Queer cinemas of the Sinosphere: Queer China goes out

Abstract This article looks at Wang Chao’s 2018 feature Looking for Rohmer (aka Seeking McCartney) as a cultural product that employs and breaks with the existing notions of queer Sinophone cinema. Utilizing the image of China’s globalization project of ‘going out’, it argues that the film forms part of new Queer Cinemas of the Sinosphere that imagine China as an active participant in a global queer culture, where tourism, consumption, and free distribution are part and parcel of a new ethnonationalist imaginary of global Chineseness. The second half of the article contends that queer independent transnational cinema, which presents a similar view of China as part of the world, works alongside China’s globalization project. Significantly, these film productions exhibit the potential for destabilization of the heteronormative family unit, proposing more nuanced investigations of queerness, community building, and national belonging.


Introduction
Much has been said about the release in the PRC of what has been termed 'the first openly gay film to ever be publicly screened in the country' (Schmid 2018).Hailed as a 'milestone moment' in Chinese film history and being compared to 'the Chinese and French version of Brokeback Mountain' , Wang Chao's 2018 feature Looking for Rohmer (aka Seeking McCartney) made headlines in China and abroad for passing censorship and receiving the coveted golden dragon seal issued by the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA, formerly SAPPRFT).Audiences expecting explicit proclamations of a gay identity were sorely disappointed, however, as the film made no direct references to gay relationships (Zhecheng 2018).Nor did it attempt to make any kind of statement regarding the position of sexual minorities in China.What the viewers did see were Chinese citizens traversing foreign lands, enjoying uninhibited travel, and consuming whatever the world had to offer them.Instead of seeing the film solely in terms of China's strong censorship and the precarious state in which filmmakers find themselvesmaking cuts without direct guidelines from the authorities and hoping the film makes it through the eye of the NRTA needle-I argue that the film serves as a reflection of This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the accepted manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.

KEYWORDS
Looking for Rohmer; queer Chinese cinema; Sinosphere; Chinese independent cinema; A Dog Barking at the Moon; minor transnationalism contemporary queer Chinese cinema and media more broadly.Forming part of a cinematic representation that imagines China as an active participant in international queer film cultures, Looking for Rohmer acts as an ethnonationalist imaginary of global 'Chineseness' , where queerness does not stand in opposition to but rather complements self-assured Chinese nationhood.In the second half of the article, I argue that independent transnational queer film productions, which present a similar view of China as part of the world, exhibit the potential for destabilization of the heteronormative family units and strong Chinese masculinity.
In an article revisiting notions of transnational cinema vis-à-vis China, Song Hwee Lim argues that the current cinematic trends in the PRC and the US point toward transnational cinema being 'inescapably national ' (2019, 2).What Lim is referring to in the case of China is not only the national cinema's involvement in the country's globalization project of 'going out' and the subsequent accruement of 'soft power' by the means of film.Also significant is the film industry's catering to the tastes of the ever-growing Chinese middle classes by incorporating foreign lands and exotic locations into its filmic universe.These trends, Lim notes, are transnational because they are national: 'certain national ambitions can no longer be contained within fixed geographical boundaries as they are increasingly projected onto the global stage and procured through transnational means' (2019, 1).In other words, China's new assertiveness on the global stage, where foreign locations become adventure grounds for the country's nouveau riche, has resulted in a cinematic new exoticism that 'ceaselessly interfaces the national and the transnational, whose power dynamic fluctuates in tandem with broader fortunes in the political and economic realms' (Lim 2019, 4).
On a similar topic of the current state of transnational Chinese cinema, Chris Berry notes that the growth of 'culturally Chinese' films in non-Sinitic languages poses a challenge to the long-established notions and definitions of both 'Chinese-language cinema' and 'Sinophone cinema' (2021).If the former language-based definition of Chinese cinema attempts to capture the cross-border production and consumption of films from the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, the latter is a narrower definition that 'emphasises resistance to power difference articulated through Sinocentric values' (Berry 2021, 3).And although many scholars have employed, modified, and critiqued the use of the term Sinophone since its conception by Shih in 2007(Lu 2007;Yue and Khoo 2014), it remains a controversial term that is inadequate in capturing the most recent phenomena in Chinese cinema.More precisely, it fails to encapsulate the development of 'films from non-Chinese people living in Chinese-majority polities and territories; and films produced by Chinese people but not predominantly in a Sinitic language' (Berry 2021, 3).
