Abstract
Chinese cinema at the turn of the twenty-first century is replete with metaphors of travel -migration, roaming, exile, diaspora, and more recently, adventure and tourism. This article explores the allegorical uses of mobility and journey in recent New Year's comedies, as exemplified by Xu Zheng's 2012 blockbuster release Ren zai jiongtu zhi taijiong/Lost in Thailand, a film that is widely considered to have shaken up China's domestic film industry. The notion of Thailand in the film as simultaneously a commercial and spiritual destination is crucial to the matter at hand. I argue that the spatial consumption typical of travel films acquires an alternative form here, one that does not fortify but rather undermines the imagination of Chinese power in a foreign land. This form of spatiality is best understood within the generic framework of New Year's comedy, as well as the larger context of consumer culture and mass entertainment. Inquiring into the mixed tropes of comedy and melodrama, I seek to illustrate how the newly emergent tourist discourse builds upon the organizational principles of holiday-themed films, and how this particular genre and style, at times, can enable apolitical encounters with the society's collective consciousness, while critiquing the limits and conditions of China's post-socialist reality from within. admission (though not regarding revenue, since Avatar charged premium prices for its 3D screenings) (Cieply 2013). Reasons for this near miracle have been chewed over in all forms of media. People found a spectrum of possible factors, from the appeal of slapstick comedy, star power and the popularity of Wai Man Yip's Ren zai jiong tu/Lost on Journey (2010), the film's quasi-prequel; to industrial causes such as blanket marketing, the increase in the number of theatres and screens in second-and third-tier Chinese cities in recent years, as well as the film's welltimed release date, which allowed it to avoid direct competition with other holiday season heavyweights, such as Yi jiu si er/Back to 1942 (Feng, 2012) , Life of Pi (Lee, 2012) , Shi er sheng xiao/Chinese Zodiac (Chan, 2012) and Yi dai zong shi/The Grandmaster (Wong, 2013) . 1 Many reviewers have agreed that Lost in Thailand had flourished under the most favourable conditions possible -what Mencius calls 'good timing, terrestrial advantages, and human relations' (tian shi, di li, ren he) -and such luck is unlikely to be replicated. Although the success of the film can be seen as an isolated event, I believe its significance lies instead in how it points out new directions that the industry can follow. As this article will illustrate, some strategies underlying the making of the film have opened new territory for the present-day Chinese cinema as business, entertainment and social practice. In early 2013, shortly after the release of Lost in Thailand, two other movies became hugely popular box office hits (Figure 1 ). One was Chinese Zodiac, a Jackie Chan vehicle with his signature humour and acrobatic moves. The other was the romantic comedy Beijing yu shang Xiyatu/Finding Mr. Right (Xue, 2013) , or literally in Chinese, 'Beijing Meets Seattle'. Despite the differences between these three films in terms of genre, style and target audience, they have one thing in common: the main stories are all set outside of China, and they all bank on the central motif of mobility and the allure of foreign locations. Chinese Zodiac is a globe-trotting action-adventure in the style of the James Bond or Jason Bourne franchises that takes its audience from France to Australia to Latvia. Finding Mr. Right, as the trailer states, is about a 'Beijing diva' in Seattle (though the film was shot mostly in Canada). Altogether, these three films grossed over $430 million, making substantial contribution to China's annual box office takings in 2013 (which totalled $3.6 billion, up almost a third on 2012) (Hunt 2014 ). These successes turned 2013 into a triumphant year in which homegrown movies outstripped Hollywood in the ever-expanding domestic market. Using foreign settings in Chinese-language films by itself is not a novelty. From as early as the 1950s, this strategy has been employed by Hong Kong directors to increase the appeal of their films at home and abroad (Van Den Troost 2010: 86) . But Chinese Zodiac, Finding Mr. Right and Lost in Thailand were hailing from a different reality and viewership. As China became the second-largest film market in 2012, and as films made in China continue to flop in global markets, especially the United States, Chinese commercial film-making these days answers almost exclusively to domestic (Mainland Chinese) demands. The cinematic consumption of foreign space, in this context, is not simply about recycling or inventing