of shared connections and when the characters move from tokyo to back to taiwei there is little fanfare sometimes the same music works as the sound bridge as the character moves from one location to the other in contrast the mainland chinese film demonstrated that china is a source of enlightenment in other words there was a quite a large shift in the film when the japanese character goes to china for china was the place where he learned what it meant in this particular narrative what it means to become a father so we see very different low representations of what japan means in a taiwanese film shared locations uh shared connectivity and in the second film china is a place where enlightenment might be located rather than it being located in japan now i would conclude with this kind of observation that we can see that the psychological distance between taiwan and japan is such that even a conception of a harmonious relationship with their northeastern neighbor takes on very different forms i know that part of this sino or rather this china u.s symposium also includes a panel about the islands and disputes in the south east asian seas right and i would i would go so far honestly to say that analyzing film is a way of understanding island disputes right now and and the reason is you can see how these films demonstrate like once again that psychological distance and i think that sometimes if we only look at policy if we only look at hollywood headlines which i wanted to bring into today's presentation because their conversation starters but if we want to understand ultimately the differences and we we should get into the narrative of the films and and and just there's a wealth of opportunity there to shed light on multiple issues right thanks for the question can i just maybe follow up really fast as well we recently held a clubhouse discussion on ho xiao xian's films i don't know if you're at a clubhouse you're welcome to join us sometimes so we have scholars based in taiwan and hong kong and melin and also in the us coming to the discussion and indeed there's so many layers from all different period of his films including capillumia which is one of my favorites as well and another film that i love is the assassin which also has different ways of portraying like politics but also from a very aestheticized one may even perceive to be the politicized stance so my contribution of the discussion that night was i feel like he is doing something really imaginative by bringing this approach of what in chinese might be known as 出事 which is this distance from politics bringing that attitude to politics which is in chinese sometimes famous ru shi inside politics so in in such a way that challenges these binaries so i really love ho xiao xian's films and i'm so glad you brought that up so thanks thank you so much i love that follow up we actually have a question from the chat so i will read it out loud i think your dresses will see so for the young non-chinese phenotypical american filmmaker who is interested in making films that appeal to the transnational audiences you mentioned chloe jiao and bro backman what other films political or humanity studies would you recommend is the question for dr fanya i think yeah either one of you can address it for sure yeah well all of ho xiao xian's films for one i think it's such interesting question to you because there are so many co-productions that have not resonated with audiences for example the great wall with with matt daemon it has become a kind of a kind of inside joke among film audiences of perhaps how not to make a or how to make a movie that won't appeal to audiences so i wonder if there's also you know go to the source of fantastic films such as as those of ho xiao xian but also perhaps for an aspiring filmmaker take notes on the films that that are not appealing and find out ways of doing the opposite of that as a brief aside i knew quite early on that i knew i wanted to be a teacher one day and i started taking notes in class about the teaching style not just the teaching content and when there was a teacher who was not resonating with students i would try to just try to record why students did not prefer that lecture and i think similarly as an aspiring filmmaker watch the films you don't like and try to reverse those techniques that seem to fall i love that response so if you're asking for very specific recommendations i can tell you a number of filmmakers who i love one person that comes to mind probably not a surprise and indeed some of his films i i don't actually like that jung ke is a relatively famous why should be safe saying quite famous internationally for some of his um in chinese language films uh and he has been quite productive uh also generating a lot of different kinds of films and uh i do want to share that um in my view sometimes the dialogue in his films uh is almost rendered with the intent that it would be translated into english uh and i wonder if professor wicks of felt that or has you know more familiarity with scholarship on language in films that might shed light on this but sometimes it turns me off a bit just because how the characters may not be speaking in a colloquial way or perhaps i'm kind of super sensitive but then oftentimes if a film after rewatching it a few times i notice all these other different layers especially on the visual plane that allows it to become a really rich text for teaching for thinking with so one film for example is the world which i am writing about as well as many others have written about and so uh yeah i just wanted to offer it as an example of sometimes learning from films uh could be a very layered process as well kind of maybe liking it is one layer but then also engaging with the on a critical plane but also unpacking why one might not like it just piggy piggybacking on professor wicks response there might be very productive and approach and dr fanyang would would you put uh do you have one kawai in your category of film makers you enjoy as well i i was going to mention him uh but then i figure you know he's so popular i do really love some of his films including uh ii dai zong shi the grand masters and uh and some could argue that his films can come off pretentious and uh i i still feel like this really imaginative work done in his work so um yeah definitely on my on my list of recommended and only of course and i want to say besides broke back i mean uh some of his earlier works like the trilogy i remember just always feeling connected to uh in in many different on many different levels so those things do come to mind there is another person i might have to look up there's a female director that i remember