Taking a cue from Lim's and Berry's challenges to the existing conceptualizations of transnational Chinese cinema today, I pose the question: where and how do we place queer Chinese cinema today?Is the official release of Wang Chao's film in China indeed a watershed moment that marks a seismic shift in global queer cinema?Or is Looking for Rohmer, which is mostly in French, Mandarin, and Tibetan, an example of a new (queer) exoticism that imagines the Chinese nation as a cosmopolitan center of global culture, where consumption and mobility serve as pillars of an ethnonationalist imaginary of global Chineseness?

Beyond the Sinophone
The last decade has seen a proliferation of research on the numerous ways non-heterosexuality is being lived, constricted, (re)presented, and imagined both within and outside the PRC.
Full-length monographs such as Hongwei Bao's Queer China (2020) and edited volumes such as Chiang and Wong's Keywords in Queer Sinophone Studies (2020) take on the multiple meanings and configurations of the term queer (ku' er in Chinese)-as a conceptual framework, an analytical tool, and an umbrella term for all gender and sexual minorities-in their investigations of the various ways queerness and Chineseness are positioned and reconstructed within and outside a globalizing China.By emphasizing not only the diversity of marginalized desires and subjectivities but also their translocal and transnational configurations, work within what is termed queer China studies attests to the constant re-negotiation of gender and sexual identities which are informed by global cultural flows and political sensibilities.Although this scholarship draws on the theories initiated in the Global North, it nonetheless emphasizes the 'geocultural travelling and mutations of "queer" as a powerful, generative tool in the political, cultural, and scholarly dimensions of diverse Chinese-speaking contexts' (Zhao and Wong 2020, 477).Significantly, the new position of China in the geopolitical and cultural sphere and its simultaneous placement in the global queer cultural consciousness has engendered a vast body of scholarship across academic fields such as LGBTQ+ cinema, literature, and television studies.This work takes on queer theory as a critical field that emerged in Western academia and localizes it to Chinese-speaking contexts, opening it to other modes of being that are not based on visibility, confrontation, and social protest (Zhao, Yang, and Lavin 2017;Wong 2020).
Forming a part of queer China studies, work within queer Chinese cinema has likewise explored the intersection between queer theory and China studies.Looking at queer representation in Chinese-language film and media, queer Chinese cinema studies investigate the production of queer cultural texts that help create, shape, and rework local tonghzi/ queer identities in a global context (Chao 2020).Moreover, numerous scholars have noted the transnational qualities of queer Sinophone cinema (Chiang and Heinrich 2014;Martin 2014).This vast, diverse field of genres, styles, and territories crosses borders, boundaries, and nation-states, challenging any attempts to place it firmly within a certain strand of cinema, be it national (Chinese) or queer (in the Euro-American sense).Rather, queer Chinese cinema places China and Chineseness in a transnational context, revealing the processes by which sexual, national, and regional identities are constantly being (re)produced and shaped by global politics, postsocialism, and neoliberal capitalism.In a global context, queer Chinese cinema enables a view of the world in which desires, identities, and modes of living are constantly being reconfigured by defying nationalist ideologies and essentializing discourses of ethnicity, authenticity, and belonging.
With recent developments in transnational Chinese cinema, however, we may need to rethink and re-evaluate the notions of queer defiance vis-à-vis state hegemony, censorship, and oppression.Whilst the notions of visibility/invisibility vis-à-vis queer activism in China differ greatly from those in the West (Engebretsen and Schroeder 2015), the creation, distribution, and consumption of queer material in itself constitutes a political act.In a milieu where governmental policies and state censorship are opaque and unsystematic, cultural texts act as a means by which queer subjectivities are being created, reshaped, and reaffirmed.Yet, the very release of Wang Chao's film and the attention it gained in the domestic and foreign press attest to the complexities in attempting to position queer defiance in terms of distribution and consumption.If this indeed is a milestone moment in the style of Stonewall, how do we make sense of the scarcity of 'gay' content in the film?And if this moment has opened the floodgates for more non-heteronormative visual content, how do we explain the Sina Weibo 2018 ban (and the subsequent reversal) of queer content or the media censorship that restricts and reshapes queer issues toward particular interpretative frameworks such as the feminization of homosexuality or stigmatization of HIV/AIDS infection?