new tropes of exoticism and fantasy, even though this is certainly part of the drill. More importantly, in order to entertain and create an effective rapport with the local audience, entertainment films must envision foreign landscape in ways that partake the local pop cultural discourse or even redefine the terms of it -a quality commonly labelled as 'jie di qi', a new idiom appearing on social media in 2012 that loosely translates to 'connected to the native soil', and can be used to describe cultural products that speak to local themes and aspirations. Films in this category are opposites of the martial arts spectacles and costume epics that prevailed in Mainland China in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Desser 2011 ). On the contrary, these productions operate in close proximity to the desire and fantasy of the masses; their sense of comedy is often broad and in conjunction with excessive corniness and provincial stereotypes. The 'otherness' of foreign locations, filtered through a strictly local lens, feeds into this evolving sense of selfhood. Their representations thus rise above the level of aesthetic distraction and become a narrative device, providing footnotes for what is absent on the screen, i.e. China. Lost in Thailand is especially interesting in this regard. The film begins with Xu Lang (Xu Zheng, also director and co-writer), a company scientist who just made a breakthrough in developing 'Supergas', a chemical additive capable of drastically enhancing the performance of fossil fuels. The only way he can continue to perfect this miracle compound is to go to Thailand and have the company's majority shareholder sign a letter of attorney. However, he is facing vicious competition with his college friend-turned-office rival Gao Bo (Huang Bo), who is eager to sell the product to the French for a quick buck, if he can get his own letter of attorney signed first. After losing his passport in Bangkok, Xu Lang is forced to team up with a sightseeing tourist named Wang Bao (Wang Baoqiang), or 'Baobao', in order to get to his desired destination. The synopsis suggests that being on the road is the major mode of address in Lost in Thailand. Numerous road movies have demonstrated that such narratives revolve around the reordering of space, which provides a platform for new experiences of time, speed and distance. Lost in Thailand takes advantage of this genre convention; in fact, parts of it function almost as a travelogue. In the protagonists' adventure across the country, Thailand appears amiably as the land of temples, elephants and smiles. Baobao, who is on vacation overseas for the first time, has a long to-do list that allows us to look into a fetishized Thai culture through a flaunting of images: transvestites, massage, fish spa, kickboxing, water festival, sky lantern and even local mafia. In these and other visual details, the film satisfies the curiosity of ordinary Chinese who have never left their country. Indeed, following the success of the film, a large number of Chinese tourists flocked to Thailand; even the Thai Prime Minister publicly thanked the film's production team for having done such a fantastic job promoting local tourism (Wang 2013 ) (Figure 2 ): the number of Chinese tourists going to Thailand has increased from 2.7 million in 2012 to 3.5 million in 2013 (News LK 2014) . The road narrative of Lost in Thailand, one that foregrounds ideas of physical mobility, therefore reflects a recent and powerful social change that is measurable in statistics. In The Altering Eye, a study of international modernist cinema from World War II to the 1970s, Robert Kolker offers an insightful observation on the relationship between the road image and America's mythic mobility: 'The road is more than a physical presence in American film; it is a sign -a communicative cultural presence connoting freedom of movement, adventure, discovery, danger, escape' (Kolker 1983: 167 ). Kolker's understanding efficiently sums up the underlying ethos that governs the travel metaphors in the film. Physical mobility and upward mobility often overlap in the Chinese context, where the local population has for decades been confined by travel restrictions and economic circumstances. The feverish tourism development in the last two decades characterizes a form of newly acquired modernity, which changes Chinese people's awareness of the self and its relation to the world through spatial imagination. The journey that Xu Lang and Baobao embark on -with Gao Bo hot on the trail -is punctuated by a series of mishaps and blunders from which humour arises. More impressively, the duo always manages to press on and keep going despite endless setbacks. This resilience is materialized in the means of transportation they stumble