Drawing on media images, internet websites, books, everyday life interactions and interviews, this edited volume seeks to probe the meanings of transnational Chinese masculinities across four continents in the world: Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. To be more specific, this volume explores the multifaceted meanings of transnational masculinities from a wide range of Han Chinese men from urban backgrounds, including businessmen, white-collar and blue-collar male workers, male authors, entertainment stars, self-identified heterosexual and homosexual men, and students. Through an interdisciplinary study of media representations and lived realities of transnational Chinese masculinities, the editors Hird and Song argue that “Confucian masculinities and elite practices, reworked and hybridized, echo across the discourses and everyday lives of contemporary Chinese men and masculinities” (p. 1).
Hird and Song theorize transnational Chinese masculinities from three pivotal tenets. The first tenet is cosmopolitanism. Hird and Song point out that privileged Chinese men's lives are filled with “cultural competition and cultural hybridity associated with the imagination of globality and the flow of global capital in today's China” (p. 8). They argue that “cosmopolitan consumerist masculinities are localized through engagement with nationalist and historically embedded discourses” and that “cosmopolitanism's interplay between the local and the global also manifests in Chinese men's switching back and forth between Western and Chinese medical treatments for impotence” (p. 8).
The second tenet is the infusion of Confucian morality in business practices. As Hird and Song contend, post-socialist China has witnessed the pursuit of materialism and the embrace of business activities by intellectual men, who were historically considered superior to merchants. Hird and Song argue that transnational Chinese masculinities are manifested in the use of the Confucian moral code of the Chinese gentlemen to legitimize material wealth in their global business practices.
The third tenet is the construction of a model fatherhood that is heterosexual, emotionally involved, and caring. Hird and Song ascertain that media campaigns have championed fathers who exhibit emotional sentiments and encouraging spirit in their interactions with their children, including attending their children's extracurricular activities and helping their children explore their individual identities. Hird and Song argue that these new practices of a heterosexual, fatherly man are interwoven with “discourses of consumer-driven ‘soft’ masculinity, ‘high-quality’ habits and behavior” (p. 9).
This volume is comprised of two parts. The first part examines media representations of transnational Chinese masculinities in online and print fiction, films, and TV dramas. The second part explores the lived experiences of transnational Chinese masculinities. While the first part discusses the ways in which transnational Chinese masculinities are represented in media outlets, the second part scrutinizes the ways in which these representations are negotiated and grappled with in individual men's everyday enactment of their transnational Chinese masculinities. At times, the line between representations and realities gets blurred when some individual men's lived existences are shaped by media representations of them.
Part I of the volume argues that transnational Chinese masculinities are represented in the media as cosmopolitan with Chinese characteristics. In Chapter 1, in examining the depictions of young elite men in films and TV drama series, Geng Song argues that a transnational Chinese masculinity is portrayed as a coexistence of a cosmopolitan fantasy with the Chinese nationalistic sensibilities and a gendered hierarchy. In Chapter 2, Arnhilt Hoefle explores the representations of Chinese men in the four episodes of Tatort, and argues that Chinese men are portrayed as globally mobile, virile, competent, and successful, contrary to the image of impotent and feminized Chinese men in the historical Orientalist discourse.
In Chapter 3, Sheldon Lu investigates the portrayals of Chinese transnational masculinities in three seminal movies by Hong Kong directors. Lu argues that, in tandem with the “rise of China” in the new century, Chinese masculinity is resurrected with the image of confident, cosmopolitan, and successful entrepreneurs. In Chapter 4, Hongwei Bao examines the online novel Beijing Story, about a tragic love story between two men in Beijing during the 1980s and early 1990s. Bao argues that sexuality, masculinity, class, and culture intersect in the same-sex love relationship, imbued by neo-Confucian values and virtues, nationalist sentiments, and class-entrenched ideologies.
