Digitized Parody: The Politics of Egao in Contemporary China

Abstract

This article investigates egao—technology-enabled online parody in contemporary China. Egao is a site where issues of power struggle, class reconsolidation, social stratification, (online) community formation, and cultural intervention, along with the transformative power of digital technologies, intersect. Through an analysis of Hu Ge’s “The Bloody Case of a Steamed Bun,” we argue that egao provides an alternative locus of power, permitting the transgression of existing social and cultural hierarchies. Satiric and ludicrous in nature, egao playfully subverts a range of authoritative discourses and provides a vehicle for both comic criticism and emotional catharsis. As an individualized form of expression of the new digital generation, it also offers insight into the collective attitudes of the new class of netizens.

Full text

Digitized parody:
The politics of egao in
contemporary China
Haomin Gong
St Mary’s College of Maryland, USA
Xin Yang
Macalester College, USA
Abstract
This article investigates egao—technology-enabled online parody in contemporary China. Egao
is a site where issues of power struggle, class reconsolidation, social stratification, (online)
community formation, and cultural intervention, along with the transformative power of digital
technologies, intersect. Through an analysis of Hu Ge’s “The Bloody Case of a Steamed Bun,” we
argue that egao provides an alternative locus of power, permitting the transgression of existing
social and cultural hierarchies. Satiric and ludicrous in nature, egao playfully subverts a range of
authoritative discourses and provides a vehicle for both comic criticism and emotional catharsis.
As an individualized form of expression of the new digital generation, it also offers insight into the
collective attitudes of the new class of netizens.
Keywords
digital generation, egao, Hu Ge, online politics, parody, postsocialist China
In early 2006, a 20-minute video entitled “The Bloody Case of a Steamed Bun” (一个馒
头引发的血案, hereafter “The Bloody Case”) became one of the most popular online
video clips in China. The video was a spoof of the 2005 blockbuster The Promise (无极),
by the world-renowned director Chen Kaige (陈凯歌). This hilarious video immediately
won acclaim from netizens, spawning a flood of similar spoofs. With its rapid spread, a
special subculture, coined egao (恶搞), emerged, which began to reshape the ecology of
the Internet landscape.
This article investigates the complex politics involved in the egao phenomenon and
its dialectic position between negotiation of the cultural space linking individual playfulness
Article
Corresponding author:
Haomin Gong, Chinese and Asian Studies, Montgomery Hall, St Mary’s College of Maryland, 18952 E Fisher
Road, St Mary’s City, MD 20686, USA
Email: hgong@smcm.edu
china
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China Information
24(1) 3–26
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DOI: 10.1177/0920203X09350249
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4 China Information 24(1)
in virtual reality and communal transgression in social reality. We believe that egao, as a
new parodic practice in contemporary China, is a site where issues of power struggle,
class reconsolidation, social stratification, (online) community formation, and cultural
intervention, along with the transformative power of digital technologies, intersect.
Through an analysis of Hu Ge’s (胡戈) “The Bloody Case,” we will argue that egao
provides an alternative locus of power, permitting the transgressing of existing social and
cultural hierarchies. Satiric and ludicrous in nature, egao playfully subverts a range of
authoritative discourses and provides a vehicle for both comic criticism and emotional
catharsis. As an individualized form of expression of the new digital generation, it also
offers insight into the collective attitudes of the new class of netizens.
To examine egao as a new technology-enabled cultural intervention, this study situ-
ates egao both within the general paradigm of the parodic and the specific sociocultural
context of contemporary China. Our critical exploration starts off from the definition of
egao within these two frames, and then examines how the advances of the new digital
technology reshape the phenomenon in its format and sociality. This, in turn, leads to a
historical investigation of the specific social situations in which the egao culture took
shape, and to a formal analysis of its distinctive discursive features.
Defining egao
What is egao? There have been many attempts to define it. The official newspaper
Guangming Daily (光明日报) characterizes egao as “a popular online strategy, in the
form of language, picture and animation, which comically subverts and deconstructs the
so-called normal.”
1
The English-language newspaper China Daily defines egao in a
more complicated way: “Egao is a popular subculture that deconstructs serious themes
to entertain people with comedy effects…. The two characters ‘e’ meaning ‘evil’ and
‘gao’ meaning ‘work’ combine to describe a subculture that is characterized by humor,
revelry, subversion, grass-root spontaneity, defiance of authority, mass participation and
multi-media high-tech.”
2
These definitions from official media capture some character-
istics of egao, such as its subversiveness of authority. However, they also demonstrate
certain ideological ambiguities and uneasiness, for instance, in interpreting egao as
something detrimental to the establishment.
Egao has also attracted scholarly attention in English. Yongming Zhou and Daria Berg
have addressed, respectively, in conference papers on egao, the carnivalesque and icono-
clastic nature of the genre. Both affirm egao’s function as a new avenue for individual(istic)
expression of Chinese netizens. Particularly, Berg approaches the issue from the socio-
logical perspective and focuses mainly on the democratizing role played by the develop-
ment of the Internet in China in shaping the egao phenomenon.
3
Through a political–cultural
approach, Zhou also sees egao as a liberating cultural practice of the individuals against
“established norms and values,” though at the same time constrained by “general control
mechanisms in China.”
4
These pioneer studies of egao provide insightful overviews of the
cultural phenomenon and open the ways for further discussion.
In our study, we see egao first and foremost as a form of parody, with a level of inevi-
table comic and satiric effects. Like other parodic practices, egao usually imitates the
parodied texts, or blatantly transplants parts or all of them into an entirely different text

Gong & Yang 5
or context. By so doing, they create ironic incongruity that triggers humor and laughter
and form varying kinds of polemical relationships with the texts and/or matters that they
satirize. Secondly, egao is a particular form of parody that is specifically shaped by the
social–historical junction of contemporary China.
5
Contemporary cultural conditions in
China determine the discursive emergence of the egao culture, which is to say, both its
forms and the politics involved. It can thus serve as a locus for unraveling the underlying
cultural, social, and political agendas.
To begin with, it is necessary to note that parody is an age-old cultural phenomenon
around the world. One can trace it back as far as ancient Greece. It has existed throughout
the course of human history in various forms. Scholarly studies of parody are abundant.
For example, the French theorist Gérard Genette delimits parody by carefully studying
the formal relationships between the “hypotext” and “hypertext.” Parody is differenti-
ated from the related forms of pastiche, travesty, skit, transposition, burlesque, and forg-
ery by its standing as a direct textual transformation (rather than an indirect imitation) in
a playful (rather than a satirical) manner.
6
Margaret A. Rose offers comprehensive analy-
ses of the history of theories and practices of parody from ancient to contemporary times.
She views parody as a self-reflective practice, which not only challenges authority but
also creates a new text by mirroring itself.
7
Linda Hutcheon, on the other hand, focuses
on parodic practices in the 20th century. She also views parody as a metatext that simul-
taneously critiques and creates. But she refuses to see parody simply in a polemical
relationship with the hypotext.
8
Simon Dentith offers a rather inclusive definition of
parody, which refers to “any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allu-
sive imitation of another cultural production or practice.”
9
Dan Harris defines parody as
“the process of recontextualizing a target or source text through the transformation of its
textual (and contextual) elements, thus creating a new text. This conversion—through
the resulting oscillation between similarity to and difference from the target—creates a
level of ironic incongruity with an inevitable satiric impulse.”
10
In view of the disparate definitions of parody and the disputes among critics on the
attributes of parody, Dentith thinks that a more fruitful approach to the politics involved is
through an investigation of its historicity.
11
It is only through investigations of specific situ-
ations in which certain forms of parody are demonstrated that we can have a better under-
standing of them. In the case of egao, we also believe that an exploration of the social and
cultural scene in contemporary China will produce more insights into egao as a special
form of parody. Specifically, we will look into the role digital technologies and the technol-
ogy-enabled cultural form and content play in the postsocialist condition of China.
Digital technologies, alternative space, and netizens
For the emergence of the parodic form of egao, one important social determinant was the
advent of digital technologies in China at the turn of the 21st century. Digital technolo-
gies, especially the technologies of digital processing and the Internet, became widely
accessible to common Chinese people, particularly to the young, urban generation. Egao,
in a sense, is a cultural product of these digital technologies.
First, egao products are predominantly made by individuals using digital technologies.
The availability of these technologies to the masses and spoofsters’ knowledge of and