upon (Figure 3 ): plane, train, tuk-tuks, bus, mini-van, trishaw, jeep, makeshift motorcycles and elephant. The changes are so frequent that vehicles in Lost in Thailand no longer assume a distinct character on their own, as they usually do in western road others (2006: 12) . As mentioned previously, the highly orchestrated Thai landscape, building on thrill and cultural strangeness, prepares tasty eye candy that can be readily consumed by Chinese moviegoers. However, Thailand in many ways is not simply a neutral background against which hysterics take place; its exoticism, on the contrary, is tailored as such that it forms a stark contrast to China as a cutthroat (if amusing) capitalist society with all its glitz and faults. Early on, the film establishes the presentday Beijing as a hectic, profit-obsessed modern world: it opens in an impersonal, highly regimented office space, where Xu Lang tries in vain to preach the importance of Supergas to his wife, whose mind is already set on divorce because of his perennial absence in family life. The subsequent montage sequence features eighteen shots of rush-hour traffic in Beijing. Moments later, Xu Lang is trapped in bumper-to-bumper traffic in Bangkok trying to make a flight. His conversation with the taxi driver goes as follows: XU: Go that way, be quick! DRIVER: No, no, no… (In Thai) jai yen yen The dialogue makes fun of the common stereotypes of Chinese and Thai. Xu Lang is characterized by impatience verbalized in phrases like 'quick', 'rush' and 'hurry', which is counteracted by 'jai yen yen', the Thai word for 'relax'. Failing to boss the driver into using a side street where apparently taxis are not allowed, Xu Lang reaches over from the backseat to press the car horn, aiming at least to inch forward. The contrast of 'national characters' -Chinese being reckless, aggressive, somewhat intrusive and dismissive of laws, versus Thai, who are calm, collected, good-natured and laid-back -continues to be manifested spatially throughout the film. As Xu Lang and Baobao venture into the rural regions, where rice fields, small retail stalls and friendly faces abound, Thailand is idealized into a primitive, unspoiled landscape that somehow preserves its innocence untouched by the materialistic culture where the protagonists are from. Gradually and unmistakably, Thailand turns into the flip side of China: typecasting aside, it is above all a place that is spiritual, colourful (green), freeflowing, leisurely and rural. In contrast, Mainland China is urban, capitalist, congested, homogenized, economically more developed, but socially irresponsible and morally questionable. This spatial analogy plays out a basic dichotomy between 'self' and 'other', a form of self-scrutiny that has occasionally been seen in popular television shows and movies since the 1990s. Beijingren zai Niu Yue/Beijinger in New York (Zheng, 1994; based on the novel by Cao Guilin published in 1991), for instance, the first Mainland Chinese television series to be filmed in the United States, amazed millions of Chinese 'with its vision of Chinese power, success, and masculinity projected onto the symbolic center of global capitalist culture' (McGrath 2010: 174) . Bujian busan/Be There or Be Square (Feng, 1998) , the first Mainland Chinese feature film shot entirely in America, provides a similar image of the Global North (represented by the United States) that 'addresses Chinese people's obsession with Western influence' (Zhang 2008: 93) . Lost in Thailand toes the same line as its predecessors in terms of romanticizing foreign landscape from a Chinese perspective. However, it also repurposes the narrative of Chinese abroad, by finding 'otherness' in non-western locations. This change of setting recognizes the major demographic shift to a wealthier, more confident and media-savvy audience. Steering away from the previous power dynamic framed by white privilege, racial and cultural differences are no longer subject to the cycle of confrontation/assimilation, which is often done at the cost of suppressing one's ethnic identity. Alternatively, the journey in Lost in Thailand is powerfully defined by the travellers' consumer identities as both tourists and businessmen (the mysterious shareholder is also in Thailand for a temple retreat). There is an assertive undertone regarding travel, and this attitude should be understood within the more pervasive subtext underlying the film: China's economic expansion and correspondingly increasing demand, as well as the sense of conquest through travelling, of amplifying and asserting one's self by venturing into new realms. If the earlier renditions of foreign landscape emphasize the inevitable duality of opportunity and threat, attraction and repulsion confronted by overseas Chinese