Berry's reconceptualization of transnational Chinese cinema as comprising of two primary forms-(1) 'culturally' Chinese films whether in Chinese or other non-Chinese languages, and (2) films that imagine and engage with China's globalization-is a response to the high number of well-received and highly praised, globally distributed films that were produced and directed by non-Chinese people in the PRC. 1 One of the most prominent examples is the Tibetan auteur Pema Tseden who has received several prestigious awards in China and internationally for works such as The Silent Holy Stones (2002), Tharlo (2015), and Jinpa (2018).Pema Tseden's films, whose action typically takes place in Amdo in Qinghai, are not targeted at a Chinese audience.Rather, the Tibetan experience is at the heart of his oeuvre, and categorizing his work as Sinophone, at best, disregards the cultural, historical, and sociopolitical context of its production.At worst, the term Sinicizes Tibetanness and incorporates it within the China-centered history of a shared, Siniticlanguage-based cultural heritage.
Prominent culturally Chinese films in non-Chinese languages reflect the transnational global order where border crossing and non-nation state belonging are part and parcel of their popularity.If Wang Chao's film, which takes place in France, China, and Tibet, is a culturally Chinese film that is predominantly in French, Mandarin, and Tibetan, how does this linguistic constellation inform our view of it and its cultural politics?As a way of combining the critique of the Sinophone with that of the cultural and historical politics of Chineseness in a foreign language, I want to include here Berry's most important contention: that China's project of going out can be seen as an economic, geopolitical, and indeed cultural contestant to American globalization.This state-run project, which has the aim of promoting Chinese investment abroad and includes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), manifests itself in cinema by imagining Chinese globalization in terms of consumption, travel, and tourism.Within these 'cinemas of the Sinosphere' (Berry 2021, 2), the world becomes a site where the Chinese protagonists (re)discover themselves, either by finding 'Mr.right' (who is almost always Chinese) in the case of female-audience romantic comedies or by proving their masculinity (by rescuing Chinese citizens abroad) with of male action genre films.In both cases, being Chinese and being reminded of that fact by the encounters with the outside world is at the very heart of these films 2 .In the following, I take a closer look at Looking for Rohmer as a queer film that imagines and proposes a particular Chineseness, one which is culturally homogenous whilst being open to global queer cultural flows as long as they do not interfere with its heterosexual ethnonational imaginary.

Banning/baiting the queer
If changes in the cinematic modes of production and distribution during the last decade have led to the creation of the cinemas of the Sinosphere, a similar phenomenon can be seen in the culturally Chinese queer cinematic production.Several critics have noted the impact of Chinese media censorship on the production of popular cultural content in the PRC.Having gone through various changes from the beginning of the new millennium, China's official policies toward the portrayal of homosexuality in mass media are predominantly characterized by conservatism, which often results in either censorship or regulation.
Jia and Zhou note that 'in 2008, Official Notice on the Restatement of Film Censorship Standards ruled that content containing "pornography, sex and vulgarisms … sexual abnormality, and homosexuality" … be cut and "corrected"' (2015).The linkage of homosexuality with abnormality, apart from exposing and solidifying the social stigma associated with gay men and women, also leads to the exclusion, erasure, and invisibility of homosexual content in the Chinese mainstream media.Moreover, its association with pornography, as exemplified by the official responses to the popularity of danmei (Boys' Love or BL) literature in China, has led to anti-porn campaigns that target 'obscene' content which includes 'abnormal sexual behavior' (Yang and Xu 2017, 169).Here, the amalgamation of homosexuality and abnormality consigns danmei content to the area of pornography, which makes it susceptible to censorship and outright removal from online forums and e-libraries.This way, the genre is 'not only denied legitimacy by the law but is outside its protection' (Yang and Xu 2017, 170), as the negative public image of BL prevents the creators from seeking legal recourse in cases of plagiarism.As a result, the state-sponsored censorship works to align public opinion with that of the state and its anxiety about and suspicion of Japanese cultural influence and foreign-based cultural flows.
