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This essay examines Chinese television drama in the 1990s. It focuses on soap operas involving transnational romances between Chinese men and Russian and American women. The construction of Chinese masculinity through the foreign woman has become a new way of imagining national identity in the age of globalization.
This article is a study of Chinese soap opera, a form of television drama that emerged and flourished in the 1990s. Television drama is the most widely watched form of entertainment in contemporary China by virtue of the high rate of television penetration in Chinese households. Although television drama dates back to 1958, when television was first seen in China, there was an explosion in the 1990s in the nation's production, broadcasting, and consumption. In 1994, more than six thousand episodes of television dramas were produced in China; in 1995, more than seven thousand episodes; and in 1996, mo2re than ten thousand episodes. In 1978, there were only 1.5 million TV sets, but by 1996, there were 280 million, and the estimated TV audience was 800 million.1 This exponential growth in TV sets and the spread of TV programming is a direct reason for the decline in film audiences in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC).
Television Drama in China: A Historical Overview. Television broadcasting in China began at seven o'clock in the evening, Beijing time, on May 1, 1958, during the era of the "Great Leap Forward." The first Chinese television drama, a thirty-minute play, Yikou cai bingzi (A Veggie Cake), was produced and aired live on the Beijing Television Station on June 15, 1958. Hu Xu, the director of this drama, coined the term dianshiju (literally "television drama") for this new form. This term harked back to the guangboju (literally "radio drama" or "radio play") in China. It was only fitting that television dramas had a parallel name.
For Hu Xu and many critics, the birth of Chinese TV drama was an indigenous phenomenon, not an act of imitating the foreign. In addition to Beijing TV and China Central TV (CCTV), television stations in Shanghai, Harbin, Guangzhou, Changchun, and Tianjing produced and broadcast their own dramas beginning in 1958. From 1958 to 1966, called the "direct telecast period" (zhibo qi) by Chinese TV historians,...