Hui Faye Xiao's Family Revolution and Shuyu Kong's Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China are welcome contributions to what both authors point out is the sparse scholarly literature on popular media texts and their role in contemporary Chinese society. Despite the manifest limits of high culture's ability to connect us to the concerns and passions of ordinary Chinese cultural consumers today, it continues to attract more research. Xiao's book is perhaps the more conventional of the two in its focus on textual analysis and it is also more pessimistic, whereas Kong's focus on the participatory role of audiences leads her to be more optimistic. These two very clearly argued texts complement each other well, and we can hope that they will stimulate further work of this type.

Xiao's Family Revolution is the first monograph to trace the changing depictions of divorce and marriage difficulties in literature, television dramas and films from the beginning of the Reform Era of the 1980s through to the first decade of the present century. As she points out, these narrative representations not only correlate with increasingly liberal divorce procedures and mushrooming rates of divorce: “What has often been overlooked is the fact that the ‘family revolution’ goes hand in hand with China's metamorphosis into a ‘risk society’ in which ‘the state reforms governmental institutions to redirect responsibilities and redistribute risks to the individuals’” (p. 26).

Furthermore, in most cases the individuals held responsible are women. In the early 1980s, the era of the Four Modernizations spawned a cycle of literature, including Wu Ruozeng's Divorce and Su Tong's A Divorce Handbook, in which men's difficulties with modernity produce misogyny directed at their wives, who are depicted as baggage holding them back. Zhang Jie's The Ark would seem to offer more promise in its sisterhood of divorced women. However, these women only see their current situation as a fall from grace, which they blame on their own “masculinization” during the Mao era. In the new century, Xiao points out that this formula is expanded massively in television series like Chinese-Style Divorce, which depict re-feminization through consumption as the way to rescue failing marriages. Here, criticism of system failings in childcare, healthcare, education and more that have driven women back into the home to become unpaid carers are overlooked in favour of a “neoliberal logic of ‘self-ownership’” (p. 128). In cinema, Xiao finds women initiating divorce, but in Ann Hui's The Postmodern Life of My Aunt and Wang Quan'an's Tuya's Wedding the results are far from promising for the protagonists.

Reading Family Revolution, it becomes easy to see why all the improvements in living standards produced by the economic growth of the last 30 years have not added up to greater happiness. In fact, as Kong points out in Popular Media, surveys indicate the trend is in the opposite direction (p. 61). Her book places a particular emphasis on the role of audiences, both in their articulation of the various popular texts she examines to their own lives, and in the role of affect in their responses. For all the signs of unhappiness that she, like Xiao, traces, she does discover indications of a growing “cultural public sphere” produced out of this “affective articulation.”

Kong's early chapters look at the appeal of Feng Xiaogang's “teargas canister” blockbuster movie on the Tangshan earthquake, Aftershock (2010), and TV series about laid-off women workers like Crying Your Heart Out (2004). She emphasizes how interviews with viewers demonstrate their investment in the tragic “structure of feeling” that the series generates, rather than its dubious upbeat narrative, which echoes the neoliberal emphasis on self-improvement that Xiao also discusses. Similarly, talk shows like The New Family Mediator emphasize psychology and morality as a solution to family unhappiness that often has social origins. While this is depressing, Kong's analysis of the online debates generated by dating shows like Are You the One? indicates their perhaps surprising ability to stimulate interest in public issues among their young audience. And, drawing on the work of Henry Jenkins on the “prosumer,” Kong demonstrates that the seemingly nostalgic spy drama Undercover and Jiang Wen's action film set in the 1920s, Let the Bullet Fly, provide plenty of material for online fans to use in their examination of contemporary society and politics through allegorical analysis and their own fictional elaborations.

Both books are very clearly written. Xiao's benefits from appendices of television dramas and films about divorce, as well as a general bibliography, which Kong's sadly lacks. Both would have further benefited from Chinese character lists of names and film titles. I also felt that almost every chapter could have been the topic for a whole book, and I hope that in-depth and detailed analyses of individual topics and works in this field of contemporary popular media will emerge as more scholars work in the area.