6 China Information 24(1)
skills in textual, audio, and video editing are prerequisites for the egao culture. Most egao
videos are produced entirely by using digital technologies on personal computers. On the
one hand, these technologies offer the egao culture some unique textual features rarely
seen previously. In 20th-century China, practices of parody could be found in every
decade.
12
However, special effects created by digital technologies, especially in the audio
and visual aspects, are totally new to Chinese people, a point on which we will elaborate
when we discuss “The Bloody Case.” On the other hand, individual access to these
technologies, previously only available to a small group, greatly shapes the contextual
features of egao. Most manifestly, it makes individual participation and creation in the
field of audio visual processing possible and brings grass-roots street wisdom and popular
voices into an area hitherto the exclusive province of specialists and elitists.
Second, the virtual world of the Internet is the space where egao takes shape, spreads,
and flourishes. Many studies have been done on the development of the Internet in Chinese
society. Scholars have paid special attention to such issues as democratization, liberalization,
public space, civil society, and state control in regard to the rapid growth of the Internet in
contemporary China.
13
For egao, the Internet offers a space other than that of traditional
media for individual expression, and it provides an imagined empowerment for netizens,
who can, for the first time, intervene in the formation of an institutionalized narrative.
This space—which does not simply refer to the physical cyberspace but also to the social
space created thereby—is marked by a rising level of social tolerance and freedom and,
simultaneously, an increasing level of constraint.
14
Virtual reality inevitably produces a
new sense of temporal and spatial relationships among participants of egao practices.
The Internet plays a catalytic role in the formation of new social groups in contemporary
China. With respect to egao, we see a paradoxical process of social formation modeled
by the decentralized and instantaneous features of the Internet: on the one hand, egao is
a highly individual activity, but on the other, the collection of spoofsters is an “imagined
community.”
15
These spoofsters share many characteristics in terms of demography and
social behavior. A predominant portion of the spoofsters, as well as other egao participants,
are young netizens, most of whom live in urban areas. Another fact provides additional
support for this hypothesis. In 2006, when a larger number of egao works appeared, the
population of Chinese netizens reached a new high of 137 million, 63.8 percent of whom
were aged between 18 and 30 and the majority of whom lived in cities rather than in the
countryside.
16
In addition, these spoofsters and other egao participants are familiar with
digital technologies to varying degrees. As most of them belong to the younger generation,
they are open to new technologies and ideas. Spoofsters also have their own spaces: BBS
(bulletin-board system), blogs, and video-sharing platforms on various web sites, including
China’s portal web sites Sina.com and Sohu.com, where they exchange their ideas, share
their experiences, and disseminate their products. New digital technologies provide the
means through which such interactions take place, and thus help form communities that
eventually exert social impacts.
“Post-” society, social stratification, age of irony
Besides technological transformation, the “post-” condition of China, social (re)stratification,
and the attitude of irony have also played a vital role in the emergence of the egao culture.

Gong & Yang 7
When exploring the question of the contours of “particular social and historical situations
in which parody is especially likely to flourish,” Dentith proposes two main criteria: (1)
parody is more likely to flourish in “open” societies or social situations than in “closed”
ones; and (2) strong stratification within a society is also very likely to produce parody.
For the first criterion, by “open” societies, Dentith means societies characterized by “a
sense of cultural belatedness” rather than by “cultural confidence.”
For him, the various
“post-” societies belong to this category, because in them “there is pervasive conscious-
ness of a past which is still strongly present, though the value of that inheritance is deeply
contested.”
17
Fredric Jameson views pastiche as a dominant cultural form of postmod-
ernism.
18
Hutcheon also maintains that “parody—often called ironic quotation, pastiche,
appropriation, or intertextuality—is usually considered central to postmodernism, both
by its detractors and its defenders.”
19
In the case of egao, contemporary Chinese society
has been described in several “post-” coinages: postmodern, post-New Era, post revolu-
tionary, post-Reform, and postsocialist. To varying degrees, these terms indicate a sense
of complicated linkage to their predecessors and therefore a lack of affirmativeness of
their own cultures.
20
This seems to conform to Dentith’s first claim. However, this claim
reeks of generality and needs to be critically substantiated by specific studies of contem-
porary Chinese society with respect to egao.
21
As for the second criterion of social stratification, it is closely relevant to the egao
culture, for the appearance of egao coincides with the process of social (re)stratification
in contemporary China. This process has been accelerated by the advent of rampant com-
mercialization since the 1990s.
22
A new social unevenness has created prevalent social
discontent,
23
which provides a basis for the emergence of egao as an avenue for satirical
expression on social inequalities that are caused by class differences. Egao, viewed from
this perspective, is about power relationships in contemporary China. Ella Shohat tells
us, “Parody is especially appropriate for the discussion of ‘center’ and ‘margins’ since—
due to its historical critical marginalization, as well as its capacity for appropriating and
critically transforming existing discourses—parody becomes a means of renewal and
demystification, a way of laughing away outmoded forms of thinking.”
24
Similar state-
ments are also made about laughter and humor, a prominent part of egao.
25
In this vein, many studies have drawn upon Bakhtinian conceptions of the carni-
valesque
26
and explored the subversive power of parody.
27
Although Bakhtin’s theory of
“carnival,” which is a remarkable critical work in the theorization of parody, is broached
in his study of the specific historical situation of the Early Modern period in Europe, it is
still a powerful weapon against the establishment in cultural conditions where an author-
ity prohibits other voices. In the specific case of egao, the two studies by Zhou and Berg
mentioned previously also regard the carnivalesque feature in egao as an effective chal-
lenge to authority.
However, in egao, the conception of the “carnivalesque” is not always applicable.
First, the carnival is usually in a collective form. But as Zhou notes, unlike many satirical
arts in the West, egao is usually an “individual” act that does not have any clear political
agenda and cannot turn into any activism. Second, the primary target of the carnival is
usually authoritarian officialdom. Indeed, many egao works satirize officialdom and the
establishment. However, it sometimes also makes fun of innocent subjects,
28
which is
foreign to the Bakhtinian account of the carnivalesque. The “e” in egao implies two

