Reading Politics Out of Entertainment: Chinese Fans’ Interpretation of House of Cards

• In Event: Transnational Media, Cultural Knowledge, and Local/Global Identities

Abstract

As a special case of online foreign content, political TV dramas represent a genre of fan objects that issues a political invitation to its consumers, an invitation to embrace certain political values that might be alien to the social realities the fans live in. This paper starts from a political economic review of transcultural TV in China, followed by a structural analysis of the online sphere of transcultural TV fandom. Through a textual analysis of posts on the Baidu post bar for fans, this paper shows how Chinese fans interpret one recent American political TV drama, House of Cards, according to two themes of contradiction: authentic/unauthentic and foreign/indigenous. When interpreting the depiction of American politics in the show as authentic, the fans were not hesitant to say that the depiction of Chinese politics is unauthentic. By contrasting the “real” American politics depicted in the show and the “real” Chinese politics based on personal experience, the identity struggle of being Chinese in the contemporary conditions of a network society is explored in the fans’ discourses.

Author

• Weiyu Zhang, National U of Singapore