in the western world, the experience with Thailand tells a different story. Notably, the adventure in Lost in Thailand is free from symbolic contrasts. Although wild and carnivalesque, the touristic fun parallelling the hapless pursuit of the comic heroes never amounts to corruption or decadence. Nor has Chinese mobility replaced white privilege in this intra-Asian context. There is plenty of self-mockery that undermines the sense of entitlement enabled by purchasing power. Masculinity, a telling sign of power, is constantly undercut by the three main characters' frustrated relationships with women. Xu Lang is desperate to reconcile with his estranged wife and daughter; Gao Bo, whose capacity for physical clowning roots in part from his feminine demeanour, is henpecked and subservient to his feisty wife; the childlike Baobao is almost asexual, but he has the fantasy that Fang Bingbing, one of China's most popular female celebrities in 2013, is his girlfriend. 2 The act of self-cancellation suggests scepticism of the power of consumerism and market-based social and human solutions. This distrust finds further expression in the strategy of 'over-identification' that is used broadly in the film, in part facilitated by its melodramatic excess. The term 'over-identification' was borrowed from Jacques Lacan by Slavoj Žižek to describe the unique resistance strategy of the Slovenian (former Yugoslav) avant-garde band Laibach in 1980s communist Yugoslavia (Žižek 2002) . Instead of promoting the typical rhetoric of East European dissident movement, which pleaded for the relaxation of the communist rule, Laibach accused the local communist regime of being still too soft and lenient, lacking absolute faith in its own system. Conversely, their performance, which took on a with dual symbols of socialist realism and Nazism, deliberately called for a form of ultra-authoritarian communism that is even more rigorous than its real-life counterpart. In doing so, the group foregrounded the regime's alleged ideals and set them against their bankruptcy in reality. Žižek applies the notion of over-identification to explain the forms of rebellion in the system of late capitalism. Assuming that 'the system has an inherent condition of functioning that its own ideology must not be taken seriously', he argues, 'the only way […] to be really subversive is not to develop critical potentials, ironic distance, but precisely to take the system more seriously than it takes itself'. 3 The strategy of over-identification in Lost in Thailand is more specifically a strategy of enthusiastically identifying with the worst of capitalist excesses and its wealth-obsessed, self-centred social effects. The premise of the story, i.e. Xu Lang prioritizes finding the shareholder over the last chance to make up with his wife and daughter -as a rational choice -betrays a fragment of a worldview in which productivity and personal success are almost exclusively extolled. Xu Lang and Gao Bo's business rivalry provides numerous anecdotes for the same belief system. The film's narrative is sustained by their tireless attempts to sabotage each other: Gao Bo plants GPS trackers and computer viruses on Xu Lang's mobile devices to keep him from finding the shareholder; in return, Xu Lang steals Gao Bo's passport and later his rental car, while at the same time managing to keep Baobao in tow with creative lies and empty promises. There is no subtle reading of their desire and selfish needs. And no one has to apologize for what he wants and does, as long as he can exploit a profitable opportunity. The narrative premise and framework here most clearly demonstrates Žižek's idea of taking 'the system more seriously than it takes itself'. Rather than balancing the astonishing costs and payoffs of capitalism, the characters embrace its logic unconditionally, not to cast irony, but as the only way to survive and succeed. The strategy of choosing the worst side of the existing order -in this case, a hardcore, uncompromising capitalism without a human face, rather than a capitalism with a positive facade (such as fair competition, rule of law, ethical sensibility, efficiency, etc.) -is so blown out of proportion that it instantly relieves the audience of the burden of believing in the system. Human relationships are dramatically reduced to part of what Karl Marx calls the 'cash nexus', in which a person's worth is hinged entirely upon his profit-making potential. Xu Lang's 'friendship' with Baobao, for instance, is prompted by Xu's dire need to find a valid passport holder to travel with him in Thailand -or no hotel or train tickets -until he finds the shareholder. During the trip, Baobao's excitement of making a new friend -they even nickname themselves as 'Thailand Legend' after the