8 China Information 24(1)
meanings: “naughtiness” as in ezuoju (恶作剧), and “evil” as in its definition in official
media. Both implications are applicable in egao practices and this sometimes brings up
controversy over the limit of what can be spoofed in egao. For each parodic form in any
specific condition there are always sacred words. For egao, a phenomenon that is still
developing, sacred words of one work may become targets of satire in another.
29
This is
a battleground of different ideological forces, not only between authorities and egao
practitioners, but also among the practitioners themselves.
Despite the very disruptive power of parody and laughter recognized by many crit-
ics,
30
we should also be aware of their cathartic effect.
31
Egao is sometimes simply for
fun and functions as a vent for pent-up emotions. As we will demonstrate later, it serves
as a channel for both spoofsters and audiences to vent their disappointments, express
their dissatisfactions, and ease their anxieties. In creating and consuming egao texts,
audiences find playful relief in the virtual world.
The last social condition we would like to examine is what Harris calls the “age of
irony,” in which the originally subversive parody becomes canonized (at least in the
genre of film). Harris’s claim is advanced upon the observation that there has been an
increasing level of cultural irony in the USA since the mid-1970s, and he characterizes it
as the culture’s state of “ironic supersaturation.”
32
Does China in the late 2000s have a
similar social situation? A quick answer to this question is: “No.” For, unlike the US,
contemporary China is not “an era where postmodern activity has become more the norm
than any sort of alternative practice.”
33
However, on the other hand, we have witnessed
an increasing level of cultural irony in China since the 1990s. In talking about the politics
of laughter in folk culture in contemporary China, the Beijing-based scholar Liu Xiaobo
(刘晓波) takes Hu Ge’s egao as a representative form and traces the “egao spirit” back
to Wang Shuo’s (王朔) novels of “hooliganism” popular in the late 1980s and 90s. He
maintains that this egao spirit has been prevalent among the masses ever since that
period, yet in various forms, which include: Cui Jian’s (崔健) rock ‘n’ roll, beauty writers
and their “lower-body” writing, the remaking of the “Red Classics” (红色经典) into TV
dramas, and Liu Di’s (刘荻) political parody online.
34
Judging from the continuity and
prevalence of these parodic practices, we may say that a spirit of cultural irony has been
on the rise over the past two decades, at least among the grass-roots population.
35
This statement leads to the issue of egao’s attributes as an emerging discourse, specifi-
cally, the question of the rise of egao as a new expressive and narrative mode against the
accumulating spirit of irony in China. Egao is an emerging cultural mode shaped by the rising
cultural irony in contemporary China and is in turn shaping the latter’s cultural scene.
Historically speaking, the accumulating cultural irony in Chinese society over the past two
decades prepared for the discursive appearance of the egao culture in 2006, during which
process Hu Ge’s egao video was regarded as the event that marked the emergence of egao.
Conversely, once egao became a discursive sign, those preparatory events that preceded it
were then renamed from the perspective of egao. Combined, these processes constitute egao
as a distinctive narrative mode that has fully earned its discursive standing.
Constructive discourse: spoofsters and audiences
The discursive standing of egao can be further revealed in the formation of constructive
communities of spoofsters and their audience and in the resulting interactive relationships

Gong & Yang 9
so formed. Because parody is fundamentally an imitative form of cultural practice, it is
typically seen as being nonconstructive or even “parasitic.”
36
This seems to be especially
the case with egao, which does not simply imitate the parodied texts, but more often
transplants the latter directly into a new text and context. This heavy reliance on hypo-
texts triggers theoretical and practical questions in the fields of both culture and law.
Many theorists have taken a different view with regard to the “constructiveness” of
the parodic.
37
Dentith sees parody as simultaneously destructive and constructive:
“Parody creates new utterances out of the utterances that it seeks to mock,” and “it pre-
serves as much as it destroys—or rather, it preserves in the moment that it destroys—and
thus the parasite becomes the occasion for itself to act as host.”
38
This is particularly
applicable to the egao phenomenon, for the moment spoofsters imitate and transplant
hypotext into new texts and contexts, they are also, playfully and self-reflexively, creat-
ing new comments both on the target hypotexts and on the world.
Stanley Fish tells us that the construction of the meanings of a text is largely the work
of “interpretive communities” who share “interpretive strategies.”
39
In responding to Terry
Caesar’s questions—“Is it possible to have parodic attitudes where there is no parody? Is it
possible to have parody where there is not the formal character of the thing parodied?”—
Harris answers: “a parodic viewing strategy” is possible among the audience.
40
In the egao culture, such communities actively participate in making the meaning of
egao productions. Hutcheon argues that readers are active “co-creators” of the parodic
text.
41
Joseph A. Dane also points out that a given reader may, in fact, “read any text as a
parody.”
42
It is clear that the meaning of egao productions relies not only on both a shared
familiarity with the hypotext and a shared attitude toward the hypertext, but also on the
interactive relationships between the initial producer and the audience. The audience’s
active decoding directly contributes to the construction of egao. Thus the comic and satiric
effect of egao is a distinctively cooperative work of the spoofsters and their audiences.
“The Bloody Case of a Steamed Bun”
Hu Ge’s video “The Bloody Case of a Steamed Bun” is the first, and by far the most
famous, work of egao. The video grew out of Hu’s disappointment with Chen Kaige’s film
The Promise, which he had seen in December 2005. It took Hu about 10 days to complete
his parody on his personal computer. He shared clips with his friends and, unexpectedly, at
the beginning of 2006, the video became one of the hottest hits on the Internet.
43
The Promise tells a complex story of love, freedom, and destiny in an allegorical
fashion. Queen Qingcheng (倾城) (Cecelia Cheung [张柏芝]), formerly a poor slave
girl, now possesses everything most women would desire—beauty, wealth, and the spe-
cial favor of the King. But in exchange for her current prestigious status she is cursed
never to have true love. The film opens with Duke Wuhuan (无欢) (Nicolas Tse [谢霆
锋]) besieging the Kingdom and demanding for Qingcheng. Coming to her rescue are
General Guangming (光明) (Sanada Hiroyuki [真田広之]) and Slave Kunlun (昆仑)
(Jang Dong-Gun [张东健]) who both fall in love with her. But at the same time they also
fall into providential dilemmas that prevent them from actually loving her. This nasty
trick turns out to be the combined work of Manshen (满神) (Chen Hong [陈红]), the
Goddess of Destiny, who determines everyone’s fate, and Wuhuan, who has been plot-
ting revenge on Qingcheng. His desire for vengeance originates from his childhood: as a

10 China Information 24(1)
child he was traumatized by Qingcheng, who cheated him out of a steamed bun, and this,
he believes, has turned him into a narrow-minded, cold-blooded killer. The film ends in
a dramatic fight, with Kunlun and Qingcheng surviving Wuhuan’s crazy vengeance and
breaking the curses placed on both of them.
Hu Ge’s egao video, sending up the over-the-top premises of Chen’s film, resets the
story, which supposedly takes place in some remote historical epoch, in the context of a
modern TV program, “China Crime Report” (中国法治报道), hosted by a stony-faced
anchor on the state-run China Central TV (CCTV). In the program, the TV anchorman is
investigating the 2005 murder case of Manager Wang (“the King”),
44
who ran a recre-
ation company. Wang was killed in a fight with his wife Zhang Qingcheng, and Captain
Sanada of the City Inspection Team is the main suspect. The negotiation expert Chen
Manshen finds out that the real criminal is Zhang Kunlun, but when the policeman Lang
is sent to arrest him, feelings between the two grow. In the following court trial, Xie
Wuhuan stands up as a witness, and all the parties involved in the murder case—
Qingcheng, Kunlun, and Sanada—are found guilty. Wuhuan is given the privilege of
carrying out the execution, which is broadcast live. The execution ends in a fight leading
to the death of Wuhuan and Sanada and the union of Kunlun and Qingcheng. The inves-
tigation reveals the mystery step by step in a suspenseful fashion as such a program usu-
ally does, during which everything in the original film is given a present-day, worldly
spin. The deliberately blurred boundary of past and present, the imaginary and the real,
sets up a background for the new narrative Hu intends to create.
Obviously, Chen’s film The Promise is the main target of Hu’s egao. The film took
Chen three years to make and cost an unprecedented RMB 300 million (about US$40
million). It also topped the Chinese box office, with revenues of around RMB 220 mil-
lion (about US$30 million).
45
However, despite Chen’s huge reputation, the substantial
investment, the all-star cast, the lush cinematography, and Chen’s high-profile promotion
in the media, the film received mixed reviews. Some people praised the film for its “ori-
ental charms” and its deep “humanistic spirit.” Chen Kaige had, in their view, told an
elegant story of “love, friendship, desire, and fear.” In contrast, some audiences were
very critical of the film and claimed that it was “empty, confusing, and mindless.” One
netizen commented sarcastically: “If time could really go back as it does in The Promise,
I would immediately return my ticket.”
46
Most of those who openly supported Chen Kaige were well-established figures, such
as film directors, actors, and professional reviewers, and their praise was expressed
through interviews and film reviews in established media groups such as Sina.com, and
on their official online pages.
47
Those who criticized the film included both celebrities
and common netizens, but the latter contributed a significant portion to the negative
views and their criticisms inundated various BBS, discussion forums, and blogs.
The audience’s preferences implied, of course, a cultural stratification directly related
to the broader social stratification of contemporary China, which can be seen in the dif-
ferentiation of the social groups of technology-savvy youngsters and well-established
elites. Supporters of The Promise identified with a kind of elite taste for the allegorical,
mythical, and even educational, which Chen had tried to achieve. Detractors, however,
read these as pretentious and empty. These stratified responses, which included attacks
on elitism, and which were, of course, greatly facilitated by advances in digital technology,

