For an insight into how Chinese popular culture has changed, compare two adaptations of the novel Guobayin Jiusi (Live Fast, Die Young) by prominent Chinese writer Wang Shuo.
Director Zhao Baogang made a TV drama with the same title in the early 1990s, while Zhang Yuan turned the novel into a love story in the film "I Love You" in 2002.
The film depicts the writer's overwhelming angst over a relationship between a young man and woman in love, similar to the storyline and tone of the hit TV drama series.
But it offers a different cultural vision, since China's society and economy has changed over the past 10 years.
Like the TV series, the film portrays single youths working in "work units" -- mainly State-owned enterprises -- and living in publicly-funded dormitories designed for the unmarried.
These young people, confined to their relatively narrow social circles, are paranoid and naive. The male protagonists idle away their time as a way of coping in the era of the planned economy.
However, these characteristics reflect a bygone era, now that globalization has taken center stage.
As a result, Zhang has turned the original story, which drew on the shared life experiences of most Chinese youth at that time, into a "story of the penniless," adding new elements from contemporary life such as IT (information technology) terms, personal computers, and the Internet.
Society has changed tremendously in the past decade or more.
In the TV drama "Live Fast, Die Young," the young protagonists are described as pioneering, romantic and modern, although still naive. But in the film "I Love You," they are depicted as distressed, confused and tortured by material desires, but still living in confined, old-fashioned "dormitories."
The most interesting part of the film is the repeatedly quarrels between the young lovers, which are caused by personality differences and emotional over-reactions.
The quarrels may reflect the insecurity felt in an increasingly cut-throat market economy.
In Wang's original novel, the idle slackers feel superior to their peers because their behavior is socially "legitimate" -- somewhat rebellious and pioneering.
But in Zhang's film, the young people, living in a different era, cannot be idle and have to be responsible for their own lives.
The legitimacy of the slackers of the old era has now been annulled by the new logic of production, exchange and consumption in the market economy.
The differences between the two works perfectly match the shift in Chinese popular culture from one era to another.
And the changed themes in the TV series and the film, both based on the same novel, show how much Chinese culture has been transformed.
(China Daily June 10, 2003)
