China Pop

How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture

China Pop is a highly original and lively look at the ways that contemporary China is changing. Jianying Zha, hailed by The Nation as “incisive, witty and eloquent all at once,” examines a wide range of developments largely unknown to Western readers: the careful planning of television soap operas to placate popular unrest after Tiananmen, the growth of the sex tabloid and pornography industries, and the politics of censorship and commercial success of the film directors Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) and Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern).

Praise

“One of the twenty-five best books of 1995.”
Voice Literary Supplement
“[A] photograph, a freeze-frame, of a country in rapid motion . . . [Zha is] a young writer with many arresting ideas and, from the evidence of China Pop, a bright literary future as well.”
The New York Times
“Perceptive . . . What China Pop so brilliantly chronicles is the commercialization of China's cultural world and the anxiety that change is causing in China's intellectuals.”
Christian Science Monitor

Books by Jianying Zha

Tide Players
The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China

Jianying Zha

Goodreads Reviews