This survey of contemporary Chinese cinema offers a comprehensive assessment of post-1989 films by the so-called Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, as well as works by an even younger wave of makers. Like the society it aims to reflect and engage, contemporary Chinese cinema has undergone a tremendous transformation in recent years. While political pressures, financial difficulties, and competition from Hollywood have seriously impeded the development of state-sponsored, mainstream Chinese cinema, younger filmmakers have quietly begun to make films that are attracting increasing critical attention at home and abroad. More than sixty such young directors are working "outside" the state-owned studio system in various ways, making films with explosive creative energy—an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of cinema in the People’s Republic of China.

This emergent cinema departs significantly from its predecessors in its politics, values, and artistic sensibility. Taking leave of the melodrama of Chinese history and politics—a central preoccupation of socialist-era cinema—these newcomers, the "Urban Generation," train their cameras squarely on the everyday reality of contemporary Chinese city life. The subject matter and stylistic orientations of these films are intimately intertwined with the rapid modernization and social dislocation occurring in urban China today. Films such as Postman, Xiao Wu, and So Close to Paradise provide microscopic studies of a society undergoing drastic and, at times, violent change. They tackle a wide spectrum of social experiences and issues—disability, alcoholism, homosexuality, mental illness, prostitution, criminal activity, bohemian life styles, migrant work, and the widening gap between the poor and the rich. There is a palpable documentary pulse in the works of these young directors, aiming for a heightened sense of reality. By insistently blurring the boundary between fiction and reality, they begin to subject the cinematic medium itself to critical scrutiny.