HICCS 2025

This panel explores cultural and spatial dynamics across borders, examining the "Burma Road" in China's Muslim Northwest, strategies and styles of youth films in the multimedia era, creative collaborations in China-Europe film co-production, and migration's impact on the cosmology of home.

Peng Hai
University of Pittsburg, Assistant Professor

Title:
"Burma Road” in the Muslim Northwest: Centering Borderlands in Kukan

Abstract:
Reemerging as a high-profile patriotic education film at the Chongqing Three Gorges Museum, Kukan: the Battle Cry of China (1941), thanks to a long sequence of air raids descending on China’s war-time capital Chongqing, has greeted the Chinese public since 2015 as the latest documentary evidence of Japanese WWII atrocities after the publications of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking (1991) and The Diaries of John Rabe (1997). The air raids footage, well over ten minutes long, has since animated much popular and academic discussion in China. The Academy award winning documentary has also engendered intense interest in Li Ling-ai, the “technical advisor” of the film, an under-credited creative force behind the film according to Asian Americanist filmmaker Robin lung. However, the “film proper,” in which at least two thirds are set in China’s southwestern and northwestern borderlands, has received no attention in English language reviews. This article focuses its analysis on the images of those borderlands and their indigenous inhabitants. A proper treatment of the bulk of the documentary’s content, I argue, brings to light little-known facts of border-crossings in the China Theater of WWII. These border-crossings, from Burma to Yunnan, Guangxi to Chongqing, Sichuan to Gansu, eastern Qinghai to the Tibetan Plateau, and extradigetically, northwestern China to Soviet Central Asia, foreground the critical role traditionally non-Sinitic parts of China played in sustaining the Chongqing-based Kuomintang regime in the Pacific War years. Aside from providing rare documentary footages on the well-told story of the “Burma Road,” images of the “Asiatic melting pot” of Gansu and Qinghai underline the heretofore unknown history of China’s northwestern Muslim transporters and road builders, who were a sine qua non force in ensuring critical supplies from the Soviet Union could reach Chongqing’s ill-equipped army via the tortuous Qilian mountains and treacherous Yellow River by mule caravans and goat-skin rafters.

Ying Xiao
University of Florida, Associate Professor

题目：
融媒体时代青春片的类型策略、视听风格与跨时空想象

摘要：
作为一种重要的题材类型，中国式青春片自1990年代第六代导演以青春成长为载体的艺术电影到21世纪新媒介时代以IP电影的商业模式迅速崛起历经了一系列的嬗变。文章通过分析青春片的叙事结构、类型元素、和文化症候对21世纪融媒体时代中国电影的青春化、数字化和微转向进行解读，并探讨其类型发展流变过程中与当代中国科技、媒介、社会转型之间的关联。这一类型的融合、拓展及媒介间性也很好的体现在青春片的视听风格上，尤其是对流行音乐类型及音乐能动性的运用上。本文首次聚焦青春片的电影音乐，通过文本细读及对视听风格的剖析，并采纳“娱乐产业乌托邦”、“异托邦”和“无托邦”等概念的比照框架对中国式青春片的类型特征及融媒体时代复杂而多变的影视文化生态网络提出归纳性的阐释和进一步的理论思考。

Mei Yang
University of San Diego, Associate Professor

Title:
Migration, Space, and the Cosmology of Home: A Comparative Perspective

Abstract:
Embarking from The Wandering Earth (2019), China’s first interstellar blockbuster, in which actions of the main characters are prompted by their wish to go home, this paper surveys the homecoming narratives observed in contemporary Chinese films, both commercial hits and art house films. These films include Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin (2013), Zhang Yang’s Shower (1999), Getting Home (2007), Yung-Shing Teng’s Return Ticket (2011) and commercial hits such as Lost on Journey (2010). I also extend beyond Chinese features and examine how the desire for home is represented against the background of transnational economic flow and cross-border labor movements in recent films. In the South Korean drama Way Back Home (2013), Australian film Lion (2016), Taiwanese semi-autobiographical American Girl (2021), and Hollywood productions such as Nomadland (2020) and Tár (2022), migration, social mobility, and the pursuit of freedom become jumbled and in the end all eerily resemble dislocation. To confront that reality, films either affirm the validity of homecoming or refute it with a more resolute exile. These films posit one question that lies at the center of my inquiry, namely, where is home, then?

I highlight two Chinese filmmakers, Li Ruijun, and Bi Gan, whose answers through the river scenes in their films are revelatory. Li’s River Road (2014) and Return to Dust (2022) tell of marginalized individuals searching for, returning

This panel examines the interplay between media, culture, and storytelling in China, exploring the global localization of Genshin Impact, avant-garde animation in 1980s China, digital reading practices of infinite fictions, and the portrayal of capitalists in socialist-era Chinese TV series.