famous Chinese pop music duo 'Phoenix Legend' -is set against Xu Lang's ruthlessly self-interested, manipulative stance; at one point, Xu literally ditches Baobao on the street, thinking the shareholder's whereabouts is within reach. By upholding the capitalist discourse in its pure, unmitigated form, the narrative rejects any alternative perspective or standard that could challenge the limitation of the system. Thus the only question, here, is whether capitalism is capable of fulfilling its own social promises: did it bring material wealth, individual freedom, and ultimately, happiness to the society? By eliminating the critical potential of its unsuspecting characters, the film creates a new critical distance among the audience, most of whom in reality would not agree with China's post-socialist capitalism without reservations. Such an explicit, unmediated endorsement of capitalist order makes the strategy of over-identification an effective countermeasure for what Žižek describes in the same context as 'today's prevailing mode of ideology' -cynicism. Modern cynicism is defined as a stance that 'generally denotes an attitude of distrust toward ethical and social values and a rejection of the need to be socially involved' (Navia 1999:141) . In China, the prevalence of cynicism is in part the by-product of a new material-oriented social life inaugurated by the economic reform in 1978. Yet the sentiment also immediately follows modern China's century-long ideological idealism and revolutionary heroism, whose cultural expressions are governed by the aesthetic of 'the sublime', where 'whatever smacks too much of the human creature […] is purged and repressed so that the all-too-human is sublimated into the super-human or even inhuman realm' (Wang 1997: 2) . The dismantling of ideological myths and the dominance of market capital has since led Chinese cinema astray from the political and ideological arena. Today, it is the official ideology that is muffled in popular discourse; grandiose political manifestations and sublime expressions of human dignity and faith have proved to be a hard sell. The box office failure of Feng Xiaogang's Back to 1942, a Spielbergian historical epic with great ambition, is a telling example. Moreover, in a time when political censorship and surveillance is still looming large in public life, cynicism in the form of debunking or mocking serious beliefs is a pragmatic form of thinking and dealing with information. The lack of space or appetite for radical critique of the existing social order has encouraged a relativist attitude towards the society's fundamental values and social behaviours. Lost in Thailand in its wider cultural themes suggests a kind of overidentification with the 'post-ideological' condition that is China today. Ordinary Chinese are attracted to the film for its fantasy of mobility and the humorous outlook of a stressed-out Chinese society of which they are all a part. Invariably, the film's pedagogical purpose is deeply tied to these facts. The major characters' single-minded pursuit of power and success gives rise to a sense of closure: the frantic business rivalry only results in futility; and as a result, both high-power competitors (as nuts and bolts of global capitalism) face a family that is about to fall apart, revealing the social costs and absurdity of their quests. Xu Lang and Gao Bo's full endorsement of the raw capitalist ideology thus provokes disbelief in the audience -who can buy into an ideology so thoroughly without using discretion? Such inkling of doubt compelled the viewers who otherwise have a more ambivalent or relativist attitude towards the dominant order to take a more critical stance. Far from advocating a fundamentalist interpretation of China's current state of affairs, Lost in Thailand delivers between-the-lines social commentary, which is just enough to tap into the deep undercurrents that shape the direction of social change. Being 'lost' overseas is symptomatic of the disorientating experience at home: China is a world of fierce competition, materialist compulsion and one-dimensional pursuit, but not necessarily a place of old-school politics. Žižek observes that 'as long as the universal dimension of our social formation remains defined in terms of capital', the only way out is to 'invent forms of political practice that contain a dimension of universality beyond capital' (Žižek 1992: 46). 