From visual pleasure to global imagination: Chinese youth’s reception of Hollywood films

Employing empirical focus group research and drawing on transnational audience studies, this article investigates the consumption and reception of American films by Chinese college students. The article argues that Hollywood films satisfy the Chinese audience’s need for entertainment, visual pleasure, and escape from the restraints and hardships of daily life. In addition, Chinese audiences’ reception of Hollywood films functions as a site of negotiation of different political and cultural values. Hollywood films evoke Chinese youth’s global imagination, trigger their reflection on and debate over their own culture and society, and inspire a collective desire for alternative modernities and an alternative way of life. Chinese audiences engage in a process of civic participation by actively debating and contemplating a functional and ideal society and value system, bringing in agency that is crucial to audience studies.