Whilst censorship is by definition prohibitive, it can also act as a productive force that enables content creators to reach a wider audience by re-creating and re-positioning their work vis-à-vis state institutions and media programming policies and guidelines (Ng 2015).More importantly, the contradictory approaches of the state censors toward media production and distribution-allowing certain seemingly innocuous content whilst banning other, arguably more contentious, subject matters to pass unaltered-can lead to self-censorship on the side of media producers.Potentially questionable and politically sensitive content is here censored not by the party-state apparatus but by the practitioners themselves.The latter align their work with commercial interests and aim for vast viewership whilst trying not to offend or shake the moral beliefs and values of their mainstream audiences (Gorfinkel 2018).As a result, the common perception of a top-down, one-dimensional totalizing power of the state to control, censor, and alter media content neglects the ways media itself reflects shifting Party priorities and domestic and international developments.The Chinese government's inconsistent attitude towards queer content, where some productions receive distribution approval whilst others are seemingly randomly shut down, predisposes queer content creators to produce work which is 'politically compatible' with Chinese cultural and ideological sensibilities.Thus, whilst the mere presence of queerness in mainstream media suggests an openness to non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality, it simultaneously reinforces Han-centric traditional values that favor heterosexual family units, highly feminized womanhood, and strong Chinese masculinity (Zhao 2021).In other words, queerbaiting serves as a means of increasing the visibility of queer content and simultaneously depoliticizing it.

Looking for queer cinemas of the Sinosphere
I have argued elsewhere that queer Sinophone cinema transverses space and time by paying close attention to that which is local and global, homebound and diasporic (Pecic 2016).By destabilizing essentialist configurations of Chineseness and queerness, it repositions queerness via its use of space and movement.This way, 'here' and 'there' serve as markers of continuous cultural processes and signifying practices that are unstable and dependent on their spatial circumstances.Despite the potential and the ability of queer Sinophone cinema to challenge notions of a national 'Chinese cinema' , recent developments in the production and distribution of queer films in the PRC point toward a heteronormative Chinese ethnonationalism on the big screen.Here, I take a close look at Wang Chao's film as it exemplifies a sensationalization/exoticization of queerness and reification of a nationalist ideology of ethnic harmony within its borders.
Known for his neorealist independent features such as Orphan of Anyang (2001) and Luxury Car (2006), Wang Chao has made a name for himself internationally as a Sixth-Generation filmmaker, particularly for his use of the aesthetic style and realist mode developed by Jia Zhangke and Wang Xiaoshuai.Winner of the Un certain regard for Luxury Car at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Wang Chao is a critically acclaimed director with ample credentials to cast for the role of Jie one of the most well-known Mandopop singers/actors in China.Han Geng, apart from being a former sole-Chinese member of the South Korean K-pop group Super Junior, has acted in several star-studded Sinophone productions alongside heavyweights such as Fan Bingbing (Ever Since We Love, 2015) and Louis Khoo and Carina Lau (Dynasty Warriors, 2021).His stature and star power within the Sinosphere are perhaps best illustrated in his role as a torchbearer at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, given to him for his contribution to the spread of Chinese culture.Whilst many commentators have noted the question of authenticity and representation in Chinese independent cinema, specifically regarding Wang Chou's oeuvre (McGrath 2011; Zhang 2010), I focus here not on the notion of representability but on those aspects that make Looking for Rohmer a particularly 'Chinese' film.Significantly, the very first scene depicts travel, in which we see our protagonist Jie riding on a bus on a newly paved road in Tibet, with snow-covered mountains adorning the picturesque Tibetan countryside.In fact, most of the film's scenes contain characters on the move-they are boarding flights, driving cars, or conversing with strangers on trains.The motif of travel would be familiar to fans of the French New Wave filmmaker Éric Rohmer, who serves as an inspiration and an explicit cultural and cinematic reference that positions Wang Chao along the same line of auteurs as his French counterpart.Whilst the citation of one of the most influential movements in world cinema affords the film a cultural cachet that goes beyond China's borders, it is the uninhibited travel across borders and continents that comes to be of special significance for the characters in Looking for Rohmer as they move freely between Tibet, Paris, Provence, and Beijing.
