A study of filmmaking in the People's Republic of China will, almost inevitably, take as its starting point the relation of the character (“the self”) to the social space in which it moves. The assumption that this dramatic relation is also, at bottom, ideological is evident in contemporary Chinese cinema through the continuity with and conflict between the pre- Liberation traditions of Confucianism and the post-Liberation ideologies of socialism, a continuity and conflict that turn on the relation among the self, the family, the workplace, and the state, the fundamental terms of any image of the social totality. Starting from these premises, this essay argues that the most complex and compelling popular film form that embodies the negotiation between the traditional ethical system and the new state ideology, one that articulates the range and force of the emotional contradictions between them, is what is known in the West as “melodrama.” Because this category is not part of the Chinese genre system, its use entails a shift of cultural perspective.

The legacy of Western criticism of melodrama in literature and film is complex and contradictory in its theoretical formulation of the affective foundations of subjectivity. For Elsaesser, melodrama is the representation of the subjectivity of the European bourgeoisie in its struggle against the authority of a declining feudalist system. That is, melodrama is a passionate meditation on the historical experience of bourgeois subjection to the economic authority of the ancien régime, an account of action and subjectivity in the social formation from the standpoint of loss and from the point of view of its victims.