CHINA POP: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and...

CHINA POP: How Soap Operas, Tabloids, and Best-Sellers Are Transforming a Culture by Jianying Zha (New World Press: $12; 210 pp.). The author offers a vivid, informal examination of recent shifts in Chinese popular culture and portraits of the artists and entrepreneurs responsible for them. The expansion of free enterprise has created alternatives to dreary state-sponsored propaganda films, TV shows and novels--entertaining works that genuinely appeal to audiences. These cracks in the government media monopoly may ultimately do more to transform Chinese society than the ill-fated political protests of Tiananmen Square: “Instead of dramatic, exhilarating breakdowns of old regimes, as occurred in Eastern Europe and Russia, what we witness in China is the slow, soft, messy meltdown of the old structure. . . . There is an impure, junky, hybrid quality in nearly all spheres of present Chinese life--culture, politics, attitudes, ideology.”