In Chapter 5, Lezhou Su narrates the transformative life of Nan Wu in the English-language novel A Free Life. Su contends that Nan Wu, through his hard work in menial jobs and Ph.D. study in the US after the Tiananmen Incident, develops a self-reliant, pioneering, and free-spirited masculinity, while his Chinese classmates faced emasculation in a dark, corrupt Chinese society with a loss of humanity. In Chapter 6, Pamela Hunt, in her analysis of the author Feng Tang and his fiction, argues that Feng develops a mode of masculinity that is subversive, transgressive, sensual, virile, yet at the same time patriarchal and elite.
Part II of the volume probes the ways in which Chinese men engage with these discursive portrayals and produce masculinities in the configurations of class, gender, and ethnicity. In Chapter 7, Jamie Coates describes the life of one of the most famous Chinese immigrants in Japan – Li Xiaomu. Coates argues that Li, in transforming his image from an entrepreneur associated with the sex industry to a politician and writer, creates a “consumerist cosmopolitan” masculinity (p. 143) that includes the image of the Japanese salaryman and the transnational entrepreneur.
In Chapter 8, Jin Feng examines the “culinary masculinity” constructed by Cai Lan, Hong Kong restaurateur, food critic, TV host, and author. Feng demonstrates the ways in which Cai Lan combines Western high cuisine criteria with the elite taste of the Confucian literati, whose sensibilities and moral virtues include filial piety and loyalty. Feng argues that Cai Lan “constructs his masculine identity by tapping into not only the male-dominated lineage of Chinese gastronomic literature but also the cosmopolitan image of Hong Kong as a vital global metropolis despite political and cultural fluctuations since its decolonization” (pp. 158–59).
In Chapter 9, Lin Song analyzes the depictions of fatherhood in the Chinese adapted version of the Korean reality show “Where Are We Going, Dad?” Song argues that the audience picks their favorite role model of the “soft” masculinity of fathers, who are expressive, affectionate, and demonstrative of their love toward their sons (p. 168). Meanwhile, Song critiques the public vs. private gender division and gender hierarchy exhibited throughout the show.
In Chapter 10, Miriam Driessen, through her ethnographic research with Chinese working-class men who migrate to Ethiopia to build roads, argues that migratory work is a route of empowerment for these men to achieve a sense of respect and honor as men, husbands, and fathers. At the same time, though, they wrestle with the fact that their children perceive them as part-strangers and that they have to compensate for their absence with material items and gifts.
In Chapter 11, based on her fieldwork with birth tourism in California, Tingyu Kang explores the situation wherein Chinese husbands stay in China to fulfil their financial responsibilities while their wives travel to California to give birth to their babies. Kang argues that while the Chinese husbands prove their masculinity through providing money and hiring Chinese male employees to care for their wives, the male workers are compelled to negotiate their gender and class identity with the feminized, domestic labor that they engage in and the power and surveillance that the Chinese husbands impose on them.
In Chapter 12, Xia Zhang, through her fieldwork among Chinese international students in the US and her research of online forums, contends that affluent female Chinese students create a discourse of the “North American despicable men” to describe well-educated, male Chinese immigrants from a non-elite background as physically unappealing, asexual and stingy, lacking social and people skills. Zhang argues that this discourse should be understood in the context of the gender and racial politics in the US as well as China's ascendancy as a global superpower that has resulted in a wide social and economic disparity.
This book employs an interdisciplinary perspective to capture the multilayered meanings of transnational Chinese masculinities. From a study of the media representations to a scrutiny of the lived experiences of Chinese men in the four continents of the world, this book makes a major contribution to Men's Studies and studies of gender and media. Since configurations of race, class, and gender are the central tenets defining the meanings of Chinese transnational masculinities, the book would have benefited from an introduction providing an analytical account of, and a critical literature review about, the intersected relationships between race, class, and gender, and the ways in which they coalesce to shape the Chinese transnational masculinities. This analysis would be crucial for tying together all the chapters as a coherent whole. That said, the book will be welcomed by a wide array of scholars interested in gender, media studies, and Men's Studies in China and beyond.
