Film Discussion Groups in China: State Discourse or a Plebeian Public Sphere?

The Chinese term "film criticism among the masses" {qunzhong yingping) refers to a system of loosely organized film discussion groups which have emerged in several Chinese cities in the wake of the economic reforms of the 1980s. The term "masses" {qunzhong) belies the political origins of this phenomenon in the 1950s when the new socialist state sought to bring about the political self-education of what it called "the masses" and at the same time, to create a basis of popular legitimacy for itself. It is therefore a historical irony that in the 1980's revival of these film discussion groups, can be detected an emerging rupture between state and popular discourse, and a decline in the hold of official messages on mass media audiences. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the interrelated notions of "civil society" and "public sphere" Civil society refers to the structural and institutional dimension of a democratic society, where voluntary associations operate outside of and independent of the state (Keane 1988ab; Taylor 1990). The public sphere, most thoroughly analyzed by Habermas for the Western context, refers to the discursive realm of social criticism and public opinion formed through public debates which are independent of state as well as market domination (Habermas 1989; Calhoun 1992). Sites for the emergence of the public sphere in 18th century Western Europe were coffee houses, salon societies, newspapers, magazines, and novels. First developed to discuss social changes at the inception of capitalism in the West, and as a way for the new bourgeoisie of the 18th century to band together against the absolutist state, the notions of "civil society" and "public sphere" have recently been re-appropriated for a different historical and political context. They have witnessed a renewed vitality in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. From the 1970s to the 1990s, these notions have informed the selfinterpretations of those seeking to liberate the realm of "society" from the totalizing socialist state (Arato 1981; Wojcicki 1981;Pelcynski 1988;Hankiss 1988;Kligman 1991). With regards to art, these social movements can be seen as efforts to free art from the dual processes of what Benjamin called the "aestheticization of politics" and the "politicization of art," which modernity had inaugurated by severing art from its traditional association with religion and cult values (1968). In this paper, I would also like to address the question for post-Mao China of the possibilities for a public sphere developing in the context of statedominated production of mass media.' The economic reforms launched in China in the 1980s have had the effect of pluralizing culture and beginning the dissolution or weakening of the state at the peripheries of its organizational apparatus (Yang 1989a). In this gradual retreat of the state, what indications are there of social self-organization and new discourse-formation in the realm of mass media culture? My paper is very much an in-progress report and reflection, based on six weeks of preliminary fieldwork visiting film discussion groups in the cities of Xi'an and Shanghai in early 1992, and a perusal of two dozen film criticisms in print. While art in state socialist contexts seeks to extract itself from state politics, art and public culture are also