Abstract

The success of contemporary Chinese popular culture, especially television dramas set against the background of the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s and early 1940s, is inseparable from the so-called ‘anti-Japan serials’ 抗日剧, a category of historical dramas that the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (hereafter SARFT) promotes as a major ‘theme drama’ 主旋律电视剧. This chapter concerns itself with the category of ‘anti-Japan serials’ from their emergence as a group of ‘theme dramas’ at the turn of the twenty-first century to their entrance into a production boom in 2010, as marked by the nation-wide broadcast of Snow Leopard 雪豹. ¹ The last few years have witnessed the genre’s mutation both qualitatively and quantitatively. Since 2010, the ‘anti-Japan serials’ have evolved from a narrative art through the market economy into what netizens have come to call leiju 雷剧 or shenju 神剧 – literally, ‘thunderous serials’ or ‘super serials’ that verge on the farcical, in some cases the mere ludicrous.