"The currency of Jameson's notion of 'national allegories' is evident in its application by scholars who are otherwise different in their political, national, and gender interests. Rather than simply agreeing or disagreeing with Jameson and his followers, let us first reconsider what Jameson means by 'allegory': 'the allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogeneous representtaion of the symbol"
- Rey Chow (403)
"...the realistic portrayal of Chinese peasants living in the feudal countryside. Instead, an age-old labor activity is now given a second-order signification, that of cinema, in order to project a very different concept of labor all together. This is the cultural labor of the 'Third World' in the 1990s, in which the 'Third World' can no longer simply manufacture mechanical body parts to be assembled and sold in the 'First World'. That the 'Third World' has been enlisted to do also is the manufacture of a reflection, an alterity that gives (back) to the 'First World' a sense of 'its' freedom and democracy while it generously allows the 'Third World' film to be shown against the authoritarian policies of 'Third World' governments. But and 'alterity' produced this way is a code and an abstraction whose fascination lies precisely in the fact that it is artificial and superficial; as Baudrillard says, 'it is the artifact that is the object of desire'..."
- Rey Chow (405)
"This structure of narcissistic value-making explains the current interest on the part of Chinese film-makers to search for China's 'own' others." (Chow, 408)
"the Chinese woman suddenly became a newly discovered 'primitive'..."(Chow, 410)
"...Qiaoying in much closer to man himself than the woman-at-home, in the rural village her avant-garde ontological proximity to masculinity is eyed with suspicion and distrust. The modernized, educated woman signifies romantic freedom - that is, 'choice' over her own body - and thus social instability. Quiaoying is represented as with out family relations. Like a mysterious signifier unleashed from centuries of anchorage to kinship, she does not know where she is heading." (411)
"Wangquen 'receives' not only food, cigarettes, and money from Xifeng, but finally, though reluctantly, also her body. Toward the end of the film, Xifeng is pregnant. By contrast, the romantic woman is turned into an outcast. Qiaoying is the 'enemy' of the economic basis of the village community who must be exiled." (411)
"Qiaoying's association with Wangcai is clearly presented as futile and futureless: Wangcai is an example of the 'decadent' younger generation of contemporary China whith no long term plan and no concern for society's future." (412)
"Romantic love becomes the signifier of emptiness - the emptiness and emptying of the social." (412)
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