Study On China’s Image Construction In American Films And TV Series

With the development of television and film technology,TV shows and films have become one of the most important entertainments in daily life.As such,these works wield an increasingly significant influence on the mind and value judgment.In the same time,in American multimedia works,the depiction of Chinese or Chinese culture can often be seen.The integrity of these descriptions would directly affect the overall perception and judgment of the American public on China.Imagination serves as one of the main ways to construct the image of China in American films and TV works.In fact,the image on TV or screen is the imagination of “China” which is absent from the normal life of American people but exists in other places.Fairly speaking,it is a special form of collective imagination of China in American society.According to the degree of the absence,the imagination of China in American society can be divided into recurring imagination and creative imagination,among which the recurring one fares a little better than the latter.Indeed,the in-depth development of international exchanges witnesses an off-the-chart popularity of recurring imagination while the other was outdated as Chinese and Chinese culture have become the main source of recurring imagination.During the process of recurring imagination,the one with critical consciousness is manifested as the form of ideology,which is the result of both integration and concealment of imagination to function as the ideological rule over the American people.Manifested as cultural misreading,the other one belongs to the type without critical consciousness,which is a prejudiced and crude interpretation of the image of China.Pageaux,Daniel-Henri,a French scholar,points that in the study of iconology,we should also consider the production and sale of literary works.To put it in other words,this move is concerned about the socialization of Chinese image.Undeniably,the development of economic globalization contributes to the worldwide export of American film and TV dramas as a kind of cultural products,which provides a new channel for people over the world to know and understand China.The media has had an important impact on the socialization of China’s image.On the one hand,the mass media provide a platform for demonstrating the absent image of China,featuring Chinese or Chinese culture.On the other hand,the development of digital technology,especially that of television and film media,is a harbinger of a new era-the era of consumption-in which acceptance of China’s image in public interacts with the construction and production as a sort of containing relation.