Gong & Yang 11
formed the background for the emergence of the new culture of egao. Access to the digi-
tal realm further distinguished different social and cultural groups, especially that of the
“digital youth” and “conventional elite” when egao became an online trend.
48
“Digital youth” here mainly refers to netizens such as the spoofsters and participants
of egao who actively produce and consume egao products online. These people are usu-
ally young urbanites who love digital technology, and for whom the Internet is a major
resource and living space. In this case, Hu Ge’s hobby-turned-profession is that of a
freelance computer music producer and online musical device seller. He produced all his
egao videos with his own editing software and these videos were spontaneously dupli-
cated and disseminated across the Internet by millions of netizens.
When “The Bloody Case” first emerged in cyberspace, it immediately attracted the
attention of netizens and caused a sensation in discussion forums, BBS, and blogs. For
instance, on www.tianya.cn, one of the most popular Chinese bulletin boards, almost all
netizens there expressed their admiration of Hu Ge’s ridiculing of Chen Kaige’s film.
Netizens used words such as “awesome,” “hilarious,” and “genius” to comment on Hu.
One posting goes: “This is awesome! It really cracks me up. ‘The Bloody Case’ is really
the essence of The Promise. This is real entertainment at the grassroots’ level.”
49
Hu’s
fans even formed various “steamed bun groups.” These young digital enthusiasts identi-
fied with Hu’s jokes, appreciated his punch-lines, recognized the cultural notes, and
shared his playful satire. To help other people better understand the egao clip, some neti-
zens even transcribed the lines and mock commercials, listing the sources of the music
Hu used in “The Bloody Case” and posting them online.
50
When Chen Kaige threatened
to sue Hu Ge, netizens arranged a large-scale online sign-up in support of Hu.
51
Conventional elites, on the other hand, include people in support of Chen’s elitist
approach in this case and against spoofsters’ violation of the established norms. For
them, denigration of The Promise only revealed disrespect for serious art and degrada-
tion of cultural taste. Egao not only exposed cultural and moral degeneracy but also
violated intellectual property rights.
52
“The Bloody Case” almost brought Hu Ge a law-
suit from Chen Kaige for copyright infringement.
53
The case still remains to be resolved
and the legal questions involved remain to be addressed by experts in law. While most
netizens stood by Hu, these conventional elites were on Chen’s side. The film reviewer
Cheng Qingsong, for example, voiced his full support of Chen’s reaction. He claimed
that Chen, as a citizen, has his right to seek justice by legal means.
54
However, this pro-
posed lawsuit only increased Hu Ge’s popularity and won him more sympathy and admi-
ration. “The Bloody Case” was consecrated as an egao classic.
This confrontation certainly highlights the tension between the establishment and the
grass-roots, usually at the margins, as well as the miscommunication between the
euphoric digital youth, who want to have fun and be cool, and the conventional elites,
who view egao from a far more serious perspective. This tension is exemplified in “The
Bloody Case” per se.
Digital technology and parodic effect
A significant part of the satirical and ludicrous effects in “The Bloody Case” comes from
the spoofster’s innovative employment of digital technologies. In parody, such effects

12 China Information 24(1)
are usually achieved through “recontextualization” and by “treating a low subject with
mocking dignity” and, conversely, “handl[ing] serious situations in a trivial manner.”
55
In “The Bloody Case,” much of the recontextualization is realized through the means of
digitalized audio-video editing. This can be immediately noticed from the opening scene,
where Hu transplants images, video clips, and sound effects from disparate sources into
a new text and creates a hilarious mixture by means of incongruous juxtaposition. The
video opens with a trailer/preview taking the format of the “China Crime Report,” but
the content of the report is from The Promise, and the background music is from the US
blockbuster The Matrix. The voiceover, dubbed by Hu Ge himself, introduces the “mur-
der case,” based on The Promise:
A small steamed bun led to bloody murder. A supposedly innocent child had his personality
distorted because of a trivial event. What made him so fragile? A policeman was summoned to
arrest the suspect, but never fulfilled his responsibility. Why was this? The murder case was
complicated. The truth was not revealed until the last minute. Welcome to the 2005 special
edition of China Crime Report “The Bloody Case of a Steamed Bun.”
Following this, the scene cuts to a typical image of “China Crime Report”: an anchorman
sits in front of the camera with a “China Crime Report” sign behind him and the CCTV
logo in the upper left corner. In announcing the allegory-turned-mundane murder case,
Hu’s dubbing imitates the standardized tone, language, and style of an anchorman in the
official media. As the narrative unfolds, it is accompanied by electronic high-beat music
from a foreign science fiction thriller. This merging of the three different sectors trans-
gresses spatial and temporal borders of different cultures.
There are many places throughout the video where Hu deliberately mismatches the
image and sound in order to create a sense of comic absurdity. For example, in the scene
where the policeman (Lang) reconciles with the criminal (Kunlun), while the pictures are
directly cut from The Promise, the music is from popular love songs (Zheng Jun’s [郑钧]
“Cinderella” [灰姑娘] and Zhang Yu’s [张宇] “The Fault of the Moon” [月亮惹的祸]).
This turns the sense of friendship and ethnic bond into an implicit sense of homosexual
love.
56
The final scene where Kunlun and Qingcheng break their curses and live happily
ever after in The Promise is accompanied by the revolutionary song of “Ode to Red
Plum” (红梅赞). With the aid of computer media software, Hu Ge succeeds in trans-
planting the cultural products that audiences are familiar with and fusing them in a comic
framework, creating a new visual text with new meanings. As the new text oscillates
between familiarity and unfamiliarity among audiences, it creates a playful discrepancy,
achieving a mixed effect of catharsis and criticism.
Targets of subversion and transgression
The primary target of Hu’s egao video is Chen’s elitism, shown in the film’s grand narra-
tive and style. This is clearly exhibited in Hu’s overall high-profile-debunking fashion in
which he restructures the plot and in the allegory-turned-triviality that populates the video.
The symbolic names Chen gives to the characters are such examples. The names are a
significant part of his allegorical design. For instance, the name of Qingcheng has specific

