The campus romance: Patterns, repetitions and a popular imaginary of youth in contemporary Chinese and Taiwanese cinema

Abstract

This thesis concerns a genre of Chinese-language film that was especially popular in the period 2011-2016, catalysed by the commercial successes of You Are the Apple of My Eye (Taiwan, 2011) and So Young (China, 2013). As is common in genre studies, this thesis is fundamentally oriented towards proper taxonomy: What should these films be called and what elements are proper or necessary to their existence as participants in a genre? These films traverse a generic terrain marked as “youth film” (qingchun pian or qingshaonian pian), “romance film” (aiqing pian), and “campus film” (xiaoyuan pian) in varied combination, but when they are discussed in academic literature, and they rarely are, it is in relation to other concerns.

In naming this genre the “campus romance”, this thesis argues that it is not precise enough to characterise these films as “youth films” of either China or Taiwan. What makes these films distinctive as a genre and understood as such by audiences are more particular elements than their representation of young people in these predominantly Chinese-speaking contexts. Their stories are more specific. They are about young people in schools – high schools and/or universities – that is, they are stories of students for whom school life is of overwhelming importance to the texture of their young lives. They are also narratives centrally propelled by romantic arcs: What takes these students meaningfully into adulthood is falling in and out of first love (chulian). This thesis aims to offer, first, an understanding of the Chinese-language campus romance film, and second, some productive modalities of film-historical scholarship for understanding the difference of such paradigmatically popular film genres.