SMU Assistant Professor of Sociology Yang Gao’s research on the influence of American television among elite Chinese youths was featured in a recent ChinaFile article — “Why’s Beijing So Worried About Western Values Infecting China’s Youth?”. She said that American TV is massively popular among young Chinese for its perceived authenticity. “This fascination is coinciding with the rise of the new ‘golden age’ of quality television in America, with complex characters and unconventional storytelling,” she said. “By comparison, Chinese TV can feel uninspired with relatively predictable plotlines and unambiguous characters. Heroes are heroes and villains are villains.”
Assistant Prof Gao also pointed out that the Chinese generation born in the ’80s and ’90s came of age amid a clash between traditional collectivist culture and the emergence of individualism. In this atmosphere, Hollywood characters have provided young people a basis on which to interrogate their own identities that isn’t often found in state-sanctioned sources. In research she conducted with university students in Beijing, she found that Hollywood themes of spontaneity, nonconformity, and self-realization particularly resonated with young Chinese fans of American TV.