this collection offers a variety of perspectives on culture in contemporary china. we begin and end with pieces by jing wang and deborah davis on the production and consumption of culture in general, before moving on to three specific areas: visual culture, music and poetry. jing wang's opening piece on “bourgeois bohemians” (bobos) in china revolves around the all-important question of how taste is constructed and a multiplicity of lifestyles imagined. in china as elsewhere in the world, lifestyles are first imagined and transmitted through advertising. wang describes how marketing campaigns propagate idealized lifestyles to different segments of china's self identified urban middle class; notably the bohemian and the xin xin renlei. deborah davis focuses on the consumption end of culture, suggesting that for all the real resentments and worries engendered by growing income inequality and job insecurity, urbanites in shanghai experience consumer culture and the pursuit of individual taste and comfort in the home through shopping to be positive experiences, particularly when juxtaposed against the deprivations of the past. both wang and davis show that the production and consumption of culture are complex phenomena that go beyond mere market manipulation. there is substantial agency involved, from urbanites joyfully participating in redecoration of their flats to the ways in which niche segments of the urban middle class separate into different “tribes.”

the braester, denton and finnane essays focus on different aspects of the production and consumption of visual culture: film, museums and fashion. braester suggests that one cannot sharply differentiate commercial film from art film on the basis of content or aesthetics, as directors previously known for making art films move into commercials, and both share similar sensibilities.

this article treats an understudied subject in popular culture studies: the mutual feed between lifestyle cultures and marketing through an examination of the bobo fever in urban china. how did an imaginary class of “bourgeois bohemians” emerge in a country where the bourgeois base is statistically small and where the bohemian equation is non-existent? to shed light on this pop-culture-turned-marketing-fad syndrome, the article introduces the concept of the “neo-tribes” and maps the pathways that link style cultures to consumer segmentation. a couple of critical questions arise from this exercise. first, is the separability of taste from class symptomatic of a “chinese leap of faith”? and secondly, is the hottest market segment today – the “neo-neo-tribes” – preparing us to address the convergence of a global youth culture?

the article looks at a model of filmmaking that has emerged since the rise of “cultural economy” in the mid-1990s. directors have collaborated with real estate developers and other entrepreneurs and become cultural brokers. they use the prestige, access and popular appeal of the cinema to establish a stronger connection between film and market forces. as filmmakers become trendsetters, their films aim not only at box office success but also at shaping economic agendas and visual experience, social networks and the aesthetic environment. filmmaking as cultural brokering has been practised by directors as disparate as the market-oriented feng xiaogang, the neorealist ning ying and the documentary producer wu wenguang.

this article presents an overview of post-mao museum representations of modern chinese history. the focus is on changing exhibitionary practices and historical narratives in prc history museums in the period of market reforms and globalization. it shows how new museum architecture, the place of museum buildings in the cityscape and new exhibitionary technologies (such as multimedia displays, dioramas, miniatures) are tied to new narratives of history that serve the interests of the ideology of market reform. conventional socialist narratives of martyrdom and revolutionary liberation have not disappeared by any means, but they are being reshaped to downplay class issues and to legitimize commercial interests, a work ethic ideology and nationalism.

in the post-mao era china competed successfully for a place in the international trade in textiles and apparel, but its economic success has not been matched by recognition of chinese fashion design on the world stage. one reason for this lies in the obstacles posed by the existing hierarchy of fashion capitals, which has proved notoriously difficult to subvert. shanghai may mean fashion in china, but unlike paris, it does not mean that to the world at large. yet the chinese fashion industry is also bedevilled by problems of its own. a high degree of national self-consciousness on the world stage is evident in international fashion shows featuring rather predictable pastiches of chinese culture. it may be the case that state-sponsored nationalism militates against both a more interesting approach to cultural heritage on the part of designers and a more receptive climate for chinese fashion on international catwalks.

the import of illegal, cut cds from the west (dakou cds) in the mid-1990s marked the revitalization of chinese rock culture. this article analyses the rise of dakou culture in the context of the interrelated processes of globalization and marketization of chinese culture. contrary to accounts that proclaim the crisis or death of chinese rock, this article describes the re-emergence of rock since the mid-1990s. it presents an overview on three different scenes, part of the dakou culture among chinese youth. the fashionable bands are inspired by a cosmopolitan aspiration, the underground bands signify the return of the political and the urban folk singers express a nostalgic longing. all three scenes attest to the current diversity of popular music cultures in china, and are interpreted as sonic tactics employed by chinese youth to carve out their own space amidst an increasingly commercialized and globalized society.

in this article i take examples of popular music recordings released in the xinjiang uyghur autonomous region during the 1990s and first few years of the 21st century, in order to illustrate the global flows of sounds and meanings which influence uyghur pop. the disseminatory power of “micro media” (cheap cassettes, vcds) facilitates the global movement of both musical sounds and political ideas. i argue, using examples of uyghur reggae and uyghur belly dancing, that these sounds and meanings are radically adapted and re-signified in the construction of uyghur identity and cultural politics, in a complex interplay between the global, national and local, and between tradition and modernity. i discuss the gendered expression of uyghur nationalism in popular song through the iconic figure of the weeping mother, demonstrating the ability of expressive culture (here music) to reveal underlying or underpinning political trends.

marketization is a prime feature of arts and culture in contemporary china. strikingly, while avant-garde poetry is hardly involved in this trend, and some of its commentators feel a sense of crisis as a result, it continues to flourish as a small but stable, high-cultural niche area that boasts increasing textual richness and a well-positioned constituency. an explanation of this phenomenon must take into account multiple re-inventions of traditional chinese notions of poetry and poethood, amid rapidly changing circumstances throughout the contemporary era. less culturally specific but no less essential, another factor is the very nature of the genre of avant-garde poetry in its social context and of artistic experiment per se, creating a problem for cultural analysis that makes numbers the measure of all things.

this article looks at the practices of communities that employ internet technologies in order to produce, distribute, consume and value chinese poetry. the article is in three parts. the first part provides a brief general overview of the current state of research about the chinese internet. i take issue with the dominant tendency of english-language research to focus almost exclusively on questions of censorship. the second part looks at the development of “web literature” (wangluo wenxue) in china, briefly outlining the meaning of the term and the content of a protracted debate about web literature that took place in 2001. the debate illustrates the limited extent to which web literature is able to distinguish itself from conventionally published literature. paradoxically, this has led to “web literature” becoming a recognized genre within print culture. in the final part, i compare a prc online poetry community with a similar community based in the usa. i conclude by arguing that previous scholarship's biased focus on the transformative aspects of cyber culture has made it difficult to gain a clear insight into the many positive and culture-specific features of chinese web literature.

over the past decade, urban residents have experienced a consumer revolution at multiple levels. in terms of material standard of living, sustained economic growth has dramatically increased spending on discretionary consumer purchases and urbanites have enthusiastically consumed globally branded foodstuffs, pop-music videos and fashion. at the same time, however, income distribution has become increasingly unequal. some scholars therefore emphasize the negative exclusionary and exploitative parameters of the new consumer culture seeing nothing more than a ruse of capitalism or marker of all that is negative about post-socialist city life. building on nearly a decade of fieldwork in shanghai, this article disputes such a linear interpretation of subordination and exclusion in favour of a more polyvalent and stratified reading that emphasizes individual narratives unfolding against memories of an impoverished personal past, and a consumer culture that simultaneously incorporates contradictory experiences of emancipation and disempowerment.