4 The film finds its way to transcend the capitalist false consciousness by asserting an emotional truth, that of family and friendship that endures despite the most aggressive bourgeois imperative. The narrative of liberation owes its persuasive power to the film's three energetic characters, whose looks and mannerisms are symbolically sculpted. Xu Lang, the well-off, sharply dressed corporate man with smart suits, duckbill hat, aviator sunglasses and a silver briefcase, represents the new class of urban professionals who own homes and cars, speak English and travel globally for leisure and work. But he is also an Everyman, who struggles, often without success, to craft a balance between work and life. Gao Bo, as Xu Lang's arch nemesis, is charged with a pouty sarcastic energy, and walking around in skintight black outfits and hipster glasses. He is the ultimate believer of free market capitalism, and would stop at nothing to get to the top. Wang Bao, on the other hand, is clearly from a different part of the economic strata. He speaks slightly accented Mandarin, makes scallion pancakes as a living, and calls himself 'Baobao' ('treasure'), a childlike nickname with rural taste. When we first see him, he wears a bleached-blonde bowl cut, is dressed in a brightblue T-shirt and orange pants, and his red matching baseball cap reveals that he is a member of a big Chinese tour group. Baobao's broad smiles, garish colours and overall excessiveness form stark contrast to the subtly attired Xu Lang, who is seated next to him on the Bangkok-bound plane. The paring of Xu Lang (the smart, smug and hapless one) and Baobao (the dumb, annoying and good-hearted one) as the unlikely yet loveable heroes comes from a long line of comic duos familiar to the Chinese audience -Sam Hui/Karl Maka, Stephen Chow/Ng Man-tat, Jackie Chan/Chris Tucker, just to name a few. In most of the classic examples, the 'dumb' one has the ability to mess up just about everything, but there is also an innocence or dreamy quality to him that makes the character vulnerable and endearing. Similarly, Baobao's big-heartedness will reveal to Xu Lang life's true priorities. His simple, earthy approach to life has set him up to ignore conventional thinking about happiness and success. Indeed, the drive for wealth and power that has alienated Xu Lang (and so many Chinese) from his family and friends has no bearing on Baobao's vision of the world. For example, after picking him up as a last resort for a travel companion, Xu Lang finds out that Baobao's pancake business actually has a large profit margin; Xu promptly offers to buy the recipe and to franchise the business. In response, Baobao says cheerfully that the secret recipe is that he has to make every pancake himself. The joke is clearly on the expansionist nature of capitalism. But the conversation also pits Xu Lang's greedy opportunism against Baobao's moral purity, suggesting that the remedy for China's unfettered capitalism lies in revitalizing humanistic social philosophy rather than triggering ideological revolt. Like many predecessors in this category, Baobao with his eccentric comic gags, becomes the linchpin of the otherwise fragmental and distressing modern society. His indifference to monetary rewards, a quality further established by his refusal of Gao Bo's offer of a bribe in exchange for information after being abandoned by Xu Lang, makes reference to the lack of moral authority and the process of commercialization that has put a price tag on almost everything in postsocialist China. Moral comedy as a measure of self-reflection and problem-solving is spatially enabled earlier in the film, when Thailand is imagined as a fantasy escape from the densely materialistic Beijing. Moreover, the road itself takes up allegorical weight. Specifically, the theme of delay becomes central to the film about a journey. Xu Lang and Baobao's trip is rife with interruptions and detours that keep them from reaching the destination. Even their quick-witted change of vehicles is parallelled with a regression in transportation technologies, from the planes and trains to tuk-tuks and elephants, and the last stretch of the journey is in fact conducted on foot. In a like manner, their progress is further set back by various technological failures: phones and mobile devices are hacked, plagued by viruses or simply become useless without Wi-Fi or a roaming plan. Modern technology, like the mechanically developed vehicles, deters as much as it propels the journey. As diversions and sidetracks become an integral part of mobility, Xu Lang (and the audience) is given an opportunity to wander away from his single-minded pursuit and start questioning its presumed importance. The prolonged journey culminates in a critical moment, when Xu Lang decides to give up the power of attorney to help Baobao win the kickboxing match, an action that indicates his final awakening from the illusion that money is the sole liberating force in one's future. Lost in Thailand strikes a sympathetic chord with millions of Chinese who, in search of their 'Chinese dreams', have come face-to-face with a disintegrating