Changing Representations of Modernity and Mobility: Chinese External Communications in Song of the Fishermen and China's Port City TV Documentaries

This chapter demonstrates the changing representations of modernity and mobility in Chinese audiovisual media about port cities in the 20th and 21st centuries. It is argued that through the lens of three contemporary TV documentaries about Chinese port cities, a new imaginary of Chinese modernity might be glimpsed, one that foregrounds mobility and China's global outlook in the new millennium. The chapter begins with an analysis of the fictional film Song of the Fishermen (Cai, 1934) to show that the prominent theme in traditional port city cinema concerns imprisonment and escape (Hallam, 2010). In contrast to film, this chapter conducts a detailed analysis of the documentaries—with links to the Belt and Road Initiative—where a new modern mobility is represented by cleansing the past and projecting a spatiality of Chinese global networks. It analyses various aspects of port-cities represented in the documentaries to reveal how a new modern spatiality and mobility is represented and marked by the depletion of liminal spaces and their replacement by a cleansed imaginary of the Chinese port that foregrounds international adventure and an inexorable "moving forward" of Chinese modernity and mobility hinting at how China might shape global order and voices.