The reason for Jie's trip to Tibet only becomes apparent at the end of the film when we realize he intends to take his queer lover's ashes back to the latter's home in Provence. 3Thus, the film is a narrative of grief and loss where the protagonist, whilst traveling between continents, goes through mourning, only to overcome his sorrow by spiritually reuniting with his lost lover. 4Yet, it is precisely the motif of travel to and from China that exhibits the interplay between the national and the transnational, as the exoticism of foreign lands and cultures is closely tied to the Sinocentic view of China as part of the world.For instance, Wang Chao's film includes references to transnational and highly regarded queer Sinophone productions.After Jie drags Rohmer out of Destination, a well-known gay club in Beijing, he takes him home in a taxi in scenes that are reminiscent of Wong Kar-wai's 1997 classic Happy Together. 5Yet, whilst the trope of travel in Wong Kar-wai's film can be read metaphorically as a repudiation of Hong Kong's reunion with the PRC at the time of the Handover, its use in Looking for Rohmer reorients Sinophone queer cinema towards Beijing as a metropole where these transnational cinematic elements come together.
The utilization of cosmopolitanism in Wang Chao's film reflects China's transnational economic policies that are closely tied to the notions of culture, ethnicity, and belonging, the result of which is a creation and cultivation of a wide range of (queer) desires.In Looking for Rohmer, young, well-educated, cosmopolitan, multilingual Chinese middle-classes travel not because they are forced to but because it offers opportunities for career advancement and cultural recreation.Furthermore, the queer subject serves as a means of showcasing the normativity of queerness in China so long as it upholds a narrative of China as a harmonious and prosperous (Han-centric) country.Rofel notes that China's transnational economic policies involve the simultaneous invocation of both cosmopolitanism and Chinese cultural and national identity.This places gay/lesbian and queer subjects in a position where they need to 'prove at once their ability to transcend nation-state boundaries and embrace neoliberal cosmopolitanism, but also to display their normativity as Chinese citizens ' (2013, 165).Sitting on a train on his way to Provence, Jie is approached by a Frenchman (a real-life film director himself) who is more than eager to display his Chinese skills to his Beijing-based interlocutor.Upon being asked if he likes China and which parts of it, the man answers: 'Guilin, Hangzhou, Xi'an, Nanjing, Shanghai… and Tibet' .The exchange is followed by the meeting with the man's Chinese wife (also from Beijing) who runs a Chinese restaurant.We learn that the business is going well and that French people love Chinese food.If Jie's queerness in the film is acknowledged, however obliquely, it is done by the means of engaging strategies of both national and transnational connection.Here, the cosmopolitan Chinese subject engages in a 'queer lifestyle' in the form of linguistic and cultural exchange, whose openness to other worldviews only reaffirms their sense of ethnic and national belonging.
The inclusion of Tibet within the Sinosphere is significant, as it falls in line with what Berry has termed 'Tibet fever' (Berry 2019, 249), a recent phenomenon in Chinese contemporary cinema where Tibet is represented as pristine and devoid of Chinese influence and/or socialism or capitalism.This 'brand image' of Tibet signifies a reversal from the earlier representations of the territory and its peoples as primitive and backward.However, the renewed interest and enthusiasm for all things Tibetan-cinema, popular culture, music-also serves as a means of (idealized) othering, as the representation of Tibetan culture uses the conventional (exoticizing) motifs of mountainous terrains, mani stones, monasteries, and prayer wheels.This positive image of Tibet disregards the adverse aspects of the territory's inclusion in the PRC, as Tibetan Buddhism and religious culture appear unaffected by Beijing's developmental policies regarding Tibet and their subsequent environmental impact.Whilst Berry argues that confronting this idealized othering is necessary 'because it challenges a cultural and political structure that makes China subject and Tibet object by instead thinking Tibetans and Chinese as part of one larger community ' (2019, 257), I contend that Wang Chao's film exoticizes Tibet for the very purpose of showcasing China's nationalist narrative of ethnic harmony.As Jie drives up the mountainous terrain on freshly paved roads on the way to collect the remains of his deceased lover, the viewer is shown beautiful snow-covered landscapes and pristine Tibetan grasslands.Here, the cinematography highlights the open spaces of the road by using extreme long shots to capture the 'closeness' between the inhabitants and their natural environment.Significantly, the use of wide shots and the lack of shot-reverse shots discourages identification with the Tibetan characters, providing the viewer with what looks like an ethnographic account of the local culture, where people are clustered as they mostly go about their daily lives.The happy intermingling of Han Chinese and Tibetans as they sing and dance their way from place to place only emphasizes the idealized representation of Tibetanness and indirectly the harmonious coexistence of multiple ethnicities within China's borders.