seeing at a film festival but the name is currently skipping my head but i'll come back to you i'll put it in the chat it's the person who did new pee do you remember ox hide professor wicks right i'm i'm thinking of on hui right now but i know that's not correct a hui is great too but i'm not as familiar with the whole earth i only know a few so for sure but one film that i really love is called ox hide and the director is a young female director but if i can get the name i'll put in the chat thank you uh we had another question um and it kind of reconciles both of your presentations together so professor wicks you talked about like the apparent breakdown of previously shared cultural academies like the oscars and do you think this is like indicative of a growing cultural isolation and if so is there any hope of a reversal so we have that sort of idea of china kind of um rejecting more western media but um professor yang you talk you talked about like this emerging like chai american like kind of idea so how do we like synthesize those two things together i think one of the topics that initially comes to mind again returning to the controversy surrounding the mulan film we know that there were 19 uh con you know members of congress who reached out to the ceo of disney and basically questioned without getting a clear response how could you work with the mainland chinese government uh we see this more recently with with netflix which can't stream its platform in china because um foreign online streamers are not permitted there but they've they're in in pre-production plans to produce the three-body problem the the famous novels and so that's also you know got in some backlash from senator from from tennessee as well about working with you know pro pro beijing a media and for me i think that and you know kind of coupling that with dr fine yang's idea for a demand for understanding china my my personal perspective is that that absolutely these media lines and and business lines of communication should should absolutely stay open i think that the way forward is is continued exchange and my really that's foundational for me as a as a premise that free speech uh is is what's most important and in order for that to be maintained the communication lines have have to be open uh in in looking at those responses by the 19 members of congress i think there's this perception that if there's an you know to whatever extent of of china is perceived as an enemy just to put it in as blatant terms as possible then then there should be no friendship whatsoever i think the the alternate perspective is you know there are so many aspects of chinese culture that aren't perceived as a threat that aren't perceived as as being uh and quote unquote an enemy and so we should build on where those lines of communication are open and so i think it's a gross oversimplification but but placing it in terms of those two options you know not being not having lines of communication at all closing them all down or keeping them open i'm definitely in the camp of keeping them open and then that leads to a much more complex and nuanced set of relationships and and but i think that's precisely the the ways in which academics and of all fields including including cultural studies can intervene and help help describe the topography in a way that allows us to negotiate where we see agreement and where we can work on issues going forward and to conclude my fear is that if you act like these 19 members of congress and simply shut down all lines of communication then you eliminate the opportunity to work together and negotiate the topography where absolutely we need efforts to of improvement in the effort of having ultimately free speech for for all participants thanks so much for the question and the opportunity to work this through in a cultural studies framework which i'm biased because i study narrative and this is my my field of inquiry but i i'm so biased as to say i think it's the the most important way of of building bridges in these type of conversations the type of knowledge that dr. fanyang brings in terms of language is crucial if we can get to any of these kind of you know political level negotiation we have to have this foundational understandings in place that was an excellent response again i guess i will add maybe two small points one is just on the topic of mulan since i actually made myself watch it in preparation for today's symposium and i just wanted to say it was very interesting to observe disney's desire to add this layer of authenticity to the film by going to xinjiang to do this live action film but then with such a consequence that is very much in contrary to their original intent so that is quite interesting to observe in terms of the broader contradiction between these film industry capitals desire to acquire market and go across borders and still and then nationalist sentiments in informing some of these state level responses to the film and its distribution and this leads to my second point which has to do with my conclusion of the talk which is this need to think about politics relationally so despite some of these attempts to close down open exchange or dialogue well the relations are there and one example that i invoke is if you think about what is presumably american air well some of the polluted air from china is scientifically proven to be also traveling back to west coast america and that is another form of chimerica media if you will and in order to rethink politics relationally we do have to recognize these entanglements very material entanglements that sometimes are obscure by rather rick that tries to uh set up the binary between china versus america in this kind of contention mode so that would be my addition to professor wix's response i think that's all the questions so thank you very much professor wix and professor yang this is an amazing discussion i felt like you guys really complemented each other's presentations well um so thank you very much i would also like to ask both of you if you're comfortable with us kind of distributing the recording around um of this meeting okay cool thank you um so yeah to the attendees thank you so much for joining us today i hope you enjoyed learning more about this topic of uh signer us relations be sure to come to our panels tomorrow where we'll go over economic decoupling and we'll also have a security panel you can find all the information for that in uh our symposium booklet which we put in the chat so yeah so feel free to contact us if you have any further questions uh yeah thank you enjoy the rest of your day thank you so much i have a great weekend should we just end this