China Pop

This paper is an analysis of the book China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Bestsellers Are Transforming a Culture, by Jianying Zha. The daughter of a Communist Party official, Zha was one of the idealists who believed that student opposition, culminating in the uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989, would overthrow the system and bring about sweeping changes in China. She argues that, despite the West's perception that China remains a despotic Communist system, China has indeed been changing, transformed not by political activism but by cultural forces that have had a more powerful and more liberating effect than any amount of marching in the streets would have been able to accomplish. She suggests that recognizing these effects requires the outsider to understand the unique nature of the Chinese character, which reflects and personifies change in very different ways from those in Western culture. Hers is a hopeful portrait of a society finding its own way into the 21st century while remaining true to its particular history and worldview.

Jianying Zha is the daughter of a top-ranking Communist Party leader. Until her father's death, the two clashed on their views of politics. Her father was in a position to see how communism was faring in other countries in the 1980s: "He was in Berlin when the wall came down, in Prague when Vaclav Havel was inaugurated. In Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev, he got a sense that communism was not doing well" (14). His daughter sum

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Category: History - C