Dai Jinhua is one of contemporary China's most influential theoreticians and cultural critics. A feminist Marxist, her literary, film and TV commentary has, over the last decade, addressed an
expanding audience in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Cinema and Desire presents Dai Jinhua's best work to date. In the book she examines the Orientalism that made Zhang Yimou the darling
of international film festivals, establishes Huang Shuqin's Human, Woman, Demon as the People's Republic's first genuinely feminist film, comments on TV representations of the Chinese
diaspora in New York, speculates on the value of Mao Zedong as an icon of post-revolutionary consumerism, and analyses the rise of shopping plazas in 1990s urban China as a strange montage in
which the political memories of Tiananmen Square and the logic of the global capitalist marketplace are intertwined.