The relationship between exoticization and cosmopolitanism reflects a similar correspondence between the national and the transnational.If Looking for Rohmer performs a form of a double exoticism, where the internal other (Tibet) and the exotic foreign (Rohmer) are showcased comfortably co-existing within the wider cultural sphere of 'China' , the same can be said for its representation of queerness.Here, the queer foreign subject is presented as equally fascinated by the exotic ethnic minority as he seeks spiritual enlightenment and appeasement of guilt stemming from the death of both his aborted son and the Chinese boy killed in traffic.As the internal and the foreign other become objects of the Han Chinese gaze, their foreignness converges in the shape of the Tibetan opera Juma and the Prince, where Jie plays the prince whilst Rohmer metamorphoses into Juma, the herdsman's daughter.As the two lovers finally connect in close-up shots in the film's denouement, we are once again reminded of all the things that are left unsaid by the early death of Rohmer.Thus, the tears in Jie's eyes are a symbol of a 'sanctioned' form of queerness, not only in Wang Chao's film but also in the wider cultural sphere of China, a queerness that exposes its own exoticism whilst acting as a means of reaffirming Han Chinese national belonging. 6 In short, by emphasizing ethnic, foreign, and queer others, however exoticized, within its own cultural and regional sphere, Chinese cinematic representation exhibits an imaginary of global Chineseness that appears open, welcoming, and cosmopolitan.

Queer Chinese soft power?
The argument that Looking for Rohmer promotes China's 'going out' invariably runs the risk of suggesting that the creators of the film somehow work at the behest of the state or the Chinese authorities in strengthening China's 'soft power' .Grouping cultural institutions and content creators together presents a distorted image of a unifying discourse on the attractiveness of Chinese cultures and values, features that would make China's 'softer' side more attractive to the outside world.Rather than emphasizing, through an official state-focused lens, the role of cultural policy in strengthening Chinese standing internationally, I highlight film production as a contributing factor to the attractiveness and likability of the country globally.In their edited volume Screening China's Soft Power, Paola Voci and Luo Hui take on Joseph Nye's original definition of the term as 'the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments ' (2004, x) and reorient it away from nation-states toward non-state agents such as content producers, international celebrities and festival programmers and organizers.Instead of focusing on the role of state policies, the editors point toward the 'mismatch between soft power's stated goals (i.e.succeeding in world politics) and some of the key means through which soft power is developed and deployed (cultural practices and values)' (Voci and Hui 2018, 2).In a similar vein, I highlight here Chinese mainstream media's volatile position between political censorship and commercialization as a way of complicating our view of both China's queer media landscape and the projection of Chinese queer content on the global stage.If the official release of Looking for Rohmer in China must be seen in the context of China's going out, does this ineluctably prevent a mode of resistance toward a unifying heteronormative and ethnonational discourse on Chineseness?Are there no readily available productions in the PRC that challenge the party state's politically and ideologically compatible queerness?Also, can reading against the grain of ethnonationalism challenge queerbaiting and sensationalism and show glimpses of defiance?I argue that independently produced and funded transnational film productions, which also showcase China as part of the world, demonstrate the capacity to subvert the notion of the heteronormative Chinese family units.Significantly, their transnationality is what makes them national.
