The sky is the limit: Feng Xiaoning’s leitmotif cinema, Chinese soft power and ideological fantasy

This article explores the intersection of politics and popular entertainment in contemporary Chinese leitmotif cinema (zhuxuanlü dianying), a genre that conflates political didacticism with Hollywood-style entertainment. Through my reading of three movies by Feng Xiaoning (馮小寧) – the hero-epos Qingzang xian/A Railway in the Clouds (2006) about the building of a rail link to Tibet; the disaster movie Chaoqiang taifeng/Super Typhoon (2008), about a Chinese metropolis hit by a storm; and the war-action drama Jiawu dahaizhan/Naval Battle (2012), about the Sino-Japanese naval conflict of 1895 – I will illustrate how leitmotif cinema negotiates demands for doctrinal orthodoxy with expectations for box office success. Feng’s cinematic aesthetics are thus symptomatic of the discursive complexity of post-socialist Chinese cinema where multiple temporalities and modes of production coexist in a climate of state-enforced ideological hegemony and revenue-driven market economics.