Narrative Content in Chinese Popular Culture

Scholarship on the narrative content of Chinese popular culture is underdeveloped. (We use the term narrative content' in a general, broad, and non-technical way to refer to all elements that constitute stories, not just narrativity or plotline. Lyric-less music, paintings, and short videos can contain narrative elements.) This may sound strange and untrue, given the sheer number of Chinese-language and English-language publications on all major genres of Chinese media entertainment products, including TV, films, video series, webnovels, games, etc. However, this becomes clear when one compares the state of research on Chinese popular culture’s narrative content with, for example, that of Chinese popular culture’s digital platforms and platformization. Studies in the latter research field are published in flagship international journals, highly cited by international scholars, and considered an indispensable contribution to its parent field of digital platformization. Studies of the former are quite numerous, but their theoretical contribution, intellectual influence, international visibility, and field coherence are very limited. There are only a small number of relatively well-developed subfields, such as studies of Chinese boys’ love webnovels, women’s images in video entertainment, Spring Festival Galas, films directed by major auteurs, and phenomenal hits such as Black Myth: Wukong and Ne Zha 2.This underdevelopment has at least three causes, all of them powerful but inconspicuous. The first is an unfortunate (and intended) intellectual development that resulted from the encoding/decoding model of popular communication and active audience theory, which famously argue that narrative content does not determine its social impact. Since the 1980s, scholars in cultural studies and the social sciences have increasingly regarded the analysis of audiences, media institutions, and production processes as superior to and/or more scientific than narrative analyses. The second cause is popular cultural coloniality: non-Western popular culture is implicitly seen, by relevant international scholarly communities, as less aesthetically achieved, theoretically intriguing, and sociopolitically significant than Western and global popular culture. This directly devalues and discourages the study of Chinese popular culture and indirectly exacerbates the first cause. Studies of media political economy, fandom, and production are much less affected by international scholarly communities’ colonial bias. The third cause is the practical issue of lower symbolic and material rewards for popular cultural narrative studies. In relevant social science fields, such as communication and media studies, cultural studies, sociology of culture, and cultural policy studies, narrative content research can expect lower rewards than studies of media institutions and mechanisms, audiences, business implications, and production. (This is partly due to the first cause.) In relevant humanities fields, such as film, literature, animation, or music studies, popular cultural research can expect lower rewards than that on serious, arthouse, historical, and already legitimated cultural texts. Such low rewards discourage scholars, especially non-tenured scholars in the market or neoliberal universities, from researching popular cultural narratives.Our rationale for creating this Research Topic is the continued underdevelopment and systematic marginalization of Chinese popular cultural narrative studies. More specifically, this Research Topic aims to i) make the multidisciplinary research field on Chinese popular cultural narratives more visible and, we hope, give it a degree of interdisciplinary coherence; ii) modestly advance the field by encouraging relatively marginalized topics, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches for narrative content studies; and iii) offer researchers in this field a publication venue of established standing (Frontiers in Communication is ranked Q2 in both Scopus and Web of Science [ESCI]) and unbiased evaluation processes for narrative content studies.Most corpora of Chinese popular cultural narratives are receiving less attention than they deserve. Some examples of narratives that are not at all marginalized include Jia Zhangke’s films, animated blockbusters such as Ne Zha 2, and popular video series with female leads, such as Empresses in the Palace and Nothing but Thirty. While numerous abstract and middle-range theoretical frameworks for analyzing narrative content are available, only a fraction of them are regularly applied in current studies of Chinese popular cultural narratives. Examples of frequently used frameworks include feminist and gender frameworks, the political control framework, and, more recently, postcolonial and decolonial frameworks. We welcome all frameworks while encouraging experimentation with a variety of new and seldom-used ones. Examples include social and political imaginaries, cognitive schema, emotional energy, chronotope, and many others. Similarly, we welcome all methodological approaches but also encourage underrepresented ones. Reacting against the aforementioned shift of popular culture studies toward research on audiences, media institutions, and production, various disciplines have been developing new approaches and/or reinforcing old ones. They do this to fortify the empirical and scientific analysis of narrative content, its meanings, and its social impact. They include critical discourse analysis, cognitive literary theory, semiotics, distant reading, systematic narrative analysis, the new sociology of literature, the political science of popular culture, and others. We encourage the use of these approaches, while fully recognizing the utility of conventional approaches, such as interpretive literary or film analysis.Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:• investigations of how subgenres of Chinese webnovels, such as zombie apocalypse, cyberpunk, boys’ love, or Cthulhu fantasy, differ from comparable ones produced in Western societies• the cultural legitimation (e.g., positive appraisal of the aesthetic value or the sociopolitical meanings) of any subset of narrative-based Chinese popular culture that is currently considered lowbrow, unproven, and/or artless, such as Chinese short dramas• analyses and clarification of narratives in specific Chinese video games, popular music, or other popular cultural content in which narratives are secondary or implicit• analyses of how creative production processes, such as the use of generative AI, influence the narrative content of Chinese popular culture• analyses of how digital platforms or other distributive mechanisms indirectly shape the narrative content of Chinese popular culture• analyses of how LGBTQ+ groups, racial minorities, workers, or other socially disadvantaged groups are represented as characters in Chinese TV and video series• analyses of how Chinese animations’ locally distinctive content contributes to storytelling, such as that in shadiao animation (沙雕动漫), AI animated dramas (AI漫剧), and 3D fantasy animated series• ethnographies or other in-depth analyses of creative workers of Chinese popular cultural narratives• explorations of how narrative content has contributed to the good performance of a given product or genre of Chinese popular culture in international entertainment markets• explorations of how and/or why Chinese narrative content deviates from global or Western archetypes and conventions—for example, many Chinese action-centered stories defy the narrative template of the hero’s journey• analyses of nationalist or other ideological elements in the narrative content of selected texts of Chinese popular culture.Information and Instructions for AuthorsManuscript summaries (Frontiers' name for abstracts) of up to 500 words will be considered until 30 November, 2026. Authors are encouraged to submit a manuscript summary before submitting a full manuscript. Topic editors: Matthew Ming-tak Chew, Yiyuan Zhang Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84882/narrative-content-in-chinese-popular-culture