Gong & Yang 13
allusion to the classical phrase qingguo qingcheng (倾国倾城, literally, “toppling kingdoms
and towns”), a phrase that describes a stunning beauty (and is also indicative of the idea
of a femme fatale), which originated in the famous story of the Han Emperor Liu Che
(刘彻) (156 bc–87 bc). In the same way, all the other character names indicate the sym-
bolic role the characters play in the allegory. However, in his egao video, Hu purportedly
mixes the actors’ names with the characters’ and therefore churns out extremely quotidian
ones that give a satirical effect through the ultra incongruity in them. In the case of
Qingcheng, the actress Cecilia Cheung’s surname “Zhang” is yoked with the character
name and makes the ludicrous “Zhang Qingcheng.” The same happens to all the other
character names: Xie Wuhuan, Chen Manshen, Zhang Kunlun, and so on. This act tre-
mendously deflates the allegorical ambience created in the film.
Moreover, the naming itself, the combination of the surname of the actors and
actresses with their fictional roles, also exaggerates the effect of the blurring of the
boundaries between the world on screen and the world in reality, and lays bare the
tricky relationship between the two that had been taken advantage of, for commercial
purposes, throughout the production and exhibition of The Promise. This very commer-
cial orientation that underlies the elitist myth that Chen creates is certainly another
main target of Hu’s egao. Besides the substantive investment, excessively refined pro-
duction, and bombarding promotional maneuvers, Chen also takes advantage of the
popular genre of costume drama, featuring swordplay, oriental mysticism, exoticism,
and sentimentalism, aiming rather explicitly at the Oscars and the international film
market. Moreover, the quite enviable lineup of superstars from across East Asia—
Hong Kong’s heartthrob couple Nicolas Tse and Cecilia Cheung, Japanese celebrity
Sanada Hiroyuki, and Korean idol Jang Dong-Gun—is an effective promotional strat-
egy by constantly being a hot topic surrounding the filmmaking. In Hu’s video, Chen’s
commercial approaches are seized on and made fun of. The grandiose palace that Chen
invested substantially in for visual effect becomes no more than a strangely shaped and
poorly located entertainment club named “Circle within a Circle” that verges on bank-
ruptcy. In this way, the sublimity, grandness, and mythicality fabricated by Chen are
transformed into vulgarity and destitution. This transformation effects a vigorous
transgression of linguistic, generic, and cultural boundaries, as well as of that between
the real and the fictional.
Embedded in satirizing the hypotexts are also references to many prevalent social
issues close to the audience. As the story unfolds, the catalyst of the murder turns out to
be a contract dispute between the boss and his migrant sex worker in a nightclub. Such
disputes are widespread in contemporary China due to the inadequacy of a regulatory
mechanism. Audiences can certainly recognize the satirical account of the underground
porn industry, back pay for migrant workers, the interrogation systems of the police, and
the education of young children.
57
Hu’s satirical edge also points at the phenomenon of
ubiquitous commercials in TV programs by imitatively chopping his own video in parts
with some deliberately awkward mock advertisements, generating viewers’ identifica-
tion in a comic way. All the social problems are narrated in the intentionally misplaced
contexts, symbolizing the absurdity of the reality as well as of the hypotext.
One place that may best illustrate the critical edge of Hu’s egao lies in his spoof
of General Guangming (literally, “Illumination”), played by the Japanese actor Sanada.

14 China Information 24(1)
In “The Bloody Case,” the General is turned into “Little Captain Sanada.” Hu Ge explains
his identity in this way:
Little Captain Sanada is Japanese. He came to China determined to express his sincere apologies
to the Chinese people. In 2004, as a city inspector, he single-handedly smashed the headquarters
of unlicensed street peddlers…. What kind of spirit is this that makes a foreigner selflessly
adopt the grand cause of the Chinese people as his own?
Sanada’s new title (captain) and profession (city inspector) invoke several layers of
irony. First and foremost, it is a conspicuous reference to Japanese militarism during the
Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). Sanada’s “unselfish spirit of internationalism,” as sol-
emnly announced by the anchorman, is ironic in its historical context and hilarious as the
“internationalism” is his new job as a city inspector in China. Second, it brings to light a
long-term social issue: the notorious confrontation between the bullying city inspectors
and powerless street peddlers. Third, the last sentence—“What kind of spirit is this that
makes a foreigner selflessly adopt the grand cause of Chinese people as his own?”—is a
verbatim quotation from one of Mao Zedong’s best-known articles, “In Memory of
Norman Bethune,” published in 1939.
58
This sentence still sounds familiar to many
Chinese today, evoking their historical memories and reminding them of the ideological
preaching of socialism. An ironic and playful tone becomes explicit in this juxtaposition
of the once most sacred sentence of the revolutionary era with the profane entertainment
endeavor of the current reform era. More importantly, Hu mocks Chen Kaige’s employ-
ment of transnationality, which is represented in the use of established actors and
actresses from the region, as a profitable means of attracting a pan-Asian audience. The
satirical effect comes not only from the extreme incongruity between the glorious and the
vulgar, but also from that between the roles in different contexts—the real, the imagi-
nary, and the stereotypical.
Self-reflexive playfulness
Another fact about egao that deserves our attention is that, despite its subversiveness,
egao involves a strong sense of playfulness. “The Bloody Case,” as Hu claimed in sev-
eral interviews, came about from the initial thought of “having some fun” and experi-
menting with the possibilities of digital technology because of his disappointment with
the film The Promise.
59
In addition, at the beginning of many of Hu’s egao videos,
including “The Bloody Case” and “The Empire of the Spring Festival Transportation”
(春运帝国), the following lines appear: “The clip you will see is the product of my self-
entertainment. The content is purely fabricated. It is for individual entertainment only
and dissemination is forbidden.” These lines are an obvious parody of the warning
against copyright infringement that always appears at the beginning of copyrighted intel-
lectual products. For the group of people who are somewhat used to pirate products,
copyright protection is another target for their egao.
60
Moreover, the line also asserts the
egao product’s own right as a new text and highlights one important characteristic of
egao: the self-entertainment oriented and individual-based creation and consumption.

Gong & Yang 15
For Hu, egao serves as a channel to vent his dissatisfaction with the established norms
(the film, the social problems, etc.). As audiences laugh along, they identify with the
critiques and laugh off their feelings of discontent as well. In a way, egao serves simul-
taneously as a means for critical expression and for emotional catharsis. The playfulness
is a significant attribute of egao, but it may go awry and border on moral irresponsibility
if it mindlessly makes fun of something that hardly deserves satirical judgment. This
mentality of individuality and playfulness coexists with grass-roots collectivity and
social effectiveness. Though initially made for fun, “The Bloody Case” became increas-
ingly political as it involved a great many people, social groups, and institutions who
contributed to its discursive signification. Such consequences are, of course, way beyond
anything Hu Ge had originally expected, yet this is the paradox of the egao culture in the
age of digital technologies, which atomizes people and yet links them together at once.
Nevertheless, this kind of individual creativity and satirical laughter does not go with-
out self-questioning. Toward the end of “The Bloody Case,” the people involved in the
murder case, Zhang Qingcheng, Zhang Kunlun, and Captain Sanada, are brought together
and are about to be punished by Xie Wuhuan. Wuhuan takes out a steamed bun, shows it
to Qingcheng, and accuses her of cheating him over a steamed bun 20 years previously.
Then Hu Ge inserts a flashback, in the form of a black-and-white video recording, and
takes the audience back to the scene when Qingcheng took away Wuhuan’s steamed bun
and ate it, thus traumatizing him. The scene then cuts back to the execution, and shows a
freeze-framed close-up of the steamed bun Wuhuan is holding, accompanied by the
voiceover: “Attention please, Xie Wuhuan’s steamed bun has come from nowhere….
The steamed bun was eaten 20 years ago. Where did Wuhuan’s steamed bun come from?”
Then Wuhuan utters the words in a painful tone, dubbed by Hu Ge himself again, “As for
this question, I don’t know either. Everything is arranged by the director.”
Hu’s playful judgment, through the mouth of Wuhuan, gives the much needed self-
reflectivity of egao, which not only deconstructs the grand narrative of Chen Kaige’s
seemingly sublime allegorical cinema but also affirms the fictional status of both the
hypotext and the egao video. At this point, Hu’s egao becomes a multimedia criticism of
Chen’s film, challenging Chen’s authority as the director of the film: in spite of the film’s
mythical, allegorical, and epical gesture, everything is no more than the director’s arbi-
trary fabrication. Moreover, by so doing, Hu also self-reflexively announces his own
status as the “author” of his own products. Obviously, they are no other than authorial/
arbitrary fabrications, and thus they are susceptible to further deconstruction. In this way,
Hu reconfigured the author(ity).
Conclusion
The egao discourse is still developing in many ways and involving more people. When
Hu Ge was “authorized” as the founding father of egao by his fans, and therefore accu-
mulated cultural capital—he was the focus of media attention, a celebrity who attracted
a great many interviews, and he was even invited by local TV stations to participate in
producing TV programs—spoofs on Hu himself soon came out.
61
Egao as a grass-roots
(sub)culture continues to pose questions on the idea of “authority” and involve more

