Along with economic reform and the reintroduction of a market economy, China has seen an increasing tension between the socialist regime and the capitalist agenda since the 1980s. In tandem with incongruities between the political and economic realms, China’s postsocialist condition has also found expression in the cultural terrain. In particular, the formation of an “alternative public sphere” has been facilitated by a changing mediascape that includes practices and venues outside the state system (Zhang 30). Notably imperative to this alternative public culture is the growing strand of independent documentary filmmaking known as the New Documentary Movement. Launched by filmmakers such as Wu Wenguang, Duan Jinchuan, Zhang Yuan, and Jiang Yue in the 1990s, the New Documentary generally rejects the official tradition of newsreels and zhuanti pian—literally “special topic films”—which are characterized
by footage compiled in accordance with pre-written scripts, and by directly addressing the audience from a grand, top-down perspective (Berry “Getting Real” 117). In opposition to these previous forms, the New Documentary highlights the “spontaneous and unscripted quality” of on-the-spot realism (122), conveying a deep concern for “civilian life” from a “personal standpoint” (Lu 14-15). Thematically, the New Documentary distances itself from official discourses, choosing instead to document the lives of ordinary people, especially those on the periphery of society, such as marginalized artists, migrant workers, miners, Tibetans, the disabled, the elderly, the poor, and those who are queer-identifying.
While lesbianism has been the focus of several films since the new millennium (beginning with The Box [Ying 2001] and Dyke March [Shi 2004]), female impersonation and transgendering are also salient queer subjects (arguably starting with Miss Jing Xing [Zhang 2000]) in this wave of independent documentary filmmaking. In this article, I would like to focus on two Digital Video (DV) documentaries of the latter category: Snake Boy/Shanghai Nanhai (Chen and Li 2001) and Mei Mei (Gao 2005). I have chosen these two documentaries because of their main subjects’ involvement with different forms of transgenderism that, taken together, incisively demonstrate the particular ways queer-identifying subjects in contemporary China negotiate their agency in terms of temporality, spatiality, individuality/collectivity, money/labour, and imagination. As will become clear, the often mutually conflicting political, economic, and cultural forces characteristic of China’s postsocialist condition mediate these factors.