Tianyi Xu
Fudan University, Masters Student

Title:
Born-Translated Chinese Videogame Genshin Impact and its Glocalization

Abstract:
This paper uses Genshin Impact, developed by Chinese game company miHoYo (HoYoverse), as a case study to connect translation theories with game studies, re-examining translation practices in contemporary Sinophone digital media. Genshin Impact has embedded translation into the game production process, enabling players worldwide to access the latest content simultaneously, altering the inherent sequence between original and translated texts to achieve a “born-translated” state. Additionally, unlike traditional localization strategies in the game industry, Genshin Impact demonstrates a path described as “glocalization” through multicultural creation and translation, providing an equal space for world cultures to showcase themselves and challenging the notion that there are dominant and subordinate cultures. The paper concludes that Genshin Impact should not be seen as a machine for cultural export but rather as one of the possibilities for future world literature. The game belongs not only to China but also to the entire world, and its born-translated characteristic and glocalization strategy welcomes players of different races and languages, allowing them to enter its world as a foreign place and engage in a detached mode of cultural experience.

Yan Zhong
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Lecturer in Chinese

题目：
钟泉艺术动画——80年代新中国文艺复兴背景下的先锋派动画

摘要：
在1992年于夏威夷国际电影节上，美国动画家大卫艾力克向美国观众正式介绍了七部中国艺术动画电影，其中两部是艺术动画代表人物钟泉的剪纸动画片《牛冤》与水墨动画片《雁阵》。
1978年中国改革开放以后出现了10年的文艺繁荣。在胡耀邦的文艺路线指导下，在改革开放后中国电影界的经济红利推动下，一种独特的国有经济支持下的文化创新活动在中国出现。当时国务院（现中共中央）电影局的经济支持下，在国务院文化部的宽松政策默许下，中国文化解出现了前所未有的繁荣，人们称之为“新中国文艺复兴的十年”。
长春电影制片厂美术分厂在这一波的文化红利中脱颖而出，在上海美术片的支援协作下，开始利用中央政府的政治经济政策，在厂长、导演钟泉的带领下生产了大批具有人文批判精神与艺术创新精神，而忽略市场需求的先蓬派艺术动画片。从1986年《象虎》、1987年的《鹰》（提名中国电影金鸡奖）、1989年的《牛冤》（获得华表奖）、1990年的《雁阵》（获得中国电影金鸡奖）等无不显示出艺术表现形式的创新与政治思维模式上的深刻反思。
在短暂的政治开放与经济红利双重加持下的动画片创新思潮迅速崛起也快速消。失然以动画家钟泉为代表的艺术院校背景的团队在21世纪迅速占领了中国动画教育产业。
他们充满人文情怀与艺术创新的制作形式成为中国动画教育的主流，在这种先锋派人文艺术动画教育的影响下，千禧一代的中国动画人开始在动画甚至电子游戏领域逐渐创造出令世界瞩目的艺术奇迹。

Chengxi Yin
Duke Kunshan University, Undergraduate Student

Title:
Gaining Pleasure in Infinite Game Worlds: Digital Reading Practices of Infinite Fiction in China

Abstract:
Infinite fiction is a popular genre of Chinese online literature characterized by protagonists navigating through various survival games in distinct small worlds with horror elements. This study examines the audiences’ fascination with this popular media by focusing on their evaluations and motivations for reading this genre. Drawing on audience research, this study challenges the textual determinism model that assumes a fixed meaning in media texts. The study combines both textual analysis of 11 infinite fiction novels with thematic analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews with 24 readers. This analysis highlights the active role of readers in their discerning criteria and preferences for evaluating satisfactory and unsatisfactory infinite fiction, as well as their active immersion, recognition, and engagement of media texts. Moreover, the findings also expand on Ang’s (1991b) argument in Watching Dallas, demonstrating that despite differences in media and content, audience perceptions and engagement with popular media share notable similarities. By examining infinite fiction through an audience-based perspective, the study provides insights into the evolving dynamics of digital reading practices in contemporary China.

Zhaoxi Liu
Department of Communication, Trinity University, Associate Professor and Carlos Augustus de Lozano Professor of Journalism

Title:
Portraying Capitalists in Socialist China: Investor Characters in Chinese TV Series

Abstract:
Chinese TV shows frequently featuring capitalists and their agents is self-contradictory in a perceived socialist country with a Communist goal of eliminating capitalism. Such a problematic is resolved, this analysis shows, via the work of ideology that is unique to the Chinese context. A close examination of the portrayal of capitalists in a few popular Chinese TV series reveals that these capitalists are not greedy, selfish, and cheating investors portrayed in American movies. Instead, the Chinese investors are socially responsible, honorable, and nationalist noble men. Such a particular construct of investors is shaped by Confucianism and nationalism, the dominant ideologies in today’s China. This analysis demonstrates how ideology shapes popular culture representation within specific context.