16 China Information 24(1)
people in disseminating, enriching, and recreating the meaning of egao texts. Though it
initially emerged on the Internet as an individualized, playfully subversive, expressive
mode, the rapid growth and increasing popularity of egao also caught the attention of
political institutions and the commercial mainstream. On the one hand, the established
institutions tried to regulate egao through legal means.
62
On the other hand, the commer-
cial mainstream also attempted to cash in on this widely popular format.
63
These actions
may regulate or tame the chaotic online practice, but they also further contribute to pub-
licizing and enriching the egao discourse.
Egao emerged as a technology-enabled cultural intervention at a particular social–histori-
cal juncture in contemporary China. As an individualized comic parody, it plays with author-
ity, deconstructs orthodox seriousness, and offers comic criticism as well as comic relief. It
provides imagined empowerment for the digital generation, exploring an alternative space for
individual expression. As embodied in “The Bloody Case,” the technology-enabled pas-
tiches, linguistic exuberance, and media carnival create laughter and humor, playfully trans-
gress both social and cultural boundaries, satirize the establishment, and provide a means for
emotional catharsis. Audiences’/netizens’ active participation further enriches the egao dis-
course and extends the playful subversiveness to a new level. Meanwhile, the self-reflexivity
of egao further reconfigures the paradoxical role of the author/authority in cultural produc-
tion. As such, egao as a cultural phenomenon offers a window on the cultural transformation
and alternative empowerment in virtual/social reality in postsocialist China. Its controversial
cultural status further betrays the social stratification and class consolidation, a new social
reality at the age of transformation when China is actively involved in developmentalism on
the one hand, and confronts the ideological ambiguity on the other.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the two anonymous readers for their valuable suggestions for
revision of this article.
Notes
1 Chen Jiu, Zhang Sheng, and He Shuqing, “Egao: hulianwang shidai de dazhong yule” (Egao: mass
entertainment in the internet age), http://www.gmw.cn/content/2007-09/03/content_662266.htm,
accessed 19 January 2009.
2 Huang Qing, “Parody Can Help People Ease Work Pressure,” China Daily, 22 July 2006, http://
www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2006-07/22/content_646887.htm, accessed 19 January 2009.
3 Daria Berg, “Spoofing Subculture, the Beijing Olympics and Web 2.0 in China” (paper
presented at International Forum for Contemporary Chinese Studies Inaugural Conference,
“Post-Olympic China: Globalization and Sustainable Development after Three Decades of
Reform,” Nottingham, UK, 2008).
4 Yongming Zhou, “Egao: Visual Carnival and Iconoclasm in Chinese Cyberspace” (paper
presented at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Atlanta, USA, 2008).
5 Needless to say, similar forms of video parody are also seen in other parts of the world.
For instance, a video clip titled “Brokeback to the Future,” a parody of both Brokeback
Mountain and Back to the Future, was wildly popular on the Internet in 2006. Egao was

Gong & Yang 17
new to Chinese people, due to a large extent to their inadequate exposure to technology-
enabled parodic tradition. This is closely tied to the specific sociopolitical context of
contemporary China.
6 We follow Gérard Genette’s terms of “hypotext,” which means the original text that parody
is based on, and “hypertext,” the text of parody. See Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the
Second Degree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
7 Margaret A. Rose, Parody/Meta-fiction: An Analysis of Parody as a Critical Mirror to the
Writing and Reception of Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1979); and Parody: Ancient, Modern
and Post-modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Michele Hannoosh also
reiterated parody as a metatext in his article, “Reflexive Function of Parody,” Comparative
Literature 41, no. 2 (1989): 113–27.
8 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (London:
Methuen, 1985). Beside these studies, a great many scholars also contribute to the understanding of
parody in different ways. To list a few: Luiz Joāo Vieira and Robert Stam, “Parody and Marginality:
The Case of Brazilian Cinema,” Framework 28 (1985): 20–49; Joseph A. Dane, Parody: Critical
Concepts versus Literary Practices: Aristophanes to Sterne (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1988); Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Ella Shohat, “Ethnicities-in-Relation: Toward a
Multicultural Reading of American Cinema,” in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American
Cinema, ed. Lester D. Friedman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 215–50; Robert
Phiddian, Swift’s Parody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Wes D. Gehring,
Parody as Film Genre: “Never Give a Saga an Even Break” (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999);
Dan Harris, Film Parody (London: British Film Institute, 2000).
9 Simon Dentith, Parody (London: Routledge, 2000), 9.
10 Harris, Film Parody, 6. Original emphasis.
11 Dentith, Parody, 22 and passim.
12 For example, the employment of parody is manifested in Lu Xun’s writing, especially in his
collection of short stories, Gushi xinbian (Old stories retold), and his zawen (essays). There
is also a lesser known story: in 1924, Lu Xun wrote the poem Wo de shilian (Lovelorn) as a
parody of Zhang Heng’s (78–139) Si chou shi (Poetry of four melancholies) to satirize the
overly sentimental lovelorn poem of his own contemporaries. In this poem, Lu Xun comically
replaces the classical poetic images of green jade, pearls, embroidered silk, and gold-inlayed
swords with trivial, vulgar items such as owls, sugar-covered hawthorns, knockout drops,
and red snakes. With the deliberate discrepancy between the original literati narration and its
modern earthy revision, Lu Xun mocks the unchecked lovelorn mood in poetry writing.
Other examples of parody in modern China include Qian Zhongshu’s novel Weicheng
(Fortress besieged) and Zhang Ailing’s (Eileen Chang) novellas of the 1940s, which satirize
the lifestyles of modern intellectuals, traditional aristocrats, the petty bourgeois, and so on.
Although the literary productions of the 1950s and 60s in the People’s Republic of China were
mainly governed by the revolutionary mandates set up by Mao Zedong, practices of parody
can still be noticed in film comedies and new historical plays in this socialist period. Because
of strict ideological control, these parodies were so moderate that they could readily be co-
opted as a means of strengthening state ideology.
With the end of the Maoist period in the late 1970s, parodies became less restricted and
more frequently seen. Among all parodists, two names need to be emphasized: Wang Xiaobo

18 China Information 24(1)
and Wang Shuo. Wang Xiaobo is a freelance writer whose works were mostly written in the
1980s and 90s. Besides his best-known parodic works of the “Age Trilogies” (Huangjin shidai
[The age of gold], Baiyin shidai [The age of silver], and Qingtong shidai [The age of bronze]),
Wang Xiaobo also comically revised classic Chinese stories such as Hongfu yeben (Hongfu
elopes at midnight) and Hongxian daohe (The story of red thread). In these stories, Wang
twists the original plot and interweaves it with comic language and psychological analysis.
In this way, he reconstructs history from a contemporary perspective, while deconstructing
it by playing with its absurdity. Wang’s goal is to make his writings “fun.” Wang has a large
number of followers among college students, who have established an online community
called “Wang’s running dogs.”
Wang Shuo is a Beijing-based writer known for his parodic works from the 1990s. Because
of his extremely cynical mockery of all orthodoxies, which are for him inevitably hypocritical,
he is called a pizi zuojia (hooligan writer). However, his huge success in the literary field
as well as in the commercial market exemplifies the role that parody plays in dealing with
the new reality in postsocialist China. The protagonists in Wang Shuo’s novels are mainly
glib-tongued urban youngsters. They are “playing for thrills” and claiming “please do not
call me human” (both of these phrases are titles of Wang’s novellas). In the story Wan zhu
(Troubleshooters), three young people organize a “Three T Company” and provide a substitute
service to help solve people’s problems. A series of hilarious stories unfold as each case is
performed and deconstructed by the three protagonists. Various humorous episodes show the
absurdity of life, and thereby demystify the solemnities of life.
13 China Information devoted a special issue (19, no. 2) in 2005 to a discussion of the Internet
in China. For recent studies of the topic in English, see Françoise Mengin, ed., Cyber China:
Reshaping National Identities in the Age of Information (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2004); Zixue Tai, The Internet in China: Cyber Space and Civil Society (London: Routledge,
2006); Yongming Zhou, Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet and Political
Participation in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Yongnian Zheng,
Technological Empowerment: The Internet, State, and Society in China (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2007).
14 Berg is quite optimistic about the liberalizing effect of the Internet on the egao phenomenon; Zhou
sees this effect, but is at the same time cautious about the other side. For him, Internet control and
censorship in China is a cause of the lack of political activism within the egao subculture.
15 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, rev. and extended ed. (London and New York: Verso, 1991). This idea of
Anderson’s is closely related to Stanley Fish’s “interpretive community” in our study, and
it will be explored in detail later. Here, we use the term more in the sense that, because of
the communicative nature of the Internet, spoofsters are widely scattered but also linked by
cyberspace at an unprecedented speed and in a form never seen before.
16 The statistics, data, and survey are available on the China Internet Network Information Center
(CNNIC) web site http://www.cnnic.net.cn/uploadfiles/pdf/2007/2/13/95522.pdf. New statistics
show that the population of Chinese netizens has reached 298 million. China surpassed the
United States as the biggest Internet user in June 2008. See Andrew Jacobs, “Internet Usage
Rises in China,” New York Times, 15 January 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/
world/asia/15beijing.html. Both accessed 19 January 2009.
17 Dentith, Parody, 28–32.

