128 • Film Studies • Issue 7 • Winter 2005 • Gary Bettinson Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema, Routledge, 2004. ISBN: 0-415-17290-X Of the various contributors to Routledge’s National Cinema series, Yingjin Zhang is faced with one of the more problematic tasks. The principal spectre that threatens Zhang’s undertaking also looms above the conception of the series as a whole: namely, the very postulation of the national cinema taxonomy, which hazards to appear not only narrowly provincial but also anachronistic in the contemporary context of globalisation and transnationality. Quite aside from the issue of globalisation, moreover, Zhang must reckon with the intra-national tensions and discontinuities that mark the Chinese nation, a country so multifarious that any monolithic articulation of the national is surely put out of reach. Historiography has consolidated the existence of ‘three Chinas’ (The People’s Republic, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), and in the past twenty years film studies has generally followed suit, demarcating three distinct if related cinemas that offer separate expressions of ‘Chineseness’. Film scholars and historians have undermined any unitary paradigm of the national in Chinese cinema by noting the divisions – historical, political, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic – that mark the three Chinas off from one another. Add to this the variegations within each territory, as well as the dispersal of the national across the global Chinese diaspora, and a coherent definition of Chineseness appears impossibly elusive and abstruse. Zhang’s present study, all the more important for being one of the few authoritative histories of Chinese cinema to be published in English, squares up to the inherent difficulties involved in bringing Chinese national cinema into focus. The author’s twin aim, which is in turn descriptive and exploratory, is to provide a chronological history of Chinese cinema as it has developed in all three territories, and to excavate an image of the national that can accommodate the kinds of fundamental disunities described above. To this end, Zhang undertakes to map out the ‘parallel, divergent and diverse developments in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan’ (11). His overall strategy is to marry a diachronic and comparative perspective with a critical approach, examining the significant trends to have emerged from Chinese film in the last century. Much of the book’s effectiveness proceeds from its skilful interweaving of these methodologies. Critical analysis allows Zhang to explore the emergence and transformation of stylistic, generic, and thematic norms. Historical exegesis situates the explicit and referential meanings of specific films within their precise socio-historical contexts. And a comparative approach lays bare the strained interactions that have typically characterised the relationship between the three interlocking cinemas. Comparative analysis also enables Zhang to demonstrate a thesis that will answer the second of his principal inquiries (to articulate the national in Chinese cinema). In light of what he calls the ‘messiness’ of China and its indigenous cinema, and despite the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party to promote the image of unification, Zhang challenges the assumption that all inhabitants of the three Chinas are cut from the same national cloth. Consequently, Zhang argues that the ‘Chinese’ in ‘Chinese cinema’ cannot be conceptualised in holistic terms but must instead be reformulated as the sum aggregate of Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and mainland cinemas. What emerges therefore is not only the re-assertion of three distinct yet equally ‘Chinese’ cinemas, but also a corollary vision of the national that recognises the competing representations imaged by each of the three Chinas. As such, an exemplum of the national is not to be found in any single Chinese film, but rather arises from a collective Reviews