The winner of the 2019 Teddy Jury Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, Xiang Zi's A Dog Barking at the Moon presents a story of repressed queer desires in a form of a family dilemma-does one keep up appearances for the sake of 'the family' and suffer the consequences, or does one reveal past secrets in an attempt to live more 'freely'?This self-funded arthouse film is an independent (sans dragon seal) transnational production which presents a cross-generational, female-based narrative that explores the issues of closeted homosexuality, family structure, and gender divisions in a middle-class Chinese home.As the protagonist returns to China from the US with her European husband to give birth to her daughter on Chinese soil, she is met by her bitter mother who blames Xiaoyu for her miscarriage, her husband's homosexuality and extramarital affairs, and her overall state of unhappiness and despair.We soon realize that Xiaoyu, despite her foreign education and experience, is unable to stand up to her parents, particularly to her mother, who has let go of her queer past to become a 'respectable' married woman.As an internationally recognized, award-winning feature, A Dog Barking at the Moon arguably contributes to China's soft power.Yet, Xiang Zi's transnational film is not a self-orientalizing tale of 'progress' and visibility, but a nuanced look at generational divides vis-à-vis expressions of gender and sexuality.Whilst Xiaoyu sympathizes with her father, who wants to get a divorce to live a more 'liberated' life, her mother's lack of the same options reveals the limitations or perhaps the impossibility of female queer desires. 7Like Looking for Rohmer, the film contains no explicitly sexual scenes, yet it presents queerness as that which haunts the patriarchal and harmonious family structure, represented by the Tang dynasty poem recitation and the scrolls on the walls of the modern household.For all of Xiaoyu's inspiration from 'foreign' , individual-centered cultures-from her reading of Thoreau's Walden to her showing her support at gay pride parades in the US-she cannot convince her mother to change her mind.In addition, her insistence on the individual pursuit of happiness appears misplaced and misguided as she shows sympathy for her father's predicament in front of his closeted lover: 'Who is tough enough to lie to himself, seal his desires, pretend in front of everyone, and fool everybody?'The self-criticizing narrative of the necessity of public visibility of queerness exhibits the highly nuanced and complicated configurations of non-normative sexual identity in China, where intervention in politics and social action based on confrontation are non-viable options for LGBTQ+ activists (Rofel 2013).Xiang Zi's film presents a contemporary China and a Chineseness that challenges both heteronormative, patriarchal discourses from within, and orientalizing narratives vis-à-vis progress, visibility, and individual freedom from the outside.
As for reading against the text, we might catch sight of a course of resistance in Wang Chao's film by concentrating on those elements that convey messages that deviate from the uniform narratives of ethnic harmony and approved nonconformity.Although Looking for Rohmer restrains queerness whilst exoticizing the Tibetan other, the viewer may develop an alternative reading based on various elements that defy the Sinocentric harmonization of differences.A potentially significant element is Puccini's Madama Butterfly CD that Jie receives from Sophie, which is played during the film and can be read as a (self-conscious) acknowledgment of the film's orientalizing narrative.Something similar could be said about the army trucks on the wind-swept Tibetan roads, a scene that runs counter to the narrative of ethnic harmony in the region.Both efforts to read against the grain, however, require active participation from the viewer if they are to serve a means of destabilizing the heteronormative family unit and/or strong Chinese masculinity.Thus, ironically, reading against the text goes against the film's ostensible openness and its 'direct' take on queerness in China.

Imagining China's global queerness
Wang Chao's film reflects the shifting practices of Chinese transnational cinema that point toward a cinematic construction of Chineseness based not on language but on culture.In other words, Looking for Rohmer is a culturally Chinese film that showcases PRC cinema's role in Chinese globalization, with its overseas settings playing an integral part in the narrative.Yet, its portrayal of queerness does not reflect the trials and tribulations of LGBTQ+ communities in China nor does it suggest a betterment of their social and legal environments.Rather, the film forms part of an exoticized image of the cosmopolitan, open, and welcoming China, whose own inclusion of ethnic minorities projects a picture of an unquestionable national unity which is consumed nationally as well as abroad.