Gong & Yang 19
18 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991), especially chapter one, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,”
1–54. Jameson distinguishes pastiche from parody by the former’s absence of depth and critical
distance from the hypotext. (Hutcheon argues against this point. See note 19.) However, as
Dentith argues, “it is argument by definition, which affects the terms in which the discussion
about postmodernism should be conducted, but not the substance.” Dentith, Parody, 156. In a
way, egao is sometimes more akin to “pastiche” in a Jamesonian sense, because, as it will be
expounded in the following part, egao does not always engage in the spoofed text critically.
19 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989), 93.
20 For discussions of “postmodernism” in China, see, for instance: Frederic Jameson, Houxiandai
zhuyi yu wenhua lilun (Postmodernism and cultural theories), trans. Xiaobing Tang (Xi’an:
Shaanxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1986); Xiaobing Tang, “The Function of New Theory: What
Does It Mean to Talk about Postmodernism in China?” In Politics, Ideology and Literary
Discourse in Modern China, ed. Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1993), 278–300; Arif Dirlik and Xudong Zhang, eds, Postmodernism and China (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Sheldon Lu, China, Transnational Visuality, Global
Postmodernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). For discussions of “post-New
Era,” see Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-
Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), esp.
157–62. For discussions of “postsocialism” in China, see: Arif Dirlik, “Postsocialism? Reflections
on ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,’” in Marxism and the Chinese Experience, ed. Arif
Dirlik and Maurice Meisner (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), 362–84; Paul G. Pickowicz,
“Huang Jianxin and the Notion of Postsocialism,” in New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities,
Politics, ed. Nick Browne, Paul G. Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 57–87; Chris Berry, Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao
China: The Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004);
Sheldon Lu, Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), esp. 204–10; Xudong Zhang, Postsocialism
and Cultural Politics: China in the Last Decade of the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008); Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature,
and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
21 After navigating through the theories of postmodernism of Jameson, Hutcheon, and John
Docker with respect to parody, Dentith later claims that the bond between postmodernism
and parody in general seems to be valid and persuasive. However, this grand narrative is “too
epochal, insufficiently alert to the more ‘micro’ and properly historical forces acting in society
at any period. What is rather needed is a description of the multiple and varying sources of
cultural authority in society, and the capacity of any social order to invent and to reinvent its
sacred words as beliefs change, different social classes take the social lead, differing cultural
forms come into and move out of prominence.” Dentith, Parody, 162. Original emphasis.
22 Studies on class stratification and transformation in contemporary China are many. To name
a few: Liang Xiaosheng, Zhongguo shehui ge jieceng fenxi (An analysis of social classes in
China) (Beijing: Jingji ribao chubanshe, 1998); Lu Xueyi, Dangdai Zhongguo shehui jieceng
yanjiu baogao (A research report on social classes in contemporary China) (Beijing: Shehui
kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2002); Lu Xueyi, Dangdai Zhongguo shehui liudong (Social
mobility in contemporary China) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2004).

20 China Information 24(1)
23 Many studies have been done on this issue. For instance, Chinese sociologist Sun Liping
writes extensively on this social transformation. He explicitly uses such concepts as “cleavage”
and “imbalance” in describing contemporary Chinese society as an uneven society. See Sun
Liping, Duanlie: ershi shiji jiushi niandai yilai de Zhongguo shehui (Cleavage: Chinese
society since the 1990s) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2003); Shiheng: duanlie
shehui de yunzuo luoji (Imbalance: the implementation logic of a cleaved society) (Beijing:
Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2004); and Boyi: duanlie shehui de liyi chongtu yu hexie
(Gaming: confrontation and harmony in a cleaved society) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian
chubanshe, 2006). McGrath also points out that “fragmentation” is a significant feature of
postsocialist China. See, McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, especially chapter one, “Worlds
in Fragments: Culture and the Market under Postsocialist Modernity.”
24 Shohat, “Ethnicities-in-Relation,” 238.
25 For instance, Manfred Pfister notes that, “[l]aughter is always caught up in the kinds of
distinctions between centre and margins every society employs to establish and stabilize its
identity: in one society, the predominant form of laughter can be that which aims from the
site of the ideological or power centre at what is to be marginalized or excluded altogether;
in another, the most significant form of laughter can arise from the margins, challenging and
subverting the established orthodoxies, authorities and hierarchies.” Pfister, Introduction, in
A History of English Laughter: Laughter from Beowulf to Beckett and Beyond, ed. Manfred
Pfister (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), vi–vii.
26 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984) and Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
27 For instance, Stam, Subversive Pleasures.
28 Furong jiejie (Hibiscus sister), Houshe nanhai (Back-dorm boys), and Wangluo xiaopang
(Net Chubby) are such examples. Spoofsters, out of the mindset of sheer entertainment and
practical jokes, created a series of anti-idols, vaunting their playful sentiment.
29 In some cases, spoofsters’ behaviors border on those of the qun mang (mob), “a group of people
gathering together and exhibiting a homogeneous and uniformed psychological consciousness.
They refuse rational and complex thinking. For different kinds of advice, thoughts, and beliefs
offered to them, they only give two choices on either extremes: either take them or refuse
them entirely, regarding them as either categorical truths or absolute fallacies.” Zhu Dake
characterizes such spoofers as hongke, the mob which kicks up a fuss. For him, this group of
people easily falls into liumang-ism, or hooliganism. Interestingly, in Zhu’s vocabulary liumang
is a paradox-charted word that indicates the conventional meaning of hooligans who disrespect
laws and moralities and cause social problems on the one hand, and also implies the ideas of
unrootedness, diaspora, mobility, marginality, unshackledness, unconstrainedness, and so on.
To a certain extent, Zhu’s definition best speaks of the double-sidedness of the egao culture. It is
a product of this multicultural, pluralistic society, in which social values become heterogeneous
and social tolerance high. However, it also testifies to the serious challenges to social norms
and values and their consequent degradation, which are exemplified in such phenomena as
loss of a certain fundamental humanity and lack of social responsibility. Sometimes, the egao
culture perplexes us as to whether it is to be viewed as “deconstructive” or as being simply
“destructive.” See, Liu Zuoyuan, “E meiti zhiyi Zhongguo wangmin ‘daode baoli’” (Russian
media question Chinese netizens’ “moral violence”), Zhongguo qingnian bao (China youth

