Modern China’s Idols: Heroes, Role Models, Stars and Celebrities

Main Article Content

Elaine M Jeffreys

Abstract

This paper examines the diversity of China’s popular culture idols with reference to a commemorative website called ‘The Search for Modern China’, which was launched in late September 2009 to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party on 1 October 1949. The website’s framing narrative suggests that the history of idol production and celebrity in the PRC can be viewed crudely as marked by disjuncture: the decline of heavy-handed Party-state involvement in the propagandistic manufacturing of socialist idols of production, followed by the grafted-on rise of western-style media-manufactured celebrities as idols of capitalist consumption. However, an analysis of the website’s pantheon of idols reveals that while some idols from the Maoist and early reform period have been relegated to the realm of fiction, revolutionary kitsch or are now simply passé, others remain very much alive in the popular imagination. A state-led project of promoting patriotic education has ensured the coexistence in commercial popular culture of revolutionary idols and contemporary celebrities, via memory sites associated with broadcast television, DVDs and the Internet, and the historical locations, museums and monuments of ‘red tourism.’

Article Details

Section
General Articles (Peer Reviewed)
Author Biography

Elaine M Jeffreys, University of Technology, Sydney

Elaine Jeffreys is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the China Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney, and Associate Professor in China Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UTS. She is co-editor with Louise Edwards of Celebrity in China (2010) Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press; editor of China’s Governmentalities: Governing Change, Changing Government (2009) London: Routledge and Sex and Sexuality in China (2009 [2006]) London: Routledge; and author of China, Sex and Prostitution (2004) London: Routledge.