Whilst this kind of major transnationalism occurs at a supranational level in terms of film production, it is important to state that there is another strand of minor transnational queer Chinese cinema which has proliferated during the last two decades.Chinese independent queer documentary cinema has portrayed the lives of sexual minorities and the queer identities of the people behind the camera since the new millennium.People such as Cui Zi' en, Shi Tou, and Fan Popo are perhaps the most prominent examples of a style of filmmaking that followed in the wake of what Berry, Lu, and Rofel termed China's 'new documentary movement' (2010).Rather than being an alternative to the authoritative records, Chinese independent documentary cinema works in addition to the official archives, complementing mainstream productions by offering new takes and insights.Fan Popo's 'exile' in Berlin, for instance, can be seen as a reflection of the current state of queer Chinese cinema.Not only does it allow him to expand his work to include experimental films and even lesbian porn.It also forms part of the queer cinemas of the Sinosphere, as his 'culturally Chinese' films feature multiple languages and nationalities whilst taking place in China and abroad.Although the rise of low-budget and spontaneous documentary production emerged and developed outside China's state-sponsored and state-controlled culture, queer independent cinema set itself apart from the fly-on-the-wall aesthetic of other types of observational cinema by going verité-here, the film directors would place themselves in front of the camera as a way of documenting and solidifying their place within the LGBTQ+ communities.Working not as a substitute for the established or the 'recognized' , it employs mainstream aesthetics to depict and portray queerness as that which appears 'normal' rather than exotic or underground (Robinson 2015).
Significant to note here is that Chinese queer documentary cinema goes beyond the national framework and forms a part of a transnational cinema.These filmmakers are already immersed in China's globalizing discourses on gendered and sexual identities, queer movements, and social and legal rights.Their modes of production and aesthetic values are indebted to transnational cultural flows, thus challenging not only ideas of a national Chinese cinema but also the notions of what constitutes queer.In other words, Chinese queer documentary cinema asks: What is national cinema?What does it mean to be Chinese?What is queer about Chinese cinema?Because queer documentaries are disseminated on the national, regional, and international film circuits, and since their target audiences are both Chinese queer communities and international film enthusiasts (for whom the films are [sub]titled in English), they also highlight the close connection between the national and the transnational.Taking the minor transnationalism model further, Bao identifies several trajectories for alternative models of cultural formation between Chinese and African independent filmmakers who co-produce, co-circulate, and co-represent minority groups.By eschewing vertical relations of assimilation (majority) and opposition (minority), the creators promote horizontal collaboration and solidarity.From the consumption of Hong Kong martial arts films in South Africa (as a way of envisioning an anti-colonial struggle) to portrayals of quotidian interactions between people of China and Lesotho (a reaction to China's expansion of screen industries to the African continent), minor transnationalism works as an on-the-ground reaction to the reformulation and reshaping of gender and sexual relations by the geopolitics of the era (Bao 2020).By rejecting the notions of civil rights based on visibility, coming out and same-sex marriage, queer activists in China and Africa imagine LGBTQ+ activism founded on collaboration and mutual support.

Conclusion
I began this article by arguing that Looking for Rohmer imagines China as an active participant in international (queer) film cultures.Proposing a Chineseness that is culturally homogenous and open to a sanctioned form of queerness, Wang Chao's film portrays an ethnonationalist imaginary of a strong and culturally attractive Chinese nation, effectively adding to the country's soft power.By way of conclusion, I argue that this kind of globalization and transnationalism, which works on a supranational level and informs the national politics of the country, only forms one part of the cinemas of the Sinosphere.Despite the engagement of non-Chinese cinemas with China's globalization, evidenced by the official collaborations between China and various African countries (Berry 2021), we need also to turn our attention to minor transnationalism not only as a counterpart to the former but as an addition to its globalizing tendencies.Just like the new documentary movement served as a complement to the official archives, minor transnational independent queer filmmaking works alongside films such as Looking for Rohmer, proposing more nuanced investigations of queerness, community building, and national belonging.

Notes
1. Berry uses the term 'Chinese-majority polities' to differentiate it from the overarching term 'China' or 'PRC' .2. Some of the most prominent ones include Xue Xiaolu's Finding Mr. Right (2013) and Wu Jing's Wolf Warrior 2 (2017).