Li Yang's socially conscious film as marginal cinema – China's state-capital alliance and its cultural ramifications

By the end of the 1990s, Chinese media saw the convergence of politics and commerce under the synergistic forces of capital and state directives. Commerce has joined forces with the state in regulating the Chinese media industry. The upshot has been the marginalization of media practices that respond neither to market logic nor to the state's imperatives. This article discusses media practices that fall into the “marginal” category. In particular, it focuses on the positioning of Li Yang as a marginal filmmaker due to his films' limited access to the domestic market as a result, at least initially, of state censorship and more recently of market censure. The article further emphasizes the significance of distribution in determining the cultural and economic status of media products.