society infatuated with wealth, status and other outward signs of success. The film articulates a suspicion of this new economic order by revealing its human cost and reifying effects on society. The strategy of over-identification makes it possible to pass on these messages, even within a system defined by a surface of cynicism, great tolerance of moral relativism and a faltering ideological centre. However, just like the classical odyssey that ended in a homecoming, the journey of our heroes must conclude on a happy note. In the end, Xu Lang saves his friendship, becomes wiser and is also able to reconcile with his wife and daughter. This encircled, artificial 'paradise' mood is best felt in a photo studio back in Beijing, against the background of a tropical ocean, where Baobao is happily posing for a photo shoot with his idol Fang Bingbing, thanks to his well-connected best buddy. Even Gao Bo, still stranded in Thailand without a passport, is rewarded with the good news of his newborn baby. The conventional ending of the film is a typical example of how comedy seeks to resolve complex social problems at the level of form. But the family reunion theme also brings to light the conservative strain beneath the film's forward-looking veneer. Home life, or domestic responsibility, is staged as intrinsic to a modern man's ultimate happiness (the female gender is utterly under-represented here). This solution redefines the problem that originates from the ideological core of capitalism, and turns it instead into a philosophical discourse. The social criticism, thus, is on a motion-obsessed society moving too fast, 'away from the stabilizing structure of community and communication' (Orgeron 2008: 2) , and this is a longstanding cinematic tradition not limited to road movies. Through the idea of mobility, Lost in Thailand communicates a double-faceted understanding of Chinese capitalism: on the one hand, it mocks the hollowness and falsity of its social promise, exposing the systematic nature of individual problems. But on the other hand, it makes it clear that capitalism has framed the narrative momentum and moral discourse all along -the romantic vision of the travellers beyond a society dominated by commercial capitalism is premised on the concept of international travel as a leisure or business opportunity associated exclusively with a bourgeoning middle class. This paradox explains a self-enclosed cultural model in mainstream media that prioritizes troubleshooting moral problems and re-establishing ethical standards -a radical alternative would have been to overhaul the entire system and find solutions at the political level, but it is clear, at least for now, that neither the film-maker nor China is ready to go that far. This surface of moral revivalism, i.e. to provide apolitical humanitarian solutions to social problems, signifies the ways in which popular cinema in China today works itself through degrees and shades of conformity, deriving variously from genre formula, gender and class subtexts, and from the commercial logic of mass entertainment itself. Figure 1: Thailand as a popular destination for Chinese tourists reflects social changes proved by statistics. movies. Reminiscent of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope's travel films in the 1950s, their function is fairly limited to driving the comic characters in and out of farcical scenarios, introducing picturesque elements on the side. But at the same time, the constant and swift change of the means of transportation highlights access, spontaneity, forward movement as well as a shade of superiority to the less developed Thailand and its antics. Riding the wave of economic reform and prosperity, the image of travelling here presents itself as representative of a new generation of Chinese stepping forward into a global future, magnifying both the entrepreneurial ambition and individual freedom. In other words, (global) mobility is celebrated as a visual spectacle in full swing. Figure 2: The use of various modes of transportation in the film, and the decrease in the speed and quality of the vehicles. [relax]… XU: No police, no camera! DRIVER: (In Thai) Really, just be calm… XU: Use the loudspeaker! DRIVER: No, no, no, no… Gentlemen don't honk their horns. Jai yen yen… XU: I'm in a rush, I don't jai yen yen! DRIVER: (In Japanese) Calm down… XU: (In Chinese) Now you are speaking Japanese. (In English) I am not Japanese, I am Chinese! DRIVER: (In Chinese) Chinese people are always in a hurry. XU: (In Chinese) Thai people are always lazy! DRIVER: (In Chinese) Whereabouts in China? XU: Beijing. DRIVER: (In Chinese) Beijing? Your traffic is even worse! (In English) This is Thailand, jai yen yen…
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