Gong & Yang 21
daily), 22 January 2008, http://qnck.cyol.com/content/2008-01/22/content_2043200.htm; Zhu
Dake, “Yi ge songruan de huayu mantou” (A soft discourse on a steamed bun), http://ent.sina.
com.cn/r/m/2006-03-02/15281003001.html. Both accessed 19 January 2009.
30 For discussions on the sense of empowerment embodied in laughter and humor, see, for
instance, Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith and Paul Cohen, in New
French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken, 1981),
245–64; Gail Finney, “Unity in Difference? An Introduction,” in Look Who’s Laughing:
Gender and Comedy, ed. Gail Finney (Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1994), 1–13;
Joseph Boskin, Rebellious Laughter: People’s Humor in American Culture (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1997).
31 For the cathartic effects of laughter, see John Parkin, Humor Theorists of the Twentieth Century
(Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1997). More critics maintain the indeterminate features of
laughter and humor. See, Michael Mulkay, On Humor: Its Nature and Its Place in Modern
Society (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Pfister, ed., A History of English Laughter;
Susanne Reichl and Mark Stein, eds, Cheeky Fictions: Laughter and the Postcolonial
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005).
32 Harris, Film Parody, 1–4.
33 Ibid., 1.
34 Liu Xiaobo, “Cong Wang Shuo shi tiaokan dao Hu Ge shi egao—jian lun houjiquan ducai
xia de minjian xiaohua zhengzhi” (From Wang Shuo-style ridicule to Hu Ge-style spoofs—
the politics of folk jokes under postauthoritarian rule), http://intermargins.net/intermargins/
TCulturalWorkshop/culturestudy/mainland/03.htm, accessed 19 January 2009. We may also
add to these the Hong Kong-based comedian Stephen Chow’s films (especially his works
Dahua xiyou [A Chinese Odyssey, Parts 1 and 2]), which have exerted huge influences on the
young urban generation in mainland China, as well as the videos of self-parody, the Da shiji
(Big histories) series, made by well-known reporters and staff of the CCTV.
35 This statement can be partially justified by popular “folk jokes,” which are passed mouth to
mouth among people on the Internet, and as short text messages on mobile phones. These
jokes sometimes even make fun of political figures and are spiced up with sexual implications.
36 See, for example, Dane, Parody, 5; Garabed D. Kiremidjian, “The Aesthetics of Parody,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28 (1969): 231–2.
37 See Rose, Parody/Meta-fiction, especially Part 3: “Parody as Meta-Fiction”; Hutcheon, A
Theory of Parody.
38 Dentith, Parody, 189. Harris sees parody in the filmic field as more constructive and argues
film parody has become a new canon. Harris, Film Parody, 7.
39 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
40 Harris, Film Parody, 7.
41 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 93.
42 Dane, Parody, 10.
43 See Wang Qian, “Hu Ge zhuanfang: wo zhizao le ‘mantouxue’ an’” (An interview
with Hu Ge: I created “The Bloody Case of a Steamed Bun”), http://ent.sina.com.cn/
m/c/2006-01-18/1952964868.html, accessed 19 January 2009.
44 Hu Ge’s spoof of character names will be discussed later.
45 See http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=promise05.htm, accessed 19 January 2009.

22 China Information 24(1)
46 For comments on The Promise, see, for example, http://ent.sina.com.cn/f/thepromise/index.
shtml; http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2005-12-21/1050936192.html; and http://www.360doc.com/
showWeb/0/0/48332.aspx, all accessed 19 January 2009.
47 For instance, celebrities such as Lu Yan (Lisa Lu), Pu Cunxin, Chen Guoxing, Hu Xuehua,
and Song Jia openly praised Chen’s film. See “Pu Cunxin deng mingxing ping Wuji: jinnian
lai zuihao de Zhongguo dianying” (Celebrities’ reviews of The Promise: the best Chinese
film in recent years), http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2005-12-21/1050936192.html, accessed 19
January 2009.
48 We borrowed two terms, “digital youth” and “conventional elite,” from Zhu Dake, “Yi ge
songruan de huayu mantou.”
49 The particular discussion page can be found on a discussion forum at http://www7.tianya.cn/
New/PublicForum/Content.asp?flag=1&idWriter=0&Key=0&idArticle=133954&strItem=fil
mtv, accessed 19 January 2009.
50 Ibid.
51 Guo Shuang, “Guowan wangyou qianming zhichi Hu Ge hanwei Mantou” (More than 10,000
netizens sign up in support of Hu Ge’s defense of A Steamed Bun), http://www.ycwb.com/gb/
content/2006-02/14/content_1068937.htm, accessed 19 January 2009.
52 Yang Tao, “Falü xuezhe yanzhong de Mantou PK Wuji” (In the eyes of law scholars: the
tension between A Steamed Bun and The Promise), Jiancha ribao (Economic daily), http://ent.
sina.com.cn/r/m/2006-02-17/1353989136.html, accessed 19 January 2009.
53 An ironic footnote to this case is that, at the beginning of each of his works, Hu Ge puts up
a warning asking viewers not to disseminate his work for uses other than their own personal
entertainment; and at the end, he lists all the works he “cites.”
54 Cheng Qingsong, “Zhichi Chen Kaige! Zuowei dianyingren he yi ge gongmin” (Supporting
Chen Kaige: as a filmmaker and a citizen), http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_476fb4b3010001yb.
html, accessed 19 January 2009.
55 Harris, Film Parody, 6; Gehring, Parody as Film Genre, 3.
56 Homosexuality in China today largely remains taboo and the mention of it can be negatively
satirical.
57 This is also true for many other spoofs: for example, the spoof of the “Red Classic,” Shanshan
de hongxing (Sparkling red star), http://www.56.com/u54/v_MTMzMTI1MDc.html, addresses
the problem of rocketing house prices; Hu Ge’s Chunyun diguo (The empire of the spring
festival transportation), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZL_F85AhSg parodies this
stressful annual experience unique to China; the spoof of Ang Lee’s most recent film, Se, jie
(Lust, caution), http://you.joy.cn/video/200583.htm, mocks the rigid English tests imposed by
the state. All these are “petty” problems that common people are most concerned with, and
these are also the problems that the government fails to handle satisfactorily.
58 Mao Tse-tung, “In Memory of Norman Bethune,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol.
II (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), 337–8. For this point, we are indebted to an
anonymous reader.
59 Wang Qian, “Hu Ge zhuanfang.”
60 The clips of The Promise used in “The Bloody Case” were originally taken from a pirated
DVD that Hu Ge bought at a market. This is part of the charge that Chen inflicted on Hu.
61 An eight-minute egao video, Yi ge mantou yinfa de mafan (The trouble over a steamed bun),
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/-itsBrmpbCw/, accessed 6 November 2009, was edited

Gong & Yang 23
by netizens who satirically narrate the trouble that Hu Ge got himself into. In the same format,
the spoofsters took video clips from Hu Ge’s “The Bloody Case,” Hong Kong comedy films,
and TV entertainment shows and made them into an egao. Thus, they playfully commented
on the confrontation between Chen and Hu. In the meantime, another egao of “The Bloody
Case,” a song entitled Jixiang san bao mantou ban (Three treasures of luck—the steamed bun
version), http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/9AoIu72TgSA/, was widely disseminated on
the Internet. The music was from the popular song Jixiang san bao (Three treasures of luck),
which was filled with familial joyfulness; but the lyrics were satirically changed to make fun
of the Chen–Hu disputes. In this way, audiences have played an active role in appreciating,
disseminating, enriching, and recreating the meaning of egao text.
62 Bothered by the increasing numbers of egao clips, the State Administration for Radio, Film
and Television (SARFT) planned to announce new regulations on online videos and required
the authors of egao to apply for a permit. Guangming ribao (Guangming daily) also organized
a workshop, invited experts from the media and universities, and discussed how to prevent
egao. The participants analyzed egao from the perspectives of morality, law, and culture, and
called for a stop to the egao trend. A detailed report on the workshop can be found at http://
www.gmw.cn/content/wseg.htm, accessed 19 January 2009. Most recently the State Copyright
Bureau announced further moves to regulate egao with legal mechanisms. These actions may
regulate the chaotic net space, but it also further contributes to publicizing the egao discourse.
63 For instance, the 2006 hesuipian (new year film), Da dianying (Big Movie), is an egao movie
that was shown in the main theater chains in China. It takes the exact format of egao, spoofing
20 mainstream films. It achieved a moderate reception.
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