7 Imagination in the Box: Woju’s Realism and the Representation of Xiaosan Ruth Y. Y. Hung S ince China joined the World Trade Organization in the 1990s, following Deng Xiapoing’s declaration that ‘To get rich is glorious’, economic transformation, guided by the Chinese State and the Communist Party, has profoundly altered the moral and cultural landscape of China. Akin to the US and UK, the new China organizes, controls and produces itself by means of media and spectacle as much as its economic power and political structure. While China changes, cultural spectacles, especially created by newly important TV and other electronic media, have become prominent devices in transforming and stabilizing China. Therefore, reading those devices carefully has become necessary for any understanding of contemporary China. In this chapter, I propose to study the critical success of the nationwide popular TV serial Dwelling Narrowness, or Woju (meaning a humble abode in English), taking it as a critical example of these changes and how its content and 9781441179456_txt_print.indd 89 02/05/2012 14:30